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Government

Congressman Introduces Bill To Limit FCC Powers 176

Posted by timothy from the but-regulators-are-perfect-and-righteous dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Representative Bob Latta (R-OH) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would limit the FCC's power to regulate ISPs in a supposed effort to keep the internet free. The bill's text is currently not available on the Library of Congress webpage or on congress.gov, but a purported copy has been spotted on scribd. Representative Latta's press release nevertheless indicates that the bill is intended to prevent the FCC from re-classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II. Latta is one of the 28 representatives who lobbied the FCC earlier this month and were shown to have received double the average monetary donations given to all House of Representative members from the cable industry over a two year period ending this past December."
Businesses

Apple Confirms Purchase of Beats For $3 Billion 188

Posted by Soulskill from the throwing-down-the-big-money dept.
SimonTheSoundMan writes: "Apple has confirmed it will buy Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion. Apple will make the purchase using $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock. An important part of the acquisition for Apple is absorbing the Beats subscription streaming service, even though it only has about 110k users. The Beats brand will remain intact, and will continue to sell headphones. "
Sci-Fi

The Singularity Is Sci-Fi's Faith-Based Initiative 339

Posted by Soulskill from the omnipotent-god-computers-will-not-run-your-life dept.
malachiorion writes: "Is machine sentience not only possible, but inevitable? Of course not. But don't tell that to devotees of the Singularity, a theory that sounds like science, but is really just science fiction repackaged as secular prophecy. I'm not simply arguing that the Singularity is stupid — people much smarter than me have covered that territory. But as part of my series of stories for Popular Science about the major myths of robotics, I try to point out the Singularity's inescapable sci-fi roots. It was popularized by a SF writer, in a paper that cites SF stories as examples of its potential impact, and, ultimately, it only makes sense when you apply copious amounts of SF handwavery. The article explains why SF has trained us to believe that artificial general intelligence (and everything that follows) is our destiny, but we shouldn't confuse an end-times fantasy with anything resembling science."
Earth

ESA's Cryosat Mission Sees Antarctic Ice Losses Double 162

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with news that seems to confirm the alarming reports last week about Antarctic ice melting. "The new assessment comes from Europe's Cryosat spacecraft, which has a radar instrument specifically designed to measure the shape of the ice sheet. The melt loss from the White Continent is sufficient to push up global sea levels by around 0.43mm per year. Scientists report the data in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (abstract). The new study incorporates three years of measurements from 2010 to 2013, and updates a synthesis of observations made by other satellites over the period 2005 to 2010. Cryosat has been using its altimeter to trace changes in the height of the ice sheet — as it gains mass through snowfall, and loses mass through melting."

Comment Re:It's one of many reasons why Adblocking is mora (Score 3, Interesting) 174

by Burz (#47034225) Attached to: Malvertising Up By Over 200%

No, he's implying ad servers need to start acting like a responsible industry. They pollute the web with malware and make a lot of sites unreadable with adblocking, owing to the moving, flashing and sometimes audible garbage that cover some sites.

If a simple text article with a few associated photos causes my computer's fan to wheeze and slows it to a crawl, and the ads keep breaking my concentration, AND they pose a security threat that (over the years) has gone from significant to huge, then their business model is just attempting to use you as a pair of eyes with a wallet attached. FUCK THEM.

Website operators like Ars Technica and Slashdot should be researching ways to deliver ads that are safe and sane -- there is no justification for a friggin' advertisement to be otherwise. Its just too bad the advertisers don't trust the content creators to serve the ads themselves. So what we get is a cycle of mistrust and negligence that puts their readers at risk of attack. Its sicko.
Earth

Studies: Wildfires Worse Due To Global Warming 379

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to scientists we can look forward to more devastating wildfires like the ones scorching Southern California because of global warming. "The fires in California and here in Arizona are a clear example of what happens as the Earth warms, particularly as the West warms, and the warming caused by humans is making fire season longer and longer with each decade," said University of Arizona geoscientist Jonathan Overpeck. "It's certainly an example of what we'll see more of in the future.""
Power

Thorium: The Wonder Fuel That Wasn't 204

Posted by samzenpus from the almost-there dept.
Lasrick (2629253) writes "Bob Alvarez has a terrific article on the history and realities of thorium as an energy fuel: For 50 years the US has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for nuclear reactors, and that effort has mostly failed. Besides the extraordinary costs involved, In the process of pursuing thorium-based reactors a fair amount of uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory. On top of that, the federal government is attempting to force Nevada into accepting a bunch of the uranium 233, as is, for disposal in a landfill (the Nevada Nuclear Security Site). 'Because such disposal would violate the agency's formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms.'"
Earth

US Climate Report Says Global Warming Impact Already Severe 627

Posted by Soulskill from the but-it-was-cold-yesterday dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: "Darryl Fears reports in the Washington Post on the U.S. government's newest national assessment of climate change. It says Americans are already feeling the effects of global warming. The assessment carves the nation into sections and examines the impacts: More sea-level rise, flooding, storm surge, precipitation and heat waves in the Northeast; frequent water shortages and hurricanes in the Southeast and Caribbean; more drought and wildfires in the Southwest. 'Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Insurance rates are rising in some vulnerable locations, and insurance is no longer available in others. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acreage. In Arctic Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and autumn storms now cause more erosion, threatening many communities with relocation.' The report concludes that over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly and that increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. 'What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.'"

Comment Re:Does the nature of the business hold it back (Score 1) 254

by Burz (#46932001) Attached to: Anti-Virus Is Dead (But Still Makes Money) Says Symantec

Security by isolation is one way to solve that problem. With a hypervisor designed for strong security instead of primarily for conveniece as is usually the case, users can safely allocate their tasks and data to different domains. For instance, 'Work' and 'Personal' could be two domains that have network access, whereas 'Vault' would hold the most sensitive info (like certain keys and passwords) and have no networking. An 'Untrusted' domain is used for most of the general web surfing-- reading articles, watching video streams, etc. On Qubes, there is also a TorVM package that facilitates the creation of anonymous domains.

So, whatever "happens in Vegas stays in Vegas". Qubes even assigns high-risk hardware, like NICs, to their own unprivileged domains.

The nice thing about this setup is that the window manager resides in the privileged domain and both the WM and its graphics stack are isolated from attacks originating in the VM domains. Further, each domain is assigned a border-color when its created so you can always get an idea of what is running in which context by glancing at the desktop. A compromised browser in 'Untrusted', for instance, could put up a window asking for admin access to the privileged domain, but the red border (and [untrusted] marker in the title) would give it away.

Copy/paste and file copy between domains are also protected; they are integrated into the UI so as to require a confirmation step so the privileged domain knows the user really intends to perform the action.
Bug

iOS 7 Update Silently Removes Encryption For Email Attachments 68

Posted by timothy from the giveth-and-taketh-away dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has removed encrypted email attachments from iOS 7. Apple said back in June 2010 in regards to iOS 4.0: 'Data protection is available for devices that offer hardware encryption, including iPhone 3GS and later, all iPad models, and iPod touch (3rd generation and later). Data protection enhances the built-in hardware encryption by protecting the hardware encryption keys with your passcode. This provides an additional layer of protection for your email messages attachments, and third-party applications.' Not anymore."

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