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Submission + - 300 Million Year Old Fossil Fish Likely Had Color Vision (nature.com)

Submitted by westlake
westlake writes: Nature is reporting the discovery of mineralized rods and cones in a 300 million year old fossil fish found in Kansas. The soft tissues of the eye and brain decay rapidly after death, within 64 days and 11 days, respectively, and are almost never preserved in the fossil record — making this is the first discovery of fossil rods and cones in general and the first evidence for color vision in a fossilized vertebrate eye.
Cellphones

Samsung Galaxy Note Edge Review 75

Posted by samzenpus from the check-it-out dept.
MojoKid writes Differentiation is difficult in the smartphone market these days. Larger screens, faster processors, additional sensors and higher resolution cameras, all are nice upgrades but are only iterative, especially when you consider the deluge of products that come to market. True innovation is coming along with less frequency and Samsung, more so perhaps than some other players, is guilty of punching out so many different phone models that it's hard not to gloss over new releases. However, the new Samsung Galaxy Note Edge may offer something truly useful and innovative with its supplementary 160 pixel curved edge display. The Note Edge is based on the same internal platform as the Galaxy Note 4, and features a 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoC with Adreno 420 graphics and 3GB of RAM. What makes the Galaxy Note Edge so different from virtually all other smartphones on the market is its curved edge display and what Samsung calls its "revolving UI" that offers app shortcuts, status updates, data feeds and features all on its own, but integrated with the rest of the UI on the primary display. You can cycle through various "edge panels" as Samsung calls them, like shortcuts to your favorite apps, a Twitter ticker, news feeds, and a tools panel for quick access to the alarm clock, stop-watch, a flashlight app, audio recorder and even a digital ruler. The Galaxy Note Edge may not be for everyone, but Samsung actually took curved display technology and built something useful out of it."

Submission + - North Korean Defector Spills Details On The Country's Elite Hacking Force (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by mattydread23
mattydread23 writes: Business Insider interviewed Jang Se-yul, a North Korean defector who trained in the country's Mirim University alongside some of the hackers who make up its elite Bureau 121 hacking squad. He explains how they train: "They take six 90-minute classes every day, learning different coding languages and operating systems, from C to Linux. Jang says a lot of time was spent dissecting Microsoft programs, like the Windows operating system, and how to attack the overall computer IT systems of enemy countries like the US or South Korea." He also explains that these hackers are among the elite in North Korea, and even though they have unfiltered information about the outside world that their countrymen lack, most of them would never dream of leaving.
The Internet

US Internet Offers 10Gbps Fiber In Minneapolis 110

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
An anonymous reader writes Christmas came early in Minneapolis! U.S. Internet has announced that they are now offering 10 Gbps service to all of their existing fiber customers. Their prior top tier service was 1 Gbps. The article also goes on to state that they're actively working on rolling out 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps fiber service as well."
Sony

Sony To Release the Interview Online Today; Apple Won't Play Ball 227

Posted by samzenpus from the watch-it-now dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports: "Sony Pictures is to distribute its film The Interview online, after a cyber-attack and a row over its release. The film will be offered on a dedicated website — seetheinterview.com — as well as via Google and Microsoft services." Notably absent among the services to provide The Interview is Apple. The New York Times reports: "According to people briefed on the matter, Sony had in recent days asked the White House for help in lining up a single technology partner — Apple, which operates iTunes — but the tech company was not interested, at least not on a speedy time table. An Apple spokesman declined to comment. "
DRM

How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us To Greater Harm 116

Posted by Soulskill from the defective-by-design dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Cory Doctorow has an article in Wired explaining why crafting laws to restrict software is going to hurt us in the long run. The reason? Because we're on an irreversible trajectory toward integrating technology with our cars and houses, bodies and brains. If we don't control the software, then at some point, we won't control parts of our homes and our selves. Doctorow writes, "Any law or regulation that undermines computers' utility or security also ripples through all the systems that have been colonized by the general-purpose computer. And therein lies the potential for untold trouble and mischief.

Code always has flaws, and those flaws are easy for bad guys to find. But if your computer has deliberately been designed with a blind spot, the bad guys will use it to evade detection by you and your antivirus software. That's why a 3-D printer with anti-gun-printing code isn't a 3-D printer that won't print guns—the bad guys will quickly find a way around that. It's a 3-D printer that is vulnerable to hacking by malware creeps who can use your printer's 'security' against you: from bricking your printer to screwing up your prints to introducing subtle structural flaws to simply hijacking the operating system and using it to stage attacks on your whole network."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Human Eye's Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate 187

Posted by Soulskill from the subtle-yet-obvious dept.
jones_supa writes: It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look "video-y," and why do movies at 24 fps look "dreamy" and "cinematic." Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here's the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we're no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we're throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution.
Crime

Study: Police Body-Cams Reduce Unacceptable Use of Force 368

Posted by Soulskill from the big-brother-watching-big-brother dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Incidents like the Michael Brown case have recently put police body-worn cameras into the public consciousness, but they're not a new idea to criminology experts. In fact, researchers at Cambridge began a study in 2012 using law enforcement in Rialto, California as a test bed. Their results are now in: "The experiment showed that evidence capture is just one output of body-worn video, and the technology is perhaps most effective at actually preventing escalation during police-public interactions: whether that's abusive behavior towards police or unnecessary use-of-force by police." The simple knowledge that both parties are being watched puts a damper on violence. "During the 12-month Rialto experiment, use-of-force by officers wearing cameras fell by 59% and reports against officers dropped by 87% against the previous year's figures." This was enough for the city of Rialto to decide it wants to move forward with body-worn cameras; hopefully the study will encourage other police departments as well.
Hardware Hacking

Many DDR3 Modules Vulnerable To Bit Rot By a Simple Program 138

Posted by Soulskill from the flipping-bits-for-fun-and-profit dept.
New submitter Pelam writes: Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Intel report that a large percentage of tested regular DDR3 modules flip bits in adjacent rows (PDF) when a voltage in a certain control line is forced to fluctuate. The program that triggers this is dead simple — just two memory reads with special relative offset and some cache control instructions in a tight loop. The researchers don't delve deeply into applications of this, but hint at possible security exploits. For example a rather theoretical attack on JVM sandbox using random bit flips (PDF) has been demonstrated before.
Businesses

Comcast-TWC Merger Review On Hold 88

Posted by Soulskill from the checking-their-bona-fides dept.
An anonymous reader writes: When the U.S. Federal Communications Commission began reviewing the merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, it imposed a 180-day deadline on the review process. The agency has now pushed that deadline back a few weeks after learning that TWC withheld over 7,000 documents they shouldn't have. TWC originally claimed the documents fall under attorney-client privilege, but that appears not to be the case.

Perhaps more disturbing, the article says another 31,000 documents "went missing" because of a vendor error. (Perhaps even more disturbing is that this is a drop in the bucket compared to the sum total of information TWC dumped on the FCC — apparently over 5 million pages. How they can be expected to properly review that much material is beyond me.)

The FCC is also ready to close the public comment period for the merger, during which over 600,000 comments were filed. Critics are making their final arguments and Comcast is tallying up all the nice things people (and paid public relations agencies) had to say.
Open Source

Docker Image Insecurity 73

Posted by Soulskill from the totally-secure-for-undefined-values-of-secure dept.
An anonymous reader writes Developer Jonathan Rudenberg has discovered and pointed out a glaring security hole in Docker's system. He says, "Recently while downloading an 'official' container image with Docker I saw this line: ubuntu:14.04: The image you are pulling has been verified

I assumed this referenced Docker's heavily promoted image signing system and didn't investigate further at the time. Later, while researching the cryptographic digest system that Docker tries to secure images with, I had the opportunity to explore further. What I found was a total systemic failure of all logic related to image security.

Docker's report that a downloaded image is 'verified' is based solely on the presence of a signed manifest, and Docker never verifies the image checksum from the manifest. An attacker could provide any image alongside a signed manifest. This opens the door to a number of serious vulnerabilities." Docker's lead security engineer has responded here.

Submission + - Startups: The crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels ... the dumb ones (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many companies emerged in 2014 offering new ways to help people connect, get stuff done, or find that special someone. Slack, for example, offers a chatty alternative to work email. Or Yonomi might actually make an Internet connected home feasible. But other new startups, looking for that new and original thing, peddled products that were gimmicky, legally unsound, or just not super useful.
Lord of the Rings

Ars: Final Hobbit Movie Is 'Soulless End' To 'Flawed' Trilogy 351

Posted by Soulskill from the things-you'll-pay-for-even-though-you-know-you'll-hate dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The final chapter to Peter Jackson's series of films based on The Hobbit debuted last week, and the reviews haven't been kind. Ars Technica just posted theirs, and it highlights all the problems with Battle of the Five Armies, a two-hour and twenty-four minute film based on only 72 pages of the book. Quoting: "The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches. ... There are other problems. Everyone in this movie takes themselves way too seriously, which makes them even harder to sympathize with. Peter Jackson leans way too hard on voice modulation to make characters seem menacing or powerful. The movie's tone is still way out of step with the book's tone. ... There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset — the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children's novel into three feature-length prequel films." Other review titles: "Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped," "The Phantom Menace of Middle Earth," and "Lots of Fighting, Not Much Hobbit."

Submission + - Parisian company uses Arduino to let anyone control its Christmas tree (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Molly McHugh
Molly McHugh writes: Reputation Squad is a digital agency and creative lab that experiments with emerging technologies like Google Glass and virtual reality. While playing with an Arduino-based light-notification system for webpage errors, the team realized they could use the same Arduino technology to create an interactive light-up Christmas tree.

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