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Submission + - USCRN shows U.S. temperatures have declined for 10 years (dailycaller.com)

Submitted by davidph on Monday June 15, 2015 @02:08PM

davidph writes: Recent research published by NOAA's National Climate Data Center purports to show that world temperatures have continued to rise over the last two decades, at least if you accept their data data manipulation. But not all climate scientists approve of the adjustments to the raw data. For instance, Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry says the National Climate Data Center paper is "politically useful for the Obama administration" but not a "useful contribution to our scientific understanding."

Now we have ten years of data from the U.S. Surface Climate Observing Reference Network, state-of-the-art weather stations "designed with climate science in mind." The high quality data from the USCRN show rather that instead of rising temperatures have actually declined slightly in the last ten years.

Submission + - If Apple Music's free trial is worth $4.4bn, why aren't indies being paid? (musicbusinessworldwide.com)

Submitted by journovampire on Monday June 15, 2015 @10:39AM

journovampire writes: Apple Music's free trial is worth a whopping US $4.4bn in customer acquisition costs (CAC) to Apple — but independent labels won't see any royalties.

Submission + - Russia and China crack encrypted Snowden files. Britain responds

Submitted by garyisabusyguy on Saturday June 13, 2015 @09:53PM

garyisabusyguy writes: According to Sunday Times:
RUSSIA and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.u...

And this non-paywalled Reuters version:
http://www.reuters.com/article...

MI6 has decided that it is too dangerous to operate in Russia or China. This removes intelligence capabilities that have existed throughout the Cold War, and which may have helped to prevent a 'hot' nuclear war.

Have the actions of Snowden, and, apparently, the use of weak encryption, made the world less safe?

Submission + - Hacking of Federal Security Forms Much Worse Than Originally Thought

Submitted by HughPickens.com on Saturday June 13, 2015 @08:02PM

HughPickens.com writes: Adam Chandler writes in The Atlantic that last week it was revealed that all of the data on Standard Form 86— filled out by millions of current and former military and intelligence workers— is now believed to be in the hands of Chinese hackers. Form 86 requires that an applicant disclose everything from mental illnesses, financial interests, and bankruptcy issues to any brush with the law and major or minor drug and alcohol use. The application also requires a thorough listing of an applicant’s family members, associates, or former roommates so hackers may have troves of personal data about Americans with highly sensitive jobs, but also the contacts or family members of American intelligence employees living abroad who could potentially be targeted for coercion. At its worst, this cyberbreach also provides a basic roster of every American with a security clearance. "That makes it very hard for any of those people to function as an intelligence officer,” says Joel Brenner. “The database also tells the Chinese an enormous amount of information about almost everyone with a security clearance. That's a gold mine. It helps you approach and recruit spies."

Meanwhile the number of current and former federal employees compromised has ballooned from 4 million to as many as 14 million. The scope of the breach is remarkable, experts say, because the personnel office apparently learned little from earlier government data breaches like the WikiLeaks case and the surveillance revelations by Edward J. Snowden, both of which involved unencrypted data. “This is potentially devastating from a counterintelligence point of view,” concludes Brenner.

Submission + - Tech Jobs and Apple: Every Bit as "Fun" as Pleasure Island?

Submitted by theodp on Saturday June 13, 2015 @10:34AM

theodp writes: On the eve of Apple's big Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the lack of diversity in tech is 'our fault' — 'our' meaning the whole tech community. "I think in general we haven't done enough to reach out and show young women that it's cool to do it [tech] and how much fun it can be," Cook explained. Indeed, the WWDC scholarship winners shooting selfies with Cook at the San Francisco Four Seasons to celebrate their iPhone apps and other WWDC attendees looked to be having as much fun as, well, Pinocchio at Pleasure Island. But, as the NY Times recently pointed out, Cook can be guilty of overlooking inconvenient truths. Which here is that most young women (and men) wouldn't find it 'cool' or 'fun' to live with 8,000 co-workers in factory dormitories where they can be roused out of bed in the middle of the night by Apple for an emergency 12-hour shift to fit glass screens into beveled iPhone frames, although that too conjures up a scene from Pleasure Island.

Submission + - SF86 Data Captured in OPM Hack

Submitted by Etherwalk on Friday June 12, 2015 @05:50PM

Etherwalk writes: The Security Clearance Process in the United States includes filling out the 127-page SF86 form, which includes things like the citizenships of all your relatives and housemates, foreign contacts and financial interests, foreign travel, psychological and emotional health, illegal drug use, and many other matters. The recent breach by the Chinese Government apparently included that information for all executive employees up to cabinet level. It's pretty much a gold mine for intelligence work and social engineering of any kind.

Submission + - LibreSSL 2.2.0 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12, 2015 @05:47PM

An anonymous reader writes: After another 3 months of work a new version of LibreSSL (2.2.0) has been released.

This will likely be the last 2.2.x release with support for SSLv3, as it will be removed entirely from the main LibreSSL tree.

Release Notes.

Submission + - Microsoft's Skype Drops Modern App In Favour Of Old Fashioned Win32 App (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Friday June 12, 2015 @11:15AM

mikejuk writes: Microsoft, after putting a lot of effort into persuading us that Universal Apps are the way of the future pulls the plug on Skype modern app to leave just the desktop version. The split in Windows apps created by the launch of Windows 8 still persists today and Microsoft is currently trying to fix this huge blunder by creating a true Windows 10 Universal App that can run on desktop, phone and mobile.Microsoft's argument is that any WinRT apps that you have or old style Windows 8 Universal apps can easily be converted to a Windows 10 Universal app with a single code base for all platforms.
Skype is one of Microsoft's flagship products and it has been available as a desktop Win32 app and as a Modern/Metro/WinRT app for some time. You would think that Skype would support Universal Apps, there are few enough of them — but no. According to the Skype blog:
"Starting on July 7, we’re updating PC users of the Windows modern application to the Windows desktop application, and retiring the modern application."
Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 Universal Apps as the development platform for now and the future but its Skype team have just disagreed big time. What ever this is not a good example of dog fooding and puts in doubt any decision programmer might have made about being an early adopter of Windows 10 Universal Apps — if Microsoft can't get behind the plan why should developers?

Submission + - Droning for sharks

Submitted by FreedomFirstThenPeac on Friday June 12, 2015 @10:58AM

FreedomFirstThenPeac writes: Apparently Orange County (specifically, Seal Beach area) has found that drones are useful for finding hazards at the beach, the story has a nice drone-shot overhead of a small shark (scale is hard to tell). They also report that it is easy to spot rip tides. The question of the day, how long till someone links imaging processing software with the guidance system so they can get the drones to hover over, and follow along, as sharks patrol off shore? Just another day at the beach, see the shoal of nerds schooling along with their drone controls? They are the ones who are missing all the swimsuit-enhanced normals in the area.

Submission + - Turning a Nail Polish Disaster into a Teachable Math Moment

Submitted by theodp on Thursday June 11, 2015 @11:13PM

theodp writes: In The Spiral of Splatter, SAS's Rick Wicklin writes that his daughter's nail polish spill may have created quite a mess, but at least it presented a teachable math moment: "Daddy, help! Help me! Come quick!" I heard my daughter's screams from the upstairs bathroom and bounded up the stairs two at a time. Was she hurt? Bleeding? Was the toilet overflowing? When I arrived in the doorway, she pointed at the wall and at the floor. The wall was splattered with black nail polish. On the floor laid a broken bottle in an expanding pool of black ooze. "It slipped," she sobbed. As a parent, I know that there are times when I should not raise my voice. I knew intellectually that this was one of those times. But staring at that wall, seeing what I was seeing, I could not prevent myself from yelling. "Oh my goodness!" I exclaimed. "Is that a logarithmic spiral?" So, got any memorable teachable math moments you've experienced either as a kid or adult? Yes, Cheerios Math counts!

Submission + - German doctors refused to warn of dangerous pilot because of secrecy laws (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423 on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:40PM

Bruce66423 writes: Doctors treating the German pilot who dove a airliner into a mountain are reported to be saying that they were concerned at his mental state but were constrained from passing this information on to his employers because of German patient confidentiality laws

Submission + - 3D Printed Steel Pedestrian Bridge Will Soon Span an Amsterdam Canal (3dprint.com)

Submitted by ErnieKey on Thursday June 11, 2015 @01:27PM

ErnieKey writes: Amsterdam is famed as the "Venice of the North," with close to 1,300 bridges in use. The next bridge to be built over one of the city's canals will be easily its highest-tech, as it will be constructed via 3D printing technology from MX3D. The steel pedestrian bridge, brought about by a collaboration between MX3D, Heijmans, Joris Laarman Lab, and several sponsors and supporters, will be built using 6-axis industrial robots that will begin construction on either bank and build in toward one another.

Submission + - Insect eyes inspire robot vision (thestack.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11, 2015 @07:20AM

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of Adelaide are developing a visual system for robots inspired by the way insects see and track their prey. The project, led by mechanical engineering PhD student Zahra Bagheri, combines years of research into insect vision and builds on expertise across neuroscience, engineering and computer science. Published yesterday in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, the study explains how findings from research into both human and insect vision could be applied to create a virtual reality simulation, allowing an artificial intelligence (AI) system to track and follow a target. The students have developed a unique algorithm which is able to “lock on to the background” and allows the target to move against it, reducing distractions and giving time for the underlying “brain-like motion processing” to work. The team is currently looking at integrating the algorithm into a bio-inspired, autonomous robot system.

Submission + - CockroachDB Aims To Survive (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Thursday June 11, 2015 @07:16AM

mikejuk writes: A new database designed to scale, survive disasters, be always consistent, and support abstractions has been released by ex-Google developers. CockroachDB has been named in honor of the sheer resilience of its insect namesake.
The claims made for CockroachDB are certainly impressive enough. It can, according to the developers, transparently manage scale with an upgrade path from a single node to hundreds. You can add capacity to the cluster by starting new storage containers and CockroachDB automatically rebalances existing data. If you kill a container, CockroachDB re-replicates its data from available sources. It self-organizes, self-heals, and automatically rebalances.
The software is open source, and you can find it, and join in as a contributor, on Github. The claims for the database are impressive, it’ll be interesting to see whether it lives up to the promises and how it evolves.
If only cockroaches weren't so icky.

Submission + - Uber's Rise in China May Be Counterfeit (qz.com)

Submitted by retroworks on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @08:31PM

retroworks writes: Josh Horwitz' story in Quartz today reports both the apparent rapid success of Uber adaptation in China, and a queasy footnote for shareholders applauding the rapid growth. While China is a natural ride-sharing haven, it also has a tradition of gaming the western system.

"Accomplices can sit in their apartments, disable location settings, and specify a pickup not far from the actual location of driver’s vehicle, the report said. The driver then accepts the hail, and goes on a trip without a passenger. After the accomplice approves payment, the driver will – hopefully – pay back the fee and share a cut of the bonus. It’s not the most clever get-rich scheme on the planet. But for drivers, it’s better than waiting for a hail in a parking lot."

Uber's spokeswoman told the Quartz writer that the company has an on-the-ground team who investigate into these various type of fraud, then uses "deep analytics, and new tools developed by our Chinese engineers in our dedicated fraud team to combat against such fraud.” The Uber spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the nature of these tools.

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