Version:3.12.26 (longterm) Released:2014-08-01 Source:linux-3.12.26.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.12.26.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.12.26.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.12.26

Flickr user: Carlos Martinez

Chronic pain, defined as disabling pain that persists despite attempts at treatment and often without obvious cause, has become a serious challenge for health professionals. It is not surprising that someone suffering from this level of pain might become depressed, but most studies consider depression a "comorbidity"—an associated disorder—or suggest that the pain is "somatization" of the depression. That is, it may be a mental disorder’s effect on the body.

These ideas ignore both the impact of pain on people and 50 years of understanding in pain science. A new study by Neil Schwartz at Stanford University and colleagues, just published in Science, has helped clarify the relationship between pain and depression. The researchers identify the underpinnings of loss of motivation in mice with chronic pain and depression.

For the study, they induced chronic pain in mice through injury. Before the injury, the mice were tested for their motivation to search for and work to get food. After the injury, they were just as interested in food they could obtain with minimal effort. But those with pain gave up much sooner when getting food required more work per pellet. This shows that chronic pain can reduce motivation.

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The Intel NUC has created a very successful niche for itself in the SFF PC market. While Gigabyte has released the BRIX lineup (with more options compared to the Intel NUC line, including AMD-based ones and NVIDIA GPU-equipped units), most offerings we have seen (such as the Logic Supply ML320) just build upon Intel's motherboard. In this situation, we have Zotac come out with the ZBOX O-series (Sphere lineup). A motherboard tracing its origins (like the Intel-based BRIX units) to the Intel NUC, it differentiates itself mainly in its aesthetics. How does it perform in our mini-PC evaluation? Read on to find out.

While Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles was growing what would become the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, he should have been serving time in his home country of France. He was sentenced to a year in custody in 2010 on fraud accusations.

A newly obtained French court document shows that Karpeles has a civil and non-civil judgment pending where, in addition to custody, he also owes €45,000 ($60,000). The document is being published jointly for the first time by Ars Technica and the French publication Le Monde. (Read the French original here and an English translation here.)

The case was brought by a former employer who accused Karpeles of stealing customer user names, customer passwords, and a domain name, among other grievances. Under French law, Karpeles is not considered a criminal but rather “un délinquant,” a delinquent offender. It's a lesser label than “criminal,” because that word is reserved only for very serious crimes within the country.

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Version:next-20140801 (linux-next) Released:2014-08-01

Civilians from towns around the area of Eastern Ukraine where flight MH17 was shot down are continuing to flee heavy fighting.

Only yesterday Microsoft officially announced the Windows Phone 8.1 Update and today some more details emerged about what is coming as part of the update. Internet Explorer was bumped to version 11 with the release of Windows Phone 8.1 which brought a lot more compatibility and speed over its predecessor IE 10. However this didn’t solve all issues for all users. With the small market share of Windows Phone, many web sites have not tested against the mobile IE browser, nor do many even attempt to detect it. This has resulted in a mobile browsing experience that is quite different than one you would get on Android or iOS.

On the IEBlog, Microsoft outlined some of the changes they are going to begin to implement as part of the 8.1 Update to address the inconsistent mobile web. They outlined the top issues affecting mobile browsing in IE as:

• Faulty browser detection not recognising IE as a mobile browser and giving the desktop experience
• Using only old webkit-prefixed features that have been replaced by standards
• Using proprietary webkit-prefixed features for which there is no standard
• Using features that IE does not support with no graceful fall-back
• Running into interoperability bugs and implementation differences in IE

The first change they are implementing is changing the User Agent string. For those unfamiliar, browsers send a text string to the web server when connecting, and this string lets the web server know what browser type is connecting, and which features the browser would support. The idea is that if a browser connects that doesn’t support a certain part of the page, it can gracefully fall back to other code. A big issue the IE team found was that web servers were not detecting IE on Windows Phone as a mobile browser, and were therefore offering up the desktop version of the page. This results in a pretty poor browsing experience on a small screened device. While not saying exactly what the new string will be (though it will be trivial to found out once the update ships) they did say that they added “like Gecko” to the desktop IE 11 when it shipped, so it will probably be something similar to this.

Twitter after changing the User Agent String - WP 8.1 (left), WP 8.1 Update (center), iPhone (right)

The next solution is that the IE team is now adding a mapping for some webkit-prefixed APIs to the standards based APIs that already exist in IE 11. This way, when a website creates content and uses the non-standard webkit prefix, IE 11 will now be able to use that code to provide a page that more correctly portrays what the developer intended. They gave the example of www.macys.com to show how the gradients were not drawn correctly in IE 11 because the web code was not standards compliant.

Macys.com gradients WP 8.1 (left), WP 8.1 Update (center), iPhone (right)

The IE team also worked to add non-standard features to the mobile IE 11. With the popularity of the iOS ecosystem, many sites have used proprietary APIs provided by Safari. With this update, Microsoft is going to do the right thing and support these, even though they are not a part of web standards. Most users don’t want to know why a site doesn’t work perfectly, they just expect it to. By adding these non-standard features, users will get a better experience.

IE 11 on the desktop went a long way towards being more standards compliant, though it still lags behind other browsers. The time the team did spend on adding standards based features though were based on ones used more on the desktop. Many HTML5 features are seldom used on sites presented as a desktop experience, but they are used on the mobile versions of the site. With this update, the IE team has added more feature compliance to help with mobile site rendering.

New York Times mobile site WP 8.1 (left), WP 8.1 Update (center), iPhone (right)

Finally, they examined some of the markup used on real pages and found there was some that was coded incorrectly or the documentation for implementation is unclear. Clear or not, they found that other browsers handled this the way the developer intended, so they’ve made changes to Trident to help with some of this as well. They also fixed several bugs within Trident that were more of a sore spot with mobile sites such as location.hash and CSS layout issues.

The irony of these changes is painfully obvious to anyone who lived through the IE6 monopoly days. At that time, many sites coded directly to features that were not part of the HTML standards and were only available in IE6 or even as ActiveX controls. It can still be an issue with business if their internal line of business web apps were written for IE6. However the web in general has moved away from that, but with the dominance of Safari as a mobile browser, a similar situation has occurred where mobile sites are being written to non-standard HTML. Microsoft has worked hard to bring their browsers into standards compliance, and now they are forced to add non-standard features in order to not degrade the user experience. It would be best if all sites were 100% standards compliant, but that day will likely never come so it is encouraging to see the work being done here to provide the end user with an experience more on-par with other mobile browsers. There is of course always more work to do. One of the often requested features that wasn’t mentioned in this blog post is text reflow. We will have to wait until next week to see if this has been added. Windows Phone 8.1 Update will be available to people in the developer preview starting next week.

Historically, the biggest class-action lawsuits filed against video game companies have stemmed from antitrust and monopoly accusations, such as Nintendo's alleged price-fixing in 1991 or EA's football-series monopolies in the mid-'00s. But in some cases, like a filing over the 2013 shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines, the suit's terms boiled down to little more than "the game stinks."

That's what happened when two fans sued producer Sega and developer Gearbox in May 2013 over that disastrous Aliens game, alleging that the game's previews were so different from the retail release that they "misled" shoppers. On Thursday, over a year after the suit was filed, Gearbox finally responded with a motion for dismissal—and revealed more of the game's woes in the process.

One section of the motion, penned by Gearbox Marketing Director Steve Gibson, recounted the game's development timeline in order to distance itself from any financial obligation should the lawsuit turn out in the plaintiffs' favor. In particular, Gibson alleged that "Gearbox supplemented Sega’s development budget with its own money" to the tune of millions, "none of which was ever repaid."

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A series of explosions in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung has killed 22 people and injured more than 200, officials say.

Linksys and ZyXEL recently updated their product portfolio for SMB (small and medium business) networking gear. The updates came in the managed switches category for both companies. In addition, ZyXEL also introduced two new gateways.

Linksys

Linksys had recently lost ground as a SMB market leader, but, after Cisco's sale of the business unit to Belkin, things have been improving rapidly. Last month, they announced the Pro series wireless access point (LAPAC1750PRO) with support for cluster managment (handling multiple access points from a single interface) and a customizable branding portal. It also had dual GbE ports for increased throughput as well as redundancy. As with any AP in this market segment, the unit could be powered by PoE (Power over Ethernet). This 3x3 802.11ac AP was priced at $500.

However, the standout announcement came this month for their managed network switches. Usually, we see vendors putting out 24 and 48-port switches, but Linksys is introducing 28 and 52-port ones. There are four models: LGS528, LGS552, LGS528P and LGS552P. The P models come with PoE+ support (802.3at) and have a 30W power budget per port. The 52 port models come with two 10 GbE uplink ports (SFP+). The non-PoE+ models are priced at $550 and $850 for the 28 port and the 52 port versions,
while the PoE+ models are priced at $950 and $1300. Note that these switches support Layer 3 static routing also.

ZyXEL

ZyXEL announced an update to the venerable GS2200 layer 2 managed switches yesterday in the GS2210 series. The updated internals reflect in lower maximum power consumption. The GS2210 also has a larger packet buffer. The lineup consists of 24-port and 48-port models with PoE (HP models) and without PoE support. Pricing for GS2210-24 comes in at $499 while the HP variant will come in at $799. The 48-port versions are priced at $1099 (GS2210-48) and $1349 (GS2210-48HP). I have been using the GS2200-24 24x7 at home for the last three years (not just as part of a testbed), and I have to say that the unit has been silent and reliable all through after initial setup.

A couple of Internet Access Gateways were also announced, targeting the hospitality market. The UAG5100 supports up to 800 concurrent devices with dual WAN capabilities and an integrated WLAN controller for managing up to 32 Wi-Fi APs. The UAG2100 supports up to 200 devices, has a built-in 802.11n AP and an integrated WLAN controller to manage up to 8 Wi-Fi APs. The firmware features of both units are geared towards monetization of Internet services as well as recording of user access information for auditing and security purposes.
 

Karishma Vaswani investigates the new wealthy in Indonesia and the growing inequality in the capital Jakarta

New data from the Pew Research Center shows that children 12 and under are coming to the US in droves

This is Curiosity, but physically, Mars 2020 will look quite similar. NASA

When NASA announced its plans for future explorations of Mars, there was a sense of disappointment in some quarters, since it featured a rover much like Curiosity. But NASA made clear that it was only using the proven technology of the vehicle itself; the instruments it carried would be all new and shaped by both the advancement of technology and the experience of past missions.

Today NASA announced exactly what instruments the mission—currently called Mars 2020—will carry. They included hardware capable of making a more directed search for organic chemicals on the red planet, which could be evidence that life existed there in the past. And it will also carry an experiment designed to test our ability to produce oxygen for future manned explorations of Mars. The rover will also gather and cache samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future mission.

NASA had received nearly 60 proposals for instruments to fly on the Mars 2020 mission. From that list, it has selected seven, which it expects will cost a total of roughly $130 million to develop and build. Once again, the rover will be equipped with a mastcam (Mastcam-Z in this iteration) that includes panoramic and stereo imaging. The rover will also carry an instrument to track the wind, temperature, and the properties of Mars' persistent dust.

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US Computer Emergency Response Team, in cooperation with the Secret Service and researchers at Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, have issued an alert about a newly identified variant of malware installed on point-of-sale (POS) systems that was used in a series of recent attacks by cyber criminals. Called “Backoff,” the malware shares characteristics with the one used to attack Target’s point of sale systems last year: it scrapes credit card data out of the infected computer’s memory. Until now, it was undetected by antivirus software; testing by researchers found it had a "zero percent detection rate" on commercial antivirus products.

POS machines are a big target for hackers, who use malware like Backoff to collect data from credit cards and other transaction information to either create fraudulent credit cards or sell the data. In many ways, the Backoff-based attacks were similar to the attack in 2011 on Subway franchises—hackers used remote desktop software left active on the machines to gain entry, either by brute-force password attacks or by taking advantage of a default password, and then installing the malware on the hacked system.

According to US-CERT, Backoff—which is Windows-specific malware—runs in the background watching memory for the “track” data from credit card swipes, which can be used to both obtain the account number on the card and to create fraudulent cards that can be used in ATMs and other point-of-sale systems. Backoff also has a keylogger function that records the key-presses on the infected computer. The malware installs a malicious stub in Windows Explorer that can reload the in-memory component if it crashes and communicates with the criminals’ command and control network—sending home captured credit card data and checking for malware updates.

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As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time. more>>

Version:3.4.101 (longterm) Released:2014-07-31 Source:linux-3.4.101.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.4.101.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.4.101.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.4.101

Version:3.10.51 (longterm) Released:2014-07-31 Source:linux-3.10.51.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.10.51.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.10.51.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.10.51

Version:3.14.15 (longterm) Released:2014-07-31 Source:linux-3.14.15.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.14.15.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.14.15.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.14.15

Exporting to PDF from Excel for iPad. All four Office apps can do this now. Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft at long last released Office for the iPad in March, in keeping with CEO Satya Nadella's "cloud first, mobile first" approach to competitors' platforms. OneNote had already been available for some time, but it was the first time Word, Excel, or PowerPoint had been available as native iPad apps. Today Microsoft updated all four applications, following the hasty addition of printer support about a month after the initial release.

All four apps can now export files as PDFs, crop pictures inline, and reset changes made to pictures. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can also use third-party fonts, presumably in addition to the Microsoft- and Apple-supplied fonts that come with iOS and the Office apps themselves. Excel, Powerpoint, and OneNote pick up more features that will be appreciated by heavier users of the desktop Office apps. From the release notes:

Excel

• Flick to select: flick a cell’s selection handle in any direction to quickly and easily select all the data in a row or column.
• External keyboard support: using an external keyboard is even easier. Use the same keys to input data and move around a worksheet as you would on your PC or Mac.
• PivotTables: interact with PivotTables that have source data in the same workbook.
• Print options: more paper sizes and scaling options give you more control over the layout when printing your workbooks.

PowerPoint

• Presenter view: view and edit speaker notes, see your next slide, or jump to other slides while presenting.
• Play media: play videos, sound effects, and background music while presenting.
• Insert video: insert videos from your Camera Roll.
• Presenter tools: now you can erase highlights and drawings on your presentation.
• Hyperlinks: add links to your presentation or edit existing ones.

OneNote

• Protected sections: now you can lock or unlock password-protected sections created in OneNote for Windows.
• Organize notebooks: now you can move and reorder pages and sections and manage subpages.
• Formatted text: copy and paste formatted text between applications—whether it's an article from Safari or a document in Word, any content you paste into OneNote will look great!
• Creating notebooks: now you can create notebooks and save them to OneDrive for business. Have multiple accounts? No problem! It's easy to select exactly where you want to store your new notebook.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all available in the App Store for any iPad running iOS 7. A Microsoft account is required to view files in all of the applications. A current Office365 subscription is required to edit files in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

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Version:3.15.8 (stable) Released:2014-07-31 Source:linux-3.15.8.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-3.15.8.tar.sign Patch:patch-3.15.8.xz (Incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-3.15.8