news.buyenne.com

(credit: Philips)

Comparing the potential benefits of one fitness device to another can be difficult when the market is so saturated, and companies work hard to stand out from the competition. For Philips, that means medical devices instead of fitness devices. The new suite of health devices that Philips launched today, including the Philips Health Watch, targets people who have or risk developing chronic conditions such as hypertension. In addition to the watch, Philips has a smart scale, a thermometer, and two blood pressure monitors as part of its family of medical-grade consumer devices.

With its simple black frame and Gorilla Glass-covered display, the Philips Health Watch isn't trying to be flashy or make a fashion statement. The watchface itself isn't a touchscreen, but the bezel around it is, so you swipe and tap on the circumference of the watch to change the display. A bunch of quick views shows you stats like steps, calories burned, active time, and so forth, and tapping the top lets you access a detailed menu full of in-depth stats. You can even input what foods you've eaten directly into the watch, which means you don't have to log every meal and snack through your phone.

Inside the $250 watch is a Philips-developed continuous optical heart rate monitor, as well as an accelerometer. In addition to basic metrics like steps, calories, and heart rate, this sensor also tracks resting heart rate, resting respiration rate, active time, sedentary time, and sleep. Even though the Health Watch is not a fitness device, it can automatically track running, walking, and biking so you don't have to manually start tracking those exercises. The watch's heart rate monitor is smart enough to know when your heart rate is consistently high, so it will register when you're doing other kinds of workouts as well.

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers for Stranger Things' first season.

New Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things wastes no time transporting viewers to a time, place, and feeling. There are vinyl records and cassette tapes, endless freedom via fixed gear bikes, and AV Club devotees with ham radios and walkie-talkies. The first episode even uses an epic, demogorgon-loaded Dungeons & Dragons campaign as both a delightful pop-culture reference and as an obvious call-out to some expected character tropes from the '80s.

Our four kid heroes represent well-established kid-movie roles: the quiet one (Will), the cynic (Lucas), the optimist (Mike), and the realist (Duncan). They have awkward, older siblings at opposite ends of the popularity spectrum, and they interact with adults we already kind of know at first blush—a flawed but capable sheriff, a stressed but determined single mom, a sage-like science teacher. Add allusions to Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and a bevy of other era-appropriate pop culture entities, and you'd be forgiven for thinking you know how this "set in 1983" series will play out.

After all, this is a story that could happen (and has happened) in any era. A kid has gone missing, some dark forces seem to be at play, and it'll take a village (or at least a team of adults, our D&D nerds, and their siblings) to figure everything out. But what makes Stranger Things stand out after its eight-episode first season is that the show only uses the familiar as a backdrop; it doesn't wallow in it or simply retread known stories. This isn't Ready Player One, new Ghostbusters, or any of the upcoming Star Wars onslaught. Instead, Netflix's lovely homage to 1980s genre fiction deploys nostalgia only to speed up and deepen world-building. Its story, by contrast, feels fresh by including enough twists and turns to keep even the most capable pop-culture detectives guessing and entertained.

A class action lawsuit brought against Nvidia over a slow RAM partition has resulted in a proposed settlement (PDF) that could pay $30 to anyone who bought the company’s GTX 970 graphics card before its troubles came to light.

In early 2015, a group of customers found that the GTX 970—which was advertised to have 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM—experienced performance issues when pushed to the limits of that memory allotment. It then came to light that the graphics card only had 3.5 GB of the high-speed RAM, with the remaining 0.5 GB running roughly 80 percent slower, as Ars Technica reported last year.

Nvidia claimed at the time that there was an error in communication between the company’s engineers and its technical marketing team, but that it had not been intentionally misleading. A year later, that position hasn’t changed: according to the motion for preliminary approval of the settlement filed in Northern California District Court last week, Nvidia “[continues] to vigorously deny all of the claims and contentions alleged in this Action.” The company, however, “considered the risks and potential costs of continued litigation of this action,” and decided to work toward a settlement, the motion adds.

This piece first appeared on Medium and is republished here with the permission of the author. It reveals a limitation in the way Apple approaches 2FA, which is most likely a deliberate decision. Apple engineers probably recognize that someone who loses their phone won’t be able to wipe data if 2FA is enforced, and this story is a good reminder of the pitfalls.

As a graduate student studying cryptography, security and privacy (CrySP), software engineering and human-computer interaction, I've learned a thing or two about security. Yet a couple of days back, I watched my entire digital life get violated and nearly wiped off the face of the Earth. That sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but honestly it pretty much felt like that.

Here’s the timeline of a cyber-attack I recently faced on Sunday, July 23, 2016 (all times are in Eastern Standard):

That’s a pretty incidence matrix (credit: Kapil Haresh)

3:36pm—I was scribbling out an incidence matrix for a perfect hash family table on the whiteboard, explaining how the incidence matrix should be built to my friends. Ironically, this was a cryptography assignment for multicast encryption. Everything seemed fine until a rather odd sound started playing on my iPhone. I was pretty sure it was on silent, but I was quite surprised to see that it said “Find My iPhone Alert” on the lock screen. That was odd.

A lot of things that try to pass themselves off as science, like homeopathy, clearly aren't scientific. But it might surprise you to know that there's no simple checklist or flow chart that lets you separate the scientific from the nice-try-but-not-quites. It's not for lack of trying; for decades, philosophers worked to figure out how a decidedly human activity could produce such reliable information, but all the big-name thinkers in the field have come up short.

Understanding why they failed is the subject of multiple graduate-level seminar classes. But if you're just interested in a brief overview, Tim Lewens can help you out.

Dr. Lewens is a philosopher of science at Cambridge University (and a Ford driver, as we discover) who's written a book called The Meaning of Science. It's meant for a general audience, yet it tackles hairy issues in the philosophy of science and throws in ruminations on the nature of humanity for free. The Meaning of Science is an odd mix that doesn't quite hang together as a coherent whole, but it's not a bad read for anyone interested in a quick-and-painless introduction to the mystery of why science works.