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Sling TV's next frontier could be streaming local TV. (credit: Sling TV)

Not two years after Aereo’s business model was shot down by the Supreme Court, another, slightly different attempt at pushing local TV onto the Internet for streaming could be coming from a partnership between Dish Network’s SlingTV and EchoStar’s Sling Media.

On Friday, Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny! said he had received a tip from a source indicating that Sling Media would be pushing out what is essentially a set-top box that would help Sling TV subscribers watch local TV from the Sling TV app. If that’s not confusing enough, the box will apparently be called AirTV, per an Echostar trademark application Zatz reported on last year.

As a result, customers of Sling TV will be able to buy an AirTV box that will look very similar to Sling Media’s M1 Slingbox, which will connect to your home antenna and your home network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet to push local channels to your mobile device or browser. “I’ll go ahead and assume the ultimate goal here is for the OTA channels from one’s residence to be co-located amongst the pay television channels of Sling TV’s $20 streaming service in a unified guide,” Zatz wrote.

(credit: Sorosh Tavakoli)

Bathrooms are a prime location for smearing disease-causing microbes all over your hands. Yet, despite societal pressures and prodding signage, a lot of people don’t clean their grimy mitts after a potty break. Some audacious folks just skip the sink all together, while others don’t wash for long enough (experts recommend singing “Happy Birthday” twice in your head) or omit the cleansing soap step. All of those sanitation-slackers threaten to spread disease—particularly in healthcare settings packed with vulnerable patients. But what the latter groups do to dry off their un-cleaned hands may end up setting off a germ bomb.

Researchers have long known that warm hand dryers can launch bacteria into the air—compared to dabbing with paper towels, which unleashes virtually none. But new jet air dryers, made by Dyson, are significantly more problematic—they launch far more viruses into the air, which linger for longer periods of time and reach much farther distances, researchers recently reported in the Journal of Applied Microbiology. This is particularly concerning because viruses, unlike many infectious bacteria, can easily maintain their infectiousness in the air and on surfaces, and just a few viral particles can spark an infection.

“The results of this study suggest that in locations where hygiene and cross-infection considerations are paramount, such as healthcare settings and the food industry, the choice of hand-drying method should be considered carefully,” the authors concluded.

(credit: Dr F. Eugene Hester, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

More than 3 million Internet-accessible servers are at risk of being infected with crypto ransomware because they're running vulnerable software, including out-of-date versions of Red Hat's JBoss enterprise application, researchers from Cisco Systems said Friday.

About 2,100 of those servers have already been compromised by webshells that give attackers persistent control over the machines, making it possible for them to be infected at any time, the Cisco researchers reported in a blog post. The compromised servers are connected to about 1,600 different IP addresses belonging to schools, governments, aviation companies, and other types of organizations.

Some of the compromised servers belonged to school districts that were running the Destiny management system that many school libraries use to keep track of books and other assets. Cisco representatives notified officials at Destiny developer Follett Learning of the compromise, and the Follett officials said they fixed a security vulnerability in the program. Follett also told Cisco the updated Destiny software also scans computers for signs of infection and removes any identified backdoors.

The US Capitol Building. (credit: House of Representatives)

The House of Representatives today approved a Republican proposal that limits the Federal Communications Commission's authority to regulate Internet providers.

The "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act" was ostensibly proposed to prevent the FCC from setting the rates charged by Internet providers. But the bill defines "rate regulation" so broadly that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler says it could prevent the commission from enforcing net neutrality rules against blocking and throttling.

The FCC says it has no plans to impose strict utility rate regulation on Internet providers, but it can review whether specific rates are "unjust" or "unreasonable" under its authority to regulate common carriers. This bill would remove that authority and could also limit the FCC's authority to prevent ISPs from applying data caps in discriminatory ways.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

The future of virtual reality beyond immersive gaming and 360-degree movie-watching is mysterious to say the least. At this year's Tribeca Film Festival, we're getting a taste of what devices like the Oculus Rift and Samsung's Gear VR could allow all kinds of creatives to do and the types of experiences we could have using this new medium.

The Storyscapes exhibition at the festival showcases a number of VR experiences and installations that all focus on interactive storytelling. We got to try out a few of them, using mostly the Gear VR headset, and in one case the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, and all of them manage to tell very different stories using the same VR medium. Oscar Raby's "The Turning Forest" is on the fanciful side of the spectrum, incorporating a tunnel-like forest installation and colorful animations to take you through an imaginary world. Meanwhile, other projects examine very real and raw parts of our society, like The Guardian's "6x9," which puts you in the position of an inmate in solitary confinement.

Group video chat without plugins is possible, just as long as everyone is using Edge. (credit: Microsoft)

Since November 2014, Microsoft has been working to build a plugin-free version of Skype that will run in the browser. That work took a step forward today, with support for no-plugin voice and video calling in Microsoft's Edge browser.

However, the support is quite limited. It requires the latest version of Edge, as shipped in Windows 10 version 1511 (build 10586). Both one-to-one and group chats are available in Edge-to-Edge calls without plugins, and one-to-one calls to the very latest version of Skype for Windows and OS X are also plugin-free. But any other combination—different browsers, older versions of Skype, or group calls to the desktop Skype clients—will still need a plugin.

Skype in the browser remains an awkward combination. There are two related specs within the browser for real-time communication (RTC), the earlier WebRTC, and the derived but different Object RTC. Edge has preliminary support for ORTC, and a JavaScript library to provide WebRTC compatibility for audio, but not video, has been developed. After long pushing back against WebRTC, Microsoft has said that it will build partial support for the specification into the browser to enable video support on top of audio in basic one-to-one situations.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The second Android N Developer Preview came out this week, and while it brings support for Vulkan, new emojis, and a few UI tweaks, there are also a few references to virtual reality buried inside the new update.

The "VR helper services" screen.

It looks like apps will soon be able to register themselves as something called a "VR Listener" or "VR Helper." In the latest Android N you can see this by navigating to Settings -> Apps -> Configure apps (the gear button in the top right) -> Special Access -> VR helper services. It looks like this will work similarly to the "Notification Access" screen (used by Android Wear to bring notifications to a smartwatch)—the VR helper services screen will show a list of apps that plug into this API, and users can allow or deny the permission.

In the settings strings there's a permissions warning related to the VR service that states "[app name] will be able to run when you are using applications in virtual reality mode." It sounds like when Android kicks over into whatever this VR mode is, the helper app will be able to pop up and do... something. We're not sure what. We're also not sure how comprehensive this "Virtual Reality Mode" is.

It wasn't exactly what divers searching for sunken ships expect to find. When the Texel Divers Club glimpsed a package in the sand-buried remains of a sunken ship off the island of Texel in the Wadden Sea, they brought it to the surface—only to discover it held a wealthy lady's most prized possessions: a silk damask dress, velvet embroidered purse, perfume ball, lice comb, stockings, and books bound in beautiful leather.

Kaap Skil Museum

A lice comb made from cow horn.

6 more images in gallery

Preserved beneath a layer of sand since the 17th century, the dress was probably for everyday wear and was of a style frequently seen in paintings from the late Renaissance. Made of rich silk damask, it likely belonged to a woman of the upper classes. Despite its fanciness, experts believe it was for everyday wear because it wasn't beaded or embroidered with golden or silver threads. The woman's books were stamped with the emblem of King Charles I, of the Stuart royal family from England, which suggests she may even have been royalty. It's exceedingly rare to find such a well-preserved collection of textiles and makes this find one of the most important of its kind in Europe.

The find is also a boon for historians who want to understand what everyday life was like during this era. What we see in paintings is not always an accurate record of people's lives. Finding this cache of typical (albeit expensive) clothing verifies that privileged women of the era really did dress in the ways we might expect and carry tiny metal balls of scented, dried flowers to mask body odors that would have been common in a culture where people didn't bathe very often—and never got any medical remedies for all the funguses and bacterial infections that flourish on human bodies.