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Submission + - Brain activity decline linear, starting at 500 ppm CO2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Is there a CO2 — level sense that says “be calm, you sleep in a chamber”, “be active, you are outdoors”, similarly to the circadian rhythm? Or is it because atmospheric CO2 makes the blood PH decline sharply already? A study says “the exposure — response between CO2 and cognitive function is approximately linear across the concentrations used in this study,” which were in the range 500 ppm — 1500 ppm. 600 ppm is exceeded already in large cities and prognosed everywhere in several decades. Is the coal industry going to make the idiocracy real?

Submission + - Stephen Hawking: Greed, stupidity greatest threats to Earth (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution, greed and stupidity are the greatest threats to Earth.

Hawking told Larry King Now on Saturday that he’s worried by overcrowding.

“We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid,” Hawking said. “Six years ago I was worrying about pollution and overcrowding. They have gotten worse since then.”

Hawking and King also discussed artificial intelligence. Hawking says governments seem to be engaged in “an AI arms race.”

“A rogue AI could be difficult to stop,” the physicist said. “We need to ensure that AI is designed ethically with safeguards in place.”

He also asked King whether his eight marriages are “a triumph of hope over experience.”

“You make a good point, Stephen,” King said. “I think the answer is yes.”

Submission + - Virgin Galactic unveils the new version of SpaceShipTwo (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: According to USA Today, Virgin Galactic unveiled the newest version of its commercial spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, dubbed the VSS Unity, 16 months after the previous version crashed, killing one of its flight crew. The company will subject the suborbital spacecraft to a rigorous series of tests before beginning commercial operations. SpaceShipTwo will take paying passengers on jaunts up to 100 kilometers into space, allowing them to feel weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. VSS Unity will be taken to a high altitude by a carrier aircraft before firing its rocket engines for the suborbital flight. The spaceship will then land like an airplane and then be prepared to do it all over again.

Submission + - Comodo's Built-In Tech Support Tool Is Open to the Internet, Has No Password

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many of Comodo's security products come bundled with an app called GeekBuddy which the company's support staff use to debug faulty products. This is a remote desktop tool. For older versions of Comodo products worked without a password on port 5091. For newer ones it used an automatically generated password which was easy to guess. If the computer was exposed to the Internet, anyone could use this feature to connect to your PC.

Submission + - Comodo Antivirus Tech Support Feature Lets Anyone Connect to Your PC (softpedia.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google Project Zero security researcher Tavis Ormandy has discovered that one of Comodo's tech support tools packed with many of the company's security products leaves the door open for attackers to connect with admin privileges on the user's PC. He discovered that to blame for this problem was a remote desktop tool called GeekBuddy, which Comodo was bundling with its security software. This tool either used no password, or used a simple system to create the password which tech support staff would use to connect to user PCs. Ormandy previously discovered a similar issue in Comodo software, related to the company's Chromodo browser.

Submission + - NVIDIA Begins Providing Open-Source 3D Driver Support For GeForce GTX 900 Series (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In late 2014 NVIDIA announced their GPUs would begin requiring signed firmware images before the open-source driver could enable hardware acceleration. That led the Nouveau developers to call the latest GPUs "very open-source unfriendly", but that criticism can now be laid to rest as NVIDIA has finally released the signed firmware and basic open-source driver code. The open-source driver can now move on with its open-source 3D enablement for Maxwell GPUs and the NVIDIA developer is hoping it will be ready for the next kernel cycle (Linux 4.6).

Submission + - U.S. encryption ban would only send the market overseas (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: A U.S. legislatures posture toward legally mandating backdoored encryption, a new Harvard study suggests that a ban would push the market overseas because most encryption products come from over non-U.S. tech companies. “Cryptography is very much a worldwide academic discipline, as evidenced by the quantity and quality of research papers and academic conferences from countries other than the U.S.," the researchers wrote.

Submission + - Google Expands 'Right To Be Forgotten' To All Global Search Results (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has confirmed that it will be updating its ‘right to be forgotten’ so that any hidden content under the ruling is removed from all versions of its search engine in countries where it has been approved. Until now Google had only been removing results from the originating country and European versions of its search engine, such as google.co.uk and google.de. The EU had previously asked for an extension of the rule to include all versions of Google. Last year, French data protection authority CNIL threatened the tech giant with a sanction should it not remove data from all of its global platforms – such as google.com – in addition to its European sites. Now, Google’s new extension of the ‘right to be forgotten’ is expected to come into force over the next few weeks.

Submission + - ZDNet Writer Argues Over Windows 10 Phoning Home

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Gordon F. Kelly of Forbes whipped up a frenzy over Windows 10 when a Voat user found out in a little experiment that the operating system phones home thousands of times a day. ZDNet's Ed Bott has written a follow-up where he points out how the experiment should not be taken too dramatically. 602 connection attempts were to 192.168.1.255 using UDP port 137, which means local NetBIOS broadcasts. Another 630 were DNS requests. Next up was 1,619 dropped connection attempts to address 94.245.121.253, which is a Microsoft Teredo server. The list goes on with NTP, random HTTP requests, and various cloud hosts which probably are reached by UWP apps. He summarizes by saying that a lot of connections are not at all about telemetry. However, what kind of telemetry and datamined information Windows specifically sends, still remains largely a mystery, with hopefully curious people doing more analysis on the operating system and network traffic sent by it.

Submission + - Russia's Putin Wants to Ban Windows on Government PCs

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: The Russian government is allegedly looking to ban Microsoft’s Windows operating system, increase taxes on foreign technology companies, develop its homegrown OS and encourage local tech companies to grow.

All these proposals comes from German Klimenko, Vladimir Putin's new 'internet czar, as Bloomberg describes him. In a 90-minute interview, Klimenko said forcing Google and Apple to pay more taxes and banning Microsoft Windows from government computers are necessary measures, as he is trying to raise taxes on U.S. companies, thus helping local Russian competitors such as Yandex and Mail.ru.

Submission + - Your credit card knows what you did last summer - and tells everyone near it

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More and more credit and debit cards are being equipped with NFC. It promises fast and convenient payment. But did you know, that many also reveal your past chip and pin transactions, including the date, amount and currency? What privacy implications do you see? See if your card also shares this information with anything reading it's NFC tag. Does your bank's ToS or Privacy Policy include this?

This story has already been picked up by Computer Bild, a popular German tech blog. Read the original story at here: https://metabubble.net/payment-cards-bank-accounts/your-number26-mastercard-knows-what-you-did-last-summer/

Submission + - Amazon Launches New, Free, High-quality Game Engine: Lumberyard

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: Amazon has both announced and released a new, free game engine, Lumberyard, which offers deep integration with its Amazon Web Services server infrastructure to empower online play, and also with Twitch, its video game-focused streaming service. Lumberyard is powerful and full-featured enough to develop triple-A current-gen console games, with mobile support is coming down the road. Its core engine technology is based on Crytek's CryEngine. However, Lumberyard represents a branch of that tech, and the company is replacing or upgrading many of CryEngine's systems. Monetization for Lumberyard will come strictly through the use of Amazon Web Services' cloud computing. If you use the engine for your game, you're permitted to roll your own server tech, but if you're using a third-party provider, it has to be Amazon. Integration of Amazon's Twitch video streaming tools at a low level also helps to cement that platform's dominance in the game streaming space. Alongside Lumberyard, the company has also announced and released GameLift, a new managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling server-based online games using AWS. GameLift will be available only to developers who use Lumberyard, though it's an optional add-on. The game engine is in beta, but is freely usable and downloadable today.

Submission + - SpaceX sets target date for next launch: February 24th

Submitted by Rei
Rei writes: After some consternation about the pacing of Falcon 9 upgrades, SpaceX has announced that it plans to launch again from Cape Canaveral with a target date of February 24th. While the primary mission will be to place the SES-9 communications satellite in orbit, this will also mark their fourth attempt to land the first stage on an autonomous drone ship, after their last launch touched down softly but fell over when one leg failed to latch. SpaceX is working to significantly accelerate the rate of production and launches — they are reportedly moving the factory from 6-8 cores produced per year to 18 at present, and expect to reach 30 by the end of the year. After the upcoming launch, they expect to launch one rocket every two to three weeks.

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