Month: December 2015

Don't question it... just do it!

In November, when Microsoft announced the first 104 Xbox 360 titles that would be newly compatible with the Xbox One, the company announced further compatibility would be added "on a regular basis" starting this month. That process began Thursday, with the announcement of 16 additional Xbox 360 titles now supported by Microsoft's newest console. Those titles are:

• Braid
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Doritos Crash Course
• Fable III
• Halo: Reach
• Hydro Thunder
• Iron Brigade
• Kane & Lynch 2
• Motocross Madness
• MS.PAC-MAN
• Peggle
• Portal: Still Alive
• Spelunky
• Splosion Man
• Ticket to Ride
• Zuma’s Revenge!

Though Microsoft says some games require slight tweaks to Microsoft's emulation system to allow for compatibility, the major factor slowing down the rollout seems to be securing permission from the various publishers of each game. Indeed, today Microsoft said it is "continuing to work with our publishing partners to grow our library of Xbox One Backward Compatibility titles, so stay tuned for more."

At the current rate of 16 newly compatible games per month, it would take about five years for the 1,000 or so Xbox 360 titles released in North America to be fully supported on the Xbox One.

(credit: Minority Report / 20th Century Fox)

As you may know, we're big fans of CCTV in the UK. At the last count there was around 6 million CCTV cameras in the UK, or about one for every ten people living here. Most of these cameras are passive: they don't actually do anything, except for constantly recording to a tape or hard drive.

The big exceptions are real-time police and intelligence cameras, such as the the UK's automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system. Here, in addition to storing the data on hard drives, number plates are actively interrogated and matched against a database of missing vehicles and wanted people.

The UK's police and intelligence agencies probably have similar real-time matching abilities with other private and public CCTV networks, though that information is obviously hard to come by. Most recently, though, the Metropolitan Police asked for access to Transport for London's ANPR network so that it can carry out real-time facial recognition on all motorists entering London.

Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, exits federal court in New York, US, on Thursday, December 17, 2015. Shkreli was arrested on alleged securities fraud related to Retrophin Inc., a biotech firm he founded in 2011. (credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In a seven-count indictment unsealed Thursday, Martin Shkreli, the embattled CEO and founder of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has been charged by the FBI with securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy for allegedly orchestrating three interwoven schemes. In what the Department of Justice terms “Ponzi-like” schemes, Shkreli allegedly defrauded investors of two former hedge funds he managed and misappropriated $11 million in assets from the biopharmaceutical company he once headed, Retrophin, all in the course of about five years.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, Robert Capers, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press conference Thursday.

Also included in the indictment are charges against Evan Greebel, who served as outside counsel for Retrophin. Greebel, who allegedly helped Shkreli pull off the schemes, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy.

The developers behind popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) League of Legends now belong entirely to Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate behind similarly popular QQ instant messenger. The news was actually revealed tangentially, when Riot released an article explaining that there would be changes to the company’s equity program.

The succinct post detailed how they will be moving from a “Riot equity program” to a “cash-based incentive program” that would allow employees to share in Riot’s successes. What this entails exactly has not been clarified. But Tencent’s move to purchase the remaining equity shares is not surprising given Riot Games’ track record.

In 2014, it was reported that League of Legends had about 67 million monthly players and more than 7.5 million concurrents, making it arguably the biggest name in e-sports. So big, in fact, that BBC Three saw fit to cover the League of Legends World Championships semi-finals. VentureBeat writes that the game netted $946 million (£633 million) in in-game spending revenues last year, a number that is likely to rise as Riot Games works on an overhaul for League of Legends.

As friendly of an online advertisement as you'll find.

In mid-August, the first commercially available ZFS cloud replication target became available at rsync.net. Who cares, right? As the service itself states, "If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You."

Of course, this product is for someone—and to those would-be users, this really will matter. Fully appreciating the new rsync.net (spoiler alert: it's pretty impressive!) means first having a grasp on basic data transfer technologies. And while ZFS replication techniques are burgeoning today, you must actually begin by examining the technology that ZFS is slowly supplanting.

A love affair with rsync

Revisiting a first love of any kind makes for a romantic trip down memory lane, and that's what revisiting rsync—as in "rsync.net"—feels like for me. It's hard to write an article that's inevitably going to end up trashing the tool, because I've been wildly in love with it for more than 15 years. Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) first announced rsync publicly in June of 1996. He used it for three chapters of his PhD thesis three years later, about the time that I discovered and began enthusiastically using it. For what it's worth, the earliest record of my professional involvement with major open source tools—at least that I've discovered—is my activity on the rsync mailing list in the early 2000s.