While the last time most of us thought of shingles was when we were itchy in eighth grade, Seagate has been thinking of them as a way to store data. Called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives, Seagate’s new drives can store eight terabytes of data for about 3 cents a gigabyte. The catch? These are great back-up drives but they’re not very fast. At 5, 900 RPM and an average… Read More
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New “Shingled” Hard Drives Hold Terabytes For Pennies A Gig
An anonymous reader writes Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFMPEG, QEMU, JSLinux…) proposes a new image format that could replace JPEG : BPG. For the same quality, files are about half the size of their JPEG equivalents. He released libbpg (with source) as well as a JS decompressor, and set up a demo including the famous Lena image. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bellard Creates New Image Format To Replace JPEG
An anonymous reader writes This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases featuring: a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. You can get it here and the list of changes are here. Existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers are encouraged to upgrade. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FreeNAS 9.3 Released
Remember when Apple went after that handy note-taking widget , a popular app that’s one the first truly useful widgets for iOS 8? Turns out, Apple’s been pulling all kinds of apps that take advantage of new features in iOS 8—even after they’ve been approved to be in the App Store. And developers are starting to get pretty upset. Read more…
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Apple Is Pulling a Bunch of the Neatest iOS 8 Apps
According to an article in World News Daily Report , loggers in the Amazon have accidentally cut down a 5, 800-year-old Samauma tree, the oldest in the world. Except there is no such tree. This “news” article with 143, 000 Facebook shares is a wholesale fabrication. Read more…
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Loggers didn’t cut down world’s oldest tree—but the real story is better
CoolChip Technologies is a startup working to redesign fans to be less of a nuisance. While there are alternatives (like liquid cooling) for those who simply cannot stand the presence of fans, CoolChip’s work doesn’t require significantly changing a machine’s internal layout. Read More
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CoolChip Technologies Is Redesigning The Humble Computer Fan
MojoKid writes: AMD just dropped its new Catalyst Omega driver package that is the culmination of six months of development work. AMD Catalyst Omega reportedly brings over 20 new features and a wealth of bug fixes to the table, along with performance increases both on AMD Radeon GPUs and integrated AMD APUs. Some of the new functionality includes Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. VSR is “game- and engine-agnostic” and renders content at up to 4K resolution, then displays it at a resolution that your monitor actually supports. AMD says VSR allows for increased image quality, similar in concept to Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Another added perk of VSR is the ability to see more content on the screen at once. To take advantage of VSR, you’ll need a Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, or R9 285 discrete graphics card. Both single- and multi-GPU configurations are currently supported. VSR is essentially AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. In addition, AMD is claiming performance enhancements in a number of top titles with these these new drivers. Reportedly, as little as 6 percent improvement in performance in FIFA Online to as much as a 29 percent increase in Batman: Arkham Origins can be gained when using an AMD 7000-Series APU, for example. On discrete GPUs, an AMD Radeon R9 290X’s performance increases ranged from 8 percent in Grid 2 to roughly 16 percent in Bioshock Infinity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have discovered a new version of the Destover malware that was used in the recent Sony Pictures Entertainment breaches, and in an ironic twist, the sample is signed by a legitimate certificate stolen from Sony. The new sample is essentially identical to an earlier version of Destover that was not signed. Destover has been used in a variety of attacks in recent years and it’s representative of the genre of malware that doesn’t just compromise machines and steal data, but can destroy information as well. The attackers who have claimed credit for the attack on Sony have spent the last couple of weeks gradually releasing large amounts of information stolen in the breach, including unreleased movies, personal data of Sony employees and sensitive security information such as digital certificates and passwords. The new, signed version of Destover appears to have been compiled in July and was signed on Dec. 5, the day after Kaspersky Lab published an analysis of the known samples of the malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Destover Malware Signed By Stolen Sony Certificate
cold fjord writes: The Weekly Standard reports, “This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to ‘advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.’ … Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015.” Among the many agencies that will be sharing records besides Health and Human Services are: Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison, Department of Labor, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records of Americans
Swedish police have reportedly raided The Pirate Bay. The Portal has been down for several hours. The site has long hidden behind the relatively lax laws of Sweden, but it appears it’s exhausted the leniency. Read more…
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The Pirate Bay Raided By Police, Site Down