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3.12.28: longterm

Latest Linux Kernel - Sat, 2014-09-06 20:46
Version:3.12.28 (longterm) Released:2014-09-07 Source:linux-3.12.28.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.12.28.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.12.28.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.12.28
Categories: FLOSS

VIDEO: 'Every day is Bill Murray day'

BBC World - Sat, 2014-09-06 18:48
The Toronto Film Festival celebrated Bill Murray day as the star attended the premier of his new film, St Vincent.
Categories: News

Feds say NSA “bogeyman” did not find Silk Road’s servers

ARS Technica - Sat, 2014-09-06 12:35

The FBI easily found the main server of the now-defunct Silk Road online drug-selling site, and didn't need the National Security's help, federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing.

The underground drug website, which was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, "reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site's leader. Trial is set for later this year.

The authorities said Friday that the FBI figured out the server's IP address through a misconfiguration in the site's login window. They said that a US warrant wasn't required to search the Icelandic server because "warrants are not required for searches by foreign authorities of property overseas."

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Categories: Tech

VIDEO: Parents 'emotional' as deaf baby hears

BBC World - Sat, 2014-09-06 11:53
The Australian parents of a deaf baby boy have described the "overwhelming" moment their son heard their voices for the first time.
Categories: News

US opens first commercial plant that converts corn waste to fuel

ARS Technica - Sat, 2014-09-06 11:00

So far, the largest biofuels efforts have involved the age-old process of converting sugars in plants into ethanol. If biofuels are ever to make a significant dent in fossil fuel use, however, they're probably going to have to be made from something that can't also be used as food (either by us or our farm animals.) That means working with something other than sugar.

The leading candidate is cellulose, a robust polymer of sugars that give plants the strength to grow several hundred feet tall. Breaking down cellulose into sugars (which can then be converted into ethanol) is not easy to do economically, although a lot of research has gone into finding processes that work. A leading candidate for this is to use the enzymes from bacteria and fungi that normally decompose wood. The US Energy Information Agency has announced that the nation's first commercial-scale plant based on this approach has just opened in Iowa.

"Project Liberty," the result of a joint venture between US-based POET and the Netherlands' Royal DSM, will have the capacity to process over 750 tons of corn stover each day. Stover is the inedible parts of the plant: husks, cobs, the stalk and leaves. Although intended to work with corn (hence the Iowa location), it's possible that the facility could be used for other sources of cellulose, like grasses.

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Categories: Tech

Barclays brings finger-vein biometrics to Internet banking

ARS Technica - Sat, 2014-09-06 08:03
The Hitachi H1 VeinID finger scanner is the size of a tennis ball. You can see the SIM card slot in the base of the device. Barclays

Barclays has announced the arrival of personal biometric scanners to keep your Internet banking security firmly under your thumb.

Gone are the days of fumbling with desktop card readers, phone authentication, and PIN codes as a finger scanner will be available to wealthy corporate banking clients from 2015, and the rest of us surely soon after.

The device, developed with Hitachi's Finger Vein Authentication Technology (VeinID), will read the subdermal patterns of the client's finger vasculature in order to combat identity fraud. Vein pattern recognition holds several advantages over fingerprint scanning, including reliability and speed, with the authentication taking only two seconds.

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Categories: Tech

The Sims 4 review: Halfway house

ARS Technica - Sat, 2014-09-06 06:41
Very tense, huh? Maybe because her roommate is ON FIRE?!

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Because I am a particularly awful person, I started my first playthrough of The Sims 4 by trapping one of its virtual citizens in a four-wall box with no doors. This simple, horrible power has been available in Sims games for over 15 years, and I am confident in claiming that everybody who has played the series has done this at least once, if just to test the weirdness boundaries of EA and Maxis’ dollhouse-management series.

Used to be, doing this resulted in your Sims soiling themselves and swaying awkwardly until keeling over. That’s still the case, only now it comes with the added awfulness of the game outright telling you how your character feels about the predicament. Any Sim you control in The Sims 4 has his or her portrait displayed in a corner of the screen at all times, and those come with giant, white letters, and a color to match, explaining exactly what the simulated person is feeling and why.

Our test case, Ashley, turned “very uncomfortable” within a few hours of game time, owing to a mix of sleeplessness and a fetid stench; 18 hours later, she turned “desolate,” indicating that she’d grown very lonely in her den of sadness. Roughly 24 hours after that, she fell over and vanished, her body and her emotions lost to the sands of time.

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Categories: Tech

VIDEO: Ceasefire holding but 'very fragile'

BBC World - Sat, 2014-09-06 04:48
There is uncertainty over whether a ceasefire between government forces and pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine is holding.
Categories: News

AUDIO: Scientists 'make telepathy breakthrough'

BBC Tech - Sat, 2014-09-06 02:01
Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two.
Categories: Tech

VIDEO: Gaza girl weeps for her father

BBC World - Sat, 2014-09-06 01:46
The BBC's Quentin Sommerville meets two young girls in Gaza whose family were victims of an attack on a UN school injuring their mother and killing their father.
Categories: News

VIDEO: Blue whale numbers bounce back

BBC Tech - Fri, 2014-09-05 20:04
Researchers believe that California blue whales have recovered in numbers and the population has returned to sustainable levels.
Categories: Tech

3.16.2: stable

Latest Linux Kernel - Fri, 2014-09-05 16:37
Version:3.16.2 (stable) Released:2014-09-05 Source:linux-3.16.2.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.16.2.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.16.2.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.16.2
Categories: FLOSS

3.14.18: longterm

Latest Linux Kernel - Fri, 2014-09-05 16:35
Version:3.14.18 (longterm) Released:2014-09-05 Source:linux-3.14.18.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.14.18.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.14.18.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.14.18
Categories: FLOSS

3.10.54: longterm

Latest Linux Kernel - Fri, 2014-09-05 16:32
Version:3.10.54 (longterm) Released:2014-09-05 Source:linux-3.10.54.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.10.54.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.10.54.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.10.54
Categories: FLOSS

VIDEO: Policeman jumps on car during protest

BBC World - Fri, 2014-09-05 16:24
An Argentine police officer has been caught on camera pretending to be run over by a protester.
Categories: News

When NSA and FBI call for surveillance takeout, these companies deliver

ARS Technica - Fri, 2014-09-05 15:35
Who needs the FBI party van when you can just order CALEA take out? FBI

Not every Internet provider can handle the demands of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant or law enforcement subpoena for data. For those companies, Zack Whittaker reports on ZDNet, the answer is to turn to a shadowy class of companies known as “trusted third parties” to do the black bag work of complying with the demands of the feds.

Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), phone companies and Internet providers can charge back the government for their efforts in responding to warrants. AT&T charges the CIA more than $10 million per year for access to its phone call metadata. But smaller ISPs who aren’t frequently hit with warrants can’t afford to keep the infrastructure or manpower on-hand to respond to requests—so they sign up with a “trusted third party” capable of doing the work as an insurance policy against such requests.

Companies such as Neustar, Yaana Technologies, and Subsentio contract with smaller providers and reap the profits from charging federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for the data. Neustar and Yaana are also essentially private intelligence companies, providing large-scale data capture and analytics (though probably not on the scale of NSA’s Xkeyscore.) Neustar is also in the phone number portability business, and owns a number of the new top level domains approved by ICANN.

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Categories: Tech

VIDEO: Is there a new World Disorder?

BBC World - Fri, 2014-09-05 15:22
The BBC's John Simpson analyses the causes and connections behind conflicts in the world at the moment - and what can be done.
Categories: News

VIDEO: The plight of Calais migrants

BBC World - Fri, 2014-09-05 14:54
Calais migrants have been protesting for better protection of their human rights and freedom.
Categories: News

VIDEO: Ukraine dominates Nato summit

BBC World - Fri, 2014-09-05 14:45
Events in Ukraine have dominated the second day of Nato summit in Wales.
Categories: News

VIDEO: Heavy shelling before Ukraine ceasefire

BBC World - Fri, 2014-09-05 14:43
The BBC's Fergal Keane reports on the hours before the Ukrainian ceasefire in Mariupol.
Categories: News
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