Tag: games

Hackers Leak Xbox One SDK Claiming Advancement In Openness and Homebrew

MojoKid writes Microsoft, it seems, just can’t catch a break. Days after a major hack took its servers offline on Christmas day, and after being lambasted in multiple stories for shipping games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection in nigh-unplayable condition, the company’s Xbox One SDK has been leaked to the public by a group calling itself H4LT. H4LT, which apparently objects to being called a hacker group, offered this explanation when asked why it was distributing the SDK. The group claims that “the SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One.” To be clear, what H4LT has done is a far cry from groups like Lizard Squad. The SDK for any given product is typically available behind some degree of registration, but they don’t necessarily cost anything. The SDK is one small component of creating the ecosystem that would be necessary to get homebrew up and running on the platform. Whether or not users will ever pull it off is another question” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Leak Xbox One SDK Claiming Advancement In Openness and Homebrew

AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Catching Up To and Beating Windows

An anonymous reader writes: Along with the open-source AMD Linux driver having a great 2014, the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver for Linux has also improved a lot. Beyond the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver closing in on Catalyst, the latest Phoronix end-of-year tests show the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is beating Catalyst on Windows for some OpenGL benchmarks. The proprietary driver tests were done with the new Catalyst “OMEGA” driver. Is AMD beginning to lead real Linux driver innovations or is OpenGL on Windows just struggling? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Catching Up To and Beating Windows

US Army Could Waive Combat Training For Hackers

An anonymous reader sends word that the U.S. Army may adjust some of its training practices and rules in order to attract the best “cyber warriors” available. “New U.S. Army cyber warriors could be spared the rigors of combat training to help the Pentagon attract badly needed recruits from the ponytail wearing Google generation, a top American general has suggested. Lt Gen Brown, commander of the US Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, said: ‘We need to give serious consideration to how the US Army could combine the technical expertise of the “Google” generation with its more traditional military skills. In order to gain an intellectual advantage over adversaries in cyberspace, we will need to tap into a talent pool that may not fit the stereotypical soldier profile. Our goal is to recruit the best talent possible.'” This is not the first time there has been talk about loosening requirements to fill these roles. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Army Could Waive Combat Training For Hackers

Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

An anonymous reader sends word that Rackspace has recovered from a severe distributed denial of service attack. “Over on the company’s Google+ page Rackspace warned of ‘intermittent periods of latency, packet loss, or connectivity failures when attempting to reach rackspace.com or subdomains within rackspace.com.’ The company’s status report later confirmed it had ‘… identified a UDP DDoS attack targeting the DNS servers in our IAD, ORD, and LON data centers [North Virigina, Chicago and London]. As a result of this issue, authoritative DNS resolution for any new request to the DNS servers began to fail in the affected data centers. In order to stabilize the issue, our teams placed the impacted DNS infrastructure behind mitigation services. This service is designed to protect our infrastructure, however, due to the nature of the event, a portion of legitimate traffic to our DNS infrastructure may be inadvertently blocked. Our teams are actively working to mitigate the attack and provide service stability.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rackspace Restored After DDOS Takes Out DNS

Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

An anonymous reader writes Linux 3.18 was recently released, thus making Linux 3.19 the version under development as the year comes to a close. Linux 3.19 as the first big kernel update of 2015 is bringing in the new year with many new features: among them are AMDKFD HSA kernel driver, Intel “Skylake” graphics support, Radeon and NVIDIA driver improvements, RAID5/6 improvements for Btrfs, LZ4 compression for SquashFS, better multi-touch support, new input drivers, x86 laptop improvements, etc. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.19 Kernel To Start 2015 With Many New Features

Human Eye’s Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate

jones_supa writes: It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look “video-y, ” and why do movies at 24 fps look “dreamy” and “cinematic.” Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here’s the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we’re no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we’re throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Human Eye’s Oscillation Rate Determines Smooth Frame Rate

Russian Hackers Stole Millions From Banks, ATMs

An anonymous reader writes Tens of millions of dollars, credit cards and intellectual property stolen by a new group of cyber criminals. Group-IB and Fox-IT, in a joint research effort, released a report about the Anunak hackers group. This group has been involved in targeted attacks and espionage since 2013. Anunak targets banks and payments systems in Russia and CIS countries. In Europe, USA and Latin America criminals were mainly focusing on retail networks as well as mass media resources. Anunak is unique in the fact that it aims to target banks and e-payment systems. The goal is to get into bank networks and gain access to secured payment systems. As a result, the money is stolen not from the customers, but from the bank itself. If they manage to infect governmental networks, they use the infrastructure for espionage. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russian Hackers Stole Millions From Banks, ATMs

A glow in the dark forest is a magical and trippy place

My, this is beautiful. Artists Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad teamed up in this projection map installation to create a ‘bioluminescent forest’ . The entire forest glows with light, from the mushrooms to the trees to the leaves to the grounds to the insects. The darkness is transformed into a magical place. Read more…

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A glow in the dark forest is a magical and trippy place

It Took 25 Hours of Continuous Concrete Pouring To Build This Aquarium

When the Miami’s Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science opens in 2016, it’s going to have an absolutely bonkers aquarium—imagine a giant camera lens, tilted on its side, that lets visitors walk below the tank and look up into it. Building it, as you might expect, entailed a feat of perfectly-timed engineering. Read more…

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It Took 25 Hours of Continuous Concrete Pouring To Build This Aquarium

Samsung Announces Production of 20nm Mobile LPDDR4, Faster Than Desktop DDR4

MojoKid writes Samsung announced today that it has begun volume production of its 8Gb LPDDR4 memory chips, with expected commercial shipments in 2015. The announcement is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, one of the most important characteristics of a modern mobile device is its battery life, and moving to a new memory standard should significantly reduce the memory subsystem’s power consumption. Second, however, there’s the clock speed. Samsung is claiming that its LPDDR4 will hit 3.2GHz, and while bus widths on mobile parts are significantly smaller than the 64-bit channels that desktops use, the higher clock speed per chip will help close that gap. In fact, multiple vendors have predicted that LPDDR4 clock speeds will actually outpace standard DDR4, with a higher amount of total bandwidth potentially delivered to tablets and smartphones than conventional PCs will see. In addition, the power savings are expected to be substantial. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Announces Production of 20nm Mobile LPDDR4, Faster Than Desktop DDR4