Version:next-20140926 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-26

Fifty people died in violence on Sunday in Xinjiang, Chinese state media said, in what police called a "serious terrorist attack".

Police in Cyprus have persuaded nearly 300 migrants, thought to be Syrian refugees, to disembark from the cruise ship that had rescued them.

South Africa's first gay-friendly mosque, which also allows women to lead prayers, must close says local authorities.

A South Carolina state trooper is sacked and arrested after shooting an unarmed black man whom he had just pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt.

Almost 350 people, said to be Syrian refugees, are refusing to disembark from a cruise ship that rescued them from a small boat stranded off Cyprus.

Ashleigh Nghiem reports on how the performing horses of the Cavalia circus are looked after.

The French government has unveiled controversial new measures to cut the number of smokers, including introducing plain cigarette packaging.

Yolande Knell reports on life inside one of Iraq's largest refugee camps, Baharka, in Erbil.

France's former president Nicolas Sarkozy re-launches his political career with a campaign rally outside Lille.

Patch notes! We considered rewriting them in Comic Sans for funsies, but cooler heads prevailed.

On Thursday evening, Apple gave its first major iOS 8 update another shot—only this time without the major bugs in yesterday's attempt. Upon installation, iOS 8.0.1 left many iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users with non-functioning cellular service and TouchID buttons. Apple told CNBC that 40,000 people were affected by the problems, and the update was quickly pulled.

iOS 8.0.2 is now available for all compatible iDevices, and its patch notes look remarkably like those from 8.0.1, with one major update: "Fixes an issue in iOS 8.0.1 that impacted cellular network connectivity and Touch ID on iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus." Otherwise, the good stuff we'd hoped for yesterday, including HealthKit fixes, a third-party keyboard update, and photo-library access for third-party apps, is now ready to rock on your favorite, compatible iDevice.

Our own Andrew Cunningham reported a smooth update on his latest iPhones; that, plus positive chatter on Twitter feeds, has us convinced that this should be a safer update to accept.

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Ministerio del Interior 2014 James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Thursday he was "concerned" over Apple and Google marketing smart phones that can't be searched by law enforcement.

"What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law," Comey told reporters. He said the bureau has reached out to Apple and Google "to understand what they're thinking and why they think it makes sense."

The move to encryption is among the latest aftershocks in the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's revelations about massive US government surveillance.

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A British jihadist who knew Ibrahim Kamara, the 19-year-old from Brighton believed to have been killed in a US airstrike on Aleppo earlier this week, speaks about their time in Syria.

Yuneec Technology had this sleek-looking drone, called Flying Eyes, at the National Broadcasters Association conference in Spring 2014. It comes fully assembled for those who just need aerial images, not a weekend project. Megan Geuss

On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration granted six aerial photo and video companies exemptions from rules that make it difficult to use drones for commercial purposes in the United States. US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx determined that drones used by these companies would not threaten other aircraft or pose a national security threat.

Law enforcement agencies, fire departments, and the military have thus far been the primary drone operators in the US. Commercial drones, especially those that are intended to make deliveries like the one that will be launched by DHL in Germany this week or the ones proposed by Amazon and others, have generally not been allowed since 2007. (Of course, people can use non-commercial drones, and potentially crash them, with certain caveats.)

The six firms, which include Astraeus Aerial, Aerial MOB, HeliVideo Productions, Pictorvision Inc., RC Pro Productions Consulting, and Snaproll Media, will certainly pave the way for other commercial drone companies seeking to deploy their own drones in agriculture, oil and gas, logistics, and other sectors as well.

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Sierra Leone's government has quarantined more than a million people in an attempt to control the spread of the deadly Ebola virus.

There has been renewed fighting around the Syrian town of Kobane - intensifying the surge of refugees trying to cross into Turkey.

BoingBoing

As reports and videos about the bendability of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus continue to accumulate, Apple issued a response on Thursday that detailed the stress-test rigors its phones endure before shipping to market. Additionally, the company announced that in the new iPhones' first six days on the market, "only nine customers" had reported bent phone issues directly to Apple.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple called the bending cases "extremely rare," then described the five-step testing process that its newest models, made of "a custom grade of anodized aluminum" along with "stainless steel and titanium inserts," had to endure. The WSJ described two of those tests in detail: the "pressure point cycling test," which applies force all over an iPhone's screen and body, and the "sit test," which simulates a situation in which someone sits on a hard surface while wearing tight pants. (We'd love to see a crash-test dummy mock-up of the latter.)

Apple's response didn't include any concession of design fault, and its specific count of nine complaining customers certainly didn't include videos and other social-media complaints that have gone live since last weekend—particularly this hard-to-watch bending of an iPhone 6 Plus posted by BoingBoing (posted next to a video of other smartphones bending back into place for comparison's sake, which their iPhone 6 Plus was unable to do).

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Samsung loves "big." Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you'll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We dug through everyone's 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this:

Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo

At 275,000 employees, Samsung (just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung's machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones and 27 tablets just in 2014.

If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple's headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The "Sony" on this chart only means "Sony Electronics," the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services.

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Amazon has started warning customers of its EC2 cloud computing platform that it's going to start rebooting their instances en masse over the next few days.

Not all EC2 instance types will need rebooting; the fast storage (HS1) and large memory (R3) virtual machines are unaffected. But the reboots will nonetheless be widespread, with all regions and all availability zones affected. Rebooting is due to start this evening and finish next Tuesday.

Amazon hasn't explained why the bulk reboot is needed, but a source speaking to ITNews has said that it's due to an embargoed flaw in the Xen hypervisor. That bug, XSA-108, is due to be publicly disclosed on October 1, by which time Amazon's reboot should be complete.

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Oculus

Over the last few years, I've tried a number of virtual reality "solutions" that involve popping a smartphone into some sort of mask that straps to your face. On the surface, it seems like a natural fit to use a phone as a combination virtual reality display, head-tilt sensor, and processor that avoids the need to tether to a bulky PC tower.

Unfortunately, every one of the prototype phone-based VR devices I'd tried delivered an on-the-cheap virtual reality experience that ranged from awful to mediocre. Issues with optics, frame rate, and accurate head tracking have plagued all of these efforts to the extent that I began to think modern cell phones just weren't up to the task of driving convincing virtual reality.

Thus, I was a bit skeptical of Gear VR, Samsung's recently announced hardware effort that turns the upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone into a VR headset using a holster powered by Rift maker Oculus. The middling hands-on experience with Gear VR reported by our own Ron Amadeo earlier this month didn't really change my impressions, either.

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