In a surprise move, Apple just announced an external battery case for the iPhone 6s. Named the iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case, the battery extends the battery life of your iPhone 6s by up to 25 hours. The new accessory is available in black and white for $99 starting today. Read More
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Apple Releases First Battery Case To Eat Third-Party Accessory Makers’ Lunch
szczys writes: Theremin, yes the same Theremin who built the instrument that made the Star Trek theme song famous, had a hand in espionage as well. Albeit not a willing one. Turns out his life is actually quite tragic. In addition to that story, Adam Fabio takes a trip through the details of “The Thing”, a bug installed in the US Embassy by the Soviet Union during the cold war. It used no batteries, instead depending on a carrier frequency transmitted by the “listener”, causing the resonant cavity to transmit back the audio from the room at a higher frequency. Pretty nifty, and so was the hiding place: a hand-carved wooden seal of the United States. Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts, right? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Theremin’s Bug Let Soviets Spy On USA For More Than 7 Years
You know the drill. Once a city has spoken with Google about bringing Fiber into their hood, there’s a process for the city to go through. A lengthy one. Checklists. The whole nine yards. Two new cities are exploring Fiber with Google and they are Chicago and Los Angeles. Yes, San Francisco has been skipped again and I’m going to go cry into my slow internet from Comcast.… Read More
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Chicago And Los Angeles Are Next Up For Google Fiber
The crowning glory of Amazon’s just dropped post-Thanksgiving press missive — trumpeting apparently accelerating holiday sales — is the lack of any actual metrics… Read More
Apple and Tesla aren’t the only two tech companies grabbing each other’s staff to fulfill their automotive dreams — Google has quietly hired Robert Rose, the lead for Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot program. It’s not clear what he’s working on besides software at Google Robotics, but it won’t be surprising if he’s working on self-driving cars . He’s unlikely to be working for Boston Dynamics , whose staff are relatively independent from the Google mothership. One thing’s for sure: Tesla will notice his absence. Rose was the lead engineer for some of SpaceX’s earlier rocketry and reported directly to Elon Musk while at Tesla, so this clearly wasn’t a trivial move. [Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images] Via: 9to5Google Source: LinkedIn
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Google hires the lead for Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving tech
Zothecula writes that researchers at the University of Glasgow have found a way to produce large sheets of graphene 100 times more cheaply than previous methods. Gizmag reports: “Since first being synthesized by Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov at the University of Manchester in 2004, there has been an extensive effort to exploit the extraordinary properties of graphene. However the cost of graphene in comparison to more traditional electronic materials has meant that its uptake in electronic manufacturing has been slow. Now researchers at the University of Glasgow have discovered a way to create large sheets of graphene using the same type of cheap copper used to manufacture lithium-ion batteries.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Scientists Produce Graphene 100 Times Cheaper Than Ever Before
An anonymous reader writes: A new wearable technology developed by a team of biomedical engineers at Texas A&M University seeks to aid seamless communication between deaf people who use sign language and those who do not understand it. The arm device contains a network of sensors which track hand movements, as well as the electromyography (EMG) signals generated by the muscles in the wrist, and process and translate the different signals into text in real-time.The prototype currently uses Bluetooth to translate the sign language to a computer or smartphone. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Wearable Tech Translates Sign Language Into Text
blottsie writes: Since 2010, the Straters have been under assault from an online campaign of ever-increasing harassment — prank deliveries, smear attacks, high-profile hacks, and threats of violence against schools and law enforcement officials in their name — and it’s slowly torn them apart. Masterminding it all is a teenage Lizard Squad hacker from Finland, at war with their son, Blair, over a seemingly minor dispute. “When the family started getting notices about their utilities being disconnected, they realized things were escalating out of control. Utility provider Commonwealth Edison once called the house to iron out the details about a request to have the power turned off after a supposed move. Something similar happened with their trash service. On Halloween 2013, Comcast shut off their cable and Internet service.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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One Family Suffering Through Years-Long Trolling Campaign
bigwophh writes: In Q4 2016, Intel will release a follow up to its Skylake processors named Kaby Lake, which will mark yet another 14nm release that’s a bit odd, for a couple of reasons. The big one is the fact that this chip mayn not have appeared had Intel’s schedule kept on track. Originally, Cannonlake was set to succeed Skylake, but Cannonlake will instead launch in 2017. That makes Kaby Lake neither a tick nor tock in Intel’s release cadence. When released, Kaby Lake will add native USB 3.1 and HDCP 2.2 support. It’s uncertain whether these chips will fit into current Z170-based motherboards, but considering the fact that there’s also a brand-new chipset on the way, we’re not too confident of it. However, the so-called Intel 200 series chipsets will be backwards-compatible with Skylake. It also appears that Intel will be releasing Apollo Lake as early as the late spring, which will replace Braswell, the lowest-powered chips Intel’s lineup destined for smartphones. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Broadwell-E, Apollo Lake, and Kaby Lake Details Emerge In Leaked Roadmap
An anonymous reader writes: A security researcher using Shodan to probe Arris cable modems for vulnerabilities has found that 600, 000 of the company’s modems not only have a backdoor, but that the backdoor itself has an extra backdoor. Brazilian vulnerability tester Bernardo Rodrigues posted that he found undocumented libraries in three models, initially leading to a backdoor that uses an admin password disclosed back in 2009. Brazilian researcher Bernardo Rodrigues notes that the secondary backdoor has a password derived in part from the final five digits from the modem’s serial number. However, the default ‘root’ password for the affected models remains ‘arris.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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600,000 Arris Cable Modems Have ‘Backdoors In Backdoors,’ Researcher Claims