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NASA

NASA Gets 2% Boost To Science Budget 121

Posted by samzenpus from the more-money-more-programs dept.
sciencehabit writes For an agency regularly called 'adrift' without a mission, NASA will at least float through next year with a boatload of money for its science programs. Yesterday Congress reached agreement on a spending deal for fiscal year 2015 that boosts the budget of the agency's science mission by nearly 2% to $5.24 billion. The big winner within the division is planetary sciences, which received $160 million more than the president's 2015 request in March. Legislators also maintained support for an infrared telescope mounted on a Boeing 747, a project that the White House had proposed grounding. NASA's overall budget also rose by 2%, to $18 billion. That's an increase of $364 million over 2014 levels, and half a billion dollars beyond the agency's request.
Advertising

Fraud Bots Cost Advertisers $6 Billion 190

Posted by samzenpus from the wanting-a-human-click dept.
Rambo Tribble writes A new report claims that almost a quarter of the "clicks" registered by digital advertisements are, in fact, from robots created by cyber crime networks to siphon off advertising dollars. The scale and sophistication of the attacks which were discovered caught the investigators by surprise. As one said, "What no one was anticipating is that the bots are extremely effective of looking like a high value consumer."

Comment Re:Here come the certificate flaw deniers....... (Score 1) 80

by Carewolf (#48565085) Attached to: New Destover Malware Signed By Stolen Sony Certificate

I work for a small company that signs its code - pretty much required if you want to install in any enterprise these days.

Its a certificate chain - we purchase a cert from a provider such as Verisign. They request basic proof of identity - business registration, contact number etc. They create a cert for us signed by them. Their cert is signed by Microsoft.

We sign our app with our cert - anyone accessing the binary signed by us can verify it hasn't been alterated and our cert was signed by Verisign, which was signed by Microsoft.

Note that all this provides is proof that the exe was created by us. It in no way guareentees that we aren't distributing our own malware etc. But what it does provide is a way of tracing a exe back to the signer.

Not if verisign or microsoft was compromised and new fake certificates was signed with the compromised master keys. Like the case with Sony here.

Comment Re:A question I hope someone can answer (Score 1) 54

by Carewolf (#48553913) Attached to: POODLE Flaw Returns, This Time Hitting TLS Protocol

For those of us who are stuck using older browsers (FireFox v10 or IE6), even with SSL disabled and only TLS 1.0 enabled, will this be a problem?

As I said, stuck. I won't appreciate replies saying to upgrade my browser.

Yes, in fact it is ONLY you who are affected. This was discovered in old versions of NSS, which means old Firefox and Chromium versions.

Comment Re:Good grief. (Score 1) 135

by Carewolf (#48553535) Attached to: British 'Porn Filter' Blocks Access To Chaos Computer Club

So the banker molestation murder cults get away with their crimes. Not sure if a good or bad thing.

I bet if you had some quiet reflection and thought carefully about it, you could figure out whether or not child molestation & murder is a good or bad thing.

Unless you are somewhere down the sociopathy spectrum, in which case you might not.

Note I didn't include the part about children. Read what you comment on before commenting.

Submission + - Global Warming to Make European Heat Waves 'Commonplace' by 2040s (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: In June 2003, a high-pressure weather system took hold over Western Europe and hovered there for weeks, bringing warm tropical air to the region and making that summer the hottest since at least 1540, the year King Henry VIII discarded his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

Temperatures were about 2.3 degrees Celsius, or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit, above average that summer, contributing to perhaps 70,000 additional deaths and hitting the elderly particularly hard. The heat was a factor in the outbreak of forest fires and in lower than usual crop yields. It caused Alpine glaciers to shrink at a rate double that seen in the previous record summer five years earlier.

Now, three scientists from the Met Office, the British weather agency, have concluded that human-caused global warming is going to make European summer heat waves “commonplace” by the 2040s.

Their findings, published on Monday in the online journal Nature Climate Change, suggest that once every five years, Europe is likely to experience “a very hot summer,” in which temperatures are about 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 1961-90 average. This is up from a probability, just a decade ago, that such events would occur only once every 52 years, a 10-fold increase.
Twitter

Cultural Fault Lines Determine How New Words Spread On Twitter 46

Posted by samzenpus from the know-what-I'm-saying? dept.
KentuckyFC writes The global popularity of Twitter allows new words and usages to spread rapidly around the world. And that has raised an interesting question for linguists: is language converging into a global "netspeak" that everyone will end up speaking? Now a new study of linguistic patterns on Twitter gives a definitive answer. By looking at neologisms in geo-located tweets, computational linguists have been able to study exactly how new words spread in time and space. It turns out that some neologisms spread like wildfire while others are used only in areas limited by geography and demography, just like ordinary dialects. For example, the word "ard", a shortened version of "alright" cropped up in Philadelphia several years ago but even now is rarely used elsewhere. The difference in the way new words spread is the result of the geographic and demographic characteristics of the communities in which the words are used. The work shows that the evolution of language on Twitter is governed by the same cultural fault lines as ordinary communication. So we're safe from a global "netspeak" for now.

Submission + - New Mexico levies $54M against US for violations at nuclear repository (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: New Mexico on Saturday levied more than $54 million in penalties against the US Department of Energy for numerous violations that resulted in the indefinite closure of the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository.

The state Environment Department delivered a pair of compliance orders to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, marking the state’s largest penalty ever imposed on the agency. Together, the orders outline more than 30 state permit violations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The orders and the civil penalties that come with them are just the beginning of possible financial sanctions the Energy Department could face in New Mexico. The state says it’s continuing to investigate and more fines are possible.

The focus has been on a canister of waste from Los Alamos that ruptured in one of WIPP’s storage rooms in February. More than 20 workers were contaminated and the facility was forced to close, putting in jeopardy efforts around the country to clean up tons of Cold War-era waste.

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