“I had the displeasure of being awoken at midnight to the sounds of civil-defense/air-raid sirens, ” writes very-long-time Slashdot reader SigIO, blaming “some schmuck with a twisted sense of humor.” The Dallas News reports: Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas’ Office of Emergency Management, said that all 156 of the city’s sirens were activated more than a dozen times… Dallas officials blame computer hacking for setting off emergency sirens throughout the city early Saturday… It took until about 1:20 a.m. to silence them for good because the emergency system had to be deactivated. The system remained shut down Saturday while crews safeguarded it from another hack. The city has figured out how the emergency system was compromised and is working to prevent it from happening again, he said… The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday. City officials reported 4, 400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Hacker Sets Off 156 Sirens At Midnight
Janko Roettgers, reporting for Variety: Streaming music services were for the first time ever responsible for more than 50 percent of all U.S. music industry revenue in 2016, according to new numbers released by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Thursday. Paid and ad-supported streaming together generated 51 percent of music revenue last year, to be precise, bringing in a total of $3.9 billion. In 2015, streaming music was responsible for 34 percent of the music industry’s annual revenue. Much of that increase can be attributed to a strong growth of paid subscriptions to services like Spotify and Apple Music. Revenue from paid subscription plans more than doubled in 2016, bringing in $2.5 billion, with an average of 22.6 million U.S. consumers subscribing to streaming services last year. The year before, subscription services had an average of 10.8 million paying subscribers. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Freshly Exhumed quotes Hackaday: The famous HAARP antenna array is to be brought back into service for experiments by the University of Alaska. Built in the 1990s for the US Air Force’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array is a 40-acre site containing a phased array of 180 high-frequency antennas and their associated high-power transmitters. Its purpose is to conduct research on charged particles in the upper atmosphere, but that hasn’t stopped an array of bizarre conspiracy theories. A university space physics researcher will actually create an artificial aurora starting Sunday (and continuing through Wednesday) to study how yjr atmosphere affects satellite-to-ground communications, and “observers throughout Alaska will have an opportunity to photograph the phenomenon, ” according to the University. “Under the right conditions, people can also listen to HAARP radio transmissions from virtually anywhere in the world using an inexpensive shortwave radio.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.