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Submission + - H.265 Codec Standard Has Been Approved (infoq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The H.265 codec standard, the successor of H.264, has been approved, promising support for 8k UHD and lower bandwidth, but the patent issues plaguing H.264 remain.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Valve Releases Half-Life (Beta) For Linux (linuxgamecast.com)

Submitted by
Athens101
Athens101 writes: "Yesterday Valve released Half-Life (beta) for the Steam Linux client. "We have released Half-Life 1 in Beta form on Linux (and OS X). Please report any issues you see on our github issues page. "

About:
Half-Life is a science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Valve Corporation, the company’s debut product and the first in the Half-Life series. First released in 1998 by Sierra Studios for Windows PCs, the game was also released for the PlayStation 2.[2] In Half-Life, players assume the role of Dr. Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist who must fight his way out of a secret underground research facility whose research and experiments into teleportation technology have gone disastrously wrong."
Apple

Submission + - Wozniak: Jobs film clip 'totally wrong' (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Yesterday saw the first clip from the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher as Jobs and Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak. In the clip, Jobs (played by Ashton Kutcher) is raving about the operating system that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (played by Josh Gad) created. While Jobs is certain that this will become a ubiquitous product for mass consumption, Wozniak needs convincing.

Following the release of the above clip, Wozniak sent an email to Gizmodo telling them that the clip is way off base, to the extent that it never even occurred!

"Totally wrong. Personalities and where the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs. They inspired me and were widely spoken at the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve came back from Oregon and came to a club meeting and didn't start talking about this great social impact. His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away. Steve came from selling surplus parts at HalTed he always saw a way to make a quick buck off my designs (this was the 5th time).

The lofty talk came much further down the line."
Android

Submission + - Petition to make Patent Trolls PAY (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "The makers of X-Plane, Laminar Research, are unhappy. Very unhappy. They are being sued by a patent troll (Uniloc) over using an industry-standard Android library for copy protection. Essentially, if the troll wins, it will shut down Android (and, by implication the Kindle) because existing app writers aren't able to pay the sorts of money being asked. Open Source may survive, but most Android apps are not Open Source.

Copy protection brings its own issues, but setting those aside, this is a serious effort to bring patent trolling (and software patents) under some sort of control. This is one of those times where the Slashdot Effect could really be useful. If enough people sign, given the increasing hatred in industry towards trolls, we might see something done about it for a change."
Science

Submission + - What's with the proton? (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "The proton, a fundamental constituent of the atomic nucleus, seems to be smaller than was thought. And despite three years of careful analysis and reanalysis of numerous experiments, nobody can figure out why.
An experiment published in Science only deepens the mystery.
The proton's problems started in 2010, when research using hydrogen made with muons seemed to show that the particle was 4% smaller than originally thought. The measurement, published in Nature, differed from those obtained by two other methods by 4%, or 0.03 femtometres. That's a tiny amount but is still significantly larger than the error bars on either of the other measurements.
The latest experiment also used muonic hydrogen, but probed a different set of energy levels in the atom. It yielded the same result as the Nature paper — a proton radius of 0.84 fm — but is still in disagreement with the earlier two measurements.
So what's the problem? There could be a problem with the models used to estimate the proton size from the measurements, but so far, none has been identified. The unlikely but tantalizing alternative is that this is a hint of new physics."
Windows

Submission + - Hacker Bypasses Windows 7/8 Address Space Layout Randomization (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Microsoft upped its security ante with Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) in Windows 7 and Windows 8 but, it seems that this mechanism to preventing hackers from jumping to a known memory location can be bypassed as a hacker has released a brilliant yet simple trick to circumvent the protection. Going by the name KingCope, the hacker who released a dozen exploits targeting MySQL, SSH last December, has detailed a mechanism through which ASLR of Windows 7, Windows 8 and probably other operating systems can be bypassed to load a DLL file with malicious instructions to a known address space. KingCope has explained the method in a blog post along with a PoC.

Submission + - Symbian officially dead. (techcrunch.com) 1

Submitted by Snirt
Snirt writes: Symbian is now officially dead, Nokia confirmed today. In the company’s earnings announcement that came out a little while ago, Nokia confirmed that the 808 PureView, released last year, was the very last device that the company would make on the Symbian platform: “During our transition to Windows
Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian,” the company wrote. “The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the
last Symbian device from
Nokia."
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Submission + - DMCA exemption ends on Jan 26th. Unlocking a cellphone becomes illegal (mashable.com)

Submitted by Acapulco
Acapulco writes: Apparently an exemption to the DMCA, determined by the Librarian of Congress will expire this Saturday, January 26th, which will make unlocking phones illegal (although not jailbreaking).

From the article:

"The new rule against unlocking phones won't be a problem for everybody, though. For example, Verizon's iPhone 5 comes out of the box already unlocked, and AT&T will unlock a phone once it is out of contract."

And:

"Advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) questions whether the DMCA has the right to determine who can unlock a phone. In an email to TechNewsDaily, EFF attorney Mitch Stoltz said, "Arguably, locking phone users into one carrier is not at all what the DMCA was meant to do. It's up to the courts to decide." "

Also:

"Christopher S. Reed from the U.S. Copyright Office noted in an email to TechNewsDaily that "only a consumer, who is also the owner of the copy of software on the handset under the law, may unlock the handset." "

Submission + - Lawsuit alleges Scientology just 'taking people's money' (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by PhxBlue
PhxBlue writes: NBC News' Erin McClam writes that a couple who left the Church of Scientology in 2010 is suing the church for misusing more than $400,000 that they donated in the 28 years they were members:

The lawsuit alleges that the church has used contributions to “stifle inquiries into the Church’s activities and finances, to intimidate members and ex-members” and “to finance the lavish lifestyle of [David] Miscavige.”

It's probably worth noting here that the church's motives have probably never changed. It has always been about "taking people's money," but now the money goes to Miscavage instead of to founder L. Ron Hubbard.
Space

Submission + - Magnetic 'Braids' May Cook the Sun's Corona (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Scientists have long puzzled over why the surface of the sun is cooler than its corona, the outer hazy atmosphere visible during a solar eclipse. Now thanks to a five-minute observation by a small, but very high-resolution ultraviolet telescope they have some answers. Hi-C, which was launched aboard a suborbital rocket to study the sun without interference from Earth's atmosphere, revealed interwoven magnetic fields braided like hair. When the braids relaxed, they released energy, heating the corona. "I had no idea we would see structures like that in the corona. Seeing these braids was very new to me," astrophysicist Jonathan Cirtain with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., told Discovery News."
Java

Submission + - A close look at how Oracle installs deceptive software with Java updates | ZDNet (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Oracle's Java plugin for browsers is a notoriously insecure product. Over the past 18 months, the company has released 11 updates, six of them containing critical security fixes. With each update, Java actively tries to install unwanted software. Here's what it does, and why it has to stop.
Cloud

Submission + - The Desktop PC Today: Death of a Legend? (saysthemagpie.com)

Submitted by
FeedTheMagpie
FeedTheMagpie writes: "A great article detailing the current situation of the desktop PC. It shows why the plethora of articles and opinion pieces decrying the stagnation of the PC market are propagandist hogwash, what the true reason behind this stagnation is, and what the future of the desktop might look like. If you like your PC, read on, if not, read it to see what you are missing out on."

Submission + - Fedora 18 Systemd Boot Performance Is Mixed (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of the most intrusive and controversal changes in the recent past was the anouncement of systemd (aka: Poetterkits). The developers defend and enforce the adaption, leaving out BSD and other UNIX like operating systems. One of their main selling points was the easy administration and huge performance during Linux boot up.

Phoronix has covered an article with backed up values. They came to the conclusion that: "Due to the user-space slowdown, the overall boot time with Fedora 18 is slower than with Fedora 17 from the Intel x86_64 systems that were used for this preliminary Fedora 18 benchmarking."

I confirm the Phoronix article and even beyond that, systemd doesn't behave as expected. Often it's required to enable or disable a service multiple times to have it either stay enabled or disabled. Even having remaining bits in /etc/rc.x causes a lot of irritation and administration annoyances.
Businesses

Submission + - Microsoft announces release date for the most expensive tablet ever! (foxnews.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: FoxNews has the news (really!) that the Microsoft has announced that its Intel-powered Surface Windows 8 Pro will go on sale on February 9, 2013 in the U.S. and Canada.

FoxNews helpfully points out that you could get the best iPad money can buy for $829, the one 64GB of storage space and LTE connectivity.... or you could spend $70 more and get Microsoft’s Surface Pro — which, by the way, doesn’t even include the company’s slick new keyboard cover (that costs another $129.99).

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