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Submission + - Survey says: Raspberry Pi still rules, but x86 SBCs have made gains (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Results from LinuxGizmos.com's annual hacker-friendly single board computer survey are in, and not surprisingly, the Raspberry Pi 3 is the most desired maker SBC by a 4-to-1 margin. In other trends: x86 SBCs and Linux/Arduino hybrids have trended upwards. The site's popular hacker SBC survey polled 1,705 survey respondents and asked for their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd favorite SBCs from a curated list of 98 community oriented, Linux- and Android-capable boards. Spreadsheets comparing all 98 SBCs' specs and listing their survey vote tallies are available in freely downloadable Google Docs.

Submission + - EU to Give Free Security Audits to Apache HTTP Server and Keepass (softpedia.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The European Commission announced on Wednesday that its IT engineers would provide a free security audit for the Apache HTTP Server and KeePass projects. The two projects were selected following a public survey that included several open-source projects deemed important for both the EU agencies and the wide public.

The actual security audit will be carried out by employees of the IT departments at the European Commission and the European Parliament. This is only a test pilot program that's funded until the end of the year, but the EU said it would be looking for funding to continue it past its expiration date in December 2016.

Submission + - NVIDIA's Interactive Screenshot Tool 'Ansel' Released Today

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: NVIDIA has today released a Game Ready GeForce driver that introduces its interactive screenshot tool 'Ansel'. Named after famed photographer Ansel Adams, this new tool requires a developer to integrate up to a couple of hundred lines of code to give players the ability to pause their game, move around the environment, and then capture a more "artistic" image. To further that artistic value, users will have the ability to apply filters as well as capture an image in high-res 360 mode so that they can be viewed properly with a VR headset. Currently, Ansel supports only a single game, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, but NVIDIA promises that many more supported titles are on the way.

Submission + - DNA, Crypto & Shakespeare: Sandia Labs Creates Mind-Blowing Storage Technolo (darkreading.com)

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: Researchers from Sandia National Labs are experimenting with a new more secure form of data storage that--get this--is based on DNA. The project is for a long-term archival technology that could securely store records for the National Archives, government personnel records, research findings at the national labs, or other sensitive classified information. (Paging the US State Department). How does The Bard fit in? The researchers got the idea from the European Bioinformatics Institute's experiment that recorded all of Shakespeare’s sonnets into 2.5 million base pairs of DNA. Welcome to the future.

Submission + - SPAM: Alzheimer's gene already shrinking brain by age of three

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The Alzheimer’s gene, which dramatically raises the risk of developing dementia, is already affecting carriers by the age of three, shrinking their brains and lowering cognition, a new study suggests.

Children who carry the APOEe4 gene mutation , which raises the chance of dementia by 15 fold, were found to do less well in memory, attention and function tests.

Areas of the brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease, such as the hippocampus and parietal gyri, were also found to be up to 22 per cent smaller in volume.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Theresa May Becomes UK's 'Spy Queen' and New Prime Minister (arstechnica.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Theresa May has become the new British Prime Minister. As she sat down with the Queen on Wednesday, a controversial surveillance draft legislation that looks to significantly increase surveillance of Brits' online activity will be debated during its second committee stage day in the House of Lords. Ars Technica reports: "The Investigatory Powers Act could be in place within months of May arriving at Number 10 — if peers and legal spats fail to scupper its passage through parliament — after MPs recently waved it through having secured only minor amendments to the bill. As home secretary, May fought for six years to get her so-called Snoopers' Charter onto the statute books." According to Ars Technica, Theresa May's key political moments on the Investigatory Powers Bill start in 1997 when she became the Member of Parliament for Maidenhead. During her opposition years, her home affairs record shows that she generally votes against the Labour government's more draconian measures on topics such as anti-terrorism and ID cards. Mid-2009: May votes against requiring ISPs to retain certain categories of communications data, which they generate or process, for a minimum period of 12 months. 2010: She was appointed home secretary in coalition government between the Conservatives and junior partner the Liberal Democrats. 2011: The previous government's shelved Interception Modernization Program is rebranded as the Communications Capabilities Development Program (CCDP) by home office under May. Mid-2012: The CCDP morphs into Communications Data Bill, which is brought before parliament. Late-2012: May's Snoopers' Charter bid fails as deputy PM Nick Clegg orders the home office to go back to the drawing board. Mid-2014: May rushes what she characterizes as an "emergency" Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill through parliament, after the European Court of Justice invalidates the Data Retention Directive for failing to have adequate privacy safeguards in place. Late-2015: British security services have intercepted bulk communications data of UK citizens for years, May reveals to MPs for the first time as she brings her revamped Snoopers' Charter bid — this time dubbed the Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB) — before parliament. Mid-2016: MPs support thrust of IPB as it passes through the House of Commons. July 13, 2016: Theresa May becomes the UK's new prime minister as peers in the House of Lords undertake a second day of committee stage scrutiny of the Investigatory Powers Bill.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Don't Graphics Cards For VR Use Motion Compensation?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Graphics cards manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD have gone to great pains recently to point out that to experience Virtual Reality with a VR headset properly, you need a GPU capable of pushing at least a steady 90 FPS per eye, or a total of at least 180 FPS for both eyes, and at high resolutions to boot. This of course requires the purchase of the latest, greatest high-end GPUs made by these manufacturers, alongside the money you are already plonking down for your new VR headset and a good, fast gaming-class PC. This raises an interesting question: virtually every LCD/LED TV manufactured in the last 5 — 6 years has a "Realtime Motion Compensation" feature built in. This is the not-so-new-at-all technique of taking, say, a football match broadcast live at 30 FPS or Hz, and algorithmically generating extra in-between frames in realtime, thus giving you a hypersmooth 200 — 400 FPS/Hz image on the TV set, with no visible stutter or strobing whatsoever. This technology is not new. It is cheap enough to include in virtually every TV set at every price level (thus the hardware that performs the realtime motion compensating cannot cost more than a few dollars total). And the technique should, in theory, work just fine with the output of a GPU trying to drive a VR headset. Now suppose you have a entry level or mid-range GPU capable of pushing only 40 — 60 FPS in a VR application (or a measly 20 — 30 FPS per eye, making for a truly terrible VR experience). You could, in theory add some cheap Motion Compensation circuitry to that GPU and get 100 — 200 FPS or more per eye. Heck, you might even be able to program a few GPU cores to run the motion compensating as a realtime GPU shader as the rest of the GPU is rendering a game or VR experience. So my question: Why don't GPUs for VR use Realtime Motion Compensation techniques to increase the FPS pushed into the VR headset? Would this not make far more financial sense for the average VR user than having to buy a monstrously powerful GPU to experience VR at all?

Submission + - CRTC Enforced $25/mo Cable TV Is Now Available To Canadians, But With Caveats

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: Last March, Canada's regulatory agency for all things broadcasting, CRTC, ruled that cable TV providers would soon be forced to offer $25/mo packages. With enforcement having kicked-off on March 1, these inexpensive packages have now been made available. As Techgage has discovered, though, the first packages out-of-the-gate pack a number of caveats, and in some cases, are outright misleading. And, despite a simple framework to worth with, the two largest providers in the country, Rogers and Bell, offer vastly different packages, and ultimately vastly different values to the consumer.

Submission + - Verizon Creates Minecraft Mod To Let Players Video Chat On An In-game Smartphone

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: There's never a lack of stuff to be impressed by in Minecraft, but rarely does that impressive stuff involve a corporation. Recently, Verizon teamed up with some prolific Minecraft streamers to design a mod that takes interactivity to a new level. After building an in-game smartphone and cellular tower, the gamer is not only able to browse the Web on the device, but also video call, all in a humorously low resolution. Verizon has created a GitHub page to explain how the magic is done.

Submission + - Zero-Day Bugs in Numerous Modems/Routers Could Compromise Millions of Users (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered a large number of zero-day flaws in 8 routers/modems from 4 manufacturers (ZTE, Huawei, Gemtek, Quanta) that would allow attackers to build a huge botnet by leveraging just a few exploits. Vulnerabilities include remote code execution, firmware rewrites, XSS, and CSRF. All these allow attackers to intercept both HTTP and HTTPS Web traffic, infect computers beyond the modem, intercept SMS messages, and detect the modem's geographical location. After six months, manufacturers have failed to fix the issues.

Submission + - Western Digital Announces World's First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive

Submitted by Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: WD today announced a new helium filled enterprise drive that allows for 10TB densities without using the SMR method, sticking to industry standard PMR. SMR, or Shingled Magnetic Recording drives can not typically be used natively by the OS or disk controllers, and instead often require extra software and/or firmware updates. This makes their broad adoption limited, since the drives are not drop-in replacements for the far more ubiquitous Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR). WD’s latest enterprise drive, sold as the HGST Ultrastar He10, uses the PMR storage method, and as such is a full drop-in replacement for any standard hard drive..

Submission + - The Race to Create a Hyperloop Heats Up (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Elon Musk unveiled his idea for a "Hyperloop" transportation system based on capsules zipping through depressurized tubes, much was made about the enormous technical challenges the design would face in development. However, that didn't stop a number of companies and organizations from starting to work on it. Several companies are pushing the development work hard, and it's looking more like a race to a workable prototype. University teams are only increasing their efforts as well. "The Illinois team enters the SpaceX contest with a strong competitive edge. This is its fourth Hyperloop design project, the first dating to fall 2013, and the Hyperloop is now a part of the MechSE curriculum. The team has assembled an interdisciplinary network of faculty from aeronautical engineering, thermal dynamics, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering and software, and two of the team members have interned at SpaceX."

Submission + - Mother claims Wi-Fi allergy killed her daughter (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A mother claims a Wi-Fi allergy killed her daughter and is accusing an Oxfordshire school of failing to safeguard children against the physical effects of wireless technology, an inquest has heard.

Jenny Fry, 15, was found in woodland near her home in Chadlington, on June 11 this year after texting a friend telling her she would not be going to school and intended to kill herself.

An inquest heard the teenager was intelligent and organised but that her life had been made a misery due to the prolonged effects of a condition known as electro-hypersensitivity (EHS).
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Journal Journal: Fare thee well, Slashdot 6

Journal by msobkow

I've been on slashdot since the early days. I've seen meme after meme come and go from the trolls, I've seen the internet grow from 28.8 modems to multi-megabit pipes. During those years we moved from 386's measured in MHz to Core CPUs measures in GHz.

But along with all the other changes, the internet itself has changed. The quality of comments on Slashdot has changed. Even the quality of selected articles has changed.

And most of it has not changed for the better.

Submission + - Treat Computer Science as a Science: It's the Law!

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Last week, President Obama signed into law H.R. 1020, the STEM Education Act of 2015, which expands the definition of STEM to include computer science for the purposes of carrying out education activities at the NSF, DOE, NASA, NOAA, NIST, and the EPA. The Bill was introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Rep. Elizabeth Etsy (D-CT). Smith's February press release linked to letters of support from tech billionaire-backed Code.org (whose leadership includes Microsoft President Brad Smith), and the Microsoft-backed STEM Education Coalition (whose leadership includes Microsoft Director of Education Policy Allyson Knox). "The bipartisan #STEMEducation Act signed into law increases #CSEducation access," Microsoft DC tweeted Friday. "Thanks @RepEsty @LamarSmithTX21 for your leadership."

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It isn't easy being the parent of a six-year-old. However, it's a pretty small price to pay for having somebody around the house who understands computers.

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