This is good news. Hopefully the politicians heed the counsel of this report.
"Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest," reports a bipartisan committee in the U.S. Congress. Mark Wilson quotes Beta News:
The Congressional Encryption Working Group (EWG) was set up in the wake of the Apple vs FBI case in which the FBI wanted to gain access to the encrypted contents of a shooter's iPhone. The group has just published its end-of-year report summarizing months of meetings, analysis and debate. The report makes four key observations, starting off with: "Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest".
This is certainly not a new argument against encryption backdoors for the likes of the FBI, but it is an important one... The group says: "Congress should not weaken this vital technology... Cryptography experts and information security professionals believe that it is exceedingly difficult and impractical, if not impossible, to devise and implement a system that gives law enforcement exceptional access to encrypted data without also compromising security against hackers, industrial spies, and other malicious actors...
The report recommends that instead, Congress "should foster cooperation between the law enforcement community and technology companies," adding "there is already substantial cooperation between the private sector and law enforcement." [PDF] It also suggests that analyzing the metadata from "our digital 'footprints'...could play a role in filling in the gap. The technology community leverages this information every day to improve services and target advertisements. There appears to be an opportunity for law enforcement to better leverage this information in criminal investigations."
The “Star Wars” actress had a cardiac issue aboard an airplane and Twitter had a heart attack.
As soon as word spread that “Star Wars” actress Carrie Fisher had a medical emergency onboard a flight, social media had a collective response: Aw, hell no.
This year has already taken Prince, Muhammad Ali, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen — and given us President Donald Trump. Folks on Twitter were not ready to lose Princess Leia, too.
Fisher’s prognosis is unclear as the actress remains in a Los Angeles hospital. According to USA Today, she is stable but remains in intensive care.
But, as noted by several people, the 60-year-old actress has already survived drug addiction and bipolar disorder. So maybe she can give us the end-of-year triumph we all so badly need.
The mountain of scientific studies about the harms of excess dietary sugar is really just a house of cards—a flimsy stack of weak conclusions based on low-quality data. And the international dietary guidelines based on those studies—the ones urging people to cut back on sweets and sugary drinks—are disingenuous and cannot be trusted.
At least, that’s what a review out this week would have you believe. To get to those bold claims, the authors used questionable methods, subjective assessments, and money from the food and beverage industry. One of the lead authors is even on the scientific advisory board of Tate & Lyle, one of the world’s largest high-fructose corn syrup producers.
Health experts and researchers were quick to criticize the review—and its blatant bias. “Although scrutiny of dietary guidelines is warranted, we believe that this review is an example of the ‘politicization of science,’” Dean Schillinger and Cristin Kearns, health experts and researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial. “Politicization occurs when an actor overly accentuates inherent uncertainties of science to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.”
AP photographer Burhan Ozbilici is a photojournalist incredibly dedicated to his job; so dedicated, in fact, that he kept on taking pictures when a gunman shot and killed Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov at a photo gallery in Ankara, Turkey. The photos he captured have instantly risen to iconic status.
Warning: The images in this post might be offensive or upsetting to some, as they depict both the gunman and his victim. Proceed with caution.
Ozbilici was working the event, but instead of putting his camera down and ducking for cover when 22-year-old Turkish police man Mevlut Mert Altintas opened fire on the Russian ambassador, he kept working. Ozbilici snapped several photos of the enraged gunman as he paced around his victim and yelled at the assembled crowd, at one point shooting Karlov again at close range.
The photos he captured have spread across the world like wildfire, prompting praise from NBC Nightly News Social Editor Micah Grimes:
Speaking with the LA Times, Ozbilici explained why and how he was able to keep on taking pictures, even the killer paced in front of him, condemning Russia for their role in Syria.
“I was, of course, fearful and knew of the danger if the gunman turned toward me. But I advanced a little and photographed the man as he hectored his desperate, captive audience,” Ozbilici tells the LA newspaper. “I was thinking: ‘I’m here. Even if I get hit and injured, or killed, I’m a journalist. I have to do my work. I could run away without making any photos… But I wouldn’t have a proper answer if people later ask me: ‘Why didn’t you take pictures?'”
To see more of the photos Ozbilici captured at the art gallery or hear his account of this terrifying moment, visit his LA Times interview or read the AP’s own coverage of the incident here.
Unless he divests himself from all his businesses, Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to violate the Constitution of the United States the second he takes office. But he’s not president yet.
On December 19, the 538 members of the Electoral College have to cast their votes, and a majority of them have to vote in favor of Trump for him to earn the title. He may have won — sorry, did I say win? I mean lost — the popular vote by a margin larger than any other president in history. But he did win the Electoral College, and the electors have yet to vote.
Some have called efforts to pressure the Electoral College “crazy,” and if this were a normal election, I would agree. But “normal” is the last word anyone would use to describe 2016. So if the election wasn’t normal, why are we expecting the Electoral College to be?
Regardless of how you feel about the Electoral College as an institution, it exists for a specific reason: to prevent someone like Donald Trump to take office. When Alexander Hamilton helped create it in 1788, it was designed specifically to prevent a political crisis like the one America has been plunged into. In fact, if you read the Federalist Papers, of which Hamilton was one of the authors,it’s as if he were almost able to predict a man like Trump being this close to the White House.
The Electoral College is like if your iPhone had an “are you sure you want to send this sext to your mom instead of your boyfriend” button. The Electoral College once prevented voters from having direct access to presidential democracy. Now it may give the country the ability to prevent a huge mistake. Its goal was to make sure the role of president would never be filled by a person who doesn’t have the “requisite qualifications” and to protect the highest office in the land “from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
No matter how you feel about Trump’s emotional instability or his bewildering approaches to foreign and domestic policy, one thing that is objectively bananas is his innumerable conflicts of interests. Given that Trump reportedly possesses at least 111 companies in 18 different countries, it would be practically impossible for Trump to prove that he is not financially benefiting from foreign governments. Since he won’t release his tax returns, the public doesn’t know the magnitude of the spiderweb of his domestic and international business holdings — and, most importantly, who is investing in them. And just like the Scotch tape holding his tie together, it’s shady AF.
If Trump were president right now, he would clearly be in violation of the Constitution by the actions he has taken since winning the election, by reportedly talking to British politician Nigel Farage about the windmills blocking the view of his golf course in Scotland. Or just look at how Trump won’t let go of his executive producer title, and presumably the profits, of NBC’s The Apprentice. These holdings would be in direct violation of the emoluments clause in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, which bars presidents from taking money or gifts from foreign leaders without Congress’s approval.
Now, I know this sounds insane, the Electoral College being filled with enough faithless electors to overturn the decision of a presidential election. It’s as crazy as … I don’t know … Donald Trump being president?
Breitbart.com published an article last week that erroneously claims global warming is coming to an end, claiming "global land temperatures have plummeted by 1 degree Celsius since the middle of the year -- the biggest and steepest fall on record." The Weather Channel finds this report especially upsetting as it's not only inaccurate but it features a video from weather.com at the top of the article. The Weather Channel reports: Breitbart had the legal right to use this clip as part of a content-sharing agreement with another company, but there should be no assumption that The Weather Company endorses the article associated with it. The Breitbart article -- a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case -- includes this statement: "The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare." In fact, thousands of researchers and scientific societies are in agreement that greenhouse gases produced by human activity are warming the planet's climate and will keep doing so. Along with its presence on the high-profile Breitbart site, the article drew even more attention after a link to it was retweeted by the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The Breitbart article heavily references a piece that first appeared on U.K. Daily Mail's site. The Weather Channel went on to refute the Breitbart article's hypothesis: This number comes from one satellite-based estimate of temperatures above land areas in the lower atmosphere. Data from the other two groups that regularly publish satellite-based temperature estimates show smaller drops, more typical of the decline one would expect after a strong El Nino event. Temperatures over land give an incomplete picture of global-scale temperature. Most of the planet -- about 70 percent -- is covered by water, and the land surface warms and cools more quickly than the ocean. Land-plus-ocean data from the other two satellite groups, released after the Breitbart article, show that Earth's lower atmosphere actually set a record high in November 2016.
Engineers with manufacturing technology company Instrumental tore apart a Galaxy Note 7 to try and figure out what may have caused some devices to overheat and explode, causing Samsung to recall and eventually cancel all Galaxy Note 7 devices. In their damning new report, the engineers discovered the root of the problem appears to be that the battery is too tightly packed inside the body of the Note 7. Digital Trends reports: They discovered the battery was so tightly packed inside the Galaxy Note 7's body that any pressure from battery expansion, or stress on the body itself, may squeeze together layers inside the battery that are never supposed to touch -- with explosive results. Batteries swell up under normal use, and we place stress on a phone's body by putting it our pocket and sitting down, or if it's dropped. Tolerances for battery expansion are built into a smartphone during design, and Instrumental notes Samsung used "a super-aggressive manufacturing process to maximize capacity." In other words, the Galaxy Note 7 was designed to be as thin and sleek as possible, while containing the maximum battery capacity for long use, thereby better competing against rival devices such as the iPhone 7 Plus and improving on previous Note models. The report speculates that any pressure placed on the battery in its confined space may have squeezed together positive and negative layers inside the cell itself, which were thinner than usual in the Note 7's battery already, causing them to touch, heat up, and eventually in some cases, catch fire. Delving deeper into the design, the engineers say the space above a battery inside a device needs a "ceiling" that equates to approximately 10 percent of the overall thickness. The Galaxy Note 7 should have had a 0.5mm ceiling; it had none.
Donald Trump, in a seemingly bizarre (even by his standards) tweet this morning:
Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do,
there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year
in jail!
Jonathan Chait:
This is an unusual “issue” for the president-elect to highlight,
given the dire conditions he claims the country faces. The odd
protester has torched the odd flag every so often for decades. The
Supreme Court in 1989 held that burning the flag constitutes
political speech, and thus cannot be banned. Republicans have
occasionally used the issue as a cheap political stunt, since a
majority of the public viscerally opposes flag-burning. To that
standard tactic, Trump added the new Trumpian touch of proposing
to revoke citizenship for violators, which would make his
unconstitutional proposal even more unconstitutional, and also
more attention-getting. And he did not send this one in the middle
of the night, as he often does, but at 6:55 a.m., a moment
probably calculated to seize the morning news cycle.
But why would he choose to pick this strange fight? Here is a case
where the common complaint that he is distracting the public from
unflattering stories rings true. Proposing a flag-burning ban is a
classic right-wing nationalist distraction, and Trump has a number
of ugly stories from which to distract: his plan for massive,
unprecedented corruption, the extreme beliefs of his
appointees, a controversy over a recount that highlights his
clear defeat in the national vote.
Trump using this as a distraction aside, the 1989 Supreme Court decision that held flag-burning to be a legal form of First Amendment protest is an interesting one. It was a 5-4 decision, but the split among justice was not along party lines. The majority decision was written by William Brennan, perhaps the staunchest liberal ever to sit on the court, and joined by Harry Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall, conservative Anthony Kennedy, and arch-conservative Antonin Scalia. Dissents were written by conservative chief justice William Rehnquist and liberal John Paul Stevens. Different times.
(Scalia, notably, is Trump’s proclaimed model for the type of justice he plans to nominate to the court.)
An 8-minute history of the giant field of physics.
Physics can be defined simply as the study of matter and energy. But that simple definition covers an enormous range of topics.
There’s the classical physics you learned about in high school: It can explain how much force it takes to slide a box across the floor, how heat transfers from one object to another, or how light bends through a prism. Then there are more modern branches, such as particle physics, which seeks to understand the fundamental building blocks of the universe. And physicists are always on the lookout for new branches yet to be discovered (they need something to account for mysteries like dark energy).
All of these topics fall under the umbrella of “physics,” and it’s a lot to keep track of. So here’s some help. In the video below, physicist Dominic Walliman explains how all the subdisciplines of physics are related in one animated “map” of the science.
In the video, Walliman explains a critical truth about physics: As scientists solved mysteries like the laws of motion or electromagnetism, their discoveries opened the door to new mysteries to solve. The mysteries opened by classical physics led to theories on relativity and quantum mechanics. And so on.
As Walliman’s animation shows, there’s still a giant “chasm of ignorance” that scientists are seeking to fill. Even though scientists now know a lot about things like optics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and electromagnetism, their tested theories still can’t explain things like dark matter and dark energy. And there’s no complete theory that squares quantum physics with relativity.
What’s exciting about the “map” of physics, is that even though it is filled up with so many subdisciplines, there may be many, many more to discover.
Walliman has made other great “map” videos, charting the subdisciplines of biology, computer science, chemistry, and mathematics. They’re great, quick, primers that will remind you how much there is to know about the world. Check them out.
In the modern era of presidential politics, no candidate has ever
won the popular vote by more than Hillary Clinton did this year,
yet still managed to lose the electoral college. In that sense,
2016 was a historic split: Donald Trump won the presidency by as
much as 74 electoral votes (depending on how Michigan ends up)
while losing the nationwide vote to Clinton by 1.7 million votes
and counting. [Note: It’s now over 2.2 million votes
and counting.]
But there’s another divide exposed by the election, which
researchers at the Brookings Institution recently discovered as
they sifted the election returns. It has no bearing on the
election outcome, but it tells us something important about the
state of the country and its politics moving forward.
The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the
Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won
nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic
activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won
combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity
last year.
I will say it flatly: Trump voters are ignoramuses, bigots, and/or fools. But time is not on their side. This is their last gasp.
"The main takeaway from the survey is simply that economists, while their views do show a wider spread on various issues than the views of climate scientists, do widely agree that climate is a serious problem requiring immediate action. And some 80 percent of them think America could help induce others to take action by restricting its own emissions; 77 percent of them support the US acting unilaterally."
It's fairly well-established at this point that there's a robust scientific consensus about the threat of climate change. But analysts and journalists often say (or imply) that there's less of an economic consensus, that economists are leery of the actions recommended by scientists because of their cost.
Is it true? It turns out there have been very few systematic surveys of economists' opinions on the subject, and the few that have been done suffer from methodological shortcomings.
Last year, the New York–based Institute for Policy Integrity tried to remedy that situation with just such a large-scale survey of economists who have published work on climate change.
The conclusion? There is broad consensus on some questions, a wider spread on others, but in every case the median opinion of climate economists supports more vigorous action against climate change, sooner. Like scientists, economists agree that climate change is a serious threat and that immediate action is needed to address it.
A quick word on the survey
IPI tried to round up the names of every economist who has published a paper on climate change in a top economics journal, or a top journal of climate economics, since 1994. It found 1,103 economists (still working in the field and reachable) and sent them the survey; 365 responded, a fairly robust number for a survey like this.
I won't get bogged down in methodology, but there are some nerdily interesting questions here about the best way to get an accurate reading of a group's opinions. IPI went with a "wisdom of the crowd" approach, surveying a large collection of economists rather than asking a smaller group to deliberate and come to a consensus (which risks groupthink and "leveling down" of outlier positions).
There's always some risk, in a survey like this, of selection bias — economists who care the most may be more likely to respond. Then again, there are some economists (e.g., Richard Tol) who are invested in countering what they see as alarmism in the profession; they might be more motivated to respond, as well. The authors partly account for these unknowns with confidence intervals; you can read more on wonky methodological questions in the longer version of the paper.
Most economists believe climate change is a serious problem that calls for immediate action
Most economists believe unmitigated climate change will be a serious problem for the US:
In both cases, these numbers are considerably higher than in most surveys of public opinion; the public is much more prone to seeing climate as a distant threat.
Economists believe climate change will harm the economy and reduce growth rates
When asked when climate change will begin having negative effects on the global economy, here's what economists said:
The median answer here is 2025, which is considerably earlier than many prominent economic models estimate. For instance, Tol's FUND model — one of the three big models used in the field — estimates that impacts will not be net negative until 2080. (More on those models later.)
Economists also agree that climate change will eventually dent economic growth rates:
Economists think economic models are doing it wrong
The most interesting results of the survey, at least to climate nerds like yours truly, are about economic models and the values and assumptions that inform them. In short, most economists who work on climate believe that the climate-economic modeling community (a relatively small subset of economists) is systematically underestimating climate change — and thus giving policymakers bad advice.
A bit of background: Climate modeling is generally done using integrated assessment models (IAMs), the shortcomings of which I have written about before. IAMs produce climate-economic forecasts that are used to inform policymaking; the results they generate are largely based on the choice of input values entered on the front end.
For instance: One such value is the "social cost of carbon," an estimate of total economic damages represented by a single ton of carbon emissions. One question on the survey directly addressed this. It noted: "In 2013, a U.S. government Interagency Working Group adopted $37 (in 2007 USD) as its central estimate for the SCC." And it asked: Does that sound right? The results:
"If we exclude individuals who did not answer this question," says the report, "three-quarters of respondents believed that the actual SCC is equal or greater than $37, as compared to the 9% that believe that $37 is too high."
If the US government's estimate of SCC is too low, it has enormous consequences for policy — a higher SCC justifies a more ambitious response.
Another key parameter in IAMs is "discount rates," which specify how much future damages (or benefits) are discounted relative to present damages. If you're interested in learning more about discount rates — and who isn't? — I wrote a long explainer on them a few years ago, complete with cute pictures of otters. For now the important point is that a higher discount rate leads to lower present-day ambition, while a lower discount rate (which puts a higher value on future damages) justifies more ambition.
Currently, the method used by the US government to calculate the future costs and benefits of policies (including climate policies) is a fixed discount rate, pegged to market interest rates. Typically this means three policy scenarios are run, using discount rates of 2.5, 3, and 5 percent respectively.
So what do economists think of this practice, as applied to climate policy? Not much:
Only 8 percent of economists think the current discount-rate method is appropriate for climate policy. A large majority think either that the rate should decline over time, or that it should be determined using ethical rather than market criteria, or both. (Using ethical criteria generally means making it lower; some argue the "intergenerational" discount rate should be zero.)
Economists were also asked if the government were going to pick a constant discount rate, what should it be? The median answer was 2 percent — lower than the lowest figure the US government uses.
Again, the consequences for policy are clear: more ambition.
Implications for climate models and climate policy
The main takeaway from the survey is simply that economists, while their views do show a wider spread on various issues than the views of climate scientists, do widely agree that climate is a serious problem requiring immediate action. And some 80 percent of them think America could help induce others to take action by restricting its own emissions; 77 percent of them support the US acting unilaterally.
Like climate scientists, professional economists are more concerned about climate, and supportive of action, than the general public.
More intriguingly, the economic consensus seems to be stronger than the economic models policymakers look to for guidance. On the surface, this seems odd. Who is making those economic models, if not economists?
In fact, the economic modeling community is a relatively small subset of climate-focused economists, with its own tribal habits and customs. IAMs have long come in for criticism from other economists. One frequent critic is MIT economist Robert Pindyck. In a recent paper called "The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy," he notes that IAMs purport to produce objective, fact-based forecasts and projections, but in fact those forecasts and projections depend almost entirely on the values of the inputs, which are decided by the modeler. In short, IAMs simply reflect the opinions of the modeler (about discount rates, etc.).
In that paper, Pindyck proposes a new method. Rather than key values (discount rate, chances of catastrophic outcomes, SCC) being rectally extracted by the modeler, they should be based on a broad sample of expert opinion.
The survey conducted by IPI is a good first step in establishing exactly what expert opinion is on these matters. Not only will it clarify where the profession stands, but it could help inform better, more representative modeling, improving the quality of the advice economists offer policymakers.
Selfie sticks are SOOO last year. If you want to be on the cutting edge of selfie technology, you really need to get your hands on the ‘world’s first selfie bottle’—a camera invention by none other than Coca-Cola.
The (let’s call it odd?) gadget was created by advertising agency Gefen Team for Coca-Cola Israel’s Summer Love event. The so-called “world’s first selfie bottle” is more of a bottle butt with a camera, gyroscope, and USB port built-in. Every time you tilt the ‘camera’ beyond 70-degrees to take a drink, the bottle snaps a selfie that you can access via the USB port.
This might seem inane to the photo purist, but Gefen claims it helps party goers be “more present and active during the event,” because “they can share their special moments just by drinking.” Who are we to argue…
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find any coke bottle selfies on the Coca Cola Israel Instagram, but if you spot any, be sure to drop a link in the comments.
"To make iPhones, there will need to be a cluster of suppliers in the same place, which the U.S. does not have at the moment," the executive said. "Even if Trump imposes a 45% tariff, it is still possible that manufacturers will decide to continue production overseas as long as the costs together with the tariffs are lower than the amount they need to spend on building and running production lines in the U.S."
So let's say Trump imposes his tarrifs, and companies still find it cheaper to stay in China... all you're going to have is a pissed-off American populace that now has to pay more for their phones.
Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn has been studying the possibility of moving iPhone production to the United States, according to Japanese website Nikkei Asian Review, leading to hopeful speculation some iPhones could one day be "Made in America" rather than be assembled and imported from China.
The report claims Apple asked both Foxconn and rival supplier Pegatron, which denied the request, to look into making iPhones stateside, although Foxconn chairman Terry Gou is said to be less enthusiastic about the idea due to inevitably higher production costs in the United States compared to China.
"Apple asked both Foxconn and Pegatron, the two iPhone assemblers, in June to look into making iPhones in the U.S.," a source said. "Foxconn complied, while Pegatron declined to formulate such a plan due to cost concerns."
In a speech at Liberty University in Virginia earlier this year, President-elect Donald Trump said "we're going to get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries," while he has also threatened to introduce a 45% tax on products imported from China.
Apple CEO Tim Cook previously told 60 Minutes it manufactures iPhones in China because of "skill," not lower wages. Cook said China has put an "enormous force on manufacturing," adding that the U.S. workforce has a smaller number of individuals with the "vocational kind of skills" needed.
China put an enormous focus on manufacturing. In what we would call, you and I would call vocational kind of skills. The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we're currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.
Meanwhile, an industry executive told Nikkei the U.S. does not have the "cluster of suppliers" needed to manufacture iPhones. In Asia, Taiwan's TSMC makes A-series chips for iPhones, Japan's Sharp and Japan Display supply iPhone displays, and South Korea's SK Hynix and Japan's Toshiba produce memory chips for the device.
"To make iPhones, there will need to be a cluster of suppliers in the same place, which the U.S. does not have at the moment," the executive said. "Even if Trump imposes a 45% tariff, it is still possible that manufacturers will decide to continue production overseas as long as the costs together with the tariffs are lower than the amount they need to spend on building and running production lines in the U.S."
U.S. manufacturing would inevitably raise concerns about Apple's profit margins and, in turn, how much the iPhone costs for customers. iPhone 7 component costs are estimated to start at $220, compared to a base price of $649, although Cook has previously dismissed third-party cost estimates as being highly inaccurate.
TSMC and Sharp have acknowledged that while U.S. manufacturing would prove more expensive, the companies would certainly consider the move over losing a major customer such as Apple. But, for now, the idea likely remains a stretch even in light of new political pressures.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
This is pretty cool. I've got a buddy at work who is color blind - I hope this app can help him out.
Colorblindness isn’t usually a debilitating condition, but it’s probably more common than you think, affecting some eight percent of the population. In extreme cases, people might wear tinted glasses to shift the colors they see nearer to real life, but most don’t bother. Now, though, a new app from Microsoft will make it easier for anyone with colorblindness to see the world a little clearer.
The app is named Color Binoculars and uses your phone’s camera as a lens through. "It’s an app that helps colorblind people distinguish color combinations that they would normally have trouble telling apart," says creator Tom Overton in a Microsoft blog. "For example, since I have difficulty distinguishing between red and green, our app makes reds...
I caused one of these reply-all hells at work a few years ago. Luckily it was only sent out to half of the company. but still, it was rough for a few hours. haha
An anonymous reader shares a Business Insider report:The NHS's 1.2 million employees are currently trapped in a "reply-all" email hell. A "test" email was accidentally sent to everyone who works at the UK health service - prompting a series of reply-all responses from annoyed recipients going out to all 1-million-plus employees of the organisations. An NHS employee told Business Insider that there have been at least 120 replies so far -- meaning that more than 140 million needless emails have been sent across the NHS's network today. As a result, they said, its email systems are running "very slow today." The NHS Pensions department is currently warning people on Twitter that "if contacting us by email please be aware that there may be delays in responding due to an issue currently affecting all NHS mail."
The Square Off is a chess board with magnets and motors that can move pieces around by remote command. It’s a new Kickstarter project that’s designed to allow people to play chess on a physical board remotely with each other via a smartphone or against a computer. It can also allow chess fans to watch live or replay famous chess matches on a physical board in front of them.
But let’s be honest here: this was clearly designed to be wizard chess from Harry Potter. But I’m not sold.
Warner Bros.
Why? Because Square Off carried the concept 90 percent of the way there and then dropped the ball. Unlike in actual wizard chess, with the Square Off, once you’ve successfully taken an opponent’s piece, the magnets just...
Earlier this year, we ran a story about how even possessions as personal as one's car or tractor, or insulin pump could not be legally hacked by the owner, but those constraints are things of the past now. From a report on Wired: Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA's ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue themt (Editor's note: the website may block users who use adblocking tools. Here's an alternate source). One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress's Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair. "This is a tremendously important improvement for consumer protection," says Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. "The Copyright Office has demonstrated that it understands our changed technological reality, that in every aspect of consumers' lives, we rely on code," says Matwyshyn, who argued for the exemptions last year. For now, the exemptions are limited to a two-year trial period. And the security research exemption in particular only applies to what the Copyright Office calls "good-faith" testing, "in a controlled environment designed to avoid any harm to individuals or to the public." As Matwyshyn puts it, "We're not talking about testing your neighbor's pacemaker while it's implanted. We're talking about a controlled lab and a device owned by the researcher."
It just seems if you're worried something you email could "come back to haunt you", it just means you need to not say those things...
The world may be increasingly becoming digital, but a small group of the Wall Street elite refuses to say anything substantive in an email, text, or chat, and some will not communicate digitally at all. From a Reuters report: This group, which includes top bankers like JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and powerful investors like Carl Icahn and Berkshire Hathaway Inc's Warren Buffett, were eschewing electronic communications long before the probe of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails and the recent hacks of her campaign manager's account made headlines. Some on Wall Street are nostalgic for a time when in-person conversations or phone calls were the norm, but others believe the words they type and send can come back to haunt them. Prosecutors have built insider trading, mortgage fraud and rate-rigging cases on embarrassing emails over the past several years, and they are often the most memorable part. Recent email woes among Washington power players have provided yet another reason for bankers to try to protect private correspondence from prying eyes. Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you."
It's this kind of stuff that Trump and his supporters don't get (economically, speaking). America won't get manufacturing jobs back due to increased automation and globalization, and that's a fact that everyone will have to come to grips with (cue discussion on UBI).
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes ComputerWorld:
In the next decade, the mining industry may lose more than half of its jobs to automation, according to a new report... This industry is adopting self-driving trucks, automated loaders and automated drilling and tunnel-boring systems. It is also testing fully autonomous long-distance trains, which carry materials from the mine to a port...
A broader question is whether mining is a bellwether for other industries. There's no clear answer, but what Aaron Cosbey, a development economist and a report author, can say is this: "Where you can find robotic replacements for human labor you tend to do it." Cosbey estimates that automation will replace 40% to 80% of the workers at a mine...
Driverless technology can increase output up to 20%, while decreasing fuel consumption up to 15%, according to the article. "This will increase demand for people with IT skills who can set up and operate the automation systems -- but at far smaller numbers than the people automation displaces."
After a bunch of fires — something you want to avoid in a smartphone — the Galaxy Note 7 is gone. Everyone can agree that your phone catching fire is a bad thing, but at the moment it’s a bit abstract. All we’ve seen are pictures of phones after they caught fire, so it was a bit tricky to imagine just what was going on to these phones.
No longer. The Associated Press has video of Dee Decasa’s phone catching fire in her Honolulu home Sunday morning — this is the sixth reported replacement Note 7 to catch fire in the US, if you’re keeping track. In the video, you can see a clearly alarmed Decasa carry a smoking phone into the kitchen and place it down, before apparently fainting.
It’s easy to imagine how terrifying it would be to have a...
Remember that historically massive denial-of-service attack last month against security researcher Brian Krebs? The source code's just been leaked, Krebs reports, "virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes KrebsOnSecurity:
The malware, dubbed "Mirai," spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords. Infected systems can be cleaned up by simply rebooting them -- thus wiping the malicious code from memory. But experts say there is so much constant scanning going on for vulnerable systems that vulnerable IoT devices can be re-infected within minutes of a reboot. Only changing the default password protects them from rapidly being reinfected on reboot...
The user who leaked the source code says "there's lots of eyes looking at IOT now... I usually pull max 380K bots from telnet alone. However, after the Krebs DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300K bots, and dropping"...
Now that the source code has been released online for that 620-Gbps attack, Krebs predicts "there will soon be many Internet users complaining to their ISPs about slow Internet speeds as a result of hacked IoT devices on their network hogging all the bandwidth. On the bright side, if that happens it may help to lessen the number of vulnerable systems."
He points out that 5.5 million new things get connected to the internet each day, according to Gartner. And they're also predicting that 6.4 billion things will be connected to the internet by the end of the year -- reaching 20.8 billion over the next four years.
I know I already have all these ROMs, but man, I think I really want one of these things.
Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition is a fairly straightforward device: it’s a tiny version of the classic console, with 30 games built in so you can play them easily on a modern television. It doesn’t have much in the way of frills, but today Nintendo is revealing a few new features for the device.
Most notably, it will offer three different display options. One, which Nintendo calls "pixel perfect" mode, cleans up the visuals so that they look crisp on your high-definition TV, while displaying them in a square format. Nintendo says that many of these 8-bit games look better in this mode than they do through the Virtual Console on the Wii and Wii U. Another mode sharpens up the visuals slightly, while maintaining the 4:3 aspect ratio of the...
AT&T is getting rid of Internet Preferences, the controversial program that analyzes home Internet customers' Web browsing habits in order to serve up targeted ads.
“To simplify our offering for our customers, we plan to end the optional Internet Preferences advertising program related to our fastest Internet speed tiers," an AT&T spokesperson confirmed to Ars today. "As a result, all customers on these tiers will receive the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area. We’ll begin communicating this update to customers early next week.”
Data collection and targeted ads will be shut off, AT&T also confirmed.
Last week, security news site KrebsOnSecurity went dark for more than 24 hours following what was believed to be a record 620 gigabit-per-second denial of service attack brought on by an ensemble of routers, security cameras, or other so-called Internet of Things devices. Now, there's word of a similar attack on a French Web host that peaked at a staggering 1.1 terabits per second, more than 60 percent bigger.
The attacks were first reported on September 19 by Octave Klaba, the founder and CTO of OVH. The first one reached 1.1 Tbps while a follow-on was 901 Gbps. Then, last Friday, he reported more attacks that were in the same almost incomprehensible range. He said the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were delivered through a collection of hacked Internet-connected cameras and digital video recorders. With each one having the ability to bombard targets with 1 Mbps to 30 Mbps, he estimated the botnet had a capacity of 1.5 Tbps.
Google's newest attempt at creating a decent instant messaging platform, Google Allo, is finally available. Google announced the new IM service at Google I/O 2016, and a whopping four months later, we finally get to try it out.
We're still not quite sure what the future of Allo holds. Will it eventually become Android's default instant messaging platform? Will we get a Chrome and Chrome OS client? After a lackluster effort with Google Hangouts (which Google says will stick around), how much does Google really care about this new platform? For now all we can do is talk about the present, and right now Google has given us an instant messaging client that doesn't seem like it was built for the modern age.
Setup is very odd in that Allo doesn't use your Google account. Sign-up and identification are done entirely through your cell carrier's phone number, just like Whatsapp and Wechat. After typing in your random string of 10 digits and getting a verification text, Allo pretends you are a complete stranger and asks for your name and profile picture. Google asking for my name is definitely off-putting, especially when—thanks to my prodigious usage of Google services—the company probably knows damn near everything about me. Allo acts more like a third-party service and pretends the Google connection doesn't exist.
As cool as this sounds, I'm not sure I want to put all of my media up in Amazon's cloud - I might have misplaced some of my receipts...
Plex is giving the world another reason to subscribe to Plex Pass subscriptions today with the launch of Plex Cloud. As the name suggests, Plex Cloud eliminates the need to run the Plex Media Server on a computer or Networked Attached Storage (NAS) in your house. It does, however, require a subscription to Amazon Drive ($59.99 per year for unlimited storage) and the aforementioned Plex Pass ($4.99 per month or $39.99 per year).
Plex Cloud functions just like a regular Plex Media Server giving you access to your media — no matter how you acquire it — from an incredibly broad range of devices. Most, but not all Plex features are available in today's beta. Some of the missing capabilities include Camera Upload and Offline Sync, though...
My 19-month-old son, Stanley, has learned how to use a camera and to shout out cheese as he presses the shutter. He has a few of my old crappy point-and-shoot film cameras in his toy box to play with, but today I gave him my old Canon G12.
To be honest, the camera is a pile of s**t and it doesn’t get used at all. It was probably a tip-top camera back in the day, but by today’s standards it’s not the best.
He wandered round the house and garden snapping away saying ‘cheese’ at everything. He even managed to switch the settings to ‘sepia’ at one point. I’m guessing he was feeling a bit pretentious and wanted to change the style of his shots. He looks through the viewfinder as well rather than use the LCD screen on the back.
After he had finished and started to press all the buttons to see what they did, I whacked the memory card in the MacBook and had a look at the pics. He did pretty well!
What do you think? Is he any good? Is the dude a photographer in the making, or should he hang the camera up now and get back to watching Paw Patrol and coloring in?
As he walked around, I grabbed a few photos of him at work on my iPhone as well. Here they are.
I hope you enjoyed these photos and seeing life through the eyes of a 19-month-old!
About the author: Timothy Jones is a photographer based in Bristol, England, who current serves as a British Army Photographer covering West Midlands and Wales. He provides local and national publications with photos and videos for the British Army. He also works as a professional event photographer. You can find more of his work on his website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This article was also published here.
It’s not always guaranteed, but here’s a great way to make sure your next wedding shoot goes viral: replace flower bouquets with adoptable puppies. That’s how photographer Caroline Logan‘s recent wedding shoot wound up skyrocketing to Internet fame.
You see, the bride in this case, Mrs. Sarah Mallouk Crain, actually works for a dog rescue non-profit called Pitties Love Peace. So naturally, when it came to planning her bridal party photos, she asked Caroline if they could trade in the bouquets for puppies from her rescue.
“When Sarah first came to me with this idea I was thrilled,” Caroline told PetaPixel over email. “Because she is so involved with rescue pup work and has a huge passion for animal rescue in general, she was excited to include this huge piece of her heart in her wedding day and encourage others to #adoptnotshop. I immediately loved the idea and couldn’t wait for their wedding day!”
Enter the puppies: one nine-week-old pit bull found on the streets of Brooklyn and lovingly referred to as Biggie Smalls, and five boxer-coonhound sisters named after the first first ladies of the United States: Martha, Abigail, Dolley, Elizabeth, and Louisa.
Fortunately, it turned out photographing the bridesmaids, groomsmen, bride, and groom with the pups was a … well … a walk in the park. The puppies actually helped make for more candid shots.
“While photographing six rambunctious puppies definitely brought an added challenge, it also caused the bridal party to be more at ease,” Caroline explained to us. “Having something to divert attention from that uncomfortable ‘Oh my goodness, I’m getting my picture taken… what do I do with my hands?!’ feeling to pure puppy bliss made for relaxed photos where the bridal party was able to focus on interacting with the fun-loving puppies as I documented it all unfold.”
Pure puppy bliss… we couldn’t describe it better if we tried:
The best part, Caroline tells us, is that all of the puppies in the photos are adoptable, and Pitties Love Peace has seen a slew of requests since the photos went viral. Speaking of which, we asked Caroline what it was like to have her photos blow up like this. The short answer: surreal.
“This has been an unbelievably exciting few days, when I photographed my first wedding at age fourteen I NEVER imagined that my photos would someday go viral!” she said over email. “Having my photos go viral has been surreal, and it’s so rewarding to see people connecting with them as much as they are! I am so grateful.”
And we are also grateful. Our day was made at least 2,567% cuter thanks to this photo series.
To see more of Caroline’s work—puppies not necessarily included—be sure to give her a visit at her website or check her out on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
bwahahahah. It probably serves these people right and I hope they learn their lesson.
TechRax -- a popular YouTuber who destroys technology for fame and riches -- has uploaded a video where he drills a hole into an iPhone 7, claiming it to be a "secret hack" to reinstall a headphone jack in the device. The only problem is that he didn't tell people it was a joke, and of course, some people fell for it. Crave Online reports: The YouTube video has amassed over 7.5 million views since being posted online last week, with it attracting 81,000 dislikes in the process. The comments section is currently torn between people who are in on the joke, people who criticize TechRax for damaging his iPhone 7, and most unfortunately, people who have tried the "hack" out for themselves. Although this is YouTube so you can never be quite sure of whether or not these folks are trolling, parsing the comments section reveals some pretty convincing complaints lobbed in TechRax's direction. It's also firmly believable that there are people dumb enough to attempt drilling a hole into their iPhone 7, which is unfortunate but that's the way the world is in 2016. You can read the comments under the YouTube video for more "convincing complaints." But as if the report didn't make it clear enough already, the video is a joke. Apple removed the headphone jack and there's no way to get it back, unless you use an adapter.
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