parsely-root – Page 8 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Blue LEDs given Nobel Prize in physics

Nobel Prize Committee Each year, roughly a quarter of the electricity we generate goes to lighting. For decades, that lighting came in the form of an incandescent light bulb, which produced 16 lumens for every Watt it was fed. Fluorescent bulbs are roughly five times as efficient, but recent LEDs do nearly 19 times better than incandescents, producing 300 lumens for each Watt. The first LEDs date back to 1907, but it’s only recently that their incredible efficiency has been brought to bear on the lighting market. One of the key holdups was our inability to generate a broad spectrum of colors. Specifically, we couldn’t make white light because we lacked the ability to produce blue LEDs. Now, the Nobel Prize in Physics is being given to three materials scientists who overcame this roadblock. The people receiving the honor are Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, both faculty at Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura, now of UC Santa Barbara, who did much of his key work while at Nichia Chemicals, a small company in Japan. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

At 650% interest, that online payday loan is a steal

Fraud and Abuse Online: Harmful Practices of Inernet Payday Lending Online payday loan operators threaten their customers, promote loans designed for long-term indebtedness, and charge exorbitant interest rates, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Lump-sum loans online typically cost $25 per $100 borrowed per pay period—an approximately 650 percent annual percentage rate,” Pew said . The report, ” Fraud and Abuse Online: Harmful Practices in Internet Payday Lending ,” (PDF) comes a month after the Federal Trade Commission halted an only payday scheme that the government said “allegedly bilked consumers out of tens of millions of dollars by trapping them into loans they never authorized and then using the supposed ‘loans’ as a pretext to take money from their bank accounts .” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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At 650% interest, that online payday loan is a steal

Fans raise cash to help phone phreaker John Draper, aka Cap‘n Crunch

Aaron Getting An online fundraiser for legendary phone phreaker John Draper , better known as Cap’n Crunch, has passed its target $5,000 in just three days . Draper himself doesn’t even know who started the fundraiser, but the money is intended to help with his medical bills. According to a recent blog post , he suffers from both degenerative spine disease and C. Diff, an inflammation of the colon . I want to thank with the bottom of my heart for an anonymous person for setting me up with qikfunder…. http://t.co/mwzDLLRpHH — John Draper (@jdcrunchman) September 25, 2014 In conjunction with others in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Draper figured out that a toy whistle given out in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal emitted a tone at 2600 Hertz. By pure coincidence, that happened to be the tone AT&T used to reset its trunk lines. As a result, Draper became a legend in the nascent world of phone phreaking, a predecessor to early personal computer hacking. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fans raise cash to help phone phreaker John Draper, aka Cap‘n Crunch

Comcast seeks to fix awful customer service, admits “it may take a few years”

Comcast executive Charlie Herrin is aiming to improve Comcast’s legendarily poor customer service. Comcast After months of getting bashed for treating customers poorly, Comcast today said it’s going to make improving customer service its “number one priority.” But the company admitted that “it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we’re known for.” Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast’s cable division, wrote today that Comcast’s customer service hasn’t kept up with Comcast’s focus on “product innovation,” technology, and content. “But this is only one half of the customer experience equation. The other half is operational excellence in how we deliver service,” he wrote. “The way we interact with our customers—on the phone, online, in their homes—is as important to our success as the technology we provide. Put simply, customer service should be our best product.” A longtime Comcast executive is being called upon to fulfill that goal. Smit announced the promotion of 15-year Comcast veteran Charlie Herrin to a new role as senior VP of customer experience. Herrin previously was senior VP of product development and led design of X1, Comcast’s new TV user interface. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast seeks to fix awful customer service, admits “it may take a few years”

Using new Corvette’s valet-recording tech could be a felony in 12 states

© General Motors Over the past few months, General Motors and its Chevrolet dealerships have been selling the 2015 Corvette with an interesting feature called Valet Mode. Valet Mode records audio, video, and driving statistics of the person in the driver’s seat when the driver isn’t around, thus keeping low-life valets from being too loose with their filthy mitts while inside a Corvette owner’s fancy car. Trouble is that in at least 12 states, using Valet Mode might be considered a felony. Federal wiretapping laws generally require only one party to consent to a recording of an interaction. But in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington, all parties are required to consent before a recording happens. So if a Corvette owner turns on Valet Mode in California and turns the car over to the unknowing attendant, that Corvette owner could be committing a felony. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Using new Corvette’s valet-recording tech could be a felony in 12 states

Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Malicious ads appears on Last.fm after advertising network Zedo serves up malicious content. Courtesy Malwarebytes Google shut down malicious Web attacks coming from a compromised advertising network on Friday. The move follows a security firm’s analysis that found the ad platform, Zedo, serving up advertisements that attempted to infect the computers of visitors to major websites. In an attack that ended early Friday morning, visitors to Last.fm, The Times of Israel, and The Jerusalem Post ran the risk of their computers becoming infected as Zedo redirected visitors’ systems to malicious servers . Because the advertisements hosted on Zedo’s servers were distributed through Google’s Doubleclick, the attack reached millions of potential victims, Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes Labs, told Ars. Distributing malware through legitimate advertising networks, a technique known as “malvertising,” has become an increasingly popular way to compromise the systems of consumers and workers alike. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google stops malicious advertising campaign that could have reached millions

Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27

Flickr user: 401(K) 2012 The US Senate passed an online sales tax in a vote this afternoon after a heated final round of debate. A small group of anti-tax Republicans, as well as Democratic Senators from states without sales tax like Montana and Oregon, argued vociferously against the bill—but to no avail. The final vote was 69-27, not much different than the 74-20 procedural vote that took place two weeks ago. The proposal has hardly changed at all in two weeks. The Marketplace Fairness Act, S.743, would allow states and localities to make Internet retailers collect sales tax from their customers if they do more than $1 million per year in out-of-state online sales. “Today the senate is voting to take a few more inches off the little guy,” said Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has fought the bill hard. “You saw ads taken out by some of the biggest businesses in the country. It’s easy to see why Mr. President. With this vote, what you have is big businesses being given the ability to force new regulations onto the start-ups, onto the small businesses.” Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27

Original iPhone to go the way of the dodo on June 11, 2013

Oh original iPhone, we’ll miss you. Roughly six years after its public launch, the original iPhone is about to become obsolete—at least in Apple’s eyes. Apple reportedly sent out internal documentation to its support partners, which was then passed on to 9to5Mac , detailing which of its products would no longer be considered current or recent devices as of June 11, 2013. The list doesn’t just include the original iPhone, though: it also includes a number of older iMacs, MacBook Pros, Xserves, and PowerBooks. According to the document , products that are considered obsolete—or perhaps for a more tasteful term, “vintage”—cannot be repaired or receive replacement parts unless they’re in the state of California, “as required by statute.” Californians can continue to get service and parts for their obsolete items through Apple retail stores, but the rest of us are pretty much out of luck. Apple notes that obsolete or vintage products can’t be serviced as mail-in repairs to AppleCare, either. This is pretty standard procedure for Apple; the other products in the list are about as old as the original iPhone, and some of them are even older (there’s a Mac mini on the list from 2005, and don’t even get us started on PowerBooks). All we know is that if you’re still actively using an original iPhone, you must have an amazing tolerance for outdated software and slow hardware. Good on you, but perhaps it’s time to think about an upgrade. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Original iPhone to go the way of the dodo on June 11, 2013

AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri

AMD AMD wants to talk about HSA, Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), its vision for the future of system architectures. To that end, it held a press conference last week to discuss what it’s calling “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” (hUMA). The company outlined what it was doing, and why, both confirming and reaffirming the things it has been saying for the last couple of years. The central HSA concept is that systems will have multiple different kinds of processor, connected together and operating as peers. The two main kinds of processor are conventional: versatile CPUs and the more specialized GPUs. Modern GPUs have enormous parallel arithmetic power, especially floating point arithmetic, but are poorly-suited to single-threaded code with lots of branches. Modern CPUs are well-suited to single-threaded code with lots of branches, but less well suited massively parallel number crunching. Splitting workloads between a CPU and a GPU, using each for the workloads it’s good at, has driven the development of general purpose GPU (GPGPU) software and development. Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD’s “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” coming this year in Kaveri

Man accused of placing GPS device on victim’s car before burglarizing her home

A burglary suspect currently on trial in Johnson County, Kansas allegedly put a GPS tracking device on a victim’s car to determine whether anyone was home. The victim, an unnamed Overland Park woman, told her story to the Kansas City Star on Friday. Overland Park police, Leawood police, and Johnson County prosecutors declined to comment on the GPS allegation to the newspaper. According to the Star , the suspect, Steven Alva Glaze, allegedly burglarized the woman’s home on March 25. The victim owns a jewelry business in the Kansas City suburb. Glaze is now on trial for 14 counts of criminal damage to property, theft, attempted burglary, and burglary for the alleged crimes. The use of GPS tracking devices surreptitiously installed on cars recalls the famous Jones v. United States case, in which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2012 that law enforcement does not have the authority to warrantlessly place a device on a criminal suspect’s vehicle. However, the use of GPS by criminal suspects to track victims still seems to be quite rare. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man accused of placing GPS device on victim’s car before burglarizing her home