Month: July 2017

Enlarge / Netflix took an active role in fighting for net neutrality rules in 2014. (credit: Yuri Victor)

The biggest websites and the biggest Internet service providers are being summoned to Congress to testify about net neutrality.

US Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he is scheduling a full committee hearing titled, "Ground rules for the Internet ecosystem," for September 7.

"Today I'm sending formal invitations to the top executives of the leading technology companies including Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, and Netflix, as well as broadband providers including Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter Communications, inviting each of them to come and testify before our full Energy and Commerce Committee," Walden said during a Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing this morning.

Enlarge / A look inside the circuitry of a "decapped" arcade chip. (credit: Caps0ff)

The community behind the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) has gone to great lengths to preserve thousands of arcade games run on hundreds of different chipsets through emulation over the years. That preservation effort has now grown to include the physical opening of DRM-protected chips in order to view the raw code written inside them—and it's an effort that could use your crowdsourced help.

While dumping the raw code from many arcade chips is a simple process, plenty of titles have remained undumped and unemulated because of digital-rights-management code that prevents the ROM files from being easily copied off of the base integrated circuit chips. For some of those protected chips, the decapping process can be used as a DRM workaround by literally removing the chip's "cap" with nitric acid and acetone.

With the underlying circuit paths exposed within the chip, there are a few potential ways to get at the raw code. For some chips, a bit of quick soldering to that exposed circuitry can allow for a dumped file that gets around any DRM further down the line. In the case of chips that use a non-rewritable Mask ROM, though, the decappers can actually look through a microscope (or high-resolution scan) to see the raw zeroes and ones that make up the otherwise protected ROM code.

Enlarge (credit: BTC Keychain)

The price of Bitcoin surged late last week as it became clear that a proposal to expand the Bitcoin network's capacity had the support it needed to go into effect. Supporters of the proposal hope that it will put an end to a two-year-old feud that has been tearing the Bitcoin community apart.

The core dispute is over how to accommodate the payment network's growing popularity. A hard-coded limit in Bitcoin software—1 megabyte per blockchain block—prevents the network from processing more than about seven transactions per second. The network started to bump up against this limit last year, resulting in slow transactions and soaring transaction fees.

Some prominent figures in the Bitcoin community saw an easy fix: just increase that 1MB limit. But Bitcoin traditionalists argued that the limit was actually a feature, not a bug. Keeping blocks small ensures that anyone can afford the computing power required to participate in Bitcoin's consensus-based process for authenticating Bitcoin transactions, preventing a few big companies from gaining de facto control over the network.

Enlarge (credit: BTC Keychain)

The price of Bitcoin surged late last week as it became clear that a proposal to expand the Bitcoin network's capacity had the support it needed to go into effect. Supporters of the proposal hope that it will put an end to a two-year-old feud that has been tearing the Bitcoin community apart.

The core dispute is over how to accommodate the payment network's growing popularity. A hard-coded limit in Bitcoin software—1 megabyte per blockchain block—prevents the network from processing more than about seven transactions per second. The network started to bump up against this limit last year, resulting in slow transactions and soaring transaction fees.

Some prominent figures in the Bitcoin community saw an easy fix: just increase that 1MB limit. But Bitcoin traditionalists argued that the limit was actually a feature, not a bug. Keeping blocks small ensures that anyone can afford the computing power required to participate in Bitcoin's consensus-based process for authenticating Bitcoin transactions, preventing a few big companies from gaining de facto control over the network.

Steve Jobs has been the subject of all kinds of art over the years, and now scenes from his life will play out on stage with powerful vocals in a new opera. The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs highlights the "complicated and messy" life of the Apple cofounder and is the product of a partnership between composer Mason Bates and librettist/Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Campbell.

Pairing something as contemporary as the story of Steve Jobs and Apple with a classical medium such as opera may seem like a mismatch. However, Bates was convinced he and Campbell could produce a compelling opera focusing on a big theme of Jobs' life—his need to control everything and make a perfect product, in contrast with the inherent uncontrollable nature of life.

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs isn't a simple story, and that's not just due to Jobs' complexities. The stage production is nonlinear, recreating 18 scenes that occurred at various times during Jobs' life and career. It features important characters that made Jobs' who he was by the time he passed away in 2011, including business partner Steve Wozniak, his wife Laurene Powell, and Japanese priest Kobun Chino Otogawa, who helped guide Jobs' conversion to Buddhism.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | John Greim)

Regardless the type of dietary supplements—from vitamins, energy drinks, herbal medicines, homeopathic products, to some hormonal treatments—they usually come with big claims about boosting health and wellbeing. While those claims are questionable (and often unfounded), the products collectively do enhance one thing: the volume of calls to poison control centers.

Between 2005 and 2012, the rate of supplement-related calls to poison centers increased 49.3 percent, researchers reported Monday in the Journal of Medical Toxicology. In the final year of data, the centers were getting calls at a rate of nearly 10 adverse exposures per 100,000 people.

There didn’t seem to be a big jump in use of dietary supplements during that time. Self-reported use among adults has held steady, around 49 to 54 percent, the authors note. But, these supplements are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration as are drugs—no FDA review or approval is required before supplements hit the market.