golf – Page 74 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds

The white portion of this AR-15, known as the “lower,” was manufactured using 3D printing. Defense Distributed Cody Wilson, like many of his Texan forebears, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to further his agenda. Wilson’s non-profit organization, Defense Distributed , released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process. Last year, his group famously demonstrated that they could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and can seemingly fire for quite awhile. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.) Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds

Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Adobe has released an emergency security update for its widely used Flash media player to patch a vulnerability being actively exploited on the Internet. The company is advising Windows and Mac users to install it in the next 72 hours. An advisory the software company issued on Tuesday said only that affected Flash flaws “are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking a link which directs to a website serving malicious Flash (SWF) content.” It identified the bugs as CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648 as indexed in the common vulnerabilities and exposures database . The advisory added the exploits targeted the Firefox browser. A spokeswoman said no other attack details are available. Adobe’s advisory assigns a priority rating of 1 to Flash versions that run on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X computers. The rating is reserved for “vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild.” The priority for Linux users carries a rating of 3, which is used to designate “vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe releases third security update this month for Flash Player

Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse

New Jersey Modern audio compression algorithms rely on observations about auditory perceptions. For instance, we know that a low-frequency tone can render a higher tone inaudible. This perception is used to save space by removing the tones we expect will be inaudible. But our expectations are complicated by the physics of waves and our models of how human audio perception works. This problem has been highlighted in a recent Physical Review Letter , in which researchers demonstrated the vast majority of humans can perceive certain aspects of sound far more accurately than allowed by a simple reading of the laws of physics. Given that many encoding algorithms start their compression with operations based on that simple physical understanding, the researchers believe it may be time to revisit audio compression. Time and frequency: Two sides of the same coin You’ll notice I didn’t say, “human hearing violates the laws of physics,” even though it was very tempting. The truth is that nothing violates the laws of physics, though many things violate the simplified models we use to approximate them. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Human hearing beats sound’s uncertainty limit, makes MP3s sound worse

Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

Four months after Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 with and for Windows 8, Redmond has finally released a version of the company’s newest browser for its 700 million Windows 7 users in 95 other languages too. The new browser will be available as an optional update immediately. Anyone with the release preview installed will have it sent as an “important” update. That’s significant because Windows Update will, in its default configuration, install it silently and automatically. Over coming months, Microsoft will classify Internet Explorer 10 as “important” in more and more markets to ensure it is installed automatically as widely as possible. This marks a significant change from Microsoft’s past practices. Traditionally, the company has released new browsers only as optional updates, and further, as interactive updates that required clicking through a EULA before installation actually took place. In late 2011, the company changed this policy, converting Internet Explorer 9 to an automatic (“important”) update. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer 10 finally released for Windows 7

The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

The Swedish Pirate Party has stopped hosting the notorious website The Pirate Bay, according to TorrentFreak. While no one knows where the site is actually run from, Web-hosting services have been provided through the Swedish Pirate Party for a few years now. Now, the site’s hosting will be taken care of by the Pirate Parties in Norway and Sweden. TPB is being forced to move because the Swedish Pirate Party is under pressure from Rights Alliance, a Swedish anti-piracy group representing large music and movie interests. Rights Alliance threatened legal action against the Pirate Party if the group didn’t stop hosting the site by tomorrow. Spain in particular could turn out to be a safe haven for the piracy-driven website, since judges in that country have found simply linking to other infringing sites is not a basis for copyright liability. The sports-streaming site Rojadirecta, for example, was exonerated after legal action against it was initiated in Spain. (That didn’t stop it from having its domain name grabbed by a US agency, before being given back last summer.) Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Pirate Bay leaves Sweden for friendlier waters

Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

Yes, this library has a Cisco 3945 router. Marmet, West Virginia is a town of 1,500 people living in a thin ribbon along the banks of the Kanawha River just below Charleston. The town’s public library is only open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. It’s housed in a small building the size of a trailer, which the state of West Virginia describes as an “extremely small facility with only one Internet connection.” Which is why it’s such a surprise to learn the Marmet Public Library runs this connection through a $15,000 to $20,000 Cisco 3945 router intended for “mid-size to large deployments,” according to Cisco. In an absolutely scathing report (PDF) just released by the state’s Legislative Auditor, West Virginia officials are accused of overspending at least $5 million of federal money on such routers, installed indiscriminately in both large institutions and one-room libraries across the state. The routers were purchased without ever asking the state’s libraries, cops, and schools what they needed. And when distributed, the expensive routers were passed out without much apparent care. The small town of Clay received seven of them to serve a total population of 491 people… and all seven routers were installed within only .44 miles of each other at a total cost of more than $100,000. In total, $24 million was spent on the routers through a not-very-open bidding process under which non-Cisco router manufacturers such as Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent were not “given notice or any opportunity to bid.” As for Cisco, which helped put the massive package together, the Legislative Auditor concluded that the company “had a moral responsibility to propose a plan which reasonably complied with Cisco’s own engineering standards” but that instead “Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers.” Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

Qualcomm’s global LTE chip could help end iPhone fragmentation

Qualcomm yesterday unveiled a new series of chips designed to solve one of the nagging problems faced by smartphone manufacturers and smartphone users: a single phone isn’t capable of hopping on any cellular network. This difficulty caused Apple to release three versions of the iPhone 5, with support for different LTE networks. As a result, customers who frequently travel overseas had to think hard about which version of the iPhone they would buy, since different countries and carriers use different cellular bands. The iPhone uses Qualcomm chips . LTE has exacerbated this cellular fragmentation, Qualcomm said. “The wide range of radio frequencies used to implement 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks globally presents an ongoing challenge for mobile device designers,” Qualcomm Senior VP Alex Katouzian said in the company’s announcement . “Where 2G and 3G technologies each have been implemented on four to five different RF bands globally, the inclusion of LTE brings the total number of cellular bands to approximately 40.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Qualcomm’s global LTE chip could help end iPhone fragmentation

Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them

Police in Singapore have issued an alert citing a dramatic rise in the number of “cyber blackmail” cases being reported. But unlike many cases that target women or teenagers , this latest rash of crimes targets men through social media sites. The Singapore Police Force reports that there have been more than 50 reported cases in the last year where “foreign” women have lured men through invitations on social networks, such as Facebook and Tagged.com, into video sex sessions that are recorded for blackmail purposes. The women “initiate cybersex” with the men over video chat, stripping for them and then encouraging them to do the same. The men are told to perform sex acts on camera for the women, and the video feeds are recorded. The men are then contacted later and told that the videos will be posted in public if the victims don’t wire money to the scammers. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sexy scammers entice men into stripping on webcam, then blackmail them

Skype calls now equivalent to one-third of global phone traffic

TeleGeography New research (PDF) from TeleGeography, a telecom market analysis firm, shows that worldwide Skype usage is now equivalent to over one-third of all international phone traffic—a record level. The firm’s new data, released Wednesday , shows that “international telephone traffic grew 5 percent in 2012, to 490 billion minutes.” At the same time, “cross-border Skype-to-Skype voice and video traffic grew 44 percent in 2012, to 167 billion minutes. This increase of nearly 51 billion minutes is more than twice that achieved by all international carriers in the world, combined.” While that doesn’t mean that telcos are going to go out of business anytime soon, it does mean that they are certainly continuing to feel the heat. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Skype calls now equivalent to one-third of global phone traffic

How we built a DIY book scanner with speeds of 150 pages per minute

Bookshelves today are simply not as appealing as they used to be, and there’s no shortage of people looking to digitize their own book collections. Fortunately, we now have easy and relatively inexpensive ways to digitize those books. You don’t have to slave away at your copier or scanner, either—we’re talking about building a book scanner of your very own. We’re not talking about the numerous book scanning services that have popped up in the last few years, offering book digitization at the cost of only a few cents per page. Nor are we talking about chopping off the binding of your book and feeding the pages into a copier or scanner, or purchasing a commercial book scanner for upwards of $10,000 (that just isn’t going to happen for most). No, we’re talking toolbelts, paint cans, bike brakes, and digital cameras—doing it yourself. For two law students interested in the legal and policy discussions surrounding copyright and technology, deciding to build a DIY Book Scanner was never just a project to digitize our own textbooks (however practical that might be). Instead, it gave us the opportunity to experience these issues first hand. Plus, we wanted to see what it would take to build one. Read 31 remaining paragraphs | Comments