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Encryption

FBI Slammed On Capitol Hill For "Stupid" Ideas About Encryption 174

Posted by samzenpus from the stupid-is-as-stupid-does dept.
blottsie writes: At a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, the FBI endured outright hostility as both technical experts and members of Congress from both parties roundly criticized the law enforcement agency's desire to place so-called back doors into encryption technology. "Creating a technological backdoor just for good guys is technologically stupid," said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer science graduate. "That's just stupid. Our founders understood that an Orwellian overreaching government is one of the most dangerous things this world could have," Lieu said.
China

China's Tencent Launches Smart Hardware OS To Rival Alibaba 22

Posted by timothy from the diversity-in-approach dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Chinese internet and media giant Tencent Holdings has today launched an operating system for mobile devices such as internet-connected phones, TVs, smartwatches and other IoT products. Tencent Operating System (OS) TOS+ is open to all developers and manufacturers free of charge should they agree to share their revenue – a framework similar to Google's popular Android mobile OS. The new Tencent OS offering, which provides voice recognition and mobile payment systems, will rival other home-grown operating systems looking to conquer the smart hardware arena with connected wearables, TVs and smart homeware technology. These competitors include smartphone maker Xiaomi and Asia's largest internet company Alibaba, who hopes to see its recently launched Yun OS eventually installed on tens of millions of smartphones. The Chinese systems for mobile and hardware products provide an alternative to Google's services, which constantly face challenges across the country due to strict censorship and licensing laws.
Ubuntu

Ubuntu 15.04 Released, First Version To Feature systemd 494

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
jones_supa writes: The final release of Ubuntu 15.04 is now available. A modest set of improvements are rolling out with this spring's Ubuntu. While this means the OS can't rival the heavy changelogs of releases past, the adage "don't fix what isn't broken" is clearly one 15.04 plays to. The headline change is systemd being featured first time in a stable Ubuntu release, which replaces the inhouse UpStart init system. The Unity desktop version 7.3 receives a handful of small refinements, most of which aim to either fix bugs or correct earlier missteps (for example, application menus can now be set to be always visible). The Linux version is 3.19.3 further patched by Canonical. As usual, the distro comes with fresh versions of various familiar applications.
Education

Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats 201

Posted by timothy from the cheating-in-schools-geogia-edition dept.
theodp writes Just weeks after an L.A. Times op-ed called on public schools to emulate high-tech companies by paying high salaries to driven, talented employees whose productivity more than compensates for their high pay, the New York Times reported on the dramatic conclusion to perhaps the largest cheating scandal in the nation's history, which saw a Judge order handcuffed Atlanta educators led off to jail immediately for their roles in a standardized test cheating scandal that raised broader questions about the role of high-stakes testing in American schools. Jurors convicted 11 of the 12 defendants — a mix of Atlanta public school teachers, testing coordinators and administrators — of racketeering, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sowed suspicion about the veracity of the test scores in 2009, and while investigators found that cheating was particularly ingrained in individual schools, they also said that the district's top officials, including Superintendent Beverly L. Hall, bore some responsibility for creating "a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation" that had permitted "cheating — at all levels — to go unchecked for years." (More below.)

Comment Junk science (Score 1) 486

by compudj (#49339517) Attached to: No, It's Not Always Quicker To Do Things In Memory

Wow. Has anyone heard about buffered writes ? And does kernel-level page cache ring a bell ? No fsync was ever used in the benchmarks, therefore, it is never actually hitting the disk. The only good thing about this paper is that the Java and Python listings are available at the end, for everyone to identify the basic flaws in this research.

So yeah, it's faster to write directly to MEMORY than to do a copy before writing to MEMORY.
Graphics

Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan 198

Posted by Soulskill from the free-as-in-beer dept.
jones_supa writes: A year ago, animation studio Pixar promised its RenderMan animation and rendering suite would eventually become free for non-commercial use. This was originally scheduled to happen in the SIGGRAPH 2014 computer graphics conference, but things got delayed. Nevertheless, today Pixar is releasing the free version into the wild. Free, non-commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. This version is fully featured, without a watermark or any kind of artificial limits. Featuring Pixar's new RIS technology, RenderMan delivers extremely fast global illumination and interactive shading and lighting for artists. The software is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. In conjunction with the release, Pixar has also launched a new RenderMan Community site where users can exchange knowledge and resources, showcase their own work, share assets such as shaders and scripts, and learn about RenderMan from tutorials.

Submission + - Stallman joins Internet, talks net neutrality, patents and more

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: According to Richard Stallman, godfather of the free software movement, Facebook is a “monstrous surveillance engine,” tech companies working for patent reform aren’t going nearly far enough, and parents must lobby their children’s schools to keep data private and provide free software alternatives. The free software guru touched on a host of topics in his keynote Saturday at the LibrePlanet conference, a Free Software Foundation gathering at the Scala Center at MIT.

Comment Re:How About (Score 0) 224

by r_naked (#49308261) Attached to: Chevy Malibu 'Teen Driver' Tech Will Snitch If You Speed

First I would never do this to my child. It is my opinion that you raise your children correctly and then you can trust them.

With that said, all a parent has to do is hide a GPS somewhere that the kid knows nothing about. Compare GPS to what the car has to say, and if they differ, then they know the car has been tampered with -- BUSTED!

I feel sorry for any parents that feel the need to use such methods....

-- Brian
PC Games (Games)

Steam On Linux Now Has Over a Thousand Games Available 192

Posted by Soulskill from the year-of-linux-on-the-console dept.
An anonymous reader writes: This week the Steam Linux client has crossed the threshold of having more than 1,000 native Linux games available while Steam in total has just under 5,000 games. This news comes while the reported Steam Linux market-share is just about 1.0%, but Valve continues brewing big plans for Linux gaming. Is 2015 the year of the Linux gaming system?

Comment I can understand why... (Score 1) 681

by alexandre (#49111995) Attached to: Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge

Those who did specialize in computer science early on, after high school let's say, tend to not understand physics / chemistry / biology / etc. as well, and it shows.

That doesn't mean they are anti-science / anti-global-warming or anything like that, just that the rest depends more on ambiant politic than critical use of scientific knowledge when shown scientific studies...

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