The victims and beneficiaries of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's reorgnanization are now known, and among the casualties of today's big Microsoft layoffs will be original content planned for the Xbox: Xbox Entertainment Studios. As first reported by Re/Code, the shutdown will occur in the next few months, Xbox chief Phil Spencer wrote in a memo to staff.

Xbox Entertainment Studios was founded last year in order to produce original content for the Xbox platform. The L.A.-based, 125-person studio was led by former CBS television president Nancy Tellem, who remains "committed to new, original programming already in production," Spencer said today.

XBox Entertainment Studios had a short life. It was announced only a year ago, but design decisions led to poor reviews. Among its weaknesses, the software was bloated and slow, and Microsoft not only hobbled it with DDR3 memory but also needlessly restricted the games to using only 6 of the 8 cores.

[Author note: I have an AMD 8320 and Win8.1, it utilizes only 2% of the processor at idle. And the Xbox doesn't have full on Win8, but a stripped down, slower version running on two full cores. Win8.1, for all it's bad press, is very fast and works great for a gaming rig simply because it does have a smaller footprint and uses much less of the processor. Most of the biggest complaints have been corrected and there's always classic shell. So there is no reason a stripped down Win8 needs 2 full cores. Next Gen just isn't going to live up to it's promise. At least not on the Xbox One.]

[2014-07-21 11:10 Ed. note: corrected misspelled CEO's name.]

The Kerbal Space Program has just released an update called "First Contract," a name chosen by the popular indie game's active user community. It introduces the concept of funds and contracts to the basic science career mode, giving a sense of purpose to the space agency simulator.

Other new aspects to the game with this update include all new agency icons (they were all fan-created and voted on), and the new factor of reputation as well: keeping those little green dudes alive actually takes on importance.¹ The game has all the goodness of a fully functional career mode, and there is now 64 bit support for both Windows and Linux (the Linux version has been 64 bit capable for some time now). If you have been hiding in a cave for the last 3 years here is a link to their homepage. Available through the website or Steam. $26.99 US at this time.

So, go forth and build rockets! In the famous words of Jebidiah Kerman, 'Splosions are the sprinkles on your ice cream sundae.'

¹ If reputation is a factor, I am in trouble for certain.

It's been proposed before, but MIT takes it a step further and is fleshing out a system where users can take control of their own data. This would be a radical shift in how things work now.

In the latest issue of PLOS One, MIT researchers offer one possible answer. Their prototype system, openPDS - short for personal data store - stores data from your digital devices in a single location that you specify: It could be an encrypted server in the cloud, but it could also be a computer in a locked box under your desk. Any cellphone app, online service, or big-data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store, which returns only as much information as is required.

Interestingly, the system involves sharing code, not data. They outline a music recommendation service that would make a recommendation to you not by requesting access to your music store, but by sending you an algorithm your datastore would run and return. There's more work to do here, but it seems like a step up from the "everyone owns your data except you" model in which we're currently living.

This week's Friday distro is Alpine Linux, a surprisingly interesting distro specialized for Routers, VPNs, VOIP service, and firewalls that takes an aggressive, proactive approach to security. It's therefore minimalist, so you can install it on a router, and includes the absolute minimum (no Perl, for example). It began life as a branch of the LEAF project, which wanted a router/vpn system that could be booted from a floppy disk and run from memory: the Alpine hackers decided that config was a bit too minimal and chose instead a slightly larger package set that also provided squid, samba, dansguardian, and some other heavier applications. I thought for sure I'd learn it was developed by a bunch of Swiss or Austrian hackers, but no: it simply stands for "A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine." Distrowatch reports it comes originally from Norway.

Most interesting of all, Alpine incorporates two security enhancements I haven't yet found on any other distro: PaX and Buffer Overflow Protection (Stack Smashing Protection). PaX is a Linux kernel patch that implements least privilege protection for memory pages. It flags data memory as non-executable, program memory as non-writable and randomly arranges the program memory. Inclusion of these two systems kept Alpine Linux protected from the vmsplice 0-day Linux kernel vulnerability: even though the attack would crash the OS, there would be no system compromise.

If you're interested in trying it, it's easy: you can run it from a USB stick, back up your config to a single file, and its simple package management and init systems make it possible to be up and running in under 10 minutes.