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takyon writes:

Intel's first two 14nm Skylake desktop chips, the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K, were launched at Gamescom in Germany and reviewed back on Aug. 5. When the processors are set at 3 GHz, Anandtech benchmarking showed 2-3% instructions per clock (IPC) improvement over Broadwell, and over 5% IPC improvement from Haswell to Skylake. Skylake's overclocking potential seems better than both Haswell and Broadwell. One explanation is that the fully integrated voltage regulator (FIVR), which had caused heating issues in Haswell and Broadwell chips, has been removed. FIVR is expected to be reintroduced in 2017 in the generation of chips following "Kaby Lake". Skylake processors will support both DDR3L and DDR4 memory, but the performance benefits of DDR4-2133 over DDR3-1866 are minor and inconsistent.

Anandtech testing found that discrete gaming performance decreased slightly (1.3%) versus Haswell when both CPUs were limited to 3 GHz. The issue might be cleared up with firmware updates and further benchmarking, but the finding sets the tone for Skylake: Not much new for desktop users, but potentially important improvements for mobile users. Skylake on the desktop does look better when compared to older CPUs, with Skylake beating Sandy Bridge by 25-37%, and Skylake should consistently reach higher clock rates than Haswell and Broadwell.

i7-6700K/i5-6600K Review at Tom's Hardware

Following a leak of embargoed Skylake "full" lineup details, Intel pushed out its fact sheet early. Anandtech has its coverage and analysis of the full launch. You may also be interested in media improvements.

Skylake "Iris Pro Graphics 580" (GT4e) will see the introduction of a fourth "slice" of execution units (EUs), bringing the high-end from Broadwell's 48 EUs to a total of 72 EUs. However, none of the chips announced today have a fourth slice. Some of the U-series (Ultrabook) chips come with "Iris Graphics 550", with three slices and 48 EUs (GT3e). Even if a GT4e part was available, a 50% increase in EUs would not mean a 50% increase in graphics performance.

Skylake GT3 and GT4 chips will come with 64 and 128 MB of eDRAM respectively (hence GT3e and GT4e). Integrated graphics and "specific workloads" are improved by the presence of eDRAM.

Skylake chips operate across a wide range of power envelopes, from 4.5 Watts on Core M (Skylake-Y) to 91 Watts on Skylake-K. Battery life on mobile platforms will be improved, particularly when watching video due to better hardware decoding.

Phoenix666 writes:

MOUNTAIN PASS >> The only rare earth mining and processing plant in the Western Hemisphere is closing and virtually all of its nearly 500 person workforce is expected to be let go. Officials from Greenwood Village, Colorado-basedMolycorp, said earlier this week they will transition their massive San Bernardino County facility to a "care and maintenance" mode while it plans to continue serving its rare earth oxide customers via its production facilities in Estonia and China.
...
Half a decade ago China produced some 97 per cent of the world's supply of rare earths. They thought it would be a cute idea to try and flex the monopolistic power they had. Not so much to try and get more for the raw materials: no, they wanted people to move rare earth-consuming businesses into China. There were export restrictions and high export tariffs on the raw materials but none at all on things that were made using them inside China and then exported.

So, for example, there's a subsidiary of Siemens out there that makes the lutetium crystals which power MRI machines. If you can't get that Lu (and that one factory consumes perhaps 90 per cent of global production) then you'd better move the factory to where you can, eh? Into China, that is. Certainly one company making the mercury vapour charges for light bulbs (which are doped with rare earths (REs) to change the spectrum of light from them), the world's largest producer of them by far, seriously considered restarting the factory inside China.

What happened then is the fun bit. The rise in the RE prices this caused meant that Molycorp and Lynas were able to gain financing to respectively reopen, and open for the first time, their mines. Not only that but they could do something vastly more expensive: set up the processing plants needed to do the complex separation of each RE from the others.

The point of the article is that China's attempt to abuse their monopoly power in rare earths has eroded their monopoly power. But the question of the strategic vulnerability that represents has not been answered...

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego demonstrated a new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body. The new technology could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices, providing an improved alternative to existing wireless communication systems, researchers said. They presented their findings Aug. 26 at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.

While this work is still a proof-of-concept demonstration, researchers envision developing it into an ultra low power wireless system that can easily transmit information around the human body. An application of this technology would be a wireless sensor network for full-body health monitoring.

"In the future, people are going to be wearing more electronics, such as smart watches, fitness trackers and health monitors. All of these devices will need to communicate information with each other. Currently, these devices transmit information using Bluetooth radios, which use a lot of power to communicate. We're trying to find new ways to communicate information around the human body that use much less power," said Patrick Mercier, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego who led the study. Mercier also serves as the co-director of the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors.

This could lead to many lab hijinks.

Original Submission

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes:

Original URL: Computerworld has an article on the final extension to the NSA's bulk collecting phone records.

The U.S. National Security Agency's controversial program for the bulk collection of domestic phone call records has been granted extension for the last time, according to documents released.

Under an order by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the NSA is now allowed to continue collecting the data for a three-month period until Nov. 28. The permission had previously been extended in June to Aug. 28.

The collection of phone records metadata, which did not include collection of information on the content of conversations, is one of many large-scale surveillance schemes of the NSA that were disclosed by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. The disclosures led to demands for the reform of government surveillance to protect people's privacy.

U.S. President Barack Obama approved as law in June the USA Freedom Act, legislation that reins in the program by leaving the phone records database in the hands of the telecommunications operators, while allowing only a targeted search of the data by the NSA for investigations.

While some provisions of the Act took effect immediately upon enactment, the ban on bulk collection of call records allowed for a 180-day transition of the program.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Archive.org has become the latest site to be blocked in Russia:

Archive.org, home to the popular Wayback Machine, is again blocked in Russia, according to a site that monitors IP addresses banned in that country. The Internet Archive's address, 207.241.224.2, turns up in the latest dump by Antizapret on GitHub.

The anti-censorship Antizapret maintains a list (currently beyond 12,000 addresses) of blocked IPs, and also provides information about anti-censorship tools like VPNs. The blog Meduza.io, which reported Antizapret's original announcement, says the Kremlin's media watchdog agency, Roskomnadzor, took exception to Wayback archiving links to Syrian Islamist videos. Because Archive.org uses HTTPS, the individual pages can't be blocked, so the whole site's been blacklisted.

It's not the first time the non-profit archive's robots have stored content that Roskomnadzor doesn't like. Wayback raised Russia's ire in June when it scooped up a page referring to the "theory and practice of partisan resistance."

Previously, Reddit was blocked in Russia for hosting a single page about growing psychedelic mushrooms, and Wikipedia was briefly blacklisted for its entry on Charas, a hashish form of cannabis. A day after Wikipedia's block was lifted, Moscow's head of communication and culture, Yevgeny Gerasimov, discussed plans for an alternate Russian version of the site.

The effects of erratic site blocking may pale in comparison to the data localization requirement that amended the Russian Federal Law on Personal Data, which came into effect on Sept. 1. Bloomberg reports:

A law now forces tech firms with Russian customers to operate local servers to handle Russian personal data. It's the latest in a string of about 20 laws tightening government control of the Internet, all put into place since President Vladimir Putin's re-election in 2012. Taken at face value the new program is aimed at protecting the privacy of Russian citizens. It's not a uniquely Russian idea, and is something Brazil and Germany are also exploring in the post-Snowden era. Yet human rights activists fear the regulation will be misused, allowing officials to spy on citizens and suppress political activists. It comes into force days after Wikipedia was briefly blacklisted because of an article about cannabis.

"The regime is already ramping up censorship and surveillance and using it to target opposition activists, so the requiring of companies to host data on servers in the country makes it easier for the government to access that data," says Laura Reed, a research analyst from Freedom House.

In theory Russia's intelligence services need a court order to access any data, but observers say they are rarely turned down. All eyes are now on Facebook, Google and Twitter, which have been meeting with the Kremlin in private to make sense of the law. At this stage it's not clear whether they will agree to comply. Google declined to comment. Facebook simply says it won't comment on speculation, and that "we regularly meet with government officials and have nothing more to share at this time."

Original Submission

We had two different reports concerning a bug in a GitHub addon to Visual Studio which led to a developer's keys to their Amazon account getting compromised which resulted in a rather large bill.

GitHub's Visual Studio Add-on costs user $6,500

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A developer published some of his code, as a paid GitHub subscriber, to a private storage space on GitHub's servers using a tool co-developed by Microsoft and GitHub. Due to a bug in the software, instead of going to their private storage space, it went to a public one, without the developer having any indication anything had gone wrong.

Included in this private code were the developer's keys to their Amazon cloud account. BitCoin miners, who scan GitHub for Amazon keys, found them and began using the developer's account to process BitCoins in the cloud. By the next morning the developer was receiving notifications of oddities on his account, and contacted Amazon support, by this time he had a $1,700 bill with Amazon. Within the next 2 hours, with various calls to Amazon for support, he finally contained the issue, with a nearly $6,500 bill.

https://www.humankode.com/security/how-a-bug-in-visual-studio-2015-exposed-my-source-code-on-github-and-cost-me-6500-in-a-few-hours

Bug in Visual Studio GitHub Commit Tool Leads to $6,500 Amazon Web Services Bill

takyon writes:

A bug in the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015 ultimately led a South African web developer to be charged $6,500 for Amazon Web Services instances used by criminals:

Carlo van Wyk of Cape Town–based Humankode said he used the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015 to commit one of his local Git code repositories to a private repository on GitHub. Unfortunately, however – and unknown to van Wyk at the time – a bug in the extension caused his code to be committed to a public GitHub repository, rather than a private one as he intended.

The extension is developed and maintained by GitHub itself, although it was created with a little help from Microsoft. Van Wyk said in his blog post that both companies have since been in touch with him and the bug has been confirmed and patched. But that won't help mitigate the fallout of what happened after van Wyk committed his repo.

Within around ten minutes after publishing his code, he received a notification from Amazon Web Services telling him his account had been compromised. He had (somewhat foolishly) included an AWS access key in the code that he had committed to GitHub.

It's not entirely clear what happened next. Van Wyk said he immediately changed his AWS root password, revoked all of his access keys, and created new ones. Nonetheless, within hours the data thieves had managed to sign him up for AWS's Elastic Compute Cluster and fire off more than 20 instances in each EC2 region. By the time the dust cleared, his AWS account had racked up a bill of $6,484.99.

Such cases aren't new. Miscreants – probably Bitcoin miners, in most cases – have begun routinely trolling public GitHub repositories with bots that search for AWS keys. In van Wyk's case, however, he never expected his repo to be public in the first place.

[...] GitHub, on the other hand, has apologized for the error in its code, describing it as "inexcusable." GitHub team member Phil Haack added, "As for preventing this in the future, we are trying to take a comprehensive look at the conditions and systems that allowed this happen in the first place and how we can improve those systems to mitigate such issues in the future."

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

Uber's business model is on the rocks [September 1] after [Federal Judge Edward Chen] granted class-action status to a lawsuit targeting the company's treatment of drivers as independent contractors.

[...] There are 160,000 drivers who will be party to the current lawsuit alleging that drivers are full employees of Uber with full labor law protections, rather than independent contractors. Any person who drove for Uber in California since mid-August 2009 and is not subject to a binding arbitration clause in her contract with the company will be considered part of the case.

[...] A jury trial will still determine whether Uber drivers meet the legal definition of employees--in which case the company would owe massive amounts of back pay to all eligible drivers--or not. And Chen did not give the drivers everything they wanted. The judge rejected class status for drivers' claims involving Uber policy around reimbursing expenses like gas, tolls, and the cost involved in a canceled fare.

[...] The cost of paying back wages and payroll taxes for the entire class, while certainly smaller than the $50 billion that the company is currently worth according to investors, would be vast.

takyon: Also at MarketWatch. In Seattle, City Council members have announced a bill that could allow Uber, Lyft, and other for-hire drivers to unionize.

juggs writes:

If you have been refusing Microsoft's offer to upgrade your Windows 7 or 8* operating system to Windows 10 due to the oft-reported data and telemetry slurping it seems inclined to do, then it is time to be on your toes as to which updates you allow to be installed on your earlier version of the operating system.

El Reg reports that Microsoft are busy pushing similar functionality to those older operating systems by way of Windows Update. The updates in question can apparently be rolled back if required.

They are however very determined in their function if allowed to be installed, going so far as to ignore such venerable solutions as additions to the HOSTS file, which has historically been a way to knobble phone-home behaviour:

Now Microsoft is revamping the user-tracking tools in Windows 7 and 8 to harvest more data, via some new patches.

All the updates can be removed post-installation – but all ensure the OS reports data to Microsoft even when asked not to, bypassing the hosts file and (hence) third-party privacy tools. This data can include how long you use apps, and which features you use the most, snapshots of memory to investigate crashes, and so on.

The updates are KB3068708 ("Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry" and mandatory) KB3075249 ("Update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7") and KB3080149 (also an "Update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry", both optional).

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward submitted this BBC story:

US President Barack Obama will trek through the wilderness in Alaska this week with British TV adventurer Bear Grylls, the NBC channel has announced. He is due to tape an episode of Running Wild with Bear Grylls to observe the effects of climate change on the area, it said. He is the first president to appear on the show, to be aired later this year.

President Obama is on a three-day tour of Alaska aimed at highlighting the pace of climate change. It is part of his administration's efforts to build support for new legislation significantly capping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the US, as well as raise attention to the ways climate change has damaged Alaska's natural landscape.

Original Submission

gman003 writes:

Game history blogger Felipe Pepe is up to part three of a series on computer role-playing games (CRPGs) that did things differently. These games might not have been the best, or even really particularly good as a whole, but they did something in a way that hadn't been done before, or since.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Most of them are fairly old - evolution is most rapid when expanding into a new niche, after all - but there are a number of newer games as well. They range from the well-known and well-regarded (Ultima, Wizardry and Might and Magic all have mentions) to the obscure (ZanZarah, The Magic Candle). For the old-school gamer, it's a nice trip down memory lane. For the new-school, it's an interesting look at the things game designers tried that never really caught on. And for game designers, it's a treasure trove of mechanics that might deserve a second chance at success.

What are your own suggestions for interesting RPGs? I would personally go with On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 3. It's a bit of a stretch to bundle with CRPGs, since it's much more along the lines of Final Fantasy than Ultima, but it takes a new approach to a number of common mechanics. The combat system is where it really shines - combat is turn-based with actions taking variable lengths of time, and taking a hit (as a PC or NPC) will delay your next action. Crucially, taking a hit in the period between queuing an action and taking it has a much larger "knockback" than taking a hit while recharging, which makes it a lot more strategic than your typical ATB system. It also changes up random encounters (all encounters appear on-screen, and only in the arena do they respawn) and items (your inventory of consumables refills after each battle). It simplified quite a lot, but that simplicity gave it a focus and elegance not often seen in RPGs.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Thousands of movies will be removed from Netflix in the US after the streaming service decided not to renew a deal with distributor Epix.

Removed titles will include the Hunger Games and Transformers movies.

Netflix, which has more than 60 million subscribers worldwide, said it wanted to focus on exclusive content.
...
Explaining the move to subscribers, Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos wrote: "While many of these movies are popular, they are also widely available on cable and other subscription platforms at the same time as they are on Netflix and subject to the same drawn out licensing periods."

Will this change in their library make you more or less likely to subscribe, or continue to subscribe?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

DropWise has developed a slippery coating that could dramatically cut the emissions from power plants by making them far more efficient. The coating works with any kind of power plant that relies on steam-driven turbines: coal, natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, biomass and nuclear.

In these power plants, steam passes through a turbine and is captured in a water condenser that cools it down and turns it into a liquid. This process of hot steam meeting a coolant creates suction that pulls the steam through the turbine to turn the blades and generate electricity. The coating would be applied on the condenser surfaces making it slippery so that the water droplets would be sucked through far more easily instead of building up on the surface, making the turbine much more efficient.

The coating could be added by passing two gasses into the condenser that with the addition of heat would react to form a thin coating within. By controlling the temperature and pressure during the process, DropWise says it can achieve nanometer-level accuracy.

Original Submission

Three astronauts will launch to the International Space Station later "tonight". From Wired:

A Soyuz spacecraft will take off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:37 local time, or 12:37 am EDT on Wednesday. If you're curious to follow along, you can watch NASA TV's live broadcast of the launch above, starting at 11:45 pm EDT tonight.

It will be a crowded time on the ISS:

Three crew members are ready to head into space Wednesday morning bringing the crew complement on the International Space Station (ISS) to nine, something that hasn't been seen since 2013.

Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov along with Andreas Mogensen from the European Space Agency, and visitors Aidyn Aimbetov from Kazcosmos, the National Space Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan, will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:37 a.m. EDT. They are scheduled to dock two days later at 3:42 a.m. on Friday with the hatch opening 6:15 a.m.

The new crew will join the One-Year duo of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko along with Russians Gennady Padalka, Oleg Kononenko and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui along with NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren.

That will take the number of people on board the station to nine. Typically there is a crew of six.

Aimbetov and Mogensen are scheduled to return to Earth on Sept. 12 along with current commander Padalka. Scott Kelly will take over command of the space station on Sept. 5.

Live coverage at NASA TV.

miljo writes:

Both Reuters and the CNBC are reporting on a study performed by security company Blue Coat that explored the most dangerous top level domains.

Researchers looked at web requests for more than 15,000 businesses and 75 million users. They found that most of the dangerous domains were used for less than 24 hours, in order to avoid countermeasures, and that most of the domains were used for phishing or delivering some type of malware.

The report puts part of the blame back on the TLD operators who, through ICANN's generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) initiative, can become administrators if they can prove that they have the proper infrastructure and pay the $185,000 evaluation fee.

Link to the original study [PDF].

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

John Koblin writes in the NYT that there's a malaise in TV these days that's felt among executives, viewers and critics, and it's the result of one thing: There is simply too much on television. John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks, reported at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour that the total number of original scripted series on TV in 2014 was 371 and will surpass 400 in 2015. The glut, according to Landgraf, has presented "a huge challenge in finding compelling original stories and the level of talent needed to sustain those stories." Michael Lombardo, president of programming at HBO. says it is harder than ever to build an audience for a show when viewers are confronted with so many choices and might click away at any moment. "I hear it all the time," says Lombardo. "People going, 'I can't commit to another show, and I don't have the time to emotionally commit to another show.' I hear that, and I'm aware of it, and I get it." Another complication is that shows not only compete against one another, but also against old series that live on in the archives of Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. So a new season of "Scandal," for example, is also competing against old series like "The Wire." "The amount of competition is just literally insane," says Landgraf.

Others point out that the explosion in programming has created more opportunity for shows with diverse casts and topics, such as "Jane the Virgin," "Transparent" and "Orange Is the New Black." Marti Noxon, the showrunner for Lifetime's "UnREAL" and Bravo's "Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce," says there has been a "sea change" in the last five years. "I couldn't have gotten those two shows on TV five years ago," says Noxon. "There was not enough opportunity for voices that speak to a smaller audience. Now many of these places are looking to reach some people — not all the people. That's opened up a tremendous opportunity for women and other people that have been left out of the conversation."

Original Submission