Fiber-based internet service is great (ask any jealous New Yorker not eligible for FiOS) but laying fiber cable costs tens of thousands of dollars per mile. Infrastructure projects to bring it to every household in a given area so expensive, even Google can’t foot the bill . So AT&T decided to use stuff most places had already to piggyback a wi-fi signal. Read more…
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AT&T Wants to Blanket the Nation With Gigabit Wi-Fi From Utility Poles
Hello, old friend Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30 th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+. Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don’t even support lower-case characters. You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There’s also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News) One quarter of all body-worn camera footage from the Oakland, Calif. police was accidentally deleted in October 2014, according to the head of the relevant unit. As per the San Francisco Chronicle , Sgt. Dave Burke testified on Tuesday at a murder trial that this was, in fact, a mistake. This incident marks yet another setback in the efforts to roll out body-worn cameras to police agencies nationwide. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Police IT staff checked wrong box, deleted 25% of body cam footage
Paleontologists working on an island off the coast of California’s Ventura County have discovered a strange mammoth skull that exhibits features never seen before in the extinct elephantine creatures. Not too big and not too small, this skull could represent a transitional species. Read more…
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Strange Mammoth Skull Found in California Puzzles Paleontologists
The University of California, Irvine , is serious about esports. This fall it will officially launch a competitive-gaming initiative, complete with scholarships and an already-decorated League of Legends team, and it’s just finished construction on a 3, 500-square-foot esports arena that’s set to open Friday, Sept. 23rd. The arena is packed with 80 gaming PCs loaded with top eSports titles, a webcasting studio and viewing screens. The arena will serve as a home base for the university’s gaming community and a place for its competitive players to train. It also represents another step forward for collegiate esports across the country. “Esports is the future of competition. Period, ” UCI’s Acting Director of Esports Mark Deppe says. “It transcends language, geography, race, age, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical ability and many other identities. In five years many more schools will official programs and more structure will be in place to regulate and provide guidance to schools. Esports also has a huge opportunity to learn from the successes and shortcomings of traditional sports and provide a model for collegiate competition in the 21st century.” Deppe hopes the arena will be 100 percent cost-neutral. UCI spent $250, 000 to build it over the summer, and it will be open to the public and students for $4 an hour; UCI hopes the revenue from its hourly use will cover administrative costs. The arena will host 25 student staff members, while other students can volunteer to assist in coaching, analysis, streaming and production roles. UCI’s arena is backed by iBUYPOWER, which provided all of its gaming PCs, and Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends . As part of its esports initiative, UCI is offering 10 scholarships, valued at $15, 000 each, to its competitive League of Legends players. The global esports market is valued at $612 million, with an audience of 134 million, according to SuperData , and it’s only predicted to grow. Universities across the United States are diving into this emerging market with scholarship programs and competitive teams. Student players bring home some real prizes when they win: Heroes of the Storm ‘s college tournament offers the winners free tuition , while the League of Legends North American collegiate championship grants $30, 000 to each winning player and $15, 000 each for second place. At UCI, players get to keep any earnings from competitions. Mark Deppe, @UCIesports acting dir., unboxes 1st computers to arrive for UCI #esports Initiative.
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UC Irvine debuts the first public college esports arena in the US
The SENA UD100 Bluetooth adapter, plus a slightly larger antenna, allows Blue Hydra to peer deep into the Bluetooth world. Sean Gallagher My new neighbor was using AirDrop to move some files from his phone to his iMac. I hadn’t introduced myself yet, but I already knew his name. Meanwhile, someone with a Pebble watch was walking past, and someone named “Johnny B” was idling at the stoplight at the corner in their Volkswagen Beetle, following directions from their Garmin Nuvi. Another person was using an Apple Pencil with their iPad at a nearby shop. And someone just turned on their Samsung smart television. I knew all this because each person advertised their presence wirelessly, either over “classic” Bluetooth or the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) protocol—and I was running an open source tool called Blue Hydra , a project from the team at Pwnie Express . Blue Hydra is intended to give security professionals a way of tracking the presence of traditional Bluetooth, BTLE devices, and BTLE “iBeacon” proximity sensors. But it can also be connected to other tools to provide alerts on the presence of particular devices. Despite their “Low Energy” moniker, BTLE devices are constantly polling the world even while in “sleep” mode. And while they use randomized media access control (MAC) addresses, they advertise other data that is unique to each device, including a universally unique identifier (UUID). As a result, if you can tie a specific UUID to a device by other means, you can track the device and its owner. By using the Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), you can get a sense of how far away they are. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth
A page from the Grolier Codex, now confirmed by an international team of scholars to be the oldest bound book found in the Americas. In a rare reversal, archaeologists have determined that a Maya book written almost 900 years ago is genuine–after decades of believing it was fake. The Grolier Codex was so named because it was first displayed in 1971 at the book lovers’ Grolier Club in New York City. Archaeologist Michael Coe, who arranged the 1971 showing, later described its rather questionable history in a book . It was acquired in a spectacularly scammy way in 1966 by a Mexican collector named Josué Sáenz. Coe says that Sáenz told him that a group of unknown men offered to sell the book to him, along with a few other items found “in a dry cave” near the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas. They would only sell it if Sáenz agreed never to tell anyone or show the book. The collector, intrigued, took a plane to a remote airstrip with two experts, who declared the codex fake. But Sáenz went with his gut and bought the codex. After allowing Coe to display it in New York, he gave it to the Mexican government. There were a number of good reasons to believe the Grolier Codex was fake–beyond the sketchy way Sáenz procured it. Unlike three other Maya Codex finds, it had writing on only one side of each of its 10 pages. Plus, some of the pages appear to have been cut relatively recently. There are odd discrepancies in the book’s calendar system, hinting that a forger might have been trying to imitate a calendar he saw in another Maya artifact. The drawings are also unusual for a Maya document, combining styles of the Mesoamerican Mixtec people with Toltec attire. The Toltec were often hailed by the Aztecs as ancestors, and their art shares many similarities with late Maya art. Though carbon dating placed the Codex’s bark pages during the late Maya period, it was not unknown for looters to find blank pages in ancient Maya caches and cover them in fake hieroglyphs to make them more valuable. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Confirmed: Mysterious ancient Maya book, Grolier Codex, is genuine
Enlarge Snatching the login credentials of a locked computer just got easier and faster, thanks to a technique that requires only $50 worth of hardware and takes less than 30 seconds to carry out. Rob Fuller, a principal security engineer at R5 Industries, said the hack works reliably on Windows devices and has also succeeded on OS X, although he’s working with others to determine if it’s just his setup that’s vulnerable. The hack works by plugging a flash-sized minicomputer into an unattended computer that’s logged in but currently locked. In about 20 seconds, the USB device will obtain the user name and password hash used to log into the computer. Fuller, who is better known by his hacker handle mubix, said the technique works using both the Hak5 Turtle ($50) and USB Armory ($155) , both of which are USB-mounted computers that run Linux. “First off, this is dead simple and shouldn’t work, but it does,” mubix wrote in a blog post published Tuesday . “Also, there is no possible way that I’m the first one that has identified this, but here it is (trust me, I tested it so many ways to confirm it because I couldn’t believe it was true).” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Stealing login credentials from a locked PC or Mac just got easier
New Horizons is currently making its way to the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt en route to a distant destination beyond Pluto. Along the way, the intrepid spacecraft has captured unprecedented images of a distant object called Quaoar—a dwarf planet about half the size of Pluto. Read more…
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NASA Spacecraft Catches a Rare Glimpse Dwarf Planet Quaoar
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg ) Aetna announced Monday that due to grave financial losses, it will dramatically slash its participation in public insurance marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act. In 2017, Aetna will only offer insurance policies in 242 counties scattered across four states—that’s a nearly 70-percent decrease from its 2016 offerings in 778 counties across 15 states. The deep cuts have largely been seen as a blow to the sustainability of the healthcare law, which has seen other big insurers also pull out, namely UnitedHealth group and Humana. But the explanation that Aetna was forced to scale back due to heavy profit cuts doesn’t square with previous statements by the company. In April, Mark Bertolini, the chairman and chief executive of Aetna, told investors that the insurance giant anticipated losses and could weather them, even calling participation in the marketplaces during the rocky first years “a good investment.” And in a July 5 letter (PDF) to the Department of Justice, obtained by the Huffington Post by a Freedom of Information Act request, Bertolini explicitly threatened that Aetna would back out of the marketplace if the department tried to block its planned $37 billion merger with Humana. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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As promised, Aetna is pulling out of Obamacare after DOJ blocked its merger