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Submission + - Big Companies Want EU Data Protection Rules Watered Down

jfruh writes: The EU is considering watering down its data protection rules to lesen the regulatory burden on small companies processing what is deemed to be "low risk" data. Unsurprisingly, there's one group that wants these rules changed even further: large companies. DigitalEurope, a lobbying group backed by IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, is pushing for further changes.

Submission + - Can anything escape a black hole? (nature.com)

Annanag writes: *Nothing* escapes a black hole, right? Except 40 years ago Stephen Hawking threw a spanner in the works by suggesting that, courtesy of quantum mechanics, some light particles can actually break free of a black hole's massive pull. Then you have the tantalising question of whether information can also escape, encoded in that so-called 'Hawking radiation'. The only problem being that no one has ever been able to detect Hawking radiation being emitted from a black hole. BUT a physicist has now come closer than ever before to creating an imitation of a black hole event horizon in the lab, opening up a potential avenue for investigating Hawking radiation and exploring how quantum mechanics and general relativity might be brought together.

Submission + - Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence in Immersive AR (roadtovr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: William Steptoe, a senior researcher in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London, published a paper detailing experiments dealing with the seamless integration of virtual objects into a real scene. Participants were tested to see if they could correctly identify which objects in the scene were real or virtual. With standard rendering, participants were able to correctly guess 73% of the time. Once a stylized rendering outline was applied, accuracy dropped to 56% (around change) and even further to 38% as the stylized rendering was increased. Less accuracy means users were less able to tell the difference between real and virtual objects. Steptoe says that this blurring of real and virtual can increase 'presence', the feeling of being truly present in another space, in immersive augmented reality applications.

Submission + - DARPA technology uncovers counterfeit microchips (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said this week one of its contractors, working on one of the agency’s anti-counterfeit projects has developed and deployed what it calls an Advanced Scanning Optical Microscope that can scan integrated circuits by using an extremely narrow infrared laser beam, to probe microelectronic circuits at nanometer levels, revealing information about chip construction as well as the function of circuits at the transistor level.

Submission + - Mangalyaan's main engine test fired for 4 seconds.

William Robinson writes: Before the spacecraft is scheduled to enter Mars orbit, Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) scientists reignited the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft's main engine for four seconds as a trial. The liquid apogee motor (LAM) engine has been idle for about 300 days since the spacecraft left the Earth's orbit on a Martian trajectory on December 1, 2013. The short-duration test was to ensure that the engine is in good shape for the 24-minute crucial manoeuvre on Wednesday.

Submission + - IEEE Standards Group Seeks To Impose Order On The Internet Of Things (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), under which tens of thousands of smart objects will interact with each other seamlessly, has a problem: a lack of uniform communication standards that will allow all those things to speak a common language. The IEEE is embarking on an ambitious effort to solve this problem, creating a standards group to bring order to IoT chaos.

Submission + - NVIDIA Launches Maxwell-Based GeForce GTX 980 And GeForce GTX 970 GPUs (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA has launched two new high-end graphics cards based on their latest Maxwell architecture. The GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 are based on Maxwell and replace NVIDIA's current high-end offerings, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780, and GTX 770. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 are somewhat similar as the cards share the same 4GB frame buffer and GM204 GPU, but the GTX 970's GPU is clocked a bit lower and features fewer active Streaming Multiprocessors and CUDA cores. The GeForce GTX 980's GM204 GPU has all of its functional blocks enabled. The fully-loaded GeForce GTX 980 GM204 GPU has a base clock of 1126MHz and a Boost clock of 1216MHz. The GTX 970 clocks in with a base clock of 1050MHz and Boost clock of 1178MHz. The 4GB of video memory on both cards is clocked at a blisteringly-fast 7GHz (effective GDDR5 data rate). NVIDIA was able to optimize the GM204's power efficiency, however, by tweaking virtually every part of the GPU. NVIDIA claims that Maxwell SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) offer double the performance of GK104 and double the perf per watt as well. NVIDIA has also added support for new features, namely Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MFAA), and Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI). Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 980 is the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card ever tested. The GeForce GTX 970 isn't as dominant overall, but its performance was impressive nonetheless. The GeForce GTX 970 typically performed about on par with a GeForce GTX Titan and traded blows with the Radeon R9 290X.

Submission + - Child porno conviction overturned because government violated Posse Comitatus (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader writes: This is another example of parallel construction, where a Navy contractor scans computers in a geographic region, and then passes the results to Law Enforcement. NOTE: child pornography is what the Navy cops to, but left unsaid is what else is being supplied under parallel construction, and what other locations have Navy (and Army, and Air Force and ...) contractors scanning.

Agent Logan’s search did not meet the required limitation. He surveyed the entire state of Washington for computers sharing child pornography. His initial search was not limited to United States military or government computers, and, as the government acknowledged, Agent Logan had no idea whether the computers searched belonged to someone with any “affiliation with the military at all.” Instead, it was his “standard practice to monitor all computers in a geographic area,” here, every computer in the state of Washington.

The record here demonstrates that Agent Logan and other NCIS agents routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate the restrictions on military enforcement of civilian law. Agent Logan testified that it was his standard practice to “monitor[] any computer IP address within a specific geographic location,” not just those “specific to US military only, or US government computers.” He did not try to isolate military service members within a geographic area. He appeared to believe that these overly broad investigations were permissible, because he was a “U.S. federal agent[]” and so could investigate violations of either the Uniform Code of Military Justice or federal law.


Submission + - Top EU Court: Libraries Can Digitize Books Without Publishers' Permission (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: The top European court has ruled that libraries have the right to digitize the contents of the books in their collections, even if the copyright holders on those books don't want them to. There's a catch, though: those digitized versions can only be accessed on dedicated terminals in the library itself. If library patrons want to print the book out or download it to a thumb drive, they will need to pay the publisher.

Submission + - Salesforce Users Hit With Malware-Based Targeted Attack

An anonymous reader writes: Global cloud-based CRM provider Salesforce has sent out a warning to its account administrators about its customers being targeted by the Dyreza malware. Dyreza is a whole new banking Trojan family, which was first spotted earlier this year targeting customers of US and UK banks. The code is designed to work similar to ZeuS and, as most online banking threats, it supports browser hooking for Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox and harvests data at any point an infected user connects to the targets specified in the malware.

Submission + - Cause of global warming 'hiatus' found deep in the Atlantic (washington.edu) 2

vinces99 writes: Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study is published Aug. 22 in Science.

Subsurface ocean warming explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth’s surface. “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung, a UW professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences. “Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause.”

What they found is that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.

Submission + - FCC warned not to take actions a Republican-led FCC would dislike (arstechnica.com)

tlhIngan writes: Municipal broadband is in the news again — this time Chief of Staff Matthew Berry, speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures, has endorsed states' right to ban municipal broadband networks and warned the (Democrat-led) FCC to not do anything that a future Republican led FCC would dislike. The argument is that municipal broadband discourages private investment in broadband communications, that taxpayer-funded projects are barriers to future infrastructure investment.

Feed Google News Sci Tech: Star dust taken from comet tail excites scientists - Contra Costa Times (google.com)


Fox News

Star dust taken from comet tail excites scientists
Contra Costa Times
We're all made of star dust, as Carl Sagan famously observed. But the nature of that dust, long before it assembled into us, is a scientific mystery whose answer may lie in a box in a UC Berkeley lab. A team of scientists there say they've captured the first...
Scientists Find Dust Particles Likely From Outside Solar SystemNewsmax.com
First Specks Of Stardust Found After Years Of SearchingForbes
Stardust Grains May Reveal First Look at Interstellar SpaceNDTV
Reuters-Headlines & Global News
all 104 news articles

Submission + - China Cracks Down On Mobile Messaging (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: China is tightening control over mobile messaging services with new rules that limit their role in spreading news. Under the new regulations, only news agencies and other groups with official approval can publish whatever the government considers political news via public accounts. 'All other public accounts that have not been approved cannot release or reprint political news,' the regulations said. Users of the instant messaging services will also have to register with their official IDs, and agree to follow relevant laws.

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