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Submission + - Six Nissan Leaf Electric Cars Can Power an Office Building (greencarreports.com)

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: How many Nissan Leafs does it take to power an office building? The answer, it turns out, is six. Nissan is the latest Japanese automaker to explore electric "vehicle-to-building" setups, this time with impressive results. The company started testing its latest system at the Nissan Advanced Technology Center in Atsugi City, Japan, during the summer. It found that just six Leafs plugged in to the building's power supply allowed it to cut peak-hour electricity use by 2 percent. Annualized, that's a savings of half a million yen (about $4,800 US) in electricity costs. How it works: The building pulls electricity from the plugged-in vehicles during peak-use hours, when power is most expensive, and then sends the power back to recharge the cars when grid prices fall. Nissan says the system is set up to ensure the cars are fully charged by the end of the workday. (Is this a devious secret way to make sure workers stay until a certain time?) Next up: Why not just do this using batteries--never mind the cars?

Submission + - Activision is preventing Gabriel Knight from coming to Linux (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by crabel
crabel writes: A Gabriel Knight remake was announced back in October with plans to release the game for Windows, Apple OS X, iPad, Android, and Linux. Unfortunately, the technical director of the game studio had bad news for Linux users:
"Figured this deserved its own thread. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but my previous statement that GK would be available on Linux turns out to be incorrect. I can't even begin to imagine why, but Activision isn't allowing the game to be made for that platform. Just PC, Mac, Android, and iOS devices."

Submission + - German summons US ambassador over NSA spying of Chancellor Angela Merkel

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: German summons the US ambassador over claims that the US monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.

Foreign minister Guido Westerwelle will personally meet US envoy John Emerson.

Previously, U.S President Barack Obama had denied the spying of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone calls when she made call to Obama for asking about the reports of NSA spying of her phone calls.

And, Germany’s defense minister said that Europe can’t simply return to business as usual in its relations with Washington following allegations that U.S. intelligence may have targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone — though he stressed that ties will remain stable.

Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere told ARD television the alleged surveillance would be “really bad” if confirmed. “The Americans are and remain our best friends, but this is absolutely not right,” he said.

Few days back, France called in the U.S. ambassador to protest at allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Comment Re:"Up to" - marketing magic (Score 1) 65

by La Gris (#45034297) Attached to: Yahoo To Offer Bug Bounty Rewards Up To $15,000

There is no wrong in your statement about $12.50 comes under "Up To $15,000,";
So there is no circunstance where you would give me up to $1,000,000 in correllation to proving you wrong on the above.
This is where I could prove you wrong.
But giving me up to $1.000.000 for proving you wrong would prove you right.

Finally, the only possible income of all this. is:
- You have to give me more than $1.000.000 for, proving you are wrong on advertising a reward to an impossible circunstance.
- And the reward has to be more than your "up-to" to save your wrongness or it would cancel itself.

Submission + - openSUSE Plans To Switch From EXT4 To Btrfs File-System (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The openSUSE Linux distribution looks like it may be the first major Linux distribution to ship the Btrfs file-system by default. The openSUSE 13.1 release is due out in November and is still using EXT4 by default, but after that the developers are looking at having openSUSE using Btrfs by default on new installations. The Btrfs features to be enabled would be the ones the developers feel are data-safe.

Submission + - How worried should we be about NSA backdoors in open source and open standards? 1

Submitted by quarrelinastraw
quarrelinastraw writes: For years, users have conjectured that the NSA may have placed backdoors in security projects such as SELinux and in cryptography standards such as AES. However, I have yet to have seen a serious scientific analysis of this question, as discussions rarely get beyond general paranoia facing off against a general belief that government incompetence plus public scrutiny make backdoors unlikely. In light of the recent NSA revelations about the PRISM surveillance program, and that Microsoft tells the NSA about bugs before fixing them, how concerned should we be? And if there is reason for concern, what steps should we take individually or as a community?

History seems relevant here, so to seed the discussion I'll point out the following for those who may not be familiar. The NSA opposed giving the public access to strong cryptography in the 90s because it feared cryptography would interfere with wiretaps. They proposed a key escrow program so that they would have everybody's encryption keys. They developed a cryptography chipset called the "clipper chip" that gave a backdoor to law enforcement and which is still used in the US government. Prior to this, in the 1970s, NSA tried to change the cryptography standard DES (the precursor to AES) to reduce keylength effectively making the standard weaker against brute force attacks of the sort the NSA would have used.

Since the late 90s, the NSA appears to have stopped its opposition to public cryptography and instead (appears to be) actively encouraging its development and strengthening. The NSA released the first version of SELinux in 2000, 4 years after they canceled the clipper chip program due to the public's lack of interest. It is possible that the NSA simply gave up on their fight against public access to cryptography, but it is also possible that they simply moved their resources into social engineering — getting the public to voluntarily install backdoors that are inadvertently endorsed by security experts because they appear in GPLed code. Is this pure fantasy? Or is there something to worry about here?

Submission + - New Documents: US is bugging its European Allies (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: US intelligence services are spying on the European Union mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, according to the latest top secret US National Security Agency documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae. Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of targets includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states. One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which, according to a 2007 document, is "implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC" – an apparent reference to a bug placed in a commercially available encrypted fax machine used at the mission. The NSA documents note the machine is used to send cables back to foreign affairs ministries in European capitals.

Submission + - High-speed camera grabs first 3D shots of untouched snowflakes (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers have developed a camera system that shoots untouched flakes "in the wild" as they fall from the sky. By grabbing a series of images of the tumbling crystals—its exposure time is one-40,000th of a second, compared with about one-200th in normal photography—the camera is revealing the true shape diversity of snowflakes. Besides providing beautiful real-time 3D snowflake photographs from a ski resort in Utah, the goal is to improve weather modeling. More accurate data on how fast snowflakes fall and how their shapes interacts with radar will improve predictions of when and where storms will dump snow and how much.

Comment Re:Not putting in DRM isn't going to eliminate DRM (Score 1) 351

by La Gris (#43233563) Attached to: Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

Yay, free cars.

But until the star-trek utopia arrives the people that used to make those cars now need a new job...

  1. Give or sell cars for free or at a loss
  2. Then sell tuned fuel in tiny sealed tanks witn embeded engine njectors, brand and model specific fittings,
  3. Ensure the fuel gauge scream empty and engine shut down half tank capacity or decrease even if parked all night,
  4. Profit

Comment Re:Non-bullshit non-jargon translation please... (Score 1) 202

by La Gris (#42394689) Attached to: Ubuntu Focusing on Tablets and the Cloud in 2013

Geek translation:

Focusing on tablets = You will get more of the Unity crapbloat
redesign Unity for mobile = We tried to sell it on desktop and...
push deeper into the cloud = there are kids reading you know.
faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice = we are going cheap on giving you a choice between clouds and clouds or clouds...
create clouds for your own consumption and commerce = You know who will consume and who will do commerce.

Comment Re:Reversion to mean? (Score 2) 170

by La Gris (#40050507) Attached to: Wozniak's Original System Description of the Apple ][

And one trick he missed that could have been done cheaply... if the video vertical sync pulse had been made available someplace in the I/O space as a bit you could test, then it would have been trivial to know when you were in the vertical blanking interval so that you could flip video buffers cleanly.

$C019 ;RDVBL bit 7 Apple IIe IIgs Vertical Blanking
$C041 ;RDVBLMSK bit 7 Apple //c Read VBL Interrupt

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