polls – Page 8 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Pull Requests Are Accepted At About The Same Rate, Regardless of Gender

An anonymous reader writes: Remember that story about how women “get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they’re women).” The study actually showed that men also had their code accepted more often when their gender wasn’t known, according to Tech In Asia — and more importantly, the lower acceptance rates (for both men and women) applied mostly to code submitters from outside the GitHub community. “Among insiders, there’s no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree.” Eight months after the story ran, the BBC finally re-wrote their original headline (“Women write better code, study suggests”) and added the crucial detail that acceptance rates for women fell “if they were not regulars on the service and were identified by their gender.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ Is Here For Christmas

Long time reader BrianFagioli writes: if you love Linux Mint and use it regularly, I have very good news — version 18.1 ‘Serena’ is finally here. There are two desktop environments from which to choose — Cinnamon and Mate. Regardless of which version you choose, please know that it is based on Ubuntu 16.04, which offers long-term support (LTS). In other words, Linux Mint 18.1 will be supported until 2021. Linux Mint 18.1 comes with the updated Cinnamon 3.2 which looks to be wonderful. The Mint team touts a new screensaver/ login screen in the desktop environment, and yeah, it looks good. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Kernel 4.9 Officially Released

“As expected, today, December 11, 2016, Linus Torvalds unleashed the final release of the highly anticipated Linux 4.9 kernel, ” reports Softpedia. prisoninmate shares their article: Linux kernel 4.9 entered development in mid-October, on the 15th, when Linus Torvalds decided to cut the merge window short by a day just to keep people on their toes, but also to prevent them from sending last-minute pull requests that might cause issues like it happened with the release of Linux kernel 4.8, which landed just two weeks before first RC of Linux 4.9 hit the streets… There are many great new features implemented in Linux kernel 4.9, but by far the most exciting one is the experimental support for older AMD Radeon graphics cards from the Southern Islands/GCN 1.0 family, which was injected to the open-source AMDGPU graphics driver… There are also various interesting improvements for modern AMD Radeon GPUs, such as virtual display support and better reset support, both of which are implemented in the AMDGPU driver. For Intel GPU users, there’s DMA-BUF implicit fencing, and some Intel Atom processors got a P-State performance boost. Intel Skylake improvements are also present in Linux kernel 4.9. There’s also dynamic thread-tracing, according to Linux Today. (And hopefully they fixed the “buggy crap” that made it into Linux 4.8.) LWN.net calls this “by far the busiest cycle in the history of the kernel project.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.9 Officially Released

5-Year-Old Critical Linux Vulnerability Patched

msm1267 quotes Kaspersky Lab’s ThreatPost: A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run of serious security issues in the operating system, most of which have been hiding in the code for years. Details on the vulnerability were published Tuesday by researcher Philip Pettersson, who said the vulnerable code was introd in August 2011. A patch was pushed to the mainline Linux kernel December 2, four days after it was privately disclosed. Pettersson has developed a proof-of-concept exploit specifically for Ubuntu distributions, but told Threatpost his attack could be ported to other distros with some changes. The vulnerability is a race condition that was discovered in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel, and Pettersson said that a local attacker could exploit the bug to gain kernel code execution from unprivileged processes. He said the bug cannot be exploited remotely. “Basically it’s a bait-and-switch, ” the researcher told Threatpost. “The bug allows you to trick the kernel into thinking it is working with one kind of object, while you actually switched it to another kind of object before it could react.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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5-Year-Old Critical Linux Vulnerability Patched

Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs

Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don’t weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn’t supported by all streaming providers — it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs

Google Asked to Remove a Billion ‘Pirate’ Search Results in a Year

Copyright holders asked Google to remove more than 1, 000, 000, 000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine over the past twelve months, TorrentFreak reports. According to stats provided in Google’s Transparency Report for the past one year, Google was asked to remove over one billion links — or 1, 007, 741, 143 links. From the article: More than 90 percent of the links, 908, 237, 861 were in fact removed. The rest of the reported links were rejected because they were invalid, not infringing, or duplicates of earlier requests. In total, Google has now processed just over two billion allegedly infringing URLs from 945, 000 different domains. That the second billion took only a year, compared to several years for the first, shows how rapidly the volume of takedown requests is expanding. At the current rate, another billion will be added by the end of next summer. Most requests, over 50 million, were sent in for the website 4shared.com. However, according to the site’s operators many of the reported URLs point to the same files, inflating the actual volume of infringing content. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Asked to Remove a Billion ‘Pirate’ Search Results in a Year

VLC Media Player Previews 360-degree Video Support

VideoLAN has released a technical preview of VLC Media Player 3.0 with 360-degree video support. The new build handles videos following the Spatial Video format, and photos and panoramas following the Spherical spec (the official test page has sample files). From an article on SoftwareCrew:The files play back just like any other video, but you can now left-click and drag within the screen or use the numeric keypad arrows to look around. VideoLAN says there are multiple display modes — Zoom, Little Planet and Reverse Little Planet — although we couldn’t immediately see how they were activated. This initial release is only available for Windows and Mac, but eventually 360-degree support will arrive for Android, iOS and Xbox One, with VR headset support likely to arrive in 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Dementia Rates Drop 24%, New Study Finds

A new study involving more than 21, 000 people across the country finds that dementia rates in people over age 65 fell from 11.6 percent in 2000 to 8.8 percent in 2012 — a decline of 24 percent. CNN reports: The decline in dementia rates translates to about one million fewer Americans suffering from the condition, said John Haaga, director of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the new study. Dementia is a general term for a loss of memory or other mental abilities that’s severe enough to interfere with daily life. Alzheimer’s disease, which is believed to be caused by a buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain, is the most common type of dementia. Vascular dementia is the second most common type of dementia and occurs after a stroke. The study, which began in 1992, focuses on people over age 50, collecting data every two years. Researchers conduct detailed interviews with participants about their health, income, cognitive ability and life circumstances. The interviews also include physical tests, body measurements and blood and saliva samples. Although researchers can’t definitively explain why dementia rates are decreasing, Langa said doctors may be doing a better job controlling high blood pressure and diabetes, which can both boost the risk of age-related memory problems. High blood pressure and diabetes both increase the risk of strokes, which kill brain cells, increasing the risk of vascular dementia. Authors of the study found that senior citizens today are better educated than even half a generation ago. The population studied in 2012 stayed in school 13 years, while the seniors studied in 2000 had about 12 years of education, according to the study. People who are better educated may have more intellectually stimulating jobs and hobbies that help exercise their brains, Langa said. The study has been published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Dementia Rates Drop 24%, New Study Finds

Second Chinese Firm In a Week Found Hiding a Backdoor In Android Firmware

An anonymous reader quotes Bleeping Computer: Security researchers have discovered that third-party firmware included with over 2.8 million low-end Android smartphones allows attackers to compromise Over-the-Air (OTA) update operations and execute commands on the target’s phone with root privileges. This is the second issue of its kind that came to light this week after researchers from Kryptowire discovered a similar secret backdoor in the firmware of Chinese firm Shanghai Adups Technology Co. Ltd.. This time around, the problem affected Android firmware created by another Chinese company named Ragentek Group. It apparently affects more than 55 low-end/burner phones from BLU, Infinix Mobility, DOOGEE, LEAGOO, IKU Mobile, Beeline, and XOLO. According to the article, the binary performing the insecure updates “also includes code to hide its presence from the Android OS, along with two other binaries and their processes… Without SSL protection, this OTA system is an open backdoor for anyone looking to take control of it.” Even worse, three domains were hard-coded into the binaries, two of which were unregistered, according to the researchers. “If an adversary had noticed this, and registered these two domains, they would’ve instantly had access to perform arbitrary attacks on almost 3, 000, 000 devices without the need to perform a Man-in-the-Middle attack.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police Raid Pirate Site, Seize 60 Servers Following MPAA Complaint

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: When it comes to shutting down pirate sites, few groups have a longer history than the Motion Picture Association of America. The Hollywood organization has dozens of pirate scalps under its belt and today is able to claim another. Serving more than a million users every day, FS.to was one of Ukraine’s largest pirate sites. Ranked the country’s 21st most popular site overall, the movie-focused platform attracted the attention of the MPAA and local rights holders alike. That has resulted in one of the biggest raids ever seen in the country. According to the cyber crime division of Ukraine’s national police, an operation shut down the platform Monday following a complaint from Hollywood. The authorities say that 19 people suspected of running the site via a network of local and offshore companies were arrested. The operation to shut the site appears to have been significant. Raids took place at the offices and homes of the suspects, plus datacenters where equipment running the site was installed. Thus far around 60 servers have been seized from a range of local ISPs but the operation is still ongoing so the tally could increase. Local sources indicate that the authorities have linked local Internet company Ferazko Holding Inc. with FS since it owns several of the site’s domains including FS.to, BRB.to and FS.ua. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Police Raid Pirate Site, Seize 60 Servers Following MPAA Complaint