SoylentNews

Congress has sent legislation to the president reviving and remaking a disputed post-9/11 surveillance program two days after letting it temporarily expire.

The vote in the Senate Tuesday was 67-32. The House already has passed the bill, and President Barack Obama plans to sign it quickly.

The legislation will phase out, over six months, the once-secret National Security Agency bulk phone records collection program made public two years ago by agency contractor Edward Snowden.

It will be replaced by a program that keeps the records with phone companies but allows the government to search them with a warrant.

Senate Republican leaders opposed the House bill but were forced to accept it unchanged after senators rejected last-ditch attempts to amend it.

The story is being covered live by The Guardian.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most voluble defenders of the NSA in the past two years, has offered a more measured endorsement of Tuesday’s vote. She says she voted for the bill because it was “the best opportunity to quickly get [surveillance] programs back up and running.”

She emphasizes that the bill will allow “this and two other important counterterrorism programs to continue,” an allusion to Section 215 and the “lone-wolf” and “roving wiretap” provisions of the Patriot Act.

“I believe these programs are necessary to protect American lives and prevent terrorist attacks in our country,” she said in a statement.

Deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, which did not back the USA Freedom Act, has nonetheless described the bill as “a milestone”.

“This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check,” Jaffer said in a statement.

Chemical leak at Apple's NC Data Center

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Around 2:00 PM EDT on Monday, Apple's Maiden, NC, data center suffered a chlorine leak that injured five people. It remains unclear whether the injured were Apple data center employees or construction workers.

Last week, a fire broke out among the solar panels atop the Mesa, AZ, sapphire manufacturing facility that Apple recently bought from GT Advanced. No injuries were reported.

The two events do not seem to be linked, except that Apple is having a bad run of luck with site safety.

Chlorine Gas Leak at Apple Data Center Puts 5 in Hospital

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Emergency crews received a call [June 1] about 2pm local time from the Apple facility on Startown Road, in Maiden, North Carolina. Local news helicopters captured footage of people being given medical attention and oxygen masks outside the facility.

The Catawba emergency services said initially two unknown chemicals were involved in the alert, later stating that it was a chlorine gas leak.

[...] It is speculated that the chlorine was a key component in the facility's water-cleaning facility, perhaps for its water-cooled components.

Two members of our community have submitted information on the Intel purchase of Altera:

Intel To Buy Altera For 16.7 billion USD

kaszz writes:

Intel bought chipmaker Altera for 16.7 billion US$. This follows another huge purchase in the semiconductor industry last week, when Avago snapped up Broadcom for $37 billion US$. This has been a record year for consolidation within the industry, as companies struggle to deal with slowing growth and stagnating stock prices. Altera had already rejected an offer from Intel, but shareholders pressured them to reconsider. "Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability. Altera has a huge FPGA business.

Perhaps this will impact Altera FPGA Linux support?

Intel Acquires Altera for $16.7 Billion

takyon writes:

Intel Corporation has announced that it is buying Altera Corporation for $16.7 billion in cash. The deal will allow Intel to access potentially valuable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) revenue streams and integrate FPGAs into Xeon chips to try and maintain its dominance in datacenters. Altera has already been using Intel's 14nm process to make its Stratix FPGAs.

The Platform has more in-depth analysis of the deal:

The first hedge that Intel is making with the Altera acquisition is that a certain portion of the compute environment that it more or less owns in the datacenter will shift from CPUs to FPGAs.

In the conference call announcing the deal for Altera, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that up to a third of cloud service providers – what we here at The Platform call hyperscalers – could be using hybrid CPU-FPGA server nodes for their workloads by 2020. (This is an Intel estimate.) Intel's plan is to get a Xeon processor and an Altera FPGA on the same chip package by the end of 2016 – Data Center Group general manager Diane Bryant showed off a prototype of such a device in early 2014 – and ramp its production through 2017, with a follow-on product that actually puts the CPU and the FPGA circuits on the same die in monolithic fashion "shortly after that."

Intel plans to create a hybrid Atom-FPGA product aimed at the so-called Internet of Things telemetry market, and this will be a monolithic design as well, according to Krzanich; the company is right now examining whether it needs an interim Atom and FPGA product that shares a single package but are not etched on a single die.