entertainment – Page 179 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

US Court Says No Warrant Needed For Cellphone Location Data

Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: Police do not need a warrant to obtain a person’s cellphone location data held by wireless carriers, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a setback to privacy advocates. The full 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, voted 12-3 that the government can get the information under a decades-old legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company. The ruling overturns a divided 2015 opinion from the court’s three-judge panel and reduces the likelihood that the Supreme Court would consider the issue. The decision arose from several armed robberies in Baltimore and Baltimore County, Maryland, in early 2011, leading to the convictions of Aaron Graham and Eric Jordan. The convictions were based in part on 221 days of cellphone data investigators obtained from wireless provider Sprint, which included about 29, 000 location records for the defendants, according to the appeals court opinion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Court Says No Warrant Needed For Cellphone Location Data

Intel’s 7th generation of Core CPUs are coming later this year

Besides its $1, 723 10-core Core i7 Extreme Edition processor , Intel just teased some other chip news during its keynote presentation at Computex. There aren’t many details available, but the company confirmed the the 7th generation of its Core CPU technology will go on sale later this year. They will be joined by its Apollo Lake chips, which are a cheaper version of the current 6th gen Skylake family. Apollo Lake should bring 4K video capability and USB-C to cheaper, 2-in-1 laptop/tablet style devices with smaller batteries. As far as the 7th generation of Core CPUs, buyers can expect support for Thunderbolt 3 , and IR cameras used for features like Windows Hello’s facial recognition.

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Intel’s 7th generation of Core CPUs are coming later this year

Fiverr Suffers Six-Hour DDoS Attack After Removing DDoS-For-Hire Listings

Two days after Fiverr, a marketplace for digital services, removed user listings from its website that advertised DDoS-for-hire services, the company’s website suffered a six-hour long DDOS attack. Softpedia reports: The incident took place on the morning of May 27 (European timezones), and the service admitted its problems on its Twitter account. At the time of writing, Fiverr has been back up and functioning normally for more than two hours. Fiverr’s problems stem from an Incapsula probe that found DDoS-for-hire ads on its marketplace, available for $5. Incapsula reported the suspicious listings to Fiverr, who investigated the issue and removed the ads. Fiverr first removed all listings advertising blatantly illegal DDoS services, but later also removed the ads offering to “test” a website for DDoS “protection” measures. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fiverr Suffers Six-Hour DDoS Attack After Removing DDoS-For-Hire Listings

The new ‘Doom’ hides sinister images in its soundtrack

It’s no secret that the new Doom is chock-full of Easter eggs and other surprises, but the latest is one you wouldn’t find just by wandering around the game’s tortured halls. Intrepid fan TomButcher has noticed that at least one tune in the soundtrack, “Cyberdemon, ” shows both pentagrams and the number 666 when you visualize the music’s frequencies through a spectrogram. Composer Mick Gordon recently teased that this hidden sinister imagery might be present in a video (below at the 3:29 mark), but there’s no doubt about it now. Clearly, he remembers the days when the original Doom ‘s hellish artwork had some parents in a frenzy. Music aficionados will be quick to note that stealthy image insertion isn’t new. Aphex Twin (aka Richard James) legendarily inserted his own face into the spectrogram for a track on his Windowlicker EP, for a start. All the same, it’s good to know that the art of sneaking in subtle audio references is far from dead — even if you’re unlikely to see this feat in many other games going forward. Via: Reddit Source: TomButcher (Imgur)

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The new ‘Doom’ hides sinister images in its soundtrack

Hackers steal $12 million from an Ecuadorian bank via SWIFT

Earlier this week reports showed another round of SWIFT-related cyber heists , this time targeting banks in Ecuador. A new report in Reuters sheds light on what actually happened to the high-tech thieves’ $12-million loot. Apparently, they moved $9 million to 23 banks in Hong Kong and $3 million to Dubai and other parts of the world. Wells Fargo transfered sums with the total value of $9 million to the accounts of four companies at HSBC and Hang Seng Bank based on authenticated SWIFT transactions. The hackers then distributed the money to what are believed to be phoney business accounts. Similar to the recent Bangladesh and Vietnam bank attacks, the thieves’ scheme involved the use of the SWIFT messaging platform. Banks use SWIFT’s platform to make financial transfers between each other, and cyber thieves typically send out fraudulent SWIFT messages requesting for funds to be routed to dummy accounts. In Bangladesh Bank’s case, the thieves used the SWIFT credentials of the institution’s employees to request several transfers to accounts overseas. They got off with $80 million, which would have been much larger ($1 freaking billion) if they didn’t misspell the word “foundation.” The hackers could have easily accessed the employees’ credentials, because the bank lacked a proper firewall. It’s not clear if that’s also what happened in Ecuador, but the thieves obviously had the same MO. American banks are now looking more closely into SWIFT’s security after news of these cyber heists surfaced. SWIFT (which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) itself is working on a five-point security plan to prevent similar events in the future. Source: Reuters

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Hackers steal $12 million from an Ecuadorian bank via SWIFT

Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC is a workstation for the size-obsessed

Andrew Cunningham Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC. 10 more images in gallery Every year when Intel refreshes its NUC mini PCs, it releases more models meant to cover a wider range of needs. There are cheap fanless NUCs, NUCs that can fit in full-size hard drives, and mainstream NUCs that are essentially little Ultrabooks inside boxes. This year is the first where Intel has tried to release a quad-core workstation-class NUC itself instead of leaving that field to OEM partners . This PC, also known as “Skull Canyon” because of Intel’s history of using skulls to promote performance-focused products, is quite a bit different from the other NUCs. It needs more space for cooling, so it’s around twice as wide as standard NUCs (though it’s a little shorter). But with that increased size comes a lot more flexibility and performance. Pricing and building Like other NUCs, the Skull Canyon version is sold as a “PC kit,” which means you have to add your own RAM, SSD, and operating system before you can actually use the thing. Assuming you want to equip it with fast PCI Express SSDs and a healthy amount of RAM, you’ll end up spending near $1,000—around $650 for the NUC itself, another $180 or so for a 256GB Samsung 950, $60-ish for 16GB of DDR4 RAM (Skylake supports up to 64GB), and $100 for your Windows 10 license if that’s the operating system you prefer to use. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC is a workstation for the size-obsessed

Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year

Danny Sullivan, reporting for Search Engine Land: How many searches per year happen on Google? After nearly four years, the company has finally released an updated figure today of “trillions” per year. How many trillions, exactly, Google wouldn’t say. Consider two trillion the starting point. Google did confirm to Search Engine Land that because it said it handles “trillions” of searches per year worldwide, the figure could be safely assumed to be two trillion or above. Is it more than two trillion? Google could be doing five trillion searches per year. Or 10 trillion. Or 100 trillion. Or presumably up to 999 trillion, because if it were 1, 000 trillion, you’d expect Google would announce that it does a quadrillion searches per year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year

Amazon Stops Giving Refunds When an Item’s Price Drops After You Purchase It

Amazon has for years issued refunds to users when the price of an item drops after they’ve purchased it. But lately the e-commerce giant hasn’t been doing that on a number of products, except for televisions, according to price-tracking companies. Recode reports: The move may have something to do with the rise of startups that track prices for Amazon customers and automatically request refunds when appropriate. One of them, a Santa Monica-based startup called Earny that is backed by the startup incubator Science, first pointed out the change. Earny scours a customer’s email inbox for digital receipts, and then continuously checks the price on a retailer’s website to see if it drops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Stops Giving Refunds When an Item’s Price Drops After You Purchase It

Paramount will end its lawsuit against ‘Star Trek’ fan film

Lawyers from Paramount/CBS have been pursuing the makers of a crowdfunded Star Trek fan film , Axanar , for months , but according to JJ Abrams, they’re finally going to back off. Abrams made the announcement at an event last night on the studio’s movie lot where the studio dedicated a street to the memory of Leonard Nimoy, premiered the second trailer (which you can watch below) for Star Trek: Beyond, showed about 15 minutes of footage from the movie, and announced plans to screen the flick on an outdoor IMAX screen at Comic-Con. At the Star Trek Beyond fan event JJ Abrahms announced that because of Justin Lin, Paramount was dropping the lawsuit against Axanar. — Axanar Productions (@StarTrekAxanar) May 21, 2016 According to Abrams, the movie’s director Justin Lin heard about the lawsuit, was personally troubled as a fan and pushed for a resolution. As you can see in the Periscope stream embedded below from Trek.fm , he said that in the next few weeks it will be announced that the lawsuit is going away. Now, in a statement to Buzzfeed reporter Adam Vary , CBS/Paramount lawyers have said that they are in settlement talks and plan to set up guidelines for future fan films. All in all, it’s probably a good call to stop antagonizing the fanbase before releasing a new movie, so it’s not too surprising that all of this news came at once. Breaking News: Star Trek Axanar lawsuit is going away… pic.twitter.com/Sgc8K983BO — Trek.fm (@trekfm) May 21, 2016 Via: Deadline Source: Axanar Productions (Twitter) , Axanar (Kickstarter) , Trek.fm (Twitter)

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Paramount will end its lawsuit against ‘Star Trek’ fan film

Superjet Technology Nears Reality After Successful Australia Test

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo: A two-hour flight from Sydney to London is a step closer to reality after the latest successful test Wednesday of hypersonic technology in the Australian desert. A joint US-Australian military research team is running a series of 10 trials at the world’s largest land testing range, Woomera in South Australia, and at Norway’s Andoya Rocket Range. Hypersonic flight involves traveling at more than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5). Scientists involved in the program — called Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation (HIFiRE) — are developing an engine that can fly at Mach 7, Michael Smart of the University of Queensland told AFP. He added that the scramjet was a supersonic combustion engine that uses oxygen from the atmosphere for fuel, making it lighter and faster than fuel-carrying rockets. The experimental rocket in the trial on Wednesday reached an altitude of 278 kilometers and a target speed of Mach 7.5, Australia’s defense department said. The first test of the rocket was conducted in 2009. The next test is scheduled for 2017 with the project expected to be completed in 2018. It’s only a matter of time before such high-speed transportation technology is implemented into our infrastructure. Last week, Hyperloop One conducted a successful test of its high speed transportation technology in the desert outside Las Vegas. Read more of this story at Slashdot.