Tag: funny

Chicagoan Arrested For Using Cell-phone Jammer To Make Subway Commute Tolerable

McGruber writes with this story from the Chicago Tribune: Last Fall, certified public accountant Dennis Nicholl boarded a Chicago subway train while carrying a plastic bag of Old Style beer. Nicholl popped open a beer and looked around the car, scowling as he saw another rider talking on a cellphone. He pulled out a black device from his pocket and switched it on. Commuters who had been talking on their phones went silent, checking their screens for the source of their dropped calls. On Tuesday, undercover officers arrested Nicholl. Cook County prosecutors and Chicago police allege he created his own personal ‘quiet car’ on the subway by using an illegal device he imported from China. He was charged with unlawful interference with a public utility, a felony. This is not the first time Nicholl has been charged with jamming cell calls. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in June 2009, according to court records. He was placed under court supervision for a year, and his equipment was confiscated and destroyed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chicagoan Arrested For Using Cell-phone Jammer To Make Subway Commute Tolerable

Seagate Debuts World’s Fastest NVMe SSD With 10GBps Throughput

MojoKid writes: Seagate has just unveiled what it is calling “the world’s fastest SSD, ” and the performance differential between it and the next closest competitive offering is significant, if their claims are true. The SSD, which Seagate today announced is in “production-ready” form employs the NVMe protocol to help it achieve breakneck speeds. So just how fast is it? Seagate says that the new SSD is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots. Seagate notes that this is 4GB/sec faster than the next-fastest competing SSD solution. The company is also working on a second, lower-performing variant that works in 8-lane PCIe slots and has a throughput of 6.7GB/sec. Seagate sees the second model as a more cost-effect SSD for businesses that want a high performing SSD, but want to keep costs and power consumption under control. Seagate isn’t ready yet to discuss pricing for its blazing fast SSDs, and oddly haven’t disclosed a model name either, but it does say that general availability for its customers will open up during the summer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seagate Debuts World’s Fastest NVMe SSD With 10GBps Throughput

Using Kexec Allows Starting Linux In PlayStation 4

jones_supa writes: Team fail0verflow, the hacker group who made Sony PlayStation 4, has introduced another method to start Linux in the game console. Instead of the previous exploit which was based on a security hole in an old PS4 firmware version, the new trick allows a kexec call to start Linux through Orbis OS (the FreeBSD-based system software of PS4). The code can be found in GitHub. Maybe this will lead to more and better PlayStation clusters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Using Kexec Allows Starting Linux In PlayStation 4

Google Docs Can Now Export EPUB

An anonymous reader writes: The EPUB format is now available as an export option from Google Docs. Tests show that the feature can very accurately translate Word-style hyperlinked indexes into EPUB sidebar indices, offering the possibility of updating legacy documents to a more portable and open format. However, despite the completely open XML-based nature of the format, and how much better it handles text-reflow than PDF can, the paucity of easy-to-use editors — particularly in the mobile space — may mean that EPUB continues to be seen as a ‘baked’ format. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Docs Can Now Export EPUB

Kremlin Falls For Its Own Fake Satellite Imagery

An anonymous reader writes: The Turkish downing of the Russian SU-24 jet last November saw a predictable series of statements from each side claiming complete innocence and blaming the other entirely. Social media was a key battleground for both sides — the Turkish and Russian governments, along with their supporters — as each tried to establish a dominant narrative explanation for what had just happened. In the midst of the online competition, a little-observed, funhouse mirror of an online hoax was brilliantly perpetrated, one with consequences likely exceeding the expectation of the hoaxster. The Russian Ministry of Defense was duped by a fake image that Russian state media itself had circulated more than a year earlier, as a way to deny Moscow’s involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Kremlin Falls For Its Own Fake Satellite Imagery

New Ransomware-as-a-Service Speaks To Victims

itwbennett writes: Cerber, a new file-encrypting ransom ware, has a couple of interesting features. First, according to cyber intelligence outfit SenseCy, it is available for sale ‘as a service’ on a private Russian-language forum, which makes it ‘available to low-level criminals who might not have the coding skills or resources to create their own ransom ware, ‘ writes Lucian Constantin. Second, one of the 3 files it drops on a victim’s desktop is a VBS (Visual Basic Scripting) file containing text-to-speech code that converts text into an audio message. ‘When the above script is executed, your computer will speak a message stating that your computer’s files were encrypted and will repeat itself numerous times, ‘ said Lawrence Abrams, administrator of the technical support forum BleepingComputer.com, in a blog post. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Ransomware-as-a-Service Speaks To Victims

SpaceX’s Latest Launch Successful, But Ends With a "Hard Landing"

Eloking writes with this news from The Verge: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space this afternoon, but — as expected — failed to land the vehicle on a drone ship at sea afterward. CEO Elon Musk said the rocket ‘landed hard’ on the drone ship. The mission requirements made a successful landing unlikely. This was SpaceX’s fourth attempt to land the Falcon 9 post-launch on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. All of the previous sea landings failed too, though the third attempt came very close. The company had low hopes of a successful landing from the start of this mission, since the rocket had to send a heavy satellite into a high orbit. That requires a lot of fuel for the launch itself, so there wasn’t much fuel left for the rocket’s return to Earth and powered landing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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SpaceX’s Latest Launch Successful, But Ends With a "Hard Landing"

MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License

New submitter _merlin writes: MAMEdev just announced that MAME (formerly Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is now entirely available under OSI-comliant, FSF-approved licenses. The project as a whole is available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL-2.0), while individual source files are available under BSD-3-Clause, LGPL-2.1 or GPL-2.0 (all compatible with GPL-2.0). Over 90% of the code, including core functionality, is available under the BSD-3-Clause license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MAME Released Under OSI-Compliant, FSF-Approved License

Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

szczys writes: Google is building a 100kW transmitter at Spaceport America. As is becoming the regular source of early info, this comes via an FCC filing in which Google has asked the agency to keep the project secret. The signal strength itself isn’t [groundbreaking] until you learn this is a directional antenna. Some of the most powerful FM radio transmitters get to 100kW, but those are omnidirectional. This is a highly focused directional antenna and that makes it sound like a big piece of Google’s hushed Broadband Drone program. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

HughPickens.com writes: Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can’t rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate. A number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning over the past year that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic. “Many in the US Bitcoin community had hoped that hitting this crisis point — a network maxed out, transactions faltering — would result in closure, with miners quickly moving to adopt whichever chain proved more valuable to their economic interests, ” says Popper. “But so far the debate is dragging on without one side claiming a clear victory, leaving tens of thousands of consumer transactions stranded in limbo.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass