hash – Page 11 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Chicago issued $2.4 million in bogus traffic tickets from speed cameras

The Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday as part of an exhaustive investigation that as many as 110,000 “questionable” speeding tickets totalling $2.4 million have been issued in the past two years in Chicago as part of a speed-camera program designed to keep kids safe near parks and schools. …City Hall has systematically ticketed drivers near schools without the legally required evidence of a schoolchild in sight. A Tribune random-sample analysis puts the number of those questionable tickets at about 110,000. And while it was pitched by the mayor as a way to protect youngsters walking near parks and schools, the most prolific cameras in the 2-year-old “Children’s Safety Zone” initiative can be found along major roadways, where crash data show child pedestrians are least likely to be struck by speeders. The lengthy report is worth a read. Among other things, the report found that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s speed camera program issued 22,000 tickets for speeding near parks and another 11,000 tickets near parks that were closed for the night. What’s more, another 28,000 citations “were issued at cameras plagued by problems with warning signs that did not meet the minimum legal requirements.” And at least 62,000 tickets were given during the summer “when school activity is so limited that drivers are left to guess whether school is in session or not.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago issued $2.4 million in bogus traffic tickets from speed cameras

Visual Studio now supports debugging Linux apps; Code editor now open source

The Visual Studio Code editor, now open source, editing TypeScript on OS X. (credit: Microsoft) NEW YORK—Developers can now debug apps running on Linux servers or IoT devices from the comfort of Visual Studio. Microsoft today released a preview of a Visual Studio extension that adds remote debugging using GDB of Linux software. This was one of many announcements made at Microsoft’s Connect developer event today as the company aims to give its developer platform the broadest reach it’s ever had, able to handle Android, iOS, and Linux development, alongside the more expected Azure, Office, and Windows. Visual Studio 2015 already made big strides in this direction, and Microsoft is pushing ahead to try to make Visual Studio the best development environment around. The free and cross-platform Chromium-based code editor Visual Studio Code is being open sourced today. A new build has also been published, adding an extension mechanism to the editor. There are already some 60 extensions available, including new language support (such as Go language), richer debugging, code linters, and more. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Visual Studio now supports debugging Linux apps; Code editor now open source

Feds bugged steps of Silicon Valley courthouse

(credit: James Vaughan ) Defense attorneys have asked a federal judge to throw out more than 200 hours of conversations FBI agents recorded using hidden microphones planted on the steps of a California county courthouse. The lawyers are representing defendants accused of engaging in an illicit real estate bid-rigging and fraud conspiracy. The steps to the San Mateo County courthouse are frequently the scene of public auctions for foreclosed homes. Federal prosecutors have admitted that on at least 31 occasions in 2009 and 2010, FBI agents used concealed microphones to record auction participants as they spoke, often in hushed voices with partners, attorneys, and others. Because the federal agents didn’t obtain a court order, the defense attorneys argue the bugging violated Constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In a court brief filed Friday in the case, attorneys wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

(credit: Global Panorama/Flickr ) In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they’re not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests. In two randomized, placebo-controlled trials of healthy people, a single course of oral antibiotics altered the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome for months, and in some cases up to a year. Such shifts could clear the way for pathogens, including the deadly Clostridium difficile . Those community changes can also alter microbiome activities, including interacting with the immune system and helping with digestion. Overall, the data, published Tuesday in the journal mBio , suggests that antibiotics may have more side effects than previously thought—at least in the gut. In the mouth, on the other hand, researchers found that microbial communities fared much better, rebounding in weeks after antibiotic treatments. The finding raises the question of why the oral microbiome is less disturbed by drugs. It could simply be because of the way that antibiotics, taken orally, circulate through the body. Or, it could imply that oral microbiomes are innately more resilient, a quality that would be useful to replicate in microbial communities all over the body. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

$635 poop pills cure deadly gastrointestinal infection

(credit: Ana C./ Flickr ) The country’s first stool bank , OpenBiome, is now selling capsules of fecal matter to treat life-threatening Clostridium difficile , or C. diff, infections. The $635 pill-based therapy, a type of fecal transplant, is highly effective against the difficult-to-treat gastrointestinal infection, according to results of a pilot study. A single dose, which includes a whopping 30 pills, cured 70 percent of patients. A second dose bumped the success rate up to 94 percent. The treatment, currently being sold only to doctors, may offer an easier alternative to other effective fecal transplant routes, namely colonoscopies, nasal tubes, and enemas . Scientists have known for years that fecal transplants in general are highly effective against C. diff infections, which can be extremely difficult to cure. The infection can cause severe, recurring diarrhea. It can be resistant to antibiotic treatments, and sometimes it turns deadly. In the US, C. diff causes more than 450,000 infections a year, leading to about 15,000 deaths . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$635 poop pills cure deadly gastrointestinal infection

AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

AT&T’s updated GigaPower coverage map. (credit: AT&T ) AT&T yesterday announced expansions of its gigabit fiber Internet service into parts of 23 cities and towns. The new markets are mostly in the suburbs of big cities where AT&T already offered its fastest broadband. For example, AT&T previously brought its “U-verse with GigaPower” service to Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Nashville, and Orlando. The expansion this week brings the service into a bunch of cities and towns within the larger metro areas. Pricing for the Internet-only 1Gbps package is either $70 a month or $110 a month, depending on where you live. As we’ve reported previously, AT&T tends to match Google Fiber’s $70 pricing , but not in areas where Google isn’t offering service. Besides that, AT&T’s lowest price in each city requires customers to opt into “Internet Preferences ,” which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in order to serve personalized ads. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

Microsoft may phase out support for TLS certificates that use the SHA-1 hashing algorithm as early as June 2016 . The decision comes in the wake of recent calculations that suggest generating collisions is quicker and cheaper than previously anticipated. SHA-1 is a hash algorithm, used to derive a 128-bit value from an arbitrary input. Its intent is for collisions—different inputs that hash to the same 128-bit value—to be hard to generate. As compute power has steadily grown over the years, it becomes quicker and cheaper to generate collisions. It was previously projected by Bruce Schneier , based on the observed growth of compute power, that creating SHA-1 collisions would be within reach of criminals by 2018 at a cost of about $173,000. On this basis, Microsoft intended to cease supporting the use of new SSL/TLS certificates using SHA-1 on January 1, 2016 and all SHA-1 SSL/TLS certificates on January 1, 2017. The new cost and performance estimates, however, suggest that the cost is both drastically lower—$75,000 to $120,000—and that the compute resources are immediately available through cloud services such as Amazon EC2. This has given browser vendors little option but to reconsider the previous 2017 timetable for retiring support of SHA-1. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

Google engineer leaves scathing reviews of dodgy USB Type-C cables on Amazon

(credit: Andrew Cunningham) One particularly conscientious Google engineer, Benson Leung, is currently on an unusual mission: he’s slowly working his way through a bunch of USB Type C cables and adaptors stocked by Amazon, to check whether they are actually up-to-spec and capable of charging his Chromebook Pixel. First things first: of the ten USB Type C products that Leung has reviewed, only three of them were fully specs-compliant and capable of charging his Pixel. The three good cables (Belkin, iOrange-E, Frieq) were invariably more expensive (about £15/$20) than the seven duff ones (£6/$10). Obviously there may be some cheap cables that do fulfil the full USB Type C specification, but Leung hasn’t found one yet. One of the offending micro-USB-to-Type-C adaptors that lacks the necessary hardware to comply with the Type C 1.1 spec. The USB Type C 1.1 specification allows for power delivery of up to 3A, which is enough juice to charge a laptop like the Chromebook Pixel. Previous USB specs, though, only allowed for power delivery of between 900mA and 1.5A. According to Leung, the problem is mostly related to how the cables deal with going from older Type A or Micro/Mini connectors to the new Type C connector. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google engineer leaves scathing reviews of dodgy USB Type-C cables on Amazon

MPAA shuts down major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time

The site that provides much of the content for illegal movies shown on the “Popcorn Time” app, PopcornTime.io, has been shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America won court orders in Canada and New Zealand. “Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them,” said MPAA Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd in a statement (PDF) . According to the piracy news site TorrentFreak, YTS stopped functioning in mid-October. Now the MPAA has taken credit for that and the PopcornTime.io shutdown. MPAA sued three “key Canadian operators” of PopcornTime.io on October 9 in Federal Court in Canada. PopcornTime.io was said by its operators to be the “official” PopcornTime fork. On October 16, the MPAA’s member studios obtained an injunction ordering the site to shut down. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MPAA shuts down major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time

Changing the Earth’s climate by covering the deserts with solar panels

Solar panels in Chile’s Atacama desert. (credit: OPIC.gov ) Currently, the Earth’s inhabitants are consuming about 17.5TeraWatts of power each year. It’s estimated that an aggressive rollout of solar panels could generate at least 400TW, and possibly much, much more. But that would involve paving over a lot of the Earth’s surface with solar panels, in many cases covering relatively reflective sand with dark black hardware. Could this have its own effects on the climate? The answer turns out to be remarkably complex. That’s in part because the panels don’t simply absorb the energy of the light—a fraction of it gets converted to electricity and shipped elsewhere. A team of US and Chinese scientists decided to account for all of this and found out that massive solar installations would cause changes in the climate, but the changes would be minor compared to what we’d see from continued greenhouse gas emissions. The authors created a number of scenarios to tease out the influence of the panels, and they used climate models to examine the changes they drove. The first method involved covering most of the Earth’s deserts and urban areas with solar panels (this would, of course, lead to a ridiculous overproduction of electricity). In a second, the power harvested by these panels was then sent to urban areas and dissipated as heat. Finally, for a somewhat more realistic view, they simply covered most of the deserts of Egypt with panels. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Changing the Earth’s climate by covering the deserts with solar panels