Tag: events

Google Calendar Ends SMS Notifications

LuserOnFire writes: Google has sent out an email this morning that says in part: “Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experience on your mobile device, even offline.” You can find the announcement on Google’s support pages as well. “Richer” may be accurate, but I’m not sure that “more reliable” describes web-based notifications; that may be why the announcement linked does not apply for Google’s “Work, Education and Government customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Calendar Ends SMS Notifications

Russian Space Agency Misused $1.8 Billion, May Be Replaced

An anonymous reader writes: After a pair of high profile launch failures in the past few months, Russian space agency Roscosmos is making headlines again: this time for corruption. A public spending watchdog reported that the organization had misused 92 billion rubles ($1.8 billion) in 2014 alone. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said their space efforts have been undermined by rampant corruption. “We have uncovered acts of fraud, abuse of authority (and) document forgery. With such a level of moral decay, one should not be surprised at the high accident rate.” He also said Roscosmos is to be “abolished, ” and replaced by a state corporation of the same name by the end of the year. “In its new, corporate identity, Roscosmos will be responsible not only for setting mission goals but managing wages for space industry workers and modernizing production facilities.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russian Space Agency Misused $1.8 Billion, May Be Replaced

Force Touch And Haptics Said To Be Coming To iOS 9 And iPhone 6S

 A new report from 9to5Mac claims iOS 9 will have support for Force Touch features, as well as haptic feedback, and that both of those will be included in the iPhone 6 hardware successor coming this fall. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the iPhone 6s (or whatever it ends up being called officially by Apple) getting Force Touch, the feature introduced with the Apple… Read More

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Force Touch And Haptics Said To Be Coming To iOS 9 And iPhone 6S

Galapagos Island Volcano Erupts After 33 Years, Threatening Fragile Ecosystem

An anonymous reader writes: Wolf volcano in the Galapagos islands has erupted for the first time in more than 30 years, sending lava flowing down its slopes and potentially threatening the world’s only colony of pink iguanas. The Galapagos National Park says that currently there is no risk to tourism operations, but the Environment Ministry is notifying tourist operators to take precautions. A tourist boat passing by took an amazing picture of the eruption. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Galapagos Island Volcano Erupts After 33 Years, Threatening Fragile Ecosystem

No, Your SSD Won’t Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down

An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago, we discussed reports that enterprise SSDs would lose data in a surprisingly short amount of time if left powered off. The reports were based on a presentation from Alvin Cox, a Seagate engineer, about enterprise storage practices. PCWorld spoke to him and another engineer for Seagate, and they say the whole thing was blown out of proportion. Alan Cox said, “I wouldn’t worry about (losing data). This all pertains to end of life. As a consumer, an SSD product or even a flash product is never going to get to the point where it’s temperature-dependent on retaining the data.” The intent of the original presentation was to set expectations for a worst case scenario — a data center writing huge amounts of data to old SSDs and then storing them long-term at unusual temperatures. It’s not a very realistic situation for businesses with responsible IT departments, and almost impossible for personal drives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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No, Your SSD Won’t Quickly Lose Data While Powered Down

This App Turns Your $600 Apple Watch Into A $20 Casio Calculator Watch

 Plenty of people have compared the Apple Watch to the classic Casio calculator watch; these guys went ahead and made the inevitable app. Meet GeekWatch — the app that turns your Apple Watch into an old-school calculator watch. Read More

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This App Turns Your $600 Apple Watch Into A $20 Casio Calculator Watch

Academics Build a New Tor Client Designed To Beat the NSA

An anonymous reader writes: In response to a slew of new research about network-level attacks against Tor, academics from the U.S. and Israel built a new Tor client called Astoria designed to beat adversaries like the NSA, GCHQ, or Chinese intelligence who can monitor a user’s Tor traffic from entry to exit. Astoria differs most significantly from Tor’s default client in how it selects the circuits that connect a user to the network and then to the outside Internet. The tool is an algorithm designed to more accurately predict attacks and then securely select relays that mitigate timing attack opportunities for top-tier adversaries. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Academics Build a New Tor Client Designed To Beat the NSA

How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today’s Internet In Jeopardy

An anonymous reader writes: While debate swirls in Washington D.C. about new encryption laws, the consequences of the last crypto war is still being felt. Logjam vulnerabilities making headlines today is “a direct result of weakening cryptography legislation in the 1990s, ” researcher J. Alex Halderman said. “Thanks to Moore’s law and improvements in cryptanalysis, the ability to break that crypto is something really anyone can do with open-source software. The backdoor might have seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe the arguments 20 years ago convinced people this was going to be safe. History has shown otherwise. This is the second time in two months we’ve seen 90s era crypto blow up and put the safety of everyone on the internet in jeopardy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today’s Internet In Jeopardy

Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs

eldavojohn writes: You’ve probably got a spindle in your closet, or a drawer layered with them: the CD-ROM discs that were mailed to you or delivered with some hardware that you put away “just in case.” Now, of course, the case for actually using them is laughable. Well, a certain eccentric individual named Jason Scott has a fever — and the only cure is more AOL CDs. But his sickness doesn’t stop there, “I also want all the CD-ROMs made by Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I want every shovelware disc that came out in the entire breadth of the CD-ROM era. I want every shareware floppy, while we’re talking. I want it all. The CD-ROM era is basically finite at this point. It’s over. The time when we’re going to use physical media as the primary transport for most data is done done done. Sure, there’s going to be distributions and use of CD-ROMs for some time to come, but the time when it all came that way and when it was in most cases the only method of distribution in the history books, now. And there were a specific amount of CD-ROMs made. There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I’m looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike.” Who knows? His madness may end up being appreciated by younger generations! Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs

How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook

An anonymous reader writes: As Microsoft prepares for the launch of Windows 10, review sites have been performing all sorts of benchmarks on the tech preview to evaluate how well the operating system will run. But now a computer science student named Alex King has made the most logical performance evaluation of all: testing Windows 10’s performance on a 2015 MacBook. He says, “Here’s the real kicker: it’s fast. It’s smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It’s unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn’t completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It’s remarkable, and it makes me believe in the 12-inch MacBook more than ever before. So maybe it’s ironic that in some regards, the new MacBook runs Windows 10 (a prerelease version, at that) better than it runs OS X.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook