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A few weeks ago, Rightscorp announced plans to have ISPs disconnect repeat copyright infringers. mpicpp (3454017) wrote in with news that Rightscorp announced during their latest earnings call further plans to require ISPs to block all web access (using a proxy system similar to hotel / college campus wifi logins) until users admit guilt and pay a settlement fine (replacing the current system of ISPs merely forwarding notices to users). Quoting TorrentFreak: [Rightscorp] says 75,000 cases have been settled so far with copyright holders picking up $10 from each. ... What is clear is that Rightscorp is determined to go after "Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cable Vision and one more" in order to "get all of them compliant" (i.e forwarding settlement demands). The company predicts that more details on the strategy will develop in the fall, but comments from COO & CTO Robert Steele hint on how that might be achieved. ... "[What] we really want to do is move away from termination and move to what's called a hard redirect, like, when you go into a hotel and you have to put your room number in order to get past the browser and get on to browsing the web." The idea that mere allegations from an anti-piracy company could bring a complete halt to an entire household or business Internet connection until a fine is paid is less like a "piracy speeding ticket" and more like a "piracy wheel clamp", one that costs $20 to have removed.

alphadogg (971356) writes with news that the transition from Windows to GNU/Linux in Munich may be in danger The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community's poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Munich's deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration (Google translation to English) of the city's end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution — "LiMux" — in a process that dates back to 2003.

1sockchuck writes In a unique approach to data center design, the new high-performance computing center in Oregon is housed in a geodesic dome. The new facility at the Oregon Health and Science University requires no mechanical air conditioning, using outside air to racks of servers reaching densities of 25kW per cabinet. The design uses an aisle containment system to separate hot and cold air, and can recirculate server exhaust heat to adjust cold aisle temperatures in the winter. It's a very cool integration of many recent advances in data center design, combining elements of the Yahoo Chicken Coop and server silo in Quebec. The school has posted a virtual tour that provides a deep technical dive.

1sockchuck writes In a unique approach to data center design, the new high-performance computing center in Oregon is housed in a geodesic dome. The new facility at the Oregon Health and Science University requires no mechanical air conditioning, using outside air to racks of servers reaching densities of 25kW per cabinet. The design uses an aisle containment system to separate hot and cold air, and can recirculate server exhaust heat to adjust cold aisle temperatures in the winter. It's a very cool integration of many recent advances in data center design, combining elements of the Yahoo Chicken Coop and server silo in Quebec. The school has posted a virtual tour that provides a deep technical dive.

First time accepted submitter carbon_tet writes I read two articles this week that made me wonder: "Would anyone actually pay for a website without trolls?" The first, was about web trolls and civility on the internet, and the second about the ad-based internet. It seems that public comments unavoidably have trolls, or they degrade very quickly until someone makes a reference to Hitler. So, is it impossible to have a substantive discussion online without trolls? Would you put your money where your mouth is to have a serious online conversation without them? Are there any topics that you would talk about (or prefer to see talked about) on a website where trolls were paywalled out?

An anonymous reader writes "Phil Plait wants you to know that asteroid 1950 DA is very, very unlikely to hit the Earth in 2880, despite what you may have read. He writes: "As it happens, 1950 DA is what's called a 'near-Earth asteroid', because its orbit sometimes brings it relatively close to Earth. I'll note that I mean close on a cosmic scale. Looking over the next few decades, a typical pass is tens of millions of kilometers away, with some as close as five million kilometers — which is still more than ten times farther away than the Moon! Still, that's in our neighborhood, which is one of the reasons this asteroid is studied so well. It gets close enough that we can get a decent look at it when it passes. Can it impact the Earth? Yes, kindof. Right now, the orbit of the asteroid doesn't bring it close enough to hit us. But there are forces acting on asteroids over time that subtly change their orbits; one of them is called the YORP effect, a weak force that arises due to the way the asteroid spins and radiates away heat. The infrared photons it emits when it's warm carry away a teeny tiny bit of momentum, and they act pretty much like an incredibly low-thrust rocket. Over many years, this can change both the rotation of the asteroid as well as the shape of its orbit."

Safensoft writes: Symantec recently made a loud statement that antivirus is dead and that they don't really consider it to be a source of profit. Some companies said the same afterwards; some other suggested that Symantec just wants a bit of free media attention. The press is full of data on antivirus efficiency being quite low. A notable example would be the Zeus banking Trojan, and how only 40% of its versions can be stopped by antivirus software. The arms race between malware authors and security companies is unlikely to stop.

On the other hand, experts' opinions of antivirus software have been low for a while, so it's hardly surprising. It's not a panacea. The only question that remains is: how exactly should antivirus operate in modern security solutions? Should it be one of the key parts of a protection solution, or it should be reduced to only stopping the easiest and most well-known threats?

Threats aren't the only issue — there are also performance concerns. Processors get better, and interaction with hard drives becomes faster, but at the same time antivirus solutions require more and more of that power. Real-time file scanning, constant updates and regular checks on the whole system only mean one thing – as long as antivirus is thorough, productivity while using a computer goes down severely. This situation is not going to change, ever, so we have to deal with it. But how, exactly? Is a massive migration of everything, from workstations to automatic control systems in industry, even possible? Is using whitelisting protection on Windows-based machines is the answer? Or we should all just sit and hope for Microsoft to give us a new Windows with good integrated protection? Are there any other ways to deal with it?

Safensoft writes: Symantec recently made a loud statement that antivirus is dead and that they don't really consider it to be a source of profit. Some companies said the same afterwards; some other suggested that Symantec just wants a bit of free media attention. The press is full of data on antivirus efficiency being quite low. A notable example would be the Zeus banking Trojan, and how only 40% of its versions can be stopped by antivirus software. The arms race between malware authors and security companies is unlikely to stop.

On the other hand, experts' opinions of antivirus software have been low for a while, so it's hardly surprising. It's not a panacea. The only question that remains is: how exactly should antivirus operate in modern security solutions? Should it be one of the key parts of a protection solution, or it should be reduced to only stopping the easiest and most well-known threats?

Threats aren't the only issue — there are also performance concerns. Processors get better, and interaction with hard drives becomes faster, but at the same time antivirus solutions require more and more of that power. Real-time file scanning, constant updates and regular checks on the whole system only mean one thing – as long as antivirus is thorough, productivity while using a computer goes down severely. This situation is not going to change, ever, so we have to deal with it. But how, exactly? Is a massive migration of everything, from workstations to automatic control systems in industry, even possible? Is using whitelisting protection on Windows-based machines is the answer? Or we should all just sit and hope for Microsoft to give us a new Windows with good integrated protection? Are there any other ways to deal with it?

McGruber writes: While reading a story in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, I saw that the paper had begun embedding Amazon Buy-It-Now links in the middle of story sentences. For example, in this article, a sentence about the sales figures for differing covers of The Great Gatsby read: At Politics and Prose, the traditional [BUY IT NOW] version — featuring the iconic eyes floating on a blue background — sold better than the DiCaprio [BUY IT NOW] cover. This change follows the July news of much larger than expected losses at Amazon and a 10-percent decline in the Amazon's stock value. In related news, the Post reports that the literary executor of George Orwell's estate has accused Amazon.com of doublespeak after they cited one of Orwell's essays in their ebook pricing debate with Hachette and other publishers.

Taxilian writes We've talked about office chairs before, but I'm one of those coders who tends to relax by doing more coding. Particularly when I'm short on time for a project, I like to move my work to where I am still around my wife and children so that I can still interact with them and be with my family, but still hit my deadlines. I have used various recliners and found that programming in them (at least in evenings) can be quite comfortable, but haven't felt like I really found the 'ideal chair' for relaxing and working on my Macbook.

I have found references to failed chairs (like La-Z-Boy Explorer, the so-called "E-cliner") that were intended for tech and failed, but are there any existing and useful options? I'd really like something that provides some sort of lap desk (to keep the heat from the laptop away from me) and reasonable power arrangements while still being comfortable and not looking ridiculous in a normal family room.

Yesterday we ran Part One of this two-part video. This is part two. To recap yesterday's text introduction: Detroit recently hosted the North American Science Fiction Convention, drawing thousands of SF fans to see and hear a variety of talks on all sorts of topics. One of the biggest panels featured a discussion on perhaps the greatest technological disappointment of the past fifty years: Where are our d@%& flying cars? Panelists included author and database consultant Jonathan Stars, expert in Aeronautical Management and 20-year veteran of the Air Force Douglas Johnson, author and founder of the Artemis Project Ian Randal Strock, novelist Cindy A. Matthews, Fermilab physicist Bill Higgins, general manager of a nanotechnology company Dr. Charles Dezelah, and astrobiology expert Dr. Nicolle Zellner. As it turns out, the reality of situation is far less enticing than the dream -- but new technologies offer a glimmer of hope. (Alternate Video Link)

Yesterday we ran Part One of this two-part video. This is part two. To recap yesterday's text introduction: Detroit recently hosted the North American Science Fiction Convention, drawing thousands of SF fans to see and hear a variety of talks on all sorts of topics. One of the biggest panels featured a discussion on perhaps the greatest technological disappointment of the past fifty years: Where are our d@%& flying cars? Panelists included author and database consultant Jonathan Stars, expert in Aeronautical Management and 20-year veteran of the Air Force Douglas Johnson, author and founder of the Artemis Project Ian Randal Strock, novelist Cindy A. Matthews, Fermilab physicist Bill Higgins, general manager of a nanotechnology company Dr. Charles Dezelah, and astrobiology expert Dr. Nicolle Zellner. As it turns out, the reality of situation is far less enticing than the dream -- but new technologies offer a glimmer of hope. (Alternate Video Link)

In addition to being the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup is a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley, a Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Columbia University, and a Distinguished Research Professor in Computer Science at Texas A&M University. Bjarne has written a number of books and was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He will be doing a live Google + Q & A within the C++ community on August 20th, 2014 at 12:30pm EST, but has agreed to answer your questions first. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

An anonymous reader writes Ryan Lackey of CloudFlare and Marc Rogers of Lookout revealed a new OPSEC device at Def Con called PORTAL (Personal Onion Router to Assure Liberty). It "provides always-on Tor routing, as well as 'pluggable' transport for Tor that can hide the service's traffic signature from some deep packet inspection systems." In essence, PORTAL is a travel router that the user simply plugs into their existing device for more than basic Tor protection (counterpoint to PogoPlug Safeplug and Onion Pi). On the down side, you have to download PORTAL from Github and flash it "onto a TP-Link compatible packet router." The guys behind the device acknowledge that not many people may want to (or even know how to) do that, so they're asking everyone to standby because a solution is pending. The project's GitHub page has a README file that lists compatible models, with some caveats: "It is highly recommended to use a modified router. The modified MR11U and WR703N provide a better experience than the stock routers due to the additional RAM. The severe space constraints of the stock router make them very challenging to work with. Due to the lack of usable space, it is necessary to use an external disk to store the Tor packages. The stock router has only a single USB port, and the best option is to use a microSD in a 3G modem." (Note: Lackey is no stranger to helping people secure internet privacy.)

Nate the greatest writes: The launch of Kindle Unlimited last month has many questioning the value of public libraries, with one pundit on Forbes even going so far as to proclaim that the U.K. could save money by shuttering all its libraries and replacing them with Kindle Unlimited subscriptions. Luckily for libraries, they're safe for now because they still beat Kindle Unlimited and its competitors in at least one category: content you want to read. As several reviewers have noted, Kindle Unlimited is stocked almost entirely with indie titles, with a handful of major titles thrown in. Even Scribd and Oyster only have ebooks from two of the five major U.S. publishers, while U.S. public libraries can offer titles from all five. They might be expensive and you might have to get on a waiting list, but as the Wall Street Journal points out, public libraries are safe because they can still offer a better selection. That is true, but I think the WSJ missed a key point: public libraries beat Amazon because they offer services Amazon cannot, including in-person tech support, internet access, and other basic assistance. The fact of the matter is, you can't use KU, Scribd, or Oyster if you don't know how to use your device, and your local public library is the best place to learn.

Detroit recently hosted the North American Science Fiction Convention, drawing thousands of SF fans to see and hear a variety of talks on all sorts of topics. One of the biggest panels featured a discussion on perhaps the greatest technological disappointment of the past fifty years: Where are our d@%& flying cars? Panelists included author and database consultant Jonathan Stars, expert in Aeronautical Management and 20-year veteran of the Air Force Douglas Johnson, author and founder of the Artemis Project Ian Randal Strock, novelist Cindy A. Matthews, Fermilab physicist Bill Higgins, general manager of a nanotechnology company Dr. Charles Dezelah, and astrobiology expert Dr. Nicolle Zellner. This video and the one you'll see tomorrow show their lively discussion about the economic, social, and political barriers to development and adoption of affordable flying cars. (Alternate Video Link)

New submitter Mauro sends word that Microsoft has announced upcoming Xbox One support for streaming media both from attached USB devices, such as flash drives, and DLNA media servers. Compatibility with a broad list of media formats will be added by the end of the year, including .MKV files. They also followed up last week's announcement of a digital TV tuner with an interesting twist: it will be able to stream broadcasts over a local network to devices running the Smartglass app, which is available on Windows, Android, and iOS.

An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced it is implementing a new effort to thwart spammers and scammers: the open standard known as Unicode Consortium's "Highly Restricted" specification. In short, Gmail now rejects emails from domains that use what the Unicode community has identified as potentially misleading combinations of letters. The news today follows Google's announcement last week that Gmail has gained support for accented and non-Latin characters. The company is clearly okay with international domains, as long as they aren't abused to trick its users.

Joshua Lifton says you can learn to type at 225 words per minute with his Stenosaurus, an open source stenography keyboard that has a not-there-yet website with nothing but the words, "Stenography is about to evolve," on it as of this writing. If you've heard of Joshua it's probably because he's part of the team behind Crowd Supply, which claims, "Our projects raise an average of $43,600, over twice as much as Kickstarter." A brave boast, but there's plenty of brainpower behind the company. Joshua, himself. has a PhD from MIT, which according to his company bio means, "he's devoted a significant amount of his time learning how to make things that blink." But the steno machine is his own project, independent of Crowd Supply.

Stenotype machines are usually most visible when court reporters are using them. They've been around since the 1800s, when their output was holes in paper tape. Today's versions are essentially chorded keyboards that act as computer input devices. (Douglas Engelbart famously showed off a chorded keyboard during his 1968 Mother of All Demos.) Today you have The Open Steno Project, and Stenosaurus is a member. And while Joshua's project may not have an actual website quite yet, it has an active blog. And the 225 WPM claim? Totally possible. The world record for English language stenography is 360 WPM. And you thought the Dvorak Keyboard was fast. Hah! (Alternate Video Link)

SpzToid writes Following up an earlier story here on Slashdot, now Xiaomi has apologized for collecting private data from its customers. From the article: "Xiaomi Inc said it had upgraded its operating system to ensure users knew it was collecting data from their address books after a report by a computer security firm said the Chinese budget smartphone maker was taking personal data without permission. The privately held company said it had fixed a loophole in its cloud messaging system that had triggered the unauthorized data transfer and that the operating system upgrade had been rolled out on Sunday. The issue was highlighted last week in a blog post by security firm F-Secure Oyg. In a lengthy blogpost on Google Plus, Xiaomi Vice President Hugo Barra apologized for the unauthorized data collection and said the company only collects phone numbers in users' address books to see if the users are online."

Last week you had the chance to pose questions to James Cameron and director John Bruno about their film, Deepsea Challenge 3D. We included some of those questions when we sat down with them to talk about the submersible and the movie. Below you'll find that conversation. Samzenpus: When you donated the Dee Sea Challenger to Woods Hole, they sent us copies of some of the sketches you made and I noticed that they were on lined paper. Is your normal design process a little more formal, or do you subscribe to the theory that some of the best ideas start out on napkins and scrap paper?

Cameron: Yeah, I like drawing on yellow legal pads because I can use the lines if I need a straight line in the drawing. That helps me kind of orient the drawing and lay it out spatially. It's just a habit I got into 20, 25 years ago. From a technical perspective, do I still pick up a pencil and draw on a pad. Most of the artists that work for me now as designers on the Avatar films they just start right off in Photoshop, or whatever their drawing program is, or their 3D programs. I can't do that. I got to put pen or pencil to paper first, and then go through the evolutionary steps.



Samzenpus: You're a successful guy with a enough resources at your disposal that you could pursue any hobby or interest. What made you decide that you would build your own submersible and dive seven miles beneath the surface of the ocean?

Cameron: Well, look, I think people are looking at the two most visible points of data that are kind of rising above the surface of the white noise out there. Right? And that's sort of "successful filmmaker" and "dove to the bottom of the Mariana Trench." What you have to do is look at what's beneath the surface, which is that, that was my eighth deep ocean expedition in 15 years, and that there was a long, causal series of steps going toward that where I was supervising other engineering projects, building deep ocean robotics, deep ocean 3D camera systems, 3D camera systems for motion pictures for other filmmakers, like Scorsese and Ang Lee, and things like that. Doing exploration, working with the science community, working to converge the astrobiology community and the deep ocean marine biology community, which we did with hydrothermal dense dives back in 2002 and 2003

You know, I've only made eight feature films. That's not much in a 30-plus year career. So what else was I doing? It was all this deep ocean exploration and technology development stuff, so all of that converged to this project. In fact, the interesting thing is that I really took my filmmaker hat off, on this project, and focused 100% on the technology and the science, which is why I needed a director to really take the reins of that for me. That's kind of a segue to you, John, if you want to pick up on how you basically got it all dumped on your doorstep.

Bruno: Yeah, I got the 2:00 a.m. phone call from Jim. I wasn't quite awake, and he basically explained to me that there was a situation with them in Australia, and would I be willing to direct this film. Three days later I was on a plane on my way to Australia, in Papua New Guinea, with no prep.

Cameron: It sounds very ad-hoc, which it was. But for several years before that, the film was being made, and the building of the sub was being documented by Andrew White, who'd been my producing partner and expedition partner for a decade, actually more than a decade at that point. Andrew and I started working together in 2000, and he died in a helicopter crash on the day that the expedition was supposed to leave. Obviously, it was a deeply distressing and horrible circumstance and very sadly, ironic because he had worked so hard to put this expedition together, to get the money, to get the sub built and so on. So John had to pick up the pieces and drop into it, kind of air-drop into a combat zone.



Samzenpus: You kept your cards pretty close to your chest while you were building the submersible. Why did you try to keep it so secret and not partner with other organizations or companies?

Cameron: I just felt that a lot of people come out with a lot of claims and things that they're going to do. I wanted to quietly develop some of the milestone technologies like the pilot-sphere, and things that we were doing that were cutting edge. I wanted to be sure before I announced anything that we were actually going to be able to do this. So when I was doing the mix on Avatar, I was literally sitting at the mix and monitoring on my laptop via Skype the pressure-testing of the sphere that was taking place at Penn State University. I was parallel-processing everything in the background of making Avatar, and nobody questioned it, it was a perfect cover story. But we did plan it pretty close to our vest, and we also thought that there were other people out there saying that they were building subs, and I didn't want the media to turn it into some race that it wasn't. My goal was to foster science. In fact, I worked with one of the other entities, who had taken over the Virgin Oceanic vehicle. I tried to be inclusive, and we shared technology, and so on because I just believed that there's so little money going into deep ocean research right now that we need to support each other, and not compete with each other. But I knew that the media would tend to want to turn it into a race to the bottom, and I didn't.

Samzenpus: There's certainly a lot of that with space exploration right now.

Cameron: Exactly. I do think it's interesting that Jeff Bezos and Elom Musk and some other private entrepreneurs are doing the most interesting work in human space flight. That's pretty cool. I grew up cognitively in the 60s, with these huge government programs doing amazing things, like landing men on the moon, and the Viking landers on Mars and all that sort of thing, being done by NASA. I grew up with that paradigm. Now we're in an age that's 'post' all that.



Samzenpus: Speaking of government-backed space exploration, there are a lot of parallels between deep-sea exploration and space exploration, but there doesn't seem to be as much push, or at least not visible government push, for ocean exploration. Do you think that should change or do you think that private organizations can do it on their own?

Cameron: I think it should absolutely change. If you look at what's happening in the oceans right now, we're systematically, and I would say, without any conscience whatsoever, ruthlessly destroying the ocean ecosystem as fast as it is humanly possible to do, and at the same time, intentionally or unintentionally, not funding research to understand that which we are destroying. It's literally out of sight, out of mind. It's happening off-shore, its happening underwater. We don't want to know about it, we don't want people to realize, the collective "we" as a civilization; we don't want people to realize what they're losing.

I know from my travels, my research, the colleagues that I run with, that we're destroying the living ocean. The water's not going anywhere, the world will still have plenty of salt water, there just won't be anything alive in it. That's not an exaggeration. When you think about the fact that we've literally eaten 90% of the fish, of the apex fish, and the coral reefs may not exist as living ecosystems beyond the middle of the century, due to warming and change in pH, so-called ocean acidification. That's pretty shocking. The government steps up once in a while and blows its own horn and says, "We just did a marine-protected area in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, that's going to protect coral reefs." No, you didn't because if you don't cap carbon emissions, temperature goes up, coral reefs die, even inside that little line that you drew on a map that says it's protected.



Samzenpus: From what it looks like, there's not very much space inside the submersible. Did you do any sort of physical training to get ready to sit in a tiny space for the seven hours?

Cameron: Well, part of it was sitting in it, which is a mental discipline, and part of it was getting into it. As we populated the inside of the sphere with the final configuration of all the instrumentation and electronics, it turned out that you couldn't get into it. It was a pretty funny thing because we built the sphere, we populated the inside of it on the test floor and the assembly floor and we oriented the hatch in the diving position, where the hatch is kind of down-looking. It was possible to crawl up into the thing to get into it, but when we put the sub on the ship you had to come into the hatch from above, now you're standing on the seat. It turned out not to be possible to transition from standing on the seat into getting your head underneath the control consoles.

John Garvin, The guy who fitted out the whole interior of the sphere, came to me, and he said, "Uh, Jim we have a problem. We just built this multi-million dollar sub and you can't get into it." So that's where the yoga paid off. Not that I'm that flexible, but I'm a lot more flexible than I would have been if I hadn't done a couple of years of yoga. I had to twist myself around, and get into a pretzel configuration to get... It's kind of like an upside-down crow pose. I had this fantasy that I was going to have this nice, cushy, gel-filled seat that was a nice, conformal padding. Of course, that fell off the bottom of the to-do list, and I ended up in utter agony for the last half of every dive. But that's just part of the mental discipline of it. Look, if you think about some of these long jet fighter sorties, where they're going out and they're refueling and doing these 10, 12 hour sorties in a cockpit that's smaller than that - there's a lot of people out there who just learned to discipline themselves to do that sort of thing.



How rigorous was the training, and was it enough?
by Anonymous Coward

Mr. Cameron:
I know you've had a long-time interest in undersea exploration, but you've been busy doing things like making films for much of your life, rather than (say) being a full-time submersible pilot. Could you please talk a bit about the training you undertook to control the craft? (It's all one *big* question, but it comes with some small ones -- Did you use a simulator beforehand? Are there differences in the control mechanisms between this and other underwater vessels you've used? How many hours did you practice either on-land or at easier depths first? Did the vessel react in the deepest parts as you expected it to, or were there hairy moments?)

Thanks for your insight!

Cameron: I was never really scared. I was more excited. I think it was appreciation before some of the big dives, in the day or two leading up to it. But that would manifest itself as a kind of real attention to detail with all the departments, launch and recovery, electronics and communications, all that. In terms of the prep, we built a simulator and we put the simulator sphere in a freezer, and we had a bio-medical monitoring booth where the expedition doctor would monitor all my vitals. John Garvin, who I mentioned before, was the leader of what we call the Sphere Internal Team, which was life-support, all the electronics and control systems, he's a cave diver, he personally would get into the simulator, and he did up to an 18-hour run inside the sub. So he actually has the record for being bolted inside the sub in a simulator run. We put it inside a freezer so we could study the heat flux, and what that would do to you, as the pilot. Hypothermia is one of the things that you fight in this deep diving.

The sub didn't have a heater. What it had was a lot of electronics, and they would dump waste heat and keep the sphere somewhat warm. But if you ever had a power failure where you lost all those electronics, you'd be sitting, essentially at about one degree Celsius. So we had to study the ways in which we would stay warm enough to survive, if we got stuck on the bottom. He did all that work for me, and then I would get in and do pilot training for a couple of hours at a time in a closed-in environment, on life-support. That training continued, when we were on the expedition. It's not apparent from the film, but a dive would take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours bolted into the sub. That would include time on deck, time floating in the water, then descent, bottom time, ascent, and then a recovery period, where they're out there looking for you and then getting you back on the ship. Then they unbolt you and let you out. In addition to that, I would spend two to three hours in the sub, doing run-up checks, where we would essentially like an astronaut, run through all the systems in the cockpit go through every single fuse, every breaker, every emergency system, power it all up, shut it back down, check all the computers, the gas analyzers, all that sort of thing.

I could geek-out on the technical stuff all day long because I love it. I was basically perceiving the world outside the sub, through four separate HD view screens, one of which was a touch-screen that was my control interface, and I had exterior cameras. So I'm getting all these video feeds on the inside of the sub. It was a very tight little cockpit, but I had really good spatial awareness from inside. But the accident, the helicopter crash, changed our schedule so much, and I spent so... Getting John up to speed on the film, getting the expedition rebooted, dealing with flying around the world, going to funerals, and just all kinds of crazy stuff. I lost a big chunk of my training period. I was training on the fly while we were on the ship, out in Papua New Guinea. I was taking that two-hour run-up check period to actually do some of my training. That turned out to be invaluable because the original plan was for John to get in, do the three-hour checkout, then I take his place and go dive, to minimize wear and tear on the pilot. But it turned out to be valuable on the job training for me to actually do the pre-flight myself.



Camera tech
by excelsior_gr

Was there any innovation in the camera equipment involved in the filming? Are there any special considerations that one has to make for filming at such depths?

Bruno: I had my 72 hours on my flight, trying to bone up on what the sub looked like. I knew the systems, the 3D cameras that were on the sub were basically designed by Jim and his team, and he was the DP. So I wasn't worried about .

Cameron: There was no film crew down there. It was a solo operation. I was like a one-man band playing the harmonica and the drums at the same time.

Bruno: Vince Pace was Jim's partner. Cameron-Pace systems had made lighter weight 3D cameras, beams for the red cameras. So they were easier. 3D cameras systems are fairly large. But these were a little smaller, and had to be moved around quite a bit. We had two rigs, one of those red systems was designed with an underwater housing. Then we had a couple of shoulder-configured rigs. And then we had a lot of little cameras that we would stick around, where we couldn't physically go because it was kind of dangerous on-deck. The Mermaid Sapphire was a survey ship, very large, but it had an open deck that was pretty packed with gear. The sub took up most of the space. And on that deck was a crane and winches to help lift and move the sub. So there were cables and wires crisscrossing the whole deck, plus the deck crew itself that had to move and guide the sub, once it was up, once it was lifted off its cradle over the edge; there was almost no space for us to be. Our launch-control officer, and my DP, quickly became my best friends because we had to figure out where we could go to film.

Cameron: Yeah, you've got to picture that you're on a ship at sea, and sometimes at a high sea state. You're picking up a 12-ton load, which becomes a wrecking ball if it gets out of control. It's stabilized by a bunch of tag lines going to wenches and so on. The sweep of where those cables, if they break, how they could sweep the deck clear of camera systems. But the story that you're trying to tell is about getting this sub into the water, pulling it back out of the water, and so on. John had the un-enviable task of trying to tell that story visually. I got knocked down once, when we were doing testing. I got slammed. I had a big bruise across my chest for about a month. So I had good respect for it. The thing is, on all the actual launches and recoveries, I was inside the sub. I was probably in the safest place on the whole ship.



Any surprises?
by amanaplanacanalpanam

What were you surprised by most in the course of this entire project, and in the environment at the trench floor?

Cameron: The thing is, we were dealing with a prototype vehicle. I went one meter below the surface. The second dive, I went down, I guess, it was 20 meters. The third dive, I went down 1000 meters. The fourth dive, I went down 5000 meters, something like that. The dive after that, I was trying to go down 8000 meters and I wound up having all kinds of problems, and you'll see that in the film. I wound up stuck down there for a while, then came back up and we fixed that. The next dive after that, I was going to the target depth, which was 11,000 meters. So it was a fairly rapid program of sea trials with a proto-type vehicle with 120 electronic systems on board. So you've got to expect failures.

The sub was designed with a lot of redundancy, and a lot of safety. So on the Challenger Deep Dive, a couple of things were happening. We were going deeper, so we were squeezing the systems harder, and also I had already dived 10 times. So certain things on the sub were already starting to wear out, like the seals on the thrusters, for example. There's always that balance between under-testing and over-testing. If you don't test enough, then you're unprepared. If you test too much, you wear out the machine. It's not like we had a whole other sub.

On that dive, what happened is about three hours into the bottom time, which was five and a half hours into the dive, I got saltwater into a couple of my thrusters. At that point, I wasn't able to maneuver properly, so I couldn't continue my horizontal exploration across the bottom. We had also been plagued by some hydraulic problems, and we had gone through our spares on our hydraulic valve packs, and that was on earlier dives. Then I had a problem with the manipulator arm where I lost function. Now, that wasn't in any way threatening to me, there was no safety issue with that. It just meant that my ability to grasp samples outside the sub just dropped to zero. So here I am, three hours into the bottom time with no ability to proceed forward and image new terrain and no ability to pick up a sample.I was basically pretty much useless as a doorstopper at that point. I was faced with a choice. I could sit down there and have my lunch and write my memoirs and run out my planned bottom-time of five hours, but that didn't make sense. I figured, let me get back on the ship. The sooner I get back on the ship, the sooner the guys can start the repair process.

I needed to go to London to a red-carpet premier of Titanic 3D, but then I was going to be back the next day. I figured I'd be back in three days and I'd just dive again. That's what was going through my mind. I wasn't down there going, "Whew, I'm glad I survived that. Thank God. Now I'm done, I can retire." I was thinking, "How am I going to continue this dive program, and get the science value that we came out here to do?"

Well, by the time I got back from London, I was back on the ship. The guys had pulled everything apart and they said, "All right. We're out of spares on the hydraulics, we've got these leaking seals. We need to get back into the shop and go through the entire thruster system." They said, "You can dive again, but you'll be plagued by the same types of problems." So at that point, I started to weigh the risk/benefit analysis. It didn't look that good because every dive is risky. It's risky for the crew on-deck, it's risky for the divers in the water, and it's risky for me in the sub. I thought, well, there's no point diving if I'm not going to get the science return out of it versus getting back into the shop, redesigning the thrusters, and coming back out. Do you see what I mean? That's kind of where we are right now.



What's next?
by Nidi62

First of all, you have done some amazing work and brought back incredibly interesting and, at times, (in the case of Titanic) haunting images. That being said, having reached the Challenger Deep-what do you plan to do next: do you want to return to the deepest part of the ocean, or do you find yourself drawn to a new destination(and what challenges do you expect to face in reaching that destination)?

Cameron: I assumed that once we showed everybody we could do it that the academic community would want to put together a program. That was our phase two plan. But at that point, I get back, and the next thing that happens is we're in sequestration, and all the discretionary funds for marine science get slashed and with all the budget cuts across the board, all the institutes and the national science foundations and so on, we didn't get that "big love" from the science community.

Now the sub is at Woods Hole Oceanographic. It's still functional. We could go dive in it at any point. It's the only existing vehicle that is functional that can reach those depths because the Nereus imploded a couple of months ago. But I think what's more likely to happen because manned vehicle systems are more costly to support, is that technology from the Deep Sea Challenge program will get incorporated into other vehicles, new-gen vehicles that are un-piloted, like AUVs, underwater autonomous vehicles, ROVs or some combination of the two, which they call an HROV, or Hybrid ROV. A lot of the technologies that we developed will get incorporated into some new-gen system. That's what I think will happen, but I haven't been briefed by what Woods Hole is currently planning.

I can always go back and dive the sub again, when I'm done with the Avatar films. Because my relationship with Woods Hole is, if I bring funding and we jointly set up a program, we can go operate the vehicle. At that point, I would be one of a number of pilots. We would train Woods Hole submersible pilots as well. We'd go through the same training program, and then we'd probably go on some kind of round robin roster to get our bottom time.

Last week you had the chance to pose questions to James Cameron and director John Bruno about their film, Deepsea Challenge 3D. We included some of those questions when we sat down with them to talk about the submersible and the movie. Below you'll find that conversation. Samzenpus: When you donated the Dee Sea Challenger to Woods Hole, they sent us copies of some of the sketches you made and I noticed that they were on lined paper. Is your normal design process a little more formal, or do you subscribe to the theory that some of the best ideas start out on napkins and scrap paper?

Cameron: Yeah, I like drawing on yellow legal pads because I can use the lines if I need a straight line in the drawing. That helps me kind of orient the drawing and lay it out spatially. It's just a habit I got into 20, 25 years ago. From a technical perspective, do I still pick up a pencil and draw on a pad. Most of the artists that work for me now as designers on the Avatar films they just start right off in Photoshop, or whatever their drawing program is, or their 3D programs. I can't do that. I got to put pen or pencil to paper first, and then go through the evolutionary steps.



Samzenpus: You're a successful guy with a enough resources at your disposal that you could pursue any hobby or interest. What made you decide that you would build your own submersible and dive seven miles beneath the surface of the ocean?

Cameron: Well, look, I think people are looking at the two most visible points of data that are kind of rising above the surface of the white noise out there. Right? And that's sort of "successful filmmaker" and "dove to the bottom of the Mariana Trench." What you have to do is look at what's beneath the surface, which is that, that was my eighth deep ocean expedition in 15 years, and that there was a long, causal series of steps going toward that where I was supervising other engineering projects, building deep ocean robotics, deep ocean 3D camera systems, 3D camera systems for motion pictures for other filmmakers, like Scorsese and Ang Lee, and things like that. Doing exploration, working with the science community, working to converge the astrobiology community and the deep ocean marine biology community, which we did with hydrothermal dense dives back in 2002 and 2003

You know, I've only made eight feature films. That's not much in a 30-plus year career. So what else was I doing? It was all this deep ocean exploration and technology development stuff, so all of that converged to this project. In fact, the interesting thing is that I really took my filmmaker hat off, on this project, and focused 100% on the technology and the science, which is why I needed a director to really take the reins of that for me. That's kind of a segue to you, John, if you want to pick up on how you basically got it all dumped on your doorstep.

Bruno: Yeah, I got the 2:00 a.m. phone call from Jim. I wasn't quite awake, and he basically explained to me that there was a situation with them in Australia, and would I be willing to direct this film. Three days later I was on a plane on my way to Australia, in Papua New Guinea, with no prep.

Cameron: It sounds very ad-hoc, which it was. But for several years before that, the film was being made, and the building of the sub was being documented by Andrew White, who'd been my producing partner and expedition partner for a decade, actually more than a decade at that point. Andrew and I started working together in 2000, and he died in a helicopter crash on the day that the expedition was supposed to leave. Obviously, it was a deeply distressing and horrible circumstance and very sadly, ironic because he had worked so hard to put this expedition together, to get the money, to get the sub built and so on. So John had to pick up the pieces and drop into it, kind of air-drop into a combat zone.



Samzenpus: You kept your cards pretty close to your chest while you were building the submersible. Why did you try to keep it so secret and not partner with other organizations or companies?

Cameron: I just felt that a lot of people come out with a lot of claims and things that they're going to do. I wanted to quietly develop some of the milestone technologies like the pilot-sphere, and things that we were doing that were cutting edge. I wanted to be sure before I announced anything that we were actually going to be able to do this. So when I was doing the mix on Avatar, I was literally sitting at the mix and monitoring on my laptop via Skype the pressure-testing of the sphere that was taking place at Penn State University. I was parallel-processing everything in the background of making Avatar, and nobody questioned it, it was a perfect cover story. But we did plan it pretty close to our vest, and we also thought that there were other people out there saying that they were building subs, and I didn't want the media to turn it into some race that it wasn't. My goal was to foster science. In fact, I worked with one of the other entities, who had taken over the Virgin Oceanic vehicle. I tried to be inclusive, and we shared technology, and so on because I just believed that there's so little money going into deep ocean research right now that we need to support each other, and not compete with each other. But I knew that the media would tend to want to turn it into a race to the bottom, and I didn't.

Samzenpus: There's certainly a lot of that with space exploration right now.

Cameron: Exactly. I do think it's interesting that Jeff Bezos and Elom Musk and some other private entrepreneurs are doing the most interesting work in human space flight. That's pretty cool. I grew up cognitively in the 60s, with these huge government programs doing amazing things, like landing men on the moon, and the Viking landers on Mars and all that sort of thing, being done by NASA. I grew up with that paradigm. Now we're in an age that's 'post' all that.



Samzenpus: Speaking of government-backed space exploration, there are a lot of parallels between deep-sea exploration and space exploration, but there doesn't seem to be as much push, or at least not visible government push, for ocean exploration. Do you think that should change or do you think that private organizations can do it on their own?

Cameron: I think it should absolutely change. If you look at what's happening in the oceans right now, we're systematically, and I would say, without any conscience whatsoever, ruthlessly destroying the ocean ecosystem as fast as it is humanly possible to do, and at the same time, intentionally or unintentionally, not funding research to understand that which we are destroying. It's literally out of sight, out of mind. It's happening off-shore, its happening underwater. We don't want to know about it, we don't want people to realize, the collective "we" as a civilization; we don't want people to realize what they're losing.

I know from my travels, my research, the colleagues that I run with, that we're destroying the living ocean. The water's not going anywhere, the world will still have plenty of salt water, there just won't be anything alive in it. That's not an exaggeration. When you think about the fact that we've literally eaten 90% of the fish, of the apex fish, and the coral reefs may not exist as living ecosystems beyond the middle of the century, due to warming and change in pH, so-called ocean acidification. That's pretty shocking. The government steps up once in a while and blows its own horn and says, "We just did a marine-protected area in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, that's going to protect coral reefs." No, you didn't because if you don't cap carbon emissions, temperature goes up, coral reefs die, even inside that little line that you drew on a map that says it's protected.



Samzenpus: From what it looks like, there's not very much space inside the submersible. Did you do any sort of physical training to get ready to sit in a tiny space for the seven hours?

Cameron: Well, part of it was sitting in it, which is a mental discipline, and part of it was getting into it. As we populated the inside of the sphere with the final configuration of all the instrumentation and electronics, it turned out that you couldn't get into it. It was a pretty funny thing because we built the sphere, we populated the inside of it on the test floor and the assembly floor and we oriented the hatch in the diving position, where the hatch is kind of down-looking. It was possible to crawl up into the thing to get into it, but when we put the sub on the ship you had to come into the hatch from above, now you're standing on the seat. It turned out not to be possible to transition from standing on the seat into getting your head underneath the control consoles.

John Garvin, The guy who fitted out the whole interior of the sphere, came to me, and he said, "Uh, Jim we have a problem. We just built this multi-million dollar sub and you can't get into it." So that's where the yoga paid off. Not that I'm that flexible, but I'm a lot more flexible than I would have been if I hadn't done a couple of years of yoga. I had to twist myself around, and get into a pretzel configuration to get... It's kind of like an upside-down crow pose. I had this fantasy that I was going to have this nice, cushy, gel-filled seat that was a nice, conformal padding. Of course, that fell off the bottom of the to-do list, and I ended up in utter agony for the last half of every dive. But that's just part of the mental discipline of it. Look, if you think about some of these long jet fighter sorties, where they're going out and they're refueling and doing these 10, 12 hour sorties in a cockpit that's smaller than that - there's a lot of people out there who just learned to discipline themselves to do that sort of thing.



How rigorous was the training, and was it enough?
by Anonymous Coward

Mr. Cameron:
I know you've had a long-time interest in undersea exploration, but you've been busy doing things like making films for much of your life, rather than (say) being a full-time submersible pilot. Could you please talk a bit about the training you undertook to control the craft? (It's all one *big* question, but it comes with some small ones -- Did you use a simulator beforehand? Are there differences in the control mechanisms between this and other underwater vessels you've used? How many hours did you practice either on-land or at easier depths first? Did the vessel react in the deepest parts as you expected it to, or were there hairy moments?)

Thanks for your insight!

Cameron: I was never really scared. I was more excited. I think it was appreciation before some of the big dives, in the day or two leading up to it. But that would manifest itself as a kind of real attention to detail with all the departments, launch and recovery, electronics and communications, all that. In terms of the prep, we built a simulator and we put the simulator sphere in a freezer, and we had a bio-medical monitoring booth where the expedition doctor would monitor all my vitals. John Garvin, who I mentioned before, was the leader of what we call the Sphere Internal Team, which was life-support, all the electronics and control systems, he's a cave diver, he personally would get into the simulator, and he did up to an 18-hour run inside the sub. So he actually has the record for being bolted inside the sub in a simulator run. We put it inside a freezer so we could study the heat flux, and what that would do to you, as the pilot. Hypothermia is one of the things that you fight in this deep diving.

The sub didn't have a heater. What it had was a lot of electronics, and they would dump waste heat and keep the sphere somewhat warm. But if you ever had a power failure where you lost all those electronics, you'd be sitting, essentially at about one degree Celsius. So we had to study the ways in which we would stay warm enough to survive, if we got stuck on the bottom. He did all that work for me, and then I would get in and do pilot training for a couple of hours at a time in a closed-in environment, on life-support. That training continued, when we were on the expedition. It's not apparent from the film, but a dive would take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours bolted into the sub. That would include time on deck, time floating in the water, then descent, bottom time, ascent, and then a recovery period, where they're out there looking for you and then getting you back on the ship. Then they unbolt you and let you out. In addition to that, I would spend two to three hours in the sub, doing run-up checks, where we would essentially like an astronaut, run through all the systems in the cockpit go through every single fuse, every breaker, every emergency system, power it all up, shut it back down, check all the computers, the gas analyzers, all that sort of thing.

I could geek-out on the technical stuff all day long because I love it. I was basically perceiving the world outside the sub, through four separate HD view screens, one of which was a touch-screen that was my control interface, and I had exterior cameras. So I'm getting all these video feeds on the inside of the sub. It was a very tight little cockpit, but I had really good spatial awareness from inside. But the accident, the helicopter crash, changed our schedule so much, and I spent so... Getting John up to speed on the film, getting the expedition rebooted, dealing with flying around the world, going to funerals, and just all kinds of crazy stuff. I lost a big chunk of my training period. I was training on the fly while we were on the ship, out in Papua New Guinea. I was taking that two-hour run-up check period to actually do some of my training. That turned out to be invaluable because the original plan was for John to get in, do the three-hour checkout, then I take his place and go dive, to minimize wear and tear on the pilot. But it turned out to be valuable on the job training for me to actually do the pre-flight myself.



Camera tech
by excelsior_gr

Was there any innovation in the camera equipment involved in the filming? Are there any special considerations that one has to make for filming at such depths?

Bruno: I had my 72 hours on my flight, trying to bone up on what the sub looked like. I knew the systems, the 3D cameras that were on the sub were basically designed by Jim and his team, and he was the DP. So I wasn't worried about .

Cameron: There was no film crew down there. It was a solo operation. I was like a one-man band playing the harmonica and the drums at the same time.

Bruno: Vince Pace was Jim's partner. Cameron-Pace systems had made lighter weight 3D cameras, beams for the red cameras. So they were easier. 3D cameras systems are fairly large. But these were a little smaller, and had to be moved around quite a bit. We had two rigs, one of those red systems was designed with an underwater housing. Then we had a couple of shoulder-configured rigs. And then we had a lot of little cameras that we would stick around, where we couldn't physically go because it was kind of dangerous on-deck. The Mermaid Sapphire was a survey ship, very large, but it had an open deck that was pretty packed with gear. The sub took up most of the space. And on that deck was a crane and winches to help lift and move the sub. So there were cables and wires crisscrossing the whole deck, plus the deck crew itself that had to move and guide the sub, once it was up, once it was lifted off its cradle over the edge; there was almost no space for us to be. Our launch-control officer, and my DP, quickly became my best friends because we had to figure out where we could go to film.

Cameron: Yeah, you've got to picture that you're on a ship at sea, and sometimes at a high sea state. You're picking up a 12-ton load, which becomes a wrecking ball if it gets out of control. It's stabilized by a bunch of tag lines going to wenches and so on. The sweep of where those cables, if they break, how they could sweep the deck clear of camera systems. But the story that you're trying to tell is about getting this sub into the water, pulling it back out of the water, and so on. John had the un-enviable task of trying to tell that story visually. I got knocked down once, when we were doing testing. I got slammed. I had a big bruise across my chest for about a month. So I had good respect for it. The thing is, on all the actual launches and recoveries, I was inside the sub. I was probably in the safest place on the whole ship.



Any surprises?
by amanaplanacanalpanam

What were you surprised by most in the course of this entire project, and in the environment at the trench floor?

Cameron: The thing is, we were dealing with a prototype vehicle. I went one meter below the surface. The second dive, I went down, I guess, it was 20 meters. The third dive, I went down 1000 meters. The fourth dive, I went down 5000 meters, something like that. The dive after that, I was trying to go down 8000 meters and I wound up having all kinds of problems, and you'll see that in the film. I wound up stuck down there for a while, then came back up and we fixed that. The next dive after that, I was going to the target depth, which was 11,000 meters. So it was a fairly rapid program of sea trials with a proto-type vehicle with 120 electronic systems on board. So you've got to expect failures.

The sub was designed with a lot of redundancy, and a lot of safety. So on the Challenger Deep Dive, a couple of things were happening. We were going deeper, so we were squeezing the systems harder, and also I had already dived 10 times. So certain things on the sub were already starting to wear out, like the seals on the thrusters, for example. There's always that balance between under-testing and over-testing. If you don't test enough, then you're unprepared. If you test too much, you wear out the machine. It's not like we had a whole other sub.

On that dive, what happened is about three hours into the bottom time, which was five and a half hours into the dive, I got saltwater into a couple of my thrusters. At that point, I wasn't able to maneuver properly, so I couldn't continue my horizontal exploration across the bottom. We had also been plagued by some hydraulic problems, and we had gone through our spares on our hydraulic valve packs, and that was on earlier dives. Then I had a problem with the manipulator arm where I lost function. Now, that wasn't in any way threatening to me, there was no safety issue with that. It just meant that my ability to grasp samples outside the sub just dropped to zero. So here I am, three hours into the bottom time with no ability to proceed forward and image new terrain and no ability to pick up a sample.I was basically pretty much useless as a doorstopper at that point. I was faced with a choice. I could sit down there and have my lunch and write my memoirs and run out my planned bottom-time of five hours, but that didn't make sense. I figured, let me get back on the ship. The sooner I get back on the ship, the sooner the guys can start the repair process.

I needed to go to London to a red-carpet premier of Titanic 3D, but then I was going to be back the next day. I figured I'd be back in three days and I'd just dive again. That's what was going through my mind. I wasn't down there going, "Whew, I'm glad I survived that. Thank God. Now I'm done, I can retire." I was thinking, "How am I going to continue this dive program, and get the science value that we came out here to do?"

Well, by the time I got back from London, I was back on the ship. The guys had pulled everything apart and they said, "All right. We're out of spares on the hydraulics, we've got these leaking seals. We need to get back into the shop and go through the entire thruster system." They said, "You can dive again, but you'll be plagued by the same types of problems." So at that point, I started to weigh the risk/benefit analysis. It didn't look that good because every dive is risky. It's risky for the crew on-deck, it's risky for the divers in the water, and it's risky for me in the sub. I thought, well, there's no point diving if I'm not going to get the science return out of it versus getting back into the shop, redesigning the thrusters, and coming back out. Do you see what I mean? That's kind of where we are right now.



What's next?
by Nidi62

First of all, you have done some amazing work and brought back incredibly interesting and, at times, (in the case of Titanic) haunting images. That being said, having reached the Challenger Deep-what do you plan to do next: do you want to return to the deepest part of the ocean, or do you find yourself drawn to a new destination(and what challenges do you expect to face in reaching that destination)?

Cameron: I assumed that once we showed everybody we could do it that the academic community would want to put together a program. That was our phase two plan. But at that point, I get back, and the next thing that happens is we're in sequestration, and all the discretionary funds for marine science get slashed and with all the budget cuts across the board, all the institutes and the national science foundations and so on, we didn't get that "big love" from the science community.

Now the sub is at Woods Hole Oceanographic. It's still functional. We could go dive in it at any point. It's the only existing vehicle that is functional that can reach those depths because the Nereus imploded a couple of months ago. But I think what's more likely to happen because manned vehicle systems are more costly to support, is that technology from the Deep Sea Challenge program will get incorporated into other vehicles, new-gen vehicles that are un-piloted, like AUVs, underwater autonomous vehicles, ROVs or some combination of the two, which they call an HROV, or Hybrid ROV. A lot of the technologies that we developed will get incorporated into some new-gen system. That's what I think will happen, but I haven't been briefed by what Woods Hole is currently planning.

I can always go back and dive the sub again, when I'm done with the Avatar films. Because my relationship with Woods Hole is, if I bring funding and we jointly set up a program, we can go operate the vehicle. At that point, I would be one of a number of pilots. We would train Woods Hole submersible pilots as well. We'd go through the same training program, and then we'd probably go on some kind of round robin roster to get our bottom time.

Ars Technica takes a look at the next generation of TrackingPoint's automatically aimed rifles (not "automatic" in the usual sense), and visited the shooting range where they're tested out. Like the company's previous generation of gun (still in production, and increasingly being sold to government buyers), TrackingPoint's offerings integrate a Linux computer that makes acquiring and tracking a target far easier and more accurate than it would otherwise be. Unlike the older models, though, this year TrackingPoint is concentrating on AR-15s, rather than longer, heavier bolt-action rifles. A slice: The signature "Tag-Track-Xact" system has gained additional functionality on the AR models, too. With the bolt-action guns, there was only one way to put a round onto a target: first, you sighted in on the thing you wanted to hit and depressed the red tagging button just above the trigger. A red pip would appear in the scope’s crosshairs, and you’d place the pip onto the target and release the button. The scope’s rangefinding laser would then illuminate the target to measure its distance, and the image processor would fix on the object; if you moved, or if the target moved, the red pip would remain atop the target. Then, to fire, you squeezed the trigger and lined the crosshairs up with the target’s pip. When the two coincided, the weapon fired. This method works fine for a bolt-action rifle where every round has to be manually chambered, but it’s less than ideal for a carbine, which one might want to fire off-hand (i.e., standing up and aiming) or from the hip. With this in mind, the AR PGFs have a new "free fire mode," in which you can tag a target once and then shoot at it as many times as you want by pulling the trigger directly, with all the shots using the ballistic data from the first shot’s tag. That means, says writer Lee Hutchinson, a rifle "with essentially 100 percent accuracy at 250 yards."

New submitter shervinemami writes (starting with a pretty big disclaimer: "I'm an Engineer at NVIDIA.") The latest CompuBench GPU benchmarks show NVIDIA's Tegra K1 running whole OpenCL algorithms around 5x faster than any other mobile device, and individual instructions around 20x faster! This huge jump is because mobile companies have been saying they support OpenCL on mobile devices since early 2013, but what they don't mention is that they only have software API support, not hardware-accelerated OpenCL running faster on their GPUs than CPUs. Now that NVIDIA's Tegra-K1 chip has started shipping in devices and thus is available for full benchmarking, it is clearly the only mobile chip that actually gives you proper hardware-accelerated OpenCL (and CUDA of course!). The K1 is also what's in Google's Project Tango 3-D mapping tablet.

theodp (442580) writes "Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city's 22,519 public school teachers on "begfunding" site DonorsChoose.org. "Everything that you asked for...every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded," Mayor Emanuel said. "Chicago's hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help," said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. "We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago's local classroom wishes come true." So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago's Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531, or about 6.5% of the $190,091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5,931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5,552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for "Mindfulness Education"). In addition to similar "flash-funding" projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google's $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google's $5 million AP STEM Access grant)."

theodp (442580) writes "Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city's 22,519 public school teachers on "begfunding" site DonorsChoose.org. "Everything that you asked for...every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded," Mayor Emanuel said. "Chicago's hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help," said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. "We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago's local classroom wishes come true." So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago's Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531, or about 6.5% of the $190,091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5,931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5,552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for "Mindfulness Education"). In addition to similar "flash-funding" projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google's $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google's $5 million AP STEM Access grant)."

They may be well reviewed and China's new top selling phone, but reader DavidGilbert99 writes with reason to be cautious about Xiaomi's phones: Finnish security firm F-Secure has seemingly proven that Xiaomi smartphones do in fact upload user data without their permission/knowledge despite the company strongly denying these allegations as late as 30 July. Between commercial malware and government agencies, how do you keep your phone's data relatively private?

StartsWithABang (3485481) writes It's finally here! Sure, we witnessed the birth of a new meteor shower earlier this year, but it was a flop. Many other showers have come-and-gone like they do every year, but none of them have given us a significant number of meteors-per-hour. But even with a near-full Moon out, it's finally time for the Perseids, the most reliable meteor shower year-after-year. Here's where to find them, where they come from and a whole lot more, including some surprising facts about where they don't come from: cometary tails!

An anonymous reader writes Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users recently found that Skype no longer works on their system: despite upgrading to the latest version they still can't sign in. We got in touch with the Microsoft-owned company and after two days, we got confirmation that a solution was in the works. "We have a Skype version for Mac OS X 10.5 users which will soon be available for download," a Skype spokesperson told TNW. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Windows Phone 7. In a support page titled "Is Skype for Windows Phone 7 being discontinued?," the Microsoft-owned company answers the question with a "yes" and elaborates that it is "permanently retiring all Skype apps for Windows Phone 7." Again, this isn't just old versions going away, or support being removed, but the apps themselves have disappeared.

Daniel_Stuckey writes You've maybe heard a bit about Stingray. Over the past couple of years, it has emerged that police forces in the US have been using the powerful surveillance tool, which tricks phones into connecting to a dragnet, to track mobile devices, and intercept calls and text messages. Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) continue to remain tight lipped about their use of the technology, leaving citizens in the dark on what privacy protections, if any, are in place for those who may get swept up by the broad surveillance techniques.

StartsWithABang writes Just over a century ago, N rays were detected by over a hundred researchers and discussed in some three hundred publications, yet there were serious experimental flaws and experimenter biases that were exposed over time. Fast forward to last week, and NASA Tests Microwave Space Drive is front page news. But a quick analysis shows that it isn't theorists who'll need to struggle to explain this phenomenon, but rather the shoddy experimentalists who are making the exact same "bad science" mistakes all over again.

An anonymous reader writes "The battle over Comcast's public WiFi network that is hosted on your cable modem continues. Comcast responded to Speedify's earlier power measurements by rushing them a new Cisco cable modem. The new modem proved to be more power hungry than the last, and also introduced some tricky IPv6 problems that caused major headaches for the team."

itwbennett writes Some security researchers on Wednesday said it's still unclear just how serious Hold Security's discovery of a massive database of stolen credentials really is. "The only way we can know if this is a big deal is if we know what the information is and where it came from," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos. "But I can't answer that because the people who disclosed this decided they want to make money off of this. There's no way for others to verify." Wisniewski was referring to an offer by Hold Security to notify website operators if they were affected, but only if they sign up for its breach notification service, which starts at $120 per year.

Mr_Silver writes TorrentFreak is reporting that the City of London Police (a private police force in government-backed livery with an authority that does not go beyond the corporate-controlled City of London area — so not to be confused with the Metropolitan Police) has seized control of a number of domains including Immunicity, a general proxy server that was set up as a censorship circumvention tool. This appears to be their next step after placing banner adverts on websites.

Shades of the recent arrest based on child porn images flagged by Google in an email, mrspoonsi writes A tip-off from Microsoft has led to the arrest of a man in Pennsylvania who has been charged with receiving and sharing child abuse images. It flagged the matter after discovering that an image involving a young girl had been allegedly saved to the man's OneDrive cloud storage account. According to court documents, the man was subsequently detected trying to send two illegal pictures via one of Microsoft's live.com email accounts. Police arrested him on 31 July.

Most of us don't think of Microsoft when our thoughts turn to open source. This is probably because the company's main products, Windows and Office, are so far from open that just thinking about them probably violates their user agreement.. But wait! says Olivier Bloch, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., we have lots and lots of open source around here. Look at this. And this and this and even this. Lots of open source. Better yet, Olivier works for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., not directly for the big bad parent company. Watch the video or read the transcript, and maybe you'll figure out where Microsoft is going with their happy talk about open source. (Alternate Video Link)

schwit1 (797399) writes with an update on the European Space Agency's comet-exploring craft Rosetta: "Rosetta has successfully achieved orbit around Comet 67P/C-G and has transmitted its first close up images. More information here (1) and here (2) about the rendezvous and what science the mission scientists plan to do as they orbit the comet." As pointed out earlier by reader Taco Cowboy, this is the fruit of a 10-year mission. Reuters points out The mission performs several historical firsts, including the first time a spacecraft orbits a comet rather than just whizzing past to snap some fly-by pictures, and the first time a probe has landed on a comet. ... There is little flexibility in Rosetta's schedule this year. The comet is still hurtling toward the inner Solar System at almost 55,000 km per hour, and the closer it gets to the sun the more active it will become, emitting gases that can make it difficult to predict the trajectory of Rosetta and its probe.

Recently, you had the chance to ask CIO for the City University of Hong Kong and AI researcher Andy Chun about his system that keeps the Hong Kong subway running and the future of artificial intelligence. Below you'll find his answers to those questions. How similar is your AI boss to the fictional Manna
by Ken_g6

Dr. Chun,
Have you read a short story about an AI boss called Manna? (I'll include relevant quotes if you don't have time.) How does your system for the Hong Kong subway compare? It's clearly similar to your subway system in some ways: "At any given moment Manna had a list of things that it needed to do.... Manna kept track of the hundreds of tasks that needed to get done, and assigned each task to an employee one at a time."

But does it micro-manage tasks like Manna?
"Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance."

Does it record employee performance metrics and report them to (upper) management like Manna?
"Version 4.0 of Manna was also the first version to enforce average task times, and that was even worse. Manna would ask you to clean the restrooms. But now Manna had industry-average times for restroom cleaning stored in the software, as well as "target times". If it took you too long to mop the floor or clean the sinks, Manna would say to you, "lagging". When you said, "OK" to mark task completion for Manna, Manna would say, "Your time was 4 minutes 10 seconds. Industry average time is 3 minutes 30 seconds. Please focus on each task." Anyone who lagged consistently was fired."

And how have employees reacted to their AI boss - if, in fact, you have been able to get honest evaluations from employees?

Chun: The AI system for the Hong Kong subway does not micro-manage like Manna. Yes, it has a list of tasks to be done, and assigns people to work on them. But that's where the similarity ends. Our AI system schedules engineers, and they have total say on how best to get their job done. The AI mainly determines which jobs are most important to be done on a particular day, whether there are enough people and equipment to do the job, and whether all the rules and constraints are met, such as safety rules. If any of these factors are not satisfied, then the job might be postponed and rescheduled for another day when resources are available and factors are right. On the surface, the AI scheduling task might seem easy, it is not. To do the scheduling requires a lot of knowledge about how railways operate, the people and equipment, and the physical layout of the tracks and power lines. Another thing the AI do is optimization, doing more with less; it tries to “combine” two or more related jobs together so that the jobs can share people/equipment.

The AI does not record employee performance. The quality of work is determined by humans right now. There is no job-specific “target times.” Actually, all jobs must be completed within roughly 4 hours, i.e. the time window when there is no passenger trains running. However, some jobs may span several days, in which case they will need to set up and shut up the worksite each day.

So far, all the people we talked to simply love the AI system. The main reason is that the AI really helps make work easier for them. Humans need not worry about forgetting some esoteric safety rule for example. With AI, everyone saves time and the company saves money, plus safety of engineering works is ensured.



Broader implications
by Iamthecheese

What real-world problems are best suited to the kind of programming used to manage the subway system? That is to say, if you had unlimited authority to build a similar system to manage other problems which problems would you approach first? Could it be used to solve food distribution in Africa? Could it manage investments?

Chun: The AI algorithms used in the Hong Kong subway can indeed be applied to other problems. It is quite generic. It can be used in any situations where there is lots of work to be done, but you have only limited resource, plus lots of restrictions on how resources can be allocated. The AI system prioritizes jobs and ensures there are sufficient resources for all jobs it approved, while at the same time satisfying all the different restrictions, such as safety, environmental concerns, business/marketing needs, etc. It also caters to any last minute change, by making sure any change will not violate those restrictions nor interfere with other jobs already assigned. It is also intelligent enough to see how resources can be optimized so that more work can be done with less. If I had unlimited authority and money to build a similar system, I would probably consider building an AI system to allocate humanitarian relief work after a nature disaster, such as after Katrina. Tasks are numerous, many parties are involved, time is critical, resources limited, and the situation is very dynamic.



Hubert Dreyfus
by MAXOMENOS

Have you read Professor Dreyfus's objections to the hopes of achieving "true AI" in his book What Computers Can't Do? If so, do you think he's full of hot air? Or, is the task of AI to get "as close to the impossible" as you can?

Chun: There is still tremendous debate on what is “true AI” and how will we know if we created it. Is Samantha-like intelligence (as in “her” the movie) true AI for example? Why or why not? The answer is not obvious. However, even without true AI, we still do some very useful work with our current AI, even if we are able to mimic only a small bit of human intelligence processing. In the AI system for the subway, we are using well-established AI algorithms, such as rules and search. But because of the sheer volume of knowledge needed to accomplish the scheduling task (several hundred rule instances), the AI actually does a better job than humans in ensuring all relevant factors are considered as well as optimizing on resources.



Narrow down to one thing that needs improvement
by gunner_von_diamond

If you had to narrow it down to one thing that needs the most improvement in the field of AI, something that we could focus on, what would it be?

Chun: If I need to narrow it down to only one thing, I would say AI needs to be better at “reading minds.” I say that with a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Humans are highly effective at communicating with each other; we understand each other sometimes with just a nod, a wink, or just a single word/sound. Computers need everything spelled out, so to speak. Computers are not good at filling-in-the-gaps with data/info from different sources, and making assumptions when data/info is missing. Humans can do that easily because they have a vast amount of life experience to draw upon.



Current progress
by JoeMerchant

Dr Chun, What area of AI development is currently making the most progress? In other words, where are the next big advances most likely to come from?

Chun: I believe the biggest progress has been in integrating AI into various devices we use daily, such as our smart phones – Siri, Cortana, Now, Pretty much everything has some “intelligence” built in - intelligent TV, intelligent refrigerator, and even intelligent washing machine. With computing power getting cheaper and cheaper, I think the next big advances will be in pushing the intelligent device concept further with intelligent IoT.



Will we know when we create it?
by wjcofkc

Considering we have yet to - and may never - quantify the overall cognitive process that gives rise to our own sentient intelligence, will we have any way of knowing if and when we create a truly aware artificial intelligence?

Chun: Interesting question, one that needs a much longer discussion. If we talk about the level of AI as in Samantha (in the movie “her”) for example, Ray Kurzweil predicts 2029 as when we will achieve that. How will we know or measure true intelligence and true awareness? My guess: have a long heart-to-heart conversation with it/him/her.



Ethics
by meta-monkey

I'm presupposing it's eventually possible to create a machine that thinks like a man. Is conscious, is self-aware. I doubt we'd get it right first try. Before we got Mr. Data we'd probably get insane intelligences, trapped inside boxes, suffering, and completely at the whim of the man holding the plug. What are your thoughts on the ethics of doing so, particularly given the iterative steps we'd have to take to get there?

Chun: I think you are asking whether it is ethical to “kill” an AI process and reboot it with a better version? I think by the time we have true conscious and true self-aware AI, we will not be able to “pull the plug,” so to speak. The AI will be intelligent enough to get its own power source and replicate/distribute itself across different networks.



Still 30 years out?
by Chas

Like many futuristic technologies, AI seems like one of those things that's always "just 30 years away". Do you think we'll make realistic, meaningful breakthroughs to achieve AI in that timeframe?

Chun: Kurzweil puts Samantha-like intelligence at 15 years away in 2029. Based on the past decade of technology progress and adoption, his prediction is quite believable. The web was only invented little more than 20 years ago. iOS/Android only 6 years old. If the progress/evolution of those technologies are good indicators, I would say it is not hard to believe that we will have realistic AI within the coming decade or so.



Bootstrap Fallacy?
by seven of five

Dr Chun, Can you comment on the potential of machine learning? Is it theoretically possible for a "naive" AI system to undergo great qualitative changes simply through learning? Or is this notion a fallacy? Although it is an attractive concept, no one in AI has pulled it off despite several decades of research.

Chun: We use machine learning all the time. It is just not learning at the same level or rate as a human. Machine learning algorithms can be used to learn new rules and knowledge structures. It can learn how to categorize things based on examples. Siri for example uses machine learning to improve its answer and knowledge about you with time. Microsoft Cortana is also using AI to get smarter as people use it. Google is experimenting with “deep learning” which will leverage ANN and the massive compute power that Google has. But you are right, we have yet to be able to create a naïve AI system that learns like a child; we will need a system that can easily interact with its environment like a child can.



programming languages
by Waraqa

With the rise of many programming languages especially popular scripting languages, Do we really need specialized languages for AI? Also, Do you think any of the existing ones is the future of AI and what qualifies it for that?

Chun: Back in the days when I started to do AI, you had to use Prolog or Lisp. They were popular because they were better at symbolic processing and symbol manipulation. Lisp, in particular, had a lot of cool language features that made it more productive as a general programming language and general programming environment. However, those differences are no longer as important since most modern programming languages share similar pool of advanced language features. The difference between scripting and programming is also blurred. Take .NET for example, all .NET languages compile to CIL and work seamlessly; allowing different programmers to use different languages. Programming language has become more of a personal preference. For me I routinely use Python, C# or Java for my AI work.

An anonymous reader writes with news that, after a six year journey, Qt will once again be maintained by a standalone company. From the Digia weblog: ... Even though the open source project and the commercial side of Qt are highly dependent upon each other, they have over the last years drifted apart. ... Because of the separation between the open source and commercial offerings, we often end up competing against ourselves instead of competing against other technologies. ... We are now starting a conscious effort to overcome these problems. As you might have read, Digia has decided to move the Qt business into a company of its own. Thus we will soon have a company (owned by Digia), that will focus 100% on Qt. At the same time we would like to take the opportunity and retire qt.digia.com and merge it with the content from qt-project.org into a new unified web presence. The unified web page will give a broad overview of the Qt technology, both enterprise and open-source, from a technical, business and messaging perspective.

Today's interview guest is literally a household name: If you look at the shelves in nearly any programmer's house, developer shop or hackerspace, you'll probably see a stretch of books from O'Reilly Media (or O'Reilly & Associates, depending on how old the books are). Tim O'Reilly started out publishing a few technical manuals in the late '70s, branching from there into well-received technical reference and instructional books, notably ones covering open source languages and operating systems (how many people learned to install and run a new OS from Matt Walsh's Running Linux?), but neither Tim O'Reilly nor the company has gotten stuck in one place for long. As a publisher, he was early to make electronic editions available, in step with the increasing capabilities of electronic readers. Make Magazine (later spun off as part of Maker Media, which also produces Maker Faires around the world) started as an O'Reilly project; the company's conferences like OSCON, Fluent, and this year's Solid are just as much a manifestation of O'Reilly's proclivity for spreading knowledge as the books are, and those are only part of the picture, being joined with seminars, video presentations, and more. Tim O'Reilly is often hailed as a futurist and an activist (he was an early proponent of 3-D printing and hardware hacking, and a loud voice for patent reform) and he's got his eye on trends from global (how the Internet functions) to more personal -- like ways that physical goods can be produced, customized, and networked. So please go ahead and ask O'Reilly about what it's been like to be a publisher of paper books in an ever-more electronic world, as well as a visionary in the world of DIY and fabrication, or anything else on your mind. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Today's interview guest is literally a household name: If you look at the shelves in nearly any programmer's house, developer shop or hackerspace, you'll probably see a stretch of books from O'Reilly Media (or O'Reilly & Associates, depending on how old the books are). Tim O'Reilly started out publishing a few technical manuals in the late '70s, branching from there into well-received technical reference and instructional books, notably ones covering open source languages and operating systems (how many people learned to install and run a new OS from Matt Walsh's Running Linux?), but neither Tim O'Reilly nor the company has gotten stuck in one place for long. As a publisher, he was early to make electronic editions available, in step with the increasing capabilities of electronic readers. Make Magazine (later spun off as part of Maker Media, which also produces Maker Faires around the world) started as an O'Reilly project; the company's conferences like OSCON, Fluent, and this year's Solid are just as much a manifestation of O'Reilly's proclivity for spreading knowledge as the books are, and those are only part of the picture, being joined with seminars, video presentations, and more. Tim O'Reilly is often hailed as a futurist and an activist (he was an early proponent of 3-D printing and hardware hacking, and a loud voice for patent reform) and he's got his eye on trends from global (how the Internet functions) to more personal -- like ways that physical goods can be produced, customized, and networked. So please go ahead and ask O'Reilly about what it's been like to be a publisher of paper books in an ever-more electronic world, as well as a visionary in the world of DIY and fabrication, or anything else on your mind. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Wikipedia says, "Ushahidi, Inc. is a non-profit software company that develops free and open-source software (LGPL) for information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping. Ushahidi (Swahili for 'testimony' or 'witness') created a website in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence reported by email and text message and placed them on a Google Maps map." Ushahidi has also been used to map some of the BP oil spill damage in Louisiana and many other events both positive and negative around the globe. This is a mature project, headquarted in Kenya, that recently spun out the BRCK, a "go anywhere, do anything, self-powered, mobile WiFi device," which looks like it would be useful in bringing Internet connectivity to places where the electricity supply is unreliable. || According to Ushahidi, today's interviewee, Rob Baker, "is responsible for overseeing company deliverables and is a lead on communications strategies. Previously, with a 10-year background in software development and with his field experience for aid programs, Rob was a lead for Ushahidi deployments around the world, primarily working in East Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. He’s spoken at the United Nations, World Bank, government, hackathons, and at technical conferences." (Alternate Video Link)

About six weeks ago, a hole in Paypal's two factor authentication and their mobile client was discovered. hypnosec (2231454) wrote in with news of another trivial way to bypass Paypal's two-factor authentication. A bug in a feature for eBay integration allows passing a GET parameter to completely bypass two-factor authentication, and you don't even need to be coming from eBay to use it. You still need the password, but additional protection is lost. From the article: eBay, in conjunction with Paypal, provide a service as to where you can link your eBay account to your Paypal account, and when you sell something on eBay, the fees automatically come out of your Paypal account. ... When you are redirected to the login page, the URL contains "=_integrated-registration." ... Once you're actually logged in, a cookie is set with your details, and you're redirected to a page to confirm the details of the process. And this is where the exploit lays. Now just load http://www.paypal.com/ , and you are logged in, and don't need to re-enter your login. So, the actual bug itself is that the "=_integrated-registration" function does not check for a 2FA code, despite logging you into Paypal. You could repeat the process using the same "=_integrated-registration" page unlimited times.

mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that the two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia and transported to Atlanta for treatment were given an experimental drug, and their conditions appear to be improving. From the article: While some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, an experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source. Although the Food and Drug Administration does allow experimental drugs to occasionally be distributed in life-threatening circumstances without approval under the expanded access or "compassionate use" conditions. It's not yet clear whether that approval was granted in this case or not. ... Brantly, who had been sick for nine days already ... [received] the first dose ... within an hour, he was able to breathe better and a rash on his body started to fade. The next day he was able to shower without help before boarding the air ambulance that flew him to Atlanta.

benrothke writes Cyberwarfare is a controversial topic. At the 2014 Infosec World Conference, Marcus Ranum gave a talk on Cyberwar: Putting Civilian Infrastructure on the Front Lines, Again. Whether it was the topic or just Marcus being Marcus, about a third of the participants left within the first 15 minutes. They should have stayed, as Ranum, agree with him or not, provided some riveting insights on the topic. In Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach, authors Paulo Shakarian, Jana Shakarian and Andrew Ruef provide an excellent overview of the topic. The book takes a holistic, or as they call it multidisciplinary, approach. It looks at the information security aspect of cyberwarfare, as well the military, sociological and other aspects. Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review. Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach author Paulo Shakarian, Jana Shakarian and Andrew Ruef pages 336 publisher Syngress rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0124078147 summary Outstanding overview and guide to cyberwarfare The book is divided into 3 parts and 13 densely packed and extremely well-researched and footnoted chapters. The book provides numerous case studies of the largest cyberwarfare events to date. Issues around China and their use of cyberwarfare constitute a part of the book. Chapter 7 details the Chinese cyber strategy and shows how the Chinese cyber doctrine and mindset is radically different from that of those in the west.

The book compares the board games of chess (a Western game) and Go (a Chinese game) and how the outcomes and strategies of the games are manifest in each doctrine.

The chapter also shows how the Chinese government outlawed hacking, while at the same time the military identified the best and most talented hackers in China, and integrated them into Chinese security firms, consulting organizations, academia and the military.

One of the more fascinating case studies details the cyber war against the corporate world from China. The book provides a number of examples and details the methodologies they used, in addition to providing evidence of how the Chinese were involved.

For an adversary, one of the means of getting information is via social networks. This is often used in parallel by those launching some sort of cyberwarfare attack. LinkedIn is one of the favorite tools for such an effort. The authors write of the dangers of transitive trust; where user A trusts user B, and user B trusts user C. Via a transitive trust, user A will then trust user C based simply on the fact that user B does. This was most manifest in the Robin Sage exercise. This was where Thomas Ryan created a fictitious information security professional names Robin Sage. He used her fake identity and profile to make friends with others in the information security world, both commercial, federal and military and he was able to fool even seasoned security professionals. Joan Goodchild wrote a good overview of the experiment here.

In chapter 10, the book details how Iraqi insurgents viewed Predator drones video feeds. Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success is just showing up. In this case, all the insurgents had to do was download the feed, as it was being transmitted unencrypted. Very little cyberwarfare required.

When the drone was being designed, the designers used security by obscurity in their decision not to encrypt the video feed. They felt that since the Predator video feeds were being transmitted on frequencies that were not publicly known, no access control, encryption or other security mechanisms would be needed.

The downside is that once the precise frequency was determined by the insurgency, in the case of the Predator drone, the Ku-band, the use of the SkyGrabber satellite internet downloader made it possible for them to effortless view the video feeds.

The only negative about the book is a minor one. It has over 100 pictures and illustrations. Each one states: for the color version of this figure, the reader is referred to the online version of the book. Having that after every picture is a bit annoying. Also, the book never says where you can find the online version.

How good is this book? The reality is that this book should indeed be read by everyone in Washington, as they are making decisions on the topic, without truly understanding it.

For most readers, this will be the book that tells them everyone they need to know that their congressman should know. Most people will never be involved with any sort of warfare, and most corporate information security professional will not get involved with cyberwarfare. Nonetheless, Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach is a fascinating read about a most important subject.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke

You can purchase Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available for review from our library please let us know.

benrothke writes Cyberwarfare is a controversial topic. At the 2014 Infosec World Conference, Marcus Ranum gave a talk on Cyberwar: Putting Civilian Infrastructure on the Front Lines, Again. Whether it was the topic or just Marcus being Marcus, about a third of the participants left within the first 15 minutes. They should have stayed, as Ranum, agree with him or not, provided some riveting insights on the topic. In Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach, authors Paulo Shakarian, Jana Shakarian and Andrew Ruef provide an excellent overview of the topic. The book takes a holistic, or as they call it multidisciplinary, approach. It looks at the information security aspect of cyberwarfare, as well the military, sociological and other aspects. Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review. Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach author Paulo Shakarian, Jana Shakarian and Andrew Ruef pages 336 publisher Syngress rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-0124078147 summary Outstanding overview and guide to cyberwarfare The book is divided into 3 parts and 13 densely packed and extremely well-researched and footnoted chapters. The book provides numerous case studies of the largest cyberwarfare events to date. Issues around China and their use of cyberwarfare constitute a part of the book. Chapter 7 details the Chinese cyber strategy and shows how the Chinese cyber doctrine and mindset is radically different from that of those in the west.

The book compares the board games of chess (a Western game) and Go (a Chinese game) and how the outcomes and strategies of the games are manifest in each doctrine.

The chapter also shows how the Chinese government outlawed hacking, while at the same time the military identified the best and most talented hackers in China, and integrated them into Chinese security firms, consulting organizations, academia and the military.

One of the more fascinating case studies details the cyber war against the corporate world from China. The book provides a number of examples and details the methodologies they used, in addition to providing evidence of how the Chinese were involved.

For an adversary, one of the means of getting information is via social networks. This is often used in parallel by those launching some sort of cyberwarfare attack. LinkedIn is one of the favorite tools for such an effort. The authors write of the dangers of transitive trust; where user A trusts user B, and user B trusts user C. Via a transitive trust, user A will then trust user C based simply on the fact that user B does. This was most manifest in the Robin Sage exercise. This was where Thomas Ryan created a fictitious information security professional names Robin Sage. He used her fake identity and profile to make friends with others in the information security world, both commercial, federal and military and he was able to fool even seasoned security professionals. Joan Goodchild wrote a good overview of the experiment here.

In chapter 10, the book details how Iraqi insurgents viewed Predator drones video feeds. Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success is just showing up. In this case, all the insurgents had to do was download the feed, as it was being transmitted unencrypted. Very little cyberwarfare required.

When the drone was being designed, the designers used security by obscurity in their decision not to encrypt the video feed. They felt that since the Predator video feeds were being transmitted on frequencies that were not publicly known, no access control, encryption or other security mechanisms would be needed.

The downside is that once the precise frequency was determined by the insurgency, in the case of the Predator drone, the Ku-band, the use of the SkyGrabber satellite internet downloader made it possible for them to effortless view the video feeds.

The only negative about the book is a minor one. It has over 100 pictures and illustrations. Each one states: for the color version of this figure, the reader is referred to the online version of the book. Having that after every picture is a bit annoying. Also, the book never says where you can find the online version.

How good is this book? The reality is that this book should indeed be read by everyone in Washington, as they are making decisions on the topic, without truly understanding it.

For most readers, this will be the book that tells them everyone they need to know that their congressman should know. Most people will never be involved with any sort of warfare, and most corporate information security professional will not get involved with cyberwarfare. Nonetheless, Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach is a fascinating read about a most important subject.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke

You can purchase Introduction to Cyber-Warfare: A Multidisciplinary Approach from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available for review from our library please let us know.

Starting at 5:15 am local time on March 26, 2012, James Cameron piloted the Deepsea Challenger to the east depression of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. He spent three hours exploring the sea floor. Later analysis of the specimens Cameron collected during this and other dives in the submersible revealed many life forms, with at least 100 of them identified as new species. One shrimp-like amphipod was found to produce a compound that was already in clinical trials to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The Deepsea Challenger submersible and science platform was donated to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on March 26, 2013, the one-year anniversary of the historic dive. A new National Geographic film chronicling the project from the beginning called, Deepsea Challenge 3D, is coming out August 8th in select theaters. Here's your chance to ask James Cameron and director John Bruno about the film, the dive, and the submersible. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Starting at 5:15 am local time on March 26, 2012, James Cameron piloted the Deepsea Challenger to the east depression of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. He spent three hours exploring the sea floor. Later analysis of the specimens Cameron collected during this and other dives in the submersible revealed many life forms, with at least 100 of them identified as new species. One shrimp-like amphipod was found to produce a compound that was already in clinical trials to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The Deepsea Challenger submersible and science platform was donated to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on March 26, 2013, the one-year anniversary of the historic dive. A new National Geographic film chronicling the project from the beginning called, Deepsea Challenge 3D, is coming out August 8th in select theaters. Here's your chance to ask James Cameron and director John Bruno about the film, the dive, and the submersible. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Starting at 5:15 am local time on March 26, 2012, James Cameron piloted the Deepsea Challenger to the east depression of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. He spent three hours exploring the sea floor. Later analysis of the specimens Cameron collected during this and other dives in the submersible revealed many life forms, with at least 100 of them identified as new species. One shrimp-like amphipod was found to produce a compound that was already in clinical trials to treat Alzheimer’s disease. The Deepsea Challenger submersible and science platform was donated to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on March 26, 2013, the one-year anniversary of the historic dive. A new National Geographic film chronicling the project from the beginning called, Deepsea Challenge 3D, is coming out August 8th in select theaters. Here's your chance to ask James Cameron and director John Bruno about the film, the dive, and the submersible. As usual, ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per post.

An anonymous reader writes "Reports indicate that Google has sold one of its two mystery Google Barges. The barge in question is located in Portland, Maine. While Google's Maine barge is to be scrapped, the fate of its second barge – located in Stockton, California – remains unknown. From the article: "Now, instead of planning a future unveiling of the finished project, Google apparently dropped it. In an email response to eWEEK, a Google spokesperson would only confirm that the barge had been sold and declined to reveal any more about the now-defunct project or any such future endeavors. The scrapping of the barge in Portland Harbor was first reported July 31 by The Portland Press, which said it will be heading out to an undisclosed location after being purchased by an unnamed international barge company. The barge carried 63 shipping containers that were arranged to create a four-story building and was slated to be filled with technologies that were to be displayed to the public."