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Submission + - USB Reversable Cable Images Emerge (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A presentation released today by Intel revealed images of the USB 3.1 Type-C cable and connectors, which is symmetrical and will no longer require a user to correctly orient the plug. Initially, the USB 3.1 Type-C specification will support up to 10Gbps data transfer speeds. The Type-C connectors resemble those of Apple's Thunderbolt cabling in that they are much smaller than today's USB SuperSpeed connectors. The receptacle opening is 8.3mm x 2.5mm.The first iteration will have a 5 volt power transfer rate, but it is expected to deliver up to 100 watts for higher power applications in the future.

Submission + - NASA Can't Ethically Send Astronauts on One-Way Missions to Deep Space (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: If NASA is serious about deep space missions, it’s going to have to change its safety guidelines, because there’s no conceivable way that, within the next few years, our engineering capabilities or understanding of things like radiation exposure in space are going to advance far enough for a mission to Mars to be acceptably “safe” for NASA. So, instead, the agency commissioned the National Academies Institute of Medicine to take a look at how it can ethically go about changing those standards.

The answer? It likely can't.

In a report released today, the National Academies said that there are essentially three ways NASA can go about doing this, besides completely abandoning deep space forever: It can completely liberalize its health standards, it can establish more permissive “long duration and exploration health standards,” or it can create a process by which certain missions are exempt from its safety standards. The team, led by Johns Hopkins University professor Jeffrey Kahn, concluded that only the third option is remotely acceptable.

Submission + - DARPA's New Biotech Unit Will Try to Create New Life Forms (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Ye sci-fi writers hard up for new material should spend an hour or so perusing the DoD's 2015 budget proposal, especially the section covering the far-out research projects underway at DARPA, where the agency's mad scientists are working to develop brain-controlled drones, biowarfare, engineer new life forms, and possibly attempt immortality.

If last year was the year of battlefield robots, cyborg soldiers, and weaponized drones, it looks like the next couple years will see the Pentagon gearing up for a deep dive into biotech. DARPA announced today it now has a unit devoted to studying the intersection of biology and engineering, the Biological Technologies Office.

The agency is betting that the next generation of defense tech will be take a cue from natural life, and as such one of the major focuses of the new unit will be on synthetic biology. It'll ramp up research into manufacturing biomaterials, turning living cells, proteins, and DNA into a sort of genetic factory.

Submission + - Life without ICANN (doc.gov) 2

Submitted by flagser
flagser writes: Without ICANN, who controls domain names and mapping? That will be a new international organization who, at least at first, will leave unchanged ICANN policies. I think that is a good thing, because I believe that changes will come, and they will be at the expense of free speech.

So what about an alternative? We (I use the term affectionately here) came up with a distributed way to share files--bitTorrent. a distributed way to exchange money--bitCoin. Why not a distributed way to handle domain names? bitNames.

Tell me you haven't thought of this. Of course you have. We would need some kind of secure client engine that runs--probably as part of a network stack--and can then talk to a browser. Best case, it replaces your current stack and thus works with any browser/internet device. This would undoubtedly require some kind of IP hardcoding (v6 please)

Does this make any sense? I have not been able to find a project like this that anyone is working on. Is it really that difficult? Tell me how we get started. You, the smart guy in the back with the beard. Tell me what the first step is?

Submission + - Just for fun: Checking Microsoft Word 1.1a source code with PVS-Studio static co (viva64.com)

Submitted by Andrey_Karpov
Andrey_Karpov writes: The Microsoft company has recently made a present to all programmers eager to dig into some interesting stuff: they revealed the source codes of MS-DOS v 1.1, v 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a. The MS-DOS operating system is written in assembler, so the analyzer cannot be applied to it. But Word is written in C. Word 1.1a's source codes are almost 25 years old, but we still managed to analyze it. There's no practical use of it, of course. Just for fun.

Comment Re:FTP? (Score 1) 161

by lister king of smeg (#46639559) Attached to: Canonical Shutting Down Ubuntu One File Services

For one, you need an FTP _server_ to exchange files (or your desktops need to be always-on, with public IP addresses). The same with rsync or ssh. I have one and I'm fine without these cloud services, but the point here is that people don't have to set up their own.

(A service that would allow an end-user to easily roll their own VPS or buy preconfigured RPi/whatever with pre-configured mail server, webmail client, file sharing etc. would be awesome. Some are in the works, none are ready yet. Which is why cloud services matter for users.)

You don't need to install a ftp server as most distros come with ssh out of the box use that with scp. As for a public IP address no you don't need that either just use a dynamic dns service that's what I use on my server.

Submission + - Pidgin/Adium/libpurple shut out by Yahoo (pidgin.im)

Submitted by bsdguy
bsdguy writes: For the last several weeks I have had trouble connecting to the Yahoo instant message servers. It started to become hit or miss about 4 weeks ago, and became more and more of a problem as time passed. Finally today I have to say that I can no longer connect to Yahoo with clients that are based on libpurple. There is noise all over various forums about this problem. If one does a web search there seem to be loads of reports of the problem, but no resolution yet. The symptoms are similar to the monkey wrench from 2009 where all things libpurple stopped working due to a Yahoo change. So far Yahoo is not owning up to changing anything, but in as much as better than 99% of libpurple users have made no changes on their client software it would seem the change is from the other end.

For those folks that use pidgin or adium for the OTR encryption feature I can say the current version of the java based client jitsu (https://jitsi.org/) seems to still interoperate with Yahoo.

This of course teaches us why non-centralized open standards based solutions are better. It is a shame that some of us have to interact with clients who do not understand or accept that there are better ways to do things than Yahoo Messaging.

If anyone has figured out what changed on Yahoo's end I am sure the folks at pidgin.im would love the input, even if as of now they are still not admitting there is an issue. Since Jitsu still works I can only guess that the libpurple problem was caused by counting on edge case use, or using something that "worked" but was outside the yahoo spec.

Submission + - Europeans Have More Fat in Their Brains than Asians (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Neandertals and modern Europeans had something in common: They were fatheads of the same ilk. A new genetic analysis reveals that our brawny cousins had a number of distinct genes involved in the buildup of certain types of fat in their brains and other tissues—a trait shared by today’s Europeans, but not Asians. Because two-thirds of our brains are built of fatty acids, or lipids, the differences in fat composition between Europeans and Asians might have functional consequences, perhaps in helping them adapt to colder climates or causing metabolic diseases.

Submission + - Alleged Silk Road Creator: Drop My Charges Because Bitcoin Isn't "Money" (forbes.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: The lawyer for Ross Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind behind the Silk Road black market, is raising some very interesting legal questions that could be thorny for the prosecution. The most interesting: Ulbricht's lawyer asked the court to dismiss money-laundering charges because Bitcoin doesn't meet the statutory definition of 'money.' He cites the recent IRS ruling declaring bitcoins 'property' rather than 'currency' in addition to law-journal articles that claim existing money-laundering laws don't apply to Bitcoin.

Submission + - The POW Who Blinked 'Torture' In Morse Code

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: The LA Times reports on the passing of Jeremiah Denton, the US Navy pilot held by the Viet Cong, who let the world know in a TV interview that POWs were being tortured by blinking out the word "torture" in Morse code. From 1965 to 1973, Denton was held at the "Hanoi Hilton" and several other infamous Vietnamese prisons and was held in isolation for lengthy periods totaling about four years. At points, he was in a pitch-black cell, a cramped hole crawling with rats and roaches. His beatings opened wounds that festered in pools of sewage. Frustrated that Denton would not confess to alleged American war crimes or reveal even basic details of US military operations, jailers subjected him to horrific abuse. Taking command of fellow POWs he usually could not see, Denton fashioned a secret prison communication system using the sound of coughs, hacks, scratching, spitting and throat-clearing keyed to letters of the alphabet. "When you think you've reached the limit of your endurance, give them harmless and inaccurate information that you can remember, and repeat it if tortured again," he told his men. "We will die before we give them classified military information." Thinking they'd broken him, Denton's captors allowed a Japanese TV reporter to interview him on May 2, 1966. "The blinding floodlights made me blink and suddenly I realized that they were playing right into my hands," he wrote. "I looked directly into the camera and blinked my eyes once, slowly, then three more times, slowly. A dash and three more dashes. A quick blink, slow blink, quick blink ." While his impromptu blinks silently told the world that prisoners were being tortured, he was unabashed in the interview, which was later broadcast around the world, in his denial of American wrongdoing. "Whatever the position of my government is, I believe in it — yes, sir," said Denton. "I'm a member of that government and it is my job to support it, and I will as long as I live."

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