New video from NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover chronicles major milestones during the final minutes of its entry, descent, and landing (EDL) on the Red Planet on Feb. 18 as the spacecraft plummeted, parachuted, and rocketed toward the surface of Mars. A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds from Mars. From a report: From…
Tag: audible
ExamSoft Flags One-Third of California Bar Exam Test Takers For Cheating
The California Bar released data last week confirming that during its use of ExamSoft for the October Bar exam, over one-third of the nearly nine-thousand online examinees were flagged by the software. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is concerned that the exam proctoring software is incorrectly flagging students for cheating “due either to the software’s technical failures or to its requirements that…
Twitch Users Protest Its DMCA Policy By Streaming Videos With Homemade Sound Effects
Wednesday Twitch warned its users to delete any videos containing copyrighted music. PC Gamer reports on what happened next: Since October, Twitch has been deleting significant quantities of videos over copyright claims, leaving the affected streamers with no way to respond or issue counter-claims. Twitch eventually explained that the number of DMCA notifications it receives from major record labels has surged,…
Ring’s Latest Security Camera Is a Drone That Flies Around Inside Your House
Ring’s latest home security camera is an autonomous drone, called the Always Home Cam, that can fly around inside your home to give you a perspective of any room you want when you’re not home. “Once it’s done flying, the Always Home Cam returns to its dock to charge its battery,” reports The Verge. “It is expected to cost $249.99 when…
Cory Doctorow Crowdfunds His New Audiobook to Protest Amazon/Audible DRM
Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (also a former EFF staffer and activist) explains why he’s crowdfunding his new audiobook online. Despite the large publishers for his print editions, “I can’t get anyone to do my audiobooks. Amazon and its subsidiary Audible, which controls 90% of the audiobook sales, won’t carry any of my audiobooks because I won’t let them put any…
Is there another planet in the universe just like Earth?
Audible podcast Exoplanets explores the hunt to find planets like our own outside our solar system. There are potentially millions of them out there, and more are found every day Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24732901-000-is-there-another-planet-in-the-universe-just-like-earth/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Spies Can Eavesdrop By Watching a Light Bulb’s Vibrations
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Researchers from Israeli’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science today revealed a new technique for long-distance eavesdropping they call “lamphone.” They say it allows anyone with a laptop and less than a thousand dollars of equipment — just a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor — to listen…
What Are the Best Free Streaming Services?
An anonymous reader shares some free streaming media options: There’s over 10,000 public domain audiobooks at LibriVox.org, created by volunteers reading public domain works. (If you’ve got time, why not record yourself reading your own favorite public domain poem or novel?) And there’s also a lot of free audiobooks (and ebooks) available through Hoopla, a free “digital media” service that’s partnering…
Amazon Tells Employees In New York and New Jersey To Work From Home To Prevent Coronavirus Spread
Amazon on Monday asked employees at its New York and New Jersey offices to work from home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This comes as the company told employees at its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle area to work from home, following reports that an Amazon employee in Seattle tested positive for the virus….
Audible Settles Copyright Lawsuit With Publishers Over Audiobook Captions
After months of back and forth, Audible has settled in a copyright lawsuit with major publishers over its plan to introduce captions to their recordings, a proposal that the publishing houses argued was simply reading. The Guardian reports: In July, the audiobook company owned by Amazon announced Captions, an additional function for the existing app that would allow customers to read…