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An Anonymous Coward writes:

NASA made the announcement that they found evidence of water on Mars. Ok.

But why didn't NASA send Mars Rover Curious over to a site with the evidence? It's only about 50km away. Well, the Rover is super slow and 50km is a long way to cover.

Perhaps more interesting is this tidbit from NPR:

The site where the water was found is off-limits to Curiosity. Why? Because Curiosity may still be carrying some bacterial spores from Earth, and the last thing NASA wants to do is seed Mars with Earth bacteria.

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pehjota writes:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has awarded its Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Taurinus X200 laptop sold by Libiquity.

This is the first product of Libiquity to achieve RYF certification. The Taurinus X200 has the same architecture and certified software as the Libreboot X200, which was certified in January 2015. The Taurinus X200 can be purchased from Libiquity at https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200.

The Taurinus X200 is a refurbished and updated laptop based on the Lenovo ThinkPad X200, with all of the original low-level firmware and operating system software replaced. It runs the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system and the free software boot system, Libreboot. Perhaps most importantly, all of Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware and software has been removed from this laptop.

The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The Taurinus X200 comes with the fast and secure Libreboot firmware and the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system. Importantly, Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware with its applications like AMT (remote out-of-band management/backdoor system, part of "vPro") and PAVP (audio/video DRM) have been removed from this laptop.

The laptop ships within the USA and may be purchased from the Libiquity Store.

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takyon writes:

Tom's Hardware is reporting on an IndieGoGo campaign to fund a dockable "smartphone PC". Symetium is pitching a customized UI Android 6.0 smartphone with a Snapdragon 820 SoC, 6 GB of RAM, and from 64 to 256 GB of flash storage along with an SD card slot. The Symetium IndieGoGo claims that the device "features an operating system designed to work seamlessly as a desktop OS and a mobile one". When docked with an external display (wirelessly or by USB), the phone can act as a keyboard and mouse.

If any of this sounds familiar, you may be remembering the Ubuntu Edge, a similar concept phone from Canonical that also used an IndieGoGo fixed funding campaign. Canonical sought $32 million for the Ubuntu Edge but only raised $12,809,906. Symetium is looking for just $1.25 million. Prices range from $499 to $999 and it is expected to ship by July 2016.

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szopin writes:

ITWorld reports:

The flaws, which were apparently missed in an earlier independent audit of the TrueCrypt source code, could allow attackers to obtain elevated privileges on a system if they have access to a limited user account.

The original authors of TrueCrypt, who have remained anonymous, abruptly shut down the project in May 2014 warning that "it may contain unfixed security issues" and advised users to switch to BitLocker, Microsoft's full-disk encryption feature that's available in certain versions of Windows.

At that time a crowd-funded effort was already underway to perform a professional security audit of TrueCrypt's source code and its cryptography implementations. The first phase, which analyzed the TrueCrypt driver and other critical parts of the code, had already been completed when TrueCrypt was discontinued. The auditors found no high-severity issues or evidence of intentional backdoors in the program.

It's impossible to tell if the new flaws discovered by Forshaw were introduced intentionally or not, but they do show that despite professional code audits, serious bugs can remain undiscovered

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jdavidb writes:

Twitter's SMS-related 140-character limit for tweets has been a hallmark of its service since its debut and the birth of microblogging. Now the company is experimenting with raising this limit through a new product whose form has yet to be revealed.

Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share tweets that are longer than the company's 140-character limit, according to multiple people familiar with the company's plans.

It's unclear what the product will look like, but sources say it would enable Twitter users to publish long-form content to the service. Users can already tweet out blocks of text with products like OneShot, but those are simply images, not actual text published on Twitter. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.

The 140-character limit has been one of Twitter's trademark features since day one. It has long been scrutinized by those outside the company, and many have argued over the years that Twitter should expand it. It has also been a topic of discussion internally at Twitter for years, according to multiple sources, and has resurfaced in recent months under interim CEO Jack Dorsey as the company has been exploring new ways to grow its user base.

By the way, Twitter is nine years old. If you're like me, you didn't realize that, and now you feel old.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Justice Department is set to argue Wednesday before a federal appeals court that it may prosecute people for crimes based on evidence obtained from their computers—evidence that was outside the scope of an original probable-cause search warrant.

That's a big deal in today's digital age. Society has evolved to the point that many people keep all of their papers and effects co-mingled on their computer hard drives.

The highly nuanced legal dispute initially seems innocent enough. It concerns an accountant's tax evasion conviction and two-year prison sentence in 2012 that was based on a court-authorized search and imaging of his computer files. Stavros Ganias' files were copied as part of an Army overbilling investigation into one of his clients. Holding on to the imaged files for nearly three years, Connecticut authorities discovered fresh evidence unrelated to the initial search of the files and got new search warrants to investigate more of the accountant's mirrored files that were already in the government's possession. All the while, Ganias had subsequently deleted those files from his hard drives after the government had imaged them, according to court records.

The case asks how long the government can retain somebody's computer files—files that are unrelated to a court warrant. The accountant's lawyers said that once the government got what it needed regarding the accountant's client, the remainder of Ganias' files should have been purged. Federal prosecutors disagreed and said they retained the imaged files for numerous reasons, including for authentication purposes and to allow "the government to comply with its discovery obligations imposed by the Constitution."

What if it were a 3-D capture of all things in view while executing a search warrant — like a "cop-cam" on steroids?

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AnonTechie writes:

The Universe should be teeming with gravity waves. As near as we can tell, just about every galaxy has at least one supermassive black hole at its core. Most large galaxies were formed by multiple mergers, which would put more than one of these supermassive black holes in close proximity. As they get close enough to start spiralling in towards a merger, their orbital interactions should produce gravity waves. As long as this process doesn't end in a merger too quickly, the Universe's population of merging black holes should fill space with a gravity wave background.

Our Earth-bound detectors aren't sensitive enough to pick this background up. Conveniently, however, nature has provided us with its own detector: pulsars. Unfortunately, a detailed study of a handful of pulsars has failed to turn up any sign of gravity waves, suggesting it might be time to revisit some of our models.

A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star. Each revolution, it sends flashes of light towards Earth, often separated by a handful of milliseconds. The timing of these pulses can sometimes be tracked with a precision of 20 nanoseconds, providing an extremely tight constraint on their expected behaviour. If a gravity wave happened to ripple through the right patch of space-time as the light pulse was on its way to Earth, it could distort the timing enough to be detectable.

That's precisely what the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array has provided for over a decade now. After creating a model that accounted for typical sources of timing variations ranging from intrinsic behaviour of the pulsar to instrument noise, they looked for signs of correlations from gravity waves. They found absolutely nothing.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/09/gravity-waves-missing-in-action-in-latest-test/

[Abstract]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6255/1522 / http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07320

[Also Covered By]: http://theconversation.com/where-are-the-missing-gravitational-waves-47940 and https://briankoberlein.com/2015/09/27/the-case-of-the-missing-gravitational-waves/

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Phoenix666 writes:

The privacy implications of Windows 10 and its data collection have been a talking point since the operating system was released. And today, Microsoft published a response of sorts.

For the most part, the new blog post reiterates the company's (lengthy) privacy policy. Terry Myerson, leader of the Windows and Devices Group, describes three classes of data and describes Microsoft's approach to each.

First is the safety and reliability telemetry data, information about system and application crashes. Myerson says that this information should be anonymous; most of it has no personal information at all, and to the extent that personal information might be included (disclosed in, for example, file and directory names or fragments of memory included in crash reports), Microsoft tries to scrub all data that it receives.

The post also loosely describes why this information is useful: a third party graphics driver was recently found to be causing crashes. The telemetry data let Microsoft know that the crash was occurring and which driver was at fault, and it gave some hints as to what the bug was. Within 24 hours of finding the bug, a fix was rolled out to members of the Windows Insider program. Another 24 hours later and the fix was rolled out to all affected Windows users.

Microsoft has heard your privacy concerns...and chooses to ignore them.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

With tiny but powerful capacitors you could make cheaper, even tinier cardiac pacemakers and computers. They'd be great in nonvolatile memory, microsensors and actuators, RFID tags, and microelectromechanical systems, applications in which the power supplies can weigh up to 10 times as much as the other parts combined. And because, like all capacitors, such devices would be able to release their charge very rapidly, they could be coupled with high-energy batteries to provide periodic surges, as conventional capacitors do to power the flash in smartphone cameras. (Miniaturized supercapacitors could thus lead to even thinner smartphones.)
...
We found the solution in LightScribe, an inexpensive, off-the-shelf laser technology that millions of people have used to etch labels and designs onto compact discs. However, instead of using a disc coated with a reactive dye that changes color on exposure to laser light, we use a very thin coat of graphite oxide. The laser heats the oxide, transforming it into graphene in precisely defined tracks, one micrometer apart. These are the electrodes. In between we leave untreated graphite oxide, which conducts ions but not electrons and so can serve as an excellent dielectric between the positive and negative graphene electrodes. To complete the cell, we top off the pattern with a droplet of gel electrolyte to provide a bit of battery-like storage—the same technique that's used in conventional supercapacitors.

The article is verbose, but has more information about their process.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The anarchist and former labor activist Robert Helms, 58, from Philadelphia, has for the last ten years earned most of his living from clinical trials, or, as he puts it, as a "guinea pig." Over that time he took part in 75 studies, often Phase I studies, in which new medicines are tried on healthy participants. Helms, who earns his money today as a painter, still maintains the website guineapigzero.com, an "electronic job magazine for people who want to be used as medical or pharmaceutical test subjects."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Weren't you afraid of dangerous side effects in these experiments?

Helms: I know, there had been frightening incidents in studies, but nothing bad ever happened to me. One time I fainted and my face fell in my food, but that was it. Also, because I was lucky: Once I was supposed to take a medicine for heart arrhythmia. My doctor had said to me beforehand, "Bob, that is not a job for a couch potato!" But because of weather the compound didn't arrive at the Study Center and I couldn't take it. Shortly thereafter I spoke with someone who had tested it and suffered severe side-effects.

College roommates of mine made several thousand dollars one summer for a sleep (deprivation) study. Have any Soylentils done likewise?

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Heidi Stevens writes in the Chicago Tribune that according to NASA astronaut Mae Jemison schools treat science like the class where fun goes to die. "Kids come out of the chute liking science. They ask, 'How come? Why? What's this?' They pick up stuff to examine it. We might not call that science, but it's discovering the world around us," says Jemison.

"Once we get them in school, we turn science from discovery and hands-on to something you're supposed to do through rote memorization." But science doesn't have to be that way says Jemison. Especially in the elementary school years. "When you have teachers saying, 'I don't have enough time for hands-on activities,' we need to rethink the way we do education," says Jemison. "The drills we do, where you're telling kids to memorize things, don't actually work. What works is engaging them and letting them do things and discover things.

" Jemison has teamed up with Bayer to advance science literacy across the United States by emphasizing the importance of hands-on, inquiry-based learning opportunities in public schools. Bayer announced recently that it will provide 1 million hands-on science experiences for kids by 2020. "Science is around us everywhere," says Jemison. Farming is science. Cooking is science. Even styling hair involves science. "When we go to the hairdresser, we want her to know something about pH balance," says Jemison with a laugh. "Boy, do we ever want her to know something about pH balance!"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has been infected by the following story:

Security researchers have uncovered a network of infected Linux computers that's flooding gaming and education sites with as much as 150 gigabits per second of malicious traffic—enough in some cases to take the targets completely offline.

The XOR DDoS or Xor.DDoS botnet, as the distributed denial-of-service network has been dubbed, targets as many as 20 sites each day, according to an advisory published Tuesday by content delivery network Akamai Technologies. About 90 percent of the targets are located in Asia. In some cases, the IP address of the participating bot is spoofed in a way that makes the compromised machines appear to be part of the network being targeted. That technique can make it harder for defenders to stop the attack.

"In short: Xor.DDoS is a multi-platform, polymorphic malware for Linux OS, and its ultimate goal is to DDoS other machines," a separate writeup on the botnet explained. "The name Xor.DDoS stems from the heavy usage of XOR encryption in both malware and network communication to the C&Cs (command and control servers)."

XOR DDoS takes hold by cracking weak passwords used to protect the command shell of Linux computers. Once the attackers have logged in, they use root privileges to run a script that downloads and executes a malicious binary file. There's no evidence XOR DDoS infects computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Linux operating system itself. Akamai's advisory has intrusion-prevention-system signatures for detecting infections and instructions for removing the malware.

"Over the past year, the XOR DDoS botnet has grown and is now capable of being used to launch huge DDoS attacks," Stuart Scholly, senior vice president and general manager of Akamai's Security Business Unit, said in a statement. "XOR DDoS is an example of attackers switching focus and building botnets using compromised Linux systems to launch DDoS attacks. This happens much more frequently now than in the past, when Windows machines were the primary targets for DDoS malware."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Using nanometer-scale components, researchers have demonstrated the first optical rectenna, a device that combines the functions of an antenna and a rectifier diode to convert light directly into DC current.

Based on multiwall carbon nanotubes and tiny rectifiers fabricated onto them, the optical rectennas could provide a new technology for photodetectors that would operate without the need for cooling, energy harvesters that would convert waste heat to electricity - and ultimately for a new way to efficiently capture solar energy.

In the new devices, developed by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the carbon nanotubes act as antennas to capture light from the sun or other sources. As the waves of light hit the nanotube antennas, they create an oscillating charge that moves through rectifier devices attached to them. The rectifiers switch on and off at record high petahertz speeds, creating a small direct current.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Shaving can be the absolute worst, especially for people with sensitive skin. Razors can leave behind razor burn, ingrown hairs and cuts, and when you've worn down a razor so that it's no longer usable, it joins the others in landfills to the tune of 2 billion razors per year in the US (PDF).

The makers of a new product called the Skarp Laser Razor want to give you an incredibly close, irritation-free shave using lasers. The prototype is an aluminum razor-shaped gizmo that they say uses a laser to cut (not burn) the hair at skin level for a close shave, and works for all hair colors.

Because the laser is supposed to last about 50,000 hours and be usable without water, it would be good for the environment as well.

http://www.cnet.com/news/forget-blades-the-skarp-laser-razor-wants-you-to-shave-with-lasers/

[Kickstarter Campaign]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st-century-shaving

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After spending $7 billion to explore for undersea oil and gas off Alaska, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it will end the 7-year project. The company had drilled one well, in the Chukchi Sea. A press release said:

Shell today provides an update on the Burger J exploration well, located in Alaska's Chukchi Sea. The Burger J well is approximately 150 miles from Barrow, Alaska, in about 150 feet of water. Shell safely drilled the well to a total depth of 6800 feet this summer in a basin that demonstrates many of the key attributes of a major petroleum basin. For an area equivalent to half the size of the Gulf of Mexico, this basin remains substantially under-explored.

It also adds that there were "...indications of oil and gas in the Burger J well, but these are not sufficient to warrant further exploration...". Other reasons given were "the high costs associated with the project, and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska."

Other sources on the same story:

• New York Times
• Boston Herald
• CBS News
• Wall Street Journal
• Scientific American
• National Geographic
• National Public Radio

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When a star with a mass of roughly ten solar masses finishes its life, it does so in a spectacular explosion known as a supernova, leaving behind as remnant "ash" a neutron star. Neutron stars have masses of one-to-several Suns, but they are tiny in size, only tens of kilometers. Neutron stars spin rapidly, and when they have associated rotating magnetic fields to constrain charged particles, these particles emit electromagnetic radiation in a lighthouse-like beam that can sweep past the Earth with great regularity every few seconds or less. Such neutron stars are known as pulsars. Pulsars are dramatic and powerful probes of supernovae, their progenitor stars, and the properties of nuclear matter under the extreme conditions that exist in these stars.

Some pulsars called millisecond pulsars spin much more quickly, and astronomers have concluded that in order to rotate so rapidly these objects must be regularly accreting material from a nearly companion star which in a binary orbit with it; the new material helps to spin-up the neutron star, which normally would gradually slow down. There are more than 200 known millisecond pulsars. An understanding of these pulsars has been hampered, however, by the fact that only about a dozen of them have had their companion stars directly detected and studied.

CfA (Centre for Astrophysics) astronomers Maureen van den Berg, Josh Grindlay, and Peter Edmonds and their colleagues used ultraviolet images from Hubble to identify the companion stars to two pulsar companions.

Original Submission