program3 – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Gawker declares bankruptcy, will auction itself off in wake of Hulk Hogan lawsuit

(credit: Miguel Discart ) UPDATE 3:00pm ET : The Verge located and published Gawker’s federal Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing, which we have mirrored here . In that document, owner Nick Denton estimates the company’s assets at $50 million to $100 million, and liabilities at $100 million to $500 million. Ryan Mac, a reporter at Forbes , provided Ars with a three-page statement from Gawker, that we have published in full , here. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gawker declares bankruptcy, will auction itself off in wake of Hulk Hogan lawsuit

US coal production drops to levels not seen since a 1980s miners’ strike

(credit: US EIA ) The first three months of 2016 saw a plunge in the US’ coal production that may be without precedent. The US Energy Information Administration, which has figures going back to the 1970s, shows only a single quarterly drop of similar magnitude—and that one came during a workers’ strike back in the early 1980s. Excepting periods of labor problems, US coal production has not been this low since the EIA started tracking it. Part of the problem is temporary. The winter was unusually mild, which lowers energy use in general. As a result, many of the coal-burning electrical plants had large stockpiles of coal on hand; they burned through these reserves rather than ordering new coal. But most of the issues are systemic. Coal is now being undercut by renewables and natural gas, which are displacing some of the demand. Utilities are responding to those low prices by adding new renewable and gas capacity. That additional capacity comes at a time when the US’ electricity demand has been growing at an unexpectedly slow pace. Combined, these factors have resulted in less use of existing coal plants. New environmental regulations are also forcing the oldest and least efficient plants to shut down early. Most of these are also coal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US coal production drops to levels not seen since a 1980s miners’ strike

“Bluetooth 5” spec coming next week with 2x more range and 4x better speed

Bluetooth 5.0, the latest version of the ubiquitous wireless standard, is set to be announced on June 16, according to an e-mail sent by Bluetooth SIG Executive Director Mark Powell. The update will apparently be called “Bluetooth 5” without a point number in an effort to “[simplify] marketing.” It’s primarily of interest because the update promises to double the range and quadruple the speed of Bluetooth 4.2. It also adds “significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions,” which is more exciting than it sounds because it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what you normally think of when you think of “advertising.” In the Bluetooth spec, an “advertising packet” allows Bluetooth devices to send small snippets of information to other Bluetooth devices even if the two aren’t actually paired or connected to one another. For instance, when you go to pair a Bluetooth keyboard or speaker with one of your devices, advertising packets can let you see the name of the device before you’ve paired it so you can distinguish it from all the other Bluetooth devices that are within range. The same technology is used by wireless beacons to transmit information about the location you’re in and by Apple’s AirDrop and Handoff features to let your Macs and iDevices know what your other Macs and iDevices are up to. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Bluetooth 5” spec coming next week with 2x more range and 4x better speed

Verizon could rule the ’90s cyberscape as owner of both AOL and Yahoo

Yahoo’s once-iconic San Francisco billboard, pictured here in 2011. (credit: Scott Schiller ) Verizon is submitting a $3 billion (£2 billion) bid to purchase Yahoo’s core Internet business, according to The Wall Street Journal , which cites an anonymous source. Though at least one more round of bidding is expected, Verizon is reportedly the leading contender. A Verizon spokesperson declined comment when contacted by Ars this morning. Yahoo has been shopping itself around for months in an attempt to sell off just about everything except its valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Yahoo is also looking to sell other assets including real estate and patents, but Verizon reportedly isn’t interested in buying those. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon could rule the ’90s cyberscape as owner of both AOL and Yahoo

Serial hacker strikes again, finds vulnerability in Better Business Bureau

A provocative white hat hacker who has previously disclosed vulnerabilities in both California’s ObamaCare portal and FireEye’s core security product has now revealed a serious flaw in the Council of Better Business Bureau’s (CBBB) Web-based complaints application, which is used by nearly a million people annually to file complaints against businesses. The CBBB criticized the “unauthorized application vulnerability test” but said in a statement that they believe “the motivation was not malicious,” and are “not pursuing the matter further.” The CBBB is the umbrella organization for the independent local BBBs, the not-for-profit consumer advocacy groups that operate in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The BBBs attempt to mediate disputes between consumers and businesses, and also accredit businesses based on how well the business meets the BBB’s “Standards of Trust.” Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Serial hacker strikes again, finds vulnerability in Better Business Bureau

Human eye might be able to detect entangled photons

(credit: Flickr user Hullabaloon. ) One of the less satisfying aspects of modern physics is the increasing separation between the phenomena that we measure and the experimenter. We measure almost everything today indirectly. If we operate our lab safely, we never directly detect an electron—instead, that charge creates a tiny potential difference on an amplifier. The amplifier generates a larger current that might drive a coil that is attached to a needle on a dial. This level of indirection is the reality of modern physics. And the alternative—passing large currents through your body—is discouraged. Yet, the desire to really see what is going on is hard to resist. This has led to an interesting publication that proposes a way to detect quantum mechanical behavior directly with the human eye. Seeing single photons The behavior in question is entanglement. But before getting to that, let’s talk about the eye. The human visual system is a pretty poor instrument as far as optics go. The eye is actually pretty good; experiments have revealed that the rods in your eye are sensitive to single photons. The brain, however, is smart; rather than try to sort out all the noise associated with every single photon detection, it tells the rods and cones not to bother it until the light reaches a certain intensity. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

TeamViewer confirms number of hacked user accounts is “significant”

Enlarge It was a tough week for TeamViewer, a service that allows computer professionals and consumers to log into their computers from remote locations. For a little more than a month, a growing number of users have reported their accounts were accessed by criminals who used their highly privileged position to drain PayPal and bank accounts . Critics have speculated TeamViewer itself has fell victim to a breach that’s making the mass hacks possible. On Sunday, TeamViewer spokesman Axel Schmidt acknowledged to Ars that the number of takeovers was “significant,” but it continued to maintain that the compromises are the result of user passwords that were compromised through a cluster of recently exposed megabreaches involving more than 642 million passwords belonging to users of LinkedIn, MySpace, and other services. Ars spoke with Schmidt to get the latest. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation: Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Paris bans pre-1997 cars from its streets during the week

Don’t expect to see cars like this on Parisian streets after this summer (unless it’s a weekend). (credit: Don O’Brien @ Flickr ) Parisians with cars built before 1997 are going to need to head to the nearest car dealership if they want to keep driving in the city after July 1. The French capital has experienced quite horrific air pollution in the last few years, and there was a massive spike in March 2015 that saw the city’s air quality drop lower than that of Beijing, China. After trying out temporary restrictions to vehicle traffic, Les Echos reports that the city has decided to implement new rules that will ban older and more polluting vehicles from its streets on weekdays. Those restrictions will also tighten over time; in 2020, only cars built since 2011 will be allowed. The vehicle classification scheme means you get one of these window stickers based on which Euro emissions standard your vehicle complies with. This announcement follows a decision by the French government to finalize a nation-wide scheme of ranking vehicle emissions (the system is based on the European emissions standards ). Any vehicle made on or before December 31, 1996 was built to conform with Euro 1, the weakest of these standards, and it’s these cars that are no longer allowed in the capital. Pre-2000 motorbikes and other two-wheeled vehicles are also on the hit list. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Paris bans pre-1997 cars from its streets during the week

AT&T’s data caps impose harshest punishments on DSL users

(credit: Mike Mozart ) AT&T’s home Internet data caps got an overhaul yesterday when the company implemented a recently announced plan to strictly enforce the caps and collect overage fees from more customers. Customers stuck on AT&T’s older DSL architecture will be facing lower caps and potentially higher overage fees than customers with more modern Internet service. AT&T put a positive spin on the changes when it announced them in March , saying that it was increasing the monthly data limits imposed on most home Internet customers. This was technically true as AT&T already had caps for most Internet users. But previously, the caps were only enforced in DSL areas, so the limits had no financial impact on most customers. Now, a huge swath of AT&T customers have effectively gone from unlimited plans to ones that are capped, with an extra $10 charge for each additional 50GB of data provided per month. The only customers who aren’t getting an increase in their monthly data allowance are the ones who have been dealing with caps the past few years, according to AT&T’s data usage website : Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

1.5 billion-year-old fossils reveal organisms of unusual size

Just a couple of 1.56 billion-year-old fossils from southern China. (credit: Maoyan Zhu) The Cambrian “explosion” of life around 540 million years ago is one heck of a story, in which a huge variety of animal body plans first appear in the fossil record. But the harder we look, the more interesting and incredible the Cambrian prequels become. Now, there’s a report of organisms big enough to be easily visible yet dating back to more than 1.5 billion years ago. The fuse to the Cambrian bomb was quite long and, at the very least, had some firecrackers tied to it. Single-celled eukaryotes, organisms with a nucleus and other complex internal structures, joined the bacteria and archaea around 1.5 billion years before the Cambrian. About 60 million years before the start of the Cambrian, a considerable batch of complex organisms appeared, although their relationships to Cambrian life are contentious. The history of multi-cellular eukaryotes in between is hard to piece together, as extraordinary luck is needed to preserve evidence of their soft cell bodies for us to find. We have a couple examples of tiny multi-cellular organisms that may have been eukaryotes, but a new discovery from a team led by Shixing Zhu of the China Geological survey adds a big one to the family. The long, flat fossils they found in 1.56 billion-year-old rocks were up to a whopping 30 centimeters long and 8 centimeters wide. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments