Month: July 2016

The new UWP Skype client. (credit: Microsoft)

It has been a slow transition, but Skype is finalizing its move away from a peer-to-peer system to a cloud-based one.

When it was first created, the Skype network was built as a decentralized peer-to-peer system. PCs that had enough processing power and bandwidth would be elected as "supernodes" and used to coordinate connections between other machines on the network. Similarly, text, voice, and video traffic would flow between peers, directly when possible (when intervening firewalls and routers were cooperative) or indirectly through other systems on the network when required.

This peer-to-peer system was generally perceived as being relatively private; with no central servers the assumption was that there was no central ability to perform wiretaps or other forms of eavesdropping. This belief was in fact mistaken.

(credit: nrkbeta)

The high court of Paris has ruled that Google and Microsoft do not have to censor their search engines to remove all results involving the world "torrent" used in conjunction with the names of three French musicians.

The French music producers' association "Syndicat national de l’édition phonographique" (SNEP) had sought a court order to force the US companies to remove results for searches pairing the word "torrent" with the artists' names, which they claimed directed users to pirate sites.

As an article on the French site NextInpact explains, the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris refused to grant SNEP's request for Google's search results to be censored because of a legal technicality raised by Google's lawyers. SNEP's request referred to only three artists, and should have been on behalf of its entire membership, the high court ruled.

What peer review shouldn't look like (perhaps minus the cheering fan). (credit: flickr user: Chris Lott)

Peer review is intended to act as a gatekeeper in science. If working researchers deem a paper fit to be published, it should mean that the research is sound, rigorous, and accurate. But an experimental analysis of peer review suggests that it might also end up rejecting high-quality material. The analysis points to high levels of competition as the source of the problem.

Because peer review is a vastly complex system that can function quite differently in various disciplines, researchers Stefano Balietti, Robert L. Goldstone, and Dirk Helbing constructed an experimental game designed to mimic some of the primary features of peer review. Participants were divided into 16 groups of nine people each and tasked with creating a piece of “art” on a computer interface. The pieces could then be submitted to one of three “art exhibitions.”

Each participant was then given three pieces of other people's art to review; pieces that averaged a score higher than five out of ten were accepted into the exhibition. Each group played 30 rounds of the game.

At times I Am Setsuna is truly beautiful.

That means you know going in that you're in for a top-down, turn-based JRPG where time ticks down actively during battles, and you can see your foes on-screen before facing them. There are no surprise encounters here—save the ones scripted into the story.

The story follows the titular Setsuna through the perspective of Endir, your masked, silent cipher of a protagonist. Setsuna has been selected as a sacrifice—like her aunt, mother, and many other women before them—on the theory that sacrificing one girl every few decades will cause the monsters that inhabit the world to leave them in peace.

By the time Endir enters the picture (on his own quest to kill Setsuna for unrelated reasons), monster activity is on the rise, and these beasts seem to be more organized than ever. Cue a fateful meeting between our hero and heroine where he decides against cold-blooded murder, and suddenly a journey ensues that pulls a growing cast of party members in its wake.