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The tweet may have initially gone out to Musk’s 1.86 million followers, but the impact was far greater. By the end of the day, Musk’s message had been retweeted more than 4,700 times and favorited another 3,700, while eliciting thousands more responses. (Maybe Twitter CEO Dick Costolo should send Musk an invoice for the IR/PR services.)

Want to send me an encrypted file? Here’s my miniLock public key: yRF4ZRBFr6QZkwPPB6D13oEvj5tJzpaA9WEjyXQCUi3hA ..

The new ASUS ‘Chromebit’ is the most interesting announcement. Due this summer, the dongle attaches to your TV via HDMI and turns your screen into a full-fledged Chrome OS computer. Google says it will cost less than $100 and is smaller than a candy bar.

slirpa loof

Today the rules are different in Redmond. The new boss who took over last year, Satya Nadella (pictured, centre, with Mr Gates to the left and Mr Ballmer on the right), recoils when he hears the term “strategy tax” and says he now tells his staff simply to “build stuff that people like”. Some of the things he has done would surely have been seen by his two predecessors as “fuck Windows” strategies. Office, the company’s popular suite of word-processing, spreadsheet and other applications, now runs on mobile devices that use competing operating systems. The company is embracing free, “open-source” software, which it used to regard as anathema. At an event in San Francisco last October Mr Nadella showed a slide that read: “Microsoft loves Linux”. In contrast, Mr Ballmer once called the open-source operating system a “cancer”.

The lesson here is simple, and Bonneau summarizes it well, saying, “If a new crypto tool is first announced in a press release or popular science magazine, don’t use it.” Good security needs to be tested and proved over time. The question becomes whether the most secure solutions will be trendy and attractive enough to win out in the end.

In a first-of-its-kind prosecution, the convicted operator of a “revenge porn” website was sentenced to nearly 18 years in prison, officials announced Friday. Kevin Christopher Bollaert, 28, of San Diego, was found guilty in February on six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft for running a website that posted nude photos of individuals, as well as identifying information, without their consent, according to Attorney General Kamala Harris. “Sitting behind a computer, committing what is essentially a cowardly and criminal act will not shield predators from the law or jail,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to be vigilant and investigate and prosecute those who commit these deplorable acts.”

Even though you’ll still find Qualcomm modems in some S6 models, it’s not the greatest news for Qualcomm. AT&T is a big mobile phone carrier and Qualcomm will be cut out of all those Galaxy S6 phones sold through AT&T.

But this is what Russinovich expects. “That’s the reality we live in today,” he says. The tech world has changed in enormous ways. So many companies—so many Microsoft customers—are now relying on open source code. And that means Microsoft must embrace it too. As Russinovich points out, the company now allows Linux on its Azure cloud computing service, a way of renting computers over the internet, and today, Linux is running on at least 20 percent of those computers.

However, BIOS support is largely lacking. Without an NVMe-aware BIOS, you can’t boot from an NVMe drive, though anyone with a x4 PCIe slot or M.2 connector can benefit from employing an NVMe drive as secondary storage. An NVMe BIOS is not a difficult technical hurdle, but it does require engineering hours and money, so it’s unlikely it will stretch far back into the legacy pool. Equally daunting for early adopters is the connection conundrum. Early on, you’ll see a lot of expansion card NVMe drives using Gen 3 PCIe slots. That's because all 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs use the new SFF-8639 (Small Form Factor) connector that’s been specially developed for NVMe and SATA Express, but is currently found only on high-end servers. An SFF-8639 connection features four Gen 3 PCIe lanes, two SATA

The Large Hadron Collider has restarted, with protons circling the machine's 27km tunnel for the first time since 2013. Particle beams have now travelled in both directions, inside parallel pipes, at a whisker below the speed of light. Actual collisions will not begin for at least another month, but they will take place with nearly double the energy the LHC reached during its first run. Scientists hope to glimpse a "new physics" beyond the Standard Model.

Salutin' Putin: inside a Russian troll house

RT @Techmeme: Delphi created an autonomous car that drove across US without human input for 99% of the time

RT @Techmeme: Delphi created an autonomous car that drove across US without human input for 99% of the time

Most people know Andy Rubin as the creator of Android. I know Andy as a twenty-something engineer at WebTV who had built a sleeping loft above his cubicle so he didn’t have to leave the office. 20 years, 3 successful startups, and 2 billion Android devices later, Andy is joining Redpoint as a Venture Partner.

TechCrunch has learned that Apple quietly bought a startup called Ottocat some time ago, which had developed a system to organize and surface apps on the app store based on “nested” categories of increasing specificity. A version of that system now powers the “explore” tab in Apple’s App Store.

The HBO Now app has made its way to the Apple TV and iOS as of today. The HBO Now channel was promised for availability ahead of the Game of Thrones premiere on the network on April 12, and the new service provides access to HBO’s entire streaming content library, as well as new shows live as they air, for $14.99 per month, with one free month included for users who sign up in April.

Likely to the delight of Apple employees, Cook also announced major Apple Watch discounts for all employees: 50% off the aluminum sport and stainless steel models and $550 off of the gold Edition variations.

Pharell sporte the Apple Watch Edition

Microsoft has released an optional update that “enables additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications when new updates are available to the user”. We discovered the update is actually a downloader for Windows 10 which will notify the user that Microsoft’s upcoming operating system can be downloaded.

The acquisition seemed to be confirmed by Randy Marsden’s LinkedIn profile, which lists him as joining Apple last September. Marsden, the chief technology officer of Dryft and also a co-founder of Swype, now leads development for Apple’s internal keyboard efforts. Whether Apple acquired Dryft for its assets or its talent in Marsden and others, we’re not exactly sure. Financial terms of the deal weren’t available.

Beats Music will be retooled and re-launched this summer, possibly with a new name. There will be a $9.99-a-month subscription for individuals and a family plan for $14.99, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The episodes that were posted online thus far are in standard-definition (SD) quality. Interestingly, some commenters note that they rather wait until HD copies become available, as they are used to watching the show in a better resolution.

HBO spent several years trying to build a digital capability in house that could compete with the impressive technical operation of its main online rival. It gave up last fall and hired MLB Advanced Media, the tech operation created by Major League Baseball that now provides streaming services to traditional television networks and other clients. Bob Bowman, the head of MLBAM, believes HBO Now will be a sort of litmus test for how the wider entertainment industry views streaming. “That’s one of the major media brands in the world, and that’s doing a launch with one of their best content properties ever,” Bowman told TechCrunch last month. “I guess what I’m saying is, this has to be 9s all the way across—99.999, in terms of reliability, customizability, beauty, and all of those other things in order to be successful with the entire world examining it.”

Twitter announced that it will be terminating agreements with third parties for reselling firehose data — the unfiltered, full stream of Tweets and all related metadata that goes along with them. Instead, it will use its own in-house big data analytics team, which it developed around its acquisition of Gnip in 2014, to seek to build direct relationships with the data companies, brands and others that use Twitter data to measure consumer sentiment, market trends and other moving targets that can be better understood by tracking online conversations — a transition it says it hopes to have completed by mid-August.