funny – Page 209 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

An Epic View of the Moon In Earth’s Orbital Embrace

astroengine writes: As a suitably impressive follow-up to the new “blue marble” image of our world released in July, NASA shared a gorgeous animation created from pictures captured by NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles (1.5 million km) away — over four times farther than the moon. In a series of images acquired between 3:50 and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16, 2015, the moon can be seen passing in front of a rotating Earth, the warm gray face of its far side framed by the swirling-cloud-covered blue water of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The north pole is at the 11 o’clock position, illustrating our planet’s 23.5-degree axial tilt. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taken from:
An Epic View of the Moon In Earth’s Orbital Embrace

Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy

An anonymous reader writes: A little over a month ago, Bill Gates made headlines when he decided to double down on his investments in renewable energy. Now, he’s written an article for Quartz explaining why: “I think this issue is especially important because, of all the people who will be affected by climate change, those in poor countries will suffer the most. Higher temperatures and less-predictable weather would hurt poor farmers, most of whom live on the edge and can be devastated by a single bad crop. Food supplies could decline. Hunger and malnutrition could rise. It would be a terrible injustice to let climate change undo any of the past half-century’s progress against poverty and disease — and doubly unfair because the people who will be hurt the most are the ones doing the least to cause the problem.” He also says government is not doing enough to fund such research, and that energy markets aren’t doing a good enough job of factoring the negative effects of carbon emissions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
Why Bill Gates Is Dumping Another $1 Billion Into Clean Energy

LibreOffice 5.0 Released

New submitter ssam writes: The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project, bringing new features including Windows 10, Android and Ubuntu touch compatibility, superior interoperability features, an updated UI, and lots of under the hood improvements. For people still running OpenOffice it is probably time to move over. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
LibreOffice 5.0 Released

Spyware Demo Shows How Spooks Hack Mobile Phones

An anonymous reader writes: Joe Greenwood, of cybersecurity firm 4Armed, recently gave a live demonstration of some of Hacking Team’s leaked spyware to the BBC. Tracking Bitcoin payments, recording audio from the microphone of a locked device, and secretly gaining control of an infected phone’s camera are just a few of the software’s capabilities. The BBC reports: “Both Mr Greenwood and 4Armed’s technical director, Marc Wickenden, said they were surprised by the sleekness of the interface. Both point out, though, that customers could be paying upwards of £1m for the software and would expect it to be user-friendly, especially if it was intended for use by law enforcers on the beat. For the tracked user, though, there are very few ways of finding out that they are being watched. One red flag, according to Mr Greenwood, is a sudden spike in network data usage, indicating that information is being sent somewhere in the background. Experienced spies, however, would be careful to minimize this in order to remain incognito.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
Spyware Demo Shows How Spooks Hack Mobile Phones

Giving Up Alternating Current

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday we discussed Soylent, the artificial food substitute created by Rob Rhinehart and his team. As it turns out, this isn’t Rhinehart’s only unusual sustainability project. In a new post, he explains how he gave up on alternating current — a tough proposition for anyone living in the U.S. and still interested in using all sorts of modern technology. Rhinehart says, “Most power in the US is generated by burning coal, immediately squandering 67% of its energy, then run through a steam turbine, losing another 50%, then sent across transmission lines, losing another 5%, then to charge a DC device like a cell phone another 50% is lost in conversion. This means for 100 watts of coal or oil burned my phone gets a mere 16.” The biggest hindrance was the kitchen. As you might expect for the creator of Soylent, he doesn’t cook, and was able to get rid of almost all kitchen appliances because of that. He uses a butane stove for hot beverages. He powers a small computer off batteries, which get their energy from solar panels. For intensive tasks, he remotes to more powerful machines. He re-wired his apartment’s LED lighting to run off direct current. Have any of you made similar changes? How much of an effect does this really have? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the article here:
Giving Up Alternating Current

The New Google Glass Is All Business

An anonymous reader writes: Google scrapped an early version of its smart glasses in January, but has developed another model just for businesses. The company hopes to get this newest version of Glass in the hands of healthcare, manufacturing and energy industry professionals by this fall. Recode reports: “The new model can fold up like a traditional pair of glasses and is more rugged for outdoor use. However, unlike most other smart glasses, it still sports a small screen to the upper right of the user’s vision, rather than displaying an image in the center of one’s view like the ODG R7 or Microsoft HoloLens.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
The New Google Glass Is All Business

Windows 10 App For Xbox One Could Render Steam Machines Useless

SlappingOysters writes: The release of Windows 10 has brought with it the Xbox app — a portal through which you can stream anything happening on your Xbox One to your Surface or desktop. Finder is reporting that the love will go the other way, too, with a PC app coming to the Xbox One allowing you to stream your desktop to your console. But where does this leave the coming Steam Machines? This analysis shows how such an app could undermine the Steam Machines’ market position. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See more here:
Windows 10 App For Xbox One Could Render Steam Machines Useless

Tomb, a Successor To TrueCrypt For Linux Geeks

jaromil writes: Last day we released Tomb version 2.1 with improvements to stability, documentation and translations. Tomb is just a ZSh script wrapping around cryptsetup, gpg and other tools to facilitate the creation and management of LUKS encrypted volumes with features like key separation, steganography, off-line search, QRcode paper backups etc. In designing Tomb we struggle for minimalism and readability, convinced that the increasing complexity of personal technology is the root of many vulnerabilities the world is witnessing today — and this approach turns out to be very successful, judging from the wide adoption, appreciation and contributions our project has received especially after the demise of TrueCrypt. As maintainer of the software I wonder what Slashdot readers think about what we are doing, how we are doing it and more in general about the need for simplicity in secure systems, a debate I perceive as transversal to many other GNU/Linux/BSD projects and their evolution. Given the increasing responsibility in maintaining such a software, considering the human-interface side of things is an easy to reach surface of attack, I can certainly use some advice and criticism. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Tomb, a Successor To TrueCrypt For Linux Geeks

Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One

jones_supa writes: Windows 10 will launch in less than a week and it is supposed to work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Device drivers all the way back to Windows Vista platform (WDDM 1.0) are supported. Softpedia performed a practical test to see how Windows 10 can run on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One netbook powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB mechanical hard disk. The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast, but the operating system itself also works fast. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original article here:
Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One

US Court: ‘Pocket-Dialed’ Calls Are Not Private

itwbennett writes: In a case of a pocket-dialed call, a conscientious secretary, and sensitive personnel issues, a federal appeals court in Ohio has ruled pocket-dialers shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy. ‘Under the plain-view doctrine, if a homeowner neglects to cover a window with drapes, he would lose his reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to a viewer looking into the window from outside of his property, ‘ the court said. The same applies to pocket-dialed calls, according to the court. If a person doesn’t take reasonable steps to keep their call private, their communications are not protected by the Wiretap Act. Read more of this story at Slashdot.