The rumor was right on the money — Apple has sent out invitations for a media event on September 7th. The teaser is characteristically cryptic between its out-of-focus lights (which, naturally, form an Apple logo) and “see you on the 7th” slogan….
Source: Engadget – Apple sends out invitations for its September 7th iPhone event
Monthly Archives: August 2016
Roku's next players reportedly deliver HDR, more 4K support
If you held off on last year’s Roku 4, the company’s next batch of media players might be for you. The big upgrade this time around is the addition of HDR support in the high-end “Roku Ultra” and “Roku Premiere Plus” (which replaces the Roku 3), Zats…
Source: Engadget – Roku’s next players reportedly deliver HDR, more 4K support
“See you on the 7th”: Apple announces date for new announcements
Enlarge (credit: Apple)
Apple has just send out press invitations for its next product event, which is happening at 10am Pacific on September 7 in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. This has become Apple’s go-to event space in recent years, replacing smaller venues like the Moscone Center, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Apple’s own town hall event space (the latter of which was officially retired earlier this year when the iPhone SE was announced).
New iPhones are a sure bet for the event—this year’s models aren’t expected to deviate too far from the existing iPhone 6S and 6S Plus design, but they’re said to include better cameras, faster chips, and no headphone jack. Along with that new hardware, we can also expect release date announcements for macOS Sierra, iOS 10, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10.
Other hardware announcements are definitely possible—practically all of Apple’s products are a year or more old at this point—but rumors have been less-than-consistent. A new Apple Watch model and new MacBook Pros are on the more likely end of the spectrum, but the larger iPad Pro and most of the Mac lineup are at least a year old, and a few of the Macs are even older. The fourth-generation Apple TV box is around a year old too, but Apple has never updated its set-top box on a regular yearly cadence the way it has with many of its other products.
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Source: Ars Technica – “See you on the 7th”: Apple announces date for new announcements
ISRO Successfully Test-fires Scramjet Rocket Engine
An anonymous reader writes: Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), on Sunday, successfully tested two indigenous scramjet engines. India has become the fourth country to demonstrate the flight testing of scramjet engine after the US, Russia and European Space Agency. According to a report, the scramjet will bring down the launch cost of weather satellite INSAT-3DR which is a weather forecast system designed for enhanced meteorological observations and disaster warning. The satellite scheduled to be launched in August earlier, but it has been postponed to September.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ISRO Successfully Test-fires Scramjet Rocket Engine
FBI: Foreign Hackers Penetrated State Election Systems
It looks like the elections in November could end up being even more interesting than they already are. I think it will be easy to tell if your local voting station has been hacked by the Russians if your list of candidates is A.) Vladimir B.) Vladimir C.) Vladimir D.) All of the above.
But three days after that call, the FBI Cyber Division issued a potentially more disturbing warning, entitled “Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems.” The alert, labeled as restricted for “NEED TO KNOW recipients,” disclosed that the bureau was investigating cyberintrusions against two state election websites this summer, including one that resulted in the “exfiltration,” or theft, of voter registration data.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – FBI: Foreign Hackers Penetrated State Election Systems
NVIDIA and VMware Virtualize VR at VMworld 2016
Delivering VR is a complex challenge since immersive VR requires seven times the graphics processing power compared to traditional 3D applications and games. Delivering VR virtually — streaming it from a data center to any device — is an even bigger challenge. NVIDIA and VMware are working to make it a reality. At VMworld 2016 we’ll show, for the first time, photo-realistic, immersive VR in a VMware virtual environment. See it for yourself at the VMvillage by taking a spin through the following technologies:
Iray VR — Iray physically based rendering produces dynamic panoramas and fully immersive light fields with stunningly realistic virtual environments. Strap on a headset and explore photorealistic virtual environments in VR.
Point Cloud — Check out time-lapse rendering created with point cloud showing the building of NVIDIA’s spectacular new building in Silicon Valley.
VRED VR — Participate in a collaborative VR design review of a Formula 1 race car created with Autodesk VRED 3D visualization software.
Virtualizing VR: How It Works
The server powering these demos has four high-end NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and VMware ESXi running on top. This set-up allows us to run four simultaneous virtual machines with VR content. Using NVIDIA GRID, we’re passing through an entire GPU and delivering a native NVIDIA driver to each VM. This provides amazing performance to multiple VR instances running on the same server.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – NVIDIA and VMware Virtualize VR at VMworld 2016
Climate simulations show effects of releasing permafrost carbon
Enlarge / Lakes formed by melting permafrost, on peatland. In Hudson Bay, Canada. (credit: Steve Jurvetson)
During the last deglaciation, between roughly 21,000 and 10,000 years ago, there was a rise in atmospheric carbon. This surge brought CO2 levels up to where they were in preindustrial times and contributed to the warming that ended the glacial period. But there’s a significant item missing from this picture: we don’t know where the carbon came from.
Researchers had suggested that changes in the distribution of ice, driven by alterations in Earth’s orbit and tilt, altered the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2. But a new paper performed a model-driven analysis of past changes in carbon levels and come up with a somewhat different answer. The authors’ simulations showed that, when a permafrost carbon component was included, it was possible to reproduce the atmospheric CO2 levels seen in ice core measurements—suggesting that carbon released by melting permafrost contributed to the rise of CO2.
Carbon accounting
Data from the ice cores can help narrow down the possibilities, because it records something called δ13C (delta-thirteen-C), which is essentially a measure of the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere. (It’s mathematically a bit more complicated, but that’s the basic idea). As this ratio is influenced by biological activity, it can give some clues about the carbon’s source. Even with these clues, however, previous simulations have failed to narrow down the possibilities. The researchers suspected that was because these weren’t taking into account an important mechanism: change in permafrost.
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Source: Ars Technica – Climate simulations show effects of releasing permafrost carbon
Make Any Bike Electric With This Add-On Wheel
Sometimes I feel like my entire life is spent commuting—by train, cab, or on foot. But biking is by far my favorite way to get around in NYC, except for those minutes I spend huffing over the Manhattan bridge. That’s where Evelo’s Omni Wheel comes in. The after-market add-on can transform most bikes into an electric-powered commute machine. And it works—for the most part.
Source: Gizmodo – Make Any Bike Electric With This Add-On Wheel
The Gun-Control Movement Gains a Few Hard Inches at UT-Austin
On the first day of fall classes on August 24 at the University of Texas, Austin, students were scrambling to catch florid plastic dildos flying over their heads, eager to display them on the outside of their backpacks. Outrageous? Embarrassing? Absurd? That’s the point. More than a thousand protesters— students and professors—were gathering beneath the campus’s clock tower to expose the absurdity of a gun culture whose laws encourage students to carry concealed guns onto college campuses but ban the open display of sex toys. At a pre-rally the day before, 4,000 of the playthings disappeared over the first 30 minutes in a mashup of outstretched limbs.
Source: Gizmodo – The Gun-Control Movement Gains a Few Hard Inches at UT-Austin
Star Wars Rebels' Second Season Is Brilliant, Its Blu-ray Set Less So
No offense to J.J. Abrams, but the best Star Wars storytelling in the past year may have been on Star Wars Rebels. Executive producer Dave Filoni and his team weaved a complex, exciting tale that not only illuminated many previous Star Wars myths, but set up new ones, too.
Source: io9 – Star Wars Rebels’ Second Season Is Brilliant, Its Blu-ray Set Less So
The best tech for college athletes
Look, there’s clearly more to college life than studying and partying. There’s also sports! Before you hit the field, gym, rink or court it’s probably worth taking stock of how you can improve your game with a little help from modern technology. An A…
Source: Engadget – The best tech for college athletes
Pan-Pan: The Kotaku Review
Indie game Pan-Pan offers players a world they desperately want to be in and then hampers their ability to enjoy it. The game’s take on exploration kept me pushing through frustrating puzzles. By the end of my journey, I’d worked through confusion all for the purpose of remaining in a sort of fantasy paradise.
Source: Kotaku – Pan-Pan: The Kotaku Review
After Illinois hack, FBI warns of more attacks on state election board systems
Enlarge / An FBI “Flash” memorandum on state Board of Elections site attacks warns of attacks on two states so far, and asks for other states to check their logs.
Someone using servers in the US, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands stole voter registration from one state’s Board of Elections website in June and unsuccessfully attacked another state’s elections website in August, according to a restricted “Flash” memorandum sent out by the FBI’s Cyber Division. The bureau issued the alert requesting other states check for signs of the same intrusion.
The “Flash” memo, obtained by Yahoo News, was published three days after Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson offered state officials assistance in securing election systems during a conference call. According to Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff, government officials told him that the attacks were on voter registration databases in Illinois and Arizona. The Illinois system had to be shut down in July for two weeks after the discovery of an attack; the registration information of as many as 200,000 voters may have been exposed.
While saying the Department of Homeland Security was unaware of any specific threat to election systems, Johnson offered states assistance from the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) “to conduct vulnerability scans, provide actionable information, and access to other tools and resources for improving cybersecurity,” a DHS spokesperson said, describing the conference call. “The Election Assistance Commission, NIST, and DOJ are available to offer support and assistance in protecting against cyber attacks.”
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Source: Ars Technica – After Illinois hack, FBI warns of more attacks on state election board systems
The FBI Says Two State Elections Databases Have Already Been Hacked
The FBI has evidence that foreign hackers have accessed the state election databases in two states. According to Yahoo News, the FBI sent out a “flash alert” to election offices and officials across the country, asking them to take better security precautions.
Source: Gizmodo – The FBI Says Two State Elections Databases Have Already Been Hacked
Facebook highlights false news story in its trending topics
Source: Engadget – Facebook highlights false news story in its trending topics
Man and machine driving together in harmony: The 2017 Volvo S90
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Say hello to the Volvo S90.
Jonathan Gitlin
Volvo is on somewhat of a roll right now. Under Chinese ownership since 2010, the Swedish car maker has invested $11 billion in all-new vehicle and engine architectures, and the results have been impressive. First out of the gate was the XC90 SUV, one of the best in class, complete with an extremely good infotainment system and plenty of semi-autonomous driver assists. Now, Volvo has followed it up with the S90, a low-slung sedan built on the same Scalable Product Architecture. After spending some time with the S90 on the traffic-filled lanes of Long Island, we can report that the Swedes offer an intriguing alternative to the mid-range luxury offerings from BMW or Mercedes.
Under the skin, the S90 shares a lot with its high-riding SUV sibling. The chassis makes use of lots of high-strength boron steel. The four-cylinder engines are carried over, from the 250hp (187kW) turbocharged T5 to the 316hp (236kW) turbo- and supercharged T6, with a plug-in hybrid T8 version due later this year. You get the same (excellent) Sensus infotainment system and an interior that shares a lot with the SUV, but for a few welcome improvements.
As befits a company investing heavily in autonomous and semi-autonomous driving, the 2017 S90 comes with Volvo’s very latest consumer-ready system, called Pilot Assist II. It’s installed as standard across the range, and it’s extremely good, even compared to the version found in the 2016 XC90s we drove earlier this year. The limitations of the previous iteration are gone—you no longer need a car in front of you for the system to work, and it no longer shuts off at 37mph (60km/h). Combined with a lane keeping assist that no longer bounces you from one side of your lane to the other, this is a Volvo that drives with you.
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Source: Ars Technica – Man and machine driving together in harmony: The 2017 Volvo S90
The pakiT may be the most compromise-free folding bike yet
Folding bikes are great for city living and multimodal transport, but it’s hard to get everything right.
Source: TreeHugger – The pakiT may be the most compromise-free folding bike yet
A Look Behind The Insane Amount Of Stop Motion Work In Kubo And The Two Strings
This is a worthwhile video featuring a bunch of timelapse clips of the insane amount of work that went into animating the stop motion scenes in Kubo And The Two Strings. Based on the number of shirt-changes from that guy moving the model, I estimate it takes approximately five days to shoot half of one millisecond of action. Me? I don’t change my shirt so you’d think I did it all in a couple minutes. A dust cloud follows me around like Pig-Pen from Peanuts. Plus I talk like Woodstock which drives all the ladies wild. Just kidding, only my girlfriend and the ‘I can’t stand you’ kind of wild, she’s leaving me.
Keep going for the video, then let’s make our own stop-motion movie on our lunch break with Play-Doh. And no eating it all this time.
Source: Geekologie – A Look Behind The Insane Amount Of Stop Motion Work In Kubo And The Two Strings
Tens of Thousands of Infowars Accounts Hacked
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: Tens of thousands of subscriber accounts for media company Infowars are being traded in the digital underground. Infowars, created by famed radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, produces radio, documentaries and written pieces. The dumped data relates to Prison Planet TV, which gives paying subscribers access to a variety of Infowars content. The data includes email addresses, usernames, and poorly hashed passwords. The administrator of breach notification site Databases. Land provided a copy of 100,223 records to Motherboard for verification purposes. Vigilante.PW, another breach notification service, also has the Infowars dump listed on its site, and says the data comes from 2014. However, every record appears to have been included twice in the data, making the actual number of user accounts closer to 50,000.Motherboard adds that it tested a few of the login credentials and that they worked.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Tens of Thousands of Infowars Accounts Hacked
Hearts, Moons & Mice
Svetlana Tigai is a CG artist and illustrator from Kyrgyzstan.
Source: Kotaku – Hearts, Moons & Mice