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sudo rm -rf writes:

The names might sound as if they were from some unpublished short story by Douglas Adams, but after having to abandon its plans to build the "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope" the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, ESO, curbed its visions and is going to build the "Extremely Large Telescope" instead.

From ESO's website

At a recent meeting ESO’s main governing body, the Council, gave the green light for the construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in two phases. Spending of around one billion euros has been authorised for the first phase, which will cover the construction costs of a fully working telescope with a suite of powerful instruments and first light targeted in ten years time. It will enable tremendous scientific discoveries in the fields of exoplanets, the stellar composition of nearby galaxies and the deep Universe. The largest ESO contract ever, for the telescope dome and main structure, will be placed within the next year.
The E-ELT will be a 39-metre aperture optical and infrared telescope sited on Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Atacama Desert, 20 kilometres from ESO’s Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal. It will be the world’s largest “eye on the sky”.

Serp Kannella and the Fuzzy Filters writes:

Seals certifying the security of many websites have long been suspected of not being worth the bits they're made of—much less the hundreds or thousands of dollars they cost in yearly fees. Computer scientists have recently presented evidence that not only supports those doubts but also shows how such seals can actually make sites more vulnerable to hacks:

The so-called trust marks are sold for less than $100 to well over $2,000 per year by almost a dozen companies including Symantec, McAfee, Trust-Guard, and Qualys. The marks are designed to instil trust in users of the site by certifying it's free of the vulnerabilities that hackers exploit to steal credit card numbers and other data.

In one of the experiments conducted by the researchers, even the best-performing service missed more than half of the known vulnerabilities. They uncovered flaws in certified sites that would take a typical criminal hacker less than one day to maliciously discover, and the researchers also developed exploits that are enabled by a site's use of security seals.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports:

Visit this page, click the "For Business" tab and then select the "Support for Small and Medium Business" option and you'll see that Redmond now charges US$499 for a single professional support incident, or US$1,999 for a five-pack.

But if you visit archive.org and explore the same page from October 25th, up comes a price of US$259 for one support incident and a five-pack price of US$1,289.

ticho writes:

CentOS Project has announced release of "rolling builds" for CentOS Linux.

CentOS Linux rolling builds are point in time snapshot media rebuild from original release time, to include all updates pushed to mirror.centos.org's repositories. This includes all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates for CentOS Linux. Machines installed from this media will have all these updates pre-included and will look no different when compared with machines installed with older media that have been "yum updated" to the same point in time.

This includes iso-based install media, as well as generic cloud images.

tonyPick writes:

The MIT Technology Review has an article on the fight over the patents for CRISPR, a new form of DNA editing.

There is some additional background on CRISPR on wikipedia.

Serp Kannella writes:

Hot on the heels of the latest Sony hack, the seemingly-dormant National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act passed by the House is expecting movement within the Senate.

If passed, the bill would allow private companies to share cybersecurity data with the Department of Homeland Security. The bill also outlines Homeland Security’s role in American cybersecurity and would reauthorize the department’s authorities.

The bill would also give legal protection to private companies that share information with the federal government. All government agencies would also be required to tell Homeland Security about any cyberattack.

What would constitute a "cyberattack" from a corporation's perspective? To paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."

pixeldyne writes:

At 1200GMT on the 6th December, NASA will again attempt to launch the Orion capsule. The previous day's launch was "scrubbed" when issues were found with the Delta IV rocket (specifically, the valves on the boosters). The Decemeber 5th launch was delayed numerous times as engineers scrambled to resolve the issues, including turning off the wind speed meters to avoid automatic abort.

The Orion capsule is a four crew vehicle designed for long duration travel, although currently it is launching unmanned to test the systems during ascent, orbital flight and re-entry.

Space.com has more information and links to the live launch feed at http://m.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html

Ting Model writes:

Julian Assange writes in an op-ed in the NYT that we are living in a surveillance society where totalitarian surveillance is embodied in our governments and embedded in our economy, in our mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions. Companies like Google and Facebook are in the same business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency says Assange and their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. This destruction of privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.”

According to Assange, the very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. "The Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored." But if there is a “democratic weapon,” that “gives claws to the weak” in George Orwell's words, it is cryptography. "It is cheap to produce: cryptographic software can be written on a home computer. It is even cheaper to spread: software can be copied in a way that physical objects cannot. But it is also insuperable — the mathematics at the heart of modern cryptography are sound, and can withstand the might of a superpower." It is too early to say whether the “democratizing” or the “tyrannical” side of the Internet will eventually win out says Assange. "But acknowledging them — and perceiving them as the field of struggle — is the first step toward acting effectively."

TGV writes:

Readwrite: Popular Coding Framework Node.js Is Now Seriously Forked

Node.js, a widely used open-source framework for building Web applications, has split into two separate projects as of late Tuesday.

Hard to tell what that will do to the popularity and current installed bases. Uber has hinted at moving über to io.js, the fork.

When ReadWrite spoke to him in November, Joyent CEO Scott Hammond said that while a Node fork was possible, it "would certainly surprise me” given Joyent’s latest efforts to bring the community into the Node decision process. Now, the atmosphere at Joyent is more one of frustration, Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill told InfoWorld. "We really believe in the stability of Node," he said, stating that Joyent was still trying to reach out to the leaders behind io.js.

This was a follow up to an earlier article on Readwrite Why Node.js Is Facing A Possible Open-Source Schism

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Both caffeine and robots being things we tend to find interesting around here, I couldn't pass this one up.

Nestlé Japan will soon begin using a humanoid robot to sell Nescafé machines as part of its ongoing effort to enhance brand engagement with consumers in Nescafé’s biggest market.

Nescafé will use the humanoid robot Pepper to sell Nescafé Dolce Gusto and Nescafé Gold Blend Barista coffee machines in home appliance stores in Japan starting in December.

Pepper is the first robot in the world that is able to read and respond to human emotion. Equipped with the latest voice and emotion recognition technology, Pepper is able to read people’s facial expressions and listen to their tone of voice to analyse how they’re feeling.

I for one welcome our new coffee-machine-selling overlords.

buswolley writes:

Russia has blocked access to GitHub after finding a text file in a repository entitled 'suicide.txt'. Surely this is pretext for Russia's continuing move towards isolation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692584

Techcrunch has Russia Blacklists, Blocks GitHub Over Pages That Refer To Suicide

Developers in Russia are putting up their feet today — that is, after they have finished stomping around in frustration for a little while. It’s emerged that Russia’s regulator RosComNadzor has blocked GitHub after the popular software and coding collaboration platform was found to be hosting content related to suicide — specifically, see this file that details 32 ways to kill yourself.

The “block” effectively amounts to an order to ISPs to restrict access to the site. And because GitHub works on HTTPS, providers can only comply by restricting access to the entire site, rather than individual pages. According to Russian blog Meduza, several leading ISPs have already complied with the order, including Beeline, MTS, MGTS and Megafon.

The block reignites the debate over how Russia’s government decides what is and what is not appropriate Internet content for people in Russia. The country’s firewall, when it was originally raised in 2012, was controversial not only because of concerns that it would be used against freedom of speech (especially in cases when that speech was critical of the state), but also because it was deemed to be too heavy-handed in how it would get implemented.

Ting Model writes:

In the US, a new solar project is installed every 3.2 minutes and the number of cumulative installations now stands at more than 500,000. For years, homeowners who bought solar panels were advised to mount them on the roof facing south to capture the most solar energy over the course of the day. Now Matthew L. Wald writes in the NYT that panels should be pointed south so that peak power comes in the afternoon when the electricity is more valuable. In late afternoon, homeowners are more likely to watch TV, turn on the lights or run the dishwasher. Electricity prices are also higher at that period of peak demand. “The predominance of south-facing panels may reflect a severe misalignment in energy supply and demand,” say the authors of the study, Barry Fischer and Ben Harack. Pointing panels to the west means that in the hour beginning at 5 p.m., they produce 55 percent of their peak output. But point them to the south to maximize total output, and when the electric grid needs it most, they are producing only 15 percent of peak.

While some solar panel owners are paid time-of-use rates and are compensated by the utility in proportion to prices on the wholesale electric grid, many panel owners cannot take advantage of the higher value of electricity at peak hours because they are paid a flat rate, so the payment system creates an incentive for the homeowner to do the wrong thing. The California Energy Commission recently announced a bonus of up to $500 for new installations that point west. "We are hoping to squeeze more energy out of the afternoon daylight hours when electricity demand is highest," says David Hochschild, lead commissioner for the agency’s renewable energy division, which will be administering the program. "By encouraging west-facing solar systems, we can better match our renewable supply with energy demand."

lhsi writes:

The video "Gangnam Style " has broken the view limit in YouTube, prompting an update into how views are handled.

Ting Model writes:

The NYT reports that NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s most significant initiative has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. “The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?” says Vance. “I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution.” When Vance became DA in 2009, it was glaringly evident that assistant D.A.s fielding the 105,000-plus cases a year in Manhattan seldom had enough information to make nuanced decisions about bail, charges, pleas or sentences. They were narrowly focused on the facts of cases in front of them, not on the people committing the crimes. They couldn’t quickly sort minor delinquents from irredeemably bad apples. They didn’t know what havoc defendants might be wreaking in other boroughs.

Vance divided Manhattan’s 22 police precincts into five areas and assigned a senior assistant D.A. and an analyst to map the crime in each area. CSU staff members met with patrol officers, detectives and Police Department field intelligence officers and asked police commanders to submit a list of each precinct’s 25 worst offenders — so-called crime drivers, whose “incapacitation by the criminal-justice system would have a positive impact on the community’s safety.” Seeded with these initial cases, the CSU built a searchable database that now includes more than 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal records. A large percentage are recidivists who have been repeatedly convicted of grand larceny, one of the top index crimes in Manhattan, but the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,” which currently stands at 81. “These are people we want to know about if they are arrested,” says Kerry Chicon. “We are constantly adding, deleting, editing and updating the intelligence in the Arrest Alert System. If someone gets out of a gang, or goes to prison for a long time, or moves out of the city or the state, or ages out of being a focus for us, or dies, we edit the system accordingly — we do that all the time.”

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to crime,” says Chauncey Parker. “The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you’ll find a gang tattoo and if you look you’ll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them.”

"gewg_" writes:

Via Common Dreams, the American Civil Liberties Union reports

[December 3], a three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a 2011 Florida law mandating that all applicants for the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program submit to suspicion-less drug tests violates the Constitution's protection against unreasonable government searches.

[...]The 11th Circuit panel's order rejects arguments made by attorneys for the State of Florida that government has the authority to require people to submit to invasive searches of their bodily fluids without suspicion of wrongdoing, stating "the warrantless, suspicionless urinalysis drug testing of every Florida TANF applicant as a mandatory requirement for receiving Temporary Cash Assistance offends the Fourth Amendment."

[...]A 2012 review of the TANF mandatory urinalysis program found that the state of Florida spent more money reimbursing individuals for drug tests than the state saved on screening out the extremely small percentage.