user agreement – Page 6 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

It’s bash, it’s Windows, it’s not a virtual machine. Perhaps the biggest surprise to come from Microsoft’s Build developer conference last week was the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The system will ship as part of this summer’s Anniversary Update for Windows 10. WSL has two parts; there’s the core subsystem, which is already included in Insider Preview builds of the operating system , and then a package of software that Canonical will provide. The core subsystem is what provides the Linux API on Windows, including the ability to natively load Linux executables and libraries. Canonical will provide bash and all the other command-line tools that are expected in a Linux environment. Microsoft is positioning WSL strictly as a tool for developers, with a particular view to supporting Web developers and the open source software stacks that they depend on. Many developers are very familiar with the bash shell, with building software using make and gcc , and editing text in vi or emacs . WSL will give these developers versions of these tools that are equal in just about every regard to the ones you get on Linux, because they’ll be the ones you get on Linux running unmodified on Windows. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

Frontier customers still have problems three days after Verizon changeover

Former Verizon customers who were switched over to Frontier Communications on Friday are still reporting outages and other problems today. Verizon sold its FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas to Frontier, but the transition has not been smooth. On Friday, Frontier acknowledged a “technical issue” involving the integration of systems, but the company said it had been fixed by 9:30am ET that morning. That assurance seems to have been premature, with customers still reporting problems on DownDetector and Twitter throughout the weekend and today. “Onto the 4th day without Internet or any working account…any timeframe guys? This is getting really crazy!” one California customer complained today. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Frontier customers still have problems three days after Verizon changeover

New ransomware installs in boot record, encrypts hard disk [Updated]

Yet another harsh lesson for people who click things they shouldn’t. A new type of malware has been described, one that takes crypto-extortion to a new level. While most cryptographic ransomware variants are selective about what they encrypt—leaving the computer usable to make it easier for the victim to pay—this new entry targets the victim’s entire startup drive, encrypting the master file table (MFT). Called Petya, the new ransomware is just the latest ransomware deliberately tailored for victims within organizations with IT support instead of a broader audience. As BleepingComputer’s Lawrence Abrams documented , Petya is currently being delivered via Dropbox links in e-mail messages targeting human resources departments at companies in Germany. The links are purported to be to an application to be installed by the HR employee. Running the attachment throws up a Windows alert; if the user clicks to continue, Petya is inserted into the master boot record (MBR) of the victim’s computer, and the system restarts. On reboot, the malware performs a fake Windows CHKDSK, warning “One of your disks contains errors and needs to be repaired,” Petya then flashes up an ASCII skull and crossbones on a red and white screen, announcing “You became victim of the PETYA RANSOMWARE!” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago

Mugello Valley Project The ancient Etruscan stele was recycled 2500 years ago for use inside the foundation of a temple, which suggests that it is quite old. The stone is about 4 feet tall, and would once have stood as part of a sacred display. 3 more images in gallery The ancient Etruscan civilization, whose great cities dotted the west coast of Italy between 2800 and 2400 years ago, was in many ways the model for ancient Greece and Rome. Etruscans lived in city states with sumptuous palaces, beautiful art, and a complicated social structure. But we know almost nothing about their daily lives, in part because most of their writing was recorded on perishable objects like cloth or wax tablets. For that reason, a new discovery made by the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project could be revolutionary. At a dig outside Florence, a group of researchers have unearthed a massive stone tablet, known as a stele, covered in Etruscan writing. The 500-pound stone is 4 feet high and was once part of a sacred temple display. But 2500 years ago it was torn down and used as a foundation stone in a much larger temple. Hidden away for thousands of years, the sandstone stab has been preserved remarkably well. Though it’s chipped, and possibly burned on one side, the stele contains 70 legible letters and punctuation marks. That makes it one of the longest examples of Etruscan writing known in the modern world. Scientists believe it will be full of words and concepts they’ve never encountered before. Almost all the writing we have from Etruscan civilization is from necropolises, massive tombs that the wealthy elites used to bury their dynastic families for generations. So a lot of the vocabulary we’ve gleaned comes from what are essentially gravestones, covered in rote phrases and praise for the dead. This new stele could reveal a lot about Etruscan religion, and possibly the names of the god or goddesses worshipped at the city. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago

Rage-quit: Coder unpublished 17 lines of JavaScript and “broke the Internet”

(credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson) It all started with a request from the developers of a messaging application to an open-source developer to change the name of a library. It ended with JavaScript developers around the world crying out in frustration as hundreds of projects suddenly stopped working—their code failing because of broken dependencies on modules that a developer removed from the repository over a policy dispute. At the center of it all is npm, Inc. , the Oakland startup behind the largest registry and repository of JavaScript tools and modules. Isaac Schlueter, npm’s creator, said that the way the whole thing shook out was a testament to how well open source works—the missing link was replaced by another developer quickly. But many developers are less than elated by the fact that code they’ve become dependent on can be pulled out from under them without any notice. The disruption caused by the wholesale unpublishing of code modules by their author, Azer Koçulu, was repaired in two hours, Schlueter told Ars, as other developers filled in the holes in the repository. The incident is, however, prompting Schlueter and the team at nmp Inc. to take a look at how to prevent one developer from causing so much collateral damage. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rage-quit: Coder unpublished 17 lines of JavaScript and “broke the Internet”

9.7-inch iPad Pro and iPhone SE both have 2GB of RAM

Enlarge / The 9.7-inch iPad Pro isn’t quite the equal of the 12.9-inch version. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple has started distributing both the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro to journalists, and one of the first things to come to light has been the amount of RAM in each device. Memory in iDevices has a big impact on performance and general usability, but Apple almost never actually talks about it so we need to have hardware in hand before we can get the full story. The good news is that the iPhone SE has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus despite its smaller size and lower price. The not as good news is that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPad Air 2, not the 4GB of RAM on offer in the 12.7-inch version. RAM doesn’t have quite the same effect in an iOS device as it does in laptops and desktops—iOS was originally designed for low RAM devices and even though current iPhones and iPads have much more RAM than the 128MB in the first iPhone, the OS is still aggressive about ejecting apps from memory. Giving an iPhone or iPad more RAM doesn’t necessarily speed up general performance, but it does mean that apps and browser tabs need to be ejected from memory less often. Today this is particularly beneficial in Safari, which needs to reload tabs when they’re ejected from RAM—at best this process adds a couple extra seconds to what ought to be a simple tab switch, and at worst you don’t have connectivity and so can’t see the tab you’re trying to open. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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9.7-inch iPad Pro and iPhone SE both have 2GB of RAM

10 more OEMs pledge to make auto-braking standard in new cars

(credit: Ford) The number of car makers committed to making automatic emergency braking a standard feature on all new cars has doubled this week. On Thursday the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced that 20 manufacturers are now onboard with the plan, which will see AEB systems installed throughout their model range by 2022. In September of last year, we reported that 10 OEMs had already made the pledge. In the past, government mandates were needed to spread advanced driver safety aids like airbags or electronic stability control systems beyond the luxury cars in which they first appeared. In this case, the auto industry has gotten ahead of possible NHTSA regulation and looks set to implement AEB itself. Speaking at an event last Fall , NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said that NHTSA wanted to see OEMs implement AEB as quickly as possible. “Safety,” he said, “should not be a luxury item. Its an obligation for all of us.” Whether 2022 qualifies as “quickly” may be a matter of opinion, but may be reasonable given the long product development lifecycles of new vehicles. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

Littermates were injected with either a control virus (right) or a virus that knocked out O-GlcNAcTransferase (OGT) (left) in a subpopulation of cells in the hypothalamus in the brain. OGT knock out made the mouse eat twice as much as its sibling. This photo was taken about five weeks after virus injection. (credit: Olof Lagerlof ) After tediously tracking calories and willfully shunning cravings, many a dieter has likely dreamt of simple switch that, when thrown, could shut down hunger and melt away pounds—and scientists may have just found it. When researchers knocked down a single enzyme in the brains of mice, the rodents seemed to lose the ability to tell when they were full. They ate more than twice their usual amount of food at meal times and tripled their body fat within three weeks. And—most strikingly—when the researchers reversed the experiment, the mice just quickly stopped eating so much . Data on the enzymatic switch, published Thursday in Science , suggests a possible target for future drugs to treat obesity in humans. The enzyme is O-GlcNAc transferase, or OGT, which is known to work in a chemical pathway controlled by nutrients and metabolic hormones, particularly insulin. That pathway has long been linked with obesity. But researchers knew almost nothing about the how the pathway linked to the metabolic disorder or OGT’s specific role. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Off-switch for overeating and obesity found in the brain

LAX to SFO flights from United Airlines move to biofuel blend

(credit: United) On Friday, United Airlines announced that its flights between Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport will now be partly powered by a biofuel mix supplied by an LA-based company called AltAir Fuels. United runs four or five flights between LAX and SFO every day, and it will fill these planes up with a combination of 30 percent biofuel and 70 percent traditional jet fuel, according to the Washington Post . The biofuel portion of the mix will be made with a range of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae,” the Post writes; it was developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The airline has agreed to purchase 15 million gallons of the mix over the next three years from AltAir. Still, the Los Angeles Times points out that United burned through 3.2 billion gallons of traditional jet fuel last year, so that 15 million gallons is just a proverbial drop in the jet fuel barrel. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II

No rest for the weary. These days, you’re lucky if some titles from certain big publishers get a year or two of post-launch online support for their games before they’re unceremoniously dropped . And then there’s Diablo II . Blizzard issued a new version 1.14 patch for the nearly 16-year-old game Thursday, five years after the game was last officially updated (not to mention, four years since the game’s sequel launched with its own attendant post-release problems and patches ) The new Diablo II patch doesn’t add any new gameplay features, balance tweaks, or anything like that. Instead, Blizzard has added compatibility with modern operating systems like Windows 10 and OS X. But Blizzard says it’s working on improvements to the game’s “cheat-detection and hack-prevention capabilities” and hints at more improvements to come. “There is still a large Diablo II community around the world, and we thank you for continuing to play and slay with us,” Blizzard writes . “This journey starts by making Diablo II run on modern platforms, but it does not end there. See you in Sanctuary, adventurers.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II