If you’re a Google Play Music All Access subscriber, you’ll get access to the new YouTube Music Key service next week. If you’re not, you can sign up for the beta here . Read more…
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If you’re a Google Play Music All Access subscriber, you’ll get access to the new YouTube Music Key
AT&T has phased out a controversial tracking program it used that inserted identification tags without an opt-out into users’ internet traffic. Read more…
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Oh Good: AT&T Will Stop Putting Undeletable Tracking IDs on Your Phone
We’ve all received that email at least once before. A kind prince/princess/spambot in Nigeria has millions of dollars, and better yet, they want to split it with you . Just hand over your social security code and wait for them to arrive on American soil. As the above newspaper clipping shows, these types of scams were going on even before email came around—in this case, as early as 1876. Read more…
Nerval’s Lobster writes With the debut of Android 5.0 (also known as Lollipop, in keeping with Google’s habit of naming each major OS upgrade after a dessert), it’s worth taking a moment to break down how the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system matches up against Apple’s iOS 8. After years of battle, the two are remarkably similar. So while nobody would ever confuse Android and iOS, both Google and Apple seem determined to go “flatter” (and more brightly colored) than ever. Whether or not you agree with their choices, they’re the cutting edge of mobile UX design. The perpetual tit-for-tat over features has reached a climax of sorts with Lollipop and iOS 8: both offer their own version of an NFC-powered e-wallet (Apple Pay vs. Google Wallet), a health app (Apple’s Health app vs. Google Fit), car-dashboard control (Android Auto vs. CarPlay), and home automation. That’s not to say that the operating systems are mirror images of one another, but in terms of aesthetics and functionality, they’ll be at near-parity for most users, albeit not for those users who enjoy customizing Android and hate Apple’s “walled garden.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android 5.0 ‘Lollipop’ vs. iOS 8: More Similar Than Ever
Samsung’s serious about virtual reality , and not just with a fancy headset accessory for the Note 4. The company’s also built its own lightweight 360-degree camera, dubbed Project Beyond. Read more…
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Samsung Project Beyond: A 360° Camera For Streaming Virtual Reality
Losing your hearing can be a frighteningly isolating experience. But instead of trying to replace the audible landscape he began losing at age 20, science writer Frank Swain decided to find a way to listen in on something humans can’t hear: the hum of Wi-Fi all around us. Read more…
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A Man Going Deaf Can Hear Wi-Fi Signals, and Here’s How They Sound
Investigators are still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong in with the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo . While the National Transportation Safety Board has been looking into an issue with the braking system , the agency has released details from surviving pilot Peter Siebold about how he managed to escape the exploding spacecraft. Read more…
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SpaceShipTwo’s Surviving Pilot Ejected Into -70 Degree Air at 50,000 Feet
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie . Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. Read more…
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Why Are ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption?
That shampoo you’re lathering into your hair may claim that it’s packed with “all-natural ingredients, ” but the label tells a different story. DMDM hydantoin? Ammonium lauryl sulphate? What is this stuff anyhow? Read more…
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What the Ingredients On Your Shampoo Bottle Actually Mean
mpicpp sends news of research at the University of Michigan in which a self-assembling chain of particles can be used as tiny, electrically-activated muscles. The team started with particles similar to those found in paint, with diameters of about a hundredth the width of a strand of hair. They stretched these particles into football shapes and coated one side of each football with gold. The gilded halves attracted one another in slightly salty water—ideally about half the salt concentration in the sports drink Powerade. The more salt in the water, the stronger the attraction. Left to their own devices, the particles formed short chains of overlapping pairs, averaging around 50 or 60 particles to a chain. When exposed to an alternating electric field, the chains seemed to add new particles indefinitely. But the real excitement was in the way that the chains stretched. … While the force generated by the fibers is about 1, 000 times weaker than human muscle tissue per unit area, it may be enough for microbots. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Demonstrate Electrically Activated Micro-Muscles