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“URINE and faeces to you”, explains a dodgy sewer-manager in one of Reginald Hill’s crime novels, “is bread and butter to me.” And he is not the only one. The BioEnergy Team, led by Ioannis Ieropoulos of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) in Britain, are hoping to profit from working with the stuff too. They have developed a new technique to turn urine into electrical power—or “urine-tricity” as they call it. People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year. BRL, a collaboration between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of...

(Videos) When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object’s surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects—a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips—into visual microphones. We recover sounds from highspeed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound. We evaluate the quality...

A brief introduction to password hashing for the uninitiated -- and why you should never trust a site that emails your password back to you!

Apparently, the feebs have been using malware and the TOR network to snoop on quite a bit more information than one might have suspected. Use the following link here for more info: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation_torpedo/

This is a fun, quarterly chart based on company reports and data from Canaccord Genuity, a Canadian investment bank. It shows the relative share of each major smartphone maker based on their operating profits. Since just about every company other than Apple and Samsung is losing money, Canaccord analyst Michael Walkley says, "Apple and Samsung once again dominated handset industry operating profits and combined to capture a remarkable 108% of Q2/14 handset industry profits as other leading OEMs such as BlackBerry, Nokia/Microsoft, and Sony posted operating losses or near breakeven results.”

Here at EFF, we see a lot of stupid patents. There was the patent on “scan to email.” And the patent on “bilateral and multilateral decision making.” There are so many stupid patents that Mark Cuban endowed a chair at EFF dedicated to eliminating them. We wish we could catalog them all, but with tens of thousands of low-quality software patents issuing every year, we don’t have the time or resources to undertake that task. But in an effort to highlight the problem of stupid patents, we’re introducing a new blog series, Stupid Patent of the Month, featuring spectacularly dumb...

Synology network attached storage (NAS) devices, capable of storing terabytes of data, have been targeted by ransomware that encrypts victims’ files. Owners of Synology's NAS devices might want to unplug their storage boxes now to avoid being affected by ransomware that uses strong encryption to lock files on the brand’s machines and demands US$350 for the decryption key. The new attack on Synology kit comes within a year of Synology NAS devices being struck by fraudulent Bitcoin mining operators, with several owners on Sunday reporting that they had found a message from the “SynoLocker Automated Decryption Service” — when accessing...

The first email in Germany was sent 30 years ago on Friday and today 62 percent of people in Germany receive at least 20 emails a day. But rules over receiving and sending emails outside of work hours in Germany are still not clear-cut. A quarter of Germans get more than 50 emails a day, while a tenth receive more than 100 a day, according to a YouGov poll. The constant stream of emails makes it hard to switch off, but short of returning to your Nokia 3210 and cutting yourself off from all the benefits of a smartphone, what...

In the mid ‘90s the Marine Corps decided Doom II might make for an excellent training supplement. It did so for two reasons—a forward-thinking commandant and a budgetary shortfall. The Marines have always had to make due with little financial support compared to the other military branches. The USMC budget often lands somewhere around four percent of the Defense Department total. In 2010, that budget was about $40 billion. Back in the ’90s, it hovered around $10 billion. The Corps also needs to train all its troops with limited cash. Regardless of their specialization, every Marine is a trained rifleman.

(CNN) -- Four years after the last major conflict in the region, Israel and Hamas have once again been on the brink of war in Gaza, though an Egypt-brokered cease-fire appears to be holding, paving the way for peace talks in future. So what is the group, and what does it hope to achieve by its rocket attacks on Israeli targets? What is Hamas? Hamas is a militant fundamentalist Islamic organization operating in the West Bank and Gaza. The name Hamas is an acronym for "Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia," or Islamic Resistance Movement in English. The word "hamas" means zeal, or...

For some time now, there has been much talk about the Raspberry Pi revolutionising the teaching of computing in schools. Linux User & Developer has devoted much space and attention to the growing number of Jamborees and the increasing attention teachers are giving to the small, £25 bare-bones machine. It is, say advocates, the perfect way to introduce children to the world of computing, allowing them to see and actually interact with the innards of the machines they are using. It is, they add, a great platform for programming and for creating all manner of electronic wonders.But for former journalist...

a South San Francisco resident received a phone call from a man fraudulently posing as a Microsoft Windows employee and asking for personal information on Wednesday, according to police. The suspect, calling himself Mike Johnson, told the resident that her computer had been compromised by a hacker and that he needed access to her computer to conduct a diagnosis. The victim did not provide any personal information to the suspect, according to police. Microsoft said that they do not contact their customers over the phone, nor do they have any records of anyone from the company calling the victim. The...

In a surprise move, HP has granted OpenVMS a new lease on life, effectively reversing last year's decision to mothball the venerable server OS. HP hasn't changed its mind about its latest OpenVMS roadmap, which has it ending standard support for some versions of the OS next year and pulling the plug completely by 2020. Rather, it has granted an exclusive license to another company, VMS Software Inc. (VSI), to take over after its own support ends. That doesn't just mean providing hospice care for geriatric servers, either. VSI says it plans to produce new builds of OpenVMS for newer...

There are people who definitely are a bit too attached to their smartphone, but this determined German schoolboy is in another league entirely. A boy enjoying a fishing trip with a group of friends accidentally dropped his iPhone over the side of the boat – so he decided to drain the entire pond. The 16-year-old took matters into his own hands after the angling club refused to let him use his diving suit to retrieve the device, sneaking back later that night armed with a powerful pump and two hoses. ‘I thought two pumps would drain enough of the water...

As a hardcore baseball guy, I often wonder why people needlessly waste their time on all those other, lesser sports. But I suppose everyone has a right to their insane opinions. In any case, football fans may want to keep an eye on this development: The NFL announced this week that it will be using RFID tracking chips on players during select games in the 2014 season. The high-tech chips — RFID stands for radio-frequency identification — will generate precise positioning data on each player on every play. Football Uniforms Throughout History For the initial rollout, the RFID system will...

It wasn't long ago that cloud storage companies such as Box and Dropbox were among the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, blessed with vast amounts of venture capital and poised to go public in blockbuster IPOs. But now, thanks to a price war launched by Google, Amazon and other tech giants, almost anyone with a laptop or tablet can get cloud storage for less than the price of a latte. That means Box and Dropbox, which sell software for businesses and consumers to store and use files on the Internet rather than a machine, are confronting a precarious future: They...

After months of getting prompts to update my Adobe Flash player I finally did so a few days ago . Yesterday discovered that I can no longer listen to KSFO , WMAL or WABC online - won't download . Worked fine before updating . I'm using Internet Explorer . Is there some setting in AFP that I need to check or uncheck ? It's in Japanese so I'll need the wife to take care of this when she gets up . Thanks in advance !

The true measure of any great gaming platform is not the number of games available. Nor is it the need to have the same games as other competing platforms (the Playstation 4 doesn't need Mario games to be considered successful). And it really isn't even about how many total games are sold, though that certainly helps. The measure of a great gaming platform is if people want to use it to play games on... rather than another platform. At least on occasion. For example: The SEGA Genesis. That beautiful console sold substantially less than the Super Nintendo. But it was...

Curious if anyone else uses Lumosity. It is supposed to be a site that "trains your brain"... But my score keeps going up, not sure of that's good or not! BTW, my LPI is: 754

AN aspiring glamour model has defended her decision to sell tickets to the birth of her third child for a total of £30,000.Pregnant glamour model Josie Cunningham has sold tickets to the birth of her first childJosie Cunningham has sold tickets to the birth of her first child[ITV] Josie Cunningham, who hit the headlines when she had a £4,800 breast enlargement on the NHS to help her pursue her career, said that the sale of the tickets was better than claiming benefits. The mother-of-two yesterday revealed that she had sold four tickets to the birth – two priced at £5,000...