entertainment – Page 8 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

HP’s Spectre x360 13 Promises Up To 16 Hours of Battery Life in a Faster, Cooler Design

From a report: The HP Spectre x360 13 is already one of the most popular 360-degree convertible laptops, and it’s about to get faster and cooler, thanks in part to Intel’s latest 8th-generation Core CPUs. Announced Wednesday, the refreshed Spectre x360 13 also offers greatly improved thermals and other nice tweaks. The Spectre x360 13 will ship on October 29 with a starting price of $1, 150, including a color-matched pen. Best Buy will begin taking pre-orders October 4. Multiple configurations will be available, but we’re listing below the specs we were given for the higher-end model ae013dx: CPU: Intel 8th-generation Core i7-8550U, a quad-core CPU with a 1.8GHz base clock and turbo boost up to 4GHz. Core i5 CPUs will also be available. RAM: 16GB LPDDR3 SDRAM. Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP’s Spectre x360 13 Promises Up To 16 Hours of Battery Life in a Faster, Cooler Design

US Studying Ways To End Use of Social Security Numbers For ID

wiredmikey quotes a report from Security Week: U.S. officials are studying ways to end the use of social security numbers for identification following a series of data breaches compromising the data for millions of Americans, Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, said Tuesday. Joyce told a forum at the Washington Post that officials were studying ways to use “modern cryptographic identifiers” to replace social security numbers. “I feel very strongly that the social security number has outlived its usefulness, ” Joyce said. “It’s a flawed system.” For years, social security numbers have been used by Americans to open bank accounts or establish their identity when applying for credit. But stolen social security numbers can be used by criminals to open bogus accounts or for other types of identity theft. Joyce said the administration has asked officials from several agencies to come up with ideas for “a better system” which may involve cryptography. This may involve “a public and private key” including “something that could be revoked if it has been compromised, ” Joyce added. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Studying Ways To End Use of Social Security Numbers For ID

According To Star Trek: Discovery, Starfleet Still Runs Microsoft Windows

AmiMoJo shares a report from The Verge: The third episode of Star Trek: Discovery aired this week, and at one point in the episode, Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham is tasked with reconciling two suites of code. In the show, Burnham claims the code is confusing because it deals with quantum astrophysics, biochemistry, and gene expression. And while the episode later reveals that it’s related to the USS Discovery’s experimental new mycelial network transportation system, Twitter user Rob Graham noted the code itself is a little more pedestrian in nature. More specifically, it seems to be decompiled code for the infamous Stuxnet virus, developed by the United States to attack Iranian computers running Windows. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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According To Star Trek: Discovery, Starfleet Still Runs Microsoft Windows

Google Scraps Controversial Policy That Gave Free Access To Paywalled Articles Through Search

For years, Google has provided a nifty trick to get around subscriptions for newspapers and magazines. But the company is now doing away with it. From a report: Google is ending its controversial First Click Free (FCF) policy that publishers loathed because it required them to allow Google search results access to news articles hidden behind a paywall. The company is replacing the decade-old FCF with Flexible Sampling, which allows publishers instead to decide how many (if any) articles they want to allow potential subscribers to access. Google says it’s also working on a suite of new tools to help publishers reach new audiences and grow revenue. Via FCF, users could access an article for free but would be prompted to log-in or subscribe if they clicked anywhere else on the page. Publishers were required to allow three free articles per day which Google indexed so that they appeared in searches for a particular topic or keyword. Opting out of the FCF feature was detrimental because it demoted a publisher’s ranking on Google Search and Google News. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Scraps Controversial Policy That Gave Free Access To Paywalled Articles Through Search

Tesla Is Shipping Hundreds of Powerwall Batteries To Puerto Rico

schwit1 quotes a report from Futurism: In a continued streak of goodwill during this year’s devastating hurricane season, Tesla has been shipping hundreds of its Powerwall batteries to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Since the hurricane hit on 20 September, much of the U.S. territory has been left without power — about 97 percent, as of 27 September — hampering residents’ access to drinkable water, perishable food, and air conditioning. The island’s hospitals are struggling to keep generators running as diesel fuel dwindles. Installed by employees in Puerto Rico, Tesla’s batteries could be paired with solar panels in order to store electricity for the territory, whose energy grid may need up to six months to be fully repaired. Several power banks have already arrived to the island, and more are en route. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt’s ‘Great Pyramid’ Mystery

schwit1 was the first Slashdot reader to bring us the news. Newsweek reports: Archaeologists believe they have found the key to unlocking a mystery almost as old as the Great Pyramid itself: Who built the structure and how were they able to transport two-ton blocks of stone to the ancient wonder more than 4, 500 years ago…? Experts had long established that the stones from the pyramid’s chambers were transported from as far away as Luxor, more than 500 miles to the south of Giza, the location of the Great Pyramid, but had never agreed how they got there. However, the diary of an overseer, uncovered in the seaport of Wadi al-Jafr, appears to answer the age-old question, showing the ancient Egyptians harnessed the power of the Nile to transport the giant blocks of stone. According to a new British documentary Egypt’s Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.’s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer’s team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt’s ‘Great Pyramid’ Mystery

Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, has been bottling water since 1843 and has grown into the largest seller of bottled water. But a detailed report on Bloomberg uncovers the company’s operation in Michigan, revealing that Nestle has come to dominate in the industry in part by going into economically depressed areas with lax water laws. It makes billions selling a product for which it pays close to nothing. Find the Bloomberg Businessweek article here (it might be paywalled, here’s an alternative source). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nestle Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For

iOS 11 Released

Today, Apple released the final version of iOS 11, its latest mobile operating system. If you have an iPhone or iPad that was released within the last few years, you should be able to download the new update if you navigate to the Settings panel and check for a software update under the General tab. The Verge reports: OS 11, first unveiled in detail back at Apple’s WWDC in June, is the same incremental annual refresh we’ve come to expect from the company, but it hides some impressive complexity under the surface. Not only does it add some neat features to iOS for the first time, like ARKit capabilities for augmented reality and a new Files app, but it also comes with much-needed improvements to Siri; screenshot capture and editing; and the Control Center, which is now more fully featured and customizable. For iPads, iOS 11 is more of an overhaul. The software now better supports multitasking so you can more easily bring two apps into split-screen mode, or even add a third now. The new drag-and-drop features are also much more powerful on iPad, letting you manage stuff in the Files app more intuitively and even letting you drag and drop photos and text from one app to another. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities

A vaccine against tooth decay “is urgently needed” writes Nature — and a team of Chinese scientists is getting close. hackingbear writes: Scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed low side effects and high protective efficiency using flagellin-rPAc fusion protein KFD2-rPAc, a promising vaccine candidate. In rat challenge models, KFD2-rPAc induces a robust rPAc-specific IgA response, and confers efficient prophylactic and therapeutic efficiency as does KF-rPAc, while the flagellin-specific inflammatory antibody responses are highly reduced. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities

Python’s Official Repository Included 10 ‘Malicious’ Typo-Squatting Modules

An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: The Slovak National Security Office (NBU) has identified ten malicious Python libraries uploaded on PyPI — Python Package Index — the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language. NBU experts say attackers used a technique known as typosquatting to upload Python libraries with names similar to legitimate packages — e.g.: “urlib” instead of “urllib.” The PyPI repository does not perform any types of security checks or audits when developers upload new libraries to its index, so attackers had no difficulty in uploading the modules online. Developers who mistyped the package name loaded the malicious libraries in their software’s setup scripts. “These packages contain the exact same code as their upstream package thus their functionality is the same, but the installation script, setup.py, is modified to include a malicious (but relatively benign) code, ” NBU explained. Experts say the malicious code only collected information on infected hosts, such as name and version of the fake package, the username of the user who installed the package, and the user’s computer hostname. Collected data, which looked like “Y:urllib-1.21.1 admin testmachine”, was uploaded to a Chinese IP address. NBU officials contacted PyPI administrators last week who removed the packages before officials published a security advisory on Saturday.” The advisory lays some of the blame on Python’s ‘pip’ tool, which executes arbitrary code during installations without requiring a cryptographic signature. Ars Technica also reports that another team of researchers “was able to seed PyPI with more than 20 libraries that are part of the Python standard library, ” and that group now reports they’ve already received more than 7, 400 pingbacks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.