Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Just roll back the clocks on the projectors (Score 5, Informative) 52

You cannot roll-back the secure clock on those projection systems. You're only allowed to change the clock for a few minutes a year, manually or automatically. You're supposed to sync your playback machines to a stratum 2 or better time source and keep them synced, to avoid any significant clock drift of the secure clock. Only the secure clock matters for content access validation, the system clock is irrelevant in this case.

Comment Re:DRM? (Score 2) 52

You can keep your kidney.

There is nothing dark happening here, just another SNAFU. It's just the general clusterfuck that is digital certificate management and yet another example how something as stupid as a "licensing issue" creates global outages. This isn't the first expired certificate that will do that it and it won't be the last...

The problem isn't so much the Sony projection system though, but rather a stupid oversight of Deluxe: The fact that the signer certificate of the keys that unlock the content have expired. Although the DCI specifications, which apply to Digital Cinema systems like this, specify that those certificates need to be checked for validity, the specifications are ambiguous on WHEN they need to be checked.

So, other projection system vendors (Barco, Dolby) aren't necessarily affected, because they probably checked the validity of the content regarding those requirements, when it was loaded onto the system and not again during playback. When those movies were loaded onto the system, the expired certificate was still valid. Another vendor that seems to be affected is GDC, they probably interpreted the vague DCI/SMPTE specifications the same way as the folks at Sony...

This all happened, because Hollywood wants their precious content to be protected from the evil pirates, but on a day like this, it feels like the pirates win every time...

Technology

Drone Startup Claims It Flew Its Ion-Propulsion Drone On 4.5-Minute Test Flight (interestingengineering.com) 65

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Florida-based tech startup Undefined Technologies announced its unique ionic propulsion drone has passed an outdoor flight test, meaning it's on track for commercial release in 2024, according to a report from New Atlas. The drone, called Silent Ventus, uses proprietary technology to ionize the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the surrounding air to create an "ionic wind" that propels the machine in the direction it wants to go. According to Undefined, the drone could be used for cargo. Though it's not been used for large-scale drone projects on Earth before, ionic propulsion isn't a new technology. In fact, it's currently one of the best technologies humans currently possess for deep space exploration propulsion and other space applications. According to Undefined, its "Air Tantrum" ionic propulsion technology produces up to 150 percent more thrust than current ion thruster technologies.

Earlier this year, the company released footage of a two-and-a-half-minute indoor flight test, saying the drone emitted 85 decibels of noise. Now, it claims it's flown a prototype for four and a half minutes, though it's only released one minute, 17 seconds of footage. The drone firm also says it achieved a noise level below 75 dB. It's now aiming to secure further investment to build a zero-emissions cargo delivery drone by 2023 that could fly for 15 minutes and make less than 70 dB. Undefined claims its "silent" 70-dB drones will lead to far fewer noise complaints in areas that will be served by urban cargo delivery drones in the future. However, it's worth pointing out that Undefined had yet to test its drone with large payloads, which will require extra thrust and will likely make more noise.

Science

How Thinking Hard Makes the Brain Tired (economist.com) 47

An anonymous reader shares a report: Physical labour is exhausting. A long run or a hard day's sweat depletes the body's energy stores, resulting in a sense of fatigue. Mental labour can also be exhausting. Even resisting that last glistening chocolate-chip cookie after a long day at a consuming desk job is difficult. Cognitive control, the umbrella term encompassing mental exertion, self-control and willpower, also fades with effort. But unlike the mechanism of physical fatigue, the cause of cognitive fatigue has been poorly understood. Previous accounts were incomplete. One of the most widely known, the biological one, draws from what is known about muscular fatigue. It posits that exerting cognitive control uses up energy in the form of glucose. At the end of a day spent intensely cogitating, the brain is metaphorically running on fumes. The problem with this version of events is that the energy cost associated with thinking is minimal. One analysis of previous studies suggests that cognitively overworked and "depleted" brains use less than one-tenth of a Tic-Tac's worth of additional glucose.

If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitie-Salpetriere University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle. In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.

Comment Re:A view from Switzerland (Score 1) 85

The EU is no better: they have started to put some great privacy laws into place (like the GDPR), but somehow privacy does not apply to people's financial lives. How can that be justified?

In order to control the populace, it's not necessary to know every little detail about them, that's only useful if you want to sell them something. The CIAs and NSAs of this world still didn't get the memo or are still in denial, but it's really that simple.

If you want to keep your population under control, you simply need to be able to control their source of income. That's also the primary reason why most governments don't like stuff like cryptocurrencies. Full financial transparency ensures they can always cut you off if they see fit to do so and they regularly do this.

Keep in mind: Governments are power-centers, so they're evil, until the opposite has been proven. History should've at least told us that lesson.

Comment Re:The only disagreement is who gets to pay (Score 1) 256

There clearly is a huge market for "legacy design ICs". So, why is nobody jumping on top of it? Where does all the old equipment go when fabs upgrade their production lines to the newest and greatest? Why not keep the fab or shove the production capacity down the line, as there is clearly a market for decades old IC designs. There is no need to worry about your precious IP as everything in there has been done and copied all over the place, the value is purely in your capability to deliver. I expect the market for "legacy IC designs" to grow. Why do we need to constantly need to re-design stuff if what we have now is good enough and has been tested through time?

Comment Re:15 years? (Score 2) 16

This trail is more show than anything else. For being one of the greatest hubs of illicit material on the Internet, they did have a shabby business model, because the whole Cyberbunker operation didn't make much more than a few hundred thousand dollars a year. So, either someone is blowing this thing so far out of proportion, it hurts to even look at it, or those who ran Cyberbunker must have been ignorant jerks, selling their high-risk services for pennies...

Comment Re:Sadly (Score 1) 106

It's partly the incompetence of Adobe that Flash eventually had to die away. Flash gave us the first viable streaming video, the first interactive video applications and a lot more. If they had built it out to a viable "VM of the Internet" and opened it up for others, it could've been much more than just the stop-gap solution between HTML 5 and modern JavaScript environments. Unfortunately, Adobe seemed to be unable to recognize its full potential and left it to rot. It took them years to come up with a 64-bit version of the runtime, Linux was badly neglected, etc.

Comment Re:Won't rescinding 230... (Score 3, Informative) 519

The thing is, in this case it's just the original poster that's liable for what he/she (in this case a he) posted, the platform (Twitter) would be largely legally protected against any such actions. What the dumb person in charge of the nuclear codes here doesn't understand, or more likely, doesn't care about, is that Section 230 actually creates something like a level playing field for on-line platforms for people to exercise their freedom of speech. Without limited liability of what their users are saying, an on-line platform can function as a conduit of information. It's a sad state of affairs that we need to talk about those kind of things on the back of a global pandemic. But apparently, the President of "the greatest nation on Earth" wants to break the fabric of the internet, because one social media outlet hurt his feelings...

Comment Re:WHO said WHAT? (Score 0) 580

Yes, they said this very early on, when those things weren't entirely clear yet. Some things need time to be established. Also, declaring a GLOBAL pandemic has far reaching consequences and actually requires a virus to have reached some global spread, before that, you can't really call it a pandemic. Meanwhile, according to Trump, in April, this would all just blow over... I'm waiting for it to blow over...

Slashdot Top Deals

The computer is to the information industry roughly what the central power station is to the electrical industry. -- Peter Drucker

Working...