Tag: california

Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

Will Nvidia give Linus a reason to lower his finger? aaltouniversityace Few companies have been the target of as much criticism in the Linux community as Nvidia. Linus Torvalds himself last year called Nvidia the ” single worst company ” Linux developers have ever worked with, giving the company his middle finger in a public talk. Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers’ good side. Yesterday, Nvidia’s Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that “NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able.” The first step was releasing documentation of the Device Control Block (DCB) layout in Nvidia’s VBIOS, describing the board’s topology and display connectors. Ritger continued: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Nvidia seeks peace with Linux, pledges help on open source driver

Apple releases iOS 7.0.1 update to fix fingerprint scanner

The new iPhone 5S is out and normal folks are getting their fingerprints all over it—exactly what Apple intended with the inclusion of the fingerprint scanner. However, early reviews have included the occasional note that the fingerprint scanner’s ability to enable iTunes purchases didn’t quite work correctly—the iPhone 5S would prompt for a password instead of simply accepting the fingerprint. To address this, Apple has issued an update to iOS 7 for the iPhone 5S (and also for the 5C, though it’s unclear what else the update addresses). Several other outlets are reporting that the update is only 17.5MB, but when I checked via iTunes on my fresh-from-the-box iPhone 5S, I got a download that was 1.39GB in size. We’ll have our full iPhone 5s review up as soon as possible, along with video showing off how the new devices (and their new cameras) work. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Apple releases iOS 7.0.1 update to fix fingerprint scanner

California Becomes First State In Nation To Regulate Ride-Sharing

Virtucon writes “Ride Sharing Services such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar received a big boost today when the California Public Utilities Commission approved rules that would allow them to continue to operate as long as the followed a few rules. This makes California the first state to adopt such rules and is expected to preempt local governments who are trying to clamp down on these services and try to regulate them like local taxi companies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Becomes First State In Nation To Regulate Ride-Sharing

California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students’ Social Media

An anonymous reader writes “A suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach to tackling the problem of cyber-bullying. It’s paying a company to snoop on students’ social media pages. ‘The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40, 500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14, 000 middle and high school students’ posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5, 000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9, 000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student “who was speaking of ending his life” on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California School District Hires Firm To Monitor Students’ Social Media

Intel’s Atom CPUs finally get serious with the new Bay Trail architecture

Intel News from a certain other company has overshadowed the 2013 Intel Developer Forum a bit this week, but Intel is hardly sitting still. For well over a year now, the company has been intensifying its efforts in the mobile space, first with Android phones and later with both Windows and Android tablets. The chips the company has been using to make these strides into mobile have all used the Atom branding, which has come a long way since its inclusion in the low-rent netbooks of years past. Chips like Clover Trail and Clover Trail+ have proven that an Intel phone’s battery life can hang with ARM chips from companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia, even if their performance sometimes leaves something to be desired. Now, Intel is ready to take the next step. We’ve talked about its next-generation Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) for tablets (codenamed Bay Trail ) before, and at IDF this week the company finally announced specific Bay Trail SKUs and devices that will include the chips when they ship later this year. Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Intel’s Atom CPUs finally get serious with the new Bay Trail architecture

Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Chad Miller Of all the new features of Apple’s new iPhone 5S , few have drawn more attention than the built-in fingerprint scanner known as Touch ID. Apple billed it as an “innovative way to simply and securely unlock your phone with just the touch of a finger.” More breathless accounts were calling it a potential ” death knell for passwords ” or using similarly overblown phrases . Until the new phones are in the hands of skilled hackers and security consultants, we won’t know for sure if Touch ID represents a step forward from the security and privacy offered by today’s iPhones. I spent several hours parsing the limited number of details provided by Apple and speaking to software and security engineers. I found evidence both supporting and undermining the case that the fingerprint readers are an improvement. The thoughts that follow aren’t intended to be a final verdict—the proof won’t be delivered until we see how the feature works in the real world. The pros I’ll start with the encouraging evidence. Apple said Touch ID is powered by a laser-cut sapphire crystal and a capacitive touch sensor that is able to take a high-resolution image based on the sub-epidermal layers of a user’s skin. While not definitive, this detail suggests Apple engineers may have designed a system that is not susceptible to casual attacks. If the scans probe deeply enough, for instance, Touch ID probably wouldn’t be tricked by the type of clones that are generated from smudges pulled off a door knob or computer monitor. In 2008, hackers demonstrated just how easy it was to create such clones when they published more than 4, 000 pieces of plastic film containing the fingerprint of a German politician who supported the mandatory collection of citizens’ unique physical characteristics. By slipping the foil over their own fingers, critics were able to mimic then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble’s fingerprint when touching certain types of biometric readers. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Fingerprints as passwords: New iPhone Touch ID gets mixed security verdict (Updated)

Austrian Professor Creates Kindle E-Book Copier With Lego Mindstorms

An anonymous reader writes “Using a Lego Mindstorms set, a Mac, and optical character recognition, Austrian professor Peter Purgathofer created a makeshift ebook copier. From the article: ‘It’s sort of a combination of high tech meets low. The scanning is done by way of the Mac’s iSight camera. The Mindstorms set does two things: Hits the page-advance button on the Kindle (it appears to be an older model, like the one in the picture above), then mashes the space bar on the Mac, causing it to take a picture.’ Purgathofer calls the creation a ‘reflection on the loss of long established rights.’ Check out the Vimeo video for a demonstration.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Austrian Professor Creates Kindle E-Book Copier With Lego Mindstorms

Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

Ron Amadeo Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, as is usual with Android updates, it’s taking much longer to roll out the general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares. 4.3’s headline features are a new camera UI, restricted user profiles, and support for new versions of Bluetooth and OpenGL ES. Other than the camera, these are all extremely dull, low-level enhancements. It’s not that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as possible. Why make boring updates? Because getting Samsung and the other OEMs to actually update their devices to the latest version of Android is extremely difficult. By the time the OEMs get the new version, port their skins over, ship a build to carriers, and the carriers finally push out the OTA update, many months pass. If the device isn’t popular enough, this process doesn’t happen at all. Updating a phone is a massive project involving several companies, none of which seem to be very committed to the process or in much of a hurry to get it done. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android

In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand’s Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent  bill actually states that a computer program is “not an invention.” Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty which requires patents to be “available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology.” Processes will still be patentable if the computer program is merely a way of implementing a patentable process. But patent claims that cover computer programs “as such” will not be allowed. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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In historic vote, New Zealand bans software patents