digest-golf – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Risky stem cell treatment reverses MS in 70% of patients in small study

MS brain lesion as seen on an MRI. (credit: James Heilman, MD ) By obliterating the broken immune systems of patients with severe forms of multiple sclerosis, then sowing fresh, defect-free systems with transplanted stem cells, researchers can thwart the degenerative autoimmune disease—but it comes at a price. In a small phase II trial of 24 MS patients, the treatment halted or reversed the disease in 70 percent of patients for three years after the transplant. Eight patients saw that improvement last for seven and a half years, researchers report in the Lancet . This means that some of those patients went from being wheelchair-bound to walking and being active again. But to reach that success, many suffered through severe side effects, such as life threatening infections and organ damage from toxicity brought on by the aggressive chemotherapy required to annihilate the body’s immune system. One patient died from complications of the treatment, which represents a four percent fatality rate. Moreover, while the risks may be worthwhile to some patients with rapidly progressing forms of MS—a small percentage of MS patients—the researchers also caution that the trial was small and did not include a control group. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Risky stem cell treatment reverses MS in 70% of patients in small study

Firefox 48 finally enables Electrolysis for multi-process goodness

Firefox, at long last, is going multi-process. Electrolysis (e10s), barring an eleventh-hour mishap, is coming to the masses with Firefox 48. In the words of long-time Mozillan Asa Dotzler, this is the most significant Firefox change the foundation has ever shipped. Back in July 2015, Firefox’s director of engineering Dave Camp said that some major changes were on their way, with the hope of winning back users and developers . Firefox’s market share has been flat or declining since 2010, ever since Chrome first started making major inroads. Finally getting e10s out the door (it was first announced in 2009!) was listed as one of Camp’s priorities, along with accelerating the retirement of XUL and XBL. Mozilla has been trialling Electrolysis to small groups of beta users since December 2015. In Firefox 48, which should be entering beta later today, e10s will be available to all users. Then, assuming no game-breaking issues are found, in six weeks (around August 2) the stable build of Firefox 48 will be released to the public with e10s enabled. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Firefox 48 finally enables Electrolysis for multi-process goodness

Verizon could rule the ’90s cyberscape as owner of both AOL and Yahoo

Yahoo’s once-iconic San Francisco billboard, pictured here in 2011. (credit: Scott Schiller ) Verizon is submitting a $3 billion (£2 billion) bid to purchase Yahoo’s core Internet business, according to The Wall Street Journal , which cites an anonymous source. Though at least one more round of bidding is expected, Verizon is reportedly the leading contender. A Verizon spokesperson declined comment when contacted by Ars this morning. Yahoo has been shopping itself around for months in an attempt to sell off just about everything except its valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Yahoo is also looking to sell other assets including real estate and patents, but Verizon reportedly isn’t interested in buying those. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon could rule the ’90s cyberscape as owner of both AOL and Yahoo

Serial hacker strikes again, finds vulnerability in Better Business Bureau

A provocative white hat hacker who has previously disclosed vulnerabilities in both California’s ObamaCare portal and FireEye’s core security product has now revealed a serious flaw in the Council of Better Business Bureau’s (CBBB) Web-based complaints application, which is used by nearly a million people annually to file complaints against businesses. The CBBB criticized the “unauthorized application vulnerability test” but said in a statement that they believe “the motivation was not malicious,” and are “not pursuing the matter further.” The CBBB is the umbrella organization for the independent local BBBs, the not-for-profit consumer advocacy groups that operate in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The BBBs attempt to mediate disputes between consumers and businesses, and also accredit businesses based on how well the business meets the BBB’s “Standards of Trust.” Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Serial hacker strikes again, finds vulnerability in Better Business Bureau

Musk’s remarks at conference imply Tesla has huge autonomous car advantage

(credit: Mashable) On Wednesday night Elon Musk grandly told audiences at the Code 2016 conference that we might be living in a simulated universe . That comment has certainly sparked attention, but he said something else that’s still got us scratching our collective head: when asked about self-driving cars, Musk said that he considers it a “solved problem,” and that “we are probably less than two years away” from safe autonomous driving. This timeline is consistent with one that he gave Ars in 2015, but the head-scratchy bit is that every other expert we’ve spoken to thinks true self-driving cars (Level 4 autonomy according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) are at least a decade out. NHTSA defines a level 4 autonomous car as one that “is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip. Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles.” Even Google’s experimental self-driving cars are classed as Level 3 by the agency. Autonomous driving experts we’ve consulted at Audi , BMW , Ford , Mercedes, and Volvo (all of which have extremely active self-driving research programs) have consistently told us the same thing: it’s comparatively easy to make a car drive itself on a highway where every car is going the same direction and there’s no pedestrian traffic. But a car that can drive itself through a busy urban interchange—think Manhattan or Mumbai at rush hour—is closer to 2030 than 2020. Even sensor OEM Mobileye, which supplies Tesla with some of its autopilot hardware , won’t have its Level 3-ready EyeQ5 system on a chip ready until 2020. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Kraftwerk loses hip-hop music-sampling copyright case

(credit: Tobias Helfrich ) After a decades-long battle, the Bundesverfassungsgericht (the supreme German Constitutional Court) has overturned a ban on a song that used a two-second sample of a Kraftwerk recording. In 1997, music producer Moses Pelham used a clip from 1977 release Metall auf Metall (Metal on Metal) in the song Nur mir (Only Mine) performed by Sabrina Setlur. Lead singer of Kraftwerk, Ralf Huetter, sued Pelham, and in 2012 the electropop pioneer won his case for copyright infringement in Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), gaining damages and a block on Nur mir . However, in today’s judgment, the eight judges of the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the lower court did not sufficiently consider whether the impact of the sample on Krafwerk might be “negligible.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Kraftwerk loses hip-hop music-sampling copyright case

HP splits again, as Hewlett Packard Enterprise spins off IT services

In 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced that it was splitting into two separate companies: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, selling servers and enterprise services, and HP Inc, selling PCs and printers. That split completed last year at the cost of more than 30,000 jobs . In a surprise announcement today, the company is about to embark on a second split: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is spinning off its IT services business. The low-margin outsourced IT services business, which HP got into with its $14 billion acquisition of EDS in 2008, is to be merged with Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) to create a new company currently known only as SpinCo. HPE will own half of the new company, HPE CEO Meg Whitman will be on the new company’s board, and HPE and CSC will each nominate half of the board members. CSC’s current CEO, Mike Lawrie, will become CEO of the new company. HPE says that the deal will save around $1 billion in operating costs. HPE shareholders will own shares in both companies, owning half of the combined company, with their stake valued at around $4.5 billion. They’ll also receive a $1.5 billion cash dividend. Additionally, the merger will see some $2.5 billion in debt moved to SpinCo’s books. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP splits again, as Hewlett Packard Enterprise spins off IT services

This 1996 Sega training video is the most ‘90s thing you’ll see this week

This internal Sega video for testers is a wonderful snapshot of the ’90s. If you’ve ever wondered what Sega was like at the height of its game-making powers, wonder no more. A staff video from the Sega vaults—made in 1996, the same year that the Sony PlayStation would begin to take over the world—has been released by the production company behind it, Green Mill Filmworks . Not only is the video a fascinating behind-the scenes look at game development and game testing, it is also, without doubt, the most ’90s thing I’ve ever seen. Even excluding the baggy clothes, questionable hair cuts, and horrifying denim, the desks of game testers interviewed—many of whom said they worked up to 90 hours a week squashing bugs—are littered with ’90s paraphernalia. My personal favourite, aside from the multiple appearances of the obligatory (for the ’90s at least) Jurassic Park merchandise, is the spinning holographic disk that appears 13 minutes in. I had one of those as a kid, and while I still don’t quite understand what the appeal was, they were all the rage at school, even over here in the UK. Of course, there’s lots of Sega tech on show too, with testers having access to the Mega Drive (Genesis to our US friends), 32X, Sega CD, Game Gear, Saturn, and even the short-lived Sega Pico, a laptop-like educational system for kids that was powered by Genesis hardware. Each tester was also issued with development cartridges—which you can see being loaded up with memory chips by hand around 18 minutes in—before having to sit and play the game relentlessly, using a VHS recorder (yes really) to record gameplay and identify when and how bugs appeared. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This 1996 Sega training video is the most ‘90s thing you’ll see this week

“Mega Cable” is here, as Charter finalizes purchase of TWC

(credit: Cole Marshall ) Charter Communications today said it has closed its acquisitions of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks following approvals from the Federal Communications Commission and regulators in California , the final state that had to sign off on the deal. Charter has nearly quadrupled in size as a result of the transactions, going from 6.8 million customers to about 25.4 million in 41 states, second in the US after Comcast’s 28 million. The merger drew opposition from some advocacy groups, including one that took to calling the new Charter ” Mega Cable .” The cost of the acquisitions was originally expected to be about $67.1 billion, though Charter will reportedly end up paying a bit more than that. Charter’s announcement today said, “The completion of the transactions will drive investment into the combined entity’s advanced broadband network, resulting in faster broadband speeds, better video products, more affordable phone service, and more competition for consumers and businesses.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Mega Cable” is here, as Charter finalizes purchase of TWC

Windows 7 now has a Service Pack 2 (but don’t call it that)

This should become a thing of the past. (credit: Microsoft ) Anyone who’s installed Windows 7 any time in the last, oh, five years or so probably didn’t enjoy the experience very much. Service Pack 1 for the operating system was released in 2011, meaning that a fresh install has five years of individual patches to download and install. Typically, this means multiple trips to Windows Update and multiple reboots in order to get the system fully up-to-date, and it is a process that is at best tedious, typically leading one to wonder why, at the very least, it cannot pull down all the updates at once and apply them with just a single reboot. The answer to that particular question will, unfortunately, remain a mystery, but Microsoft did today announce a change that will greatly reduce the pain of this process. The company has published a “convenience rollup” for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (and Windows Server 2008 R2), which in a single package contains all the updates, both security and non-security, released since the Service Pack, up through April 2016. Installing the rollup will perform five years of patching in one shot. In other words, it performs a very similar role to what Windows 7 Service Pack 2 would have done, if only Windows 7 Service Pack 2 were to exist. It’s not quite the same as a Service Pack—it still requires Service Pack 1 to be installed, and the system will still report that it is running Service Pack 1—but for most intents and purposes, that won’t matter. Microsoft will also support injecting this rollup into Windows 7 Service Pack 1 system images and install media. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 7 now has a Service Pack 2 (but don’t call it that)