Mad guys ride the largest and most insane urban zip-line in the world

This is the largest urban zip-line ride in the world—and it must b e the most insane too. Watch these guys zip down a 10, 000-foot line placed on top of a 700-foot building in Panama City. Then—half way through it and as if this weren’t scary enough on its own—they let go and dive with their parachutes. Madness. Read more…

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Mad guys ride the largest and most insane urban zip-line in the world

UK Spy Agency Certifies Master’s Degrees In Cyber Security

An anonymous reader writes Intelligence agency GCHQ has just accredited six UK universities to teach Master’s degrees in online security that meet the intelligence agency’s “stringent criteria.” From the press release: “The certification of six Master’s degrees in Cyber Security was announced by Rt.Hon Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, when he visited GCHQ today. This marks another significant step in the development of the UK’s knowledge, skills and capability in all fields of Cyber Security as part of the National Cyber Security Programme. The National Cyber Security Strategy recognises education as key to the development of Cyber Security skills and, earlier in the year, UK universities were invited to submit their Cyber Security Master’s degrees for certification against GCHQ’s stringent criteria for a broad foundation in Cyber Security.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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UK Spy Agency Certifies Master’s Degrees In Cyber Security

Elon Musk Promises 100,000 Electric Cars Per Year

Dave Knott sends this news from the CBC: Tesla stock was up five per cent on Friday morning after CEO Elon Musk said the electric-car company would deliver 100, 000 vehicles next year. Its earnings report released Thursday shows Tesla continues to operate at a loss as it spends on engineering and setting up an assembly line for its Model X SUV, which is scheduled to go into production early next year. But investors were cheered by the news that the company would deliver 100, 000 vehicles next year, up from 22, 000 in 2013 and a projected 35, 000 this year. Tesla reported a loss of $61.9 million in its second quarter, compared with a loss of $30.5 million in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue nearly doubled to $769.3 million, missing Wall Street’s forecast of $801.9 million, but expenses were also up as Tesla prepares some ambitious projects, spending $93 million in the quarter on research and development alone. While the Model X is in development, the longer-term plan is for a cheaper, mass-market car, the Model 3, to be launched in 2017. The biggest investment Tesla will make is in its large lithium-ion production plant, to be built at an as-yet-unnamed U.S. location in a $5-billion partnership with Panasonic. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Elon Musk Promises 100,000 Electric Cars Per Year

10 Malware Removal Apps Tested, Malwarebytes Comes out on Top

A recent test done by the independent antivirus research group AV-TEST— whose tests we’ve mentioned in the past —took a look at the performance of today’s most popular malware removal applications. Most of the applications showed excellent performance, but only Malwarebytes—a free download—managed a perfect score. Read more…

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10 Malware Removal Apps Tested, Malwarebytes Comes out on Top

Opt Out of Amazon Prime’s Free Two-Day Shipping, Earn $1 Video Credit

If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, you can choose a no-rush shipping option during checkout and earn $1 of Amazon Instant Video credit for every order. Read more…

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Opt Out of Amazon Prime’s Free Two-Day Shipping, Earn $1 Video Credit

Do Apple and Google Sabotage Older Phones? What the Graphs Don’t Show

Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan takes a look in the New York Times at interesting correlations between the release dates of new phones and OSes and search queries that indicate frustration with the speed of the phones that people already have. Mullainathan illustrates with graphs (and gives plausible explanations for the difference) just how different the curves are over time for the search terms “iPhone slow” and “Samsung Galaxy slow.” It’s easy to see with the iPhone graph especially how it could seem to users that Apple has intentionally slowed down older phones to nudge them toward upgrading. While he’s careful not to rule out intentional slowing of older phone models (that’s possible, after all), Mullainathan cites several factors that mean there’s no need to believe in a phone-slowing conspiracy, and at least two big reasons (reputation, liability) for companies — Apple, Google, and cellphone manufacturers like Samsung — not to take part in one. He points out various wrinkles in what the data could really indicate, including genuine but innocent slowdowns caused by optimizing for newer hardware. It’s an interesting look at the difference between having mere statistics, no matter how rigorously gathered, and knowing quite what they mean. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Do Apple and Google Sabotage Older Phones? What the Graphs Don’t Show

Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling

MojoKid (1002251) writes The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can’t seem to handle the streaming video service’s traffic, boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection. What he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he’s paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it’s adding extra hops. Speeds didn’t get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon’s Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn’t know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling

GOG.com Announces Linux Support

For years, Good Old Games has made a business out of selling classic PC game titles completely free of DRM. Today they announced that their platform now supports Linux. They said, We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by … We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. … Note that we’ve got many classic titles coming officially to Linux for the very first time, thanks to the custom builds prepared by our dedicated team of penguin tamers. … For both native Linux versions, as well as special builds prepared by our team, GOG.com will provide distro-independent tar.gz archives and support convenient DEB installers for the two most popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu and Mint, in their current and future LTS editions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GOG.com Announces Linux Support

Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy

First time accepted submitter Carly Page writes When asked for its response to Edward Snowden’s claims that “Dropbox is hostile to privacy”, Dropbox told The INQUIRER that users concerned about privacy should add their own encryption. The firm warned however that if users do, not all of the service’s features will work. Head of Product at Dropbox for Business Ilya Fushman says: “We have data encrypted on our servers. We think of encryption beyond that as a users choice. If you look at our third-party developer ecosystem you’ll find many client-side encryption apps….It’s hard to do things like rich document rendering if they’re client-side encrypted. Search is also difficult, we can’t index the content of files. Finally, we need users to understand that if they use client-side encryption and lose the password, we can’t then help them recover those files.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy

Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD

MojoKid writes: Intel just launched their new SSD 2500 Pro series solid state drive, the follow-up to last year’s SSD 1500 Pro series, which targets corporate and small-business clients. The drive shares much of its DNA with some of Intel’s consumer-class drives, but the Pro series cranks things up a few notches with support for advanced security and management features, low power states, and an extended management toolset. In terms of performance, the Intel SSD 2500 Pro isn’t class-leading in light of many enthusiast-class drives but it’s no slouch either. Intel differentiates the 2500 Pro series by adding support for vPro remote-management and hardware-based self-encryption. The 2500 Pro series supports TCG (Trusted Computing Group) Opal 2.0 features and is Microsoft eDrive capable as well. Intel also offers an administration tool for easy management of the drive. With the Intel administration tool, users can reset the PSID (physical presence security ID), though the contents of the drive will be wiped. Sequential reads are rated at up to 540MB/s, sequential writes at up to 480MB/s, with 45K – 80K random read / write IOps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD