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Comment Re:Ah, come one, don't we trust the Feds? (Score 1) 90

by Shakrai (#49190667) Attached to: US Marshals Service Refuses To Release Already-Published Stingray Info

The latest FCC actions were DECADES in the making.

Using a law that was first written when your telephone had a hand crank and last updated when 33.6kbit/s voiceband modems represented the "bleeding edge" of consumer internet connectivity.

This op-ed raises an interesting question: "The real issue is who pays for new Internet investment. Do big users like Netflix and Facebook bear some costs or are these left to the ISPs -- which shift them to the monthly bills of households? For example: In 2014, Netflix agreed to pay Comcast for smoother streaming of its videos. The open question is whether the FCC will permit these interconnection payments and, if so, at what level. But the FCC has weakened the ISPs' bargaining position by requiring them to accept all comers."
Graphics

Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux 52

Posted by timothy from the good-news-for-a-change dept.
An anonymous reader writes For those wondering when the first graphics driver for the new Khronos Vulkan API will materialize and for what hardware, it looks like the first driver could very well be for Intel graphics and it might not be too far away. It turns out Valve developed an Intel Linux Vulkan driver to help ISVs bootstrap their new Vulkan code, with Valve planning to open-source this driver code. This is yet another reason to love Valve, especially as Intel graphics on Linux don't even support OpenGL 4 yet.

Submission + - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 and Atomic Host Hit General Availability (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Red Hat today released the first milestone update to its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x (RHEL) platform. Among the new features in RHEL is the dogtag certificate system and improved two-factor authentication support. Perhaps more noteworthy is the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Atomic Host which is an optimized version of RHEL specifically for the deployment of Docker containers. Red Hat is using Google Kubernets for orchestration and the OStree open source technology as a way to enable 'snappy' transactional updates and rollback capabilities. Atomic Host also introduces the concept of 'super-privileged' containers. The super-privileged containers allow users to deploy system services as containers and then run those service containers with privileged access to the host system.

Comment Re:Ah, come one, don't we trust the Feds? (Score 1) 90

by Shakrai (#49190471) Attached to: US Marshals Service Refuses To Release Already-Published Stingray Info

If we trust FCC to ensure "fairness" of Internet Service Provision:

If the Federal Government can't determine what's fair, then who can?

why don't we trust the Marshals Service to be fair as well? Are they being controlled by a different President or something?

People here are kind of like John Kerry, they were in favor of the Government before they were against it.

Submission + - Valve Developed An Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For those wondering when the first graphics driver for the new Khronos Vulkan API will materialize and for what hardware, it looks like the first driver could very well be for Intel graphics and it might not be too far away. It turns out Valve developed an Intel Linux Vulkan driver to help ISVs bootstrap their new Vulkan code, with Valve planning to open-source this driver code. This is yet another reason to love Valve, especially as Intel graphics on Linux don't even support OpenGL 4 yet.

Submission + - Betaworks CEO: There Will Be No Line Between Us and Our Devices (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Betaworks CEO John Borthwick thinks that we’ve been spending too much time heralding the rise of artificial intelligence to human-level consciousness. What we should be discussing instead is the rise of augmented intelligence: the increasing integration of computing devices into our lives. Sometimes that augmentation makes us smarter. But other times it dumbs us down, in the form of poorly designed software or hardware, such as when a software update to his Nest thermostat caused his device to conclude it was summertime while a snowstorm raged outside. “Like the proverbial frog that sat in a slowly warming pot of water, we are now boiling ourselves in this new world,” he writes.
United States

US Marshals Service Refuses To Release Already-Published Stingray Info 90

Posted by timothy from the don't-look-behind-the-curtain dept.
v3rgEz (125380) writes The U.S. Marshals Service is known to be one of the most avid users of StingRays, and documents confirm that the agency has spent more than $9 million on equipment and training since 2009. But while it appears the USMS is not under any nondisclosure agreement with the device manufacturer, the agency has withheld a wide range of basic information under an exemption meant to protect law enforcement techniques — despite the fact that that same information is available via a federal accounting website.
The Courts

Software Freedom Conservancy Funds GPL Suit Against VMWare 188

Posted by timothy from the this-isn't-nam-man-there-are-rules dept.
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes with this excerpt from a news release from the Software Freedom Conservancy: Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GPLv2, the license of Linux and many other Open Source and Free Software included in VMware's ESXi products. Serge Wroclawski points out the SFC's technical FAQ about the suit. One nugget: This case is specifically regarding a combined work that VMware allegedly created by combining their own code (“vmkernel”) with portions of Linux's code, which was licensed only under GPLv2. As such, this, to our knowledge, marks the first time an enforcement case is exclusively focused on this type of legal question relating to GPL

Submission + - Robocops Direct Traffic in the Congo (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: The Guardian describes robocops used in Kinshasa to direct traffic:
"The solar-powered aluminium robots are huge, towering over the jammed streets of Kinshasa, as cars and motorcyles jostle for road room, their horns blasting.
Each hand on the odd-looking machines — built to withstand the year-round hot climate — is fitted with green and red lights that regulate the flow of traffic in the sprawling city of nine million.
The robots are also equipped with rotating chests and surveillance cameras that record the flow of traffic and send real-time images to the police station."
These are second generation robots designed by a Congolese association of women engineers.
"Although the humanoids look more like giant toys than real policemen, motorists have given them a thumbs up.
“There are certain drivers who don’t respect the traffic police. But with the robot it will be different. We should respect the robot,” taxi driver Poro Zidane told AFP."

Submission + - CRTC issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians

Submitted by zentigger
zentigger writes: Canadians rejoice! It looks like the new anti-spam regulations might actually have some teeth! Today, the CRTC issued a $1.1 million fine to Compu-Finder for violating Canada’s anti-spam legislation by sending commercial emails without consent, as well as messages in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function properly. Furthermore, an analysis of the complaints made to the Spam Reporting Centre of this industry sector shows that Compu-Finder accounts for 26% of all complaints submitted.

Submission + - Conservancy Announces Funding for GPL Compliance Lawsuit (sfconservancy.org)

Submitted by Jeremy Allison - Sam
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: From the article:

Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GPLv2, the license of Linux and many other Open Source and Free Software included in VMware's ESXi products.

Submission + - Developers Race to Develop VR Headsets that Won't Make Users Nauseous

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Nick Wingfield reports at the NYT that for the last couple of years, the companies building virtual reality headsets have begged the public for patience as they strive to create virtual environments that don't make people physically sick. “We’re going to hang ourselves out there and be judged,” says John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus, describing what he calls a “nightmare scenario” that has worried him and other Oculus executives. “People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up,” says Carmack. "The fear is if a really bad V.R. product comes out, it could send the industry back to the ’90s." In that era, virtual reality headsets flopped, disappointing investors and consumers. “It left a huge, smoking crater in the landscape,” says Carmack, who is considered an important game designer for his work on Doom and Quake. “We’ve had people afraid to touch V.R. for 20 years.” This time around, the backing for virtual reality is of a different magnitude. Facebook paid $2 billion last year to acquire Oculus. Microsoft is developing its own headset, HoloLens, that mixes elements of virtual reality with augmented reality, a different medium that overlays virtual images on a view of the real world. Google has invested more than $500 million in Magic Leap, a company developing an augmented reality headset. “The challenge is there is so much expectation and anticipation that that could fall away quite quickly if you don’t get the type of traction you had hoped,” says Neil Young

At least one company, Valve, believes it has solved the discomfort problem with headsets. Gabe Newell says Valve has worked hard on its virtual reality technology to eliminate the discomfort, saying that “zero percent of people get motion sick” when they try its system. According to Newell, the reason why no one has gotten sick yet is thanks to Valve’s Lighthouse motion-tracking system, a precise motion-tracking system that is capable of accurately tracking users as they move around a space. In the meantime the next challenge will be convincing media and tech companies to create lots of content to keep users entertained. “Virtual reality has been around for 20 years, and the one thing that has been consistent throughout this is that the technology is not mature enough,” says Brian Blau,. “Today there’s the possibility for that to change, but it’s going to take a while for these app developers to get it right.”
Intel

Intel Reveals Unlocked, Socketed Broadwell and Core i7 NUC With Iris Graphics 51

Posted by timothy from the faster-all-the-time dept.
MojoKid writes Intel held an event at a location adjacent to GDC last night, where the company discussed some updates to its 5th Gen Core processor line-up, Intel graphics developments, the Intel Hardware SDK, and its various game developer tools. Chris Silva, Director of Marketing for Premium Notebook and Client Graphics teams disclosed a few details that a socketed, unlocked, 65W desktop processor based on Intel's Broadwell architecture, featuring Iris graphics, is due to arrive sometime in mid-2015. It's noteworthy because this will be Intel's first desktop CPU with Iris Pro graphics and because it is multiplier unlocked. It will be interesting to see what Iris Pro can do with some overclocking. Intel then showed off a new NUC mini PC powered by a 28W, quad-core Core i7 Broadwell processor, which also featured Iris graphics. The device has a tiny .63 liter enclosure with support for high-performance M.2 solid state drives and features an array of built-in IO options, like USB3, BT4, and 802.11ac WiFi. Bryan Langley, Principal PM for Windows Graphics also talked a bit about DirectX 12, disclosing that the company would be ready with DX12 support when Windows 10 arrives and that there are optimizations in DX12 and their drivers that would deliver performance enhancements to current and future Intel graphics platforms.

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