Rosetta, the comet-exploring spacecraft, has finally gotten within sight of the comet it’s been traveling towards for the first time since waking up from its 2-year long slumber through deep space — and it sent back the pictures to prove it. Read more…
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Rosetta Just Caught Its First Glimpse of Its Destination Comet
schwit1 (797399) writes “Texting and driving is dangerous but a new survey finds talking on a cellphone while behind the wheel may be even worse. The National Safety Council’s annual report found 26 percent of all crashes are tied to phone use, but noted just 5 percent involved texting. Safety advocates are lobbying now for a total ban on driver phone use, pointing to studies that headsets do not reduce drive distraction.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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More Than 1 In 4 Car Crashes Involve Cellphone Use
An anonymous reader writes: “Mining new Bitcoins is computationally expensive — you can’t expect to do much on your standard home computer. Many miners have built custom rigs to mine more efficiently, but it was only a matter of time until somebody went industrial. Dave Carlson’s goal is to mine 10% of all new Bitcoins from now on. He’s built literally thousands of units. They collectively use 1.4 million BitFury mining chips, which are managed by a bunch of Raspberry Pis. ‘The current rigs each contain 16 boards, with each board containing 16 BitFury chips, for a total of 256 mining chips on each rig. Carlson said about 90, 000 processor boards have been deployed, which would put the number of rigs at about 5, 600. A new board [being designed] will have 756 chips on each rig instead of 256.’ Carlson says his company spent $3-5 million to get everything set up. They current generate 7, 000 — 8, 000 Bitcoins per month, which, at current rates, would be worth over $4 million.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Operation Wants To Mine 10% of All New Bitcoins
cartechboy writes: “One of the arguments for electric cars is that we are reducing greenhouse gases and emitting less CO2 than vehicles with an internal combustion engine. But Mazda says its next-generation SkyActiv engines will be so efficient, they’ll emit less CO2 than an electric car. In fact, the automaker goes so far as to say these new engines will be cleaner to run than electric cars. Is it possible? Yes, but it’s all about the details. It’ll depend on the test cycles for each region. Vehicles are tested differently in Europe than in the U.S., and that variation could make all the difference when it comes to these types of claims. At the end of the day whether future Mazdas with gasoline-powered engines are cleaner than electric cars or not, every little bit in the effort to reduce our carbon emissions per mile is a step in the right direction, right?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mazda Says Its Upcoming Gas-Powered Cars Will Emit Less CO2 Than Electric Cars
wiredmikey (1824622) writes “Microsoft warned on Monday of a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2014-1761) in Microsoft Word 2010 that is being actively exploited in targeted attacks. If successfully exploited, an attacker could gain the same user rights as the current user, Microsoft said, noting that users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than accounts with administrative privileges. ‘The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted RTF file using an affected version of Microsoft Word, or previews or opens a specially crafted RTF email message in Microsoft Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email viewer, ‘ Microsoft explained Microsoft did not share any details on the attacks that leveraged the vulnerability, but did credit Drew Hintz, Shane Huntley, and Matty Pellegrino of the Google Security Team for reporting it to Microsoft.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Word Zero-Day Used In Targeted Attacks
mdsolar (1045926) writes “Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has announced that, based on satellite data analysis from UK company Inmarsat, Malayian Airlines flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean, and no one on board survived. ‘Effectually we looked at the doppler effect, which is the change in frequency, due to the movement of a satellite in its orbit. What that then gave us was a predicted path for the northerly route and a predicted path the southerly route, ‘ explained Chris McLaughlin, senior vice president of external affairs at Inmarsat. ‘What we discovered was a correlation with the southerly route and not with the northern route after the final turn that the aircraft made, so we could be as close to certain as anybody could be in that situation that it went south. Where we then went was to work out where the last ping was, knowing that the aircraft still had some fuel, but that it would have run out before the next automated ping. We don’t know what speed the aircraft was flying at, but we assumed about 450 knots.’ Inmarsat passed the relevant analysis to the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) yesterday. The cause of the crash remains a mystery.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When this Jurassic plant was smothered in molten lava one hundred and eighty million years ago, it was almost instantly fossilised—in incredible cellular detail. Read more…
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Molten Lava Fossilized This Plant Down to Its Single Cells
An anonymous reader writes with a link to an article by the EFF’s Jennifer Lynch, carried by Gizmodo, which reports that the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department “took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that ‘All [license plate] data is investigatory.’ The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter. This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under “general warrants” that targeted no specific person or place and never expired. ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. … Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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L.A. Police: All Cars In L.A. Are Under Investigation
schwit1 (797399) writes with this excerpt from the Washington Examiner: “A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military. The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Navy Database Tracks Civilians’ Parking Tickets, Fender-Benders
VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are great for protecting your privacy and security while you use the internet . Whether you’re at home or abroad, they’re essential for protecting your data. This week, we want to know which ones you think are the best. Read more…
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What’s The Best VPN Service Provider?