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Update by takyon: Not anymore.

The theater chain said on Friday morning that it was not going to make good on CEO Adam Aron's suggestion that the theater chain could allow people to text during film showings. [...] The response was swift and unfavorable, with the public telling AMC in no uncertain terms that the idea was a bad one.

mendax adds this link.

Phoenix666 writes:

One of the largest cinema chains in the US is considering letting customers use their mobile phones during films. AMC chief executive Adam Aron said he wanted to encourage so-called millennials to visit the cinema. He told Variety magazine: "You can't tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That's not how they live their life."

But he said he would have to find a solution that did not disturb other movie-goers. [...] Mr Aron said young adults today were not visiting the cinema as much as their parents did when they were young.

Why go to the cinema when you can download and watch whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want, while doing or consuming whatever you want?

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Phoenix666 writes:

A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code.

By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.

Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code.

The problem command was "rm -rf": a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The "rm" tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for "force", telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files.

His backups were also mounted at the time. That's a nightmare scenario, right there.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

For several months, I've seen complaints about slow Windows 7 updates. This month, the gripes have reached a crescendo, and it's time for Microsoft to fix it.

Back in March, I created two squeaky-clean installations of Windows 7, starting with a Microsoft-created copy of Windows 7 Service Pack 1. In one, I relied on Automatic Update to pull down and install all of the "checked" updates, except for the "Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, version 1511, 10586" optional update. On the other, I picked specific updates and applied them manually.

In both cases, it took overnight to complete the task. On several occasions, I simply gave up in disgust and moved to another task.

Late last month, Ed Bott on ZDNet reported that it took him more than 24 hours to similarly install Win7 Pro.

[...] Frankly, I don't think Microsoft is intentionally slowing down Windows 7 updates. But I think it's sufficiently focused on Win10 development that problems with Win7 fade into the background, not rising above ambient noise level. And paying customers get it in the jaw.

Poster Bob(maybe)OrNot says:

They could cut ~42% of excess CPU usage by not doing what their documentation says not to do (calling QueryPerformanceFrequency more than once). One could hope this would cut run time by that much.

[...] "QueryPerformanceFrequency retrieves the frequency of the performance counter. The frequency of the performance counter is fixed at system boot and is consistent across all processors. Therefore, the frequency need only be queried upon application initialization, and the result can be cached." – Microsoft

They called this function about 3,270,000 times during the 2 hour check for updates. Microsoft says "Only call this once, it won't change between boots", Microsoft calls it 3.27 MILLION times. Windows update is slow.

Source: InfoWorld

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/brazil-president-signs-law-legalizing-renegade-cancer-pill

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takyon writes:

China may become the first country to turn on a 100 petaflops supercomputer, just one order of magnitude away from "exascale":

A little over one year ago, export blocks put in place by the US government threatened to derail China's plans to upgrade its Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the world's fastest since June 2013, to its originally planned peak capacity of 100 petaflops. At the time, many in the industry anticipated that the efforts to block China's supercomputing capability by banning access to US technology from Intel and other hardware vendors would backfire.

Indeed, China was sufficiently incentivized to redouble efforts on its homegrown supercomputing effort and it had the cash from the squashed Intel deal to do it. A couple months after news of the blacklist came out, China revealed plans to build not one, but two 100-petaflops supercomputers using a variety of native chip, accelerator and interconnect technologies. One of these systems was a fully-realized Tianhe-2, which was slated for a late-2016 launch.

VR World, the same publication who broke the blacklisting story last year, is now reporting that China is on track to announce a 100-petaflops supercomputer in June, during the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. China had originally said it would have such a system in late-2016, but this is the same country that launched its 33-petaflops (LINPACK) Tianhe-2 two years early.

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takyon writes:

An Uber-like company intended to transport kids will shut down. Shuddle claimed to have used a more stringent background check process than competitors like Uber and Lyft, offered real-time monitoring of rides for parents, and allowed drivers to check kids out of things like afterschool activities:

San Francisco-based Shuddle Inc., an on-demand ride service for children, said it would shut down operations on Friday, a move that comes after failing to raise more venture capital. The company had raised $12.2 million in funding but struggled to attract more in a cooling funding environment. The company had 32 full-time employees as well as a network of contractors it called "driver-caregivers."

[...] The shutdown hits after venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2016 declined 25% from the previous quarter, according to industry tracker Dow Jones VentureSource. Investors are growing particularly wary of services in the on-demand sector, which saw a surge of investment following the popularity of services like Uber Technologies Inc. Services in this sector have subsidized money-losing with venture capitalists' dollars.

A snippet from the company's letter to customers (emphasis mine):

On behalf of the entire team here at Shuddle, we are saddened to inform you that Shuddle will be ceasing operations and closing business as of end-of-the-day Friday, April 15th. We worked hard to find the financial resources that would allow us to continue to grow, but ultimately could not raise the funding required to continue operations.

[...] We hope our drivers find new flexible work opportunities that you enjoy, and we take our hats off to our parent customers who work so hard everyday to help their kids get safely to school, home and fun.

Also at the San Francisco Chronicle. The New York Times has an article about similar services such as HopSkipDrive, Zum, and Kango.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Gene-edited CRISPR mushroom escapes US regulation:

Letter from Yinong Yang to USDA

Reply from USDA to Yang

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takyon writes:

Post-NAND memory/storage technologies that are almost as fast as DRAM (in terms of latency) but denser and cheaper will be arriving in the coming years. One such technology is Intel's 3D XPoint (also branded as "Optane"). Intel has demonstrated the performance of an Optane device at its IDF 2016 keynote in Shenzhen, China:

In the test, Intel used two computer systems. The first system utilized two Intel SATA SSDs to transfer a movie from the host machine to a Thunderbolt 3-connected device using another Intel SATA SSD. The transfer performance clearly shows a TLC-based SATA device--most likely the company's new SSD 540 or 5400 Series business-class drive. The second computer transferred the same movie file over Thunderbolt 3, but this time the host and destination media were based on Optane memory technology.

On the surface, the 2 GB/s transfer was impressive. The performance was consistent and didn't take much time. Upon closer inspection, though, this was the worst possible demonstration of Optane technology Intel could have shown. The company's own SSD 750 Series could have produced similar results.

The demonstration the world is waiting on involves random performance; it's the one area Optane changes storage for consumers. We won't see Optane technology in a data backup device for a decade or more, but a small amount of Optane to cache TLC NAND will go a long way in improving the user experience. If Intel doesn't arrange a public demonstration, we will have to wait until the second half of 2017 when we get our own Optane devices to run the tests ourselves.

At IDF 2015 in San Francisco Intel displayed a static image of Optane reading random data at 76,000 IOPS using queue depth 1. That is a full 7x improvement over the company's current NVMe-based consumer SSDs.

In other news, Everspin has begun to ship samples of 256 Mb Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM). Crossbar tried to remind everyone that it still exists. The last time we saw HP/HPE, it had seemingly abandoned "memristors" to work on the generically-named Storage-Class Memory with SanDisk. Intel could become the first to bring post-NAND memory to the consumer market with XPoint devices with capacities of at least 16-32 GB priced at $2-4/GB, enough to store an operating system and some applications.

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takyon writes:

The University of California in Davis has spent $175,000 to try to improve its online image:

The University of California in Davis has spent $175,000 on search engine optimization (SEO) and online reputation management – to hide an embarrassing incident in which students were pepper-sprayed on campus. The massive bill has come to light this week after the Sacramento Bee filed information requests on the university's expenditure after it noticed that its "strategic communications budget" has nearly doubled from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.

The newspaper found that the university had taken out several contracts aimed at "cleaning up the negative attention" that the university received when students were pepper-sprayed in November 2011 during a protest over large tuition fee hikes and in support of the broader Occupy movement of that time. The incident received worldwide attention when video was published of UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike nonchalantly spraying a group of students with the chemical spray while they sat on the ground holding a peaceful rally.

[...] In an effort to limit the university's connection with the pepper-spraying, UC Davis hired Maryland-based Nevins & Associates for $15,000 a month for six months to "create and execute an online branding campaign" not just for the University of Davis, but also its chancellor Linda Katehi, who was widely criticized for her handling of the protests and faced calls for her resignation.

Here's the website of The University of California in Davis. Did I mention the University of California in Davis?

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martyb writes:

Who is the main character in Game of Thrones? Mathematicians Have an Answer:

Fans of the Game of Thrones books and TV series have long quarreled over who the true hero of the story is. Daenerys? Tyrion? Jon Snow? Hodor? Every time a character seems to be developing into a protagonist, he or she is brutally killed (video). Such is the perilous existence of the major players in the world of the wildly popular HBO series—when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.

But several main characters remain. And in order to determine the one true hero of them all—the one most vital to the story, with the most important connections to other characters—we must turn to math.

Andrew J. Beveridge, an associate professor of mathematics at Macalester College, and Jie Shan, an intrepid undergraduate, decided to turn the world of the Game of Thrones books into a social network using network science, a branch of applied graph theory that draws from several disciplines, including economics, sociology, and, computer science, to examine how information flows from one thing to another.

[...] the mathematicians ranked the characters by several different measures. One, called degree centrality, simply ranks the characters by how many others they're connected with. Other measures, like PageRank (the same algorithm that Google uses for its search engine), actually puts the characters into a feedback loop, rewarding them based on how important the people that they're associated with are in the network.

From TFS, here is the graph they constructed; the main character's name stands out among the others.

Their research, entitled "Network of Thrones," is published in the Mathematical Association of America's publication, Math Horizons (pdf).

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

If there's ever been a sign that video games are part of the mainstream it has to be this: The world's largest news outlet the BBC just ran the following story in their main news feed about a bug in a Ubisoft game:

Ubisoft has promised to fix a fault with its blockbuster video game Tom Clancy's The Division that caused hundreds of players' characters to vanish.

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Bot writes:

The annual Debian developers conference, debconf 16, is taking place July 2-9 in Cape Town, South Africa, featuring for the first time ever Microsoft as a silver sponsor.

This seems consistent with the strategy, that pessimists may define EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), of seeking close integration with the GNU/Linux system.

The move, from a traditionally hostile company that recently started showing enthusiasm towards open source software, is causing a mixture of derision and opposition in the community. As the grey beards in the IT community might recall, most of Microsoft partners, from IBM to the humble dev, tend to end up screwed in the long term. Will GNU/Linux be the exception?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

VICE News, in conjunction with Motherboard have an exclusive special report that started with a high-level surveillance probe of Montreal's criminal underworld and ultimately revealed that the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), Canada's federal policing agency, has had access to the global decryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010.

Neither the RCMP nor BlackBerry confirmed that the cellphone manufacturer handed over the global encryption key, and both fought against a judge's order to release more information about their working relationship, though the Crown prosecutors admitted that the federal police service had access to the key.

Although the key wouldn't offer police a backdoor into most of BlackBerry's government and business clients — who are allowed to use their own organization-specific private keys and who make up BlackBerry's core constituency — it would mean that police enjoyed years of access to Canadians' personal cellphones without the public being any the wiser.

The story on Motherboard: Exclusive: How Canadian Police Intercept and Read Encrypted BlackBerry Messages.

Note: The "Five Eyes" "...often abbreviated as 'FVEY', refers to an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence." (Emphasis added.)

Original Submission

mendax writes:

The New York Times published today a story that, if successful, will put a dent in some of the secrecy involved in the government's snooping operations:

The software giant [Microsoft] is suing the Justice Department, challenging its frequent use of secrecy orders that prevent Microsoft from telling people when the government obtains a warrant to read their emails.

In its suit, filed Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Seattle, Microsoft's home turf, the company asserts that the gag order statute in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 — as employed today by federal prosecutors and the courts — is unconstitutional.

The statute, according to Microsoft, violates the Fourth Amendment right of its customers to know if the government searches or seizes their property, and it breaches the company's First Amendment right to speak to its customers.

Microsoft's suit, unlike Apple's fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation over access to a locked iPhone, is not attached to a single case. Instead, it is intended to challenge the legal process regarding secrecy orders.

The company is also trying to fuel a public debate about the frequent use of secrecy orders in government investigations and, in the process, portray itself as an advocate of its customers' privacy. The suit itself could plod through the courts, with appeals going on for months or even years.

Good for Microsoft! They're doing something right for a change.

takyon: Tom's Hardware, The Intercept .

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

El Reg :

Analysis In the wake of the FBI's failed fight against Apple, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have introduced a draft bill that would effectively ban strong crypto.

The bill would require tech and communications companies to allow law enforcement with a court order to decrypt their customers' data. Last week a draft copy of the bill, dubbed the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, was leaked, but the new version is even worse than the discussion draft.

In the draft version, court orders could only be issued for a crime resulting in death or serious bodily harm, terrorism and espionage, crimes against minors, serious violent felonies or Federal drug crimes. In the final version, those caveats are gone, so any court order will allow the police to access the data they want.

The bill would apply to "device manufacturers, software manufacturers, electronic communication services, remote communication services, providers of wire or electronic communication services, providers of remote communication services, or any person who provides a product or method to facilitate a communication or to process or store data." That's a pretty wide net.

"No entity or individual is above the law," said Feinstein. "The bill we have drafted would simply provide that, if a court of law issues an order to render technical assistance or provide decrypted data, the company or individual would be required to do so.

"Today, terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts, even in the face of a court order. We need strong encryption to protect personal data, but we also need to know when terrorists are plotting to kill Americans."

Idiots, I tell you, they're a pair of idiots.

Also submitted by mendax who noted that The Wall Street Journal published a story on this today.

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