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Comment Re:Repatriation, yeah right. (Score 1) 389

I have a fair amount of confidence that if he were freed, we'd read an article about his sad, untimely death within a couple of years. You know, those strange suicides where they shot themselves 3 times in the head. Maybe a tragic car crash. The powers that be have good resources and plenty of plausible deniability.

I don't think it would take any "powers that be" to do the job.

Submission + - Tiniest Linux COM yet? (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: An open-spec COM that runs OpenWRT Linux on a MIPS-based Ralink RT5350 SoC has won its Indiegogo funding. The $20, IoT-focused VoCore measures 25 x 25mm. How low can you go? Tiny computer-on-modules (COMs) for Internet of Things (IoT) applications are popping up everywhere, with recent, Linux-ready entries including Intel’s Atom or Quark-based Edison, Ingenic’s MIPS/Xburst-based Newton, Acme Systems’s ARM9/SAM9G25 based Arrietta G25, and SolidRun’s quad-core i.MX6-based MicroSOM. Now, an unnamed Chinese startup has raised over six times its $6,000 Indiegogo funding goal for what could be the smallest, cheapest Linux COM yet.

Submission + - Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident (npr.org)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "In February, a 55-gallon drum of radioactive waste burst open inside America's only nuclear dump, in New Mexico.

Now investigators believe the cause may have been a pet store purchase gone bad.

"It was the wrong kitty litter," says , a geochemist in Richland, Wash., who has spent decades in the nuclear waste business.

It turns out there's more to cat litter than you think. It can soak up urine, but it's just as good at absorbing radioactive material.

"It actually works well both in the home litter box as well as the radiochemistry laboratory," says Conca, who is not directly involved in the current investigation.

Cat litter has been used for years to dispose of nuclear waste. Dump it into a drum of sludge and it will stabilize volatile radioactive chemicals. The litter prevents it from reacting with the environment.

And this is what contractors at were doing as they packed Cold War-era waste for shipment to the dump. But at some point, they decided to make a switch, from clay to organic.

"Now that might sound nice, you're trying to be green and all that, but the organic kitty litters are organic," says Conca. Organic litter is made of plant material, which is full of chemical compounds that can react with the nuclear waste.

"They actually are just fuel, and so they're the wrong thing to add," he says. Investigators now believe the litter and waste caused the drum to slowly heat up "sort of like a slow burn charcoal briquette instead of an actual bomb."

After it arrived at the dump, it burst."

Submission + - Goodbye, Ctrl-S (medium.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 'Save your work!' — This was a rallying cry for an entire generation of workers and students. The frequency and unpredictability of software crashes, power outages, and hardware failures made it imperative to constantly hit that save button. But in 2014? Not so much. My documents are automatically saved (with versioning) every time I make a change. My IDE commits code changes automatically. Many webforms will save drafts of whatever data I'm entering. Heck, even the games I play have an autosave feature. It's an interesting change — the young generation will grow up with an implicit trust that whatever they type into a computer will stay there. Maybe this is my generation's version of: 'In my day, we had to get up and walk across the room to change the channel on the TV!' In any case, it has some subtle but interesting effects on how people write, play, and create. No longer do we have to have constant interruptions to worry about whether our changes are saved — but at the same time, we don't have that pause to take a moment and reflect on what we've written. I'm sure we've all had moments where our hands hover over a save/submit button before changing our minds and hammering the backspace key. Maybe now we'll have to think before we write.

Submission + - Is Too Much Computer Time Killing Kids' Ability to Learn?

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: A teacher's union in Northern Ireland is asserting that children spending too much time on computers are impairing their ability to learn. The asserted excessive computer use is being blamed for an inability to concentrate or socialize. As one teacher puts it, '... these gadgets are really destroying their ability to learn.' One question no one seems to be asking is whether the kids showing these symptoms are getting enough sleep.

Submission + - Almost 100 arrested in worldwide swoop on Blackshades malware (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by MattSparkes
MattSparkes writes: Law enforcement around the world has teamed-up to arrest 97 for buying/using Blackshades malware, which can remotely seize control of a victim's computer, access documents, record keystrokes and even activate their webcam to take surreptitious pictures and video. It is also able to encrypt files in order to extract a ransom for their release. Blackshades RAT is a commercial product costing less than $200 which was marketed as a tool to test network security. However, it is widely used by hackers and was even said by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to have been used against Syrian activists by the government in 2012.

Submission + - RFC 7258: Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack (tbray.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: That's the title of RFC 7258, also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for "Best Common Practice"); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people's use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is: This monitoring is an attack and designers of Internet protocols must work to mitigate it.

Submission + - Australian government devastates game industry (digitallydownloaded.net)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: Australia's new conservative government has just handed down its first budget, which includes stripping all funding from the Interactive Games Fund which helps fund the development of video games in the country. The games industry in Australia has had a rough time, with some big names, such as Team Bondi shutting down over the last half decade (that last link is from 2011 and notes that even then the industry was in dire straits).

Submission + - EU Court of Justice Paves Way for "Right to be Forgotten" Online

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has today ruled that Google, Bing and others, acting as internet search engine operators, are responsible for the processing that they carry out of personal data which appears on web pages published by third parties. As a result any searches made on the basis of a person’s name that returns links/descriptions for web pages containing information on the person in question can, upon request by the related individual, be removed.

The decision supports calls for a so-called "right to be forgotten" by Internet privacy advocates, which ironically the European Commission are already working to implement via new legislation. Google failed to argue that such a decision would be unfair because the information was already legally in the public domain.

Submission + - Oil Man Proposes Increase in Oklahoma Oil-and-Gas Tax

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Daniel Gilbert reports at the WSJ that Oklahoma oil man George Kaiser is breaking with fellow energy executives in asking the state to raise taxes on oil companies, including his own. "Oklahoma is in desperate financial circumstances," says the billionaire philanthropist, who controls Kaiser-Francis Oil Co. Kaiser says a higher tax on oil-and-gas production could help the state pay for education and much needed infrastructure improvements and is asking legislators to return the state’s gross production tax to 7 percent, challenging a plan proposed by fellow oil company executives who want to see the rate settle at 2 percent for the first four years of production. But many of Kaiser's competitors disagree. Several energy companies and the State Chamber of Oklahoma say that lower tax rates for the costliest oil and gas wells are necessary to continue drilling at a pace that has stimulated economic activity and created other sources of revenue. Berry Mullennix, CEO at Tulsa-based Panther Energy, credits the tax program for helping his company grow to more than 90 employees, up from 18 a few years ago. “I would argue the tax incentive is a direct reason we have so much horizontal drilling in the state today,” Mullennix says. “The companies used the credit to help discover this massive wealth in oil and natural gas.” When companies decide to drill a well, they make their best guesses on how much it will cost to drill the well, how much the well will produce and what the commodity price will be. All of those estimates can vary widely, Kaiser says. “With ad valorem taxes, the difference among states is 2 or 3 or 4 percent. The other factors can vary by 50 or 100 percent.” Compared with those other factors, Kaiser says the tax rate is incidental. “It’s a rounding error."

Submission + - TLS 1.3 Ready to Drop RSA Key Transport (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: The IETF working group responsible for the TLS 1.3 standard is closing in on a decision to remove RSA key transport cipher suites from the protocol.

Decades-old RSA-based handshakes don’t cut it anymore, according to experts, who are anxious to put a modern protocol in place, one that can fend off an intense commitment from cybercriminals and intelligence agencies to snoop and steal data. The consensus is to support Diffie-Hellman Exchange or Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Exchange, both of which support perfect forward secrecy, which experts are urging developers and standards-bearers to instill as a default encryption technology in new applications and build-outs.

Submission + - Crashed drone rescue, Grand Canyon (suasnews.com)

Submitted by garymortimer
garymortimer writes: In my opinion Christopher should have fessed up to his actions with the park authorities and they might have sent somebody roped up and suitably equipped to recover the Phantom from the tree.

It’s a great video, well made and interesting. Christopher, it’s not worth endangering the lives of others that might be involved in the recovery of an injured person in a compromised position or worse still a body.

Be careful out there people, your systems are just stuff. If you look through the video comments another YouTube user had the same experience at the Grand Canyon and his Phantom was stolen before he could get it recovered by a climber. Perhaps DJI should extend their no fly zones to include national parks.

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