The post Knee Deep in PLA: Our 2015 3D Fabrication Shootout Kicks Off appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Friday, July 31
Knee Deep in PLA: Our 2015 3D Fabrication Shootout Kicks Off
Mozilla Blasts Microsoft CEO For Replacing User Defaults With Windows Apps
Looks like Microsoft's Windows 10 debut is a hit: The new version of the operating system, which launched Wednesday, now powers more than 14 million devices, the company says.But not everyone is thrilled with the new software. In an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Mozilla CEO Chris ...
NSA report shows China hacked 600+ US targets over 5 years
NBC has released a 2014 slide from a secret NSA Threat Operations Center (NTOC) briefing—a map that shows the locations of "every single successful computer intrusion" by Chinese state-sponsored hackers over a five-year period. More than 600 US businesses and institutions were breached during that period.
The slide was provided to NBC by an unnamed "intelligence source," who said the briefing "highlighted China's interest in Google and defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and in air traffic control systems... [and] catalogued the documents and data Chinese government hackers have exfiltrated," the network reported.
The report suggests that the NSA has been tracking Chinese cyber-attacks for years and that its own network surveillance of China gives the agency the ability to correlate those attacks with specific sources. The briefing shown to NBC listed locations for the sources of each of the "exploitations and attacks," NBC reported.
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Windows 10’s weirdly disjointed music, video, and store apps
Windows 8 was the first Windows to include a Store, along with a pair of new apps: Music and Video. While those apps had some nice features, they were both designed for the hard sell, better suited to being storefronts than media players.
Windows 8.1 shook up the store and included brand new Music and Video apps. Store features weren't gone, but they were no longer the priority.
Windows 10 shakes up the store again. The Music and Video apps have shed the Xbox branding that they used in Windows 8 and are now "Groove Music" and "Movies and TV." If we thought the effort to sell was a little too overwhelming in the Windows 8 apps, the Windows 10 ones swing too far in the other direction.
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Report: Russian agency launches probe against same-sex kiss, family emoji
After giving the world's gay community quite possibly its most iconic studly-man image in decades, the Russian government has since gone on a legislative and regulatory tear against all things gay. This week, the controversial "gay propaganda" bill that President Vladimir Putin signed into law in 2013 was linked to an apparent effort by a Russian agency to discover pro-gay communications on social networks, especially those that include emoji and emoticons with same-sex kisses and family images with two dads or two moms.
The Russian-newspaper story was reported in the United States by Vocativ on Wednesday. It explained that the country's Roskomnadzor media-watchdog agency reached out to a pro-government youth activism group, known as Young Guard of United Russia, and asked its members to essentially snitch on anybody whose social media posts broke the country's Article 6.13.1 law, which forbids, among other things, "propaganda of homosexuality among minors."
According to the original Russian report, the uncovered letter sent to this activism group by Roskomnadzor Deputy Head Konstantin Vladimirovich Marchenko contained specific guidances about emoji on Facebook, along with his concerns that "most" social media users are minors—even though a cursory glance at not-so-concrete surveys reveals that most Russian social media users are not minors and are therefore not under the purview of the law in question. We, like Vocativ, also wonder whether Marchenko's request made any mention of the eggplant emoji in this regard.
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We’re hiring! Are you a grade-A gadget lover and tech reviewer in NYC?
Friends! Arsians! Lend me your ears—and your resumes because we are a-hiring!
Ars is looking to hire on a tech reviewer and gadgetologist to join our butt-kicking gadget review team. Perks of the job include being able to argue about Android in-person with Ron Amadeo, hear wisdom from Andrew Cunningham's Reviews Cat, touch Peter Bright's glorious beard, and maybe even down some Soylent shots with me in a well-ventilated location. We need someone who's sharp, tech-savvy, personable, and who doesn't mind appearing on camera, since you're going to see a lot more video on Ars in the near future.
There are two catches: first, this is not an entry-level job. We need someone who's been in the reviewing game before, at least a bit, and we need to see some writing samples. Second: you have to be in the New York City area, no exceptions.
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Researchers craft atom-thick version of a junction used in transistors
The discovery that it was possible to isolate graphene, a single-atom thick sheet of carbon, has opened the door to the development of a variety of atomically thin materials, many with distinctive properties. But developing devices using these 2D materials is challenging. A lot of the traditional techniques for manipulating their behavior either don't work or require that the 2D material be linked to bulkier, three-dimensional hardware.
Now, some researchers may have taken a tiny step toward developing a device that's entirely one atom thick. They've managed to create a key electrical junction, used in devices like diodes and transistors, from two different 2D materials. The border between these materials is atomically sharp, and the sheets themselves are only a few hundred picometers deep.
The device in question is called a p-n junction. It's formed at the boundary between (wait for it) p-type semiconductors and n-type semiconductors. The p-type tends to have "holes" that are missing an electron, while the n-type is characterized by an excess of electrons. Normally, these are formed by "doping," or adding small numbers of other atoms to a crystal of silicon. They're key components of diodes, transistors, LEDs, and photovoltaic cells, so being able to produce them is critical to pretty much all of modern electronics.
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Hacklet 68 – Rocket Projects
There’s just something amazing about counting down and watching a rocket lift off the pad, soaring high into the sky. The excitement is multiplied when the rocket is one you built yourself. Amateur rocketry has been inspiring hackers and engineers for centuries. In the USA, modern amateur rocketry gained popularity after Sputnik-1, continuing on through the space race. Much of this history captured in the book Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam, which is well worth a read. This week’s Hacklet is dedicated to some of the best rocketry projects on Hackaday.io!
If you want more rocketry goodness, check out our brand new rocket project list! Rocket projects move fast, if I missed yours as it streaked by, don’t hesitate to drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet, As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!
Filed under: Hackaday Columns
Free Tickets to Maker Faire New York: Join the Street Team
The post Free Tickets to Maker Faire New York: Join the Street Team appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Facebook: Our drones will use lasers to deliver 10Gbps Internet access
Facebook has made significant progress in a project to build solar-powered drones that can deliver Internet connectivity using lasers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday.
"I'm excited to announce we’ve completed construction of our first full scale aircraft, Aquila, as part of our Internet.org effort," Zuckerberg wrote. "Aquila is a solar powered unmanned plane that beams down Internet connectivity from the sky. It has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, but weighs less than a car and can stay in the air for months at a time. We've also made a breakthrough in laser communications technology. We've successfully tested a new laser that can transmit data at 10 gigabits per second. That's ten times faster than any previous system, and it can accurately connect with a point the size of a dime from more than 10 miles away."Obviously, that 10Gbps would be shared among multiple users, but it could connect a lot of people to the Internet.
Facebook's Internet.org project aims to bring Internet service to parts of the world where people have little or no access. Today, Facebook is working with mobile operators to provide free access to parts of the Web on low-end phones. But that won't be enough, Zuckerberg wrote.
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Warrantless mobile phone location tracking heads to Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court is being asked to resolve once and for all whether the authorities need a court warrant under the Fourth Amendment to obtain a suspect's cell-site location data records.
The case the justices were asked to review Friday concerns a Florida man who got a life term for several robberies in a 2012 case built with his mobile phone's location data the police obtained without a warrant.
The case has big privacy implications for anybody who carries a mobile phone. According to the government, that device may be tracked at will without the Fourth Amendment's probable cause standard being met.
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Don’t Be a Drone Jerk
The post Don’t Be a Drone Jerk appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Appeals court: Actually, Newegg did win that case
Newegg is famous for fighting patent trolls, and the company is currently trying to win fees from several cases where it has won or the troll has given up.
In one of those cases, Newegg fought a non-practicing entity called Pragmatus Telecom, which dropped its case against Newegg before discovery was complete. Newegg asked for attorneys fees but was rejected by the Delaware district court, which found that Newegg wasn't the "prevailing party"—in other words, it hadn't really won the case at all, so it couldn't be granted fees.
Today the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned (PDF) that order, meaning Newegg will get a second shot at collecting fees. While the order is nonprecedential, the chance of defendants being awarded fees is changing the economics of the patent-trolling business.
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New attack on Tor can deanonymize hidden services with surprising accuracy
Computer scientists have devised an attack on the Tor privacy network that in certain cases allows them to deanonymize hidden service websites with 88 percent accuracy.
Such hidden services allow people to host websites without end users or anyone else knowing the true IP address of the service. The deanonymization requires the adversary to control the Tor entry point for the computer hosting the hidden service. It also requires the attacker to have previously collected unique network characteristics that can serve as a fingerprint for that particular service. Tor officials say the requirements reduce the effectiveness of the attack. Still, the new research underscores the limits to anonymity on Tor, which journalists, activists, and criminals alike rely on to evade online surveillance and monitoring.
"Our goal is to show that it is possible for a local passive adversary to deanonymize users with hidden service activities without the need to perform end-to-end traffic analysis," the researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Qatar Computing Research Institute wrote in a research paper. "We assume that the attacker is able to monitor the traffic between the user and the Tor network. The attacker’s goal is to identify that a user is either operating or connected to a hidden service. In addition, the attacker then aims to identify the hidden service associated with the user."
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