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takyon writes:

Dow Chemical Company and DuPont have agreed to merge into an entity named DowDuPont, before splitting into three distinct companies organized by market segment:

The two largest chemical companies in America will become one entity named DowDuPont, as Dow Chemical and DuPont say they're joining in a "merger of equals." The new company will have a market capitalization of around $130 billion. After the merger, the resulting behemoth would be split into what Dow Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris calls "three powerful new companies," with a combined revenue of around $83 billion.

Now that the two companies' boards of directors have agreed to terms, their shareholders will also need to affirm the merger. Terms of the agreement state that Dow shareholders will get 1 share of the new enterprise for each Dow share they own, while DuPont shareholders will get 1.28 shares. They will own about 50 percent of the new enterprise.

The massive deal also will need the approval of federal regulators. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2016, with the segmentation taking place up to two years later. The three corporations will have distinct identities, according to a news release announcing the merger. Here's a list of relevant quotes, along with the projected revenue for each proposed company:

• Agriculture: "Leading global pure-play agriculture company that unites DuPont's and Dow's seed and crop protection businesses." Revenue: $19 billion.
• Material Science: "A pure-play industrial leader, consisting of DuPont's Performance Materials segment, as well as Dow's Performance Plastics, Performance Materials and Chemicals, Infrastructure Solutions, and Consumer Solutions ... operating segments." Revenue: $51 billion.
• Specialty Products: "The businesses will include DuPont's Nutrition & Health, Industrial Biosciences, Safety & Protection and Electronics & Communications, as well as the Dow Electronic Materials business." Revenue: $13 billion.

The companies hope to save $3 billion during the merger period and DuPont already plans to cut around 10% of staff. Dow will also purchase glassmaker Corning's 50% stake in the Dow Corning joint venture. Reuters reports that the merger may spur other deals, such as another attempt by Monsanto to purchase Syngenta. We've had a lot of merger news lately but this one will still rank among the twenty biggest ever.

How about some Teflon to cleanse this news from your mind?

Original Submission

SubiculumHammer writes:

People complain about where Mozilla's money goes... Well...

From The Mozilla Open Source Blog:

We are delighted to announce the first set of awards in the Mozilla Open Source Support program's "Foundational Technology" track, which supports projects that Mozilla uses or relies upon.>

...

The first seven awardees are:

Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term "slave" from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

CodeMirror: $20,000. CodeMirror is a powerful source code editor built with Web technologies, used in the Developer Tools and in Mozilla Thimble. Their award will be used to improve support for both right-to-left languages and complex script input.

Discourse: $25,000. Discourse is online discussion forum software, used by several Mozilla communities. Their award will be used to make email a first-class interaction mechanism for Discourse, allowing Discourse instances to replace and improve upon mailing lists.

Read The Docs: $48,000. Read The Docs is a website for building and hosting documentation, used by many of Mozilla's Web projects. Their award will be used to add the ability to generate documentation from code without needing to install it, thereby making it easier to build the documentation for complex projects.

Mercurial: $75,000. Mercurial is a distributed source code management system, used heavily by Mozilla for core repositories such as mozilla-central. Their award will be used to implement better support for 'blame' (showing who last changed some code) and a better web UI.

Django: $150,000. Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets.

Bro: $200,000. Bro is network monitoring software, which is at the heart of Mozilla's intrusion detection system for our network. Their award will be used to build the Comprehensive Bro Archive Network, a public repository of modules and plugins for Bro.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Wal-Mart has launched its own smartphone app for processing payments, rather than adding support for systems being touted by the likes of Samsung, Apple, and Google (Wallet):

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched its own mobile payment system, dubbed Walmart Pay, in select stores near its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters on Thursday, giving customers their first opportunity to use a mobile payment system in its stores.

The retailing giant so far hasn't allowed other mobile payment platforms, including Samsung Pay or Apple Pay. Instead, it built its own system, which it said works with any iOS or Android device that can support the Walmart app and at any checkout lane, including self-service checkout.

Walmart Pay can handle major credit, debit, pre-paid and Walmart gift cards. The company is in discussions that could result in other mobile wallets being added to Walmart Pay, said Daniel Eckert, senior vice president of services for Walmart U.S.

Wal-Mart is part of a consortium called the Merchant Customer Exchange that includes Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. Inc. The MCX is working on an app called CurrentC that is still in the pilot phase in Columbus, Ohio. Members of the Merchant Customer Exchange pledged not to accept other mobile payment systems, according to The Wall Street Journal. That exclusivity was temporary and expired in August, a Walmart spokesperson said, freeing members to allow other mobile wallet transactions.

Wal-Mart plans to roll out Walmart Pay nationally after the first half of next year.

Original Submission

"exec" writes in from IRC:

From ras.org.uk:

From 13 to 15 December, skywatchers across the world will be looking up as the Geminid meteor shower reaches its peak, in potentially one of the best night sky events of the year.

At its peak and in a clear, dark sky, tens of 'shooting stars' or meteors may be visible each hour (the theoretical maximum under ideal conditions is about 120 an hour). Meteors are the result of small (mm- to cm-sized) particles entering the Earth's atmosphere at high speed, burning up and superheating the air around them, which then shines as a characteristic short-lived streak of light. In this case the debris is associated with the asteroidal object 3200 Phaethon, which many astronomers believe to be an extinct comet.

The meteors appear to originate from a 'radiant' point in the constellation of Gemini, hence the name Geminid. By 0200 GMT the radiant will be almost overhead as seen from the UK, making it ideally placed for observers. As a bonus, the Moon will not be present in the sky for most of the night during the period of maximum activity, so the prospects for a good view of the shower are excellent. And unlike many astronomical phenomena, meteors are best seen without a telescope and are perfectly safe to watch with the naked eye.

Original Submission

darkfeline informed us about:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/12/sha1-sunset-will-block-millions-from-encrypted-net-facebook-warns/

SHA1 certificates for secure SSL/TLS communications are deprecated due to known computational vulnerabilities. To ensure secure communications, a forced deprecation sounds reasonable (i.e. refuse to connect to these). That has the side effect that it will lock out many users who are unable to use stronger hashes such as SHA256. However, if a fallback to SHA1 is provided (as Facebook is proposing), everyone will be vulnerable to SHA1 downgrade man-in-the-middle attacks.

What to do?

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) is reporting a successful startup of the experimental Wendelstein 7-X fusion device.

On 10th December, the day had arrived: the operating team in the control room started up the magnetic field and initiated the computer-operated experiment control system. It fed around one milligram of helium gas into the evacuated plasma vessel, switched on the microwave heating for a short 1,3 megawatt pulse – and the first plasma could be observed by the installed cameras and measuring devices.

"We're starting with a plasma produced from the noble gas helium. We're not changing over to the actual investigation object, a hydrogen plasma, until next year," explains project leader Professor Thomas Klinger: "This is because it's easier to achieve the plasma state with helium. In addition, we can clean the surface of the plasma vessel with helium plasmas."

The objective of fusion research is to develop a power source that is friendly to the climate and, similarly to the sun, harvests energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Between January 2013 and May 2015, one employee at the U.S. embassy in London hacked into over 400 online accounts belonging to at least 200 victims and forwarded at least 1,300 messages to himself:

Michael Ford, who worked in the American embassy in London, pleaded guilty to nine charges of cyber-stalking, seven of computer hacking to extort and one of wire fraud. He preyed on sorority members at US universities and aspiring models. Ford used the details he learned after hacking the women to find new victims.

The 36-year-old, from Atlanta, in the American state of Georgia, posed as technical support staff from a well-known email company and sent phishing messages to thousands of potential victims. Pretending to be a member of the non-existent account-deletion team, he told them their accounts would be closed unless they sent him their passwords. He then accessed their email and social media accounts in search of explicit photos and other personal information, such as home and work addresses, employment information and details about family members.

He used that information to demand additional sexually explicit material, such as videos of the women undressing in changing rooms at pools and shops. If they refused, Ford would respond with escalating threats that included messages such as: "Don't worry, it's not like I know where you live." He also posted explicit photos of the women online or sent them to friends and family.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Featuring creators of Community, Rick and Morty, Adventure Time

http://www.polygon.com/2015/12/9/9878980/mystery-science-theater-3000-revival-final-countdown-telethon

-- submitted from IRC

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter is nearing its end, and project lead (and series creator) Joel Hodgson is concluding the campaign in a big way: with a celebrity-filled celebration.

On Dec. 11 – the campaign's final day – Hodgson will host a live countdown party at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. MST3K: The Final Countdown is an eight-hour telethon that will start off at 2 p.m. PT with a screening of two of Hodgson's personal favorite episodes of the original series. The video, which you can check out at the top of the page, is currently live – although don't expect to see anything until this Friday, when the event begins.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

An electric car has been tested that managed a huge 1,100 mile range on a single charge. A massive jump from current electric cars.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/129419-electric-car-with-light-aluminium-air-battery-travels-1-100-miles-on-a-single-charge-take-note-tesla

-- submitted from IRC

An electric car has been tested that managed a huge 1,100 mile range on a single charge. A massive jump from current electric cars like the Tesla Model S which tops out at around 300 miles.

The secret to this super range is a type of battery technology called aluminium-air. This uses oxygen naturally occurring in the air to fill its cathode. This makes it far lighter than liquid filled lithium-ion batteries to give car a far greater range.

Phinergy, who created the battery, is an Israeli company who worked with aluminium specialist Alcoa Canada to create the batteries.

[...] Aluminium-air batteries drain turning the metal into aluminium hydroxide which can then be recycled to make new batteries. That will mean swapping out batteries every few months. But since it's so much lighter and cheaper than current efforts it should offer huge mileage and be affordable.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The BBC reports that one Canadian, Angele Grenier, is fighting back against the maple syrup monopoly granted to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ), which controls 77% of the world's maple syrup supply:

The problem for Mrs Grenier, and Quebec's other so-called "maple syrup rebels", is that they cannot freely sell their syrup. Instead, since 1990 they have been legally required to hand over the bulk of what they produce to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (which in French-speaking Quebec is abbreviated to FPAQ).

Backed by the Canadian civil courts, the federation has the monopoly for selling Quebecois maple syrup on the wholesale market, and for exporting it outside the province. It sets the price for how much it pays producers, and it charges them a 12% fee per pound of syrup. Producers are only allowed to sell independently a very small amount of syrup, to visitors to their farm, or to their local supermarket. And then they still have to pay the 12% commission to the FPAQ.

"We don't own our syrup any more," says Mrs Grenier, who calls the federation the "mafia". Unwilling to put up with this state of affairs, Mrs Grenier and her husband have in recent years been selling their maple syrup across the border in the neighbouring Canadian province of New Brunswick. In scenes that could come from a Hollywood drugs movie, they load barrels of syrup on to a truck as quickly as possible, and then race it over the border line under the cover of darkness. The couple are breaking the law, but say they are fighting for the right to sell their syrup for a price - and to customers - of their own choosing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the FPAQ has taken a very dim view.

[More After the Break]

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

From the fine folks over at net-security.org comes this interesting announcement:

ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database whose release was announced earlier this year, is now open source.

Developers MacLane Wilkison and Michael Egorov changed the license from proprietary to AGPLv3 on Monday, and invited the public to use it: "Try it, build awesome things with it, break it. Then tell us about it."

ZeroDB is based on the eponymous protocol that allows end-to-end encrypted queries, which in turn allows encrypted data to be stored on untrusted servers (e.g. in a public cloud).

[...] "In ZeroDB, the client is responsible for the database logic. Data encryption, decryption and compression also happen client side. Therefore, the server never has any knowledge about the data, its structure or order," it is explained in the documentation.

"Since the server has no insight into the nature of the data, the risk of a server-side data breach is eliminated. Even if attackers successfully infiltrate the server, they won't have access to the cleartext data," the developers pointed out.

No, NCommander, we don't need to switch databases twice in a year. Wait till 2016 at least.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The U.S. Constitution has 27 amendments; each was proposed by Congress and ratified by the states.

However, the Constitution sets forth another procedure, never before used, for amending the Constitution. At the request of two thirds of the states, a constitutional convention would be held, at which amendments could be proposed. Any proposals would become part of the Constitution if three fourths of the states ratified them, either at state conventions or in the state legislatures.

Currently, 27 of the needed 34 states have petitioned Congress for a constitutional convention, for the ostensible purpose of writing a balanced-budget amendment (BBA). However, the convention might propose other changes in addition or instead of a BBA—even a total rewrite of the Constitution—if 38 states agreed, the changes would become law.

In November, legislators from 30 states met in Salt Lake City to discuss the matter.

• Forbes article from 2014 (mirror)
• John Birch Society (has a map)
• utahpolicy.com
• Deseret News
• Yellowhammer News
• The Universe—Brigham Young University
• San Francisco Chronicle
• KSTU-TV
• The Columbian
• Washington Post blog about historical attempts at constitutional conventions
• The Spokesman-Review

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Tom's Hardware is highlighting a Kickstarter project for the Pine A64, a 64-bit computer board competing on specs with the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B:

Essentially, the Pine A64 can be viewed as a more powerful next-generation Raspberry Pi device. The Pine A64 contains a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at 1.2 GHz. Compared to the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B that was released earlier this year and uses four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 900 MHz, not only does the Pine A64 have a higher clock speed, but it also has a more advanced architecture, which consumes less power and achieves greater performance.

For graphics processing, the Pine A64 uses the dated Mali-400 MP2 GPU. Although we cannot compare the performance of the GPU inside of the Pine A64 to the VideoCore IV inside of the Raspberry Pi without testing both devices, Pine64 stated that the Pine A64 will be capable of 4K video playback, whereas the Raspberry Pi is limited to a resolution of 1920x1200. This gives the Pine64 an edge and should help to attract users planning to use it as a small HTPC system.

The two main options, Pine A64 and Pine A64+, cost $15 and $19 respectively. The A64+ comes with double the RAM (1 GB DDR3 vs 512 MB DDR3) and three additional ports for camera, touch panel, and LCD accessories. Other price tiers come with 2 GB of RAM, and 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

The Huffington Post reports

The U.S. Department of Education will cancel $27.8 million in federal student loans owed by some 1,300 former students of defunct for-profit school chain Corinthian Colleges Inc. after determining that the students were swindled into taking on the debt, according to a government report released [December 3].

The move marks the first recent use of a little-utilized provision in federal law that gives student debtors the right to petition the Education Department to discharge their debt in cases where they were defrauded into taking out loans.

The debt forgiveness plan only affects 1 percent of the roughly 125,000 student debtors who are eligible for expedited debt cancellation. That comes to about 2 percent of the students' nearly $1.3 billion in combined loan balances. The department said in June and November that those borrowers were eligible for immediate loan relief after determining that Corinthian had likely defrauded the former students by advertising false job placement rates.

[...] Borrower advocates [Debt Collective] criticized the department, led by Secretary Arne Duncan, for the paltry number of approved debt relief applications and the relatively small number of applications the department has received, compared to the number of eligible borrowers.

[...] "The department funneled billions of dollars to executives and shareholders of these fraudulent 'schools' for over a decade" [...] "It now wants to save face by creating a Rube Goldberg-type contraption to prevent as many people as possible from seeking the relief they deserve."

[...] Thursday's move comes six months after Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said the government would "fast track" applications submitted by students who attended certain programs at Heald College, a primarily California-based career school owned by Corinthian.

As the USA presidential race plods on, a footnote:

[More after the break.]

takyon writes:

Google Research Blog has reported a 100 million times (10⁸) speedup when using D-Wave quantum annealing systems to solve certain optimization problems versus a single classical processor core. Note that D-Wave systems are said to cost $10 million, far more than a single core:

During the last two years, the Google Quantum AI team has made progress in understanding the physics governing quantum annealers. We recently applied these new insights to construct proof-of-principle optimization problems and programmed these into the D-Wave 2X quantum annealer that Google operates jointly with NASA. The problems were designed to demonstrate that quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes.

We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10⁸ times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10⁸.

[More after the break.]

"gewg_" writes with the news that TechDirt reported:

Earlier this year, the state of New Mexico passed one of the most solid pieces of asset forfeiture reform legislation in the country. All it asked for was what most people would consider to be common sense: if the government is going to seize assets, the least it could do in return is tie the seizure to a conviction.

Now, the state is finding out that bad habits are hard to break. CJ Ciaramella reports that the government is going after another part of the government for its refusal to stop taking stuff without securing a conviction.

Two New Mexico state senators are suing Albuquerque after the city has refused to stop seizing residents' cars, despite a law passed earlier this year ending the practice of civil asset forfeiture.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, New Mexico state senators Lisa Torraco and Daniel Ivey-Soto said Albuquerque is defying the new law and "has continued to take property using civil forfeiture without requiring that anyone--much less the property owner--be convicted of a crime."

These would be the two senators who pushed for the much-needed reform. They managed to get the law passed, but Albuquerque (along with other cities in the state) haven't shown much interest in altering their tactics. The only incentive the new law has on its side is the threat of legal action or legislative pressure. The old incentives--hundreds of thousands of dollars--are still motivating local law enforcement.

Previous: Albuquerque Cops "Comply" with Records Request by Encrypting the Videos

Original Submission