Tag: open source

Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class

Samsung recently unveiled its EVO Plus 256GB microSD card, capable of storing more than 12 hours of 4K video footage, 33 hours of full HD recording, 55, 200 photos or 23, 500 MP3s. While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life, you’ll probably want one. The card features Samsung’s newest V-NAND technology, with read/write speeds of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. It will be available in June to over 50 countries at a price of $250, which includes a 10 year warranty. Personally, I have no need for such a high-capacity card at this time, but I marvel how far technology has progressed in the last few years, let alone months. SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March, 2015, which was the highest capacity microSD card up until now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class

Amazon Goes After YouTube With New Online Video Posting Service

Spencer Soper, writing for Bloomberg (edited and condensed): Amazon will let people post videos to its website and earn money from advertising, royalties and other sources, putting the company in more-direct competition with Google’s YouTube. Amazon already offers movies and television programs over the Internet — including its own original productions — to compete with Netflix. The new product dubbed Video Direct will let Amazon give consumers more options about what to watch without an upfront fee because many of those posting videos will be paid based on how their content performs. Competing streaming services have been driving up the cost of this material. Amazon used a similar strategy to boost its inventory of electronic books through Kindle Direct Publishing, which lets authors bypass traditional publishers and reach readers directly by posting and selling their own e-books online. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant said the service is designed for “professional video producers, ” but its only requirements are that the videos be high definition and have closed-captioning for the hearing impaired.The company is offering 15 cents for every hour of viewing a video creator’s content via Prime Video in the U.S, and six cents an hour for views outside of the U.S. Content creators can also allow Amazon to show their videos to any visitor for free. In such case, Amazon says it is offering 55 percent of all ad revenue their clips generate. Content creators can also sell their videos via its subscription service, or its rental its store — in which case, Amazon will offer 50 percent of the revenue. YouTube has been long criticized for paying less to YouTube creators, forcing many to leave the platform, or look for alternate revenue channels. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Goes After YouTube With New Online Video Posting Service

Tucows Bans Pop-Up Ads, Goes Ad-Free

HughPickens.com writes: Tucows began as a software downloads site nearly 25 years ago and has since evolved beyond that early core business and into domain names, mobile phone service and symmetrical gigabit fiber Internet in select towns and cities in the US. Now Tucows has announced that as a gesture of goodwill, Tucows has banned deceptive ads, hidden download buttons, pop-ups, flypaper, toolbars and other such Internet nastiness from the the nearly 40, 000 software titles it hosts for users on it’s download sites. “On the Tucows downloads site today, you’ll find no flashing ads. No toolbars. No pop-ups, ” says CEO Elliot Noss. “You might see a few plugs for other Tucows services, but nothing too egregious and certainly not anything that’s pretending to be a download button.” With Tucows’ success in domain names, mobile phone service (Ting) and fiber Internet (Ting Internet), Tucows’ revenue from downloads has become less relevant when looking at the balance sheet. “We don’t lightly walk away from opportunities or revenue, ” says Noss. “In the end, though, we’d rather have the Tucows name associated with good; with a belief in the power of the Internet to affect positive change. An ad-heavy site that packages browser toolbars along with every download isn’t something we want people to think of when they hear ‘Tucows, ‘.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tucows Bans Pop-Up Ads, Goes Ad-Free

Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Slashdot reader RockDoctor brings an update on a project to build Babbage’s Analytical Engine: Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after. Since 2011 a group under the name of “Plan-28” have been working towards building a full version of the machine known as the Analytical Engine. (The group’s name refers to the series of Babbage’s plans which they are working to — versions 1 to 27 obviously having problems.) This week, they’ve released some updates on progress on their blog. Significant progress includes working on the machine’s “internal microcode” (in today’s terminology; remember, this is a machine of brass cogs and punched cards!) [and] archive work to bring the Science Museum’s material into a releasable form (the material is already scanned, but the metadata is causing eyestrain). “One of the difficulties in understanding the designs is the need to reverse engineer logical function from mechanical drawings of mechanisms — this without textual explanation of purpose or intention…” Progress is slow, but real. Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it’s predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as “the world’s first programmer” is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Microsoft Overhauls SharePoint To Compete With Slack In The Mobile Era

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is overhauling SharePoint today, and introducing iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile apps. The iOS SharePoint app will arrive by the end of June, with the Android and Windows 10 Mobile versions due for release later this year. All of the mobile apps are designed to make SharePoint more accessible on the go, allowing users to access things like corporate intranet sites and content. Alongside the new apps, Microsoft is also providing access to SharePoint Online document libraries in OneDrive mobile apps, and the ability to copy from OneDrive to SharePoint. Microsoft plans to synchronize SharePoint Online document libraries with the new OneDrive sync client by the end of the year, and integrate SharePoint sites with Office 365 Groups. Microsoft’s new Flow service, which lets you automate tasks, will also be integrated into SharePoint by the end of the year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Overhauls SharePoint To Compete With Slack In The Mobile Era

Samsung Smart Home Flaws Let Hackers Pick Connected Doors From Anywhere In the World

Researchers have discovered flaws in Samsung’s Smart Home automation system, which if exploited, allows them to carry a range of remote attacks. These attacks include digitally picking connected door locks from anywhere in the world. The flaws have been documented by researchers from the University of Michigan ahead of the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. “All of the above attacks expose a household to significant harm — break-ins, theft, misinformation, and vandalism, ” the researchers wrote in a paper. “The attack vectors are not specific to a particular device and are broadly applicable.” Dan Goodin, reports for Ars Technica: Other attacks included a malicious app that was able to obtain the PIN code to a smart lock and send it in a text message to attackers, disable a preprogrammed vacation mode setting, and issue a fake fire alarm. The one posing the biggest threat was the remote lock-picking attack, which the researchers referred to as a “backdoor pin code injection attack.” It exploited vulnerabilities in an existing app in the SmartThings app store that gives an attacker sustained and largely surreptitious access to users’ homes. The attack worked by obtaining the OAuth token that the app and SmartThings platform relied on to authenticate legitimate users. The only interaction it required was for targeted users to click on an attacker-supplied HTTPS link that looked much like this one that led to the authentic SmartThings login page. The user would then enter the username and password. A flaw in the app allowed the link to redirect the credentials away from the SmartThings page to an attacker-controlled address. From then on, the attackers had the same remote access over the lock that users had. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Smart Home Flaws Let Hackers Pick Connected Doors From Anywhere In the World

Biotech Company To Attempt Revitalizing Nervous Systems of Brain-Dead Patients

Sarah Knapton, writing for The Telegraph: A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs. A biotech company called BioQuark in the U.S. has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life. Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas. The trial participants will have been certified dead and only kept alive through life support. They will be monitored for several months using brain imaging equipment to look for signs of regeneration, particularly in the upper spinal cord — the lowest region of the brain stem which controls independent breathing and heartbeat. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Biotech Company To Attempt Revitalizing Nervous Systems of Brain-Dead Patients

Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built

HughPickens.com writes: Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas — the world’s tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5 billion. You could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8 billion. Or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1, 500 years at a cost of $6.5 billion… But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4, 500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20, 000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days’ labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built

Germany Plans $1.4 Billion In Incentives For Electric Cars

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg article: German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government reached a deal with automakers to jointly spend 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) on incentives to boost sluggish electric-car sales. Buyers will be able to receive as much as 4, 000 euros in rebates to help offset the higher price of an electric vehicle, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said at a press conference in Berlin. Purchasers of hybrid cars will get as much as 3, 000 euros off the price. The industry will shoulder 50 percent of the cost. The program is set to start in May, pending approval from the German parliament’s budget committee, he said. “The goal is to move forward as quickly as possible on electric vehicles, ” Schaeuble told reporters, adding that the aim is to begin offering the incentives next month. “With this, we are giving an impetus.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Germany Plans $1.4 Billion In Incentives For Electric Cars