Pipedot

Google and its partners are preparing a flood of new hardware to sway consumers away from cheap Windows laptops. Chromebooks from HiSense and Haier go on sale today for just $150 each. You also might consider the Asus Chromebit that will cost less than $100. The Chromebit looks very similar to the Chromecast, but runs a full Chrome-OS instance, on-a-stick, ready to plug into any monitor. "Think of a school lab, all the peripherals, but stuck to a desktop. Now you can replace that."

I'm a stupid American. Even though many foreigners may not speak English fluently, we force everyone to speak it anyway. In 1887, Dr. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof constructed a neutral language using common root words from many different European languages. This universal language is much easier to learn and shows less favoritism than picking an arbitrary natural language.

The Australian senate passed a law to retain all metadata for two years for phone and internet communications. 2500 "metadata police" can now allow accept to phone and internet records. Australians still do not know how much this will cost or who will pay. Several parties have stated that metadata collection can be easily bypassed including George Brandis and other MPs, the Australia Pirate Party and notable commentators.

For almost as long as aircraft carriers have existed, they’ve been equipped with steam-powered catapults to help fighters and bombers get airborne. That’s a remarkably old-fashioned technology when you’re launching stealth fighters that cost upwards of $20 million each. Aircraft carriers are gigantic, but the runways simply aren’t long enough for most planes to generate sufficient lift under their own power.

When submitting a story for a piece of news, which site do you link to? Depending on the popularity of the news, many dozens of organizations may have written an article on the topic. Some articles may lack proper grammar/citations or exist behind a paywall. Some sites may have abusive advertisements or frivolous JavaScript usage. You can exclusively use your favorite source, or link to several of the more popular news sites, or simply rely on the user to search for more information.

Smartphone thefts are down 40% in London, 22% in San Francisco and 16% in New York, while iPhone thefts are down even further, since the implementation of "kill switches," which allow owners to completely deactivate a phone that has been lost, making a stolen device worthless.

Scientists at the University of Florida have confirmed the Asian and Formosan subterranean termites — both formidable non-native species — are mating in south Florida. The offspring of these species thrive by combining the strongest qualities of their parents. The two species are considered particularly damaging and difficult to control, since they travel underground and burrow up through buildings. What sort of termite do they produce? The bad news is that based on lab results, the hybrid colonies appear to grow faster than those of either species that produced them.

An easier to squeeze mayonnaise bottle might be coming out this year, and easier to squeeze toothpaste could be here in 2017. This is thanks to a liquid-impregnated coating called LiquiGlide that can keep the inside of a container permanently wet and allow its contents to easily slide out. Elmers Products, Inc. is on board, too, and has already signed a contract with LiquiGlide to let you get every drop of glue out of the bottle. Follow the link for videos of the coating in action.

This month, Boeing was granted a patent for generating force fields that keep shockwaves from harming military vehicles. The Boeing Company's patent, "Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc," was filed in May 2012.

The latest set of site updates have reworked font sizes to make it easier to configure larger text rendering.

So much for browser security. Researchers who participated in the Pwn2Own hacking contest this week demonstrated remote code execution exploits against the top four browsers, and also hacked the widely used Adobe Reader and Flash Player plug-ins. The Pwn2Own contest takes place every year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, and is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard’s Zero Day Initiative program. The contest pits researchers against the latest 64-bit versions of the top four browsers in order to demonstrate Web-based attacks that can execute rogue code on underlying systems.

http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/radioexp/

An AC just discovered hand held 2-way Wi-Fi radios and wants to know if anyone has any experience with them. Likely the most popular product is the ICOM IP100H. There have been a couple of basic radio enthusiast reviews, which outline the short-range from hand-held to AP, and higher price than conventional radios, but not much else.

“Mars One” is the hole-in-the-wall company getting mainstream press coverage for promoting unbelievable and non-doable plans to colonize Mars by 2025. Scientists and astronomers are saying that the plan is delusional, laughable, dangerous and a huge scam. Mars One has not developed any kind of space technology that will allow the outer space travel to occur. There were no proven contracts with other companies that provide space equipment. All the people behind Mars One are just a bunch of scammers.

NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are preparing to launch an expandable habitat module dubbed "BEAM" to the International Space Station later this year. The 13 foot by 10 foot inflatable capsule will provide astronauts aboard the space station an extra 565 cubic feet of volume (roughly equivalent to a family-sized camping tent) that the astronauts will use for a lounge and also as a testing facility in orbit.

Google's project hosting service, Google Code, is the latest Google product to get the axe. Launched in 2006, the site hosted many FLOSS-type software projects and provided free downloads, source code management, an issue tracker, and wiki pages. Although new project creation is already disabled, the site will stay functional until August 2015 in order to give projects time to migrate to alternatives, such as GitHub and GitLab.

Google's premium Chromebook Pixel, launched over 2 years ago, has finally been updated with new hardware internals. Although the new model looks nearly identical to the old model, with both models sharing the same physical size and weight, the insides have received a much needed refresh with a much faster processor and more memory. The port configuration is also updated to include 2 of the new USB Type-C connectors instead of the Mini Display Port and the power connector. An "LS" model (for "Ludicrous Speed") will also be available with even more RAM, SSD, and CPU performance.

Today, as reported by many outlets, Apple announced a new 12" MacBook. The main takeaways are:

"We have seen a concerning trend that is about to spiral out of control: Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) are further on the rise. What’s even more concerning is how they are spreading. After big vendors as Oracle (Java) and Microsoft (Bing and Skype) started bundling, now antivirus vendors have joined the game. We did research on some of the most popular PUP practices among the freeware antivirus vendors, and the results are quite disturbing.

It is one of the most toxic substances known to man and has been used to poison kings, emperors and even prize winning racehorses. Worldwide arsenic poisoning caused by contaminated water and food is thought to harm more than 137 million people. Even low levels of arsenic poisoning can cause damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys and liver, leading to cancer, heart disease and diabetes. But scientists have discovered one small population of people living in a remote part of the Andes in north west Argentina who have developed some resistance to arsenic. They have found that over thousands of years the local inhabitants there have developed a genetic ability to metabolise the arsenic to reduce the impact it has on their bodies. They found one gene in particular - AS3MT, which is thought to play a role in arsenic metabolism - occurred in far higher frequencies compared to populations living in Columbia and Peru.

"Blackphone 2 caters to the enterprise, the security-minded and the paranoid" they say, and these days, that is a slogan that just might catch your attention. It caught mine.

After 2 years and 10 months, XFCE 4.12 has been released, and its changelog is an impressive list of refinements, improvements, and new features.

HP has become the latest “legacy” IT vendor to announce it would ship commodity switches for web-scale data centers that support network management software other than its own. HP Switches will run the Cumulus Linux OS. The company claims the approach can reduce data center operating costs by up to 68 percent. HP’s competitors Dell and Juniper have already announced open commodity network switches of their own. Dell said it would ship data center switches with a Linux-based network operating systems by Cumulus Networks or by Big Switch Networks, as alternatives to its own network OS, last year. Notably, Cisco has not introduced commodity switches. The world’s largest data center networking vendor has built an empire selling tightly coupled hardware-and-software bundles, and cheap open network hardware is a threat to its dominance. However, Cisco too has been slowly offering more software-defined networking/OpenFlow features and compatibility in their hardware.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have developed a pair of telescopic contact lenses with 2.8x magnification. Really just a pair of super-tiny aluminum telescopes, the contacts are still only about 1.5 millimeters thick, and feature 1 mm-wide channels or pores that allow the required breathability — maintaining airflow. This last part proved to be one of the biggest challenges, requiring years of experimentation.

It is a sad day for Science Fiction and film fans.

As has been reported everywhere, the FCC has approved Net Neutrality rules and declared broadband a Utility.

You've got an Apple product on your desk, and you've got another in your pocket. You might even have one on your wrist. But is the next step something for your garage?

The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever. Ratings for both cable and the broadcast networks are down. There has been negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011. The number of U.S. households is still growing, but fewer households have TV because they are watching video on mobile devices instead. The amount of video viewed on mobile devices is going through the roof. About 40% of all YouTube traffic comes from mobile.

Isn't it strange how all the high-end smartphones with keyboards have disappeared? There isn't a desirable smartphone with a keyboard on the horizon. The original Motorola Droid was the phone that started the Android phenomenon, yet the Droid 5 never materialized.

Lenovo, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, has apologized for security flaws in the malware they pre-install on consumer laptops, and attempted to issue instructions on how to fix a flaw that fatally compromised user security. The company was forced to issue a second set of instructions after security experts said that following its first set would do nothing to patch up the security holes the adware created. But even the second set is “incomplete”, according to researchers, and leaves users of the popular Firefox browser vulnerable.

In November 2012 the Mozilla Foundation announced “Project Shumway”, an effort to create a “web-native runtime implementation of the SWF file format.” Two-and-a-bit years, and a colossal number of Flash bugs later, Shumway has achieved an important milestone by appearing in a Firefox nightly, a step that suggests it's getting closer to inclusion in the browser.

The New York Times is asking what the primary wireless technology of the future will be: Traditional wireless carriers operate their services primarily with cell towers, but offer Wi-Fi as a secondary option to bear some of the load. Upstarts FreedomPop and Republic Wireless do the opposite. They offer services that rely primarily on Wi-Fi networks, and in areas without Wi-Fi, customers can pull a signal from regular cell towers. “They demonstrate just how disruptive a Wi-Fi-first operator can be, and just how much cost they can take out.”

m0n0wall is an embedded firewall distribution based on FreeBSD. It provides a small image which can be put on Compact Flash cards, CD-ROMs, or hard disks, and includes a web-based GUI to control all aspects of the firewall without having to type a single shell command.

Nokia's up-and-coming "Here" maps and navigation app, available for free for anyone running Android 4.1 or above, is no longer in "beta" hitting version 1.1, and has added 3-D venue maps and improved routing. It now displays 3D maps for shopping centers and airports in 70 different countries and allows navigating through multiple floors with a sliding bar. Nokia also dialed back the interface in several different areas to preserve the screen real estate for the map content.

Samsung is warning customers about discussing personal information in front of their smart television set. The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature. When the feature is active, such TV sets "listen" to what is said and may share what they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said. Privacy campaigners said the technology smacked of the telescreens, in George Orwell's 1984, which spied on citizens. Samsung has issued a statement that emphasized the voice recognition feature is activated using the TV's remote control.

Today is the deadline for an agreement reached between the Federal Communications Commission and wireless carriers back in 2013. Starting today, once you've paid off your contract or owned a pre-paid phone (or other device, like a tablet) for a year, all major US carriers must unlock your phone for you if you ask. Carriers also have to tell you when your phone is eligible to be unlocked, and they have to unlock phones for deployed military personnel.

For today's Safer Internet Day Google is promoting a "safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones" by giving you a 2 GB Google Drive bonus for checking your security settings. To be eligible for the bonus, go to this page to verify your current account settings to make sure they are up to date. Although the three simple steps only take a few seconds to review, the storage bonus, unfortunately, does not get applied until around February 28th.

Southern California Edison (SCE) is currently in the process of cutting about 500 IT workers at its Irwindale offices and replacing them with cheaper H-1B visa holders working for Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services; two India based IT outsourcing firms. SCE will save about $40,000 per worker, about $16 million a year by replacing American workers with foreigners on an H-1B visa. The layoffs began in August and are expected to be completed by the end of March.

Apple has announced its plans to re-purpose a 1.3 million sq ft facility in Mesa, Arizona, into a $2 billion data center which will also play host to all the company’s data operations across the globe. It will employ 150 full-time personnel, and will also result in between 300 and 500 construction and trade jobs. The facility was previously leased to GT Advanced Technologies, an Apple supplier producing sapphire glass which declared bankruptcy last year when Apple declined to use the sapphire in their products due to failing in drop tests.

The world’s first hotel staffed almost entirely by robots and controlled by the latest in computer technology is slated to open, yes, in Japan. The hotel will initially be staffed by 10 robots working alongside humans to provide a wide range of services from manning the reception desk to carrying bags and cleaning rooms. The management hopes to eventually "have more than 90 percent of hotel services operated by robots.”

The world's first Ubuntu phone goes on sale next week in an attempt to carve out a place for the Linux-based OS in the mobile space. Canonical said the limited launch is aimed at "avoiding the pain faced by other platforms" that tried to push their handsets to the mass-market too early, and they must work hard to get the Ubuntu Phone noticed. It will also be giving handsets to a select group of "enthusiastic Ubuntu and bq users" in London today.

Samsung has finally released Tizen OS on a phone, something they've been planning on doing since 2012. Tizen has a strange, strange history, half Intel, half Nokia, half Samsung, supported by the Linux foundation for reasons unknown. Now apparently its making its debut in India on a budget phone. Ars has a comprehensive review.