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Sci-Fi

Amazon Plans Blockbuster TV Series Based On Chinese Sci-Fi Trilogy 'The Three-Body Problem' (medium.com) 158

Posted by BeauHD from the coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you dept.
hackingbear writes from a report: Amazon is reportedly likely to earmark $1 billion for a television series (Warning: source paywalled, alternative source) based on the ultra-popular Chinese science fiction trilogy The Three Body Problem. The American video subscription service will likely acquire the rights to the Yugo-winning, extremely popular trilogy of novels written by Liu Cixin and produce three seasons of episodes. The rights to the trilogy are currently owned by Lin Qi, the chairman of Youzu Interactive, a Chinese developer and publisher that typically focuses on online and mobile games.

Comment So why the massive datacenters? (Score 4, Interesting) 46

by mbourgon (#56190467) Attached to: Apple Confirms It Uses Google's Cloud For iCloud Services

Since they've been building datacenters for over 5 years, what are they using them for? Even the 500k square foot one in North Carolina was already overkill, more so if they're just holding metadata.

Fun task: on Windows, rip a new CD with iTunes, preferably something rare. Start Resource Monitor, go to Network, TCP Connections, Search for iTunes. Was trying to find a different network hog this weekend and saw iTunes uploading to AWS, which made no sense.

Comment My personal votes: (Score 1) 2

by mbourgon (#55823471) Attached to: 2017: Best Fiction Books, TV Shows & Movies

Book: Charlie Stross, "Empire Games". Surveillance state technothriller meets parallel universes.
Album: Wobbler, "From Silence to Somewhere". Scandinavian Folk Prog-rock, reminiscent of Gryphon, Yes, maybe even Jethro Tull.
TV: Expanse has been fricking great, but I'm currently watching "Dark" on Netflix and it's pretty good. Honorable mention to The Tick for actually being a lot of fun.
Movie: Blade Runner 2049. Stunned that they actually pulled it off. People complained it was derivative, but that's part of being a sequel. And I thought they handled a bunch of the concepts from the original quite well overall, in some cases better than the original.
Games: a bunch of great board games this year, from Azul to Photosynthesis, though for PC gaming I haven't come across much that was my type of game, but Xcom 2 was pretty good.

More than anything, though 2017 itself was a bit of a sh*tshow, there was a ton of good things to watch/read/listen/play.

Comment Re:While everyone was distracted (Score 2) 152

by mbourgon (#55738201) Attached to: FCC's Own Chief Technology Officer Warned About Net Neutrality Repeal

A couple points here:
1) It's not ALL of Fox, just 21st Century. Fox News and the Fox TV network aren't included
2) It still has to be approved. It's likely it will be, given the pro-business/anti-competition slant of the current administration.
3) "all the data that floods their network". To be fair, that's part of why people HAVE the internet. If your job is to provide me internet traffic for which I pay you, if you're my only option for broadband, and if you can't do it, then why do you have a monopoly and why are you preventing competition?
4) Netflix is quickly leaving the "other people's content" space and has been aggressively focusing on their own shows/movies (Marvel, Orange, House of, Bright, etc). It's actually getting hard to find movies/tv shows on Netflix that aren't created by Netflix. Netflix plans to spend $8 billion on programming next year.

Submission + - Secure Apps Exposed to Hacking via Flaws in Underlying Programming Languages (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Research presented this week at the Black Hat Europe 2017 security conference has revealed that several popular interpreted programming languages are affected by severe vulnerabilities that expose apps built on these languages to attacks. The author of this research is IOActive Senior Security Consultant Fernando Arnaboldi. The expert says he used an automated software testing technique named fuzzing to identify vulnerabilities in the interpreters of five of today's most popular programming languages: JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

The researcher created his own fuzzing framework named XDiFF that broke down programming languages per each of its core functions and fuzzed each one for abnormalities. His work exposed severe flaws in all five languages, such as a hidden flaw in PHP constant names that can be abused to perform remote code execution, and undocumented Python methods that lead to OS code execution. Arnaboldi argues that attackers can exploit these flaws even in the most secure applications built on top of these programming languages.

Submission + - SPAM: Governments turn tables by suing public records requesters

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: An Oregon parent wanted details about school employees getting paid to stay home. A retired educator sought data about student performance in Louisiana. And college journalists in Kentucky requested documents about the investigations of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Instead, they got something else: sued by the agencies they had asked for public records.

Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.

The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards. Still, the recent trend has alarmed freedom-of-information advocates, who say it's becoming a new way for governments to hide information, delay disclosure and intimidate critics.

"This practice essentially says to a records requester, 'File a request at your peril,'" said University of Kansas journalism professor Jonathan Peters, who wrote about the issue for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2015, before several more cases were filed. "These lawsuits are an absurd practice and noxious to open government."

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:Solving a non-problem. (Score 1) 93

by mbourgon (#55218805) Attached to: Typing By Brain Arrives: No Surgery Necessary

FTFA: "The innovation lies in picking up EMG more precisely—including getting signals from individual neurons—than the previously existing technology, and, even more important, figuring out the relationship between the electrode activity and the muscles so that CTRL-Labs can translate EMG into instructions that can control computer devices."
Security

Ebay Asks Users To Downgrade Security (krebsonsecurity.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the security-woes dept.
Ebay has started to inform customers who use a hardware key fob when logging into the site to switch to receiving a one-time code sent via text message. The move from the company, which at one time was well ahead of most e-commerce companies in providing more robust online authentication options, is "a downgrade to a less-secure option," say security reporter Brian Kerbs. He writes: In early 2007, PayPal (then part of the same company as Ebay) began offering its hardware token for a one-time $5 fee, and at the time the company was among very few that were pushing this second-factor (something you have) in addition to passwords for user authentication. I've still got the same hardware token I ordered when writing about that offering, and it's been working well for the past decade. Now, Ebay is asking me to switch from the key fob to text messages, the latter being a form of authentication that security experts say is less secure than other forms of two-factor authentication (2FA). The move by Ebay comes just months after the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) released a draft of new authentication guidelines that appear to be phasing out the use of SMS-based two-factor authentication.

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