Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes: If Netflix's promise to invigilate users' IP addresses and block VPNs is more than a placatory sop to the lawyers, and if the studios would rather return to fighting piracy by lobbying governments to play whack-a-mole with torrent sites, the streaming company's long-term efforts to abolish or reduce regional licensing blockades could falter this year. This article examines the possible hard choices Netflix must make in appeasing major studios without destroying the user-base that got their attention in the first place. I wonder how long VPN vendors will keep bragging that their services provide worldwide streaming availability, and whether some of them will actually do a decent job of it.

An anonymous reader writes: An American woman named Tamara Fields has sued Twitter in U.S. federal court, saying the social network gave the Islamic State a voice to spread its propaganda. Fields's husband died on November 9, when the terrorist organization attacked a police training center in Amman, Jordan. The complaint alleges, "Without Twitter, the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most-feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible." At the end of 2015, Twitter stepped up its efforts (or at least its official policies) to block such content from its site. But the company has been under fire for over a year from citizens and law enforcement officials over the activity of various terrorist groups on its platform. Fields's attorneys hope that her husband's death will give her proper standing to challenge Twitter in court.

itwbennett writes: This weekend, Apple security expert Patrick Wardle will detail a vulnerability in Apple's Gatekeeper that makes it possible to bypass the anti-malware defense. This is the same vulnerability that was disclosed last April, which Apple said it patched later. Wardle was able to easily bypass Apple's fixes. He says "all Apple did was blacklist the signed apps he was abusing, but didn't fix the underlying issue, which is that, essentially, Gatekeeper functions as a guard that doesn't check" software already on the whitelist.

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix have announced they'll be taking further steps to ensure users are not circumventing geo-restrictions. David Fullagar, Vice President of Content Delivery and Architecture at Netflix says "Some members use proxies or "unblockers" to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. This announcement comes just days after Netflix Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt said that a VPN blocking policy might be impossible to enforce."

An anonymous reader writes: The DDoSing outfit that spawned the trend of "DDoS-for-Bitcoin" has been arrested by Europol in Bosnia Herzegovina last month. DD4BC first appeared in September 2015, when Akamai blew the lid on their activities. Since then almost any script kiddie that can launch DDoS attacks has followed their business model by blackmailing companies for Bitcoin.

An anonymous reader writes: The DDoSing outfit that spawned the trend of "DDoS-for-Bitcoin" has been arrested by Europol in Bosnia Herzegovina last month. DD4BC first appeared in September 2015, when Akamai blew the lid on their activities. Since then almost any script kiddie that can launch DDoS attacks has followed their business model by blackmailing companies for Bitcoin.

1sockchuck writes: Colocation and content delivery specialist EdgeConneX is operating unmanned "lights out" data centers in 20 markets across the United States, marking the most ambitious use to date of automation to streamline data center operations. While some companies have operated prototypes of "lights out" unmanned facilities (including AOL) or deployed unmanned containers with server gear, EdgeConneX built its broader deployment strategy around a lean operations model. The company uses software to remotely control the generators and UPS systems at each data center, and can dispatch techs when on-site maintenance is needed.

An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Microsoft has open-sourced the core components of Chakra, the company's JavaScript engine used in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. The project, dubbed ChakraCore, has been released under the MIT License on GitHub. The official blog post reads in part: "The ChakraCore repository provides a fully supported and open-source standalone JavaScript engine, with the same characteristics as the Microsoft Edge’s Chakra engine, to embed in projects, innovate on top of and contribute back to. We will be accepting community contributions and input to ChakraCore. Once the changes from any pull request have been vetted, our goal is to ensure that all changes find their way to be shipped as a part of the JavaScript engine powering Microsoft Edge and the Universal Windows Platform on Windows 10."

Mark Wilson writes: Trend Micro may still be smarting from the revelation that there was a serious vulnerability in its Password Manager tool, but today the security company warns of the dangers of sharing ransomware source code. The company says that those who discover vulnerabilities need to think carefully about sharing details of their findings with the wider public as there is great potential for this information to be misused, even if it is released for educational purposes. It says that 'even with the best intentions, improper disclosure of sensitive information can lead to complicated, and sometimes even troublesome scenarios'. The warning may seem like an exercise in stating the bleeding obvious, but it does serve as an important reminder of how the vulnerability disclosure process should work.

1sockchuck writes: Connected cars generate a lot of data. That's translating into big business for data center providers, as evidenced by a major data center expansion by Uber, which needs more storage and compute power to support its global data platform. Uber drivers' mobile phones send location updates every 4 seconds, which is why the design goal for Uber's geospatial index is to handle a million writes per second. It's a reminder that as our cars become mini data centers, the data isn't staying onboard, but will also be offloaded to the data centers of automakers and software companies.

itwbennett writes: In a lawsuit in Northern California that was dismissed in 2014, Falun Gong practitioners alleged that Cisco Systems built a security system, dubbed "Golden Shield," for the Chinese government knowing it would be used to track and persecute members of the religious minority. That case is being appealed, and on Monday the EFF, Privacy International and free-speech group Article 19 filed a brief that supports the appeal. Many U.S. and European companies sell technology to regimes that violate human rights, and if this case goes to trial and Cisco loses, they may think twice, said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. "In a lot of instances, these companies are selling directly to the government, and they know exactly what is going to be happening," Cope said.

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has now joined the CIA's John Brennan in having his personal online accounts hacked. A teenage hacker known as 'Cracka' has claimed responsibility for the hack, reporting that he had infiltrated Clapper's home telephone, online accounts and his personal email, as well as his wife's Yahoo account. Cracka had managed to change the settings on Clapper's Verizon Fios account so that any calls to his home number were redirected to the Free Palestine Movement group in California.

An anonymous reader writes: The IT community was shaken a few weeks ago when Juniper Networks firewalls were found to contain "unauthorized code" that seemed to enable a backdoor. Now, Fortinet firewalls have been found to contain an apparent SSH backdoor as well. "According to the exploit code, the undisclosed authentication works on versions 4.3 up to 5.0.7. If correct, the surreptitious access method was active in FortiOS versions current in the 2013 and 2014 time frame and possibly earlier, based on this rough release history. The weakness was eventually patched, but so far, researchers have been unable to locate a security advisory that disclosed the alternative authentication method or the hard-coded password." A spokesperson for Fortinet told El Reg, "This was not a 'backdoor' vulnerability issue but rather a management authentication issue."

theodp writes: After India's telecom regulator asked a local company to temporarily stop Facebook's Free Basics service amid questions about whether it violates net neutrality, Facebook launched a controversial lobbying campaign, encouraging FB users to write to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which oversees the country's Internet policy, urging the service be preserved. As of Jan. 7, the deadline for accepting comments, the regulator said it had received nearly two million comments from accounts affiliated with the site, including the domain names "@supportfreebasics.in" and "@facebookmail."

But many of these comments, the regulator said in a statement, are "basically template responses and the content are identical in nature." TRAI's we-ain't-buying-it response to the orchestrated flood of millions of comments (from both sides) differs markedly from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, which recently told the Court (PDF) it couldn't possibly comply with a Judge's six-month deadline to address issues with the OPT STEM Extension Program because it was overwhelmed by "the approximately 50,500 comments" (about what the average Slashdot reader reviews in a day!) from individuals urged on by the White House and other organizations. By the way, among the comments received by DHS was one from NAFSA — the lobbying powerhouse that represents 3,500 colleges and universities — calling for DHS to have OPT extensions expanded to include all fields of study (PDF).

theodp writes: After India's telecom regulator asked a local company to temporarily stop Facebook's Free Basics service amid questions about whether it violates net neutrality, Facebook launched a controversial lobbying campaign, encouraging FB users to write to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which oversees the country's Internet policy, urging the service be preserved. As of Jan. 7, the deadline for accepting comments, the regulator said it had received nearly two million comments from accounts affiliated with the site, including the domain names "@supportfreebasics.in" and "@facebookmail."

But many of these comments, the regulator said in a statement, are "basically template responses and the content are identical in nature." TRAI's we-ain't-buying-it response to the orchestrated flood of millions of comments (from both sides) differs markedly from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, which recently told the Court (PDF) it couldn't possibly comply with a Judge's six-month deadline to address issues with the OPT STEM Extension Program because it was overwhelmed by "the approximately 50,500 comments" (about what the average Slashdot reader reviews in a day!) from individuals urged on by the White House and other organizations. By the way, among the comments received by DHS was one from NAFSA — the lobbying powerhouse that represents 3,500 colleges and universities — calling for DHS to have OPT extensions expanded to include all fields of study (PDF).

itwbennett writes: Trend Micro has released an automatic update fixing the problems in its antivirus product that Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy discovered could allow "anyone on the internet [to] steal all of your passwords completely silently, as well as execute arbitrary code with zero user interaction." The password manager in Trend's antivirus product is written in JavaScript and opens up multiple HTTP remote procedure call ports to handle API requests, Ormandy wrote. Ormandy says it took him 30 seconds to find one that would accept remote code. He also found an API that allowed him to access passwords stored in the manager. This is just the latest in a string of serious vulnerabilities that have been found in antivirus products in the last seven months.

An anonymous reader writes: There's some good news for "free-range" parents and fans of children being allowed to walk places on their own. A recently approved federal education law will allow students to take alternative forms of transportation to and from school with parental permission. Fastcoexist reports: "Relax, parents. Now you can allow your kids to walk, ride a bike, or take a bus to school, without you or your children getting arrested. The recently-signed Every Student Succeeds Act contains a section (858) that protects the rights of kids to walk or go out alone. The act was sponsored by Utah senator Mike Lee, who is a supporter of the Free Range Kids movement, and provides some hope for parents who feel that their kids should be allowed some autonomy to get by own their own." One can only hope that children will be allowed to go to the park on their own soon as well.

Koreantoast writes: It's no secret that governments across the globe have been taking advantage of new technologies to create stronger surveillance systems on citizens. While many have focused on the actions of intelligence agencies, local police departments continue to create more sophisticated systems as well. A recent article highlights one new system deployed by the Fresno, California police department, Intrado's Beware. The system scours police data, public records, social media, and public Internet data to provide a "threat level" of a potential suspect or residency. The software is part of a broader trend of military counterinsurgency tools and algorithms being repurposed for civil use. While these tools can help police manage actively dangerous situations, providing valuable intel when responding to calls, the analysis also raises serious civil liberties questions both in privacy (where the data comes from) and accuracy (is the data valid, was the analysis done correctly). Also worrying are the long term ramifications to such technologies: there has already been some speculation about "citizen scores," could a criminal threat score be something similar? At very least, as Matt Cagle of the ACLU noted, "there needs to be a meaningful debate... there needs to be safeguards and oversight."

jones_supa writes: North Korea has expanded its own loudspeaker broadcasts along the inter-Korean border as a counteraction to South Korea's retaliatory broadcasts critical of the communist nation, sources said Monday. In retaliation for North's nuclear test last Wednesday, South resumed its anti-Pyongyang broadcast campaign two days later, a form of psychological warfare detested by the communist country, where outside information is tightly blocked out. "The North initially operated its own loudspeakers at two locations and has now expanded to several locations," a government source said. "In fact, the anti-South loudspeaker broadcasts appear to be coming from every location where we are broadcasting." The North Korean broadcasts are not clearly audible from the South Korean side of the border, but mostly deal with internal propaganda messages and music promoting its leader Kim Jong-un. "We are not sure if it's an issue of electric power or the performance of the loudspeakers, but the sound is very weak," another government source said.

An anonymous reader writes: Five years after AT&T discontinued its unlimited mobile data plan, the company is bringing it back with a catch: users must be subscribed to DirecTV or U-verse TV as well. The service will start at $100/month for a single subscriber. Two additional users can be added for $40/month each, and the fourth is free. There's also one more caveat: "Customers that exceed 22 gigabytes of data use in one month will have their speed throttled during peak network traffic periods." AT&T looks to do battle with T-Mobile, who has a similar four-person plan. This is one of the first major consequences of AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV last year for $48.5 billion. The company says it will soon roll out other plans to combine the services.

An anonymous reader writes: Five years after AT&T discontinued its unlimited mobile data plan, the company is bringing it back with a catch: users must be subscribed to DirecTV or U-verse TV as well. The service will start at $100/month for a single subscriber. Two additional users can be added for $40/month each, and the fourth is free. There's also one more caveat: "Customers that exceed 22 gigabytes of data use in one month will have their speed throttled during peak network traffic periods." AT&T looks to do battle with T-Mobile, who has a similar four-person plan. This is one of the first major consequences of AT&T's acquisition of DirecTV last year for $48.5 billion. The company says it will soon roll out other plans to combine the services.

itwbennett writes: A new study of a recent cyberattack against Ukrainian power companies suggests malware didn't directly cause the outages that affected at least 80,000 customers. While malware was used to gain access to networks, the attackers then opened circuit breakers that cut power, according to information published Saturday by the SANS Industrial Control Systems (ICS) team. The attackers used direct intervention to try to mask their actions to the power systems operators and also conducted denial-of-service attacks on the utilities' phone systems to block complaints from affected customers, SANS said.

echo-e writes: Renowned singer David Bowie has died after an 18-month battle with cancer. His latest album, Blackstar, was only just released on Friday — his birthday. His last live show was in 2006. Bowie rose to fame in the 1970s, and he is known for hits such as Under Pressure, Let's Dance, and Space Oddity. He also appeared in handful of films, such as Labyrinth in 1986. Bowie was also notable for being one of the few musicians to immediately see the value and staying power of MP3s and the digital distribution of music. If anything, he was overly optimistic about it. In 2002, he said, "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

echo-e writes: Renowned singer David Bowie has died after an 18-month battle with cancer. His latest album, Blackstar, was only just released on Friday — his birthday. His last live show was in 2006. Bowie rose to fame in the 1970s, and he is known for hits such as Under Pressure, Let's Dance, and Space Oddity. He also appeared in handful of films, such as Labyrinth in 1986. Bowie was also notable for being one of the few musicians to immediately see the value and staying power of MP3s and the digital distribution of music. If anything, he was overly optimistic about it. In 2002, he said, "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

theodp writes: When President Obama delivers his final State of the Union address on Tuesday, the White House reports that the inspiring individuals seated with the First Lady will include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "Microsoft has been a leader in expanding access to computer science in K-12 classrooms," explains the White House, perhaps unaware that the company reportedly struck a deal to kill BASIC on Macs in 1985 and stopped including BASIC on PCs after Windows 95. Ironically, Microsoft now laments that girls began to stop seeing themselves as coders after 1984, which gave rise to the need for today's Microsoft-led national K-12 CS intervention. "Girls don't see other girls programming," Microsoft explained in 2013, "so they just don't know that it's available to them." So, is there such a thing as corporate Munchausen syndrome by proxy?

theodp writes: When President Obama delivers his final State of the Union address on Tuesday, the White House reports that the inspiring individuals seated with the First Lady will include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "Microsoft has been a leader in expanding access to computer science in K-12 classrooms," explains the White House, perhaps unaware that the company reportedly struck a deal to kill BASIC on Macs in 1985 and stopped including BASIC on PCs after Windows 95. Ironically, Microsoft now laments that girls began to stop seeing themselves as coders after 1984, which gave rise to the need for today's Microsoft-led national K-12 CS intervention. "Girls don't see other girls programming," Microsoft explained in 2013, "so they just don't know that it's available to them." So, is there such a thing as corporate Munchausen syndrome by proxy?

An anonymous reader writes: Shortly after the death of Debian founder Ian Murdock, Bruce Perens, who succeeded Murdock as Debian Project Leader in 1996 and was also Murdock's employer for a period of time, claimed very publicly that Murdock died of mental illness, although no evidence has been provided. Without referencing Murdock or Perens, another prominent Debian Developer, Daniel Pocock, has asserted that discussion about who has or had a mental illness is a step too far. To be fair, it sure doesn't sound like Perens was trying to do other than express sympathy in light of a tragic death.

StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we've collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim. (Related: Yesterday's post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.)

Layzej writes: With only a few stations left to report, 2015 is virtually certain to beat 2014's record as the planet's warmest year since record keeping began in 1880. The new record was caused by the long-term warming of the planet due to human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide, combined with a extra bump in temperature due to the strongest El Niño event ever recorded in the Eastern Pacific. Record warm ocean temperatures in the tropics in 2015 led to a global coral bleaching event, which is expected to cause a loss of 10 — 20% of all coral worldwide. Weather Underground recounts several other records that accompanied the heat including the most intense hurricane ever observed in the Western Hemisphere, the ongoing agricultural fires in Indonesia — the most expensive disaster in Indonesia's history estimated at $16 billion in damages, flooding in America and India, and record central pacific hurricane activity.

Lucas123 writes: Smart gun developers have faced pushback from opponents who fear adoption will lead to mandates. But this week, President Obama embraced the technology, creating the biggest customer of them all for smart guns: the federal government. He instructed several departments to "review the availability of smart gun technology on a regular basis, and to explore potential ways to further its use and development to more broadly improve gun safety." Joel Moshbacher, national co-chair of a gun safety advocacy group, said the move this week is "a game changer." Smart gun developers he's spoken with need only a few million to move their prototypes to market, so $20 million would be a windfall for several developers. Donald Sebastian, senior vice president for research and development at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), said federal dollars are the only way to advance the technology because of pushback by opposition groups. For example, when Armatix, a German startup, tried to introduce a smart handgun in the U.S. two years ago, it was met with vehement protests, including threats to burn down a Maryland store that was going to sell it. A second store in California that was carrying it also pulled it from its shelves citing pressure from those opposed to the tech.

Lucas123 writes: Smart gun developers have faced pushback from opponents who fear adoption will lead to mandates. But this week, President Obama embraced the technology, creating the biggest customer of them all for smart guns: the federal government. He instructed several departments to "review the availability of smart gun technology on a regular basis, and to explore potential ways to further its use and development to more broadly improve gun safety." Joel Moshbacher, national co-chair of a gun safety advocacy group, said the move this week is "a game changer." Smart gun developers he's spoken with need only a few million to move their prototypes to market, so $20 million would be a windfall for several developers. Donald Sebastian, senior vice president for research and development at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), said federal dollars are the only way to advance the technology because of pushback by opposition groups. For example, when Armatix, a German startup, tried to introduce a smart handgun in the U.S. two years ago, it was met with vehement protests, including threats to burn down a Maryland store that was going to sell it. A second store in California that was carrying it also pulled it from its shelves citing pressure from those opposed to the tech.

theodp writes: On Sunday, The Simpsons declared computer coding class the nation's latest educational fad (script). Proving Principal Skinner's point, K12CS.org on Thursday announced a New Framework to Define K-12 Computer Science Education, the collaboration of participants from a number of states (MD, CA, IN, IA, AR, UT, ID, NE, GA, WA), large school districts (NYC, Chicago, San Francisco), technology companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple), organizations (Code.org, ACM, CSTA, ISTE, MassCAN, CSNYC), and individuals (higher ed faculty, researchers, K-12 teachers, and administrators). "A steering committee initially comprised of the Computer Science Teachers Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and [tech bankrolled and led] Code.org will oversee this project," explained a CSTA blog post. "Funding for the project will be provided by Code.org and the ACM. The framework will identify key K-12 computer science concepts and practices we expect students exiting grades 2, 5, 8, and 12 to know."

In a FAQ, K12CS.org envisions a Programming and Algorithms standard for 1st Graders that calls for the 5-year-olds to "Work collaboratively in clear roles (e.g., pair programming) to construct a problem solution of a sequence of block-based programming commands." A day before the announcement, Politico reported that K-12 CS education is expected to get a State of the Union mention this year, and that the White House and U.S. Dept. of Education have been trolling for CS success stories in conjunction with the announcement of a broad set of new commitments to CS Education in early 2016.

Rei writes: With the world's first successful low-speed landing of an orbital rocket's first stage complete, SpaceX looks to continue that success by attempting its second landing — this time, on their new drone ship in the Pacific. While SpaceX has announced plans to turn their successfully-landed rocket, reportedly flight-ready, into a a museum piece, the stage they recover next may be SpaceX's first chance to prove the mudslinging of their competitors wrong and show that Russia's worries are well founded. That is, if they can successfully pull it off.

Rei writes: With the world's first successful low-speed landing of an orbital rocket's first stage complete, SpaceX looks to continue that success by attempting its second landing — this time, on their new drone ship in the Pacific. While SpaceX has announced plans to turn their successfully-landed rocket, reportedly flight-ready, into a a museum piece, the stage they recover next may be SpaceX's first chance to prove the mudslinging of their competitors wrong and show that Russia's worries are well founded. That is, if they can successfully pull it off.

itwbennett writes: Uber has agreed to pay a penalty of $20,000 in a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman for delaying telling drivers about the data breach of their personal information in 2014. The company has also agreed to tighten employee access to geo-location data of passengers, following reports that the company's executives had an aerial 'God View' of such data, the office of the attorney general said in a statement Wednesday.

itwbennett writes: Uber has agreed to pay a penalty of $20,000 in a settlement with New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman for delaying telling drivers about the data breach of their personal information in 2014. The company has also agreed to tighten employee access to geo-location data of passengers, following reports that the company's executives had an aerial 'God View' of such data, the office of the attorney general said in a statement Wednesday.

An anonymous reader writes: Smart TVs running older versions of the Android operating system are being infected with malware that was specifically built to target smart TVs. Infections occur via applications downloaded from a series of sites ran under the H.TV brand. These are websites that offer applications specifically built for Android smart TVs that allow users to watch TV channels from other regions of the globe. As usual, these apps are side-loaded from unofficial app stores. Fortunately, it's not a smart TV ransomware.

On December 28, 2015, Larry Seltzer wrote an article for Ars Technica provocatively titled (by Ars editors), The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? A link to this article was posted on Slashdot, where it provoked a spirited discussion. In this video conversation, we talked to Larry about mobile aps vs. Web standards. Not surprisingly, he had some interesting things to say.

jones_supa writes: South Korea has said that it will resume anti-Pyongyang loudspeaker broadcasts this week along the heavily fortified border with North Korea in retaliation of Pyongyang's claimed hydrogen bomb test. The broadcasts will resume at noon on Friday, told Cho Tae-yong, deputy chief of the presidential office of national security. Cho added that South Korean troops maintain combat readiness and will sternly retaliate against North Korea if Pyongyang follows with a provocation. In August, South resumed the broadcasts for the first time in 11 years in retaliation for the North's land-mine attack that maimed two South Korean soldiers. The two sides later held days of intensive high-level talks and produced a deal in which South agreed to stop propaganda broadcasts unless an abnormal situation occurs. Which now did.

itwbennett writes: A couple of years ago, Facebook revealed it was using Blu-ray disks as a cost-efficient way to archive the billions of images that users uploaded to its service. When Facebook users upload photos, they're often viewed frequently in the first week, so Facebook stores them on solid state drives or spinning hard disks. But as time goes on the images get viewed less and less. At a certain point, Facebook dumps them onto high-capacity Blu ray discs, where they might sit for years without being looked at. Now, Panasonic has said it plans to commercialize the technology for other businesses, and is working on new disks that will hold a terabyte of data.

Okian Warrior writes: Long term readers may recall the Free State Project, a plan to gather 20,000 liberty-minded participants and move to a low-populated state, as covered here on Slashdot. The project reached 90% of its 20,000 member goal last year with accelerated growth in recent months, and is on track to trigger the move to New Hampshire before year's end.

An anonymous reader writes: Smart payments startup Coin has announced it will team up with MasterCard to use its electronic card technology to help companies integrate payment services into their wearable devices. Under the new MasterCard partnership, owners of wearables with integrated Coin technology will be able to pay at retail outlets without the need to take out any cash or card . The deal is not exclusive, which means that there is still potential for Visa and American Express customers to benefit when the Coin-embedded tech begins to ship later this year.

New submitter n0w4k writes: Researchers at the University of Groningen have developed a self-replicating system able to not only pass hereditary information from one generation to another, but also mutate (non-paywalled link to the paper). It is a crucial step towards Darwinian evolution of abiotic species and artificial life. According to the authors and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, in order to fully reach this goal, a death mechanism needs to be implemented in the system. Otherwise new species can only form but not disappear.

Self-replicating chemical systems have been widely studied before; some were even able to mutate. However, this discovery provides the first example of mutating replicators which are fully artificial.

Full disclosure: I am one of the co-authors; you can ask me if you have some specific questions or suggestions — maybe they can be implemented in the lab!

An anonymous reader writes: Zerodium, the company that buys zero-day bugs from security researchers and then sells them forward to government intelligence agencies, has put out a new bounty, this one on Adobe's Flash Player. The exploit vendor is offering $100,000 to the first researcher that finds a similar zero-day bug, capable of avoiding Flash's newly-released isolated heap memory protection feature. Previously, Zerodium offered $1 million to a security researcher for a zero-day bug in Apple's iOS 9 operating system.

StartsWithABang writes: In 2012, astronomers announced that the nearest star system to us, the Alpha Centauri system, possessed at least one exoplanet around it. A periodic signal that recurred just every 3.24 days was consistent with an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting and gravitationally tugging on the second largest member of the star system: Alpha Centauri B. That planet, named Alpha Centauri Bb, turns out not to actually be there. A reanalysis of the data shows that a combination of stellar properties and the times at which the observations were made conspired to produce this spurious signal: a signal that goes away if the data is handled correctly. Accounting for everything correctly reveals something else of interest, a periodic 20-day signal, which may turn out — with better observations — to be Alpha Centauri's first exoplanet after all.

Advocatus Diaboli sends a report from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept about the NSA's efforts to subvert encryption. Back in 2013, several major publications reported that the NSA was able to crack encryption surrounding commerce and banking systems. Their reports did not identify which specific technology was affected. The recent backdoor found in Juniper systems has caused the journalists involved to un-redact a particular passage from the Snowden documents indicating the NSA targeted the "two leading encryption chips" in their attempts to compromise encryption. Quoting: The reference to "the two leading encryption chips" provides some hints, but no definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully targeted. Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which companies this might reference. But he said that "the damage has already been done. From what I've heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical eye as a result of what the NSA has done. That's too bad, because I suspect only a minority of products have been compromised this way."

Advocatus Diaboli sends a report from Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept about the NSA's efforts to subvert encryption. Back in 2013, several major publications reported that the NSA was able to crack encryption surrounding commerce and banking systems. Their reports did not identify which specific technology was affected. The recent backdoor found in Juniper systems has caused the journalists involved to un-redact a particular passage from the Snowden documents indicating the NSA targeted the "two leading encryption chips" in their attempts to compromise encryption. Quoting: The reference to "the two leading encryption chips" provides some hints, but no definitive proof, as to which ones were successfully targeted. Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins, declined to speculate on which companies this might reference. But he said that "the damage has already been done. From what I've heard, many foreign purchasers have already begun to look at all U.S.-manufactured encryption technology with a much more skeptical eye as a result of what the NSA has done. That's too bad, because I suspect only a minority of products have been compromised this way."

Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system. This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.

An anonymous reader writes: IEEE researchers are proposing new standards for haptic codecs over software-defined 5G networks in order to achieve the ambitious 1ms latency and reliability required for the 'tactile internet'. It's a trivial consideration when hugging chickens over a network, more serious for applications of telesurgery, and a proposed leap in network quality that seems likely to yield benefits for general data streams as well.

An anonymous reader writes: IEEE researchers are proposing new standards for haptic codecs over software-defined 5G networks in order to achieve the ambitious 1ms latency and reliability required for the 'tactile internet'. It's a trivial consideration when hugging chickens over a network, more serious for applications of telesurgery, and a proposed leap in network quality that seems likely to yield benefits for general data streams as well.