Innehållsförteckning för #243 från AppleMagazine

High-tech hackers brought in by the Pentagon to breach Defense Department websites were able to burrow in and find 138 different security gaps, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Friday. The so-called white-hat hackers were turned loose on five public Pentagon internet pages and were offered various bounties if they could find unique vulnerabilities. The Pentagon says 1,410 hackers participated in the challenge and the first gap was identified just 13 minutes after the hunt began. Overall, they found 1,189 vulnerabilities, but a review by the Pentagon determined that only 138 were valid and unique. The experiment cost $150,000. Of that, about half was paid out to the hackers as bounties, including one who received the maximum prize of $15,000 for submitting a number of security gaps. Others received varying amounts,…

Chewbacca Mom has a new toy to play with after Hasbro unveiled a custom action figure bearing her likeness. Candace Payne’s wildly popular video of her hysterically laughing while wearing Hasbro’s toy Chewbacca mask has gained more than 157 million views on Facebook since she posted it nearly a month ago. She was invited to the toymaker’s Rhode Island headquarters last week and presented with an action figure with her head on Chewbacca’s body that comes complete with a removable mini Chewbacca mask. Entertainment Weekly reports the doll spouts several of Payne’s catchphrases from the Facebook video, including“I am such a happy Chewbacca.” Payne has been showered with gifts and has made numerous appearances around the country to discuss the video in recent weeks.…

Critically acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke says he will make a virtual reality film next year with a romantic story as he and viewers get used to the new medium, and declared: “I think VR is going to be the next big thing.” The director, better known for films that depict China’s social changes and acts of violence, told AppleMagazine that the short film would be a gentle romance as “it takes time for people to feel comfortable” in virtual reality. “The speed and direction of movements may make people feel physically uncomfortable, so we’re starting with a romantic story,” he said in an interview. Virtual reality entertainment consists largely of video games, but film festivals are starting to showcase VR films as directors venture into the new medium. It…

The Getaway Red Hot Chili Peppers The eleventh studio album from one of America’s most prominent rock acts – the Red Hot Chili Peppers – is a clear indication that the four-piece show very few signs of slowing down, even after a 33-year career. FIVE FACTS: 1. The Getaway is produced by five-time Grammy Award winning musician, songwriter and producer Danger Mouse – an alias of Brian Joseph Burton – who has also worked with Gorillaz, Beck, and The Black Keys. 2. The band have been nominated for 63 awards, winning 33 of them – including 6 Grammy Awards. 3. The first album not produced by Rick Rubin since 1989. Rubin has produced albums for countless other notable artists, including Kanye West, Adele, and the Beastie Boys. 4. Performed with…

Rooftop solar panels and churning wind turbines are hastening the demise of U.S. nuclear power plants and the safety fears and high operating costs they bring. The latest example is California’s Diablo Canyon twin-reactor facility. California’s largest utility and environmental groups announced a deal Tuesday to shutter the last nuclear power plant in the state. The move comes as the operators of the country’s aging nuclear facilities confront rising repair bills at a time when sources of clean, safer energy cost less. Competition from a glut of natural gas and surging solar and wind production also has dampened enthusiasm in Europe for nuclear power. So did the 2011 disaster in Fukushima, Japan, when an earthquake and tsunami led to meltdowns and radioactive releases at a nuclear plant. But China is…

A Chinese supercomputer has topped a list of the world’s fastest computers for the seventh straight year - and for the first time the winner uses only Chinese-designed processors instead of U.S. technology. The announcement Monday is a new milestone for Chinese supercomputer development and a further erosion of past U.S. dominance of the field. Last year’s Chinese winner in the TOP500 ranking maintained by researchers in the United States and Germany slipped to No. 2, followed by a computer at the U.S. government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Also this year, China displaced the United States for the first time as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500. China had 167 systems and the United States had 165. Japan was a distant No. 3 with…

Routine use of small drones by real estate agents, farmers, filmmakers and countless other commercial operators was cleared for takeoff by the Obama administration Tuesday, after years of struggling to write rules that would both protect public safety and free the benefits of a new technology. The Federal Aviation Administration announced the creation of a new category of aviation rules designed specifically for drones weighing less than 55 pounds. The long-anticipated rules mean commercial operators can fly drones without special permission. Industry and government officials describe commercial drones as the biggest game-changing technology in aviation since the advent of the jet engine. “This is a watershed moment in how advanced technology can improve lives,”said Brendan Schulman, a vice president at DJI, the world’s largest civilian drone-maker. Jason Miller, an Obama…

Fans of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” will have the chance to immerse themselves in their favorite show next summer. The show’s fan site Watchers on the Wall said Tuesday it will host a three-day convention in Nashville, Tennessee, from June 30 to July 2, 2017. The agenda will include panels, performances, workshops, speeches and a chance to get autographs from and photos with people connected to the show. Zack Luye, co-director of the fan site, said no detail will go unnoticed. The book series from George R.R. Martin began in 1996 and the TV adaptation is HBO’s most popular program. Organizers haven’t announced who from the show will participate.…

A NASA spacecraft is bound for a Fourth of July encounter with Jupiter in the latest quest to study how the largest planet in the solar system formed and evolved. As Juno approaches Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment, it will fire its main engine to slow down and then slip into orbit around the planet. “It’s a one-shot deal,” mission chief scientist Scott Bolton from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said Thursday. “Everything is riding on it.” If all goes as planned, Juno will spend nearly a year circling Jupiter’s poles and peering through clouds to scrutinize the planet’s southern and northern lights, which are considered the strongest in the solar system. “Jupiter is a planet on steroids. Everything about it is extreme,” Bolton said during a briefing…

Electric car maker Tesla Motors wants to buy solar panel maker SolarCity for up to $2.8 billion in an attempt to create a one-stop shop for cleaner energy as consumers become more concerned about fossil fuels harming the environment. The all-stock bid announced Tuesday values SolarCity Corp. at $26.50 to $28.50 per share, depending on a review of the company’s books. SolarCity’s stock surged $3.31, or 16 percent, to $24.50 in after-hours trading following the announcement of the deal. Tesla’s shares sank $24.86, or 11 percent, to $194.75, signaling that many investors don’t like the idea of the company relinquishing 8 to 9 percent of its current market value of $32 billion to expand into the solar energy industry. Both of the companies, located about 17 miles apart in Silicon…

Amid the hooting and hollering at Washington Redskins minicamp, there’s a different sound in the air during running back drills. Coaches whack at the football with Matt Jones carrying it, and it beeps. Then it beeps longer. That’s a good sign. The Redskins are one of five NFL teams using so-called beeping or whistling footballs to emphasize ball security. When the ball is being held correctly with the fundamental five points of pressure, it emits an audible beeping sound at about 80 decibels to tell a player he’s doing it right. “If I had that ball in high school, I don’t think I would’ve had a fumble,” Jones said. “It’s teaching me how to squeeze the ball at the point of contact. Everything has changed about me holding the ball.”…

After introducing the world to several new female heroes at last year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, story-driven game makers at this week’s gathering of the interactive industry are uncharacteristically putting more racially diverse protagonists front and center in their games. From an Indian-American space dweller in “Tacoma” to a biracial Vietnam War veteran in “Mafia III,” the heroes and anti-heroes appearing on the massive posters and screens across the Los Angeles Convention Center represent more ethnicities than have been showcased in the past. “We wanted to tell a very different ‘Mafia’ story this time,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of “Mafia” publisher 2K Games. “That meant getting away from classic ‘Godfather’ fare with a bunch of Italian characters. Once we decided to set the game in New Orleans in 1968, it just…

Get a charge out of chocolate? New research suggests candy companies may be able to make lower fat versions of the tasty treat with a little electrical trick. By running liquid chocolate through an electric field, researchers were able to make it flow more easily. And that means it doesn’t need so much fat, they say. Cutting the fat in chocolate has been a much-studied challenge in the industry. The new approach was described Monday by researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia. During production, chocolate is handled as a liquid that includes solids like cocoa suspended in melted fat and oil, they noted in a paper released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A certain level of fat is needed to let the chocolate flow easily enough…

Twitter is now letting its users post videos that are up to 140 seconds long, an increase from its previous 30-second limit. The move is part of the social media company’s efforts to attract a broader set of users, some of whom feel confined by its limits on the length of tweets - as well as videos. It’s also likely to help users make money from such videos, and comes at a time when online videos are becoming increasingly widespread and popular, especially on the platforms of rivals such as Facebook. Videos will also be longer on Vine, Twitter’s video-sharing social network. Twitter said that it is starting with a “small group” of Vine creators who will “be able to add a video to their Vine, turning the six second…

A handful of new startups are tackling a thorny problem that AOL couldn’t solve with zillions of dollars: How to cover local news in different cities without going broke. Some see a news hole left behind by the shrinking newsrooms of traditional city newspapers and alt-weeklies. Others want to woo smartphone-addicted millennial readers. They’re using newsletters and social media like Instagram to build an audience for their sites. The latest entrant is the brainchild of three media executives who want to launch a string of sites in mid-size cities, starting with Denver. Their first site, Denverite , launched on June 14 with a staff of nine and an expected annual budget of $1 million - large for a local-news site. Posts are earnest, with zippy photos and video. Goals are…

Apple kicked off its annual World Wide Developers Conference on June 13 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and with it came some serious announcements for its operating systems – macOS, tvOS and watchOS all enjoyed upgrades, but it was iOS which remained the star of the show. The tenth iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system comes packed with serious improvements to its core apps – Messages, News, Music and Photos all got a facelift – and Apple handed third party developers more control over its core apps. Now, apps can be integrated with Siri, Messages, Phone, Maps and even more. We’ve rounded up ten of the biggest changes coming with iOS 10. SWIFT PLAYGROUNDS One of the most exciting announcements at WWDC 2016 was Swift Playgrounds, a new app…

The Obama administration selected a Los Angeles group Monday to lead an effort aimed at making manufacturing companies more competitive globally by helping them consume less energy and produce less pollution. The Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition in Los Angeles will receive $70 million from the federal government to establish the ninth of 15 “manufacturing hubs” that President Barack Obama wants set up across the country. The winning team of nearly 200 partners will at least match that amount. The private-public partnership will develop smart sensors to make all types of manufacturing more efficient, Obama said at a conference designed to showcase investment opportunities in the United States. The U.S. manufacturing sector has added over 800,000 jobs since February 2010. The industry has benefited greatly from lower natural gas prices. Obama…

London Has Fallen The funeral of the British Prime Minister, attended by all leaders of the Western World, soon turns into a catastrophic plot to assassinate them all. It soon transpires that the President of the United States, his secret service head, and a British MI-6 agent may be the only people with any chance of stopping it... FIVE FACTS: 1. Set 3 years after the events of Olympus Has Fallen (2013). 2. Morgan Freeman has played the President on one previous occasion, in Deep Impact (1998). 3. Olympus Has Fallen (2013) director Antoine Fuqua refused to direct this sequel because he didn’t like the script. Fuqua has also worked on Shooter (2007), and The Equalizer (2014). 4. Gerard Butler has also starred in 300 (2006), P.S. I Love You…

Japanese Internet company Softbank Corp. is selling its stake in Finnish game developer Supercell to Chinese technology firm Tencent in a deal announced Tuesday that values the company at about $10.2 billion. Separately, Nikesh Arora, Softbank’s president and chief operating officer, announced his resignation, although he will remain an adviser. He had joined the company from Google in 2014 and was instrumental in the Supercell sale, as well as other Softbank investments, mainly in India and other parts of Asia. Softbank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said Arora had been picked to succeed him, but Son decided he wanted to do “a few more crazy ideas” and stay at his job for another decade, and that would be too long of a wait for Arora. “Helping Masa begin the transformation of…

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The U.S. robotics expert tapped to head Toyota’s Silicon Valley research company says the $1 billion investment by the giant Japanese automaker will start showing results within five years. Gill Pratt told reporters that the Toyota Research Institute is also looking ahead into the distant future when there will be cars that anyone, including children and the elderly, can ride in on their own, as well as robots that help out in homes. Pratt, a former program manager at the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, joined Toyota Motor Corp. first as a technical adviser when it set up its artificial intelligence research effort at Stanford University and MIT. He said safety features will be the first types of AI applications to appear in Toyota vehicles. Such features are…