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Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: As expected, the Linux 4.13 kernel series was made official this past weekend by none other than its creator, Linus Torvalds, which urges all Linux users to start migrating to this version as soon as possible. Work on Linux kernel 4.13 started in mid-July with the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone, which already gave us a glimpse of the new features coming to this major kernel branch. There are, of course, numerous improvements and support for new hardware through updated drivers and core components. Highlights of Linux kernel 4.13 include Intel’s Cannon Lake and Coffee Lake CPUs, support for non-blocking buffered I/O operations to improve asynchronous I/O support, support for “lifetime hints” in the block layers and the virtual filesystem, AppArmor enhancements, and better power management. There’s also AMD Raven Ridge support implemented in the AMDGPU graphics driver, which received numerous improvements, support for five-level page tables was added in the s390 architecture, and the structure randomization plugin was added as part of the build system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released

Sharp Announces 8K Consumer TVs Now That We All Have 4K

Thuy Ong reports via The Verge: Now that you’ve upgraded to a shiny new 4K TV, Sharp has revealed its latest screen to stoke your fear of missing out: a 70-inch Aquos 8K TV. That 8K (7, 680 x 4, 320) resolution is 16 times that of your old Full HD (1920 x 1080) TV. Sharp calls it “ultimate reality, with ultra-fine details even the naked eye cannot capture, ” which doesn’t seem like a very good selling point. Keep in mind that having a screen with more pixels doesn’t buy you much after a certain point, because those pixels are invisible from a distance — while an 8K panel would be beneficial as a monitor, where you’re sitting close, it won’t buy you much when leaning back on the couch watching TV. HDR, however, is something else entirely, and fortunately, Sharp’s new 8K set is compatible with Dolby Vision HDR and BDA-HDR (for Blu-ray players). The lack of available 8K HDR content is also a problem. But there is some content floating around. The TV will be rolling out to China and Japan later this year, and then Taiwan in February 2018. Sharp is repurposing its 70-inch 8K TV as an 8K monitor (model LV-70X500E) for Europe, which will be on sale in March. There is no news about a U.S. release. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sharp Announces 8K Consumer TVs Now That We All Have 4K

60,000 Germans Evacuate While Officials Try To Defuse a WWII Bomb

More than 70 years ago the UK’s Royal Air Force dropped an 1, 100-pound bomb on Germany. They just found it. An anonymous reader quotes ABC: Residents in two German cities are evacuating their homes as authorities prepare to dispose of World War II-era bombs found during construction work this week. About 21, 000 people have been ordered to leave their homes and workplaces in the western city of Koblenz as a precaution before specialists attempt to defuse the 500-kilogram bomb on Saturday afternoon (local time). Among those moved to safety are prison inmates and hospital patients. Officials in the financial capital Frankfurt, meanwhile, are carrying out what is described as Germany’s biggest evacuation. Frankfurt city officials have said more than 60, 000 residents will have to leave their homes for at least 12 hours. Failure to defuse the bomb could cause a big enough explosion to flatten a city block, a fire department official said. “This bomb has more than 1.4 tonnes of explosives, ” Frankfurt fire chief Reinhard Ries said. “It’s not just fragments that are the problem, but also the pressure that it creates that would dismantle all the buildings in a 100-metre radius”… Police will ring every doorbell and use helicopters with heat-sensing cameras to make sure nobody is left behind before they start diffusing the bomb. Reuters notes that every year Germany discovers more than 2, 000 tons of live bombs and munitions, adding “In July, a kindergarten was evacuated after teachers discovered an unexploded World War Two bomb on a shelf among some toys.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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60,000 Germans Evacuate While Officials Try To Defuse a WWII Bomb

Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3%

Data for the month of August 2017 from reliable market analytics firm Net Applications is here, and it suggests that Linux has finally surpassed the three percent mark, quite possibly for the first time in recent years. According to Net Applications, the desktop market share of Linux jumped from 2.53 percent in July to 3.37 percent in August. There’s no explanation for what amounted for this growth. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Desktop Market Share Crosses 3%

Cummins Unveils Electric Semi Truck Before Tesla

Cummins has beat Tesla to the punch by unveiling its own electric semi truck. According to Forbes, the fully electric, class 7 day-cab urban hauler, called Aeos, gets 100 miles of range from its 140-kWh battery pack and can haul a 22-ton trailer. While the company does offer the options of additional battery packs to triple the range or a range-extending engine generator, the Aeos is better suited for city use rather than long-haul trucking. Autoblog reports: While this electric truck is a concept, it’s a working demonstration of a product Cummins plans to start producing in 2019. At the unveiling in Columbus, Ind., Cummins also revealed its latest near-zero-emissions natural gas engines, as well as the X15 and lightweight X12 clean diesel engines. The company said it is embracing new technologies that allow its customers to contribute to a sustainable future. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Cummins Unveils Electric Semi Truck Before Tesla

Massive New Spambot Ensnares 711,000,000 Email Addresses

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: A huge spambot ensnaring 711 million email accounts has been uncovered. A Paris-based security researcher, who goes by the pseudonymous handle Benkow, discovered an open and accessible web server hosted in the Netherlands, which stores dozens of text files containing a huge batch of email addresses, passwords, and email servers used to send spam. Those credentials are crucial for the spammer’s large-scale malware operation to bypass spam filters by sending email through legitimate email servers. The spambot, dubbed “Onliner, ” is used to deliver the Ursnif banking malware into inboxes all over the world. To date, it’s resulted in more than 100, 000 unique infections across the world, Benkow told ZDNet. Troy Hunt, who runs breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, said it was a “mind-boggling amount of data.” Hunt, who analyzed the data and details his findings in a blog post, called it the “largest” batch of data to enter the breach notification site in its history… Those credentials, he explained, have been scraped and collated from other data breaches, such as the LinkedIn hack and the Badoo hack, as well also other unknown sources. The data includes information on 80 million email servers, and it’s all used to identify which recipients have Windows computers, so they can be targeted in follow-up emails delivering Windows-specific malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Massive New Spambot Ensnares 711,000,000 Email Addresses

How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto

An anonymous reader shares a report: The ‘creator’ of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world’s most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi’s real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire’s identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him — his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s ‘known’ writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5, 000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM and then through MUSCULAR, the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi’s writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto

Ancient Tablet Reveals Babylonians Discovered Trigonometry

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Trigonometry, the study of the lengths and angles of triangles, sends most modern high schoolers scurrying to their cellphones to look up angles, sines, and cosines. Now, a fresh look at a 3700-year-old clay tablet suggests that Babylonian mathematicians not only developed the first trig table, beating the Greeks to the punch by more than 1000 years, but that they also figured out an entirely new way to look at the subject. However, other experts on the clay tablet, known as Plimpton 322 (P322), say the new work is speculative at best. Consisting of four columns and 15 rows of numbers inscribed in cuneiform, the famous P322 tablet was discovered in the early 1900s in what is now southern Iraq by archaeologist, antiquities dealer, and diplomat Edgar Banks, the inspiration for the fictional character Indiana Jones. Now stored at Columbia University, the tablet first garnered attention in the 1940s, when historians recognized that its cuneiform inscriptions contain a series of numbers echoing the Pythagorean theorem, which explains the relationship of the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. (The theorem: The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides.) But why ancient scribes generated and sorted these numbers in the first place has been debated for decades. Mathematician Daniel Mansfield of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) realized that the information he needed was in missing pieces of P322 that had been reconstructed by other researchers. He and UNSW mathematician Norman Wildberger concluded that the Babylonians expressed trigonometry in terms of exact ratios of the lengths of the sides of right triangles, rather than by angles, using their base 60 form of mathematics, they report today in Historia Mathematica. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ancient Tablet Reveals Babylonians Discovered Trigonometry

Bill Gates and Richard Branson Back Startup That Grows ‘Clean Meat’

A large global agricultural company has joined Bill Gates and Richard Branson to invest in a nascent technology to make meat from self-producing animal cells. “Memphis Meats, which produces beef, chicken and duck directly from animal cells without raising and slaughtering livestock or poultry, raised $17 million from investors including Cargill, Gates and billionaire Richard Branson, according to a statement Tuesday on the San Francisco-based startup’s website, ” reports Bloomberg. From the report: This is the latest move by an agricultural giant to respond to consumers, especially Millennials, who are rapidly leaving their mark on the U.S. food world. That’s happening through surging demand for organic products, increasing focus on food that’s considered sustainable and greater attention on animal treatment. Big poultry and livestock processors have started to take up alternatives to traditional meat. To date, Memphis Meats has raised $22 million, signaling a commitment to the “clean-meat movement, ” the company said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bill Gates and Richard Branson Back Startup That Grows ‘Clean Meat’

IRS Now Has a Tool To Unmask Bitcoin Tax Evaders

SonicSpike shares a report from The Daily Beast: You can use bitcoin. But you can’t hide from the taxman. At least, that’s the hope of the Internal Revenue Service, which has purchased specialist software to track those using bitcoin, according to a contract obtained by The Daily Beast. The document highlights how law enforcement isn’t only concerned with criminals accumulating bitcoin from selling drugs or hacking targets, but also those who use the currency to hide wealth or avoid paying taxes. The IRS has claimed that only 802 people declared bitcoin losses or profits in 2015; clearly fewer than the actual number of people trading the cryptocurrency — especially as more investors dip into the world of cryptocurrencies, and the value of bitcoin punches past the $4, 000 mark. Maybe lots of bitcoin traders didn’t realize the government expects to collect tax on their digital earnings, or perhaps some thought they’d be able to get away with stockpiling bitcoin thanks to the perception that the cryptocurrency is largely anonymous. “The purpose of this acquisition is to help us trace the movement of money through the bitcoin economy, ” a section of the contract reads. The Daily Beast obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act. The contractor in this case is Chainalysis, a startup offering its “Reactor” tool to visualize, track, and analyze bitcoin transactions. Chainalysis’ users include law enforcement agencies, banks, and regulatory entities. The software can follow bitcoin as it moves from one wallet to another, and eventually to an exchange where the bitcoin user will likely cash out into dollars or another currency. This is the point law enforcement could issue a subpoena to the exchange and figure out who is really behind the bitcoin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IRS Now Has a Tool To Unmask Bitcoin Tax Evaders