Go To Jail For Visiting a Web Site? Top Law Prof Talks Up the Idea

David Rothman writes: Eric Posner, the fourth most-cited law professor in the U.S., says the government may need to jail you if you even visit an ISIS site after enough warnings. He says, “Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way—and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech. The law would provide graduated penalties. After the first violation, a person would receive a warning letter from the government; subsequent violations would result in fines or prison sentences. The idea would be to get out the word that looking at ISIS-related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden” There would be exemptions for Washington-blessed journalists and others. Whew! Alas, this man isn’t Donald Trump — he is a widely respected University of Chicago faculty member writing in Slate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Go To Jail For Visiting a Web Site? Top Law Prof Talks Up the Idea

Developer Claims ‘PS4 Officially Jailbroken’

colinneagle sends word that a developer has claimed to have achieved a jailbreak of the PlayStation 4. Networkworld reports: “If you have a PS4 and want to run homebrew content, then you might be happy to know developer CTurt claimed, “PS4 is now officially jailbroken.” Over the weekend, CTurt took to Twitter to make the announcement. He did not use a jail vulnerability, he explained in a tweet. Instead, he used a FreeBSD kernel exploit. Besides posting “an open source PlayStation 4 SDK” on GitHub, CTurt analyzed PS4’s security twice and explained PS4 hacking. CTurt updated the open source PS4 SDK yesterday; he previously explained that Sony’s proprietary Orbis OS is based on FREEBSD. In the past he released the PS4-playground, which included PS4 tools and experiments using the Webkit exploit for PS4 firmware version 1.76. To put that in context, Sony released version 3.0 in September. However, CTurt claimed the hack could be made to work on newer firmware versions. Other PS4 hackers are reportedly also working on a kernel exploit, yet as Wololo pointed out, it is unlikely there might be more than proof-of-concept videos as the developers continue to tweak the exploit. Otherwise, Sony will do as it has in the past and release a new firmware version. In October 2014, developers nas and Proxima studied the PSVita Webkit exploit, applied it to the PS4, and then released the PS4 proof-of-concept. Shortly thereafter. Sony pushed out new firmware as a patch.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Developer Claims ‘PS4 Officially Jailbroken’

YouTube axes direct video uploads from webcams

If you’re one of the few recording to YouTube straight from your webcam, the video-hosting site will soon get rid of that feature. On January 16th, you’ll no longer be able to capture video straight from the camera connected to your computer and upload it to the web. Google says the feature is “rarely used” and runs on “tech” (read: Flash ) that’s no longer supported. The tool has been around for years, debuting the same year Mountain View nabbed YouTube . Despite the direct upload abilities, it seems the feature wasn’t very popular with folks posting videos on the site. When the time comes, users will need to first save footage on their computer or mobile device before uploading via the web or YouTube apps for Android and iOS. [Image credit: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images] Via: The Next Web Source: YouTube

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YouTube axes direct video uploads from webcams

This electric car took almost a decade to build

We drive the Arcimoto SRK from Mark Frohnmayer’s Oregon-based electric carmaker to see how the eighth-generation concept stacks up against previous prototypes.The last time we checked in with Arcimoto, the Oregon-based electric carmaker was on the fifth version of its “everyday electric” SRK prototype. The year was 2011 and Arcimoto President and Founder Mark Frohnmayer was brimming with ideas to further improve the company’s SRK concept. Now, four years and three generations later, we catch up with Frohnmayer and the team at Arcimoto to see how the company’s eighth-generation SRK improves on its predecessors in every way. “A few weeks ago we finished our generation-eight prototype, ” said Frohnmayer. “It’s certainly a huge leap beyond what we had on the road in 2011 and this is what we’re actually intending to bring to the marketplace late next year.” By dropping nearly half the weight of previous versions, the eighth-gen SRK improves on range, performance and price, at a target MSRP of $11, 900. “The notion of the SRK was to be a product that anybody could afford, ” said Frohnmayer. Have an RSS feed? Click here to add Translogic . Follow Translogic on Twitter and Facebook . Click here to learn more about our host, Jonathon Buckley.

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This electric car took almost a decade to build

MST3K Breaks Kickstarter Record

the_Bionic_lemming writes: Raising over 6.3 million dollars in just one month MST3K fans helped push the new 14 episode series past the Official Kickstarter Veronica Mars total of $5, 702, 153 by raising $5, 764, 229 On Kickstarter. $600, 000 + Was added to the total from the Add on store at MST3K.com . And what’s more, they did it with only 48, 270 backers compared to 91, 585 Veronica Mars backers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MST3K Breaks Kickstarter Record

DHS Deployed Plane Above San Bernardino To Scoop Up All Phone Calls After Attack

schwit1 writes: Federal investigators looking into the San Bernardino massacre deployed a spy plane overhead after the attacks in an apparent attempt to find additional suspects. The Department of Homeland Security is said to have put up the single engine craft over the California city and ordered it to make repeated circles overhead. The craft would likely have been equipped with Dirtbox technology which can scan tens of thousands of phones in one go to identify suspects. The report adds to the intrigue about whether or not there were accomplices in the San Bernardino attacks, which took place last Wednesday and were the worst terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DHS Deployed Plane Above San Bernardino To Scoop Up All Phone Calls After Attack

AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

An anonymous reader writes: Basic ASLR was not implemented in 3 major antivirus makers, allowing attackers to use the antivirus itself towards attacking Windows PCs. The bug, in layman terms, is: the antivirus would select the same memory address space every time it would run. If attackers found out the memory space’s address, they could tell their malicious code to execute in the same space, at the same time, and have it execute with root privileges, which most antivirus have on Windows PCs. It’s a basic requirement these days for software programmers to use ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to prevent their code from executing in predictable locations. Affected products: AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky. All “quietly” issued fixes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky Antiviruses All Had a Common Bug

Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave’s 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing