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Submission + - US Slaps Sanctions on North Korea After Sony Cyberattack (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The United States imposed financial sanctions Friday on North Korea and several senior government officials in retaliation for a cyber attack on Sony Pictures. President Obama said he ordered the sanctions because of "the provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions and policies of the Government of North Korea, including its destructive, coercive cyber-related actions during November and December 2014."

The activities "constitute a continuing threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," he added, in a letter to inform congressional leaders of his executive order. The new measures allow the Treasury Department "to apply sanctions against officials of the Government of North Korea and the Workers' Party of Korea, and persons determined to be owned or controlled by, or acting for or on behalf of" these bodies.

Submission + - New Canadian copyright laws require ISPs to retain, share illegal download info

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: New Years Day brought into force new Canadian copyright laws that attack illegal downloaders

As of January 1st Internet service providers (ISPs) are required to pass along notices of alleged copyright infringement., something which used to be voluntary. ISPs must also retain records of the notices they receive and forward to users for at least six months in case a copyright owner decides to pursue legal action. Lawsuits could seek up to $5,000 for downloading copyrighted material for personal use, and up to $20,000 for a download that led to commercial gain. ISPs are also now be required to provide your personal info, but only if the copyright owner sues.

Search engines also have to remove cached versions of allegedly infringing material that have been removed from a website. Non-compliance allows copyright owners to pursue legal action and claim damages against them as well.

Finally, a review of the Copyright Act every five years is now required.

Submission + - Red Hat Engineer Improves Math Performance of Glibc

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Siddhesh Poyarekar from Red Hat has taken a professional look into mathematical functions found in Glibc (the GNU C library). He has been able to provide an 8-times performance improvement to slowest path of pow() function. Other transcendentals got similar improvements since the fixes were mostly in the generic multiple precision code. These improvements already went into glibc-2.18 upstream. Siddhesh believes that a lot of the low hanging fruit has now been picked, but that this is definitely not the end of the road for improvements in the multiple precision performance. There are other more complicated improvements, like the limitation of worst case precision for exp() and log() functions, based on the results of the paper Worst Cases for Correct Rounding of the Elementary Functions in Double Precision. One needs to prove that those results apply to the Glibc multiple precision bits.

Submission + - Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There's No Easy Fix (fivethirtyeight.com)

Submitted by jIyajbe
jIyajbe writes: Christie Awchwanden of FiveThirtyEight.com writes "When the latest international Climate Conference wrapped up in Lima, Peru, last month, delegates boarded their flights home without much official discussion of how the planes that shuttled them to the meeting had altered the climate. Aircraft currently contribute about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions...if the aviation industry were a country, it would be one of the world’s top 10 emitters of CO2. And its emissions are projected to grow between two and four times by 2050."

Beyond just volume of emissions:

Planes don’t just release carbon dioxide, they also emit nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and black carbon, as well as water vapor that can form heat-trapping clouds...These emissions take place in the upper troposphere, where their effects are magnified. When this so-called radiative forcing effect is taken into account, aviation emissions produce about 2.7 times the warming effects of CO2 alone...

Submission + - How civilisations can spread across a galaxy

Submitted by kanweg
kanweg writes: If you look at the milky way at night, it appears not much is changing. But over time, stars get closer and further to each other. Coryn Bailer-Jones, an astrophysicist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, found that of 14 stars coming within 3 light years of Earth, the closest encounter is likely to be HIP 85605, which now lies some 16 light years away in the constellation of Hercules. It will get a close as the Oort cloud.
Human or alien civilisations could practice star hopping. Why travel 16 light years through space when you can just wait until a star with a suitable planet gets close and cover only the last stretch with an artificial spaceship? Take your time for a thoughtful response; it will take another 250,000 to 470,000 year before the close encounter.

Submission + - Laws for thee but not for me.... (watchdog.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation’s top court found that a police officer who mistakenly interprets a law and pulls someone over hasn’t violated their Fourth Amendment rights.

If a police officer reasonably believes something is against the law, they are justified in initiating a traffic stop, says the U.S. Supreme Court. The problem? According to North Carolina traffic law, only one tail light needs to be functional. That means the initial stop, justified on these grounds, would have been illegal — and so would the seizure of the cocaine found in Heien’s car

“The result is a system in which “ignorance of the law is no excuse” for citizens facing conviction, but police can use their own ignorance about the law to their advantage,” notes the legal brief on the case by a coalition of civil rights organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union and Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Although this was a traffic stop, imagine this applied to computer search & seizure. Suddenly, you could be facing "reasonable belief" that you committed a crime.

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this will enable a Police State.

Submission + - 2014 - Hottest Year on Record (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes: Data from three major climate-tracking groups agree: The combined land and ocean surface temperatures hit new highs this year, according to the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United Kingdom's Met Office and the World Meteorological Association.

If December's figures are at least 0.76 degrees Fahrenheit (0.42 degrees Celsius) higher than the 20th century average, 2014 will beat the warmest years on record, NOAA said this month. The January-through-November period has already been noted as the warmest 11-month period in the past 135 years, according to NOAA's November Global Climate Report. Scientific American reports on five places that will help push 2014 into the global warming record books.

Submission + - CIA confesses on UFO sightings 1

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: Over the last few days, the CIA has been tweeting out links to its top ten most-read “BestOf2014” documents. Today, it confessed that “Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the ‘50s? It was us.”

http://venturebeat.com/2014/12...

Submission + - Practical Project management (telirati.com)

Submitted by Zigurd
Zigurd writes: How can we forge a practical, undogmatic tool set for software project management that works in the reality of how software is created? And, how can you, as someone not steeped in traditional project management and in Agile, feel confident enough to commit the heresy of a mixed approach?

Submission + - School Defied Google and US Government, Let Boys Program White House Xmas Trees

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: This holiday season, Google and the National Parks partnered to let girls program the White House Christmas tree lights. While the initiative earned kudos in Fast Company's 9 Giant Leaps For Women In Science and Technology In 2014, it also prompted an act of civil disobedience of sorts from St. Augustine of Canterbury School, which decided Google and the U.S. government wouldn't determine which of their kids would be allowed to participate in the coding event. "We decided to open it up to all our students, both boys and girls so that they could be a part of such an historic event, and have it be the kickoff to our Hour of Code week," explained Debra Knox, a technology teacher at St. Augustine.

Submission + - The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Nick Szabo writes that when we use web services, we are relying on an architecture based on full trust in an unknown "root" administrator, who can control everything that happens on the server. They can read, alter, delete, or block any data on that computer at will. Even data sent encrypted over a network is eventually unencrypted and ends up on a computer controlled in this total way. With current web services we are fully trusting, in other words we are fully vulnerable to, the computer, or more specifically the people who have access to that computer, both insiders and hackers, to faithfully execute our orders, secure our payments, and so on. Compare this architecture to traditional commercial protocols, such as ticket-selling at a movie theater, that distribute a transaction so that no employee can steal money or resources undetected. There is no "root administrator" at a movie theater who can pocket your cash undetected. On the Internet, instead of securely and reliably handing over cash and getting our goods or services, or at least a ticket, we have to fill out forms and make ourselves vulnerable to identity theft in order to participate in e-commerce.

Recently a developing technology, often called "the block chain", is starting to change this. A block chain computer is a virtual computer, a computer in the cloud, shared across many traditional computers and protected by cryptography and consensus technology. A block-chain computer, in sharp contrast to a web server, is shared across many such traditional computers controlled by dozens to thousands of people. By its very design each computer checks each other's work, and thus a block chain computer reliably and securely executes our instructions up to the security limits of block chain technology, which is known formally as anonymous and probabilistic Byzantine consensus (sometimes also called Nakamoto consensus). Instead of the cashier and ticket-ripper of the movie theater, the block chain consists of thousands of computers that can process digital tickets, money, and many other fiduciary objects in digital form. "I think we see every week now somewhere between one and three entrepreneurs come in with blockchain ideas," says Chris Dixon. "There's definitely some momentum behind it."

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