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Phoenix666 writes:

The Washington Post reports that Adm. Michael S. Rogers is continuing to advocate for weakened encryption as the White House explores a number of possible schemes, as illustrated by this infographic.

For months, federal law enforcement agencies and industry have been deadlocked on a highly contentious issue: Should tech companies be obliged to guarantee government access to encrypted data on smartphones and other digital devices, and is that even possible without compromising the security of law-abiding customers?

Recently, the head of the National Security Agency provided a rare hint of what some U.S. officials think might be a technical solution. Why not, suggested Adm. Michael S. Rogers, require technology companies to create a digital key that could open any smartphone or other locked device to obtain text messages or photos, but divide the key into pieces so that no one person or agency alone could decide to use it?

"I don't want a back door," Rogers, the director of the nation's top electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, using a tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. "I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks."

[...] The split-key approach is just one of the options being studied by the White House as senior policy officials weigh the needs of companies and consumers as well as law enforcement — and try to determine how imminent the latter's problem is. With input from the FBI, intelligence community and the departments of Justice, State, Commerce and Homeland Security, they are assessing regulatory and legislative approaches, among others.

The White House is also considering options that avoid having the company or a third party hold a key. One possibility, for example, might have a judge direct a company to set up a mirror account so that law enforcement conducting a criminal investigation is able to read text messages shortly after they have been sent. For encrypted photos, the judge might order the company to back up the suspect's data to a company server when the phone is on and the data is unencrypted. Technologists say there are still issues with these approaches, and companies probably would resist them.

Google, Apple, and others have been pretty badly burned by the NSA's crimes, so it's probably safe to say Mike Rogers should file that idea under Norfolk & Way.

Phoenix666 writes in with a Quartz report on the new recipes being churned out by IBM's Watson natural language processing system:

Steve Abrams, the director of IBM's Watson Life research program, told Quartz that Watson scanned publicly available data sources to build up a vast library of information on recipes, the chemical compounds in food, and common pairings. (For any budding gastronomers out there, Abrams said Wikia was a surprisingly useful source.) Knowledge that might've taken a lifetime for a Michelin-starred chef to attain can now be accessed instantly from your tablet.

The Watson team has actually published a cookbook of its AI-inspired dishes in partnership with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE), which launches April 14. While Quartz has not been able to test out Watson's esoteric parings yet, here are some that stood out:

• Belgian bacon pudding, a desert containing dried porcini mushrooms
• Vietnamese apple kebab, with the vaunted mushroom-and-strawberry pairing
• Portuguese lobster roll, with appetizing "saffron fluid gel"
• Hoof-n-Honey ale, with veal stock
• Thai-Jewish chicken, with potato latkes and rice balls
• The shrimp cocktail, which is a beverage with actual shrimp in it
• Kenyan Brussels spouts, with cardamom

It sounds like another sort of molecular gastronomy. Have any Soylentils eaten recipes like that? Does it work?

AnonTechie writes in about the NSA's effort to counter inconvenient insider threats:

Snowden's stream of leaked NSA secrets about classified surveillance programs shined the public spotlight on the clandestine government organization. Though the stream has now dissipated to a trickle, the impact to the intelligence community continues.

[...] Within NSA's Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, no one wants to face another Snowden. With NSA's widespread adoption of cloud computing, the spy agency may not have to.

NSA bet big on cloud computing as the solution to its data problem several years ago. [...] NSA's GovCloud - open-source software stacked on commodity hardware - creates a scalable environment for all NSA data. Soon, most everything NSA collects will end up in this ocean of information.

At first blush, that approach seems counterintuitive. In a post-Snowden world, is it really a good idea to put everything in one place -- to have analysts swimming around in an ocean of NSA secrets and data? It is, if that ocean actually controls what information analysts in the NSA GovCloud can access. That's analogous to how NSA handles security in its cloud.

NSA built the architecture of its cloud environment from scratch, allowing security to be baked in and automated rather than bolted on and carried out by manual processes. Any piece of data ingested by NSA systems over the last two years has been meta-tagged with bits of information, including where it came from and who is authorized to see it in preparation for the agency's cloud transition.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Caroline O'Donovan reports at Buzzfeed that Google plans to announce a new product aimed at connecting Google search users with local home-service providers — like plumbers and electricians.

Currently, Google searches for things like plumbers and electricians return links to service providers along with associated AdWord advertisements. Sources said the new product would go beyond this presentation format to actually connect search users with service providers.

Google isn't the only tech company looking to tap into the huge and rapidly expanding home services industry. Amazon just launched its new Home Services site, which allows Amazon shoppers to search, select, and pay for things like landscapers and car mechanics without ever leaving the site.

Amazon is offering more than 700 services that include just about anything that might require a professional to come to your door. Tasks are searchable on Amazon, just like any other product, and there are no estimates — offers will be priced by the professional before the job takes place. Amazon says it vets all the professionals for the invite-only program before inclusion. "It's a pretty natural extension of our business to move into the service space," says Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace. "In talking to customers, they don't feel like anyone serves their needs end to end. You can pay a subscription to get reviews, but why not just do that on Amazon for free?"

Hugh Pickens writes:

Paul Tassi reports at Forbes that the first four episodes of the new season of Game of Thrones, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites. The four episodes appeared to come from a screener sent to reviewers with the digital watermark blurred out and are in 480p resolution, equivalent to standard-definition TV, not HD. The episodes have already been downloaded a million times, and that figure is expected to climb by the season 5 premiere. Game of Thrones has consistently set records for piracy, which has almost been a point of pride for HBO. "Our experience is [piracy] leads to more penetration, more paying subs, more health for HBO, less reliance on having to do paid advertising... If you go around the world, I think you're right, Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world. Well, you know, that's better than an Emmy."

How the leak happened isn't a mystery. Television critics typically receive the first four episodes of an HBO show before its season premiere, and Game of Thrones is no exception. HBO could not immediately say whether the leak could be traced to screener copies of the show. "I suspect HBO may be a bit more restrictive about handing out Game of Thrones screeners to press, given the event-like nature of the show and its reliance on keeping spoilers close to the chest," writes Tassi. "I really don't see why commentary like that needs to exist in the first place." The network can take solace in at least one thing, though. Episode four ends on a heck of a cliffhanger, and those who pirated the episodes will be in the same boat as those of us who received them legally — waiting until May to find out what happens next. "I would imagine it's more fun to just spend the next month watching week to week as nature intended, even if you are watching illegally," concludes Tassi. "Game of Thrones is one of the last true "event" shows where it's something you want to talk about Sunday night or Monday morning with friends and strangers alike."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

El Reg has noted:

Torvalds looses neatened number [release featuring] non-disruptive patches, Z13 support, and more.

[...] The new number isn't a sign of a major upgrade. As we've chronicled, Torvalds thinks that it looks a bit silly when version numbers go beyond x.19.

As the Benevolent Dictator for Life says in his post at the kernel mailing list:

since rc7 [...] It's mainly driver fixes (media, sound, pci, scsi target, drm, thermal..), misc arch updates (nios2 and x86), and scattered fixes elsewhere. Really not a lot during the last week.

After you folks hammered on the 7 release candidates and gave the kernel team bug reports, any drama seems to have been wrung out.

We previously discussed the never-need-to-reboot patching feature that has now been incorporated into the kernel.

AnonTechie writes:

Forty-five years have passed [autoplay video] since the flight launched:

After losing oxygen and power in its unsuccessful trip to the moon, Apollo 13 still managed to do one thing well: land back on Earth.

April 11 marks the 45th anniversary of the mission's launch from Florida's Kennedy Space Center with the goal of landing on the moon. Watch the video above to learn about what's frequently called NASA's "successful failure."

Related: See a 1970 explanation of What Happened to Apollo 13.

fleg writes:

From the The Guardian.

Introducing the Sad Puppies...

"The shortlists for the long-running American genre awards, won in the past by names from Kurt Vonnegut to Ursula K Le Guin and voted for by fans, were announced this weekend to uproar in the science fiction community, after it emerged that the line-up corresponded closely with the slates of titles backed by certain conservative writers. The self-styled "Sad Puppies" campaigners had set out to combat what orchestrator and writer Brad Torgersen had criticised as the Hugos' tendency to reward "literary" and "ideological" works.

Today's Hugos, Torgersen has blogged, "have lost cachet, because at the same time SF/F has exploded popularly – with larger-than-life, exciting, entertaining franchises and products – the voting body of 'fandom' have tended to go in the opposite direction: niche, academic, overtly to the Left in ideology and flavor, and ultimately lacking what might best be called visceral, gut-level, swashbuckling fun".

Twenty years ago, he writes, "if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds". Nowadays, he claims, the same jacket is likely to be a story "merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings".

And here we have the Rabid Puppies definitely not mentioning GamerGate:

Another group of allied rightwing campaigners, dubbing themselves the Rabid Puppies and led by Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, have also added their voices to the block-voting campaign against what Day called "the left-wing control freaks who have subjected science fiction to ideological control for two decades and are now attempting to do the same thing in the game industry".

And finally a bit of Martin:

"Call it block voting. Call it ballot stuffing. Call it gaming the system. There's truth to all of those characterisations. You can't call it cheating, though. It was all within the rules. But many things can be legal, and still bad ... and this is one of those, from where I sit. I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired," he wrote.

"If the Sad Puppies wanted to start their own award ... for Best Conservative SF, or Best Space Opera, or Best Military SF, or Best Old-Fashioned SF the Way It Used to Be ... whatever it is they are actually looking for ... hey, I don't think anyone would have any objections to that. I certainly wouldn't. More power to them," he added. "But that's not what they are doing here, it seems to me. Instead they seem to want to take the Hugos and turn them into their own awards."

"gewg_" writes:

Russia Today America reports:

A 14-year-old middle school student is facing felony computer hacking charges after he admitted to accessing a teacher's computer during class without permission. If that wasn't bad enough, he then displayed an image of two men kissing.

Domanik Green, an eighth grader at Paul R. Smith Middle School in Holiday, Florida, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access: a third-degree felony under Florida state law.

[...] The school had distributed a single password for all teachers to use, approximately two years ago. One educator had shared it with a student, who soon let his classmates in on the secret.

The Tampa Bay Times notes:

Green, interviewed at home, said students would often log into the administrative account to screen-share with their friends. They'd use the school computers' cameras to see each other, he said.

Green had previously received a three-day suspension for accessing the system inappropriately. Other students also got in trouble at the time, he said. It was a well-known trick, Green said, because the password was easy to remember: a teacher's last name. He said he discovered it by watching the teacher type it in.

Ethanol-fueled writes:

A local affiliate of CBS reports:

General Atomics is scheduled on Friday to unveil a 1,000-ton superconducting electromagnet to be used in a 35-nation fusion energy study. According to General Atomics, the Poway-built device that's powerful enough to lift an aircraft carrier out of the water will be showcased at a news conference in Poway.

The electromagnet will be used in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor experiments in France, in which scientists will try to create a burning plasma that demonstrates the feasibility of fusion energy. Clean fusion energy has been a holy grail for researchers looking for alternatives to standard nuclear energy and carbon-based fuels. Scientists say fusion energy does not create long-term waste products or meltdown risks.

General Atomics is more well-known for their Predator and Reaper military drones. As much negativity is swirling around these parts about the military industrial complex, there could be much potential benefit from the technological progress General Atomics and others are making. What do you all think?

Rich writes:

elementary have just released the final version of their long expected elementary OS version 0.3 "Freya". After a week-long countdown, an expected release candidate was skipped and they went from beta 2 straight to the final.

A brief overview of the project from the Wikipedia entry:

elementary OS is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. It makes use of a desktop with its own shell named Pantheon, and is deeply integrated with other elementary OS applications like Plank (a dock), Midori (the default web browser) and Scratch (a simple text editor). This distribution uses Gala as its window manager, which is based on Mutter. The distribution initially started as a set of themes and applications designed for Ubuntu which later turned into its own Linux distro. Being Ubuntu-based, it is compatible with its repositories and packages. It uses Ubuntu's own software center to handle installation/removal of software, though its own software center is in the making. Its user interface aims at being intuitive for new users without consuming too many resources.

The team is known for their highly polished "Pantheon" desktop environment as well as for their funding strategy that requires the visitor to enter a donation amount, even if it is zero, before revealing download links.

Will this release be solid enough for them to aim for the top spots of Linux distributions?

"gewg_" writes:

AlterNet reports New Mexico Ends "Policing for Profit"

In a historic move, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) [on April 10] signed into law a bill that will end civil asset forfeiture by law enforcement in the state, a practice widely known as "policing for profit." The measure is House Bill 560

Under civil asset forfeiture, police and prosecutors can seize someone's property without ever charging them with a crime, let alone convicting them. Police can then funnel many of those assets, including cash seizures, back to their own departments, creating a vicious cycle of more profit-driven law enforcement providing more resources to law enforcement for more profit-driven law enforcement.

"This is a good day for the Bill of Rights," said [American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico] Executive Director Peter Simonson. "For years, police could seize people's cash, cars, and houses without even accusing anyone of a crime. Today, we have ended this unfair practice in New Mexico and replaced it with a model that is just and constitutional."

The practice of asset forfeiture has been coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent years as cases of abuse become more widely known. The Obama administration Justice Department has in the past few months taken steps to address asset forfeiture abuse at the federal level, and asset forfeiture reform bills have been introduced in a number of states this year. The governor of Wyoming vetoed one last month.

New Mexico is the first state where such a bill has passed, and it now has the strongest asset forfeiture protections in the county. The bill passed the legislature unanimously.

wantkitteh writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on Blizzard's decision to release tokens redeemable for game subscription time as in-game tokens, tradeable for Azeroth Gold in the Auction House. This has had the practical economic upshot of giving the in-game gold a legitimate real-world value for first time.

To start the market off, Blizzard set the price of a $20 token at 30,000 gold. That gold price increased incrementally for a few hours before plummeting precipitously starting yesterday evening in the US. As of this writing, just over 24 hours after the markets opened, that initial gold price of a token has fallen over 27 percent to 21,739 gold, according to an API-based tracking site.

This isn't that surprising when you look at the going rates for WoW gold from third-party sellers. According to wowgoldrates.com, $20 can get you anywhere from 10,000 to roughly 15,000 gold on the gray market, depending on which reseller you use (you can get slightly better rates if you buy in bulk).

The tokens are worth 30 days of game time, are currently only available on US servers and represent a hefty premium against regular account subscription rates. Their in-game price drop rebounded at 20,307g and rallied to 26,977g. At the time of submission, the $20 tokens were valued at 23,071g, making $1 worth 1,153.55g.

The grey market has responded with substantial rate changes since the quotations in the Ars article. One seller is now offering 24,000g for $20.43, their rates working out to between 1179.25 and 1263.80, depending on volume. So, while gold buyers, subscription dodgers and Blizzard are all celebrating, the gold sellers have seen their margins slashed and are investing heavily in aspirin.

tonyPick writes:

According to National Geographic the sources of mysterious radio signals which have been puzzling astronomers for years have been discovered. According to a study by Emily Petroff, the signals, called Perytons, turn out to be from microwave ovens:

But almost since the beginning, one thing has been clear about perytons: Despite mimicking a deep space signal, they're produced by a source that's somewhere near Earth. Astronomers knew this because perytons simultaneously show up in multiple viewing fields rather than arriving from a single point.

In this respect, perytons are very much unlike their cousins called fast radio bursts, highly energetic signals that truly appear to be coming from very, very far away and have no known origin.

Petroff and her colleagues discovered the source of perytons after they installed a real-time radio interference monitor at the Parkes telescope. In January, the telescope detected three of the signals – and the interference monitor picked up three simultaneous interference signatures. The team recognized the interloping frequencies as possibly belonging to a microwave oven.

[...] As one might expect from a cosmological signal, fast radio bursts tend to show up rather randomly around the clock. But, perhaps unsurprisingly in retrospect, the peryton data show those signals "clustering near the lunchtime hour."

The study in question is available at arXiv.org, and according to the summary:

Subsequent tests revealed that a peryton can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle. Radio emission escaping from microwave ovens during the magnetron shut-down phase neatly explain all of the observed properties of the peryton signals.

Spotted at Scientific American's Physics Week In Review.

takyon writes:

IBM and FUJIFILM have demonstrated the equivalent of an LTO magnetic tape cartridge with a capacity of 220 terabytes.

According to IBM:

To achieve 123 billion bits per square inch, IBM researchers developed several new technologies, including:

• A set of advanced servo control technologies that include a high bandwidth head actuator, a servo pattern and servo channel and a set of tape speed optimized H-infinity track follow controllers that together enable head positioning with an accuracy better than 6 nanometers. This enables a track density of 181,300 tracks per inch, a more than 39 fold increase over LTO6.
• An enhanced write field head technology that enables the use of much finer barium ferrite (BaFe) particles.
• Innovative signal-processing algorithms for the data channel, based on noise-predictive detection principles, enable reliable operation with an ultra narrow 90nm wide giant magnetoresistive (GMR) reader.

Rumors of tape's death are greatly exaggerated; LTO-6 tape pricing has fallen to $0.02 per GB, and a record 6.6 exabytes of tape were shipped in Q3 2014. The LTO roadmap calls for 48 terabyte LTO-10 tapes at some point in the future. Each new generation of LTO roughly doubles capacity, so a 200 TB LTO-12 tape may be slated for 2030.

In April 2014, Sony announced the development of 148 Gb/in² tape that could enable a 185 TB tape cartridge. A month later, IBM and FUJIFILM announced that they had achieved the equivalent of an 85.9 Gb/in², 154 TB tape. The new tape is based on the same NANOCUBIC™ technology.

Edit: Changed to reflect a tape cost of $8/TB compressed, $20/TB uncompressed.