Month: October 2018

Enlarge / This will be... interesting. (credit: IBM)

This is no trick, and whether it's a treat remains to be seen: IBM and Red Hat executives announced Monday that IBM is acquiring the open source software and cloud services company in a $34 billion cash deal.

Red Hat will remain a standalone business unit within IBM, and an IBM spokesperson said that IBM "will remain committed to Red Hat’s open source ethos, its developer community and its open source community relationships." Red Hat will maintain its current leadership team and remain in its current headquarters and facilities. The culture will remain as well—though it's possible IBM and Red Hat may cross-pollinate a bit more than they have in the past.

In a webcast, IBM Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Arvind Krishna and Red Hat Executive Vice President and President of Products and Technologies Paul Cormier echoed the spokesperson's statement, stating that all of Red Hat's existing partnerships with other cloud providers and all of Red Hat's open source development projects—including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the OpenShift implementation of Kubernetes-based containers, and the OpenStack cloud computing platform—would continue as before. Likewise, Krishna said that IBM would continue its partnerships with other Linux distributions.

(credit: Flickr / craigfinlay)

Among a wide range of new DMCA exemptions recently approved by the Librarian of Congress (LoC) is a limited legal right for video game preservationists to restore online games that have been "abandoned" by their creators to a playable form. But the new rules come with a number of caveats that could require some significant hoop-jumping from affected research institutions.

Back in 2015, the Librarian of Congress granted libraries, archives, and museums (and members of the public) the right to circumvent defunct DRM protections that require "phoning home" to authentication servers that are no longer maintained by the original game maker. That existing exemption, which also allows research institutions to use hack console firmware to get around such DRM, has been extended as part of the triennial review of such rules.

But the 2015 exemption stopped short of letting research institutions relaunch versions of the centralized gameplay servers required to play many online-focused games. The copyrighted "audiovisual content" that was originally stored on those servers was still protected by the DMCA, the LoC argued three years ago.

Ron Amadeo

Today, OnePlus is announcing its newest flagship smartphone and lifting the review embargo. The OnePlus 6T is a mid-cycle update to the OnePlus 6, so while the specs haven't moved much, you do get plenty of upgrades. There's a new design with a teardrop camera notch on the front, a bigger display, a new baseline of 128GB of storage, and a bigger 3700mAh battery. Most interestingly, there's now an in-display optical fingerprint reader, which makes the 6T the first US-bound smartphone with this new fingerprint tech.

Speaking of US sales, OnePlus is also making progress on the carrier front. This is the first OnePlus device that will land in brick-and-mortar stores in the US, thanks to a deal with T-Mobile. The phone is also certified for use on Verizon, so while you won't find one in a Verizon store, you can bring a 6T in and Verizon will activate it.

Enlarge / Mmmm, chocolate. We can indulge in delicious truffles today because of the cultivation of cacao in the Amazon basin thousands of years ago. (credit: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

We owe our perennial favorite sweet indulgence, chocolate, to Central American Aztec and Mayan people living nearly 4,000 years ago. At least that's what archaeologists have long assumed. But an international team of researchers has uncovered evidence that the plant from which chocolate is made was first cultivated in South America 1,500 years earlier than that.

Past and present are inextricably linked when it comes to the origins of food. "Today we all rely, on one extent or another, on foods that were created by the indigenous peoples of the Americas," says Michael Blake of the University of British Columbia, co-author of a new study published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. "And one of the world's favorites is chocolate."

The chocolate we know and love comes from cacao beans, which grow inside large pods on cacao trees. Once the beans are harvested, they are left to ferment for several days and then dried. The dried beans are roasted and ground out. The liquid that comes out of this process becomes the cocoa butter used to make your favorite chocolate bar; any residue is turned into cocoa powder.