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Submission + - Steam after death?

Submitted by kuzb
kuzb writes: I'm a gamer. I probably will be until the day it's not possible anymore. Like many others, I've got heavy investment in my steam library which now encompasses hundreds of titles and represents thousands of dollars. As a gamer, the games I've acquired are as important to me as any other item which might have sentimental value to someone else.

It got me thinking, what happens to all this media when I die? What happens with other services where I have media? Is it legal for me to will this content to someone else, or do all the rights to such content just vanish?

Submission + - Wireless Charging at Starbucks

Submitted by sentiblue
sentiblue writes: Hey Slashdotters.... So I've seen the wireless charging stations being deployed at quite many Starbucks locations and I see that the device is a little adpater that plugs into the charging port of the phone and then that adapter has to be placed on top of a designated circle on the table to get charged.

I don't understand the incentive of doing this, let alone the cost to develop it! The term wireless is supposed to give you a reasonable range of operation that allows you to move your device.

So if you use a cable to charge a phone, you can actually place the phone anywhere in the radius of the cable length. With this wireless charging option, you actually have to place the phone right on top of the circle... allowing you device to only spin around that exact spot. If you move the device any more than that, it will not charge.

What's the point? I don't get it!

Submission + - Archos unveils world's first 256GB Android tablet and Fusion Storage technology (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: In order to stand out among the sea of rectangular slabs, a company must do something bold and unique. Today, Archos announces the world's first Android tablet to have 256GB of onboard storage. Even cooler? The company announces its fusion storage technology, allowing internal memory to seamlessly combine with a microSD card.

Submission + - Feds admit Stingray can disrupt bystanders' communications

Submitted by linuxwrangler
linuxwrangler writes: The government has fought hard to keep details about use and effects of the controversial Stingray device secret. But this Wired article points to recently released documents in which the government admits that the device can cause collatoral damage to other network users. The controversy has heated to the point that Florida senator Bill Nelson has made combative statments that such devices will inevitably force lawmakers to come up with new ways to protect privacy — a comment that is even more remarkable considering that the Stingray is produced by Harris Corporation which is headquartered in Nelson's home state.

Submission + - New Seagate Shingled hard drive teardown

Submitted by Peter Desnoyers
Peter Desnoyers writes: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are starting to hit the market, promising larger drives without heroic (and expensive) measures such as helium fill, but at a cost — data can no longer be over-written in place, requiring SSD-like algorithms to handle random writes.

At the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference in February, researchers from Northeastern University (disclaimer — I'm one of them)
dissected shingled drive performance both figuratively and literally, using both micro-benchmarks and a window cut in the drive to uncover the secrets of Seagate's first line of publicly-available
SMR drives.

TLDR: It's a pretty good desktop drive — with write cache enabled (the default for non-server setups) and an intermittent workload it performs quite well, handling bursts of random writes (up to a few tens of GB total) far faster than a conventional drive — but only if it has long powered-on idle periods for garbage collection. Reads and large writes run at about the same speed as on a conventional drive, and at $280 it costs less than a pair of decent 4TB drives. For heavily-loaded server applications, though, you might want to wait for the next generation.

Videos (in 16x slow motion) showing the drive in action — sequential read after deliberately fragmenting the drive, and a few thousand random writes.

Submission + - ISIS threatens life of Twitter founder after thousands of account suspensions (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: After a wave of account bannings that marks Twitter's most aggressive move ever against ISIS, new images circulated from militants shows founder Jack Dorsey in crosshairs with the caption "Twitter, you started this war." The famously tech-savy ISIS has met a number of defeats on American-built social media recently with sites like Twitter and YouTube banning the group's efforts in unprecedented numbers.

Submission + - Facebook Explains When Employees Can Access Your Account Without Your Password

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, Paavo Siljamäki, director at the record label Anjunabeats, told a very interesting story about an interaction with a Facebook engineer logging into his account without entering his account credentials. We got in touch with Facebook to learn when exactly the company’s employees can perform such actions. In short, Siljamäki says he was asked if a Facebook employee could “look” at his profile, to which he gave permission. The engineer then accessed the account without entering Siljamäki’s password.

Submission + - Giant craters found in Siberia, but scientists are nervous to study them (smh.com.au)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Russian scientists have now spotted a total of seven craters, five of which are in the Yamal Peninsula. Two of those holes have since turned into lakes. And one giant crater is rimmed by a ring of at least 20 mini-craters, the Siberian Times reported. Dozens more Siberian craters are likely still out there, said Moscow scientist Vasily Bogoyavlensky of the Oil and Gas Research Institute, calling for an "urgent" investigation.

He fears that if temperatures continue to rise — and they were five degrees higher than average in 2012 and 2013 — more craters will emerge in an area awash in gas fields vital to the national economy. "It is important not to scare people, but to understand that it is a very serious problem and we must research this," he told the Siberian Times. "We must research this phenomenon urgently, to prevent possible disasters."

These objects need to be studied, but it is rather dangerous for the researchers," Bogoyavlensky told the Siberian Times. "We know that there can occur a series of gas emissions over an extended period of time, but we do not know exactly when they might happen. ... It is very risky, because no one can guarantee there would not be new emissions."

Making matters worse, the gas is extremely flammable. One of the methane bursts has already caught fire. Nearby residents in a town called Antipayuta say they recently saw a bright flash in the distance. "Probably the gas ignited," Bogoyavlensky said. "This shows us that such [an] explosion could be rather dangerous and destructive. Years of experience has shown that gas emissions can cause serious damage to drilling rigs, oil and gas fields and offshore pipelines."

Submission + - How Does One Verify Hard Drive Firmware? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In light of recent revelations from Kaspersky Labs about the Equation Group and persistent hard drive malware, I was curious about how easy it might be to verify my own system's drives to see if they were infected. I have no real reason to think they would be, but I was dismayed by the total lack of tools to independently verify such a thing. For instance, Seagate's firmware download pages provide files with no external hash, something Linux distributions do for all of their packages. Neither do they seem to provide a utility to read off the current firmware from a drive and verify its integrity.

Are there any utilities to do such a thing? Why don't these companies provide such a thing to users? Has anyone compiled and posted a public list of known-good firmware hashes for the major hard drive vendors and models? This seems to be a critical hole in PC security.

I did contact Seagate support asking for hashes of their latest firmware; I got a response stating that '...If you download the firmware directly from our website there is no risk on the file be tampered with." [their phrasing, not mine]. Methinks somebody hasn't been keeping up with world events lately.

Submission + - As Big As Net Neutrality? FCC Kills State-Imposed Internet Monopolies (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by tedlistens
tedlistens writes: On Thursday, before it voted in favor of "net neutrality," the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to override state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that have barred local governments and public utilities from offering broadband outside the areas where they have traditionally sold electricity. Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance said the move was as important for internet competition as net neutrality: "Preventing big Internet Service Providers from unfairly discriminating against content online is a victory, but allowing communities to be the owners and stewards of their own broadband networks is a watershed moment that will serve as a check against the worst abuses of the cable monopoly for decades to come." The laws, like those in over a dozen other states, are often created under pressure from large private Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon, who consequently control monopolies or duopolies over high-speed internet in these places.

Submission + - Ask SD: How do you handle the discovery of a web site disclosing private data?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I recently discovered that a partner web site of a financial institution I do business with makes it trivially easy to view documents that do not belong to me. As in, change the document ID in a URL and view someone else's financial documents. This requires no authentication, only a document URL. (Think along the lines of an online rebate center where you upload documents including credit card statements.) I immediately called customer service and spoke with a perplexed agent who unsurprisingly didn't know what to do with my call. I asked to speak with a supervisor who took good notes and promised a follow-up internally. I asked for a return call but have not yet heard back. In the meantime, I still have private financial information I consider to be publicly available. I'm trying to be responsible and patient in my handling of this, but I am second guessing how to move forward if not quickly resolved. So, Slashdot, how would you handle this situation?

Submission + - A step closer to explaining high-temperature superconductivity? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: For years some physicists have been hoping to crack the mystery of high-temperature superconductivity—the ability of some complex materials to carry electricity without resistance at temperatures high above absolute zero—by simulating crystals with patterns of laser light and individual atoms. Now, a team has taken—almost—the next-to-last step in such "optical lattice" simulation by reproducing the pattern of magnetism seen in high-temperature superconductors from which the resistance-free flow of electricity emerges.

Submission + - Hyperloop Construction Starts Next Year With the First Full-Scale Track (wired.com)

Submitted by neanderslob
neanderslob writes: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to start construction on an actual hyperloop next year. The idea is to build this to serve the proposed Quay Valley (A 150K resident solar power city in Kings County California, developed by Kings County Ventures). The project will be paid for with $100 million that Hyperloop Transportation Technologies expects to raise through a direct public offering in the third quarter of this year. The track itself will be a 5 mile loop and won't reach anywhere close to the 800mph that Musk proposed in his white paper but it's a good start!

Submission + - UNDER U.S. PRESSURE, PAYPAL NUKES MEGA FOR ENCRYPTING FILES (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by seoras
seoras writes: After coming under intense pressure PayPal has closed the account of cloud-storage service Mega. According to the company, SOPA proponent Senator Patrick Leahy personally pressured Visa and Mastercard who in turn called on PayPal to terminate the account. Bizarrely, Mega's encryption is being cited as a key problem.... ... What makes the situation more unusual is that PayPal reportedly apologized to Mega for its withdrawal while acknowledging that company’s business is indeed legitimate.
However, PayPal also advised that Mega’s unique selling point – it’s end-to-end-encryption – was a key concern for the processor."

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