SoylentNews

pinchy writes:

National Geographic has an interesting article on a phenomenon known as earthquake lights where scientists have apparently made some headway into determining the cause.

Rare flashes of light that are sometimes seen around earthquakes are not caused by birds, or planes, or UFOs—all of which had been previously used to explain the phenomena known as earthquake lights.

Instead, the lights are caused by electrical properties of certain rocks in specific settings, report scientists in a new paper.

Sometimes called earthquake lightning, the lights can take "many different shapes, forms, and colors," says study coauthor Friedemann Freund, an adjunct professor of physics at San Jose State University and a senior researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Freund says common forms of earthquake lights include bluish flames that appear to come out of the ground at ankle height; orbs of light called ball lightning that float in the air for tens of seconds or even minutes; and quick flashes of bright light that resemble regular lightning strikes, except they come out of the ground instead of the sky and can stretch up to 650 feet (200 meters).

Phoenix666 writes:

Good news for hobbyists!

From RaspberryPi.org:

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way above the fold. Raspberry Pi 2 is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing Model B+), featuring:

• A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (~6x performance)
• 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory)
• Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1

Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10.

Although I can't think why anyone would choose a B+ any more.

MrNemesis writes:

As reported by The Register, the Financial Times (paywalled article) today listed that Eyeo, the parent company behind the well-known AdBlock Plus browser extension, has extended its whitelist of "acceptable ads" to include ads and trackers from Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Taboola.

Users can still disable these by turning off the extension's "Acceptable Ads" feature, but with the continuing erosion of paid bypassing of such blocking features, how much life do commercially sustained ad-blockers have in them?

"gewg_" writes:

Silviu Stahie at Softpedia reports

The Internet is abuzz today after Bill Gates published an image on his Facebook page and a link towards his website with the text "15 years from now, most people in poor countries will be able to take classes online." It's a sound goal and it's perfectly doable, but in the image posted on Facebook the operating system is Ubuntu.

As a former Microsoft CEO and the founder of what we call today Windows, you might think that he would pay a little more attention towards his message, but this particular detail has slipped past the radar of the ones posting on Facebook, unless he did that himself, which would be even funnier.

tonyPick writes:

Added to the TED website from last week is a talk from Miguel Nicolelis on Mind controlled exoskeletons, and brain to brain communication (originally filmed October 2014).

You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and monkeys, for now) to send messages brain to brain.

A transcript of the presentation is also available.

"gewg_" writes:

The Document Foundation announces

"We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars, and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and [is] now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today's UX trends."

LibreOffice 4.4 offers several significant improvements in other areas, too:

• Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows, and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;
• Digital signing of PDF files during the export process;
• Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related issues while opening OOXML files;
• Addition of several new default templates, designed by volunteers;
• Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering, and toggling bullets on or off;
• Better Track Changes--with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar--and AutoCorrect features in Writer;
• Improved import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher, and AbiWord files, [as well as] Microsoft Works spreadsheets;
• New import filters for Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II, and RagTime for Mac;
• Greatly expanded support for media capabilities on each platform.

tonyPick writes:

Make has an article on Gislain Benoit's Clock, constructed from discrete components and using point to point soldering.

Gislain's home page has more details and several newer projects.

Squidious writes:

A pleasant surprise for electronics nerds: Horowitz & Hill’s The Art of Electronics is finally receiving a third edition. The first edition was published in 1980, the second in 1989. The new edition is arriving in April of 2015. This latest edition is about 300 pages longer and is thoroughly revised and updated.

tt2497980 writes:

Well, that didn't take long!

Last year, after Coke took 10% stake in the company, Keurig started shipping a new version of their instant coffee machines. The primary 'improvement' was the addition of DRM designed to exclude any coffee not approved by Keurig. It is a scheme very much like the ink cartridge DRM of IBM/Lexmark.

One coffee maker has decided to crack that Keurig's DRM and are now shipping a device you insert into the maker that lets you spoof it into thinking any coffee is 'authorized.' They are capitalizing on their new Freedom Clip by giving it away along with free samples of their coffee.

lonehighway writes:

TorrentFreak.com (http://torrentfreak.com/huge-security-flaw-leaks-vpn-users-real-ip-addresses-150130/) is reporting VPN users are facing a massive security flaw as websites can easily see their home IP-addresses through WebRTC. The vulnerability is limited to supporting browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, and appears to affect Windows users only. Luckily the security hole is relatively easy to fix. With a few lines of code websites can make requests to STUN servers and log users’ VPN IP-address and the “hidden” home IP-address, as well as local network addresses.

A demo published on GitHub by developer Daniel Roesler allows people to check if they are affected by the security flaw. (https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips )

ah.clem writes:

A new study by a team of physicists at Rice University, Zhejiang University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Florida State University and the Max Planck Institute adds to the growing body of evidence supporting a theory that strange electronic behaviors -- including high-temperature superconductivity and heavy fermion physics -- arise from quantum fluctuations of strongly correlated electrons.

The study, which appeared in the Jan. 20 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes results from a series of experiments on a layered composite of cerium, rhodium and indium. The experiments tested, for the first time, a prediction from a theory about the origins of quantum criticality that was published by Rice physicist Qimiao Si and colleagues in 2001.

The ScienceDaily article may or may not be here.

tonyPick writes:

The BBC is reporting that the British army is setting up the "77th Brigade" to fight the "social media war"

The Army is setting up a new unit that will use psychological operations and social media to help fight wars "in the information age".

The title of the unit is a reference to the original 77th Indian Infantry Brigade:

The Army spokesman said it would share the "spirit of innovation" of the Chindits in the Burma Campaign of 1942 to 1945.

Chindits was the name given to the Long Range Penetration (LRP) groups that operated in the Burmese jungle behind enemy lines, targeting Japanese communications.

The same story is also covered at The Guardian, ITV News and The Telegraph. The Psy Ops element is likely to be from the 15 Psy Ops Gp which has been operational for many years. There is concern regarding the manpower required to establish the Brigade: the British Army is already facing manpower cuts and the diversion of soldiers from existing combat units to a specialist unit would not be welcomed by many serving and former commanders.

LancePodstrong writes:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/new-e-mail-shows-feds-considered-snooping-on-cars-parked-at-gun-shows/

Nearly six years ago, two federal law enforcement agencies considered using license plate readers (LPRs) at gun shows—at least in the Phoenix, Arizona area.

LPRs scan plates at a very high speed—often 60 plates per second—and record the date, time, and precise location that a given plate was seen. Typically, on a patrol car, that plate is then immediately compared to a list of wanted or stolen cars, and if a match is found, the software alerts the officer. But all scans are routinely kept by various law enforcement agencies for long periods of time, sometimes as long as years or more.

According to a heavily redacted set of documents that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) received and published earlier this week, a 2009 e-mail presumably from the Drug Enforcement Agency states that the “DEA Phoenix Division Office is working closely with the [Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms] on attacking the guns going to [REDACTED] and the gun shows, to include programs/operation with LPRs at the gun shows.”

Wow, shocking. /s

Appalbarry writes:

The last time that I installed Cyanogenmod, it was because "Official" Android had added a "feature" that made the phone considerably less useful for me. Now, with my fourth Android phone, running KitKat, they've done it again, eliminating USB Mass Storage mode.

That's why I'm excited to see that, according to ABI Research, non-Google forks of Android account for more than 40% of Android installs. As reported elsewhere:

It seems to be research release season and ABI has also reported numbers for smartphone shipments. However, this time we have a breakdown of what proportion of Android is forked (AOSP). That is, Android devices that aren’t sanctioned by Google, haven’t passed compatibility testing and don’t have Google Apps and Google Play Services (at least not legally anyway).

Even though most of these are assumed to be oddball Asian variants of Android, it still means that end users have options that fit their needs - the kind of choice that Linux users expect and love.

ticho writes:

After having used the Internet profusely for propaganda and recruitment, jihadist organizations have realized that investigators are gleaning crucial information online and are increasingly concealing their web presence, experts say.

Apart from recent orders given to fighters to limit their exposure, erase the footprint of their online activity and avoid revealing too many place names or faces, the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front groups are increasingly using the "Dark Web" -- the hidden part of the Internet protected by powerful encryption softwares.