Tag: insurance

Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras

An anonymous reader writes: Have you enjoyed reading the constant flow of news about how red light cameras are failing? They’ve been installed under the shadow of corruption, they don’t increase safety, and major cities are dropping them. Well, the good news is that red-light cameras are on the decline in the U.S. The bad news is that speeding cameras are on the rise. From the article: “The number of U.S. communities using red-light cameras has fallen 13 percent, to 469, since the end of 2012, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization funded by the insurance industry. That includes the 24 towns in New Jersey that participated in a pilot program that ended this month with no pending legislation to revive it. Meanwhile, the institute estimates that 137 communities use speed cameras, up from 115 at the end of 2011.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras

Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Zanadou writes On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided but despite the rise of various TPB clones and rumors of reincarnations, thepiratebay.se domain remained inaccessible, until today. This morning the Pirate Bay’s nameservers were updated to ones controlled by their domain name registrar binero.se . A few minutes later came another big change when The Pirate Bay’s main domain started pointing to a new IP-address (178.175.135.122) that is connected to a server hosted in Moldova. So far there is not much to see, just a background video of a waving pirate flag (taken from Isohunt.to) and a counter displaying the time elapsed since the December 9 raid. However, the “AES string” looks promising. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

IoT Is the Third Big Technology ‘Wave’ In the Last 50 Years, Says Harvard

dcblogs writes: The Internet of Things (IoT) may be more significant in reshaping the competitive landscape than the arrival of the Internet. Its productivity potential is so powerful it will deliver a new era of prosperity. That’s the argument put forth by Michael Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School and James Heppelmann, president and CEO of PTC, in a recent Harvard Business Review essay. PTC is a product design software firm that recently acquired machine-to-machine firm Axeda Corp. In the past 50 years, IT has delivered two major transformations or “waves, ” as the authors describe it. The first came in the 1960s and 1970s, with IT-enabled process automation, computer-aided design and manufacturing resource planning. The second was the Internet and everything it delivered. The third is IoT. That’s a strikingly sweeping claim and there will no doubt be contrarians to Porter and Heppelmann’s view. But what analysts are clear about is that IoT development today is at an early stage, perhaps at a point similar to 1995, the same year Amazon and eBay went online, followed by Netflix in 1997 and Google in 1998. People understood the trend at the time, but the big picture was still out of focus. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IoT Is the Third Big Technology ‘Wave’ In the Last 50 Years, Says Harvard

You’re Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South

HughPickens.com writes In the U.S., a new solar project is installed every 3.2 minutes and the number of cumulative installations now stands at more than 500, 000. For years, homeowners who bought solar panels were advised to mount them on the roof facing south to capture the most solar energy over the course of the day. Now Matthew L. Wald writes in the NYT that panels should be pointed west so that peak power comes in the afternoon when the electricity is more valuable. In late afternoon, homeowners are more likely to watch TV, turn on the lights or run the dishwasher. Electricity prices are also higher at that period of peak demand. “The predominance of south-facing panels may reflect a severe misalignment in energy supply and demand, ” say the authors of the study, Barry Fischer and Ben Harack. Pointing panels to the west means that in the hour beginning at 5 p.m., they produce 55 percent of their peak output. But point them to the south to maximize total output, and when the electric grid needs it most, they are producing only 15 percent of peak. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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You’re Doing It All Wrong: Solar Panels Should Face West, Not South

VirtualXP Runs Your Old XP Installation Safely in Windows 7 or 8

Windows: Many people have kept their old Windows XP computers running because they have software on the systems that can’t be reinstalled. VirtualXP lets you migrate an existing Windows XP installation into a virtual machine that you can run on Windows 7 or 8. Read more…

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VirtualXP Runs Your Old XP Installation Safely in Windows 7 or 8

Why Chinese Hackers Would Want US Hospital Patient Data

itwbennett (1594911) writes In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about the Chinese hackers who stole hospital data of 4.5 million patients, IDG News Service’s Martyn Williams set out to learn why the data, which didn’t include credit card information was so valuable. The answer is depressingly simple: people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims. John Halamka, chief information officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network, said a medical record can be worth between $50 and $250 to the right customer — many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password. ‘If I am one of the 50 million Americans who are uninsured … and I need a million-dollar heart transplant, for $250 I can get a complete medical record including insurance company details, ‘ he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Chinese Hackers Would Want US Hospital Patient Data

How Facebook Is Saving Power By 10-15% Through Better Load Balancing

An anonymous reader writes Facebook today revealed details about Autoscale, a system for power-efficient load balancing that has been rolled out to production clusters in its data centers. The company says it has “demonstrated significant energy savings.” or those who don’t know, load balancing refers to distributing workloads across multiple computing resources, in this case servers. The goal is to optimize resource use, which can mean different things depending on the task at hand. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Facebook Is Saving Power By 10-15% Through Better Load Balancing

Network Hijacker Steals $83,000 In Bitcoin

An anonymous reader writes with news that bogus BGP announcements can be used to hijack work done by cryptocurrency mining pools. Quoting El Reg: Researchers at Dell’s SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) have identified an exploit that can be used to steal cryptocurrency from mining pools — and they claim that at least one unknown miscreant has already used the technique to pilfer tens of thousands of dollars in digital cash. The heist was achieved by using bogus Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to multiple large hosting companies, including Amazon, Digital Ocean, and OVH, among others. After sending the fake BGP updates miners unknowingly contributed work to the attackers’ pools. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Network Hijacker Steals $83,000 In Bitcoin

A Nest of Copper Foam Lets This Tiny PC Run Silently Without Fans

You eventually tune it out, but the constant whir of a desktop computer’s cooling fans can take a toll on your psyche. It’s like a buzzing mosquito that never strikes, and never stops. So the folks at a German company called Silent Power have created a compact desktop PC that trades noisy fans for a block of exposed copper foam that dissipates heat so effectively no fans are required. Read more…

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A Nest of Copper Foam Lets This Tiny PC Run Silently Without Fans