Tag: california

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Photograph by David Davies In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United States Department of Commerce, has retained ultimate control of the domain name system (DNS) since transitioning it from a government project into private hands in 1997. With Commerce’s blessing, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the primary essential governing body for Internet policy. The new change is  in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil has fumed at revelations of American spying on its political leaders and corporations, which were first revealed in September 2013 as the result of documents distributed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The South American country also threatened to build its “own cloud,” as a consequence of the NSA’s spying. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

The number of Californians who walk, bike, or take transit on an average day has doubled in the last

The number of Californians who walk, bike, or take transit on an average day has doubled in the last decade, according to a new study by Caltrans. Also notable: More people in their 20s and 30s are not getting their licenses at all. [ Los Angeles Times ] Read more…        

More here:
The number of Californians who walk, bike, or take transit on an average day has doubled in the last

Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

Around this time last year Mozilla and Epic Games showed off the Unreal 3 game engine running in the browser, using a combination of the WebGL 3D graphics API and asm.js , the high performance subset of JavaScript. Commercial games built using this technology were launched late in the year. With this apparently successful foray into using the browser as a rich gaming platform, Mozilla and Epic today demonstrated a preview of Epic’s next engine, Unreal Engine 4, again boasting near-native speeds. The Web version of UE4 uses Emscripten to compile regular C and C++ code into asm.js. Unreal Engine 4 running within Firefox. Over the past year, Mozilla has improved asm.js’s performance, to go from around 40 percent of native performance, to something like 67 percent of native. Our own testing largely supported the organization’s claims, though we noted certain limitations at the time, such as JavaScript’s lack of multithreading. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Mozilla strives to take Web gaming to the next level with Unreal Engine 4

How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files

CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The CIA gave Senate Intelligence Committee staffers access to its data offsite—in a leased facility the CIA controlled. It sounds like something out of Homeland : at a secret location somewhere off the campus of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leases a space and hires contractors to run a top-secret network, which it fills with millions of pages of documents dumped from the agency’s internal network. But that’s apparently exactly what the CIA did for more than three years as part of an agreement to share data with the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on its controversial detention and interrogation program. And it’s also how the agency was able to gain access to the computers and shared network drive used by committee staffers in a search that Senator Diane Feinstein contended today  crossed multiple legal and constitutional boundaries. In a speech on the Senate floor this morning, Feinstein detailed the strange arrangement and accused the CIA of breaking its agreement with the committee on multiple occasions. She also accused the agency of reportedly filing a criminal report against committee staffers with the Justice Department in “a potential effort to intimidate this staff.” The details shared by Feinstein show the length to which the CIA went to try to control the scope of the data that was shared with Senate staffers—and still managed to give them more than some officials in the agency wanted to. Even with multiple levels of oversight, the CIA managed to hand over the data along with an internal review of that very data, which included the agency’s own damning assessment of the interrogation program. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read more here:
How CIA snooped on Senate Intel Committee’s files

Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

Intel’s pitch for Silicon Photonics. Intel and several of its partners said they will make 800Gbps cables available in the second half of this year, bringing big speed increases to supercomputers and data centers. The new cables are based on Intel’s Silicon Photonics technology that pushes 25Gbps across each fiber. Last year, Intel demonstrated speeds of 100Gbps in each direction, using eight fibers. A new connector that goes by the name “MXC” holds up to 64 fibers (32 for transmitting and 32 for receiving), enabling a jump to 800Gbps in one direction and 800Gbps in the other, or an aggregate of “1.6Tbps” as Intel prefers to call it. (In case you’re wondering, MXC is not an acronym for anything.) That’s a huge increase over the 10Gbps cables commonly used to connect switches and other equipment in data centers today. The fiber technology also maintains its maximum speed over much greater distances than copper, sending 800Gbps at lengths up to 300 meters, Intel photonics technology lab director Mario Paniccia told Ars. Eventually, the industry could boost the per-line rate from 25Gbps to 50Gbps, doubling the overall throughput without adding fibers, he said. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives

sciencehabit writes “Most magnets shrug off tiny temperature tweaks. But now physicists have created a new nanomaterial–an ultrathin 10-nanometer layer of nickel grafted onto a 100-nanometer-thick wafer of a substance called vanadium oxide–that dramatically changes how easily it flips its magnetic orientation when heated or cooled only slightly. The effect, never before seen in any material, could eventually lead to new types of computer memory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View article:
Nanomaterial May Be Future of Hard Drives

iOS 7.1 released, improves iPhone 5S stability, iPhone 4 speed, and more

After months of testing, iOS 7.1 is finally here. Andrew Cunningham Apple has just released iOS 7.1, the first major update to iOS 7 . The new update provides a variety of security and stability fixes, some speed improvements, and UI tweaks that refine the new design introduced back in December. The update is available for all devices that can run iOS 7: the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5C, and 5S; the iPad 2, both Retina iPads, both iPad minis, and the iPad Air; and the fifth-generation iPod touch. The update brings a whole pile of fixes. It addresses a crashing bug with the iPhone 5S, improves speed on the iPhone 4, introduces the new CarPlay feature, adds new accessibility options, and makes a handful of other refinements to the UI. The first iOS 7.1 beta was released to developers back in mid-November, and four additional betas have been issued since then. Throughout the beta cycle, Apple has continuously adjusted the operating system’s user interface, polishing it and making it more consistent. We’ve been playing with the iOS 7.1 betas for a few months now, and we’ll be publishing a full review of the software after we’ve spent a little more time with the final release. We’ll also be revisiting our original article about performance on the iPhone 4 later today. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Continued here:
iOS 7.1 released, improves iPhone 5S stability, iPhone 4 speed, and more

Teens get banned from an app after vicious attacks and threats

simon_bramwell The developers of Yik Yak , an app that works as an anonymous message board for up to 500 people in close proximity to one another, have selectively disabled the app’s use in Chicago following vicious sniping and rumor mongering by children using it at school. WLS-TV in Chicago reports that people in the city won’t be able to use Yik Yak until the developers figure out a way to get youth usage under control. Apps for sharing information anonymously like Wut and Secret have seen a recent surge in popularity. In the case of Wut and Secret, users are connected to people they actually know—Secret uses the mobile device’s contact list, and Wut’s (anonymous) contacts are powered by Facebook. Yik Yak, by contrast, connects a large swath of people—friends, enemies, and strangers—based entirely on their location. Among middle and high schoolers, this becomes many lockers’- and bathroom walls’-worth of pain and drama. WLS-TV reports students in Chicago have used it to spread rumors about rape, and in other locales, schools have been evacuated because of bomb threats on the service. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
Teens get banned from an app after vicious attacks and threats