The best keyboard ever is back You may not know the Model F by name, but you know it by sound---the musical thwacking of flippers slapping away. The sound of the '80s office. The IBM Model F greeting the world in 1981 with a good ten pounds of die-cast zinc and keys that crash down on buckling metal springs as they descend. It's a sensation today's clickiest keyboards chase, but will never catch. And now it's coming back. Popular Mechanics | Also read TechSpot's best keyboards
Building a PC remote starter from scratch Most gerbils are aware that Silverstone makes high-end PC enclosures, most of them with elegant styling and aluminum construction. The company's cases don't get as full-boat weird as competitor Lian Li's, but someone in upper management clearly lets the engineers go a little crazy with some of the accessories in the product catalog. One of the somewhat off-the-wall categories Silverstone gets into is its three-model line of PC remote controls. The Tech Report
TV networks hide bad ratings with typos, report says If I mistakenly write "NBC Nitely News," you can probably still tell what program I'm talking about. Nielsen's automated system can't, however, and a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers. CNET
Amid unprecedented controversy, W3C greenlights DRM for the web Early today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body publicly announced its intention to publish Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)---a DRM standard for web video---with no safeguards whatsoever for accessibility, security research or competition, despite an unprecedented internal controversy among its staff and members over this issue. EFF
The streaming problem: How spammers, superstars, and tech giants gamed the music industry A few weeks after the release of Kendrick Lamar's "Humble," the hard-charging lead single on his fourth album Damn., the song landed at No. 1 on Billboard's streaming chart. It's been on the chart ever since, never falling below No. 3 as users have played it more than 291 million times on Spotify alone. Vulture
How to defend your website with ZIP bombs If you have ever hosted a website or even administrated a server you'll be very well aware of bad people trying bad things with your stuff. When I first hosted my own little linux box with SSH access at age 13 I read through the logs daily and report the IPs (mostly from China and Russia) who tried to connect to my sweet little box (which was actually an old ThinkPad T21 with a broken display running under my bed) to their ISPs. Christian Haschek
Why people are still making NES games Officially, the NES died in 1995, some nine years after its launch. Unofficially, though, dedicated fans are keeping Nintendo's retro console very much alive. Today, the most prolific and respected NES developers are people such as Kevin Hanley, from Crestview, Florida. Since 2009, Hanley has made nine "homebrew" NES games, cartridges and all. His catalogue is an eclectic mix of remakes and originals. Eurogamer
OneDrive has stopped working on non-NTFS drives OneDrive users around the world have been upset to discover that with its latest update, Microsoft's cloud file syncing and storage system no longer works with anything other than disks formatted with the NTFS file system. Both older file systems, such as FAT32 and exFAT, and newer ones, such as ReFS, will now provoke an error message when OneDrive starts up. Ars Technica
This circuit board will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3... Under the cover of night, enemy agents capture an elite solider unit. The agents hold down the commander and cut through the skin of his upper arm, pulling out a slim, transparent circuit board containing the unit's military directives. But as soon as the agents remove the device, it dissolves before their eyes. IEEE Spectrum
John McAfee can finally use his name, settles lawsuit but Intel still wins It was last year when, John McAfee, the co-founder of an antivirus company that's now owned by Intel, took Intel to the court over the right to use his name for commercial purposes. John McAfee wanted to rename his company MGT Capital to John McAfee Global Technologies. Intel also filed a counter case involving trademark infringements and unfair competition. Fossbytes
Free as in beer, or the story of Windows viruses Whenever there's a new Windows virus out there wreaking global havoc, the Linux types get smug. "That'll never happen in our open operating system," they say. "There are many eyes looking over the source code." But then there's a Heartbleed vulnerability that keeps them humble for a little while. Anyway, at least patches are propagated faster in the Linux world, right? While the Linuxers are holier-than-thou, the Windows folks get defensive. Hackaday