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Deinfector writes:

The BBC reports:

The boss of one of Europe's largest media companies has strongly criticised Google in an open letter printed in a German newspaper. Axel Springer publishes more than 200 newspapers and magazines including German papers Die Welt and Bild. It also has a significant online presence and television and radio interests.

Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, says his company is afraid of Google and its power. He also asks in the letter, addressed to Google boss Eric Schmidt, whether Google intends to create a superstate where anti-trust and privacy laws don't apply.

Google has not commented on the letter.

Yog-Yogguth writes:

From Testing for reverse Heartbleed courtesy of Schneier's blog:

"Anything that speaks TLS using OpenSSL is potentially vulnerable, but there are two main classes of client apps that are worth mentioning:

1. Traditional clients are things like web browsers, apps that use HTTP APIs [snip]
2. Open agents are clients that can be driven by an attacker but don't reside on an attacker's machine. If you can direct some remote application to fetch a URL on your behalf, then you could theoretically attack that application. The web is full of applications that accept URLs and do something with them; any of these have the potential to be vulnerable [snip]"

The main conclusion so far is that one has to purge all flawed versions of OpenSSL from all computers: server or client makes no real difference, firewalls make no real difference either as the bug now works both inbound and outbound.

There is also a Reverse Heartbleed Tester.

Angry Jesus writes:

Developed for the military, wide-area surveillance is on the cusp of deployment in American cities along with a whole host of other real-world and computerized tracking systems. The idea behind wide-area surveillance is to record everything in all directions from an "eye in the sky" like a blimp or a UAV so that police and other people with access to police systems can 'rewind' time and inspect everything that happened before, during and after in the vicinity of an event of interest, like a robbery (or more nefariously, like the daily movements of a reporter meeting with a government whistleblower).

Explaining that a test deployment in Compton had been kept confidential from the public, an LA County Sheriff who supervised the project said that, "A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush."

bucc5062 writes:

A colorful twist to mostly dry experiments on turning to alternate sources for fuel, the Navy used a radio controlled (RC) airplane to test a fuel that essentially came from seawater. Curious they choose an Army plane (P-51 Mustang) and not a Navy plane like the Hellcat or Wildcat fighter.

From a related article

Essentially, on a very basic level, what the Navy is doing is extracting CO2 and Hydrogen from the seawater, and then recombining it into hydrocarbon chains, and then liquefying that (via a metal catalyst) into synthetic fuel. The type of synthetic fuel that can be made can vary, but jet fuel (similar to diesel) and petroleum-type fuels, like what was run in that little model plane, and, yes, that same sort of fuel could potentially be run in your normal old gasoline car with minimal or no modifications.

While there is a cost, it takes over 23,000 gallons of sea water to make one gallon of fuel, the Navy feels it could be a viable product within 7-10 years.

The Navy is saying they feel that the system could be commercially viable in 7-10 years or so, and resulting fuel would cost between $3-$6/gallon, which is not bad at all, really - that's essentially on par with current costs for fuels we pull out of the ground.

Angry Jesus writes:

The earlier, bigger part of hacking history often had congregations as protagonists. From CCC in the early 80s to TESO in the 2000s, through LoD, MoD, cDc, L0pht, and the many other sung and unsung teams of hacker heroes, our culture was created, shaped, and immortalized by their articles, tools, and actions.

Why don't we see many hacker groups anymore? And why is that that the few which are around, such as Anonymous and its satellite efforts, do not have the same cultural impact as their forefathers?

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

From arstechnica comes the following report.

A federal judge issued an order today decreeing that Google's court battle against a "patent troll" owned by its competitors must be fought out in California, not in Texas.

The ruling is a substantial victory for Google because venue matters a great deal in patent litigation. The search giant was facing the possibility of fighting a powerful trolling entity in the Eastern District of Texas, considered a district friendly to patent holders. The patent-holding company in this case is the Rockstar Consortium, which was formed when Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and Blackberry teamed up to spend $4.5 billion to buy the patents belonging to Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian telecom company.

Angry Jesus writes:

The Guardian has published an op-ed by Edward Snowden elaborating on his reason for questioning Vladimir Putin on Russia's surveillance policies. To critics who claim Putin had co-opted Snowden for his own political goals, he points out that you can't call someone to account for lying to the public unless they are first on the record lying to the public.

The Guardian also makes available a copy of the video and documents Russia's use of SORM to perform surveillance during the Sochi Winter Olympics.

floppydisk and jdccdevel wrote:

An Earth-sized exoplanet has been found in the habitable zone of another star. The discovery, using data gathered by NASA's productive Kepler space telescope, is the first of its kind. The planet, Kepler-186f, orbits a star of the common red dwarf type. Stars of this class have a mass of about 1/2 that of our sun, and are the most common type of star in our galaxy. The planet itself has an orbital period of 130 days, and "receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset."

The paper that discusses the discovery is freely accessible, along with dedicated webpages hosting the press kit, and a webpage on the Planetary Habitability Laboratory site.

Maybe it's a little far away for a visit, but this should be an interesting target for exoplanet imaging in the future!

Appalbarry writes:

While Neil Young makes headlines for creating a new high audio quality audio player, and others continue to rely on iTunes for music, millions of other people are saving their dollars for the 8th annual Record Store Day this Saturday!

Record Store Day was conceived in 2007 at a gathering of independent record store owners and employees as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1000 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally. There are Record Store Day participating stores on every continent except Antarctica.

Special this year is the latest from noted vinyl fan Jack White, who will be recording and pressing the world's fastest record a new disc recorded, pressed, and released in just one day!

Ethanol-fueled writes:

The New York Times presents a contrast between the architecture choices of South Korean tech titans, Samsung and LG. Both rivals are building new American headquarters, and on this score, the contest isn't close. Buildings are corporate symbols and advertisements, after all. Samsung comes across as a good citizen here; LG as a lousy neighbor.

Samsung's 1.1-million-square-foot North American offices, include a boxy, sleek glass behemoth that vaguely harks back to office parks of the 1970s. Most importantly, though, The building links to the city's light-rail system and fits into San Jose's street grid. It's eco-friendly, with public gardens, plazas and a cafe near a parking garage that is partly camouflaged behind solar panels.

In contrast, LG's new $300 million, 490,000-square-foot headquarters would rise 143 feet high and above the treeline next to a national natural landmark. The site had been zoned to prohibit anything over 35 feet high, a provision that protects the view, but the company, a hefty local taxpayer, won a variance.

From the article:

Getting more to the point, You'd think the company's bosses wouldn't want to look bad, compared with their rival. The project in San Jose is thoughtful. LG's is a public shame.

[ Submitter's note: This is an excellent opportunity to discuss corporate social responsibility and the ignorance and/or arrogance of corporate leadership, but in my opinion, something seems a bit "off" about the above quoted sentence as displayed to an American audience. Could the article in fact be a subtle or not-so-subtle "hit-piece" on LG? ]

lhsi writes:

A study into Cognitive Motor Performance looked at players playing Starcraft 2. An advantage of using this game in testing was that it is a non-laboratory activity (so has voluntary participation) that requires real-time decisions "conferring a large advantage to players who can act and make decisions quickly".

The authors discovered that around age 24, the looking-doing latency was increasing, and this was consistent across all leagues. Click here for a dandy chart.

From the article:

In summary, we provide the most precise estimate thus far of the onset, around 24 years of age, of cognitive-motor decline in an[sic] complex task performed by millions of people around the world. Despite it's[sic] early onset, the decline is a significant performance deficit, suggesting early adulthood declines are real world relevant. Further, we find no evidence that this decline can be attenuated by expertise, despite claims that domain relevance should be a major determinant on whether attenuation should occur. Experience nevertheless allows one to compensate for these declines indirectly. In our study, older players appear to hold their own despite their declines, perhaps by decreasing their cognitive load through the use of simplified strategies or improved use of the game interface.

Medical xpress highlight that it isn't all bad; older players more readily use short cut and sophisticated command keys to compensate for declining speed in executing real time decisions.

gewg_ writes:

Alternet reports on eduction reform in Tennessee.

The Tennessee House and Senate have approved a measure that allows for two free years of tuition at community colleges or technical schools for all the state's high school graduates. The proposal not only has the backing of Republican Gov. Bill Haslam, it was based on his idea.

floppydisk writes:

Tom's Hardware reports on an Avast Antivirus study which found that ~24% of their customers still used XP, and of those, 27% didn't plan to upgrade.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has cut the price of XP patches by as much as 95% for those corporations and governments that haven't yet moved on. The model now seems to be a "new ceiling is $250,000, according to several sources, although the $200-per-device price remained in place." That ceiling is down from $5 million just a few weeks ago. Those patches, by the way, are not available for the general public.

Woods writes:

In late 2016, our favorite Saturnian orbiter Cassini will commence the final phase of the Solstice Mission. Using Titan to alter its orbit with Saturn, Cassini will drop between the inner-most ring and the cloudy top of Saturn for 22 loops before finally entering the atmosphere.

An excellent writeup of the Cassini missions was posted in a guest blog at The Planetary Society by John Spencer, written near the beginning of 2009, John was unsure NASA would have funding for this final phase. Worry not, John! Everything looks good from here.

NASA has announced that (Surprise!) we can help choose the name of the final phase of the mission. All suggestions must be received by April 25, 2014. The current name is "Proximal Orbits", which I am fairly fond of, but only because if its high Scrabble score. NASA has provided a list of names, but none of them invoke any sense of awesomeness, so I hope we are able to come up with something better.

Sir Garlon writes:

A US-based group of plant breeders is launching an initiative to start open-sourcing seeds from new crops, starting with "29 new varieties of 14 different crops, including carrots, kale, broccoli and quinoa."

Blackmoore writes:

The Guardian brings us Economist Thomas Piketty — Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why.

Piketty is a man for the times. For 1970s anxieties about inflation substitute today's concerns about the emergence of the plutocratic rich and their impact on economy and society. Piketty is in no doubt, as he indicates in an interview in today's Observer New Review, that the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it.

It is a startling thesis and one extraordinarily unwelcome to those who think capitalism and inequality need each other. Capitalism requires inequality of wealth, runs this right-of-centre argument, to stimulate risk-taking and effort; governments trying to stem it with taxes on wealth, capital, inheritance and property kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Thus Messrs Cameron and Osborne faithfully champion lower inheritance taxes, refuse to reshape the council tax and boast about the business-friendly low capital gains and corporation tax regime.

Piketty deploys 200 years of data to prove them wrong.

buswolley writes:

Robert Krulwich at NPR writes, "Many have tried to outperform Ayumu (that's the chimp's name), but when you see how easy it is for him, how matter-of-factly he gets things right, it's clear he's got a talent that's built in. It's not a talent you'd expect a chimp to have, but, hey, this isn't a trick. Nature isn't pro-human or pro-chimp. It's just nature." [Contains link to YouTube video]