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Submission + - Meow ...and it's gone! 1

Submitted by PuceBaboon
PuceBaboon writes: Ars Technica is reporting a new attack on unprotected databases which, to date, has deleted all content from over 1,000 ElasticSearch and MongoDB databases across the 'net, leaving the calling-card "meow" in its place.
Most people are likely to find this a lot less amusing than a kitty video, so if you have a database instance on a cloud machine, now would be a good time to verify that it is password protected by something other than the default, install password..

Comment Attitude of those in Power--I'll be dead (shrug) (Score 2) 478

The current generation of leaders is going to leave an absolute garbage dump of a planet to the next generation--the Millennials.

Think I'm exaggerating? Australia just recently gave up on its effort to meet its Paris climate agreement carbon reduction targets.

Lots of folks gonna' be packing up and moving to escape rising seas and suffocating heat (e.g., S. Arizona).

Submission + - Scientists Accidentally Blow Up Their Lab With Strongest Indoor Magnetic Field (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Tokyo accidentally created the strongest controllable magnetic field in history and blew the doors of their lab in the process. As detailed in a paper recently published in the Review of Scientific Instruments, the researchers produced the magnetic field to test the material properties of a new generator system. They were expecting to reach peak magnetic field intensities of around 700 Teslas, but the machine instead produced a peak of 1,200 Teslas. (For the sake of comparison, a refrigerator magnet has about 0.01 Tesla)

In both the Japanese and Russian experiments, the magnetic fields were generated using a technique called electromagnetic flux-compression. This technique causes a brief spike in the strength of the magnetic field by rapidly “squeezing” it to a smaller size. [...] Instead of using TNT to generate their magnetic field, the Japanese researchers dumped a massive amount of energy—3.2 megajoules—into the generator to cause a weak magnetic field produced by a small coil to rapidly compress at a speed of about 20,000 miles per hour. This involves feeding 4 million amps of current through the generator, which is several thousand times more than a lightning bolt. When this coil is compressed as small as it will go, it bounces back. This produces a powerful shockwave that destroyed the coil and much of the generator. To protect themselves from the shockwave, the Japanese researchers built an iron cage for the generator. However they only built it to withstand about 700 Teslas, so the shockwave from the 1,200 Teslas ended up blowing out the door to the enclosure.

Submission + - SPAM: TSA fails most tests in latest undercover operation at US airports 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

When ABC News asked the source if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, “You are in the ballpark.”

In a public hearing after a private classified briefing to the House Committee on Homeland Security, members of Congress called the failures by the Transportation Security Administration disturbing.

Rep. Mike Rogers went as far as to tell TSA Administrator David Pekoske, “This agency that you run is broken badly, and it needs your attention.”

It isn’t broken. TSA is doing exactly what it was designed to do: Create the illusion that Washington is Doing Something.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Astronaut Dick Gordon has died (astronautscholarship.org)

Submitted by sconeu
sconeu writes: Dick Gordon, Pilot of Gemini 11 and Command Module Pilot of Apollo 12 has died at the age of 88. Gordon was also slated to command the cancelled Apollo 18 mission.

Submission + - H1-B Administrators Challenging an Unusually Large Number of Applications

Submitted by decaffeinated
decaffeinated writes: Bloomberg reports that starting this summer, employers began noticing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications. Cases that would have sailed through the approval process in earlier years ground to a halt under requests for new paperwork.

“We’re entering a new era,” said Emily Neumann, an immigration lawyer in Houston who has been practicing for 12 years. “There’s a lot more questioning, it’s very burdensome.” She said in past years she's counted on 90 percent of her petitions being approved by Oct. 1 in years past. This year, only 20 percent of the applications have been processed. Neumann predicts she’ll still have many unresolved cases by the time next year’s lottery happens in April 2018.

Submission + - The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly (forbes.com) 2

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes: Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel looks at a climate model (MW67) published in 1967 and finds "50 years after their groundbreaking 1967 paper, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right."

An analysis on the "Climate Graphs" blog shows exactly how close the prediction has proven to be: "The slope of the CO2-vs-temperature regression line in the 50 years of actual observations is 2.57, only slightly higher than MW67’s prediction of 2.36" They also note that "This is even more impressive when one considers that at the time MW67 was published, there had been no detectable warming in over two decades. Their predicted warming appeared to mark a radical change with the recent past:"

Comment Re:Anyone tried Firefox on Android recently? (Score 1) 317

by decaffeinated (#55131305) Attached to: TechRepublic: Mozilla 'Is Desperately Needed to Save the Web'
Okay...so I installed FF on Android and tried it (platform is a Note 4). Not nearly as sluggish as I remember it from the past. The scrolling of long, graphics-intensive web pages is still a problem. The simplest example is to load news.google.com in both Chrome and Firefox and scroll the content with your finger. Chrome is smooth as silk. FF is noticeably choppy...and slow. Still, if I didn't want Google snooping my browsing habits, I could live with FF.

Submission + - Ashley Madison Hackers Threaten Release Of All Data Unless Site Closes (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by heretic108
heretic108 writes: According to KrebsOnSecurity, the infamous Ashley Madison affairs hookup website has been hacked by a group calling itself The Impact Team. This group are demanding the immediate and permanent shutdown of Ashley Madison, as well as a related site Established Man, or else they will publicly release all customer personal data.

Comment Future of free hosting at Sourceforge? (Score 3, Interesting) 75

by decaffeinated (#50138325) Attached to: A Note On Thursday's Downtime
Serious question: Just out of curiosity, who pays the bills for all of the infrastructure that keeps Sourceforge running?

Hardware isn't free and employees aren't free. I seriously don't understand how Sourceforge has kept the lights on all these years.

And by the way, I'm a very satisfied user of their services. But I do worry about their future.

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