Tag: journal

Bloomberg Predicts EVs Cheaper than IC Engine Cars Within 10 Years

Lucas123 writes: With the price of lithium-ion batteries continuing to plummet, already dropping 65% since 2010, electric vehicles will become cheaper to own by the mid-2020s, according to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The report also forecasts that sales of EVs will hit 41 million by 2040, up from 462, 000 in 2015. By 2040, EVs will make up 35% of new light-duty vehicle sales, even if the price of crude oil goes back up from $33 today to $70 in the future. The adoption of EVs will displace about 13 million barrels of oil per day by 2040, when the clean-energy cars represent about one-quarter of cars on the road. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Bloomberg Predicts EVs Cheaper than IC Engine Cars Within 10 Years

Slysoft (of AnyDVD Fame) Closes After Increased International Pressure By AACS

jlp2097 writes: It looks like the recent activities by Hollywood studios and the AACS LA finally led to the closing of Slysoft Inc, creator of the popular AnyDVD HD tool for creating personal backups of BluRay/DVD/etc. Slysoft Inc’s website confirms the closing due to “recent regulatory requirements”. The final nail in the coffin has also been confirmed with slightly more details in their forum: “this is final. Slysoft is gone.” Sad to see them go — it looks like legitimate buyers of BluRays will now have to find other sources for backing up their property to HTPCs and NASes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read this article:
Slysoft (of AnyDVD Fame) Closes After Increased International Pressure By AACS

Big Test Coming Up For Kilogram Redefinition

szotz writes: Electromechanical balances have got to be better than an aged lump of platinum and iridium right? Teams are working to get kilograms measured and shipped to Paris in time for a test to see whether the technology (along with another that uses ultrapure silicon spheres) is now ready to redefine the kilogram. Why is this redefinition interesting? Because it’s about using physics to overcome one problem with weight standards based on tightly held exemplars in standards bodies’ inner sanctums: the mass of those exemplars can change, however subtly, introducing uncertainty and confusion. From the article: The world’s metrologists aim to change this state of affairs in 2018 by fixing the kilogram to the Planck constant, a fundamental physical constant. That shift would, at least in principle, allow any laboratory to “realize” the kilogram from scratch with a series of experiments and specialized equipment. But for that scheme to work, the kilogram derived by one laboratory must be the same as those derived by others. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original article here:
Big Test Coming Up For Kilogram Redefinition

German Police Allowed To Use Its Own "Federal Trojan"

An anonymous reader writes: The German Interior Ministry has approved for investigative use a spying Trojan developed by the German Federal Criminal Police (a so-called “federal Trojan”). In fact, it could end up being used as early as this week. The police will have to get a court order to use the spyware, and prove that the suspect is involved in a crime threatening citizens’ “life, limb or liberty”. The malware has been developed in-house, and has been available since autumn 2015. It is supposed to be used only for so-called telecommunication surveillance at the source, i.e. to read emails, chats and wiretap phone calls made by the target via his or her computer or smartphone, and not to access files, steal passwords, or set up video or audio surveillance via the device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
German Police Allowed To Use Its Own "Federal Trojan"

A 19-Year-Old Made A Free Robot Lawyer That Has Appealed $3M In Parking Tickets

schwit1 writes: Hiring a lawyer for a parking-ticket appeal is not only a headache, but it can also cost more than the ticket itself. Depending on the case and the lawyer, an appeal — a legal process where you argue out of paying the fine — can cost between $400 to $900. But with the help of a robot made by British programmer Joshua Browder, 19, it costs nothing. Browder’s bot handles questions about parking-ticket appeals in the UK. Since launching in late 2015, it has successfully appealed $3 million worth of tickets. He is cutting into the government trough and lawyers’ jobs. That’s a double whammy. How long is it before the bar association and government get automated lawyers disqualified? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original post:
A 19-Year-Old Made A Free Robot Lawyer That Has Appealed $3M In Parking Tickets

Stealing Keys From a Laptop In Another Room — and Offline

Motherboard carries a report that with equipment valued at about $3, 000, a group of Israeli researchers have been able to extract cryptographic keys from a laptop that is not only separated by a physical wall, but protected by an air gap. This, they say, “is the first time such an approach has been used specifically against elliptic curve cryptography running on a PC.” From the article: The method is a so-called side-channel attack: an attack that doesn’t tackle an encryption implementation head on, such as through brute force or by exploiting a weakness in the underlying algorithm, but through some other means. In this case, the attack relies on the electromagnetic outputs of the laptop that are emitted during the decryption process, which can then be used to work out the target’s key. Specifically, the researchers obtained the private key from a laptop running GnuPG, a popular implementation of OpenPGP. (The developers of GnuPG have since released countermeasures to the method. Tromer said that the changes make GnuPG âoemore resistant to side-channel attack since the sequence of high-level arithmetic operations does not depend on the secret key.â) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More here:
Stealing Keys From a Laptop In Another Room — and Offline

Intel and Micron Partnership Soon To Launch 10TB SSD For Enterprise Market

MojoKid writes: Intel and Micron have been tag-teaming various storage and memory technologies and word on the web is that the fruits of that partnership is a 10-terebyte SSD that’s right around the corner. The largest SSD in Intel’s stable at the moment is 4TB, which itself is pretty large. However, both Micron and Intel are of the opinion that typical planar NAND flash memory has gone about as far as it can go, and that 3D stacked Flash memory is the future. They’ve also developed a “floating gate cell” design – a first for 3D stacked memory – resulting in 256Gb multi-level cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit inside of a standard package. The two companies are targeting gumstick-sized SSDs reaching 3.5TB and regular 2.5-inch SSDs hitting (and even surpassing) 10TB. Apparently that’s about to become a reality. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
Intel and Micron Partnership Soon To Launch 10TB SSD For Enterprise Market

Mattel Unveils $300 3D Printer

Lucas123 writes: Perhaps in an attempt to get out ahead of the consumer 3D printing market, which has allowed popular toys such as Legos to be replicated, Mattel today announced it would begin shipping its $300 fused filament fabricator machine in October. Mattel’s ThingMaker at-home toy-making device, reinvents the company’s iconic 1960s toy by the same name. The new ThingMaker allows users to upload design files via Mattel’s proprietary Design App, which works on Android or iOS devices. The 3D printer can then print single-part toys or print hundreds of different parts to be assembled into toys using ball-and-socket joints. Mattel’s ThingMaker Design App is based on Autodesk’s Spark, an open 3D printing platform that provides extensible APIs for each stage of the 3D printing workflow. Because it’s based on an open architecture, the ThingMaker Design App also works with other 3D printers; it is available now and free to download for iOS and Android devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View original post here:
Mattel Unveils $300 3D Printer

Pollen-Based Electrodes Could Boost Battery Storage

An anonymous reader writes: Bee pollen could hold the answer to next generation battery research, according to a new study led by scientists at Purdue University, Indiana. The team has been exploring how the unique microstructures found in allergen pollen grains could be used to provide a more energy efficient type of energy storage. The research explained that by turning pollen into a carbon anode with a more efficient microstructure than graphite, the team was able to create a battery which could store more energy than conventional graphite models. The scientists took the pollen from honeybees and common wetland plant cattails, and discovered that cattail pollen had more energy-storing capacity, compared to the bee pollen. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Follow this link:
Pollen-Based Electrodes Could Boost Battery Storage

Iranian App Helps Users Avoid Morality Police

An anonymous reader writes: Young people in Iran are using a new app called Gershad (a contraction of ‘Gashte Ershad’, or ‘guidance patrol’), to avoid the ‘morality police’ by sharing the location of checkpoints with other users. At checkpoints strict Islamic dress and behavior codes are enforced, and their ad hoc nature can make them difficult to avoid. Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, said of Gershad, “This is an innovative idea and I believe it will lead to many other creative apps which will address the gap between society and government in Iran.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
Iranian App Helps Users Avoid Morality Police