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Submission + - Elite Frontier Orchestral Remake in the works (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the beginning there was Elite. A game that defined a Genre. It's sequel Frontier was a game people either loved or hated. What cannot be denied was that the music brought an extra dimension to space battles. Careening towards planet earth at millions of kilometers a second, pursuing a military target, accompanied by a rousing rendition of Marvellous Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain".

The person responsible for this, David Lowe aka "Uncle Art", was somewhat of a musical legend in his era. Previously responsible for music on a rift of classic games such as IK+, StarGlider, Turbo Outrun just to name a few.

Recently his daughter Holly set up a kickstarter to get him out of retirement and back in the studio. Abbey Road to be precise. To remaster the Elite II: Frontier score with a full orchestra. If the target is reached this would be an an awesome piece of musical nostalgia.

Submission + - Adblock Plus Reduces University Network Bandwidth Use By 40 Percent

Submitted by Mickeycaskill
Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Colombia, Canada claims it saved between 25 and 40 percent of its network bandwidth by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network.

The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of bandwidth was saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers.

The experiment carried out over a period of six week, and involved 100 volunteers in an active enterprise computing environment at the university. The study’s main conclusions were that Adblock Plus was not only effective in blocking online advertisements, but that it “significantly” reduced network data usage.

Although the university admits there are some limitations of the study, it suggests that the reduced network data demand would lead to lower infrastructure costs than a comparable network without Adblock Plus.

Submission + - A reimplementation of NetBSD using a MicroKernel

Submitted by cen1
cen1 writes: In his talk at BSDCan 2015, Andrew S. Tanenbaum explains the design and implementation of Minix 3 operating system and usage of NetBSD userland on top of it. The kernel is written in 15000 lines of code and has reliability, modularity, small size, self-healing and security as it's primary goals. Kernel has no malloc, uses fixed size data structures and has all the drivers in user space, restricting their access and isolating them in the process.

Submission + - UK Student's Dissertation Redacted Thanks to Wassenaar Rules

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: U.S.-based security researchers may soon be championing the case of Grant Wilcox, a young U.K. university student whose work is one of the few publicly reported casualties of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

Wilcox last week published his university dissertation, presented earlier this spring for an ethical hacking degree at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, England. The work expands on existing bypasses for Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), free software that includes a dozen mitigations against memory-based exploits. Microsoft has on more than one occasion recommended use of EMET as a temporary stopgap against publicly available zero-day exploits.

Wilcox’s published dissertation, however, is missing several pages that describe proof-of-concept exploits, including one that completely bypasses a current EMET 5.1 installation running on a fully patched Windows computer. He said last Wednesday in a blogpost that the missing pages and redactions within the text happened partly because of the Wassenaar Arrangement.

“Whilst it has impacted the release of my research it has not impacted my passion and I plan to continue researching such material as and when I feel like, though in an ideal world I would like clearer instructions so I can figure out how to do this appropriately (of which there seems to be some confusion),” Wilcox said in an email to Threatpost.

Submission + - Test Pilot Admits the F-35 Can't Dogfight (medium.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January.

And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him.

The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon.

Your tax dollars at work.

Submission + - Bruce Schneier says: "Encryption should be enabled for everything by default." (schneier.com)

Submitted by snowder
snowder writes: This is important. If we only use encryption when we're working with important data, then encryption signals that data's importance. If only dissidents use encryption in a country, that country's authorities have an easy way of identifying them. But if everyone uses it all of the time, encryption ceases to be a signal. No one can distinguish simple chatting from deeply private conversation. The government can't tell the dissidents from the rest of the population. Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive.

Submission + - SCOTUS denies Google's request to appeal Oracle API (c) case

Submitted by Neil_Brown
Neil_Brown writes: The Supreme Court of the United States has today denied Google's request to appeal against the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling (PDF) that the structure, sequence and organization of 37 of Oracle's APIs (application program interfaces) was capable of copyright protection. The case is not over, as Google can now seek to argue that, despite the APIs being restricted by copyright, its handling amounts to "fair use".

Professor Pamela Samuelson has previously commented (PDF) on the implications if SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal.

More details at The Verge.

Submission + - Google eavesdropping tool installed on computers without permission (theguardian.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Privacy campaigners and open source developers are up in arms over the secret installing of Google software which is capable of listening in on conversations held in front of a computer.

First spotted by open source developers, the Chromium browser — the open source basis for Google's Chrome — began remotely installing audio-snooping code that was capable of listening to users.

It was designed to support Chrome's new "OK, Google" hotword detection — which makes the computer respond when you talk to it — but was installed, and, some users have claimed, it is activated on computers without their permission.

Submission + - Is Microsoft's .NET Ecosystem on the Decline? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: In a posting that recently attracted some buzz online, .NET developer Justin Angel (a former program manager for Silverlight) argued that the .NET ecosystem is headed for collapse—and that could take interest in C# along with it. “Sure, you’ll always be able to find a job working in C# (like you would with COBOL), but you’ll miss out on customer reach and risk falling behind the technology curve,” he wrote. But is C# really on the decline? According to Dice’s data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice’s ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline. Data from the TIOBE developer interest index mirrors that trend, he said, with “C# developer interest down approximately 60% down back to 2006-2008 levels.” Is the .NET ecosystem really headed for long-term implosion, thanks in large part to developers devoting their energies to other platforms such as iOS and Android?

Submission + - Sunday Times issues DMCA takedown notice to the Intercept over Snowden article (documentcloud.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Sunday the newspaper the Sunday Times published an article citing anonymous UK government sources that Edward Snowden was in the hands of the Russians and Chinese. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept published a scathing criticism of the article. In this article, Glenn published a photograph of the paper's front page on which the story occurred. Yesterday, the Intercept received a DMCA take down notice from News Corp on account of the photograph.
The Intercept is refusing to comply with the take down notice.

Submission + - Edward Snowden: The World Says No to Surveillance (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two years after his wistle-blowing, Edward Snowden finds that his action had profound effects on political decision making and on citizen's understanding of privacy issues.

Submission + - Tim Cook: "Weakening encryption or taking it away harms good people" (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: Over the last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly made headlines as a spearpoint in the new crypto wars. As FBI director James Comey pushes for legally mandated backdoors on encryption, Cook has added default strong encryption to Apple devices and vocally resisted Comey's campaign. Echoing warnings from technical experts across the world, Cook said that adding encryption backdoors for law enforcement would weaken the security of all devices and "is incredibly dangerous," he said last night at the Electronic Privacy Information Center awards dinner. "So let me be crystal clear: Weakening encryption or taking it away harms good people who are using it for the right reason."

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