Go To Jail For Visiting a Web Site? Top Law Prof Talks Up the Idea

David Rothman writes: Eric Posner, the fourth most-cited law professor in the U.S., says the government may need to jail you if you even visit an ISIS site after enough warnings. He says, “Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way—and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech. The law would provide graduated penalties. After the first violation, a person would receive a warning letter from the government; subsequent violations would result in fines or prison sentences. The idea would be to get out the word that looking at ISIS-related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden” There would be exemptions for Washington-blessed journalists and others. Whew! Alas, this man isn’t Donald Trump — he is a widely respected University of Chicago faculty member writing in Slate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Go To Jail For Visiting a Web Site? Top Law Prof Talks Up the Idea

200-year old giant salamander discovered outside a cave in China

Chinese giant salamanders are incredible amphibious beasts that look more like monsters from a movie than something that could exist in real life on this here Earth. They are comically huge, like brown boulder-sized beings who are unaware of how big they are. This one, discovered outside a cave near Chongqing, China, is over 4 and a half feet long and weighs nearly 115 pounds. Experts believe that it may be around 200 years old. Read more…

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200-year old giant salamander discovered outside a cave in China

Universal Remote Desktop Coming To Windows 10 Soon

jones_supa writes: For those using the Continuum feature of Windows and who work from home or in the office, you’ll be pleased to know that the Remote Desktop Universal app is not only happening but will be released soon as a Technical Preview. This follows up on the Remote Desktop preview, which is already available for PC. The news came from Jason of the Microsoft Continuum team: “We’ve heard a lot of buzz around being able to connect to a remote desktop from Continuum for phone. We are excited to share that the Remote Desktop Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app will be released very soon in Technical Preview.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Universal Remote Desktop Coming To Windows 10 Soon

Public domain illustrations from old books

Old Book Illustrations is a search engine and browseable library of—you’ve guessed it!—the engraved illustrations and litho prints found in old books. Choose the type of illustrations you want to see: animals or people, landscapes, buildings, etc. Choose your favorite illustrators from a list: Gustave Doré, John Leech, Charles H. Bennett…[and] Find illustrations by the title of the book or periodical in which they were published: Æsop’s fables, Punch, L’Illustration… The scans are high-resolution (though it appears the scanned items are sometimes worse-for-wear) and most come with lots of details about their original creation and printing.

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Public domain illustrations from old books

How the potato changed the world and altered the course of history

French fries. Baked potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Potato chips. Potatoes are everywhere because they’re easy to grow, nutritious, and totally delicious. But they’re also crucially important to the creation of the world as we know it. The modern world was built on potatoes! Ted-Ed explores the history of potatoes and shows how Western countries rose to power off the backs of potato eaters. Read more…

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How the potato changed the world and altered the course of history

A Totally Feasible Plan to Turn Manhattan’s Busiest Street Into a 40-Block Park

New York City has plenty of parks that revamp aging transit infrastructure: The High Line transforms a decrepit elevated rail route , the Lowline reclaims forgotten tunnels . But neither of those is as ambitious as the Green Line, a concept that would turn a major street into a linear park. Read more…

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A Totally Feasible Plan to Turn Manhattan’s Busiest Street Into a 40-Block Park

Developer Claims ‘PS4 Officially Jailbroken’

colinneagle sends word that a developer has claimed to have achieved a jailbreak of the PlayStation 4. Networkworld reports: “If you have a PS4 and want to run homebrew content, then you might be happy to know developer CTurt claimed, “PS4 is now officially jailbroken.” Over the weekend, CTurt took to Twitter to make the announcement. He did not use a jail vulnerability, he explained in a tweet. Instead, he used a FreeBSD kernel exploit. Besides posting “an open source PlayStation 4 SDK” on GitHub, CTurt analyzed PS4’s security twice and explained PS4 hacking. CTurt updated the open source PS4 SDK yesterday; he previously explained that Sony’s proprietary Orbis OS is based on FREEBSD. In the past he released the PS4-playground, which included PS4 tools and experiments using the Webkit exploit for PS4 firmware version 1.76. To put that in context, Sony released version 3.0 in September. However, CTurt claimed the hack could be made to work on newer firmware versions. Other PS4 hackers are reportedly also working on a kernel exploit, yet as Wololo pointed out, it is unlikely there might be more than proof-of-concept videos as the developers continue to tweak the exploit. Otherwise, Sony will do as it has in the past and release a new firmware version. In October 2014, developers nas and Proxima studied the PSVita Webkit exploit, applied it to the PS4, and then released the PS4 proof-of-concept. Shortly thereafter. Sony pushed out new firmware as a patch.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Developer Claims ‘PS4 Officially Jailbroken’

How Netflix Plans To Cut Its Behemoth Bandwidth Use

At peak hours, Netflix makes up a mind-bending 37 percent of all internet traffic in North America. So it’s come up with a new way of divvying streaming power to all its shows, which’ll not only make streaming faster, but also decrease the suffocating Netflix footprint on the online ecosystem. Read more…

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How Netflix Plans To Cut Its Behemoth Bandwidth Use