68571225
submission
iONiUM writes:
As reported by many news sources, yet another plane has lost contact during a trip.
This comes on the heels of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which is still missing, and Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which was shot down.
The question has to be asked: is airline travel still safe, especially within Asia? And, why has the news completely forgot about flight 370?
66146517
submission
iONiUM writes:
From the article: 'Hans Fredrik Lennart Neij, known to hackers as TiAMO, was detained in the north-eastern Thai town of Nong Khai. He was subject to an international warrant after he was convicted in 2009 of aiding copyright infringement.' He has fled Sweden while on bail after a sentence of a one-year sentence and being ordered to pay $3.6m in damages.
The article goes on to say: 'Neij had been living in Laos since 2012 and travelled nearly 30 times to Thailand, where he has a house on the resort island of Phukat, Maj Gen Eimsaeng added.'
66060837
submission
iONiUM writes:
The UN released a new climate change report which concludes that it is indeed happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault. From the article: 'The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that nearly all warming seen since the 1950s is man-made.'
However, the report isn't entirely dire. It goes on to say: 'To get a good chance of staying below 2C, the report's scenarios show that world emissions would have to fall by between 40 and 70 percent by 2050 from current levels and to "near zero or below in 2100".'
Below zero of course means mining existing CO2 out of the atmopshere somehow.
65446409
submission
iONiUM writes:
According to a few news articles, the general public has taken notice of all the recent security breaches in open source software. From the article: 'Hackers have shaken the free-software movement that once symbolized the Web’s idealism. Several high-profile attacks in recent months exploited security flaws found in the “open-source” software created by volunteers collaborating online, building off each other’s work.'
While it's true that open source means you can review the actual code to ensure there's no data-theft, loggers, or glaring security holes, that idealism doesn't really help out most people who simply don't have time, or the knowledge, to do it. As such, the trust is left to the open source community, and is that really so different than leaving it to a corporation with closed source?
63641039
submission
iONiUM writes:
As reported by many news articles, the total routing table for the internet exceeded 512k on Tuesday. This caused many older routers to fail, and resulted in major websites being very slow, or completely inaccessible. Hopefully the lack of access to cat pictures woke people up to the preparation and work needed to keep the internet functioning, and the need to ensure IPv6 is working, although somehow I doubt it.
58612075
submission
iONiUM writes:
As per the MSDN article, the long proposed user request for SIMD support has finally been answered. A NuGet package preview is available here. From the article: "You may think that task-based programming or offloading work to threads is already the answer. While multi-threading is certainly a critical part, it’s important to realize that it’s still important to optimize the code that runs on each core. SIMD is a technology that employs data parallelization at the CPU level. Multi-threading and SIMD complement each other: multi-threading allows parallelizing work over multiple cores while SIMD allows parallelizing work within a single core."
58580485
submission
iONiUM writes:
Many sources are now reporting on the massive bug affecting almost the entire internet in Open SSL (including Yahoo!). There are guides offering information on the bug and how to patch it, as well as a dedicated website to test if a website is vulnerable. This bug allows users to get usernames and plain texts passwords, as well as active sessions even when the connection is using SSL. Here is a list of the top 1000 vulnerable sites.
58267141
submission
iONiUM writes:
From the article, "The impacts of global warming are likely to be "severe, pervasive and irreversible", a major report by the UN has warned." A major document was released by the IPCC outlining the current affects on climate change, and they are not good. For specific effects on humans: "Food security is highlighted as an area of significant concern. Crop yields for maize, rice and wheat are all hit in the period up to 2050, with around a tenth of projections showing losses over 25%."
57516029
submission
iONiUM writes:
From the article: "According to Jamie Farrell, the lead author in a University of Utah scientific study of Yellowstone National Park’s super volcano, the magma inside the volcanic caldera is 2.5 times larger than previously believed and spans a distance of 55 miles." As well, the article notes "The Mount St. Helens eruption created an eruption column (hot volcanic ash) which rose 80,000 feet. By contrast, should the Yellowstone caldera erupt, its smoke would circle the planet. Scientists believe the eruption would make a global event causing damage throughout the world. It is believed that the last eruption occurred 640,000 years ago. Some researchers believe the caldera is due to explode soon which notion is disputed by Farrell. He explained that he doesn’t know when it will explode, which begs the obvious question of how he is the able to refute those who say the caldera may explode sometime soon."
55374689
submission
iONiUM writes:
After EA staunchly denied any offline mode, it would seem the disastrous SimCity launch and continual gamer community anger (as well as a CEO firing), EA finally caved and has now going to make an offline mode. However, the obvious question still remains: is it too little too late?
54553301
submission
iONiUM writes:
Today BlackBerry announced a $4.4 billion loss, and a deal with Foxconn to outsource hardware manufacturing. One interesting stat is that 75% of sales were actually older BB7 devices. That said, CEO John Chen says "We are very much alive, thank you." as well as "Our 'for sale' sign has been taken down and we are here to stay. BlackBerry recently announced it has entered into an agreement to receive a strategic investment from Fairfax Financial and other institutional investors, which represents a vote of confidence in the future of BlackBerry."
54553115
submission
iONiUM writes:
Today in Canada, the supreme court struck down the prostitution laws as unconstitutional in a 9-0 ruling. While prostitution has always been legal in Canada, all activities surrounding it such as brothels, or making a living from the avails of it, have been illegal. As such, it has resulted in dangerous working conditions for prostitutes, which violates the Canadian charter of rights. The court has given parliament 1 year to draft new laws surrounding prostitution.
53208361
submission
iONiUM writes:
On the heels of the Cyprus University accepting BitCoins, Virgin Galactic has now announced they too will accept it for trips to space. From the article: "A lot of the people who have joined Bitcoin are tech-minded people, as are many of our current future astronauts."
52657597
submission
iONiUM writes:
As a follow up to LG's announcement of mass flexible OLED production, and as a competitor to the limited Samsung Round trial which was only available in Korea on SK Telecom, LG has released the G Flex phone which is curved vertically (instead of the Round's horizontal bend, which many thought was the 'wrong way'). In addition, the G Flex can actually be flexed, as shown in the video in the article.
51788515
submission
iONiUM writes:
Much like how Voyager 1 left and then it didn't for the umpteenth time, climate change is now a grave concern again. From the article: "Scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa calculated that by 2047, plus or minus five years, the average temperatures in each year will be hotter across most parts of the planet than they had been at those locations in any year between 1860 and 2005." It also appears there is no way to stop it: "The models show that unprecedented temperatures could be delayed by 20 to 25 years if there is a vigorous global effort to bring emissions under control.", but delay is the only thing we can do. It will affect the tropics first, "Unprecedented climates will arrive even sooner in the tropics, Dr. Mora’s group predicts, putting increasing stress on human societies there, on the coral reefs that supply millions of people with fish, and on the world’s greatest forests." This comes on the heel of a Canadian Arctic report that claims "In a paper released Tuesday, they say their research provides evidence “that we are witnessing the transformation of the Arctic at an exceptional pace.”" Is it time to more-or-less give up on stopping carbon emissions, and just focus on how to handle the income changes?
