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Submission + - Constitutional Crisis Averted: Judge Dismisses "Emoluments Clause" Suits (politico.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Politico reports, "A federal judge ... dismissed a pair of lawsuits claiming that President Donald Trump’s failure to divest himself of his real estate empire and other business holdings violated the Constitution’s provision banning receipt of foreign “emoluments” while in public office. U.S. District Court Judge George Daniels ruled that the two suits were fatally flawed because the plaintiffs failed to show injury directly related to the use of Trump’s properties by foreign officials and governments. Daniels, ... is an appointee of President Bill Clinton, also said the issue was one that Congress should police, not the courts. “As the only political branch with the power to consent to violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, Congress is the appropriate body to determine whether, and to what extent, Defendant’s conduct unlawfully infringes on that power,” the judge wrote. “If Congress determines that an infringement has occurred, it is up to Congress to decide whether to challenge or acquiesce to Defendant’s conduct. As such, this case presents a non-justiciable political question.”"

Submission + - NASA Making Plans for Interstellar Mission in 2069 (nypost.com) 2

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The New York Post relays news from New Scientist that during the 2017 Geophysical Union Conference scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reveled that they are planning an interstellar exploration mission for the year 2069. The goal is to send a probe to Alpha Centauri some 4.3 light years away. NASA is working on technology to allow a spacecraft to reach 10% of the speed of light which might allow them to reach Alpha Centauri as soon as 44 years. A number of technologies are being explored, although there are many practical hurdles. The New Scientist article adds that the 2016 NASA budget directed NASA to study interstellar travel that could reach 10% of the speed of light by 2069.

Submission + - Apple Hit With Class Action Lawsuit After Admitting To Slowing Down Old iPhones (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A day after Apple acknowledged slowing down iPhones with degraded batteries, a Los Angeles man is pursuing a class action lawsuit in the matter. Owners didn't agree to the prospect, and it hurts the devices' value, according to a filing by plaintiff Stefan Bodganovich, cited by TMZ. The case is said to be particularly concerned with the impact on iPhone 7 users. The suit asks that Apple stop throttling older devices, and pay compensation to affected people. Over the course of December, a number of people on Reddit and elsewhere have speculated that iPhones perform faster after battery replacements, mostly citing anecdotal evidence. Apple effectively confirmed that situation on Wednesday, but with the provision that it only throttles phones to prevent sudden, potentially damaging shutdowns.

Submission + - California Poised To Hit 50 Percent Renewable Target A Decade Ahead of Schedule (cleantechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Every year, the California Energy Commission releases its Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) report, which gives details about the mix of energy experienced by all utilities within the state during the preceding 12 months. The report for this year, released in November, shows that all three of the state’s investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric —are projected to derive 50% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That is a full decade ahead of schedule. PG&E reports it used 32.9% renewable energy in the past year. The figure for SoCal Edison was 28.2%. San Diego Gas & Electric led the pack with 43.2% renewable energy. Now that the 50% goal is within reach, California is looking ahead to its next milestone — 80% renewables by 2050. “Once we get to about 50 percent, we’re going to start to run into new challenges — the second 50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent,” Brown notes. Part of the challenge will be balancing the grid using new technologies to avoid the need for fossil fueled “peaker plants” to provide additional electricity when demand is high.

Submission + - Firefox Users Spooked by Mysterious Add-On 1

Submitted by Dutch Gun
Dutch Gun writes: Some Firefox users were recently spooked by the sudden appearance of an add-on named Looking Glass, with a mysterious description of MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS. As it turns out, the add-on is an "experiment" from Mozilla's Shield group, but there was no way to identify it as such via normal UI methods, except for a single mozilla.com e-mail at the end of a list of contributors.

While the plug-in is benign in nature, the concern it caused users due to its opaque name and description has sparked a small furor on Reddit, apparently prompting some to turn off Telemetry and Experiments even among those who had willingly enabled them previously.

Perhaps this Shield study was actually attempting to find out how users would react to a random, vaguely-threatening-sounding add-on suddenly appearing in their browser without any user intervention?

Submission + - When the browser's TLS padlock lying to us (github.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's an ongoing discussion about the use of Cloudflare. The browser's padlock icon indicates the secure connection — between the user and the destination server is fully encrypted by TLS technology.
This is false because the middle point named "Cloudflare" is reading all data from us and destination server.

Comment Re:privacy? (Score 1) 276

Justifiably, there are a lot of comments here along the line of "too many results". Apparently, search engines think that lots of results are preferable to few results. In a way that makes sense because if you get the right answer (more properly, a right answer) early on, what do you care about the following million irrelevancies?

The /. mindset seems to be "...if only I could enter the right (possibly nonexistent today) command or switch or whatever, then I'd get the right results early in the results list, and to heck with the rest." Personally I think this "forward" approach is unsolvable. If it were doable I think we'd be a lot closer to it today.

Instead of the "forward" approach I suggest a "back-end" approach: if the best a browser can do is hand you a boatload of possibilities, maybe the browser should supply you with tools to refine those possibilities. One idea along these lines is to consider your list of results as a series of entries in a relational database, and let you refine the list with, say, SQL-like commands. For example:

DELETE ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.sequence > 1000;

-- Limits further operations to the first 1000 results. Note this doesn't delete the actual pages (!), just the entries in the "database" of search results.

FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF "clinton" IN ENTRY.url AND "Hillary" IN ENTRY.text THEN DELETE ENTRY;

-- Gets rid of all pages containing "Hillary" if the url contains "clinton". Yes, it's a lot of typing but the browser saves all commands and you can create a file that is auto-executed for every search result, if it means that much to you.

FOR ALL ENTRY IN RESULTS IF ENTRY.date > '2014/06/20' and ENTRY.date < '2014/12/21' THEN PASS ELSE DELETE ENTRY;

-- Removes everything except pages made in Summer/Fall of 2014. It must have been a very good year.

And so on.

About half of the /. community is about ready to pounce on this as being unworkable. Commands that require searching lots of url's, even if limited to 1000, can take a long time to execute. At the moment this is true but that doesn't mean things will stay that way. "All" it takes are support hooks in the master database. E.g., "Is 'Hillary' in <url0>,<url1>,<url2>,<url3>,<url4>,etc." Presumably the search index can answer this without any network I/O.

Probably what's needed is a research project that identifies what kind of properties are useful in the "results database". No need to build your own search engine -- just send a search command to Google (under program control) and harvest the results, building the "results database". It's not that hard. Building an SQL-like command parser isn't that difficult either, assuming knowledge of lex and yacc, or the like. It's a bit more difficult to figure out what properties and commands are useful. (If any!)

Summer Of Code, anyone?

Comment Re:So what? (Score 0) 944

by Old Grey Beard (#45784253) Attached to: 60% of Americans Unaware of Looming Incandescent Bulb Phase Out

> You do realize that the colour spectrum of LEDs is a solved problem, right?

But that doesn't mean MY problem is solved. It's not clear to me I'll be able to find a bulb of the right size with all the features, such as 50-100-150 3-way, good color spectrum, dimmability etc.

Imagine all the Yahoos at Home Depot who will tell you this or that bulb will work for whatever purpose you specify, when in fact they're just following their training: sell first and leave the returns for the insensitive clods at the returns desk.

Comment Re:but how much IO can they do?? (Score 1) 272

by Old Grey Beard (#42427979) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Easiest Way To Consolidate Household Media?

As an aside, does anyone know if there exists a software package that lets you perform securely encrypted incremental remote backups?

I have EaseUS Todo Backup and it looks like it can do all that, but it costs money (~$30) and probably only runs on Windows. I've got a Linksys Slug with 3TB storage and use EaseUS for weekly full and nightly differential backups. But I don't use encryption...hmm, I wonder why?
Security

Submission + - 'Stuxnet-like' Malware Hits Manufacturing Industries in Iran (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Iranian officials on Tuesday said that a “Stuxnet-like” cyber attack against hit some industrial units in a southern province.
"A virus had penetrated some manufacturing industries in Hormuzgan province, but its progress was halted," Ali Akbar Akhavan said, quoted by the ISNA news agency.

Akhavan said the malware was "Stuxnet-like" but did not elaborate and that the attack had occurred over the "past few months." One of the targets of the latest attack was the Bandar Abbas Tavanir Co, which oversees electricity production and distribution in Hormuzgan and adjacent provinces. He also accused "enemies" of constantly seeking to disrupt operations at Iran's industrial units through cyber attacks, without specifying how much damage had been caused.

Iran has blamed the US and Israel for cyber attacks in the past. In April, it said a voracious malware attack had hit computers running key parts of its oil sector and succeeded in wiping data off official servers.
Android

Submission + - Dell Gives up on Android, Doubles Down on Windows 8 (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by
hugheseyau
hugheseyau writes: ""Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke made a less than shocking announcement at this year’s Dell World Conference in Austin. The company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. ... So if Dell is giving up on Android, what comes next? The company claims its doubling down on Windows 8, and the enterprise market.""
Microsoft

Submission + - Missing e-mail

Submitted by Antony-Kyre
Antony-Kyre writes: Since Microsoft hasn’t been of any help, I’m asking Slashdot. Ever since they switched from the previous look to that “Outlook” look in Hotmail, I haven’t received any spam. This isn’t spam I block. This is spam I’m collecting that I’d like to eventually report and/or investigate (long story). It’s been days now (not opening any messages to check the last time I received e-mail), and I don’t know what to do. I usually expect perhaps dozens a week, but unless a spam network was recently taken down, I figure Hotmail is blocking e-mail at its source. Has anyone else been having similar problems?

Comment Re:The short list. (Score 1) 102

by Old Grey Beard (#41950521) Attached to: MOOC Mania

Very nice list.

I'd like to propose home schooling aids. No, home schooling is not new. What is new is the large amount of help now available for parents who are willing and able to teach their own kids.

Also: education vouchers, where parents can choose to send their children to schools outside their district.

Both of these are politically charged innovations that try to address some problems with American education. So was Brown. Not everybody needs to approve of an innovation for it to have an impact.

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