Tag: security

India Launches Five Foreign Satellites

vasanth writes: “India has put into orbit five foreign satellites, including one built by France two from Canada and one each from Singapore and Germany. The PSLV (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) has so far successfully launched 67 satellites, including 40 foreign ones, into space. The PSLV costs about 17 million USD and the cost is seen as a major advantage India has over other countries in terms of commercial launches. When talking about the cost of the project, the Prime Minister of India noted that the launch was cheaper than Hollywood film Gravity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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India Launches Five Foreign Satellites

Bug In Fire TV Screensaver Tears Through 250 GB Data Cap

jfruh (300774) writes Tech writer Tyler Hayes had never come close to hitting the 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap imposed by Cox Cable — until suddenly he was blowing right through it, eating up almost 80 GB a day. Using the Mac network utility little snitch, he eventually tracked down the culprit: a screensaver on his new Kindle Fire TV. A bug in the mosaic screensaver caused downloaded images to remain uncached. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bug In Fire TV Screensaver Tears Through 250 GB Data Cap

How to Short-Stroke Your Hard Drive for Optimal Speed

Windows: If you’d like the speed of your mechanical hard drive to be closer to SSD speeds, short-stroking your hard drive is your best bet. These steps can get your hard drive up to speed at the cost of some memory. Read more…

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How to Short-Stroke Your Hard Drive for Optimal Speed

This Graphic Shows What Happens to Your Social Accounts When You Die

None of us like to think about our death or the death of a loved one, but death is one thing it’s important to prepare for. When it comes, you don’t want to be stuck trying to get into a loved one’s Gmail or Facebook account to shut things down. This graphic shows you what you’re in for, and what you—or your loved ones—should have ready. Read more…

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This Graphic Shows What Happens to Your Social Accounts When You Die

Cambridge Team Breaks Superconductor World Record

An anonymous reader writes University of Cambridge scientists have broken a decade-old superconducting record by packing a 17.6 Tesla magnetic field into a golf ball-sized hunk of crystal — equivalent to about three tons of force. From the Cambridge announcement: “A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china. The Cambridge researchers managed to ‘trap’ a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla — roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet — in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cambridge Team Breaks Superconductor World Record

Apple just released the Mavericks 10.9.4 update.

Apple just released the Mavericks 10.9.4 update. The update fixes some WiFi issues, general reliability issues, and a quirk where some computers weren’t properly waking from sleep. Grab the update from Apple right now . Read more…

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Apple just released the Mavericks 10.9.4 update.

In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions

The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700, 000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion, ” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it. At least they showed their work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions

How Apple Can Take Its Headphones To the Next Level

redletterdave (2493036) writes “Apple is one of the biggest headphone makers in the world thanks to those signature white earbuds that have shipped with every iPod, iPhone, and iPad since 2001. But even two years after earbuds became ‘EarPods, ‘ the design could still be improved — and competitors are taking notice. Amazon recently unveiled a new pair of in-ear headphones that are magnetic, tangle-free and $5 cheaper than Apple’s $30 EarPods, while smaller startups are promoting their own wireless and customizable 3D-printed earbuds. But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with ‘one or more integrated physiological sensors’ designed to help users keep track of their body stats.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Apple Can Take Its Headphones To the Next Level

Half of Germany’s Power Supplied By Solar, Briefly

assertation (1255714) writes with this interesting tidbit from Reuters about the state of solar power in Germany: German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour — equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity — through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said. The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Half of Germany’s Power Supplied By Solar, Briefly