Tag: technology

Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate

An anonymous reader writes: Spain’s Ministry of the Interior has announced the first ever arrest of an eBook pirate. The suspect is said to have uploaded more than 11, 000 literary works online, many on the same day as their official release. More than 400 subsequent sites are said to have utilized his releases. The investigation began in 2015 following a complaint from the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO), a non-profit association of authors and publishers of books, magazines, newspapers and sheet music. According to the Ministry, CEDRO had been tracking the suspect but were only able to identify him by an online pseudonym. However, following investigations carried out by the police, his real identity was discovered. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate

‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider’s Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: “‘OCP has a cultlike following, ‘ one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. ‘The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.’ OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it ‘open source’ so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there’s a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple’s networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely — never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple’s exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple’s secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said ‘no.’ ‘The whole team quit the same week, ‘ this person told us.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

(credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established , nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that’s also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm’s bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

Apple To Obsolete iPhone 4 and Late 2010 MacBook Air On October 31

Apple will make all iPhone 4 models, the late 2010 13-inch MacBook Air, third-generation AirPort Extreme, and mid-2009 AirPort Time Capsule obsolete come October 31, MacRumor claims, citing a different report. From the report: Apple products on the vintage and obsolete list are no longer eligible for hardware service, beyond a few exceptions. Apple defines vintage products as those that have not been manufactured for more than five years but less than seven years ago, while obsolete products are those that were discontinued more than seven years ago. Each of the products added were released between 2009 and 2010. The report specifically pertains to Apple’s vintage and obsolete products list in Japan, but the new additions will more than likely extend to the United States, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific and Europe regions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple To Obsolete iPhone 4 and Late 2010 MacBook Air On October 31

California City Converts Its Street Lights Into A High-Speed IoT Backbone

Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford describes how the city of Santa Monica installed its own high-speed IoT backbone on its street lights and traffic signals — and why it’s important. Neutral “micro” cell sites can make very high-capacity wireless transmissions available, competitively, to everyone (and every sensor) nearby. This can and should cause an explosion of options and new opportunities for economic growth, innovation, and human flourishing in general… Very few American cities have carried out this transmogrification, but every single one will need to. Santa Monica…is a city that will be able to control its future digital destiny, because it is taking a comprehensive, competition-forcing approach to the transmission of data… Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally overseen, reasonably priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits. Santa Monica’s CIO warns that now telecoms “are looking for exclusive rights to poles and saying they can’t co-locate [with their competitors]. They’re all hiring firms to lock up their permits and rights to as many poles as possible, as quickly as possible, before governments can organize.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California City Converts Its Street Lights Into A High-Speed IoT Backbone

Forget holograms, here’s a ‘floating e-ink’ display

The amount of pixels in a display has been the source of forum flamewars since the advent of HDTV, which makes an experimental display technology from the University of Sussex so interesting. It’s called JOLED and it measures a whopping 7 x 6 voxels high and wide, respectively. Hold on, it gets more interesting. Each voxel is a diminutive multi-colored sphere, and they’re suspended in mid-air by an array of ultrasound speakers that “create high-pitched and high-intensity soundwaves that are inaudible but forceful enough to hold the spheres in place, ” according to the school . That holds the JANUS objects in place, but to make them spin and show different colors at different times is something else entirely. What seems to be the key to the rotation is that the spheres are coated with titanium dioxide — also used to purify air when mixed with concrete — which, when a exposed to an electrical field causes them to rotate. “JOLED could be like having a floating e-ink display that can also change its shape, ” researcher Deepak Sahoo said in a canned press release quote. Maybe don’t expect to have these sitting on your desk, though. The school suggest that it could wind up like many of Disney Research’s projects and be used in commercial or tourism settings. Some examples? Showing the changing patterns of carbon footprints or changes in currency conversion rates. So, don’t expect to watch Luke Cage on one of these in HDR anytime soon is what I’m saying. “We also want to examine ways in which such a display could be used to deliver media on-demand, ” University of Sussex’s Sriram Subramanian said. “A screen appears in front of the user to show the media and then the objects forming the display fall to the ground when the video finishes playing.” The scientists hope to increase the pixel density as well as the amount of colors displayed (sound familiar?), and will be presenting their research next week at Japan’s ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium. Via: TechCrunch Source: University of Sussex

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Forget holograms, here’s a ‘floating e-ink’ display

Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more

(credit: Hefin Richards ) There has been yet another major data breach, this time exposing names, IP addresses, birth dates, e-mail addresses, vehicle data, and occupations of at least 58 million subscribers, researchers said. The trove was mined from a poorly secured database and then published and later removed at least three times over the past week, according to this analysis from security firm Risk Based Security. Based on conversations with a Twitter user who first published links to the leaked data , the researchers believe the data was stored on servers belonging to Modern Business Solutions , a company that provides data storage and database hosting services. Shortly after researchers contacted Modern Business Solutions, the leaky database was secured, but the researchers said they never received a response from anyone at the firm, which claims to be located in Austin, Texas. Officials with Modern Business Solutions didn’t respond to several messages Ars left seeking comment and additional details. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more

Android 7.1 To Roll Out To Nexus Devices in December; Preview Goes Out This Month

Google said today it will roll out Android 7.1 to a range of Nexus devices — including Nexus 6 — later this year (December). A developer preview of Android 7.1 will be available to enthusiasts later this month. From an Engadget report: They also confirmed what 7.1 will bring to the table. Aside from Daydream VR support, most of the new features focus on giving developers more options to spruce up their apps’ functionality. First, they can now make custom shortcuts, much like the ones popping up in iOS via 3D Touch. There’s also support for image keyboards so users can insert stickers or GIFs within apps. For carriers and calling apps, 7.1 has APIs for multi-endpoint calling and telephony configuration. Lastly, developers can now route users to a Settings page to free up storage space by deleting unused files. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android 7.1 To Roll Out To Nexus Devices in December; Preview Goes Out This Month

White House Vows ‘Proportional’ Response For Russian DNC Hack

After the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security publicly blamed Russia for stealing and publishing archived emails from the Democratic National Committee on Friday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said today that President Obama will consider a “proportional” response. ABC News reports: “We obviously will ensure that a U.S. response is proportional. It is unlikely that our response would be announced in advanced. It’s certainly possible that the president could choose response options that we never announce, ” Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. “The president has talked before about the significant capabilities that the U.S. government has to both defend our systems in the United States but also carry out offensive operations in other countries, ” he added. “There are a range of responses that are available to the president and he will consider a response that’s proportional.” The Wall Street Journal report mentions several different ways to response to Russia. The U.S. could impose economic sanctions against Moscow, punish Russia diplomatically, opt to allow the Justice Department to simply prosecute the hacks as a criminal case, and/or launch a U.S. cyberattack targeting Russia’s election process. Of course, each response has its pros and cons. “They could escalate into a more adversarial conflict between both countries, ” writes Carol E. Lee for the Wall Street Journal. “But the absence of a response could signal that such behavior will be tolerated in the future.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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White House Vows ‘Proportional’ Response For Russian DNC Hack

Sprint To Provide 1 Million Students With Free Internet, Mobile Devices

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Wireless carrier Sprint Corp on Tuesday pledged to provide 1 million U.S. high school students with free mobile devices and internet access as part of a White House initiative to expand opportunities for lower income kids. Marcelo Claure, chief executive of Sprint, said the plan builds on the company’s prior commitment through the White House’s ConnectED program to get 50, 000 students high speed internet. He said Sprint realized that while providing students with internet at school was helpful, students would still need to be able to use the internet at home. “We are going to equip 1 million kids with the tools they need to reach their full potential and achieve their dreams, ” Claure told reporters on a White House call. Sprint aims to give cell phones, tablets, laptops or mobile hot spots to students who do not have internet at home. Students would be able to choose the type of device that might meet their needs and it would be coupled with four years of free data plans. The company hopes to reach its goal of a million students in five years. Manufacturers have agreed to provide the mobile devices at no cost, Claure said. He also said the company would encourage customers to donate their old devices to the program and that it would not cost Sprint much to allow the free use of its network. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sprint To Provide 1 Million Students With Free Internet, Mobile Devices