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Submission + - Elderly drivers in Japan could be limited to vehicles with automatic braking 1

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Japan's National Police Agency has proposed several new rules to regulate elderly drivers, including limiting them to vehicles with automatic braking systems to increase public safety. The panel was tasked with finding ways to mitigate the risks associated with dementia, poor vision and deteriorating physical strength associated with seniors. Deadly traffic accidents caused by people 75 or older are on the rise, though fatal accidents overall are on the decline. Automatic braking systems apply the car's brakes if a collision is imminent.

Separately Japanese authorities are offering elderly drivers who give up their licences a discount on their funerals.

Submission + - Encryption Would Not Have Protected Secret Federal Data Says DHS

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Sean Gallagher reports at Ars Technica that Dr. Andy Ozment, Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity in the Department of Homeland Security, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that in the case of the recent discovery of an intrusion that gave attackers access to sensitive data on millions of government employees and government contractors, encryption would "not have helped" because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked—likely through social engineering. Ozment added that because of the lack of multifactor authentication on these systems, the attackers would have been able to use those credentials at will to access systems from within and potentially even from outside the network. "If the adversary has the credentials of a user on the network, they can access data even if it's encrypted just as the users on the network have to access data," said Ozment. "That did occur in this case. Encryption in this instance would not have protected this data."

The fact that Social Security numbers of millions of current and former federal employees were not encrypted was one of few new details emerged about the data breach and House Oversight member Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was the one who pulled the SSN encryption answer from the teeth of the panel where others failed. "This is one of those hearings where I think that I will know less coming out of the hearing than I did when I walked in because of the obfuscation and the dancing around we are all doing here. As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."

Submission + - 49 Suspected Members Of Cybercriminal Group Arrested In Europe

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A joint international operation led to the dismantling of a group of cybercriminals active in Italy, Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Georgia, who are suspected of committing financial fraud involving email account intrusions. The operation resulted in the arrest of 49 suspected members of the criminal group, 58 properties were searched, and authorities seized laptops, hard disks, telephones, tablets, credit cards and cash, SIM cards, memory sticks, forged documents and bank account documents.

Submission + - U.S. tech giants ask Obama not to compromise encryption (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two industry bodies which represent, among others, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and IBM have written [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/09/us-cybersecurity-usa-encryption-idUSKBN0OP09R20150609] to President Obama urging that the U.S. government not seek to legislate 'official back doors' into encryption techniques. The Software and Information Industry Association and the Information Technology Industry Council sent the 'strongly worded' letter on Monday, celaring "Consumer trust in digital products and services is an essential component enabling continued economic growth of the online marketplace...Accordingly, we urge you not to pursue any policy or proposal that would require or encourage companies to weaken these technologies, including the weakening of encryption or creating encryption 'work-arounds,"

Submission + - SpaceX Wants Permission For Satellite Internet

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SpaceX has filed documents with the U.S. government asking for permission to begin testing a project to serve internet access from space. "The plan calls for launching a constellation of 4,000 small and cheap satellites that would beam high-speed Internet signals to all parts of the globe, including its most remote regions." This follows news that Facebook and Google had stepped back their efforts in that arena. SpaceX could prove to be a better fit for the project, given that they need only rely on themselves for launching into orbit. "The satellites would be deployed from one of SpaceX’s rockets, the Falcon 9. Once in orbit, the satellites would connect to ground stations at three West Coast facilities. The purpose of the tests is to see whether the antenna technology used on the satellites will be able to deliver high-speed Internet to the ground without hiccups."

Submission + - Freedom of information requests turn up creationist materials in schools (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 2008, Louisiana passed a law that was designed to let teachers introduce creationism into public classrooms alongside evolution. Zack Kopplin, a student at the time, decided to fight the law by sending Freedom Of Information Act requests to the schools, asking for anything mentioning creationism or the law itself. While most ignore him, he has received documents showing a clear anti-science stance from school officials. "In one, which appears to contain a set of PowerPoint slides, there's a page titled "Creationism (Intelligent Design)" that refers students to the Answers in Genesis website, along with two other sites that are critical of that group's position. In another, a parent's complaint about a teacher who presents evolution as a fact is met by a principal stating that 'I can assure you this will not happen again.'"

Submission + - Memory alloy bounces back into shape 10 million times (bbc.com)

Submitted by wrp103
wrp103 writes: Engineers have produced an alloy that springs back into shape even after it is bent more than 10 million times.
"Memory shape alloys" like this have many potential uses, but present incarnations are prone to wearing out.
The new material — made from nickel, titanium and copper — shatters previous records and is so resilient it could be useful in artificial heart valves, aircraft components or a new generation of solid-state refrigerators.
The work appears in Science Magazine.
Security

Submission + - NSA Considers Its Networks Compromised (net-security.org) 1

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Debora Plunkett, head of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, has confirmed what many security experts suspected to be true: no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable — not even that of the NSA. "There's no such thing as 'secure' any more," she said to the attendees of a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations, and confirmed that the NSA works under the assumption that various parts of their systems have already been compromised, and is adjusting its actions accordingly.
Space

Submission + - Mars site may hold 'buried life' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by sridharo
sridharo writes: Researchers have identified that ancient rocks from Nili Fossae could contain fossilised remains of life. These rocks are very similar to Pilbara rocks in North West Australis. The rocks are estimated to be upto four billion years old i.e three quarters of the history of Mars

Submission + - Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day (sysadminday.com)

Submitted by ArbiterOne
ArbiterOne writes: The 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is today. Celebrated worldwide on the last Friday of July, this holiday honors those who fight in the digital trenches to keep the 'Net alive.

OpenDNS offers a way to remind your boss about the holiday, while another blogger shares war stories. The startup Ksplice created an homage to these heroes... in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure.

How are you celebrating Sysadmin Day?
Education

Submission + - Children Using Technology Have Better Lit Skills (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: A UK study of three thousand children aged nine to sixteen suggests something that may not come as a shock to geeks: using technology increases a child's core literary skills. As Researcher Obvious put it, "The more forms of communications children use the stronger their core literary skills." And for those of us worried about a world of "tl;dr" and "Y U H8n?" the research claims that 'text speech' does not damage literacy. The biggest shortcoming of this research is that it appears the children graded their own writing in that their methodology was an online survey designed to ask the children which technology they use and then follow up with asking them how well they write to determine which children have better literacy skills.

Submission + - IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machine (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by bth
bth writes: A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But this week researchers from IBM Corp. are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.

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