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Submission + - Bdale Garbee supports systemd as default for Debian (itwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The chairman of the Debian technical committee, Bdale Garbee, has cast his support behind systemd as the init system for the next release of the widely-used community Linux distribution.

Submission + - AMD Considered GDDR5 For Kaveri, Might Release Eight-Core Variant (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Of all the rumors that swirled around Kaveri before the APU debuted last week, one of the more interesting bits was that AMD might debut GDDR5 as a desktop option. GDDR5 isn't bonded in sticks for easy motherboard socketing, and motherboard OEMs were unlikely to be interested in paying to solder 4-8GB of RAM directly. Such a move would shift the RMA responsibilities for RAM failures back to the board manufacturer. It seemed unlikely that Sunnyvale would consider such an option but a deep dive into Kaveri's technical documentation shows that AMD did indeed consider a quad-channel GDDR5 interface. Future versions of the Kaveri APU could potentially also implement 2x 64-bit DDR3 channels alongside 2x 32-bit GDDR5 channels, with the latter serving as a framebuffer for graphics operations. The other document making the rounds is AMD's software optimization guide for Family 15h processors. This guide specifically shows an eight-core Kaveri-based variant attached to a multi-socket system. In fact, the guide goes so far as to say that these chips in particular contain five links for connection to I/O and other processors, whereas the older Family 15h chips (Bulldozer and Piledriver) only offer four Hypertransport links.

Submission + - Will Boys Get Short Shrift Due to Spun AP CS Exam Stats?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: At first glance, the headline in The Salt Lake Tribune — Very Few Utah Girls, Minorities Take Computer Science AP Tests — appears to be pretty alarming. As does the headline No Girls, Blacks, or Hispanics Take AP Computer Science Exam in Some States over at Education Week. Not One Girl Took The AP Computer Science Test In Some States warns a Business Insider headline. And so on and so on and so on. So how could one quibble with tech-giant backed Code.org's decision to pay teachers a $250 "Female Student Bonus", or Google's declaration that 'the ultimate goal of CS First is to provide proven teaching materials, screencasts, and curricula for after-school programs that will ignite the interest and confidence of underrepresented minorities and girls in CS,' right? But the thing is, CollegeBoard AP CS exam records indicate that no Wyoming students at all took an AP CS exam (xls) in 2013, and only a total of 103 Utah students (xls) had reported scores. So, let's not forget about the girls and underrepresented minorities, but since AP CS Exam Stats are being spun as a measure of CS education participation (pdf) and equity, let's also not forget that pretty much everyone has been underrepresented if we look at the big AP CS picture. If only 29,555 AP CS scores were reported (xls) in 2013 for a HS population of about 16 million students, shouldn't the goal at this stage of the game really be CS education for all?

Submission + - Translating President Obama's NSA reform promises into plain English (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The cynics at the Register have picked apart Barack Obama's NSA reform promises. As to be expected, there's some good, some deliberate vagueness, talk of 'ticking bomb scenarios' and the politician's favourite 'promises to commit to future reforms'. Basically, it's a fig-leaf to kick the can down the road so the next president has to deal with it. He's promising bulk data will go to a third party so the NSA can't see it. Okay, who is this magical third party?

Submission + - US Wary of Allowing Russian Electronic Monitoring Stations Inside US (nytimes.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The New York Times reports, "... the next potential threat from Russia may not come from a nefarious cyberweapon or secrets gleaned from ... Snowden ... Instead, this menace may come in the form of a ... dome-topped antenna perched atop an electronics-packed building surrounded by a security fence somewhere in the United States. ... the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing ... the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen ... monitor stations, on United States soil ... These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System ... The Russian effort is part of a larger global race by several countries ... to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS. For the State Department, permitting Russia to build the stations would help mend the Obama administration’s relationship with the government of President Vladimir V. Putin ... But the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon, suspect that the monitor stations would give the Russians a foothold on American territory that would sharpen the accuracy of Moscow’s satellite-steered weapons. The stations, they believe, could also give the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders. ... administration officials have delayed a final decision until the Russians provide more information and until the American agencies sort out their differences ..."

Submission + - GCC 4.9 Coming with Big New Features

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: When GCC 4.9 is released in 2014 it will be coming in hot on new features with a large assortment of improvements and new functionality for the open-source compiler. Phoronix provides a recap of some of the really great features of this next major compiler release from the Free Software Foundation. For a quick list: OpenMP 4.0, Intel Cilk Plus multi-threading support, Intel Bay Trail and Silvermont support, NDS32 port, Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, Address Sanitizer, ADA and Fortran updates, improved C11 / C++11 / C++14, better x86 intrinsics, refined diagnostics output. Bubbling under are still: Bulldozer 4 / Excavator support, OpenACC, JIT compiler, disabling Java by default.

Submission + - Average cost per 'official' wiretap in the United States: $50,452 (sovereignman.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Last week, in a very, very quiet release, the US Federal Court system published its annual Wiretap report to Congress.

This is something that is required by law; the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) must annually report the number of federal and state applications for court orders to “intercept wire, oral, or electronic communications.”

Note – this report only covers wiretapping orders by US courts; it does not include anything related to the NSA’s electronic surveillance, FBI ‘administrative subpoenas’ to Google / Facebook, the US Postal Service snooping people’s physical mail, or any of this top secret FISA nonsense.

In other words, these numbers add yet another dimension to how vast the US spy state has become.

The report gives a lot of eye-popping details about these official, court-ordered wiretaps, including:
  • Riverside County, California is the most spied-on county in the United States
  • Followed by Clark County, Nevada
  • 3,395 wiretaps were ordered, averaging 29.03 days each
  • The average cost of a wiretap order last year was $50,452
  • The highest cost was $872,841 for a Federal wiretap in the Eastern district of Washington
  • 87.39% of these wiretap orders were connected to drug-related charges
  • Only 18.19% of these wiretaps actually led to a conviction

Submission + - Scientists Make a Light Switch Controlled By Individual Photons (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the Vienna University of Technology have worked together to develop an optical transistor that is sensitive to light at a quantum level.

Transistors are the electrical “switches” that make both information storage and logical operations possible in computers. Normally, electricity flows through them at either higher or lower voltages to give them values of 1 or 0. The 1s and 0s, which are called bits, combine with other bits in specific patterns to establish information, which software then manipulates procedurally.

This transistor uses light instead of electricity, and it functions according to quantum mechanics. Specifically, its design takes advantage of both wave and particle descriptions of light that interacts with two reflective mirrors. When light passes through the two mirrors the transistor is "on" with a value of 1, and when it does not it is "off" with a value of 0.

Submission + - The Dangers Of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: In March of 2012 legendary game designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert ran a Kickstarter to design a new adventure game, asked for $400,000, and came away with more than $3.3 million. Their promised delivery date was October 2012. Now it's July 2013, and the project still needs cash, which they plan to raise by selling an "early release" version on Steam in January 2014. One possible lesson: radically overshooting your crowdfunding goal can cause you to wildly expand your ambitions, leading to a project that can't be tamed.

Submission + - Sent to jail because of a software bug.

Submitted by toshikodo
toshikodo writes: The BBC is reporting a claim that some sub-postoffice workers in the UK have been sent to jail because of a bug in the accounting software that they use. Post Office admits Horizon computer defect. I've worked on safety critical system in the past, and I am well aware of the potential for software to ruin lives (thankfully AFAIK nobody has been harmed by my software), but how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?

Submission + - The Black Underbelly Of Windows 8.1 'Blue' 3

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Changes in Microsoft's forthcoming upgrade to Windows 8 reveal the dark underbelly of Microsoft's evolving agenda, one that finds pieces of Windows 8 inexplicably disappearing and a new feature that allows Microsoft to track your local searches cropping up, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'As Windows 8.1 Milestone Preview testers push and prod their way into the dark corners of Windows 8.1 "Blue," they're finding a bunch of things that go bump in the night. From new and likely unwelcome features, to nudges into the Microsoft data tracking sphere, to entire lopped-off pieces of Windows 8, it looks like Microsoft is changing Windows to further its own agenda.'

Submission + - Secure Boot Coming to SUSE Linux Servers (serverwatch.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: UEFI Secure Boot is a problem that only desktop users need to worry about right? Well kinda/sorta/maybe not. SUSE today is releasing SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3 which will include for the first time — support for UEFI Secure Boot. Apparently SUSE sees market demand for Secure Boot on servers too.

Our market analysis shows that UEFI Secure Boot is a UEFI extension that does not only cover desktops, but might very well also be deployed and even required on server systems going forward," Matthias Eckermann, Senior Product Manager at SUSE said. /blockquoteL

Submission + - Hackers Make the Appellate Case for Weev

Submitted by USSJoin
USSJoin writes: Andrew Auernheimer (or Weev, as he's often better known) is serving a 41-month sentence under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The case is currently on appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals; his lawyer filed the appellate brief last week. Now, a group of 13 security researchers, led by Meredith Patterson, and including include Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, Space Rogue, Jericho, Shane MacDougall, and Dan Kaminsky, are making their own thoughts heard by the court. They are submitting a brief to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that argues that not only is Weev's conviction bad law, but if upheld, it will destroy independent security research, and perhaps the rest of consumer safety research as well. (Disclaimer: I am one member of the group.)

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