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A Co. Tyrone teenager took his own life when private images of him were sent to his online friends as part of a blackmail plot. Seventeen-year old GAA player Ronan Hughes, from Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, was given 48 hours to send £3,000 ($4,700) to a fake Facebook account the Northern Irish police service (PSNI) later tracked down to Nigeria. Speaking to The Irish News, the teenager’s parents told of how Ronan had come to them three days before his death to tell them of the threat. Ronan became a victim of the blackmail threat when he posted images to a...

A typical computer chip includes millions of transistors connected with an extensive network of copper wires. Although chip wires are unimaginably short and thin compared to household wires both have one thing in common: in each case the copper is wrapped within a protective sheath. For years a material called tantalum nitride has formed protective layer in chip wires. Now Stanford-led experiments demonstrate that a different sheathing material, graphene, can help electrons scoot through tiny copper wires in chips more quickly. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a strong yet thin lattice. Stanford electrical engineer H.-S....

Executive SummaryWe live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network. While our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, the law hasn’t kept pace. To date, the U.S. Congress hasn’t managed to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act to acknowledge that email stored more than 6 months deserves identical protections to email stored...

We've got a secret the rental car companies would prefer you didn't know. people camping in RV More The Cheapest Way to Roadtrip Might Surprise You 3 Ways to Avoid Costly Rental Car Insurance These Are the Most Hated Fees in America This won’t come as news to commuters and frequent road trippers, but drivers are encountering more and more toll roads, as well as higher and higher tolls on the existing ones. The latest example is I-10 in Texas, where plans called for the maximum toll during peak travel hours to shoot from $7 to $10 as of May...

If your rocking a Samsung smartphone, you could be vulnerable to hackers, thanks to a preinstalled keyboard on your device.The vulnerability was discovered by Ryan Welton from mobile security specialists NowSecure. The issue is with the preinstalled Swift keyboard which looks for language pack updates over an unencrypted line. Welton found that a hacker could create a spoof proxy server and send a fake update to the device with malicious code. The hacker could then exploit the device by eavesdropping on incoming and outgoing messages or voice calls, access personal data such as pictures or text messages, tamper with apps,...

When lifeguards at a popular Southern California surfing spot decided to use a high-tech drone to keep swimmers safe from shark attacks, they got a chilling eyeful. The drone flies up about a 100 feet, looks down at a wide area and when they see shadows they can focus on them. In a matter of minutes the lifeguards can see just how many sharks may be lurking just yards from the shoreline. “This morning, we launched it and 10 minutes later, we knew there were 10 to 12 sharks in the Surfside [Beach] area,” said Chief Joe Bailey, a Seal...

The internet seems to love to hate on LeBron James – especially after losing in the NBA Finals. Not to rub salt into fresh wounds but some of these were just too good to pass up. Plus, they are all in good fun. Go Warriors. #DubNation

It’s become almost axiomatic that Apple AAPL -0.57% devices and the apps on them are more secure than the competition. But researchers continue to blow up that notion and today a group of academics have ripped apart the security protections in Mac OS X and iOS to show it’s not only possible to create malware and get it onto the App Store, but it’s also feasible to launch “devastating” attacks using rogue software to steal the most sensitive personal data around, from iCloud passwords and Evernote notes to dodgy selfies and more. The attacks, known as unauthorized cross-app resource access...

The Hague (AFP) June 16, 2015 A Dutch startup has unveiled plans to build the world's first 3D-printed bridge across an Amsterdam canal, a technique that could become standard on future construction sites. Using robotic printers "that can 'draw' steel structures in 3D, we will print a (pedestrian) bridge over water in the centre of Amsterdam," engineering startup company MX3D said in a statement, hoping to kick off the project by September. The plan involves robotic arm printers 'walking' across the canal as it slides along the bridge's edges, essentially printing its own support structure out of thin air as...

SEATTLE — Four senior Microsoft executives, including Stephen Elop and Mark Penn, will leave the technology company, in the biggest organizational shake-up yet under chief executive Satya Nadella. In an email sent to Microsoft employees on Wednesday morning, Mr. Nadella said three of the departures were related to his decision to organize the company’s engineering efforts into three groups. The three executives leaving as a result are Mr. Elop, the former chief executive of Nokia who has been leading Microsoft’s devices group; Eric Rudder, the leader of its advanced technology and education efforts; and Kirill Tatarinov, the head of its...

It appears as if much of the open source infrastructure we depend on is suffering from neglect. That’s the message brought to the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) by David Nally. Listening to his talk, “The Tragedy of Open Source,” it was hard not to think that some of our infrastructure projects are beginning to resemble some disintegrating municipal water and sewer systems, or maybe compare his examples with our crumbling roads and bridges. Nally is a South Carolina based “recovering sysadmin” who now wears many hats at Apache as well as being an employee at Citrix.The neglect he mentions has caused...

Ford should stop selling cars because they sell more trucks, paper argues In case you haven't heard, the Wall Street Journal has run an embarrassingly blinkered editorial called "Why Apple Should Kill Off the Mac" which is, on the face of it, nonsensical. We expect this sort of asinine fodder from the logic-averse scrawls of established nitwits like your Dvoraks, your Enderles -- but the Wall Street Journal was once a respected, legitimate newspaper (at least until Rupert Murdoch bought it).If it were the guy next to you in Starbucks, you might smile out of politeness -- but your attention...

I have been reporting on Apple for more than 20 years now, and in all that time no product has had such an impact on my life as this little piece of hardware and software. I don’t say that for dramatic effect, it has had a profound effect on the way I live. As you will read later, this is the most personal review I have ever written.However, before we get there, I need to address a few other items, so let’s get started.I picked up my Apple Watch from Apple the day before they went on sale to the...

TechRax asks, “What better way to put the 38mm 18k yellow gold Apple Watch Edition to use then to crush it with 2 powerful neodymium magnets equaling to 650 pounds of force?” So, in a followup to his unboxing video, TechRax has posted “$10,000 Gold Apple Watch Edition Crushed By Magnets” to his YouTube Channel.Check out how the Apple Watch Edition does versus two powerful neodymium magnets:Direct link to video here. MacDailyNews Take: Smashingly effective is showing just how hardy Apple Watch Edition is – it still chimes upon connection to the charger!The 18-karat gold developed for Apple Watch Edition...

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it has detected an intrusion into its own systems, and you'll never believe who the company thinks is behind it. CEO Eugene Kaspersky claims a nation-state hacked into his company's network in order to steal information about its technologies. The unidentified hackers exploited security flaws in Microsoft Software Installer files to infect Kaspersky's network with malware. Kaspersky is referring to the malware as "Duqu 2.0", because it appears to be tied to the same cybercriminals that used Duqu malware to attack Iran, India, France and Ukraine a few years ago. Back then, the hackers...

A recent study by real-estate brokerage Redfin showed that more people are looking to move out of the Bay Area than ever before. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said that tech workers and their high salaries could be responsible for making Silicon Valley unaffordable. A new Redfin study demonstrates a correlation between rising home prices and hiring by big tech companies.They found that, as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have ramped up their hiring in various cities in the past year, the cost of homes in those cities has also gone up. "For every 1% increase in technology workers, there’s a...

The super-sophisticated malware that infiltrated Kaspersky Labs is more crafty than first imagined. We're told that the Duqu 2.0 software nasty was signed using legit digital certificates issued to Foxconn – a world-leading Chinese electronics manufacturer, whose customers include Microsoft, Dell, Google, BlackBerry, Amazon, Apple, and Sony. The code-signing was uncovered by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, who are studying their Duqu 2.0 infection. Windows trusts Foxconn-signed code because the Chinese goliath's certificate was issued by VeriSign, which is a trusted certificate root. Thus, the operating system will happily load and run the Foxconn-signed Duqu 2.0's 64-bit kernel-level driver without setting...

A police force has defended scanning the faces of 90,000 festival-goers this weekend and checking them against a list of wanted criminals across Europe. Leicestershire Police, which used facial recognition technology on revellers at Download, said it had now destroyed the information it gathered. It was believed to be the first time the software had been used at an outdoor event in the UK... ...A cashless payment system was put in place for the first time in a bid to cut crime. Thousands of revellers braved the rain at Download, held at Donington Park, to see headliners Slipknot, Muse and...

Yes, Doom is back. And now we know a lot more about what kind of Doom it’s going to be. If you’re a fanatic for one of the most groundbreaking first-person shooter franchises in gaming history, you’re going to be salivating. Bethesda Softworks showed off a preview tonight of its latest Doom game in front of a crowd of fans and press in advance of the Electronic Entertainment Expo game trade show in Los Angeles. The first demo showed an entire level of fine work with a shotgun, fist, machine gun, and chainsaw. The crowd reacted with cheers with every...

A £30,000 scheme to teach schoolchildren how to use Wikipedia has been condemned as a waste of taxpayers’ money. An IT expert is being paid the sum by a council to visit schools and show pupils aged 13 and 14 how to “critically engage” with the online encyclopedia. The children will be taught how to search for entries and look for mistakes and bias in articles. The scheme is set to begin at secondary schools in Leicester later this year. Council leaders say searching for information online and evaluating its reliability is “an essential skill for all citizens”. But Chris...