Become an IT Security professional for $29

The world of IT Security is ever-changing and fast-paced and with increased worries over black hat hackers, the demand for IT security professionals is increasing as well. Whether it’s important credit card information or private data from a company, hacking is a real problem that is best fended off by people who hack themselves. If you’re interested in getting into this field, you have probably wondered how do you even begin to understand the certifications required to step into this field?

Become an IT Security professional for $29! Learn more

There are three major certifications that IT Security employers are looking for: CompTIA Security+, Ethical Hacker Certification, and Cisco’s CCNA Security. With all of these under your belt, you’d be qualified to break into this exciting field.

Allow us to introduce you to the 2017 IT Security & Ethical Hacking Certification Training by the IT experts at LearnSmart.

Right now, you can start your certification training in all three areas for only $29.99, that’s a 98% savings! This bundle of three courses would normally cost you almost $2,000.

This incredibly low price gives you 12 months of access to course content that includes:

• Types of keyloggers, including hardware, software, and kernel/driver keyloggers
• Password studies: how they’re created, restored and cracked
• Spyware and the necessary countermeasures
• Securing Windows systems against attacks and Windows security measures
• Over 50 hours of advanced training and 48 hours of course content

Get access to these great courses at a low price! Learn more

After completing these courses you’ll be prepared to take on your exams, and depending on how you study you could be done these courses in a few short weeks! Don’t miss out on your chance to step into this exciting career! The price is right and the time is now, you can get your IT Security and Ethical Hacking Certification training for 98% off the regular price with Android Central Digital Offers!

Everything you need to know about WebVR

Your web browser is also a VR platform.

Most conversations about VR surround specific headsets, like Oculus Rift or Google Daydream. WebVR, as the name suggests, is bringing immersive experiences to anything with a browser. It’s a lot of fun to explore, and something anyone can try out without a lot of set up or additional hardware.

Lets get to know WebVR together!

Read more at VR Heads!

Get great deals on Logitech gear today only

Our friends at Thrifter are back again, this time with great deals on Logitech gear that won’t last until the end of the day!

Amazon’s Gold Box Deal of the Day features a selection of Logitech PC gear. Pretty much anything you get from Logitech is going to be pretty high quality and these are all good prices, but there’s a couple of items that stand out as a worthy investment here:

Logitech MX Anywhere 2 Wireless Mouse – $48 (from $60)

This is a match for the lowest price ever on this wireless mouse. The Anywhere mouse uses Logitech’s Darkfield laser technology to allow it to track on any surface, even glass. It can connect to whatever device you need it to with the included receiver or through Bluetooth. Plus, this new generation uses a micro-USB cable and built-in battery to keep it charged so you don’t waste money on batteries.

Logitech Z523 Speaker System with Subwoofer – $50 (from $75)

The only audio system in the listing for today, the Z523 is an inexpensive and simple way to add some quality sound to your computer setup. This thing is not going to revolutionize the way you think about audio, but you’ll be hard pressed to find this level of quality sound for $50 no matter where you look. The $50 price matches its lowest ever and is the lowest it has dropped in at least three months.

Logitech HD Pro C920 1080p Webcam – $50 (from $60)

If you’re looking to do any sort of streaming or video conferencing, the C920 is the webcam to get. It’s a favorite for gamers and podcasters alike. It delivers solid 1080p video and can work with programs like Skype and Open Broadcaster Software. The price matches its lowest all time and is only the second time it has dropped this low in 2017.

These aren’t the only options available. There’s a big list, but the deals end when the day does so get moving!

See at Amazon

For more great deals be sure to check out our friends at Thrifter now!

Should you buy the all new Amazon Fire 7?

Is Amazon’s newest budget tablet worth your $50?

The online giant is calling it the “all new Fire 7,” which is perhaps more a marketing thing than actual hard truth when it comes to the tablet in question. It is new, and it is improved, but marketing hype is still marketing hype.

So, let’s actually break down what is new and whether this latest budget tablet is worth your time.

See at Amazon

What’s actually new?

There are subtle differences in the hardware on the all new Fire 7, but ones that will make for a solid improvement in user experience. The first of these is that it now supports the microSDXC standard which means you can now expand your internal storage by up to 256GB based on currently available cards.

The next important improvement is the inclusion of dual-band Wi-Fi, which means you’re now able to use the Fire 7 on the 5GHz band. Traditionally these give you better speeds over your local network, and it’s a notable upgrade over the single-band available in the old model.

Amazon has also an improved 7-inch IPS display in the new Fire 7, though just how good that is will have to wait until we actually see one.

Then there’s a little thing called Alexa. Amazon’s AI platform continues to grow, and following its inclusion on the most recent Fire TV products, Alexa is now on the basic Fire tablet, too. Holding the home button launches Alexa and from there you can ask questions and control your connected home devices just as you can with an Echo.

Is it worth getting one?

Absolutely. We’ve long recommended the Fire 7 as a cheap tablet that’s actually worth buying and that hasn’t changed with the new one. The improvements that have been made strengthen an already great product for $50.

Alexa is probably only going to excite you if you’re already getting into that ecosystem, but if you are, it’s yet another piece of tech you can use to turn on your lights and much more besides.

If you already have a Fire 7, it’s not necessarily worth ditching it just to grab the latest one. If it’s working just fine still, keep hold of it for now. Then again, $50 is almost an impulse buy, which is part of what makes the Fire 7 so good in the first place.

See at Amazon

Garmin Virb 360 continues action cam line with 360-degree 5.7K thrills

Garmin has announced its first 360-degree action cam, the water and dust proof Virb 360 that captures all the action around it in up to 5.7K resolution.

The Garmin Virb 360 also captures 360-degree audio, to ensure that surround sound systems expand the experience.

Strangely, for a 360-degree camera, it’s square rather than round, but comes with two extreme angle lenses and Garmin’s automatic in-camera stitching technology to ensure completely spherical images and video are seamless.

It shoots up to 5.7K at 30fps and uses 4K Spherical Stabilisation to ensure that footage is smooth and steady.

It offers one hour of rechargeable battery life, which you can see on the built-in mini display. There are also one-touch button controls, voice control to start and stop recordings, and it links with the Virb Android or iOS app to edit, share and even livestream video.

The camera can take 360-degree, 15-megapixel photos, including burst and time lapse. It has Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ANT+ and NFC connectivity.

You will require external storage for saving footage on the Virb 360 itself, with microSD cards up to 128GB supported.

The Garmin Virb 360 will be available from June for a recommended retail price of $799.99 in the US. We’re still waiting on pricing details for the UK.

The Long Now: Planning for a future 10,000 years away

In an age of self-driving cars, virtual reality worlds and artificial intelligence, some would say the future is already here. Technology moves at such breakneck speeds that companies in Silicon Valley often have product roadmaps that stretch five to ten years ahead. But what about decades? Centuries? Millenia? In the search for the next big thing, we often lose sight of the even bigger picture: of how the actions of today can affect our great-great grandchildren of tomorrow. The Long Now, however, is a foundation that aims to correct that.

Created in 1996, the Long Now is a San Francisco-based non-profit organization dedicated to long-term thinking. Among its founders are prominent luminaries in science and technology. Examples include Stewart Brand, who’s an editor of The Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of The WELL (an online community that’s been around since 1985); Danny Hillis, a computer theorist who worked on the idea of parallel computers — the basis for supercomputers and RAID arrays; and Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired.

“They were all kind of part of Silicon Valley, realizing that a lot of things were happening that were not allowing for some of the longer-term issues in society that needed to be addressed,” said Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now. “There wasn’t an excuse to think of certain things in long enough terms, like climate change or hunger. None of these things have a ‘return on investment’ as it were. We were just writing them off as things we weren’t going to deal with. And if we’re going to address these large and important issues, we need to have a frame of reference.”

Clock One: Winder & Main Differential from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

This prompted Hillis to have an idea for a 10,000-year clock, which would be the first-ever project of the Long Now. “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year,” he said, in a description of the clock on the Long Now’s website. “The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.”

If that sounds like fantasy, well, it isn’t. The clock is real, and it’s being built in the mountains of western Texas, on a plot of land owned by none other than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The entire clock will be mechanical, made out of stainless steel, titanium and ceramic. It will chime every thousand years, and thanks to a special melody-generator, the chimes are programmed never to repeat.

The composer behind the tunes is musician Brian Eno, who also coined the “Long Now” name of the foundation. Stewart Brand writes that it indicates “not the short now of next quarter, next week, or the next five minutes, but the ‘long now’ of centuries.” Rose was hired to work on the prototype in 1996 — essentially the Long Now’s first employee — and has only now just finished most of the underground excavation. There is no timeline for completion; it’ll be done when it’s done.

But why go through all this trouble? The purpose is to get people to ask that question; to prompt themselves to think about time in the frame of centuries and generations, rather than weeks and months. “If a clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well?” asks Brand. The clock is thus a symbol, an icon to long-term thinking. “That is really what the Long Now is all about,” says Rose. “Our hope is to inspire people to think in a different time frame.”

The Rosetta Wearable Disk from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

The Clock, as it is known, is not the Foundation’s only project. Over the past decade, the Long Now has launched a series of different ventures, some more ambitious than others. There’s the Rosetta Project, which started as a collection effort of parallel texts and information in thousands of different languages, which the foundation then micro-etched into a tiny three-inch solid nickel disk using the same technology as silicon chip fabrication. On this disk is more than 13,000 pages of information in more than 1,500 human languages. All you need to read it is a microscope. The purpose of such a project is to keep these languages alive, tens and thousands of years into the future.

Perhaps the most controversial is a project co-founded by Brand called Revive & Restore, which aims to bring extinct species back to life through a process known as de-extinction. Using methods like genome mapping and genetic engineering, the team hopes to revive extinct species in order to “preserve biodiversity and genetic diversity,” and also to undo the harm that humans have caused in killing them off in the first place. Right now, they’re working on bringing back the passenger pigeon, the heath hen, the black-footed ferret and even the wooly mammoth.

One of the reasons this project is perfect for long-term thinking is that de-extinction is a science that will likely take years, if not decades, to implement properly. Not only is the actual genome mapping a chore — turns out harvesting DNA from ancient parts is pretty difficult — there also needs to be studies done on whether it’s a good idea. After all, the world has changed a lot since these animals died off and many living species have evolved to adapt to the changed world. “If you’re going to bring the species back, fundamentally you’re asking yourself if there’s a place for the species to live in the here and now,” says Rose.

Projects aside, perhaps the one venture that the Long Now is most known for is its ongoing lecture series, where it invites experts from around the world to talk about topics in the long term — be it predictions of the next 30 years or how certain industries can benefit from thinking so far into the future.

Kevin Kelly, for example, gave a talk recently about the next 30 digital years, where he talked about how you can apply long-term thinking to today’s fast-paced technological world. Observations include how the shift in the industry is moving more toward services rather than products, and that we’re all in a perpetual newbie state because there’s always something new to learn. He also talked about the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how it doesn’t really replace us so much as helps us. He posits that, in future, we’ll all operate as sort of “cybercentaurs,” where we’ll be part human and part AI. “The best doctor diagnosticians are not Watson, or AI — it’s the team of doctor and AI,” said Kelly. “We’re going to be paid by how well we work with AI.”

Rose has his own thoughts about how technology companies can benefit from long-term thinking. One example is with data archiving. “With so many governments and NGOs using Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office suite to archive birth records, death records, marriage records, infrastructure records … all of these things go into these data formats that are owned by these companies,” says Rose. “We’re talking about data that we would want in a thousand years. These companies need to take that responsibility very seriously. They think of themselves as technology companies, but actually what they are now are infrastructure companies.”

[Photo credit: Because We Can]

Of course, one of the issues with technology is that it’s always evolving, so it’s hard to predict about what will happen tens of years down the line. “There was a very strong belief in the early days of the internet that all we had to do was connect everybody and then everything was going to be great,” Rose says. “We’re just now learning that there are downsides to connecting everybody…. there used to be a world where all the news went through three major news agencies with hundreds of people doing fact checking for every single thing. We were annoyed by that, but they were doing it in a way that’s vastly more careful and researched than what we now see as news.”

He added: “It is very new to us, this idea of where all communication is infinite and free and instantaneous. I believe we’re not good at it yet.”

By its very nature, the Long Now is always looking to the future. Three years ago, it opened The Interval, a bar in San Francisco that serves tea and coffee by day and cocktails by night. It serves two functions: as a venue for Long Now events and as a public space for anyone and everyone to come together to discuss long-term thinking. The Interval also houses a small collection of artifacts from several Long Now projects. Upcoming talks include how to be prepared for a catastrophic event (“Imagining catastrophe from the Cold War to Bird Flu”) and what geological records tell us about the human relationship with the natural world.

When asked what he thought would be good lessons that people take from long-term thinking, Rose says he thinks we’re far better off creating “principle-based systems rather than rule-based systems.” “One example is the Bill of Rights,” he says, pointing to an example of a principles-based system. “It’s a page and a half document. It’s very simple. It was designed to be reinterpreted by every generation into the future. That’s one way of making the law.”

“Another way of making the law is a twelve-hundred-page health care law that no one’s ever read that is self-contradictory,” he added, commenting on the recent health care repeal bill. “One trusts the future. The other doesn’t.”

Welcome to Tomorrow, Engadget’s new home for stuff that hasn’t happened yet. You can read more about the future of, well, everything, at Tomorrow’s permanent home and check out all of our launch week stories here.

Apple launches free courses for the next generation of app coders

Apple has unveiled a free curriculum designed to teach high school and community college students app coding schools. The Swift language course has already been adopted by six US community college systems that will distribute it to half a million students this fall. While it’s generous on Apple’s part, Tim Cook acknowledged that it needs to address an industry-wide shortage of coders, especially for enterprise apps. “That’s really in its infancy, in terms of explosion, and so there’s just a ton of opportunity here,” he told USA Today.

The course entails around 180 hours of training with lesson plans, instruction and exercises for teachers. Students will “learn to code and and design fully functional apps, gaining critical job skills in software development and information technology,” writes Apple. The program is an extension of Apple kindergarten to grade 12 “Everyone Can Code” curriculum that helps students get comfortable with code.

It will be offered in the community college curriculum’s in Alabam, Columbus STate, Harrisburg Area, Houston, Mesa and San Mateo. Houston is also opening an iOS Coding and Design School, Apple says.

The availability of the course just ahead of Apple’s WWDC is just a coincidence, Cook said, adding that’s more about getting it ready ahead of the Fall 2017 semester. However, we wouldn’t be surprised to hear him trumpet the program during the event’s keynote address.

Apple wrote that like the recently announced $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund, “the new Swift coding curriculum is another example of Apple’s commitment to economic development [in the US].” However, in an interview with Mashable, he dismissed the idea that Apple was trying to curry favor with Trump’s “America first” White House. “We began working on Swift many years ago. It spanned multiple administrations. No this isn’t related to anything to do with politics.”

While Swift is open source, it’s primarily used to build iOS apps, so coders would want to learn another language to do Android apps (for now). By getting as many students as possible hooked on Swift, however, Apple is obviously aiming to gain an advantage for its own ecosystem. “It’s sort of the next step of a long plan for us with Swift and trying to help prepare people for the new economy,” Cook said.

Source: Apple

Get a lifetime of Zoolz 1TB of cloud storage for $30

If you’ve ever been on the wrong side of a hard drive crash, you know the stress and frustration that goes along with losing your valuable data. There’s no shortage of cloud backup services out there, but the cost can be hard to justify, especially when you just need some extra space for old photos and personal documents. That’s why we recommend Zoolz for long-term storage. A 1TB account normally runs for around $40 / year, but for a limited time you can get a lifetime subscription for just $30.

Zoolz Dual Cloud splits your cloud drive between on-demand and cold storage. You can retrieve frequently accessed files from your instant vault, while lesser-used data gets stored in your archive. Both vaults protect your files with military grade 256-AES encryption to ensure that your digital assets stay private before leaving your computer.

It’s only a matter of time before your hard drive fails, so don’t wait until then. Get a lifetime subscription to Zoolz for $30 today and rest easy knowing your data is securely backed up.

Check out these other popular offers from GDGT Deals:

• Save over 70 percent on a 6-pack of vintage style Edison Bulbs

• The Aerix FPV racing drone is down to just $100

• Get the Pioneer X-CM56B Stereo System for 25 percent off

Sphero’s latest app-controlled toy is a ‘Cars 3’ tie-in

Sphero’s made a name for itself with connected, rolling toys like the Ollie, SPRK and, perhaps most famously, the Star Wars-inspired BB-8. Of course, the company couldn’t have brought its replica of the Force Awakens character to market without Disney’s approval, and the two seem to be keen on working together. Today, Sphero introduced its first app-controlled car, based on the “Ultimate Lighting McQueen” personality from Pixar’s Cars franchise. Sphero says the new toy is its most animatronic device yet, featuring five motors for steering, drifting, lifting and moving up and down, as well as animated eyes and a mouth that make it feel more realistic.

In addition, there are capacitive touch panels around the vehicle’s shell, which let you do things like wake it up and have it talk to you by simply rubbing your hands on spots like the windshield. The companion app isn’t only for driving, as Sphero’s built-in a few games and activities, including a training mode that helps you to get used to Ultimate Lightning McQueen quickly. The car is said to last about 40 minutes on a charge, with top speeds hitting about 6mph (10kmh). If you’re into it, its price may bring your spirits down a bit: Sphero’s pricing its new toy at a whopping $299. If that’s not a deal-breaker, you can order one today from the company’s site. The toy is expected to ship in time for the premiere of Cars 3 on June 16th.

Xbox’s Game Pass offers 100 titles starting June 1st

Remember when we told you that Microsoft was launching its own Netflix-style subscription service for games? Well, thanks to Danny Mcbride, we now know that it’s coming to an Xbox One near you on June 1st. As we reported previously, Xbox Game Pass will set you back $10 a month, allowing users to download anything they wish from a library of over 100 Xbox 360 and Xbox One titles. The initial lineup looks fine, if unremarkable, featuring the likes of Halo 5: Guardians, Payday 2, NBA 2K16 and Soul Calibur II. While we know a handful of other titles coming to the service, the vast majority of the 100 plus game library still remains unknown.

Still, a new subscription service is a big ask, especially when most Xbox gamers are already paying $60 for a Live Gold membership. Sensibly then, Microsoft has decided to offer everyone a free 14-day trial, so Xbox One owners can see whether the service is really for them.

With the full game lineup still under wraps, it remains to be seen whether this package will actually offer enough Xbox One games to make it good value. One thing’s for sure though, at $120 a year, Microsoft will need to continuously pull out the big titles if it’s going to convince gamers that Xbox Game Pass is worth the price of admission.

Source: Xbox (Facebook)