SSE – Solid State Electrolytes for long lasting batteries

So far we’ve heard about Solid State Drives (SSD) which are much faster than normal drives. Now, researches are looking for Solid State Electrolytes (SSE) which will help us have batteries that will last much longer. Today’s batteries are based on Liquid-State Electrolytes and they have their limitations. Researches from MIT and Samsung have developed a new material which can be used in future batteries to increase their storage, their life and make them safer. I would love to have a battery that lasts for a week (at least) with a single charge.

How to crash Skype

This post is not for technical gurus and hackers, everyone with a Skype can crash it. By sending a simple message the application crashes badly for both the sender and the receiver and it needs re-installation. This bug affects some new versions of Skype. The message is not a massive amount of characters but a simple short message. If you want to try it, send “http://:” and voila! I would never believe that such a bug exists in such a popular application for so long time. I believe Microsoft developers will try to blame the initial software developers that wrote the legacy code!

Microsoft Edge – The new web browser

Microsoft Edge is the new web browser by Microsoft. It will replace Internet Explorer in the new operating system, Windows 10. Microsoft Edge was known as project Spartan and Microsoft announced that they were paying thousands of dollars to the hackers that can find vulnerabilities to its new web browser. We all know that Internet Explorer is not good enough, lets hope that the new web browser will be as good as Firefox. It is designed to be basic and minimalistic and it will be shipped on all Windows 10 devices.

NSA and CIA are watching porn

No, I am not kidding, and you are reading it correctly. Agents from both NSA and CIA are tasked to watch videos including porn. The reason behind this is simple, Al-Qaeda and ISIS (Islamic State) send coded messages to their followers using pornography, reddit, twitter and any other way or social media suits their needs. Israeli Intelligence Agency noticed those messages terrorists are sending using images and videos with the technique called steganography. Steganography is the art/method to hide a message/file in another message/file. For example a shopping list that can contain a secret message, an image that can contain another file or image and so on. The advantage of steganography versus cryptography is that the message is publicly available to everyone and it doesn’t attract attention. I will show you a real example at the end of the article. Back to our news, CIA and NSA are watching nude photos and porn videos to find those message. Of course, terrorists are also using cryptography, advanced cryptography to avoid (delay as far as possible) decryption even with NSA supercomputers. Those nude pictures agents are watching all day long is not only from known terrorists but from everyone, they have surveillance programs were they capture almost anything so think twice the next time you will take a nude picture of your… self.

Apple shares your voice with 3rd parties

Apple is one of the worst companies when it comes to user privacy. They share everything, including your voice. You think that talking to Siri is personal and safe but it is not. The company admitted that they share audio collected by Siri to 3rd party companies (yes, more than one) and they do it for at least two years. Even if you trust Apple with your privacy, I can’t even imagine what you asked Siri about, can you really trust every 3rd party company and their employees? I don’t think so. If you believe that whatever you said to Siri isn’t confidential then think also about every email or sms you sent by using your voice (speech-to-text).

Led zeppelin cover by kids

Kids from Louisville Leopard Percussionists, a non-profit organization, learn music and gain proficiency to an instrument. In the following video you can see the children playing Led Zeppelin. When I came across this video, it made me smile. I was part of an orchestra when I was at school but we never played songs that cool. In addition, kids have memorized the entire song, at least I haven’t noticed any papers/screens which makes it even more impressive. Nice choice and keep rocking!

5G connections with 1Tbps

News from university of Surrey spread very fast when security researches achieved a 1Tbps wireless connection with 5G. 5G is the next generation of mobile communication technology and it looks very promising. It is faster, more cost-effective and more energy-efficient than the previous technologies. 5G is expected to be offered by 2020 which is 5 years from now and we can’t wait to use it. I know that we will not have 1Tbps connection in our smart phones but anyway we don’t have that even now with wired connections. Imagine being able to download 100 movies in 3 seconds wirelessly, this is the speed recorded by the 5GIC.

Dell accepts Bitcoin payments

Dell, one of the biggest companies in the PC market is now accepting Bitcoin, the most known crypto-currency in the world. This made possible after partnership with Coinbase. Any purchase from Dell’s website can use also Bitcoin as payment option. Dell wanted to give this flexibility to their customers. My guess is that in few years Bitcoin will be the first payment option in all online stores. After some drops to the price of Bitcoin which is predictable because more and more companies accept Bitcoin but they convert it immediately to dollars which drives the price down

Microsoft accepts Bitcoin

I delayed a month to post this. Microsoft started accepting Bitcoin payments to allow their customers to buy games, software and videos with the crypto-currency. After partnership with BitPay now Microsoft customers can add money to their Microsoft account . After that they can buy any digital goods Microsoft offers. That gives Microsoft customers another way to purchase what they want and Bitcoin owners another option to where to spend their coins.

Website statistics

Analytics is something you can see on a variety of websites but from time to time I get an email asking about the visitors of the site. In order to avoid some of them and make publicly available for everyone the origin of the visitors, I created a table from Google analytics. This table contains the countries and the percentage of the visitors from each of them for the last 30 days. The numbers change almost every month, few months ago France and Italy were higher in the list. I will post updates once per year in order to have somewhere historically the statistics.