An anonymous reader writes: A network administrator in Denmark is requiring users to perform a finger press on a banana to receive their Wi-Fi passwords. "The banana is mounted and in production," he posted Thursday, sharing two pictures. The banana uses a special new circuit board from Makey Makey to form a connection between the banana and a cheap Raspberry Pi computer with a screen attached, according to one technology site. They note that it could also detect finger presses on a doughnut, an apple, or even Jell-o, and offer this quote from the sys-admin about his motivations. "It's fun... It'll make people smile. It beats a static WPA password in funnyness." And most importantly, "When people leave our office, they can't access our WI-Fi because there's no banana to touch." This guy deserves some kind of award, come July 29th.

An anonymous reader writes: Google's 'Cardboard' virtual reality initiative has put low-cost smartphone VR viewers in the hands of millions, but the experience provided by these simple phone holders doesn't compare with dedicated mobile VR hardware like Samsung's Gear VR. Now it seems that Google may be ready to move from Cardboard viewers to dedicated VR hardware. Four new full-time job listings at the company's Mountain View, CA headquarters seek candidates for the company's virtual reality group who are experienced with designing and manufacturing 'high-volume' consumer electronics devices. Road to VR suggests that Google could be creating a mobile VR headset under its flagship Nexus brand. The postings come just as the company's Clay Bavor dropped other responsibilities to fully dedicate his time as Google's VP of Virtual Reality.

New submitter mdnuclear writes: In a strange echo of the depressed oil economy SolarCity recently announced a layoff of a quarter of its workforce as the apparent result of the Nevada PUC's decision to phase solar net-metering customers down from retail to wholesale per kWh. A scathing editorial in the WSJ last December took both solar leasing companies and their financial underwriters to task, calling net metering a "regressive political income redistribution in support of a putatively progressive cause."

Wednesday the PUC fronted a possible compromise, 'grandfathering' existing net metering customers to their current rates to create a third caste of energy consumers, those who had been in the right place at the right time — for awhile. One who had paid $22k into solar lamented, "I'm not happy; my wife isn't happy, we could have done something else with that money." Like many who leave Vegas, perhaps they should have. But this begs the real question... are net-metering schemes ultimately 'right' or 'wrong' for the grid?

MojoKid writes: The original Intel Compute Stick wasn't without issues. Last year's model featured dated 802.11n wireless connectivity and had only a single USB port, which meant using a hub and/or dongles, should you want to connect multiple peripherals to the device or boost its wireless capabilities. The new updated Intel Compute Stick, however, features Intel's newer Cherry Trail Atom platform, with 802.11ac 2x2 WiFi, and USB 3.0. There's still just 2GB of RAM in the device, along with 32GB of storage, but Windows 10 Home also now comes pre-installed. The result is a fully functional PC that won't burn up any benchmarks but offers utility for mainstream computing tasks and is even capable of streaming up to 4K video content. The little device can essentially turn any HDMI-equipped display into a basic PC.

szczys writes: You've used many devices that have Intel's Management Engine built into them, even if you haven't heard of it before. This is the lowest level of security, built directly into the chips. But obscurity is part of its security and part of its weakness. Nobody knows exactly how ME works, yet it includes a wide range of features that would be frightening if exploited. The ME is always listening, able to receive packets even when the device is asleep. And it has the lowest level of access to every part of the computer system.

itwbennett writes: There is growing evidence that intrusions into the power grid and other critical infrastructure by hostile foreign nation states are real and happening. But there's "much less agreement over how much of a threat hackers are," writes Taylor Armerding. "On one side are those – some of them top government officials – who have warned that a cyber attack on the nation's critical infrastructure could be catastrophic,"writes Armerding. Others are crying FUD, including C. Thomas, a strategist at Tenable Network Security, who got some attention when he argued in an op-ed that the biggest threat to the U.S. power grid not a skilled hacker, but squirrels, are crying FUD. Who has it right? Agreement seems to coalesce around two points: 1) the cyber security of industrial control systems remains notoriously weak and 2) hostile hackers will improve their skills over time. So, while we haven't reached "catastrophe" yet, a properly motivated terrorist group could become a cyber threat.

gthuang88 writes: Virtual digital assistants are gaining popularity with the rise of Siri, Google Now, and Facebook's M service. Now startups are using related artificial intelligence techniques to solve business problems. Talla is building an interactive bot on Slack and HipChat for handling workflows in recruiting and human resources. The software uses natural language processing, word vectors, and some deep learning. Other startups, such as Gamalon, DataRobot, and Sentenai, are focused on probabilistic programming, data science, and machine learning for the Internet of things. Working with private data sets and business apps could help these startups avoid competing with the big players, at least for now.

An anonymous reader writes: A hidden backdoor account was discovered embedded in the firmware of devices deployed at the White House and in various US Military strategic centers, more precisely in AMX conference room equipment. The first account was named Black Widow, and after security researchers reported its presence to AMX, the company's employees simply renamed it to Batman thinking nobody will notice. AMX did remove the backdoor after three months. In its firmware's official release notes, AMX claimed that the two accounts were only used for debugging, just like Fortinet claimed that its FortiOS SSH backdoor was used only internally by a management protocol.

Theovon writes: For quite some time now, "open hardware" enthusiasts have had access to a number of open source CPUs, including OpenRISC. However, it wasn't until recently that there has been any kind of open source GPU. In 2014, the Vertical Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced MIAOW. MIAOW is in many ways a clone of the AMD Southern Islands architecture and can even run some of the same binary code. Unfortunately, MIAOW is missing some key components such as video and memory systems, making it not currently possible to implement fully in hardware. For this, Nyuzi comes to the rescue. Nyuzi (formerly Nyami) has been in development since 2010 and is a fully functional open source GPU inspired by Larrabee. Although architecturally different from the SIMT architectures from AMD and Nvidia, researchers at Binghamton University and several other places have already used it to conduct research on GPUs. A paper (PDF) was published in March 2015 about this processor (one of the authors was the original founder of the Open Graphics Project), and Nyuzi (homepage) can be downloaded from GitHub.

MojoKid writes: Late last year marked the introduction of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM courtesy of AMD's Fury family of graphics cards, each of which sports 4GB of HBM. HBM allows these new AMD GPUs to tout an impressive 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, but it's also just the first iteration of the new memory technology. Samsung has just announced that it has begun mass production of HBM2. Samsung's 4GB HBM2 package is built on a 20 nanometer process. Each package contains four 8-gigabit core dies built on top of a buffer die. Each 4GB HMB2 package is capable of delivering 256GB/sec of bandwidth, which is twice that of first generation HBM DRAM. In the example of NVIDIA's next gen GPU technology, code named Pascal, the new GPU will utilize HBM2 for its frame buffer memory. High-end consumer-grade Pascal boards will ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory (in four, 4GB packages), offering effective memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec (256GB/sec from each HMB2 package). Samsung is also reportedly readying 8GB HBM2 memory packages this year.

prisoninmate writes: Canonical has been working on expanding the capabilities of Ubuntu Touch for a long time now, and it appears the company will reportedly unveil the first dedicated Ubuntu tablet device this year, during the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2016 event. Canonical has been working on implementing support for X11 apps on its Ubuntu mobile operating system, allowing users to run any graphical software that is currently in the Ubuntu repositories, such as GIMP or Firefox.

An anonymous reader writes: A new report at Phoronix looks at the OpenGL performance of 27 graphics cards from the GeForce 8 through GeForce 900 series. Various Ubuntu OpenGL games were tested on these graphics cards dating back to 2006, focusing on raw performance and power efficiency. From oldest to newest, there was a 72x increase in performance-per-Watt, and a 100x increase in raw performance. The NVIDIA Linux results arrive after doing a similar AMD comparison from R600 graphics cards through the R9 Fury. However, that analysis found that for many of the older graphics cards, their open-source driver support regressed into an unworkable state. For the cards that did work, the performance gains were not nearly as significant over time.

An anonymous reader writes: Amnesty International has accused Apple, Samsung, Sony, and other tech companies of failing to do basic checks to ensure minerals used in their products are not mined by children. A new report explains how cobalt is harvested from mines by children as young as seven years old. The cobalt then ends up in lithium-ion batteries sold to device-makers throughout the world. The list of companies who use these batteries also includes Daimler, Dell, HP, Huawei, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Vodafone, Volkswagen, and ZTE. Amnesty International notes that half the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where many mining operations have terrible track records for accidents and concern for workers' welfare. They say, "the vast majority of miners spend long hours every day working with cobalt without the most basic of protective equipment, such as gloves, work clothes or facemasks to protect them from lung or skin disease." According to UNICEF, about 40,000 kids worked in mines across southern DRC in 2014.

szczys writes: Rick Wesson has been working on a solution to identify the same piece of malware that has been altered through polymorphism (a common method of escaping detection). While the bits are scrambled from one example to the next, he has found that using a space filling curve makes it easy to cluster together polymorphically similar malware samples. Forming the fingerprint using these curves is computationally expensive. This is an Internet-scale problem which means he currently needs to inspect 300,000 new samples a day. Switching to a GPU to do the calculation proved four orders of magnitude efficiency over CPUs to reach about 200,000 samples a day. Rick has begun testing FPGA processing, aiming at a goal of processing 10 million samples in four hours using a machine drawing 4000 Watts.

mrspoonsi writes with Business Insider's report that presidential candidate Donald Trump says he'd like to make Apple "start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries." From the article: Trump's ultimatum to the most valuable company in the world was made towards the end of a 45-minute speech he gave at Liberty University in Virginia on Monday. The most popular candidate in the Republican party said he would impose a 35% business tax on American businesses manufacturing outside of the United States. Apple has manufactured its Mac Pro at a factory in Texas since 2013, but the vast majority of its products (including the iPhone) are largely made and assembled in China. How Trump would force Apple's supply chain, which relies heavily on a vast network of suppliers and large factories throughout Asia, to be brought stateside remains unknown. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently called the U.S. tax code "awful for America." If Trump (or anyone) thinks this is a good idea, why start or stop with Apple?

mdsolar writes with news about the launch of the "Great Green Fleet," part of a Navy plan to use 50% alternative fuels by 2020. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports: "This Wednesday, there surely will be tears, hugs and excitement as sailors begin another deployment to the world's hotspots. On the surface, it will be a replay of a common occurrence in any Navy town when sailors go to sea, but in the ships' gas tanks will be fuel made from renewable resources that has officials back at the Pentagon exuberant. 'Underway on beef-fat power' might not have the same ring as 'Underway on nuclear power,' the historic message the Nautilus submarine beamed when it left the pier 61 years ago today. Nonetheless, the Navy is trumpeting the use of renewable biofuels as a game-changer. In 2009, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced that the Navy and Marine Corps would get half of their power from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020, and that the Navy would deploy an entire carrier strike group using biofuels by 2016."

MojoKid writes: AMD is making a stink about SYSMark, a popular benchmarking program that's been around for many years, and one the chip designer says is not reliable. Rather than provide meaningful results and information, AMD claims SYSMark unfairly favors Intel products and puts too much emphasis on strict CPU performance above all else. John Hampton, director of AMD's client computing products, explained in a video why SYSMark itself is an unreliable metric of performance. He even brought up the "recent debacle" involving Volkswagen as proof that "information provided by even the most established organizations can be misleading." Salinas says SYSMark's focus on the CPU is so "excessive" that it's really only evaluating the processor, not the system as a whole. In comparison, PCMark 8 probes not only the CPU, but graphics and subsystems as well. In an attempt to drive the point home, AMD ran a set of custom scripts it developed based on Microsoft Office and timed how long it took each system to complete them. The Intel system took 61 seconds to finish the benchmark versus 64 seconds for the AMD platform, a difference of about 6-7 percent and in line with what PCMark 8 indicated, though Sysmark shows a stark delta of 50 percent in favor of Intel with comparable CPUs.

An anonymous reader writes: For the past several years, Japan has been trying to encourage development of hydrogen fuel cell technology for cars. Now it seems some German manufacturers are getting interested as well. "Audi used last week's North American International Auto Show in Detroit to debut its h-tron Quattro fuel cell SUV concept, and the UK's Autocar is reporting that Mercedes-Benz has green-lit for production a fuel cell version of its GLC SUV." The Audi vehicle has a range of roughly 600km. BMW has been working on this problem too: "For quite a while, the company was experimenting with internal combustion engines that used H2 instead of the traditional hydrocarbon fuel. More recently, it showed us an i8 and 5 Series powered by fuel cells, although neither is set for production."

mdsolar writes with news that Belgium's decision to restart a reactor at its Tihange nuclear power plant and its aging Doel plant have some of its European neighbors uneasy. Phys.org reports: "As the two cooling towers at Belgium's Doel nuclear power belch thick white steam into a wintry sky, people over the border in the Dutch town of Nieuw-Namen are on edge. They are part of a groundswell of concern in the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg over the safety of Belgium's seven aging reactors at Doel and at Tihange, further to the south and east. 'I'm happy Holland, Germany and Luxembourg are reacting because they (officials) don't listen to you and me,' butcher Filip van Vlierberge told AFP at his shop in Nieuw-Namen, where people can see the Doel plant. Benedicte, one of his customers, nodded in agreement. Van Vlierberge said he was particularly uneasy with the Belgian government's decision in December to extend the lives of 40-year-old reactors Doel 1 and Doel 2 until 2025 under a deal to preserve jobs and invest in the transition to cleaner energy."

New submitter moriarty1972 writes: More details about Microsoft's HoloLens have come out. The device will offer roughly five to five and a half hours of battery life when working on Word documents or email, and about two and a half hours when using it for highly intensive computational work involving detailed renderings. Mashable reports: "Microsoft's augmented reality headset called the HoloLens has already won over a number of fans eager to try the device, but details about how it works have been scarce However, a few more bits of information about the HoloLens leaked during a recent event in Tel Aviv, Israel, courtesy of Bruce Harris, a technical evangelist at Microsoft."