74620933
submission
snydeq writes:
Public keys, trusted hardware, block chains — InfoWorld's Peter Wayner discusses tech tools developers should be investigating to help secure the Internet for all. 'The Internet is a pit of epistemological chaos. As Peter Steiner posited — and millions of chuckles peer-reviewed — in his famous New Yorker cartoon, there's no way to know if you're swapping packets with a dog or the bank that claims to safeguard your money,' Wayner writes. 'We may not be able to wave a wand and make the Internet perfect, but we can certainly add features to improve trust on the Internet. To that end, we offer the following nine ideas for bolstering a stronger sense of assurance that our data, privacy, and communications are secure.'
74569689
submission
bigwophh writes:
Machine learning has helped a multitude of different technologies become a reality, including emotion-detection. Most examples to date have been rather simple, such as being able to detect a smile or a frown. But with today's super-fast computers, and even mobile devices, we're now able to detect emotion with far greater accuracy and nuance. Facial recognition expert Rana el Kaliouby recently gave a talk at TED to highlight just how accurate emotion-detection has become, and depending on your perspective, the result is either amazing, or downright scary. To accurately detect someone's emotion, Rana's software detects eight different factors, which include frowning, showing disgust, engaged, and raised eyebrows, among other things. Through research with this software, a couple of interesting factoids are revealed. In the United States, women are 40% more likely to smile than men. But the technology is ultimately destined for software that will detect the user's emotion and react accordingly.
74543157
submission
MojoKid writes:
Marshall may be better known for its music equipment, but that isn't stopping the company from bringing a better audio experience to the smartphone market with its London handset. Given its highly customizable nature, it should come as no surprise that London runs Google's Android operating system (Lollipop 5.0.2). The London features dual front-facing speakers, a Wolfson WM8281 sound processor, Bluetooth atpX support, and a gold-tinged scroll wheel on the right side of the device that handle volume control, which Marshall says offers "tactile precision [that] allows you to find that sweet spot of sonic goodness." Once you get past the audio-centric functionality, there's a lot of lower-end hardware under the hood of the London. You'll find a 4.7-inch 720p display, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor with 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, LTE connectivity, 8MP rear camera, 2MP front-facing camera, and a removable 2500 mAh battery. In other words, those specs make the London more in line with the Moto G.
74534443
submission
coondoggie writes:
What matters most in improving employee engagement levels--defined as the sense of purpose and commitment employees feel toward their employer and its mission— is valuing employees, that is, an authentic focus on their performance, career development, and inclusion and involvement in decisions affecting their work. The key is identifying what practices to implement and how to implement them.
74489923
submission
MojoKid writes:
Mobile workstation notebooks typically offer a fair degree of performance but usually at the expense of battery life. It comes with the territory for machines that are configured with higher-end processors with discrete graphics chips, as well as high-end displays that take more power to light up. Lenovo, however, seems to have found a way to strike a better balance with their new ThinkPad W550s machine, that comes equipped with an Intel Core i7-5600U CPU, an NVIDIA Quadro K620M GPU and a 15.5 inch IPS display that sports 2880X1620 native res. With that kind of horsepower and that many pixels to push, you would think untethered up-time wouldn't be its strong suit but Lenovo configured a snap-in extended battery for the W550s. The 6-cell extended battery, in combination with its 3-cell internal battery was able to power them machine for over 18 hours of light duty web browsing in real-world testing (Lenovo claims up to 20 hrs of battery life). The machine also lasted over 5 hours under heavy load Battery Eater testing and the extended battery is unobtrusive, tilting the keyboard up slightly toward the user but keeping well inside the machine's footprint. As is standard for workstation-class ThinkPads, it's not the sexiest machine style-wise but the ThinkPad W550s offers the performance high-end components and battery life too boot, along with classic ThinkPad workhorse build quality.
74488037
submission
Lucas123 writes:
A reported $23 billion offer to purchase U.S.-based Micron, one of the largest DRAM and memory makers in the world, by a Chinese state-owned chip maker isn't likely to succeed for several reasons, not the least of which is that the U.S. government is unlikely to approve it and Micron has no reason to sell. Tsinghua Unigroup, a somewhat enigmatic company that is funded by Tsinghua University in China, offered $21 a share for Micron, which is a 19.3% premium over Micron's closing price on Monday. Micron's market cap is currently $20.7 billion. Micron has denied it received an offer from Tsinghua, but a Wall Street Journal report claimed the offer was real. Industry analysts however, believe Tsinghua may have used the WSJ as a trial balloon for an offer. Analysts also say rumors of a deal for Micron have been floating around for more than a month. Still, the possibility of a deal surprised some in the industry who expected China to organically grow its own DRAM and memory businesses. By acquiring Micron, however, China would instantly become a big player in what is a robust market. Fang Zhang, an IHS memory analyst, said Micron will not likely accept a buyout offer because the company has been performing well and expects to continue to do so. Additionally, the U.S. government considers chip technology vital to national security, so approval of the deal would at the very least take months if not more than a year during a time when the Chinese economy is at risk of collapse.
74487199
submission
coondoggie writes:
The FBI in concert with Interpol and other worldwide law enforcement teams say they have taken down the international cybercriminal site marketplace Darkode and arrested 70 people involved with the site.
74459857
submission
coondoggie writes:
It is one of the major issues of letting large unmanned aircraft share the sky with commercial airliners: preventing a disaster by keeping the two aircraft apart – or “well clear” in flight. "The most difficult problem we are trying to solve is how do we replace the eyes of the pilot in the cockpit? We have developed, and are currently testing, detect-and-avoid algorithms. We're also running multiple research experiments to support the validation of this technology," said Maria Consiglio, who leads the NASA Langley Sense and Avoid/Separation Assurance Interoperability.
74428143
submission
coondoggie writes:
Sometimes some of the coolest stories get lost in history. The CIA recently noted one of them – famous French food chef and author Julia Child’s critical involvement in developing a shark repellent recipe for military personnel and explosives during WWII.
74391693
submission
harrymcc writes:
As Reddit has experienced a revolt of its community in recent weeks, many pundits have referenced Digg--the once-mighty social news site which predated Reddit and suffered its own member rebellion. But Digg's cofounder and former CEO, Jay Adelson, told Fast Company's Jared Newman that the two situations aren't as similar as they may appear.
74374071
submission
MojoKid writes:
When AMD launched the liquid-cooled Radeon Fury X, it was obvious the was company willing to commit to new architecture and bleeding edge technologies (Fiji and High-Bandwidth Memory, respectively). However, it fell shy of the mark that enthusiasts hoped it would achieve, unable to quite deliver a definitive victory against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 Ti. However, AMD just launched their Radeon R9 Fury (no "X" and sometimes referred to as "Fury Air"), a graphics card that brings a more compelling value proposition to the table. It's the Fury release that should give AMD a competitive edge against NVIDIA in the $500+ graphics card bracket. AMD's Radeon R9 Fury's basic specs are mostly identical to the liquid-cooled flagship Fury X, except for two important distinctions. There's a 50MHz reduction in GPU clock speed to 1000MHz, and 512 fewer stream processors for a total of 3584, versus what Fury X has on board. Here's the interesting news which the benchmark results demonstrate: In price the Fury veers closer to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, but in performance it sneaks in awfully close to the GTX 980 Ti.
74314913
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Government Accountability Office has been tracking EINSTEIN’s implementation since about 2010 and will later this year issue an update on the status of the system. But this week, it included some details of its report in an update on the state of federal security systems, and all is not well.
74311817
submission
MojoKid writes:
OCZ is launching a brand new series of solid state drives today, dubbed the Trion 100. Not only are they the first drives from the company to use TLC NAND, but they're also the first to use all in-house Toshiba technology with the drive's Flash memory and controller both designed and built by Toshiba. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba TLC NAND Flash memory and a Nanya DDR3 DRAM cache. Details are scarce on the Toshiba TC58 controller but it does support Toshiba's QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Correction — a Toshiba proprietary error correction technology) and the drives have a bit of SLC cache to boost write performance in bursts and increase endurance. The OCZ Trion 100 series is targeted at budget conscious consumers and users still contemplating the upgrade from a standard hard drive. As such, they're not barn-burners in the benchmarking department, but performance is still good overall and a huge upgrade over any HDD. Pricing is going to be very competitive as well, at under .40 per GiB for capacities of 240GB, 480GB and 960GB and .50 per GiB for the smallest 120GB drive.
74295227
submission
MojoKid writes:
Previously, you might not have thought much about a wig on a manikin, but checking out NVIDIA's latest tech demo, as a gamer or 3D graphics artists, hair can be pretty interesting. The video is of NVIDIA HairWorks 1.1, a simulation and rendering tool for creating lifelike hair and fur in video games. In the clip, NVIDIA shows off a Fabio-style hairdo with about 500,000 hairs that bounce and sway as the camera circles and forces move the hair. If this was a real wig, it might unseat one of the most boring videos ever. However, as an example of what modern 3D graphics can do with hair physics, it's pretty darn cool. Previous demos of HairWorks showed up to 22,000 strands of hair, making the jump to half a million much much more significant. The video was recorded with ShadowPlay on a GeForce GTX 980, which has some serious muscle, though it's not the most powerful card in NVIDIA's lineup. What's cooler than making life-like human hair? Putting flowing manes on vicious monsters, of course. Apparently, NVIDIA HairWorks simulation technology also plays a role in bringing more than a dozen creatures to life in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
74287911
submission
coondoggie writes:
When it began a year ago, there were 104 teams competing for $4 million in prize money in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s ambitious tournament — known as the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) — to see who can build the best fully automatic network defense system.
