Tag: gender

Model drone finds elderly man, missing for three days, alive

It took just 20 minutes for a model drone to locate a missing elderly Wisconsin man, a feat that helicopters, search dogs, and volunteers couldn’t accomplish in three days. Just don’t tell that to the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regulatory wings are already flapping about model drones. This weekend’s discovery of the 82-year-old man in an area of crops and woods comes amid a legal tussle between flight regulators and model drone operators—the latest of which coincidentally involves search-and-rescue missions. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Model drone finds elderly man, missing for three days, alive

DOE, commercial partners start world’s largest carbon capture project

Earlier this week, the US Department of Energy announced that work has started on what when finished will be the world’s largest carbon capture facility. Located in Thompsons, Texas, the project will capture a portion of the emissions from the coal-fired W.A. Parish Generating Station. The CO 2 will then be compressed and piped to the West Ranch oil field, where it will be injected under ground. This will help liberate oil that’s otherwise difficult to extract, but has the added benefit that the carbon dioxide typically stays underground, sequestered. The project was originally planned as a small pilot that would only extract CO 2 from the equivalent of 60 megawatts of the plant’s 3,500MW of generating capacity. When it was realized that the amount of CO 2 from 60MW of would be too little CO 2 to supply the oil field’s needs, the project scope was expanded to 240MW. At that scale, the facility would become the largest of its type in the world. The exhaust gas will have its sulfates removed before being bubbled through a solution of amines, which will bind the CO 2 . Once separated from the rest of the gasses, the carbon dioxide will be released by heating the amine solution, which can be recycled. The CO 2 is then sent under pressure via a pipeline. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DOE, commercial partners start world’s largest carbon capture project

Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers

Jonathan Ryan In May 2014, I reported on my efforts to learn what the feds know about me whenever I enter and exit the country. In particular, I wanted my Passenger Name Records (PNR), data created by airlines, hotels, and cruise ships whenever travel is booked. But instead of providing what I had requested, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) turned over only basic information about my travel going back to 1994. So I appealed—and without explanation , the government recently turned over the actual PNRs I had requested the first time. The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I’ve ever used; some of them also contain: Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers

Id shows off double-jumping, skull-crushing new Doom at QuakeCon

If you weren’t at QuakeCon, this content-free teaser is all you get to see of the new Doom for the time being. The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas’ QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game, which somehow hasn’t been leaked online yet. The good news is that plenty of people that were there are reporting on the unveiling, which seemed to include a number of extremely un- Doom -like additions. One of the bigger changes brought by the new Doom (which is notably not being called Doom 4 anymore ) is a jet-pack powered double-jump, à la Crysis 3 , Titanfall , Destiny and, now, presumably, every first-person shooter to come out in the next year or two. Players can also climb up the sides of “large crates and gaps” according to PC Gamer’s report , adding even more ability to go vertical. But it’s the Mortal Kombat -style melee finishing moves that seem to have gotten the crowd the most riled up. PC Gamer describes how, once an enemy is low on health, the player can get close and activate moves that see “lower jaws pulled off, skulls stomped on, and hearts torn out with the level of detail usually reserved for those slow-mo bullet cams in the Sniper Elite series.” Rock Paper Shotgun noted  that “enemies break apart like moldy bread… literally tearing them in half sometimes.” The outlet also reported scenes with “crushing heads, chunks flying everywhere.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Id shows off double-jumping, skull-crushing new Doom at QuakeCon

Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

At least 13,000 Chicago motorists have been cited with undeserved tickets thanks to malfunctioning red-light cameras, according to a 10-month investigation published Friday by the Chicago Tribune . The report found that the $100 fines were a result of “faulty equipment, human tinkering or both.” According to the investigation: Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets—560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued—downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records. City officials and Redflex Traffic Systems of Arizona, the report said, “acknowledged oversight failures and said the explosions of tickets should have been detected and resolved as they occurred. But they said that doesn’t mean the drivers weren’t breaking the law, and they defended the red light camera program overall as a safety success story. The program has generated nearly $500 million in revenue since it began in 2003.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

Bitcoin pool GHash.io commits to 40% hashrate limit after its 51% breach

Antana GHash.io announced that “it is not aiming to overcome 39.99 [percent] of the overall Bitcoin hashrate,” in a new statement published Wednesday . This marks a clear departure from the large Bitcoin pool’s recent flirtations with 51 percent . If that threshold is crossed for sustained periods of time, it concentrates power in ways that Bitcoin’s decentralized design normally does not allow. “If GHash.io approaches the respective border, it will be actively asking miners to take their hardware away from GHash.io and mine on other pools,” the statement continues. “GHash.io will encourage other mining pools to write similar voluntary statements from their sides.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin pool GHash.io commits to 40% hashrate limit after its 51% breach

Human memory-saving devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA

Flickr user: Dierk Schaefer Two teams creating devices that stimulate the brain to restore memory function have been  granted $37.5 million  by DARPA to develop the technology. Both will initially work with people with epilepsy who have been given implants to locate where their seizures originate. The researchers will reuse the data gathered during this process to monitor other brain activity, such as the patterns that occur when the brain stores and retrieves memories. One team will then attempt to map these patterns by recording the brain activity of epilepsy sufferers with mild memory problems while they play a computer game about remembering things. The pattern differences between the best and worst scores among these patents will be used to develop an algorithm for a personalized stimulation pattern to keep the brain performing at an optimal level. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Human memory-saving devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA

Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

Context In the latest cautionary tale involving the so-called Internet of things, white-hat hackers have devised an attack against network-connected lightbulbs that exposes Wi-Fi passwords to anyone in proximity to one of the LED devices. The attack works against LIFX smart lightbulbs , which can be turned on and off and adjusted using iOS- and Android-based devices. Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson gave a good overview here of the Philips Hue lights, which are programmable, controllable LED-powered bulbs that compete with LIFX. The bulbs are part of a growing trend in which manufacturers add computing and networking capabilities to appliances so people can manipulate them remotely using smartphones, computers, and other network-connected devices. A 2012 Kickstarter campaign raised more than $1.3 million for LIFX, more than 13 times the original goal of $100,000. According to a blog post published over the weekend , LIFX has updated the firmware used to control the bulbs after researchers discovered a weakness that allowed hackers within about 30 meters to obtain the passwords used to secure the connected Wi-Fi network. The credentials are passed from one networked bulb to another over a mesh network powered by 6LoWPAN , a wireless specification built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard . While the bulbs used the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to encrypt the passwords, the underlying pre-shared key never changed, making it easy for the attacker to decipher the payload. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto weakness in smart LED lightbulbs exposes Wi-Fi passwords

$1,099 iMac review: lose 50% of your performance to save 18% of the money

Technically, this is the $1,299 iMac, not that you’d be able to tell the difference. Andrew Cunningham Apple’s new $1,099 iMac will undoubtedly be a popular computer. People in the know who want the most computing bang for their buck would be smarter to step up to a higher-end model, but there are plenty of people—casual users, schools, businesses—who just want an iMac that’s “fast enough,” not one that’s “as fast as it could possibly be.” For those people, we obtained one of the new entry-level iMacs so we could evaluate its performance. On paper, it sounds like a big step down—you’re going from a quad-core desktop processor and GPU to a dual-core Ultrabook processor and GPU. This new iMac and the base MacBook Air models in fact use the exact same processor, even though historically there’s been a big performance gap between MacBook Airs and iMacs. In practice, the story is more complicated. Let’s talk about what the new low-end iMac changes, and then we’ll spend some time looking at processor performance. Read 29 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$1,099 iMac review: lose 50% of your performance to save 18% of the money

Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million

Aurich Lawson Over the weekend, Steam’s annual summer video game sale posted its final list of bargains, gathering the two-week sale’s most popular discounts for one last hurrah. Steam sales veterans, heeding the usual advice of “wait until the last day,” responded in kind by storming the service during the sale’s final 24 hours. On Steam’s official statistics page, which logs the past 48 hours of activity, the service confirmed just how big that last hurrah was, counting over 8 million simultaneous live users on Sunday . That’s a new peak for the service, which had crossed the 7 million concurrent mark this past December. Valve Software, operators of the Steam store, announced during January’s Steam Dev Days that the service had reached 75 million active users, which comes shy of the 186 million accounts we measured in April . A NeoGAF thread talking about the Steam numbers showed that they compare well to Xbox Live’s 48 million members (both Gold and otherwise) as of May 2013 and PSN’s 110 million members as of July 2013. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam reaches highest-ever concurrent user count at over 8 million