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Submission + - Google Chrome Now Has Over 1 Billion Users

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the I/O 2015 developer conference today, Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of product, announced that Chrome has passed 1 billion active users. Less than a year ago, Google revealed Android has over 1 billion active users. These are indeed Google’s biggest ecosystems. Google also shared that Google Search, YouTube, and Google Maps all have over 1 billion users as well. Gmail will reach the milestone next; it has 900 million users.

Submission + - Google Calendar Ends SMS Notifications

Submitted by LuserOnFire
LuserOnFire writes: Google has sent out an email this morning that says in part:

Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experience on your mobile device, even offline.

Submission + - Orange County Public Schools to monitor students on social media

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Orange County school district is now monitoring students' social media messages in an effort to curb cyberbullying, crime on campus and suicide.

Orange County Public Schools announced Thursday that it has acquired software to monitor social media "to proactively prevent, intervene and (watch) situations that may impact students and staff." The district has obtained an annual license with SnapTrends, software that monitors Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

School officials acknowledge the online snooping might raise privacy questions. But board member Linda Kobert said the district is taking advantage of "new tools to protect our children."
Android

NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV Reviewed: Gaming and Possibly the Ultimate 4K Streamer 54

Posted by timothy from the ensmallening-rocks dept.
Earlier this week, NVIDIA officially launched its SHIELD Android TV set-top device, with far more horsepower than something like Roku or Apple TV, but on par with an average game console, and at a more affordable price tag of $199. MojoKid writes: What's interesting, however, is that it's powered by NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC which features a Maxwell-derived GPU and eight CPU cores; four ARM A57 cores and four A53s. The A57 cores are 64-bit, out-of-order designs, with multi-issue pipelines, while the A53s are simpler, in-order, highly-efficient designs. Which cores are used will depend on the particular workload being executed at the time. Tegra X1 also packs a 256-core Maxwell-derived GPU with the same programming capabilities and API support as NVIDIA's latest desktop GPUs. In standard Android benchmarks, the SHIELD pretty much slays any current high-end tablet or smartphone processor in graphics, but is about on par with the octal-core Samsung Exynos in terms of standard compute workloads but handily beating and octal-core Qualcomm Snapdragon. What's also interesting about the SHIELD Android TV is that it's not only an Android TV-capable device with movie and music streaming services like Netflix etc., but it also plays any game on Google Play and with serious horsepower behind it. The SHIELD Android TV is also the first device certified for Netflix's Ultra HD 4K streaming service.
China

Microscopic Underwater Sonic Screwdriver Successfully Tested 28

Posted by timothy from the twisting-in-the-waves dept.
afeeney writes: Researchers at the University of Bristol and Northwestern Polytechnical University in China have created acoustic vortices that can create microscopic centrifuges that rotate small particles. They compare this to a watchmaker's sonic screwdriver. So far, though, the practical applications include cell sorting and low-power water purification, rather than TARDIS operations. Appropriately enough, one of the researchers is named Bruce Drinkwater.

Submission + - EFF fights abuse of court orders to close sites in the wake of Grooveshark (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: The EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) has involved itself in lots of online battles — including the fightback against NSA surveillance, and the drive for net neutrality. The latest fight sees the organization joining forces with web performance and security firm CloudFlare in tackling the site blocking activities of the record industry.

The digital rights group is battling record labels which it says are forcing web firms into becoming the "copyright police". The move was prompted by the closure of Grooveshark, a music website run by one of CloudFlare's clients. It re-opens the question of who is ultimately responsible for the content that appears on sites — those posting it, those hosting it, or any other company involved in the delivery?
Robotics

Untethered Miniature Origami Robot That Self-Folds, Walks, Swims, and Degrades 27

Posted by timothy from the I-can-do-those-things-at-scale dept.
jan_jes writes: MIT researchers demonstrated an untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades at ICRA 2015 in Seattle. A miniature robotic device that can fold-up on the spot, accomplish tasks, and disappear by degradation into the environment promises a range of medical applications but has so far been a challenge in engineering. This work presents a sheet that can self-fold into a functional 3D robot,actuate immediately for untethered walking and swimming, and subsequently dissolve in liquid. Further, the robot is capable of conducting basic tasks and behaviors, including swimming, delivering/carrying blocks, climbing a slope, and digging. The developed models include an acetone-degradable version, which allows the entire robot's body to vanish in a liquid. Thus this experimentally demonstrate the complete life cycle of this robot: self-folding,actuation, and degrading.

Submission + - 200 Open Source Projects Later: Source Code Static Analysis Experience

Submitted by Andrey Karpov
Andrey Karpov writes: Positive Hack Days is a unique international event. It is the only event which brings together the elite of the hackers' world, leaders of the information security industry and representatives of the Internet community to cooperate in addressing burning information security issues. PHDays considers many different preferences of the entire information community and covers the most topical issues related to information security.

The PVS-Studio analyzer is a methodology of detecting errors in program code. However, error is not an incorrect work of the program but also a potential vulnerability. Everything depends on perspectives you look at this errors.

That is why we took part in this forum and tried to demonstrate how often programmers make mistakes or make it vulnerable without any suspicions. The report is based on checking more than 200 projects experience. We were finding various defects with the help of PVS-Studio.

Here we suggest you to acquaint with our report:

Comment Re:Go for it (Score 1) 43

by smittyoneeach (#49804255) Attached to: Survey - George W. Bush more evil than Stalin, Mao, Lenin
I'll take your lack of specific examples of bigotry, even against the dictionary definition: "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself" as an admission that you're blowing smoke. Disagreeing with "their ideas" is not "intolerance toward those".
You seem to play d_r's game of raping the language in support of Holy Progress. Or am I overlooking something?

Comment Re:Not clear (Score 1) 6

by smittyoneeach (#49804253) Attached to: George W Bush wanted to officiate at gay wedding.
Jeb who? If the little brother somehow threads it, it won't be due to the religious right. See 2012 election, where said constituency kinda left Romney hanging in the breeze.
If you want to posit an anti-Mormon bias, that's OK. But what substantial religious qualifications does Jeb have?
tl;dr: I think this argument is weak tea, myself.
Google

Google Photos Launches With Unlimited Storage, Completely Separate From Google+ 175

Posted by timothy from the delete-is-the-hardest-key-to-press dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a report that Google yesterday announced at its I/O conference a photo-storage site known as Google Photos. Says the article: The new service is completely separate from Google+, something Google users have been requesting for eons. Google is declaring that Google Photos lets you backup and store "unlimited, high-quality photos and videos, for free." It's a bit creepy to see all the photos that Google still has on tap, including many that I've since deleted on my phone.
Science

The Case For a Muon Collider Succeeding the LHC Just Got Stronger 53

Posted by timothy from the other-people's-money dept.
StartsWithABang writes: If you strike the upper atmosphere with a cosmic ray, you produce a whole host of particles, including muons. Despite having a mean lifetime of just 2.2 microseconds, and the speed of light being 300,000 km/s, those muons can reach the ground! That's a distance of 100 kilometers traveled, despite a non-relativistic estimate of just 660 meters. If we apply that same principle to particle accelerators, we discover an amazing possibility: the ability to create a collider with the cleanliness and precision of electron-positron colliders but the high energies of proton colliders. All we need to do is build a muon collider. A pipe dream and the stuff of science fiction just 20 years ago, recent advances have this on the brink of becoming reality, with a legitimate possibility that a muon-antimuon collider will be the LHC's successor.

Submission + - Untethered Miniature Origami Robot that Self-folds, Walks, Swims, and Degrades

Submitted by jan_jes
jan_jes writes: MIT researchers demonstrated an untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades at ICRA 2015 in Seattle.

A miniature robotic device that can fold-up on the spot, accomplish tasks, and disappear by degradation into the environment promises a range of medical applications but has so far been a challenge in engineering. This work presents a sheet that can self-fold into a functional 3D robot,actuate immediately for untethered walking and swimming, and subsequently dissolve in liquid.
Further the robot is capable of conducting basic tasks and behaviors, including swimming, delivering/carrying blocks, climbing a slope, and digging.

The developed models include an acetone-degradable version, which allows the entire robot’s body to vanish in a liquid. Thus this experimentally demonstrate the complete life cycle of this robot: self-folding,actuation, and degrading.

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