history – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Iran Cuts Internet Access and Threatens Telegram Following Mass Protests

Long-time Slashdot reader cold fjord writes: As seething discontent has boiled over in Iran leading to mass protests, protesters have taken to the streets and social media to register their discontent… The government has been closing schools and shutting down transportation. Now, as mass protests in Iran go into their third day there are reports that internet access is being cut in cities with protests occurring. Social media has been a tool for documenting the protests and brutal crackdowns against them. Iran previously cut off internet access during the Green Movement protests following the 2009 elections. At the same time the Iranian government is cutting internet access they have called on Telegram, reportedly used by more than 40 million Iranians, to close the channels used by protesters. Telegram is now closing channels used by the protesters while Telegram itself may be shut down in Iran. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Iran Cuts Internet Access and Threatens Telegram Following Mass Protests

Construction Workers Find 30 Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Eggs

An anonymous reader quotes BGR: Chinese construction workers digging on Christmas day found a gift that was wrapped 130 million years ago in the form of 30 incredibly preserved dinosaur eggs. The discovery was made in the city of Ganzhou at the future site of a new middle school, but work on the new facility had to be put on hold after the ancient eggs were discovered. According to state media, the workers reported uncovering “oval-shaped stones” while clearing rock away using explosive blasts. The workers suspected they might be important so they alerted local law enforcement who took command of the site and contacted experts from a nearby museum who confirmed the “rocks” were actually fossilized dinosaur eggs. The eggs, which are thought to date from the Cretaceous period, are estimated to be as old as 130 million years. The location where they were discovered is believed to have once been an ancient lakeshore, which would have been a pleasant place for the dinosaurs to raise their brood. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Construction Workers Find 30 Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Eggs

Bitcoin jumps another 10 percent in 24 hours to pass $19,000

Enlarge / A Soyuz rocket launches from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. (credit: NASA) Bitcoin’s price set a new record on Saturday as the virtual currency rose above $19,000 for the first time on the Bitstamp exchange. The gains came just hours after the currency crossed the $18,000 mark. Bitcoin’s value has doubled over the last three weeks, and it’s up more than 20-fold over the last year. Bitcoin’s value keeps rising despite a growing chorus of experts who say the currency value is an unsustainable bubble. One CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Street economists and market strategists saw bitcoin’s rise as a bubble, compared to just two percent who said the currency’s value was justified. Another survey reported by the Wall Street Journal this week found that 51 out of 53 economists surveyed thought bitcoin’s price was an unsustainable bubble. We recently asked two experts on the history of bubbles about bitcoin, and both saw echoes of earlier bubbles in the current bitcoin boom. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin jumps another 10 percent in 24 hours to pass $19,000

Museum of African American History is freely digitizing home movies

Humanity has access to more data than ever before, but there’s still so much media scattered around the world that might rot away before it can be preserved. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is launching an initiative to save some of the most precious — home movies — by digitizing, for free, any and all films that folks want to bring in to the Washington, DC institution. The Great Migration home movie project will set up service on the museum’s second floor, and visitors can make an appointment to have their media safely stored in digital form. The team can digitize a range of formats, from 16mm and 8mm home video to obsolete tape-based mediums like MiniDV, Betacam and VHS to audio recordings. Home movies offer real insight into the lives of African Americans that popular films and television from the day don’t offer, the museum wrote in its post on the project: “While major motion picture film and television historically lacked diverse representation, black history was instinctively being preserved in everyday home movies. Today, these personal narratives serve as an invaluable tool for understanding and re-framing black moving image history, and provide a much needed visualization of African American history and culture. Just as the museum explores what it means to be an American and share how American values like resiliency, optimism, and spirituality are reflected in African American history and culture; these films are a moving image record of these values in practice.” Via: Blavity Source: The National Museum of African American History and Culture

This Guy Is Digitizing the VHS History of Video Games

An anonymous reader shares a report: UK-based gaming journalist and blogger Chris Scullion is on a mission to preserve his collection — and maybe your collection, too — of these old video game VHS tapes. In the 80s and 90s, video game companies and trade magazines made these tapes to accompany popular titles or new issues with bonus material or promotional footage, giving a glimpse into how marketing for games was done in the industry’s early days. Scullion has 18 tapes to upload so far, and plans to provide accompanying commentary as well as the raw video as they go up on his YouTube channel. Scullion’s first upload is a promotional tape for Super Mario All-Stars, given away by Nintendo UK in 1993. It’s hosted by Craig Charles, who played Lister in the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. Digitizing his collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He’s capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing — a higher frame rate than many standard commercial digitizing devices that capture at 30fps — so that no frames are missed. Some of the tapes he’s planning to digitize have already been converted and uploaded to YouTube by other people, he says, but most are either poor quality or captured with less-advanced grabbing devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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This Guy Is Digitizing the VHS History of Video Games

Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

On September 7th, an extraordinarily powerful radio telescope in Canada has begun listening to the sounds of the universe. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME will help scientists learn more about the history of the cosmos, radio bursts from pulsars and gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime whose existence were finally confirmed by scientists in 2016. CHIME looks like a collection of four 100-meter-long skateboarding halfpipes, but they weren’t made for anybody to skate on. They were built over the past seven years to hear very weak signals from the universe and to gather one terabyte of information per second all day, every day. That means it’s constantly creating and updating a massive 3D map of space. When the 50 Canadian scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) started conceptualizing the project, there was no system that could handle that amount of information. Thanks to advances in video game hardware, the system now exists. Since 1 TB per second is pretty insane, CHIME compresses the info it gathers by a factor of 100, 000 first before saving files on disks. Now that it’s up and working, CHIME is ready to work towards achieving its primary goal: measuring the acceleration of the universe’s expansion. An accurate measurement of the expansion will help scientists figure out what causes it, whether it’s actually the mysterious form of energy that’s believed to be permeating space called ” dark energy ” or something else. By extension, the telescope’s data could one day confirm if dark energy truly exists. University of British Columbia’s Dr. Mark Halpern explains: “With the CHIME telescope we will measure the expansion history of the universe and we expect to further our understanding of the mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion ever faster. This is a fundamental part of physics that we don’t understand and it’s a deep mystery. This is about better understanding how the universe began and what lies ahead.” Source: CHIME

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Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

Shipping Company Maersk Says June Cyberattack Could Cost It Up To $300 Million

An anonymous reader shares an article: Container shipping company A.P. Moller Maersk on Tuesday said it expects that computer issues triggered by the NotPetya cyberattack will cost the company as much as $300 million in lost revenue. “In the last week of the [second] quarter we were hit by a cyber-attack, which mainly impacted Maersk Line, APM Terminals and Damco, ” Maersk CEO Soren Skou said in a statement. “Business volumes were negatively affected for a couple of weeks in July and as a consequence, our Q3 results will be impacted. We expect that the cyber-attack will impact results negatively by USD 200-300m.” Maersk Line was able to take bookings from existing customers two days after the attack, and things gradually got back to normal over the following week, the company said. It said it did not lose third-party data as a result of the attack. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Shipping Company Maersk Says June Cyberattack Could Cost It Up To $300 Million

14,700 years ago, cannibals conducted rituals in this English cave

PLoS Nestled in the dramatic Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, UK, there’s a roomy limestone cave called Gough’s Cave where a few generations of people lived about 14,700 years ago. They littered the floor with the remnants of their meals, leaving hundreds of bones behind for archaeologists to find. Now, scientists have analyzed these bones and discovered that some of them are from six separate human beings. And they bear the distinct marks of ritual cannibalism. Natural History Museum of London scientist Silvia Bello and her colleagues write in PLoS One about the find. The bones came from a child, two adolescents, two adults, and one elderly adult. All showed evidence of butchery, which leaves characteristic marks behind when sharp tools are used for defleshing. The bones were also covered in human tooth marks from biting and gnawing, and some had been broken open for their marrow. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Startup Unveils Revolutionary New Rechargeable Alkaline Batteries

Slashdot reader cdreimer quotes the New York Times: Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today’s lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable… Ionic Materials could change that equation with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company’s breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones. Cheaper and more powerful batteries are also considered by many to be the driver needed to make the cost of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar competitive with the coal, gas and nuclear power that support the national energy grid. The company “has demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles for its prototypes, ” and it’s now even investigating aluminum-based alkaline batteries which would also be lighter than lithium-ion batteries. The company is backed by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who also envisions the batteries being used in electric cars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Startup Unveils Revolutionary New Rechargeable Alkaline Batteries

Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Hundreds of Victims For Years

An anonymous reader shares a report: A mysterious piece of malware has been infecting hundreds of Mac computers for years — and no one noticed until a few months ago. The malware is called “FruitFly, ” and one of its variants, “FruitFly 2” has infected at least 400 victims over the years. FruitFly 2 is intriguing and mysterious: its goals, who’s behind it, and how it infects victims, are all unknown. Earlier this year, an ex-NSA hacker started looking into a piece of malware he described to me as “unique” and “intriguing.” It was a slightly different strain of a malware discovered on four computers earlier this year by security firm Malwarebytes, known as “FruitFly.” This first strain had researchers scratching their heads. On the surface, the malware seemed “simplistic.” It was programmed mainly to surreptitiously monitor victims through their webcams, capture their screens, and log keystrokes. But, strangely, it went undetected since at least 2015. There was no indication of who could be behind it, and it contained “ancient” functions and “rudimentary” remote control capabilities, Malwarebytes’s Thomas Reed wrote at the time. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mysterious Mac Malware Has Infected Hundreds of Victims For Years