science – Page 306

Google To Provide Free Internet For Public Housing Residents To All Fiber Markets

VentureBeat, an anonymous reader notes, reports that Google has announced it will expand on an earlier move to provide free internet service to poor Austin residents. Now, rather than for 4300 residents of housing provided by the Housing Authority of Austin, the company “has promised to expand that offering to every other current and future Google Fiber market. The move is part of U.S. President Obama’s ConnectHome program, launched by the White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with the goal of bringing Internet connectivity to more school-aged children and families living in HUD-assisted housing in 27 communities across the country. … Google promises the program will extend to all its Google Fiber cities.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
Google To Provide Free Internet For Public Housing Residents To All Fiber Markets

Toyota Recalls 625,000 Hybrid Vehicles Over Software Glitch

hypnosec writes: Yesterday we discussed news that over 65, 000 Range Rovers were being recalled over a software issue. Not to be outdone, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota on Wednesday recalled 625, 000 hybrid vehicles globally to fix a different software defect. The automaker said the defect in question might lead to shut down of the hybrid system while the car is being driven. The recall was due to software settings that could result in “higher thermal stress” in parts of a power converter, potentially causing it to become damaged. Toyota dealers will update the software for both the motor/generator control ECU and hybrid control ECU in the involved vehicles. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
Toyota Recalls 625,000 Hybrid Vehicles Over Software Glitch

New Horizons Has Made its Closest Approach to Pluto! [updating]

After nine years and over 3.26 billion miles, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto earlier today. Assuming it survived the encounter, the probe is now drifting away from the dwarf planet as it heads deeper into the Kuiper Belt. Read more…

Continue Reading:
New Horizons Has Made its Closest Approach to Pluto! [updating]

Google Accidentally Reveals Data On ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Requests

Colin Castro points out an article from The Guardian, who noticed that Google’s recent transparency report contained more data than intended. When perusing the source code, they found data about who was making requests for Google to take down links under the “right to be forgotten” law. The data they found covers 75% of all requests made so far. Less than 5% of nearly 220, 000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures, the Guardian has learned, with more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members of the public. … Of 218, 320 requests to remove links between 29 May 2014 and 23 March 2015, 101, 461 (46%) have been successfully delisted on individual name searches. Of these, 99, 569 involve “private or personal information.” Only 1, 892 requests – less than 1% of the overall total – were successful for the four remaining issue types identified within Google’s source code: “serious crime” (728 requests), “public figure” (454), “political” (534) or “child protection” (176) – presumably because they concern victims, incidental witnesses, spent convictions, or the private lives of public persons. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comcast Launches Streaming Service and Unveils Pricing For 2G Fiber

An anonymous reader writes: Comcast has announced the release of its Gigabit Pro service which offers speeds up to 2 gigabits per second. The service is $300 a month (agree to a two year contract and get the early promotional price of $159 per month) with a $500 installation and activation fee. The new service is only available in the Jacksonville, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Florida area. This announcement comes on the heels of the $15-per-month “Comcast Stream” launch. The live TV and streaming video service does not require a cable TV subscription, but live TV channels can only be watched on customer’s home internet connections. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Comcast Launches Streaming Service and Unveils Pricing For 2G Fiber

Ditching RAM may lead to low-cost supercomputers

Many servers , supercomputers and other monster systems thrive on high-speed RAM to keep things running smoothly, but this memory is wildly expensive — and that limits not just the number of nodes in these clusters, but who can use them. MIT researchers may have a much more affordable approach in the future, though. They’ve built a server network (not shown here) that drops RAM in favor of cheaper and slower flash storage, yet performs just about as well. The key was to get the flash drives themselves (or specifically, their controllers) to pre-process some of the data, instead of making the CPUs do all the hard work. That doesn’t completely close the speed gap, but the differences are virtually negligible. In one test, 20 servers with 20TB of flash were about as fast as 40 servers with 10TB of RAM. This doesn’t mean that flash-centric computing will be useful absolutely everywhere. MIT has only demonstrated its technique helping out with database-heavy tasks like ranking web pages. This wouldn’t necessarily help much with tasks that depend more on calculations, and the networked design means it this RAM-less approach wouldn’t do much to help your home PC. All the same, this could help a lot if it lets your favorite cloud service run faster, or helps cost-conscious scientists devote money toward other projects. [Image credit: AP Photo/Jens Meyer] Filed under: Storage , Science Comments Source: MIT News

Originally posted here:
Ditching RAM may lead to low-cost supercomputers

Self-Destructing Mosquitoes Are Annihilating Wild Populations

Self-destructing mosquitoes are maybe possibly my favorite invention of the century. Okay, smartphones and Spotify are pretty great, too, but having just spent a couple of weeks in bug-infested New England, I might be a taaaad biased. Read more…

See the original post:
Self-Destructing Mosquitoes Are Annihilating Wild Populations

Amnesty International Seeks Explanation For ‘Absolutely Shocking’ Surveillance

Mark Wilson writes: A court recently revealed via email that the UK government had been spying on Amnesty International. GCHQ had put Amnesty under surveillance — despite this having previously been denied — and now the human rights organization wants answers. In a letter to the UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Amnesty International asks for an explanation for the surveillance. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal’s (IPT) email made it clear that GCHQ had been intercepting, accessing and storing communications, something that Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Salil Shetty believes ‘makes it vividly clear that mass surveillance has gone too far’. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boeing Patents an Engine Run By Laser-Generated Fusion Explosions

MarkWhittington writes: Boeing has had a patent approved for an aircraft engine that uses laser-generated nuclear fusion as a power source, according to a story in Business Insider. The idea is already generating a great deal of controversy, according to the website Counter Punch. The patent has generated fears of what might happen if an aircraft containing radioactive material as fuel were to crash, spreading such fuel across the crash site. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
Boeing Patents an Engine Run By Laser-Generated Fusion Explosions

Adblock Plus Reduces University’s Network Traffic By 25 Percent

Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada claims it cut 25% of its network traffic (40% of video traffic) by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network. The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension (PDF) in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of data transfer were saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers. The experiment was carried out over a period of six weeks. Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue Reading:
Adblock Plus Reduces University’s Network Traffic By 25 Percent

Ken May

Tag: science