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Submission + - SPAM: Stargazers eye the nation's first dark sky reserve in Idaho

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Tourists heading to central Idaho will be in the dark if local officials get their way.

The first International Dark Sky Reserve in the United States would fill a chunk of the state's sparsely populated region that contains night skies so pristine that interstellar dust clouds are visible in the Milky Way.

"We know the night sky has inspired people for many thousands of years," said John Barentine, program manager at the Tucson, Arizona-based International Dark-Sky Association. "When they are in a space where they can see it, it's often a very profound experience."

Supporters say excess artificial light causes sleeping problems for people and disrupts nocturnal wildlife and that a dark sky can solve those problems, boost home values and draw tourists. Opposition to dark sky measures elsewhere in the U.S. have come from the outdoor advertising industry and those against additional government regulations.

Researchers say 80 percent of North Americans live in areas where light pollution blots out the night sky. Central Idaho contains one of the few places in the contiguous United States large enough and dark enough to attain reserve status, Barentine said. Only 11 such reserves exist in the world.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Firefox 57 Will Hide Search Bar and Use a Uni-Bar Approach, Like Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla will drop an iconic section of its UI — the search bar — and will use one singular input bar atop the browser, similar to the approach of most Chromium browsers. This change will go live in Firefox 57, scheduled for release on November 14, and will be part of Photon — the codename used to describe Firefox's new user interface (UI) — also scheduled for a public release in v57.

Mozilla engineers aren't removing the search bar altogether, but Firefox will hide this UI element by default. Users can still re-enable it by going to "Preferences Search Search Bar" and choosing the second option. The current Firefox search bar is redundant since most of its features can be performed by the URL address bar.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What's a practical response to the Equifax breach? 9

Submitted by AdamStarks
AdamStarks writes: What steps can the average joe take to protect their identity? Accepting Equifax's help forfeits your right to sue; it's the same with applying for protection at TransUnion (not sure about Experian). Extra services at those companies also cost money, but that's putting even more of your data in their hands, and it's not clear whether the protection/help they provide is worth it (leaving aside not wanting to reward bad behavior).

Submission + - Researchers dismiss bid to cast aspersions on Marcus Hutchins (itwire.com)

Submitted by troublemaker_23
troublemaker_23 writes: A number of security researchers have dismissed an article by reporter Brian Krebs about Marcus Hutchins, the Briton who is awaiting trial in the US on charges of writing and distributing the Kronos banking malware, by pointing out that it has nothing to do with the case.

Submission + - Researchers Find a Way to Disable Intel ME Component Courtesy of the NSA (bleepingcomputer.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Positive Technologies — a provider of enterprise security solutions — have found a way to disable the Intel Management Engine (ME), a much-hated component of Intel CPUs that many have called a secret backdoor, even if Intel advertised it as a "remote PC management" solution. People have been trying for years to find a way to disable the Intel ME component, but have failed all this time. This is because disabling Intel ME crashes computers, as Intel ME is responsible for the initialization, power management, and launch of the main Intel processor. Positive Technologies experts revealed they discovered a hidden bit inside the firmware code, which when flipped (set to "1") it will disable ME after ME has done its job and booted up the main processor. The bit is labelled "reserve_hap" and a nearby comment describes it as "High Assurance Platform (HAP) enable." High Assurance Platform (HAP) is an NSA program that describes a series of rules for running secure computing platforms. Researchers believe Intel has added the ME disabling bit at the behest of the NSA, who needed a method of disabling ME as a security measure for computers running in highly sensitive environments. Obligatory /. comment listing all of Intel's backdoor reports.

Submission + - New Zealand Supreme Court rules operation against Kim Dotcom was illegal (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Mashiki
Mashiki writes: New Zealand supreme court rules that spying against Kim Dotcom was illegal, that GCSB violated the law, including the observation of citizens and residents within the country. It was also determined by the courts that the operation had gone on longer then was stated by both the police and GCSB. This may, leave the extradition case up in the air since the methods used to gain the information have been ruled illegal, in turn this makes the arrest illegal, along with the seizure of his equipment illegal. "“The GCSB has now admitted that the unlawfulness was not just dependent upon residency issues, it went further. The reason it went further was because it didn’t have authorization to carry out the kind of surveillance that it was carrying out under the legislation, as it was at that time”" The GCSB has said that it was impossible to plead the case as it would jeopardize national security.
The Almighty Buck

Revealed: How One Amazon Kindle Scam Made Millions of Dollars (zdnet.com) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the trick-or-treat dept.
An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt with us from a report via ZDNet that summarizes a catfishing scheme designed to deceive Amazon users into buy low-quality ebooks: Emma Moore is just one of hundreds of pseudonyms employed in a sophisticated "catfishing" scheme run by Valeriy Shershnyov, whose Vancouver-based business hoodwinks Amazon customers into buying low-quality ebooks, which have been boosted on the online marketplace by an unscrupulous system of bots, scripts, and virtual servers. Catfishing isn't new -- it's been well documented. Some scammers buy fake reviews, while others will try other ways to game the system. Until now, nobody has been able to look inside at how one of these scams work -- especially one that's been so prolific, generating millions of dollars in royalties by cashing in on unwitting buyers who are tricked into thinking these ebooks have some substance. Shershnyov was able to stay in Amazon's shadows for two years by using his scam server conservatively so as to not raise any red flags. What eventually gave him away weren't customer complaints or even getting caught. It was good old-fashioned carelessness. He forgot to put a password on his server.

Submission + - NASA crunchtime: 2 minutes or less to fix lost satellite 189 million miles away (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by bongey
bongey writes: NASA may have only 2 minutes or less to fix a STEREO-B satellite before the computer causes it to lose contact again. NASA lost contact with their STEREO-B satellite nearly 22 months ago when performing a routine test. NASA scientist are afraid to turn on the computer at this point because it may cause them to lose contact again. A more detail techincal summary can be found here http://www.nasa.gov/feature/go...

Submission + - SPAM: Mysterious, ice-buried Cold War military base may be unearthed by climate change

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie: a secret military operation hidden beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. But that’s exactly what transpired at Camp Century during the Cold War. In 1959, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the subterranean city under the guise of conducting polar research—and scientists there did drill the first ice core ever used to study climate. But deep inside the frozen tunnels, the corps also explored the feasibility of Project Iceworm, a plan to store and launch hundreds of ballistic missiles from inside the ice.

The military ultimately rejected the project, and the corps abandoned Camp Century in 1967. Engineers anticipated that the ice—already a dozen meters thick—would continue to accumulate in northwestern Greenland, permanently entombing what they left behind. Now, climate change has upended that assumption. New research suggests that as early as 2090, rates of ice loss at the site could exceed gains from new snowfall. And within a century after that, melting could begin to release waste stored at the camp, including sewage, diesel fuel, persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, and radiological waste from the camp’s nuclear generator, which was removed during decommissioning.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - DoJ uses obsolete software to subvert FOIA requests (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: An MIT PhD student has filed a suit in Federal court alleging that the use of a 21yo IBM green screen controlled search software to search the Department of Justice databases in response to Freedom of information requests constitutes an deliberate failure to provide the data that should be being produced

Submission + - Scientists Say the Asteroid That Killed The Dinosaurs Almost Wiped Us Out Too

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Conventional wisdom states that mammalian diversity emerged from the ashes of the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction event, ultimately giving rise to our own humble species. But Joshua A. Krisch writes at This Week that the asteroid that decimated the dinosaurs also wiped out roughly 93 percent of all mammalian species. "Because mammals did so well after the extinction, we have tended to assume that it didn't hit them as hard," says Nick Longrich. "However our analysis shows that the mammals were hit harder than most groups of animals, such as lizards, turtles, crocodilians, but they proved to be far more adaptable in the aftermath." Mammals survived, multiplied, and ultimately gave rise to human beings.

So what was the great secret that our possum-like ancestors knew that dinosaurs did not? One answer is that early mammals were small enough to survive on insects and dying plants, while large dinosaurs and reptiles required a vast diet of leafy greens and healthy prey that simply weren't available in the lean years, post-impact. So brontosauruses starved to death while prehistoric possums filled their far smaller and less discerning bellies. "Even if large herbivorous dinosaurs had managed to survive the initial meteor strike, they would have had nothing to eat," says Russ Graham, "because most of the earth's above-ground plant material had been destroyed." Other studies have suggested that mammals survived by burrowing underground or living near the water, where they would have been somewhat shielded from the intense heatwaves, post-impact. Studies also suggest that mammals may have been better spread-out around the globe, and so had the freedom to recover independently and evolve with greater diversity. "After this extinction event, there was an explosion of diversity, and it was driven by having different evolutionary experiments going on simultaneously in different locations," Longrich says. "This may have helped drive the recovery. With so many different species evolving in different directions in different parts of the world, evolution was more likely to stumble across new evolutionary paths."

Submission + - And then, after you die, some genes turn ON and start to...

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: Gizmodo has a summary of two separate scientific studies about what your genes do after you die. You think your body stops after death, but up to 2 days later certain genes may turn ON and start doing stuff for another 2 days before they give up the ghost. We are all zombies for upto 4 days after death.

Submission + - Appeals court slams record companies on DMCA in Vimeo case

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In the long-simmering appeal in Capitol Records v. Vimeo, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld Vimeo's positions on many points regarding the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. In its 55 page decision (PDF) the Court ruled that (a) the Copyright Office was dead wrong in concluding that pre-1972 sound recordings aren't covered by the DMCA, (b) the judge was wrong to think that Vimeo employees' merely viewing infringing videos was sufficient evidence of "red flag knowledge", and (c) a few sporadic instances of employees being cavalier about copyright law did not amount to a "policy of willful blindness" on the part of the company. The Court seemed to take particular pleasure in eviscerating the Copyright Office's rationales. Amicus curiae briefs in support of Vimeo had been submitted by a host of companies and organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, Public Knowledge, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Microsoft, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Twitter.

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