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Submission + - Methane Emissions From Gas Flaring Being Hidden From Satellite Monitors (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Oil and gas equipment intended to cut methane emissions is preventing scientists from accurately detecting greenhouse gases and pollutants, a satellite image investigation has revealed. Energy companies operating in countries such as the US, UK, Germany and Norway appear to have installed technology that could stop researchers from identifying methane, carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants at industrial facilities involved in the disposal of unprofitable natural gas, known in the industry as flaring. Flares are used by fossil fuel companies when capturing the natural gas would cost more than they can make by selling it. They release carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants when they burn as well as cancer-causing chemicals. Despite the health risks, regulators sometimes prefer flaring to releasing natural gas – which is 90% methane – directly into the atmosphere, known as “venting”.

The World Bank, alongside the EU and other regulators, have been using satellites for years to find and document gas flares, asking energy companies to find ways of capturing the gas instead of burning or venting it. The bank set up the Zero Routine Flaring 2030 initiative at the Paris climate conference to eradicate unnecessary flaring, and its latest report stated that flaring decreased by 3% globally from 2021 to 2022. But since the initiative, “enclosed combustors” have begun appearing in the same countries that promised to end flaring. Experts say enclosed combustors are functionally the same as flares, except the flame is hidden. Tim Doty, a former regulator at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said: “Enclosed combustors are basically a flare with an internal flare tip that you don’t see. Enclosed flaring is still flaring. It’s just different infrastructure that they’re allowing.

“Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapour combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions.” The only method of detecting flaring globally is by using satellite-mounted tools called Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite of detectors (VIIRS), which find flares by comparing heat signatures with bright spots of light visible from space. But when researchers tried to replicate the database, they saw that the satellites were not picking up the enclosed flares. Without the satellite data, countries were forced to rely mostly on self-disclosed reporting from oil and gas companies, researchers said. Environmentalists fear the research community’s ability to understand pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector could be jeopardised.

Submission + - Company Offers $206M in Secured Notes Backed by IPv4 Addresses (circleid.com)

Submitted by penciling_in
penciling_in writes: Cogent (CCOI) recently announced that it was offering secured notes for $206M. The unusual part is what it’s using as security: some of its IPv4 addresses and the leases on those IPv4 addresses.

The notes are expected to be repaid in five years. It’s important that Cogent is creating a special-purpose, bankruptcy-remote subsidiary for this security. The registry in charge of IPv4 records in North America is ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, and while they allow transfers, they are only allowed if the recipient can demonstrate need, or if the recipient owns the entire organization or network that holds the addresses.

Submission + - Automated Emergency Braking mandated by 2029 (caranddriver.com) 1

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

However, automated emergency braking systems will be a federally mandated standard . . . by 2029. Following the finalization of a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is announcing the new safety standard for all passenger cars and light trucks by September 2029.

This technology requires forward-facing camera, which makes both the price and cost of maintenance and repair more expensive. In my view, it does not pass cost vs. benefit analysis.

Comment Re: And nothing will happen (Score 1) 168

lol it was a reference to your joke about going to the theatre, but the theatre being no fun.

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a theatre while sitting next to his wife. So the question "other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play" is a quip used to highlight that something really nasty is being ignored.

Like if Mrs Lincoln walked out of the theatre having just lost her husband and someone said "well other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play".

Man it's not funny now that I explained it.

Comment Re: No cross device sync (Score 1) 28

by MrNaz (#64444944) Attached to: Microsoft Launches Passkey Support For All Consumer Accounts

"If you trust Apple to secure the secure domain on the phone, why don't you trust them to sync to another secure domain?"

Because trusting the keys into the secure enclave on the device is worlds away from trusting the enormous amount of untrusted infrastructure needed to transmit those keys to a cloud service.

"The "phone as second factor" has terrible usability. Apple isn't interested in it."

Congratulations. You win the "most wrong thing said on Slashdot today" award.
https://support.apple.com/en-a...
https://support.apple.com/en-a...

I could probably Google a dozen more links. Not only is Apple interested in it, but they are a member of the FIDO alliance and have already implemented it:
https://www.apple.com/au/newsr...

Have a nice day!

Comment Distro choice is subjective, try a few in VMs. (Score 2) 153

Distro choice is so personal I don't advocate one but suggest trying a variety in VMs then choosing what suits your use case. Free prebuilt VM free abound online. VMs are a fine way to sample distros and keep a Windows install where useful. Of course you can run Windows VM on your Windows host for testing versions like LTSC.

I mostly have Linux hosts (I use Xubuntu LTS) with Windows guests which is a very convenient way to install Windows as one may revert to the clean install snapshot I take after install. I sample other distros as VM and when I upgrade make a VM of my old install as a very convenient backup.

For example you might try Linuxes in VMs on your Windows host, then choose a distro for bare metal. To retain your familiar Windows install on the same machine or anywhere you like (including external drives) you could make a VM of it.

LTS releases are normally best for reliability but if you need something bleeding edge for a specific task it can live in a VM instead of being the host OS.

Submission + - German police bust Europe's 'largest' scam call center (dw.com)

Submitted by Plumpaquatsch
Plumpaquatsch writes: Investigators teamed up with colleagues from the Balkans and Lebanon in raids set up by months of intense surveillance. Authorities say the operation thwarted over €10 million in damages and led to 21 arrests.

Dubbed "Operation Pandora," the sting began in Germany in December 2023, after a suspicious bank teller contacted police when a 76-year-old customer from Freiburg sought to hurriedly withdraw €120,000 ($128,232) from her savings account to hand over to a fake police officer.

When real police investigators tracked the internet-based telephone number that had been used to lure the woman, they discovered a veritable goldmine.

Rather than shutting down the number, authorities instead went on the offensive, setting up their own call center in which hundreds of officers from Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Berlin and Saxony worked around the clock monitoring some 1.3 million calls in real time, as the number from the initial scam was tied to an entire network of fraud call centers.

Police were able to trace and record data from the calls, as well as warn potential victims of what was in fact happening, in turn winning valuable time to put together the April 18 sting.

Police say their efforts allowed them to thwart some €10 million in damages in roughly 6,000 cases of attempted fraud.

Comment Re: No cross device sync (Score 1) 28

by MrNaz (#64444072) Attached to: Microsoft Launches Passkey Support For All Consumer Accounts

Think of passkeys as building the TOTP device directly into every device you use. Your laptop, phone, ipad, digital dildo, whatever. They all have TOTP built right in to them. So when you turn it on and scan your fingerprint, enter your code, swipe the pattern, use face unlock or whatever, that's factor one. The device itself is factor two. So with the regular unlock mechanism you're used to, you get 2FA for free bound to a device that is (theoretically) not cloneable.

In other words, logging in to every service yo use is as easy as unlocking your phone and twice as secure.

Comment Re: No cross device sync (Score 2) 28

by MrNaz (#64443814) Attached to: Microsoft Launches Passkey Support For All Consumer Accounts

Passkeys are SUPPOSED to be device dependant, because they turn your device into a big second factor of auth. Allowing them to be synced across multiple devices would break their fundamental nature. If you need multiple devices, just add a passkey on your other device to your SSO provider and done. You just need to enroll each of your devices once. It's really not as much trouble as it sounds and it's MUCH more secure than passwords.

Passkeys were designed pretty carefully. There's no perfect balance between security and convenience, but Passkeys are not at all a bad solution.

Submission + - Breakthrough in imaging 3D chemistry at nanometer resolution (phys.org) 1

Submitted by Hovden
Hovden writes: A recent leap in our ability to see the chemistry of matter in three-dimensions at the nanoscale was achieved, allowing scientists to understand how nanomaterials are chemically arranged. Measuring the 3D distribution of chemistry at the nanoscale is a longstanding challenge for metrological science. Traditionally, seeing matter at the smallest sizes requires too many high-energy electrons for 3D chemical imaging. The high beam exposure that destroys the specimen before an experiment is completed. Even larger doses are required to achieve high resolution. Thus, chemical mapping in 3D has been unachievable except at lower resolution with the most radiation-hard materials.

High-resolution 3D chemical imaging is now achievable near or below one-nanometer resolution by a team from Dow Chemical and the University of Michigan. Using a newly introduced method, called multi-modal data fusion, high-resolution chemical tomography provides 99% less dose by linking information encoded within both elastic and inelastic scattered signals. The researches show sub-nanometer 3D resolution of chemistry is measurable for a broad class of geometrically and compositionally complex materials.

Submission + - 30 MiB webpage complains about Mastodon-triggered high server load (itsfoss.com)

Submitted by nunojsilva
nunojsilva writes: Yesterday, the "It's FOSS News" website published an article, available in a webpage that pulled more than 10 MB in the first minutes after being opened (~30 uncompressed, and this with no user interaction), and which some minutes later managed to reach 35 MB of downloaded data (>100 MB uncompressed, also without interaction).

The webpage that loaded more than 100 MB complains that sharing links to their site on the Mastodon platform causes them increased server load, because of how Mastodon generates blurbs with a thumbnail and description.

I don't know what to say, except maybe: Don't open this story's link with javascript enabled. Maybe if they want to complain about Slashdot effect, it'd be good if their pages didn't pull, like, 100 MB in the first place...

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