NASA New Horizons spacecraft makes Pluto flyby
After roughly 7.5 billion kilometres, and a nine-and-a-half year journey, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto this morning. As the spacecraft passed the mark Tuesday morning at 7:49 a.m. ET, crowds of scientists cheered at NASA's flight operations centre in Maryland. At its closest approach, the spacecraft came within 13,000 kilometres of Pluto, at a speed of about 50,000 kph. Pictures taken by New Horizons, which should arrive on earth this evening, are expected to be the highest resolution picturees of Pluto ever seen and should provide eager scientists with new material to study for years to come.
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Firefox now Blocks Flash by Default
In a major announcement, the CEO of Mozilla, developer of the popular Firefox web browser, tweeted that Adobe Flash will no longer be supported and will be blocked outright in the newest release. The often unstable Flash has been plagued with security vulnerabilities, however, still remains a popular platform for video players, and perhaps more annoyingly, pop-up ads. Mozilla and many other big players in the technology world have been pressuring Adobe to discontinue Flash in favour of more stable alternative such as HTML5. With approx. 15% of all internet users using Firefox, Mozilla might be trying to finally push Adobe over the edge.
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Microsoft delays Surface Hub Luanch
Microsoft announced Monday that the luanch of one of it's most ambitious projects will be put on hold indefinitely. The Surface Hub, a television-sized tablet meant for buisness environements, was meant to launch on September 1st, with 55-inch and 84-inch models retailing for $7,000 and $20,000 respectively. Meant to replace traditional projectors, video conferencing equipment and whiteboards, the Surface Hub has attracted a lot of attention from the business community for use in board room collaboration, according to Microsoft. Production was only meant to be on a smaller scale, however, due to the hight interest and number of pre-orders, Microsoft has delayed launch in order to increase the scale of prodcution.
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Toronto Developper Highlights Flaws in new TTC App
In an attempt to highlight both the security issues and the poor design of the Toronto Transit Commisison's new mobile app, TTCconnect, a developper in Toronto has created a very convincing fake. Dan Crampton uploaded his app to the code-sharing website GitHub, which looks and functions almost identically to the one developped by New York startup firm Bytemark Inc. for the TTC. The TTCconnect app allows commuters to purchase and use virtual day passes on their smartphone. Crampton says he has no intention of using or distributing his app, instead his goal was to point out the security flaws in the app, such as using default fonts and easy-to-recreate animations, allowing conterfieters to cheat the system and get free transit passes. A TTC spokesperson stated that approx. 500 people have already purchased passes with the app and have seen no sign of fraud and that they will be diligent in preventing counterfeiting and will prosecute anyone caught doing to so the full extent of the law.
Read more on Metro News Canada...
In an attempt to highlight both the security issues and the poor design of the Toronto Transit Commisison's new mobile app, TTCconnect, a developper in Toronto has created a very convincing fake. Dan Crampton uploaded his app to the code-sharing website GitHub, which looks and functions almost identically to the one developped by New York startup firm Bytemark Inc. for the TTC. The TTCconnect app allows commuters to purchase and use virtual day passes on their smartphone. Crampton says he has no intention of using or distributing his app, instead his goal was to point out the security flaws in the app, such as using default fonts and easy-to-recreate animations, allowing conterfieters to cheat the system and get free transit passes. A TTC spokesperson stated that approx. 500 people have already purchased passes with the app and have seen no sign of fraud and that they will be diligent in preventing counterfeiting and will prosecute anyone caught doing to so the full extent of the law.
Read more on Metro News Canada...
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