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Earth

The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct 417

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-not-easy-being-green dept.
merbs writes: The biggest extinction event in planetary history was driven by the rapid acidification of our oceans, a new study concludes (abstract). So much carbon was released into the atmosphere, and the oceans absorbed so much of it so quickly, that marine life simply died off, from the bottom of the food chain up. That doesn't bode well for the present, given the similarly disturbing rate that our seas are acidifying right now. A team led by University of Edinburgh researchers collected rocks in the United Arab Emirates that were on the seafloor hundreds of millions of years ago, and used the boron isotopes found within to model the changing levels of acidification in our prehistoric oceans. They now believe that a series of gigantic volcanic eruptions in the Siberian Trap spewed a great fountain of carbon into the atmosphere over a period of tens of thousands of years. This was the first phase of the extinction event, in which terrestrial life began to die out.
United States

Reason: How To Break the Internet (in a Bad Way) 489

Posted by timothy from the but-the-council-of-wise-men-have-decreed dept.
Widespread public sentiment favors the FCC's move to impose rules intended to establish "net neutrality"; an anonymous reader writes with a skeptical viewpoint: "No decent person," write Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry in a special issue of Reason, "should be *for* net neutrality." Across the board, the authors write, letting the FCC dictate ISP business practices will result in everything they say they're trying to avoid. For instance, one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre). That will almost certainly be forbidden under the FCC's version of neutrality.

Comment It's Really Radio! (Score 4, Informative) 106

by Bruce Perens (#49435639) Attached to: Bell Labs Fighting To Get More Bandwidth Out of Copper

DSL sends radio frequencies over twisted pair. Lots of carriers on lots of different frequencies. Radio stations actually interfere with it, for this reason some DSL systems are known to perform better in the daytime! DSL also puts out broadband radio noise.

Coaxial cable leaks too. When I lived on Long Island, I used to be able to receive it with an antenna! But it generally leaks less.

Fiber to the home is a much better option, but many locales are not being built out for it and will never be. Where I live we have ATT fiber to the neighborhood, and the last 1000 feet are copper. And it's slower than coaxial cable.
The Internet

Bell Labs Fighting To Get More Bandwidth Out of Copper 106

Posted by samzenpus from the I'm-giving-it-all-she's-got-captain dept.
jfruh writes You might think that DSL lost the race to cable and fiber Internet years ago, but Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs is working on a host of projects to extract more and faster bandwidth out of existing technologies. The company's G.fast technology aims to get hundreds of megabits a second over telephone lines. Other projects are aiming to boost speeds over fiber and cell networks as well.
United States

US Started Keeping Secret Records of International Telephone Calls In 1992 81

Posted by samzenpus from the original-list dept.
schwit1 writes Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries. The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified. The operation had 'been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,' including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.
Businesses

Phone App That Watches Your Driving Habits Leads To Privacy Concerns 73

Posted by samzenpus from the buying-your-privacy dept.
Toshito writes Desjardins Insurance has launched a smartphone app that tracks driver behaviour in return for the promise of substantial savings on car insurance. Two years ago, Desjardins began offering a telematic device that plugs into a vehicle's diagnostic port, to track acceleration, hard braking and the time of day you were driving, for instance. Now, there's no plug-in device required. With Desjardins's new Ajusto app, all you need is your smartphone. But this comes with great concerns over privacy, and problems have been reported where the device was logging data when the user was riding a bus instead of driving his own car.
Space

NASA's Chief Scientist Predicts Evidence For Life Beyond Earth By 2025 160

Posted by Soulskill from the and-it'll-take-just-a-few-years-after-that-to-make-them-angry-at-us dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA, predicts we're not far off from finding evidence for alien life. At a panel discussion yesterday, she said, "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years." She added, "We know where to look. We know how to look. In most cases we have the technology, and we're on a path to implementing it." Stofan thinks putting astronauts on Mars will be a big part of that goal. As efficient as robot missions are, she thinks it'll take humans digging and cracking rocks to find definitive evidence for life on other worlds.

Submission + - US Gov Investigating Highly Sophisticated Russian Hack Of White House (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The FBI, US Secret Service, and US intelligence agencies are investigating a highly sophisticated hack of White House systems that support the executive office of the President. The attack leveraged the existing compromise of the US State Department network which may still be unresolved, and raises further questions about Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for her official responsibilities. The attack on the White House is thought to have begun with a phishing email attack. The attack was routed through computers around the world, but signs point to hackers working for the Russian government. Although the systems compromised were not classified they contained data considered to be highly sensitive, including detailed information on President Obama's schedule. US officials have been surprised by the aggressiveness of Russian hackers in recent months. Two months ago Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate committee that the "Russian cyberthreat is more severe than we have previously assessed." This comes at a time when Russia is increasing flexing its military muscle by supporting separatists in Ukraine, more aggressive probes by Russian bombers and fighter jets along the borders of Baltic nations, the UK, and US, and President Putin's recent revelation that he was willing to order Russia's nuclear combat forces to alert to ensure the success of Russia's covert invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region.

Submission + - U.S. started keeping secret records of international telephone calls in 1992 (usatoday.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA's intelligence arm, was the government's first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans' privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.

The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans' calls, but the records â" which numbers were dialed and when â" allowed agents to map suspects' communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.

The operation had "been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority," including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

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