szczys writes: While you may have heard of the Ghost Army that was used to fake troop movements during WWII, it's unlikely that you truly grasp the level of skill and success these elite groups achieved. At its surface, the story is about inflatable armies that could fool German intelligence from afar. That is one visual component, but there were many more involving sound and radio communications. Before the digital age, it was quite a trick making authentic audio recordings of military vehicle sounds on 2-mile long spools of very thin wire played back from vehicles outfitted with 500 Watt speakers. The A/V wasn't complete without radio communications spoofed to look like the Ghost Army was the real deal: this used the best of personal-morse-code-style impersonators. Elite groups trained in these phony arts operated throughout the European theater. Their story was top secret long after the war because the craft was considered a strategic asset well into the cold war era.

An anonymous reader writes: Last year on Christmas, the LizardSquad hacking group took down PSN and Xbox Live for many hours via DDoS attacks. This year another group, called Phantom Squad, is planning the same thing. The group has been launching small test attacks on PSN, Xbox, Reddit, SWOTR, and other game servers over the past few days.

HughPickens.com writes: Sewell Chan reports at the NYT that Britain's highest court has unanimously rejected an attempt by Donald J. Trump to block the construction of a wind farm near his luxury golf resort in northeast Scotland. Trump has vowed to stop further development on the project if the offshore wind farm — 11 turbines, which would be visible from the golf resort 2.2 miles away — goes forward. Trump spokesman George A. Sorial denounced the ruling as "extremely unfortunate for the residents of Aberdeen and anyone who cares about Scotland's economic future" adding that the wind farm will "completely destroy the bucolic Aberdeen Bay and cast a terrible shadow upon the future of tourism for the area. History will judge those involved unfavorably, and the outcome demonstrates the foolish, small-minded and parochial mentality which dominates the current Scottish government's dangerous experiment with wind energy."

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, withdrew Trump's status as a business ambassador to Scotland last week after Trump called for Muslims to be barred from entering the United States. Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen has stripped Mr. Trump of an honorary degree it awarded him in 2010. Trump's mother was born in Scotland and moved to the United States in the 1930s. " I think I do feel Scottish," said Trump at one time.

An anonymous reader writes: A day after Philips announced that it would drop support for third-party Hue bulbs the company has reversed its decision. An announcement reads is part: "We recently upgraded the software for Philips Hue to ensure the best seamless connected lighting experience for our customers. This change was made in good faith. However, we under estimated the impact this would have on a small number of customers who use lights from other brands which could not be controlled by the Philips Hue software. In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system."

MarkWhittington writes: While NASA remains fixated on its Journey to Mars, quietly, the FAA is positioning itself as the lead United States Government agency for a return to the moon. According to a story in Space News, "FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) unanimously approved a recommendation that the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation begin discussions with ESA on ways American companies could participate in what's known as 'Moon Village.'" The "Moon Village" is a European concept for an international moon base where various countries and private entities would collocate habitats for mutual support and benefit.

mdsolar writes with news that city officials in Woodland, North Carolina have taken issue with being ridiculed by the internet and want to set the record straight. According to the article: "Usually what happens in Woodland stays in Woodland, a town 115 miles east of Raleigh with one Dollar General store and one restaurant. But news of the Northampton County hamlet's moratorium on solar farms blew up on social media over the weekend after a local paper quoted a resident complaining to the Town Council that solar farms would take away sunshine from nearby vegetation. Another resident warned that solar panels would suck up energy from the sun. As outlandish as those claims seem, town officials say the Internet got it wrong."

An anonymous reader writes that the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) was inserted into the omnibus budget deal passed by the House of Representatives late last night. Engadget reports: "Last night's budget bill wasn't all about avoiding a government shutdown. Packed inside the 2,000-page bill announced by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the full text of the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2015. If you'll recall, the measure passed the Senate back in October, leaving it up to the House to approve the bill that encourages businesses to share details of security breaches and cyber attacks. Despite being labeled as cybersecurity legislation, critics of CISA argue that it's a surveillance bill that would allow companies to share user info with the US government and other businesses. As TechDirt points out, this version of the bill stripped important protections that would've prevented directly sharing details with the NSA and required any personally identifying details to be removed before being shared. It also removes restrictions on how the government can use the data."

An anonymous reader writes: George Hotz, known for unlocking early iPhones and the PlayStation 3, has developed an autonomous driving system in his garage. "Hotz's approach isn't simply a low-cost knockoff of existing autonomous vehicle technology. He says he's come up with discoveries—most of which he refuses to disclose in detail—that improve how the AI software interprets data coming in from the cameras." The article has a video with Hotz demonstrating some basic autonomous driving similar to what Tesla rolled out earlier this year. He's clearly brimming with confidence about what the system can accomplish with more training.

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, Google, and Twitter have agreed to remove hateful posts from their platforms within 24 hours in Germany, officials announced yesterday. The web companies committed to the move in a new agreement with German authorities, after coming under increased pressure to help curb racism online in the country. The agreement will require web companies operating in Germany to conform with the law when monitoring hate speech expressed on their platforms, instead of referring to internal policies. The German law stipulates that any comment inciting violence against ethnic or religious groups is punishable by up to three years in prison.

An anonymous reader writes: Several major tech and open source sites—including Opensource.com and Infoworld—have published lists of the top open source projects of the year. What's your pick for the biggest, best, or most important open source project of 2015? Are there any projects that made big leaps this year that aren't getting the recognition they deserve?

sciencehabit writes: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) leads the way among U.S science agencies getting increases in the final 2016 spending bill released today. NIH is the winner in absolute dollars. It gets a bump of $2 billion, or 6.6%, from its current budget of $30.1 billion. Spending on science programs at NASA would grow by 6.6%, to $5.6 billion, and rise by 5.6% in the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, to $5.35 billion. The National Science Foundation would receive an additional $119 million, or 1.6%, to $7.46 billion, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy would get a 6% boost, to $291 million. NASA in particular got great allocations for planetary science and commercial crew.

SmartAboutThings writes: Bill Gates is known as a big philanthropist, and now his own company will commit to even more charity work by launching a new organization, Microsoft Philanthropies. Microsoft's president and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith outlined the goals for the new organization, saying it will partner with nonprofit organizations to help expand technology projects to people who need it. He said, "Just as there is an extremely effective commercial ecosystem which brings the promise of technology to life in the marketplace, there must be a strong societal ecosystem that brings the promise of technology to life in the community space, especially where there is the greatest need." Mary Snapp, who joined Microsoft as its first female attorney in 1988, will lead Microsoft Philanthropies report directly to Smith.

schwit1 writes: In the past forty years the use of descriptive words by scientists to positively hype their results in papers has increased steadily. "Researchers at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands say that the frequency of positive-sounding words such as 'novel', 'amazing', 'innovative' and 'unprecedented' has increased almost nine-fold in the titles and abstracts of papers published between 1974 and 2014. There has also been a smaller — yet still statistically significant — rise in the frequency of negative words, such as 'disappointing' and 'pessimistic'.

The most obvious interpretation of the results is that they reflect an increase in hype and exaggeration, rather than a real improvement in the incidence or quality of discoveries, says Vinkers. The findings "fit our own observations that in order to get published, you need to emphasize what is special and unique about your study," he says. Researchers may be tempted to make their findings stand out from thousands of others — a tendency that might also explain the more modest rise in usage of negative words.

The word 'novel' now appears in more than 7% of PubMed paper titles and abstracts, and the researchers jokingly extrapolate that, on the basis of its past rise, it is set to appear in every paper by the year 2123." This study was focused on the medical field, so it is unclear if its results could be extrapolated to other science fields.

David Rothman writes: Eric Posner, the fourth most-cited law professor in the U.S., says the government may need to jail you if you even visit an ISIS site after enough warnings. He says, "Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective way—and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech.

The law would provide graduated penalties. After the first violation, a person would receive a warning letter from the government; subsequent violations would result in fines or prison sentences. The idea would be to get out the word that looking at ISIS-related websites, like looking at websites that display child pornography, is strictly forbidden" There would be exemptions for Washington-blessed journalists and others. Whew! Alas, this man isn't Donald Trump — he is a widely respected University of Chicago faculty member writing in Slate.

prisoninmate writes: A zero-day security flaw was discovered by developers Ismael Ripoll and Hector Marco in the upstream GRUB2 packages. GRUB2 did not correctly handle the backspace key when the bootloader was configured to use password protected authentication, thus allowing a local attacker to bypass GRUB's password protection. Versions from 1.98 (December, 2009) to 2.02 (December, 2015) are affected. At the moment, it looks like only a few distributions received the patched GRUB2 versions, including Ubuntu, Debian (Squeeze LTS only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.