Source: Engadget
Source: Boing Boing
Eli Pariser is the author of The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think as well as one of the original founders of Upworthy (and, full disclosure, my former boss there). Since leaving Upworthy, he's focused his efforts on a new project called Civic Signals, which explores new ways to leverage the democratic power of the Internet for good and for positive change. — Read the rest
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
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Google and Intel are warning of a high-severity Bluetooth flaw in all but the most recent version of the Linux Kernel. While a Google researcher said the bug allows seamless code execution by attackers within Bluetooth range, Intel is characterizing the flaw as providing an escalation of privileges or the disclosure of information.
The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
So far, little is known about BleedingTooth, the name given by Google engineer Andy Nguyen, who said that a blog post will be published “soon.” A Twitter thread and a YouTube video provide the most detail and give the impression that the bug provides a reliable way for nearby attackers to execute malicious code of their choice on vulnerable Linux devices that use BlueZ for Bluetooth.
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Source: Hacker News
Source: Hack a Day
I can’t remember how exactly I came across the OrbiTouch keyboard, but it’s been on my list to clack about for a long time. Launched in 2003, the OrbiTouch is a keyboard and mouse in one. It’s designed for people who can’t keyboard regularly, or simply want a different kind of experience.
The OrbiTouch was conceived of by a PhD student who started to experience carpal tunnel while writing papers. He spent fifteen years developing the OrbiTouch and found that it could assist many people who have various upper body deficiencies. So, how does it work?
To use this keyboard, you put both hands on the sliders and move them around. They are identical eight-way joysticks or D-pads, essentially. The grips sort of resemble a mouse and have what looks like a special resting place for your pinky.
One slider points to groups of letters, numbers, and special characters, and the other chooses a color from a special OrbiTouch rainbow. Pink includes things like parentheses and their cousins along with tilde, colon and semi-colon. Black is for the modifiers like Tab, Alt, Ctrl, Shift, and Backspace. These special characters and modifiers aren’t shown on the hieroglyphs slider, you just have to keep the guide handy until you memorize the placement of everything around the circle.
The alphabet is divided up into groups of five letters which are color-coded in rainbow order that starts with orange, because red is reserved for the F keys. So for instance, A is orange, B is yellow, C is green, D is blue, E is purple, then it starts back over with F at orange. If you wanted to type cab, for instance, you would start by moving the hieroglyph slider to the first alphabet group and the color slider to green.
The interesting thing about this keyboard and this particular word is that all the letters for cab are in the first group. The keyboard will let you keep one of the sliders in place if you have repeated colors or letter groups, so you can keep the alpha slider in place and just move the rainbow slider around from green to orange to yellow to spell cab. Let’s watch it type ‘Hackaday’ over and over:
Every letter, number, and special character has an equivalent directional pair that may or may not be easy to memorize. According to the FAQ, the maximum output you can expect from this thing is 30-40WPM. Although it is a combination keyboard and mouse, if you play any games that are more serious than say, Minesweeper,
forget about it. You’ll have to keep switching between keyboard and mouse mode, and it’s a whole thing, and you’re gonna die really quickly.
I think the color code is a great idea, but if you’re colorblind, it’s likely not going to be the keyboard for you. Also, you would have to have the use of both hands and a pretty good amount of coordination to be able to drive this keyboard/mouse hybrid creature. On the plus side, every gesture requires equal force, which is fairly low.
Apparently this keyboard rates highly with autistic people because of the alphabetically rainbow-tastic way that the inputs are laid out. Those aesthetic choices are definitely a high point in my book. I think it’s neat that it’s so totally different from any other keyboard. It looks fun to try, at least for little while. Though I can’t imagine typing an entire Hackaday article on one, it looks way more fun to learn than Dvorak. I might buy one someday, but the OrbiTouch is a touch on the expensive side at $399, or you can pick them up used for around $200. They were actually sold out of both the black-and-white versions on the OrbiTouch website at the time of this writing, but there are a few out there on the electronic bay.
So is this keyboard really assistive technology? It kind of depends on your level of functioning. If typing hurts, but you still need to do it, this could be your saving grace. All things considered, I would think that all the joystick motion would aggravate wrist issues or even cause them, but since I haven’t tried actually tried one out, I can’t say for sure. Have any of you tried one?
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: AnandTech Articles
Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has today announced the company’s next generation mainstream Ryzen processor. The new family, known as the Ryzen 5000 series, includes four parts and supports up to sixteen cores. The key element of the new product is the core design, with AMD’s latest Zen 3 microarchitecture, promising a 19% raw increase in performance-per-clock, well above recent generational improvements. The new processors are socket-compatible with existing 500-series motherboards, and will be available at retail from November 5th. AMD is putting a clear marker in the sand, calling one of its halo products as ‘The World’s Best Gaming CPU’. We have details.
Source: Ars Technica
IBM announced this morning that the company would be spinning off some of its lower-margin lines of business into a new company and focusing on higher-margin cloud services. During an investor call, CEO Arvind Krishna acknowledged that the move was a "significant shift" in how IBM will work, but he positioned it as the latest in a decades-long series of strategic divestments.
"We divested networking back in the '90s, we divested PCs back in the 2000s, we divested semiconductors about five years ago because all of them didn’t necessarily play into the integrated value proposition," he said. Krishna became CEO in April 2020, replacing former CEO Ginni Rometty (who is now IBM's executive chairman), but the spin-off is the capstone of a multi-year effort to apply some kind of focus to the company's sprawling business model.
The new spin-off doesn't have a formal name yet and is referred to as "NewCo" in IBM's marketing and investor relations material. Under the spin-off plan, the press release claims IBM "will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform, which represents a $1 trillion market opportunity," while NewCo "will immediately be the world’s leading managed infrastructure services provider." (This is because NewCo will start life owning the entirety of IBM Global Technology Services' existing managed infrastructure clients, which means about 4,600 accounts, including about 75 percent of the Fortune 100.)
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