On the top floor of an old brick building in the heart of Berlin, a group of journalists and tech enthusiasts are working to spur the Syrian media revolution. Their weapon is an unassuming black case the size of a shoebox that allows opposition radio stations in Syria to transmit inside hostile territory. Dubbed PocketFM, the device is basically a low-powered radio transmitter. Coupled with a satellite dish to receive new programs, a car battery for power and a one-meter (three-foot) antenna, it can broadcast FM radio within a 5-kilometer (3-mile) radius. That's enough to cover a town or a city district, said Philipp Hochleichter, who oversees development of the device for the Berlin-based nonprofit organization Media in Cooperation and Transition.

The U.S Space Company SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at a landing pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida after launching 11 satellites into orbit.

By now, most people feel comfortable conducting online financial transactions on the Web. The cryptographic schemes that protect online banking and credit card purchases have proven their reliability over decades. But right now, there is no effective way to prevent misuse of your data by the people authorized to access it, say for example a bank employee can still access your data, and frequently we are reading news about misuse of the data by the bank employees. i-e Once you share your data with the bank, Healthcare system or any other private company, for your online transactions, you don't have any control over who exactly is using or misusing your data.

Scientists have turned individual cells into miniature lasers by injecting them with droplets of oil or fat mixed with a fluorescent dye that can be activated by short pulses of light. This finding could help to broaden how light is used for both medical diagnosis and treatment. The system was devised by Harvard Medical School scientiest, and it uses droplets of fat or oil within a cell to reflect and amplify light, generating a laser. Conventional luminescent probes, which include fluorescent dyes and proteins, have relatively broad emission spectra. This limits the number of probes that can be used simultaneously, because it is often difficult to distinguish these sources of luminescence from the broad background emissions of naturally occurring molecules in tissue.

In defiance of the rage of the security community who see the advances of spyware and intrusiveness endangering our precious private lives and anonymity Samsung have mated a mobile phone and a fridge to produce a device dedicated to supplying food and spying on you. Samsung showed models of this impressive privacy intruding device at the recent CES demonstrating how the 'Tizen' software could add a whole new dimension to invading our privacy in our own homes. Mike Lilly from Samsung Electronics Australia was quoted as saying this was "meaningful innovation" adding "We’ve seen internet fridges out there in the past but this is actually useful", meaning that it is useful for recording information about eating and spending habits to a degree higher than currently available even compared to mobile phone apps. Samsung plan launch the fridge in July quoting "it’s important to get it into a lot of homes". Scary.

Admit it, we have all thought about it. Off the grid. Disconnected. Bushed out. Gone. Ever wondered what happens when an entire town of people disconnects on purpose? Ever wanted to join such a community? Now you can as seen here on Unplanned America. The question though is: Would you?

A Fitbit device has detected a pregnancy before the expectant mother knew. The couple posted a question online that the device was reporting an unusual heart rate reading asking for a way to recalibrate the device or for a replacement. A standard test showed that the woman was two months pregnant.

The dreaded Apple Error 53 has returned in IOS 9. This error is thrown when Apple devices detect that a non-Apple technician repaired the phone. Users are complaining that they can not access their data. Apple claims that bricking the iPhone in this scenario is a security measure to protect users.

In a shocking move the Australian government has transferred control of the MyGov portal to the DTO. This slap in the face to the mighty DHS comes after several months of serious problems with the online government portal after the Australian tax system, Centrelink, Medicare and other systems were changed to use MyGov as the central logon. Tens of thousands of Australians took to social media in 2015 to complain about the DHS portal after the ATO made using the portal mandatory for online tax returns. The problems were so bad that the ATO opened a backdoor allowing citizens to bypass the MyGov system. After spending millions to integrate two of the largest federal departments, Centrelink and Medicare, the step of removing MyGov from the hands of the DHS is an F on this year's report card.

In the last year Europe has experienced the greatest influx of people seen since the second world war. The chancellor of Germany offered asylum to Syrians as part of the effort to assist those displaced by war. The number of known people who have entered Europe to claim asylum in 2015 exceeded 2015. With the discovery that a number of people were claiming to be Syrian when entering Europe countries a number of the EU states have started to use biometric technology including face detection software to identify where migrants have come from as part of the asylum claiming process. Sweden expects to deport up to 80,000 people after discovering that their asylum claims are not valid based on this and similar technology. Other European countries are expected to follow suit in 2016. Technology and digital records is advancing to the point where it is now possible to trace where a person has come from originally and where they have been. Sweden has seen the number of new migrants entering the country fall since it brought in systematic photo ID checks on travelers on January 4.

I'm searching for a Linux LiveCD which includes the proprietary NVIDIA driver.

The emails offer a rare glimpse into a world where corporate interests can dictate their own science and scientists for hire willingly oblige. It’s a phenomenon that’s grown in recent decades as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease. The National Institutes of Health’s budget for research grants has fallen 14 percent since its peak in 2004, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With scarce resources, there’s little money for academics to study chemicals that most already deem to be toxic. Yet regulatory officials and attorneys say companies have a strong financial interest in continuing to publish research favorable to industry.

Linux Mint installation media briefly compromised:

It is official. The iPhone is the best device to have for data privacy. Not even the resources available to the biggest three letter agencies in America can crack it. Apple has now been ordered to create a hack to get access to an iPhone and privacy supports are against. The primary concern is that if Apple can hack around their own security on the iPhone which would allow for data to be retrieved without triggering the device data wipe function then it will be repeatedly used by law enforcement in the future. Considering that the iPhone login was designed with this scenario in mind it could be difficult for even Apple to get around. There are fears expressed that the next step by the US Government would be to compel Apple to provide this solution for use by law enforcement and other agencies to violate the privacy of US Citizens.

Amazon.com has raised the free shipping minimum to $49 from $35 for non-Prime members, according to information provided on the Amazon website. The company hasn't published a press release with the news. For books, the threshold is still $25.

Continued legal issues for companies using strong encryption in their products:

The epicenter of internet construction nightmares for homeowners is on Lambs Lane in Southeast Austin, where last October a flash flood allegedly caused by Google’s construction crews blocking nearby storm drains brought two feet of water into the home of Arnulfo and Dolores Cruz, causing $100,000 in damages. Hundreds of other complaints cite yard and property damage, trespassing, and construction vehicles blocking access to driveways.

Amazon has deprecated full disk encryption in Fire OS 5:

Obama thinks that having a secure mobile device amounts to having a phone fetish. In another bizare move by the soon-to-be-ex president of the USA, the commandeer in chief has been quoted as being strongly against strongly encrypted mobile devices to the point where full near unbreakable, in the current computing environment, secure devices is basically people just worshipping their phone. How will we catch pedophiles? Why do we allow terrorists to get away with protecting their secrets? The US goverment must be able to access anyone's files (papers in the constitution) at any time and those who stand in the way must be wrong. How dare people walk around with a bank vault for their data that can not be easily copied.

Now you can stick your finger in your ear to make a phone call, not just pretend to talk to someone thanks to an invention by Samsung. The device from Samsung spin-off Innomdle Lab fits any standard wristwatch and connects to Google Android smartphones. When a phone call arrives, the wearer can accept it with a button on the band, and audio is translated into vibrations which travel up the skin. By pushing their index finger on to the front of the ear, or tragus, the user can hear the conversation even though no one around them hears a thing.

If you thought your Internet service was slow, consider being a customer of Cincinnati Bell’s 75 baud Telegraph Grade service, on offer to subscribers since the 1800s for low-speed stock quotes, telegrams, and office-to-home communications. But don’t consider it too long, because the service is about to be discontinued.

When the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 came out in 2014, I refused to believe smaller size phones were truly dead. I didn’t want to believe they’d done it, but the signs were clear. Other iPhone owners told me there would be an adjustment period. I would have an easier time using and holding onto a live fish, the way it flops around in my hand. The time I spend using my phone hasn’t changed, but now my hands go numb and wrist and fingers ache holding it.

A widely distributed scam email that quotes people's actual postal addresses, links to a dangerous form of ransomware called Maktub. The phishing emails told recipients they owed hundreds to businesses and that they could print an invoice by clicking on a link - but that leads to malware. "It's incredibly fast and by the time the warning message had appeared on the screen it had already encrypted everything of value on the hard drive - it happens in seconds. This is the desktop version of a smash and grab - they want a quick payoff."

A California start-up named Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES) has a clever idea for storing electrical power at the most extreme scales, e.g. those of the power grid itself. It's a battery of sorts. The scheme include a really big hill and a few railroad cars. Energy to be stored in the system is first used to pull the rail cars via electric locomotives to the top of the hill, where it persists as potential energy. So long as the cars are at the top of the hill, the initial energy expended to get them up there remains trapped within the system. To recover that energy, the cars are simply lowered down the hill, turning built-in motor-generators in the process. This power is collected and then returned to the grid. The system is able to recover 80 percent of the power that it takes in, which is better than pumped-storage hydro (due to evaporation) or most batteries.

A generating tower at the world's largest solar energy plant was shut down Thursday after a mirror misalignment caused sunlight to burn through electrical wiring and start a small fire, according to officials. The blaze broke out around 9:30 a.m. Officials said that flames could be seen near the ninth floor of the Unit 3 tower, but that they had apparently died out by the time firefighters arrived.

A startup called HMD Global Oy (Helsinki, Finland) has been formed to takeover the Nokia brand for mobile phones and tablet computers and has said it intends to spend $500 million marketing Nokia as an Android-based mobile device over the next three years. HMD is owned by Smart Connect LP, a private equity fund managed by Jean-Francois Baril, a former Nokia executive, as well as by HMD management. As part of the same deal, Microsoft is selling remaining feature phone business assets to FIH Mobile Ltd., a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industries (trading as Foxconn Technology Group).

The last audio cassette company in the country held on tight as its former competitors abandoned cassettes for CD production. Now that analog has begun to make a comeback, the National Audio Company, or NAC, owns its market and is making more cassettes than ever before. When everyone jumped on the CD boat in the late 90s, NAC wasn’t hurt because its customers were mostly spoken-word performers and people just buying blank media. So the company began slowly buying and rehabbing its competitors’ equipment. "We were preparing ourselves to pick the music market up when it came back, and that’s exactly what happened." Now NAC is making cassettes for Metallica, a special release of the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack, and what looks like countless basement recordings from smaller bands.

With just one day remaining before tiny Tennessee-based electric co-op Duck River claimed it would rip Comcast’s equipment and wiring off its utility poles for non-payment of pole attachment fees, Comcast showed up with a check. Had Comcast not come up with a payment, Duck River was prepared to start removing Comcast’s wiring and equipment from its poles, and cut power to Comcast’s equipment, which would have killed service for about 7,000 Comcast customers.

Google is claiming that updates to apps in the Android Play Store may soon become much smaller due to their use of a new algorithm named “Courgette” developed from bsdiff. The algorithm can reduce the size of patches by up to 50% according to Google, and they have previously been using it for updates to the desktop Chrome browser.

Yahoo has sold off its operating business for about $4.8 billion to Verizon Communications in a cash deal that will reduce the storied tech company to mainly holding its cash, valuable stake in Alibaba, Yahoo Japan and non-core patents. Once a mainstay of the internet, Yahoo steadily declined in popularity and relevance as it failed to keep up with its competitors. For $4.8 billion, Verizon will get Yahoo’s 1 billion monthly active users, its internet properties and key applications like search, email, and Yahoo's advertising systems. Yahoo will get yet another chance to reinvent itself and possibly find a way to make itself relevant in today's market. No word on if president and Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer will be retained.

Like many others, Bruce Schneier is sounding the alarm that the Internet of Things security nightmare isn't just about things like poor or non-existent security for thermostats: rather, that "software control" of an ever-widening pool of interconnected devices and systems designed to act without human intervention creates an urgent threat the likes of which we've never seen.

The iris scanner in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is a welcome step forward in device security, but according to Samsung it comes with a long list of caveats. The iris recognition system uses three lenses to capture the image signal, but iris scanner may not work if you wear glasses or contacts, use it in low light conditions, if you've had eye surgeries such as LASIK, LASEK, intraocular lens implants or if you've had iris scar treatment. The performance of the iris scanner may also be affected if the user has an eye disease that affects the irises. You also need to be able to position the phone "25 to 30 centimeters from your face" with your eyes in the on-screen circles so the front-facing scanner can register your iris, something that may be awkward to do in a moving vehicle or while walking.

A portable device may allow doctors to create single doses of biopharmaceutical medications on demand, potentially speeding the treatment of diseases that include diabetes and cancer. The system, described in the journal Nature Communications, can currently produce two biologic drugs from a single yeast strain in the device, creating near-single-dose production in less than 24 hours with limited infrastructure.

AT&T announced on Friday that the company will be providing 1TB of data a month to U-Verse customers, at speeds up to 300 megabits per second starting August 21st. This should be enough data to stream more than 13 hours of HD video content per day.

Consumer Reports Labs tested Glow, a very popular menstrual cycle/fertility-tracking app, and found that the app's designers had made a number of fundamental errors in the security and privacy design of the app, which would make it easy for stalkers or griefers to take over the app, change users' passwords, spy on them, steal their identities, and access extremely intimate data about the millions of women and their partners who use the app.

A vulnerability in inexpensive wireless keyboards lets hackers steal private data, security company Bastille reported this week. The vulnerability lets a hacker use a new attack the firm dubbed "KeySniffer" to eavesdrop on and capture every keystroke typed from up to 250 feet away.

Enterprise-targeting cyber enemies are deploying vast amounts of potent ransomware to generate revenue and huge profits – nearly $34 million annually according to Cisco’s Mid-Year Cybersecurity Report out this week.

During the Olympic opening ceremonies, NBC may very well stand for "Nothing But Commercials". Viewers took to Twitter to slam the network’s frequent commercial breaks after six commercial breaks in under 40 minutes. Inserting commercials is probably the reason that NBC did a tape delay of the opening ceremony.

FossForce has an interesting video interview with Timothy Lord:

In a new paper uploaded to the ArXiv pre-print server, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken, Germany demonstrate a method of identifying individuals even when most of their photos are un-tagged or obscured. The researchers' system, which they call the “Faceless Recognition System,” trains a neural network on a set of photos containing both obscured and visible faces, then uses that knowledge to predict the identity of obscured faces by looking for similarities in the area around a person's head and body.

Since 2012, neuropathologist Daniel Perl has advocated for this theory: specifically that blast waves caused physical damage at the intersection of the brain's gray matter and white matter , where microscopic analysis of the brains of former soldiers who suffered from PTSD reveals a "brown dust" of scarring, in regions that are neuroanatomically associated with sleep and cognition.

Rob Rhinehart, developer of the meal replacement milkshake known as Soylent, has been criminally charged over his off-grid “experiment in sustainable living”. He installed an off-grid shipping container home, without obtaining city permits, and he allegedly refused city orders in January and April to remove the container. He could face up to two years in prison and a $4,000 fine.

It looks like the end of the road for Win 7 & 8 users may be at hand. Microsoft’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Nathan Mercer just announced that, “From October 2016 onwards, Windows will release a single Monthly Rollup that addresses both security issues and reliability issues in a single update. The Monthly Rollup will be published to Windows Update (WU), WSUS, SCCM, and the Microsoft Update Catalog. Each month’s rollup will supersede the previous month’s rollup, so there will always be only one update required for your Windows PCs to get current."

After 20-month search period, a key dark matter detection experiment has officially come up empty-handed, casting doubt on the existence of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), which have been far and away the leading explanation for one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.

Cloud management provider and co-founder of OpenStack, Rackspace says it will be going private in a deal that will pay shareholders $4.3bn. Investment house Apollo Global Management will be paying $32 per share to buy out stakeholders and run Rackspace as a privately held company. Rackspace stock closed yesterday (prior to the announcement) at $30.19 per share.

Ask most people what happens when they boot their PC and they will respond with a range of answers from I don't know to The BIOS starts the boot process etc. Very few people realize that modern PCs have a hidden subsystem that lurks behind the main OS with full access to the computer even when it is in sleep mode. This system is called the Intel Management Engine. Given that it can access any part of the OS, memory or storage and has a range of capabilities which includes communication via ethernet the FSF has nominated the Intel ME system should be ditched. Given that the owner of the hardware has no control over the ME and can't even see it, and that the ME is a viable attack vector for completely taking over a PC "It is a threat to freedom, security, and privacy that can't be ignored." The only question we have is: Can we get rid of it?

The case for Planet Nine's existence keeps getting stronger. Astronomers have discovered several more objects in the extreme outer solar system whose orbital characteristics hint at the existence of an unseen "perturber" in the dark depths far from the sun — a hypothetical world larger than Earth that scientists are calling Planet Nine. "If you want to put a number on it, I'd be somewhere like 80 percent sure that there's a Planet [Nine] out there," said Scott Sheppard.

With a lot of phones having small internal storage and no means with which to expand it (SD cards are still uncommon), there is a constant battle to make space. There is cloud storage but WiFi internet access isn’t always available. There are USB OTG (On The Go) adapters that can provide storage but it's not natively supported on many devices either.

The company that operates the for-profit vocational school chain ITT Technical Institute, with more than 130 campuses in 38 states (one of the country’s largest) announced that it was permanently closing all its campuses nationwide. It blamed the shutdown on the recent move by the U.S. Education Department to ban ITT from enrolling new students who use federal financial aid. Like many other for-profit college operators, ITT has faced federal and state investigations of its predatory recruiting and shady accounting practices, with up to 60% of students defaulting on loans.

New York City’s cutting edge public Wi-Fi project, LinkNYC has hit some stumbling blocks. After continued complaints about people viewing pornography and other inappropriate content, on September 14 LinkNYC completely turned off browsing capabilities for the tablets installed in each kiosk. Their main functionality—free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, map functions, and USB charging ports has not changed. LinkNYC notes that “The kiosks were never intended for anyone’s extended, personal use.”