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Submission + - Congressman Wants to Repeal Patriot Act (techdirt.com)

Submitted by korbulon
korbulon writes: New Jersey congressman Rush Holt has submitted legislation to repeal both the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act in an attempt to curtail the expansion of government infringment of citizens' rights and privacy. In a press announcement Holt stated: "My bill would restore the probable cause-based warrant requirement for any surveillance against an American citizen being proposed on the basis of an alleged threat to the nation." In an interesting twist, Holt is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat, giving NJ voters have a chance to indirectly voice their opinion regarding NSA surveillance and eavesdropping .

Submission + - These are the words iOS won't suggest for you (tuaw.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While auto-correct in iOS will do its darndest to either correct a misspelling or, at the very least, give you something to laugh about, there are a slew of words that iOS will simply not auto-correct, no matter how close the typed word is to the real thing.

What's more, there are a number of misspelled words that Apple will not even proffer complete suggestions for when the user's intent could not be any more clear.

As one might expect, such words are controversial and politically charged. Some examples include abortion, homoerotic, marijuana, rape, and ammo.

Submission + - Intel Caught Cheating in AnTuTu Benchmark To Show-up ARM? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Recently, industry analysts came forward with the dubious claim that Intel's Clover Trail+ low power processor for mobile devices had somehow seized a massive lead over ARM's products, though there were suspicious discrepancies in the popular AnTuTu benchmark that was utilized to showcase performance. It turns out that the situation is far shadier than initially thought. The version used in testing with the benchmark isn't just tilted to favor Intel — it seems to flat-out cheat to accomplish it. The new 3.3 version of AnTuTu was compiled using Intel's C++ Compiler, while GCC was used for the ARM variants. The Intel code was auto-vectorized, the ARM code wasn't — there are no NEON instructions in the ARM version of the application. Granted, GCC isn't currently very good at auto-vectorization, but NEON is now standard on every Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A15 SoC — and these are the parts people will be benchmarking. But compiler optimizations are just the beginning. Apparently the Intel code deliberately breaks the benchmark's function. At a certain point, it runs a loop that's meant to be performed 32x just once, then reports to the benchmark that the task completed successfully. Now, the optimization in question is part of ICC (the Intel C++ compiler), but was only added recently. It's not the kind of procedure you'd call by accident. AnTuTu has released an updated "new" version of the benchmark in which Intel performance drops back down 20-50%. Systems based on high-end ARM devices again win the benchmark overall, as they did previously.

Submission + - Snowden claims that NSA collaborated with Israel to write Stuxnet virus (cryptome.org)

Submitted by andrewa
andrewa writes: From an interview with Der Spiegel. Snowden claims that the NSA, amongst other things, collaborated with Israel to write the Stuxnet virus. Not that this is news, as it has been suspected that it was a collaborative effort for some time. Snowden doesen't seem to offer any proof though.

Submission + - Hidden Microphone found in Ecuadorian Embassy where Julian Assange is holed up (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: A hidden microphone has been found inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is holed up, according to the country's foreign minister. Ricardo Patiño said the device had been discovered a fortnight ago inside the office of the Ecuadorean ambassador, Ana Alban, while he was in the UK to meet Assange and discuss the whistleblower's plight with the British foreign secretary, William Hague. "We regret to inform you that in our embassy in London we have found a hidden microphone," Patiño told a news conference in Quito on Tuesday. "I didn't report this at the time because we didn't want the theme of our visit to London to be confused with this matter," he said. "Furthermore, we first wanted to ascertain with precision the origin of this interception device in the office of our ambassador." He described the discovery of the device as "another instance of a loss of ethics at the international level in relations between governments" and said he would reveal more details as to who might have planted the microphone on Wednesday.

Submission + - LibreOffice Calc Set to Get GPU Powered Boost from AMD (datamation.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: We all know that the open source LibreOffice Calc has been slow — forever and a day. That's soon going to change thanks to a major investment made by AMD into the Document Foundation. AMD is helping LibreOffice developers to re-factor Calc to be more performance and to be able to leverage the full power of GPUs and APUs.

"The reality has been that Calc has not been the fastest spreadsheet in the world," Suse Engineer Michael Meeks admitted. "Quite a large chunk of this refactoring is long overdue, so it's great to have the resources to do the work so that Calc will be a compelling spreadsheet in its own right."

Submission + - Firefox takes the performance crown from Chrome

Submitted by diegocg
diegocg writes: Recent browser benchmarks are showing surprising results: in "a geometric mean of all four performance-based categories: Wait Times, JavaScript/DOM, HTML5/CSS3, and Hardware Acceleration", Firefox 22 "pulls off an upset, replacing the long-time performance champion Google Chrome 27 as the new speed king" (other browsers benchmarked were IE10, Opera 12, and Opera Next). With these results, and Firefox developers focusing in fixing the UI sluggishness, can this be the start of a Firefox comeback, after years of slow market share decline?.

Submission + - You Will Get DirectX 11.2 Only With Windows 8.1 1

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: Microsoft has just announced the next version of DirectX, 11.2, on its website. But the real "problem" is that it is going to be exclusive to Windows 8.1 and next generation consoles — Xbox One and Play Station 4. This is not news, as DirectX 11 was exclusive to Windows 8. But is this going to help Microsoft convince people to ugprade or will make them angry?

Submission + - Copying Rival Games Rife at Zynga (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Beware ex-employees. It should be a mantra for all businesses, but particularly ones who are in trouble and have just laid off over 500 workers out of the blue. One ex-Zynga employee decided the best way to vent his/her anger was to take to Reddit and answer questions — revealing that copying rival games was endemic at Zynga and that the company's business strategy was "terrible" among other dirty little secrets.

Submission + - Prison Architect prison simulation game launched for linux (introversion.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Prison Architect is a Prison Simulation and Management game currently released in Alpha from indie developers Introversion Software (Uplink, Darwinia, DEFCON and Multiwinia). Prison Architect was initially released in September 2012 and has been played by nearly 90,000 gamers so far. 10 Alpha updates have been released and Introversion is committed to continuing to release a major update each month. From Alpha 10 onwards Prison Architect will be available for Linux — from the Introversion Blog:

"We are now supplying builds for Linux via steam and as a standalone download from our website. The game should be widely compatible across the various Linux distributions, but please let us know if you have problems by logging bugs in our bug tracker. We have targeted Ubuntu 12.04 (32 bit and 64 bit) as a starting point, and we anticipate wider compatibility in later alphas. Please note that we do require glibc 2.15 or later, which unfortunately means Prison Architect does not currently work on Debian Stable."

Submission + - Facebook Silently Removes Ability to Download Your Posts (angrymath.com) 1

Submitted by dcollins
dcollins writes: Facebook has a "Download Info" capability that I've used regularly since 2010 to archive, backup, and search all the information that I've written and shared there (called "wall posts"). But I've discovered that sometime in the last few months, Facebook silently removed this largest component from the Downloaded Info, locking up all of your posted information internally where it can no longer be exported or digitally searched. Will they reverse course if this is publicized and they're pressured on the matter?

Submission + - Microsoft assigns six patents to patent troll Vringo (groklaw.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Some days $30 million seems like a lot of money, and other days it's just a bit of a letdown. Vringo is a once-upon-a-time ringtone company that's now basically a holding company for search patents dating back to the Lycos days, and it used those patents to sue Google. In November, a federal jury found that the patents were infringed, but Google should pay just $30 million, far less than the nearly $700 million it was seeking.
Investors had big dreams for Vringo, but that too-small payday, combined with an assurance of a lengthy appeal by Google, has left the stock price disappointingly stagnant.

In January Vringo unveiled its wholly predictable backup plan—sue the one other viable search engine, Microsoft's Bing. Now that case has settled for $1 million, plus five percent of whatever Google ultimately pays, according to a Vringo regulatory filing yesterday...

The five percent addendum is an interesting twist to this early settlement. One has to wonder if Microsoft really fought very hard. The company has effectively paid $1 million for an "option" to see its chief competitor hurt 20 times as bad as it is.

The settlement also provides for Microsoft to transfer six patents to I/P engine, the patent-holding subsidiary of Vringo. "The assigned patents relate to telecommunications, data management, and other technology areas," stated Vringo in its filing.

Submission + - EFF formally objects to inclusion of DRM in HTML5 (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a formal objection with the W3C against the inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) for streamed media in HTML5. The W3C HTML working group is developing EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) that would bring in standardized DRM plugins for streamed media. EFF, through its full objection, has pointed out that the creation of EME and the implementation of usage controls on the web platform do not fall under the purview of the HTML working group. Further, the existing web standards already support the use cases that are not related to usage control. EFF is of the opinion that usage control like the EME, which was declared ‘in-scope’ by W3C exec team in February, effectively point to options such as paywalls, subscription models, watermarked content, etc which are already supported by existing web standards.

Submission + - Now PETA Wants to Sue People Who Leave Anonymous Comments (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is incensed over an article in the Huffington Post that details that organization's unsettling practice of euthanizing animals in a Virginia facility that many have assumed is a no kill shelter.

According to the New York Post, PETA wants to sue some of the people who have left comments on the article. The problem is that, following the practice of many on the Internet, many of the comments are under assumed names or are anonymous. PETA is attempting to discover the true identities of their critics so that it can sue them for defamation.

Submission + - Step aside CISPA, SOPA, DMCA, PIPA, ACTA. Introducing CTAIP.

Submitted by Aaron B Lingwood
Aaron B Lingwood writes: Cory Doctorow unearths a plan by the US entertainment industry to lobby for the legalization of deploying rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to attack pirates. The hilariously named "Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property" has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that's pretty bonkers. But amidst all that crazy, there's a bit that stands out as particularly insane: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally.

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