Month: August 2016

Enlarge (credit: Fedora Magazine)

Fedora 24 is very near the best Linux distro release I've used, and certainly the best release I have tested this year. Considering 2016 has welcomed new offerings like Mint 18 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, that says a great deal about the Fedora project's latest work. But like many Fedora releases before it, even Fedora 24 got off to a rocky start.

Longtime Fedora users are more than likely conservative when it comes to system upgrades. And historically, new Fedora releases tend to be rough around the edges. Wise Fedora followers tend to be patient and give a new release a couple of months for the kinks to work out and the updates to flow in. Usually, such a timing cushion also means all the latest packages in RPM Fusion have been updated as well. With that kind of precedent, being the first to jump on a Fedora upgrade—which comes every eight or so months—can be risky.

Patience does typically reward you with a really great Linux distro, though. And far more valuable than updated apps, waiting means you can skip catastrophic bugs like the one that completely broke Fedora 24 on Skylake systems after a kernel update. Fedora 24 shipped with Linux kernel 4.5 and managed to miss kernel 4.6 by about two weeks, which is a shame because no less than Linus Torvalds himself called kernel 4.6 "a fairly big release - more commits than we've had in a while." In other words, perhaps Fedora should have waited a few weeks to ship.

Enlarge / "Who's a good puppy?!" (credit: Enikő Kubinyi)

In most tests of general intelligence, dogs rate as reasonably clever, but nothing like primates. The one place where dogs beat primates is in interacting with humans. It's not clear whether dogs are better at reading human intentions or simply more motivated to act on them, but dogs truly seem to get us.

Now, researchers in Hungary have tested dogs' willingness to cooperate with us by getting them to sit still in an MRI machine. By tracking the dogs' brain activity, the researchers were able to determine that dogs can recognize not only words, but the emotional tone behind them. Dogs recognize when both words and tone indicate praise. That's when they feel rewarded.

The work was performed by a group of researchers based in Budapest, which becomes important when we get to the words the dogs were responding to. The hypothesis behind their work: dogs can recognize both the meaning of what's being said (technically, its lexical content) as well as the intonation used in saying it. In other words, it's not enough to say "good boy" to your dog—you have to sound like you mean it.

Enlarge / French Education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, leaving the Elysee Presidential Palace last week in Paris. (credit: Frederic Stevens/Getty Images)

France's education minister has asked the company that makes Pokemon Go to keep its most valuable creatures out of French schools.

At a press conference earlier today, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said she will soon meet with California-based Niantic to ask them to tweak their game. According to statements reported by The Associated Press, Vallaud-Belkacem wants to keep some creatures out of French schools, since she's worried they would tempt non-students to enter.

Principals can already apply online for a school to be wholly removed from the game's map, but Vallaud-Belkacem wants the company to take some steps without being asked. The minister says that her main concern is the placement of extremely rare or "legendary" Pokemon creatures in schools, which would prove too tempting to strangers who shouldn't be around the school.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T today won a major victory over the Federal Trade Commission, which was trying to punish AT&T for throttling the Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans.

The FTC sued AT&T in October 2014, seeking refunds for customers who paid for unlimited data. The FTC said AT&T deceived customers by offering unlimited data plans and then throttling speeds once customers hit certain usage thresholds, such as 3GB or 5GB in a month. In response, AT&T claimed that the FTC had no jurisdiction over AT&T because of the company's status as a common carrier.

This argument was complicated. At the time, AT&T was a common carrier for landline phone and mobile voice service, but not for mobile Internet access. The Federal Communications Commission later reclassified mobile Internet as a common carrier service, which put it under a stricter FCC regime but exempted AT&T from FTC oversight.

Enlarge / The updated Outlook.com experience that many of us don't have yet. (credit: Microsoft)

In May 2015, Microsoft announced a big overhaul was coming to its Outlook.com free mail service. The new look Outlook.com looked a lot closer to the Outlook Web Access component in Exchange. It had Exchange features like the Clutter folder for handling all those e-mails that aren't quite spam but aren't quite important, pinned and flagged mail, new calendar views, and a better mobile interface that supports swipe-based gestures. In February 2016, this new experience was announced as being out of beta, and Microsoft rolled it out immediately to new users in North America. Everyone else was scheduled to be upgraded by the end of summer.

It looks like that's not the plan any more. The upgrade has been partially performed, and some users have been upgraded while others have not. A new error message (spotted by Twitter user gwydionjhr) suggests that those who don't have the update by now won't get it for quite a while. While attempting to share calendars, users have noticed that sharing between non-upgraded and upgraded users isn't possible, and this situation apparently won't be remedied until the first half of 2017.

It's not clear what the hold-up is or why the roll-out is taking longer than expected. The rollout is a big one behind the scenes, with Microsoft saying that the new system uses "Office 365-based infrastructure" and that there are hundreds of millions of accounts to migrate. Certainly the scale of what Microsoft is doing is certainly significant, but the delays are also frustrating, especially for anyone wanting to share calendars.

Enlarge / What exactly will Madden NFL '17 have to say about Colin Kaepernick in its next "live commentary" patch update? We'll find out soon enough. (credit: bmward_2000 via Flickr)

For years, EA Sports' major-league games have included downloadable weekly updates to address real-life issues like injuries and player trades. This year, the company's biggest American series, Madden NFL, is going one step further by adding a human touch to these weekly add-ons—updated commentary tracks. Over the course of the 2016-17 NFL season, you'll hear the game's narrators, real-life sports analysts Charles Davis and Brandon Gaudin, remark on current football events. And if this week's any indication, they won't focus only on the biggest news in touchdowns, trades, and tackles.

On Monday, Gamespot confirmed the next commentary update for Madden NFL '17 will include discussion about San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's choice to sit down during the pre-game singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, something he has done during the NFL preseason. The mention will be "brief," according to a quoted EA Sports representative, and it will be included to reflect "our commitment to authenticity." The Gamespot report didn't confirm exactly when the next commentary patch would go live for players of the PS4 and Xbox One game.

What Davis and Gaudin decide to talk about will be very telling for EA Sports' first year of "live commentary" for a major league sport. Perhaps the duo will mention Kaepernick's own explanation for the sit-down, which he said was inspired by oppression of black people across the US. Kaepernick went on to promise he'd continue sitting through anthems until "this country is representing people in the way that it’s supposed to." The EA Sports duo could also mention that former 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh offered a mixed response to Kaepernick's actions, or they can draw upon a pile of quotes from other players that show both support and opposition to Kaepernick's stance. Who knows—the duo could even mention black American athletes protesting civil rights issues in past decades.

Enlarge / Not pictured here (or anywhere in this week's episode): Darlene. (credit: Michael Parmelee/USA Network)

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for the most recent episode of Mr. Robot (S2E8)

Mr. Robot staff writer and technical producer Kor Adana doesn't sleep much (four and a half hours is realistic while in the midst of production). Part of that comes from sheer volume of work. Adana holds the high-profile role of coming up with the show's famed hacks. He's involved in everything from generating an idea and recruiting consultants through the feasibility testing and onscreen portrayal. The entire process can take three or four months for a mere three or four seconds on-screen. On top of that, Adana also works to clear various technical products appearing on the show, leads Mr. Robot's many Easter egg initiatives, and contributes to the overall narrative (including writing an episode this season).

But nerves about Mr. Robot's reception week to week don't quite help Adana relax either, and this latest episode created more stress than usual. One week after the show ended on a cliffhanger with a gigantic plot reveal, Mr. Robot's most recent hour never even addressed the situation. Perhaps even more remarkably, it marked the first episode where main character Elliot Alderson didn't appear on-screen for a single second. As Adana tells Ars on this week's Decrypted podcast: