When is an asteroid not an asteroid? When it’s a binary pair. Turns out that an asteroid discovered late last year is actually two gravitationally bound objects in orbit around each other. But this particular duo, dubbed 2017 YE5, belongs to an exceptionally rare class of near-Earth objects.
Source: Gizmodo – Newly Discovered ‘Asteroid’ Is Far Freakier Than Astronomers Expected
An anonymous reader shares a report: This is the first time FIFA, soccer’s governing body, has allowed video replay to be used to make penalty calls in a World Cup. And while fans of basketball and American football are used to the referees stopping the game to consult video footage, soccer purists say it’s ruining everything. The major complaint is that it’s making the matches much longer than the typical 90-minute games. Martin Rogers, a sports columnist for USA Today, says Video Assistant Referee (or VAR) is “slow, clunky and unpredictable.” Over the phone from Russia, where he’s reporting on the World Cup, he jokes, “I remember back in the day, when if a game kicked off at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, you’d be all wrapped up by 4:45.” Rogers says this type of technology works well for American football and basketball. “When you look at the calls that are used for replay, in basketball for example, it’s normally factual. It’s based on, ‘Did a player get a shot off before the clock expired?’ It’s easy. You know. It’s black and white.” But soccer, Rogers says, is different. He’s referring to one of the most hated and beloved qualities of the game: the endless drama. It’s a thespian sport.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Has Video Refereeing Ruined The World Cup?
By Mark Smirniotis
This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Read the full VPN guide here.
We spent more t…
Source: Engadget – The best VPN service
If you are a lover of the crunchy and the salty, you have probably, at one point or another, found yourself with various, mostly consumed bags and boxes of chips, crackers, and other snack products. Rather than eat them individually, sad handful by sad handful, you should combine them all to make a snack mix.
Source: LifeHacker – Make This Snack Mix From Leftover Snacks
We are still a few days away from Amazon’s annual Prime Day sales event, which kicks off Monday and runs for 36 hours. However, if you’re itching for a deal ahead of the big the event and happen to be in the market for a laptop, good news—Amazon has partnered with Acer to bundle a free Echo Dot with the purchase of an Alexa-enabled Nitro,
Source: Hot Hardware – Acer Bundles Alexa-Enabled Notebooks Free Echo Dot Ahead Prime Day
Enlarge / Messages like this one would have come up every time hackers pushed a modified app to their victims. But YOLO, apparently. (credit: Cisco Talos)
In what appears to be a case of highly focused social engineering against a small group of iPhone users, malicious actors managed to get 13 iPhones registered on their rogue mobile device management (MDM) servers and then pushed out applications that allowed the hackers to track the locations of the phones and read victims’ SMS messages.
The attacks, reported by Cisco’s Talos, used the “BOptions” sideloading technique to modify versions of legitimate applications, including WhatsApp and Telegram. The initiative inserted additional libraries into the application packages, and the modified applications were then deployed to the 13 victim iPhones via the rogue mobile device management systems.
“The malicious code inserted into these apps is capable of collecting and exfiltrating information from the device, such as the phone number, serial number, location, contacts, user’s photos, SMS, and Telegram and WhatsApp chat messages,” wrote Talos researchers Warren Mercer, Paul Rascagneres, and Andrew Williams in a post on the attack. “Such information can be used to manipulate a victim or even use it for blackmail or bribery.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Hyper-targeted attack against 13 iPhones dropped malicious apps via MDM
Adobe is bringing the “full version” of its industry-standard Photoshop app to the iPad, and its other desktop apps may follow suit, according to a report from Bloomberg today. Get ready to unsharp mask all the things.
Source: Gizmodo – ‘Full Version’ of Adobe Photoshop is Reportedly Coming to iPads
Pusha T is making moves in the tech world, announcing a new app he’s working on called “heir.” With heir, users will be able to vote on hip-hop tracks, upvoting them with a fire emoji or downvoting them with a skull and crossbones. Voters can also ea…
Source: Engadget – Pusha T’s ‘heir’ app lets users vote on hip-hop tracks
This is a video of a sinkhole swallowing a well in the village of Ambukuthi in the Wayanad district of South India. One second it’s there, and the next, it’s gone (like my assistant during my magic show finale). Also, I have no clue how sinkholes work except that they’re terrifying, but I would not be standing so close.
The well, which was a few generations old, was a popular landmark and fondly called ‘Muthassi Kinar’ (Granny’s well).
Local residents said the well sunk due to heavy monsoon rains, which have ravaged the district over last three weeks.
Eyewitnesses said a strange sound started emanating from inside the well on the morning of July 9. As many gathered near the well, it sunk right in front their eyes.
No word if that creepy girl from The Ring was involved, but I have my suspicions. When reached for comment about the incident, Mikey had this to say: “Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.” No clue what that means.
Keep going for the video.
Source: Geekologie – Well Well Well: Video Of A Sinkhole Swallowing A Water Well
Fans of the Sylvester Stallone movie Demolition Man will recall that in that science fiction film, Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the “Franchise Wars.” So in the future, all restaurants are Taco Bell. While we can all just dream of such a paradise, Taco Bell decided to draw on that pop-culture reference…
Source: Gizmodo – Taco Bell reveals that Nacho Fries are back in Demolition Man-themed trailer
Comics are filled with alternate realities—that’s why they call them multiverses, after all. While strange, most of these worlds are just variations of the primary universe, where Superman landed in Russia instead of America, or the radioactive spider bit Gwen Stacy, and so on. But underneath all those realities lies…
Source: Gizmodo – The Weirdest and Most Wonderful Alternate Dimensions in the Marvel and DC Universes
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is making rapid progress on his plan to leave all of us poor suckers behind on this godforsaken planet, and he plans to start selling tickets for suborbital space flights in 2019. On Friday, a new report claimed that the right to be a Blue Origin guinea pig will cost $200,000 to $300,000.
Source: Gizmodo – Jeff Bezos Expected to Charge at Least 0,000 for Space Rides in His Rich People Escape Pods
Enlarge / The 10.5-inch iPad Pro. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Adobe is working on a full version of the popular photo-editing program Photoshop for Apple’s iPad, according to a Bloomberg report. Sources claim the software company plans to announce the new app at its annual MAX conference this October, with the app’s launch scheduled for sometime in 2019.
The new app would reportedly allow users to run a full version of Photoshop on an iPad and continue edits on another device like a desktop PC. Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Creative Cloud product head, told Bloomberg that the company is working on “cross-platform iteration of Photoshop and other applications,” but he declined to provide a timeline for their release.
“My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible,” Belsky said. “There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Adobe plans to bring full version of Photoshop to the iPad next year
Epic Games is raking so much cash from Fortnite that it has decided to take a smaller slice of sales from creators in the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Instead of the previous 70 percent (developers) / 30 percent (Epic Games) split, Epic Games is reducing its cut to just 12 percent, effectively giving developers a raise to 88 percent.
It gets
Source: Hot Hardware – Good Guy Epic Games Gives Unreal Engine Asset Creators Huge Pay Raise After Fortnite Breakthrough
As user growth slows in developed markets, Silicon Valley companies are increasingly looking at developing markets such as India for new customers. The playbook of many of these companies is similar: make services work on low-cost devices that are increasingly popular among new users in these nations. Facebook, Microsoft, Uber, Twitter, Google, and Amazon have all released “lite” apps (they usually have fewer features, but are comparatively less resource intensive) for these markets, with some also offering their services as progressive web app (that mimic app-esque behavior on a website, but don’t require installation of any special app for access). But how do these apps fare on the low-cost devices? And what is it like to live on a low-cost smartphone? A reporter ditched his iPhone for a $60 Android handset to find out: The phone is, well, basic. It comes with a slow-as-molasses processor, so little memory that I kept having to remove and reinstall apps to keep the thing running, a camera that would have been at home on the first iPhone, a two-year-old version of Android, about a dozen pre-installed Google apps that take up hundreds of megabytes, and a single, measly gigabyte of usable storage. Imagine your favorite Android phone, except with a waaay crappier screen, cameras, storage, and battery to get an idea. What I bumped into immediately after turning on the Bharat 2 for the first time was the lack of storage, and this limitation entirely defined what I used my phone for. I had to start off by uninstalling the pre-installed bloatware before I actually installed any apps, because the first thing I got after switching on the phone was a low storage notification. Slack went out the window because it was too bloated; Outlook, my email app of choice, was too big to install; and pretty much everything else — banking apps, shopping apps, games, and more — was a luxury I’d live without. Even Google Maps Go, a lightweight browser version of Google Maps that the company said is “designed to run quickly and smoothly on devices with limited memory,” was crippled, allowing me to look up a location only to prompt me to download the full version of Google Maps when I asked for turn-by-turn directions. So I boiled down to the essentials: staying in touch with people, catching up on news, ordering cabs, and watching videos (which went shockingly well, and supports the huge popularity of video here), pretty much the same as the Next Billion. Further reading: Shitphone: A Love Story (2015).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – On Silicon Valley Companies’ Bet On Boosting Their Userbases in Developing Markets With Dirt-Cheap Phones and Lite Apps
Ron Amadeo
As someone who spends a lot of time with smartphones, I often get asked, “Hey Ron, what Android phone should I buy?” The high-end answer is usually easy: buy a Pixel phone. But not everyone is willing to shell out $650+ for a smartphone, especially the types of casual users that ask for advice. Beyond the flagship smartphones, things get more difficult within the Android ecosystem. Motorola under Google used to be great at building a non-flagship phone, but since the company was sold to Lenovo (which gutted the update program), it has been tough to find a decent phone that isn’t super expensive.
Enter HMD’s Nokia phones, an entire lineup of cheap smartphones ranging from $100 to $400. HMD recently launched the second generation of its lineup, with phones like the Nokia 2.1, 3.1, and 5.1. We recently spent time with the highest end phone in this series that happens to be one of the few HMD devices for sale in the US: the Nokia 6.1. And for $269, you get a pretty spectacular-sounding package of a Snapdragon 630, a 5.5-inch 1080p screen, stock Android 8.1, fast updates, and a metal body.
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Source: Ars Technica – Nokia 6.1 Review—The best answer to “What Android phone should I buy?”
Being online has never been more embarrassing. People are renting 10 minutes of time on private jets for the ‘gram. The most innocuous and best-meaning of posts can spark outrage. You can’t talk to someone on a plane without it becoming a viral story that leads to harassment. The president tweets.
Source: LifeHacker – Why You Need an Anonymous Social Media Account
Supposing you’ve followed the PC’s steady downward spiral over the last few years, the following news might surprise you: Between April and June worldwide PC shipments marked a 1.4 percent increase compared to the same timeframe last year. Market ana…
Source: Engadget – Business and gaming boost PC shipments for the first time since 2012
Just the other day we were talking about military documents on the dark web selling for as little as $200 and today the talk is about hackers selling backdoors into PCs for just $10 on the dark web. This latest offer was discovered when researchers at McAfee Labs looked into the sale of remote desktop protocol access on the dark web. Apparently, there are tens of thousands of compromised systems listed there and you can buy access if you want. This is a pretty serious issue because you can do just about anything you want to the machine you gain access to. Most of those systems listed are running Windows 2008/2012 Server. Tighten up your security folks!
RDP access is a standard tool which allows one user to connect to and control another user’s computer over a network. The process is often used for support and administration, but in the wrong hands, RDP can be leveraged with devastating consequences…
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Hackers are Selling Backdoors Into PCs for Just
AMD has released a new version of their Adrenalin software version 18.7.1. This version claims to offer speed increases in Earthfall for Vega 56 and RX 580/560. It also fixes the black screen flickering issue when booting to desktop on a DisplayPort. You can grab the new software here. The full release notes are right here.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.7.1 Now Available
