Two New Sonic Games Announced, Seek to Recapture the Glory Days Sega announced two new Sonic games at its San Diego Comic-Con party to celebrate the blue hedgehog's 25th anniversary. The first game reimagines iconic levels from Sonic's past, while the second is an untitled game that stars classic and modern versions of Sonic in a new adventure against Eggman. Gamespot

Hexen II's forgotten multiplayer mod Siege was the most ambitious shooter of the 90 In the summer of 1998, I was stuck indoors. My best friend had broken his leg, and so we resolved to beat the hardest video games either of us had ever played: Hexen: Beyond Heretic and its just-released sequel Hexen II. We beat both that summer and got pretty good at Deathmatch to boot. Since it was the days of dial-up, we spent our limited online time gaming and read very little about what was, at the time, a thriving mod community for games based on Quake's engine. PC Gamer

EFF Lawsuit Takes on DMCA Section 1201: Research and technology restrictions violate the first amendment The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the U.S. government today on behalf of technology creators and researchers to overturn onerous provisions of copyright law that violate the First Amendment. EFF's lawsuit, filed with co-counsel Brian Willen, Stephen Gikow, and Lauren Gallo White of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, challenges theanti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the 18-year-oldDigital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). EFF

Auto industry publishes best practices for cybersecurity The Automotive industry's main group for coordinating policy on information security and "cyber" threats has published a "Best Practices" document, giving individual automakers guidance on implementing cybersecurity in their vehicles for the first time. The Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) released the Automotive Cybersecurity Best Practices document on July 21st, saying the guidelines are for auto manufacturers as well as their suppliers. Security Ledger

Neuroscientists just isolated the part of the brain that controls free will Free will might have been the province of philosophers until now, but we've cracked the problem with an fMRI. Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins report in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics that they were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision – how activity in the brain changes during the deliberation over whether to act. ExtremeTech

Rescue drone in development at University of New Brunswick A drone development team working out of the University of New Brunswick is taking robotics to the beach in order to save swimmers and assist lifeguards. The "Breeze Bird" development team is working on a concept the could see automatic drones launch over shorelines and coastal areas, identify people in danger of drowning, and drop flotation devices --- all with the push of a button. CBC

Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 vs. 760 vs. 960 vs. 1060 Linux performance To complement yesterday's launch-day GeForce GTX 1060 Linux review, here are some more benchmark results with the various Nvidia x60 graphics cards I have available for testing going back to the GeForce GTX 460 Fermi. If you are curious about the raw OpenGL/OpenCL/CUDA performance and performance-per-Watt for these mid-range x60 graphics cards from Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal, here are these benchmarks from Ubuntu 16.04 Linux. Phoronix

Forget Comcast. Here's the DIY approach to Internet access You can see the snow-capped Pyrenees mountains from Gurb, about 75 kilometers north of Barcelona. It's a quiet farming community of 2,500, and in most ways there's nothing special to set it apart from many such towns across the Catalonia region of Spain. So why do people like me eagerly journey to Gurb? Backchannel

We threw a Minecraft party to test Samsung's Gear VR headset I've been lucky enough to have had some pretty unique VR experiences. In fact, my perspective is a bit warped (see what I did there?). Compared to other VR early adopters, I suspect that I'm more jaded by "normal" VR than most. By "normal" VR, I mean seated VR (like the Oculus Rift) that isn'tdecoupled and doesn't use motion controls. The Tech Report

Biometrics researcher asks: Is that eyeball dead or alive? Imagine a high-security facility where government official X must verify her identity by positioning her eyes in front of an iris scanner. This kind of biometric identification is far more accurate than fingerprint scanning, but there's still a catch. A miscreant may be able to fool the system by simply holding up a high-res photo of X's eye. Or, in a grislier scenario, the imposter could come equipped with X's actual eyeball, which had been plucked from its owner's head. IEEE Spectrum

A beginner's guide to understanding convolutional neural networks Convolutional neural networks. Sounds like a weird combination of biology and math with a little CS sprinkled in, but these networks have been some of the most influential innovations in the field of computer vision. 2012 was the first year that neural nets grew to prominence as Alex Krizhevsky used them to win that year's ImageNet competition... Adesh Pande

The RedMonk programming language rankings: June 2016 With the spring and summer travel schedule drawing to a close, we finally have had time to sit down and run the numbers collected back in June. As always, aside from the fact that we run our own GitHub rankings now, the process used for our bi-annual programming language rankings remains the same as when Drew Conway and John Myles White first looked at the question late in 2010. RedMonk

Microsoft responds to allegations that Windows 10 collects 'excessive personal data' Yesterday France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) slapped a formal order on Microsoft to comply with data protection laws after it found Windows 10 was collecting "excessive data" about users. The company has been given three months to meet the demands or it will face fines. Beta News