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n1 writes:

ScienceDaily reports:

A new study links the March 2014 earthquakes in Poland Township, Ohio to hydraulic fracturing that activated a previously unknown fault. The induced seismic sequence included a rare felt earthquake of magnitude 3.0, according to research published online by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

In March 2014, a series of five recorded earthquakes, ranging from magnitude 2.1 to 3.0, occurred within one kilometer (0.6 miles) of a group of oil and gas wells operated by Hilcorp Energy, which was conducting active hydraulic fracturing operations at the time. Due to the proximity of a magnitude 3.0 event near a well, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) halted operations at the Hilcorp well on March 10, 2014.

"These earthquakes near Poland Township occurred in the Precambrian basement, a very old layer of rock where there are likely to be many pre-existing faults," said Robert Skoumal who co-authored the study with Michael Brudzinski and Brian Currie at Miami University in Ohio. "This activity did not create a new fault, rather it activated one that we didn't know about prior to the seismic activity."

n1 writes:

From Spacetelescope.org

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy—otherwise known as Messier 31. The enormous image is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.

This sweeping view shows one third of our galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, with stunning clarity. The panoramic image has a staggering 1.5 billion pixels — meaning you would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image. It traces the galaxy from its central galactic bulge on the left, where stars are densely packed together, across lanes of stars and dust to the sparser outskirts of its outer disc on the right.

mendax writes:

Well, it's happened again! Fortune is reporting that:

Hackers have stolen more than $5 million in virtual currency from Bitstamp, a major bitcoin exchange, forcing the company to freeze user accounts, suspend trades and block deposits.

The Slovenia-based company said Monday that fraudsters made off with 19,000 bitcoins a day prior. It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the theft or how it happened.

The article adds:

Bitstamp has previously said that it tries to keep up to 90% of its funds on hard drives, known in bitcoin jargon as “cold storage,” that are off the grid and therefore harder to hack into. This attack appears to have targeted the remaining 10-15% of crypto-currency that is stored on servers in a data center.

Such storage, or what’s called a “hot wallet,” is more convenient because bitcoin owners can make transactions smoother and more quickly. But, being connected to the internet, it is also more vulnerable to theft.

If I had any Bitcoins I think I'd keep them under my mattress. They'd be safer.

bugamn writes:

Archive.org added a new library of DOS games. The games are playable on the browser through EM-DOSBOX, a port of the DOS emulator. The games are provided without instructions, so some experimentation (or search for old manuals) might be necessary. The library does not mention any copyright concerns, although some of the games can be found for sale on sites such as Steam and GoG.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted on Science is a report on the end of the Mercury Messenger mission, as the probe runs out of fuel and will be unable to maintain an orbit.

The story links to a more detailed New Scientist article, and also a competition run by the messenger team to name five impact craters

n1 writes:

Ars Technica reports:

Smart TVs, as a category, are slowly evolving from "basic interfaces you use to launch Netflix" to full-fledged computing platforms in their own right. While some set-top boxes like the FireTV or the Nexus Player let you add a mini-computer to existing TVs, others are building those capabilities directly into the TVs themselves. Sharp and Philips are releasing several sets with Android TV built in. LG just announced some TVs running WebOS 2.0. And Panasonic has just announced the first TVs to ship with Mozilla's Firefox OS.

yanom writes:

You've probably heard of Clojure, the Lisp language that has tight interoperability with Java and the JVM. Well now there's Hy, a Lisp for Python. It has mutual compatibility with Python, wherein Hy code can use Python libraries and Hy files can be accessed from a Python program with "import hy". There's even a source-code translator, hy2py, that produces readable Python code from Hy S-expressions. Have any Soylentils used Hy? Any thoughts?

Hugh Pickens writes:

For most climbers, The Nose of El Capitan is such an outrageous challenge that climbing it is the crowning achievement of a climbing career. Now John Branch reports at The New York Times that Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, are trying something that has never been done — scaling El Capitan's Dawn Wall in Yosemite National Park, as smooth as alabaster, as steep as the bedroom wall, and more than half a mile tall — without the benefit of ropes, other than to catch their falls. “If they get it completed, it will be the hardest completed rock climb in the world,” says Tom Evans. “This will be the climb of the first half of the 21st century.” After a week of slow, steady progress, and with good weather forecast for the next week, optimism is building that Caldwell and Jorgeson would complete a task they had worked toward — studying, training and failing on a couple of prior pushes — for several years with single-minded obsession. Evans says that only about 13 of El Capitan’s climbing routes had been free climbed, meaning that moving upward is done only with hands and feet. The Dawn Wall, so named because its southeast orientation catches the first light of morning, is far harder than any of the others. “What makes the Dawn Wall so special is that it’s almost not possible,” says Alex Honnold. “The hardest pitches on the Dawn Wall are harder than I’ve ever climbed.”

The rock climbing on this particular route is defined by grabbing edges of rock as thin and sharp as razor blades, and balancing across the most friction-dependent smears of blank, glacier-polished granite. But part of the difficulty of such a quest is the cumulative effect on the mind and body. Climbing for days in a row can rub fingers raw. Sleeping in slings amid the elements can be taxing, if not dangerous. Climbing mostly in the late afternoon and into the night, using headlamps and the lights of the roped-in camera crew recording the expedition, Caldwell and Jorgeson are moving steadily. Family members and friends are tracking the climb through text messages and social media and if things continue to go well, they will converge on El Capitan sometime in the coming days. “Best case is seven days,” Caldwell says of the finish. “Worst case is mid-February. Or not at all, I suppose.”

mendax writes:

Ars Technica has a story about a talk recently given by U.S. Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan about the landmark Supreme Court decision. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association ruled that video games are indeed speech and expression.

Speaking at a forum hosted by Princeton University back in November, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association the toughest case she'd ever been part of. Kagan responded to an audience question by saying that she is "not usually an agonizer," but in deciding this case she was "all over the map... Every day I woke up and I thought I would do a different thing or I was in the wrong place."

The problem, it seems, is that Kagan's personal feelings on the law conflicted with the direction the First Amendment and established legal precedent were pointing her decision. Speaking about the decision, Kagan halted numerous times to reassemble her thoughts, saying, "I have to say, everything in my—it should be that you should not be able—if a parent doesn't want her kids to buy violent video games, that should be the parents'—it should be that this law was OK, I guess is what I'm saying."

"But I could not figure how to make the First Amendment law work to make it OK," she continued. "It's clearly a content-based distinction [and] that's usually subject to the strictest scrutiny. There was no very good evidence, not of the kind one would normally need, that the viewing or playing of violent video games was harmful [to minors]. And so I just couldn't make it work under the First Amendment doctrine that we have and have had for a long time."

It's most unusual for a judge, especially a U.S. Supreme Court justice, to discuss in public his or her personal feelings. But it's good to see that she was able to do what all judges are supposed to do, to put aside their own personal opinions and morality and made their decisions based upon the law.

"gewg_" writes:

der Spiegel reports

[...] an Afghan named Mullah Niaz Mohammed [...][given the code name "Doody"][...] is number 3,673 on the [secret Joint Prioritized Effects List] and NATO has assigned him a priority level of three on a scale of one to four. In other words, he isn't particularly important within the Taliban leadership structure.

[...] visibility is poor [...] the gunner fires a "Hellfire" missile. But he has lost sight of the mullah during the maneuver, and the missile strikes a man and his child instead. The boy is killed instantly and the father is severely wounded. When the pilot realizes that the wrong man has been targeted, he fires 100 rounds at "Doody" with his 30-mm gun, critically injuring the mullah.

The child and his father are two of the many victims of the dirty secret operations that NATO conducted for years in Afghanistan. Their fate is described in secret documents to which SPIEGEL was given access. Some of the documents concerning the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the NSA and GCHQ intelligence services are from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Included is the first known complete list of the Western alliance's "targeted killings" in Afghanistan. The documents show that the deadly missions were not just viewed as a last resort to prevent attacks, but were in fact part of everyday life in the [guerrilla] war in Afghanistan.

The list, which included up to 750 people at times, proves for the first time that NATO didn't just target the Taliban leadership, but also eliminated mid- and lower-level members of the group on a large scale. Some Afghans were only on the list because, as drug dealers, they were allegedly supporting the insurgents.

[...] the kill lists raise legal and moral questions that extend far beyond Afghanistan. Can a democracy be allowed to kill its enemies in a targeted manner when the objective is not to prevent an imminent attack? And does the goal of eliminating as many Taliban as possible justify killing innocent bystanders?

Hugh Pickens writes:

The cost of getting to orbit is exorbitant, because the rocket, with its multimillion-dollar engines, ends up as trash in the ocean after one launching, something Elon Musk likens to throwing away a [Boeing] 747 jet after a single transcontinental flight. That's why on Tuesday morning at 6:20 a.m. EST his company hopes to upend the economics of space travel in a daring plan by attempting to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket intact on a floating platform, 300 feet long and 170 feet wide in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has attempted similar maneuvers on three earlier Falcon 9 flights, and on the second and third attempts, the rocket slowed to a hover before splashing into the water. “We’ve been able to soft-land the rocket booster in the ocean twice so far,” says Musk. “Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds, then tipped over and exploded. It’s quite difficult to reuse at that point.”

After the booster falls away and the second stage continues pushing the payload to orbit, its engines will reignite to turn it around and guide it to a spot about 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. Musk puts the chances of success at 50 percent or less but over the dozen or so flights scheduled for this year, “I think it’s quite likely, 80 to 90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly.” SpaceX will offer its own launch webcast on the company's website beginning at 6 a.m. If SpaceX’s gamble succeeds, the company plans to reuse the rocket stage on a later flight. “Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level."

fliptop writes:

Bruce Schneier had a piece on how taxi drivers in Kyoto, Japan are being encouraged to loiter because their mere presence seems to reduce crime:

In Kyoto about half of the convenience stores had signed on for the Midnight Defender Strategy. These 500 or so shops hung posters with slogans such as "vigilance strengthening" written on them in their windows. These signs are indicators to taxi drivers that they are allowed to park there as long as they like during breaks. The stores lose a few parking spaces in the process but gain some extra eyes which may be enough to deter a would-be bandit from making their move.

Since the program started in September 2013 the number of armed robberies among participating stores dropped to four compared to 18 in the previous year. On the other hand, the shops which were not in the Midnight Defender Strategy saw an increase in robberies, up from seven to nine incidents compared to the year before. Overall the total number of robberies was nearly halved in the prefecture.

Original story found at RocketNews.

c0lo writes:

The shutdown timetable for Google's OpenID: completely gone by April 20, 2015, with some intermediary steps

Google+ sign-in implements OAuth2.0. The - maybe subtle - difference between OpenID and OAuth:

OpenID and OAuth are both authentication methods, but while OpenID is a way to use a single set of user credentials to access multiple sites, OAuth is more a way to allow one site to access and use information related to the user's account on another site.

freesword writes:

The Guardian reports on efforts being made on one of the Netherlands' northernmost islands, Texel (pronounced Tessel), to produce salt tolerant crops. The project is the work of Marc van Rijsselberghe's Salt Farm Texel, which began testing saline crops in 2010 with both field experiments and lab experiments with the help of researchers from VU University Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - the literal translation of which is "Free [as in liberated] University Amsterdam").

The project beat 560 competitors from 90 countries to win the prestigious USAid grand challenge award for its salt-tolerant potato.

“The world’s water is 89% salinated, 50% of agricultural land is threatened by salt water, and there are millions of people living in salt-contaminated areas. So it’s not hard to see we have a slight problem,” said van Rijsselberghe. “Up until now everyone has been concentrating on how to turn the salt water into fresh water; we are looking at what nature has already provided us with.”

Some of the Texel seed potatoes are already on their way to Pakistan where 4.2 million hectares of land is salt affected and farmers are often forced to use brackish groundwater to water their crops, which reduces yields and the quality of the crops.

According to Dutch team, there is no risk of overdosing on salt when eating crops fed by sea water. The salt is mostly retained in the leaves of the plant.

AnonTechie writes regarding TechCrunch story:

The natural reaction of many citizens, companies and governments is to try to get their data out of the United States and out of the hands of American companies. The idea is a seductive one, even for Americans. Offshoring money has been a popular strategy for tax avoidance. Why not offshore data to a foreign company?

This offshoring of data to avoid surveillance is not just an idle notion. As a privacy lawyer with experience in the intelligence community and the Obama White House, technology companies have asked me how they might pursue such a strategy. It turns out that shifting user data abroad or into the hands of foreign companies is a very poor way to combat American surveillance.

The Justice Department may put a lot of pressure on Swiss banks, but it doesn’t hack into offshore accounts to recover ill-gotten gains. By contrast, intelligence agencies are not known for scrupulously observing the laws of foreign countries in which they operate, even when (as in the United States) they are subject to a system of domestic legal oversight.

NSA directors have stated quite openly their desire to collect everything American law permits. However, what the law allows the NSA to do varies starkly depending on where data is collected. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the rules that apply to data collected from a switch, wire, or server in the United States are stricter than the safeguards that apply to data collected overseas.