wired – Page 5 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

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”

London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

An artist’s conception of the Boom aircraft at London’s Heathrow Airport. (credit: Boom) After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems. But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to The Guardian , Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City. The agreement brings Branson’s Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin’s base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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London to NYC in just 3.4 hours? A roundtrip will set you back $5,000

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

Intel’s high-end quad-core NUC ships in May for $650

Enlarge / The “Skull Canyon” Core i7 NUC. (credit: Intel) Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year , but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like along with its specs, release date, and cost. The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed “Skull Canyon,” includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ —not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel’s graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed ), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Mbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC. It’s got a good port selection, including a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, a mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, four USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, an SD card slot, a gigabit LAN port, and an IR sensor for use with remote controls. The HDMI 2.0 port ought to make some HTPC fans happy, since the standard NUCs are still stuck on version 1.4 and can’t view HDCP 2.2-protected content. And this is all in addition to the aforementioned Thunderbolt 3 port; this will be the first NUC since the original to support Thunderbolt, which opens up possibilities for external graphics cards down the line. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s high-end quad-core NUC ships in May for $650

SQL Server for Linux coming in mid-2017

Apparently. (credit: Microsoft) It’s not April 1. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group, announced today that next year Microsoft will be releasing a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux . A private preview is available today that includes the core relational database features of SQL Server 2016. The announcement implies two things. Either there is a large number of Linux-using corporations out there that are desperate for SQL Server’s feature set (as opposed to open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MaxDB, or the proprietary ones such as IBM’s DB2 and, of course, Oracle’s Oracle), or there is a large number of SQL Server-using organizations out there that are keen to ditch the cost of their Windows licenses but happy to continue to pay for their SQL Server licenses. Neither seems obvious to us. The Windows version will go into general availability later this year, with a wave of launch-related events starting on Thursday. SQL Server 2016 boasts new in-memory database capabilities that can make some workloads 30-100 times faster and support for encryption for data at rest, in memory, and on the wire. It also offers analytics support using R. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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SQL Server for Linux coming in mid-2017

New DisplayPort 1.4 standard can drive 8K monitors over a USB Type-C cable

(credit: VESA) Today, most new computers with DisplayPort or USB Type-C connectors support the DisplayPort 1.2 standard, which provides enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display at 60Hz over a single cable. In late 2014, VESA published the DisplayPort 1.3 standard, which increased the available bandwidth enough to drive 60Hz 5K displays or 30Hz 8K displays over a single cable. And today, VESA has finalized and released the DisplayPort 1.4 spec , which can drive 60Hz 8K displays and supports HDR color modes at 5K and 8K. The physical interface used to carry DisplayPort data—High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3), which provides 8.1Gbps of bandwidth per lane—is still the same as it was in DisplayPort 1.3. The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a “visually lossless” form of compression that VESA says “enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio.” This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR “deep color” over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables. USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too. The standard includes a few other features, most of which are targeted at home theater buffs: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DisplayPort 1.4 standard can drive 8K monitors over a USB Type-C cable

OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Enlarge / An errant update may have disabled your Mac’s Ethernet port recently. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) If you’re having problems with your Mac’s Ethernet port this morning, the culprit may be an errant automatic update that Apple published over the weekend. Luckily, the damage isn’t permanent: an Apple support article posted yesterday will walk you through diagnosing and fixing the problem, which involves connecting to your network via Wi-Fi and running a software update command in the Terminal. If you’re reading this and your Ethernet port is working fine, odds are good that you’ve already installed the follow-up update released to fix the problem. The culprit is an update for the System Integrity Protection feature for OS X, the El Capitan feature that protects some system folders and keeps unsigned or incorrectly signed kernel extensions (or “kexts,” roughly analogous to drivers in a Windows or Linux machine) from loading. In this case, the kext used to enable the Ethernet port on Macs was blacklisted—if you restarted your Mac after applying this update but before your computer had a chance to download the quickly issued fix, you’ll find yourself without an Ethernet connection. This blacklist isn’t updated through the Mac App Store like purchased apps or OS X itself. Rather, it uses a seamless auto-update mechanism that executes in the background even if you haven’t enabled normal automatic updates. Apple uses a similar mechanism to update OS X’s anti-malware blacklist, a rudimentary security feature introduced in 2011 following the high-profile Mac Defender malware infection and occasionally used to push other critical software updates . Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OS X blacklist accidentally disables Ethernet in OS X 10.11

Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Playing back a conversation, on the Windows Phone version. You’ll be forgiven for having forgotten about Skype Qik, the short video messaging service from Skype that Microsoft launched in October 2014. It offered low friction messaging—no need to create an account, merely having a phone number would do—similar to WhatsApp, SMS, or all sorts of other popular messaging services. Well, now it’s going away. The company says that the major features of Qik have been rolled into the regular Skype apps; video messaging already existed in Skype when Qik was released, and filters were added in October last year. As such, the app isn’t really needed any more, and Qik will stop working on March 24. Skype Qik was a successor to a short video messaging service called Qik that Skype bought in January 2011 for $150 million, just months before Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The original Qik service was built around capturing video messages and sharing them with others. It was closed down in April 2014, as Skype introduced its own integrated video messaging capability. In that context, the new Skype Qik was a little strange, as it overlapped strongly with both the previously shuttered service, and the newly-added Skype capabilities. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft kills off Qik, the video messaging service you didn’t know it had

Linux Mint hit by malware infection on its website, forum after hack attack

(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock) Linux Mint forum users, and anyone who downloaded and installed a copy of the 17.3 Cinnamon edition on Saturday have probably been compromised by hackers and need to take action immediately, the distro’s creator has warned. Clem Lefebvre, confirmed in a blog post that the “intrusion” had taken place over the weekend. He said: “Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.” He added that the resultant malware infection had only affected ISOs downloaded from the Linux Mint site on Saturday, February 20. “As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition,” Lefebvre said. However, by Sunday it was a different story , with Linux Mint confirming that its forums database had also been targeted in the hack of its systems. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip

(credit: Drexel University ) Since the tech boom began decades ago, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of electronics. Today, some technological dreamers are talking about “smart environments” where electronics are seamlessly integrated into our environment, providing comfort and convenience. For these dreams to be achieved, we need to get electronics—not just the chips—miniaturized to the point where sensors can be pervasive. This involves developing high-performance electrochemical storage devices to enable long-lived sensors and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. But efficient miniaturized energy storage devices have proven to be challenging to create; it can be done, but it’s hard to integrate the results with other electronics. Supercapacitors According to an article in Science , an international team of scientists has now reported some progress in this area—specifically with the design of micro-supercapacitors. Supercapacitors are a class of materials that can store energy through accumulation of charge at the surface of a high-surface-area carbon sheet. They typically have a good cycle life, moderate energy density (6 Wh/kg), and high power densities (> 10 kW/kg). Supercapacitors are a great replacement for batteries in applications that require high power delivery and uptake with a very long charge-discharge cycle life; micro-supercapacitors are the same kind of material but much, much smaller. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tiny micro-supercapacitors built directly on a chip