be quiet! Pure Rock Review
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AT&T Plans To Compete With Google Fiber in Kansas City
AT&T is gearing up for a battle with Google Fiber in Kansas City as it has now brought its own GigaPower fiber-to-the-home service to the area. AT&T is offering the service at the same price as Google Fiber, but will charge an additional $29 for users that opt out of the "Internet Preferences" program. The same deal was offered in Austin in 2013 and tracks "the webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter... AT&T Internet Preferences works independently of your browser's privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track, and private browsing. If you opt-in to AT&T Internet Preferences, AT&T will still be able to collect and use your Web browsing information independent of those settings." AT&T uses the information gathered to better target ads to customers. Users that opt-in will have a price of $70 per month with the option to add a TV bundle with HBO for $120 month and voice service for $150 per month.
Source: Ars Technica
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Chromecast Support is Coming to VLC Media Player
VLC media player, a free and open source program which plays virtually every media file available, is coming to Google’s Chromecast. According to a recently posted changelog for VLC 3.0, the next major version of the cross-platform multimedia player, support for Chromecast is just one of new features that will be included. With Chromecast support, users of VLC will be able to stream content from a variety of sources, including computer, tablets, and smartphones, as the media player by VideoLan is compatible with nearly every operating system. While other media players have recently introduced Chromecast support, VLC is unique in that it boasts a large user base that is likely to benefit from the added support for Chromecast.
Source: Pocket-lint
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Terraria: Underworld Announced
Terraria is a very popular 2D sandbox game where players are tasked with exploring randomly generated worlds. When the creator of the game abruptly stopped development on it, some were nervous about the news until it was announced that he was working on Terraria 2. It has now been announced by co-creators Re-Logic and Engine Software that the next game in the series will officially be entitled Terraria: Otherworld. While not a direct sequel to the first game, it will be set "in an alternate dimension within the Terraria universe." The Re-Logic team described the game in more detail stating, "Terraria: Otherworld places the player in a life-and-death struggle to restore a once-pristine world – now overrun by a malevolent force that has corrupted nature itself – to its original splendor. Along with a rag-tag band of survivors, will you be able to successfully harness the power of an array of weaponry, magic, defenses, and even the world itself to thwart the designs of this unseen evil?" The game will be on display at GDC next month where more details about it will be revealed.
Source: Game Watcher
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Equation Group Spying Software Found on Hard Drives Across the World
A research team has announced some rather interesting findings that show a sophisticated spy software has been installed on hard drives across the world. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow, Russia, released their findings that show "the most advanced threat actor" they've ever seen embedded in the hard drives of personal computers. The spying software, dubbed Equation Group, is linked to the National Security Agency and has been found in hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi, and more. The infected hard drives are most prevalent in Iran, but also show up in Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, and 21 other countries.
Equation Group is supposedly in computers of government and military installations, telecoms, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists. While the software is simply linked to the NSA and not actively tied to it, Kaspersky says it is similar to Stuxnet, which was used to attack Iran's uranium enrichment facility in 2007. The new software can monitor activities on computers, even ones disconnected from the Internet, and even take full control of high-profile targets. The hard drive can even be reprogrammed by the software to become a slave, which is something Kaspersky has not seen before.
Kaspersky Lab will release more information about Equation Group in the near future, with something that may even directly tie the software to the NSA.
Source: Ars Technica and CommonDreams
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Working with New 2D Materials
Two dimensional materials have been of great interest for years now, as they can possess some very unusual and useful properties. Graphene is a prime example of this, with it tremendous strength, conductivity, and flexibility, and so is germanane, an atom-thick sheet of germanium. Germanane was first made a couple years ago at Ohio State University, and since then the researchers have been tinkering with it and making some interesting discoveries.
There is a little irony to the work with germanane for potential use in future computers, as germanium was used to make transistors before silicon, the current standard. The researchers are trying to keep the work within what is possible with silicon fabrication methods though. Part of their work has been focused on manipulating germanane's optical properties. It already transmits electron some 10 times faster than silicon and is better at absorbing light, but by tuning germanane's electron structure, it may be able to interact with a significantly wider portion of the spectrum than currently possible. This could lead to improved LEDs, lasers, solar cells, and more.
The researchers have also been investigating a 2D tin material by making germanane samples that contain 9% tin atoms. It has been theoretically predicted that a 2D tin material would be a topological insulator and capable of transmitting electrons with 100% efficiency, at room temperature. The predictions also state that only certain bonds would form on the material's top and bottom, which the researchers observed with the germanane samples.
Source: Ohio State University
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Pure Speculation Fuels Rumor of Apple Buying Tesla Motors
Over the weekend an article came out speculating that Apple could buy Tesla Motors for a staggering $75 billion. This article isn't a rumor of something that will happen, but rather just speculation on something the author says may happen sometime in the next 18 months because of Apple's interest in making an electric car. Making a car is no small task, and even for a company as high-profile as Apple, will take years before anything comes to fruition. Tesla Motors only sold 33,000 cars last year, while other car manufacturers sell ten times that in just a single month.
Electric cars are certainly the future, but need to mature and become more readily available until then. The batteries alone need to mature, as they're heavy, expensive, and not all that great for the environment to create. Tesla CEO Elon Musk does want to create batteries to power people's homes for up to a week and build low-cost batteries in a Gigafactory, but those are a ways off. The battery packs for a house may end up costing more than the house itself, even.
There are plenty of other car manufacturers out there with electric cars either available or planned, or even with hybrid models that can run solely on electric for a time. Tesla is not the only electric car manufacturer, so it has plenty of competition to set its cars apart. Could Apple help with that? Sure, it could, if it wants to grossly overpay to get there (Tesla is worth $25 billion) and risk cutting its profit margins down from the 30% range to the 5-10% range. In fact, Tesla finally managed to turn a profit just last year, when before it always lost money.
So, if Apple wants to buy Tesla Motors, nothing will stop it if it wants to. Apple is considering an electric car and buying Tesla would help out that strategy, but the risk may not outplay the reward. Right now everything concerning Apple and Tesla is just speculation. A partnership between the two would make more sense than outright purchase.
Sources: Calacanis, Brunozzi, GPS Business News, and Forbes
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Telescopic Contacts and Wink-to-Zoom Glasses
Vision is a very important sense and many people would say they cannot live without it, so naturally many technologies have been developed to correct imperfect vision. Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in older adults, so it has gotten some special attention. Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne recently demonstrated telescopic contact lenses and smart glasses for fighting the condition.
The contact lenses utilize a thin reflective telescope made of plastics, aluminum mirrors, polarizing thin films, and biologically safe glues to hold it all together. When light enters the lenses, it is bounced around by the mirrors, to expand the image resulting in a 2.8 times magnification. To keep the lenses safe to use, the researchers have incorporated 0.1 mm wide air channels in them, to allow oxygen to reach the eye.
The glasses work with the contact lenses to select whether you see a normal or magnified image. When you wish to see normal vision, the glasses allow through light of with the polarization matching the lenses' 1x aperture, while a different polarization matches the 2.8x aperture. The glasses have a light source and detector in order to distinguish winks from blinks, because it is winking one eye or the other that switches between the magnifications.
Source: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne via EurekAlert!
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