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Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

D. enigmata ron the right, with the three larger samples on the left representing D. discoides . PLoS one Over the past few years, studies of genomes have confused what we thought we knew about the origin of animal life. Instead of the simple sponges being the earliest branch off the animal tree, a group of relatively complex organisms, the ctenophores, seem to be the earliest branch . That finding has some serious implications as it suggests that a nervous system evolved twice . Now, some more traditional biology may upset the family tree even further. Old samples taken from the seabed near Tasmania contain examples of two different species that may belong to a phylum entirely unknown to us—one that split off near the base of the animal tree. The strange creatures also have features that suggest they may be related to remains from the Ediacaran, a period in which the first animal life appears in the fossil record. The samples actually date from a research cruise taken nearly 30 years ago, where a “sled” was dragged along the ocean floor and samples returned to the surface. The new species weren’t recognized as interesting when they were first found, so they were left mixed in with the rest of the collection, which was fixed with formaldehyde and then dumped in 80 percent ethanol. The samples suffered a bit of further abuse when one of the authors wanted to refresh the alcohol and was given 100 percent ethanol instead. (The paper actually notes, “Unfortunately absolute alcohol was provided without comment instead of the requested 80 percent ethanol.”) Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tasmanian depths may have been hiding unknown animal phylum

Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Front Porch ad. A Northern California company that bills itself as the “worldwide leader in Wi-Fi monetization” is the vendor behind Comcast’s and other US cable companies’ promotional advertising campaign performed through JavaScript injection, Comcast said Monday. Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed the vendor’s name, Front Porch of Sonora, hours after Ars reported that Comcast recently started serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. We wrote that Comcast’s decision to inject data into the net raises security concerns and cuts to the heart of the ongoing net neutrality debate . As it turns out, Front Porch also does business with Cox, Time Warner, Bright House, and Cablevision in the US, Front Porch CTO Carlos Vazquez said in a telephone interview. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet the tech company performing ad injections for Big Cable

Epic makes Unreal Engine 4 free for students

On Thursday, Epic Games announced that it would make the complete Unreal Engine 4 suite free to use for universities and students on a case-by-case basis. Interested teachers and students can now submit their credentials via Epic’s official site , and upon acceptance, they will have access to the suite without having to pay the standard $19 per month fee . “There’s no separate ‘academic’ version or anything like that,” UE4 General Manager Ray Davis said to Ars in a phone interview. “The cool thing is, as a student, even if you don’t decide to subscribe upon graduation, you’ll still retain access to any version of the engine you had at that point. We’re not leaving people hanging at the end of a school year or anything like that.” Though UE4’s university-specific offer isn’t quite as accessible as Crytek’s CryENGINE, which can be downloaded by anybody on a non-commercial basis, Epic’s revision does stem from feedback the company received after it announced UE4’s pricing structure during this year’s Game Developers Conference . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic makes Unreal Engine 4 free for students

Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

Within four days of the first public reports of a major flaw in OpenSSL’s software for securing communications on the Internet, mass attacks searched for and targeted vulnerable servers. In a report released this week, IBM found that while the attacks have died down, approximately half of the original 500,000 potentially vulnerable servers remain unpatched, leaving businesses at continuing risk of the Heartbleed flaw. On average, the company currently sees 7,000 daily attacks against its customers, down from a high of 300,000 attacks in a single 24-hour period in April, according to the report based on data from the company’s Managed Security Services division. “Despite the initial rush to patch systems, approximately 50 percent of potentially vulnerable servers have been left unpatched—making Heartbleed an ongoing, critical threat,” the report stated. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Heartbleed is the gift that keeps on giving as servers remain unpatched

US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Kevin / flickr The US Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has deleted nearly a decade’s worth of documents from four US appeals courts and one bankruptcy court. The deletion is part of an upgrade to a new computer system for the database known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. Court dockets and documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, were maintained with “locally developed legacy case management systems,” said AOC spokesperson Karen Redmond in an e-mailed statement . Those five courts aren’t compatible with the new PACER system. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

More Windows 9 rumors: one-click upgrades, interactive tiles, notification center

Rumors about the next major version of Windows continue to trickle out in the run up to an anticipated public preview in September. Neowin reports that internal builds of the operating system currently sport a one-click upgrade feature to update from one build to the next. While there’s no guarantee that such a feature will necessarily ship, it would be consistent with Microsoft’s move to more rapid releases and continuous improvement rather than infrequent major updates. Currently, upgrading Windows is a major undertaking. During betas and previews, there’s often no good ability to move from one build to the next without performing a full reinstall. Even when moving between stable versions, upgrading can be failure-prone and time-consuming. While it’s possible that the upgrade capability will be limited to previews, it looks like a strong indication that Microsoft wants to make this process easier. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

According to the slides, there will be three new NUC boards spread across give different boxes, all launching in the first half of 2015. FanlessTech We’re generally fans of Intel’s NUC (“Next Unit of Computing”) mini-PCs, which use Ultrabook parts to create reasonably capable desktop PCs that can fit just about anywhere. When last we heard about new Broadwell-based versions of the boxes, they were due to launch in late 2014, but delays of higher-performance Broadwell parts has apparently pushed them back. New Intel slides from FanlessTech now show seven new NUC boxes launching in the first half of 2015. The slides also tell us what kind of boxes we can expect, though there are no big surprises here; the Broadwell NUC lineup is broadly similar to that of Haswell. There appear to be three boards: one high-end Core i5 model, one middle-end Core i3 model, and one Core i5 model with Intel’s vPro technology integrated to make it more appealing to enterprises. All appear to come in two types of enclosures, one with extra room for a 2.5-inch SATA III hard drive and one without. This makes for a total of six Broadwell NUC boxes. The revised NUC roadmap. FanlessTech All six boxes will share most of the same ports and features: two display outputs, Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, NFC, M.2 slots for SSDs, support for up to 16GB of RAM, and changeable lids (these may just be for customization purposes, though past rumors have suggested that some could be used as wireless charging pads). The vPro models will use two mini DisplayPorts while the standard i5 and i3 boxes will use one mini DisplayPort and one micro HDMI port, and all models appear to come with Intel’s 7265 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter soldered on—with current models, you must supply your own mini-PCI Express Wi-Fi card. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

Prosecutors hit Silk Road suspect Ross Ulbricht with new drug charges

The US government claims these are Ross Ulbricht’s fraudulent identification cards. United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of NY Federal prosecutors have tacked on three new charges in the criminal case against Ross Ulbricht, the suspect that the government has identified as the mastermind of the Silk Road online drug marketplace. According to a 17-page amended indictment filed late Thursday night, the government added one count of “narcotics trafficking,” one count of “distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet,” and ” conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identification documents .” Previously, Ulbricht had been indicted in February 2014 on four formal criminal offenses: narcotics trafficking conspiracy, continuing criminal enterprise, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Prosecutors hit Silk Road suspect Ross Ulbricht with new drug charges

YouTube subscription plan leaks: offline play, no ads, 20 million songs

A handful of the full set of screenshots obtained by Android Police. Android Police More details have leaked about Google’s upcoming subscription service for YouTube, these in the form of screenshots posted by Android Police on Monday. The service, called YouTube Music Key, will give subscribers ad-free and offline playback of YouTube videos, as well as audio-only material. Per the screenshots, users will be able to play music on their mobile phones “with or without video, in the background, or with your screen off”—all things that the single-tasking YouTube apps could not previously do. Subscribers will also be able to play music via “YouTube Mix,” a recently-added feature that works similarly to radio stations on other streaming services. A YouTube Music Key subscription provides access to a 20-million-song catalog, roughly the same size as that of Spotify and Rdio , as well as a collection of material the app refers to as “concerts, covers, and remixes.” While YouTube is rife with content beyond artists’ official discographies, a lot of it of legally questionable provenance, it’s not clear from the screenshots how Google will decide what goes into YouTube Music Key. Subscribers to the service will also be subscribed to “Google Play Music Key” for free, which is likely a rebranded Google Play Music All Access . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube subscription plan leaks: offline play, no ads, 20 million songs

Linux-on-the-desktop pioneer Munich now considering a switch back to Windows

The world is still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop, but in 2003 it looked as if that goal was within reach. Back then, the city of Munich announced plans to switch from Microsoft technology to Linux on 14,000 PCs belonging to the city’s municipal government. While the scheme suffered delays , it was completed in December 2013. There’s only been one small problem: users aren’t happy with the software, and the government isn’t happy with the price. The switch was motivated by a desire to reduce licensing costs and end the city’s dependence on a single company. City of Munich PCs were running Windows NT 4, and the end of support for that operating system meant that it was going to incur significant licensing costs to upgrade. In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux. Later, the plan was updated to use LibreOffice and Ubuntu. German media are reporting that the city is now considering a switch back to Microsoft in response to these complaints. The city is putting together an independent expert group to look at the problem, and if that group recommends using Microsoft software, Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid of the CSU party says that a switch back isn’t impossible. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Linux-on-the-desktop pioneer Munich now considering a switch back to Windows

Ken May

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