North Korean state TV aired a bizarre video Friday afternoon showing off the country’s latest nuclear-capable ICBM. And while the Hwasong-17 missile was meant to be the star of the show, we all know the real star.
Source: Gizmodo – North Korea TV Airs Terrible Action Movie-Style Footage of Newest Nuclear Missile
While Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open industry standard backed by many notable hardware vendors, Intel engineers as usual are leading the charge when it comes to the Linux kernel bring-up. Intel engineers continue working on the Linux support around this high speed CPU-to-device/memory interface built atop PCIe…
Source: Phoronix – Intel Continues Preparing CXL With Linux 5.18
FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 3 is out as the latest weekly test build for this upcoming BSD operating system update…
Source: Phoronix – FreeBSD 13.1 Beta 3 Enables Reproducible Kernel Build Option By Default
With an improved camera, boosted performance and excellent battery life, Apple’s 2021 256GB 10.2-inch iPad is already a solid deal at the regular $479 price. However, you can now pick one up at Amazon in silver or space gray for $429, an all-time low and a full $20 less than the lowest price we’ve seen so far.
Buy 10.2-inch 256GB iPad at Amazon – $429
Sure, the 2021 iPad has rocked the same design for quite some time now, but that also means Apple has had a long time to polish and refine it. At the same time, there are some significant improvements. The wide-angle front camera works better for video calls, performance gets a big boost thanks to the A13 Bionic chip, and it delivers a solid 10-plus hours of battery life. It even has a headphone jack, and best of all, it’s relatively cheap compared to other iPad models.
The drawbacks are the lack of a USB-C port, a rather stodgy design (those thick bezels) and no second-gen Pencil support — for that, you’ll need an iPad Air, mini, or Pro. But most of us use an iPad for browsing the web, reading and watching video content. The 256GB model is a better choice than the 64GB version for things like that, so the $50 discount makes it an easy choice.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Source: Engadget – Apple’s 10.2-inch iPad with 256GB storage falls to a new Amazon low
For all those worried about the Firefox maker, now you can chip in five or ten bucks a month. The Mozilla Developer Network, which hosts free, open access to web standard documentation, tools, samples and other good stuff, is going pay-for-play with a premium subscription plan that adds new personalization features. …
Source: LXer – Mozilla creates paid-for subscriptions for web doc library
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Bandai Namco and CyberConnect2 have announced the remaster release of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R, which will be launched in the early fall of 2022.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle is a 3D fighting game originally released for the PlayStation 3 in 2014, featuring forty characters from the show’s previous animated seasons. The new remaster of the game will expand to a roster capacity of more than fifty characters, to accommodate the characters taken from the new season of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.
Japanese video game publisher and developer Bandai Namco and CyberConnect2, which did the original All-Star Battle, will collaborate once again to work on the remaster of the video game to maintain the authenticity of the creator Hirohiko Araki’s captivating art styles.
The remastered game modes will remain largely unchanged from the original release. However, the remaster does feature a revamped and improved fighting system, with new combos, dashes, and a new tag-team battle system called “Support Attack.”
With over one hundred battles with varying settings and conditions from their revamped All-Star Battle Mode, along with several special cosmetic skins and unique illustrations of the characters, the options have grown considerably.
The precise release date of the new video game remains unknown, but the firms have stated that it will hover between September and October 2022.
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The post JoJo’s All-Star Battle R Release appeared first on Akihabara News.
Source: Akihabara News – JoJo’s All-Star Battle R Release
DevSecOps adoption offers your enterprise improved security, compliance, and even competitive advantages as it faces new threat vectors, a new world of work, and demanding customers. It’s only a matter of time before DevSecOps subsumes DevOps because it offers the same core practices but adds a security focus to each phase of the development lifecycle.
Source: LXer – A guide to implementing DevSecOps
The world never run out of bad ‘B’ movies to mock, apparently, because Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) is back for a 13th season, Variety has reported. Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign last year that raised $6.52 million, a full 13-episode season of the series will arrive on a dedicated streaming platform called Gizmoplex starting on May 6th.
As usual, some ordinary humans have been kidnapped by mad scientists (played by Felicia Day, Patton Oswalt and Mary Jo Pehl) and are forced to watch some terrible B-movies. To survive the process, they create companion robots to help provide a continuous stream of taunting and jokes throughout the entire running length of the films.
This year there will be three hosts: Jonah Heston, Emily Connor, and original host Joel Robinson. They’ll “be forced to endure some of the cheesiest movies ever to appear on MST3K, including our first-ever Halloween special, our first-ever 3D movie, and a holiday special finale so big it’ll take all three hosts to riff it,” according to the team. The B-movies on the slate include Robot Wars, Santo in the Treasure of Dracula and The Million Eyes of Sumuru.
The show was created by Joel Hodgson and debuted in 1988. It ran for 10 seasons on Comedy Central and the Sci-Fi Channel until 1999, and was later revived by Netflix in 2017 for two seasons, following another Kickstarter campaign. However, Netflix declined to pick it up for a third season.
The latest revival will thus air independently on a dedicated MST3K platform called Gizmoplex, which offers a website and apps (iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, and Amazon FireTV). It’ll premiere on May 6th with three episodes released daily from Friday to Sunday. After that, new episodes and one of 12 shorts will arrive every two weeks. The platform will also offer classic MST3K episodes from season 1-10, and for a limited time, they’ll be free and ad-free.
If you want the new episodes, though, you’ll have to sign up (unless you pledged support on Kickstarter). Individual episodes will cost $10, a three-month pass is $50, and a full season from May 22 to February 23 is $135. The latter includes a digital download of season 13.
Source: Engadget – ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ is back on a dedicated streaming platform
If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm’s 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm’s estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Netflix Could Reap .6 Billion Per Year By Charging Password-Sharing Users Extra Fees, Analysts Say
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install or upgrade to the latest version of uGet download manager on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
Source: LXer – How to Install uGet on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
File shares are essential for collaboration in any network. The Samba team has just released version 4.16, which includes removing some of the obsolete components of the SMB 1 file-sharing protocol.
Source: LXer – Samba 4.16 Removes the Old SMB1 Protocol
Reddit is looking into the possibility of introducing some video features reminiscent of TikTok’s, according to TechCrunch. While the project is still in its very early stages and hasn’t even entered the testing phase yet, TechCrunch says it could include TikTok-like video editing tools that make it easy for you to “react” to another person’s post or to incorporate it into your content.
On TikTok, you can use a feature called Duet to put your video side by side with another user’s to create remixes, parodies and the like. In 2020, the service also introduced Stitch, which lets you integrate scenes from another video into your own. It enabled the quick creation of funny responses to viral videos and even responses that fact check wrong information going around on the platform. Reddit does allow you to post videos on its website, but it doesn’t have features like Duet and Stitch yet.
You probably wouldn’t think of Reddit if you’re made to list social networks with a focus on video. And the goal of this project isn’t to create a TikTok competitor, but rather to provide its users another way to engage in discussions, especially if the original post is also a video. Reddit did purchase TikTok rival Dubsmash back in 2020, but it shut down the service in February this year and incorporated video features from the defunct video-sharing platform. This particular project will also use video technology from Dubsmash.
A spokesperson told TechCrunch that Reddit is now reaching out to individual communities to see if they’re interested in the new video features. It will only take steps to begin initial testing after they receive (most likely positive) feedback from the communities:
“In line with our work to help people engage in the topics that matter to them through social audio, video, text, memes, and more, we’re in the process of reaching out to a few Reddit communities to see if a new video feature we’re working on is something they find useful and fun. After getting feedback from Redditors, we’ll explore an initial test for this new capability.”
Source: Engadget – Reddit is reportedly exploring the addition of TikTok-like video features
The HID subsystem updates have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.18 merge window…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.18 Has Many Apple Keyboard Improvements, New Razer Driver & Tablet Improvements
The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world’s most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The New York Times reports: The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy since the bloc put the world’s toughest rules to protect people’s online data into effect in 2018. The legislation is aimed at stopping the largest tech platforms from using their interlocking services and considerable resources to box in users and squash emerging rivals, creating room for new entrants and fostering more competition. […] The Digital Markets Act will apply to so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors including a market value of more than 75 billion euros, or about $83 billion. The group includes Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. Specifics of the law read like a wish list for rivals of the biggest companies. Apple and Google, which make the operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone, would be required to loosen their grip. Apple will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps, a change the company has warned could harm security. The law will also let companies such as Spotify and Epic Games use payment methods other than Apple’s in the App Store, which charges a 30 percent commission.
Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services so that it could offer competing products, a practice that is the subject of a separate E.U. antitrust investigation. The law will result in major changes for messaging apps. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, could be required to offer a way for users of rival services like Signal or Telegram to send and receive messages to somebody using WhatsApp. Those rival services would have the option to make their products interoperable with WhatsApp. The largest sellers of online advertising, Meta and Google, will see new limits for offering targeted ads without consent. Such ads — based on data collected from people as they move between YouTube and Google Search, or Instagram and Facebook — are immensely lucrative for both companies.
[…] With these actions, Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. European standards are often adopted worldwide, and the latest legislation further raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under new era of oversight — just like health care, transportation and banking industries.
“Faced with big online platforms behaving like they were ‘too big to care,’ Europe has put its foot down,” said Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission. “We are putting an end to the so-called Wild West dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide.” On Thursday, representatives from the European Parliament and European Council hammered out the last specifics of the law in Brussels. The agreement followed about 16 months of talks — a speedy pace for the E.U. bureaucracy — and sets the stage for a final vote in Parliament and among representatives from the 27 countries in the union. That approval is viewed as a formality.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – EU Takes Aim at Big Tech’s Power With Landmark Digital Act
Is “open” the future of human progress, as this recent book argues? Maybe. To know for sure, we’ll need to clearly define it—and the purposes it serves.
Source: LXer – Making the case for openness as the engine of human progress
Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: Microsoft’s DirectStorage API promises to speed up game-load times, both on the Xbox Series X/S and on Windows PCs (where Microsoft recently exited its developer-preview phase). One of the first games to demonstrate the benefits of DirectStorage on the PC is Square Enix’s Forspoken, which was shown off by Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono at GDC this week. As reported by The Verge, Ono said that, with a fast NVMe SSD and DirectStorage support, some scenes in Forspoken could load in as little as one second. That is certainly a monstrous jump from the days of waiting for a PlayStation 2 to load giant open-world maps from a DVD.
As a demonstration of DirectStorage, though, Forspoken’s numbers are a mixed bag. On one hand, the examples Ono showcased clearly demonstrate DirectStorage loading scenes more quickly on the same hardware, compared to the legacy Win32 API — from 2.6 seconds to 2.2 seconds in one scene, and from 2.4 seconds to 1.9 seconds in another. Forspoken demonstrated performance improvements on older SATA-based SSDs as well, despite being marketed as a feature that will primarily benefit NVMe drives — dropping from 5.0 to 4.6 seconds in one scene, and from 4.1 to 3.4 seconds in another. Speed improvements for SATA SSDs have been limited for the better part of a decade now because the SATA interface itself (rather than the SSD controller or NAND flash chips) has been holding them back. So eking out any kind of measurable improvement for those drives is noteworthy.
On the other hand, Ono’s demo showed that game load time wasn’t improving as dramatically as the raw I/O speeds would suggest. On an NVMe SSD, I/O speeds increased from 2,862MB/s using Win32 to 4,829MB/s using DirectStorage — nearly a 70 percent increase. But the load time for the scene decreased from 2.1 to 1.9 seconds. That’s a decrease that wouldn’t be noticeable even if you were trying to notice it. The Forspoken demo ultimately showed that the speed of the storage you’re using still has a lot more to do with how quickly your games load than DirectStorage does. One scene that took 24.6 seconds to load using DirectStorage on an HDD took just 4.6 seconds to load on a SATA SSD and 2.2 seconds to load on an NVMe SSD. That’s a much larger gap than the one between Win32 and DirectStorage running on the same hardware.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – DirectStorage Shows Just Minor Load-Speed Improvements In Real-World PC Demo
If you’re building multi-architecture solutions, you need to know how container image architectures work, how to pull them, and how to run containers on different systems using Podman.
Source: LXer – How to specify the CPU architecture when pulling images with Podman
I want to get this out of the way up top: I’m someone who can forgive many of a board game’s flaws if it looks good.
Source: Kotaku – Space Race: The Kotaku Review
A Japanese startup called H2L Technologies wants you to be able to feel pain inside the metaverse, via a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks. Futurism reports: “Feeling pain enables us to turn the metaverse world into a real [world], with increased feelings of presence and immersion,” H2L CEO Emi Tamaki told the Financial Times. The Sony-backed startup’s wearable isn’t designed with only inflicting pain in mind. It’s also meant to convey “weight and resistance feeling to users and avatars on the Metaverse,” according to the company.
Thanks to the wristband’s electrical stimulation, it can mimic a range of sensations from catching a ball to a bird pinching the wearer’s skin. Tamaki’s goals are much greater than a simple wristband. She’s hoping to “release humans from any sort of constraint in terms of space, body and time” within the next decade.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Startup Says Its Tech Can Inflict Actual Pain in the Metaverse
The European Union has reached an agreement to adopt the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping antitrust law meant to rein in Apple, Google, Meta and other tech giants. Lawmakers reached a “provisional” agreement on the law Thursday, following hours of negotiations, the European Parliament wrote in a statement.
The law could have far-reaching implications, some of which could extend beyond Europe. Most notably, one of the primary provisions of the DMA is that messaging providers would need to make their services interoperable with other services, “EU lawmakers agreed that the largest messaging services (such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage) will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms, if they so request,” the EU Parliament said following the agreement.
It’s unclear for now if this requirement would also apply to interoperability between the large messaging platforms themselves. Parliament wrote that the interoperability provisions for social networks “will be assessed in the future.”
We have a deal on #DMA! Last trilogue with @Europarl_EN and @EUCouncil ended with a good, strong agreement.
Tune into our press conference tomorrow 8:45 😊 pic.twitter.com/krHHsOqG8u— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) March 24, 2022
In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said the company was “concerned” about some aspects of the law. “We remain concerned that some provisions of the DMA will create unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities for our users while others will prohibit us from charging for intellectual property in which we invest a great deal,” the spokesperson said. “We believe deeply in competition and in creating thriving competitive markets around the world, and we will continue to work with stakeholders throughout Europe in the hopes of mitigating these vulnerabilities.”
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The DMA also prohibits companies from “combining personal data for targeted advertising” without explicit consent, a move that could limit Meta and others’ ability to serve targeted ads to users. As The New York Times points out, there are still many questions about how European lawmakers will enforce these new rules and the companies in question are likely to raise legal challenges.
Earlier proposals of the law also included provisions that would change how Apple and Google ran their app stores. Under the proposed rules, Apple would have to allow users to install apps from other stores, and both Apple and Google would be required to allow developers to bypass their companies; storefronts and use their own billing. It’s unclear if those provisions were included in the latest agreement. The European Parliament will hold a press conference Friday, when they are expected to share more details.
Source: Engadget – European Union reaches provisional agreement on antitrust law targeting tech giants