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Submission + - Protesters Blockade Microsoft's Seattle Headquarters Over Tax Dodging (geekwire.com) 2

Submitted by reifman
reifman writes: A thousand unionized healthcare workers protested outside Microsoft's Seattle offices over its Nevada tax dodge on Friday. Microsoft shareholders have pocketed more than $5.34 billion in tax savings as Washington State social services and schools have taken huge cuts. In a hearing Wednesday, the Supreme Court suggested it may hold the Legislature in contempt and order it to repeal all tax breaks to restore proper funding to K-12 schools and universities.

Submission + - Core i7 5960X + X99 Motherboards Start Mysteriously Burning Up (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel's Haswell-E Eight-Core CPU and X99 motherboards just debuted but it looks like there may be some early adoption troubles leading to the new, ultra-expensive X99 motherboards and processors burning up. Phoronix first ran a story about their X99 motherboard having a small flame and smoke when powering up for the first time and then Legit Reviews also ran an article about their motherboard going up in smoke for reasons unknown. The RAM, X99 motherboards, and power supplies were different in these two cases. Manufacturers are now investigating and in at least the case of LR their Core i7-5960X also fried in the process.

Submission + - FAA Scans the Internet For Drone Users; Sends Cease and Desist Letters (governmentattic.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FAA has released a set of cease and desist letters sent in 2012 and 2013 to people operating drone vehicles for a variety of purposes including: tornado research, inspecting gas well stacks, aerial photography, journalism education, and other purposes. Drone cease and desist letters sent during 2014 are available from the FAA upon request.

Submission + - GPL risk shown when popular Minecraft plugins shut down by DMCA.

Submitted by Maxo-Texas
Maxo-Texas writes: One of the primary programmers, Wesley Wolfe (Wolvereness), who contributed over 23,000 lines of code to the Bukkit project which enhances Minecraft server performance and allows others to write "mods" and "plugins" submitted a DMCA request September 5th, preventing use of his code in the popular Bukkit or Spigot (and numerous other Minecraft plugins, mods, and other open source enhancements that depend on them). This has the effect of freezing all further development for multi-player server Minecraft based on these addons until the issue is resolved.

The programmer says that Mojang must release the Minecraft server code to the public domain since decompiled, deobfuscated versions of the java code are included in the Bukkit project before he will withdraw the DMCA. Mojang has never released the real source code and has stated they will not opensource the server code to meet the GPL and LGPL licensing requirements.

Read more here:
http://www.spigotmc.org/thread...

This approach might be a risk for other GPL and LGPL projects out there which are derivative of or enhance non GPL programs or products.

Submission + - Robot Dramas: Autonomous Machines in the Limelight on Stage and in Society

Submitted by aarondubrow
aarondubrow writes: We're entering an era where we'll increasingly coexist with robots and other intelligent machines — some of which may look like us. Not only is there a growing number of industrial robots (about 1.5 million today), there are 10 million Roombas in our homes, porter-bots in our hospitals and hotels, social robots in our nursing homes and even robot spectators at baseball games in Japan, tele-operated by remote fans.

Theater is not an arena that we typically associate with robots, however, artists, musicians and producers are often early adopters and innovative users of emerging technologies. In fact, robots got their name from the 1920 play, R.U.R., by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek. An article in the Huffington Post describes a panel discussion at the National Academy of Science in June that featured the producers of three recent plays that starred robots. The plays highlight our robot anxieties, while offering new visions for human-robot interactions in the future.

Submission + - You Have Your Windows In My Linux 1

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Ultimately, the schism over systemd could lead to a separation of desktop and server distros, or Linux server admins moving to FreeBSD, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Although there are those who think the systemd debate has been decided in favor of systemd, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise. I've seen many declarations of victory for systemd, now that Red Hat has forced it into the enterprise with the release of RHEL 7. I don't think it's that easy. ... Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows.'

Submission + - Jennifer Lawrence/iCloud Hack and the Need for Zero-Knowledge Data Storage (calltheninja.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The recent hack of dozens of celebrity iCloud accounts and subsequent theft/posting of their private photos highlights the need for host-proof aka "zero-knowledge" data storage. Companies like SpiderOak have been using this technology for years so why are DropBox and Apple so far behind?

Submission + - NATO Set to Equate 'Cyberattacks' with Global Warfare (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the upcoming NATO meeting, according to the New York Times, the 28 member States are expected to ratify "a far-reaching change in the organization’s mission of collective defense: For the first time, a cyberattack on any of the 28 NATO nations could be declared an attack on all of them, much like a ground invasion or an airborne bombing.”

A former NATO ambassador describes NATO's technological capability as "pretty basic" and suggests any counter-cyberattacks would likely be lodged by member states (meaning the US and maybe Britain). He opines, "It's a measure of how far we've come on this issue that there's now a consensus that a cyberattack could be as devastating as any other kind of attack, maybe even more so."

Helpfully, the agreement avoids defining what sort of 'cyberattack' would warrant an armed response. The Times describes the agreement as "deliberately unclear."

Submission + - AMD Launches Radeon R9 285 'Tonga' GPU And FX-8370E, FX-8370, FX-8320 Processors (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD has launched two new products today for DIY enthusiasts and system integrators. The AMD Radeon R9 285 is a new mainstream GPU from AMD that is the first product built around AMD's new Tonga GPU, dubbed the Radeon R9 285. As its name suggests, this card falls into AMD's current line-up in between the Radeon R9 270X and R9 280X. It's essentially a tweak of the company's Hawaii architecture that actually drops in at a lower power envelope versus the Radeon R9 280X but with better performance and the latest features in AMD's architecture, like TrueAudio and FreeSync monitor sychronization technology. AMD has also launched the FX-8370E, FX-8370 and FX-8320E line of performance mainstream CPUs today as well, The new FX-8370, FX-8370E, and FX-8320E are familiar in many ways. These cores are still based on the older Piledriver architecture that debuted in 2012, they can still process two threads per module and four modules total for eight CPU cores, and they still rely on AMD's Socket AM3+. What these new chips do offer is an opportunity for enthusiasts in the mid-range category with 95W motherboards to step up to better processors. Before today, AMD didn't really have an eight-core option in the 95W range, which means a 95W motherboard topped out with a six-core FX-6300 with a 3.5GHz base clock and a 4.1GHz Turbo. Now, enthusiasts can step up to the FX-8370E with its 3.3GHz / 4.3GHz spread and eight cores, rather than just six.

Submission + - Would you sell YOUR privacy for $100 a month? (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by gunner_von_diamond
gunner_von_diamond writes: In order to use many websites and social networks, you have to forfeit a certain amount of your privacy.
But one San Diego firm is willing to pay you for the privilege of following you around as you browse the web, make searches and use social networks.
For $100 (£60) a month, Luth Research will track your every move online before selling it to the highest bidder, typically companies looking to advertise on the web.
As well as tracking browsing history, web searches, time spent on social networks and the user’s location, participants are also asked to complete survey questions about their behaviour.
This means clients can ask participants follow-up questions about why they choose to visit certain sites, or more details about their movements.
All the information is collected through a virtual private network connection, and the data is securely routed through Luth Research’s servers.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: The State of Free Video Editing Tools

Submitted by Shadow99_1
Shadow99_1 writes: I used to do a lot of video editing a few years ago at an earlier job and at that time I used Adobe Premiere. Now a few years later I'm looking to start doing some video editing for my own personal use, but I have a limited budget that pretty well excludes even thinking about buying a copy of Adobe Premiere. So I ask slashdot: What is the state of free (as in beer or as in open source) video editing tools?

In my case... I support a windows environment at work and so it's primarily what I use at home. I am also using a camcorder that uses flash cards to record onto, so for me I need a platform that supports reading flash cards. So that is my focus but feel free to discuss video editing on all platforms.

Submission + - AMD Releases new Tonga GPU, Lowers 8-core CPU to $229

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: AMD looks to continue addressing the mainstream PC enthusiast and gamer with a set of releases into two different component categories. First, today marks the launch of the Radeon R9 285 graphics card, a $250 option based on a brand new piece of silicon dubbed Tonga. This GPU has nearly identical performance to the R9 280 that came before it, but includes support for XDMA PCIe CrossFire, TrueAudio DSP technology and is FreeSync capable (AMD's response to NVIDIA G-Sync). On the CPU side AMD has refreshed its FX product line with three new models (FX-8370, FX-8370e and FX-8320e) with lower TDPs and supposedly better efficiency. The problem of course is that while Intel is already sampling 14nm parts these Vishera-based CPUs continue to be manufactured on GlobalFoundries' 32nm process. The result is less than expected performance boosts and efficiency gains.

Submission + - Code.org Discloses Top Donors

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Under the leadership of Code.org, explained the ACM, it joined CSTA, NCWIT, NSF, Microsoft and Google in an effort "to reshape the U.S. education system," including passing a federal law making Computer Science a "core subject" in schools. If you're curious about whose money helped fuel the effort, Code.org's Donors page now lists those who gave $25,000+ to $3,000,000+ to the K-12 CS cause (the nonprofit plans to raise $20-30 million for 2015-16 operations). Microsoft is at the top of the list as a Platinum Supporter ($3,000,000+), while Bill Gates is Gold ($1,000,000+), and Steve Ballmer is Silver ($500,000+). Interestingly, six of Code.org's ten biggest donors are also Founders of Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us tech immigration reform PAC.

Submission + - In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist (theatlantic.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—"taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.

Submission + - 160,000 New Malware Samples Appear Each Day

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Malware is still being created at the record levels reached in the previous quarter: 15 million new samples were generated, at an average rate of 160,000 every day, according to Panda Security. Trojans, once again, have accounted for more infections (62.8%) than any other type of malware, although this figure is lower than the previous quarter (79.90%). Potentially Unwanted Programs are in second place with 24.77% of infections, underlining how these techniques are now being used massively. A long way behind came adware/spyware (7.09%), viruses (2.68%) and worms (2.66%).

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