walking-dead – Tech Today w/ Ken May

‘Star Trek Discovery’ explores new frontiers on September 24th

After four months of production following a worrisome delay , CBS is finally comfortable enough with its long-awaited new Star Trek series to set a release date: September 24th, 2017. That’s right on schedule . The new series will star Michelle Yeoh as Captain Philippa Georgiou with The Walking Dead’s Sonequa Martin-Green as her First Officer, Michael Burnham. The 15-episode season will launch Sunday the 24th at 8:30PM ET on CBS and run through November 5th. The second half of the season (episodes 8-15) is slated to start next January. The show is an exclusive to CBS All Access, the company’s streaming subscription service, although the first episode will also air on CBS proper. This means that the CBS All Access app will be the exclusive place for Star Trek fans to check out this latest chapter. It’s an intentionally limiting move that seems to be made to boost interest in the CBS All Access service, but we’re hoping it comes to regular TV eventually so more viewers can tune in.

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‘Star Trek Discovery’ explores new frontiers on September 24th

A Walking Dead-themed burger made to taste like human flesh is…

A Walking Dead -themed burger made to taste like human flesh is coming to London The creators even consulted real-life cannibals to make the recipe (which doesn’t actually include any human flesh)

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A Walking Dead-themed burger made to taste like human flesh is…

Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

For the second half of the 1990s, my standard advice to people buying computers was to max out the RAM as the cheapest, best way to improve their computers’ efficiency. The price/performance curve hit its stride around 1995, and after decades when a couple gigs of RAM would cost more than the server you were buying it for, you could max out all the RAM slots in any computer for a couple hundred bucks. Operating systems, though, were still being designed for RAM-starved computers, and when you dropped a gig or two of RAM in a machine, it screamed . It’s still good practice to max out your RAM, but it doesn’t get you much of a dividend. The turbo-charger of the 2010s is solid-state disk-drives, and they’re screaming up the same price/performance curve that RAM traversed twenty years ago. Two years ago, I traded my laptop drive for a 400GB SDD, spending as much on the drive as I had on the machine, and it was worth every penny. My laptop battery-life nearly doubled, and I stopped getting watch-cursors altogether; no matter what task I performed, it was done instantly. In October, I bought a one terabyte SDD for a ridiculous $435 — about a third of what I paid for a 600GB drive a little over a year ago! — and having run it for two months now, I’m prepared to pronounce it good. I wasn’t familiar with the manufacturer, Crucial, but they got very good reviews on Amazon, and at that price I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. My machine — a Thinkpad X230 running Ubuntu 13.10 — chugs along with nary a beach-ball, and I can go six to eight hours on a six-cell battery with full brightness, and continuous Wifi and Bluetooth usage. I’m rough on my computer, and it’s taken plenty of knocks and bumps without any noticeable impact on the drive. To accompany the new drive, I bought a pair of $78 Toshiba USB3 1TB drives (one for backing up at the office, the other for my travel bag). They’re nothing near as fast as the SDD, but combined with the USB3 bus, they’re plenty quick for daily incremental backups, which take less than five minutes. If your storage needs aren’t as massy as mine, there’s a whole line of Crucial SDDs, 480GB for $269 , 240GB for $140 and so on. They all come with three year warranties, though I haven’t had cause to get service for my drive yet (knock wood). The drive is 7mm high, and comes with an easy-to-fit adapter for 9mm enclosures. I was less impressed with the adapter I bought to copy the files over; it was fiddly and prone to losing its connection. Ultimately, I slapped the new drive into a case in order to make the transfer. Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1

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Terabyte laptop SDDs for $435!

Apps come bundled with secret Bitcoin mining programs, paper over the practice with EULAs

Researchers at Malwarebytes have discovered that some programs covertly install Bitcoin-mining software on users’ computers , papering over the practice by including sneaky language in their license agreements allowing for “computer calculations, security.” The malicious programs include YourFreeProxy from Mutual Public, AKA We Build Toolbars, LLC, AKA WBT. YourFreeProxy comes with a program called Monitor.exe, which repeatedly phones home to WBT, eventually silently downloading and installing a Bitcoin mining program called “jhProtominer.” So now that we have proof that a PUP is installing miners on users systems, do they do it without ever letting the user know? Well not exactly, their EULA specifically covers a section on Computer Calculations: COMPUTER CALCULATIONS, SECURITY: as part of downloading a Mutual Public, your computer may do mathematical calculations for our affiliated networks to confirm transactions and increase security. Any rewards or fees collected by WBT or our affiliates are the sole property of WBT and our affiliates. Their explanation is basically the purpose of Bitcoin Miners and that they will install this software on the system, run it, use up your system resources and finally keep all rewards from the effort YOUR system puts in. Talk about sneaky. In my opinion, PUPs have gone to a new low with the inclusion of this type of scheme, they already collected information on your browsing and purchasing habits with search toolbars and redirectors. They assault users with pop-up ads and unnecessary software to make a buck from their affiliates. Now they are just putting the nails in the coffin by stealing resources and driving user systems to the grave. Potentially Unwanted Miners – Toolbar Peddlers Use Your System To Make BTC [Adam Kujawa/Malwarebytes] ( via /. )

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Apps come bundled with secret Bitcoin mining programs, paper over the practice with EULAs

Google admits that Youtube/Google Plus integration increased ASCII porn, spam and trolling – UPDATED

Earlier this month, mathematics vlogger Vi Hart posted a ringing denunciation of the new integration of Youtube comments with Google Plus, arguing that the ham-fisted change had brought Youtube comments to an even lower low. Hart said that the new system gave precedence to people who were able to provoke lots of replies with trollish and insulting behavior, crowding out good commenters. Now, Youtube has officially recognized that the new system has led to an increase in spam, flaming, and the posting of ASCII art pornography . It’s part of a wider program through which Google is attempting to drive all its users into Google Plus (largely because advertisers are willing to pay higher rates for “social” ads, this being the latest industry mania). Googlers’ annual bonuses are being paid out based on Google Plus’s success, meaning that across the business, Google Plus is being crammed into every possible corner . The latest Android system, KitKat, tries to force users into Google Plus accounts for sending and receiving SMSes, and makes you opt out of Google Plus about six times during setup. When Google Plus came in, its company proponents insisted that forcing people to use their real names would improve civility. As is often the case when doctrine fails to line up with reality, they have now doubled down on their folly. If Google Plus hasn’t made the Internet “civil,” the problem can’t be that Real Names don’t work — the problem must be that Google Plus hasn’t been wedged into enough corners of the Internet. It’s hard to believe that Google managed to make Youtube comments worse, but there you have it. It turns out that if you provide Google engineers and product designers with sufficient motivation, there’s no limit to how bad things can get. Update : Thanks to David Otaguro for clarifying that the Google bonuses for Google Plus success was a one-year only affair to coincide with the service’s launch, and that the bonus was only partially based on Google Plus’s success. The Google+ integration has also proven unpopular in a broader sense for a couple of reasons. The change constitutes a) meddling with a well-understood, if broken, system in the interest of creating engagement and more data affiliated with real people, thus creating more business for Google, and b) doing so using Google’s social network, which sits somewhere on a spectrum between reviled and ignored. Google seems to be counting on the outcry against Google+ itself to eventually settle down. The company’s response to the newly bad YouTube comments has been to finally introduce better content moderation at a high level. The update to the system will have “better recognition of bad links,” according to the YouTube blog post, as well as “improved ASCII art detection” and altering the display of long comments. The next step will be to add bulk comment moderation, a long-requested feature that YouTube has avoided until now. The post also mentions briefly that the team is “working on improving comment ranking.” However, no details are provided on how the system will overcome YouTube’s ability to co-opt the definition of “engaged” and turn it into, specifically, “controversial.” The Google+ integration, though, appears to be here to stay. That’s despite the fact that the strongest user-based case for its use—that accountability will prevent trolls from trolling—has been killed, drowned in a sea of ASCII penises. YouTube hilariously impotent against ASCII comment pornographers [Casey Johnston/Ars Technica]

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Google admits that Youtube/Google Plus integration increased ASCII porn, spam and trolling – UPDATED

Google turns in child porn owner who used its cloud services

Google turned in a man who copied child pornography to his cellphone using Picasa. Raul Gonzales, 40, was charged with possessing more than 3,000 pornographic pictures of children on the phone. The FBI says the investigation began in March when Google’s hashing technology found two child porn pictures in his Picasa library. Picasa is a cloud-sharing platform for images owned by Google. From there, the company notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which says it found more images on a Tumblr account owned by Gonzalez. That’s when the feds took over. Agents say they also found pictures of a 9-year-old who is close to the family, and that Gonzales admitted to sexually assaulting the child. “When an image is found,” Google assured CBS, “an employee will inspect it to make sure it’s actual abuse and not just a picture of a child at bathtime.” It’s good to know that an alleged sexual predator was identified and dealt with, and it’s good to know that Google assigns individual humans to inspect our naked children for the authorities’ consideration.

How engineers freeze soil to create structurally sound solid walls of earth

In Japan, engineers are attempting to contain radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant by freezing the ground around it into “ice walls” that will remain frozen for years . At Nova, Jessica Morrison writes about this weird technique, which has been around for over half a century and is more commonly used as part of massive construction projects with large underground components, including Boston’s Big Dig.

Spooks throw Obama under the bus: He knew about Merkel spying since 2010

An anonymous “US intelligence source” told a German newspaper that Obama had been briefed on the fact that the NSA had tapped German chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone in 2010, and that he’d personally let it go. Expect a lot more of this, as spooks who are sick of being kicked around for conducting the spying that high-ranking administration officials had been delighted to green-light start to whisper the names of their collaborators in government. Bild am Sonntag newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying that National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander had briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010. “Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue,” the newspaper quoted a high-ranking NSA official as saying. News weekly Der Spiegel reported that leaked NSA documents showed that Merkel’s phone had appeared on a list of spying targets since 2002, and was still under surveillance shortly before Obama visited Berlin in June. Obama aware of Merkel spying since 2010: German media [Deborah Cole/AFP] ( via /. )

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Spooks throw Obama under the bus: He knew about Merkel spying since 2010

Promising work on diabetes vaccine

Researchers at Finland’s Tampere University have identified a set of viruses they believe to be responsible for Type 1 diabetes , and they have formulated a vaccine for it that has had promising results in mice. The enterovirus in question attacks the pancreas, and is similar to the virus that causes polio. They’re forming a research syndicate to raise the €700m needed for human trials. Researchers have looked at more than a hundred different strains of the virus and pinpointed five that could cause diabetes. They believe they could produce a vaccine against those strains. ”We have identified one virus type that carries the biggest risk,” said professor Heikki Hyöty. ”A vaccine could also protect against its close relatives, to give the best possible effect.” Finnish team makes diabetes vaccine breakthrough ( via /. )

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Promising work on diabetes vaccine

On Windows’ battery life problems

Jeff Atwood loves everything about his Surface Pro 2 except for its terrible battery life . The Windows light usage battery life situation has not improved at all since 2009. If anything the disparity between OS X and Windows light usage battery life has gotten worse. Microsoft positions Windows 8 as an operating system that’s great for tablets, which are designed for casual web browsing and light app use – but how can that possibly be true when Windows idle power management is so much worse than the competition’s desktop operating system in OS X – much less their tablet and phone operating system, iOS? A typical data point: Windows, on a 13″ MacBook Air, lasts about half as long per charge as OS X. What’s the deal?

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On Windows’ battery life problems