The flash storage drive in certain mid-2012 models of the MacBook Air could fail at any time, but Apple will replace it for free. Josh Centers explains how to find out if your drive is affected.

 

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Åklagare meddelade i dag att åtal inte kommer att väckas mot den brandman som körde över och dödade en 16-åring i samband med olyckan i juli i år, då ett sydkoreanskt plan kraschade på San Franciscos flygplats.

mspohr writes "The NY Times has an interesting story about a pair of researchers who 'discovered that they could freeze, or crash, the software that monitors a [power] substation, thereby blinding control center operators from the power grid.' These two engineers wrote software to test for vulnerabilities in the control systems of electrical power grids which use a protocol called DNP3 to communicate with sub-stations. They first tested an open source implementation of the protocol and didn't find any problems. They were worried that their software test wasn't adequate so they started testing proprietary systems. The broke every single one of the 16 proprietary systems they tested initially and found nine more systems vulnerable in later testing. They were able to install malware and also found firewalls ineffective. The pair reported this to the Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, I.C.S.-C.E.R.T. and didn't get much of a response. It's scary that our electrical grid is so vulnerable and there doesn't seem to be much urgency to get it fixed. A few patches have been issued, but who knows if the systems have been updated?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phopojijo writes "A monitor redraws itself top to bottom because of how the electron guns in CRT monitors used to operate. VSync was created to align the completed frames, computed by a videocard, to the start of each monitor draw; without it, midway through a monitor's draw process, a break (horizontal tear) would be visible on screen between the two time-slices of animation. Pixels on LCD monitors do not need to wait for above lines of pixels to be drawn, but they do. G-Sync is a technology from NVIDIA to make monitor refresh rates variable. The monitor will time its draws to whenever the GPU is finished rendering. A scene which requires 40ms to draw will have a smooth 'framerate' of 25FPS instead of trying to fit in some fraction of 60 FPS." NVIDIA also announced support for three 4k displays at the same time. That resolution would be 11520×2160.

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Nio libanesiska medborgare som hållits fångna i Syrien har frisläppts.

En gymnastiksal på en skola norr om Mariestad började brinna i kväll.

I'm watching a person die on one of the social networks, second-hand, in the words of an adult child. I keep wanting to say it might be time for hospice, but it's not my place to say anything. I'm not a family member, I don't know the people. But the story is a familiar one.

There comes a point when cancer has got you. Until then there's a tradeoff between quality of life and survival. I can have a good few days, weeks or months, or I can maybe have a few more of them, but be tortured. Not be a person, as much as someone who is operated on, stitched up, kept alive. Up to a point you fight, but then at some point, you take the prize, pain killers, and figure out what you want to do with the remaining time.

You can spend the time remarkably high, even, at times, happy. My father chose morphine, and spent his last weeks high as a kite, doing nothing, sad for sure, but also able to reflect on his life, and spending lots of time hanging out with people who known him, instead of being an object of the health care system. He was at home till the end.

I spent a lot of time in the hospital with him when he was fighting, and I didn't want him to give up. But now, a few years later, it's very obvious he did the right thing. He might have had another year or two, some of the doctors said that, but there wasn't really much he could do with the time, and most of it would be spent in a hospital, steadily losing the battle, and what remained of his dignity.

Every family goes through this. The process doesn't end with death. But how you come to feel about it has a lot to do with how much fighting there was, and at what point the finality of it was accepted.

Asteroid made a "close" approach to Earth this week but there was only miniscule risk of it smashing into planet.

Qatari foreign minister says nine people kidnapped in Aleppo last year have been released by Syrian rebels.

Much fuss has been made over the inaccuracy of the iPhone 5s sensors, but it turns out that the problem is neither new nor unusual.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

If you’re looking for something spooky to play in the run-up to Halloween, Limbo is a creepy platform game for thinkers that raises the bar for touchscreen controls.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Den moçambikiska armén slog tillbaka mot den oppositionella rörelsen Renamo i dag, dagen efter att sju soldater dödats i ett bakhåll.

jfruh writes "Privacy blogger Dan Tynan couldn't help but notice the ads targeting his web browsing for a plus-sized women's clothing store, not least because he's neither a woman nor plus-sized. But trying to figure out why those ads kept popping up in his browser led to some disturbing discoveries. He had opted out of targeted Google ads, and at first glance the ads seemed to come from Google — but digging deeper, he found that Google's DoubleClick was only the intermediary, which meant his opt-out didn't apply. And his opt-outs from other ad services seemed to have vanished."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Level Money is a minimalistic budgeting app for the iPhone. Josh Centers explains why it’s perfect for him, and for anyone who needs more awareness of their financial standing.

 

Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

New submitter SanDogWeps writes "Sean Gallagher over at Ars Technica reports that when the U.S.S. Zumwalt (DDG 1000) puts to sea later this year, it will be different from any other ship in the Navy's fleet in many ways. The $3.5 billion ship is designed for stealth, survivability, and firepower, and it's packed with advanced technology. And at the heart of its operations is a virtual data center powered by off-the-shelf server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and over 6 million lines of software code. From the article: 'Called the Common Display System, or CDS (pronounced as "keds" by those who work with it), the three-screen workstations in the operations center are powered by a collection of quad-processor Intel motherboards in an armored case, which gives new meaning to the nautical phrase "toe buster." Even the commanding officer's and executive officer's chairs on the bridge have CDS workstations built-in. Each CDS system runs multiple LynxOS-based Linux virtual machines, which can run on various networks partitioned by security level and purpose. '"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.