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fork(2) writes:

From the (Kansas City) Daily Star Albany :

Recent moves in Congress to restrict the use of Russian rocket engines on national security missions sparked a revolution in the U.S. commercial space program. Private businesses such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, as well as Aerojet Rocketdyne, are lining up to offer homegrown rocket engines to NASA. Meanwhile, Russian President Putin just abolished his country's own Federal Space Agency, replacing 'Roscosmos' with a new corporation that "will design new spacecraft and implement new projects by itself."

But before you assume that Russia has been bitten by the Capitalism bug - don't. In contrast to SpaceX, which is a private venture, Russia's new-and-improved Roscosmos will be wholly owned by the Russian state.

Asserting complete control over the space effort is, to Putin's mind, a way to control costs and prevent corruption, such as when certain persons at Roscosmos famously embezzled or wasted as much as $1.8 billion in 2014. Whether the restructuring will also make space travel "cheaper," as [deputy prime minister] Rogozin hopes, remains to be seen.

SpaceX publishes a price of $61.2M USD for a Falcon 9 launch. Can Roscosmos compete with that? The Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture ULA finds that price hard to beat. So do the French and Chinese. From the article:

[...] California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez described a conversation she had with France's Arianespace a few years ago: "They were telling me that their launch costs about $200 million equivalent. They said they weren't worried about UAL [sic] but could I get rid of SpaceX? Because they were going to drive them out of business!"

And over in China, officials interviewed by Aviation Week recently lamented that "published prices on the SpaceX website [are] very low." So low, in fact, that with China's own Long March rockets costing $70 million per launch, "they could not match them."

Original Submission

butthurt submitted a story that became:

Just prior to retiring, the UK's former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron arranged for a parliamentary vote on whether the Trident nuclear-armed submarine programme should be renewed.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn is opposed to nuclear weapons, having said "I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations." However, some Labour MPs support Trident; Corbyn has made this a free vote.

The submarines operate out of a base at Faslane in Scotland. All the MPs belonging to the Scottish National Party, which advocates Scottish independence, are opposed to Trident. One asked the prime minister: "Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children?” and her answer was:

Yes. And I have to say to the honourable gentleman the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike some suggestions that we could have a deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seem to come from the Labour party frontbench.

One Conservative MP who is opposed to Trident criticised his own party when he said "This is a political weapon aimed rather effectively at the Labour party."

The Guardian has a page with updates on the vote. It has the text of the motion and lists the number of parliamentary seats held by each party (links added by submitter):

Conservatives - 330
Labour - 230
SNP - 54
DUP - 8
Lib Dems - 8

The motion passed by 472 votes to 117. It seems likely that it had the support of nearly all Conservative MPs and a sizable fraction of Labour.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

When there is a real threat, security theater kills people.

For nearly a decade, anyone driving through one of Baghdad's many checkpoints was subjected to a search by a soldier pointing a security wand at their vehicle and watching the device intently to see if its antenna moved. If it pointed at the car, it had supposedly detected a possible bomb.

The wands were completely bogus. It had been proven years ago, even before 2013 when two British men were convicted in separate trials on fraud charges for selling the detectors. The devices, sold under various names for thousands of dollars each, apparently were based on a product that sold for about $20 and claimed to find golf balls.

Yet the Iraqi government continued to use the devices, spending nearly $60 million on them despite warnings by U.S. military commanders and the wands' proven failure to stop near-daily bombings in Baghdad.

It took a massive suicide bombing that killed 300 people in Baghdad on July 3 — the deadliest single attack in the capital in 13 years of war — for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to finally ban their use.

Source: Military.com
Related: July Baghdad bombings
ADE651 Detector

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.

After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another.

For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore's Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.

[...]

This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets.

Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/transistors-will-stop-shrinking-in-2021-moores-law-roadmap-predicts

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.

The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.

The material is four times harder than pure titanium and has applications in making longer-lasting medical implants, they say.

Conventional knee and hip implants have to be replaced after about 10 years due to wear and tear.

Details of the new metal - an alloy of gold and titanium - are revealed in the journal, Science Advances.

Prof Emilia Morosan, of Rice University, Houston, said her team had made the discovery while working on unconventional magnets made from titanium and gold.

The new materials needed to be made into powders to check their purity, but beta-Ti3Au, as it is known, was too tough to be ground in a diamond-coated mortar and pestle.

The material "showed the highest hardness of all Ti-Au [titanium-gold] alloys and compounds, but also compared to many other engineering alloys", said Prof Morosan.

She said the hardness of the substance, together with its higher biocompatibility, made it a "next generation compound for substantively extending the lifetime of dental implants and replacement joints".

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36855705

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The anonymous woman was raped in Houston in 2013, according to court documents, and was cooperating with prosecutors when she suffered a breakdown while testifying in December 2015.

She has bipolar disorder and was admitted to a local hospital for mental health treatment when the judge ordered a recess for the holiday break until January 2016.

According to the documents, authorities were scheduled to be on vacation and "did not want the responsibility of having to monitor Jane Doe's well being or provide victim services to her during the holiday recess."

The complaint alleges that the district attorney's office obtained an order from the Harris County sheriff to take the woman into custody so she would not flee before completing her testimony.

The employee booking her into Harris County Jail identified her as a "defendant in a sexual assault case, rather than the victim." That impacted her treatment from jail staff, as the complaint reads:

The Harris County Jail psychiatric staff tormented Jane Doe and caused her extreme emotional distress and mental anguish by further defaming her, falsely insisting to her that she was being charged with sexual assault, and refusing to acknowledge her status as an innocent rape victim."

Doe also suffered beatings from other inmates and from a guard, who then requested assault charges to be filed against her "in an attempt to cover up the brutal abuse," according to the complaint.

[...] The complaint notes that her "rapist was also an inmate in the same facility" and treated more humanely. "Her rapist was not denied medical care, psychologically tortured, brutalized by other inmates, or beaten by jail guards," it reads.

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/22/487073132/rape-survivor-sues-after-texas-authorities-jailed-her-for-a-month

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Original URL: http://www.itworld.com/article/3099084/researchers-release-free-decryption-tools-for-powerware-and-bart-ransomware.html#tk.rss_news

Security researchers have released tools this week that could help users recover files encrypted by two relatively new ransomware threats: Bart and PowerWare.

PowerWare, also known as PoshCoder, was first spotted in March, when it was used in attacks against healthcare organizations. It stood out because it was implemented in Windows PowerShell, a scripting environment designed for automating system and application administration tasks.

Researchers from security firm Palo Alto Networks have recently found a new version of this threat that imitates a sophisticated and widespread ransomware program called Locky. It uses the extension .locky for encrypted files and also displays the same ransom note used by the real Locky ransomware.

This is not the first time the PowerWare/PoshCoder creators have imitated well-designed ransomware threats, probably in an attempt to convince users that there's no point in trying to recover their files without paying. In the past, they've used the CryptoWall and TeslaCrypt ransom notes.

Luckily, PowerWare is nowhere near as strong as the ransomware programs it impersonates. It uses the AES-128 encryption algorithm, but with a hard-coded key, which allowed the Palo Alto researchers to create a decryption tool that should work at least for this latest variant.

Also this week, researchers from antivirus firm AVG managed to crack another ransomware program called Bart that first appeared in June. This threat is notable because it locks files inside password-protected ZIP archives instead of using sophisticated encryption algorithms.

Bart infections are easy to identify because the affected files will have the extension .bart.zip appended to their original name and extension -- for example document.docx will become document.docx.bart.zip.

Bart's ZIP-based encryption uses a very long and complex password, but the AVG researchers have figured out a way to guess the key using brute-force methods. Their Bart decryption tool requires the user to have at least one unaffected copy of a file that has been encrypted.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Yahoo! has finally found a billions-slinging buyer for its "assets":

Verizon Communications Inc said Monday it would buy Yahoo Inc's core internet properties for $4.83 billion in cash to expand its digital advertising and media business, in a deal that ends a lengthy sale process for the fading Web pioneer. The purchase of Yahoo's operations will boost Verizon's AOL internet business, which it bought last year for $4.4 billion, and give it access to Yahoo's ad technology tools, BrightRoll and Flurry, and assets such as search, mail and messenger.

The deal, expected to close in early 2017, marks the end of Yahoo as an operating company, leaving it with a 15 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and a 35.5 percent interest in Yahoo Japan Corp. "The sale of our operating business, which effectively separates our Asian asset equity stakes, is an important step in our plan to unlock shareholder value for Yahoo," Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer said in a statement on Monday.

Did you know that Verizon owns TechCrunch?

Microsoft executives recalled a previous buyout attempt and breathed a sigh of relief:

In February 2008 Microsoft Corporation made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for US$44.6 billion. Yahoo formally rejected the bid, claiming that it "substantially undervalues" the company and was not in the interest of its shareholders. Three years later Yahoo had a market capitalization of US$22.24 billion.

martyb: Registered on 1995-01-18, yahoo.com has been around for a long time. Many services were made available on their site such as e-mail, groups, finance. What, if any, of their services have you used? Do you still use them? What are your plans in light of the buyout?

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Up in the sky, look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a solar-powered internet drone!

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3098912/internet/facebook-completes-first-test-flights-of-solar-powered-aquila-internet-drone.html

Facebook has revealed that it has completed the first successful flight of it's Aquila drone, which it hopes will eventually be used to provide internet access to remote regions of the world. The company, which has been testing a one-fifth scale version of the drone for months, initially hoped to fly the full-sized aircraft for 30 minutes, but far exceeded that goal.

[...]

What exactly is Aquila? Just an unmanned, solar-powered, internet-providing drone from Facebook. Yasmeen Abutaleb shares the important background information:

Facebook...completed a successful test flight of a solar-powered drone that...will help it extend internet connectivity to every corner of the planet.
...
Aquila, Facebook's lightweight, high-altitude aircraft, flew at a few thousand feet for 96 minutes in Yuma, Arizona...The company ultimately hopes to have a fleet of Aquilas that can fly for at least three months at a time at 60,000 feet...and communicate with each other to deliver internet access.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Mozilla yesterday said it will follow other browser markers by curtailing use of Flash in Firefox next month.

The open-source developer added that in 2017 it will dramatically expand the anti-Flash restrictions: Firefox will require users to explicitly approve the use of Flash for any reason by any website.

As have its rivals, Mozilla cast the limitations (this year) and elimination (next year) as victories for Firefox users, citing improved security, longer battery life on laptops and faster web page rendering.

"Starting in August, Firefox will block certain Flash content that is not essential to the user experience, while continuing to support legacy Flash content," wrote Benjamin Smedberg, the manager of Firefox quality engineering, in a post to a company blog.

Firefox 48 is slated to ship on Aug. 2.

[...]

Firefox is late to the dump-Flash party.

Original Source: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3098606/web-browsers/firefox-sets-kill-flash-schedule.html

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Tech Crunch reports that NASA has produced a video from images made by its Deep Space Climate Observatory. The spacecraft is in a Lissajous orbit around the Sun–Earth L₁ Lagrange point, from which the sunlit side of the Earth can always be seen. The 167-second video (warning: has narration) was made from images collected over the course of a year.

additional links:
press release
Youtube

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has announced she will resign as chair of the Democratic National Committee. The resignation is to become effective after the party's convention. The organisation's e-mail system was hacked; leaked e-mails appear to confirm accusations that Wasserman-Schultz had taken action favouring Hillary Clinton in her contest against Bernie Sanders to become the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. Sanders had previously called for Wasserman-Schultz to resign, a request he reiterated in light of the leak.

Wasserman-Schultz said in a statement:

I know that electing Hillary Clinton as our next president is critical for America's future. I look forward to serving as a surrogate for her campaign in Florida and across the country to ensure her victory.

coverage:

• New York Times
• The Guardian
• Washington Post
• Breitbart News

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/nepal-prime-minister-khadga-prasad-oli-resigns-160724134624798.html

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Russian athletes have escaped a proposed blanket ban on their participation in the upcoming Rio Olympics:

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has rejected clarion calls for Russia to be banned from next month's Rio Olympics over the nation's doping record, offering athletes a lifeline by ruling that decisions on individual competitors will be left to the international sports federations. The IOC's decision on Sunday, less than two weeks before the Rio Games opens on Aug. 5, follows the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) call for a blanket ban in response to the independent McLaren report that found evidence of state-sponsored doping by Russian athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

[...] The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) said the IOC had failed to show leadership with its decision. "Many, including clean athletes and whistleblowers, have demonstrated courage and strength in confronting a culture of state-supported doping and corruption within Russia," USADA chief Travis Tygart said. "Disappointingly, however, in response to the most important moment for clean athletes and the integrity of the Olympic Games, the IOC has refused to take decisive leadership. The decision regarding Russian participation and the confusing mess left in its wake is a significant blow to the rights of clean athletes." Russia's Sports Minister, Vitaly Mutko, said the decision cleared the way for Russian participation. "I hope that the majority of international federations will very promptly confirm the right of (Russian) sportspeople in different types of sports to take part in the Olympic Games," Mutko said.

Previously: All Russian Athletes Could be Banned From Competing at the Rio Olympics

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

- Story:
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202646-physical-key-extraction-attacks-on-pcs/fulltext

- Archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202646-physical-key-extraction-attacks-on-pcs/fulltext
https://archive.is/MrXho

For attackers, ramming the gates of cryptography is not the only option. They can instead undermine the fortification by violating basic assumptions made by the cryptographic software. One such assumption is software can control its outputs. Our programming courses explain that programs produce their outputs through designated interfaces (whether print, write, send, or mmap); so, to keep a secret, the software just needs to never output it or anything that may reveal it. (The operating system may be misused to allow someone else's process to peek into the program's memory or files, though we are getting better at avoiding such attacks, too.)

Yet programs' control over their own outputs is a convenient fiction, for a deeper reason. The hardware running the program is a physical object and, as such, interacts with its environment in complex ways, including electric currents, electromagnetic fields, sound, vibrations, and light emissions. All these "side channels" may depend on the computation performed, along with the secrets within it. "Side-channel attacks," which exploit such information leakage, have been used to break the security of numerous cryptographic implementations

Original Submission