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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:108

posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @10:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-astronauts-does-it-take dept.

Three astronauts on Thursday landed back on Earth after nearly six months aboard the International Space Station.

A Russian Soyuz capsule with NASA's Randy Bresnik, Russia's Sergey Ryazanskiy and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency descended under a red-and-white parachute and landed on schedule at 2:37 p.m. local time (0837 GMT; 3:37 a.m. EST) on the vast steppes outside of a remote town in Kazakhstan.

The three were extracted from the capsule within 20 minutes and appeared to be in good condition.

Bresnik, Ryazansky and Nespoli spent 139 days aboard the orbiting space laboratory. The trio who arrived at the station in July contributed to hundreds of scientific experiments aboard the ISS and performed several spacewalks.

They left Alexander Misurkin, commander of the crew, and two Americans, Joe Acaba and Mark Vande Hei, in charge.

Do you think astronauts on the ISS play a drinking game where they try to land toilet bombs on earth-bound targets? I would.


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @09:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the apparently-it-wasn't-clean-enough dept.

US woman used bitcoin to move cash to Islamic State, police say

A New York woman has been accused of laundering bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and wiring the money to help the so-called Islamic State. Zoobia Shahnaz, 27, was charged with bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and money laundering and is being held without bail.

Ms Shahnaz was born in Pakistan and worked as a lab technician in the US. Prosecutors say she took out fraudulent loans of $85,000 (£63,000) in order to buy the bitcoin online.

From the DoJ press release:

"Syria is a perilous and violent war-torn country, but the subject in this investigation was allegedly so determined to assist ISIS that she planned a covert, illegal entry into Syria," stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. "On top of which, she allegedly tried to launder virtual currency to bolster terrorists' dwindling financial support. The FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force kept this woman from her dangerous and potentially deadly goal. We will do all we can to stop the next person hoping to do the same. We want to thank our law enforcement partners Suffolk County Police Department, with whom we worked this case side-by-side."


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the automate-that-already dept.

Gotta keep 'em separated:

When unexplained traffic jams happen, says an MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) study, you can probably blame tailgaters. The researchers say that if drivers kept an even distance between cars rather than driving too close to the vehicle in front, traffic flow would remain even. This "bilateral control," could double the speed of the average vehicle on busy highways.
...
This ideal is very different from what is the norm in most thinking about traffic, especially by those stuck in it. Drivers (and, consequently, vehicle control systems) tend to be looking ever forward, responding only to what's ahead and largely ignoring what's behind. Thus, in stop-and-go or slow-and-go situations (traffic jams), each vehicle reacts to the vehicle in front, causing intermittent slowdowns or stops (jams) in wave-like patterns. When vehicles are working to maintain equal distances both from the car in front and the vehicle behind, the MIT paper contends, these wave patterns are minimized and traffic flows more smoothly.

Maintaining even spacing facilitates lane changes and merges as well.


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posted by janrinok on Friday December 15 2017, @06:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the jaguar-and-fries dept.

Accoustic monitoring to stop poachers:

Populations of large cats such as jaguars and pumas are in global decline due to habitat loss and indiscriminate hunting of them and their prey by humans. Newly developed acoustic loggers are able to record sounds of shotguns and chainsaws, shedding light on the frequency and patterns of illegal exploitation.

The results, presented today at the 'Ecology Across Borders' conference in Ghent, Belgium will help monitor biodiversity and reduce human-wildlife conflicts in tropical forests.

Ecologists from the University of Southampton (UK) and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico) have been studying the presence and distribution of the elusive jaguar and puma in three contiguous regions of protected and unprotected forest in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

Camera traps and analysis of faeces revealed that jaguars and pumas prefer to prey on peccaries, deer and coati—species that are regularly hunted by local communities for their wild meat.

Are jaguars and pumas tastier than peccaries or deer?


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posted by janrinok on Friday December 15 2017, @04:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the ooops,-there-goes-another-one dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/game-changing-attack-on-critical-infrastructure-site-causes-outage/

Hackers who may have been working on behalf of a nation recently caused an operational outage at a critical-infrastructure site, researchers said Thursday. The attackers did so by using a novel piece of malware to target the system that prevents health- and life-threatening accidents.

The malware was most likely designed to cause physical damage inside the unnamed site, researchers from the Mandiant division of security firm FireEye said in a report. It worked by targeting a safety instrumented system, which the targeted facility and many other critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising. The malware has been alternately named Triton and Trisis, because it targeted the Triconex product line made by Schneider Electric.

"Mandiant recently responded to an incident at a critical infrastructure organization where an attacker deployed malware designed to manipulate industrial safety systems," Mandiant researchers wrote. "The targeted systems provided emergency shutdown capability for industrial processes. We assess with moderate confidence that the attacker was developing the capability to cause physical damage and inadvertently shutdown operations."

The accidental outage was likely the result of the Triconex SIS, or "safety instrumented system." The SIS shut down operations when it experienced an error that occurred as the hackers were performing reconnaissance on the facility. Although the hackers were likely seeking the ability to cause physical damage inside the facility, the November shutdown was likely not deliberate.


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @02:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the cry-moar dept.

As if Star Citizen didn't have enough problems, now its developers are being sued by Crytek:

Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope, including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.

In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.

Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released


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posted by martyb on Friday December 15 2017, @01:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-when-they-are-earth-shattering-kabooms dept.

Intended to serve doomsday preppers and other survivalists, Wise Co.'s supply chain is being stretched by extreme weather events:

Jackson is the 42-year-old chief executive officer of Wise Co., a leading brand in survival foods, that is, Mylar pouches of freeze-dried meals such as Savory Stroganoff and Loaded Baked Potato Casserole designed to remain edible on shelves for a quarter century. Over the past several years, the prepper phenomenon—people geared for imminent disaster—has come out of the backwoods via shows like the National Geographic Channel's Doomsday Prepper and media reports of the very rich and very worried buying and fortifying luxury bunkers. Jackson's been positioning Wise to feed the trend. During the call, he felt a rush of conflicting emotions—not so much from the prospect of getting a fat government contract while legions of people suffer, but because the windfall could derail his business strategy. A 2-million-serving order will increase his sales for 2017 about 15 percent but stretch his supply more than he's comfortable with; his answer to Lee was not an easy yes.


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @11:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the at-least-it's-in-the-air dept.

Has the People's Republic caught up?

The Chengdu J-20 marks the first entry of a multirole stealth fighter into China's armed forces. According to the Department of Defense (DOD), China views stealth technology as a core component in the transformation of its air force from "a predominantly territorial air force to one capable of conducting both offensive and defensive operations." Designed for enhanced stealth and maneuverability, the J-20 has the potential to provide China with a variety of previously unavailable air combat options and enhance its capability to project power.

As an advanced multirole stealth fighter, it is speculated that the J-20 can fulfill both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat roles for the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and the aviation branch of the People's Liberation Army Navy (referred to as either Naval Aviation or the PLAN-AF). According to PLAAF Senior Colonel Shen Jinke, the J-20 will enhance the overall combat capability of China's air force. A 2016 report by the DOD states that the J-20 represents a critical step in China's efforts to develop "advanced aircraft to improve its regional power projection capabilities and to strengthen its ability to strike regional airbases and facilities." In 2014, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission described the J-20 as "more advanced than any other fighter currently deployed by Asia Pacific countries."


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @10:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-better-or-for-worse dept.

Chat is dead. Long live chat!

It's the year 2000, I'm just about eight years old, and it's my first day on AOL Instant Messenger. My fingers move clumsily across the plastic keyboard as I try to type fast enough to keep up with two cousins who are already seasoned AIM pros, sending me rapid-fire missives of excitement in our little online chat room. I'm in Boston and they're in New York, but "omg we can talk all the time!!!!"

We weren't alone in our excitement. First released in 1997, AIM was a popular way for millions of people to communicate throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it helped form Internet culture and communication as we know them today. It's where so many of us became fluent in LOL-ing and emoticons, and caught the itch to stay in constant contact with others no matter where we are.

But in the two decades since its launch, AIM's popularity has dwindled in favor of mobile-focused platforms for communicating, like Facebook, Instagram, and Slack. At its peak in 2001, AIM had 36 million active users; as of this summer, it had just 500,000 unique visitors a month. And so, in early October, Verizon-owned Oath (which comprises AIM's creator, AOL, and Yahoo) announced that on December 15 it would take this giant of the early Internet offline.

A better question is, why did it take 20 years for chat and texting to catch on?


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @08:38AM   Printer-friendly
from the eaten-by-the-mouse dept.

The Walt Disney Co. has set a $52.4 billion, all-stock deal to acquire 20th Century Fox and other entertainment and sports assets from Rupert Murdoch's empire. The deal between Disney and 21st Century Fox marks a historic union of Hollywood heavyweights and a bid by Disney to bolster its core TV and film businesses against an onslaught of new competitors in the content arena.

Disney is betting on an ambitious purchase of a sizable chunk of 21st Century Fox, hoping that more cable networks, production studios and other properties will buoy it into the future as it dives into the direct-to-consumer streaming distribution business with sports and entertainment services planned to launch in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/disney-fox-merger-deal-52-4-billion-merger-1202631242/

Also at The NYTimes, The Verge, and the The LATimes


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posted by janrinok on Friday December 15 2017, @08:05AM   Printer-friendly

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies the power to potentially reshape Americans' online experiences.

The agency scrapped the so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone service.

The action reversed the agency's 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to have stronger oversight over broadband providers as Americans have migrated to the internet for most communications. It reflected the view of the Trump administration and the new F.C.C. chairman that unregulated business will eventually yield innovation and help the economy.

It will take weeks for the repeal to go into effect, so consumers will not see any of the potential changes right away. But the political and legal fight started immediately. Numerous Democrats on Capitol Hill called for a bill that would reestablish the rules, and several Democratic state attorneys general, including Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, said they would file a suit to stop the change.


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @07:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-smelling-exhaust dept.

Feed your cattle, fuel your Mustang:

Sweet sorghum is not just for breakfast anymore. Although sorghum is a source for table syrup, scientists see a future in which we convert sorghum to biofuel, rather than relying on fossil fuel. That potential just grew as University of Florida researchers found three UF/IFAS-developed sorghum varieties could produce up to 1,000 gallons of ethanol per acre.

"Sweet sorghum has the potential to be an effective feedstock for ethanol production," said Wilfred Vermerris, a UF/IFAS professor of microbiology and cell science and a co-author on the study.

Ethanol produced from sweet sorghum can be used for auto and jet fuel, UF/IFAS researchers said.

UF/IFAS researchers picture big fuel potential from sorghum partly because it's so abundant. Sorghum is the fifth largest cereal crop in the world and the third largest in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2014, the U.S. was the largest producer of sorghum in the world.

UF/IFAS scientists like sorghum because it can be cultivated twice a year in Florida, requires little fertilizer, uses water efficiently and can be drought resistant, UF/IFAS research shows.

Combine this with terra preta to get more harvests per year and they might have something.


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posted by mrpg on Friday December 15 2017, @05:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the ping-google.com-reply-from-en.kremlin.ru dept.

All your packets are belong to us:

Internet traffic for some of the world's largest tech firms was briefly rerouted to Russia earlier this week in what appeared to be a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) attack.

OpenDNS-owned Internet monitoring service BGPmon reported the incident on Tuesday. BGPmon noticed that 80 IP prefixes for organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, NTT Communications, Twitch and Riot Games had been announced by a Russian Autonomous System (AS).

It happened twice on Tuesday and each time it only lasted for roughly three minutes. The first event took place between 04:43 and 04:46 UTC, and the second between 07:07 and 07:10 UTC.

Despite being short-lived, BGPmon said the incidents were significant, including due to the fact that the announcements were picked up by several peers and some large ISPs, such as Hurricane Electric and Zayo in the U.S., Telstra in Australia, and NORDUnet, which is a joint project of several Nordic countries.

Another interesting aspect was that all the targeted traffic was associated with high-profile organizations. Experts also pointed out that the Russian AS (AS39523) had not been seen making announcements for several years before this incident.


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posted by mrpg on Friday December 15 2017, @04:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the #-sudo-nano-/etc/hosts dept.

Internet of Things users need to become sysadmins, America's Federal Bureau of Investigation says.

That's a summary of the Feds' blog post, published this week, in which the agency's Beth Anne Steele wrote that Things are best deployed on their own network, with an off-switch.

Steele's post offered a checklist explaining how consumers can best secure their stuff, including a suggestion to: "Isolate 'IoT' devices on their own protected networks" – which means you'll want a firewall between your broadband modem and the switch that connects the devices.

The checklist might reach beyond the capabilities of the average IoT buyer, who just wants to swipe the phone app to control their lights (because the wall is so far away), but on its own, that's a point worth making. So here's the full list, with El Reg commentary.

"Change default usernames and passwords?" Brain shutting down. Too. Much. Techno-babble.


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posted by mrpg on Friday December 15 2017, @02:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the 000-00-0001 dept.

The Associated Press is reporting that Jordan Hamlett, a Louisiana private investigator and self-proclaimed benevolent "white hat" hacker, pleaded guilty on Monday to misusing Donald Trump's Social Security number in repeated attempts to access the president's federal tax information before the 2016 election. Hamlett faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine following his guilty plea in federal court.

A court document accompanying Hamlett's plea agreement says he used Trump's Social Security number and other personal information to open an online application for federal student aid on Sept. 13, 2016. After obtaining a username and password, he tried to use an Internal Revenue Service data retrieval tool to obtain Trump's tax information, the document says.

"The defendant made six separate attempts to obtain the federal tax information from IRS servers, but he was unsuccessful," says the document. It doesn't specify how much of Trump's tax information could have been retrieved with the online tool.

[..] Federal prosecutors had asked Judge James Brady to bar Hamlett's lawyer from presenting a trial defense that that he was acting as a benevolent "white hat" hacker. Brady, a senior federal judge who died Saturday at a Baton Rouge hospital, ruled last month that Hamlett couldn't testify that he had a "good purpose" in attempting to test security flaws in the website.

[... Defense attorney] Fiser said Hamlett liked to test security systems for weaknesses in his spare time and would notify system administrators if he found a system vulnerable to a security breach. Hamlett once discovered a security flaw that allowed for public access to the Livingston Parish Sheriff's Office's "raw" reports on open investigations and exposed personal information about police officers.

source: Louisiana man admits misusing Trump's Social Security number


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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 15 2017, @12:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the would-you-like-javascript-with-your-coffee dept.

We've discussed the potential for stealing CPU cycles from javascript-enabled browsers many a time. It seems one coffee shop in Buenos Aires has put it into practice:

A customer of Starbucks Buenos Aires accused the popular café company of illegally mining Bitcoin using his personal laptop. Noah Dinkin, the man who discovered that his laptop was being used to mine cryptocurrency via Starbucks' free WiFi, tweeted a screenshot to prove it. [It] shows that the WiFi provider in Starbucks Buenos Aires forces a 10 second delay when you first connect to the WiFi so it can mine crypto using the customer's laptop.

Starbucks responded to Dinkin on Twitter to clear up the accusation 10 days later.

Other twitterers pointed out that the crypto-currency in question was in fact Monero, not Bitcoin.

Also covered by The Register and the BBC among others.


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