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Submission + - AirAsia Flight Loses Contact With Air Traffic Control (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by iONiUM
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?

Comment See what Google Ads you've clicked on (Score 1) 699

by iONiUM (#48548697) Attached to: French Publishers Prepare Lawsuit Against Adblock Plus

I run all my desktop browsers with ABP. I thought I never click on Google Ads, however recently I checked the history of my primary Google account and was very surprised to find that I had, and not just a few times, many times, and on things I had been interested in.

You can see your own history through Google's History site: Google History for Ads. It's pretty interesting. I don't know how they're getting me, but I assume it's on my phone. In any case, it's been so subtle (and useful) that I am in no way upset (I actually needed/wanted these things).

That's how advertising should be. Beyond that, all the un-targeted stuff deserves to be blocked.

Comment XBOX Live (Score 2) 170

by iONiUM (#48548539) Attached to: Sony Hacks Continue: PlayStation Hit By Lizard Squad Attack

Here is their twitter: Lizard Patrol.

They have been attacking XBOX Live randomly for the last 3 weeks which takes down everyone's (including mine) Netflix, games, etc. It's pretty annoying. They even re-tweeted the ankle bracelet on one of their members who is under house arrest after being released from jail. I don't know how they can get away with the blatant DDoS attacks.

Comment LTE? (Score 1) 216

by iONiUM (#48499485) Attached to: How the Rollout of 5G Will Change Everything

I'm with Rogers (Canada) and I'm usually on their LTE network (Rogers LTE). As per the wiki, the theoretical speed is 150Mbit/s, but similar to what the article notes, when I run speed test I typically get ~14Mbit/s depending on the time of day.

I'm not that excited about any "new generation" 4G or whatever, as this is more than fast enough for my daily needs when I'm not on WiFi.

Comment Accused? (Score 3, Insightful) 256

by iONiUM (#48499331) Attached to: UK Police To Publicly Shame Drunk Drivers On Twitter This Christmas

I'd be okay if they did this with convicted drunk drivers, but doing it with accused is not cool.

This is the exact same problem with the media (and police) talking about accused sexual predators, like the notorious Jian Ghomeshi case going on in Canada right now. The guy was crucified by the public social media lynch mob before he charged had even be levied. Is this what society has become? We demand justice before someone even has a chance in court?

Submission + - Pirate Bay Co-Founder 'TiAMO' Arrested in Thailand (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by iONiUM
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.'

Submission + - UN Climate Change Panel: It's happening, and it's almost entirely man's fault (ap.org)

Submitted by iONiUM
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.

Comment Re:They tried to raise prices 20% unnanounced (Score 1) 392

by iONiUM (#48270833) Attached to: Cutting the Cord? Time Warner Loses 184,000 TV Subscribers In One Quarter

I'm with Rogers (Canada), and I've had over 5 modems fail over the last 10 years. This is in various houses, and various locations. The most obvious cause of failure was when it was in a humid basement. But in many other cases, there was no obvious cause (it was on an upper floor, very dry and ideal conditions).

In any case, I "rent" my modem, but every year I call and complain and they take the rent fee off. As such, whenever it breaks, I just swap it for free for another one.

They don't make electronics like they used to, I guess.

Submission + - Confidence Shaken In Open Source Security Idealism (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by iONiUM
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?

Submission + - Canada to Bypass Keystone with Oil Pipeline To the Atlantic

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Bloomberg reports that Canadians have come up with an all-Canadian route to get crude oil sands from Alberta to a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick that will give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply. The pipeline, built by Energy East, will cost $10.7 billion and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. "It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude," writes Bloomberg. "And if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there’s a bonus: Obama can’t do a single thing about it." So confident is TransCanada Corp., the chief backer of both Keystone and Energy East, of success that Alex Pourbaix, the executive in charge, spoke of the cross-Canada line as virtually a done deal. “With one project,” Energy East will give Alberta’s oil sands not only an outlet to “eastern Canadian markets but to global markets,” says Pourbaix. “And we’ve done so at scale, with a 1.1 million barrel per day pipeline, which will go a long way to removing the specter of those big differentials for many years to come.”

The pipeline will also prove a blow to environmentalists who have made central to the anti-Keystone arguments the concept that if Keystone can be stopped, most of that polluting heavy crude will stay in the ground. With 168 billion proven barrels of oil, though, Canada’s oil sands represent the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and that oil is likely to find its way to shore one way or another. “It’s always been clear that denying it or slowing Keystone wasn’t going to stop the flow of Canadian oil,” says Michael Levi. What Energy East means for the Keystone XL pipeline remains to be seen. “Maybe this will be a wake up call to President Obama and U.S. policymakers to say ‘Hmmm we’re going to get shut out of not just the energy, but all those jobs that are going to go into building that pipeline. Now they are all going to go into Canada," says Aaron Task. “This is all about ‘You snooze, you lose.’”

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