An anonymous reader writes: According to Re/code, Twitter is doing away with its 140-character limit for tweets. The company is currently planning on increasing the limit to 10,000 characters, though the final number may change before they roll it out. "Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with some kind of call to action that there is more content you can't see. Clicking on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content. The point of this is to keep the same look and feel for your timeline, although this design is not necessarily final, sources say."

An anonymous reader writes: Today Microsoft announced partnerships with several companies to bring Windows 10, Office 365, and Azure to cars. Volvo is having their Call Universal App integrate with Windows 10 smartphones and Microsoft Band 2 watches to let drivers interact with their cars. Harman, a company that builds infotainment systems, will allow drivers to access Office 365 services (while parked or while the car is driving itself). IAV, a similar company, will let users stream Windows 10 Continuum from their smartphone directly to a vehicle's dashboard. Finally, Nissan's LEAF and Infiniti models in Europe will run their telematics system on Azure. "The common thread between these announcements is that Microsoft is pitching Azure as an enabling platform, tossing in analytics and focusing on its core productivity strengths. Aside from the Microsoft Band 2 partnership with Volvo, Microsoft is taking an enterprise behind-the-scenes approach to the auto industry."

An anonymous reader writes: Today U.S. President Barack Obama rolled out a set of executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence. The most controversial of the provisions requires licenses for those who sell guns at gun shows and on the internet, and forces background checks on buyers. There are also a number of measures dedicated to making background checks more foolproof and universal. Less controversial but more on-topic for Slashdot is that Obama is requiring the departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to investigate smart gun technology. This can include RFID chips, fingerprint scanners, and other bits of technology. Their goal will be to "explore potential ways to further its use and development to more broadly improve gun safety." The new gun measures include a proposal for a $500 million investment into providing care for people with serious mental illnesses.

sciencehabit writes: Lumos Labs, the company that produces the popular 'brain-training' program Lumosity, yesterday agreed to pay a $2 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for running deceptive advertisements. Lumos had claimed that its online games can help users perform better at work and in school, and stave off cognitive deficits associated with serious diseases such as Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury, and post-traumatic stress.

The $2 million settlement will be used to compensate Lumosity consumers who were misled by false advertising, says Michelle Rusk, a spokesperson with the FTC in Washington, D.C. The company will also be required to provide an easy way to cancel auto-renewal billing for the service, which includes online and mobile app subscriptions, with payments ranging from $14.95 monthly to lifetime memberships for $299.95. Before consumers can access the games, a pop-up screen will alert them to the FTC's order and allow them to avoid future billing, Rusk says.

New submitter qmrq sends news that Linode, a major provider of virtual private servers, has been compromised again. In a blog post, they said, "A security investigation into the unauthorized login of three accounts has led us to the discovery of two Linode.com user credentials on an external machine. This implies user credentials could have been read from our database, either offline or on, at some point. The user table contains usernames, email addresses, securely hashed passwords and encrypted two-factor seeds." The Linode team said it found evidence of unauthorized access to three customer accounts. They don't yet know who is behind the attacks.

An employee for PagerDuty said they were compromised through Linode Manager all the way back in July. "In our situation the attacker knew one of our user's passwords and MFA secret. This allowed them to provide valid authentication credentials for an account in the Linode Manager. It's worth noting that all of our active user accounts had two-factor authentication enabled. ... We also have evidence from access logs provided by Linode that the attackers tried to authenticate as an ex-employee, whose username ONLY existed in the Linode database."

In the past, Los Alamos National Laboratory has done some of the United States' most crucial research and development. Lately, the lab has been dealing with accidents and management problems. Reader DougDot directs us to a report from the Santa Fe New Mexican about the questions surrounding LANL's future. Quoting: Federal officials told Congress in December that they will put the LANL contract up for competitive bid for only the second time since the lab opened in 1943. The current LANS contract ends Sept 30, 2017. Identifying what went wrong, and why the lab has proven so difficult to manage, will play an important role for the Department of Energy as it seeks out new managers to run the lab. Investigators say the problems stem from repeated management weaknesses, the kind that were supposed to get fixed when the Department of Energy turned to private industry in 2006 to oversee the lab.

It was the first time the federal government had put the lab’s management up for bid, with the idea that a for-profit model, operating under an incentives-based contract, would fix the problems that haunted the nonprofit University of California, which had run the lab since World War II. ... experts, watchdog groups and former lab employees point to an array of problems, from a clash of cultures between the regimented and profit-driven Bechtel and the languorous, research-oriented university; to incentives that may have induced contractors to put a premium on meeting deadlines despite safety risks; to a mix of shoddy accountability and micromanagement on the part of the federal government.

An anonymous reader writes: Zerodium, the company that buys zero-day bugs from security researchers and then sells them forward to government intelligence agencies, has put out a new bounty, this one on Adobe's Flash Player. The exploit vendor is offering $100,000 to the first researcher that finds a similar zero-day bug, capable of avoiding Flash's newly-released isolated heap memory protection feature. Previously, Zerodium offered $1 million to a security researcher for a zero-day bug in Apple's iOS 9 operating system.

HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian reports that Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, plans to release his new novel, a historical drama set in London during the 1840s, in installments via an app. It's a tradition that dates back to Charles Dickens, but utilizes modern technology. Each of Belgravia's 11 chapters will be delivered on a weekly basis, and will come with multimedia extras including music, character portraits, family trees and an audio book version. "To marry the traditions of the Victorian novel to modern technology, allowing the reader, or listener, an involvement with the characters and the background of the story and the world in which it takes place, that would not have been possible until now, and yet to preserve within that the strongest traditions of storytelling, seems to me a marvelous goal and a real adventure," says Fellowes.

Publisher Jamie Raab says the format appealed to her precisely because of Fellowes's television background and his ability to keep audiences engaged in a story over months and even years. "I've always been intrigued by the idea of publishing a novel in short episodic bites. He gets how to keep the story paced so that you're caught up in the current episode, then you're left with a cliffhanger."

StartsWithABang writes: In 2012, astronomers announced that the nearest star system to us, the Alpha Centauri system, possessed at least one exoplanet around it. A periodic signal that recurred just every 3.24 days was consistent with an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting and gravitationally tugging on the second largest member of the star system: Alpha Centauri B. That planet, named Alpha Centauri Bb, turns out not to actually be there. A reanalysis of the data shows that a combination of stellar properties and the times at which the observations were made conspired to produce this spurious signal: a signal that goes away if the data is handled correctly. Accounting for everything correctly reveals something else of interest, a periodic 20-day signal, which may turn out — with better observations — to be Alpha Centauri's first exoplanet after all.

bricko notes a report on what appears to be the first power outage known to have been caused by hackers: Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity last week, researchers said. ... On Monday, researchers from security firm iSIGHT Partners said they had obtained samples of the malicious code that infected at least three regional operators. They said the malware led to "destructive events" that in turn caused the blackout. If confirmed it would be the first known instance of someone using malware to generate a power outage.

Over the past year, the group behind BlackEnergy has slowly ramped up its destructive abilities. Late last year, according to an advisory from Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team, the KillDisk module of BlackEnergy infected media organizations in that country and led to the permanent loss of video and other content. The KillDisk that hit the Ukrainian power companies contained similar functions but was programmed to delete a much narrower set of data, ESET reported. KillDisk had also been updated to sabotage two computer processes, including a remote management platform associated with the ELTIMA Serial to Ethernet Connectors used in industrial control systems.

Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secured. But, as the results of a recent Justice Department investigation show, when you start poking around in those dark corners, you sometimes find very ugly things.

Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers' personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million.

What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud.

Press2ToContinue writes: When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. To make matters worse, about 30 of the disks were damaged, with deep gouges in the magnetic surface. "Cobb said a few of the disks were formatted in DOS, but most of them were from an older operating system called CP/M. CP/M, or Control Program for Microcomputers, was a popular operating system of the 1970s and early 1980s that ultimately lost out to Microsoft's DOS. In the 1970s and 1980s it was the wild west of disk formats and track layouts, Cobb said. The DOS recoveries were easy once a drive was located, but the CP/M disks were far more work. " So what was actually on the disks? Lost episodes of Star Trek? The secret script for a new show? Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?

Unfortunately, we still don't know. The Roddenberry estate hasn't commented yet, and the data recovery agency is bound by a confidentiality agreement.

itwbennett writes: Researchers at Rapid7 have disclosed vulnerabilities in Comcast's Xfinity Home Security offerings that prevent the system from alerting homeowners to unsecured doors or windows and would also fail to sense an intruder's motion in the home. The root cause of the problem can be found in the ZigBee-based protocol used by Comcast's system to operate over the 2.4 GHz frequency band. Rapid7's Phil Bosco discovered that the Xfinity Home Security system does not fail closed with an assumption of an attack if radio communications are disrupted. Instead, the system fails open, reporting that all sensors are intact, doors are closed, and no motion is detected.

iONiUM writes: According to an article at Discover, "Authorities in Brazil have recently issued an unusual and unprecedented announcement to women: don't get pregnant, at least not just yet. Amidst an intractable outbreak of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, public health authorities in Brazil are highly suspicious of an unusual surge of cases of microcephaly among newborn children." There were over 3,000 cases in 2015.

It's believed this virus is linked to shrinking newborns brain, and it is spreading. "Zika virus is transmitted by mosquitoes, and it was first detected in Uganda in the 1940s. After spreading through Africa and parts of Asia, it has made its way to Latin America. There is no known vaccine to prevent or medicine to treat the disease caused by the virus. Since May 2015, the Brazilian government estimates that some 1.5 million people have been infected with the virus." The CDC has published an article about it, and travel warnings are now being issued for pregnant women.

Advocatus Diaboli sends a report from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept about the NSA's efforts to subvert encryption. Back in 2013, several major publications reported that the NSA was able to crack encryption surrounding commerce and banking systems. Their reports did not identify which specific technology was affected. The recent backdoor found in Juniper systems has caused the journalists involved to un-redact a particular passage from the Snowden documents indicating the NSA targeted the "two leading encryption chips" in their attempts to compromise encryption. Quoting: The reference to "the two leading encryption chips" provides some hints, but no definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully targeted. Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which companies this might reference. But he said that "the damage has already been done. From what I've heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical eye as a result of what the NSA has done. That's too bad, because I suspect only a minority of products have been compromised this way."

szczys writes: You take tape for granted, but it's truly an engineering wonder. For instance, Scotch Magic tape exhibits triboluminescence; it will generate a bit of bluish light when coming off the roll in a darkened room. It emits X-Rays if unrolled in a vacuum. But this common tape is just the tip of the iceberg. Nava Whiteford looks at lab uses of many different types of tape. Kapton tape is thermally stable and non-conductive. Carbon tape is conductive but resistive. That moves into the non-resistive and more niche tape types. There's a tape for every function. This instant and non-messy way to connect two things together has a lot of science behind it, as well as ahead of it in experimentation, manufacturing, and of course household use.

itwbennett writes: A cyberespionage group known in the security community as Sandworm or BlackEnergy, after its primary malware tool, has recently updated its arsenal with a destructive data-wiping component and a backdoored SSH server. On the eve of Dec. 23, a large area in the Ivano-Frankivsk district in Ukraine suffered a power outage. Ukrainian news service TSN reported that the outage was caused by a virus that disconnected electrical substations. Researchers from antivirus vendor ESET believe that this attack was performed with the BlackEnergy malware and that it wasn't the only one. 'As well as being able to delete system files to make the system unbootable — functionality typical for such destructive trojans — the KillDisk variant detected in the electricity distribution companies also appears to contain some additional functionality specifically intended to sabotage industrial systems,' the ESET researchers said in a blog post.

onedobb writes: Tests confirm that when Binge On is enabled, T-Mobile throttles all HTML5 video streams to around 1.5Mps, even when the phone is capable of downloading at higher speeds, and regardless of whether or not the video provider enrolled in Binge On. This is the case whether the video is being streamed or being downloaded—which means that T-Mobile is artificially reducing the download speeds of customers with Binge On enabled, even if they're downloading the video to watch later. It also means that videos are being throttled even if they're being watched or downloaded to another device via a tethered connection.

alphadogg writes: A new wireless standard that extends Wi-Fi's reach down into the 900MHz band will keep the 802.11 family at the center of the developing Internet of Things, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced today. 802.11ah, combines lower power requirements with a lower frequency, which means that those signals propagate better. That offers a much larger effective range than current Wi-Fi standards, which operate on 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, and lets the newer technology penetrate walls and doors more easily.

An anonymous reader writes: Cloud-based file hosting giant Dropbox has patented a new synchronization technology which could allow users to use a peer-to-peer network to securely share and collaborate on documents without the need to store them in the company's centralized servers. The patent application details how the system could allow back up to a range of media to multiple devices simultaneously, cutting the need for users to constantly upload and download from remote hardware. Dropbox argues that the development of peer-to-peer distributed sharing could boost content download speeds, eliminating bottlenecks, therefore increasing the speed at which content can be shared among individuals.

An anonymous reader writes: There were a lot of stories told about the future in 2015. More than usual, maybe. Big budget blockbusters, hefty, idea-rich novels, and epic, dystopian video games—there was complex, stirring speculative fiction dripping from every media faucet we've got. And it spoke volumes about our anxieties about the present. In 2015, those anxieties are, apparently, concern the rise of science denial, climate change, total collapse.