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An Anonymous Coward writes:

"[Lucky Green, the person] responsible for very early [TOR] nodes says 'recent events' make it impossible to continue"[1]

"It will therefore be left to others to speculate about whether or not Green's decision is the result of the turmoil in the project, which emerged when Jacob Applebaum exited amid accusations and recriminations, and continued with the project's board replacing itself."

[1] Full Article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/18/lucky_green_torpedos_tors_tonga_node/

[1arc] Full Article (Archived):
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/18/lucky_green_torpedos_tors_tonga_node/

"Lucky Green's message[2] to the community reads as follows:"

"Given recent events, it is no longer appropriate for me to materially contribute to the Tor Project either financially, as I have so generously throughout the years, nor by providing computing resources. This decision does not come lightly; I probably ran one of the first five nodes in the system and my involvement with Tor predates it being called "Tor" by many years.

Nonetheless, I feel that I have no reasonable choice left within the bounds of ethics, but to announce the discontinuation of all Tor-related services hosted on every system under my control. Most notably, this includes the Tor node "Tonga", the "Bridge Authority", which I recognize is rather pivotal to the network

Tonga will be permanently shut down and all associated crytographic keys destroyed on 2016-08-31. This should give the Tor developers ample time to stand up a substitute. I will terminate the chron [sic] job we set up so many years ago at that time that copies over the descriptors. In addition to Tonga, I will shut down a number of fast Tor relays, but the directory authorities should detect that shutdown quickly and no separate notice is needed here.

I wish the Tor Project nothing but the best moving forward through those difficult times."

[2] Tonga (Bridge Authority) Permanent Shutdown Notice:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19690

[2arc] Tonga (Bridge Authority) Permanent Shutdown Notice (Archived):
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19690

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that NASA has announced approval of funding to continue monitoring and managing several spacecraft:

• Opportunity (launched July 2003)
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched August 2005)
• Mars Odyssey Orbiter (launched April 2001)
• Dawn (launched September 2007)
• the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched June 2009)
• Mars Express (in partnership with ESA)
• Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (launched November 2013)
• Curiosity (launched November 2011)
• New Horizons (launched January 2006)
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched August 2005)

New Horizons, which passed the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015, is en route to a Kuiper belt object called 2014 MU₆₉. The funding means that when New Horizons reaches 2014 MU₆₉ around the beginning of the year 2019, NASA should be financially able to receive data about the encounter.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Comcast is getting ready to bid on spectrum as it prepares a move into the mobile broadband business.

Bidding under the name "CC Wireless Investment, LLC," Comcast submitted its application a few months ago and is now one of 62 qualified bidders announced by the Federal Communications Commission on Friday. These bidders have submitted down payments and met all the necessary requirements to participate in the auction, which is shifting 600MHz airwaves from TV broadcasters to wireless carriers. Bidding is scheduled to begin on August 16.

Comcast files to participate in FCC's broadcast TV spectrum auction.

Comcast has said it will only buy spectrum if the price is right, but there are ample signs that it is planning a mobile data service. Comcast has activated a Mobile Virtual Network Operator agreement with Verizon Wireless that will let Comcast resell the carrier's service, and it has created a new mobile division, Multichannel News reported. Comcast has also been developing a large network of Wi-Fi hotspots, in part by turning its cable Internet customers' home modems into hotspots.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Fiona Tang writes in ACLU FOIA Seeks Information About How Government Launders Evidence:

Today the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records related to "parallel construction," the government's practice of falsifying a trail of evidence in order to conceal controversial investigative techniques from the courts and the public.

Under parallel construction, instead of disclosing how its investigation actually took place, the government presents a sanitized version of events. The practice allows the government to evade legal challenges to the use of such techniques, and also to keep the very existence of such techniques a secret. Recent news reports have shown that parallel construction might be far more common than we'd like to think, so we've asked the government to provide any records it has documenting the practice.

... parallel construction has been used to cover up some of the most notorious surveillance techniques in the past decade. It initially captured the public's attention in August 2013, when Reuters published an article scrutinizing the elusive Drug Enforcement Administration Special Operations Division's use of the practice. Parallel construction received renewed attention this past May, when a non-disclosure agreement between the FBI and the Oklahoma City Police Department was released through a state records request. The non-disclosure agreement governs the use of cell site simulators—colloquially known as "stingrays"—and requires that the Oklahoma City Police Department use the technology for "lead purposes only," further explaining that the agency must "use additional and independent investigative means and methods . . . that would be admissible at trial" in lieu of disclosing to the defendant the fact that a stingray device was used.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report has found that Russian security services were involved in operating a state-sanctioned doping program during previous Olympic games that threw out positive drug test results. This is referred to as "Disappearing Positive Methodology" in the report. A decision to cheat was apparently made following poor Russian performance and medal count at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. The cheating was not limited to track and field as previously believed. As a result, the IOC has convened an emergency meeting and likely intends to ban all Russian athletes from competing in the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games:

Russia should be banned from this summer's Olympics and Paralympics after evidence was found of a four-year, state-sponsored doping programme, says the World Anti-Doping Agency. A Wada-commissioned report found urine samples of Russian competitors were manipulated across the "vast majority" of summer and winter Olympic sports from late 2011 to August 2015.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) will decide on Tuesday whether to provisionally ban Russia from the Rio Olympics, which start on 5 August. IOC president Thomas Bach will host a telephone conference call to decide on "provisional measures and sanctions".

Some of the data was recovered from wiped hard drives, and microscopic tool marks were also found on the bottles of the swapped urine samples. Crucially, Russian FSB agent Evgeny Blokhin gained access to a Sochi drug testing lab disguised as a sewage and pipes engineer. Russia president Vladimir Putin has said he will suspend some of the officials named in the report, but warned against "politics" interfering with sports.

Also at The New York Times , The Guardian , NPR, and RT.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Variety reports that Netflix has arranged with CBS to stream all Star Trek television programmes, including the upcoming series. Under the arrangement, Netflix will have the exclusive right to distribute the shows in 188 countries. Canada and the United States are not covered by the deal; Bell Media and CBS have the distribution rights there. Besides the upcoming series, the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise are encompassed. Star Trek: The Animated Series is not mentioned in the article—perhaps an oversight?

The future series is to be made in Toronto beginning in September, for a release in January. A press release says it is to include

[...] a new ship, new characters and new missions, while embracing the same ideology and hope for the future [...]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Can you fit the entire Library of Congress on a cube smaller than a dust mite? A team of nanoscientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands says, "Yes":

By scooting around individual chlorine atoms on a flat sheet of copper, the scientists could write a 1 kilobyte message at 500 terabits per square inch. That's around 100 times more info per square inch than the most efficient hard drive ever created. Otte says the method could theoretically fit every book ever written onto a flat copper sheet the size of a postage stamp. The new storage device is outlined today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

[...] Here's how it's done: [research leader Sander] Otte's team found that they could put chlorine atoms onto a cold grid of copper metal and get them to form into perfect squares. Think of it like a checkerboard. Any empty spot that was missing a chlorine atom would [be] like a dark square on Otte's checkerboard. Next, the researchers found they could scoot around the chlorine atoms on this grid, sort of like a sliding block puzzle, and thus rearrange where the dark spots on the grid are. It's done with a tool called a scanning tunnelling microscope, which is a bit like an ultra-thin needle that can nudge atoms up and down, left and right.

[...] To create the data storage device, Otte starts with a copper plate that's been randomly peppered with chlorine atoms, leaving plenty of blank spaces. He then scoots around the atoms until he's formed a larger 12-by-12 grid with chunks of ordered atoms and darker blank spaces. If any of these 144 chunks has some fatal error—say the copper underneath has some elemental impurity—Otte can mark off that box as defective with a tiny 4-atom symbol in its upper left-hand corner.

The arrangement of atoms and blank spaces translates to individual bits of data. A blank space followed by a chlorine atom is a 0, while the reverse (a chlorine atom and then a blank space) is a 1.

Also covered at The Register .

[Update: The Nature article, in Figure 3: Kilobyte atomic memory provides an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) image, with translation, of the encoding of part of Richard P. Feynman's December 1959 lecture Plenty of Room at the Bottom.]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes in with an article on researching jurors online:

Mining prospective jurors' Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts is common practice for many attorneys looking to spot biases that might cost their clients a fair trial.

Now, a federal judge's ruling in a copyright battle between Silicon Valley heavyweights Oracle and Google has reignited debate about the practice while also offering a potential middle ground.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup, raising concerns about prospective jurors' privacy, said attorneys could research the jury panel, but would have to inform it in advance of the scope of the online sleuthing and give the potential jurors a chance to change online privacy settings.

Otherwise, they had to agree to forego the searches.

Alsup said prospective jurors are not "celebrities or public figures ... but good citizens commuting from all over our district, willing to serve our country."

"Their privacy matters," the judge said in March.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The wide adoption of 3D/vertical NAND with increased feature sizes and endurance will apparently lead to the introduction of low-cost QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND. 3D NAND's increased flash cell size and overprovisioning will counteract the reduction in endurance caused by moving from 3 to 4 bits per cell:

We covered the TSV [Through Silicon Vias] notion here and now take a look at quadruple level cell (QLC) flash technology. Toshiba will present on this and TSVs in a keynote session at the August 6-9 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. The session abstract notes: "New technologies such as QLC (Quadruple Level Cell) BiCS FLASH offer high density, low-cost solutions, while TSV (Through Silicon Via) NAND offers high performance with significant power reduction."

To recap, BiCS stands for Bit Cost Scalable and is Toshiba and flash foundry partner WDC's approach to 3D NAND, the layering of ordinary or planer (2D) NAND chips atop each other. We have 48-layer cells in production and 64-layer ones coming with 96-layer and even 128-layer chips in prospect. Progress beyond 64-layers has problems due to the difficulties in etching holes through the layers and so the TSV idea is to have two layers of layering: two 64-layer chips one on top of the other, with holes through them both, TSVs, for wiring to hold them together and carry out cell activity functions as well.

[...] Back in March, Jeff Ohshima, a Toshiba executive, presented on TSVs and QLC flash at the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop and suggested 88TB QLC 3D NAND SSDs with a 500 write cycle life could be put into production. The Flash Memory Summit keynote could add more colour to this.

Related:

Toshiba and SanDisk Announce 48-Layer 256 Gb 3D NAND
Toshiba Brings Through-Silicon Vias to NAND Flash
Western Digital, SanDisk, and the NAND Market
"String-Stacking" Being Developed to Enable 3D NAND With More Than 100 Layers (NAND devices with 64 layers and above will be difficult to create, so stacking 48-layer devices will be used to increase density)

Original Submission

SrLnclt writes:

As you may recall, the FBI has investigated a scouting director of the St. Louis Cardinals. He pleaded guilty in January to five counts of "hacking" the Houston Astros player database in 2013 and 2014, a time period in which he was promoted to director of baseball development with the Cardinals.

Today Christopher Correa has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for hacking the Houston Astros' player personnel database and email system in an unusual case of high-tech cheating involving two Major League Baseball clubs. He was fired last summer and now faces 46 months behind bars and a court order to pay $279,038 in restitution. He had faced up to five years in prison on each count.

Major League Baseball could still discipline the Cardinals, possibly with a fine or a loss of draft picks, but has so far said only that it looked forward to getting details on the case from federal authorities.

Original Submission

Eponymous Coward writes:

URL: https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/18/opera-browser-sold-to-a-chinese-consortium-for-600-million/

Opera used to be the cutting edge of browsers. Many features that we take for granted today, started in Opera in one way or the other (tabbed browsing, anyone?). Its decline started when they got rid of their presto rendering engine in order to be just another skin of Chrome, and with that one decision, effectively eliminated what made them desirable. Now the empty husk is being sold to another consortium.

Who still uses Opera, who will continue to use it?
What are your favorite features from Opera "back in the day"?

A group of folks from the original Opera crew went off to create the Vivaldi Browser; how many of you are using that? Is there an update on how this browser handles privacy?

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

According to this article at softpedia,

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

NPR's All Things Considered (ATC) reported on West Virginia's flooding problems where floods have destroyed hundreds of bridges, most of them small, serving only a few houses. During the rebuilding, a different style of bridge is becoming popular -- one designed by Mennonite engineers. From the ATC story:

A few miles away, a bulldozer clears away the remnants of two washed out bridges next to a creek. With so many damaged bridges in the state, other religious organizations are stepping up. Mennonites from around the country are working with Baptists from the state, including Jack Cobb.

JACK COBB: This is phenomenally well-designed. And what's fantastic about this is this is a model that's exportable. With minor changes, this bridge could be 20-foot long. It could be 30-foot long. It could be 40-foot long.

GLYNIS BOARD: The Mennonites designed the bridges and created an easy-to-replicate process to get the bridges rebuilt and fast. And they're doing it differently. Mennonite engineer Johann Zimmermann says rather than building a complete concrete structure, they're using wooden decking and steel beams anchored to bedrock. It's quickly built, more easily maintained and more resilient than what they're replacing.

Floodwaters like those that wrecked communities in June tested his design. All are still intact. Zimmerman says the most impressive feature of the new bridges is not the design, but the collaboration between local, federal, private and religious organizations.

[Continues...]

fork(2) writes:

ScienceDaily reports on a new paper by researchers at Colorado State University that suggests that "a major factor in women's decision to leave a STEM path after Calculus I isn't ability, but confidence in their ability."

It's no secret that Calculus I is a major hurdle in the quest for a science degree. But, according to a new paper by Colorado State University researchers, the class is far more likely to discourage women than men from continuing on in their chosen field. How much more likely? One-and-a-half times. And it doesn't take a math degree to spot that as a serious imbalance.

The findings, published in PLOS ONE, suggest that a major factor in women's decision to leave a STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) path after Calculus I isn't ability, but confidence in their ability.

Both men and women experience a loss of confidence in their math skills at a similar rate in Calc I, says co-author Jess Ellis, an assistant professor of mathematics in the College of Natural Sciences. The problem, says co-author Bailey Fosdick, an assistant professor of statistics, is that women arrive with lower math confidence to begin with. "When women are leaving, it is because they don't think they can do it" -- not because they can't do it -- she says.

[...] Of the students who switched out after Calculus I, when asked why they decided against taking Calculus II, most of the possible explanations fell fairly equally across the genders (too many classes, not needed for major, etc.) -- except for one: "I do not believe I understand the ideas of Calculus I well enough to take Calculus II." Of those who had been planning to major in a STEM area, 14 percent of men who switched out listed this as a reason; 35 percent of women did. But fewer than one in five of the departing students of either gender reported that their Calc I grade was actually too low to continue.

The paper appears in the open access journal PLOS ONE .

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Knock us over with a feather: a study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has found that those who infringe intellectual property for a living are quite fond of anonymity technologies that cover their tracks.

The Office last week emitted a Deloitte-penned study titled Research on Online Business Models Infringing Intellectual Property Rights (PDF), the first effort in a research project aimed at figuring out just who pirates what and why.

The study aims “to provide an overview of the different infringing business models, assessing how they function, how they are financed, how they generate profits for their operators, what kinds of content they disseminate and how large their user bases are.” It's hoped that policy-makers can arm themselves with this information and respond accordingly.

The study identified 25 different business models for IP abuse, [...]

EUIPO Executive Director António Campinos writes, in his foreword, that the “shadow landscape” responsible for IP abuse “more and more relies on new encrypted technologies like the TOR browser and the BitCoin virtual currency, which are employed by infringers of IPR to generate income and hide the proceeds of crime from the authorities.”

A promised Phase 2 study will offer “a more quantitative oriented phase where specific business strategies can be researched in more detail.

Original Submission