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GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard

GoDaddy has announced “an open set of APIs for DNS providers and web service providers, ” called Domain Connect. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “Once enabled, customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity, ” according to the announcement, “streamlining and simplifying the process of connecting websites and domain names registered on different platforms.” GoDaddy’s submitted it for consideration as an IETF standard, where they have the support of Microsoft and Squarespace, as well as the other two largest registries, eNome and Name.com. But in the meantime, they told ProgrammableWeb, the specificaion is “out there in the public, open for feedback and adjustment.” “GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process, ” the site reports, “by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, WordPress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries… in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they’ve done it all correctly.” Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy’s implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering “said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GoDaddy Proposes New DNS Configuration Standard

Microsoft’s ‘Project Scorpio’ games will run in native 4K

You’d be forgiven for doubting that Microsoft’s Project Scorpio could really deliver on the promise of 4K gaming. Most PlayStation 4 Pro games won’t run in true 4K , and the current wave of 4K-capable PC video cards cost more than whole consoles . However, Microsoft vows that there won’t be any trickery involved with its own titles. In an interview with USA Today , the company’s Shannon Loftis says that all first-party games arriving “in the Scorpio time frame” will run in native 4K — you’ll have at least a few games to show what your new TV can do. Loftis doesn’t say which games those are, although that isn’t surprising when Scorpio is roughly a year away. All the same, the 4K commitment could be crucial to giving the new Xbox hardware a strong start. Even if many third-party games resort to upscaling instead of real 4K, you’ll have some incentive to buy the new system. It won’t necessarily make you forget about the PS4 Pro (game selection, as always, is a crucial factor), but it might just tempt you to upgrade from an original Xbox One instead of holding out a little while longer. Via: GamesRadar Source: USA Today

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Microsoft’s ‘Project Scorpio’ games will run in native 4K

Lyft Says Robots Will Drive Most Of Its Cars in Five Years

A week after its rival Uber began rolling out self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, Lyft has said it also expects to roll out its self-driving by next year. Its president John Zimmer outlined a “three-phase” plan for the company, noting that self-driving cars will be made available to Lyft users in the first phase. But in this phase, it only plans to roll out self-driving cars that can “drive along fixed routes” and that the “technology is guaranteed to be able to navigate.” Recode adds: In the second phase, the self-driving cars in the fleet will navigate more than just the fixed routes, but will only drive up to 25 miles per hour. As the technology matures and the software encounters more complex environments, Zimmer wrote, cars will get faster. The third phase, expected to happen sometime in 2021 or 2022, will be when all Lyft rides will be completed by a fully autonomous car. Shortly after that phase begins, car ownership will see a steep drop-off, according to Zimmer. Zimmer, who has long been a vocal proponent of ending car ownership, set a date for the death of the personally owned car in major U.S. cities: 2025. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sustainable Leather Grown from Mushrooms!

A San-Francisco-based company called MycoWorks has made an incredible advance in materials: They can now grow leather from the mycelium in mushrooms, using a process that’s renewable, CO2-negative and customizable. That latter part means they can predetermine what the leather looks like—cow, elephant skin, snakeskin—and most intriguingly, can grow it to any size! The company claims that the material “feels and performs like leather, ” being “strong, flexible and durable, just like conventional leathers. It is also water-resistant.” Furthermore, they state that their production process “takes a fraction of the time and resources…compared to processes for making leather from animal hides.” Green credentials aside, I think what’s most fascinating is the fact that they can grow it in large sheets. When selecting hides, all leatherworkers must live with the limitations of a cow’s body; with that obstacle removed, I think that once the right designer gets their hands on this stuff, we’ll see some truly spectacular, large-scale leather creations that could not be produced the conventional way.

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Sustainable Leather Grown from Mushrooms!

Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

Ars visits The Coalition in Vancouver, BC. Video shot by Sam Machkovech, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link) VANCOUVER, BC—The future of high-end PC gaming is looking good thanks to graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan , which let game engines more directly access multi-threaded processes in your hungry gaming computer’s CPU and GPU. As of right now, however, neither API has been heavily tested in the public gaming market. Vulkan’s biggest splashes to date have included noticeable, if incremental, bumps for games like Dota 2 and this year’s Doom reboot, while DX12 has been applied to PC versions of existing Xbox One games—meaning that we’ve seen those games jump up to impressive 4K resolutions, but we haven’t seen similar jumps in geometry or other major effects. This fall, Microsoft is finally taking the DX12 plunge with a deluge of ” Xbox Play Anywhere ” game launches, including this week’s Forza Horizon 3 , but arguably the biggest DX12er of the bunch is October’s Gears of War 4 . I wouldn’t have made that statement before game developer The Coalition unveiled the game’s DirectX 12 version for the first time, but after seeing what the company had to offer, I was amazed. Here, finally, was a Gears of War game that looked as stunning as the original did during its era—you know, so long as you can afford the game’s “recommended” PC build spec. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

Woman Finds Mysterious Disney Time Capsule In Her Wall After Louisiana Floods

Janet Knox’s Baton Rogue home is now just a shell of its former self. The recent floods in Louisiana have forced her to tear out the waterlogged walls of her house and begin the rebuilding process. But Knox has had at least one pleasant surprise during the clean up. She found a time capsule dating back to 1942 stuffed inside one of the walls in her home . But there’s something that doesn’t add up. Read more…

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Woman Finds Mysterious Disney Time Capsule In Her Wall After Louisiana Floods

Valve pulls games after studio plans to sue critical players

If you ran a game studio and faced a slew of very negative (and sometimes threatening) user reviews, what would you do? Strive to improve your work? Rig the reviews ? Ignore the haters? Digital Homicide decided that it would be better to sue the reviewers … and now, it’s facing the consequences. Valve has pulled all of Digital Homicide’s games from Steam in response to a developer subpoena forcing Valve to reveal the identities of 100 users who posted harsh reviews, paving the way for an $18 million personal injury lawsuit. Digital Homicide’s legal action is “hostile to Steam, ” a Valve spokesperson says. The lawsuit, filed by Digital Homicide’s James Romine, comes alongside a separate claim against YouTuber Jim Sterling, whose videos have frequently roasted the developer’s games. Some of Sterling’s fans have supposedly harassed both James and his brother Robert through the mail. Not surprisingly, Digital Homicide has a different take on the situation. It claims that it’s only suing after Valve did little to moderate user game reviews, at least some of which included death threats. The company deserves a “safe environment” to do business, it says, and Valve is reportedly showing a “reckless disregard” for the Steam community. The truth might be somewhere in between the Valve and Digital Homicide positions. There’s no question that at least some of the reviews are uncalled for, and that Valve didn’t clamp down on them quickly (even if they weren’t likely serious). However, it’s not clear that all of the reviews were so hostile, and Digital Homicide doesn’t exactly have a squeaky-clean reputation. It has been waging a war against Sterling for many months, including doxxing and questionable YouTube takedown requests, in response to videos that do little more than highlight the studio’s shady practices. On top of producing shovelware (it posted 18 games on Steam Greenlight in one year), Digital Homicide has allegedly masqueraded as different developers and offered game keys in exchange for rigging Greenlight votes. The company may have already been on the road to a Steam ban — the subpoena could just be the last straw. Via: Polygon Source: Rami Ismail (Twitter) , Digital Homicide , SidAlpha (YouTube)

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Valve pulls games after studio plans to sue critical players

Terabit fiber optic speeds just came closer to reality

Sure, researchers have been showing off terabit data speeds in fiber optics for years , but they’ve seldom been practical. That exotic technology may work over long distances, but it can quickly fall apart when you throw typical network loads in the mix. However, it’s about to become much more practical. Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom and the Technical University of Munich have shown off 1Tbps data speeds in a field trial that involved “real conditions, ” with varying channel conditions and traffic levels. The secret was a new modulation technique, Probabilistic Constellation Shaping. Instead of using all the networking’s constellation points (the “alphabet of the transmission”) equally, like typical fiber, it prefers those points with lower amplitudes — the ones that are less susceptible to noise. That helps transmissions reach up to 30 percent further, since you can adapt the transmission rate to fit the channel. It’s so effective that the team got close to the theoretical peak data speeds possible for the fiber connection. You’re likely not going to see these terabit fiber lines in regular use for a while, since there’s a large gap between a field test and making commercially available lines. The timing might be ideal, mind you — 5G cellular data is just gathering momentum, and telecoms will need gobs of bandwidth to cope with the increased demands. A realistic 1Tbps fiber option would make sure that the internet’s wired backbones don’t collapse under the load. Via: FossBytes , ZDNet Source: TUM

‘Mr. Robot’ star Rami Malek wins Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy

The USA series Mr. Robot has more than just surprisingly realistic hacking scenes , as it now can claim an Emmy win. Series star Rami Malek snagged the Outstanding Lead Actor award tonight, beating out Kevin Spacey, Bob Odenkirk and others. After double checking to make sure we were all seeing this too (good call), Malek said he wanted to “honor the Elliots…because there’s a little bit of Elliot in all of us.” What an #Emmys moment! @ItsRamiMalek of @whoismrrobot just won! pic.twitter.com/U4XdK2ue6V — Television Academy (@TelevisionAcad) September 19, 2016 One person can change the world. @ItsRamiMalek has won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor. #MrRobot pic.twitter.com/CvHJrHw8G5 — Mr. Robot (@whoismrrobot) September 19, 2016 http://televisionacad.tumblr.com/post/150616888353/emmys-winner-for-outstanding-lead-actor-for-a Source: Emmys.com

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‘Mr. Robot’ star Rami Malek wins Outstanding Lead Actor Emmy

We Haven’t Seen This Many Comic Books in Stores Since 1996

The comic book industry spent years on the edge of irrelevance, struggling to find an audience after the boom of the 1990s ended. Nowadays, thanks in no small part to the surge in superhero movies, comic book distribution is higher than it’s been in decades. Read more…

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We Haven’t Seen This Many Comic Books in Stores Since 1996

Ken May

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