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Power

Solar Impulse Airplane To Launch First Sun-Powered Flight Across America 89

Posted by samzenpus from the guided-by-the-light dept.
First time accepted submitter markboyer writes "The Solar Impulse just landed at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California to announce a journey that will take it from San Francisco to New York without using a single drop of fuel. The 'Across America' tour will kick off this May when founders Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg take off from San Francisco. From there the plane will visit four cities across the states before landing in New York."
Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus from the take-a-look dept.
A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Firefox

Emscripten and New Javascript Engine Bring Unreal Engine To Firefox 124

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the cycle-is-nearly-complete dept.
MojoKid writes "There's no doubt that gaming on the Web has improved dramatically in recent years, but Mozilla believes it has developed new technology that will deliver a big leap in what browser-based gaming can become. The company developed a highly-optimized version of Javascript that's designed to 'supercharge' a game's code to deliver near-native performance. And now that innovation has enabled Mozilla to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the browser. As a sort of proof of concept, Mozilla debuted this BananaBread game demo that was built using WebGL, Emscripten, and the new JavaScript version called 'asm.js.' Mozilla says that it's working with the likes of EA, Disney, and ZeptoLab to optimize games for the mobile Web, as well." Emscripten was previously used to port Doom to the browser.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the bending-the-rules dept.
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
Power

Submission + - Why Earth Hour Is a Waste of Time and Energy (slate.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Next Saturday from 8:30PM to 9:30PM EST is 'Earth Hour' (0:30 to 1:30 UTC on Sunday). Millions of people will be participating by shutting off their lights for an hour to show they care about the environment. However, according to this article in Slate, Earth Hour is simply 'vain symbolism,' and it won't actually save any energy — quite the opposite. Quoting: 'Notice that you have not been asked to switch off anything really inconvenient, like your heating or air-conditioning, television, computer, mobile phone, or any of the myriad technologies that depend on affordable, plentiful energy electricity and make modern life possible. If switching off the lights for one hour per year really were beneficial, why would we not do it for the other 8,759? Hypothetically, switching off the lights for an hour would cut CO2 emissions from power plants around the world. But, even if everyone in the entire world cut all residential lighting, and this translated entirely into CO2 reduction, it would be the equivalent of China pausing its CO2 emissions for less than four minutes. In fact, Earth Hour will cause emissions to increase. As the United Kingdom’s National Grid operators have found, a small decline in electricity consumption does not translate into less energy being pumped into the grid, and therefore will not reduce emissions. Moreover, during Earth Hour, any significant drop in electricity demand will entail a reduction in CO2 emissions during the hour, but it will be offset by the surge from firing up coal or gas stations to restore electricity supplies afterward.'

Submission + - Port Scanning /0 Using Insecure Embedded Devices (sourceforge.net) 1

Submitted by thornmaker
thornmaker writes: From the abstract:

While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study.
Earth

Submission + - Method Developed to Produce Vastly Cheaper Clean Water 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "David Alexander reports that defense contractor Lockheed Martin has found a way to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue. Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin — just one atom in thickness — it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water. "It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," says John Stetson, who began working on the issue in 2007. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less." Stetson adds that if the new filter material, known as Perforene, was compared to the thickness of a piece of paper, the nearest comparable filter for extracting salt from seawater would be the thickness of three reams of paper — more than half a foot thick. Access to clean drinking water is increasingly seen as a major global security issue. Competition for water is likely to lead to instability and potential state failure in countries important to the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence community report last year. According to the report “during the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will almost certainly experience water problems — shortages, poor water quality, or floods — that will contribute to the risk of instability and state failure, and increase regional tensions (PDF).""

Comment Re:Ouch. (Score 1) 3

by InfiniteBlaze (#42903047) Attached to: Computer Repair Company Takes Revenge on Devious Customer
In the interest of being political, I will not expound upon the fault in your description of the problem. Suffice it to say that it's hooey. RAID isn't magic, and it isn't terribly complex. You add drives to an array, and that's handled by the drive controller. Most RAID controllers wipe the drive clean when you create an array, which would have destroyed all of his data. It wouldn't have just been "corrupted". I can think of maybe two scenarios where there might be "telltale signs" of a failed attempt to create a RAID array, but neither seems to apply in this case. Regardless, for some reason, your story piqued my interest, so I went ahead and searched on your customer's name. The first article of significance I came upon was this: http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/nerds-on-call-c443471.html It was on the third page of a Google search for the name listed in your "original source" link. I'd say his claim seems to back up my suspicion - the technician(s) assigned were not competent, and for you to come to a place where geeks hang out and try to besmirch the name of a customer for whom it seems the service was not just poor, but HORRIBLE is a smear on your own name. I'm not going to continue to chastise you. I imagine your fears of actually having to pay for the mistakes of one of your techs (or yourself) are enough to worry about without having your peers tell you the ways in which someone screwed up. My best advice is that when this actually goes to court, since it seems the man's disability claim has been affected and he'll need money on which to survive, let your lawyer do the talking for you. The one other claim that you linked (where a clerk gave him brake fluid instead of power steering fluid) does not constitute "a lot of 'mistakes'".

Comment Ouch. (Score 1) 3

by InfiniteBlaze (#42883387) Attached to: Computer Repair Company Takes Revenge on Devious Customer
You don't seem to have much of a defense. There are no "telltale signs" of setting up a RAID. It's either set in the BIOS or set in the RAID controller's BIOS. Also, it's pretty easy to determine the integrity of the data - a simple hard drive test can tell if the drive is failing, and any live CD is acceptable for determining if the files still exist or not. Seems like a case of technical incompetence, IMO. Nice style on the website though.
Open Source

Submission + - Why a Linux user is using Windows 3.1 (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: About two weeks back, I was using my Android tablet and looking for a good graphics editor. I wanted something with layers and good text drawing tools. That’s when it hit me. We already have that.

Photoshop used to run on Windows 3.1. And Windows 3.1 runs great under both DOSBox and QEMU, both of which are Open Source emulators available for Android and every other platform under the sun.

So I promptly set to work digging up an old copy of Photoshop. The last version released for Windows 3.1 was back in 1996. And finding a working copy proved to be...challenging. Luckily, the good folks at Adobe dug around in their vaults and managed to get me up and running.

And, after a bit of tweaking, I ended up with an astoundingly functional copy of Photoshop that I can now run on absolutely every device I own. And the entire environment (fonts, working files and all) are automatically backed up to the cloud and synced between systems.

But what other applications (and, potentially, games) does this give me access to? How far can I take this?

Submission + - A Supersonic Ping Pong Gun (arxiv.org)

Submitted by
Frans Faase
Frans Faase writes: "The Ping Pong gun or Ping Pong bazooka has been a popular and compelling tool for physics education. However, the design necessarily means the ball emerges at subsonic speed. The design has been modified to include a pressure chamber and a convergent-divergent nozzle, similar to the design of some supersonic wind tunnels. This modification results in supersonic speeds. The current design has achieved a launch speed of 406 m/sec, about Mach 1.23."

Comment How is this... (Score 1) 58

by InfiniteBlaze (#41619029) Attached to: Google Wades Further Into Hardware With "Nexus Call Center"
wading further into hardware? You mean by planning and preparing for the release by ensuring there is adequate support for the anticipated customers? The title gives the impression that we should expect a piece of equipment that allows us to establish a centralized call center for our own businesses...not that Google has outsourced their phone support. -1 for Misleading
Android

Submission + - Android Security Flaw Erases All Data (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by InfiniteBlaze
InfiniteBlaze writes: From the article:

"A major security flaw that causes all of the data stored on an Android smartphone to be erased has been discovered and samsung devices seem to be the target.

Technical University Berlin's Ravi Borgaonkar said websites have tricked Android owners into activating malicious code by selecting on-screen phone numbers.

He added that no Android device could tell the difference between real phone numbers to USSD codes recognized by smartphones as a set of instructions to erase the data from its memory card.

A proportion of the malware seems to only target Samsung devices. Once the malware triggers a factory reset, there was no method of restoring the data, he added."

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