SoylentNews

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

The IRS seriously looking at shutdowns to save money isn't generally news of the Soylent variety. But as juggs and mrcoolbp are hard at work getting our fiscal house in order over the next twelve days so as to lose as little of your generous contributions as strictly necessary to taxes, I figured this was worth a story.

The IRS is considering its own temporary shutdown due to recent budget cuts enacted by Congress, its chief said Thursday.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said furloughs — forced unpaid days off for employees as part of an IRS closure — is one idea reluctantly being tossed about to save money, though they are hoping they will not have to go there.

“People call it furloughs; I view it as: Are we going to have to shut the place down? And at this point, that will be the last thing we do, … but there is no way we can say right now that that wont happen,” Koskinen told reporters at a Thursday press conference on the upcoming tax season. “Again, I would stress that would be the last option.”

I for one welcome the decrease in power of our wealth-destroying overlords.

buswolley writes:

Over at PandoDaily, Nanthaniel Mott writes, Are Peer-to-Peer Mesh Networks the Future of Internet Freedom?

"Open Garden has raised $10.8 million to create the next Internet. And as crazy as that sounds, thanks to the success of its FireChat peer-to-peer messaging service, it might just work.

Instead of sending messages through an Internet connection or cellphone network, FireChat uses the Bluetooth and WiFi radios on every smartphone to create its own “mesh network,” which can then transfer data between the networks’ members without requiring any external infrastructure.

That second Internet, or Internet Two or whatever it will be called, is likely to become increasingly popular in the coming years. Countries around the world have started to restrict Internet freedoms, whether it’s through laws requiring companies to keep data on domestic servers or via the imprisonment of people who use the Internet to share information the government doesn’t want them to share."

Are peer-to-peer mesh networks the future of internet freedom?

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

A new report [carried out on behalf of Scottish government by the British Trust for Ornithology and the University of the Highlands and Islands' Environmental Research Institute] found that over 99 percent of seabirds were likely to alter their flight paths in order to avoid collision with offshore wind farms. While the analysis offers new estimates of which seabirds and what percentage change course to avoid wind turbines, it still leaves many questions about the overall impacts of wind turbines--on and offshore--on bird populations.

[...]thousands of birds could still be killed each year and that this "could even significantly reduce the total populations of some species."

"It is therefore vital that individual developments avoid the most important places for seabirds," [said Aedan Smith of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds]. "Impacts on seabirds must be reduced significantly if offshore wind is to realize its full potential of delivering much needed sustainable renewable energy."

Different birds have markedly different reactions to the wind farms, according to the report. Gannets, which are large, white birds, avoid entering wind farms altogether, while gulls are "less cautious" and may even be drawn to the sites for their foraging benefits. Even so, the report says that inside the farms, gulls "seem to show a strong avoidance of the turbine blades."

Related:
Wind Turbines Kill Birds and Bats

chromas writes:

Just over a year and a half ago, the Kepler space telescope suffered a failure of the second of its four stabilizing reaction wheels, prompting a 'shutdown' of its data–gathering mission because, if nothing else, the sun itself would continuously put pressure on the telescope to rotate. However, some engineers figured out that if they rotate Kepler to near-parallel to the sun, the solar pressure is evenly distributed across its surface and acts as kind of a third wheel.

Now, a team of scientists have announced Kepler is still helping us make discoveries. From the Harvard CfA:

Due to Kepler's reduced pointing capabilities, extracting useful data requires sophisticated computer analysis. Vanderburg and his colleagues developed specialized software to correct for spacecraft movements, achieving about half the photometric precision of the original Kepler mission.

Kepler's new life began with a 9-day test in February 2014. When Vanderburg and his colleagues analyzed that data, they found that Kepler had detected a single planetary transit.

The newfound planet, HIP 116454b, has a diameter of 20,000 miles, two and a half times the size of Earth. HARPS-N showed that it weighs almost 12 times as much as Earth. This makes HIP 116454b a super-Earth, a class of planets that doesn't exist in our solar system. The average density suggests that this planet is either a water world (composed of about three-fourths water and one-fourth rock) or a mini-Neptune with an extended, gaseous atmosphere.

Hugh Pickens writes:

After Uber's success, nearly every pitch made by starry-eyed technologists “in Silicon Valley seemed to morph overnight into an ‘Uber for X’ startup" with various companies described now as “Uber for massages,” “Uber for alcohol,” and “Uber for laundry and dry cleaning,” among many, many other things. The conventional narrative is this: enabled by smartphones, enterprising young businesses are using technology to connect a vast market willing to pay for convenience with small businesses or people seeking flexible work. Now Leo Marini writes that the Uber narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this new economy would fall apart: inequality.

"There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone," says Marini. "First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins." There is no denying the seductive nature of convenience—or the cold logic of businesses that create new jobs, whatever quality they may be concludes Marini. "All that modern technology has done is make it easier, through omnipresent smartphones, to amass a fleet of increasingly desperate jobseekers eager to take whatever work they can get."

"gewg_" writes:

ExtremeTech reports

For the past five years, Microsoft has been forced to offer first-time Windows users in Europe a choice of web browser. This was a result of an EU ruling in 2009, which found that Microsoft had been unfairly abusing its operating system monopoly to push Internet Explorer into the hands of millions of unwitting, unfortunate users. The deal only required Microsoft to play fair for five years, though --- and that period of imposed atonement has now concluded. Once again, Microsoft is free to make Internet Explorer the default web browser in Windows.

[...][The Browser Choice ballot in Windows], which ran when you first installed a copy of Windows in Europe, offered 11 different browsers on two pages, with their order randomized at page load. The first page consisted of "first tier" browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and either Maxthon or Safari); the second page, a selection of lesser-known "second tier" browsers such as Avant Browser, Rockmelt, and Sleipnir. The idea, of course, was to give users the option of installing a different browser. Now, after five years of active duty, Browser Choice has been shut down.

[...]I guess the one saving grace is that Internet Explorer is actually quite good now: IE11 is fast, efficient, and compliant with most modern web standards--and I'm sure IE12, when it arrives (maybe with Windows 10) will push the bar even higher. The average web user is a lot more savvy than in the olden days, too: Even my mother knows how to use Internet Explorer to download Firefox.

sigma writes:

A story from cmswire.com claims:

For a long time now, open source has been gradually expanding into more and more segments of the computing industry. In 2014 though, that gradual trickle became a veritable flood, and software development fundamentally shifted toward an open source model. For the infrastructure software used for scale-out computing, it’s virtually impossible to find examples that are not open source.

Clearly, open source is here to stay. Even if you believe you’re one of those rare open-source-free enterprises, you might want to reevaluate your situation, because chances are that you're using open source software and just don’t know it.

CMSWire has an article outlining key strategies for managing open source adoption in your enterprise.

Additional link: https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/158-jim-zemlin/799252-2014-the-open-source-tipping-point

Blackmoore writes:

It that time of year again — Alek's Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease. The website that lets you attempt to control a Griswold-style Christmas light display from your web browser is back online for one last year. The website is totally free but also raises awareness and funds for charity via optional/voluntary donations — over $80,000 for the Center for Celiac Research.

In Alek's own words:

A question often asked is how much does it cost to light the holiday display — the electrical meter does spin a bit faster. That's easy to calculate - with all 25,000 lights ON, the current draw is 76.2 amps. Multiply by 120 Volts and divide by 1,000 to get 9.1 KiloWatts. The electricity cost in Colorado is about 10 cents per KiloWatt-Hour, so to run the display continuously for an hour, it costs 91 cents/hour - not much! But remember that Internet Surfers are turning the lights on & off ... so divide that by two and then multiply by the 5 hours/day it's active, and the electricty costs 227 cents per day. Multiply that by 31 days and for $70, a whole month of holiday fun is provided to people around the world ... plus some awareness and thousands of dollars in donations for Celiac Disease Research!

[Ed's note: What are the best holiday light displays you've found on-line?]

Hugh Pickens writes:

The human genome is astonishingly complex and dynamic, with genes constantly turning on or off, depending on what biochemical signals they receive from the body. Scientists have known that certain genes become active or quieter as a result of exercise but they hadn’t understood how those genes knew how to respond to exercise. Now the New York Times reports that scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have completed a study where they recruited 23 young and healthy men and women, brought them to the lab for a series of physical performance and medical tests, including a muscle biopsy, and then asked them to exercise half of their lower bodies for three months. The volunteers pedaled one-legged at a moderate pace for 45 minutes, four times per week for three months. Then the scientists repeated the muscle biopsies and other tests with each volunteer. Not surprisingly, the volunteers’ exercised leg was now more powerful than the other, showing that the exercise had resulted in physical improvements. But there were also changes within the exercised muscle cells’ DNA. Using technology that analyses 480,000 positions throughout the genome, they could see that new methylation patterns had taken place in 7,000 genes (an individual has 20–25,000 genes).

In a process known as DNA methylation, clusters of atoms, called methyl groups, attach to the outside of a gene like microscopic mollusks and make the gene more or less able to receive and respond to biochemical signals from the body. In the exercised portions of the bodies, many of the methylation changes were on portions of the genome known as enhancers that can amplify the expression of proteins by genes. And gene expression was noticeably increased or changed in thousands of the muscle-cell genes that the researchers studied. Most of the genes in question are known to play a role in energy metabolism, insulin response and inflammation within muscles. In other words, they affect how healthy and fit our muscles — and bodies — become. Many mysteries still remain but the message of the study is unambiguous. “Through endurance training — a lifestyle change that is easily available for most people and doesn’t cost much money,” says Sara Lindholm, “we can induce changes that affect how we use our genes and, through that, get healthier and more functional muscles that ultimately improve our quality of life.”

sigma writes:

Researchers from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ), and the University of Vienna have developed a new quantum imaging technique in which the image has been obtained without ever detecting the light that was used to illuminate the imaged object.

Their sketch of a cat was generated with photons that have never touched the object, instead using entangled pairs of photons and discarding the photons that have interacted with the sketch. The researchers are confident that their new imaging concept is very versatile and could even find applications where low light imaging is crucial, in fields such as biological or medical imaging.

frojack writes:

Linux Magazine carries another issue of Bruce Byfield's Blog in which Bruce takes on the futility of filing Bug Reports using the typical on-line bug reporting tools that are used by much of the free software world (as well as some proprietary software developers).

Byfield, an ardent open source supporter, makes the case that the current generation of bug reporting software is misguided at best, and explains why he would rather blog about a bug than file a bug report. He compiles a list of impediments that most of us have encountered while submitting a bug report to our favorite distro or package maintainers.

Among the problems Byfield clicks off are:

• You have to create an account, you may end up with a dozen of these
• You have to know which component of the software is the problem
• Even a combo box list of components may not be meaningful
• Need to open the (often failing) application to find the exact version number
• Need to assign a "Severity", too high - it gets dismissed, too low - it gets ignored
• By the time you get to enter a description, you're already exasperated
• Then you have to list any of your futile attempts to fix it
• Often you need to attach a file - which usually means crafting a special example
• Before you are done you've spent a minimum of 30 minutes or maybe an hour

[More after the break.]

BradTheGeek writes:

Ars technica: New York state to ban fracking for natural gas

Today, the health commissioner of the state of New York, Howard Zucker, announced that he has completed a study into the health impacts of hydraulic fracturing for the recovery of natural gas. Although there are few demonstrated health risks, Zucker noted that there are a great many uncertainties about the process, and these make it impossible to design intelligent regulations that minimize potential risks. As a result, the state will ban the practice indefinitely.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

link: Chromecast Now Lets Your Guests Take Over Your TV Without Needing Your WiFi Password

Back in June, Google announced a rather nifty new feature coming to Chromecast: your friends and house guests would soon be able to connect to your Chromecast without being on your WiFi network, thanks to the clever use of magic ultrasonic sounds.

after a few months of silence, that feature launches.

One bummer of a caveat, though: it’ll only work if your friend’s phone is running Android, for now. Why? It all comes down to that age-old problem: iOS apps aren’t allowed to do certain things required to make it work, so they’re rolling with it on Android until that changes.

Guest mode is off by default. Flip it on, and your Chromecast will start displaying a PIN on its idle screen. Meanwhile, your TV will start emitting ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the human ear*, which Chromecast-enabled apps on your phone will be listening for. When the two find each other, everything falls into place and the pairing is made.

[* No word yet on if non-human ears (i.e. dogs) can hear it. If your dog starts whining whenever your Chromecast is on, you should probably turn guest mode back off.]

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on the NASA High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) mission proposals.

Quoting Chris Jones, from the Space Mission Analysis Branch of NASA’s Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate:

The article covers the details of the proposed mission, and links to a YouTube animation of the concept: "A way to explore Venus".

Also covered at Geek.com and Extreme Tech.

Leebert writes:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), one of the core entities for Internet governance and operations, announced that it had been compromied in late November via a "Spear-Phishing" attack.

They state that the compromised credentials were used to access more sensitive systems. Specifically, they mention:

The attacker obtained administrative access to all files in the CZDS [Centralized Zone Data System]. This included copies of the zone files in the system, as well as information entered by users such as name, postal address, email address, fax and telephone numbers, username, and password. Although the passwords were stored as salted cryptographic hashes, we have deactivated all CZDS passwords as a precaution. Users may request a new password at czds.icann.org. We suggest that CZDS users take appropriate steps to protect any other online accounts for which they might have used the same username and/or password. ICANN is providing notices to the CZDS users whose personal information may have been compromised.

They also identified unauthorized access to (ostensibly innocuous parts of) the ICANN GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] Wiki as well as user-level accounts on the ICANN Blog and the ICANN WHOIS information portal.

While they're not terribly specific about how the attack happened aside from mentioning that the "email credentials of several ICANN staff members" were compromised, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out where it probably went from there. The impact seems rather minimal, but given the level of control that ICANN has over DNS, it does make one wonder how close we came to a major incident.