Posts Tagged ‘linux’

A group of cybersecurity experts has come out in opposition to a White House-backed proposal that would dramatically expand the FBI’s wiretapping capabilities for internet communication services. In a new research paper , the group argues against new regulations under what’s being called CALEA II, an extension to the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act , which mandated law enforcement backdoor access for telephone networks. The new regulation would do something similar for internet communications, threatening heavy fines on companies that do not comply with wiretapping orders.

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Security experts warn FBI wiretap bill would make apps less secure

TechCrunch is reporting that two of the largest players in online food delivery have been talking about joining forces. GrubHub and Seamless, which offer websites and mobile apps that allow users to order food online for delivery to their home or business, are said to be discussing a potential merger. According to the report, no deal has been finalized just yet, thought the talks are characterized as “serious.” While both companies are arguably the two most well-known competitors in their particular arena, that hasn’t stopped a number of other entrants from bringing their own online food-ordering services to market. Merging would allow the two companies to bolster their respective offerings, resulting in an even more entrenched… Continue reading…

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Seamless and GrubHub food delivery services reportedly considering merger

Market research firm IDC just released its latest quarterly look at the smartphone market, and for the first time Windows Phone marketshare has eclipsed BlackBerry. During Q1 2013, Windows Phone devices accounted for 3.2 percent of all smartphones shipped, while BlackBerry devices made up 2.9 percent of the market. That’s a change from last quarter, when Windows Phone made up 2.6 percent of all shipments, compared to 3.2 percent for BlackBerry. While that’s good news for Microsoft in a relative sense — they’ve been trailing BlackBerry for third place for quite some time — it’s pretty obvious that we still don’t have a true third smartphone ecosystem that consumers are responding to yet. It’s still a two-horse race between Apple and..

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Windows Phone overtakes BlackBerry to claim third place in 2013 smartphone shipments

Google and NASA have teamed up to launch a new laboratory focused on advancing machine learning. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab — hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California — will contain a quantum supercomputer that will be used by researchers from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and all over the world to pioneer breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Continue reading…

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Google and NASA collaborate on AI research with new quantum supercomputer

The Oscar-winning animated movie Brave is a tale of a young princess refusing to obey stereotypes by rebelling against an arranged marriage. When Disney decided to give the movie’s heroine, Merida, a makeover that brings her in line with Disney princesses of the past, the masses rebelled. As Jezebel reports , a Change.org petition against the attempt to sexualize the character reached more than 200,000 signatures, leading Disney to quietly remove the new image from its Disney Princess website. Continue reading…

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Disney abandons sexualization of ‘Brave’ heroine after public backlash

Indiana University has replaced their supercomputer, Big Red, with a new system predictably named Big Red II. At the dedication HPC scientist Paul Messina said: “It’s important that this is a university-owned resource. … Here you have the opportunity to have your own faculty, staff and students get access with very little difficulty to this wonderful resource.” From the article: “Big Red II is a Cray-built machine, which uses both GPU-enabled and standard CPU compute nodes to deliver a petaflop — or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second — of max performance. Each of the 344 CPU nodes uses two 16-core AMD Abu Dhabi processors, while the 676 GPU nodes use one 16-core AMD Interlagos and one NVIDIA Kepler K20.” Read more of this story at Slashdot

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Indiana University Dedicates Biggest College-Owned Supercomputer

anderzole writes “The FDA recently gave clearance to Vital Art and Science Inc. (VAS) to market software which enables people with degenerative eye conditions such as macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy to monitor their vision at home with their iPhone. The software, which is called myVisionTrack, isn’t a replacement for regular visits to the doctor, but rather allows patients to keep tabs on their vision in between visits with eye care professionals. VAS notes that retinal diseases affect approximately 40 million individuals worldwide and 13 million in the United States. While treatments have been developed to deal with degenerative eye conditions, early diagnosis is of paramount importance — which is why the software is so important.” Read more of this story at Slashdot

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FDA Approves Software For iPhone-Based Vision Test

Full Tilt Poker players will finally begin to recover their money, after it became tied up when the major poker website was shut down by the Department of Justice in April, 2011. In July, a deal made between rival company PokerStars and the DOJ, resulted in PokerStars purchasing Full Tilt with the requirement of paying back all uncompensated players. An administrator for the claims process has been announced, and information for players looking to be compensated will be detailed soon.

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Full Tilt Poker players’ reimbursement begins after two year wait

First previewed in December, version 2.0 of the popular Mac launcher app Alfred is now publicly available, offering a selection of new features and improvements over previous versions. The new update allows you to take advantage of the new Workflows feature , as well as theme customization and improved contact search support. Workflows operates on a set of triggers, which can be manually dragged into place in a visual editor and connected to create mini programs which can automate different tasks. The Alfred team highlights that the app provides hotkey support to launch AppleScript actions, as well as the ability to launch files, create system commands, and control your iTunes library

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Alfred 2.0 launches with new Workflows, better customization, and improved contact search support

Xi3, one of the first batch of companies working with Valve on a “Steam Box” console, has opened pre-orders for its gaming-optimized PC. The Piston, which was first shown off at CES in January , uses a small enclosure like that of Xi3′s other modular computers. The $999.99 price tag gets you a 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM, with more details forthcoming; we’ve previously heard that it will be optimized to work with Steam and Big Picture Mode. Pre-order customers can upgrade the size of the SSD to 256GB or 512GB, but the latter almost doubles the price of the machine, adding $750. Further details will be forthcoming as the Piston nears release around the end of 2013

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Xi3 opens $999.99 pre-orders for Piston, the first ‘Steam Box’ gaming computer

Ever noticed anything a little different about the drop-down menus on Amazon’s website? Ben Kamens has, and he’s published an illuminating explanation on his website. According to Kamens, lead developer at Khan Academy, the distinguishing factor is Amazon’s speed — moving your cursor along the site’s main drop-down brings up submenus almost instantly.

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The subtle genius behind Amazon’s lightning-fast drop-down menus

call -151 writes “An editorial appearing in the ACM notices complains about the effects of the Elsevier boycott particularly with respect to academics refusing to do unpaid review for for-profit journals, particularly the extortionate Elsevier journals. Mathematician Tim Gowers’s post gave energy to this about a year ago and recently he reflected on progress in several directions, including developing new arXIv overlay journals. Not disclosed in the ACM editorial is that the author serves on three Elsevier editorial boards; I take it that his complaining about the difficulty of finding referees is an indication that the boycott is having some good effect.

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Editorial In ACM On Open Access Publishing In Computer Science

Flozzin writes with news that documents published to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s website have provided new details about Project Glass, Google’s augmented-reality headset. “A test report describes video playing on the device alongside audio running to a ‘vibrating element.’ The description tallies with a patent filing suggesting it plays sound via ‘bone-conduction’ tech rather than earbuds. Developers are due to receive a test edition of the headset later this year. …

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Details of Google’s Project Glass Revealed In FCC Report

Virtucon writes “Ars technica has an interesting article on how Google is handling requests from law enforcement for access to Gmail accounts. With the recent Petraeus scandal where no criminal conduct was found, it seems that they’re re-enforcing their policies and standing up for their users. ‘In order to compel us to produce content in Gmail we require an ECPA search warrant,’ said Chris Gaither, Google spokesperson. ‘If they come for registration information, that’s one thing, but if they ask for content of email that’s another thing.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Pushing Back On Law Enforcement Requests For Access To Gmail Accounts

An anonymous reader writes “Radical Islamist hackers have been harassing Egyptologist Kate Phizackerley’s online journal Egyptological and her blog KV64. Phizackerley and her team finally got tired of it and shut their online work down. As blogger Roger Pearse says, ‘A bunch of violent scumbags… who never have contributed in any way to the web, have successfully interfered with the scientific effort of the entire human race..

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Islamist Hackers Shut Down Egyptology Research Journal

carmendrahl writes “A science historian has collaborated with a publisher to digitize a one-of-a kind collection of chemists’ signatures. In the shadow of World War II, a Japanese chemist named Tetsuo Nozoe traveled outside his land for the first time, and collected autographs from the people he met on the way. This turned into a forty year hobby, and a 1200-page collection. The digital collection sucks chemists in for hours- it’s full of cartoons, jokes, haikus, and scribbles the signers admit to having scrawled “in a drunken state”

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One-of-a-Kind Chemistry Autograph Collection Goes Digital

Nerval’s Lobster writes “Last week, Facebook announced Graph Search, a system for searching the social network’s vast collection of users, photos, and ‘Liked’ interests. But how will Facebook power it? The Disaggregated Rack, which will separate compute, RAM, storage, and caching functions in order to remain flexible in the face of Graph Search’s changing needs. By breaking up resources and scaling them independently of each other, Facebook can scale without needing to constantly open up new servers and upgrade new hardware.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Facebook Will Power Graph Search

Last summer designer Andrew Kim’s vision for “The Next Microsoft” got a lot of traction online — including on The Verge — for its aggressively minimal rebranding of the company across platforms. The next month Microsoft unveiled its actual new logo , but that doesn’t mean it didn’t take note — Kim just announced that he’s been hired by the company, which got in touch after seeing his designs. While “countless” other companies apparently followed suit, Kim says that Microsoft was the most obvious choice, and promises to create his “greatest work ever” when he starts in the summer.

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Microsoft hires designer who presented bold revamp of the company’s brand

davecb writes “Rick Falkvinge reports today that the Swedish Pirate Party has laid charges against at least Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal before the Finansinspektionen , for refusing to pass on money owed to Wikileaks. The overseer of bank licenses notes (in translation) that ‘The law states, that if there aren’t legal grounds to deny a payment service, then it must be processed.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Swedish Pirate Party Presses Charges Against Banks For WikiLeaks Blockade

After box art for the highly-anticipated BioShock Infinite was unveiled just last week, fans of the series complained that it was little more than a generic video game cover featuring a man and a gun. The game’s creative director Ken Levine spoke to Wired about the tough decisions that went into the design, saying he had to step back and look at it as if he were “just some frat guy.” However, Levine says, hardcore fans of the series stand to benefit from the more generic artwork, too. To find out how, check out the full interview at the source link below. Continue reading…

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How the controversial box art of ‘Bioshock Infinite’ was made

MojoKid writes “The time we spend making calls on smartphones pales in comparison to the other activities we use it for, like surfing the web, logging into Facebook, streaming music and video, and of course playing games. It’s that latter functionality that a startup called Green Throttle wants to tap into, and given the horsepower of today’s smartphones, it makes a lot of sense. The company envisions harnessing the power of today’s well-equipped Android smartphones and tablets in order to play console-like games on your HDTV. Right now the concept is limited to select devices — Google Nexus, Samsung Galaxy S II and S III, HTC One X, Kindle Fire HD, and Asus Transformer — though the company says it’s adding to the list quickly

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Company Turns Your Android Smartphone Into a Game Console

An anonymous reader wrote in with a story on OS News about the latest release of the Genode Microkernel OS Framework. Brought to you by the research labs at TU Dresden, Genode is based on the L4 microkernel and aims to provide a framework for writing multi-server operating systems (think the Hurd, but with even device drivers as userspace tasks). Until recently, the primary use of L4 seems to have been as a glorified Hypervisor for Linux, but now that’s changing: the Genode example OS can build itself on itself: “Even though there is a large track record of individual programs and libraries ported to the environment, those programs used to be self-sustaining applications that require only little interaction with other programs. In contrast, the build system relies on many utilities working together using mechanisms such as files, pipes, output redirection, and execve.

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Multi-Server Microkernel OS Genode 12.11 Can Build Itself

An anonymous reader writes “Last week, Nate Silver ranked Google Consumer Surveys as one of the most accurate polling firms of the 2012 US election. This week, Google has released the raw data that went into its election-day prediction, and is running a contest for interesting visualizations of that data. They provide a few examples of their own, including a WebGL globe view.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Releases Raw Election Polling Results

AT&T and Verizon bid farewell to unlimited data plans long ago, but other carriers have thus far kept the desirable option alive — albeit just barely. US Cellular is the latest to join in, giving customers with an LTE-enabled device the chance to switch to a $40 unlimited data plan during the holiday season. Naturally the special rate comes in addition to your regular voice/text package, and you’ll also need to reside in one of US Cellular’s LTE markets to take advantage. But if you meet that criteria, you’ll be able to sign up for a maximum of 24 months of unlimited data.

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US Cellular offering limited-time unlimited LTE data plan, valid for a maximum of two years

Most of the photography we see of World War II in history books is black and white, giving younger generations the false impression of a muted era, stripped of the vibrancy of color. Visual News has spotted a gigantic Library of Congress Collection featuring thousands of color photos that breathe new life into the time period. Visual News has posted its selection of 30 of the images, and you can also take a look at the full — albeit intimidatingly large — collection from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information at the Library of Congress . Continue reading…

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Library of Congress posts elusive color photography from World War II