Tag: science

Windows 10 one year later: The Anniversary Update

Last year’s  Windows 10 release  was unlike any Windows release I’ve ever used before, and I’ve used most of them. Almost every Windows release to-date had a sort of unfinished vibe that reflects the product’s history. Parts of the operating system developed long ago have almost fossilized, being preserved verbatim in each subsequent release. It gives the entire operating system an overall incomplete feel. Take Control Panel as an example. The oldest parts of Control Panel use dialogs for each group of settings, as this mouse window exemplifies. Those tabs are extensible by third parties. That SetPoint Settings tab, for example, launches Logitech’s mouse app for configuring the various buttons on my Performance MX mouse. New systems to this very day continue to use this extensibility; most Windows laptops will have a tab to configure their touchpad. Read 92 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 one year later: The Anniversary Update

Cisco Finds $34 Million Ransomware Industry

Ransomware is “generating huge profits, ” says Cisco. Slashdot reader coondoggie shares this report from Network World: Enterprise-targeting cyber enemies are deploying vast amounts of potent ransomware to generate revenue and huge profits — nearly $34 million annually, according to Cisco’s Mid-Year Cybersecurity Report out this week. Ransomware, Cisco wrote, has become a particularly effective moneymaker, and enterprise users appear to be the preferred target. Many of the victims were slow to patch their systems, according to the article. One study of Cisco devices running on fundamental infrastructure discovered that 23% had vulnerabilities dating back to 2011, and 16% even had vulnerabilities dating back to 2009. Popular attack vectors included vulnerabilities in JBoss and Adobe Flash, which was responsible for 80% of the successful attacks for one exploit kit. The article also reports that attackers are now hiding their activities better using HTTPS and TLS, with some even using a variant of Tor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cisco Finds $34 Million Ransomware Industry

Android Stagefright Bug Required 115 Patches, Millions Still At Risk

eWeek reports that “hundreds of millions of users remain at risk” one year after Joshua Drake discovered the Stagefright Android flaw. Slashdot reader darthcamaro writes: A year ago, on July 27, 2015 news about the Android Stagefright flaw was first revealed with the initial reports claiming widespread impact with a billion users at risk. As it turns out, the impact of Stagefright has been more pervasive…over the last 12 months, Google has patched no less than 115 flaws in Stagefright and related Android media libraries. Joshua Drake, the researcher who first discovered the Stagefright flaw never expected it to go this far. “I expected shoring up the larger problem to take an extended and large effort, but I didn’t expect it to be ongoing a year later.” Drake believes targeted attacks use Stagefright vulnerabilities on unpatched systems, but adds that Android’s bug bounty program appears to be working, paying out $550, 000 in its first year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android Stagefright Bug Required 115 Patches, Millions Still At Risk

Open Source Gardening Robot ‘FarmBot’ Raises $560,000

Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: FarmBot is an open-source gantry-crane-style outdoor robot for tending a garden bed. The project is crowdfunding a first production run and has raised US$561, 486 of their US$100, 000 goal — with one day left to go… The onboard control system is based around a Raspberry Pi 3 computer and an Arduino Mega 2560 Microcontroller. Many of the parts are 3D printable. Two years ago Slashdot covered the genesis of this project, describing its goal as simply “to increase food production by automating as much of it as possible.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open Source Gardening Robot ‘FarmBot’ Raises $560,000

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Becomes World’s Third Richest Person

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Strong earnings from Amazon and a boost to the company’s stock have made its founder, Jeff Bezos, the world’s third richest person, according to Forbes. Mr Bezos owns 18% of Amazon’s shares, which rose 2% in trading on Thursday. Forbes estimated his fortune to be $65.3 billion (49.5 billion British Pound). Amazon’s revenue beat analysts’ expectations, climbing 31% from last year to $30.4 billion in the second quarter. Profit for the e-commerce giant was $857 million, compared with $92 million in 2015. According to Forbes estimates, Mr Bezos’s fortune is only surpassed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, worth $78 billion (59 billion British Pound), and the $73.1 billion (55 billion British Pound) fortune of Zara founder Amancio Ortega. Amazon had developed a reputation for announcing little or no profit each quarter, but appeared to hit a turning point last year and has seen improving earnings since. Amazon shares have spiked 50% since February. BBC’s report includes some bullet points about Bezos. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. He studied at Princeton University and worked on Wall Street. In 1994, he launched Amazon as an online book retailer. A lifelong Star Trek fan, Bezos launched Blue Origin spaceflight and aerospace firm in 2000, and more than a decade later, he purchased The Washington Post newspaper in 2013. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Becomes World’s Third Richest Person

Australia Has Moved 1.5 Metres, So It’s Updating Its Location For Self-Driving Cars

An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: Australia is changing from “down under” to “down under and across a bit”. The country is shifting its longitude and latitude to fix a discrepancy with global satellite navigation systems. Government body Geoscience Australia is updating the Geocentric Datum of Australia, the country’s national coordinate system, to bring it in line with international data. The reason Australia is slightly out of whack with global systems is that the country moves about 7 centimetres (2.75 inches) per year due to the shifting of tectonic plates. Since 1994, when the data was last recorded, that’s added up to a misalignment of about a metre and a half. While that might not seem like much, various new technology requires location data to be pinpoint accurate. Self-driving cars, for example, must have infinitesimally precise location data to avoid accidents. Drones used for package delivery and driverless farming vehicles also require spot-on information.ABC has more details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Australia Has Moved 1.5 Metres, So It’s Updating Its Location For Self-Driving Cars

Apollo astronauts dying of heart disease at 4-5X the rate of counterparts

(credit: NASA ) Deep space travel takes a toll on the body—and it’s apparently something you can’t moon-walk off. Apollo astronauts who have ventured out of the protective magnetosphere of mother Earth appear to be dying of cardiovascular disease at a far higher rate than their counterparts—both those that have stayed grounded and those that only flew in the shielding embrace of low Earth orbit. Though the data is slim—based on only 77 astronauts total—researchers speculate that potent ionizing radiation in deep space may be to blame. That hypothesis was backed up in follow-up mouse studies which provided evidence that similar radiation exposure led to long-lasting damage to the rodents’ blood vessels. All of the data is published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports . The study, while not definitive, may add an extra note of caution to the potential hazards of future attempts to fly to Mars and elsewhere in the cosmos. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apollo astronauts dying of heart disease at 4-5X the rate of counterparts

Intel’s Core M Compute Stick is an actually usable computer with caveats

Intel’s Core m3 Compute Stick. Andrew Cunningham Back in January at CES , Intel showed us a full range of mini desktop PCs that it has been releasing steadily over the course of the year. The first was a new, inexpensive version of its Compute Stick , followed by a new, mainstream Skylake NUC , and finally a quad-core NUC box that wasn’t quite like anything the company had done before. Now Intel has sent us the last device we learned about at the beginning of the year: a Core m3-powered version of the Compute Stick that sits somewhere between the Atom version and the Skylake NUC on the price and performance spectrum. It looks more or less like the Atom version we’ve already seen, but it introduces a few neat ideas (and enough performance) that it’s actually plausible as a general-use desktop computer. The bad news is the price tag, which at $380 (with Windows, $300 without, and XXX with Windows and a Core m5) is pretty far outside the sub-$150 impulse-buy zone that the other Compute Sticks exist inside. So how well does it work? What compromises do you make when you shrink a decent laptop’s worth of power into a stick? And how big is the niche for a relatively powerful, relatively expensive stick-sized desktop, anyway? Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s Core M Compute Stick is an actually usable computer with caveats

Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features

New submitter Miche67 writes: As part of the July 2016 update to Office 365, Microsoft is adding several features across the board to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word, however, is getting the biggest new features — Researcher and Editor — to improve your writing. “As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document, ” reports Network World. “[Editor] builds on the already-existing spellchecker and thesaurus to offer suggestions on how to improve your overall writing. In addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and the wavy blue line under bad grammar, there will be a gold line for writing style.” The new features are expected to be available later this year. In addition to the two new features added to PowerPoint last year — Designer and Morph, Microsoft is offering Zoom, a feature that lets you easily create “interactive, non-linear presentations.” “Instead of the 1-2-3-4 linear method of presenting slides, forcing you to place them all in the order you wish to display, presenters will be able to show their slides in any order they want at any time, ” reports Network World. “This way you can change your presentation order as needed without having to stop PowerPoint or interrupt the display.” As for Outlook, Focused Inbox is coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs. The “Focused” tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the “Other” tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly. In addition, @mentions are coming to Outlook 365 and Outlook for PC and Mac, “making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features