vanity-fair – Page 17 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

A big chunk of the Sierra Nevada caught fracturing on video

If you like geology, you’re used to relying on an active imagination. Most geologic processes occur too slowly to see them play out for yourself. Many of the exceptions are dangerous enough that you might not want a front row seat or rare enough that the odds of being there to witness it are disheartening. Sometimes, though, the Earth throws us a bone—or in this case, a gigantic slab of granite. One interesting way that rocks weather and crumble apart is called “exfoliation.” Like the skin-scrubbing technique, this involves the outermost layers of exposed igneous or metamorphic bedrock sloughing off in a sheet. Over time, this tends to smooth and round the outcrop—Yosemite’s Half Dome providing a spectacular example. We’re not entirely sure just what drives the peeling of an outcrop’s skin like this, but the classic explanation is that it’s the result of bringing rocks that formed at great pressure up to the surface. Once there, the outer layers can expand slightly, creating a physical mismatch with the layers below them. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

D. enigmata ron the right, with the three larger samples on the left representing D. discoides . PLoS one Over the past few years, studies of genomes have confused what we thought we knew about the origin of animal life. Instead of the simple sponges being the earliest branch off the animal tree, a group of relatively complex organisms, the ctenophores, seem to be the earliest branch . That finding has some serious implications as it suggests that a nervous system evolved twice . Now, some more traditional biology may upset the family tree even further. Old samples taken from the seabed near Tasmania contain examples of two different species that may belong to a phylum entirely unknown to us—one that split off near the base of the animal tree. The strange creatures also have features that suggest they may be related to remains from the Ediacaran, a period in which the first animal life appears in the fossil record. The samples actually date from a research cruise taken nearly 30 years ago, where a “sled” was dragged along the ocean floor and samples returned to the surface. The new species weren’t recognized as interesting when they were first found, so they were left mixed in with the rest of the collection, which was fixed with formaldehyde and then dumped in 80 percent ethanol. The samples suffered a bit of further abuse when one of the authors wanted to refresh the alcohol and was given 100 percent ethanol instead. (The paper actually notes, “Unfortunately absolute alcohol was provided without comment instead of the requested 80 percent ethanol.”) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Front Porch ad. A Northern California company that bills itself as the “worldwide leader in Wi-Fi monetization” is the vendor behind Comcast’s and other US cable companies’ promotional advertising campaign performed through JavaScript injection, Comcast said Monday. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed the vendor’s name, Front Porch of Sonora, hours after Ars reported that Comcast recently started serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. We wrote that Comcast’s decision to inject data into the net raises security concerns and cuts to the heart of the ongoing net neutrality debate . As it turns out, Front Porch also does business with Cox, Time Warner, Bright House, and Cablevision in the US, Front Porch CTO Carlos Vazquez said in a telephone interview. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Epic makes Unreal Engine 4 free for students

On Thursday, Epic Games announced that it would make the complete Unreal Engine 4 suite free to use for universities and students on a case-by-case basis. Interested teachers and students can now submit their credentials via Epic’s official site , and upon acceptance, they will have access to the suite without having to pay the standard $19 per month fee . “There’s no separate ‘academic’ version or anything like that,” UE4 General Manager Ray Davis said to Ars in a phone interview. “The cool thing is, as a student, even if you don’t decide to subscribe upon graduation, you’ll still retain access to any version of the engine you had at that point. We’re not leaving people hanging at the end of a school year or anything like that.” Though UE4’s university-specific offer isn’t quite as accessible as Crytek’s CryENGINE, which can be downloaded by anybody on a non-commercial basis, Epic’s revision does stem from feedback the company received after it announced UE4’s pricing structure during this year’s Game Developers Conference . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic makes Unreal Engine 4 free for students

Oculus targets $200 to $400 range for consumer version of VR headset

Kyle Orland When Oculus eventually releases a consumer version (CV1) of its Rift virtual reality headset, the company wants to “stay in that $200-$400 price range,” founder Palmer Luckey told Eurogamer in a recent interview. That lines up roughly with the $350 currently being charged for the second Development Kit (DK2) version of the Rift, which began shipping to developers recently. Luckey warned Eurogamer, though, that the consumer version price range “could slide in either direction depending on scale, pre-orders, the components we end up using, business negotiations…” One thing that won’t be sliding around anymore is the technical specs for the CV1. “We know what we’re making and now it’s a matter of making it.” Luckey wouldn’t be pinned down on the specifics of those consumer specs, but he said to expect a jump in resolution above the DK2, similar to the 720p to 1080p jump we saw between the first development kits (DK1) and DK2. Luckey also teased improvements to 90Hz “or higher” refresh rate (up from 75Hz in DK2) and lowered weight and size for the consumer headset. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus targets $200 to $400 range for consumer version of VR headset

Judge mulls contempt charges in Microsoft’s e-mail privacy fight with US

Robert Scoble A federal judge is mulling whether to hold Microsoft in contempt of court for defying orders to give the US government e-mails stored on an overseas server. The case is the nation’s first testing the Obama administration’s position that any company with operations in the US must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. The US believes the e-mail on a Microsoft server in Dublin, Ireland is associated with narcotics trafficking. Microsoft on Tuesday reiterated its position that it was talking with US District Judge Loretta Preska, the judge who sided with the Obama administration on Friday. “We will not be turning over the e-mail,” Microsoft said in a statement. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge mulls contempt charges in Microsoft’s e-mail privacy fight with US

Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it

Most of Intel’s announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we’re getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel’s consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you’ll need to start looking at Xeons). We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March , when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips (“Devil’s Canyon”) and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today’s information has already leaked, we’ll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don’t follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public. The CPUs Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Within four days of the first public reports of a major flaw in OpenSSL’s software for securing communications on the Internet, mass attacks searched for and targeted vulnerable servers. In a report released this week, IBM found that while the attacks have died down, approximately half of the original 500,000 potentially vulnerable servers remain unpatched, leaving businesses at continuing risk of the Heartbleed flaw. On average, the company currently sees 7,000 daily attacks against its customers, down from a high of 300,000 attacks in a single 24-hour period in April, according to the report based on data from the company’s Managed Security Services division. “Despite the initial rush to patch systems, approximately 50 percent of potentially vulnerable servers have been left unpatched—making Heartbleed an ongoing, critical threat,” the report stated. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole’s two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole A home’s Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation . The Helmholtz equation models “the propagation of electronic waves” that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces. The author of the post in question , Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment’s long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says

A sixth-generation iPod Nano embedded in a watch band. Aaron Muszalski Re/code is reporting that Apple will introduce a wearable device on September 9 alongside two next-generation iPhones. Such a device from Apple has been highly anticipated since the wearable market received newcomers from Samsung, LG, and Motorola . Apple’s entry into this market was originally expected sometime in October based on an earlier report from Re/code. The site has had a good track record of correctly predicting the timing of Apple product releases since the AllThingsD days. John Paczkowski, who reported the news, says that the coming device will certainly be equipped to make use of Apple’s HealthKit platform for its Health app, as well as HomeKit, which is a platform to connect devices to smart appliances and light bulbs. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s wearable device will be revealed September 9, Re/code says