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Submission + - Justice Sotomayor Warns Against Tech-Enabled "Orwellian" World (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke on Thursday to faculty and students at the University of Oklahoma City about the privacy perils brought on by modern technology. She warned that the march of technological progress comes with a need to enact privacy protections if we want to avoid living in an "Orwellian world" of constant surveillance. She siad, "There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don’t like the fact that someone I don’t knowcan pick up, if they’re a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."

Submission + - After NSA Revelations, Why Aren't More News Organizations Using HTTPS? (pressfreedomfoundation.org) 2

Submitted by ageisp0lis
ageisp0lis writes: More than fifteen months after the NSA revelations laid bare the overwhelming scope of online surveillance and fueled the demand for privacy, virtually none of the top news websites—including all those who have reported on the Snowden documents—have adopted the most basic of security measures to protect the integrity of their content and the privacy of their readers: deploying HTTPS by default. That includes The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, ProPublica and Der Spiegel.

Submission + - Harvard's CompSci intro course boasts record-breaking enrollment (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Harvard College's CS50, the school's Introduction to Computer Science course for undergrads, has attracted about 1 in 8 students this fall — a new record for the school and yet another sign of just how hot this field is becoming for the job-hungry. Overall, 818 undergrads (or 12% of the student body) signed up for the challenging course http://docs.registrar.fas.harv... this semester, and nearly 900 students are registered when factoring in graduate and cross-registered students. Topics included in the syllabus include Linux, cryptography, HTML and JavaScript. David Malan, a Harvard CompSci grad, teaches the course.

Submission + - Solar Power-Based Enhanced Oil Recovery Technology (cleantechnica.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Royal Dutch Shell has teamed with a sovereign investment fund from Oman to invest $53 million in a company that manufactures solar power equipment designed for increasing oil production. Glasspoint Solar Inc. installs aluminium mirrors near oil fields that concentrate solar radiation on insulated tubes containing water.

The steam generated from heating the water is injected into oil fields to recover heavy crude oil. This concept of enhanced oil recovery involves high pressure injection of hot fluids to recover heavy crude oil. The use of renewable energy like solar power makes great economic sense, as the fuel cost associated with this enhanced oil recovery technology is practically zero.

Shell hopes to employ this technology in its oil fields in Oman. The company hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with enhanced oil recovery operations. A large-scale successful implementation of this technology could be a game changer for major consumers like India and the US. Both have substantial oil reserves, but are unable to tap them due to high costs involved in heavy oil recovery.

Submission + - Mozilla 1024-Bit Cert Deprecation Leaves 107,000 Sites Untrusted (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Mozilla has deprecated 1024-bit RSA certificate authority certificates in Firefox 32 and Thunderbird. While there are pluses to the move such as a requirement for longer, stronger keys, at least 107,000 websites will no longer be trusted by Mozilla.

Data from HD Moore's Project Sonar, which indexes more than 20 million websites, found 107,535 sites using a cert signed by what will soon be an untrusted CA certificate. Grouping those 107,000-plus sites by certificate expiration date, the results show that 76,185 certificates had expired as of Aug. 25; of the 65 million certificates in the total scan, 845,599 had expired but were still in use as of Aug. 25, Moore said.

Submission + - LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LLVM 3.5 along with Clang 3.5 are now available for download. LLVM 3.5 offers many compiler advancements including a unified 64-bit ARM back-end from the merging of the Apple and community AArch64 back-ends, C++1y/C++1z language additions, self-hosting support of Clang on SPARC64, and various other compiler improvements.

Submission + - How a Super-Intelligent AI Could Wipe Out Humanity (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: Oxford University futurist Nick Bostrom thinks we're doomed. It's his job to contemplate existential threats to the human species, and he predicts that a super-smart artificial intelligence program will be the end of us.

His new book, Superintelligence, outlines AI takeover scenarios, discusses what might motivate a superintelligent AI, and lays out reasons why the AI’s pursuit of its goals would likely lead to our extinction. This excerpt from the book imagines a situation in which a developing AI lulls humans into complacency before making a "treacherous turn."

Submission + - MS urging people to ignore strong passwords (wired.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft appears to be making a concerted effort to get people to ignore decades of advice on complex passwords. Wired has a piece about Cormac Herley, a Principal Researcher at MS, saying "burdening users with choosing stronger passwords seems like a big waste of effort." http://www.wired.com/2014/08/p... (Original paper "strength above that needed to withstand online guessing is effectively wasted": http://research.microsoft.com/...).
Separately, Roger Grimes, a Principal Analyst at MS, has an opinion piece in Infoworld “Why you don't need long, complex passwords” arguing that password guessers “aren’t even measurable noise in most environments.” http://www.infoworld.com/d/sec...

Submission + - Northrop Grumman Gives Early Look at its XS-1 Experimental Spaceplane Design (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Northrop Grumman, in partnership with Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic, has unveiled the preliminary design it is developing as part of DARPA’s XS-1 Spaceplane project. Looking like a windowless update of a 1960s Dyna Soar orbiter, it’s the next step in producing launch systems that will dramatically reduce the costs of getting into orbit.

Submission + - gcc LTO reduces firefox package size by 50% (gnu.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Link Time Optimization used to be a lot of promise for little gain, and typically unable to deal with packages in the MSLOC range. Seemingly no longer. Reported in gcc's bugzilla is an impressive result for firefox:
'Firefox since version 30 as well as Thunderbird since version 31 both compile fine with LTO enabled without the need of any additional patches. The package size was reduced by 51% (firefox ~420MB -> ~207MB) and 59% (thunderbird ~480MB -> ~200MB). Both programs work as intended, no crashes or unexpected behaviour so far.'
Has time come to rebuild the world using LTO ?

Submission + - Website turns tables on the Indian call centre scammers (techcentral.co.za)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Indian call centre warning users that their computer is infected is one of the longest running and most annoying Internet scams. TechCentral’s Regardt van der Berg took one of the scammers for a ride.

Submission + - Critical Delphi and C++ Builder VCL library bug found

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to execute malicious code has been discovered in the Visual Component Library (VCL) library of Embarcadero's Delphi and C++Builder application development environments, and could, therefore, also affect applications that were built by using the software and that use the affected library. C++Builder and Delphi have been used in software development for many years. Financial institutions, healthcare organizations and companies in several other industries have developed homegrown applications using these products.

Submission + - Metamaterial Superconductor Hints At New Era Of High Temperature Superconductors

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Superconductors allow current to flow with zero resistance when cooled below some critical temperature. They are the crucial ingredients in everything from high-power magnets and MRI machines to highly sensitive magnetometers and magnetic levitation devices. But one big problem is that superconductors work only at very low temperatures--the highest is around 150 kelvin (-120 degrees centigrade). So scientists would dearly love to find ways of raising this critical temperature. Now a group of physicists say they've found a promising approach--to build metamaterial superconductors that steer electrons in the same way as other metamaterials steer light to create invisibility cloaks. The inspiration for the work comes from the observation that some high temperature superconductors consist of repeated layers of conducting and dielectric structures. So the team mixed tin--a superconductor at 3.7 kelvin--with the dielectric barium titanate and found that it raised the critical temperature by 0.15 kelvin. That's the first demonstration that superconductors can be thought of as metamaterials. With this proof of principle under their belts, the next step is to look for bigger gains at higher temperatures.

Submission + - Scientists baffled by unknown source of CFCs 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Scientists have found that, despite their complete ban since 2007, ozone-depleting CFCs are still being pumped into the atmosphere from some unknown source.

Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), which was once used in applications such as dry cleaning and as a fire-extinguishing agent, was regulated in 1987 under the Montreal Protocol along with other chlorofluorocarbons that destroy ozone and contribute to the ozone hole over Antarctica. Parties to the Montreal Protocol reported zero new CCl4 emissions between 2007-2012.

However, the new research shows worldwide emissions of CCl4 average 39 kilotons (about 43,000 U.S. tons) per year, approximately 30 percent of peak emissions prior to the international treaty going into effect. "We are not supposed to be seeing this at all," said Qing Liang, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study published online in the Aug. 18 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. "It is now apparent there are either unidentified industrial leakages, large emissions from contaminated sites, or unknown CCl4 sources."

Note: CCI4s were previously referred to as CFCs, which is to the public the more familiar abbreviation.

That there seems to be an unknown source of CFCs suggests strongly that the entire theory of CFCs destroying the ozone layer is faulty. If CFCs were being produced naturally in the past then the ozone layer should not exist based on this theory. That it does exist says the CFCs are not harmful to it and were banned unnecessarily.

Submission + - Professor Steve Ballmer Will Teach At Two Universities This Year (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: When Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board of directors, he cited a fall schedule that would 'be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season.' It turns out Ballmer will teach an MBA class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in the fall, and a class at USC’s Marshall School of Business in the spring. Helen Chang, assistant director of communications at Stanford’s Business School, told Business Insider that Ballmer will be working with faculty member Susan Athey for a strategic management course called 'TRAMGT588: Leading organizations.' As for the spring semester, Ballmer will head to Los Angeles — closer to where his Clippers will be playing — and teach a course at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. We reached out to the Marshall School, which declined to offer more details about Ballmer’s class.

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