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hankwang writes:

Linux Mint 17 "Qiana", the latest version of the popular Linux distribution, was just released. It is a long-term support version, to be supported with security updates until 2019. It is released in the MATE (Gnome 2 fork) and Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork) versions. It is the first release of a new update strategy; the next few releases until 2016 will be based on the same base packages as this LTS version.

AnonTechie writes:

How to Hack a Car and Control It From 1500 Miles Away:

"When you are driving an automobile today, you are driving a big computer system that happens to have wheels and a motor," says a security researcher interviewed by Motherboard. And there are definite vulnerabilities in CAN bus, the network at the heart of your car that communicates with everything from the windshield wipers to the engine. In the video, you can watch information security researcher Mathew Solnick take control of a car from his laptop. If it's any consolation, hacking a car is not easy, and this is definitely not the simplest way for someone to take you out. So take heart-there are plenty of other things to fear in the world than car hackers.

AnonTechie writes:

The Real-Life Science Behind The Summer's Most Outrageous Sci-Fi Movies: Mechanized suits, alien apes, dinosaur robots - this summer's blockbusters are brimming with scientific-sounding conceits. But is there any real science to back them up? While you watch, here's something to chew on (besides the popcorn).

Appalbarry writes:

The Vancouver Sun reports that the BC Supreme court has approved a class action lawsuit against Facebook. From TFA:

British Columbia's Supreme Court gave the go-ahead Friday to a class-action suit against Facebook seeking damages for the networking giant's practice of turning users into brand ambassadors when they hit the "like" button for a product or service.

Judge Susan Griffin said there is evidence that the names or portraits of B.C. residents who are Facebook users were used without their consent in Facebook's Sponsored Stories. Facebook, which last year paid $20 million US to settle a lawsuit in the United States over its sponsored stories, stopped using them earlier this year.

In the Globe and Mail story Facebook seems to claim that because they no longer do this they shouldn't be held accountable for doing it in the past.

mrcoolbp writes:

We've finally reached the end. The name will be....

...SoylentNews.org!

I know, it's a bit anti-climactic, but we've gone over the results and our current name won by a significant margin. We'll follow up with a post detailing the voting results in a few days.

Edit: The results data are available in responses to this comment.

For what it's worth, there were a lot of us that would have like to see the name change. The staff even had a chance to override this decision, but instead we decided to support the community's choice.

I'd like to thank everyone who spent a lot of time (and in some cases money) suggesting domains, voting, and bearing with us through this long complex process. It turned into a huge, non-trivial task to pull off, and I appreciate your patience and understanding. We listened to your criticisms of the process as well and we've learned a lot about how we can significantly improve this process for the future.

Okay, now cue all the "I told you that SoylentNews would win!1!!1!!" comments...

lhsi writes:

BitTorrent Inc demands $5.8 million in damages from BitTorrent Marketing GmbH.

BitTorrent Inc, the parent company of the popular file-sharing applications uTorrent and BitTorrent, is demanding $5.8 million in damages from its German namesake. The San Francisco company accuses Bittorrent Marketing GmbH of misleading prospective users and intercepting sensitive company email. As the owners of two of the most-used BitTorrent clients on the Internet, BitTorrent Inc. is catering to an audience of close to 200 million regular users.

Needless to say there is plenty of interest in the BitTorrent brand, and in some cases this demand is being exploited by third-party companies. One of the outfits that has operated in this space is the German-based Bittorrent Marketing GMBH. [Bittorrent Marketing GmbH] owns the German and European trademark for Bittorrent and has several related domain names such as Bit-Torent.com, Bit-Torrent.com and Bitorrent.net. These domains have been mainly used for advertising, pointing people to paid products.

This has been a thorn in the side for BitTorrent Inc. who launched a lawsuit against its German nemesis two years ago. Since the German company and its owner Harald Hochmann failed to respond in court, BitTorrent is moving for a default judgment. In a filing submitted this week they demand $5.8 million in damages. After a no-show at court, BitTorrent Inc. Is requesting a default judgement against another company that has the same name.

But why should a German company which holds the rights to the trademarks that it is using in Europe have to answer to a US court?

Hawkwind writes:

A group of Danes trying to save the word while keeping their Carlsberg cool have come up with a rather useful Green innovation. Earth cooled beer. This completely off grid solution is designed for the backyard patio or garden, relying on a hand crank to move beer from Mother Earth to the imbiber. The group's slogan is Save the world one earth cooled beer at a time and promotes itself with the testimonial "eCool is the greatest gift a man could wish for". No wonder the group can't keep up with demand.

I suspect between Danish love of the outdoors during the summer time, and drinking beer, this is going to be a hit. Hard to say how it'll do outside of Denmark but I have this strong desire to find out if the $350 price tag includes shipping to California.

• New user-selectable themes, including a Night Mode. Themes are now CSS based and use no images for effects.
• New collapsible comment with the Improved Threaded mode. (Has set as default for all users that have Threaded or Nested set. You can change it back if you dislike it.)
• New message display that shows all messages in reverse chronological order as a full message (now without the email footer). Also set the Daily Newsletter to be off for new users.
• Removed a bunch of unneeded code that will make page loading faster.
• Static pages (FAQ and About) are now dynamic and show the proper user menu and theme.
• RSS now encoded properly.
• Preferences update to make pages work together better. (Most of the work was on the admin side so most of you will never see the bulk of the changes.) Also fixed a issue with the Homepage Prefs where the reset to default would not set everything to the defaults.
• Updates to the Submissions system. The pages look better and now your past submissions are organized better.
• Login system updated to allow passwords with unlimited lengths and user names of upto 35 characters.
• Slashboxes fixed so that they show properly when you change your Homepage settings.
• Pollbooth updates to make pages look better.
• Fixed issue with long words and page elements overflowing their parent divs by adding word-wrap: break-word; to the css.
• Smoke-test of subscriber code; expect to see a few users with stars running around as we get the bugs out
• And a bunch of smaller fixes that you will be sure to notice.

A huge round of applause to paulej72 for going through the bug list and sorting out much of what was there. Furthermore, I'd also like to extend thanks to iWantToKeepAnon and TheMightyBuzzard for contributions to this release.

As always, feel free to submit your issues to our bugtracker where our crack team of flying monkeys will labor to try and make it part of future site upgrades.

Check past the break for more thoughts and comments on these changes.

kaszz writes:

A class of Discrete Logarithm Problems (DLPs) used in a 128-bit crypto scheme allegedly cracked in two hours (paper). It can also be formulated as breaking 128-bit secure supersingular binary curves or how to solve discrete logarithms fast. Findings to be presented at the IACR Crypto 2014 conference.

J053 writes:

The US House of Representatives voted 219-189 today for an amendment to a DEA funding bill which exempts "any person acting in compliance with State laws relating to the production, possession, distribution, dispensation, administration, or delivery of marihuana" from the provisions of 21 USC 801 (the Controlled Substances Act).

The amendment, introduced by Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R, CA-48) was supported by 28 co-sponsors, and must still survive a conference committee, since the Senate has passed its own version of the appropriations bill.

yanom writes:

Steve Ballmer has offered to buy the L.A. Clippers off disgraced former owner Donald Sterling for $2 Billion, Slate reports. They have also inexplicably included the classic Ballmer enthusiasm video with their news coverage, and frankly I think it's hilarious.

skullz writes:

Acer has been struggling as of late and is hoping to revamp sales via personal cloud servers, AKA punch a hole through the home firewall to the desktop.

From PC world:

Acer's "Build Your Own Cloud" service will start rolling out to consumers in late June with a suite of updated apps that will work on mobile devices and PCs, including devices from other companies.

The struggling PC maker talked up the company's cloud strategy Thursday, showing off apps that it is marketing under the "ab" brand, which stands for "Acer" and "Build Your Own Cloud." The products are a major update to Acer's existing cloud-based apps, and let users synchronize files and multimedia on PCs and mobile devices.

So far this seems to be just a software solution but with a hardware company pushing it there might be hope of some neat bits built into a system for backup and security at a later date.

From ZDNet:

[Acer's CEO] said most people store their data on their local storage and not in the cloud. "We want users to 'build-your-own-cloud'," he said. "We have a technology platform [where] you can access your data, documents, and photos, in your local hard drive to devices you carry with you, like smartphones and tablets," he added.

Ignoring the "cloud" buzzword this should allow users to easily set up a file server accessible across multiple devices and probably get some easy firewall + router configuration as well. I didn't see anything about backup, availability, security, or the like so not really a "cloud" solution, more of a easy to use server. Assuming that Acer doesn't actually look or store the user data this still solves one problem for people who have not been able to get a Samba share working: how do I access my files from any of my devices anywhere without having to trust my data to a 3rd party?

AnonTechie writes:

The new SpaceX Dragon V2 seems to be an amazing machine, capable of transporting seven astronauts to orbit and then soft-land anywhere on Earth using thrusters and retractile legs-with the accuracy of an helicopter. Elon Musk claims that they will be able to refuel it and launch it again right away.

AnonTechie writes:

Billions of kg of CO2 could be saved by scrapping DVDs, research suggests:

A new study has shown that streaming can be much better for the environment, requiring less energy and emitting less carbon dioxide (CO2), than some traditional methods of DVD renting, buying and viewing.

The researchers, who have published their study today, 29 May, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, cite modern devices such as laptops and tablets as the reason for this improvement, as they are much more efficient than older, energy-sapping DVD players. Furthermore, the driving that is required to go and buy, or rent, DVDs makes this method much more energy- and carbon-intensive. A significant proportion of the energy consumption and carbon emissions for streaming comes from the transmission of data, which increases drastically when more complex, high-definition content is streamed.

In their study, the researchers, from Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory and Northwestern University, estimated that if all DVD viewing in the US was shifted to streaming services in 2011, around 2 billion kg of CO2 emissions could have been avoided and around 30 petajoules (PJ) of energy saved the equivalent of the amount of electricity needed to meet the demands of 200,000 US households.

They estimated that in 2011, 192 PJ of energy was used, and 10.4 billion kg of CO2 emitted, for all methods of DVD consumption and streaming in the US.

From this, they calculated that one hour of video streaming requires 7.9 megajoules (MJ) of energy, compared to as much as 12 MJ for traditional DVD viewing, and emits 0.4 kg of CO2, compared to as much as 0.71 kg of CO2 for DVD viewing.

The study can be found here.

Blackmoore and Somnanda wrote:

Many of us grew up watching Reading Rainbow with LeVar Burton, who, of course, also played Geordi La Forge on Star Trek.

Well, he's bringing a new version to the web with the help of Kickstarter. They surpassed their $1M goal in under 12 hours (currently over $2.4M with 33 days remaining). However, some are skeptical (cynical?).