Applied Hacking’s Samy Kamkar ( previously ) has released Opensesame , an app for hacked IM-ME texting toys that can open millions of fixed-code garage doors in less than a minute. Read the rest
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Open garage-doors in less than a minute with a hacked kid’s toy
YouTube has been making its own space on multiple entertainment services for a while, but according to a report from the Financial Times , it’s now on the cusp of revealing its own subscription services for some of its specialist video channels. Rumored for several months, according to the FT ‘s unnamed sources it will include up to 50 different channels, with subscription pricing starting at “as little as $1.99 a month.” Google has already followed up, saying it had nothing to announce just yet, but that it was investigating “a subscription platform that could bring even more great content to YouTube .” Filed under: Home Entertainment , Internet , HD , Google Comments Via: Gizmodo Source: Financial Times (subscription)
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Financial Times: YouTube is close to launching paid-subscription channels
The Verge is reporting that Amazon is in talks with record labels to create a new subscription music service. More »
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Is Amazon in Talks to Create a Subscription Music Service?
derekmead writes “College students’ voracious appetite for study drugs like Adderall is widespread enough that it was one of the main topics of a marquee lecture on neuroethics at Society for Neuroscience’s 2012 conference called ‘The Impact of Neuroscience on Society: The Neuroethics of “Smart Drugs.”‘ It was excellent stuff by Barbara Sahakian, faculty at Department of Psychicatry at the University of Cambridge. Her focus is on prescription drugs for diseases and conditions like Alzheimer’s, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression, with the fundamental goal of understanding the neural basis of dysfunction to develop better drugs. Specifically, she wants to create drugs with no risk for substance abuse which means drugs that have no effect on dopamine. The true goal then of her research, fundamentally and briefly, is to repair the impaired. But doing so brings us to the discussion of how much repair is ethical when the repair can be disseminated to people who don’t actually need it. Divisions abound on what is to be done. Some experts say that if people can boost their abilities to make up for what mother nature didn’t give them, what’s wrong with that? Others say that people shouldn’t be using these drugs because they’re designed for people with serious problems who really need help. So another question for the ethicists is whether cognitive enhancers will ultimately level the playing field or juice the opposing team.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Is Non-Prescription ADHD Medication Use Ever Ethical?
An anonymous reader writes “It’s approximately 11 years since Windows XP was unveiled, and this week Microsoft was still at it trying to convince users that it’s time to upgrade. A post on the Windows For Your Business Blog calls on businesses to start XP migrations now. Microsoft cites the main reason as being that support for XP ends in April 2014, and ‘most new hardware options will likely not support the Windows XP operating system.’ If you run Windows Vista, Microsoft argues that it’s time to ‘start planning’ the move to Windows 8. As this article points out, it’s not uncommon to hear about people still running XP at work.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Urges Businesses To Get Off XP
another random user writes with news that NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest wireless carrier, will be rolling out a real-time translation app for phone calls on November 1. At launch, the app will translate Japanese into English, Mandarin, and Korean, and later that month it will add French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai. No word on Klingon. From the article: “The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism. However, the software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations. … It provides users with voice translations of the other speaker’s conversation after a slight pause, as well as providing a text readout. … NTT Docomo will soon face competition from France’s Alcatel-Lucent which is developing a rival product, WeTalk. It can handle Japanese and about a dozen other languages including English, French and Arabic. The service is designed to work over any landline telephone, meaning the company has had to find a way to do speech recognition using audio data sampled at a rate of 8kHz or 16kHz. Other products — which rely on data connections — have used higher 44kHz samples which are easier to process.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.