entertainment – Page 226 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Galapagos Island Volcano Erupts After 33 Years, Threatening Fragile Ecosystem

An anonymous reader writes: Wolf volcano in the Galapagos islands has erupted for the first time in more than 30 years, sending lava flowing down its slopes and potentially threatening the world’s only colony of pink iguanas. The Galapagos National Park says that currently there is no risk to tourism operations, but the Environment Ministry is notifying tourist operators to take precautions. A tourist boat passing by took an amazing picture of the eruption. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Galapagos Island Volcano Erupts After 33 Years, Threatening Fragile Ecosystem

Firefox’s Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44%

An anonymous reader writes: Former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis recently released a paper (PDF) that examines Firefox’s optional Tracking Protection feature. The duo found that with Tracking Protection enabled, the Alexa top 200 news sites saw a 67.5 percent reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set. Furthermore, performance benefits included a 44 percent median reduction in page load time and 39 percent reduction in data usage. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox’s Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44%

Ads Based On Browsing History Are Coming To All Firefox Users

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced plans to launch a feature called “Suggested Tiles, ” which will provide sponsored recommendations to visit certain websites when other websites show up in the user’s new tab page. The tiles will begin to show up for beta channel users next week, and the company is asking for feedback. For testing purposes, users will only see Suggested Tiles “promoting Firefox for Android, Firefox Marketplace, and other Mozilla causes.” It’s not yet known what websites will show up on the tiles when the feature launches later this summer. The company says, “With Suggested Tiles, we want to show the world that it is possible to do relevant advertising and content recommendations while still respecting users’ privacy and giving them control over their data.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Factory Reset On Millions of Android Devices Doesn’t Wipe Storage

Bismillah writes: Ross Anderson and Laurent Simon of Cambridge University studied a range of Android devices and found that even though a “factory reset” is supposed to fully wipe storage, it often doesn’t. Interestingly enough, full-device encryption could be compromised by the incomplete wiping too. ITnews reports: “The researchers estimated that 500 million Android devices may not fully wipe device disk partitions. As many as 630 million phones may not wipe internal SD cards. Five ‘critical failures’ were outlined in the researchers’ Security Analysis of Android Factory Resets paper. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Factory Reset On Millions of Android Devices Doesn’t Wipe Storage

Academics Build a New Tor Client Designed To Beat the NSA

An anonymous reader writes: In response to a slew of new research about network-level attacks against Tor, academics from the U.S. and Israel built a new Tor client called Astoria designed to beat adversaries like the NSA, GCHQ, or Chinese intelligence who can monitor a user’s Tor traffic from entry to exit. Astoria differs most significantly from Tor’s default client in how it selects the circuits that connect a user to the network and then to the outside Internet. The tool is an algorithm designed to more accurately predict attacks and then securely select relays that mitigate timing attack opportunities for top-tier adversaries. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Academics Build a New Tor Client Designed To Beat the NSA

How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today’s Internet In Jeopardy

An anonymous reader writes: While debate swirls in Washington D.C. about new encryption laws, the consequences of the last crypto war is still being felt. Logjam vulnerabilities making headlines today is “a direct result of weakening cryptography legislation in the 1990s, ” researcher J. Alex Halderman said. “Thanks to Moore’s law and improvements in cryptanalysis, the ability to break that crypto is something really anyone can do with open-source software. The backdoor might have seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe the arguments 20 years ago convinced people this was going to be safe. History has shown otherwise. This is the second time in two months we’ve seen 90s era crypto blow up and put the safety of everyone on the internet in jeopardy.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today’s Internet In Jeopardy

Jason Scott of Textfiles.com Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs

eldavojohn writes: You’ve probably got a spindle in your closet, or a drawer layered with them: the CD-ROM discs that were mailed to you or delivered with some hardware that you put away “just in case.” Now, of course, the case for actually using them is laughable. Well, a certain eccentric individual named Jason Scott has a fever — and the only cure is more AOL CDs. But his sickness doesn’t stop there, “I also want all the CD-ROMs made by Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I want every shovelware disc that came out in the entire breadth of the CD-ROM era. I want every shareware floppy, while we’re talking. I want it all. The CD-ROM era is basically finite at this point. It’s over. The time when we’re going to use physical media as the primary transport for most data is done done done. Sure, there’s going to be distributions and use of CD-ROMs for some time to come, but the time when it all came that way and when it was in most cases the only method of distribution in the history books, now. And there were a specific amount of CD-ROMs made. There are directories and listings of many that were manufactured. I want to find those. I want to image them, and I want to put them up. I’m looking for stacks of CD-ROMs now. Stacks and stacks. AOL CDs and driver CDs and Shareware CDs and even hand-burned CDs of stuff you downloaded way back when. This is the time to strike.” Who knows? His madness may end up being appreciated by younger generations! Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour

HughPickens.com writes: Jennifer Medina reports at the NY Times that the council of the nation’s second-largest city voted by a 14-1 margin to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. Los Angeles and its almost 4 million residents represent one of the biggest victories yet for those pushing wage increases across the country. Proponents hope it will start to reverse the earning gap in the city, where the top 7% of households earn more than the bottom 67%. Detractors point out the direct cost increase to businesses, which could total as much as a billion dollars per year. If a business can’t handle the increased cost, the employees this measure was designed to help will lose their jobs when it folds. An editorial from the LA Times says it’s vital for other cities nearby to increase their minimum wage, too, else businesses will gradually migrate to cheaper locations. They add, “While the minimum wage hike will certainly help the lowest-wage workers in the city, it should not be seen as the centerpiece of a meaningful jobs creation strategy. The fact is that far too many jobs in the city are low-wage jobs — some 37% of workers currently earn less than $13.25 an hour, according to the mayor’s estimates — and even after the proposed increase, they would still be living on the edge of poverty.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Los Angeles Raises Minimum Wage To $15 an Hour

FBI Alleges Security Researcher Tampered With a Plane’s Flight Control Systems

Salo2112 writes with a followup to a story from April in which a security researcher was pulled off a plane by FBI agents seemingly over a tweet referencing a security weakness in one of the plane’s systems. At the time, the FBI insisted he had actually tampered with core systems on an earlier flight, and now we have details. The FBI’s search warrant application (PDF) alleges that the researcher, Chris Roberts, not only hacked the in-flight entertainment system, but also accessed the Thrust Management Computer and issued a climb command. “He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights. He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or ‘hacking’ the airplane’s networks. He used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system.” Roberts says the FBI has presented his statements out of their proper context. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Alleges Security Researcher Tampered With a Plane’s Flight Control Systems

Wind Turbines With No Blades

An anonymous reader writes: Wired has a profile of Spanish company Vortex Bladeless and their unusual new wind turbine tech. “Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity.” Instead of relying on wind to push a propeller in a circular motion, these turbines rely on vorticity — how wind can strike an object in a particular way to generate spinning vortices of air. Engineers usually try to avoid this — it’s what brought down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But this Spanish company designed the turbine computationally to have the vortices occur at the same time along its entire height. “In its current prototype, the elongated cone is made from a composite of fiberglass and carbon fiber, which allows the mast to vibrate as much as possible (an increase in mass reduces natural frequency). At the base of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the mast’s movement regardless of wind speed. This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast’s oscillation to improve the energy-gathering efficiency.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wind Turbines With No Blades