An anonymous reader quotes a report from the EFF: EFF is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Klein, a bona fide hero who risked civil liability and criminal prosecution to help expose a massive spying program that violated the rights of millions of Americans. Mark didn't set out to change the world. For 22 years, he was a telecommunications technician for AT&T, most of that in San Francisco. But he always had a strong sense of right and wrong and a commitment to privacy. When the New York Times reported in late 2005 that the NSA was engaging in spying inside the U.S., Mark realized that he had witnessed how it was happening. He also realized that the President was not telling Americans the truth about the program. And, though newly retired, he knew that he had to do something. He showed up at EFF's front door in early 2006 with a simple question: "Do you folks care about privacy?"

We did. And what Mark told us changed everything. Through his work, Mark had learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) had installed a secret, secure room at AT&T's central office in San Francisco, called Room 641A. Mark was assigned to connect circuits carrying Internet data to optical "splitters" that sat just outside of the secret NSA room but were hardwired into it. Those splitters -- as well as similar ones in cities around the U.S. -- made a copy of all data going through those circuits and delivered it into the secret room. Mark not only saw how it works, he had the documents to prove it. He brought us over a hundred pages of authenticated AT&T schematic diagrams and tables. Mark also shared this information with major media outlets, numerous Congressional staffers, and at least two senators personally. One, Senator Chris Dodd, took the floor of the Senate to acknowledge Mark as the great American hero he was.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Most of the changes on the Sega Retro wiki every day are tiny things, like single-line tweaks to game details or image swaps. Early Monday morning, the site got something else: A 47MB, 272-page PDF full of confidential emails, notes, and other documents from inside a company with a rich history, a strong new competitor, and deep questions about what to do next.

The document offers glimpses, windows, and sometimes pure numbers that explain how Sega went from a company that broke Nintendo's near-monopoly in the early 1990s to giving up on consoles entirely after the Dreamcast. Enthusiasts and historians can see the costs, margins, and sales of every Sega system sold in America by 1997 in detailed business plan spreadsheets. Sega's Wikipedia page will likely be overhauled with the information contained in inter-departmental emails, like the one where CEO Tom Kalinske assures staff (and perhaps himself) that "we are killing Sony" in Japan in March 1996.

"Wish I could get our staff, sales people, retailers, analysts, media, etc. to see and understand what's happening in Japan. They would then understand why we will win here in the US eventually," Kalinske wrote. By September 1996, this would not be the case, and Kalinske would tender his resignation. Not all of the compilation is quite so direct or relevant. There are E3 floor plans, nitpicks about marketing campaigns, and the occasional incongruity. There is a Post-It note stuck to the front of the "Brand Strategy" folder -- "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97" -- that I will be thinking about for days.

Tech platforms spent millions opposing sweeping antitrust reforms, and their lobbyists may soon be able to breathe a giant sigh of relief -- at least for the next few years. From a report: Early Tuesday morning, the House Committee on Appropriations released a more than 4,000-page bill stacked with congressional priorities. But notably, a pair of antitrust bills that received broad bipartisan support was not included in the final measure. The bills were approved out of the Senate Judiciary Committee nearly a year ago, but they haven't yet been brought up for a floor vote. As part of a last-ditch effort to approve the bills, lawmakers tried to attach them to the must-pass spending bill, but the effort did not receive the backing necessary from congressional leadership.

For more than three years, lawmakers have held dozens of hearings and introduced a number of bipartisan bills to reform the tech industry. But the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) saw the most support, despite expensive lobbying campaigns from tech companies opposing them. Sen. Richard Blumenthal's (D-CT) timely OAMA would ban tech giants like Google and Apple from strong-arming third-party developers to enter into anticompetitive agreements to be hosted on their company app stores. The AICO, spearheaded by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), would have stopped Big Tech companies from providing preferential treatment to their own products and services across their platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A high-profile push by Congress to rein in the nation's biggest internet companies is at risk of failing with time running out to pass major legislation ahead of midterm elections. Alphabet's Google, Apple, Amazon.com and Meta and their trade groups have poured almost $95 million into lobbying since 2021 as they seek to derail the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which has advanced further than any US legislative effort to address the market power of some of the world's richest companies. After a nearly two-year battle, the bill is now at a critical juncture as the Senate returns this week for a final stretch before the November midterms. Backers of the measure swear they have the necessary votes, yet it's unclear if they do, and the Senate will be busy with other must-pass spending legislation.

Although clipping the wings of tech giants through antitrust reform had support from both Republicans and Democrats during this Congress, a likely GOP majority in the House next year is expected to focus on allegations that internet platforms squelch conservative viewpoints. That's why tech lobbyists have been trying to run out the clock. Leading Republicans like California's Kevin McCarthy, who is on track to become Speaker under a GOP majority, have publicly opposed the antitrust push. The legislation's sponsors can see the window narrowing. Antitrust advocates were expecting a vote before Congress adjourned for four weeks in August. But Schumer told donors in July that it didn't have enough votes to pass.

The bill has 13 co-sponsors in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass and be sent to the House. Supporters like Yelp's head of public policy Luther Lowe, a longtime Google critic, argue that enough undecided lawmakers would vote for the measure if it came to the floor. A Schumer spokesperson said he's working with the bill's sponsors to find the necessary votes and he still plans to bring it to the floor. The bill was approved by both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on strong bipartisan votes. Several amendments have addressed concerns about privacy and security issues. What hasn't killed the bill "has made it stronger," said Yelp's Lowe. The measure seeks to restrict the companies from favoring their own products, so that competitors who depend on these platforms to reach consumers wouldn't be at a disadvantage. That could impact the design of Google Maps, the display of Apple Music on an iPhone or the prominence of Amazon Basics on the company's e-commerce site. "I don't see it going to the floor," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group that counts Amazon, Google and Facebook among its members. "With an election coming up, I expect senators to come back and focus on issues that are popular with voters. Tech regulation is not one of those issues."

Clip art of a rock just sold for 400 ether, or about $1.3 million, late Monday afternoon. The transaction marks the latest sale of EtherRock, a brand of crypto collectible that's been around since 2017 -- making it one of the oldest non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the block. From a report: EtherRock is, as the name implies, a JPEG of a cartoon rock, built and sold on the ethereum blockchain. There are only 100 out there, and that scarcity is part of what's driving up its value. So, what are these rock pics good for? According to the EtherRock website, "these virtual rocks serve NO PURPOSE beyond being able to be brought and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game :)" Following this latest sale, the new price floor for an EtherRock NFT has been raised to $1.02 million. Two days ago, the cheapest rock went for $305,294. Two weeks ago, it was $97,716.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Now that Jeff Bezos's space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that's being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA -- money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that's headquartered in Cantwell's home state.

Cantwell's amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. "It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America," Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell's measure wouldn't rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos's company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it's likely to benefit. The measure has been attached to the Endless Frontier Act as part of a manager's amendment and authorizes $10.032 billion through the year 2026 for the moon program. Authorization alone does not fund the program, and Congress would still need to appropriate the money, or the executive would need to find other appropriated funds.

IEEE Spectrum describes how the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) partnered with Pivot Technology Services to help them relocate their massive radio-frequency emulation testbed, called "Colosseum." The testbed was built for the agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) -- a three-year competition to demonstrate the validity of using AI to work together in order to use wireless spectrum more efficiently than operating on pre-allocated bands. Slashdot reader Wave723 shares an excerpt from the report: Colosseum was originally built and housed at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That changed at the beginning of October, when the testbed was dismantled and later trucked to Los Angeles for the competition's finale, scheduled to begin at 3:30pm PDT today at MWC Los Angeles. [...] There may have been some molehills during the checks, but moving Colosseum definitely qualifies as a mountain. The testbed uses 3 Peta-Ops per second of computing power and 52 terabytes per second of data to emulate 65,000 channel operations between 256 wireless devices. It can draw up to 92 kilowatts of power and requires 200 gallons of water per minute to cycle through its cooling system to keep it from overheating.

Colosseum is housed within a space twice of the size of a cargo container -- in fact, its housing is literally built from two converted cargo containers put side by side. The halves arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the set-up for MWC Los Angeles, and were hauled into the building and onto the convention floor by two 18-wheelers. We're going to move right past the crazy fact that DARPA and its hired logistics companies drove two semi-trucks into the Los Angeles Convention Center, because it gets better. To actually lower Colosseum's halves onto the ground, the next step involved something that both Tilghman and Gabel referred to as a "forklift ballet." As it turned out, the convention center didn't have a forklift strong enough to lift either half, so everyone improvised and used four smaller forklifts simultaneously by carefully arranging them around each half of Colosseum. It worked, but Gabel, in showing me a video of the forklift ballet, pointed out a moment where one of the forklift's rear wheels lifted off the ground as the machine and its operator grappled with Colosseum's weight...

China's Chang'e-4 mission to the dark side of the moon has discovered signs of mantle material at the moon's surface, "effectively setting an 'X' on lunar maps for future explorers seeking this not-so-buried geological treasure," reports Scientific American. From the report: China's Chang'e-4 mission touched down near the south pole on the lunar far side on January 3, 2019, the first spacecraft ever to land intact on this largely unexplored region of the moon. Consisting of a lander and rover, the mission is still going strong today, with the rover -- called Yutu-2 -- continuing its journey across the surface. On board are a variety of instruments, and today in Nature scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing report the mission's first scientific results, suggesting lunar mantle material has at last been located.

"We found that the material of the Chang'e-4 landing site is mainly composed of olivine and low-calcium pyroxene," says Dawei Liu, one of the paper's co-authors. "This mineral combination is the candidate mantle-derived material." Chang'e-4 rests inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, which, at 2,500 kilometers across, is one of the solar system's oldest and largest known impact craters. Specifically, the mission touched down in the 186-kilometer-wide Von Karman crater within this larger basin. Von Karman was produced billions of years ago by the impact of a large comet or asteroid; such collisions can excavate mantle material from deep underground, allowing it to be scattered across the surface by subsequent impacts.

The mantle material was discovered using the Visible and Near Infrared Spectrometer on Yutu-2, which can ascertain the chemical composition of rocks by studying their reflected light. Both olivine and pyroxene are believed to be among the first minerals that froze out from the moon's magma ocean as it cooled, falling to its solid base deeper in the mantle. Because previous surveys from orbit have revealed much of Von Karman's floor to be composed of lava from volcanic eruptions rather than excavated mantle, the paper's authors suspect the material detected by Yutu-2 was actually blasted into Von Karman from the upper mantle beneath another nearby impact structure, the 72-kilometer-wide Finsen crater.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A small Cessna soared high above the Mojave Desert recently, its engine growling in the choppy morning air. As the aircraft skirted the mountains on the edge of Death Valley National Park, a clutch of passengers and environmentalists peered intently at a broiling salt flat thousands of feet below. The desolate beauty of the Panamint Valley has long drawn all manner of naturalists, adventurers and social outcasts -- including Charles Manson -- off-road vehicle riders and top gun fighter pilots who blast overhead in simulated dogfights.

Now this prehistoric lake bed is shaping up to be an unlikely battleground between environmentalists and battery technologists who believe the area might hold the key to a carbon-free future. Recently, the Australia-based firm Battery Mineral Resources asked the federal government for permission to drill four exploratory wells to see if the hot, salty brine beneath the valley floor contains economically viable concentrations of lithium. The soft, silvery-white metal is a key component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries and is crucial to the production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

The drilling request has generated strong opposition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club and the Defenders of Wildlife, who say the drilling project would be an initial step toward the creation of a full-scale lithium mining operation. They say lithium extraction would bring industrial sprawl, large and unsightly drying ponds and threaten a fragile ecosystem that supports Nelson's bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and the Panamint alligator lizard, among other species.

"The BBC has an article detailing new efforts to replace plastics used in products and construction with newer, less environmentally harmful alternative materials," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. The new products mentioned in the report include: Stone Wool: To transform one of the world's most abundant resources into something with utility and sustainability takes a special kind of alchemy. Stone wool comes from natural igneous rock -- the kind that forms after lava cools -- and a steelmaking byproduct called slag; these substances are melted together and spun into fibers, a little like candyfloss.

Mycotecture: Mushrooms aren't just a flavor-packed addition to ravioli or ragu (or a sparkplug to the occasional psychedelic adventure); soon, tree-hugging fungi and forest-floor toadstools may replace materials like polystyrene, protective packaging, insulation, acoustic insulation, furniture, aquatic materials and even leather goods.

Urine Bricks: Cement, concrete's primary ingredient, accounts for about 5% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers and engineers are working to develop less energy-intensive alternatives, including bricks made with leftover brewery grains, concrete modeled after ancient Roman breakwaters (Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock to form mortar, a highly stable material), and bricks made of, well, urine. As part of his thesis project, Edinburgh College of Art student Peter Trimble was working on an exhibit that was supposed to feature a module on sustainability. Almost by accident, he created "Biostone": a mixture of sand (incidentally, one of Earth's most abundant resources), nutrients, and urea -- a chemical found in human urine.

A greener particleboard: Despite what it sounds like, particleboard -- those rigid panels made of compressed and veneered wood chips and resin used in furniture and kitchen cabinetry throughout the world -- hasn't actually a place in the green-building pantheon. That's because the glue that binds particleboard's wood fibers traditionally contain formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable, strong-smelling chemical and known respiratory irritant and carcinogen. That means your faux-wood Ikea shelf is quietly "off-gassing" toxins into the air. One company, NU Green, created a material made from 100% pre-consumer recycled or recovered wood fibre called "Uniboard." Uniboard saves trees and avoids landfill, while also generating far fewer greenhouse gases than traditional particleboard, and contains no toxins. That's because Uniboard has pioneered the use of renewable fibers like corn stalks and hops, as well as no added formaldehyde (NAF) resin instead of glue.

CNET just published a fierce pro-net neutrality editorial co-authored by Nancy Pelosi, the soon-to-be Majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Mike Doyle, the expected Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and Frank Pallone, Jr. the expected Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The three representatives argue that "the Trump FCC ignored millions of comments from Americans pleading to keep strong net neutrality rules in place." The FCC's net neutrality repeal left the market for broadband internet access virtually lawless, giving ISPs an opening to control peoples' online activities at their discretion. Gone are rules that required ISPs to treat all internet traffic equally. Gone are rules that prevented ISPs from speeding up traffic of some websites for a fee or punishing others by slowing their traffic down....

Without the FCC acting as sheriff, it is unfortunately not surprising that big corporations have started exploring ways to change how consumers access the Internet in order to benefit their bottom line.... Research from independent analysts shows that nearly every mobile ISP is throttling at least one streaming video service or using discriminatory boosting practices. Wireless providers are openly throttling video traffic and charging consumers extra for watching high-definition streams. ISPs have rolled out internet plans that favor companies they are affiliated with, despite full-page ads swearing they value net neutrality. And most concerning, an ISP was found throttling so-called "unlimited" plans for a fire department during wildfires in California.

Make no mistake, these new practices are just ISPs sticking a toe in the water. Without an agency with the authority to investigate and punish unfair or discriminatory practices, ISPs will continue taking bolder and more blatantly anti-consumer steps. That is why we have fought over the past year to restore net neutrality rules and put a cop back on the ISP beat. In May, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan bill restoring net neutrality rules. Despite the support of a bipartisan majority of Americans, the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives refused our efforts to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

Fortunately, the time is fast coming when the people's voices will be heard.
The editorial closes by arguing that "Large corporations will no longer be able to block progress on this important consumer protection issue."

Amazon's fleet of automated warehouse robots, now more than 100,000 machines strong, is working alongside human employees to help meet the e-commerce giant's massive fulfillment demand. From a report: The company's robots carry inventory around massive warehouse floors, compiling all the items for a customer's order and reducing the need for human interaction with the products. But the chief technologist of Amazon Robotics, Tye Brady, insists that these robots are enhancing human efficiencies rather than eliminating warehouse jobs.

Amazon has been going full steam ahead when it comes to hiring and now employs over 500,000 people. Brady views the robots as necessary to this growth. "When there are tens of thousands of orders going on simultaneously, you are getting beyond what a human can do," he told the audience at MIT Technology Review's first EmTech Next conference today. Humans still provide necessary skills in the fulfillment process, like dexterity, adaptiveness, and plain old common sense. For example, when some popcorn butter accidentally fell off a pod in a fulfillment center, it got squished, creating a big buttery mess in the middle of the floor. The curious robots didn't know how to handle the situation but wanted to go check it out. "The robots were driving through it, and they'd slip and get an encoder error," says Brady.

Recently you had a chance to ask animal behavior expert and autism advocate Dr. Temple Grandin a question. Below you'll find her answers about factory farming, animal behavior, and living with autism.

An anonymous reader writes "Google has a huge research budget and an apparent willingness to take on huge projects. They've gotten themselves into autonomous cars, fiber optic internet, robotics, and Wi-Fi balloons. But that raises a question: if they're willing to commit to projects as difficult and risk as those, what projects have they explored but rejected? Several of the scientists working at Google's 'innovation lab' have spilled the beans: '[Mag-lev] systems have a stabilizing structure that keeps trains in place as they hover and move forward in only one direction. That couldn't quite translate into an open floor plan of magnets that keep a hoverboard steadily aloft and free to move in any direction. One problem, as Piponi explains, is that magnets tend to keep shifting polarities, so your hoverboard would constantly flip over as you floated around moving from a state of repulsion to attraction with the magnets. Any skateboarder could tell you what that means: Your hoverboard would suck. ... If scaling problems are what brought hoverboards down to earth, material-science issues crashed the space elevator. The team knew the cable would have to be exceptionally strong-- "at least a hundred times stronger than the strongest steel that we have," by Piponi's calculations. He found one material that could do this: carbon nanotubes. But no one has manufactured a perfectly formed carbon nanotube strand longer than a meter. And so elevators "were put in a deep freeze," as Heinrich says, and the team decided to keep tabs on any advances in the carbon nanotube field.'"

sciencehabit writes "Left to its own devices, a bubble will weaken and pop as the fluid sandwiched between two thin layers of soap succumbs to gravity and drains toward the floor. But when researchers trapped a bubble between two platinum electrodes and cranked up the voltage, the fluid reversed direction and actually flowed up, against the force of gravity. The newly strong and stable bubbles could live for hours, and even visibly change colors as their walls grew fatter. Because soap film is naturally only nanometers thick, this whimsical experiment could help scientists create more efficient labs-on-chips, the mazes of nanotunnels that can diagnose disease based on the movements of a miniscule drop of blood."

This morning at 08:58 UTC a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck off the coast of southeastern Alaska. The depth was just shy of 10km. The quake occurred roughly 106km from the city of Craig and about 341km from the capital city of Juneau. A tsunami warning was issued shortly after the quake, but later canceled when it became apparent that sea level changes would be minor, with no widespread destructive wave. The observed tsunami was no more than six inches high. The earthquake was felt on land, shaking houses and tossing objects to the floor, but as yet there are no reports of injuries. The U.S. Geological Survey said, 'At the location of this earthquake, the Pacific plate is moving approximately northwestward with respect to the North America plate at a velocity of 51 mm/yr. This earthquake is likely associated with relative motion across the Queen Charlotte fault system offshore of British Columbia, Canada, which forms the major expression of the Pacific:North America plate boundary in this region. The surrounding area of the plate boundary has hosted 8 earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater over the past 40 years."

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. House of Representatives voted 397-0 today on a resolution to oppose U.N. control of the internet. 'The 397-0 vote is meant to send a signal to countries meeting at a U.N. conference on telecommunications this week. Participants are meeting to update an international telecom treaty, but critics warn that many countries' proposals could allow U.N. regulation of the Internet.' The European Parliament passed a similar resolution a couple weeks ago, and the U.N. telecom chief has gone on record saying that freedom on the internet won't be curbed. However, that wasn't enough for U.S. lawmakers, who were quite proud of themselves for actually getting bipartisan support for the resolution (PDF). Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said, 'We need to send a strong message to the world that the Internet has thrived under a decentralized, bottom-up, multi-stakeholder governance model.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Candace Jackson writes that an increasing number of home builders and buyers are looking for a new kind of security: homes equipped to handle everything from hurricanes, tornadoes and hybrid superstorms like this week's Sandy, to man-made threats ranging from home invasion to nuclear war. Fueling the rise of these often-fortresslike homes are new technologies and building materials—which builders say will ultimately be used on a more widespread basis in storm- and earthquake-threatened areas. For example, Alys Beach, a 158-acre luxury seaside community on Florida's Gulf Coast, has earned the designation of Fortified...for safer living® homes and is designed to withstand strong winds. The roofs have two coats of limestone and exterior walls have 8 inches of concrete, reinforced every 32 inches for 'bunkerlike' safety, according to marketing materials. Other builders are producing highly hurricane-proof residences that are circular in shape with 'radial engineering' wherein roof and floor trusses link back to the home's center like spokes on a wheel, helping to dissipate gale forces around the structure. Deltec, a North Carolina–based builder, says it has never lost a circular home to hurricanes in over 40 years of construction. But Doug Buck says some 'extreme' building techniques don't make financial sense. 'You get to a point of diminishing returns,' says Buck. 'You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.''

Earlier this month you asked Principal Scientist at the BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre, Dr. Ramsey Faragher, about his NAVSOP navigation system and the future of positioning systems in general. Below you'll find his answers.

I was in Las Vegas last week to see the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. (Officially, it's the International Consumer Electronics Show, but no one calls it "ICES.") I've been to CES just a few times before, but usually as the finish line of a marathon drive from Seattle, rather than a plane flight from Tennessee as it was this time around. I've also never arrived with an armload of video equipment, which brings its own hassles. (Did you notice our videos?) Following are a few thoughts about the experience.