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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

The internal tissues of the fossilized fern. Benjamin Bomfleur A violent death has led to a remarkably lucky preservation. Researchers in Sweden have discovered ferns that were buried suddenly in a volcanic eruption during the Jurassic period. The sudden burial has preserved stunning details of the fern, down to showing the plant’s chromosomes being separated during cell division. In fact, the details are sufficient to determine that its genome hasn’t undergone major changes in at least 180 million years. The fossil was found in a volcanic deposit in southern Sweden. It belongs to a group of plants called the royal ferns (technically, the Osmundaceae ). The group, which includes a number of different species, was already known as a bit of a living fossil, since some of its distinctive features have been seen on plants that are 220 million years old, and a variety of other fossil species look indistinguishable from modern forms. The samples themselves are simply stunning. Not only are the internal details of various plant tissues preserved, but internal details of individual cells have been preserved. These include cells at various stages of the cell division process; darker, dense material shows the chromosomes being split up between the two incipient daughter cells. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Spectacular fossil fern reveals Jurassic-era chromosomes

Oculus Rift “DK2” eyes-on: Finally, VR without the Ocu-latency

Calm down, Oculus DK2! Now’s not the time for fear. That comes later. Today’s announcement about the latest improved version of the Oculus Rift headset was good news for virtual-reality geeks, but it came with two caveats. First, this still isn’t the final model meant for wide consumption, but rather a second stab at the headset’s development kit. And second, it won’t reach its intended, limited audience of developers until July of this year. That’s not soon enough for the GDC-attending contingent at Ars! After all, we’re already desperate to escape our current tech-conference reality, mostly comprising grumpy faced games industry professionals. Thus, gaming editor Kyle Orland and I grabbed our press laminates and hopped the giant Oculus Rift line,  Wayne’s World -style , to take the refreshed headsets for a spin—and grill company founder Palmer Luckey in the process. I have shoved my eyes into the original Oculus headset a few times now, which means that I have no patience for its largest failings: latency and refresh. The original responds just slowly enough to your head’s motions to feel detached, but worse, its tiny screens suffer from a slight frame refresh hitch. Couple those with a low-resolution screen pushed directly into your skull, and even first-person gaming freaks like myself can expect a one-way ticket to Headache Town. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oculus Rift “DK2” eyes-on: Finally, VR without the Ocu-latency

Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Kyle Orland At a “Driving the Future of Innovation at Sony” panel today, Sony Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida revealed the company’s long-rumored plans to enter a virtual reality headset space that has gained new relevance in the wake of the Oculus Rift’s development . The headset, codenamed Project Morpheus (after the god of dream, not the Matrix character, Sony clarified), is being developed by an international team of Sony engineers. “Virtual Reality is the next innovation from PlayStation that may well change the future of games,” Yoshida said. “Nothing elevates the level of immersion better than VR,” he continued, adding that VR “goes one step further than immersion to deliver presence.” The headset will have its position and orientation tracked 100 times per second in a full 360 degrees of rotation within a three cubic meter “working volume.” Tracking will make use of high-fidelity inertial sensors in the unit itself, tiny tracking markers on the surface of the headset, and the same stereo PlayStation Camera that tracks the DualShock 4 and PlayStation Move. Sony R&D engineer Dr. Richard Marks wryly noted at the panel that the PlayStation Camera “almost seems as if it was designed for VR, actually,” to laughs from the audience. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony reveals Project Morpheus, its virtual reality headset for PS4

Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

The BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope at the South Pole, designed to measure polarized light from the early Universe. Steffen Richter When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately.  By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the  BICEP  microwave telescope located at the South Pole.  Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size. BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe. Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Detection of primordial gravitational waves announced

GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

GitHub’s staff. GitHub GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee. Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch . The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account. Julie Ann Horvath. “I met her and almost immediately the conversation that I thought was supposed to be casual turned into something very inappropriate,” Horvath told TechCrunch. “She began telling me about how she informs her husband’s decision-making at GitHub, how I better not leave GitHub and write something bad about them, and how she had been told by her husband that she should intervene with my relationship to be sure I was ‘made very happy’ so that I wouldn’t quit and say something nasty about her husband’s company because ‘he had worked so hard.’” Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after harassment claim

Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

BGPMon’s alert on the detection of the change to the route to Google’s primary DNS server. BGPmon.net For about a half hour on Saturday, some requests to one of Google’s DNS servers in the US were re-routed through a network in Venezuela. A false Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcement from the Venezuelan network caused the diversion, which affected networks primarily in Venezuela and Brazil, as well as a university network in Florida. It all started at 5:23pm Greenwich Time (UTC). Andree Toonk of the network monitoring service BGPmon.net told Ars that the false routing request was dropped 23 minutes later, “most likely because the network that announced this route realized what happened and rolled back the change (to their router) that caused this.” During the intervening period, he said, traffic may have been re-routed back to Google, or it just may have been dropped. The result was failed DNS requests for those on the affected networks. Network rerouting through bogus BGP “announcements”—advertisements sent between routers that are supposed to provide information on the quickest route over the Internet to a specific IP address, such as the Google DNS service’s 8.8.8.8—have become increasingly common as a tool for Internet censorship. They’re used to stage “man-in-the-middle” attacks on Web users and to passively monitor traffic to certain domains. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google DNS briefly hijacked to Venezuela

How to set up your own private instant messaging server

For the past few years, I’ve run my own XMPP-based instant messaging server. It’s an incredibly convenient way for my wife and I to send links back and forth to each other while we’re on our computers, and I very much like the idea of not having to depend on a third party for the exchange of simple messages. Not that Google is going to mine a lot of useful data out of our instant messages anyway (though they would be able to tell that we like funny cat pictures)—still, the server has come in extremely handy on occasions in the past. Getting the server application set up is quite easy, and even better, it works with any XMPP-compatible instant messaging application—Adium, Pidgin, Trillian, and just about anything else that can speak the open XMPP protocol. The video below will walk through the process of setting up and installing Prosody , a lightweight Lua-based instant messaging server application. We’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 for our server, though Prosody is a cross-platform application and will run on Windows, OS X, and a number of different Linuxes. Strap in, grab your server, and let’s roll! Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to set up your own private instant messaging server

In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

Photograph by David Davies In a historic decision on Friday, the United States has decided to give up control of the authoritative root zone file, which contains all names and addresses of all top-level domain names. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), under the United States Department of Commerce, has retained ultimate control of the domain name system (DNS) since transitioning it from a government project into private hands in 1997. With Commerce’s blessing, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) acts as the primary essential governing body for Internet policy. The new change is  in advance of the upcoming ICANN meeting to be held in Brazil in April 2014. Brazil has fumed at revelations of American spying on its political leaders and corporations, which were first revealed in September 2013 as the result of documents distributed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The South American country also threatened to build its “own cloud,” as a consequence of the NSA’s spying. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone

NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has kept a push-button hacking system called Turbine that allows the agency to scale up the number of networks it has access to from hundreds to potentially millions. The news comes from new Edward Snowden documents published by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept today. The leaked information details how the NSA has used Turbine to ramp up its hacking capacity to “industrial scale,” plant malware that breaks the security on virtual private networks (VPNs) and digital voice communications, and collect data and subvert targeted networks on a once-unimaginable scale. Turbine is part of Turbulence, the collection of systems that also includes the Turmoil network surveillance system that feeds the NSA’s XKeyscore surveillance database. While it is controlled from NSA and GCHQ headquarters, it is a distributed set of attack systems equipped with packaged “exploits” that take advantage of the ability the NSA and GCHQ have to insert themselves as a “man in the middle” at Internet chokepoints. Using that position of power, Turbine can automate functions of Turbulence systems to corrupt data in transit between two Internet addresses, adding malware to webpages being viewed or otherwise attacking the communications stream. Since Turbine went online in 2010, it has allowed the NSA to scale up from managing hundreds of hacking operations each day to handling millions of them. It does so by taking people out of the loop of managing attacks, instead using software to identify, target, and attack Internet-connected devices by installing malware referred to as “implants.” According to the documents, NSA analysts can simply specify the type of information required and let the system figure out how to get to it without having to know the details of the application being attacked. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world

Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed

Time to update! iOS 7.1 is here, and it fixes a lot of iOS 7.0’s biggest problems. Aurich Lawson There were about six months between the ouster of Scott Forstall from Apple in late October of 2012 and the unveiling of iOS 7.0 in June of 2013. Jony Ive and his team redesigned the software from the ground up in that interval, a short amount of time given that pretty much everything in the operating system was overhauled and that it was being done under new management. The design was tweaked between that first beta in June and the final release in mid-September, but the biggest elements were locked in place in short order. iOS 7.1’s version number implies a much smaller update, but it has spent a considerable amount of time in development. Apple has issued five betas to developers since November of 2013, and almost every one of them has tweaked the user interface in small but significant ways. It feels like Apple has been taking its time with this one, weighing different options and attempting to address the harshest criticism of the new design without the deadline pressure that comes with a major release. We’ve spent a few months with iOS 7.1 as it has progressed, and as usual we’re here to pick through the minutiae so you don’t have to. iOS 7.1 isn’t a drastic change, but it brings enough new design elements, performance improvements, and additional stability to the platform that it might just win over the remaining iOS 6 holdouts. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Refinements, additions, and un-breaking stuff: iOS 7.1 reviewed