82324865
submission
eggboard writes:
While blue light emitted by monitors and mobile displays has been widely cited as a cause in disrupting people's circadian rhythm, the evidence is thin: a narrow range of blue spectra might not be the problem (it may be a more complicated interaction), brightness may be more important, and Night Shift's (and f.lux's) effects are probably too negligible anyway.
74291185
submission
eggboard writes:
If you've ever turned on what's now called "two-step verification" for an Apple ID, you had to create a Recovery Key. Lose this 14-digit code and have your password reset (because of hacking attempts against you), and you might lose access forever to purchases and data, as Owen Williams almost did. Apple confirmed today that starting with its public betas of OS X 10.11 and iOS 9, two-factor authentication won't have a Recovery Key. Instead, if you have to reset a password or lose access to devices, you'll have to go through an account verification process with human beings.
56856163
submission
eggboard writes:
Jen A. Miller has an egg allergy of a variety that her doctor has told her could produce a severe reaction if she were vaccinated for the flu, as flu vaccines are grown from viral strains incubated in chicken eggs. But, she explains, two new approaches have been approved by the FDA and are in production that don't use eggs at all; they're on the market in small amounts already, but will be available in much larger quantities soon. It's not just about egg allergies: the new vaccine types (one relying in insect proteins and the other on animal proteins) provide a much faster turnaround time in response to flu pandemics — as little as two to three months from isolation of a strain to mass production instead of at least six months with eggs.
56790707
submission
eggboard writes:
I thought I knew what I was doing when I budgeted for a Kickstarter campaign. I spent weeks sorting out details, set a number ($48,000) that included expenses, Kickstarter fees, and a margin of error. In the end, we raised over $56,000. But my tax planning nearly put a crimp in cash flow, and could have been real problem. It all worked out, but I've written a detailed guide for people for before and after a campaign to avoid my mistakes.
56053049
submission
eggboard writes:
Henk Rogers was a Dutchman who arrived in Japan in the 1980s following a girlfriend (later, his wife). An inveterate D&D player, he became enthralled with the NEC-8801, and nearly killed himself trying to create a D&D-like world that he released as The Black Onyx. No one initially knew what to make of it, and the game sold slowly at first. Through savvy pricing, packaging, and press attention, sales grew, and the game jumpstarted RPGs in Japan. Rogers got left behind, though, as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy hit a local nerve better than his efforts. "I also realized that I didn’t quite understand the Japanese aesthetic and way. These games were quite different to mine, and just struck a more effective cultural chord.” Rogers went on to license Tetris to Nintendo, though, so he did just fine.
56043501
submission
eggboard writes:
Public libraries are starting to build temporary and permanent labs that let patrons experiment with new arts, crafts, and sciences, many of them associated with the maker movement. It's a way to bring this technology and training to those without the money or time to join makerspaces or buy gear themselves. It seems to extend the mission of libraries to educate, inform, and enrich, but is a seemingly rare move in the direction of teaching people to create for pleasure and professionally. Many libraries are experimenting with experimenting.
55910531
submission
eggboard writes:
The Internet Archive has copies of Web pages corresponding to 378 billion URLs. It's working on several efforts, some of them quite recent, to help deter or assist with link rot, when links go bad. Through an API for developers, WordPress integration, a Chrome plug-in, and a JavaScript lookup, the Archive hopes to help people find at least the most recent copy of a missing or deleted page. More ambitiously, they instantly cache any link added to Wikipedia, and want to become integrated into browsers as a fallback rather than showing a 404 page.
55511325
submission
eggboard writes:
The tools to make crafts, electronics prototypes, and cool stuff have started rapidly to turn to medical gear, especially in developing nations. The early results are quite marvelous, but there are a ton of concerns, too. The pace of change is incredibly fast:[Many people] without any without any formal medical training—can take advantage of access to global supply chains, cutting-edge medical knowledge, and recent leaps in design and fabrication technology that have made the prototyping process faster, cheaper, and simpler than ever before. Even as concerns about safety and liability are only starting to be addressed, medical inventors and other technical tinkerers are already improving and saving lives—sometimes their own.
9995812
submission
eggboard writes:
Martin Beck, who in 2008 co-wrote a paper describing a way to inject packets into a secured Wi-Fi system, is back with a more extensive exploit. His "Enhanced TKIP Michael Attacks" still doesn't allow extraction of a key, and is limited to TKIP (not AES-CCMP) WPA-protected networks. Still, he's figured out how to put in large payloads, and to extract data sent from an access point to a client--all without cracking the network key. The attack requires proximity to sniff and inject data, but it's another crack in the older key standard (TKIP) that no one with serious security interests should still use.
