Latest News - Page 2878

Both consumers and business users face a tremendous amount of security threats, despite next-generation security solutions trying to keep PCs and mobile devices protected.

Malware is increasingly sophisticated and slipping by traditional anti-virus software, with software creators finding low risk and high reward for their behaviors.

"As often as not, malware gets into your systems become you invited it by clicking a link without thinking," said Bruce Campbell, VP of Marketing at Clare Computer Solutions, in a statement to TweakTown. "Take the dreaded CryptoLocker ransomware... most commonly, it was introduced as an attachment to an e-mail that said it was from UPS. The attachment looked like a PDF file and the e-mail said - Track Information, see attached."

A data breach suffered by the Archdiocese of Seattle is now being investigated by the FBI and IRS, as personal information stolen has reportedly been used for false tax returns, so criminals can take the refunds.

Students from the Seattle Bishop Blanchet High School were released early on Friday, with school administrators hoping to give faculty and volunteers the ability to go home and check their IRS and credit reports. Students at the O'Dea High School had Friday off so administrators could try to further evaluate the data breach.

The Archdiocese of Seattle has created an online portal for those concerned following the data breach. Also, they recommend calling the IRS Identity Protection Specialized Unit: 1-800-908-4490, ext. 245 to learn if tax identity theft has occurred.

Prison inmates doing life sentences might not be good enough in the future, with scientists from Oxford University exploring new controversial technologies that would see them extending human life, in a way.

Their research could see prison firms developing drugs that make time pass slowly, something that could make an inmate feel like they're living out consecutive life sentences - lasting up to 1000 years. Dr Rebecca Roache spoke with Aeon magazine, where she said: "Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying."

Dr Roache used the example of two parents murdering their own four-year-old son, saying that the 30-year sentence they received was "laughably inadequate." In her Practical Ethics blog, Dr Roache notes that the parents would receive a humane treatment, unlike their son. She wrote: "They will, for example, be fed and watered, housed in clean cells, allowed access to a toilet and washing facilities, allowed out of their cells for exercise and recreation."

President Vladimir Putin's government has reportedly banned four websites operated by Kremlin opponents and critics. Opponent Alexei Navalny had his website blocked for Russian Internet users, along with online newspaper Grani, an opposition information website, and a radio station website (despite it being state-operated).

The Russian government defended its actions by saying the websites helped organize "illegal" protests, according to reports in the region. Navalny is serving a two-month house arrest punishment because he violated five-year probation for an embezzlement-related charge.

Over the past two years, Putin has continually put the squeeze on media outlets located in his country - most recently, the editor of Lenta.ru, a major Russian independent news site, resigned due to increased pressure from Moscow.

Days before the Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco, Valve sent its latest Steam Controller prototype to WIRED. The new controller was meant to feature a touchscreen in the center, with four buttons around it, but the new one still doesn't feature a touchscreen.

Instead, it has morphed into more of a traditional console controller, with two diamond-shaped arrays of buttons. It looks (at least in the picture) a little more comfortable than the first Steam Controller, but I would've liked to have seen a touchscreen on the controller. The circular touchpads are still in play, which match both the precision and resolution of a mouse, giving gamers more precision than traditional controllers.

Intel-owned McAfee wants to keep mobile users more secure by offering its Antivirus & Security suite available to Apple iOS and Google Android users.

There are plenty of free software products available designed for smartphones and tablets, but paid versions provide a more complete suite. The McAfee Labs collected 2.47 million Android malware samples in 2013, with 744,000 in Q4 alone.

"With India placed on the tip of mobile device explosion, there is an overwhelming need of adoption of security and privacy protection in our digital lives," said Jagdish Mahapatra, McAfee Managing Director in India, in a statement. "With free access to our award-winning mobile security product, Indian consumers will be empowered to access all the benefits of this connected world and enjoy a safe mobile life."

SolidFire, the Boulder, Colorado based manufacturer of all-flash storage systems has announced Q2 2014 availability of Carbon, Version 6 of its Element OS. Included in this upcoming release is a whole new set of enterprise class features such as real-time replication and integrated backup & restore.

SolidFire is providing this upgrade for free to existing customers including all the new enhancements. The new features included are:

Popular retailer Target had multiple warnings that a credit and debit card breach was underway, but still didn't do enough to try and stop the problem.

A recent series of interviews with more than 10 former Target employees, and a handful of people familiar with the attack indicate the company was aware of a data breach underway - and the alert system worked - signaling malware was installed before being publicly disclosed.

"I don't think it is about not paying attention to the technologies as much as fine tuning for actionable, relevant information from the technology," said Joe Schumacher, Neohapsis security consultant, in a statement to SCMagazine. "Many security systems (e.g. Web application firewall, log monitoring, intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems, etc.) correlate large amounts of data into a single repository. Unfortunately, a lot of companies and professional services stop here."

At some point, I am sure that most of us have fantasized about being the stereotypical mad scientist who spends his days in a lab filled with chemical experiments and electricity arcing from one source to the other. While most of us will never make it to this point in our scientific endeavors, we can have a cool device that sends arcs of electricity shooting from one electrode to another, and have it play music at the same time.

A new Kickstarter campaign from ExcelPhysics is offering kits that let backers build their own speakers that emanate sound by using nothing but the plasma generated when electricity arcs from one electrode to another. "A plasma speaker plays music just like your normal speaker but it uses an arc of electrical plasma running at 30,000 volts," the company said on its Kickstarter page. "Most people aren't aware that plasma arcs can be modulated to generate sounds so your friends will be in for a surprise when you explain to them that the plasma arc IS the speaker! Your typical speaker uses an electromagnet to vibrate small drums, but a plasma speaker uses an electrical arc to ionize and compress the air around it to play music, all with no moving parts!"

The Plasma Speaker works by plugging in an audio source such as your smartphone, laptop, or radio. The audio input is converted into a pulse that causes an arc of high-votage electricity to jump from one electrode to another, and the audio is reproduced as sound waves emanating from the plasma. This is definitely one Kickstarter I am backing, and you should too. Head over to the source link below for more information.

Traditionally coins minted in the US have a very distinctive round and flat shape, but a new release from the US Mint has all but shattered that pattern. A new commemorative design will soon roll out that honors the National Baseball Hall of Fame's 75th birthday in the form of the country's first curved coin. The round coin takes the profile of a baseball and is featured in both gold and silver mintings.

The coins profile and design are loosely based on the curved shape of the International Year of Astronomy coins minted by France back in 2009, as well as Australia's Southern Cross coins. Designed by California Artist, Cassie McFarland, the coins feature a baseball on the front and a catchers mitt on the reverse. Her winning "Hand full of Gold" design was chosen from a pool of 178 entries and was based off of a baseball glove she used as a kid.

"Raised loving the native pastime, a glove assisted me not only as a tool, but helped foster communication between my family and peers," she wrote in her submission. "It is a fundamental symbol for teamwork and camaraderie." Up to 50,000 $5 gold coins, 400,000 $1 silver coins and 750,000 half-dollar coins will be minted, and will cost an extra $35, $10 and $5 each, which will go toward funding the Baseball Hall of Fame's non-profit operations.

Electronic education kits were one of the highlights of my youth, and I spent many hours attaching resistors, wires and other components together via those little shiny springs. Today with microcontroller boards such as the Arduino being as cheap as they are, educational electronic kits have taken on a whole new look, and ease of use. The Portable Dual Arduino Micro XPlorerBoard is one of those new easy to use educational electronic boards.

Featuring support for two Arduino Micro boards, the XPlorerBoard makes life easy by eliminating loose parts, and adding in very handy features such as a 3V and 5V logic level converter, on-board power supply, and a full compliment of analog and digital sensors. Since the XPlorerBoard was designed for education, the entire board is coated in an anti-static coating and all of the leads on the bottom are protected as well.

The entire board along with accessories fits neatly into a standard binder as well, making the board portable and easy to carry to class or your favorite MakerSpace. The XPlorerBoard is being offered through a KickStarter campaign right now and appears to be one of the best value educational development kits on the market at the moment. Best of all, the XPlorerBoard is a product of Savanna, Georgia, and not too far from my home town!

Educational robotics hold a special place in my heart, and over the last few years, I have designed several different models that I have used to teach both my self as well as others the theory behind embedded electronics for robots. All of my designs have been based on the Arduino development platform though, something many educational robotic kits default to. A new project on Kickstarter aims to continue trend and focuses its build around Arduino to offer an affordable educational robot.

The Pi-Bot has been engineered from the ground up, with several full redesigns throughout the process to make things more affordable, functional, and educational. It's makers have included students in the design process as well to ensure that the project is appealing and fun. The Pi-Bot gets its name from its Pi symbol shaped chassis, and not from the utilization of a Raspberry Pi like the name would have you believe. The educational kit is being offered through Kickstarter and is well on its way to reaching its funding goal now. Check out the source link below for more information.

One of the biggest events in college sports is the NCAA March Madness tournament that is played each year. This tournament has 67 games and a total of about 150 hours of live TV coverage before the winner is announced. If you are a fan of March Madness that has a Kindle Fire tablet, you will have a new way to enjoy the games this year.

The NCAA March Madness Live app has been around for platforms like Android and iOS for a while. The app lets the users watch live games wherever they are via a web connection. This year the app will be offered on another platform, the Amazon Kindle Fire. That means Kindle Fire owners with a cable subscription to a participating provider can watch games on the go.

Users do have to log into the app using the username and password from their cable or satellite provider. If you are wondering, the selection for the teams that will play in the tournament will start on March 16. The games start on March 18 and will continue until the winner is announced on April 5-7.

A few months back I reviewed what I consider to be one of the best development boards on the market today, the Beagle Bone Black. In that time I have grown to realize the true potential that is locked inside the Beagle Bone Black, and unlike the Raspberry Pi (another favorite of mine), the Beagle Bone Black has much more I/O to share even when connected to a massive LCD touch-screen.

Recently, Element14 unveiled one of the coolest "Capes" for the Beagle Bone series to date. Dubbed the Beagle Bone View, these new add-on LCD screens come in 4.3-inch and 7-inch sizes and feature a 4-wire resistive touch panel. The 4.3-inch model features an effective resolution of 480x272 pixels while the 7-inch version has a slightly higher resolution of 800x480 pixels. The boards are powered directly from the Beagle Bone Black or Beagle Bone with no external power connection needed to the screens.

The included "Cape" module features full access to all 92 GPIO pins and features five switches, two user defined LEDs and a flexible FPC Cable similar to the one used on the Raspberry Pi camera module. The length of the cable is limited, but is long enough to position either LCD in any project. The 4.3-inch and 7-inch BB View LCD Screen Cape's retail for $79 and $119 respectively from Newark.com / Element14.

It looks like we could expect Intel to surprise the world by releasing its Haswell-E processors at Computex in Taipei, in just a few months time. The chipmaker is preparing its new Core i7 Extreme CPU, as well as its X99 chipset.

Intel's Haswell-E processor will be the company's first desktop processor to feature eight cores, for a total of 16 threads. We should also expect 20MB of L3 cache, quad-channel DDR4 memory support, Turbo Boost 2 technology, an 40 integrated PCI Express 3.0 lanes. The new Haswell-E CPUs will be made on Intel's 22nm process.

The new Haswell-E processors will arrive as the 5000-series, compatible only with the X99 chipset and LGA2011-3 socket. The platform is being targeted toward enthusiasts, so we should see some exotic motherboards unveiled at Computex by the usual players: ASUS, GIGABYTE, ASRock and so forth. The new X99 chipset should deliver some great new features and technologies, too.

ASRock has announced that it has partnered up with Kloudian to unveil its own cloud storage service, ASRock Cloud. ASRock Cloud includes a three-year subscription to Orbweb.ME Professional, which is priced at $149.97.

This is a personal cloud storage service which is normally priced at $49.99 per year, as well as one-month upgrade to Orbweb.ME Ultimate, which gives consumers access to a Remote Desktop function. James Wei, the CEO of Kloudian, said: "It is very exciting to work with ASRock, one of the world's largest motherboard manufacturers. With the continued proliferation of mobile devices and the growing demand to 'stay connected', we are proud to provide a powerful and convenient solution to enable users the freedom of their portable device plus the power of their ASRock personal computer."

ASRock Cloud comes in both iOS and Android apps, or you can your web browser on your PC, where you can then remotely power on your PC, stream music, photos and video clips remotely through Orbweb.ME's file Xplorer, at anytime, anywhere. In order to jump in on this, you have to own an ASRock motherboard, and then visit this link for more info.

Lea Michele, who is best known for her role as Rachel Barry on the hit television series Glee, dished to Billboard magazine about her overwhelming desire to join the cast of American Horror Story. According to Lea Michele, she has literally begged Ryan Murphy, who is the creator, writer, director, and producer (talented fellow) of both Glee, and American Horror Story, to let her in on an upcoming season of American Horror Story. According to Lea Michele (via Billboard):

"I've basically talked to him about it every day. If I could get my fans to start working on that for me, that would be great. I've been literally begging him. But it would probably have to be for their season five, or something like that. I think it would be a great opportunity for people in the acting world to see."

What exactly could Lea Michele have to offer a dark, hellish, nuanced-gothic television show like American Horror Story? Well, by looking at her track record, quite a lot.

League of Legends professional gamer Cheon 'Promise' Min-Ki attempted suicide by jumping from a twelve story building after he revealed an eSports match-fixing and scam via Reddit. Currently, the South Korean based gamer is in a serious condition.

Promise was a part of an eSports team where he claimed that it was nothing more than a scam. The gamer confessed that he and his team mates were told that they will receive cash sponsorships and computers. But what he came to know later that the sponsors will only give them gaming gear in exchange for the rights to the team's brand name.

He added,"Our manager Noh had lied to us, and took out a loan to pay for our housing, living expenses, computers, and even our salaries. He was planning on placing illegal bets on eSports games and fixing them to win back the borrowed money and make a profit."

Razer updated its Blade series thin-for-a-gaming-laptop system with the newer GTX 800M series video card, and its 14" model using a QHD+ resolution.

To maintain a particular form-factor, design and maintaining aesthetics true to Razer's brand name, it goes without saying that the company will spend a lot of money on research and development. Its now known that Razer spent $380,000 for redesigning the standard USB port's colour.

Razer didn't do any changes to the USB as a hardware, but wished to replace the USB 3.0's blue plastic colour to a custom one that fitted with their brand's theme: black and acidic green.

Today, the Central Bank of Singapore announced that it will now regulate all virtual currency intermediaries that operate and do business within the country's borders. The country says that this move will address concerns over money laundering, and terrorism funding. Starting today, Bitcoin Exchanges, virtual currency ATM's and vending machines that accept Bitcoins or other virtual currencies will have to verify the identity of its customers and report all transactions that seem suspicious in nature.

This aligns Singapore with US efforts to bring regulation to the wild west that is cryptocurrency, but this regulation does not mean that there will be any form of safeguards extended to investors like their are in traditional investments made with analog money. This means that while regulators wish to control the currency, they do not wish to protect its investors against collapse, theft, or loss due to natural disasters.