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kaszz writes:

Nokia has announced its intention to acquire the telecoms equipment company Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6 billion EUR (US$16.6bn). The new company will be called Nokia and have its headquarters in Finland, but will retain Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs name for its R&D activities. The deal has to be approved by Nokia shareholders.

Nokia has also announced a "strategic review" of its HERE mapping business, which evolved from its acquisition of Navteq back in 2007 for $8.1 billion. It will reportedly sell the mapping division for $2 billion. That price is at the low end of what was previously rumored.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A New Jersey state legislator who is sponsoring a bill against swatting, has himself been swatted:

According to a report by NJ.com, Moriarty received a phone call at his home on Saturday from a police officer asking if everything was okay; the assemblyman was then informed that someone had anonymously called in a report of a shooting at the home. He was then told to describe his clothing and step outside, where he saw a crowd of officers armed with "helmets, flak jackets and rifles."

There was no mention if the legislator questioned the over-militarizing of the police or no-knock raids...

davester666 submitted:

The US Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet of a first time meeting between State Councilor and Minister of Public Security of the People's Republic of China (PRC) Guo Shengkun and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson "to discuss homeland security and law enforcement cooperation." Areas where they pledged to work together included cyberterrorism, repatriation and fugitive issues, intellectual property, and counter-terrorism.

When reporting on this, The Guardian focused mostly on the fugitive and repatriation issues:

Chinese public security authorities said the US supported Chinese programmes dubbed "Sky Net" and "Operation Fox Hunt", which are meant to coordinate a campaign to track down suspected corrupt officials who have fled overseas and to recover their assets. The Chinese government has given the US a priority list of Chinese officials suspected of corruption and who are believed to have fled there, state media has reported.

One might speculate that this program could be easily abused to add political refugees to the list of "corrupt" officials as well. This seems it could be a slippery slope for the US from an ideological standpoint.

Adrian Harvey writes:

Researchers at UCB and NASA have developed prototypes of robots that can survive a crashdown at 30mph and then operate by deforming to make the robot roll. ComputerWorld reports includes a video of the robots moving.

These tensegrity (or floating compression) structures are not that new and Buckminster Fuller drew on them in creating some of his architecture. But there has been a lot of research recently on algorithms to find and model these structures, making the design of robots with particular charactistics a lot simpler.

From the ComputerWorld article:

"We've decided that these structures are so strong that they can actually withstand the landing at 30 miles an hour without any additional support," said Adrian Agogino, a scientist working at NASA Ames research center. "So no additional airbags, no additional landing support. This entire thing could actually land on Titan and then, as an active structure, could roll around like a rover." Researchers have thought about using such so-called tensegrity structures for some time, but have lacked complex computer algorithms that can model how they work, but that's now available and the results are encouraging, said Agogino.

hash14 writes:

The Virginia election commission, which is responsible for certifying whether machines are fit to be used in elections, has decertified the Advanced Voting Solutions WINVote and for many very good reasons. Amongst the many security flaws in this product are:

• Weak administrator passwords such as "admin" or "abcde"
• Use of an embedded version of Windows XP which hasn't been updated since 2004
• Use of WEP for Wifi encryption
• An absence of any firewall

Worse still, this machine has been used in actual elections and its lack of any logging or record-keeping means that we'll never know if its weaknesses were used to manipulate the outcome of an election. As a proof of concept, security researchers successfully demonstrated accessing the machine and manipulating the recorded vote counts.

Adrian Harvey writes:

The New Zealand based commercial space company Rocket Lab has unveiled their new rocket engine which the media is describing as battery-powered. It still uses fuel, of course, but has an entirely new propulsion cycle which uses electric motors to drive its turbopumps.

To add to the interest over the design, it uses 3D printing for all its primary components. First launch is expected this year, with commercial operations commencing in 2016.

anubi writes:

If you filed your IRS (US Internal Revenue Service) income tax forms through someone else, and that list gets into the hands of phishers, do you think you could detect it?

A lot of people fall for this. Hard. Gizmodo reports:

A lot of people are falling for them: A study of 150,000 phishing emails by Verizon partners found that 23 percent of recipients open phishing messages, and 11 percent open attachments. Is that not crazy? One in 10 people opens an attachment when they have no idea what they’re opening.

And it happens fast: It takes an average of 82 seconds from the time a phishing campaign is launched, until the first sucker bites. And this isn’t just phishing in people’s Gmail accounts. It’s happening on sensitive business and government accounts where the targets should theoretically know better.

Another article in Wired is reporting:

Typically, it takes months if not years to uncover a breach. In 2012, for example, FireEye reported that the average cyber-espionage attack continued unabated for 458 days before the victim discovered the hack.

[More after the break.]

Imagine starting your day without any coffee. Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Tim Hortons and vany other chains thrive on our coffee addiction. Add to that the fact that many of us have already had a cup or two even before venturing out to get a cup from one of those chains. Well, an Anonymous Coward has written in to tell us of some hard-working folks who had to give up real coffee for months at a time!

For years, the hard-working astronauts aboard the ISS had to begin their day with freeze-dried, reconstituted coffee served in plastic pouches. Now, this gross injustice may finally be remedied. The resupply mission scheduled to be launched today (Tuesday) will carry a new model of space espresso maker. Manufactured by Lavazza and the Italian aerospace firm Argotec, the machine is specially designed for microgravity operation, and uses off-the-shelf Lavazza coffee packets.

kaszz writes:

U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that the computers that control and monitor the aircraft isn't protected enough by on-board firewalls intended to protect avionics from hackers. These could be breached if flight control and entertainment systems use the same wiring and routers had they in turn, been connected to the on-board WiFi. The GAO report authors stated that the affected planes include the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the Airbus A350 and A380. All have advanced cockpits that are wired into the same WiFi system used by passengers.

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists are preparing to drill 5,000 ft. down in the center of the Chicxulub Crater to recover 15 million years of information:

The $10 million mission in collaboration with the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, will offer the researchers an unprecedented view, made possible courtesy of new technology. "The Chicxulub impact crater has been a remarkable scientific opportunity for the 20 years since it's been discovered" researcher with the project and the University of Texas, Austin, Sean Gulick says. And this new opportunity to unearth the core, may provide far more answers than researchers could have ever imagined. "We think that the peak ring is the record of the material that rebounded and splashed outward [after the impact]."
...
The researchers believe that their models have created an accurate view of the conditions surrounding the impact and the crater, however, soon they will have rock-hard evidence to back their claims. They believe that aside from providing a view into the death of millions of species that more recent layers of rock could reveal just how long it took for life to return to the area—an important, yet missing, layer to our past.

Project leaders have not commented on whether their headquarters will in fact be Señor Frog's.

AnonTechie writes in with an article from Ars Technica:

Prosecutors say they have evidence indicating the former head of computer security for a state lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to him buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot, according to a media report.

Eddie Raymond Tipton, 51, may have inserted a thumbdrive into a highly locked-down computer that's supposed to generate the random numbers used to determine lottery winners, The Des Moines Register reported, citing court documents filed by prosecutors. At the time, Tipton was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association ), and he was later videotaped purchasing a Hot Lotto ticket that went on to fetch the winning $14.3 million payout.

"gewg_" writes:

According to StatCounter, in September 2014, Linux usage in Malta was 1 percent. By October, usage was over 4 percent. There was a peak after Christmas and current numbers are around 5 percent.

Blogger and Linux advocate Robert Pogson has charted the numbers. He says:

Malta is one of those places where the small size allows one to see significant migrations to GNU/Linux desktop in their full glory. Notice the ascendance of GNU/Linux in the same week that school started that year. The peak usage was on Thursday, 2015-Jan-8 at 6.83% a day or two after the Christmas break ended. Even use on weekends showed dramatic growth.

Hugh Pickens writes:

A couple of months ago, it was a color-changing dress that blew out the neural circuits of the Internet. Now Kenneth Chang reports in the NYT that a problem from a math olympiad test for math-savvy high school-age students in Singapore is making the rounds on the internet that has perplexed puzzle problem solvers as they grapple with the simple question: "So when is Cheryl's birthday?"

Albert and Bernard just met Cheryl. “When’s your birthday?” Albert asked Cheryl.
Cheryl thought a second and said, “I’m not going to tell you, but I’ll give you some clues.” She wrote down a list of 10 dates:
May 15 — May 16 — May 19
June 17 — June 18
July 14 — July 16
August 14 — August 15 — August 17
“My birthday is one of these,” she said.
Then Cheryl whispered in Albert’s ear the month — and only the month — of her birthday. To Bernard, she whispered the day, and only the day.
“Can you figure it out now?” she asked Albert.
Albert: I don’t know when your birthday is, but I know Bernard doesn’t know, either.
Bernard: I didn’t know originally, but now I do.
Albert: Well, now I know, too!
When is Cheryl’s birthday?

Logical puzzles like this are common in Singapore. The Singapore math curriculum, which has a strong focus on logic-based problem solving, has been so successful that it's been adopted around the world. According to Terrance F. Ross, US students have made strides in math proficiency in recent years, but they still lag behind many of their peers internationally, falling at the middle of the pack in global rankings. In the same PISA report the U.S. placed 35th out of 64 countries in math. "And even though the "Cheryl's Birthday" question may be atypical of the average Singaporean classroom, perhaps it's still worth asking: Are you smarter than a (Singaporean) 10th-grader?"

takyon writes:

The NASA Curiosity rover has found evidence [abstract] of "night-time transient liquid brines in the uppermost 5 cm of the subsurface that then evaporate after sunrise".

The observations point to a daily water cycle supported by perchlorate salts in the soil. Mars should be too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but the briny water has a lower freezing point.

Phoenix666 writes:

The world's first robotic kitchen prepares crab bisque for breakfast:

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited along to a warehouse in north London to see what is being billed as "the world's first automated kitchen." The system, made by Moley Robotics in the UK, can only make crab bisque right now—and it requires that all of the ingredients and utensils are pre-positioned perfectly. The goal, though, is to have a consumer-ready version within two years, priced at around £10,000 ($14,600). The company envisions an "iTunes style library of recipes" that you can download and have your robot chef prepare.

In its current form, the Moley Robotic Kitchen is essentially two very expensive robotic arms, with two even dearer fully articulated biomimetic humanoid hands made by the Shadow Robot Company on the ends. In front of the robot is a kitchen—a sink, a stovetop, an oven, and a range of utensils, including the aforementioned blender. The ingredients are placed in bowls and cups on the worktop. Once everything is set up, an engineer simply presses "start" on the controlling PC, the robot arms whirl around for 30 minutes, and voilà: crab bisque.

Simply stunning. Fresh from the arms of your android girlfriend, you awake from a coding/WoW binge to a delicately prepared breakfast of crab bisque. Geek nirvana, here we come!