news.buyenne.com

The Japan-exclusive Firefox Fx0, the closest thing the platform had to a flagship. (credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla is ending its plan to build an OS for smartphones. Today at Mozilla's "Mozlando" developer event, the company announced that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. TechCrunch has a statement from Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices:

We are proud of the benefits Firefox OS added to the Web platform and will continue to experiment with the user experience across connected devices. We will build everything we do as a genuine open source project, focused on user experience first and build tools to enable the ecosystem to grow.

Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels.

We’ll share more on our work and new experiments across connected devices soon.

As an open source project, Firefox OS will never really "die," but it sounds like we shouldn't expect to see any more commercial smartphones.

We actually got to do a full review of a Firefox OS device with the $35 Intex Cloud FX. The hardware definitely wasn't high end, but the software didn't help matters, either. The HTML-only approach to app development meant there was basically nothing designed for the platform other than the apps that came with it, leaving us with no benchmarks, no alternative browsers, and not much to do. Firefox OS was mostly relegated to cheap phones like the Cloud FX, with the most expensive, the Fx0, clocking in at $420 and only available in Japan.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson and Getty)

Getting a Linux server hacked and made part of a botnet is easier than some people may think. As two unrelated blog posts published in the past week demonstrate, running a vulnerable piece of software is often all that's required.

Witness, for example, a critical vulnerability disclosed earlier this year in Elasticsearch, an open source server application for searching large amounts of data. In February, the company that maintains it warned it contained a vulnerability that allowed hackers to execute commands on the server running it. Within a month, a hacking forum catering to Chinese speakers provided all the source code and tutorials needed for people with only moderate technical skills to fully identify and exploit susceptible servers.

A post published Tuesday by security firm Recorded Future deconstructs that hacker forum from last March. It showed how to scan search services such as Shodan and ZoomEye to find vulnerable machines. It includes an attack script written in Python that was used to exploit one of them and a separate Perl script used to make the newly compromised machine part of a botnet of other zombie servers. It also included screenshots showing the script being used against the server. The tutorial underscores the growing ease of hacking production servers and the risk of being complacent about patching.

Hello Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of great deals today—and one in particular that could sell out quickly. For today only, you can get a Jackery Giant+ 12,000mAh portable battery pack for only $22 and change. The extra battery lets you charge up multiple devices at once via USB, and it's compatible with Android and iOS devices. Considering the pack's list price of $129, you won't be able to find it for a better price after today. Grab it before it's gone!

As usual, we have a big list of other electronics deals below, too.

Featured deals

Enlarge / "Big moon Horizons on Cobra and SRV," by CMDR [AEDC] Haridas Gopal. (credit: CMDR [AEDC] Haridas Gopal)

Ninety frames per second. That’s the new target for consumer VR gear: you need hardware capable of rendering two HD images with all the trimmings at a steady 90fps, or the whole thing starts to shake and judder and make you sick. That 90fps requirement is what’s driving the disturbingly high VR system requirements posted a few days ago for Elite: Dangerous by Frontier Developments; according to Frontier, you need 16GB of RAM, a fast i7 quad-core CPU, and a GeForce GTX 980 to do VR well with Elite and consumer VR hardware.

Studio founder and CEO David Braben is aware that the spec is high—the recommended video card alone will set you back at least $500—but Braben is in somewhat of a privileged position among game developers: he has one of the only shipping triple-A games that, as of today, officially supports VR without having to dig into config files and enable hidden dev-only options (I’m looking at you, Alien: Isolation). The game’s soon-to-be-released "Horizons" 2.0 expansion, which is currently in semi-open testing by the Elite playerbase, raises the bar and adds SteamVR support alongside Oculus Rift support, meaning you could plug an HTC Vive into your computer and play Elite: Dangerous on it right now, at the 90 frames per second the Vive prefers for glass-smooth head tracking.

Elite is one of the best VR experiences a PC gamer can have right now—and believe me, if a PC game supports VR, I’ve tried it out on my Oculus Rift DK2 at home, which is attached to a gaming PC that meets or exceeds Frontier’s VR spec in every category (I have a 980ti video card, but only one—SLI in Elite with VR is currently problematic due to a combination of different issues). Braben explained that the game’s VR support is the result of a complex dance of intuition and design iteration.

According to sources speaking to Variety, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has been green-lighted for a 10-episode TV adaptation on Spike TV.

Each episode will be an hour long, and J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of Babylon 5 and co-creator of Sense8 will serve as Red Mars’ writer, co-executive producer, and showrunner. Vince Gerardis, co-executive producer of Game of Thrones, will also serve as executive producer on Red Mars with Straczynski. Robinson will reportedly be an on-the-set consultant.

The Red Mars project has been on Spike TV’s plate for some time, but the network only just decided to move full-speed ahead with it, according to Variety. The show will go into production this summer and premiere in January 2017.