The German city of Munich, once seen as a open-source pioneer, has decided to return to Windows. Windows 10 will be rolled out to about 29, 000 PCs at the city council, a major shift for an authority that has been running Linux for more than a decade. From a report: Back in 2003 the council decided to to switch to a Linux-based desktop, which came to be known as LiMux, and other open-source software, despite heavy lobbying by Microsoft. But now Munich will begin rolling out a Windows 10 client from 2020, at a cost of about Euro 50m ($59.6m), with a view to Windows replacing LiMux across the council by early 2023. Politicians who supported the move at a meeting of the full council today say using Windows 10 will make it easier to source compatible applications and hardware drivers than it has been using a Linux-based OS, and will also reduce costs associated with running Windows and LiMux PCs side-by-side. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Month: November 2017
Lightning Can Trigger Nuclear Reactions, Creating Rare Atomic Isotopes
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Rare forms of atoms, like carbon-13, carbon-14, and nitrogen-15, have long been used to figure out the ages of ancient artifacts and probe the nuances of prehistoric food chains. The source of these rare isotopes? Complicated cascades of subatomic reactions in the atmosphere triggered by high-energy cosmic rays from outer space. Now, a team of scientists is adding one more isotope initiator to its list: lightning. Strong bolts of lightning can unleash the same flurry of nuclear reactions as cosmic rays, the researchers report in Nature. But, they add, the isotopes created by these storms likely constitute a small portion of all such atoms — so the new findings are unlikely to change the way other scientists use them for dating and geotracing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Lightning Can Trigger Nuclear Reactions, Creating Rare Atomic Isotopes
Yesterday Americans Spent $5 Billion Online
An anonymous reader quotes CNN Money: Black Friday 2017 was all about digital sales. American shoppers spent a record $5 billion in 24 hours. That marks a 16.9% increase in dollars spent online compared with Black Friday 2016, according to data from Adobe Digital Insights, which tracks 80% of online spending at America’s 100 largest retail websites… Meanwhile, malls and big-box retailers were left only slightly emptier. Early estimates from ShopperTrak, a data analytics company that measures the number of shoppers at stores, said foot traffic “decreased less than one percent when compared to Black Friday 2016.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Yesterday Americans Spent $5 Billion Online
Firefox Quantum Is ‘Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome’, Says Wired
Wired’s senior staff writer David Pierce says Firefox Quantum “feels like a bunch of power users got together and built a browser that fixed all the little things that annoyed them about other browsers.” The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It’s a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It’s better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It’s my new go-to browser. The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows… I routinely find myself with 30 or 40 tabs open while I’m researching a story, and at that point Chrome effectively drags my computer into quicksand. So far, I haven’t been able to slow Firefox Quantum down at all, no matter how many tabs I use… [But] it’s the little things, the things you do with and around the web pages themselves, that make Firefox really work. For instance: If you’re looking at a page on your phone and want to load that same page on your laptop, you just tap “Send to Device, ” pick your laptop, and it opens and loads in the background as if it had always been there. You can save pages to a reading list, or to the great read-it-later service Pocket (which Mozilla owns), both with a single tap… Mozilla has a huge library of add-ons, and if you use the Foxified extension, you can even run Chrome extensions in Firefox. Best I can tell, there’s nothing you can do in Chrome that you can’t in Firefox. And Firefox does them all faster. I’ve noticed that when you open a new tab in Chrome’s mobile version, it forces you to also see news headlines that Google picked out for you. But how about Slashdot’s readers? Chrome, Firefox — or undecided? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Firefox Quantum Is ‘Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome’, Says Wired
All 24 suspects nabbed as part of phone scam ring have pled guilty, DOJ says
Enlarge (credit: Nevada Wier / Getty Images News ) Federal prosecutors said recently that the last of 24 US-based defendants have pleaded guilty as part of the takedown of a massive phone-based scam that spanned all the way to India. Miteshkumar Patel’s guilty plea, signed on November 13, marks the last of the 24 men, while 32 more suspects remain at large in India. Over a year ago, federal authorities announced that 56 people and six companies had been indicted on various fraud charges involving phone call scams purportedly coming from the Internal Revenue Service and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officials. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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All 24 suspects nabbed as part of phone scam ring have pled guilty, DOJ says
A lost ‘Doctor Who’ episode featuring Tom Baker is finally here
Doctor Who fans have waited nearly four decades for today. Shada — an episode that began filming in 1979 with Tom Baker as the legendary Time Lord — is finally finished and available to download (a DVD will be released in the UK on December 4th, and in the US on January 9th). An animated segment and a new scene were produced to fill in the footage gaps, both of which feature Baker reprising his role as the Doctor. To add to the prestige, the episode was also written by Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. As you can expect, Shada was an almost mythical entry in the series for fans. But it wasn’t the only “lost” episode. Last year, the BBC also released an animated version of The Power of the Daleks using audio from the original episode, after losing the source video. That recreation was produced by Charles Norton, who also spearheaded the animated segment in “Shada.” Via: Variety Source: iTunes
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A lost ‘Doctor Who’ episode featuring Tom Baker is finally here
Quantum encryption is now fast enough for voice calls
Quantum encryption is theoretically a dream for security, as you can’t even inspect the data without altering it. However, it’s currently several times slower than the conventional kind, which makes it impractical for voice calls or streaming video. Science may have come to the rescue, though: researchers have developed a quantum encryption key distribution system that promises to be five to 10 times faster than existing methods, or roughly on par with conventional encryption when run in parallel. The trick was to cram more data into each photon. Normally, you can only encode one bit per photon by using a weak laser. The team discovered that it could encode two bits by tweaking the release time of photons and using high-speed photon detectors to track these changes. Effectively, they’re giving photons properties they couldn’t have before. There’s a lot of effort left before this becomes practical, not the least of which is the size: a transmitter/receiver combo would be about as large as a computer. It’s more realistic than you might think, mind you. All the parts beyond the single-photon detector are readily available, and it could even be used for “free space” (read: over the air) transmissions. Eventually, there may be a time when you could hold a secure voice chat knowing that even the most determined spy couldn’t listen in. Via: Phys.org Source: Science Advances
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Quantum encryption is now fast enough for voice calls
Devs Working To Stop Go Math Error Bugging Crypto Software
Richard Chirgwin, writing for The Register: Consider this an item for the watch-list, rather than a reason to hit the panic button: a math error in the Go language could potentially affect cryptographic libraries. Security researcher Guido Vranken (who earlier this year fuzzed up some bugs in OpenVPN) found an exponentiation error in the Go math/big package. Big numbers — particularly big primes — are the foundation of cryptography. Vranken posted to the oss-sec mailing list that he found the potential issue during testing of a fuzzer he wrote that “compares the results of mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, …) across multiple bignum libraries.” Vranken and Go developer Russ Cox agreed that the bug needs specific conditions to be manifest: “it only affects the case e = 1 with m != nil and a pre-allocated non-zero receiver.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Devs Working To Stop Go Math Error Bugging Crypto Software
‘MST3K’ will mock B movies for another season on Netflix
If Twitch’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 binge-fest didn’t scratch your itch, we’ve got good news for you: Netflix is renewing the show’s revival MST3K: The Return for a second season (and the 12th season overall). A brief announcement video (featuring series creator Joel Hodgson, current host Jonah Ray, and Felicia Day) hit YouTube shortly after Shout Factory’s annual Turkey Day marathon — which diehards no doubt tuned in to for Thanksgiving b-movie wisecracks. If you’re planning to make it a MST3K -themed weekend, you can still catch the 20 classic episodes stocked on Netflix. Or, maybe you’re saving a box set or two for the occasion. After all, nothing says Thanksgiving like robots sending up Space Mutiny . Source: Mystery Science Theater 3000 (YouTube)
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‘MST3K’ will mock B movies for another season on Netflix
Museum of African American History is freely digitizing home movies
Humanity has access to more data than ever before, but there’s still so much media scattered around the world that might rot away before it can be preserved. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is launching an initiative to save some of the most precious — home movies — by digitizing, for free, any and all films that folks want to bring in to the Washington, DC institution. The Great Migration home movie project will set up service on the museum’s second floor, and visitors can make an appointment to have their media safely stored in digital form. The team can digitize a range of formats, from 16mm and 8mm home video to obsolete tape-based mediums like MiniDV, Betacam and VHS to audio recordings. Home movies offer real insight into the lives of African Americans that popular films and television from the day don’t offer, the museum wrote in its post on the project: “While major motion picture film and television historically lacked diverse representation, black history was instinctively being preserved in everyday home movies. Today, these personal narratives serve as an invaluable tool for understanding and re-framing black moving image history, and provide a much needed visualization of African American history and culture. Just as the museum explores what it means to be an American and share how American values like resiliency, optimism, and spirituality are reflected in African American history and culture; these films are a moving image record of these values in practice.” Via: Blavity Source: The National Museum of African American History and Culture
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Museum of African American History is freely digitizing home movies