Tag: entertainment

Microsoft Leak Reveals New Windows 10 Workstation Edition For Power Users

Upon close inspection of the Windows 10 build that Microsoft accidentally pushed to insiders last week, several users are reporting discovering the reference of a new Windows 10 SKU. From a report: In a leaked slide, Microsoft describes the edition as “Windows 10 Pro for Workstation” with four main capabilities: 1. Workstation mode: Microsoft plans to optimize the OS by identifying “typical compute and graphics intensive workloads” to provide peak performance and reliability when Workstation mode is enabled. 2. Resilient file system: Microsoft’s file system successor to NTFS, dubbed ReFS, is enabled in this new version, with support for fault-tolerance, optimized for large data volumes, and auto-correcting. 3. Faster file handling: As workstation machines are typically used for large data volumes across networks, Microsoft is including the SMBDirect protocol for file sharing and high throughput, low latency, and low CPU utilization when accessing network shares. 4. Expanded hardware support: Microsoft is also planning to allow Windows 10 Pro for Workstation on machines with up to 4 CPUs and a memory limit of 6TB. Windows 10 Pro currently only supports 2 CPUs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Leak Reveals New Windows 10 Workstation Edition For Power Users

Trump Wants To Modernize Air Travel By Turning Over Control To the Big Airlines

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, President Donald Trump endorsed a plan to hand over oversight of the nation’s airspace to a non-profit corporation that will likely be largely controlled by the major airlines. Republicans argue that privatizing air traffic control will help save money and fast track important technological upgrades. But Democrats and consumer groups criticize that plan as a corporate giveaway that will inevitably harm passengers. The air traffic reform proposal, which fell short in Congress last year, would transfer oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to a government-sanctioned, independent entity that would be made up of appointees from industry stakeholders. The effort picked up steam when the union representing air traffic controllers endorsed the plan, citing years of understaffing by the FAA. Some passengers may balk at the idea of handing over day-to-day management of the nation’s highly complex air traffic control system to the same companies that rack up tens of thousands of customer complaints a year, and occasionally physically assault or drag passengers off their planes. But the Trump administration argues this is the only way to modernize a system that still runs on technology that’s been around since World War II. The FAA is already years into a technology upgrade known as NextGen, which involves moving from the current system based on radar and voice communications to one based on satellite navigation and digital communications. The FAA wants to use GPS technology to shorten routes, save time and fuel, and reduce traffic delays by increasing capacity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Trump Wants To Modernize Air Travel By Turning Over Control To the Big Airlines

Apple Announces New 10.5-Inch iPad Pro With Narrower Side Bezels, 120Hz Refresh Rate Display

At WWDC 2017 today, Apple unveiled a brand new iPad Pro with a 10.5-inch display and 40% narrower bezels. The new iPad features a 50% brighter True Tone display and “ProMotion” technology which increase refresh rates up to 120hz. 9to5Mac reports: The new iPad Pro includes dynamic refresh rate adjustments, screens move from 24hz to 48hz to 120hz. This maximizes battery life and performance, when you need it. The A10x Fusion chip improves CPU and GPU by at least 40%. Cameras have also been upgraded with the same sensor as the iPhone 7 on the back and the front. Apple demoed a photo app called “Affinity Photo, ” to demonstrate the 120hz refresh rates. Apple says new iPad Pro performance compares favorably with a desktop computer. This includes incredibly fast selections and fluid Apple Pencil interactions. Both iPad models start with 64GB of memory and maxes out to 500GB at the high-end. There are also several new software features for iPad, coming this fall with iOS 11: A new customizable Dock that provides quick access to frequently used apps and documents from any screen; Improved multitasking, including a redesigned app switcher that brings Spaces to iOS, making it easier to move between apps or pairs of active apps, used in Split View and now Slide Over; Multi-Touch Drag and Drop, which is available across the system to move text, photos and files from one app to another, anywhere on the screen; A new document scanner in Notes, which lets users easily scan single or multi-page documents, removes shadows and uses powerful image filters to enhance readability; and Deeper integration with Apple Pencil, with support for inline drawing to write along text in Notes and Mail, Instant Markup to easily sign documents, annotate PDFs or draw on screenshots, and a new Instant Notes feature, which opens Notes from the Lock Screen by simply tapping Apple Pencil on the display. New searchable handwriting makes it easy to search for handwritten text or characters. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Announces New 10.5-Inch iPad Pro With Narrower Side Bezels, 120Hz Refresh Rate Display

Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

After hunting down torrent sites for more than a decade, Hollywood now has a more complex piracy threat to deal with. From a report: Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their “business models” and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0. “Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own, ” McCoy said. “If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I’ll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as ‘Piracy 3.0’

British Airways IT Outage Caused By Contractor Who Accidentally Switched off Power

An anonymous reader shares a report: A contractor doing maintenance work at a British Airways data centre inadvertently switched off the power supply, knocking out the airline’s computer systems and leaving 75, 000 people stranded last weekend, according to reports. A BA source told The Times the power supply unit that sparked the IT failure was working perfectly but was accidentally shut down by a worker. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Airways IT Outage Caused By Contractor Who Accidentally Switched off Power

Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

Determining how to prevent acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption. From a report: HTTPS prevents governments and others from seeing the specific page users are visiting. For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn’t tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square. Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its service using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain articles on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full version would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its site with HTTPS. The Harvard researchers began by deploying an algorithm which detected unusual changes in Wikipedia’s global server traffic for a year beginning in May 2015. This data was then combined with a historical analysis of the daily request histories for some 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 in order to determine possible censorship events. After a painstakingly long process of manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researchers found that, globally, Wikipedia’s switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

Malicious Apps Brought Ad-Clicking ‘Judy’ Malware To Millions Of Android Phones

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The security firm Checkpoint on Thursday uncovered dozens of Android applications that infected users’ devices with malicious ad-click software. In at least one case, an app bearing the malware was available through the Google Play app store for more than a year. While the actual extent of the malicious code’s spread is unknown, Checkpoint says it may have reached as many as 36.5 million users, making it potentially the most widely-spread malware yet found on Google Play… The nefarious nature of the programs went unnoticed in large part, according to Checkpoint, because its malware payload was downloaded from a non-Google server after the programs were installed. The code would then use the infected phone to click on Google ads, generating fraudulent revenue for the attacker. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Malicious Apps Brought Ad-Clicking ‘Judy’ Malware To Millions Of Android Phones

JSON Feed Announced As Alternative To RSS

Reader Anubis IV writes: With Slashdot recently asking whether we still use RSS, it may come as a surprise that something interesting has happened in the world of news feeds this week. JSON Feed was launched as an alternative to RSS and Atom, eschewing the XML they rely on — which is frequently malformed and difficult to parse — in favor of a human readable JSON format that reflects the decades of combined experience its authors have in the field. The JSON Feed spec is a simple read that lays out a number of pragmatic benefits the format has over RSS and Atom, such as eliminating duplicate entries, adding the ability to paginate feeds so that old entries remain available, and reducing the need for clients to scrape sites to find images and other resources. Given that it’s authored by the developers behind one of the earliest, popular RSS clients and a recently Kickstarted blogging platform, the format is intended to address the common pain points currently faced by developers when producing and parsing feeds. While it remains to be seen whether JSON Feed will escape the chicken-and-egg stage of adoption, several clients have already added support for the fledging format in the week since its announcement, including Feedbin, Inoreader, and NewsBlur. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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JSON Feed Announced As Alternative To RSS

New OS/2 Warp Operating System ‘ArcaOS’ 5.0 Released

The long-awaited modern OS/2 distribution from Arca Noae was released Monday. martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM’s discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. ArcaOS offers a new set of drivers for ACPI, network, USB, video and mouse to run OS/2 in newer hardware. It also includes a new OS installer and open source software like Samba, Libc libraries, SDL, Qt, Firefox and OpenOffice… It’s available in two editions, Personal ($129 with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days [and six months of support and maintenance updates]) and Commercial ($239 with one year of support and maintenance). The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell. By Tuesday Arca Noae was reporting “excessive traffic on the server which is impacting our ordering and delivery process, ” though the actual downloads of the OS were unaffected, the server load issues were soon mitigated, and they thanked OS/2 enthusiasts for a “truly overwhelming response.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New OS/2 Warp Operating System ‘ArcaOS’ 5.0 Released

Popular Torrent Site ExtraTorrent Permanently Shuts Down

ExtraTorrent, the world’s second largest torrent index, on Wednesday said it is permanently shutting its doors. The site, which launched in 2006, had steadily climbed the ranks in the piracy world to become the second most popular torrent site, observing millions of daily views. TorrentFreak adds: “ExtraTorrent with all mirrors goes offline.. We permanently erase all data. Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones. Thx to all ET supporters and torrent community. ET was a place to beâ¦.” TorrentFreak reached out to ExtraTorrent operator SaM who confirmed that this is indeed the end of the road for the site. “It’s time we say goodbye, ” he said, without providing more details. ExtraTorrent is the latest in a series of BitTorrent giants to fall in recent months. Previously, sites including KickassTorrents, Torrentz.eu, TorrentHound and What.cd went offline. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Popular Torrent Site ExtraTorrent Permanently Shuts Down