Electronic Arts has moved quietly to begin the process of shutting down the online servers for a bunch of old games, some of them absolute classics, some you would be forgiven for having forgotten all about.
Source: Kotaku – EA Shutting Down Servers For Loads Of Very Good, Very Old Games
No one knows for sure what the future of DC will hold on the big screen, but two of its most popular stars are going to be front and center: Batman and Superman, as well as the worlds of both characters.
Source: Gizmodo – Man of Steel 2 Is Back in Play, Along With More Batman Villain Films
It took more than an hour to mine a block of bitcoin (BTC) on Monday, leaving thousands of transactions stuck in an unconfirmed state. CoinDesk reports: According to on-chain data from several block explorers, the interval between the two latest blocks mined by Foundry USA and Luxor was 85 minutes. According to Mempool, over 13,000 transactions were pending before the latest block was mined.
Last week Bitcoin underwent a difficulty adjustment to ensure block confirmations kept taking place every 10 minutes. With mining difficulty surging to 35.6 trillion it becomes more expensive to mine bitcoin, which heaps pressure on a mining industry that is dealing with soaring energy prices and a crypto bear market. Tadge Dryja, founder of the Lightning Network, tweeted that an 85-minute interval between blocks can be expected to happen once every 34 days, not taking into account difficulty changes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Bitcoin Fails To Produce 1 Block For Over An Hour
Valve is preparing to roll-out Proton 7.0-5 as the newest version of this Wine-derived software that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux. For facilitating some testing prior to the formal Proton 7.0-5, a release candidate was published today…
Source: Phoronix – Proton 7.0-5 RC Gets More Windows Games Running On Linux
LEGO set 60335, a “Train Station” for the LEGO City line, is not the first in the company’s history to ship with some kind of poop. It is, however, the first to ship with an enormous pile of human shit that is clogging up a toilet.
Source: Kotaku – New LEGO Set Has A Huge Sh*t In Its Toilet
Renowned voice actor Jennifer Hale, known for her role as Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series and the new voice of action character Bayonetta, released a statement in response to the discourse following Bayonetta’s former voice actress claiming she wasn’t offered a living wage by PlatinumGames to reprise her…
Source: Kotaku – Jennifer Hale Speaks Out On Replacing Bayonetta’s Original Voice Actor
Enlarge / In this photo illustration, a Lexie Lumen hearing aid rests on a pharmacy counter at a Walgreens store on October 17 in Los Angeles. Walgreens is making Lexie Lumen hearing aids available for sale over the counter for adults beginning today following an FDA ruling allowing over-the-counter sales for hearing devices. (credit: Getty | Mario Tama)
Today, Americans can buy cheaper hearing aids for mild-to-moderate hearing loss without a prescription from a range of common retailers, including Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart—finally making the critical health devices more affordable and accessible to the estimated 28.8 million adults who could benefit from them.
The US Food and Drug Administration estimates the change could lower the average cost of obtaining a hearing aid by as much as $3,000. As of today, Walgreens is selling an over-the-counter model similar to hearing aids that range from $2,000 to $8,000 per pair at specialty retailers for just $799 per pair on its shelves, the White House said Monday. Likewise, Walmart said that, as of today, it is selling over-the-counter hearing aids ranging from $199 to $999 per pair, which are comparable to prescription hearing aids priced at $4,400 to $5,500 per pair.
The move is years in the making. In 2017, Congress passed a bipartisan proposal directing the FDA to set rules for selling over-the-counter devices. But the rules were slow to come. In July 2021, President Biden signed an executive order spurring the FDA to produce the rules, which the agency finalized in August of this year.
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Source: Ars Technica – Cheaper hearing aids hit stores today, available over the counter for first time
South Korea’s two largest domestic internet companies, Naver and Kakao, have experienced significant service interruptions after the datacenter that hosts much of their infrastructure was shut down by a Sunday fire. The Register reports: The datacenter in question is operated by SK C&C, one of the many arms of South Korean conglomerate SK. SK C&C offers a range of cloud and tech infrastructure services, bills itself as a “total digital transformation partner” and operates three datacenters, in which it happily houses client systems. The one in Pangyo, just south of South Korea’s capital Seoul, was built in 2014, covers 66,942 square meters, and boasts what SK C&C describes as “Latest/eco-friendly technology”. And it caught fire on the weekend. The company has not said what cause the facility to catch fire, nor the extent of the blaze.
But many services from Kakao and Naver were unavailable for many hours at a time, starting from Saturday afternoon. Impact of the outages was wide. The tweet below is an example of one business’s reaction. Kakao has acknowledged the outage in a blog post that apologizes for the service interruption and slow restoration, and admits that disaster recovery efforts were delayed. The company has created an Emergency Response Committee and three sub-committees — one to probe the cause of the incident, another to develop disaster countermeasures, and a third to arrange compensation for stakeholders. Naver’s announcement admits that “some functions such as search, news, shopping, cafe, blog, open talk, and smart store center had errors.” The company says all services have now been restored.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Datacenter Fire Takes Out South Korea’s Top Two Web Giants
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — UK-based Skyports, a firm aiming to become a leader in the vertiport industry, has announced the opening of a Tokyo office.
This follows the announcement last month of the appointment of Atsushi Okada, who has a background in urban design and smart city development, as the firm’s Japan country manager.
Yun-Yuan Tay, the Asia-Pacific head for Skyports, stated, “The Asia-Pacific region is an important hub for advanced air mobility, and Japan a leading market within it. With support from our investor Kanematsu Corporation, we have significantly matured our networks and portfolio in the country in the last year with multiple projects in progress. The incorporation of our Japanese office was the next logical step in strengthening our operations in the country.”
New Tokyo head Okada added that “Japan will play an important role in the future of advanced air mibility–the next big innovation for the transport and logistics sector. For Skyports, the focus for the next year is to progress our ongoing projects in Osaka and Tokyo through site assessments and regular engagements with the regulatory authorities as we look towards 2025 for initial deployment.”
The partnership between Skyports and the Tokyo-based Kanematsu Corporation has been deepening for several years. The two firms began their collaboration in 2020, and since then their links have become increasingly intimate.
In August, it was announced that Kanematsu, together with the Sumitomo Corporation, were leaders in Skyports’ US$26 million Series B investment round.
Aside from Japan, this business alliance is also quite active in the Singapore market, where drone delivery operations are being jointly developed. This is also where Skyports’ Asia-Pacific head office is located.
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The post Skyports Opens Tokyo Office appeared first on Akihabara News.
Source: Akihabara News – Skyports Opens Tokyo Office
Snort is an Open Source Intrusion Prevention and Detection System (IDS). In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snort on Ubuntu 22.04.
Source: LXer – Install and Configure Snort 3 Intrusion Detecting System on Ubuntu 22.04
Hop in the truck, strap in Dorothy, and watch out for the flying cows. Hollywood is getting back into the storm-chasing game with the film that brought the weather to the extreme, Twister. Deadline reports that after producer Steven Spielberg “flipped” out over a new script, his Amblin Entertainment is teaming up with…
Source: Gizmodo – A Sequel to Twister Is Coming to Theaters Like the Finger of God
Steve Mould re-created The Rings of Power title sequence using patterns produced by vibrating square plates.
The first time I saw the opening credits for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I thought the patterns looked remarkably like so-called “Chladni figures“: vibrational patterns that form when one scatters sand on a vibrating plate. It seems I was not the only one. British science communicator and YouTube star Steve Mould got so many comments from viewers about the similarities that he decided to test that hypothesis—by re-creating the title sequence with his own vibration-generated patterns. He documents the journey, and the associated science, in the video above. The final re-created title sequence starts at the 10:55 mark.
The phenomenon is technically known as cymatics. In 1680, Robert Hooke experimented with running a bow along glass plates covered in flour to induce vibrations and noted the telltale nodal patterns that formed in the flour. “A rigid plate will have a set of natural resonance frequencies just like a string, and when the plate is excited at one of these frequencies, it will form a standing wave with fixed nodes,” University of North Carolina physicist Greg Gbur wrote back in 2013. “These nodes will form lines on the plate, in contrast to points on the string.” The flour on the plate made those nodal lines visible.
The 18th century German physicist and musician Ernest Chladni perfected the method 100 years later when he repeated Hooke’s pioneering experiments with circular plates, even demonstrating the effect before Napoleon. The various shapes or patterns created by resonance frequencies are known as “Chladni figures” in his honor. Chladni even came up with a mathematical formula to predict which patterns would form. The higher the rate of oscillation, the more complex those figures will be. Similar methods are still used when designing acoustic instruments: violins, guitars, and cellos, for example.
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Source: Ars Technica – What it takes to re-create Rings of Power title sequence with Chladni figures
Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)
Last fall, scammers infiltrated social platforms like dating apps, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, attempting to convince people to download Coinbase Wallet. Once the targeted users downloaded the wallet, the scammer would then send links to fraudulent websites, prompting users to purchase a “voucher” that seemed like a safe transaction protected and facilitated by Coinbase’s trusted platform, but was “actually a malicious smart contract.” Horrified users eventually discovered the smart contract gave “the scammers complete access to the entire funds in the victim’s wallets” without requiring authorizations to withdraw funds.
Today, nearly 100 people from all over the globe are seeking to make the publicly traded Coinbase pay for allegedly doing nothing to protect users. Users alleged that Coinbase was unmoved by reports that scammers were draining accounts of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency. In total, Coinbase Wallet users that are suing collectively lost $21 million.
For months, users allegedly warned the company of this seeming security flaw. Instead of acting to protect users, though, Coinbase “took no remedial steps to fix the security flaw or even warn customers about this major problem, despite warning customers about other security risks,” according to a recently filed arbitration demand. This allegedly allowed “hundreds” of additional users to become targets of “an easily preventable” liquidity mining pool scam.
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Source: Ars Technica – Coinbase users scammed out of M in crypto sue company for negligence
Action-packed law comedy She-Hulk just concluded its first season in true Jennifer Walters style, not to mention excitement for the future of the character. Director Kat Coiro recently sat down with io9 to chat about the season, creating a distinct take on a Marvel show, and that K.E.V.I.N cameo with Jen’s wink to the…
Source: Gizmodo – She-Hulk Director Kat Coiro Discusses That Genre-Smashing Finale
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Late last Friday, Nvidia decided that it was “unlaunching” the lower-end 12GB version of its upcoming GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card so that it could be renamed and released at a later date. This was good news, for the people who care about this kind of thing—the $899 12GB RTX 4080 and $1,199 16GB RTX 4080 were substantially different cards with much different performance levels. Giving them both the same name could have created unnecessary disappointment and confusion for buyers of the cheaper card.
The problem for GPU makers is that Nvidia planned to launch those cards in mid-November, and partners had already started manufacturing and packaging them so they could be shipped out to retailers. Gamers Nexus has spoken with sources at two of Nvidia’s board partners about some of these logistical hurdles, reporting that existing boxes for 12GB RTX 4080 cards were being “collected and destroyed” and that Nvidia “is at least subsidizing the boxes, or part of them, to be replaced.” The relabeled GPUs will supposedly be reintroduced or relaunched (or un-unlaunched?) around CES in January 2023.
There will be costs for other board partners, too, both for GPUs that have already been produced and those that will be manufactured after Nvidia has settled on a name (Gamers Nexus says this hasn’t happened, but that “4070” or “4070 Ti” seems most likely). GPU coolers usually have the card’s name and model number printed on it somewhere, occasionally in a prominent place with programmable LEDs underneath. These coolers will either need to be rebadged, reprinted, or replaced to switch out the old RTX 4080 branding with the new branding.
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Source: Ars Technica – Nvidia’s last-minute 12GB RTX 4080 rebrand will be a pain for GPU makers
Meta’s Facebook is (was?) one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with billions of users. However, its failing virtual reality metaverse project, Horizon Worlds, isn’t doing nearly as well. In fact, a new report shows that barely anyone is spending much time in Horizon Worlds at all, with most…
Source: Kotaku – Facebook’s Metaverse Is Apparently Filled With Mostly Empty ‘Sad’ Worlds
Recent studies have suggested that eating late at night may lead to weight gain, so how late is too late to eat? And while we’re asking questions, do we really know that you’ll gain weight if you eat a late dinner?
Source: LifeHacker – How Late in the Evening Is ‘Too Late’ to Eat a Meal?
A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal claims that a law firm hired cyber mercenaries to hack into his emails and circulate embarrassing material that ultimately led to his firing from the paper.
Source: Gizmodo – Fired Wall Street Journal Reporter Alleges a Law Firm Hired Hackers to End His Career
For a long time it has been known that diets dominated by ultra-processed food (UPF) are more likely to lead to obesity. But recent research suggests that high UPF consumption also increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and, according to a recent American study involving 50,000 health professionals, of developing colon cancer. From a report: On a more general note, last month a study in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology found that people born after 1990 are more likely to develop cancer before they’re 50 than people born before 1970. It’s suspected that UPF might be a contributing factor to this development.
As the UK is estimated to draw more than 50% of its calorie intake from UPF, this is no passing health scare but an issue that goes to the very heart of our culinary lifestyle. But before looking deeper into the issue there is an obvious question: what is a UPF? NOVA (not an acronym) is a widely used food classification system that separates foods into four categories based upon their level of processing. Almost all foods, aside from fresh fruit and raw vegetables, undergo some degree of process. Cooking is a process, and it usually involves added ingredients such as oil and salt. In NOVA’s first category, Group 1 is unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, milk). Group 2 is made up of processed culinary ingredients such as sugars, oils and butter. Group 3 is processed foods (canned vegetables and fish, bread, jam). Group 4 is ultra-high processed foods, which are mostly low in protein and fibre, and high in salt, sugar and fat, and have undergone industrial interventions such as extrusion, moulding and milling.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ultra-Processed Meals Are Unhealthier Than You Think
