Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One major investment giant has now released three separate reports arguing that Tesla Motors is going to help kill power companies off altogether. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley stirred up controversy when it released a report that suggested that the increasing viability of consumer solar, paired with better battery technology—that allows people to generate, and store, their own electricity—could send the decades-old utility industry into a death spiral. Then, the firm released another one. Now, it's tripling down on the idea with yet another report that spells out how Tesla and home solar will "disrupt" utilities.

An anonymous reader writes Laptop Mag battery tested the leading phones on all four major U.S. carriers and found that the same models on T-Mobile typically last 1 to 3 hours longer on a charge. This trend is not new, but has continued for over 3 years of testing. The article says While we don’t know for certain why T-Mobile phones last longer on a charge, there are some strong possibilities. T-Mobile’s network could be more efficient at sending and receiving data because of the bands it uses, or maybe there are far fewer customers on its LTE network, easing the strain. Another possibility is that T-Mobile tends to pre-load less bloatware on its flagship devices relative to the other carriers. AT&T is firmly in second place in the battery life findings presented, with Verizon and Sprint jockeying for last of the four carriers measured. It woud be interesting to see a similar test battery for phones in marginal reception areas; searching for service seems to deplete my battery faster than talking does.

Today's interview guest is literally a household name: If you look at the shelves in nearly any programmer's house, developer shop or hackerspace, you'll probably see a stretch of books from O'Reilly Media (or O'Reilly & Associates, depending on how old the books are). Tim O'Reilly started out publishing a few technical manuals in the late '70s, branching from there into well-received technical reference and instructional books, notably ones covering open source languages and operating systems (how many people learned to install and run a new OS from Matt Walsh's Running Linux?), but neither Tim O'Reilly nor the company has gotten stuck in one place for long. As a publisher, he was early to make electronic editions available, in step with the increasing capabilities of electronic readers. Make Magazine (later spun off as part of Maker Media, which also produces Maker Faires around the world) started as an O'Reilly project; the company's conferences like OSCON, Fluent, and this year's Solid are just as much a manifestation of O'Reilly's proclivity for spreading knowledge as the books are, and those are only part of the picture, being joined with seminars, video presentations, and more. Tim O'Reilly is often hailed as a futurist and an activist (he was an early proponent of 3-D printing and hardware hacking, and a loud voice for patent reform) and he's got his eye on trends from global (how the Internet functions) to more personal -- like ways that physical goods can be produced, customized, and networked. So please go ahead and ask O'Reilly about what it's been like to be a publisher of paper books in an ever-more electronic world, as well as a visionary in the world of DIY and fabrication, or anything else on your mind. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Deathlizard (115856) writes "Have a Synology NAS? Is it accessible to the internet? If it is, You might want to take it offline for a while. Synolocker is a 0-day ransomware that once installed, will encrypt all of the NAS's files and hold them for ransom just like Cryptolocker does for windows PC's. The Virus is currently exploiting an unknown vulnerability to spread. Synology is investigating the issue."

vinces99 (2792707) writes "Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles, storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it – all without requiring batteries. Or, battery-free sensors embedded around your home that could track minute-by-minute temperature changes and send that information to your thermostat to help conserve energy. This not-so-distant 'Internet of Things' reality would extend connectivity to perhaps billions of devices. Sensors could be embedded in everyday objects to help monitor and track everything from the structural safety of bridges to the health of your heart. But having a way to cheaply power and connect these devices to the Internet has kept this from taking off. Now, University of Washington engineers have designed a new communication system that uses radio frequency signals as a power source and reuses existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to these devices. Called Wi-Fi backscatter, this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-Fi infrastructure. The researchers will publish their results at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication's annual conference this month in Chicago. The team also plans to start a company based on the technology. The Pre-print research paper.