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Submission + - PlayStation Gamers Are Now Authoring Their Own Games With "Dreams" For PS4 (pushsquare.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The game studio that made Big Little World for PS4 has put "Dreams" for PS4 — essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine — into open access. Dreams is not a game. It is more of an end to end create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC. Dreams lets you 3D model/sculpt, texture, animate and create game logic, allowing complete 3D games to be authored from scratch. Here is a Youtube video showing someone 3D modeling a fairly sophisticated game character and environment in Dreams (https://youtu.be/_PNUVFYgI8w?t=10 ) Everything from platformers to FPS games to puzzle, RPG and Minecraft type games can be created. What is interesting about Dreams is that everything anybody creates with it becomes available and downloadable in the DreamVerse and playable by other Dreams users — so Dreams is also a distribution tool like Steam, in that you can share your creations with others. While PC users have long had access to 3D modeling and game authoring tools, Dreams has opened up creating console games from scratch to PS4 owners for the first time, and appears to have made the processs quicker, easier and more intuitive than, say, learning 3D Studio Max and Unity on a PC. Dreams comes with hours of tutorial walkthroughs for beginners, so in a sense it is a game engine that also teaches how to make games in the first place.

Submission + - Google Uses Gmail To Track a History of Things You Buy - and It's Hard To Delete (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A page called “Purchases” shows an accurate list of many — though not all — of the things I’ve bought dating back to at least 2012. I made these purchases using online services or apps such as Amazon, DoorDash or Seamless, or in stores such as Macy’s, but never directly through Google. But because the digital receipts went to my Gmail account, Google has a list of info about my buying habits. Google even knows about things I long forgot I’d purchased, like dress shoes I bought inside a Macy’s store on Sept. 14, 2015.

But there isn’t an easy way to remove all of this. You can delete all the receipts in your Gmail inbox and archived messages. But, if you’re like me, you might save receipts in Gmail in case you need them later for returns. There is no way to delete them from Purchases without also deleting them from Gmail — when you click on the “Delete” option in Purchases, it simply guides you back to the Gmail message. Google’s privacy page says that only you can view your purchases. But it says “Information about your orders may also be saved with your activity in other Google services ” and that you can see and delete this information on a separate “My Activity” page. Except you can’t. Google’s activity controls page doesn’t give you any ability to manage the data it stores on Purchases.

Submission + - Salesforce inadvertently provides view/modify access to data worldwide (salesforce.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A worldwide outage of Salesforce has been ongoing since early morning on May 17th. The outage is caused by the deployment of a database script that resulted in granting users broader data access than intended.

There remains no estimation of the issue to be resolved, and users of businesses utilizing the Salesforce platform remain unable to access their data.
To attempt to minimize data leakage, Salesforce disabled all access to data objects resulting in a near complete outage for users. Salesforce did not acknowledge the issue publicly for hours, leaving worldwide users and administrators attempting to spend resources to troubleshoot the issues in isolation.

On Salesforce's trust page a message was eventually posted:
"To protect our customers, we have blocked access to all instances that contain impacted customers until we can complete the removal of the inadvertent permissions in the impacted customer orgs. As a result, customers who were not impacted may experience service disruption."

Submission + - Elon Musk Wants To Put An AI Hardware Chip In Your Skull (itmunch.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: ITMunch reports that Elon Musk apparently believes that the human race can only be 'saved' by implanting chips into our skulls that make us half human, half AI: "Elon Musk’s main goal, he explains, is to wire a chip into your skull. This chip would give you the digital intelligence needed to progress beyond the limits of our biological intelligence. This would mean a full incorporation of artificial intelligence into our bodies and minds. He argues that without taking this drastic measure, humanity is doomed. There are a lot of ethical questions raised on the topic of what humanity according to Elon Musk exactly is, but he seems undeterred. 'My faith in humanity has been a little shaken this year,' Musk continues, 'but I’m still pro-humanity.' The seamless conjunction of humans and computers gives us humans a shot at becoming completely 'symbiotic' with artificial intelligence, according to Elon Musk. He argues that humans as a species are all already practically attached to our phones. In a way, this makes us almost cyborg-like. The only difference is that we haven’t managed to expand our intelligence to that level. This means that we are not as smart as we could be. The data link that currently exists between the information that we get from our phones or computers is not as fast as it could be. 'It will enable anyone who wants to have superhuman cognition,' Musk said. 'Anyone who wants.'"

Submission + - Marco Rubio Introduces Privacy Bill to Create Federal Regulations on Data (fortune.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill Wednesday aimed at creating federal standards of privacy protection for major internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. The bill, titled the American Data Dissemination Act, requires the Federal Trade Commission to make suggestions for regulation based on the Privacy Act of 1974. Congress would then have to pass legislation within two years, or the FTC will gain the power to write the rules itself (under current laws, the FTC can only enforce existing rules). While Rubio’s bill is intended to reign in the data collection and dissemination of companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Netflix, it also requires any final legislation to protect small businesses from being stifled by new rules. The caveat comes when one considers states’ rights to create their own privacy laws. Under Rubio’s legislation, any national regulations would preempt state laws—even if the state’s are more strict.

Submission + - US Now Says All Online Gambling Illegal, Not Just Sports Bets (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Justice Department’s decision that all internet gambling is illegal will cast a pall on the industry as businesses and state lotteries evaluate the implications of the change and the government’s plans to enforce it. The U.S. now says federal law bars all internet gambling, reversing its position from 2011 that only sports betting is prohibited under a law passed 50 years earlier. Although the federal law specifically prohibits transmission of wagers and related information across state lines, the Justice Department’s new interpretation will impact all online gambling because as a practical matter it’s difficult to guarantee that no payments are routed through other states, said Aaron Swerdlow, an attorney with Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro LLP in Los Angeles.

The reversal was prompted by the department’s criminal division, which prosecutes illegal gambling. The opinion issued about seven years ago that the 1961 Wire Act only banned sports gambling was a misinterpretation of the statute, according to a 23-page opinion by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel dated Nov. 2 and made public Monday. The new reading of the law probably will be tested in the courts as judges may entertain challenges to the government’s view of the law’s scope, the Justice Department said. It may also affect states that began selling lottery tickets online after the 2011 opinion, as well as casinos that offer online gambling.

Comment Re:Small NAS box suggestions? (Score 1) 115

by jkonrath (#48574497) Attached to: FreeNAS 9.3 Released

Get a Lenovo TS140 for $219 (http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-70A4000HUX-i3-4130-Computer/dp/B00F6EK9J2) - it uses ECC, is quiet, fairly low power, and has more than enough horsepower.

That comes with 4GB - throw in another 4GB for ~$55.

That's diskless. Throw in three WD Red 2TBs for under $100 each, and install the OS on a USB drive. That would give you a 4TB RAIDZ setup with one drive of parity. Closer to $600, but that's cheap for a system that actually has ECC RAM in it.

Comment Smallest boards (Score 1) 176

by jkonrath (#47327233) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Is It Feasible To Revive an Old Linux PC Setup?

You won't be able to get away with an ARM system like RasPi as others have mentioned, but you might find a few semi-small x86 options.

Minnowboard has a 4.2" square board based on the Atom 640, but no IDE, and it's maybe $200. (http://www.minnowboard.org/technical-features/)

The best combination of cheap/small is probably Mini-ITX, at 6.7" square. An average mboard is maybe $50, plus a processor, RAM, power, and everything else. But you also won't have IDE, and you'll run into all of the usual driver support issues.

There are Nano, Pico, and Mobile-ITX, but you're going to raise the price almost exponentially with each jump down. Pico-ITX boards are at least $200-300.

Comment Re:Kinesis Advantage Keyboard (Score 1) 702

by jkonrath (#46791231) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Tech Products Were Built To Last?

It's a Toyota/BMW comparison. The Advantage is a mechanical keyboard, with Cherry Brown switches, while the Microsoft is membrane switches. There's a lot more tactile feel to the switches, and they keys themselves don't wear and fade like the MS one. It's slightly louder, but it's also not as mushy. It's fairly easy to take apart and clean, too.

The one big thing about the Advantage is that aside from the two key banks being completely split from each other, they are in "wells" that curve inward, and some of the most-used non-alpha keys (space, modifiers, enter, backspace) are on banks under your thumbs. It's a learning curve, and if you don't touch-type, it's a steep one. But it's a huge comfort difference.

I used to swear by the MS Naturals, and would burn through one a year. I switched to the Kinesis four years ago, and it still looks and feels almost brand new.

Comment Worth noting (Score 5, Interesting) 93

by jkonrath (#46789075) Attached to: Samsung's Position On Tizen May Hurt Developer Recruitment

It's most likely that the three different platforms mentioned were developed and evangelized by three different teams at Samsung that never talked to each other. Each team probably thinks their solution is *the* solution.

When I worked at Samsung, divisions were heavily siloed, and often the first time you heard about what they were doing was when you saw it on a news site. Even within the same platform, teams were heavily divided. Our software dev outreach teams didn't even have a way to talk to the hardware design teams.

Comment Remember the 486SX? (Score 1) 70

by jkonrath (#46357811) Attached to: Project Ara: Inside Google's Modular Smartphones

Does anyone remember when 486SX computers came and it was a big deal that you could later upgrade the processor to a 486DX computer, making them totally modular and cool, and then like ten seconds later, Intel came out with the Pentium with a completely different bus and the entire system was obsolete? That's about what this sounds like. The second you get in your hands the all-updatable 64-bit system, every phone moves to 128-bit chips and you're stuck with half as many pins on your plugs just to get your phone up to current technology.

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