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California Has Become the First State To Get Over 5% of Its Power From Solar

Lucas123 writes: While the rest of the nation’s solar power generation hovers around 1%, California clocked in with a record 5% of power coming from utility-grade (1MW or more) solar power sources, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group and the Energy Information Administration. That’s three times the next closest state, Arizona. At the same time, 22 states have yet to deploy even one utility-grade solar power plant, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. Meanwhile, the rest of the world saw a 14% uptick in solar power installations in 2014 for a total of 54.5GW of capacity, and that figure is expected to grow even faster in 2015. While China still leads the world in new solar capacity, Japan and the U.S. come in as a close second and third, respectively. In the U.S. distributed solar and utility-grade solar installations are soaring as the solar investment tax credit (ITC) is set to expire next year. The U.S. is expected to deploy 8.5GW of new solar capacity in 2015, according to Mercom Capital Group. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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California Has Become the First State To Get Over 5% of Its Power From Solar

“Unquestionable greed,” the startup CEO who stole $765k from his friends

SAN FRANCISCO—Dressed in matching yellow scrubs from the nearby Alameda County Jail, Jon Mills looked resigned to his fate. After taking a plea deal on two felony counts of wire fraud, the young former startup CEO appeared in federal court Tuesday afternoon for sentencing. Mills had moved to California five years ago with a dream to hit it big in Silicon Valley. The company he founded, Motionloft , uses small sensors to perform analytics on in-store foot traffic. Everything worked. The company continues to succeed, and celebrity venture capitalist Mark Cuban remains its sole investor. But that success wasn’t enough. In early 2013, Mills told at least five people that if they gave him relatively small amounts of money, they would own stakes in the company. He claimed that a Cisco acquisition worth hundreds of millions of dollars was supposedly imminent, so Mills and all Motionloft shareholders others would stand to make a tidy profit. In reality, Mills knew the deal didn’t exist. Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Unquestionable greed,” the startup CEO who stole $765k from his friends

Google kills 200 ad-injecting Chrome extensions, says many are malware

Google is cracking down on ad-injecting extensions for its Chrome browser after finding that almost 200 of them exposed millions of users to deceptive practices or malicious software. More than a third of Chrome extensions that inject ads were recently classified as malware in a study Google researchers carried out with colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley. The Researchers uncovered 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users. Google officials have since killed those extensions and incorporated new techniques to catch any new or updated extensions that carry out similar abuses. The study also found widespread use of ad injectors for multiple browsers on both Windows and OS X computers. More than five percent of people visiting Google sites have at least one ad injector installed Within that group, half have at least two injectors installed, and nearly one-third have at least four installed. Google officials don’t bar such ad injectors outright, but they do place restrictions on them. Terms of service for Chrome extensions , for instance, require that the ad-injecting behavior be clearly disclosed. Customers of DoubleClick and other Google-operated ads services must also comply with policies barring unwanted software . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google kills 200 ad-injecting Chrome extensions, says many are malware

Judge rejects AT&T claim that FTC can’t stop unlimited data throttling

A federal judge has rejected AT&T’s claim that it can’t be sued by the Federal Trade Commission, which is trying to put a stop to the carrier’s throttling of unlimited data plans . The FTC sued AT&T in October 2014, saying the company deceived customers by offering unlimited data plans and then throttling data speeds once customers hit certain usage thresholds, such as 3GB or 5GB in a month. AT&T claimed in January  that because it is a common carrier, it isn’t subject to FTC jurisdiction. In a decision out of US District Court in Northern California yesterday, Judge Edward Chen refused to dismiss the lawsuit. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Judge rejects AT&T claim that FTC can’t stop unlimited data throttling

Uber driver arrested for trying to burglarize passenger’s house

An Uber driver was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of attempting to break in to the residence of a woman he had just brought to the Denver International Airport. Gerald Montgomery The 51-year-old driver, Gerald Montgomery, allegedly used what the police described as “burglary tools” to try to open the back door of the Colorado woman’s house. The victim’s roommate was home and confronted Montgomery, the Denver Police Department said. Uber said it has “deactivated” Montgomery’s “access to the platform, pending a full investigation.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Uber driver arrested for trying to burglarize passenger’s house

New Firefox version says “might as well” to encrypting all Web traffic

Developers of the Firefox browser have moved one step closer to an Internet that encrypts all the world’s traffic with a new feature that can cryptographically protect connections even when servers don’t support the HTTPS protocol. Opportunistic encryption, as the feature is known, acts as a bridge between plaintext HTTP connections and fully compliant HTTPS connections based on transport layer security or its predecessor, protocol secure sockets layer. These traditional Web-based encryption measures require site operators to obtain a digital credential issued by a browser-recognized certificate authority and to implement TLS protection through OpenSSL or a similar code library. Even then, many sites are unable to fully encrypt their pages because they embed ads and other third-party content that’s still transmitted in plaintext. As a result, large numbers of sites (including this one) continue to publish some or all of their content in HTTP, which can be readily manipulated by people with the ability to monitor the connection. OE, as opportunistic encryption is often abbreviated, was turned on by default in Firefox 37, which was released this week. The move comes 17 months after an Internet Engineering Task Force working group proposed OE become an official part of the HTTP 2.0 specification . The move garnered critics and supporters alike, with the former arguing it may delay some sites from using the more secure HTTPS protections and the latter saying, in effect, some protection is better than none. The chief shortcoming of OE is its lack of authentication for cryptographically validating that a connected server is operated by the organization claiming ownership. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Firefox version says “might as well” to encrypting all Web traffic

California governor mandates 25 percent water use reduction

Today, California Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that is intended to spur water savings. The order comes as the state enters another year of extreme drought caused by lack of winter rain and snowfall. The state receives almost all of its precipitation in the winter and relies on that to fill reservoirs and deposit snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. But this year, there was no precipitation for the entire month of January, leaving snowpack at many locations well below average —and completely absent in many areas. The new order focuses on conservation, with mandatory water reductions in cities and towns that will cut use by 25 percent. Many of the additional steps are obvious and probably should have been done before a crisis hit: remove 50 million square feet of lawns, have places like school campuses, golf courses, and cemeteries limit water use, and ban any installation of new irrigation systems that don’t use efficient drip irrigation. Standards for toilet and faucet water use will also be updated. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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California governor mandates 25 percent water use reduction

10% of Americans have a smartphone but no other Internet at home

One out of 10 Americans owns a smartphone but has no other Internet service at home, with the poor far more likely to find themselves in this situation than those who are well off, according to a  Pew Research Center report released today . “10 percent of Americans own a smartphone but do not have broadband at home, and 15 percent own a smartphone but say that they have a limited number of options for going online other than their cell phone,” Pew Senior Researcher Aaron Smith wrote. “Those with relatively low income and educational attainment levels, younger adults, and non-whites are especially likely to be ‘smartphone-dependent.’” Pew said that 7 percent of Americans are in both categories—a smartphone is their only option for using the Internet at home, and they have few easily available options for going online when away from home. Pew refers to these Americans as “smartphone-dependent.” Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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10% of Americans have a smartphone but no other Internet at home

​Selfie sticks are banned at Coachella and Lollapalooza

If you’re heading to either music festival this year, you can leave that selfie stick behind. Both April’s Coachella and Lollapalooza in July have added the rods to their prohibited item lists. At Lollapalooza, the rules stipulate no “GoPro attachments like sticks, selfie sticks & monopods.” Coachella said that “Selfie sticks / narsisstics” won’t allowed in, showing a healthy lack of self-awareness… and spelling skill. As NME notes , the telescopic sticks have already been banned at multiple music venues, which can now add to the no-selfie stick list of major museums and Premier League football stadiums . The ban should help the non-stick carrying public enjoy public events and spaces a little more. The blowback has started, but it’s probably not going to stop the selfie … or the sale of associated peripherals. Comments Source: NME , Coachella , Lollapalooza

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​Selfie sticks are banned at Coachella and Lollapalooza