At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130, 000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75, 560 in the next year, the AP reported. From the article: That’s enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer Gov. Jerry Brown’s spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes a record $11.4 billion for the corrections department while also predicting that there will be 11, 500 fewer inmates in four years (alternative source) because voters in November approved earlier releases for many inmates. The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2, 000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10, 000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69, 000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Follow this link:
At $75,560, Housing a Prisoner in California Now Costs More Than a Year at Harvard

Police In Oklahoma Have Cracked Hundreds of People’s Cell Phones

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Motherboard: Mobile phone forensic extraction devices have been a law enforcement tool for years now, and the number of agencies using them is only rising. As part of an ongoing investigation, we have finally been able to turn up some usage logs of this equipment, from Tulsa Police Department, and Tucson Police Department. While the logs do not list the cause of the crime or any other notes about why the phone was being searched, it does list the make of the phone, the date, and the type of extraction. First, let’s go over what extraction devices are being used here. Tucson PD opted for the brand that is arguably the worldwide leader in mobile device forensics, the Israeli company Cellebrite. Tulsa Police Department however opted for a few different models — they purchased two different password breakers from Teel Technologies in 2015, and in March 2016 gave about $1, 500 to Susteen for their SecureView extraction device (SecureView was the product Susteen created when the FBI requested they create a more advanced extraction device for them). It does its work instantly, and has an incredible reach into a phone’s data. They renewed this contract in 2017. In August 2016 they also purchased the Detective extraction device from Oxygen Forensics. Oxygen is much less common than Cellebrite, from what we have found. The kicker really is how often these are being used — it is simply really hard to believe that out of the 783 times Tulsa Police used their extraction devices, all were for crimes in which it was necessary to look at all of the phone’s data. Even for the 316 times Tucson PD used theirs in the last year, it is still a real stretch to think that some low-level non-violent offenders weren’t on the receiving end. There are some days where the devices were used multiple times — Tulsa used theirs eight times on February 28th of this year, eight again on April 3rd, and a whopping 14 times on May 10th 2016. That is a whole lot of data that Tulsa was able to tap into, and we aren’t even able to understand the why. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Police In Oklahoma Have Cracked Hundreds of People’s Cell Phones

Your Entire PC In a Mouse

slash-sa writes: A Polish software and hardware developer has created a prototype computer which is entirely housed within a mouse. Dubbed the Mouse-Box, it works like a conventional mouse, but contains a processor, flash storage, an HDMI connection, and Wi-Fi connectivity. It is connected to a monitor via the HDMI interface and connects to an Internet connection through standard Wi-Fi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Your Entire PC In a Mouse

With the Successful Funding of the iBox Nano, 3D Printers Just Got a Lot Smaller and Cheaper

Surely some of you remember the toy called Shrinky Dinks, the polystyrene toy that allows users to turn pieces of plastic into smaller pieces of plastic. (According to Wikipedia, 90’s alt-rockers Sugar Ray were originally known as ‘Shrinky Dinx’ until Milton Bradley threatened a lawsuit—more nostalgia than you asked for on a Tuesday morning, I know.) If it’s a somewhat dated reference, I must say that I envy the children of the future, who may well grow up with the parentally supervised fun of the 3D printing thanks to iBox Printers . The Melbourne, FL-based company’s flagship Nano model is available for pre-order for under $300 on Kickstarter . We’ve previously seen a similarly diminutive CNC machine , but the iBox is rather more impressive, considering that 3D printing adds a veritable dimension of complexity. Moreover, the portable device is quiet, lightweight and can run on batteries, all thanks to the use of ultra-efficient LCD lamps to UV-cure the resin. Made from a series of stacked acrylic plates, the housing looks something like a tissue box, with an overhead-projector-style print head; on the UI end, the Nano is controlled primarily via mobile/web app over WiFi. (more…)

Read the original post:
With the Successful Funding of the iBox Nano, 3D Printers Just Got a Lot Smaller and Cheaper

This Bronze Candle Will Burn Forever and Never Melt Away

Given how important it’s been to our development, mankind will always be drawn to open flames. But if you’re tired of buying tea light candles in bulk for a little bit of accent lighting, Fabien Gerlier’s Caviar might be better suited to adding accent lighting to your home. Made of sintered bronze, the lamp stays lit without ever burning away. Read more…        

More:
This Bronze Candle Will Burn Forever and Never Melt Away

iPhone A7 Chip Benchmarks: Forget the Specs, It Blows Everything Away

We just ran benchmarks on Apple’s new iPhone 5S, revealing that, yup, this is the dopest smartphone silicon ever made. This thing freaking churns, crushing every other smartphone out there on both computational power and graphics. But if you look at common specs like core-count and clock speed for the hardware, you’d never know it. Read more…        

Taken from:
iPhone A7 Chip Benchmarks: Forget the Specs, It Blows Everything Away

How to Trick iOS 7 Into Letting You Hide Apple’s Annoying Default Apps

Be honest: when was the last time you opened your iPhone’s Stocks app? Yeah, us neither. Everyone has their own habits when it comes to iOS apps, and fortunately, YouTube user macmixing has posted a wonderful little hack that lets you get rid of any offending stock apps from your home screen— without actually deleting them altogether. Read more…        

Read the original:
How to Trick iOS 7 Into Letting You Hide Apple’s Annoying Default Apps

The First Flexible Silicon Paper Could Revolutionize Mobile Gadgets

Imagine a smartphone you can roll up and slip into your shirt pocket. Or a tablet that can be folded like a newspaper and slipped in your back pocket. It’s an idea that’s been tossed around in science fiction for a years, but now it’s a small step closer to reality because researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China have developed the world’s first flexible silicon . Read more…        

See the original post:
The First Flexible Silicon Paper Could Revolutionize Mobile Gadgets

BT Runs an 800Gbps Channel On Old Fiber

judgecorp writes “BT has demonstrated an 800Gbps ‘superchannel’ on a 410km fiber in its core network, which was not able to carry 10Gbps channels using older technology. The superchannel is an advanced dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technique, created by combining multiple coherent optical signals into one channel, which had previously been shown in laboratory tests. BT ran the test on a fiber with optical characteristics (high polarization mode dispersion) that made it unsuitable for 10GBps using current techniques. That’s a good result for BT, because it means its existing core fiber network can be upgraded to handle more data. It’s also a good customer story for Ciena, which makes the optical switches used in the test.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post:
BT Runs an 800Gbps Channel On Old Fiber