Tag: digest-golf

Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Aurich Lawson Giant social networking company Facebook has just announced it has “reached a definitive agreement” to acquire virtual reality headset maker Oculus for $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares valued at $1.6 billion. Oculus can earn another $300 million if it reaches unspecified performance milestones, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014. In announcing the deal, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the move is about much more than gaming, and goes well beyond the kneejerk FarmVille VR jokes that propagated at warp speed immediately in the announcement’s wake. “While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology,” Facebook said in a blog post . “Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education, and other areas,” he wrote. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play, and communicate.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]

Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Andrew Cunningham The California computer science student who hacked various women’s computers for the purposes of “sextortion”—including Miss Teen USA 2013, Cassidy Wolf —has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. The sentence comes after Jared James Abrahams pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and three counts of extortion last November. According to a press release published Monday afternoon by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Abrahams “used the nude photos to extort victims by threatening to publicly post the compromising photos or videos to the victims’ social media accounts—unless the victim either sent more nude photos or videos, or engaged in a Skype session with him and did what he said for five minutes.” As Ars Deputy Editor Nate Anderson wrote last year , Abrahams became decently adept at using remote administration tools (RATs), a malware used to spy on victims. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
Sextortionist who hacked Miss Teen USA’s computer sentenced to 18 months

Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Link:
Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

GitHub’s staff. GitHub GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee. Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch . The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account. Julie Ann Horvath. “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

Comcast and Time Warner Cable lost 1.1 million video customers in 2013

Mr.TinDC Comcast, Time Warner Cable (TWC), and all other top cable companies lost pay-TV subscribers in 2013, but the companies were able to boost their total broadband Internet subscribers, according to research by Leichtman Research Group. Comcast and TWC, the two biggest cable companies in the US, combined for 1.1 million lost video subscribers. Comcast finished 2013 with 21.7 million multi-channel video subscribers, down 305,000 according to  Leichtman’s research . TWC lost 825,000 video subscribers, dropping to 11.4 million.”The top nine cable companies lost about 1,735,000 video subscribers in 2013—compared to a loss of about 1,410,000 subscribers in 2012,” the research said. At the same time, Comcast added 1.3 million broadband Internet subscribers to hit a total of 20.7 million . TWC gained 211,000 broadband subscribers to bring its total to 11.6 million. Comcast’s 1.3 million broadband subscriber gain accounted for “49 percent of the total net additions for the top providers in the year,” the research said. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Taken from:
Comcast and Time Warner Cable lost 1.1 million video customers in 2013

How to set up your own private instant messaging server

For the past few years, I’ve run my own XMPP-based instant messaging server. It’s an incredibly convenient way for my wife and I to send links back and forth to each other while we’re on our computers, and I very much like the idea of not having to depend on a third party for the exchange of simple messages. Not that Google is going to mine a lot of useful data out of our instant messages anyway (though they would be able to tell that we like funny cat pictures)—still, the server has come in extremely handy on occasions in the past. Getting the server application set up is quite easy, and even better, it works with any XMPP-compatible instant messaging application—Adium, Pidgin, Trillian, and just about anything else that can speak the open XMPP protocol. The video below will walk through the process of setting up and installing Prosody , a lightweight Lua-based instant messaging server application. We’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 for our server, though Prosody is a cross-platform application and will run on Windows, OS X, and a number of different Linuxes. Strap in, grab your server, and let’s roll! Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original:
How to set up your own private instant messaging server

Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

Google’s makeover kicks the underlined URL to the curb, with a few other changes. Experiencing mild disorientation while using Google today? Google has quietly rolled out a subtle redesign for its search results that, among other things, removes the age-old hyperlink underline, bumps the font size two points, and evens out the line spacing. Google search results have gotten incremental changes over the years, and the search page certainly no longer looks like it did when the site first launched. Jon Wiley, the lead designer for Google search, took to Google+ Wednesday to say that the new look “improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look.” Having gone nearly a decade without underlined hyperlinks, we here at Ars wholeheartedly agree with the decision. The redesign moves Google up and away from competitors like Yahoo and Bing , which preserve the underline. However, it only catches Google up to the upstart DuckDuckGo, which does not use underlines and is cleaner still on its search results page, with truncated URLs for each result. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Google search redesign hews closer to competitor DuckDuckGo

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

Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting

We are used to illegal activities looking and feeling far more illegal than this. A new BitTorrent-powered video app has been released that beautifies the torrenting process to the point that TorrentFreak describes it as “Netflix for pirates.” The app, which is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, shows a catalog of movies and loads them up on a computer in an interface as seamless as that of most legit streaming services, but using means that are generally less than legal. Typically, torrenting a movie (illegally, if it’s copyrighted property) involves seeking out a sketchy torrent website littered with porn ads to download a .torrent file that users hope will actually result in a movie and not, say, a virus. The process’s pitfalls and risks are many, not to mention the potential for getting called out by one’s ISP and, in rare instances, being fined or sued. Popcorn Time eliminates the seedier aspects of torrent location in a slick app that doesn’t involve dealing with files, download speeds, or seeding—at least on the front end. The app began as a Github project that now has over 50 contributors. It is free, open-source, and has no ads or other money-making schemes. The app works by using an API provided by torrent service YTS to stream the file, which is then shared from the user’s computer after the download is completed. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Follow this link:
Popcorn Time reinvents the seedy process of torrenting