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Comment Almost all Adobe software (Score 1) 201

I currently use Adobe Lightroom, and occasionally Photoshop, but I'm guessing that all of Adobe's big apps work the same way. For LR, you can go 30 days without an internet connection before it loses most of its functionality. After 30 days, all the sliders (think color adjustments, exposure, and a bunch of other functions) no longer work. I haven't tested this, but I believe you can still crop a photo, so it still has SOME functionality, but you won't be using it to edit wedding photos. I haven't checked lately, but I'm guessing that Adobe Reader will still work after 30 days of no internet connection.

Comment This is better how? (Score 1) 151

From the summary (no, I didn't read the article): "Currently, the best of those established treatment options can only improve symptoms in 60 to 70 percent of patients" and " the drug had completely erased all traces of symptoms in two-thirds of PTSD patients." To me, the 60 to 70 percent sounds very close to the two-thirds of patients (roughly 66.667%). So, this is better how? I did see in the summary that this drug is reaching some patients who were not helped by other therapy (perhaps part of the 30-40 percent?), so that is a good thing, but the rate of help is not better. What are the (projected) long-term side-effects? Is it worth the long-term costs?

Submission + - Android Spyware Targets Business Executives (helpnetsecurity.com)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Researchers from mobile security outfit Skycure have recently analyzed a malicious app they found on an Android 6.0.1 device owned by a VP at a global technology company. The name of the malicious package is “com.android.protect”, and it comes disguised as a Google Play Services app. It disables Samsung’s SPCM service in order to keep running, installs itself as a system package to prevent removal by the user (if it can get root access), and also hides itself from the launcher. The spyware is able to collect chats and messages sent and received via SMS, MMS, and popular email and IM apps; record audio and telephone calls; collect pictures and take screenshots; collect contacts, browser histories, the contents of the calendar, and so on.

Submission + - Mimicking nature turns sewage into biocrude oil in minutes (newatlas.com) 1

Submitted by Big Hairy Ian
Big Hairy Ian writes: Biofuels are often touted as an alternative to fossil fuels, but many depend on raw materials that would quickly become scarce if production were scaled up. As an alternative to these alternatives, the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day.

Comment Re:Arrrrrrrr (Score 1) 105

by roger_that (#53183627) Attached to: Pirate Party Gains Seats In Iceland's Election

Rei, I spent 4 years in Iceland thirty years ago, and I have been in some of those forests. At that time, they could have been measured in square yards, and I don't think any of the trees were over 15 feet tall, most being under 5 feet tall. I am glad to hear that some reforestation is being done, and I hope it goes well, but most of the trees that (used to be) planted there grow pretty slowly, so I don't see the "self-sufficient on lumber in a decade or two" claim as being accurate (but we can hope). I hope to get back over there one of these years....

Submission + - Google Identified Major Kernel Vulnerability In Apple's OS And iOS Systems (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In June Google’s Project Zero team identified a devastatingly effective exploit in Apple’s XNU kernel, and was able to develop perfect privilege escalation attacks by targeting a task port process thread called 'owningTask'. Project Zero member Ian Beer became dubious about the name of the task: 'OwningTask implies an ownership relationship which might lead kernel extension developers to believe that behind the scenes IOKit is actually maintaining an ownership relationship which will ensure that the lifetime of this userclient will always be dominated by the lifetime of the owningTask. This is a dangerous assumption.' Project Zero apprised Apple of the vulnerability at the beginning of June, and initially refused Apple's request for sixty days' grace, but eventually settled on September 21st for disclosure. But when Apple's last-minute September fix turned out to be ineffective, Project Zero agreed to keep quiet, eventually granting Apple nearly five months of silence about the task_t bug — which has now been fixed in the latest updates to Mac OS and iOS.

Submission + - Met Office Accurately Predicts Winter Weather A Year In Advance

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The UK’s Met Office has revealed new seasonal forecasting capabilities which enable the weather service to predict winter climate changes up to a year in advance. The development has been made possible thanks to supercomputer technology granted by the UK Government in 2014. The £97 million high-performance computing facility has allowed researchers to increase the resolution of climate models and to test the retrospective skill of forecasts over a 35-year period starting from 1980. The forecasters claim that new supercomputer-powered techniques have helped them develop a system to accurately predict North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the climatic phenomenon which heavily impacts winters in the UK. Lead researcher Nick Dunstone commented that the ability to now understand and predict the NAO could have significant economic benefits for a range of sectors, including transport, energy, water management, and the insurance industry.

Submission + - Quantum Research Achieves 10-Fold Boost In Superposition Stability

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of Australian researchers has developed a qubit offering ten times the stability of existing technologies. The computer scientists claim that the new innovation could significantly increase the reliability of quantum computing calculations. The new technology, developed at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), has been named a ‘dressed’ quantum bit as it combines a single atom with an electromagnetic field. This process allows the qubit to remain in a superposition state for ten times longer than has previously been achieved. The researchers argue that this extra time in superposition could boost the performance stability of quantum computing calculations. Previously fragile and short-lived, retaining a state of superposition has been one of the major barriers to the development of quantum computing. The ability to remain in two states simultaneously is the key to scaling and strengthening the technology further.

Submission + - Feds Walk Into A Building, Demand Everyone's Fingerprints To Open Phones

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Forbes reports that the Department of Justice was issued a search warrant to gather the fingerprints of all the people present at a California residence, including residents and visitors.
The memorandum included "authorization to depress the fingerprints and thumbprints of every person who is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES during the execution of the search and who is reasonably believed by law enforcement to be the user of a fingerprint sensor-enabled device that is located at the SUBJECT PREMISES and falls within the scope of the warrant."

Submission + - KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop Officially Released

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: KDE will celebrate 20 years of activity on October 14, 2016, and they've just released the first LTS (Long Term Support) version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Prominent new features of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS include support for desktop widgets, a new system-wide search functionality that promises to let users easily search their KDE desktops for everything they want, including apps, music, videos, files, folders, etc., a new tool to get hot new stuff for your KDE Plasma desktop, such as wallpapers, widgets, desktop effects, or window styles, and infinite customization possibilities. Moreover, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS comes with a unified look for the default Breeze theme so that, no matter what type of application you're using (Qt4, GTK2, GTK3, or Qt5), it will look the same, mobile phone notifications, along with the ability to use your smartphone as a PC remote, transfer files or mute music during calls, all with the new KDE Connect plasmoid. There 's also Right-to-Left (RTL) language support, simplified global shortcuts, improvements to many applets, and much better Wayland support. KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will receive nine point releases until 2018.

Submission + - Microsoft ends Tuesday patches (helpnetsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday was a big day for Patch Tuesday. It was the last traditional Windows Patch Tuesday as Microsoft is moving to a new patching release model. In the future, patches will be bundled together and users will no longer be able to pick and choose which updates to install. Furthermore, these new ‘monthly update packs’ will be combined, so for instance, the November update will include all the patches from October as well.

Submission + - Malware Counts Word Docs to Evade Detection (threatpost.com) 2

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: A new macro-based malware has been spotted that goes to novel lengths to avoid detection. Once a computer is compromised, the malware will count the number of Word documents stored on the local drive; if it's more than two, the malware executes. Otherwise, it figures it's landed in a virtual environment or is executing in a sandbox and stays dormant.

A typical test environment consists of a fresh Windows computer image loaded into a VM. The OS image usually lacks documents and other telltale signs of real world use.

If no Microsoft Word documents are found, the VBA macro's code execution terminates, shielding the malware from automated analysis and detection. Alternately, if more than two Word documents are found on the targeted system, the macro will download and install the malware payload.

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