Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Nintendo President Considers an End of Region Locking (technobuffalo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Back at the helm of his company after recovering from surgery, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has responded that the company must address one of the biggest glaring missteps of its current two consoles: region-locking.
Math

Mathematical Proof That the Universe Could Come From Nothing 429

Posted by Soulskill from the you-are-a-long-term-fluctuation dept.
TaleSlinger writes: One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a "Big Bang", but the mathematical mechanism by which this occurred has been lacking. Cosmologists at the Wuhan Institute have published a proof that the Big Bang could indeed have occurred spontaneously because of quantum fluctuations. "The new proof is based on a special set of solutions to a mathematical entity known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. In the first half of the 20th century, cosmologists struggled to combine the two pillars of modern physics— quantum mechanics and general relativity—in a way that reasonably described the universe. As far as they could tell, these theories were entirely at odds with each other.

At the heart of their thinking is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This allows a small empty space to come into existence probabilistically due to fluctuations in what physicists call the metastable false vacuum. When this happens, there are two possibilities. If this bubble of space does not expand rapidly, it disappears again almost instantly. But if the bubble can expand to a large enough size, then a universe is created in a way that is irreversible. The question is: does the Wheeler-DeWitt equation allow this? "We prove that once a small true vacuum bubble is created, it has the chance to expand exponentially," say the researchers.

Submission + - A Tech Rebellion Brewing? (xconomy.com)

Submitted by gthuang88
gthuang88 writes: Joi Ito is a rebel, but he’s also head of the MIT Media Lab and depends on funding from big companies like Fox, Intel, and Google. Anil Dash is a Web entrepreneur, but he wants the industry held responsible for its nefarious terms of service, poor civic track record, and lack of diversity. Ayah Bdeir runs a hardware startup, but she rails against blind consumption of apps and devices. A recent PopTech gathering shows tech leaders are wrestling with their role in society. It also uncovers a fundamental tension between rebellious startups and the institutions they seek to disrupt.

Submission + - Motorola Droid Turbo hands-on and first impressions (androidauthority.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Taking the place of the Droid Ultra in the Verizon exclusive Motorola line-up, the Droid Turbo looks to offer everything you’d expect from a flagship device, and more. To find out exactly what this device has to offer, we go hands on, and give you our first impressions about the Motorola Droid Turbo!

Submission + - Website peeps into 73,000 unsecured security cameras via default passwords (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: After coming across a Russian website that streams video from unsecured video cameras that employ default usernames and passwords (the site claims it's doing it to raise awareness of privacy risks), a blogger used the information available to try to contact the people who were unwittingly streamed on the site. It didn't go well. The owner of a pizza restaurant, for example, cursed her out over the phone and accused her of "hacking" the cameras herself. And whoever (finally) answered the phone at a military building whose cameras were streaming on the site told her to "call the Pentagon."

The most common location of the cameras was the U.S., but many others were accessed from South Korea, China, Mexico, the UK, Italy, and France, among others. Some are from businesses, and some are from personal residences. Particularly alarming was the number of camera feeds of sleeping babies, which people often set up to protect them, but, being unaware of the risks, don't change the username or password from the default options that came with the cameras.

It's not the first time this kind of issue has come to light. In September 2013, the FTC cracked down on TRENDnet after its unsecured cameras were found to be accessible online. But the Russian site accesses cameras from several manufacturers, raising some new questions — why are strong passwords not required for these cameras? And, once this becomes mandatory, what can be done about the millions of unsecured cameras that remain live in peoples' homes?

Submission + - Facebook launches Ebola charity donation button (techfeasta.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook Inc said users would now have option to donate directly to various Ebola relief charities through a button at the top of their News Feeds.
The Internet

After Silk Road 2.0 Bust, Eyes Turn To 'Untouchable' Decentralized Market 108

Posted by Soulskill from the for-relatively-touchable-values-of-untouchable dept.
apexcp sends this article from The Daily Dot: Following a wave of Dark Net arrests that brought down the famous anonymous drug market Silk Road 2.0, all eyes have turned to a marketplace called OpenBazaar that is designed to be impossible to shut down. Described as the "next generation of uncensored trade" and a "safe untouchable marketplace," OpenBazaar is fundamentally different from all the online black markets that have come before it, because it is completely decentralized. If authorities acted against OpenBazaar users, they could arrest individuals, but the network would survive. "If you're thinking about OpenBazaar as Silk Road 3.0, you're thinking about it much too narrowly," said OpenBazaar operations lead Sam Patterson in an interview last night. "I actually think it's much more powerful as eCommerce 2.0."

Submission + - Cisco Projects Data Center Traffic Will Nearly Triple

Submitted by dinscott
dinscott writes: Cisco projects that, over the next five years, data center traffic to nearly triple, with cloud representing 76% of total data center traffic. By 2018, half of the world's population will have residential Internet access, and more than half of those users' content will be supported by personal cloud storage services. Global data center traffic will nearly triple from 2013 to 2018 with a combined annual growth rate of 23% growing from 3.1 zettabytes/year in 2013 to 8.6 zettabytes/year in 2018. A zettabyte is trillion gigabytes. The 8.6 zettabytes of data center traffic predicted for 2018 is equivalent to streaming all of the movies (approximately 500,000) and television shows (3 million) ever made in ultra-high definition (UHD) 250,000 times.
Graphics

Major Performance Improvement Discovered For Intel's GPU Linux Driver 96

Posted by Soulskill from the striving-for-parity dept.
An anonymous reader writes: LunarG, on contract with Valve Software, discovered a critical shortcoming with the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver that was handicapping the performance. A special bit wasn't being set by the Linux driver but was by the Windows driver, which when enabled is increasing the Linux performance in many games by now ~20%+, which should allow for a much more competitive showing between Intel OpenGL performance on Windows vs. Linux. However, the patch setting this bit isn't public yet as apparently it's breaking video acceleration in certain cases.

Submission + - The gravitational force doesn't have an infinite range after all 1

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: One of the things we learn about the gravitational force is that it has an “infinite range” to it. Because it’s a ~1/r^2 force, and because as you move radially away from the source, a sphere spreads out (in surface area) as ~r^2, you don’t lose anything as you move farther and farther away. So long as you intercept the same angular size on the sky, you’ll experience the same amount of force. But you can’t move arbitrarily far away from a source and still feel its gravitation! Despite being an infinite range force, our Universe has only been around a finite amount of time, and signals only propagate at a finite speed. Here's the reconciliation of these two seemingly contradictory facts.

Submission + - Why Scientists Think Completely Unclassifiable and Undiscovered Life Forms Exist

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a new paper published in Science, researchers at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute note that "there are reasons to believe that current approaches [to discovering life] may indeed miss taxa, particularly if they are very different from those that have so far been characterized." They believe life forms exist that don't fall into the established eukaryota, archaea, or bacteria kingdoms.
They argue that there may be life out there that doesn't use the four DNA and RNA bases that we're used to; there may be life out there that has evolved completely separately from everything that we have ever known to exist; there may be life that lives in places we haven't even looked.
Medicine

Low-Cost 3D-Printed Prosthetic Hand To Be Tested On Amputees In Ecuador 16

Posted by samzenpus from the we-can-print-him-better dept.
Zothecula writes A PhD candidate and six undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UCIC) have created a low-cost, programmable, 3D-printed prosthetic hand that may soon change the lives of amputees in Ecuador. The hand costs just $270 to manufacture, making it a small fraction of the cost of a typical prosthetic of this type.
Security

Home Depot Says Hackers Grabbed 53 Million Email Addresses 99

Posted by samzenpus from the reply-all dept.
wiredmikey writes Home Depot said on Thursday that hackers managed to access 53 million customer email addresses during the massive breach that was disclosed in September when the retail giant announced that 56 million customer payment cards were compromised in a cyber attack. The files containing the stolen email addresses did not contain passwords, payment card information or other sensitive personal information, the company said. The company also said that the hackers acquired elevated rights that allowed them to navigate portions of Home Depot's network and to deploy unique, custom-built malware on its self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada.
Android

Microsoft Makes Office Mobile Editing Free As in Freemium 98

Posted by timothy from the free-is-relative dept.
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today announced a significant change to its Office strategy for mobile devices: creating and editing is now free. The company also released standalone Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for the iPhone, as well a new preview of these apps for Android tablets. Starting today, whether you're using an Office app on Android or iOS, you can create and edit content without an Office 365 subscription. The company is pitching this move as "More of Office for everyone."

Submission + - Worldwide Aaron Swartz Day Memorial Hackathons This Weekend (aaronswartzday.org)

Submitted by sterlingcrispin
sterlingcrispin writes: There are hacakathons taking places all over the world in memory of Aaron Swartz taking place this weekend, November 8th and 9th to "bring together the varied communities that Aaron touched to figure out how the important problems of the world connect, and to share the load of working on those problems."

I think this is an important reoccurring event and should be listed on slashdot. If you are interested in open access, privacy, free speech, transparency, citizen activism, human rights, and information ethics please attend, promote this event, and contribute to its growth.

http://www.aaronswartzday.org/

I'm organizing the Los Angeles meet up and would love to see you there — http://www.aaronswartzday.org/...

Slashdot Top Deals

Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz

Close