Month: January 2016

Most of us have tried to sneak a quick game of Minesweeper in during our computer classes at school, but for students at Garnes High School in Norway, playing games won't be something they'll have to hide. Garnes Vidaregåande Skole, a public high school in the city of Bergen, Norway, is to start teaching e-sports to its students starting in August. The elective class puts e-sports on the same footing as traditional sports such as soccer and handball at the school. 30 or so students enrolled in the program will study five hours a week during the three-year program.

Folk High Schools—boarding schools that offer one year of non-examined training and education—have already offered some e-sports training, but this will be the first time that e-sports find a place in a regular high school.

Students on the program will not simply spend five hours a week playing games at school. While gaming skills are important, the classes will include 90 minutes of physical training optimized for the games in question, with work on reflexes, strength, and endurance. Each class will be split; 15 students will play while the other 15 perform physical exercise. In an interview with Dotablast, Petter Grahl Johnstad, head of the school's science department, says that the students will have their performance graded, with game knowledge and skills, communication, co-operation, and tactical ability all being assessed.

Artist Berndnaut Smilde imagines strange new climates of the Anthropocene by suspending clouds in the middle of rooms. (credit: Berndnaut Smilde)

11,700 years ago, the Earth suffered a catastrophic climate change. As the ice age ended, sea levels rose by 120 meters, the days grew warmer, and many kinds of plant and animal life died out. But one animal began to thrive more than ever before. Homo sapiens, which had already spread to every continent except Antarctica, came up with a new survival strategy. Today, we call it farming.

Thanks in part to that innovation, humans survived to witness the dramatic transition from the Pleistocene epoch to the Holocene—it was the first such geological transition in almost 2 million years. But now geologists say we're witnessing another transition, as we move from the Holocene into an epoch called the Anthropocene. Here's what that means.

Remember the Holocene

At the dawn of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, humans lived in nomadic groups, often returning to the same campsites year after year but always on the move. Still, there is evidence that they were dabbling with gardening opportunistically, perhaps leaving seeds behind at favorite campsites to encourage the growth of grain.

(credit: Shinya Suzuki)

According to a survey from market research group Phoenix Marketing International, 38 percent of all Apple Pay transaction volume comes from in-app purchases, with only 62 percent of purchases made in-store. The survey doesn’t offer a reason as to why in-app purchases seem to be so robustly represented, but in a press release from Phoenix, Greg Weed, director of card research at the company, suggested that "the number of acceptance locations [for Apple Pay] is relatively small (but growing) and the incidence of reported friction at the point-of-sale is high.”

That is, in-app purchases may look like a large part of Apple Pay's transaction volume because in-store purchases are still working to get off the ground.

Phoenix has been surveying Apple Pay users for over a year now. In April the group reported that “47 percent of all Apple Pay users shopping in a participating store were not able to use Apple Pay to complete a transaction at least once,” either because the terminal didn’t work, the cashier couldn’t help the customer, or for some other reason.

(credit: Tripp)

A local activist has won an important intermediary step in his legal quest to force the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to produce documents that fully explain the department's use of cell-site simulators, also known as IMSI catchers.

In a Monday opinion in Martinez v. Chicago Police Department, Cook County Circuit Judge Kathleen Kennedy denied the city’s motion to dismiss. This decision paves the way later this month for a closed-door hearing (in camera review) where the judge gets to privately review the documents in question.

Back in September 2014, activist Freddy Martinez filed a request under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. Among other items, Martinez initially asked for:

Forget biopsies, ultrasounds, mammograms, pap smears, rectal exams, and other unpleasant cancer screenings—the race is now on for simple, affordable blood tests that can detect all sorts of cancers extremely early.

On Sunday, genetic sequencing company Illumina Inc. announced the start of a new company called Grail, which will join dozens of companies developing such blood tests. Toting big-name investors including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Illumina's high-profile startup raised more than $100 million to get Grail going. The company hopes that Grail’s tests will be on the market by 2019 and cost around $500 a pop.

Though researchers have recently questioned the benefits of early cancer screening—showing in some cases that early detection does not generally save lives—Illumina is confident that the science behind the blood-based screens is at least possible. Illumina Chief Executive Jay Flatley, who will be Grail’s chairman, said Illumina has been working on the tests for about a year and a half. "We've made tremendous progress, which gives us the confidence that we can get to the endpoint that we expect."

This is what cyber looks like. (credit: CSI: Cyber / CBS)

There are lots of cringeworthy technology moments on television, especially when the words "hacking" and "cyber" are introduced into the plot. But of all the broadcast and cable networks, CBS is the biggest purveyor of techno-idiocy, proving again and again that none of the producers behind its stable of pseudo-procedural dramas has a clue about how anything on that crazy thing called the Internet works. NCIS set the benchmark with its two-people-on-one-keyboard-to-out-hack-a-hacker scene, but then the network doubled down and launched CSI:Cyber, which returned last night.

The future of Cyber is currently in doubt. CBS has pulled its timeslot to make room for a midseason replacement, so there may well be only a few more opportunities for the latest CSI franchise to cyber-scare network viewers with plots loosely based on something producers read about on Yahoo Answers. OK, to be fair, Cyber's writers are at least occasionally inspired by actual vulnerabilities that have been ripped from the headlines. It's just often these headlines are several years old.

Throughout its run thus far, the show has offered hat-tips to real security researchers. An episode late last year involved a "jackpotting" hack of ATMs at "Barnaby Bank," named for a security researcher who demonstrated that vulnerability—Barnaby Jack. Jack would afterward serve as director of embedded device security research at IOActive until his death in 2013. But the road to entertainment hell is paved with good intentions.