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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

Microsoft's relentless Windows 10 nagware has interrupted a live TV weather forecast, urging meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade.

The operating system suddenly popped up a box on screen insisting the station's computer be upgraded to the latest version--while Slater was on air describing thunderstorms rolling through Iowa, USA.

The cyber-badgering blatted over her doppler weather radar, which was being broadcast on KCCI 8 News [April 27].

"Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 10. Gosh, what should I do?" Slater asked sarcastically.

So, do you know of a case of MSFT update pushiness that rivals this?

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CaTfiSh writes:

The $4.4 billion Large Haldron Collider has been shut down by a wandering weasel which managed its way into the collider's 66kV transformer and was promptly fried.

The collider is expected to be up and running in a few days.

The unfortunate creature did not survive the encounter with a high-voltage transformer at the site near Geneva in Switzerland.

The LHC was running when a "severe electrical perturbation" occurred in the early hours of Friday morning.

A spokesman for Cern said that the weasel did not get into the tunnels, just the electrical facilities.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-weasel-large-hadron-collider.html

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HughPickens.com writes:

BBC reports that the US Air Force has conducted air strikes targeting ISIS's stores of money destroying up to $800 million in cash which has contributed to a 90% jump in defections and a drop in new arrivals.

US intelligence indicated the group's cash troubles had led it to start selling vehicles to make money, says Maj Gen Gersten, the deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the US-led operation against IS. In January, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that IS announced it was to cut fighters' salaries in half "because of the exceptional circumstances that the Islamic State is passing through". In one case, Gersten says, an estimated $150 million was destroyed from the air at a house in Mosul, Iraq after forces fighting IS received intelligence indicating in which room of the house money was stored. But according to Patrick Wintour writing in The Guardian, these assertions are hard to verify, and could be seen as self-delusion, propaganda or disinformation – all designed to reassure public opinion that Isis is being slowly degraded. However the claims chime with documentary evidence published by researchers in the counter-terrorism journal CTC Sentinel, showing that Isis is struggling to fund its fighters, which make up about 60% of the group's costs.

Likening the anti-Isis coalition's efforts to financially weaken the Isis base to the economic warfare waged against Nazi Germany during the second world war, individuals including Air Vice-Marshal Edward Stringer have come to regard efforts to understand, and undermine, the group's funding as equally important to military gains. "Isis is trying to get more hard cash through extortion of the local population," says Stringer . "We are starting to see corruption and embezzlement among senior leaders, suggesting we are having success."

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takyon writes:

Microsoft is purchasing synthesized strands of DNA to test DNA data storage:

Microsoft is buying ten million strands of DNA from biology startup Twist Bioscience to investigate the use of genetic material to store data.

The data density of DNA is orders of magnitude higher than conventional storage systems, with 1 gram of DNA able to represent close to 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. DNA is also remarkably robust; DNA fragments thousands of years old have been successfully sequenced. These properties make it an intriguing option for long-term data archiving. Binary data has already been successfully stored as DNA base pairs, with estimates in 2013 suggesting that it would be economically viable for storage of 500 years or more.

At a future price of 2 cents per base pair, or 1 cent per bit (ignoring the need for error correction), a terabyte would cost $80 billion (and weigh a nanogram). Once synthesized, copying it would be as cheap as using a PCR machine.

Also at TechCrunch.

Related: An Isolated Vault Could Store Our Data on DNA for 2 Million Years
Scientists Store Digital Images in DNA, and Retrieve Them Perfectly

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Deeo Kain writes:

Almost a year and a half in the making, Devuan no longer is an Alpha-stage Linux distribution. A major site overhaul salutes the rollout of the first Beta release:
https://beta.devuan.org/

Here is an excerpt from an article from The Register on the release:

The effort to create a systemd-free Debian fork has borne fruit, with a beta of "Devuan Jessie" appearing in the wild.

Devuan came into being after a rebellion by a self-described "Veteran Unix Admin collective" argued that Debian had betrayed its roots and was becoming too desktop-oriented. The item to which they objected most vigorously was the inclusion of the systemd bootloader. The rebels therefore decided to fork Debian and "preserve Init freedom". The group renamed itself and its distribution "Devuan" and got [to] work, promising a fork that looked, felt, and quacked like Debian in all regards other than imposing systemd as the default Init option.

[...] Kudos, though, to the group for getting it out there! Now to see if there's really a groundswell of support for the cause of "Init freedom", as the greybeards name their cause.

The inclusion of systemd appears not to be holding rival Linux distros back: our review of Ubuntu 16.04 suggests it will be a speed bump for most users. Our Debian Jessie review said it slices a few seconds off boot times but is removable with little fuss for those who would prefer to go their own way at startup time. ®

How many people have been using this distro out of their worry over systemd's voracious appetite of everything standing between the kernel and the user? What are others using who share similar worries but have turned to other distros?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/04/27/sunny-states-sabotaging-solar-energy

"The 10 states account for more than 35 percent of the total rooftop solar potential in the contiguous United States but have just 6 percent of rooftop capacity, the report [PDF] said, citing data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory."
[...]
"Environmentalists say impediments to rooftop solar make it difficult for the United States to meet fossil-fuel emission reductions established by the Paris climate change accord, which 175 world leaders signed at the United Nations on April 22."
[...]
"Sixty percent of all installed solar capacity in the United States have been done by utilities [and] nearly all of that came from large-scale installations.
That's probably because rooftop solar is not as profitable."
[...]
"Under most net metering policies, utilities are required to buy this power at the full retail rate, even though it would cost them less to produce the electricity themselves," David Owen, executive vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, said in February.

No free sun for you(tm)!

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

Linda Katehi, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis, has been suspended pending an investigation into the decision to spent hundreds of thousand of dollars improving Google search results for her name, amid a range of other questionable activities.

The decision to put Katehi on paid administrative leave was made by UC President Janet Napolitano, who wrote a two-page letter(PDF) to Katehi noting she would be suspended for 90 days pending the outcome of a "rigorous and transparent investigation."

The revelation that Katehi's office had spent $175,000 in an effort to "achieve a reasonable balance of positive natural search results on common terms concerning UC Davis and Chancellor Katehi" was dug out by the Sacramento Bee looking into why UC Davis' "strategic communications budget" had jumped from $2.93M in 2009 to $5.47M in 2015.

The events Katehi was seeking to whitewash--when security officers pepper-sprayed sitting students back in 2011--received nationwide press attention for the seemingly callous way in which the undergraduates were treated. The news that the university had secretly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to remove that reputational stain was similarly covered.

[...] Napolitano's letter also puts a spotlight on other concerns over Katehi's behavior, including the employment of her son, her husband, and her daughter-in-law by the university.

[...] The letter [also] refers to complaints that student fees have been used for "unapproved instructional purposes" which would be "a serious violation of University policy".

[...] UC Davis students have been holding rallies calling for Katehi's resignation for over a week.

Previous: University of California in Davis Spent $175k on SEO and "Reputation Management"

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frojack writes:

Info World reports

Under US law, stuff left on a computer account is deemed abandoned after 180 days, something left over from when people failed to pick up their mail at the post office.

This had been expanded over time to mean just about any email you keep in imap folders or even deleted pop mail, not routinely expunged. And of course cloud storage is often left sitting that long.

Getting a warrant has not proven to be an insurmountable problem for police, apparently they are available for the asking, with no recourse to the email provider or the email customer. But at least there may come to be the pretense of due process if the Senate also passes this bill, and the president signs it. (Which he may not do).

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Gravis writes:

The working group that is drafting the W3C's Encrypted Media Extension (EME) specification (aka DRM in HTML5) is baking in language that would allow the DMCA to be invoked despite denials that "EME [is] putting DRM in HTML".

The EME is a set of predefined javascript functions that invoke functions in Content Decryption Modules (CDM) and CDMs are containers for DRM functionality. It's simple and innocuous but how it's worded and what they refuse to define is where the danger lies.

First, the EME is hooked to the DMCA by using very specific legal language: "content protection". One of the people working on the specification freely admits that "it is well-known that the purpose of content protection is not to prevent all unauthorized access to the content (this is impossible)" but despite the fact that it cannot protect the content, the entire working group insists on this very specific language and has refused alternative wording. The reason of course is because "protected content" is the legal term that DRM implementers always use.

Second, the EME is hardware specific by refusing to make a specification for CDMs. By not defining how CDMs are implemented, this leaves it up to each browser author to invent their own. All existing implementations of the CDMs are done using non-portable binary plugins that execute directly on your computer. This means that if a website is using a CDM that isn't ported to your specific browser, OS and architecture, you cannot view the video on that page. So if your computer runs on PowerPC instead of x86 you are out of luck, every site using CDMs will be out of your reach. That's not all, despite having a 4K SmartTV, you can't watch Netflix in 4K because it uses PlayReady 3.0 and it was reveiled last year that PlayReady 3.0 is only for Windows 10 and requires hardware DRM. Specifically it uses an instruction set extension to use a hidden "security processor" which is only in the latest generation of Intel and AMD chips.

All proposed alternatives to the legal language and a legitimate alternative to hardware specific lock-in were rejected by those drafting the EME. After looking into their backgrounds, I found that the group is composed exclusively of Microsoft, Netflix and Google employees.

If you wish to express your concerns, you can still do so on the github issue pages:
Issue #159: Remove all "protection" language
Issue #166: EME specification needs to include a CDM specification

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fleg writes:

The Guardian is reporting that...

On Wednesday, the FBI confirmed it wouldn't tell Apple about the security flaw it exploited to break inside the iPhone 5C of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook in part, because the bureau says it didn't buy the rights to the technical details of the hacking tool.

"Currently we do not have enough technical information about any vulnerability that would permit any meaningful review," said Amy Hess, the FBI's executive assistant director for science and technology.

$1.3m and no source code?

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mendax writes:

The New York Times published an article that says something about the security of networks at German universities, and at universities in general:

Printers at several universities across Germany produced anti-Semitic leaflets on or before Hitler's birthday this week, after hackers appeared to break into their computer systems, according to university officials.

Universities in Hamburg, Lüneburg and Tübingen confirmed that printers connected to their computer networks had suddenly started churning out the leaflets, most of them on Wednesday, the anniversary of Hitler's birth in Braunau, Austria, in 1889.

At least six other universities in Germany reported similar episodes, according to the German news agency DPA.

The leaflet produced at the University of Hamburg carried the slogan "Europe, awake!" and alluded to the mass migration that brought more than one million people, many from the Middle East, to the Continent last year. "Europe is being flooded by enemy strangers," it read, in part.

Without naming Hitler, the leaflet referred to "the words of a former European führer" who blamed the Jews for bringing non-Europeans to the Rhineland.

The article noted a similar breach at American universities, including one at Princeton in March.

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CoolHand writes:

Gigafactory article" has lots of pretty pictures of it...

With such enormous interest in the new mass-market Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle, it's imperative that Tesla Motors [NASDAQ:TSLA] get their massive battery factory, the Gigafactory, constructed and fully operating on a tight timeline. In addition, Tesla's got significant demand for it's stationary storage products, the Powerwall and Powerpack, which also depend on heavily on the Gigafactory. To get a 'Gig' status update, Lauren Sommer from KQED Science* got an exclusive interview with JB Straubel, Tesla co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, and offers us a rare, inside look at progress.

Sommer writes, "Tesla's Gigafactory is a lot like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory: it's mysterious, it's big and few people have been inside... It's tucked away in a dusty valley, half an hour east of Reno. Driving up Electric Avenue, the factory is a stark contrast on the horizon. It's a sleek white building with a red stripe, almost like one of the company's cars." In her interview with Tesla's top brass, Straubel proclaims, "It's really hard to get a sense of scale. I mean, it's huge... I think it's on the order of around a hundred football fields." Straubel says, the Gigafactory is about scale. He believes scaling up could drive down the cost of batteries 30 percent or more. "We think we'll probably be able to exceed that," Straubel says. "Our vehicles can be more affordable. More people can have access to them."

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n1 writes:

Millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the nation's largest living generation, according to population estimates released this month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Millennials, whom we define as those ages 18-34 in 2015, now number 75.4 million, surpassing the 74.9 million Baby Boomers (ages 51-69). And Generation X (ages 35-50 in 2015) is projected to pass the Boomers in population by 2028.

The Millennial generation continues to grow as young immigrants expand its ranks. Boomers – whose generation was defined by the boom in U.S. births following World War II – are older and their numbers shrinking as the number of deaths among them exceeds the number of older immigrants arriving in the country.

Source: Pew Research

Millennials in New York City earn about 20% less than the previous generation of young workers and are likely to struggle for years from the effects of the late-2000s recession, according to a report from city Comptroller Scott Stringer.

Source: The Wall Street Journal [paywalled]

Another point worth mentioning in the article is that nationwide, the percentage of millennials living independently (read: not in their parents[sic] house) has fallen from 51% in 2007, to just 45% in 2014.

In summary, people from 18-34 are going to college, getting into debt, entering into the workforce at minimum wage, and living with their parents. The very definition of the American dream isn't it?

[...] The economy is weak, the only jobs being created are primarily waiter and bartender jobs, and the fed is fueling a[n] enormous student loan credit bubble. Now, courtesy of years of mismanaged policies and incompetence, millennials have do face the consequences directly.

Source: ZeroHedge

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Webweasel writes:

The hidden world in short-wave.

I was interviewed a few weeks back for my website priyom.org [Javascript recommended] which is a community that tracks and logs Numbers Station and military radio stations from all over the world.

The article on The Daily Beast can be found here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/06/the-stupidly-simple-spy-messages-no-computer-could-decode.html

When I was 10 years old, I found a shortwave radio in a crumbling old leather trunk where we kept family photos and other memorabilia. As I spun the dial, tinny, modulating noises, like the song of an electronic slide whistle, emanated from the radio's small speaker. Staticky cracks and pops competed for airtime. The sounds swished and swirled, unintelligible and unremarkable. But then, emerging through the clamor, was a voice.

I might have run right over it with the dial, but the voice's rhythmic, steady pacing caught me up short. It wasn't a deejay. Nor a commercial. And he wasn't singing. He was just speaking. The same line, over and over again.

"7...6...7...4...3." Pause. "7...6...7...4...3."

I don't remember if those were the exact numbers. But they were numbers. A repeated sequence which had no obvious meaning, and was entirely devoid of context. To find him here, amidst the screeches and howls of the shortwave frequencies, was like coming upon a man standing in the middle of a forest, talking out loud to no one.

How long had he been here? Who was he talking to? He had that officious tone of the recorded telephone operators who chastised you for dialing a wrong number. "Please hang up, check the number, and dial again." And the same distracting static I'd heard in those messages filled the background. I wasn't sure if he was speaking live, or if he'd been recorded and set loose to play into the air.

It's well-written and a good introduction into the world of number stations and short-wave. I think the Soylent community will enjoy the article, maybe prompt some of you to dig a radio out of your attic and have a listen. Alternatively, you can listen to some stations online. Different stations broadcast at different times; check out the listings on the station schedule page (Javascript required).

Some other resources to check out on the scene:

Enigma 2000 group http://www.brogers.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000
Simon Mason's website http://www.simonmason.karoo.net/

[Ed. addition.] These stations apparently depend on previously-distributed one-time pads:

In cryptography, the one-time pad is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked if used correctly. In this technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key. Then, each bit or character of the plaintext is encrypted by combining it with the corresponding bit or character from the pad using modular addition.

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FakeBeldin writes:

Another novel application of the All Writs Act is to require suspects to decrypt their hard disks. Refusing to comply landed one suspect in jail without trial. He's been in there for 7 months already.

To me this seems to be a gross perversion of justice. Guilty until proven innocent? I haven't read the All Writs Act, but somehow being detained for 7 months without trial seems like it shouldn't be within the scope of any law -- irrespective of the alleged crime. (Yes, I'm aware of Guantanamo Bay.)

PS: Concerning the alleged crime (child pornography), keep in mind:

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