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And yet Ars Technica claimed in an article that there were indeed ransom demands made to Dyn. That seems to be at odds with Flashpoint's statement.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Given the links between the Mirai DDoS on Brian Krebs, and Dyn's involvement in helping him research that, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it wasn't the same or related groups of cybercriminals responsible for both.

Inspired by Hypercard.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

What's new is this is an exploit uses a hardware vulnerability, not a software vulnerability. While Ars is lacking specific details, the article reads as though it's a vulnerability in a common type of memory chip (or controller thereof) and doesn't depend on a specific version of Android or Dalvik. That sounds different to me, but I'm no expert.

And more ignorant nonsense gets modded Informative. The anti-science here is getting worse. Posters like you not only drastically overestimate your own knowledge of unfamiliar fields, you then insist to others it must all be a scam.

Weather and climate models aren't some arbitrary curve-fitting; they're physically based using ridiculously detailed physical simulations of air movements and ocean currents, starting from an observed state and running the simulation forward. Read up a little, and maybe you'll learn how to learn again.

And the over-zealous faith in anything tagged science is just as bad.

Simulations of plasma physics are orders of magnitude more detailed still, and examining problems over immensely smaller timescales, like fractions of seconds of a cubic metre, as opposed to decades and centuries of our entire planet. Go talk to physicists working with plasma physics though and ask them about computer simulated predictions for any radical new plasma confinement configuration. The computer simulated results are a reasonable starting point, but are certainly not considered definitive by anybody. More often than not, on building a real world machine it doesn't match the simulation. So much so in fact, that often times demonstrating a promising configuration in a computer model isn't enough to even get a prototype built.

The sacrifices in accuracy made for a plasma physics model is minute compared to what climate models have to do. We are talking computational cells the mesuared in miles in many cases.

You can act indignant and rail against claims that over fitting isn't a problem because of the physical simulation underneath, but you are simply flat wrong. The enormous number of simplifications made to compute results is a huge window for injecting over fit into a hindcast. Read up on climate model tuning and you'll see the authors themselves saying EXACTLY that(quote at the end). They note that there are times were you get better results by taking variables AWAY from the more realistic values they should have.

CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution.

And more ignorant nonsense gets modded Informative. The anti-science here is getting worse. Posters like you not only drastically overestimate your own knowledge of unfamiliar fields, you then insist to others it must all be a scam.

Weather and climate models aren't some arbitrary curve-fitting; they're physically based using ridiculously detailed physical simulations of air movements and ocean currents, starting from an observed state and running the simulation forward. Read up a little, and maybe you'll learn how to learn again.

And the over-zealous faith in anything tagged science is just as bad.

Simulations of plasma physics are orders of magnitude more detailed still, and examining problems over immensely smaller timescales, like fractions of seconds of a cubic metre, as opposed to decades and centuries of our entire planet. Go talk to physicists working with plasma physics though and ask them about computer simulated predictions for any radical new plasma confinement configuration. The computer simulated results are a reasonable starting point, but are certainly not considered definitive by anybody. More often than not, on building a real world machine it doesn't match the simulation. So much so in fact, that often times demonstrating a promising configuration in a computer model isn't enough to even get a prototype built.

The sacrifices in accuracy made for a plasma physics model is minute compared to what climate models have to do. We are talking computational cells the mesuared in miles in many cases.

You can act indignant and rail against claims that over fitting isn't a problem because of the physical simulation underneath, but you are simply flat wrong. The enormous number of simplifications made to compute results is a huge window for injecting over fit into a hindcast. Read up on climate model tuning and you'll see the authors themselves saying EXACTLY that(quote at the end). They note that there are times were you get better results by taking variables AWAY from the more realistic values they should have.

CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution.

I upgraded to 4.8 yesterday due to the Dirty COW bug.

Too many jokes about dirty cows are expected.

Or you can do a huge physically-based simulation using the real laws of thermodynamics, which is what they actually do.

I imagine it never occurred to you to wonder why they needed a supercomputer just to try a few statistical models, and still only managed 62% accuracy rather than 95%. If it had, you might have stopped to think.

Someone else who missed the big red flag. Here, learn something.

And more ignorant nonsense gets modded Informative. The anti-science here is getting worse. Posters like you not only drastically overestimate your own knowledge of unfamiliar fields, you then insist to others it must all be a scam.

Weather and climate models aren't some arbitrary curve-fitting; they're physically based using ridiculously detailed physical simulations of air movements and ocean currents, starting from an observed state and running the simulation forward. Read up a little, and maybe you'll learn how to learn again.

And more ignorant nonsense gets modded Informative. The anti-science here is getting worse. Posters like you not only drastically overestimate your own knowledge of unfamiliar fields, you then insist to others it must all be a scam.

Weather and climate models aren't some arbitrary curve-fitting; they're physically based using ridiculously detailed physical simulations of air movements and ocean currents, starting from an observed state and running the simulation forward. Read up a little, and maybe you'll learn how to learn again.

Linus explained on the GitHub link:

This is an ancient bug that was actually attempted to be fixed once (badly) by me eleven years ago in commit 4ceb5db9757a ("Fix get_user_pages() race for write access") but that was then undone due to problems on s390 by commit f33ea7f404e5 ("fix get_user_pages bug").

In the meantime, the s390 situation has long been fixed, and we can now fix it by checking the pte_dirty() bit properly (and do it better). The s390 dirty bit was implemented in abf09bed3cce ("s390/mm: implement software dirty bits") which made it into v3.9. Earlier kernels will have to look at the page state itself.

Also, the VM has become more scalable, and what used a purely theoretical race back then has become easier to trigger.

To fix it, we introduce a new internal FOLL_COW flag to mark the "yes, we already did a COW" rather than play racy games with FOLL_WRITE that is very fundamental, and then use the pte dirty flag to validate that the FOLL_COW flag is still valid.

So there was an attempt to fix the race condition over a decade ago, but it got undone.

Re "The government must mandate equal quality of life for all!"
How can that be done in inner city areas? What connection quality exists beyond landline telephone connections?
Coax? Something from the U-verse years? DSL?
"pulp- and paper-insulated feeder cables" (8/15/2014)
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Build a new network and allow any service to be selected? Offer a US wide service with a new national Bell System to look after it all?
Go with a Universal Service Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... thats offers "adequate facilities at reasonable charges" to inner city areas?
Who will fund, control, define and build adequate facilities? Is working voice and 911 adequate in an inner city area?
What kind of "Internet Access" should be built with subsidies? Tests for eligibility with citizenship and photo ID on application to get connected to a new fast gov network?
What speed should inner city users be offered if upgrades cannot be built given entire new networks need to be built to get past the paper and pulp tubes?
Enough to upload a scanned document to web 2.0 to interact with a city or state web portal? Make a VOIP call to a gov official or gov approved charity?
Should all websites be open to inner city users on this subsidies net? Or just a walled garden of approved social media, educational video sites and city/work/jobs/state/federal/gov services portals?
Should the US gov give free computers or locked down app devices for inner city users who can prove citizenship? A locked down browser that has a nice gui for gov/approved NGO/charity/employment/educational services?
Just fast enough to VOIP/webcam for a job interview after requesting such an outside network connection be allowed?
Quality services to escape poverty or contact local or federal bureaucrats, get health results back, improve nutrition, find a local free clinic, report someone for a gift card? New Internet Stamps for inner city areas?
Truck in contractors from country and wealth parts of the city to fix inner city internet services?

They've downgraded to plain old HTTP sitewide, it appears. Even if you go to https://arstechnica.com/ it redirects you back to the non-secure version.

this is a good point. Though I note that on the subject of stamps Apple is moving towards fewer on iPhones (see photo 3)- perhaps could apply to notebooks also?

You can look at the article instead. The Vice link doesn't seem to work correctly (or need to register for the feed?).

- "Ethical training" of people in A.I. fields, particularly as the technology is used to control more real-world objects that could lead to concerns about safety and security.

Doctors & lawyers receive ethical training, yet we still have a lot of unethical doctors & lawyers. If we created a "sentient" A.I., what's to say that it wouldn't find some way to get around its ethical programming by the people ethically trained to create it? Don't forget about Microsoft's recent venture.

Ethical training of people in A.I.

Not ethical training of A.I.

- "Ethical training" of people in A.I. fields, particularly as the technology is used to control more real-world objects that could lead to concerns about safety and security.

Doctors & lawyers receive ethical training, yet we still have a lot of unethical doctors & lawyers. If we created a "sentient" A.I., what's to say that it wouldn't find some way to get around its ethical programming by the people ethically trained to create it? Don't forget about Microsoft's recent venture.

That's not an announcement of an EOL of a product, it's speculation based on HR practices (You do know about EMC being bought out by Dell, right?), I think I'll wait for a real announcement before relying on The Register.

This already made the rounds at Ars. The current spat has nothing to do with Section 230. The warrant states that BackPages was complicit in editing ads to hide their illegality befor posting. That makes them complicit. Section 230 won't protect you if you edit the stuff your users post.

Anyway, the formal charges are here. Pimping is defied in teh CA Penal Code as profiting off of someone else's prostitution. I'd like to note that further reading of the Ars thread brings to light that things like Overt Act 9 are not nebulous "some child", but rather, that they have children who are testifying.

tl;dr: this is about section 230. This is about a company taking an active role in prostitution and sex trafficking.

Saying "an appeals court with a panel of judges" is redundant: Appeals courts are always judges, never juries. Anyone who has watched 5 minutes of any TV legal drama can tell you that. Here appeals judges were upheld a jury verdict.

For Jury Bias: http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

For Judge Bias: https://www.techdirt.com/artic... https://news.ycombinator.com/i... http://arstechnica.com/civis/v... http://www.law360.com/articles... https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

They're perfect brands for Verizon. These guys seem like real jerks to me.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizon-workers-can-now-be-fired-if-they-fix-copper-phone-lines/

They're failing to keep their promises and service agreements to push more lucrative tech. They shouldn't be operating as a telco if they are not willing to maintain the network. This is practically sabotage. I know I've moved on from POTS but but there's folks who can't and the alternatives don't serve them. If I couldn't get cable I'd be pretty pissed off if the telco didn't maintain the copper and DSL wasn't an option and they wanted me to use some expensive low cap data plan to fix the problem. Fuck Verizon. I know the other telcos like AT&T are guilty of a lot of things too... Maybe the rant should be fuck telcos and cable companies. I don't really feel the joy of capitalist marketplace choice when you only have one or two ways to be bent over and raped by a giant corporation.

AT&T is ending the program you are referring to.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

If only that were true: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

And the ruling that blocked the FCC from mandating competition? It was a suit filed by NC and TN.

Lawsuits happened over 10 years ago in Lafayette, LA. AT&T and Cox Cable sued the city for installing their own fiber.

http://lusfiber.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

For wireless, have you heard of the Quark VR adapter being worked on for the Vive? http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Sounds... unimpressive to me, especially seeing how as it streams over WiFi instead of a more optimized, higher bandwidth protocol, practically guaranteeing inadequate bandwidth and excessive lag. (though I don't know - if it only faked a dedicated wifi network well enough to not interfere with anything else, while mostly using a more optimized protocol...) But I think the basic concept is sound - make the currently-niche expensive specialty hardware of the helmet use the lowest-latency connections available, and then "graft in" a comparatively cheap modular wireless adapter for those who find the wires a bigger problem than the lag. And if/when you find it disappointing, well, just unplug it and go back to the low-latency wiring. At least you're not stuck throwing away the expensive part because the problematic cheap part is fully integrated.

I'm not sure I completely agree with your characterization of the processing demands though. Yes, trying to put the latest not-quite-photorealistic games into VR demands... well... everything you can throw at it, plus way more than you can afford. But that's not necessarily integral to the VR experience - numerous indie projects have shown that compelling VR experiences can be created with relatively simplistic cartoon graphics which can be rendered by comparatively slow hardware. And that might well be a market worth tapping into. Not everyone has been completely jaded by modern gaming systems, millions of people are are quite happy playing Farmville and the like - and might find great enjoyment in a relatively crude but extremely immersive gameworld. Heck, as a serious gamer it's been a decade since I made the drunken claim that graphics had reached the point where further improvement could no longer substantially contribute to gameplay, and nothing has happened to change my mind since then. And my smartphone has considerably more processing power than my gaming rig did back then.

"The headset currently requires Oculus's software suite to operate, which headset wearers must use to load games and find more software in the online Oculus Store. The software requires an Internet-connected process called OVRServer_x64, which sends and receives data even when you're not in a game, and the privacy policy spells out at least some of what's included in those transmissions."

"Oculus Rift’s privacy policy allows the company to gather information on users’ locations, physical movements, and interactions with games and services. The policy notes that Oculus may use that information for marketing and promotional purposes."

http://uploadvr.com/facebook-o...
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

It's important to note the headline is a lie from the hacker: the "dump" is a collection of docs from the previous DNC hack and has nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation.

The ploy clearly worked though - too many people stop at the headline.

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Oculus Rift is 461 PPI. Pixel phone is 441 PPI.

Note that 4K is a pixel count, not a resolution. A 4K 24" monitor has a different resolution than a 4K 50" monitor.

Doubt it.

Apparently these aren't actually Clinton Foundation Docs at all, they're from previous hacks. There also seems to be some deliberate bullshit thrown in.

I'm not a fan of the corporate media, but they do tend to be more reliable then shit created by an ex-spy whose country invented Maskirovska.

This makes no sense. The most dangerous red light violations are the ones where the runner is totally oblivious to the traffic light (sleeping, drunk, talking to a passenger, etc). A camera wouldn't help under those circumstances. Red light cameras only change behavior in those cases where the driver sees running as a choice - during the first few seconds or when there is obviously no one coming on the cross street. These aren't the dangerous cases.

On the other hand, red light cameras increase rear-end collisions at lights. http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Also, as to the cell phone comment, this is the phone that was offered, and the only phone legally allowed to contain classified information: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

It was never meant to be hooked to State unclassified email, it is only for classified. For unclassified, State hands out a Blackberry.

http://press.blackberry.com/en...

What, the Ars Technica test where the Samsung S7 trumps the iPhone 7, just like we see here? That test?

What "Trumping"? First off, the iPhone 7 vs. the S7 isn't a fair fight. The S7 is larger in all dimensions, and has almost twice as much battery capacity. It SHOULD be getting like TWICE the battery-life; but instead, it ekes out a measly 44 extra minutes, or about 6%. Wow. That means NOTHING in real-world use; likely more like around 15-20 mins., depending on what you are doing. Talk about a battery-hog! Meanwhile, as Apple starts fine-tuning the OS (GCD?) to push more and more threads to the low-power cores, and does its usual re-nice-ing and other optimizations to balance the CPU load better, mark my words, we'll see that "Trumping" start going the other way, BIG time.

And just imagine what the battery life of the iPhone 7 would be if it had that much battery (and how much longer it would take to charge!).

By the way, the iPhone 7 Plus is already "Trumping" EVERY other phone that Ars tested, and that's BEFORE iOS starts being optimized for lower power consumption...

Come back around iOS 10.3 or so, and we'll talk. Meanwhile, those S7s will still be on the same ol' nasty, insecure Marshmallow, for better or worse. At least Marshmallow FINALLY has a better Permissions model though; so I guess there is that...

What, the Ars Technica test where the Samsung S7 trumps the iPhone 7, just like we see here? That test?

--With a drive that size (8TB) I hope you are at -least- mirroring it; and if you're not using ZFS or btrfs, you should have several backups *and* checksums on your files. The chances of bitrot and unrecoverable reads on a single spinning disk with that much storage are much greater.

REF:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/w...

https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

Considering Apple blatantly stole the iPhone design from LG, yes it was frivolous.

Really? If you're talking about the LG Prada, Ars Technica sure doesn't think so.

And again, it takes a severe case of Willful Blindness to NOT come to the conclusion that Samsung's product was far and away into the territory of "causing consumer confusion" between the two products; considering that, from 10 feet away, they are pretty much indistinguishable.

Face it: Apple was completely in the right to sue the pants off of Samsung for their nearly perfect copy of the iPhone (until you picked up the Samsung and compared its performance (or indeed, ANY Android phone's) with that of the iPhone, that is), and Samsung would have (and did) do the same to Apple.

This is a *huge* variance from Ars Technica's wifi battery testing:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

They found that the iPhone 7 lasted much longer in both of their web browsing tests than the HTC 10 and lasted only a bit less than the S7 and G5.

Even on Which's 3G (why only 3G ?) web browsing testing, phones with 1.5 times the battery don't get anywhere near that much extra life.

It's pretty hard to judge without more samples and more info on the testing methods but, taking these tests at face value:

a) iOS 10 seems *horribly* optimized for 3G phone calling
b) Android (along with whatever extra stuff is on the three Android phones) seems terribly optimized at the other stuff. They have *much* larger batteries but don't manage anywhere near commensurate battery life with Wifi or 3G web browsing tests.

VirnetX is regularly described as a patent troll, making most of its revenue through licensing the patents that it holds. They also instigated lawsuits against Microsoft and Cisco.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

If you don't surf questionable sites,

Yes, because no one has ever pushed a malicious ad into an ad network and got the ads published on big-name sites.

have an up-to-date av program

Everyone knows that AV detection rates are all less than 100%.

Be the first on your block to become part of a million watch botnet.

You thought 15000 CCTV cameras caused trouble? Insignificant compared to what a million watches can do.

You overestimate the value of new land, and there is a very restricted sense in which Mars can be considered "new land". GP is also wrong for different reasons.

There's a reason that the intelligence of rocket scientists is a byword. Their designs have to have very close tolerances and operate in extremes of environments that are both literally and figuratively beyond what can be found on Earth. The general idea is that you have to take a lot of the most explosive substances that you can find (usually corrosive and toxic as a bonus), put the absolute minimum amount of structural material around it, and then hope that when you make it explode, it does so in a controlled way.

Interesting related links: How NASA Brought the Monstrous F1 "Moon Rocket" back to life.
Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants [pdf].

The proposed rocket gives a thrust figure larger than that of the Saturn V rocket by a factor of ~3.6, or about nine times the Space Shuttle Solid Booster. As the Ars Technica article notes, "T]he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom." If anyone is under the impression that nothing can be learned constructing an engine three times more powerful, let them disabuse themselves of that notion. Directing and controlling forces of that magnitude is an awesome challenge, and if nothing else they're probably going to have to be pretty ingenious to find someplace to test it without destroying millions of windows.

In this case though, the value of the journey is mostly what we learn getting there. Mars is dead, and even if it were made of solid gold it would not be economical to retrieve it. Some few people may get to die on Mars, and God help us, there may eventually be some human born on that hellish world. We're not likely to be able to send enough people to have a self-sustaining colony, or a breeding population, and the only thing that we will get in return is new information. Mars may have some new physical surprises left for us, but it's probably pretty unlikely that we will learn anything of very great significance to us Terrans, and we can probably learn most of the same things (more slowly) using robots.

Going to Mars doesn't exactly open up the solar system to humanity, but it is an important step in that direction. Your political comments are nonsense, of course, but it's an interesting question whether we will ever have a good enough reason to colonize any extrasolar planets. Clearly now we lack the political will to go to Mars, but at some point it's going to be cheap enough that some nation-state will be able to find the motivation: the prestige of being first, if nothing else. In the long run, space elevators are merely a matter of materials science, which will drop the cost to LEO, and from there energetically speaking it's a short trip to the rest of the solar system. Even at that point though, the requirements to get to another world will be shall we say astronomically larger. (No, you don't get to propose violations of physical laws to get around this. If you don't understand why, go bother a physics professor.) It is difficult to imagine circumstances which would favor or enable the building of the kind of "generation ship" we would need to reach the stars.

The thing that Musk is not wrong about is that going to Mars is possible, and if our rockets today are not quite up to scratch, it's probably just a matter of time before we have sufficiently powerful ones. We have fuels which we know can do the job, and we're developing better ones, and scaling up a machine isn't going to be as hard as inventing it in the first place. Which is not to say it will be trivial but it will be possible. Probably they'll blow a lot of things up trying, but hey, welcome to rocke

thinks he'll be able to wring out some amazingly fat government subsidies

Exactly.
“SpaceX no doubt has some brilliant ideas about Mars. But who will pay?”

From the Ars Technica article:
“He’s made a lot of money from NASA over the years, and now he may be about to effectively tell NASA that they’ve had their head up their ass for a long time about how to go to Mars, that this is how we’re going to do it, and you’re going to pay. I don’t know how well that is going to be received.”
http://arstechnica.com/science...

My personal take is humans to Mars is a fantasy, perpetuated by an old dated Manifest Destiny. I see no huge landrush to the Gobi Desert even though it’s a thousand times easier to settle. Reason it is barren, inhospitable (except for a few hardened individuals). We romanticized about Mars because it is so far away (and will always be 20 years away from putting a man on Mars like fusion power is always 10 years away).

You mean like some troll paying out of pocket to hire other trolls to manipulate public opinion? Someone like, say...an American businessman?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

"Global Free Speech" doesn't exist and the US is largely responsible for that. Now the collective IQ of the American public has hit such a sugar-buzzed low that there are people who think that the purpose of free speech is to "disrupt elections." Meanwhile the more paranoid are concerned that some dirty foreigners might be attempting to "disrupt" their elections, completely ignoring the wealthy old-boys-network of AMERICAN citizens who are ACTUALLY disrupting elections, lobbyists, PACs and all.

And I'm sure I've left out some major categories.

Oh yeah, sex toys.

If you remember how to make an F1 engine for the Saturn5, NASA would like to talk to you.

NASA has pretty much got that one covered.

Ultimately this will just be another augment to automated monitoring, for use in any place where there is benefit to knowing people's emotions but a cost associated with having a human watch them all the time.

Like the TSA security check points at airports?

The TSA already tries to do behavioral profiling. I could see them jumping all over this as the latest magic cure-all to make up for the incompetence of their screeners who miss 95% of the things they're supposed to be watching for.

In your eagerness to point out the ineptness of the TSA, you may have missed the part where each individual's emotional responses have to be measured before subsequent emotional responses can be identified. Of course, this means it's useless for detecting the emotions of people who haven't been previously baselined, e.g., random people in a TSA screening line.

Ultimately this will just be another augment to automated monitoring, for use in any place where there is benefit to knowing people's emotions but a cost associated with having a human watch them all the time.

Like the TSA security check points at airports?

The TSA already tries to do behavioral profiling. I could see them jumping all over this as the latest magic cure-all to make up for the incompetence of their screeners who miss 95% of the things they're supposed to be watching for.

You don't need a diet with a fancy name, more willpower or agonizing exercise to lose weight. The basic problem is that sugar is chemically addictive and it's being added to all of our foods. You are constantly in withdraw (strung out) which reduces the amount of energy you have and thus get less exercise. The sugar industry has been suppressing science for half a century and they have finally gone too far because the general population is dying from sugar induced illnesses.

FYI: the reason people lose weight by abstaining from eating foods that are carbohydrates is because it's hard to add sugar to meat and vegetables but it's very easy to add it to carbohydrates.

Here is a better story with pictures of the phone and the skin grafts. Those brutal images should change your mind on the hyperbole.

Contrast impersonating a news professional with impersonating a cable repair person:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Or they just drop the charges entirely and walk away.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...