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Submission + - Coleco pulls trademark on the Chameleon / Retro VGS (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Last month the Coleco Chameleon showed up at Toy Fair promising a taste of retro-gaming glory. But those promises have come to naught after a non-start to its Kickstarter and numerous accusations regarding faked prototypes. Today the Chameleon suffers another blow as Coleco Holdings, the company with the rights to the Coleco name and properties, has terminated its association with RetroVGS and the Chameleon project.
Coleco partner Chris Cardillo gave Engadget the following statement, which will also appear on Coleco's Facebook page:

"Retro has decided that the work that they have created is not sufficient to demonstrate at this time. Consequently, we can no longer proceed with the project and the Chameleon project will be terminated. This separation is amicable. We wish Retro luck in the future."

This isn't the only blow RetroVGS has suffered in the past week: On Saturday David Giltinan, the managing editor of RetroVGS's RETRO Magazine, announced his departure from the company. He cited the ongoing issues with the Chameleon as the impetus behind his leaving, saying "I have to separate myself from everything associated with it." Though he conceded poor messaging from RetroVGS, he also asserted that there was "no ill intent or maliciousness on the part of the team."

We've reached out to RetroVGS for comment on the future of the project."

Submission + - Eclipse pushes new open IDE (prweb.com)

Submitted by LeadSongDog
LeadSongDog writes: Backed by Codenvy, Microsoft Corp., Red Hat, and SAP, the Eclipse Foundation has touted a new cloud based IDE they call "Eclipse Che", built upon Java, Javascript, and Docker.

Submission + - Reid Hoffman is my hero (markethive.com)

Submitted by markethive
markethive writes: Venture capitalist and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has a simple but powerful piece of advice for strategizing in business: Figure out your ideal outcome and work backward from there.

Hoffman explained the approach during an episode this week of The Tim Ferriss Show, in which investor and author Ferriss asked Hoffman how he came to be known as the firefighter at PayPal, where he was an early board member, and how aspiring entrepreneurs can replicate those tactics.

“It starts with, what is the end result that you want to have happen?” said Hoffman, using the example of convincing a regulator that your company is not subject to regulation that might appear applicable.

Hoffman was speaking specifically about when the founders of PayPal decided the company would not be a bank, after applying for a banking license. The challenge the so-called firefighter faced was convincing regulators that while Paypal accepted deposits, the company still wasn’t a bank.

“One key thing is regulators will never tell you that it is not their job to regulate you,” explained Hoffman, continuing, “What they will say is that actually here there is nothing for me to actively regulate.”

So Hoffman worked backwards from what he understood to be the actual mindset of regulators to convince them that there was nothing the company was doing that they needed to regulate. That thought process took the form of several questions that can be applied in a variety of situations:

        How do they (regulators or whoever you need to persuade) make judgments?
        What are the key considerations they take into account?
        How can you learn about those considerations?
        Who do you need to need to know? (Put another way, who is knowledgeable about the topic at hand?)

“What are the kinds of things that would get them to say, ‘Okay, I think you’re being reasonable within my purview of how I am out to help govern society, help protect consumers, help protect other entities – you’re good by me,’ ” said Hoffman.

The venture capitalist, who has a Master of Studies in philosophy from Oxford, said he learned to strategize from playing games of strategy by the company Avalon Hill as a child. Knowing how games worked taught him how to structure a game, which taught him the type of reverse-causal thought pattern he espouses.

Hoffman highly recommends playing games, especially against human players, as a way of developing a strong sense of strategy. He said playing sports can also be helpful, though he cautioned that rules in sports tend to be rigid in contrast to the ever-changing rules of the marketplace. Other than games, he recommended reading military strategy by philosophers and strategists like Sun Tzu, the Chinese general who wrote The Art of War.

Hoffman cautioned that a lot of people think themselves better at strategy than they in fact are. One of the most important parts of strategizing, whether the situation is dealing with a competitor or convincing a regulator to get off your company’s case, is flexibility and adaptability he emphasized. Companies that can’t adapt are the ones that crash and burn.

“They learn to play one game, they get good at it, and then the marketplace changes and now it’s a new kind of game and you have to adjust to playing that new game. That’s actually in fact part of recognizing when a strategy applies,” he said.

Submission + - More Than Half of Americans Think Apple Should Comply with FBI, Finds Pew Survey (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple may not have the public's support in its legal fight with the FBI, according to a recently published Pew report. In a survey that reached 1,000 respondents by phone over the weekend, Pew researchers found 51 percent of respondents believed Apple should comply with FBI demands to weaken security measures on an iPhone used in the San Bernardino attacks, in order to further the ongoing investigation. Only 38 percent of respondents agreed with the company's position.

Limiting the sample to respondents who own a smartphone only improved the numbers somewhat, changing them to a 50-41 split in the FBI's favor. Among those who own an iPhone, the numbers are even closer, but still in the FBI's favor 47 to 43 percent.

Submission + - Drinking more coffee may undo liver damage from booze (reuters.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Drinking more coffee might help reduce the kind of liver damage that's associated with overindulging in food and alcohol, a review of existing studies suggests.

Researchers analyzed data from nine previously published studies with a total of more than 430,000 participants and found that drinking two additional cups of coffee a day was linked to a 44% lower risk of developing liver cirrhosis.

Submission + - Linux Virtual Ethernet Bug Delivers Corrupt TCP/IP Data (vijayp.ca)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Vijay Pandurangan from Twitter warns about a Linux kernel bug that causes containers using Virtual Ethernet devices for network routing to not check TCP checksums. Examples of software stacks that use Virtual Ethernet devices are Docker on IPv6, Kubernetes, Google Container Engine and Mesos. The kernel flaw results in applications incorrectly receiving corrupt data in a number of situations, such as with bad networking hardware. The bug dates back at least 3 years or more – it is present in kernels as far back as the Twitter engineering team has tested. Their patch has been reviewed and accepted into the kernel, and is currently being backported to -stable releases back to 3.14 in various distributions. If you use containers in your setup, Pandurangan recommends that you deploy a kernel with this patch.

Submission + - Secret Aerial FBI Program Uncovered By 23-Year-Old Journalist (cbslocal.com)

Submitted by sharkbiter
sharkbiter writes: The story was first reported by Sam Richards who put out information under the twitter handle @MinneapoliSam. The 23-year-old independent journalist first published the story of the FBI surveillance program on the website Medium on May 26.

His story featured screen grabs from FlightRadar24.com showing the circular routes the low-flying planes took over not just Minneapolis, but cities including New York, Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix and Dallas.

Richards said his investigation began when his friend noticed the low-flying suspicious flight and showed him the screen grab.

Submission + - Users With Weak SSH Keys Had Access to GitHub Repositories for Popular Projects

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Earlier this year, researcher Ben Cox collected the public SSH (Secure Shell) keys of users with access to GitHub-hosted repositories by using one of the platform’s features. After an analysis, he found that the corresponding private keys could be easily recovered for many of them. The potentially vulnerable repositories include those of music streaming service Spotify, the Russian Internet company Yandex, the U.K. government and the Django Web application framework. GitHub revoked the keys, but it's not clear if they were ever abused by attackers.

Submission + - uTorrent can steal your CPU cycles to mine Bitcoins (engadget.com)

Submitted by mlauzon
mlauzon writes: Engadget is reporting that the most recent version of uTorrent [3.4.2] is installing Epic Scale in the background to mine for Bitcoins and steal your computers CPU cycles, and BitTorrent Inc. reaps the rewards and you get nothing. It's bad enough that BitTorrent had to include ads in uTorrent, but this is icing on their cake. My suggestion is to jump ship and show BitTorrent Inc. that it can't do what it's doing and get away with it. Check out qBittorrent (http://www.qbittorrent.org/), a completely open source client licensed under GPLv2.

Submission + - Windows 93 Is Real, And It's Spectacular

Submitted by rossgneumann
rossgneumann writes: It’s 2015, but Windows 93 is finally ready. Your new favorite operating system is here and it’s weird as hell. The browser-based OS makes us thirst for what could’ve been if Microsoft didn’t skip between Windows 3.X and Windows 95. The fully clickable “OS” greets users with the Playstation 1 bootup sound signaling they’re about the trip into an alternate universe. The first version of Windows 93 went up in October, but its creator posted on Reddit last night that it’s finally complete.

Submission + - Energy-generating fabric set to power battery-free wearables (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers in Korea and Australia have developed a flexible fabric which generates power from human movement – a breakthrough which could replace batteries in future wearable devices. The effect of the fabric's nanogenerators mirrors static electricity with the two fabrics repeatedly brushing against each other and stealing electrons from the one another – this exchange creates energy from the wearer’s activity without the need for an external power source. During testing, the researchers demonstrated the nanogenerator powering a number of devices such as LEDs, a liquid crystal display, as well as a keyless car entry system embedded in a nanogenerator “power suit”.

Submission + - New Chinese graphene smartphones boost battery life by 50% (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The first graphene phones have been unveiled today by two Chinese firms, Moxi and Galapad. The smartphones feature touch screens, batteries and thermal conduction, all of which incorporate the recently isolated ‘wonder’ material known for its extraordinary electrical conductivity, and strong chemical and mechanical properties. 30,000 graphene phones, which will use the Android system, were put on sale on Monday by Moxi and Galapad, in the Chongqing municipality in southwest China, for 2,499 yuan each. The graphene technology was developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is thought to make the touch screens more sensitive and prolong battery life by at least 50%.

Submission + - Law and Governance as a "Social Technology"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Virgin’s Entrepreneur blog has an article on an idea called "Startup Cities” which argues that governments should adopt the trial-and-error processes of tech startups. By giving municipalities strong autonomy, the article argues, reforms can be piloted on a smaller scale as different municipalities try different political solutions. From the article: "The biggest paradox of today’s world is that we have rapid, constant progress in physical technologies like phones and computers, but billions of people have no access at all to good law and governance, or what you might call ‘social technologies’. If we can treat law and governance as tech – then perhaps we can innovate in it.” The idea brings to mind Nassim Taleb’s argument that political risk should be spread over small, local jurisdictions so that policies don’t bring down entire countries if they fail.

Submission + - Shortcut, highly efficient event concessions (shortcutapp.com)

Submitted by Buford Taylor
Buford Taylor writes: Founded by early employees of Eventbrite and Uber, Shortcut lets attendees at live events skip the queue at the concession or merchandise stand. They can order from their phones and receive exclusive discounts for their next event.

For the venue, it's increased sales, it's happier attendees, and it's a way to finally know which of their attendees are spending money at concessions.

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