60626667
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If you still buy DVDs, you're killing the environment. Maybe that's a little extreme, but the environmental benefits of streaming a movie (or downloading it) rather than purchasing a DVD are staggering, according to a new US government study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households. It would have cut roughly 2 billion kilograms of carbon emissions. According to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters , even when you take into account cloud storage, data servers, the streaming device, streaming uses much less energy than purchasing a DVD.
If, like me, you're thinking, "who buys DVDs anymore, anyways," the answer is "a lot of people."
60588547
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The Edward Snowden saga is coming to a close. As a final act, Glenn Greenwald, who's been working closely with the whistleblower to publish leaked information about the National Security Agency, has said he will reveal a list of Americans that have been targeted by the NSA. And tonight, Snowden will be giving his first American television interview to NBC. It’s been a dizzying year of revelations about US government spying. Programs like PRISM—the ones capable of mass surveillance—have received the most media attention, and in some cases even become household names. But there are other things exposed in the string of leaks that have received relatively little media attention, despite presenting serious threats to privacy, freedom of speech, and the way we use the web. Here's a look back at some of those forgotten discoveries.
60544285
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Daniel_Stuckey writes:
This morning, at the US district court of New York's Southern District, Judge Loretta Preska handed down a sentence to Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka "Sabu"—time served followed by one year supervised release. Monsegur's lenient sentencing took place in the same ceremonial courtroom where outlaw-hacktivist Jeremy Hammond—who committed cybercrimes unwittingly with the aid of Monsegur, an Anonymous hacker turned FBI informant—received his 10-year prison sentence last November. Monsegur entered the room to find a sparse crowd of journalists, three members of his family, and a couple dozen others awaiting the hearing, and 40 minutes later walked free. Citing a sentencing submission filed by the government on Friday afternoon, Monsegur's attorneys agreed with the motion to side-step his recommended sentencing of 259 to 317 months of jail time due to the ex-LulzSec leader's "extraordinary" help to the feds. Since his arrest in 2011, the former hacker he helped the FBI bust some 300 potential cyberattacks.
60371321
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Pot and video games have long been bound together in hazy, wedded bliss—as well as in compulsion and codependency. Many a World of Warcraft binger has been found in the darkest hours of the night with clouds of sweet, milk-white smoke curling around him, a bong next to the keyboard. But the way these lovers, games and weed, commingle has only rarely been studied, and when done so, usually exclusively in the context of substance abuse and how it relates to what is known as PVP: “problem video game playing.”
60320767
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
It’s no secret that the federal government is having a hard time hiring cybersecurity experts, largely because many hackers can find more lucrative deals that don't involve working for the feds. But there's another wrinkle: the FBI now says that its drug-testing policies are keeping experts off the payroll. According to the Wall Street Journal , FBI Director James Comey said that the in order to pursue so-called cyber criminals, the government would pretty much have to let government hackers get stoned—because who's going to quit the habit just to work for the FBI? “I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey said, clearly not pandering to stereotypes.
60320593
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The notorious troll and hacker known as Andrew “weev” Auernheimer spent 13 months in jail for exposing an AT&T security flaw. He was recently released when a federal court overturned the conviction on grounds of improper venue. Now, Auernheimer has penned an open letter to the Department of Justice in which he demands reparations for acts of “fraud” and “violence” carried out against him over the past three years. Those reparations must be paid in bitcoin (BTC), he says—28,296, to be exact. At current market value, that comes out to $13.7 million. The bombastic letter is titled “Open letter to federal scum,” and was allegedly bcc’d to “a few hundred journalists” (including Motherboard). In it, 28-year-old Auernheimer writes that he calculated the sum owed to him based on his market value:
60249299
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
If the sum of all the protests in Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup consists of one man taking off his shirt and throwing his shoes, the shock troops of Rio de Janeiro’s military police have got it covered. In a demonstration to journalists of the skills the battalion had picked up from an FBI-led training course, 19 police officers, each dressed like emo Ninja Turtles, clasping Perspex shields and rubber batons, successfully apprehended the semi-naked shoe-thrower. The improbable scenario was not lost on the police’s spokesman, Commander André Luiz Araújo Vidal. “Unfortunately, what you saw today was just a small part of our training,” he said afterwards. “Most of our troops are busy preparing for a demonstration later today.”
60249239
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Over the last five years, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has found dozens of potentially habitable planets. The only problem is that we can’t actually see them, because the glare from those planets’ stars makes it impossible to image them directly. A new, audacious plan to completely block out the light from those stars, however, could change all of that. The plan calls for a satellite to be sent out several tens of thousands of miles from Earth. The satellite will unfold a huge, flower-shaped metal shade that will literally block the light of some far-out star to the point where a space telescope, which will directly communicate with Starshade, will be able to image whatever planets are orbiting it directly. It’s called Starshade, and, given the name, it works exactly how you might expect it to. If you look directly at the sun, you're not going to be able to see anything in the sky around it. Hold up something between your eyes and the sun to block it, however, and you'll be able to see much better.
60136613
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Collecting user data to serve up targeted ads is Google's bread and butter, and yet the company refuses to speak publicly about how its infamous augmented eyewear could kick that business model into high gear. Still, the tightlippedness hasn't done anything to stem the speculation that Google Glass will usher in a new era of advertising. One tech startup exploring that nascent industry is Personal Neuro, which has developed a brain-scanning electroencephalography (EEG) gadget, similar to the Emotiv EEG headset, which collects the wearer’s brainwave data, analyzes it, and leverages the neural insights to create various apps. By reading and interpreting brain signals, it can determine a consumer’s mood, emotions, and taste. Now, combine that data with data from Glass features like geolocation or eye-tracking, and you’ve got a trove of information that could be used to deliver hyper-personalized ads to someone wearing the augmented device.
60136513
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A homemade Lithuanian drone was reportedly being used to smuggle cigarettes into Russia, meaning that organized crime has beaten Amazon to the punch in the quest to deliver desirable products to customers aerially. Russia has “detained” the drone, Oleg Dzhurayev, a spokesman with the Kaliningrad border department of the Russian Federal Security service, told one of Russia's largest news organizations, ITAR-TASS, earlier this week. It’s not the first time drones have been used to smuggle products—back in November, people tried to smuggle drugs into a prison in Georgia; the same thing happened in Sao Paolo back in March and in Quebec last fall. Basically, people have learned that drones are good at carrying things (I, for one, am pretty into this miniature single cigarette pack-carrying drone you see in the video above—it’s pretty cute).
60053565
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
We’ve slowly begun to see a rise in the number of internet-connected things—watches, thermostats, glasses, and even plants—but we’re still in the infancy of what’s likely to become a worldwide trend, according to more than 1,600 experts polled by the Pew Research Center. “In 2008, the number of internet-connected devices first outnumbered the human population, and they have been growing far faster than we have,” Patrick Tucker, author of The Naked Future: What Happens In a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? , told Pew. “There will be 50 billion in 2020. These will include phones, chips, sensors, implants, and devices of which we have not yet conceived.” The internet will become so common, the report suggests, that it will become “like electricity”—it’ll be everywhere, but you won’t really think about it. It's not the first time seemingly-insane numbers have been thrown out. Some want there to be as many as a "trillion sensors" on the same time scale.
60011915
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The UK’s High Court ruled yesterday that HM Revenue and Customs acted “unlawfully” when it declined to detail how it was investigating the export of digital spy tools created by a British company. Human rights group Privacy International is celebrating the decision of Mr. Justice Green, which means HMRC now has to reconsider releasing information on its investigation into controls surrounding the export of malware known as FinFisher, created by British supplier Gamma International. The widespread FinFisher malware family, also known as FinSpy, can carry out a range of surveillance operations, from snooping on Skype and Facebook conversations to siphoning off emails or files sitting on a device. It is supposed to benefit law enforcement in their investigations, but has allegedly been found in various nations with poor human rights records, including Bahrain and Ethiopia.
59973029
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Earlier this year, in the black heart of the City of London, Europe’s financial capital, I talked to a group of penetration testers (ethical hackers who poke holes in their customers’ systems to figure out where they are weakest), who agreed to create some new honeypots and demonstrate their use for me. I wanted to understand more about how honeypots were built, and whether we could glean any patterns if we added fresh traps in new locations.
Honeypots are normally created on virtual private servers—rentable places to host things on the internet. Once you’ve bought your plot of land for a couple of quid, you download honeypot software; in our case, we used programs known as Dionaea and Kippo. This process is essentially like installing a new operating system onto a dumb machine, and creates what appears to hackers to be a genuinely vulnerable server. In reality, none of the features of the systems work, but they look real enough.
59972845
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Twenty days into a 30-day mission, seven hours into a nine-hour deep dive, scientists aboard the Thomas G. Thompson research ship the lost contact with their remotely operated robotic submarine.
The unmanned vehicle, Nereus, was exploring the Karmadec Trench northeast of New Zealand, going as deep as 11,000 meters—almost seven miles below the surface. After emergency recovery protocols failed to bring Nereus back, the scientists began searching near the dive site. From the Thompson, the scientists spotted debris floating on the surface. It was from Nereus. At 2PM Saturday, the robo-sub was confirmed as lost.
59796383
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a major update to its mobile app, Google Maps will now integrate Uber's on-demand car service. That means when you're looking up the route from point A to B in certain cities, the app will show you the best way to drive, bike, walk, or Uber there. Choose option four, and a single tap launches your Uber app and hails you a black car. That's an entire fourth mode of transport there folks, which speaks to what the Silicon Valley darlings may have in mind for the future—aside from being a smart and obvious PR move. Google Ventures is a major investor in Uber, so it's in the both companies' best interest to promote the app. It'll be interesting to see if the maps integration is a sweetheart deal for Uber, or if Google incorporates its competitor apps too: Lyft, Sidecar, and Hailo. The venture firm poured $258 million into the startup last summer, propelling the company to its $3.5 billion valuation. That's Google's largest deal ever, sparking a swirl of speculation about Google's future intentions with the transportation startup.
