Some people have had enough, and they've organized a boycott at "http://boycottsystemd.org" to organize efforts. From the top: "Disclaimer: We are not sysvinit purists by any means. We do recognize the need for a new init system in the 21st century, but systemd is not it." OK, that's enough to keep me reading. They outline twelve well-thought-out reasons systemd is dangerous, and a set of ways you can get involved, including refusing to use systemd distros, moving to slackware, crux, gentoo, BSD, and more. Here's just one of them:

systemd clusters itself into PID 1. Due to it controlling lots of different components, this means that there are tons of scenarios in which it can crash and bring down the whole system. But in addition, this means that plenty of non-kernel system upgrades will now require a reboot. Enjoy your new Windows 9 Linux system! In fairness, systemd does provide a mechanism to reserialize and reexecute systemctl in real time. If this fails, of course, the system goes down. There are several ways that this can occur9. This happens to be another example of SPOF.

Interesting times. When's the last time you heard someone advocate moving immediately to Slackware or Gentoo?

Oliver Roeder gives competitive Scrabble a serious analysis in a recent pair of articles previewing and covering the 2014 National Scrabble Championship, with a focus on the man who is considered the world's best: Nigel Richards.

In a game in 1998, then-newcomer Richards had a rack of CDHLRN? ("?" denotes a blank tile). There was an E available on the board; Richards could have played CHILDREN for a bingo and a 50-point bonus. Instead, Richards played through two disconnected Os and an E. The word? The 10-letter CHLORODYNE.

If you're wondering what the word means - well, it means Richards is the greatest Scrabble player to ever live.

Apple has decided to up its game, but is it too late for them and the icloud brand, or is it only the users who will suffer?

The security problems that allowed the celebrity photos to leak was, Apple said, found between keyboard and chair (not in those words), iCloud has added extra security features to their popular file storage medium.

The changes come in the wake of the recent leak of a large number of photos from celebrity accounts, allegedly from hacked iCloud accounts. Apple previously released a statement denying any breach within its systems, but admitting that celebrity accounts were compromised by attackers using standard phishing techniques.

Apple may have the technical chops to tighten up security, but it can't (probably) remediate the intrinsic risk in using cloud services, no matter how convenient cloud service may be. Let's see if this changes the public's opinion of cloud backup over all, which has until now been on the rise.

Bell Labs, once dominant innovators in the field of technology has long since fallen from glory. Their old research center, where many of their inventions took shape (including the touch-tone telephone!) has been vacant since 2007. Now, it looks like the historical building is finding new life.

As far back as the 1930s, the site was a research center for AT&T. The scientists who toiled here were pioneers in developing the transistor, cellphones, touch-tone dialing and fiber optic communications, amassing seven Nobel Prizes.

But since 2007, when the property was closed by Alcatel-Lucent, which had acquired it in a spinoff from AT&T, the structure's fate has been uncertain. At one point, another developer proposed demolishing it, setting off an international outcry from scientists and architects who feared the loss of a piece of intellectual history and an architectural gem.

...The redevelopment plan, which would cost well over $100 million, could transform the former Bell Labs building into a commercial center for Holmdel, a community of about 17,000 people. With no downtown, most of the town's retail properties now sit along busy Route 35.

Nvidia has sued two major technology corporations, Qualcomm and Samsung, claiming it has a 13 year old patent over the GPU itself. John Hruska of Extreme Tech comments.

There are two reasons why this case sticks out. First, Nvidia, is suing Samsung - a company which does not build its own graphics IP and merely licenses the work of others, including Qualcomm's Adreno, ARM's Mali, and Imagination Technologies' PowerVR. Nvidia's blog post claims that Samsung dismissed these issues as a "supplier problem," ignoring the fact that from Samsung's perspective, that's exactly what this is.

Second, while it's true that this is Nvidia's first patent lawsuit against another company, many of the patents the company is asserting go right back to the beginning of the GPU era. Nvidia is accusing Samsung and Qualcomm, for example, of violating its patent on transform and lighting engines - a patent that dates back to the early days of 3D accelerated games, some 13 years ago. Most of the other patents are nearly as old, and cover equally fundamental aspects of modern GPU programming.

SIMS 4 has been out long enough for reviewers and gamers to provide feedback on the latest chapter in the mighty SIMS franchise. So far the reviews have not been highly positive.

The game has a number of issues with the most disturbing being deformed babies leading to galleries of deformed SIMS 4 babies. The consensus at this stage is that the game is ok, lacks game mechanics users expect in a SIMS game, has some new quirks, and generally could be a lot better.

EA has apparently not learnt from the last SIMCity debacle with SIMS 4 requiring an Origin account and internet connectivity to register. Players are disappointed. Too bad! Given the resources EA commands and that 5 years have passed since the last SIMS this game could have been awesome.

IBM, 1950s inventor of modern hard drives, is said to be working on a new technology to replace their creation.

Saving files to memory is something that's supposed to be mostly invisible for the end user. We don't need to think about it; it just has to work. But whether it's a solid-state or hard disk drive, conventional storage solutions have their limitations -- namely, speed, rewritability and durability. A team at IBM Research's Almaden facility in California has a cure for all of that and it's called "racetrack memory."

The new technology is said to be far faster than solid state, and far more durable.

In the Hindu pantheon, Kali represents death and change, the dispelling of evil and the devouring of the unwanted. She is forbidden, and even death itself, but therefore also an element of salvation. In the Linux world, she is like opening a can of whoop-ass on your server.

Kali Linux (appropriately named, if I may say so) is a Linux distro focused on penetration and exploit testing, and therefore the element of change that will get you to shore up all those gaping configuration gaps in your systems: it's perhaps your salvation! But enough metaphors. Practically, Kali Linux installs on a DVD or pendrive, and contains dozens and dozens of specialized penetration testing tools to test your system. It's developed by the folks at Offensive Security, and grew out of the well-acclaimed Backtrack Linux, which had the same focus.

It's based on Debian rather than Ubuntu so you get a dated version of the Gnome 2 desktop, but who cares? It's not really a desktop, just a platform for launching tools. Over three hundred of them, from information gathering to vulnerability analysis, password attacks, wireless attacks, spoofing, stress testing, reverse engineering, hardware hacking, forensics, and more. As mentioned, you can run it from a DVD, pendrive, or even remote-boot from PXE or install to Amazon cloud. To make it as useful as possible they support ARM aggressively including ARMEL and ARMHF (and of course Raspberry Pi and cousins), plus as many different wifi devices as humanly possible.

They're innovating, too, producing opensource products like the ISO of Doom (hardware backdoor), custom images, the Evil Wireless Access Point, and more.

Fun stuff if you want to ensure your system is as safe as possible; scary stuff if you don't want to bother. Kali's Distrowatch page has more information including a link to their excellent documentation (the best place to start if you want to know what else Kali does), but ZDNet has a good review and LinuxBSDOS has another cursory review with some decent screenshots.

Scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new long-necked, long-tailed dinosaur that has taken the crown for largest terrestrial animal with a body mass that can be accurately determined.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/09/04/this-is-the-kind-of-dinosaur-you-find-in-hollywood/

A new generation of routers have emerged that promise unparalleled gigabit wireless speeds using new 802.11ac Wi-Fi technology. The problem is that our mobile devices - even the ones that boast 802.11ac radios - often can't take full advantage of them. Broadcom aims to change that with a new wireless chipset that will boost theoretical connection speeds from a smartphone or tablet to the Wi-Fi router to 650 Mbps. That may not be gigabit speed, but gigabit speed was always a bit of misnomer anyway - it's more an indication of overall network capacity rather than how quickly any given device could connect to the network.