For everything from family to computers…
Having to close a tab with audio blaring from an auto-play ad is one of the web’s greatest annoyances, but at the same time, most of us want to hear videos coming from YouTube or Netflix. How do you mute one without the other? Fortunately, there are a couple of easy solutions available.
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On September 8, 1966, exactly 50 years ago today, the very first episode of Star Trek aired on television. More than just science fiction, it dared to imagine a future for humanity where it had moved past war, inequality, and poverty, replacing them with tolerance, exploration, and hope. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that Star Trek changed the world.
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So, uh
, do you suddenly find yourself in need of some wireless headphones? Mpow’s Seashell earbuds are just $13 today with promo code MVDC6Q2F. Even at that price, they’ll even last for seven hours on a charge, or two hours longer than Apple’s new $159 AirPods.
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Still missing Mythbusters? It’s not about to come back any time soon, but you might get the next best thing. Netflix (which has a habit of resurrecting fan favorite shows) has greenlit White Rabbit Project, a series from Mythbusters Build Team veterans Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci. The premise is right up their alley. They’ll investigate strange topics (such as exotic World War II weapons or seemingly impossible jailbreaks) and use science to determine the truth. You won’t have to wait long to see how well the concept works, either — Netflix premieres White Rabbit Project on December 9th, so you won’t have to put up with the year-long waits that come with other streaming releases.
Source: Deadline
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Indians consume a lot of fish: Data from 2014 estimated that each urban citizen consumed an average of 2.8 kg per year, or about 3.7 million kg for the whole country. That leaves a lot of leftover bones, scales and tails. As they reported this week in Applied Physics Letters, a team of researchers at Jadavpur University looked for ways to re-use this "biowaste" and pioneered a method to generate electricity from it.
First, some biophysics. Fish scales have collagen fibers containing piezoelectric properties: Stress them and you generate a charge. Considering this, the researchers collected a large volume of them and used a demineralization process to make them transparent and flexible. Then they toyed with the hierarchical alignment of these treated scales, boosting their energy yield and effectively creating a bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator.
It can scavenge several types of ambient mechanical energies like body movements, machine and sound vibrations and wind flow. Even touching the nanogenerator produced enough electricity to light 50 LEDs. The result is a big step for self-powered flexible electronics, which could one day be developed into things like pacemakers energized by heartbeats that safely biodegrade in time. While it could also find applications in transparent and portable electronics, the biocompatibility likely makes this tech more valuable to medical uses like e-healthcare monitoring, in vitro diagnostics and edible devices.
Source: Phys.org
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You’d think protecting your computer with a strong password can keep it safe, but apparently, all it takes to steal your log-in credentials is a $50 piece of hardware and an app. According to R5 Industries principal security engineer Rob Fuller, he was able to pilfer usernames and passwords from locked computers using a USB device loaded with a hacking app called Responder. The stolen passwords are encoded, sure, but once they’re in another person’s possession, they can be cracked. One of the small, Linux-powered computers he used (USB Armory) costs $155, but the other (Hak5 Turtle) costs only $50. Computers share log-in credentials with them, because they recognize the devices as trusted Ethernet adapters.
Fuller said the combination worked on all versions of Windows and even on El Capitan, though he still needs to check whether his Mac experiment was a fluke. He also said that the hack was so easy to pull off, he "tested it so many ways to confirm" since he had such a hard time believing it was possible.
He captured the process on cam, which you can watch below, and explained how it works in an email to Ars Technica:
"What is happening in the video, is the USB Armory is being plugged into a locked (but logged in) system. It boots up via the USB power, and starts up a DHCP server, and Responder. While it’s doing this, the victim is recognizing it as a Ethernet adapter. The victim then makes route decisions and starts sending the traffic it was already creating to the Armory instead of the "real" network connection. Responder does its job and responds to all kinds of services asking for authentication, and since most OSs treat their local network as "trusted" it sees the authentication request and automatically authenticates. Seeing that the database of Responder has been modified the Armory shuts down (LED goes solid)."
Of course, this is a non-issue if you exclusively use your computer at home, and there’s nobody living there you don’t trust. But if you tend to bring laptops to coffee shops and other places, check out this prevention technique Fuller recommends, or just make sure you never leave your computer unattended.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Rob Fuller
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Indian consumers are already celebrating the arrival of Mukesh Ambani’s new Reliance Jio service, seizing on the billionaire’s promise to deliver rock bottom prices and download speeds that will enable streaming video.
The 4G network, which reaches more than 80% of the country, officially went live Monday with a set of generous introductory offers. Indians will be able to use Jio for free until the end of 2016, and pay as little as 149 rupees ($2.25) a month for data after that.
“Anything and everything that can go digital is going digital — at an exponential rate,” Ambani told investors last week at his company’s annual general meeting. “Life is going digital.”
Only one fifth of adults in India have access to the Internet. Few public Wi-Fi spots exist, and fast broadband connections require infrastructure that is rarely found in poorer urban areas, much less rural ones.
But that is changing fast. If the Jio network succeeds, Ambani will be able to capitalize on a seismic shift that could see hundreds of millions of Indians come online in the coming years — in most cases via a smartphone.
It’s a market that tech industry giants desperately want to crack. Google (GOOG) has installed free Wi-Fi at train stations across India, and Facebook (FB, Tech30) tried to offer a free version of its platform.
Ambani has invested billions constructing nearly 100,000 telecoms towers across India. He estimates that Jio already covers some 18,000 cities and 200,000 villages. By March 2017, his aim is to reach 90% of the population.
Building a national 4G network from scratch represents a major risk for Ambani, who got out of telecoms about 15 years ago after a dispute with his brother, Anil Ambani, who controls Reliance Communications.
The brothers, who together are estimated to be worth $26 billion, have patched things up in recent years. Jio will be able to use radio frequencies owned by Reliance Communications.
Related: 900 million Indians can’t get online. Here’s why.
Rival networks have responded to the launch of Reliance Jio with special offers of their own, making a price war a near certainty. Airtel has slashed its prices for 3G and 4G service by 80%, and Vodafone (VOD) has boosted the amount of data in its plans by nearly 70%.
If Jio, which means “live life” in Hindi, is to become another mega business in Reliance’s stable of energy, media, chemicals and retail operations, the network will have to be able to handle the load from millions of new customers.
On Tuesday in New Delhi, a device on the Reliance network was showing impressive download speeds of 21 megabits per second. With $20 billion at stake, that kind of performance needs to be replicated across India.
— Huizhong Wu contributed reporting.
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