September 2017 – Page 97 – news.buyenne.com

Universal Flash Storage: UFS 3.0 schafft 2,4 GByte pro Sekunde

Künftige Smartphones setzen auf Universal Flash Storage in der Version 3.0 mit verdoppelter Geschwindigkeit. Der UFS-Standard schafft 2,4 GByte pro Sekunde. Hersteller wie Phison arbeiten bereits an Controllern für den Flash-Speicher. (UFS-Standard, Smartphone)

Indiegames-Rundschau: Cyberpunk, Knetmännchen und Kampfsportkünstler

Von großen und kleinen Indies, Horror und Couchduellen: Golem.de präsentiert die spannendsten Indiegames der vergangenen Wochen. Von Rainer Sigl (Indiegames, Games)

In Irma prep, GasBuddy downloads increased 10x, nuclear reactors stayed online

As the hurricane hits, fuel and power are in short supply.

Before Hurricane Irma made landfall in Key West, FL on Sunday morning, Floridians hustled to make final preparations in case the storm severed the critical transportation, communication, and power lines that keep modern life humming. That sent much of the state driving to gas stations to top off tanks in the event an escape was required. But many stations couldn’t meet the sudden demand, so fuel shortages and miles-long lines fast became a reality.

Enter GasBuddy, an app that crowd-sources gas prices for bargain hunters. The app helped locals search for well-stocked gas stations in the days leading up to Irma, earning an endorsement from Florida Governor Rick Scott last week. On Thursday it was downloaded 350,000 times, up from the app’s usual 30,000 installations, according to the Wall Street Journal.

GasBuddy even sent two of its gas analysts to Florida’s state capitol to help lawmakers there figure out where to direct relief gas supplies. The company, which was founded in 2000, has previous experience disseminating information during crises like superstorm Sandy in 2012, and recently Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

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Demonoid Hopes to Return to Its Former Glory

The semi-private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid returned from the ashes earlier this year and is slowly rebuilding its community. The site’s founder, who’s back in charge once again, is working on a new and improved version of the site and hopes Demonoid will one day return to its former glory.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Demonoid has been around for well over a decade but the site is not really known for having a stable presence.

Quite the opposite, the torrent tracker has a ‘habit’ of going offline for weeks or even months on end, only to reappear as if nothing ever happened.

Earlier this year the site made another one if its trademark comebacks and it has been sailing relatively smoothly since then. Interestingly, the site is once again under the wings of a familiar face, its original founder Deimos.

Deimos decided to take the lead again after some internal struggles. “I gave control to the wrong guys while the problems started, but it’s time to control stuff again,” Deimos told us earlier.

Since the return a few months back, the site’s main focus has been on rebuilding the community and improving the site. Some may have already noticed the new logo, but more changes are coming, both on the front and backend.

“The backend development is going a bit slow, it’s a big change that will allow the server to run off a bunch of small servers all over the world,” Deimos informs TorrentFreak.

“For the frontend, we’re working on new features including a karma system, integrated forums, buddy list, etc. That part is faster to build once you have everything in the back working,” he adds.

Demonoid’s new logo

Deimos has been on and off the site a few times, but he and a few others most recently returned to get it back on track and increase its popularity. While the site has around eight million registered users, many of these have moved elsewhere in recent years.

“I want to to see the community we had back. Don’t know if it’s possible but that’s my aim,” Deimos says, admitting that he may not stay on forever.

Many torrent sites have come and gone in recent years, but they are still here today. Looking back, Demonoid has come a long way. What many people don’t know, is that it was originally a place to share demo tapes of metal bands. Hence the name DEMOnoid.

“It originally started as a modified PHP based forum that allowed posting of .torrent files. At some point, we started using a full torrent indexing script written in PHP that included a tracker, and started building the first version of the indexing site it is today,” Deimos says.

The site required users to have an invite to sign up, making it a semi-private tracker. This wasn’t done to encourage people to maintain a certain ratio, as some other trackers do, but mostly to keep unsavory characters away.

“The invitation system was implemented to keep spammers, trolls and the like out,” Deimos says. “Originally it was due to some very problematic people who happened to have a death metal band, back in the DEMOnoid days.

“We try to keep it open as often as possible but when we start to get these kinds of issues, we close it,” he adds.

In recent years, the site has had quite a few setbacks, but Deimos doesn’t want to dwell on these in public. Instead, he prefers to focus on the future. While torrent sites are no longer at the center of media distribution, there will always be a place for dedicated sharing communities.

Whether Demonoid will ever return to its former glory is a big unknown for now, but Deimos is sure to do his best.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”

Librarians would have “rebutted it in a heartbeat,” says medieval scholar.

Last week, a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs published a long article in the Times Literary Supplement about how he'd cracked the code on the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.

As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media (we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations."

The weirdly-illustrated 15^th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. In his article, Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point.

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Look back at PAX West 2017 with our photo scavenger hunt

If you find them all, you win the highly coveted “nothing.”

Sam Machkovech

We've been so busy sorting through all the pictures we took at last weekend's PAX West expo (and fighting off the remnants of some virulent PAX pox) that we haven't gotten around to posting our favorite images from the show until now. As you scroll through our gallery, see if you can find:

An unreleased console that is already worth many times it retail value on the secondary market.
A console originally released in 1977.
A DJ Hero controller.
A street sign named after a minor Super NES character.
A hand-written sign that's signed "You're welcome."
A typed piece of paper signed "Dr. Exoskeleton."
A sign that promises a "Baked Ham Dinner."
A "Sheikah Slate" Nintendo Switch case.
A game box with a tongue.
A stuffed pig.
A Blastoise.

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The dye whisperer: Meet the chemist giving biologists worldwide new colors

They’re brighter, more stable, a little less clunky, and, for now, a steal.

You can never have enough photons.

Biologists, they always want more, says Luke Lavis, a dye chemist with Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And, he lets slip under a smile, they’re “super picky.”

Still, biologists appreciate his work. While Lavis’ fellow chemists might be inclined to see his latest series of molecular dyes as “incremental” advances, biologists are jumping at the chance to use them, he says. A dye ever-so-slightly brighter can make the difference between seeing a single protein’s true wiggly movements within a cell—illuminating hidden details of our basic biology—and seeing a useless, fluorescent blur.

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Amazon Fire tablets on sale for $35 and up this week (Prime exclusive)

Have an Amazon Prime membership, and need a cheap tablet? Amazon’s offering Fire tablets for as little as $35 today, but only to Amazon Prime subscribers. New members can always sign up for a 30-day free trial for Amazon Prime to score the discount though. Fire tablets might be most useful to Prime members, thanks […]

Amazon Fire tablets on sale for $35 and up this week (Prime exclusive) is a post from: Liliputing

Firefox 57 ditches the search bar (but you can re-enabled it)

Once upon a time most web browsers had separate text fields for search and web addresses. But these days most take their cue from Google Chrome and feature a single text box that you can use to search the web or enter a URL, among other things. Firefox has long been a holdout. But starting […]

Firefox 57 ditches the search bar (but you can re-enabled it) is a post from: Liliputing

Tink Tabs Handy T1 im Hands on: Das bessere Hotelsmartphone ist sicherer und schneller

Mit dem Tink Labs T1 sollen Hotelgäste weltweit ein Smartphone mit Internetzugang und Appnutzung erhalten. Wir haben uns das Gerät angeschaut und finden es deutlich besser als den Vorgänger, der gravierende Sicherheitsprobleme aufweist. Ein Hands on von Hauke Gierow (Handy, VoIP)