On September 15, 1995, Hackers was released in the theaters to a relative thud, recovering less than half its production budget at the box office. But the tale of a group of high school hackers—with cool-sounding hacker handles like “Zero Cool†and “Acid Burnâ€â€”stumbling upon a grand corporate conspiracy found a second life on home video, becoming a cult classic two decades later.
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Russian antitrust authorities ruled on Monday that Google had abused its dominant market position with Android, its mobile operating system, by favoring the company’s own services over those of rivals, including Yandex, a Russian competitor. Unlike in other parts of the world, where Google has outmuscled domestic search rivals, Yandex still holds more than a 50 percent market share in Russian online search
For a long time the copyright held over the song "Happy Birthday to you" has been held up by those opposed to copyright in its current form as a clear example of copyright abuse. The song is based on a tune written before 1893 by Mildred Hill and Patty Hill titles "Good Morning to All". Today the copyright for this song is claimed to be held by Warner/Chappell Music. Two years ago Warner/Chappell Music attempted to collect royalties from a company working on a documentary film. In a judgement handed down by U.S. District Judge George H. King the original copyright only covered the musical arrangement not the lyrics and the Happy Birthday song is now in the public domain.
In the next week, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) will have exhausted their supply of IPv4 addresses. The metaphorical IPv4 cupboards are bare. The Internet will continue to operate, but all organizations must now accelerate their efforts to deploy IPv6. At this point, the rules for how IPv4 address resources are allocated will change. Request might not get fulfilled and applicants might be offered a smaller block or the choice to be added to a waiting list for IPv4 addresses that become available.
The Kepler mission has found the first near-Earth-size planet - called Kepler-452b - in the "habitable zone" around a G2 star much like our own sun. Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. Its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer as the planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star. That star, Kepler-452, is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation on Tuesday launched the much-awaited display for its tiny, credit card sized computer. Pi display joins the family of accessories made by the foundation. The foundation has been working on the display for almost a year now. It’s an RGB 800×480 display @60fps with 24-bit color and 10 point capacitive touch capabilities. The display has mounting holes at the back so you can easily mount the Pi to it and use the whole thing as one unit. The good news is that it’s using DSI (Display Serial Interface) for connectivity which leaves the only HDMI port on the Pi free for other use – such as connecting to a bigger monitor.
In July, the BBC announced proposals to “invest†in BBC World Service. This includes a desire for a "bigger digital presence" in Russian through a new digital service. But BBC satellite TV for Russia is problematic. Very few Russians have rotatable satellite dishes. About 25% of Russian homes have fixed Ku-band satellite dishes to receive direct-to-home services such as TricolorTV and NTV+. Western news channels are not included and are legally not welcome.
Researchers have discovered that when hands are poorly washed airborne germ counts are 27 times higher around air dryers in comparison with the air around paper towel dispensers. This shows that both jet and warm air hand dryers spread bacteria into the air and onto users and those nearby. "These findings are important for understanding the ways in which bacteria spread, with the potential to transmit illness and disease," said Professor Mark Wilcox, who led the study.
Google will soon let advertisers tap into one of the most lucrative types of ad targeting: email addresses. The search giant is rolling out a new tool called Customer Match, which lets advertisers use a list of email addresses to target specific users across Google services. To be targeted through this technique, you only need to be logged into your Google account and have given your email address to a retailer, perhaps by buying something from their website or giving it out to sign up for a loyalty program. Google will also be compiling lists with general customer habits like YouTube viewing and Google search histories to target ads with.
France's data privacy regulator rejected Google's appeal of an order to remove search results worldwide upon request, saying Monday that companies that operate in Europe need to abide by the prevailing laws. If a French citizen files a request under the "right to be forgotten," CNIL said Google must comply with the order worldwide -- not just on European extensions of its search engine, such as .fr, .es, or .de for example -- or face possible sanctions. The agency denied that it was trying to apply French law on the "right to be forgotten" globally, as Google had accused the watchdog of doing.
On government requests for customer text messages:
Advanced Micro Devices is handing out pink slips to 5% of the company’s global workforce, as part of a restructuring plan to help improve poor fiscal results after declining sales and six consecutive quarterly losses. AMD has 9,469 employees as of June 2015 and will cut approximately 470 positions. The restructuring plan will target “all sites, all levels, all functions,†an AMD spokesman said, adding that engineers will represent a smaller portion of layoffs. Cuts will mostly come from sales, marketing, and operations segments.
Lighter than air vehicles are, for the most part, relics of a distant past. Despite the past century of flight mostly belonging to airplanes and helicopters, there’s been a slight resurgence of dirigibles this century. Not least among them is the Dragon Dream, by the Aeroscraft Corporation. This is only half the size of their planned airship...
Cargo containers streamlined and revolutionized freight. Their uniform, boxy shape and sharp edges make them instantly stackable, but not terribly aerodynamic. For transport by air, that usually means fitting square pegs into round planes. A new plane design by Boeing, granted a patent this week, could change that. Instead of slotting cargo containers into a round tube, the Boeing plane would line them up longwise in a neat row, then lower its aerodynamic body on top.
EMC has reported declining profits in July, and its core storage division has seen revenue growth grind to a halt; it grew just 2 percent between 2013 and 2014, compared to 16 percent between 2010 and 2011. Activist hedge fund Elliott Management Corp., which has a 2 percent stake in EMC, has also pressured the company to sell its 80 percent stake in VMware.
Two mysterious red hazes hovered over Earth on August 10. Astronauts onboard the International Space Station snapped a picture of the first one as it passed over the Midwest--either Illinois or Missouri. And yesterday NASA's Earth Observatory announced that a second one was spotted just minutes later over Mexico.These jellyfish-shaped streaks in the sky that reach into space are called red sprites, and they're considered to be rare phenomena—or at least elusive to human eyes.
Via Soylent
Today, October 13, marks the start of data retention for user internet and phone data in Australia. Many telecommunication providers are not confident that they can record the data as required by the laws passed in March 2015 and only half have lodged their implementation plan with the government. With the public still in the dark about how much this will cost, how effective it will be, how long it will last there are questions abound about the legitimacy of data retention. Thankfully, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has already weighed in on how Australians should avoid having the government capture their data: Use a VPN.
Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi have joined the growing list of manufacturers whose diesel cars are known to emit significantly more pollution on the road than in regulatory tests. “The issue is a systemic one†across the industry, said Nick Molden, whose company Emissions Analytics tested the cars. Diesel cars from Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and Jeep all pumped out significantly more NOx in more realistic driving conditions. NOx pollution is at illegal levels in many parts of the UK and is believed to have caused many thousands of premature deaths and billions of pounds in health costs.
A few interesting features of the site where silently introduced over the past year (like notifications), while others have long since been shrouded in mystery (like the stream). We also haven't had a meta update for while, so lets dig into some of the new changes:
A federal appeals court ruled Friday in a decadelong dispute that Google digitization of over 20 million books, mostly out-of-print titles, did not violate copyrights because the company only showed short sections of the books in its database, so it would be difficult for anyone to read any of the works in their entirety by repeatedly entering different search requests. "This does not threaten the rights holders with any significant harm to the value of their copyrights or diminish their harvest of copyright revenue."
This week on BSD Now, the *BSD communities' podcast - OpenBSD developer Brandon Mercer discusses the state of IT in health care; The NetBSD 7.0 Release, and other headlines:
A new study finds that rising placebo responses may play a part in the increasingly high failure rate for clinical trials of drugs, but the authors of the study say that the increase in placebo responses occurred only in trials conducted in the United States.
On Friday the Obama administration secured a "cyber theft pledge" from South Korea.
Jim Malcolm pulls up a video on his smartphone he recently shot at Disneyland. We see a ride from Jim's point of view. With a swipe of his finger, the camera spins around and we see Jim's face -- same ride, different angle. He puts his finger on the phone's screen and drags it down, and now we can see his kids sitting behind him on the ride.
Chromebooks have been wildly popular on Amazon. But what will happen to them if Google merges Chrome OS and Android? Rumors have been circulating for quite some time that Google would someday combine Chrome OS and Android, and now it looks like that might happen sooner than anybody expected. A new report indicates that the merge of the two mobile operating systems may happen by 2017.
The Internet... Who Needs It?
The world’s first entirely light-based memory chip to store data permanently has been developed by material scientists at Oxford University. The device makes use of materials used in CDs and DVDs, and it could help dramatically improve the speed of modern computing. Today’s computers are held back by the relatively slow transmission of electronic data between the processor and the memory. There’s no point using faster processors if the limiting factor is the shuttling of information to-and-from the memory. The researchers think using light can significantly speed this up.
A wide spread adoption of 3D stereoscopic television is hindered by the lack of high-quality 3D content. One promising solution to address this need is to use automated 2D-to-3D conversion. However, current conversion methods produce low-quality results that exhibit artifacts that are not acceptable to many viewers. By exploiting the graphics-rendering software that powers sports video games, researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2-D video of soccer games into 3-D. The converted video can be played back over any 3-D device — a commercial 3-D TV, or Google’s new Cardboard system, which turns smartphones into 3-D displays, or special-purpose displays such as Oculus Rift.
"Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes," Dingledine writes. "Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users."
Verizon Communications Inc is exploring a sale of its enterprise assets which could be worth as much as $10 billion. The sale would include the business formerly known as MCI (acquired in 2006), which provides landline and Internet services for large business customers, as well as Terremark (acquired in 2011), its data center unit. The assets have estimated annual earnings of around $2 billion. The businesses have struggled to keep up with advances in cloud computing, and face fierce price competition from players such as Google and Amazon. Verizon is still considering how some of these asset sales could best be structured and no deal is imminent.
On Monday, Google announced the release, as an opensource project (Apache License), of TensorFlow.
As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable. Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy.
Back in 1950, a farmer would have been able to grow around 2,500 kilograms of wheat per hectare of cropland. Today, that figure has more than tripled. Advances in plant breeding and technical innovations will continue to be necessary in order to feed the growing global population. This is where Bosch’s agricultural robot “Bonirob†can play a part.
A lot of times the systems are politically mandated in the sense that you have somebody on the Hill or Congress who will mandate a system and they'll mandate a particular period of time and they'll mandate the amount of money to spend and they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. So what happens is, if you're there as a government person, you’re trying to translate some political wish into something that's topical and it’s not very easy,†Bob Charette says. Another problem is that there isn’t much accountability when it comes to projects that fail.
Algae has been genetically engineered to kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The algae nanoparticles, created by scientists in Australia, were found to kill 90% of cancer cells in cultured human cells. The algae was also successful at killing cancer in mice with tumours.
Google has announced that it will cover the legal fees for protecting the Fair use Rights of youTube video Creators. Google started this New Fair Use Protection Program by refusing to remove few youtubes videos that received DMCA take down notices from copyright owners.
"After the recent Paris terror attacks, the French government is proposing to forbid and block the use of the Tor anonymity network, according to an internal document from the Ministry of Interior seen by French newspaper Le Monde.
Li-Fi is a new method of delivering data. It uses the visible spectrum rather than radio waves. For the first time, this new technology has been tested in a working office. Li-Fi is a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication. The Li-Fi system uses standard light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to transmit electronic data signals, which will enable users to access the internet through the ordinary lighting systems in schools, workplaces and homes.
The Chinese smartphone company Huawei has unveiled their new quick charging lithium-ion batteries at the 56th Battery Symposium in Japan. Using next generation technology, these new batteries have achieved a charging speed 10 times faster than that of normal batteries, reaching about 50% capacity in mere minutes.
In a similar situation to the Lenovo backdoor "Superfish", Dell has now acknowledged that a security hole exists in some of its recently shipped laptops that could make it easy for hackers to intercept users' private data.
3-D printing is great, assuming you're printing one material for one purpose, and that you’re fine with a few do-overs. But the technology is still far behind in reliably producing a variety of useful objects, with no assembly required, at a moderate cost.
Combining biological components, such as cells and tissues, with soft robotics can enable the fabrication of biological machines with the ability to sense, process signals, and produce force. Engineers at the University of Illinois are working on developing a Bio-Robot which can be produced easily by using 3D printing technology. They developed similar bio-bots few years back, but that time they used heart cells. Now they find a way to use muscle cells to gain more control. The frequency of the electric field determines the speed of this bio-bot.
TAILS Linux 1.8 is out (Dec 15, 2015)
3D printing Technology is growing very fast upto the level of printing a building itself. A professor is working on technology named as Contour Crafting which can print an entire 2,500 sqft house in 20 hours.
Australian company pin.net.au now refuses to process payments for VPN users. The software used by the pin.net.au rejects payments originating from a known VPN IP address as it is "high risk" and may be an attempt to conduct fraud. A pin.net.au representative has stated that users need to disable VPN software to make online purchases. The Australian government recently started logging internet and phone activity. Australian politicians have recommended using a VPN and other secure technology to ensure privacy online.
The polarization of light is the physical phenomenon behind polarized sunglasses and most 3-D movie systems. MIT researchers have shown that by exploiting the polarization of light they can increase the resolution of conventional 3-D imaging devices as much as 1,000 times. The technique could lead to high-quality 3-D cameras built into cellphones, and perhaps to the ability to snap a photo of an object and then use a 3-D printer to produce a replica. The work could also help the development of driverless cars. The researchers call this new system Polarized 3D.
Microsoft recently copped flak over forcing users to accept Windows 10 updates. Some users have reported serious problems from Windows 10 updates which included system failure. Now Google is following the same path. Google Play now has a term in the licencing agreement which allows Google to force update any software on Android devices. Without root access most users will be SOL to block or fix problems.
"Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day[1]. But no matter what name cell-site simulators go by, whether they are in the hands of the government or malicious thieves, there's no question that they're a serious threat to privacy[2]." (By Nadia Kayyali - remainder of article @ [1])