program1 – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

University pays almost $16,000 to recover crucial data held hostage

Canada’s University of Calgary paid almost $16,000 ($20,000 Canadian) to recover crucial data that has been held hostage for more than a week by crypto ransomware attackers. The ransom was disclosed on Wednesday morning in a statement issued by University of Calgary officials. It said university IT personnel had made progress in isolating the unnamed ransomware infection and restoring affected parts of the university network. It went on to warn that there’s no guarantee paying the controversial ransom will lead to the lost data being recovered. “Ransomware attacks and the payment of ransoms are becoming increasingly common around the world,” Wednesday’s statement read. “The university is now in the process of assessing and evaluating the decryption keys. The actual process of decryption is time-consuming and must be performed with care. It is important to note that decryption keys do not automatically restore all systems or guarantee the recovery of all data. A great deal of work is still required by IT to ensure all affected systems are operational again, and this process will take time.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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University pays almost $16,000 to recover crucial data held hostage

Verizon could rule the ’90s cyberscape as owner of both AOL and Yahoo

Yahoo’s once-iconic San Francisco billboard, pictured here in 2011. (credit: Scott Schiller ) Verizon is submitting a $3 billion (£2 billion) bid to purchase Yahoo’s core Internet business, according to The Wall Street Journal , which cites an anonymous source. Though at least one more round of bidding is expected, Verizon is reportedly the leading contender. A Verizon spokesperson declined comment when contacted by Ars this morning. Yahoo has been shopping itself around for months in an attempt to sell off just about everything except its valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Yahoo is also looking to sell other assets including real estate and patents, but Verizon reportedly isn’t interested in buying those. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon could rule the ’90s cyberscape as owner of both AOL and Yahoo

Human eye might be able to detect entangled photons

(credit: Flickr user Hullabaloon. ) One of the less satisfying aspects of modern physics is the increasing separation between the phenomena that we measure and the experimenter. We measure almost everything today indirectly. If we operate our lab safely, we never directly detect an electron—instead, that charge creates a tiny potential difference on an amplifier. The amplifier generates a larger current that might drive a coil that is attached to a needle on a dial. This level of indirection is the reality of modern physics. And the alternative—passing large currents through your body—is discouraged. Yet, the desire to really see what is going on is hard to resist. This has led to an interesting publication that proposes a way to detect quantum mechanical behavior directly with the human eye. Seeing single photons The behavior in question is entanglement. But before getting to that, let’s talk about the eye. The human visual system is a pretty poor instrument as far as optics go. The eye is actually pretty good; experiments have revealed that the rods in your eye are sensitive to single photons. The brain, however, is smart; rather than try to sort out all the noise associated with every single photon detection, it tells the rods and cones not to bother it until the light reaches a certain intensity. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

For the first time a country has invested heavily in space mining

Concept image of a harvester for Deep Space Industries. (credit: Deep Space Industries) Luxembourg, a small European country about the size of Rhode Island, wants to be the Silicon Valley of the space mining industry. The landlocked Grand Duchy announced Friday it was opening a €200 million ($225 million) line of credit for entrepreneurial space companies to set up their European headquarters within its borders. Luxembourg has already reached agreements with two US-based companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, to open offices in Luxembourg and conduct major research and development activities. “We intend to become the European center for asteroid mining,” said Étienne Schneider, deputy prime minister and minister of the economy, during a news conference Friday. The mining of space resources is a long bet. Although some deep-pocketed investors from Google and other companies have gotten behind Planetary Resources, and people like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have speculated that within a couple of decades most manufacturing and resource gathering will be done off Earth, there is precious little activity today. Humans have never visited an asteroid, and NASA is only just planning to launch its first robotic mission to visit and gather samples from an asteroid, OSIRIS-REx , this summer. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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For the first time a country has invested heavily in space mining

Inkjets + lasers = new precision 3D printing system

Printing butterflies is just one possibility for the new inkjet/laser system. (credit: Lewis Lab / Wyss Institute at Harvard University ) Customizable, wearable electronics open the door to things like heart-monitoring t-shirts and health-tracking bracelets. But placing the needed wiring in a complex 3D architecture has been hard to do cheaply. Existing approaches are limited by material requirements and, in the case of 3D writing, slow printing speeds. Recently, a research team at Harvard University developed a new method to rapidly 3D print free-standing, highly conductive, ductile metallic wires. The new method combines 3D printing with focused infrared lasers that quickly anneal the printed nanoparticles into the desired architecture. The result is a wire with an electrical conductivity that approaches that of bulk silver. 3D printed conductive wires The new 3D printing approach starts like a standard inkjet: concentrated silver nanoparticle inks are printed through a glass nozzle. The ink is then rapidly annealed by a focused infrared beam trailing the print stream by 100µm. This laser annealing process increases the density of the nanoparticles, transforming them into a shiny silver wire. The researchers demonstrated that its ability to print an array of silver wires with diameters ranging from the sub-micron up to 20µm through variation of a few key printing parameters. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Inkjets + lasers = new precision 3D printing system

Reddit forsakes Imgur with launch of native image upload tool

How Reddit’s native image/gif upload tool appears when you want to post (credit: Reddit) A big change is rolling out on Reddit that will affect the way you post and view images on the site. Through a thread created by a Reddit product team member named Andy (u/amg137), the site announced it’s launching an image-upload tool for single photos and gifs on select subreddits. This means the site is shifting away from its informal partner Imgur, which currently hosts the majority of Reddit’s uploaded images. With the tool, users will be able to upload images up to 20MB and gifs up to 100MB in size directly to Reddit. When viewing a thread that started with an image or a gif, users will click on the thread and be taken to the thread page with the media at the top and the comments below. With Imgur-hosted images, clicking on the Reddit link takes you directly to that image on Imgur’s site. To see thread discussion, you had to click on the “comments” link directly below it. Andy explains in the post that the company is hoping the native image tool will make the Reddit experience more seamless. “For a long time, other image hosting services have been an integral part of how content is shared on Reddit—we’re grateful to those teams, but are looking forward to bringing you a more seamless experience with this new feature,” he writes. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reddit forsakes Imgur with launch of native image upload tool

AT&T’s data caps impose harshest punishments on DSL users

(credit: Mike Mozart ) AT&T’s home Internet data caps got an overhaul yesterday when the company implemented a recently announced plan to strictly enforce the caps and collect overage fees from more customers. Customers stuck on AT&T’s older DSL architecture will be facing lower caps and potentially higher overage fees than customers with more modern Internet service. AT&T put a positive spin on the changes when it announced them in March , saying that it was increasing the monthly data limits imposed on most home Internet customers. This was technically true as AT&T already had caps for most Internet users. But previously, the caps were only enforced in DSL areas, so the limits had no financial impact on most customers. Now, a huge swath of AT&T customers have effectively gone from unlimited plans to ones that are capped, with an extra $10 charge for each additional 50GB of data provided per month. The only customers who aren’t getting an increase in their monthly data allowance are the ones who have been dealing with caps the past few years, according to AT&T’s data usage website : Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Windows 7 now has a Service Pack 2 (but don’t call it that)

This should become a thing of the past. (credit: Microsoft ) Anyone who’s installed Windows 7 any time in the last, oh, five years or so probably didn’t enjoy the experience very much. Service Pack 1 for the operating system was released in 2011, meaning that a fresh install has five years of individual patches to download and install. Typically, this means multiple trips to Windows Update and multiple reboots in order to get the system fully up-to-date, and it is a process that is at best tedious, typically leading one to wonder why, at the very least, it cannot pull down all the updates at once and apply them with just a single reboot. The answer to that particular question will, unfortunately, remain a mystery, but Microsoft did today announce a change that will greatly reduce the pain of this process. The company has published a “convenience rollup” for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (and Windows Server 2008 R2), which in a single package contains all the updates, both security and non-security, released since the Service Pack, up through April 2016. Installing the rollup will perform five years of patching in one shot. In other words, it performs a very similar role to what Windows 7 Service Pack 2 would have done, if only Windows 7 Service Pack 2 were to exist. It’s not quite the same as a Service Pack—it still requires Service Pack 1 to be installed, and the system will still report that it is running Service Pack 1—but for most intents and purposes, that won’t matter. Microsoft will also support injecting this rollup into Windows 7 Service Pack 1 system images and install media. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 7 now has a Service Pack 2 (but don’t call it that)

OS X 10.11.5 and iTunes 12.4 updates bring security and usability fixes

Enlarge / iTunes 12.4. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple today released OS X 10.11.5, the fifth major update to OS X El Capitan since it was released last September. The company also released iTunes 12.4, a minor update that tweaks the user interface in an effort to simplify it. The El Capitan update doesn’t change much. There are quite a few security fixes and a few tweaks related to enterprise usage , but little in the way of user-visible changes. iTunes 12.4 is more noticeable change. It doesn’t fix the core problem with iTunes—that having one program to handle local music, streamed music from Apple Music, TV and movie purchases, podcasts, and iOS device backups and administration makes for lots of clutter and confusion—but it does present a marginally more streamlined version of the app everyone loves to hate. The top navigation bar has had several buttons removed, and the app uses a persistent sidebar instead of multiple drop-down menus to let you view your media. iTunes versions of yore also made heavier use of sidebars for navigation—sometimes the old ways really are best. Finally, the back and forward buttons now let you “navigate between your Library, Apple Music, iTunes Store, and more.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X 10.11.5 and iTunes 12.4 updates bring security and usability fixes

Windows 10’s Wi-Fi credential sharing is going away in the Anniversary Update

Last night, a new Windows 10 Insider Preview unexpectedly made its way onto the Internet after Microsoft accidentally started releasing it to end users while sending it to Windows Update. The new build, 14342, takes some big steps forward in Edge’s extension support. Previously, extensions in the Edge browser had to be manually downloaded and installed. Now they are installed and updated in the same way as Universal Windows Apps. The number of extensions available for Edge has also grown, with a couple of ad blockers now joining the fray. With this build, Microsoft is starting to bring back some of the more tablet-oriented features that were in Windows 8 but removed from Windows 10. Swipe navigation in the browser is now back, allowing you to navigate back and forward just by swiping the page left and right. The next Mobile build will also include this capability. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments