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Comment Re:Why is the White House involved? (Score 2) 227

by hey! (#48669123) Attached to: Sony To Release the Interview Online Today; Apple Won't Play Ball

Presidents, governors and mayors all do this kind of thing -- call up private businesses and ask them to do stuff. The mayor may call a local business and ask it to reconsider withdrawing its sponsorship of the local youth baseball league. The governor might call up union leaders and senior management in a strike, particularly if it affects things lots of people need like transit or health care.

This is the exercise of *soft* power, of influence rather than of compulsion. Obama can't call Apple and compel them to change their stance. But he can call Tim Cook and *persuade* him, possibly with more success than Michael Lynton, particuarly given that the two may be having some kind of dispute. Ego *does* play a role in CEO decision making.
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."
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."
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.

Comment Re:*sips pabst* (Score 1) 351

by Tom (#48666041) Attached to: Ars: Final Hobbit Movie Is 'Soulless End' To 'Flawed' Trilogy

he was dragged kicking and screaming into directing it

And at no point did he have the option to say "no" and walk away, I'm sure. Because he's not living in a free country and he is so poor that he would starve if he did that.

When you burn out in life, you'll understand.

No, when you burn out in life you walk away from everything that causes you trouble and find a place where you are safe and can recover.

Comment miscreation (Score 3, Insightful) 351

by Tom (#48665989) Attached to: Ars: Final Hobbit Movie Is 'Soulless End' To 'Flawed' Trilogy

I've seen the first two so far and they didn't convince me for the 3rd. I'll probably go because my GF wants to.

The problem is that The Hobbit is an entirely different book compared to LOTR. It's a childrens book, a soft introduction to Middle Earth, not an epic fantasy tale. It should've been dealt with in a different way, not as a "we made a shitload of money, so let's make more LOTR movies" prequel. It basically fell into the same trap as the Star Wars prequels - the attempt to replicate a success by doing more of the same, completely missing the idea that maybe the first was a success exactly because it was not more of the same, but stood out from what else was on offer at the time.

And omg were they filled with crap that had nothing to do with story or book and was only added to complete some Hollywood recipe.

They should've made it one move, for a younger audience, made by a different director, without trying to make it a prequel and "foreshadowing" everything we've already seen.

Submission + - Comcast-TWC Merger Review On Hold (pcmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When the U.S. Federal Communications Commission began reviewing the merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, it impose 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 "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 companies, and paid public relations agencies) had to say.

Submission + - Docker Image Insecurity (titanous.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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.

Submission + - Ars: Final Hobbit Movie is 'Soulless End' to 'Flawed' Trilogy (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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."

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