The simple answer is probably not. That’s because the sun involves a special type of fire that is able to “burn” water, and so it will just get hotter and six times brighter. Here’s why. Read more…
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Could the Sun Be Extinguished By a Bucket of Water Just As Big?
Greenpeace can get a little aggressive with its tactics. That doesn’t mean that it’s not fighting for a good cause! But after the organization marched through the sacred Nazca Lines etched into the Peruvian desert for a climate protest, capturing it all on camera with a drone, you have to wonder what the hell they were thinking. Greenpeace isn’t the best at thinking things through, though. Read more…
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How Greenpeace Wrecked One of the Most Sacred Places in the Americas
Sony says the recent breach of its servers and weeklong cyber humiliation is an “unprecedented” strike and an “unparalleled crime.” If they’re shocked by these events, they’ve been shocked for almost a year: leaked emails obtained by Gawker show security troubles dating back to February. Read more…
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Sony Was Hacked in February and Chose to Stay Silent
If you’re running out of digital storage and are on a tight budget, you could do a lot worse than consider Seagate’s latest hard drive. Part of its Archive HDD line , you can pick up an 8TB model for just $260. Read more…
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This 8TB Seagate Hard Drive Only Costs $260
Some time in 2015, Iowa will become the first state to offer an official app from the state’s Department of Transportation that can serve as your driver’s license and ID . That’s pretty incredible. It’s also getting us much closer to a more convenient, wallet-free future. Read more…
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Iowa Is Going To Let You Use a Smartphone As Your Driver’s License
Remember when Apple went after that handy note-taking widget , a popular app that’s one the first truly useful widgets for iOS 8? Turns out, Apple’s been pulling all kinds of apps that take advantage of new features in iOS 8—even after they’ve been approved to be in the App Store. And developers are starting to get pretty upset. Read more…
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Apple Is Pulling a Bunch of the Neatest iOS 8 Apps
HughPickens.com writes: Benny Evangelista reports at the San Francisco Chronicle that a class-action suit has been filed in District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris, claiming that Comcast is “exploiting them for profit” by using their home router as part of a nationwide network of public hotspots. Comcast is trying to compete with major cell phone carriers by creating a public Xfinity WiFi Hotspot network in 19 of the country’s largest cities by activating a second high-speed Internet channel broadcast from newer-model wireless gateway modems that residential customers lease from the company. Although Comcast has said its subscribers have the right to disable the secondary signal, the suit claims the company turns the service on without permission. It also places “the costs of its national Wi-Fi network onto its customers” and quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push “tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers.” The suit also says “the data and information on a Comcast customer’s network is at greater risk” because the hotspot network “allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Comcast Sued For Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots
MojoKid writes: AMD just dropped its new Catalyst Omega driver package that is the culmination of six months of development work. AMD Catalyst Omega reportedly brings over 20 new features and a wealth of bug fixes to the table, along with performance increases both on AMD Radeon GPUs and integrated AMD APUs. Some of the new functionality includes Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. VSR is “game- and engine-agnostic” and renders content at up to 4K resolution, then displays it at a resolution that your monitor actually supports. AMD says VSR allows for increased image quality, similar in concept to Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Another added perk of VSR is the ability to see more content on the screen at once. To take advantage of VSR, you’ll need a Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, or R9 285 discrete graphics card. Both single- and multi-GPU configurations are currently supported. VSR is essentially AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. In addition, AMD is claiming performance enhancements in a number of top titles with these these new drivers. Reportedly, as little as 6 percent improvement in performance in FIFA Online to as much as a 29 percent increase in Batman: Arkham Origins can be gained when using an AMD 7000-Series APU, for example. On discrete GPUs, an AMD Radeon R9 290X’s performance increases ranged from 8 percent in Grid 2 to roughly 16 percent in Bioshock Infinity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have discovered a new version of the Destover malware that was used in the recent Sony Pictures Entertainment breaches, and in an ironic twist, the sample is signed by a legitimate certificate stolen from Sony. The new sample is essentially identical to an earlier version of Destover that was not signed. Destover has been used in a variety of attacks in recent years and it’s representative of the genre of malware that doesn’t just compromise machines and steal data, but can destroy information as well. The attackers who have claimed credit for the attack on Sony have spent the last couple of weeks gradually releasing large amounts of information stolen in the breach, including unreleased movies, personal data of Sony employees and sensitive security information such as digital certificates and passwords. The new, signed version of Destover appears to have been compiled in July and was signed on Dec. 5, the day after Kaspersky Lab published an analysis of the known samples of the malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Destover Malware Signed By Stolen Sony Certificate
cold fjord writes: The Weekly Standard reports, “This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to ‘advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.’ … Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015.” Among the many agencies that will be sharing records besides Health and Human Services are: Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison, Department of Labor, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records of Americans