Monthly Archives: August 2016

The Acer Predator 21X is the world’s first curved-screen laptop

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  • Behold! The first curved laptop screen! Notice how there are no photos with the lid closed. Here’s hoping it can actually be closed flush…

Acer has unveiled some new laptops at IFA in Germany, including the utterly monstrous curved-display 21-inch Predator 21X. Acer says it’s the world’s first laptop with a curved screen.

The new Predator 21X laptop sits at the very top of Acer’s gaming laptop range. The curved screen, which has a resolution of 2560×1080, is powered by two of Nvidia’s latest mobile GTX 1080 graphics cards. The screen is G-Sync enabled, too.

CPU-wise, the laptop has a new 7th-gen Kaby Lake Intel Core processor, but we don’t know exactly which model. Given the laptop’s desktop-replacement aspirations we are probably looking at some kind of quad-core 45W TDP chip, rather than one of the dual-core low-power parts unveiled by Intel this week. Intel isn’t planning to release its quad-core Kaby Lake parts until the first quarter of 2017—which incidentally is when the Predator 21X is meant to go on sale.

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Source: Ars Technica – The Acer Predator 21X is the world’s first curved-screen laptop

10 Tricks to Make Yourself a Chromebook Master

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Chromebooks are on the up and up
. If you’re using a laptop running Google’s lightweight, web-based Chrome OS software, there are a bunch of hidden tricks you might not be aware of, from safely giving others access to your Chromebook to getting the newest features for the OS before anyone else. Here are 10 tips for becoming an expert Chromebook user.

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Source: Gizmodo – 10 Tricks to Make Yourself a Chromebook Master

Building a new Tor that can resist next-generation state surveillance

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Enlarge (credit: Paramount)

Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Law enforcement has been less enthusiastic, worrying that online anonymity also enables criminal activity.

Tor’s growth in users has not gone unnoticed, and today the network first dubbed “The Onion Router” is under constant strain from those wishing to identify anonymous Web users. The NSA and GCHQ have been studying Tor for a decade, looking for ways to penetrate online anonymity, at least according to these Snowden docs. In 2014, the US government paid Carnegie Mellon University to run a series of poisoned Tor relays to de-anonymise Tor users. A 2015 research paper outlined an attack effective, under certain circumstances, at decloaking Tor hidden services (now rebranded as “onion services”). Most recently, 110 poisoned Tor hidden service directories were discovered probing .onion sites for vulnerabilities, most likely in an attempt to de-anonymise both the servers and their visitors.

Who can forget the now-famous "Tor stinks" slide that was part of the Snowden trove of leaked docs.

Who can forget the now-famous “Tor stinks” slide that was part of the Snowden trove of leaked docs.

Cracks are beginning to show; a 2013 analysis by researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), who helped develop Tor in the first place, concluded that “80 percent of all types of users may be de-anonymised by a relatively moderate Tor-relay adversary within six months.”

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Source: Ars Technica – Building a new Tor that can resist next-generation state surveillance

This 21-Inch Gaming Laptop With a Curved Display Is Too Absurd for This World

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For a long time the borderline boutique manufacturer MSI had the market cornered on weird, overpowered laptops no sane person would spend their money on. But Acer’s just snatched the “WTFuckery” straight out of MSI’s hands with this 21-inch gaming laptop.

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Source: Gizmodo – This 21-Inch Gaming Laptop With a Curved Display Is Too Absurd for This World

Samsung Unveils Hot New Gear S3 Classic And Frontier Smartwatches

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Samsung Unveils Hot New Gear S3 Classic And Frontier Smartwatches
Samsung Gear S3 Frontier (Left), Gear S3 Classic (Right)

Samsung just wrapped up an event at the IFA expo in Berlin, at which the company unveiled a duo of new Gear S3 branded smartwatches. The new Samsung Gear S3 Classic and Gear S3 Frontier leverage many of the design elements from last-year’s sleek Gear S2, like the rotating control

Source: Hot Hardware – Samsung Unveils Hot New Gear S3 Classic And Frontier Smartwatches

Deadspin Rougned Odor Slaps Walk-Off Dinger, Stares Down Edwin Diaz | Sploid Miraculous Spray-On Coa

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Deadspin Rougned Odor Slaps Walk-Off Dinger, Stares Down Edwin Diaz
| Sploid Miraculous Spray-On Coating Protects a Watermelon From a 150-Foot Drop
| Jezebel The New Bachelor Is an Actual Shocker and a Familiar Face All at the Same Time
| The Concourse Donald Trump Might Actually Go to Mexico Tomorrow [Update]
|

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Source: LifeHacker – Deadspin Rougned Odor Slaps Walk-Off Dinger, Stares Down Edwin Diaz | Sploid Miraculous Spray-On Coa

Jalopnik Terrifying Video Perfectly Explains The Purpose Of Runaway Truck Ramps | Lifehacker Four Th

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Jalopnik Terrifying Video Perfectly Explains The Purpose Of Runaway Truck Ramps
| Lifehacker Four Things That Will Get Your Computer Use Monitored at Work
| Steamed Developer Decides To Pull Game From Steam After Just Three Days
| Kotaku Konami Has No Plans To Finish MGSV The Phantom Pain’s Mission 51
|

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Source: Gizmodo – Jalopnik Terrifying Video Perfectly Explains The Purpose Of Runaway Truck Ramps | Lifehacker Four Th

Hackers Snatch Over 60 Million Passwords From Dropbox’s Leaky Servers

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Hackers Snatch Over 60 Million Passwords From Dropbox’s Leaky Servers
More details about a previously disclosed security breach at cloud storage provider Dropbox have come to light. The hack itself is old news—it occurred back in 2012—but what’s new is how many users were affected by it. Hackers made off with details belonging to north of 68 million Dropbox users, prompting a mass password reset.

The folks

Source: Hot Hardware – Hackers Snatch Over 60 Million Passwords From Dropbox’s Leaky Servers

Will Amazon Kill FedEx?

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I don’t know if Amazon will kill FedEx and UPS but those two sure are going to feel the loss of Amazon’s delivery dollars, that’s for sure. Hell, Amazon could just cut to the chase and buy FedEx or UPS and be done with it.

Providing near-instant gratification on Amazon’s scale isn’t cheap. Last year the company spent $11.5 billion on shipping—nearly twice what it did two years ago. Along with leasing jets and buying trailers, Amazon has opened more than 28 sorting centers, 59 delivery stations that feed packages to local couriers, and more than 65 Prime Now hubs stocked with best-selling items that can be rushed to customers around the world, according to MWPVL International, a Montreal-based supply chain consultant. “This year we estimate Amazon is going to sell 7.2 billion items,” says Gene Munster, an internet industry analyst at Piper Jaffray. “In 2020, which is only four years away, we expect them to sell 12.6 billion items.”

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Will Amazon Kill FedEx?

How Deep Learning Will Help Your Smartphone Track Your Gaze

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From diagnosing certain mental disorders to optimizing the placement of images in textbooks, eye tracking is useful across a variety of fields: psychology, medicine, advertising, marketing and more. Scientists and researchers can learn a lot from understanding where people look and why. But making eye tracking easy and ubiquitous has been hard. Deep learning and NVIDIA GPUs are changing that.

Given its potential, it’s nagged researchers that getting one’s eyes tracked wasn’t easier. “It was quite shocking to me that we all don’t have eye-trackers,” says Aditya Khosla, a graduate student in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory of MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science department. Khosla and a team of six other researchers from the University of Georgia and the Max Planck Institute of Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany, set out to achieve a straightforward goal: create eye-tracking software that could run on any mobile phone with a camera.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – How Deep Learning Will Help Your Smartphone Track Your Gaze

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Intel Bring Premium 4k Movies to PCs

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Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) and Intel Corporation today announced that ULTRA, SPHE’s 4K movie streaming service, will debut on computers powered by 7th Gen Intel® Core™ processors beginning Q1 in 2017. Coinciding with the expanded availability of the service, ULTRA will add new features like 48 hour rentals and free 10 minute previews, allowing customers to experience a sample of any film on the service in full 4k resolution before buying.

With its new 7th Gen Intel Core processor, Intel is bringing 4K content to mainstream PC users. This latest processor sets a higher bar for richer experiences and incredible performance and responsiveness, with long battery life and true 4K entertainment. More than 100 stunning new devices powered by 7th Gen Intel Core will be available this holiday season, and some will be available as early as September. By leveraging new hardware security technologies in its processor, computers powered by 7th Gen Intel Core will be the first PCs to provide secure access to premium 4K movies and television content through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s ULTRA 4K service.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Intel Bring Premium 4k Movies to PCs

$499 Dell Latitude 13 2-in-1 Device With Keyboard, Extra 20% Off Coupon For Computer Accessories At Amazon And More

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$499 Dell Latitude 13 2-in-1 Device With Keyboard, Extra 20% Off Coupon For Computer Accessories At Amazon And More
Welcome back for the latest installment of HOT deals, direct from our friends at TechBargains. On tap for you all today, we have deals on a Dell Latitude 13 7000 convertible device, a Samsung Gear VR Headset, a special Amazon PAX Coupon for discounts on some cool components and peripherals, and more. Full details for all of today’s deals are

Source: Hot Hardware – 9 Dell Latitude 13 2-in-1 Device With Keyboard, Extra 20% Off Coupon For Computer Accessories At Amazon And More