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Submission + - Why there is so little breathable oxygen in space (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: You breathe it every minute, but there's hardly any molecular oxygen—otherwise known as O2—in space. In 1998, NASA even launched a satellite that was supposed to find lots of molecular oxygen but never did—except when scientists, worried that the instrument was faulty, aimed it at Earth. Now, a ground-based experiment has revealed why this life-giving molecule is so rare in the cosmos: because oxygen atoms cling tightly to stardust, preventing them from joining together to form oxygen molecules. The discovery should yield insight into the chemical conditions that prevail when stars and planets arise.
Space

SpaceX Testing Passenger Escape System Tomorrow 55

Posted by Soulskill from the coming-home-safely dept.
An anonymous reader writes: On Wednesday, SpaceX will be performing the first test of a prototype for its passenger capsule escape system. Most rockets have a launch abort system that will save the lives of its crew within the first few minutes of launch, but not beyond a relatively low altitude. SpaceX is designing the new system to be able to return astronauts safely whether they're close to the ground or near orbit.

The Dragon capsule will fire eight SuperDraco thrusters, capable of producing 120,000 lbs of axial thrust between them in under a second. With that amount of thrust, the capsule can get half a kilometer away from a failing rocket in under 5 seconds. SpaceX will have 270 sensors aboard the prototype, including a crash test dummy. The main mission goals include: determining the best sequencing for the launch abort timeline, getting all eight thrusters to fire in unison, and seeing how an aborted launch affects both the inside of the capsule and the area around it. The test is planned to start at 7 a.m. EDT (11:00 UTC), but they have a 7.5-hour window if there are minor delays.
Cellphones

Police Can Obtain Cellphone Location Records Without a Warrant 216

Posted by Soulskill from the your-data-is-our-data dept.
mi writes: A new ruling from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals found by a margin of 9-2 that law enforcement does not need to get a warrant to grab your cell phone's location records. The justices ruled that there is no expectation of privacy for your location when you're using a cell phone. This decision (PDF) was based on a case in which a man was convicted of robbery after months of location data was given to authorities by his cell phone carrier, MetroPCS. Police got the information using a court order, rather than a warrant, because there were less stringent requirements involved. One of the judges wrote: "We find no reason to conclude that cellphone users lack facts about the functions of cell towers or about telephone providers' recording cell tower usage."
Businesses

Report: Microsoft Considering Salesforce Acquisition 58

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is considering making a bid for CRM and cloud software company Salesforce, after hearing that Salesforce was entertaining an offer from another company. No talks are underway, but Salesforce has started working with investment banks to figure out how it wants to respond to such offers. Salesforce has a market value of about $50 billion, so any sort of acquisition would be a huge business deal.
Intel

Video Mark and Joel Make Autonomous Drones in Their Spare Time (Video) 17

Posted by Roblimo from the when-a-drone-hits-your-eye-like-a-big-pizza-pie-that's-a-lawsuit dept.
Mark F. Brown and Joel Rozenweig build autonomous drones; that is, drones that don't need an operator every second. You tell the autonomous drone, "Pick up package # 941A at the loading dock and deliver it to 451 Bradbury St.' and off it goes. It's going to be a while yet before that happens, but one day....

Back in the present, dronemaking is still a hobby for Mark and Joel, something they do for fun after spending their workdays as software engineers at Intel. Joel says there is 'remarkably little' crossover between their jobs and their hobby, and that (so far) Intel has contributed little beyond some Edison modules (which you can buy for less than $50) and travel to the Embedded Linux Conference, where they gave a talk accompanied by these slides. NOTE: We have a little bonus for you today. We try to keep videos to 10 minutes or less, but we have no such constraints on transcript length. So if you want the 'full' version of this interview, please read the transcript.

Submission + - Cyberlock lawyers threaten security researcher over vulnerability disclosure

Submitted by qubezz
qubezz writes: Security researcher Phar (Mike Davis/IOActive) gave his 30 days of disclosure notice to Cyberlock (apparently a company that makes electronic lock cylinders) that he would release a public advisory on vulnerabilities he found with the company's security devices. On day 29, their lawyers responded with a request to refrain, feigning ignorance of the previous notice, and invoking mention of the DMCA (this is not actually a DMCA takedown notice, as the law firm is attempting to suppress initial disclosure through legal wrangling). Mike's blog states:


The previous DMCA threats are from a company called Cyberlock, I had planned to do a fun little blog post (cause i .. hate blog posts) on the fun of how I obtained one, extracted the firmware bypassing the code protection and figured out its "encryption" and did various other fun things a lock shouldn't do for what its marketed as.. But before I could write that post I needed to let them know what issues we have deemed weaknesses in their gear.. the below axe grinderery is the results.

What should researchers do when companies make baseless legal threats to maintain their security-through-obscurity?

Submission + - The World's Most Wasteful Megacity

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: The world’s most wasteful megacity is a densely populated, steadily aging, consumerist utopia where we buy, and throw away, a staggering amount of stuff. Where some faucet, toilet, or pipe, is constantly leaking in our apartments. Where an armada of commerce-beckoning lights are always on. Where a fleet of gas-guzzling cars still clog the roadways. I, along with my twenty million or so neighbors, help New York City use more energy, suck down more water, and spew out more solid waste than any other mega-metropolitan area.

Submission + - Visualizations of Rebel Alliances in the UK Government (blogspot.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I just published this article and thought it might be of interest to Slashdot readers.

It's about a collection visualizations I created based on public voting data from The Public Whip project, which collects and normalizes voting data from the UK House of Commons. The visualizations show relationships between MPs, with a focus on agreement rates, and more interestingly — rebellion.

Submission + - Google Can't Ignore The Android Update Problem Any Longer (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An editorial at Tom's Hardware makes the case that Google's Android fragmentation problem has gotten too big to ignore any longer. Android 5.0 Lollipop and its successor 5.1 have seen very low adoption rates — 9.0% and 0.7% respectively. Almost 40% of users are still on KitKat. 6% lag far behind on Gingerbread and Froyo. The article points out that even Microsoft is now making efforts to both streamline Windows upgrades and adapt Android (and iOS) apps to run on Windows. If Google doesn't adapt, "it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner. And if users want those platforms, OEMs will have no choice but to switch to them too, leaving Google with less and less Android adoption." The author also says OEMs and carriers can no longer be trusted to handle operating system updates, because they've proven themselves quite incapable of doing so in a reasonable manner.

Submission + - French parliament approves new surveillance rules (bbc.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The French parliament has approved a controversial law strengthening the intelligence services, with the aim of preventing Islamist attacks.
The law on intelligence-gathering, adopted by 438 votes to 86, was drafted after three days of attacks in Paris in January, in which 17 people died.
The Socialist government says the law is needed to take account of changes in communications technology.
But critics say it is a dangerous extension of mass surveillance.
They argue that it gives too much power to the state and threatens the independence of the digital economy.

Main provisions of the new law:

Define the purposes for which secret intelligence-gathering may be used

Set up a supervisory body, the National Commission for Control of Intelligence Techniques (CNCTR), with wider rules of operation

Authorise new methods, such as the bulk collection of metadata via internet providers

Submission + - But can the IAEA verify the Iran deal? (thebulletin.org) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards analyst Alissa Carrigan looks at an important question that needs an answer: Given the staffing requirements of the verification framework outlined in the Iran deal, can the IAEA actually carry out sufficient verification in Iran? Carrigan breaks down what is required for the IAEA to do its job, and compares the work that will be required in Iran to what the agency did in South Africa and Iraq. Great stuff.

Submission + - AirMap: App Helps Drone Flyers Navigate Airspace Restrictions (xconomy.com)

Submitted by Xconomy'sBT
Xconomy'sBT writes: What’s the difference between driving a remote-controlled toy Lamborghini on your driveway and flying a hobby drone to take roof-level aerial videos of your family barbeque? Flying the drone could draw punishment from the Federal Aviation Administration---a potential $10,000 fine for violating national airspace system restrictions. A California company has created a digital map, AirMap, to help recreational drone users navigate within the complex layers of restricted zones around airports, parks, wildlife refuges, and institutions, as well as temporary flight restrictions due to events like the President’s speaking tours.
Few consumers know they’re required to notify airport officials in advance of any plan to fly a drone within a five-mile radius of an airport, says air rights legal expert Gregory McNeal, co-founder of AirMap with aviation entrepreneur and flight instructor Ben Marcus.

From the story at online tech news organization Xconomy:
While the Federal Aviation Administration publishes aeronautical charts of the national airspace system up to 60,000 feet, that’s too much information for a recreational drone user to interpret, McNeal says. AirMap strips away the top layers—where passenger jets fly, for example—to show only the flight restrictions from the ground level up to 500 feet—the region where drones actually operate.
AirMap also gives street-level detail of the boundaries of restricted zones, unlike the scale of FAA charts designed to help aircraft pilots navigate around whole cities, McNeal says. Drone operators need that higher resolution to find out exactly which fields, or specific blocks on a street, are outside the five-mile radius around an airport, for example. The invisible boundary line might fall right through the middle of an intersection or a local park, McNeal says. Commercial drone operators often need the same kind of street-level information. For example, realtors use drones to capture images of individual houses for sale.

Submission + - Why Was Linux The Kernel That Succeeded? (thevarguy.com) 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: One of the most puzzling questions about the history of free and open source software is this: Why did Linux succeed so spectacularly, whereas similar attempts to build a free or open source, Unix-like operating system kernel met with considerably less success? Christopher Tozzi has rounded up some theories, focusing specifically on kernels, not complete operating systems. These theories take a detailed look at the decentralized development structure, pragmatic approach to things, and the rich developer community, all of which worked in favor of Linux.
Space

Extreme Exoplanet Volcanism Possibly Detected On 55 Cancri E 40

Posted by Soulskill from the fun-place-to-visit-but-i-wouldn't-want-to-live-there dept.
astroengine writes with this excerpt from Discovery.com: Using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have revealed wild atmospheric changes on a well studied exoplanet — changes that they suspect are driven by extreme volcanic activity. Over a period of two years, the team, led by University of Cambridge researchers, noted a three-fold change in temperature on the surface of 55 Cancri e. The super-Earth planet orbits a sun-like star 40 light-years away in the constellation of Cancer. It is twice the size of Earth and 8-times our planet's mass. 55 Cancri e is well-known to exoplanet hunters as the "diamond planet" — a world thought to be carbon-rich, possibly covered in hydrocarbons. But this new finding, published in the arXiv pre-print service, has added a new dimension to the planet's weird nature. "This is the first time we've seen such drastic changes in light emitted from an exoplanet, which is particularly remarkable for a super-Earth," said co-author Nikku Madhusudhan, of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, in a press release. "No signature of thermal emissions or surface activity has ever been detected for any other super-Earth to date."
Input Devices

The Challenge of Getting a Usable QWERTY Keyboard Onto a Dime-sized Screen 144

Posted by timothy from the you-will-fail-at-that-task dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Spain and Germany are building on Carnegie Mellon's work to attempt to create workable text-input interfaces for wearables, smartwatches and a new breed of IoT devices too small to accomodate even the truncated soft keyboards familiar to phone users. In certain cases, the screen area in which the keyboard must be made usable is no bigger than a dime. Of all the commercial input systems I've used, Graffiti seems like it might be the most suited to such tiny surfaces.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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