Windows 10 going to add Ubuntu’s bash and Linux command line and lots more in next update

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March 31, 2016

At Wednesday’s Microsoft Build keynote, an announcement made developers the most excited was even nerdier. The crowd went nuts when Microsoft announced that a full version of the Bash command line interface is coming from Linux – an operating system that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once likened to “a cancer” – to Windows 10 this summer.

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Ubuntu’s bash and Linux command line coming to Windows 10

For Microsoft, it’s a big part of its crucial appeal to the developers building apps on Windows 10.

If you’ve ever used the command prompt on Mac OS X, you’ve seen Bash in action. Even though it’s entirely text-based, it offers a lot of power and flexibility for a developer or IT pro to interact with a system, and so it’s been a mainstay of most programmers’ workflows since its introduction way back in 1989.

To make it work, Microsoft partnered up with Canonical, developers of the mega-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. Thanks to some technical wizardry work by the two companies, Windows 10 now has a way to run Ubuntu software.

Microsoft also says that running Ubuntu software on Windows has little-to-no drop in performance.

It’s also a big extension of Microsoft’s newfound love of Linux on its Microsoft Azure cloud. This takes that same philosophy and brings it straight to developers and their daily lives.

It’s a big part of Microsoft’s Windows 10 story: Microsoft needs developers on board with Windows 10 if it wants to succeed. And to do that, Microsoft needs to make the operating system as friendly as possible to the ways they like to work.

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What other features can we expect in the new update ?

For starters, the free update delivers Windows Hello biometric authentication to the Edge browser and apps.

The second feature focuses on stylus input, called Windows Ink.

“We lose notes in our notebooks, take pictures of whiteboards, and can’t do equations or music composition with a keyboard. Windows Ink is an all-new experience, putting the power of Windows in the tip of your pen, enabling you to write on your device as you do on paper, creating sticky notes, drawing on a whiteboard, and easily sharing your analog thoughts in the digital world,” Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said in a blog post.

Supported apps include Edge, Maps and Office, while Microsoft claims that developers can add the feature to their apps with “as little as two lines of code”.

Cortana is the third big focus point, as the firm introduced a Cortana Collection on the Windows Store, Cortana functionality above the lockscreen and text messaging on your phone via the desktop version of Cortana.

Microsoft also had Xbox-related news, saying that the Xbox edition of the Anniversary Update will bring the Windows Store to the console.

Microsoft’s HoloLens also saw some news, as the company confirmed that it was shipping out the device to developers.

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Google bypassed China’s Great Firewall for 105 Minutes

By

Sabarinath

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March 29, 2016

We know that China is not that much fond to Google and its services so they are blocking Google with their Great Firewall but last night somehow Google managed to penetrate through China’s Firewall for 105 minutes.

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Google Bypassed China’s Great Firewall

Usually web users of mainland China cannot access Google’s services without going through a virtual private network but yesterday night according to South China Morning Post, at about 11.30pm, a growing number of Chinese internet users put posts online saying they were able to access Google’s search engine through Google.com, Google.com.hk, Google.com.vn, Google.com.sg.

Yet Gmail and other popular foreign websites, such as Twitter,Facebook and YouTube, remained blocked during the period, according to the internet users.

Access to Google was short-lived because all the services were once again blocked by about 1.15am on Monday.

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Some Chinese media said on their official microblogs that access had become possible because Google had introduced a series of new IP servers – vn\jp\uk\in\ar\es\pk\sa\sg – for India, Japan and other countries in South-East Asia.

Because they were new, China’s Great Firewall, also referred to as the Golden Shield Project, didn’t not recognise the IP addresses as ones it should block, and allowed them to pass through the censors.

Great Firewall is a major factor in the virtual lives of all Chinese citizens, the system is not entirely perfect and this not the first time China’s Great Firewall accidently allowed access to blocked websites, in 2013, Facebook and Twitter managed to worm their way through.

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Researchers managed to transfer data at record-speed 57Gbps using fiber optic technology

By

Avinash A

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March 26, 2016

record-speed 57Gbps using fiber optic technology

University of Illinois engineers managed to put together fiber optic technology capable of transmitting data at speeds of 57 gigabits per second, all error free. The 57 Gbps threshold is not only impressive, but sets a completely new record for fiber-optic data transmission.

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Record Internet Speed To Transfer Data Using Fiber Optic Technology

Graduate researcher Michael Liu will present the research team’s developments in oxide-VCSEL technology, which underpins fiber-optic communications systems, at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition today in Anaheim, California. The research team was led by electrical and computer engineering professor Milton Feng – who will be in attendance at the conference – and also included professor emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr. and graduate researcher Curtis Wang.

As big data has gotten bigger, the need has grown for a high-speed data transmission infrastructure that can accommodate the ever-growing volume of bits transferred from one place to another.

“Our big question has always been, how do you make information transmit faster?” Feng said. “There is a lot of data out there, but if your data transmission is not fast enough, you cannot use data that’s been collected; you cannot use upcoming technologies that use large data streams, like virtual reality. The direction toward fiber-optic communication is going to increase because there’s a higher speed data rate, especially over distance.”

Feng’s group has been pushing VCSEL technology to higher speeds in recent years, and in 2014 was the first group in the U.S. to achieve error-free data transmission at 40 Gbps. Now, in a series of conference papers, they report 57 Gbps error-free data transmission at room temperature, as well as 50 Gbps speeds at higher temperatures up to 85 degrees Celsius (185 degrees Fahrenheit).

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Achieving high speeds at high temperatures is very difficult, Feng said, due to the nature of the materials used, which prefer lower temperatures. However, computing components grow warm over extended operation, as anyone who has worked on an increasingly heated laptop can attest.

“That’s why data centers are refrigerated and have cooling systems,” Feng said. “For data centers and for commercial use, you’d like a device not to carry a refrigerator. The device needs to be operational from room temperature all the way up to 85 degrees without spending energy and resources on cooling.”

Feng hopes that the conference presentations and papers will prove that high-speed operation at high temperatures is scientifically possible and useful for commercial applications.

“This type of technology is going to be used not only for data centers, but also for airborne, lightweight communications, like in airplanes, because the fiber-optic wires are much lighter than copper wire,” Feng said. “We believe this could be very useful for industry. That’s what makes the work so important to us.”

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New wireless mouse vulnerability could let hackers to take over your computer

By

Sabarinath

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March 24, 2016

Those who are using wireless mouse, I had a bad news for you. Security researchers found that a vulnerability in wireless mouse from popular manufactures could let hackers to take over the computer or gain access to a network within seconds.

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Wireless Mouse Vulnerability Could Welcome Hackers To Your Computer

Marc Newlin and Balint Seeber, the pair working for Bastille, a startup cyber security company discovered security vulnerability, MouseJack.

The researchers are able to exploit the vulnerability and prove that hackers as far as 100 meters away could potentially exploit the affected wireless mouse or keyboard and use it as a portal to potentially take over a computer, transfer files, insert malware, delete the contents, and even infiltrate a network.

How MouseJack Attack Works ?

Wireless mice from companies like HP, Lenovo, Amazon and Dell use unencrypted signals to communicate with computers.

“They haven’t encrypted the mouse traffic, that makes it possible for the attacker to send unencrypted traffic to the dongle pretending to be a keyboard and have it result as keystrokes on your computer. This would be the same as if the attacker was sitting at your computer typing on the computer,” — said Newlin, a security researcher at Bastille.

A hacker uses an antenna, a wireless chip called a dongle, both available for the less USD $20, and a simple line of code to trick the wireless chip connected to the target computer into accepting it as a mouse.

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“So the attacker can send data to the dongle, pretend it’s a mouse but say ‘actually I am a keyboard and please type these letters,” — Newlin said.

“If we sent unencrypted keyboard strokes as if we were a mouse it started typing on the computer, typing at a 1000 words per minute,” — Rouland said.

And at a thousand words a minute, the hacker can take over the computer or gain access to a network in seconds.

It was found that Bluetooth devices are not vulnerable to this type of attack.

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To see MouseJack in action, checkout the video :

Unlike these earlier exploits which attacked the encryption schemes for dongle to keyboard communication, Mousejack shows that an attacker can entirely bypass a dongle’s encryption scheme and powerdrive keystrokes to the computer (Windows or Mac).

These keystrokes impersonate the user and thus have all the authority to steal data and damage local or network file systems that the logged-in user has.

Bastille adds that some of the larger companies with WiFi-based mice have since pushed out firmware updates to help prevent such hacks in the futurue.

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Oxford professor won £500,000 for solving 300-year-old mathematical theorem

By

Avinash A

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March 16, 2016

Believe it or not, someone just won £500,000 for solving one line mathematical equation, which remained unsolved for last 300-years. A professor from Oxford University earned this achievement by cracking Fermat’s Last Theorem.

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Professor Won £500,000 For Solving Fermat’s Last Theorem

Sir Andrew Wiles, 62, was awarded the Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he published in 1994, by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.

The Abel Prize is widely regarded as the Nobel for mathematics and the most prestigious international award for the discipline.

“It is a tremendous honour to receive the Abel Prize and to join the previous laureates who have made such outstanding contributions to the field.
“Fermat’s equation was my passion from an early age, and solving it gave me an overwhelming sense of fulfilment,” — Sir Andrew, currently a professor at Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute was quoted as saying by The Telegraph
“It has always been my hope that my solution of this age—old problem would inspire many young people to take up mathematics and to work on the many challenges of this beautiful and fascinating subject.”

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First formulated by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, the Fermat’s Last Theorem states: There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is greater than 2. Wiles has been awarded for developing proof for this simple looking yet complex theorem.

Fermat himself claimed to have proved the theorem, but in what must rank as one of the greatest teases in the history of mathematics, claimed that the margin of the book he was making notes in was too narrow to elaborate. Over the next three centuries, mathematicians around the world tried and failed to solve the theorem.

Wiles took seven-year quest to solve the problem, working in his attic without telling anyone except for his wife. In 1993, after seven years of intense study at Princeton University, Wiles went public with his proof in a series of lectures at Cambridge. When he wrote the proof on the board to conclude the lectures, the room erupted in applause from the two hundred researchers present.

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But later that year, a mathematician who was checking Wiles’s proof found a major mistake in his workings. Wiles was devastated but vowed to fix the error, and called on his former student, Richard Taylor to help. After a year of work, the mistake was corrected and the revised proof published.

Wiles had solved the problem by combining three complex mathematical fields, namely modular forms, elliptic curves, and Galois representations. Though complicated, Wiles said the equations were not beyond the capabilities of a student. “The truth is the methods I used were not any more sophisticated than I could certainly do as an undergraduate,” he said.

In solving the Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles developed new tools which have since allowed researchers to make great strides in an ambitious effort to unify disparate branches of mathematics.

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Stardock’s new multi-GPU tool let you mix AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in a PC

By

Sabarinath

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March 14, 2016

What you think about mixing of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in a single PC ? Untill now I thought it was impossible to combine these two rival brands to work together but now a company came up with a new idea of multi-GPU tool that will will allow gamers to combine the power of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in one machine.

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Multi-GPU Tool to Mix AMD and Nvidia Graphics Cards in a PC

Stardock, the company famous for its Windows customization software – such as desktop organization utility Fences, and its Start menu alternatives, come up with this new multi-GPU tool.

“Basically, it’s multi-GPU. You can mix and match cards however you want. One of the biggest problems with games is that a new video card comes out from AMD and Nvidia, and they’re like [expensive], and you have to make a call. I like my video card. I can play most games on it, and I don’t want to spend $800 on some new video card. But imagine, instead, hey, they’re having a sale [using my GTX 760 as an example]. Hey, they’re having a sale on an AMD 290 for $75. Wouldn’t it be cool to put this into your computer and double your performance. You keep this in there [the 760]. You put this in there [the 290], and your games are twice as fast without doing anything else.” – said by Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to Venturebeat

Of course, with NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and AMD’s CrossFire you can link multiple graphics cards together but only of the corresponding manufacturer, and the cards must be identical.

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But with this new Stardock approach enables you to mix brands and generations of cards. So gamers will be able to throw any old card in to boost the power of their existing video board. And the interesting thing is all of these will be possible not with a new hardware peripheral but via software.

Stardock and Microsoft have supposedly been working together for about a year now to take advantage of a feature found in DirectX 12 that will make this possible. Name of the product and details of the requirements still remain undisclosed.

This new multi-GPU tool could even benefit monitor makers. Instead of needing to buy beefier cards to run games at 4K resolution, you could just get one or two older cards to help you meet that threshold. It could also help motherboard manufacturers. People may need more PCIe spots, and it’s cheaper to upgrade a motherboard and use a cheaper card than to buy the newest, most powerful GPUs.

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Newly discovered plastic-eating bacteria could save our planet

By

Jenna Jose

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March 13, 2016

One of the major problem that our planet facing today is plastic pollution. We know plastics are non-biodegradable materials, and according to reports we manufacture over 300 million tonnes of plastics each year for use in everything from packaging to clothing. But after use when we discarded these plastics, they will become a real threat to our environment. But now scientists found a new plastic-eating bacteria to minimize this problem.

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Discovered Plastic-Eating Bacteria

A group of scientists from at Kyoto University, Japan discovered a species of plastic-eating bacteria which is capable to breaks down fully one of the most common kinds of plastic called Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the type often used to package bottled drinks.

Earlier a group of Yale researchers has led to the discovery of a rare fungus that can break down plastic. And now its found that any microbes that can eat it.

To find the plastic-eating bacteria research team collected 250 PET-contaminated samples including sediment, soil and wastewater from a plastic bottle recycling site.

Next they screened the microbes living on the samples to see whether any of them were eating the PET and using it to grow. They originally found a consortium of bugs that appeared to break down a PET film, but they eventually discovered that just one of bacteria species was responsible for the PET degradation. They named it Ideonella sakainesis.

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plastic-eating bacteria — Bottle breakdown | Image Credits : Sciencealert

Further tests in the lab revealed that it used two enzymes to break down the PET. After adhering to the PET surface, the bacteria secretes one enzyme onto the PET to generate an intermediate chemical. That chemical is then taken up by the cell, where another enzyme breaks it down even further, providing the bacteria with carbon and energy to grow.

The researchers report that a community of Ideonella sakaiensis working this way could break down a thin film of PET over the course of six weeks if the temperature were held at a steady 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

This opens a whole new approach to plastic recycling and decontamination. At present, most plastic bottles are not truly recycled. Instead they are melted and reformed into other hard plastic products.

The PET-digesting enzymes offer a way to truly recycle plastic. They could be added to vats of waste, breaking all the bottles or other plastic items down into into easy-to-handle chemicals. These could then be used to make fresh plastics, producing a true recycling system.

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New MIT Javascript code will load all web pages 34% faster in any browser

By

Sabarinath

-

March 10, 2016

Even though if we have good internet connection sometimes we have to wait several minutes for a single web page to load. This is because now websites are getting more complex. But now a group of computer scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come with a new tool that promises to solve this problem.

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Load All Web Pages 34% Faster

A team of researchers of MIT, working at the university’s Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory developed a system known as Polaris, that can make your browser to load all web pages 34% faster. Polaris cuts load-times by determining the best way to ‘overlap’ the downloading of different parts of a webpage.

How Polaris Work ?

When you visit a new page, your browser reaches across the internet to fetch ‘objects’ like pictures, videos, and HTML files. The browser then evaluates the objects and puts them on the page. However, some objects are dependent on others, and browsers can’t see all of these dependencies until they come across them.

Polaris works by tracking all of these relationships and dependencies between objects on the page and turning the information into a ‘dependency graph’ that can be interpreted by your browser. Polaris essentially gives the browser a roadmap of the page, with all the details of the best and quickest way to load it.

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“It can take up to 100 milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data,” says PhD student Ravi Netravali, who is first author on a paper about Polaris. “As pages increase in complexity, they often require multiple trips that create delays that really add up. Our approach minimizes the number of round trips so that we can substantially speed up a page’s load-time.”

The researchers tested Polaris across a range of network conditions on some of the world’s most popular websites, and found it made them load an average of 34 per cent faster when compared to a normal browser.

The good news is that Polaris is written in JavaScript. That means that it could be introduced to any website—it’d just have to be running on the server in question, so it’d automatically kick in for any page load—and used with unmodified browsers.

The team is hoping that some day soon the system will be integrated directly into browsers so that they will be able to work on further optimizations and everyone will be able to experience a faster Internet.

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