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butthurt writes:

BBC News reports on an ESA essay (PDF), Spacecraft risk posed by the 2016 Perseid outburst. The essay warned of

The BBC explains that this means the Earth was predicted to pass "through a particularly distinct bit of debris" that had been deflected by Jupiter. The meteor strikes have been taking place since mid-July and are expected to continue through the weekend.

additional coverage:

• Daily Mail
• Los Angeles Times
• NASA (Javascript required)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Microsoft said it is bolstering its Xbox arsenal with the purchase of a startup specializing in letting people join in the fun while watching live-streamed game play.

Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of the deal to buy Seattle-based Beam, which puts an interactive spin on the hot trend of video games being spectator sports.

"With Beam, you don't just watch your favorite streamer play, you play along with them," Xbox Live partner group program manager Chad Gibson said in a blog post.

For example, Beam can be used to let viewers assign missions, summon adversaries, or select virtual gear in games being streamed online by broadcasters.

Beam, which launched in January of this year, will become part of the team at Microsoft devoted to the technology titan's Xbox consoles.

"As part of Xbox, we'll be able to scale faster than we've ever been able to before," Beam co-founder and chief executive Matt Salsamendi said in an online post.

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takyon writes:

Google is designing a new operating system (also at Github) based on its own new kernel (Magenta), which may be intended to unify/replace Android and ChromeOS. It is also expected to run on a wide range of ARM and x64 devices, such as Chromecast, Raspberry Pi 3, smartphones, laptops, and desktops.

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takyon writes:

NASA has found hydrocarbon-filled canyons on Titan:

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found deep, steep-sided canyons on Saturn's moon Titan that are flooded with liquid hydrocarbons. The finding represents the first direct evidence of the presence of liquid-filled channels on Titan, as well as the first observation of canyons hundreds of meters deep.

A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters describes how scientists analyzed Cassini data from a close pass the spacecraft made over Titan in May 2013. During the flyby, Cassini's radar instrument focused on channels that branch out from the large, northern sea Ligeia Mare.

The Cassini observations reveal that the channels -- in particular, a network of them named Vid Flumina -- are narrow canyons, generally less than half a mile (a bit less than a kilometer) wide, with slopes steeper than 40 degrees. The canyons also are quite deep -- those measured are 790 to 1,870 feet (240 to 570 meters) from top to bottom.

Liquid-filled canyons on Titan (open, DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069679)

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cafebabe writes:

When I visit a poorly electro-mechanical engineer, we often watch two episodes of a television series. Indeed, my friend often watches fiction in two episode chunks because this is similar to the duration of a short feature film. Previous visits included the first two episodes of Breaking Bad , the next two episodes of Breaking Bad, the first two episodes of Continuum and the first two episodes of Dark Matter . To indicate the quality of The Expanse , we watched four episodes in one sitting. This is unprecedented for us.

The Expanse, which airs on the SyFy channel in the US, is set in a future where most of the solar system is colonized with ethnically diverse people who retain their languages, customs and fashion. One character has a notably heavy Afrikaans accent. A Martian captain has a distinctly Chinese appearance. However, people remain tribal; mostly Earther, Martian or Belter. This is a future where your gravity well means more than your genes. Belters provide water and minerals. Mars has its own industrial base and technology. Unfortunately, like the Philip K. Dick story The Crystal Crypt, Earth and Mars are on the brink of war and any random event could be the catalyst. Mars is resentful of Earth's squandered resources. Earth tortures Luna dissidents. Terrorists and sympathisers are widely suspected.

[Continues...]

jIyajbe writes:

From Electoral-Vote.com:

A theory has been circulating that the Donald Trump tweets that come from an Android device are from the candidate himself, while the ones that come from an iPhone are the work of his staff. David Robinson, a data scientist who works for Stack Overflow, decided to test the theory. His conclusion: It's absolutely correct.

Robinson did some text-mining (using R) to analyze roughly 1,400 tweets from Trump's timeline, and demonstrated conclusively that the iPhone tweets are substantively different than the Android tweets. The former tend to come later at night, and are vastly more likely to incorporate hashtags, images, and links. The latter tend to come in the morning, and are much more likely to be copied and pasted from other people's tweets. In terms of word choice, the iPhone tweets tend to be more neutral, with their three most-used phrases being "join," "#trump2016," and "#makeamericagreatagain." The Android tweets tend to be more emotionally charged, with their three most-used phrases being "badly," "crazy," and "weak."

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takyon writes:

"Niku", also known as 2011 KT19, is a newly discovered trans-Neptunian object with an unusual orbit around the Sun:

There are plenty of weird objects in our solar system, but the newly discovered trans-Neptunian object (TNO) Niku might be one of the weirdest. It's not the composition of Niku that makes it strange. It seems to be a chunk of ice about 124 miles (200 km) in diameter, placing it at the lower threshhold of objects that might be considered dwarf planets. There are plenty of objects its size and its composition out in the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

No, the really weird thing about Niku is that it's far, far, far above the ecliptic — the sort of "plane" of the solar system on which the planets lie, with the Earth considered at the 0 degree point on the ecliptic. So how far is Niku above it? 110 degrees. In other words, it's so far above it that it has entered a retrograde orbit. The most inclined of the planets is Mercury, at 7 degrees above the ecliptic. Dwarf planets Pluto and Eris are 17 degrees and 44 degrees above it, with many dwarf planets falling in that range. Many smaller solar system objects can be in inclined orbits, including asteroids and comets. But Niku is certainly one of the largest objects in such an orbit.

Also at New Scientist.

Discovery of A New Retrograde Trans-Neptunian Object: Hint of A Common Orbital Plane for Low Semi-Major Axis, High Inclination TNOs and Centaurs

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damnbunni writes:

Kenny Baker, the fellow inside the R2-D2 suit, died in his sleep Saturday morning. He had been fighting a respiratory illness for a long time.

He was in the first six Star Wars films, but did not reprise the role in The Force Awakens although he served as a consultant on the film.

takyon: Kenny Baker at IMDB. He also played Fidgit in Time Bandits.

Original Submission

Congressional Leaders Were Briefed a Year Ago on Hacking of Democrats

fork(2) writes:

Reuters is reporting that US intelligence officials were aware a year ago that Russian efforts were being made to attack the Democratic Party. Moreover, they informed top congressional leaders who were prevented from telling the targets about the attack because the information was so secret.

From the article:

The disclosure of the Top Secret information would have revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies were continuing to monitor the hacking, as well as the sensitive intelligence sources and the methods they were using to do it.

The material was marked with additional restrictions and assigned a unique codeword, limiting access to a small number of officials who needed to know that U.S. spy agencies had concluded that two Russian intelligence agencies or their proxies were targeting the Democratic National Committee, the central organizing body of the Democratic Party.

The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies sometimes delay informing targets of foreign intelligence activities under similar circumstances, officials have said.

The alleged hacking of the Democrats and the Russian connection did not become public until late last month when the FBI said it was investigating a cyber attack at the DNC. The DNC did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Hacker Releases Personal Data of Around 200 Congressional Democrats

takyon writes:

There has been another leak of U.S. Democratic Party data, this time including the personal phone numbers and email addresses of House Democrats. Memos and opposition research were also included:

The hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 dumped the personal contact info of House Democrats on his website Friday, part of the latest batch of documents from a widespread breach of Democratic groups.

The document was obtained from the cyberattack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The hacker also published DCCC shared passwords to several online databases and news networks.

The release has been listed at https://cryptome.org/.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for butthurt

A duo of computer experts at the University of Birmingham, Flavio Garcia and David Oswald, have uncovered two flaws in VW's keyless entry systems that could allow hackers to remotely unlock over 100 million cars sold by the firm since 1995.

The first vulnerability gives hackers the ability to remotely break into nearly every car VW has sold since 2000, while the second impacts "millions" more vehicles including models from Ford, Peugeot and Citroen.

Source: The Inquirer

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Recent work by astrophysicists has discovered a mechanism for the formation of spiral-arm galaxies.

The finding was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the journal of the American Astronomical Society.

The discovery provides a better understanding for the formation of spiral arms in a kind of disk galaxy known as a spiral galaxy, said Hamed Pour-Imani, a physics doctoral student at the U of A and lead author of the study. Spiral arms are the elongated and curved spiral sections that are connected to the center of a spiral galaxy, such as our own Milky Way.

"Spiral galaxies are fascinating structures in astronomy, and the exact mechanism of the formation of spiral arms is still a mystery in astrophysics," Pour-Imani said. "Our work provides strong evidence for the density wave theory of spiral galaxies, which is one of two popular theories to explain the spiral structures."

Density wave theory was proposed in the 1960s to explain the spiral arm structure of spiral galaxies. The theory posited that spiral arms are not material in nature, but instead made up of areas of greater density, similar to a traffic jam on the highway. Stars move in and out of the spiral arms as they orbit the galaxy. The density wave theory predicts that the pitch angle of spiral arms should vary with the wavelength of the galaxy's image.

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martyb writes in with the story New Trek series committed to casting diversity, main character won't be captain | Ars Technica

Series is set 10 years before the USS Enterprise's five-year mission.

We still don't know much specific information about Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise's return to television after over a decade, but showrunner Bryan Fuller has dropped a few more hints during the Television Critics Association press tour this week.

According to TV Guide , the show's lead character will be a woman, but she won't be the captain of the USS Discovery. All iterations of Star Trek, especially from The Next Generation onward, have had an ensemble cast to some degree, but the commanding officer's perspective has usually been the most important.

"To see a character from a different perspective on a starship, who has a different dynamic [and] relationship with the captain and with subordinates, felt like it was going to give us richer context [and allow us to] have different types of stories with that character," said Fuller.

Discovery will be firmly committed to diversity in casting, a traditional virtue of olderTrek series (at least relative to what other contemporary TV shows were doing). In addition to the female lead, Fuller hopes to cast an openly gay character, and The Hollywood Reporter says that the rest of the seven-character cast will be rounded out by "a female admiral, a male Klingon captain, a male admiral, a male adviser and a British male doctor." Fuller also wants to have more aliens on the show and to have those alien races look more like aliens and less like humans in heavy makeup.

And we're getting a few more details on where Discovery will fit into Trek's vast fictional universe. Fuller says the show is set in the "Prime" Trek timeline—not the "Kelvin" timeline established by JJ Abrams' rebooted film franchise in 2009—and will deal with an event referenced but not fully explored in past Trek fiction. The show will be set a decade before the USS Enterprise's five-year mission documented by the original series, and while this opens up the door to original series characters that fans may already be familiar with, Fuller wants Discovery's first season to focus on establishing the new characters.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Elon Musk's space company has set itself the lofty goal of reaching Mars, and it's ready to test the rockets it expects to get it there. The Raptor rocket engine has been shipped to the company's test site in Texas, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell revealed at a keynote address at the Small Satellite Conference. [...] SpaceX confirmed that the rocket engine is ready to be tested. The Raptor, which will drive the rockets bound for Mars, is projected to be more than three times more powerful than the Merlin engines attached to the company's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Also covered at Ars Technica.

Separately, there is a two-hour Falcon 9 launch window starting at 1:26 AM ET on Sunday (1 hour and 17 minutes after the launch of this story). SpaceX may come close to its goal of launching a rocket about every other week by the end of the year. SpaceX has set up a live-stream on YouTube of both the JCSAT-16 Hosted Webcast and the JCSAT-16 Technical Webcast.

As for the prospect of reusability:

If the Falcon 9 lands intact tonight, SpaceX will officially have six recovered rockets in its possession. However, the company has yet to actually reuse one of these reusable rockets. The goal right now is to re-launch a Falcon 9 that the company landed in April sometime this fall, either in September or October, according to CEO Elon Musk. Until then, SpaceX seems to be acquiring a nice little stockpile of rockets that have gone to space.

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n1 writes:

Halal Supermarket in France Told to Sell Pork and Alcohol or Face Closure

A halal supermarket in France has been ordered to start selling pork and alcohol or face being shut down.

Good Price discount store in north-west Paris has been accused of breaching the conditions of its lease by not acting as a general food store, the local housing authority has claimed.

It argues that the local community in Colombes are not being served properly at the shop if no pork or alcohol products are sold there.

[...] The shop is allegedly prioritising a certain group within society which breaches the country's principles, the authority said.

Source: Metro

Cannes Bans "Burkinis" Over Suspected Link to Radical Islamism

The mayor of Cannes in southern France has banned full-body swimsuits known as "burkinis" from the beach, citing public order concerns.

David Lisnard said they are a "symbol of Islamic extremism" and might spark scuffles, as France is the target of Islamist attacks.

France is on high alert following a series of incidents including July's truck attack in nearby Nice.

Anyone caught flouting the new rule could face a fine of €38 (£33). They will first be asked to change into another swimming costume or leave the beach.

Source: BBC News

Original Submission

fleg writes:

The We-Vibe 4 Plus is a rubbery clamp that looks a little like the oversized thumb and forefinger of a Disneyland character pinching down. It comes in black, purple or pink and is billed as the "number one couple's vibrator." It has Bluetooth so that, once inserted into the desired part of your body, you can connect it to your smartphone and then use the We-Vibe app to control the intensity of its vibration.

So far, so saucy, but the following was revealed by two security researchers @gOldfisk and @rancidbacon at Defcon.

When the device is in use, the We-Vibe 4 Plus uses its internet connectivity to regularly send information back to its manufacturer, Standard Innovations Corporation. It sends the device's temperature every minute, and lets the manufacturer know each time a user changes the device's vibration level. The company could easily figure out some seriously intimate personal information like when you get off, how long it takes, and with what combinations of vibes.

Standard Innovation Corporation's president Frank Ferrari explains why they do this.

"At We-Vibe, we strive to create innovative products that have our customer's preferences in mind," he said. "We-Vibe collects data on the use of its products in terms of vibration intensity and mode for market research purposes so that we can better understand what settings and levels of intensity are most enjoyed."

Original article here

Original Submission