There’s no doubt you’ve given some iOS apps access to personal data like your photo library or contact list. But if you’ve given them access to your camera, they could be doing a lot more than you’re aware of behind the scenes, including photographing you without your knowledge. Luckily, you can stop the surreptitious…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Stop iOS Apps From Secretly Spying Through Your Camera
Source: Engadget – Google’s physical authentication keys are effective but limited
When you’re heading home from a night out with friends, sharing an Uber often makes a lot of sense. However, up until now, you’d have to verbally tell your driver you were going to make a few stops, and then input a new address each time someone gets out of the car. It’s a process that works, but tends to be pretty…
Source: LifeHacker – Now You Can Add Multiple Stops to Your Uber Ride
In Q3 2017, Backblaze introduced both 10 TB and 12 TB hard drives into their data centers and added over 59 petabytes of data storage, bringing their total storage capacity to 400 petabytes. These drives are still new, so there isn’t much insight to be gleaned from them so far, but the company does have more to say about consumer vs. enterprise drives based on their consistency in failure rate.
The hard drive failure rate for the quarter was 1.84%, our lowest quarterly rate ever. There are several factors that contribute to this, but one that stands out is the average age of the hard drives in use. Only the 4 TB HGST drives (model: HDS5C4040ALE630) have an average age over 4 years — 51.3 months to be precise. The average age of all the other drive models is less than 4 years, with nearly 80% of all of the drives being less than 3 years old.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2017
With holiday travel season looming and American airline companies increasingly trying to squeeze every last dollar out of passengers (and every inch of space out of planes), surely there’s a way to make flying at least somewhat more bearable. If you can’t afford a business class upgrade (because really, who can) and…
Source: LifeHacker – These are the Worst Seats on Most Airplanes
In its careers section this week, science journal Nature surveyed more than 5,700 early-career scientists worldwide who are working on PhDs. Three-quarters of them, they told the journal, think it’s likely that they will pursue an academic career when they graduate. How many of them will succeed? The editorial board of the journal wrote in a column published on Wednesday. Most PhD students will have to look beyond academia for a career, the editorial board added. From the article: Statistics say these young researchers will have a better chance of pursuing their chosen job than the young footballers. But not by much. Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States. Simply put, most PhD students need to make plans for a life outside academic science. And more universities and PhD supervisors must make this clear. That might sound like an alarmist and negative attitude for the International Weekly Journal of Science. But it has been evident for years that international science is training many more PhD students than the academic system can support. Most of the keen and talented young scientists who responded to our survey will probably never get a foot in the door. Of those who do, a sizeable number are likely to drift from short-term contract to short-term contract until they become disillusioned and look elsewhere.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Many Junior Scientists Need To Take a Hard Look at Their Job Prospects
The success of most parties hinges on the quality and amount of booze served and, while serving a big bowl of punch is easier on the host or hostess, serving a punch that people will keep coming back to it is a little trickier. A good punch is so balanced that one might not even realize there was any ethanol floating…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Make a Surprisingly Lethal Punch
While Spotify has become synonymous with music streaming online, it’s not so well-known for its video shows. Many people don’t even know they exist. That’s why the company is now rebooting its video efforts and canceling a whole slew of original vide…
Source: Engadget – Spotify reportedly canceling original shows in video strategy refresh
A preview for the first season of Hulu’s The Runaways shows us that our heroes are fighting the scariest bad guys of all: parents.
When Marvel debuted Runaways back in 2003, it took the superhero genre in a compelling new direction. Not only did it have teenage characters who were more than sidekicks or mini versions of adults, but it also upped the stakes by pulling a Game of Thrones and killing off major characters. Hulu’s series based on the books is coming next month, and the first trailer pushes all the right buttons.
Created and written by Brian K. Vaughan (Saga, Y: the Last Man), Runaways is about a group of six teenage friends who discover their parents are secretly a gang of supervillains called the Pride. Torn between loyalty to their families and a desire to make things right, the characters are ambivalent and complex right out of the gate. Some of them have been trained in the ways of superpowers by their parents, while others are just figuring out what they can do. Led by tactical mastermind Alex (Rhenzy Feliz), they quickly decide to band together and fight evil. But that means running away from home, leaving everything they love behind, and taking on the people they once believed were their protectors.
The cast from the show, and from the comics. Hulu has definitely gotten the look right. (credit: Hulu/Marvel)
In this trailer, we meet the founding members of the Runaways (it’s not clear whether this show will kill any of them off the way the comics did). There’s Alex, who shows his friends the secret room where their parents are sacrificing innocent people. Molly (Allegra Acosta) has super strength, probably inherited from her mutant telepath parents. Gert (Ariela Barer) has a mind-meldy connection with a genetically-engineered dinosaur from the future named Old Lace. Then there’s Karolina (Virginia Gardner), who thought she was human until she turned into a glowing, solar-powered alien known as a Majesdania. Chase (Gregg Sulkin) is the son of mad scientists, and we see him with the fire-controlling “fistigons” that he’s stolen from his parents.
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Source: Ars Technica – Hulu’s Runaways may actually do justice to the brilliant comics
A server that held data central to Georgia’s elections was wiped this summer, destroying the potential for a forensic investigation to determine whether or not the server was compromised by hackers, the AP reports.
Source: Gizmodo – Georgia Wiped Its Election Server While Advocates Fought for Security Investigation
Enlarge / Georgia voters at a voting machine during the US presidential election at the Athens-Clarke County Fleet building in Athens, Georgia on November 8, 2016. (credit: TAMI CHAPPELL/AFP/Getty Images)
A server and its backups, believed to be key to a pending federal lawsuit filed against Georgia election officials, was thoroughly deleted according to e-mails recently released under a public records request.
Georgia previously came under heavy scrutiny after a researcher discovered significant problems with his home state’s voting system. A lawsuit soon followed in state court, asking the court to annul the results of the June 20 special election for Congress and to prevent Georgia’s existing computer-based voting system from being used again. The case, Curling v. Kemp, was filed in Fulton County Superior Court on July 3.
As the Associated Press reported Thursday, the data was initially destroyed on July 7 by the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, the entity tasked with running the Peach State’s elections.
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Source: Ars Technica – Days after activists sued, Georgia’s election server was wiped clean
NVIDIA has largely been sitting pretty since the GeForce 10-series arrived and gave it a comfortable performance lead in the graphics realm, but things have changed: AMD’s Vega cards are at least fast enough that you might consider them instead. Nee…
Source: Engadget – NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 Ti battles AMD’s latest video cards
Anxiety is like an incredibly annoying little brother. It is antagonistic, frustrating, and overwhelming 90% of the time. The other 10%, you forget it exists until you’re reminded of it with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you walk through your front door.
Source: LifeHacker – This 15 Pound Blanket Helped Rewire My Brain
This is a short video of a python showing off its exceptional tree-climbing form. If I were an Olympic judge I’d give it a solid 9.5 for technique. I’m not an Olympic judge though, and I’m not even allowed to judge pies in the baking contest at the county fair because “You can’t lick the entries,” and “You can’t put pie in your pockets,” even though I very clearly just did both.
Keep going for the whole video while I speculate whether or not the forbidden fruit in the Garden Of Eden was actually a coconut.
Source: Geekologie – Freaky Deaky: Video Of A Python Coiling Up A Tree
The circumstances surrounding death are always a surprise. Even when it isn’t sudden, when it has been expected for weeks—months, even—there is always the shock of absence and loss, and the overwhelming feeling that comes with all of the details that need to be tended to while in the throes of grief. It’s in those…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Feed a Grieving Friend With a Meal Train
Robotron23 writes: Wealth inequality is at its highest since the turn of the 20th century — the so-called ‘Gilded Age’ — as the proportion of capital held by the world’s 1,542 dollar billionaires swells further. The report, commissioned by the Swiss banking giant UBS and UK accounting company PwC, discusses the impacts of technology and globalization on the situation, and arrives weeks after the IMF recommended that the world’s richest pay higher taxes to ease the disparity of wealth.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ‘The Second Gilded Age Is Upon Us’
MYMUG is the latest stop on the road to coffee vessel perfection, and you can save by preordering.
Source: LifeHacker – MYMUG is the Evolution of Ceramic You’ve Been Waiting For
From Aristotle and da Vinci to van der Rohe, thinkers and creatives have been praising minimalism for millennia.
Source: TreeHugger – Miimalism may be trendy, but it certainly isn’t new
Most of the automakers announcing their adoption of Apple’s CarPlay have mentioned them in reference to cars, and for good reason: It only works with screens, which are starting to become widespread on new 4-wheeled vehicles. But on Tuesday, Honda re…
Source: Engadget – Honda’s 2018 Gold Wing is the first motorcycle with CarPlay
Enlarge (credit: Apple)
According to Bloomberg, Apple is taking a markedly different path with its streaming TV series than the likes of HBO Now or Showtime. The sources for the report—which include Hollywood producers and other industry insiders who have met with the company in recent months—paint a picture of a very conservative corporation making slow progress.
They say that Apple has expressed a preference for uplifting, family-friendly shows and that it has been disinterested in other kinds of pitches—even those from prestigious artists like Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuarón—because they don’t fit that mold.
Carpool Karaoke, based on the segment from CBS’ The Late Late Show with James Corden, was scheduled to premiere on Apple Music in April, but it didn’t. The series came out in August instead. The Bloomberg report indicates that the show was delayed because the initial cuts had swearing and “references to vaginal hygiene.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Apple will invest billion in TV, but don’t expect Game of Thrones
