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Tucows Bans Pop-Up Ads, Goes Ad-Free

HughPickens.com writes: Tucows began as a software downloads site nearly 25 years ago and has since evolved beyond that early core business and into domain names, mobile phone service and symmetrical gigabit fiber Internet in select towns and cities in the US. Now Tucows has announced that as a gesture of goodwill, Tucows has banned deceptive ads, hidden download buttons, pop-ups, flypaper, toolbars and other such Internet nastiness from the the nearly 40, 000 software titles it hosts for users on it’s download sites. “On the Tucows downloads site today, you’ll find no flashing ads. No toolbars. No pop-ups, ” says CEO Elliot Noss. “You might see a few plugs for other Tucows services, but nothing too egregious and certainly not anything that’s pretending to be a download button.” With Tucows’ success in domain names, mobile phone service (Ting) and fiber Internet (Ting Internet), Tucows’ revenue from downloads has become less relevant when looking at the balance sheet. “We don’t lightly walk away from opportunities or revenue, ” says Noss. “In the end, though, we’d rather have the Tucows name associated with good; with a belief in the power of the Internet to affect positive change. An ad-heavy site that packages browser toolbars along with every download isn’t something we want people to think of when they hear ‘Tucows, ‘.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast the Titan X

NVIDIA gave us a taste of its new Pascal architecture with the P100 graphics card last month, which is aimed at servers for heavy duty computing. Now, it’s ready to show off how that technology will be adapted for consumers with its new GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. As you’d expect, it’s fast: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it’s better than its current performance king, the Titan X. It’s also faster than two GTX 980 cards running together using SLI technology. Like the P100, the 1080 is built with a new 16nm FinFET (a type of 3D transistor) manufacturing process, which makes it more power efficient, on top of just being faster. The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity, ” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars [for that], ” he said. NVIDIA is basically positioning the GTX 1080 as the gamer’s dream card. Prior to its unveiling, Huang showed off several new titles like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider running at max settings in a high resolution over 60 frames per second. He later revealed that all of the games were running on the new card, to the delight of the entire crowd. But of course, NVIDIA won’t be alone with new hardware this year. AMD is expected to debut new cards with its Polaris technology this summer, which will focus on power efficiency as well. It sounds like Polaris is better suited for gaming laptops at the moment, but it could also be a way for AMD to deliver some powerful cards that you can actually afford (think under $300). Developing…

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NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast the Titan X

AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are available for Microsoft Edge

Back in March, Microsoft started testing a version of its new Edge browser on Windows 10 with support for extensions. Now, one of the most-requested features is covered with the introduction of AdBlock and AdBlock Plus extensions for Edge. The feature list appears to be mostly intact from its Chrome and Firefox iterations, with the ability to block varying levels of ads or whitelist certain sites (like… Engadget.com for example). AdBlock for Edge https://t.co/9VC1sGE3bk Adblock Plus for Edge https://t.co/MRSvQZoxlW — WalkingCat (@h0x0d) May 6, 2016 Not everyone uses extensions for their browsing experience, but for those of us who rely on them every day, it’s impossible to consider switching to a browser without a healthy library of optional add-ons. You’ll need to be in the preview program to test out the extension-enabled browser, and if you are, just check the video below to find out how to install them. Via: Walking Cat (Twitter) Source: AdBlock (Windows Store) , AdBlock Plus (Windows Store)

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AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are available for Microsoft Edge

Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Slashdot reader RockDoctor brings an update on a project to build Babbage’s Analytical Engine: Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after. Since 2011 a group under the name of “Plan-28” have been working towards building a full version of the machine known as the Analytical Engine. (The group’s name refers to the series of Babbage’s plans which they are working to — versions 1 to 27 obviously having problems.) This week, they’ve released some updates on progress on their blog. Significant progress includes working on the machine’s “internal microcode” (in today’s terminology; remember, this is a machine of brass cogs and punched cards!) [and] archive work to bring the Science Museum’s material into a releasable form (the material is already scanned, but the metadata is causing eyestrain). “One of the difficulties in understanding the designs is the need to reverse engineer logical function from mechanical drawings of mechanisms — this without textual explanation of purpose or intention…” Progress is slow, but real. Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it’s predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as “the world’s first programmer” is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Charter acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved by the FCC

It feels like forever since Time Warner Cable agreed to merge with Charter Communications , for an estimated $55 billion . But today, nearly a year after the two companies struck a deal, the Federal Communications Commission has finally granted its approval . The announcement follows FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and the US Justice Department green-lighting the merger in April, which confirmed that it was only a matter of time before it became official. It’s worth noting that Charter is also acquiring Bright House Networks , a regional TV and internet provider, as part of the agreement between it and the government. Additionally, last month Wheeler revealed there would be some caveats for Charter , including not being be able to impede access to streaming content. Namely, Charter can’t set data caps for subscribers or charge for service based on usage — and there might be more compromises. A detailed release of the conditions for the merger will be released over the coming days, according to a statement from the FCC . Nevertheless, this positions Charter as the second largest cable and internet service in the US with 24 million subscribers total, right behind Comcast’s 28 million . Persistence pays off , folks. Source: Federal Communications Commission

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Charter acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved by the FCC

All the Best Comics You’ll Want to Snag on Free Comic Book Day

Tomorrow, May 7, is the happiest day of the year for comics fans: Free Comic Book Day, which is both a celebration of the hobby and a chance to read tons of new comics given away without paying a dime! While some are reprints, most contain awesome new material—and here’s our guide to the very best of this year’s offerings. Read more…

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All the Best Comics You’ll Want to Snag on Free Comic Book Day

Check Out the Seriously Gnarly Creatures Discovered at the Bottom of the Mariana Trench

Need a pick-me-up on this dreary Friday afternoon? After checking out some of the nightmare-inducing life forms NOAA’s deep-sea diving robot discovered at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, sleep will be the last thing on your mind. Read more…

Color-Changing Threads Might One Day Turn Your T-Shirt Into a Screen

Look around and count the number of screens surrounding you. You’ll probably run out of fingers before you’re done, but why stop there? Researchers at UC Berkeley have come up with a way to weave color-changing threads into fabrics, turning even garments into yet another display. Read more…

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Color-Changing Threads Might One Day Turn Your T-Shirt Into a Screen

Piracy site for academic journals playing game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole

Alexandra Elbakyan won’t let her Sci-Hub pirate site of academic journals die— despite publisher Elsevier’s lawsuit. (credit: Courtesy of Alexandra Elbakyan) We reported a few weeks ago on a popular pirate site for science journals whose oversees admin was being sued by one of the world’s leading academic publishers, Elsevier. Elsevier is the same New York publisher that the late Aaron Swartz had noted in his ” Guerilla Open Access Manifesto ” that told academics and researchers they had a “duty” to free the knowledge they were privileged to read behind Elsevier’s paywall. Because of the lawsuit, which Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has refused to participate in, she’s been engaged in a game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole in response to Elsevier winning court orders demanding the shuttering of the popular site’s domain name. The site allows anybody, not just academics, to access tens of millions of scholastic research articles for free. When Ars interviewed Elbakyan and learned that she had a similar philosophy to Swartz, she had already altered the site’s domain from sci-hub.org to sci-hub.io and changed others because of a court order blocking the .org domain. Now that domain, registered with Chinese registrar Now.cn, has also been killed. That has forced the site to move to sci-hub.bz and sci-hub.cc. This cat-and-mouse domain game is reminiscent of the decade-long game the admins of The Pirate Bay have been playing. When one domain gets lost to a court order, the site springs up on another. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Piracy site for academic journals playing game of domain-name Whac-A-Mole

FDA flexes regulatory muscles, says vaping, e-cigs now under its control

(credit: Flickr/ecig click ) The US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that it has extended its authority and will now regulate electronic cigarettes, hookah tobacco, cigars, and other tobacco products under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act . The regulatory move, first proposed in 2014, is largely aimed at protecting kids from tobacco and nicotine products. The result is that e-cigs and the other products will now be subject to the same federal regulations as regular cigarettes. These regulations include some relatively uncontroversial rules such as a ban on selling e-cigs to minors (which some states have already done), requiring a photo ID to buy e-cigs, not selling e-cigs out of vending machines, and a ban on free e-cig samples. But the regulations also require that e-cigarette manufactures register with the agency and put any new devices through a pre-market regulatory approval process. By “new,” the FDA means any novel devices put on the market after February 15, 2007. Devices released before then will be grandfathered into the regulations. However, in the relatively young e-cig market, the vast majority of current products were introduced after 2007 and will be subject to the approval process. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FDA flexes regulatory muscles, says vaping, e-cigs now under its control

Ken May

Author: kenmay