firehose

As the Pentagon tentatively lays blame for hacking attacks at the feet of the Chinese military, the US Department of Homeland Security grapples with replacing four of its most prominent cybersecurity-focused officials. That includes Deputy Undersecretary for Cybersecurity Mark Weatherford, as well as DHS second-in-command Jane Holl Lute. According to the New York Times, though, the search for replacements has highlighted how vulnerable the agency really is.

Sources have said that while the DHS is considering Symantec or McAfee executives, as well as Washington officials, they're worried that these picks wouldn't have much-needed links to either Silicon Valley or the hacking community. These sources would rather see a hacker community "rock star" like Def Con founder Jeff Moss, whose conference frequently draws intelligence officials looking for fresh talent. Moss joined the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Council in 2009, and he's served on a task force meant to help the agency recruit cybersecurity experts.

While Congress and the White House have stressed the importance of putting resources towards cybersecurity, the Times sources seem to express some pessimism about the agency's prospects. "Where is cyber at DHS right now?" asks one. "Who is minding the shop? And what have we been talking about for the past four years?"

Submitted by: Unknown

Harvard and MIT are among a group of universities planning to spend tens of millions of dollars on "massively open online courses (MOOCs)," a new type of higher education teaching that can include thousands of students in a single lecture. The two institutions have already launched an online platform called edX to offer these courses. (Stanford has been a leader in online education as well, and its competing Class2Go platform has already been adopted by other universities.) But whether MOOCs are actually the future of education still seems to be a point of confusion and concern among professors. In a large profile of educators and administrations involved in the educational shift, The New Yorker explores whether pedagogy at a higher level is a more about the weekly lectures that MOOCs emulate or about placing students in an intellectual environment with face-to-face connections.

As The New Yorker writer Nathan Heller notes, "Bill Clinton, a lower-middle-class kid out of Arkansas, might have received an equally distinguished education if he hadn't gone to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, but he wouldn't have been President." Even if universities haven't determined if there's truly a distinction, many are already moving to put MOOCs into regular practice.

Submitted by: Unknown (via Reddit)

By Samit Sarkar on May 13, 2013 at 2:30p

Amazon launched its new virtual currency, Amazon Coins, today, giving Kindle Fire users a new way to purchase content in the device's Amazon Appstore and within Kindle Fire apps.

The company said in February that it would debut Amazon Coins this month. Coins correlate directly with pennies — $1 equates to 100 Coins — and to mark the currency's launch, Amazon has given every Kindle Fire owner in the U.S. a free 500 Coins, $5 worth. Kindle Fire owners can buy Coins on Amazon, with discounts of up to 10 percent for bulk purchases.

"We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities — today is Day One for Coins," said Mike George, Amazon's vice president of apps and games.

Amazon Coins don't change anything for people making Kindle Fire games and apps: Developers will receive the same 70 percent cut of revenue that they get from purchases made with real money.

Since launching Drive last year, Google has offered users 5GB of free Dropbox-style storage for documents and their Picasa / Google+ photos — but Gmail has long had its own, separate 10GB of storage. Now, Google is unifying storage across its products, something that should automatically make Drive a lot more useful to many users. All Google users now get a combined 15GB of shared storage across Drive, Google+ photos, and Gmail that can be used as they wish. If you're a light Gmail users, you can devote some (or all) of that 15GB to Drive — immediately making it one of the larger free cloud storage options out there.

Unfortunately, Google has also done away with one of its storage tiers — previously, users could add 25GB of storage to Drive for $2.49 per month. That option is now gone; the cheapest extended storage option is adding 100GB to your Google account for $4.99 per month. That's half the price of Dropbox's 100GB plan, and some recent improvements to Drive have made it even better as a Dropbox replacement than ever. We're not sure yet what'll happen to users on the $2.49 monthly plan, but we imagine users will get billed as normal for their space until they cancel it — we're reaching out to Google to find out for sure. As with so many of Google's changes, these new Drive plans will start rolling out to users "over the next couple of weeks."

The prestigious New York Museum of Metropolitan of Art made headlines earlier this month when museum officials announced plans to return two large statues to Cambodia, after concurring with evidence provided by Cambodian officials that the artifacts were looted from an ancient temple in the country. The Met maintains that, for now at least, the rest of their vast collection will stay put. "There are no claims at all to speak of in the antiquities field," Harold Holzer, a senior spokesperson for the Met, told The Verge. But the incident raises a thorny question for museums in the US and Europe: how many of the objects in their collections were stolen or acquired illegally, and how many should be sent home?

"There are no claims at all to speak of in the antiquities field."

For now, there’s no easy answer. The process of identifying museum objects that were stolen, and then returning them to their countries of origin, is called " and — were taken from their home countries by occupying armies or grabby colonial governments, mostly over the past 300 years.

Photo of the disputed "Elgin Marbles" at the British Museum. (Credit: Phil Whitehouse, Flickr CC-by-2.0.)

Many of these objects were also looted by people within the countries of origin. But no matter who took them, they were often spirited away across several borders and then purchased by a series of private collectors. Those individuals later sold them to museums for vast sums, maintaining that the objects were legally acquired. This makes it difficult to pinpoint the true origins of artifacts or the validity of claims to ownership. Indeed, the Archaeological Institute of America, a nonprofit group representing archaeologists in the US, estimates that as many of 85-90 percent of "classical and certain other types of artifacts on the market do not have a documented provenance."

85-90 percent of artifacts on the market do not have documented provenance

The contention that Western museums should identify and return such objects has only come up relatively recently, over the past 50 years, namely as European and American colonies in Africa and Asia have declared independence, developed their economies, and started to throw political weight around. "Repatriation has become a hot topic in the last decade or so, with many third-world countries trying to assert their independence and cultural identity by demanding the return of their cultural objects that were stolen from them," Julia Fischer, a professor of art history at Georgia Southern University, wrote in an email to The Verge. "In many cases, I believe these objects should be returned home."

"I believe these objects should be returned home."

But it’s unclear how many objects in museums around the world should even be considered for repatriation, given that no clear criteria exist to make that determination. The UN has made some progress, establishing a 1970 convention designed to curb the export of stolen artifacts and allow countries to issue repatriation claims, then pay to have the objects returned. But many museums around the world have interpreted this convention to mean that if they can prove an object left its country of origin before 1970, they’re in the clear.

Meanwhile, a UN report issued last year evaluating the effectiveness of the convention found it to have "serious weaknesses," including a lack of staffing and few international laws to back it up. A UN committee established following the convention has presided over just six cases of successful restitutions in the past 40 years. But on the plus side, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and international law group Interpol watch lists for artifacts reported stolen. "Of course every museum director watches these things," Holzer said of the lists.

Photo showing damage caused by looters to a temple in Cambodia. (Credit: UNESCO/C.Jacques.)

"Wise and thoughtful judgement is necessary."

Outside of the UN and Interpol, several other efforts exist to cut down on the theft of artifacts and promote the return of stolen ones. The International Council of Museums (ICOM), a private organization representing 20,000 museums around the the globe, states in its ethics code for acquisitions that if a museum "has reason to doubt" the legality of an object, it should reach out to police and scholars to investigate the object’s country of origin. But ICOM’s leaders have also resisted the idea of a broad review of artifacts at member museums, saying in 2002: "Repatriation of objects is an issue that should be very carefully dealt with. Wise and thoughtful judgement is necessary. Unnecessarily strong judgements or declarations should in any case be avoided."

Around the same time, ICOM also began advocating something of a partial fix, an idea it calls "digital repatriation" or "virtual repatriation" — scanning and uploading images of objects online, with the intent of allowing people in origin countries the opportunity to view them without museums having to send them back. But ICOM denies that this idea is meant to replace physical object returns. In 2007, the ICOM ethics committee chair said digital repatriation "has never been proposed as a ‘soft option’ or easy alternative to physical repatriation."

a case-by-case basis

Among American museums, repatriation has mostly occurred on a "case-by-case" basis — typically when officials are confronted by foreign governments with solid evidence. The process often takes years, and it isn’t pleasant. The J. Paul Getty museum near Malibu, California, infamously agreed in 2007 to return upwards of 40 artifacts to Italy, including a large statue thought to be a likeness of the goddess Aphrodite that it purchased for $18 million in 1988. In recent years, museums across the country, from Brooklyn to Arizona, have all agreed to return objects to other countries or to native tribes within the US, in part motivated by a 1990 law requiring federally-funded institutes to identify and return Native American objects.

The Met itself has repatriated dozens of objects over the past 20 years to countries including Rome, Egypt, and India, as the museum itself openly asserts, even sending The Verge press clippings of notable repatriations it has made going back to 1994. "We returned items by making good decisions on our own," said Holzer. "We have acted responsibly on a whole range of items. I can say that the Met never stops studying and researching the pieces in its collections."

Globe outside UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. (Credit: UNESCO/Niamh Burke.)

"Collecting reliable statistics is correspondingly hard."

But because so many museums in the US act of their own accord to return objects, there’s no sense of how many total objects have been returned so far. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), of which the Met and some 220 other museums are members, "does not keep statistics on repatriation claims or returns," as a spokesperson told The Verge. Another US museum organization, the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), also doesn't maintain any cumulative list. "The universe of US museums is vast and diverse, ranging from great institutions like the Met to the smallest college or community art galleries," said Erik Ledbetter, who led repatriation issues for AAM from 2003 to 2009. "Collecting reliable statistics from such a vast and diverse field is correspondingly hard."

It’s also difficult to say just how many more repatriation claims will pop up in the future, as countries and tribes gain more political and economic clout. Even advocates of repatriation say the practice could go too far, leaving prestigious Western museums wiped out. "I worry that with all the returns occurring lately that our museums will lack the diversity that is needed to understand world art in its entirety," Fischer said.

"There’s no purge."

The AAMD says it’s not worried about this possibility, because it only focuses on repatriation claims from 1971 onward. "This does not open up all museum collections to claims," the organization’s spokesperson told The Verge. "Rather, it focuses on a limited and specific collection of materials." Officials with the Met agree. "We’re not trying to make any statements about the collection overall. There’s no purge, there’s no task force, no wholesale reexamination of things," Holzer said. Further, he argues that museums may actually help the process of returning artifacts to their home countries. "If anybody has anything to say about [objects], they can come up front and tell us," Holzer said. "If they are in the hands of private collectors or hoarders, nobody would know."

By Jeremy Laird on May 13th, 2013 at 4:00 pm.

Back in Feb we had a little chin wag about the mad dash of annual graphics hardware launches slowing to a saunter. We can add a little more flesh to the bones of that story this week, with some pretty plausible looking details of Nvidia’s upcoming plans – and further confirmation of nothing new from AMD. It’s worth a quick dip into the mucky waters of rumour for anyone pondering a GPU upgrade or a generally a new rig as some new kit – of sorts – is imminent.

So, the latest scuttlebutt goes something like this. Nvidia is tooling up to unleash its shiny new 700 series video boards. The bad news is that we’re largely looking at a bunch of rebadges, not properly new GPUs.

The good is that you’ll be getting more for your moolah. If the rumours are right, Nvidia is planning to pluck the mighty GK110 chip from the mental-money GeForce Titan card, turn a few bits off and stick a GeForce GTX 780 badge on it.

2,496 shaders instead of 2,688, 208 texture units instead of 224, 40 render outputs instead of 48. That sort of thing. Overall, we’re talking 80-plus per cent of a Titan. And thus still a monster of a GPU. But it will be £400 odd instead of £800. Yay.

Cheaper chips

OK, still not exactly a democratic pricing. But there’s more. The existing GeForce GTX 680 and its GK104 chip is also said to be getting a rebadge. It’ll take the GTX 770 slot and purportedly higher clocks. If so, you’ll be getting better-than-680 pixel pumping for roughly 670 pricing. Huzzah.

We’re still talking a likely £300 or so for the 770, so perhaps sir would be interested in the GTX 760 Ti, allegedly little more than a rebaked GTX 670? Now we’re down nearer £200 for a board that currently costs £300.

All these ‘new’ boards are due to begin appearing from the end of the month, or thereabouts. If you’re in the market, therefore, hold fire for a few weeks. If you’re lucky enough to already own a 600 Series board, then cue the rejoicing. Because your hardware effectively remains current when the 700 Series rocks up.

Nvidia’s Kepler-gen cards, like current fave GTX 670, are being rebagded

Apart from the happy side effect of not suddenly making your precious 600 board look about as cutting edge as an Atari 2600, that’s handy because it means you’ll continue to reap the benefit of Nvidia’s best efforts in terms of driver updates. Not that Nvidia instadumps old GPU designs when it comes to tweaking drivers. But, inevitably, the quest to flog kit means the latest chips must be a priority.

One other thing worth remembering about the Titan chip in the upcoming GTX 780 is that it’s a very different architecture from Nvidia’s GPU family proper. It packs twice the transistor count of GK104 but not twice the performance. In simple terms, there’s stuff in there for general purpose computing that doesn’t do a great deal for games. Makes it a beast for things like pro image rendering, if that’s your bag.

I reckon the GTX 780 will fly off the shelves and into the homes of freelance graphic designers.

And AMD?

As for AMD, as per my previous missive, it’s all change, everything stays the same. From what I can tell, AMD is plotting some Radeon HD 8000 series boards for later this year. But according to PDF files freely available from AMD’s website, these boards are straight rebadges – 7970 becomes 8970 etc – with no spec changes. Oh, and they’re only for system builders, not for the likes of you and I to buy. Odd, but there you go.

That said, if Nvidia does indeed roll out the cards detailed above, we should at least get a price drop from AMD to compensate. Generally, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about all these rebadges, but personally I’m cool with it all.

That’s because at worst it’s a bit disappointing for chaps and chapesses who had an eye on a new flagship board. But how many fall into that group? For everyone else, we’ll have access to faster cards for less money. And given how modest the specs are on the next-gen consoles, the current crop of highish-end PC boards look good to go for a while.

By Craig Pearson on May 13th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Way way back in gaming’s past, I’m talking spring of ’93, there was a game released called The Incredible Machine. It was so long ago that it ran on DOS and it wasn’t in the RPS tag system. I just had to input it manually. TIM, as it’s jollily known, was a game about performing easy tasks in the most complicated fashion. A Rube Goldberg inspired game, where putting a ball in a box needed a confusing series of pulleys, and possibly a cat. There have a been a few sequels, but a new version hasn’t appeared on the PC since 2005. Despite waffling on about it, this post is not about The Incredible Machine. It is a Rube Goldberg paragraph, intended to lead you to information about a just announced spiritual successor, Contraption Maker.

Contraption Maker is the new game from Jeff Tunnell, the original designer of The Incredible Machine. It is also a game about building contraptions, which I would have hilariously named
“The Immaculate Contraption”. There’s not a lot of information, though given what it’s based on, we can guess at the content. It does look like it’s embracing people’s desire to show off their wonderful toys (another better name), with direct to Youtube uploading. And there will be sharing of all the content you make, and mods to mess with. There’s even a suggestion of Arduino integration, which is where my brain leaves the road.

Time to hop on the conveyor belt to a bucket that will lower us into a carousel that will fire us at memory lane. Here’s what The Incredible Machine used to look like.

There will be early access “soon”.