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Submission + - Why Isn't Anyone Talking About the Botched Apple Music Launch?

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: When Apple Music launched yesterday, it only launched on iOS apps at the appointed time. Peter Smith writes this about the desktop experience:

The Apple Music site had a Try Now button up for desktop users all day, and clicking it opened iTunes. iTunes 2.1.2 if you were up to date. The problem was that Apple Music requires iTunes 2.2, and as late as 6 PM ET that wasn't available. If you clicked the Try Now button, iTunes would open and inform you that you needed iTunes 2.2 and offered an Upgrade button. That Upgrade button would take you to the web to download the old version of iTunes that didn't support Apple Music.

But nowhere in the tech press did you see mention of the botched launch. VentureBeat wanted to make sure you knew how not to get charged for Apple Music, as did Engadget and TheVerge. And TechCrunch thought things were "going pretty well so far" when, at 6:20 PM ET, some Mac users finally started getting the update ( seven hours after scheduled launch).

Submission + - Hundreds of Dark Web mirror sites 'booby-trapping' Tor users (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tor users are being warned about hundreds of fake and booby-trapped .onion websites after the founder of Dark Web search engine ahmia.fi noticed a clone of his own site online. Juha Nurmi, who operates an open source .onion search engine, found over two hundred fake replicas of Dark Web pages, including the popular Tor version of DuckDuckGo. In a Tor-Talk post [https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-June/038295.html] he suggests that there are several copies of the targeted websites, each with similar addresses. Unlike on the traditional World Wide Web, unindexed Tor pages are typically located through directories rather than across search engines and often have complicated URLs – thus making it easier for fake addresses to go unnoticed. Nurmi added that the fake sites are working as transparent proxies to the real pages, allowing hackers to launch attacks against their targets.
 
The Almighty Buck

Scientist Union's Talks Stall Over Pay 80

Posted by Soulskill from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.
HughPickens.com writes: The Sacramento Bee reports that the labor contract between California's state government and the 2,800 employees represented by the California Association of Professional Scientists expired this week, spotlighting yet again the long-running feud over whether the tiny union's members should earn as much as their peers in federal and local governments and private industry. "It's a challenge to keep people motivated," says Rita Hypnarowski. "We talk about retaining the best and the brightest, but I can see that's not going to happen." A recent survey by the Brown administration found that the total compensation for half of state-employed chemists is less than $8,985 per month ($5,715 in salary, plus $3,270 in benefit costs). That's 33 percent less than the median total compensation for federal chemists, nearly 13 percent less than the midpoint for local-government chemists and almost 6 percent below the private sector.

Members of the union perform a wide variety of tasks, everything from fighting food-borne illnesses to mopping up the Refugio State Beach oil spill. For example, Cassandra McQuaid left a job last year at the Department of Public Health's state-of-the-art Richmond laboratories where she tracked foodborne illnesses. It's the kind of vital, behind-the-scenes work that goes unnoticed until an E. coli outbreak makes headlines and local health officials need a crack team of scientists to unravel how it happened. "It really came down to money," says McQuaid. "I just couldn't live in the Bay Area on a state salary."
Operating Systems

People Are Obtaining Windows 7 Licenses For the Free Windows 10 Upgrade 172

Posted by Soulskill from the cheap-is-relative dept.
jones_supa writes: Windows 7 has quickly started increasing its market share of desktop operating systems, nearing 61%. If you're wondering why this is happening when Windows 10 is almost here, the reason is this: Windows 10 will be available as a free upgrade for those running Windows 7 and 8, and the new OS will have the exact same hardware requirements as its predecessor, so the majority of PCs should be able to run it just as well. Because Windows 7 was launched in 2009, a license is more affordable than for Windows 8, so many users are switching to this version to take advantage of the Windows 10 free upgrade offer.
Verizon

How Verizon Is Hindering NYC's Internet Service 123

Posted by Soulskill from the shareholder-value-trumps-citizen-value dept.
Cuillere writes: Verizon promised to make FiOS available to all New York City residents. The deadline passed a year ago, and many residents still don't have FiOS as an option, but Verizon claims to have done its part. "The agreement required Verizon to 'pass' homes with fiber (not actually connect them), but no one wrote down in the agreement what they thought 'pass' meant. (Verizon’s interpretation, predictably, is that it doesn’t have to get very close.)" The situation is a mess, and the city isn't having much luck fighting it in the courts. Susan Crawford offers a solution: set up wholesale fiber access for third party ISPs and absolve Verizon of customer service responsibility.

Submission + - China's new security law seeks to make cyberspace more 'controllable' (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China has today passed a new security legislation which looks to extend governmental powers over cyberspace, in reaction to what it referred to as a growing threat towards Chinese systems. According to a text released in Beijing today [http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/lfgz/flca/2015-05/06/content_1935766.htm], the new National Security Law seeks to “safeguard national security, defend the people’s democratic dictatorship and the socialist system with Chinese characteristics.” Regarding the country’s cyberspace, the bill looks to reinforce federal control over the country’s networks and calls for tougher mechanisms to deal with cyberattacks, theft of national secrets as well as the diffusion of any illegal or offensive materials. It requires that all critical state infrastructure and information must be kept “secure and controllable” to be able to protect Chinese cyber sovereignty. China has said repeatedly that it faces a constant onslaught of hacking attempts. The ruling Communist Party puts great effort into monitoring potentially harmful content online and blocks any webpage it deems illegal.
Canada

Quebec Government May Force ISPs To Block Gambling Websites 60

Posted by Soulskill from the good-luck-on-your-saving-throw dept.
New submitter ottawan- writes: In order to drive more customers to their own online gambling website, the Quebec government and Loto-Quebec (the provincial organization in charge of gaming and lotteries) are thinking about forcing the province's ISPs to block all other online gambling websites. The list of websites to be blocked will be maintained by Loto-Quebec, and the government believes that the blocking will increase government revenue by up to $27 million (CAD) per year.
Earth

Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Empty Toner Cartridges? 189

Posted by timothy from the using-them-as-ice-cream-dishes-is-popular dept.
New submitter MoarSauce123 writes: Over time I accumulated a number of empty toner cartridges for a Brother laser printer. Initially, I wanted to take a local office supply chain store up on their offer to give me store credit for the returned cartridge. For that credit to be issued I would have to sign up for their store card providing a bunch of personal information. The credit is so lousy that after the deduction from the sales price of a new toner cartridge the price is still much higher than from a large online retailer. And the credit only applies to one new cartridge, so I cannot keep collecting the credit and then get a cartridge 'for free' at some point.

I also looked into a local store of a toner refill chain. Their prices are a bit better, but the closest store is about half an hour away with rather odd business hours. Still, at the end they charge more than the large online retailer asks for a brand new cartridge. For now I bring the empty cartridges to the big office supply store and tell them that I do not want their dumb store credit. I rather have big corp make some bucks on me than throw these things in the trash and have it go to a landfill. Are there any better options? Anything from donating it to charity to refilling myself is of interest.

Submission + - New Open Source Guitar Released

Submitted by PraxisGuitars
PraxisGuitars writes: Praxis Guitars released the geometry source code for the Zero mk2 Mantis guitar under Creative Commons Sharealike-Attribute licensing. The Praxis Zero mk2 is a modular electric guitar framework that was designed to be easily fabricated on a 3 axis CNC mill. The source code license allows for commercial replication and modification.
Graphics

Nvidia Details 'Gameworks VR', Aims To Boost Virtual Reality Render Performance 25

Posted by timothy from the here's-a-mud-in-your-eye dept.
An anonymous reader writes: In a guest article published to Road to VR, Nvidia graphics programmer Nathan Reed details Nvidia's 'Gameworks VR' initiative which the company says is designed to boost virtual reality render performance, including support for 'VR SLI' which will render one eye view per GPU for low latency stereoscopy. While many Gameworks VR features will be supported as far back as GeForce 6xx cards, the company's latest 'Maxwell' (9xx and Titan X) GPUs offer 'Multi-projection' which Reed says, 'enables us to very efficiently rasterize geometry into multiple viewports within a single render target at once... This better approximates the shading rate of the warped image that will eventually be displayed—in other words, it avoids rendering a ton of extra pixels that weren't going to make it to the display anyway, and gives you a substantial performance boost for no perceptible reduction in image quality.'
Businesses

Cisco To Acquire OpenDNS 147

Posted by timothy from the but-I-thought-open-dns-was-the-alternative dept.
New submitter Tokolosh writes: Both Cisco and OpenDNS announced today that the former is to acquire the latter. From the Cisco announcement: "To build on Cisco's advanced threat protection capabilities, we plan to continue to innovate a cloud delivered Security platform integrating OpenDNS' key capabilities to accelerate that work. Over time, we will look to unite our cloud-delivered solutions, enhancing Cisco's advanced threat protection capabilities across the full attack continuum—before, during and after an attack." With Cisco well-embedded with the US security apparatus (NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.) is it time to seek out alternatives to OpenDNS?

Submission + - Retro City Rampage Getting a DOS Version (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: There is an indie game port in works which certainly cracks a smile on one's face. Vblank Entertainment is bringing Retro City Rampage — its homage to 8-bit games and Grand Theft Auto — over to one of the influential gaming operating systems of all time: DOS! Retro City Rampage 486 is a port of Retro City Rampage DX, an enhanced version of the game featuring a story mode, arcade challenges, and free roaming. As the name suggests, if one wants to run the game natively, a beefy 486 CPU is required, along with 3.7 MB of disk space and 4 MB of RAM. But of course, DOSBox can be used as well. A release date for the DOS version of the game is not yet known.

Submission + - Former L0pht Hacker Mudge Leaves Google to Start Cyber UL

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: One of the longstanding problems in security–and the software industry in general–is the lack of any universally acknowledged authority on quality and reliability. But the industry moved one step closer to making such a clearinghouse a reality this week when Peiter Zatko, a longtime researcher and hacker better known as Mudge in security circles, announced he’s leaving Google to start an initiative designed to be a cyber version of Underwriters’ Laboratory.

Zatko said on Monday that he had decided to leave Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects team and start a cyber UL, at the behest of the White House.

The new project will not be run out of the White House, Zatko said, and the specifics of the plan are not clear right now. But the fact that someone with Zatko’s experience, history, and respect in the security community is involved in the project lends immediate weight and potential to it.

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