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Hire the Hackers

Anonymous Coward writes | 2 minutes ago

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An anonymous reader writes "An interesting take on the controversial topic of turning criminal hackers over to the "Light Side" where their exceptional skills can be put to good use."
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China's Smartphone Boom Times Are Over, Says Lenovo CEO

itwbennett (1594911) writes | 2 minutes ago

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itwbennett (1594911) writes "Since 2010, Lenovo's smartphone business has almost solely grown on demand from Chinese consumers, with the company rising to become one of the country's top handset vendors. 'But now the China market is not hyper-growing any longer,' said Lenovo's CEO Yang Yuanqing in an earnings call earlier this month. 'It has been saturated. If you want to win you have to find new growth areas.'"
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UK ISPs to Add Report Terrorist Button and Block Related Websites

Anonymous Coward writes | 6 minutes ago

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An anonymous reader writes "The United Kingdom’s largest four broadband ISPs, including BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband and TalkTalk, have reached an agreement with the Government to block their customers from accessing terrorist and extremist material on the Internet. The ISPs will also offer a reporting button so that the public can notify providers when new sites crop up.

The Government has long called for “extremist” content to be blocked using Internet filtering technologies, which began in 2011 with the anti-terrorism Prevent Strategy and cropped up again at the end of 2013 as part of a report from the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism.

No doubt few right-minded people would have any serious objection to the principal of blocking websites that clearly contain terrorist material or which encourage related acts, although it’s always vital to consider context as otherwise ISPs might also end up blocking legitimate content."

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iOS 8 jailbreak download

Anonymous Coward writes | 21 minutes ago

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An anonymous reader writes "Currently entire iOS 8 and 8.0.x users are able to cydia install & Cydia download with Pangu8 jailbreak version for iOS 8 and 8.0.x apple iPhone, ipad and ipod touch devices. I’m very glad totell you that pangu 8 is an untethered jailbreak tool. Pangu8 has developed from Pangu jailbreak tool. The Pangu jailbreak developers have improved pangu tool to offer iOS 8 / 8.0.x untethered jailbreak. Pangu8 jailbreak now have updated their latest version as pangu8 1.2.1 with numerous bug fixes. Pangu8 developers released pangu8 Mac version too."
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Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X

MojoKid (1002251) writes | about half an hour ago

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MojoKid (1002251) writes "One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say "effectively" because while third-party SSDs will still work, they'll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when its sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive at maximum performance. Without it, an SSD's real world performance will steadily degrade over time. What Apple did with OS X 10.10 is introduce KEXT (Kernel EXTension) driver signing. KEXT signing means that at boot, the OS checks to ensure that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. It's conceptually similar to the device driver checks that Windows performs at boot. However, with OS X, if a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate TRIM-enabled driver."
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Facebook Testing Lithium-ion Batteries for Backup Power

itwbennett (1594911) writes | 1 hour ago

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itwbennett (1594911) writes "Facebook has just started testing lithium-ion batteries as the backup power source for its server racks and plans to roll them out widely next year. Lithium-ion has been too expensive until now, says Matt Corddry, Facebook's director of hardware engineering, but its use in electric cars has changed the economics. It's now more cost effective than the bulky, lead-acid batteries widely used in data centers today."
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Mathematics great Alexander Grothendieck, 86, dies in France

Anonymous Coward writes | 1 hour ago

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An anonymous reader writes "Alexander Grothendieck, one of the great eccentric geniuses of 20th century mathematics, has died in France at the age of 86. Grothendieck was leading mind behind algebraic geometry. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966. He reached the very pinnacle of his profession before abandoning the discipline, taking up anti-war activism, retreating into the life of a recluse and refusing to share his research. He died on Thursday in a hospital in Saint-Girons in southwestern France.

 "

Google Wallet API For Digital Goods Will Be Retired On March 2, 2015

Anonymous Coward writes | 1 hour ago

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An anonymous reader writes "Google has quietly revealed it plans to retire the Google Wallet API for digital goods on March 2, 2015. The company plans to continue supporting the sale of apps on Google Play as well as in-app payments, but users will not be able to purchase any virtual items offered on the Web through Google Wallet. We say “quietly” because there is no official announcement from Google. Furthermore, Google says it has no plans to proactively communicate the change to Google Wallet users; buyers will simply get 404 errors when trying to check out after support is pulled."

Anit-competitve Apple disable TRIM on 3rd-party SSD's in Yosemite

loadedmind (921872) writes | 1 hour ago

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loadedmind (921872) writes "Seems like Apple's greed knows no bounds. Article from hothardware.com — http://hothardware.com/News/An...

Quote from site: "Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made upgrading or using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. ""

Comet Lander to Deploy Drill as Battery Life Wanes

Anonymous Coward writes | 3 hours ago

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An anonymous reader writes "With less than a day of battery life left, The European Space Agency’s Philae probe will begin to drill for samples even though the drilling may dislodge it. From the article: "Philae is sitting in the shadow of a cliff, and will not get enough sunlight to work beyond Saturday. Friday night's radio contact with the orbiting Rosetta satellite will be the last that engineers have a reasonable confidence will work. The team is still not sure where on the surface the probe came to rest after bouncing upon landing on Wednesday. Scientists have been examining radio transmissions between the orbiter and the lander to see if they can triangulate a position. This work has now produced a 'circle of uncertainty' within which Philae almost certainly lies.""

U.S. Justice Department Using Fake Towers on Planes to Gather Data from Phones

Tyketto (97265) writes | yesterday

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Tyketto (97265) writes "The US Department of Justice has been using fake communications towers installed in airplanes to acquire cellular phone data for tracking down criminals, reports The Wall Street Journal. Using fix-wing Cessnas outfitted with DRT boxes produced by Boeing, the devices mimic cellular towers, fooling cellphones into reporting "unique registration information" to track down "individuals under investigation." The program, used by the U.S. Marshalls Service, has been in use since 2007 and deployed around at least five major metropolitan areas, with a flying range that can cover most of the US population. As cellphones are designed to connect to the strongest cell tower signal available, the devices identify themselves as the strongest signal, allowing for the gathering of information on thousands of phones during a single flight. Not even having encryption on one's phone, like found in Apple's iPhone 6, prevents this interception.

While the Justice Department would not confirm or deny the existence of such a program, Verizon denies any involvement in this program, and DRT (a subsidiary of Boeing), AT&T, and Sprint have all declined to comment."

Using Wikipedia to forecast disease spread

Anonymous Coward writes | yesterday

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An anonymous reader writes "Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory have used Wikipedia logs as a data source for forecasting disease spread. The team was able to successfully monitor influenza in the United States, Poland, Japan, and Thailand, dengue fever in Brazil and Thailand, and tuberculosis in China and Thailand. The team was also able to forecast all but one of these, tuberculosis in China, at least 28 days in advance."
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Sony To Take On Netflix With Playstation Vue

stephendavion (2872091) writes | 6 hours ago

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stephendavion (2872091) writes "Sony is planning to launch PlayStation Vue, a TV service for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles providing on demand programmes and live content. The company will roll out the service to selected customers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and is expected to feature content from CBS, Fox, NBC Universal, Discovery Communications and 75 other channels. The service is expected to allow users to save their programmes for up to 28 days."

Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin's Creed Unity Poor Performance

MojoKid (1002251) writes | yesterday

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MojoKid (1002251) writes "Life is hard when you're a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin's Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could've hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game's disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics — suddenly, all of this is AMD's fault. An official company forum post currently reads: "We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin's Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available." There are multiple problems with this assessment. First, there's no equivalent Nvidia-centric post on the main forum, and no mention of the fact that if you own an Nvidia card of any vintage but a GTX 970 or 980, you're going to see less-than ideal performance. According to sources, the problem with Assassin's Creed Unity is that the game is issuing tens of thousands of draw calls — up to 50,000 and beyond, in some cases. This is precisely the kind of operation that Mantle and DirectX 12 are designed to handle, but DirectX 11, even 11.2, isn't capable of efficiently processing that many calls at once. It's a fundamental limit of the API and it kicks in harshly in ways that adding more CPU cores simply can't help with."
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Window Washing A Skyscraper Is Beyond a Robot's Reach

HughPickens.com (3830033) writes | 10 hours ago

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HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "Patrick McGeehan writes in the NYT that the image of a pair of window washers clinging to a scaffold dangling outside the 68th floor of 1 World Trade Center have left many wondering why robots can't rub soapy water on glass and wipe it off with a squeegee relieving humans of the risk of injury, or death, from a plunge to the sidewalk? The simple answer, several experts say, is that washing windows is something that machines still cannot do as well as people can. “Building are starting to look like huge sculptures in the sky,” says Craig Caulkins. “A robot can’t maneuver to get around those curves to get into the facets of the building." According to Caulkins robotic cleaning systems tend to leave dirt in the corners of the glass walls that are designed to provide panoramic views from high floors. “If you are a fastidious owner wanting clean, clean windows so you can take advantage of that very expensive view that you bought, the last thing you want to see is that gray area around the rim of the window ."

Another reason for the sparse use of robots is that buildings require a lot more maintenance than just window cleaning. Equipment is needed to lower people to repair facades and broken windows, like the one that rescue workers had to cut through with diamond cutters to rescue the window washers. For many years, being a window cleaner in Manhattan was regarded as one of the most dangerous occupations in the world: by 1932, an average of one in every two hundred window cleaners in New York was killed each year. Now all new union window cleaners now take two hundred and sixteen hours of classroom instruction, three thousand hours of accredited time with an employer and their union makes sure workers follow rigorous safety protocols. In all, there are about 700 scaffolds for window washing on buildings in New York City, says union representative Gerard McEneaney. His members are willing to do the work because it pays well: as much $26.89 an hour plus benefits. Many of the window cleaners are immigrants from South America. “They’re fearless guys, fearless workers.""

U.S. Education Chief Don't Know Much About Online CS Education History

theodp (442580) writes | 10 hours ago

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theodp (442580) writes "Writing in Vanity Fair, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan marvels that his kids can learn to code online at their own pace thanks to "free" lessons from Khan Academy, which Duncan credits for "changing the way my kids learn" (Duncan calls out his kids' grade school for not offering coding). The 50-year-old Duncan, who complained last December that he "didn't have the opportunity to learn computer skills" while growing up attending the Univ. of Chicago Lab Schools and Yale, may be surprised to learn that the University of Illinois was teaching kids how to program online in the '70s with its PLATO system, and it didn't look all that different from what Khan Academy came up with for his kids 40 years later (Roger Ebert remarked in his 2011 TED Talk that seeing Khan Academy gave him a flashback to the PLATO system he reported on in the '60s). So, does it matter if the nation's education chief — who presides over a budget that includes $69 billion in discretionary spending — is clueless about The Hidden History of Ed-Tech? Some think so. "We can't move forward," Hack Education's Audrey Watters writes, "til we reconcile where we've been before." So, if Duncan doesn't want to shell out $200 to read a 40-year-old academic paper on the subject (that's a different problem!) to bring himself up to speed, he presumably can check out the free offerings at Ed.gov. A 1975 paper on Interactive Systems for Education, for instance, notes that 650 students were learning programming on PLATO during the Spring '75 semester, not bad considering that Khan Academy is boasting that it "helped over 2000 girls learn to code" in 2014 (after luring their teachers with funding from a $1,000,000 Google Award). Even young techies might be impressed by the extent of PLATO's circa-1975 online CS offerings, from lessons on data structures and numerical analysis to compilers, including BASIC, PL/I, SNOBOL, APL, and even good-old COBOL."

US Marshals flying cell tower spoofers on small planes.

whoever57 (658626) writes | 11 hours ago

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whoever57 (658626) writes "The US Marshals Service is running cell tower spoofers on small planes. These devices are called "dirtboxes". The devices are made by Boeing Co. and can collect information from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight. When asked about the program, the US Justice department could neither confirm nor deny the reports."
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Finally, Things Are Looking Up For Space City

gallifreyan99 (3502381) writes | yesterday

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gallifreyan99 (3502381) writes "When the shuttle program was ended, and manned space exploration was put on hold, the people of Titusville, Florida were left in big trouble.

"Just 20 miles northwest of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it used to have a proud nickname: Space City USA. The dizzying boom of the 1950s and ‘60s helped create myriad jobs by giving work to nearby aerospace companies. Unfortunately, the past 15 years have seen everything dry up By December 2010, Titusville had one of the America’s highest unemployment rates, 13.8 percent."

But even though there's been plenty of bad news recently, the city hopes that the private space industry can save it from destruction."

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