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Submission + - SpaceX Is Officially Building Elon Musk's Hyperloop

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: SpaceX is building a hyperloop, Elon Musk's fantastical, futuristic transport tube capable of moving people and freight at speeds of 760 miles per hour.
The company is building a one- to three-mile-long hyperloop test track outside its Hawthorne, California headquarters with plans to test the technology within a year. It's the first time that Musk, who conceived of the hyperloop, has been involved with any concrete plans to actually build it.

Submission + - Cuba's Answer to the Internet Fits in Your Pocket and Moves by Bus

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Susan Crawford reports on "El Paquete" (the package), Cuba's answer to the internet, an informal but extraordinarily lucrative distribution chain where anyone in Cuba who can pay can watch telenovelas, first-run Hollywood movies, brand-new episodes of Game of Thrones, and even search for a romantic partner. The so-called "weekly package," which is normally distributed from house to house contains the latest foreign films a week, shows, TV series, documentaries, games, information, music, and more. The thumb drives make their way across the island from hand to hand, by bus, and by 1957 Chevy, their contents copied and the drive handed on. "El Paquete plays to Cuban strengths and needs," writes Crawford because Cubans are great at sharing. "And being paid to be part of the thumb-drive supply chain is a respectable job in an economy that is desperately short on employment opportunities." Sunday the "weekly package" of 1 terabyte is priced at $ 10, then $2 on Monday or Tuesday and $1 for the rest of the week.

The sneakernet is still in use today in other parts of the world including Bhutan where a sneakernet distributes offline educational resources, including Kiwix and Khan Academy on a Stick to hundreds of schools and other educational institutions. Google once used a sneaknet to transport 120 TB of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway".

Submission + - Philae's lost seven months were completely unnecessary

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, the Philae lander reawakened after seven dormant months, the best outcome that mission scientists could've hoped for with the way the mission unfolded. But the first probe to softly land on a comet ever would never have needed to hibernate at all if we had simply built it with the nuclear power capabilities it should've had. The seven months of lost data were completely unnecessary, and resulted solely from the world's nuclear fears.

Submission + - YouTube Launching Gaming Hub This Summer to take down Twitch (mainbored.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a statement released Friday, Google-owned YouTube announced it has plans to launch a gaming hub this summer so users can follow their favorite games as well as stream their own virtual content.

Submission + - Trade Bill Fails in the House (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: President Obama suffered a major defeat to his Pacific Rim free trade initiative Friday as House Democrats helped derail a key presidential priority despite his last-minute, personal plea on Capitol Hill.

The House voted 302 to 126 to sink a measure to grant financial aid to displaced workers, fracturing hopes at the White House that Congress would grant Obama fast-track trade authority to complete an accord with 11 other Pacific Rim nations.

This was after silicon valley heavyweights made a last minute push to pass the bill and the white house got personal with many Democratic lawmakers.

Submission + - US Teen Pleads Guilty To Teaching ISIS About Bitcoin Via Twitter

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Ali Shukri Amin, a 17-year-old from Virginia, has pled guilty to charges that he aided ISIS by giving the group advice about using bitcoin. An odd and potentially troubling aspect of the charges is that this all took place in public — he Tweeted out links to an article on his blog about bitcoin and Darknet could help jihadi groups, making it difficult to say whether he was publishing information protected under free speech or was directly advising the terrorist organization.

Submission + - Missing files cause A400M deadly crash. (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Think you had a bad day when your software drivers go missing? Rejoice, you get to live!
A fatal A400M crash was linked to data-wipe mistake during an engine software update. A military plane crash in Spain was probably caused by computer files being accidentally wiped from three of its engines, according to investigators. Plane-maker Airbus discovered anomalies in the A400M's data logs after the crash, suggesting a software fault.And it has now emerged that Spanish investigators suspect files needed to interpret its engine readings had been deleted by mistake.This would have caused the affected propellers to spin too slowly causing loss of power and eventually, a crash.

Submission + - PHP at 20: From Pet Project to Powerhouse

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Ben Ramsey provides a look at the rise of PHP, the one-time ‘silly little project’ that has transformed into a Web powerhouse, thanks to flexibility, pragmatism, and a vibrant community of Web devs. 'Those early days speak volumes about PHP’s impact on Web development. Back then, our options were limited when it came to server-side processing for Web apps. PHP stepped in to fill our need for a tool that would enable us to do dynamic things on the Web. That practical flexibility captured our imaginations, and PHP has since grown up with the Web. Now powering more than 80 percent of the Web, PHP has matured into a scripting language that is especially suited to solve the Web problem. Its unique pedigree tells a story of pragmatism over theory and problem solving over purity.'

Submission + - Solar Power Capacity Installs Surpass Wind and Coal for Second Year 1

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Residential rooftop solar installations hit a historical high in the first quarter of 2015, garnering an 11% increase over the previous quarter and a 76% increase over the Q1, 2014. New installations of solar power capacity surpassed those of wind and coal for the second year in a row, accounting for 32% of all new electrical capacity, according to a new report by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Residential solar installation costs dropped to $3.46 per watt of installed capacity this quarter, which represents a 2.2% reduction over last quarter and a 10% reduction over the first quarter of 2014.

Submission + - Nuclear blasts shed light on how animals recover from annihilation (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, France detonated four nuclear bombs on the Fangataufa atoll—a ring-shaped island of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The detonations—the largest, a hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki—destroyed just about all life in the region, setting up an “unthinkable” ecological experiment: If life had to start fresh, would it develop the same way again? A new study of the aftermath of the blasts suggests it would not.

Submission + - Bug Bounties in the Crosshairs of Wassenaar Rules

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Bug bounties have gone from novelty to necessity, not only for enterprises looking to take advantage of the skills of an organized pool of vulnerability hunters, but also for a slew of independent researchers who make a living contributing to various vendor and independent bounty and reward programs.

The proposed U.S. rules for the Wassenaar Arrangement pose a real challenge for all sides of that equation.

Under the rules, researchers who find a zero-day vulnerability and develop a PoC exploit triggering the issue, would have to apply for an export license in order to privately disclose their findings with the vendor in question. As a result, there will be occasions when a foreign researcher, for example, would have to share details on a zero-day with their government before the vendor in question.

“There are lots of concerns from researchers if this gets implemented,” said Kymberlee Price, senior director of operations at Bugcrowd, a private company that provides a platform for organizations wishing to start bug bounty programs. “Is it worth the effort to continue to report vulnerabilities if you have to go through a government and are likely to have to disclose details on that vulnerability? Do we want foreign governments knowing about it before it’s reported directly to the vendor so it can be patched?”

Submission + - Fracking Safe, Says EPA

Submitted by sycodon
sycodon writes: A long-awaited EPA report on hydraulic fracturing concludes that the extraction process has “not led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”

Submission + - Supreme Court may decide the fate of API's, Klingonese, Dothraki... (slate.com)

Submitted by nerdpocalypse
nerdpocalypse writes: In a larger battle than even Godzilla V Mothra, Google V Oracle threatens not only Japan but the entire Nerd World. What is at stake is how a language can be patented. This affects not just programming languages, API's, and everything that runs..well...everything, but also the copyright status of new languages such as Klingon and Dothraki

Submission + - You thought NSA bulk data collection was dead?

Submitted by fustakrakich
fustakrakich writes: Guess again!
US officials confirmed to the Guardian that in the coming days they will ask a secret surveillance court to revive the program – deemed illegal by a federal appeals court – all in the name of “transitioning” the domestic surveillance effort to the telephone companies that generate the so-called “call detail records” the government seeks to access. The unconventional and unexpected legal circumstance depends on a section of the USA Freedom Act, which Obama signed into law on Tuesday, that provides a six-month grace period to prepare the surveillance and legal bureaucracies for a world in which the National Security Agency is no longer the repository of bulk US phone metadata. During that time, the act’s ban on bulk collection will not yet take effect.

Submission + - Bing sponsored results spoof Google URLs, taking users to adware sites (expertreviews.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Searching for Google Chrome on the UK version of Bing, we were hit with large ad box. While the top two hits were clearly for dubious download sites, it's the third link that made us pause: it showed a link that appeared to be from Google.com and listed the link as www.Google.com/Chrome.

Although the site looks legitimate, the URL is actually spoofed and clicking it leads to a completely different site (csoftonline.com). This is incredibly misleading and, while the main Bing search engine shows legitimate results, the differences between the sponsored and organic search listings won't be obvious to everyone. This means that people could end up on this site by mistake.

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