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Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

szczys writes: Google is building a 100kW transmitter at Spaceport America. As is becoming the regular source of early info, this comes via an FCC filing in which Google has asked the agency to keep the project secret. The signal strength itself isn’t [groundbreaking] until you learn this is a directional antenna. Some of the most powerful FM radio transmitters get to 100kW, but those are omnidirectional. This is a highly focused directional antenna and that makes it sound like a big piece of Google’s hushed Broadband Drone program. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

HughPickens.com writes: Ben Popper writes at The Verge that bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass as the bitcoin network reached its capacity, causing transactions around the world to be massively delayed, and in some cases to fail completely. The average time to confirm a transaction has ballooned from 10 minutes to 43 minutes. Users are left confused and shops that once accepted Bitcoin are dropping out. For those who want the Bitcoin system to continue to grow and thrive, this is troubling. Merchants can’t rely on digital transactions that can take minutes or hours to validate. A number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning over the past year that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. A schism has developed between the team in charge of the original codebase for Bitcoin, known as Core, and a rival faction pushing its own version of that open source code with a block size increase added in, known as Classic. “Many in the US Bitcoin community had hoped that hitting this crisis point — a network maxed out, transactions faltering — would result in closure, with miners quickly moving to adopt whichever chain proved more valuable to their economic interests, ” says Popper. “But so far the debate is dragging on without one side claiming a clear victory, leaving tens of thousands of consumer transactions stranded in limbo.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin’s Nightmare Scenario Has Come To Pass

DoD Announces New Bug Bounty Program Called Hack the Pentagon

Quince alPillan writes: Announcing what it calls “the first cyber bug bounty program in the history of the federal government, ” the Department of Defense says it’s inviting vetted hackers to test the security of its web pages and networks. Vetted hackers will need to pass a background check and will be attacking a predetermined system that is not a part of critical operations. This program is being put together by the Digital Defense Service, launched last fall. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DoD Announces New Bug Bounty Program Called Hack the Pentagon

iOS 9.3 Will Tell You If Your Employer Is Monitoring Your IPhone

An anonymous reader writes: Nobody likes being monitored. But even if you suspected your company is following your activities on the iPhone, would you know where to check? In the next iteration of its smartphone operating system, iOS 9.3, Apple is looking to make this an easier task. According to Reddit user MaGNeTiX, the latest beta of iOS 9.3 has a message telling users their iPhone is being supervised. The message is as prominent as can be, both on the device’s lock screen and in the About section. “This iPhone is managed by your organization, ” the message on the lock screen says. And in the About screen, you get a little more detail, with a message saying your iPhone’s supervisor can monitor your Internet traffic and locate your device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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iOS 9.3 Will Tell You If Your Employer Is Monitoring Your IPhone

Israeli Troops Who Relied On Waze Blundered Into Deadly Palestinian Firefight

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli forces mounted a rescue mission in a Palestinian neighborhood after gun battles erupted when two soldiers mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.The clashes late Monday in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. According to initial Israeli reports, the two soldiers said they had been using Waze, a highly touted Israeli-invented navigation app bought more than two years ago by Google. The smartphone app, which has a settings option to ‘avoid dangerous areas, ‘ relies on crowdsourcing to give users the fastest traffic routes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC

MojoKid writes: Even for mainstream users, it’s easy to feel the differences between using a PC that has an OS installed on a solid state drive versus a mechanical hard drive. Also, with SSD pricing where it is right now, it’s also easy to justify including one in a new configuration for the speed boost. And there’s obvious benefit in the enterprise and data center for both performance and durability. As you might expect, Google has chewed through a healthy pile of SSDs in its data centers over the years and the company appears to have been one of the first to deploy SSDs in production at scale. New research results Google is sharing via a joint research project now encompasses SSD use over a six year span at one of Google’s data centers. Looking over the results led to some expected and unexpected findings. One of the biggest discoveries is that SLC-based SSDs are not necessarily more reliable than MLC-based drives. This is surprising, as SLC SSDs carry a price premium with the promise of higher durability (specifically in write operations) as one of their selling points. It will come as no surprise that there are trade-offs of both SSDs and mechanical drives, but ultimately, the benefits SSDs offer often far outweigh the benefits of mechanical HDDs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC

Scientists Achieve Perfect Efficiency For Water-Splitting Half-Reaction

Dthief writes: Splitting water is a two-step process, and in a new study, researchers have performed one of these steps (reduction) with 100% efficiency. The results shatter the previous record of 60% for hydrogen production with visible light, and emphasize that future research should focus on the other step (oxidation) in order to realize practical overall water splitting. The main application of splitting water into its components of oxygen and hydrogen is that the hydrogen can then be used to deliver energy to fuel cells for powering vehicles and electronic devices. The process involves exposing the water to a mass of platinum-tipped nanorods, with visible light driving the reaction. The 100% efficiency refers to the photon-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency, and it means that virtually all of the photons that reach the photocatalyst generate an electron, and every two electrons produce one H2 molecule. At 100% yield, the half-reaction produces about 100 H2 molecules per second (or one every 10 milliseconds) on each nanorod, and a typical sample contains about 600 trillion nanorods. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Achieve Perfect Efficiency For Water-Splitting Half-Reaction

As of Tonight, 1900 Steam Games For Linux

New submitter KGIII writes: “After a recent Steam change, there were more than 1, 900 Steam Linux games listed as Valve ended up including yet-to-be-released Linux game ports. That total including unreleased Linux games is now up to 2, 009! But in terms of released Linux game titles available for download right now, the 1, 900 threshold was crossed tonight to end out February.” It’s getting there. All of you gamers might just be able to make the choice to move to Linux soon. It looks like there are quite a few more games coming down the pipe. This is a good thing as it gives gamers more options for their operating system. I imagine this bodes well for the SteamOS project and for the dedicated SteamOS devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are CEOs Overpaid? Not Compared With College Presidents

schwit1 writes: For outrageous executive earnings, don’t look to Wall Street — look to academia. High pay for CEOs attracts annual attention and recitations about the immorality of capitalism, but when the focus is on average CEO pay, they make less than half the annual earnings of college presidents, according to CBS News. The average CEO earns $176, 840 annually, an amount that would make a university president into a pauper. In academia, college presidents earn $377, 261 annually. Americans outraged and indebted by high college costs will be quick to draw the parallel between a college president’s pay and their tuition bill. Correlation, though, doesn’t imply causation. College presidents aren’t always the highest-paid college employees — athletic coaches often earn more. Regardless, college presidents “are well into the 99th percentile of compensation for wage earners in the United States, ” Peter L. Hinrichs and Anne Chen noted for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John McAfee: NSA’s Back Door Has Given Every US Secret To Enemies

John McAfee, American computer programmer and contributing editor of Business Insider, explains how the NSA’s back door has given every U.S. secret to its enemies. He begins by mentioning the importance of software, specifically meta- software, which contains a high level set of principles designed to help a nation survive in a cyberwar. Such software must not contain any back doors under any circumstances, otherwise it can and may very likely allow perceived enemies of the U.S. to have access to top-secret information. For example, the Chinese used the NSA’s back door to hack the Defense Department last year and steal 5.6 million fingerprints of critical personnel. “Whatever gains the NSA has made through the use of their back door, it cannot possibly counterbalance the harm done to our nation by everyone else’s use of that same back door.” McAfee believes the U.S. has failed to grasp the subtle implications of technology and, as a result, is 20 years behind the Chinese, and by association, the Russians as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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John McAfee: NSA’s Back Door Has Given Every US Secret To Enemies

Ken May

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