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Submission + - New Apache Allura project for project development hosting (apache.org)

Submitted by brondsem
brondsem writes: Today the Apache Software Foundation announced the Allura project for hosting software development projects. Think GitHub or SourceForge on your own servers — Allura has git, svn, hg, wiki, tickets, forums, news, and more. It's written in python and has a modular and extensible platform so you can write your own tools and extensions. It's already used by SourceForge, DARPA, German Aerospace Center, and Open Source Projects Europe. Allura is open source; available under the Apache License v2.0. When you don't want all your project resources in the cloud on somebody else's walled garden, you can run Allura on your own servers and have full control and full data access.

Submission + - Linux may succeed Windows XP as OS of choice for ATMs (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Dega704
Dega704 writes: Some financial services companies are looking to migrate their ATM fleets from Windows to Linux in a bid to have better control over hardware and software upgrade cycles.

Pushing them in that direction apparently is Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows XP on April 8, said David Tente, executive director, USA, of the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA).

"There is some heartburn in the industry" over Microsoft's end-of-support decision, Tente said.

ATM operators would like to be able to synchronize their hardware and software upgrade cycles. But that's hard to do with Microsoft dictating the software upgrade timetable. As a result, "some are looking at the possibility of using a non-Microsoft operating system to synch up their hardware and software upgrades," Tente said.

Submission + - Missing Plane Would Have Been Found By Now If Communications Box Had $10 Upgrade (ibtimes.co.uk) 1

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: The missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 might have been found by now if a small communications box on the plane had been configured to send out more frequent reports, according to British satellite communications firm Inmarsat.

Critics of the aerospace industry are now calling out its "outdated" accident investigation process and asking for data from the black box to be streamed in-flight to the cloud, which could be expensive, but Inmarsat's Senior VP Chris McLaughlin says that the plane could have been found by now if the communications box buried in the plane's avionics had been configured to send out more frequent reports.

"What we have at the moment would have been fine if the airlines had been mandated to provide data on all their flights. The only area where data is mandated is on the transatlantic route, which is so busy that everyone needs to know where all the other planes are," he said. "We may never know what happened to the plane because the cockpit is not mandated to be monitored in other areas, and we urge regulators to look into this."

Submission + - Spinoffs from Spyland: How Some NSA Technology Is Making Its Way Into Industry (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MIT Technology Review reports, "Like other federal agencies, the NSA is compelled by law to try to commercialize its R&D. It employs patent attorneys and has a marketing department that is now trying to license inventions ... The agency claims more than 170 patents ... But the NSA has faced severe challenges trying to keep up with rapidly changing technology. ... Most recently, the NSA’s revamp included a sweeping effort to dismantle ... “stovepipes,” and switch to flexible cloud computing ... in 2008, NSA brass ordered the agency’s computer and information sciences research organization to create a version of the system Google uses to store its index of the Web and the raw images of Google Earth. That team was led by Adam Fuchs, now Sqrrl’s chief technology officer. Its twist on big data was to add “cell-level security,” a way of requiring a passcode for each data point ... that’s how software (like the infamous PRISM application) knows what can be shown only to people with top-secret clearance. Similar features could control access to data about U.S. citizens. “A lot of the technology we put [in] is to protect rights,” says Fuchs. Like other big-data projects, the NSA team’s system, called Accumulo, was built on top of open-source code because “you don’t want to have to replicate everything yourself,” ... In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation. When Atlas Venture’s Lynch read about that, he jumped—here was a technology already developed, proven to work on tens of terabytes of data, and with security features sorely needed by heavily regulated health-care and banking customers. ... Eventually, Fuchs and several others left the NSA, and now their company is part of a land grab in big data ..."

Submission + - Xbox One Chat Headsets Still Hit Or Miss 1

Submitted by TheG0at
TheG0at writes: When the Xbox One launched, it had no native support for aftermarket headsets. You were forced to use your TV's sound system to hear the game and either the (crappy) bundled headset mic or Kinect for chat. Some enterprising users of course took advantage of this gap and modified the bundled chat adapter to allow you use your Xbox 360 Headset as seen in our review: http://bit.ly/1ozrsQA . (I still use this, you can see why below)

Now Microsoft has rolled out their own "Stereo Headset Adapter". We reviewed it here: http://bit.ly/NUa6Rn and were impressed at first, that is until we got into party chat and found perhaps why they didn't call it a "chat adapter": http://bit.ly/1miSvB0

We returned that and ordered up Microsoft's "Stereo Headset" to see if it worked better than tying to use an old 360 headset. It actually was pretty good as seen here: http://bit.ly/1d3Cega

On a whim, we tried out Turtle Beach's "XO Four" headset and it's turned out to be better than Microsoft's offering, if you don't mind spending a little more: http://bit.ly/1peT2Rx

We are still finding that the sound when in "Party Chat" is not nearly as good as other communication methods be. We recorded this Titanfall video using party chat: http://bit.ly/1jbmvtZ and this one using Skype on Xbox One, still using the same hardware: http://bit.ly/1gVt0ym .

Since the controller firmware update included in the Xbox's March update, we've also been experiencing the microphone cutting out in chat, requiring unplugging and re-plugging of the chat module into the controller to fix.

Hopefully Microsoft will spend a little more time on getting things up to snuff in upcoming patches.

Submission + - Fruit Flies are Better Than You at Calculus

Submitted by DudeTheMath
DudeTheMath writes: Cornell University scientists studied how fruit flies respond to flight disturbances (instead of wind gusts, they used carefully controlled magnetic pulses) and found that the flies recover in as little as three wing beats (at 250 per second) by doing some kind of calculus in a little "integrated circuit" of neurons that control the wings directly. The pitch and yaw results are already published, and the roll study is forthcoming. (NYT, partial paywall, autoplay of fly that starts with a car ad.)

Submission + - A New State of Matter Has Been Discovered (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: The days when solid, liquid and gas were the only three states of matter were over when newer states such as plasma and superficial fluid were discovered. It seems like science students will be updating their course notes in the near future, thanks to the discovery of a yet another state of matter. Say hello to Dropleton which comes across as a new sort of puny particle that may possess the postulates of the liquid state of matter.

Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth blasts OSS FUD

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a Google+ posting, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, announces that Ubuntu is sticking with MySQL in the upcoming Trusty Tahr (14.04) release. In response to a followup question from ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Shuttleworth offers some pointed comments on the OSS FUD culture: "As for phobias, the real pitchforks have been those agitating against Oracle. I think Oracle have been an excellent steward of MySQL, with real investment and great quality. Appreciating and celebrating that doesn't detract from our willingness to engage elsewhere. I think the tendency to imagine conspiracies and malfeasance is one of the sadder aspects of OSS culture. Don't feed it."

Submission + - Bitcoin Exchanges Halt Withdrawals After 'Massive' DDoS Attack (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Bitstamp bitcoin exchange has temporarily halted its users from withdrawing bitcoins, as it is targeted by a "massive and concerted" cyber attack.

A DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack is being felt across the bitcoin landscape, with a number of exchanges affected by what is known as the cryptocurrency 'transaction malleability problem', first discovered in 2011 and flagged up by the Mt Gox exchange earlier this week.

Submission + - Sophisticated Spy Tool 'The Mask' Rages Undetected for 7 Years (wired.com)

Submitted by thomst
thomst writes: Kim Zetter of Wired's Threat Level reports that Kaspersky Labs discovered a Spanish-language spyware application that employs "uses techniques and code that surpass any nation-state spyware previously spotted in the wild." The malware, dubbed "The Mask" by Kaspersky's researchers, targeted targeted government agencies, diplomatic offices, embassies, companies in the oil, gas and energy industries, and research organizations and activists had been loose on the Internet since at least 2007, before it was shut down last month. It infected its targets via a malicious website that contained exploits — among which were the Adobe Flash player vulnerability CVE-2012-0773 — that affected both Windows and Linux machines. Users were directed to the site via spearphishing emails.

Submission + - 14 in '14: Rash of unplanned nuclear reactor shutdowns this year (nrc.gov)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Winter is the time when nuclear power ought to be at its best. Cooling water is not lacking which sometimes troubles summer operations. Electricity demand is high in the northern states, and with cold weather emergencies, an "extra reliable" power source ought to be appreciated. But starting with the troubled Indian Point reactor in NY on January 6 this year, there has been a rash of unplanned shutdowns of nuclear power reactors. Beaver Valley in PA went down the same day, while Fort Calhoun in NE had an ice blocked sluice gate on the 9th. The next day, Robinson in SC shutdown while on the 17th, Monticello in NM led both Harris in NC and Comanche Peak in TX on the 18th in going dark. In MD, Calvert Cliffs' double shutdown on the 22nd is causing grave concern at the NRC as it paints a history of carelessness and January closed out with two more shutdowns at Millstone in CT and Salem in NJ. Already this month two reactors have shutdown, one at Diablo Canyon in CA and twice now at North Anna in VA on first on the 2nd and then on the 9th of February.

While the nuclear power industry has been jaw boning about fuel supply diversity and some strain had been put on natural gas supply infrastructure in the Northeast with this winter's weather, does demonstrating nuclear unreliability like this really support their ideas or would a few more domestic natural gas pipe lines and under-river electric transmission lines down from Quebec be better investments in keeping warm in the winter?

Submission + - Arduino + Beagleboard + Goldfish = Fish On Wheels

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Remember when you were a kid and goldfish were, for at least a few months, a central part of life? It turns out goldfish aren't just good pets--or a good introduction to mortality--they're capable of driving as well. Yes, you read that correctly, goldfish can drive, and there's video to prove it. Well, we should rephrase that, goldfish can drive with the help of the insane geniuses at Studio Diip. They combined Arduino and Beagleboard circuits with a webcam, a battery, a fish tank, and a robot vehicle, freeing the goldfish from its boring life on a shelf. The system uses the webcam to see where the goldfish is going, then directs the robot car to follow. Turns out the goldfish is a bit more capable than you though, eh?

Submission + - NASA Now Accepting Applications From Companies That Want To Mine The Moon (theverge.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Verge reports, "NASA is now working with private companies to take the first steps in exploring the moon for valuable resources like helium 3 and rare earth metals. Initial proposals are due tomorrow for the Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown program (CATALYST). One or more private companies will win a contract to build prospecting robots, the first step toward mining the moon. ... Final proposals are due on March 17th, 2014. NASA has not said when it will announce the winner. ... According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty of the United Nations, countries are prohibited from laying claim to the moon. The possibility of lunar mining and the emergence of private space companies has triggered a debate over lunar property rights ..." — More at the Examiner.

Submission + - Godot Game Engine Released Under MIT License (godotengine.org) 1

Submitted by goruka
goruka writes: Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can deploy to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn. Godot was born as an in-house engine, and was used to publish several work-for-hire commercial titles.

With more than half a million lines of code, Godot is one of the most complex Open Source game engines at the moment, and one of the largest commitments to open source software in recent years. It allows developers to make games under Linux (and other unix variants), Windows and OSX.

Submission + - Is this the biggest rip-off ever built on open source? (itnews.com.au) 2

Submitted by littlekorea
littlekorea writes: Australia's weather bureau has racked up bills of $38 million for a water data system, based on Red Hat Linux, MySQL and Java, that was originally scheduled to cost somewhere between $2 million and $5 million. The Bureau's supplier, an ASX-listed IT services provider SMS Management and Technology, did a good job of embedding itself in the bureau, with all changes having to be made by the original consultant that built it. Smells fishy?

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