Pipedot

A few interesting features of the site where silently introduced over the past year (like notifications), while others have long since been shrouded in mystery (like the stream). We also haven't had a meta update for while, so lets dig into some of the new changes:

Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi have joined the growing list of manufacturers whose diesel cars are known to emit significantly more pollution on the road than in regulatory tests. “The issue is a systemic one” across the industry, said Nick Molden, whose company Emissions Analytics tested the cars. Diesel cars from Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and Jeep all pumped out significantly more NOx in more realistic driving conditions. NOx pollution is at illegal levels in many parts of the UK and is believed to have caused many thousands of premature deaths and billions of pounds in health costs.

Today, October 13, marks the start of data retention for user internet and phone data in Australia. Many telecommunication providers are not confident that they can record the data as required by the laws passed in March 2015 and only half have lodged their implementation plan with the government. With the public still in the dark about how much this will cost, how effective it will be, how long it will last there are questions abound about the legitimacy of data retention. Thankfully, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has already weighed in on how Australians should avoid having the government capture their data: Use a VPN.

Via Soylent

Two mysterious red hazes hovered over Earth on August 10. Astronauts onboard the International Space Station snapped a picture of the first one as it passed over the Midwest--either Illinois or Missouri. And yesterday NASA's Earth Observatory announced that a second one was spotted just minutes later over Mexico.These jellyfish-shaped streaks in the sky that reach into space are called red sprites, and they're considered to be rare phenomena—or at least elusive to human eyes.

EMC has reported declining profits in July, and its core storage division has seen revenue growth grind to a halt; it grew just 2 percent between 2013 and 2014, compared to 16 percent between 2010 and 2011. Activist hedge fund Elliott Management Corp., which has a 2 percent stake in EMC, has also pressured the company to sell its 80 percent stake in VMware.

Cargo containers streamlined and revolutionized freight. Their uniform, boxy shape and sharp edges make them instantly stackable, but not terribly aerodynamic. For transport by air, that usually means fitting square pegs into round planes. A new plane design by Boeing, granted a patent this week, could change that. Instead of slotting cargo containers into a round tube, the Boeing plane would line them up longwise in a neat row, then lower its aerodynamic body on top.

Lighter than air vehicles are, for the most part, relics of a distant past. Despite the past century of flight mostly belonging to airplanes and helicopters, there’s been a slight resurgence of dirigibles this century. Not least among them is the Dragon Dream, by the Aeroscraft Corporation. This is only half the size of their planned airship...

Advanced Micro Devices is handing out pink slips to 5% of the company’s global workforce, as part of a restructuring plan to help improve poor fiscal results after declining sales and six consecutive quarterly losses. AMD has 9,469 employees as of June 2015 and will cut approximately 470 positions. The restructuring plan will target “all sites, all levels, all functions,” an AMD spokesman said, adding that engineers will represent a smaller portion of layoffs. Cuts will mostly come from sales, marketing, and operations segments.

On government requests for customer text messages:

France's data privacy regulator rejected Google's appeal of an order to remove search results worldwide upon request, saying Monday that companies that operate in Europe need to abide by the prevailing laws. If a French citizen files a request under the "right to be forgotten," CNIL said Google must comply with the order worldwide -- not just on European extensions of its search engine, such as .fr, .es, or .de for example -- or face possible sanctions. The agency denied that it was trying to apply French law on the "right to be forgotten" globally, as Google had accused the watchdog of doing.

Google will soon let advertisers tap into one of the most lucrative types of ad targeting: email addresses. The search giant is rolling out a new tool called Customer Match, which lets advertisers use a list of email addresses to target specific users across Google services. To be targeted through this technique, you only need to be logged into your Google account and have given your email address to a retailer, perhaps by buying something from their website or giving it out to sign up for a loyalty program. Google will also be compiling lists with general customer habits like YouTube viewing and Google search histories to target ads with.

Researchers have discovered that when hands are poorly washed airborne germ counts are 27 times higher around air dryers in comparison with the air around paper towel dispensers. This shows that both jet and warm air hand dryers spread bacteria into the air and onto users and those nearby. "These findings are important for understanding the ways in which bacteria spread, with the potential to transmit illness and disease," said Professor Mark Wilcox, who led the study.

In July, the BBC announced proposals to “invest” in BBC World Service. This includes a desire for a "bigger digital presence" in Russian through a new digital service. But BBC satellite TV for Russia is problematic. Very few Russians have rotatable satellite dishes. About 25% of Russian homes have fixed Ku-band satellite dishes to receive direct-to-home services such as TricolorTV and NTV+. Western news channels are not included and are legally not welcome.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has awarded its Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Taurinus X200 laptop sold by Libiquity. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The Taurinus X200 comes with Libreboot firmware and the FSF-endorsed Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system. Importantly, Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware with its applications like AMT (remote out-of-band management/backdoor system, part of "vPro") and PAVP (audio/video DRM) have been removed from this laptop. The laptop ships within the USA and may be purchased from the Libiquity Store.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation on Tuesday launched the much-awaited display for its tiny, credit card sized computer. Pi display joins the family of accessories made by the foundation. The foundation has been working on the display for almost a year now. It’s an RGB 800×480 display @60fps with 24-bit color and 10 point capacitive touch capabilities. The display has mounting holes at the back so you can easily mount the Pi to it and use the whole thing as one unit. The good news is that it’s using DSI (Display Serial Interface) for connectivity which leaves the only HDMI port on the Pi free for other use – such as connecting to a bigger monitor.

The Kepler mission has found the first near-Earth-size planet - called Kepler-452b - in the "habitable zone" around a G2 star much like our own sun. Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. Its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer as the planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star. That star, Kepler-452, is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger. The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

In the next week, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) will have exhausted their supply of IPv4 addresses. The metaphorical IPv4 cupboards are bare. The Internet will continue to operate, but all organizations must now accelerate their efforts to deploy IPv6. At this point, the rules for how IPv4 address resources are allocated will change. Request might not get fulfilled and applicants might be offered a smaller block or the choice to be added to a waiting list for IPv4 addresses that become available.

In a latest study, the researchers at the University of Queensland have discovered an evidence that “giant killer lizards” used to walk on the Australian land nearly 50,000 years ago. The team has concluded that some of the earliest aborigines may have faced the large predator on their homeland. According to Dr. Gilbert Price, a vertebrate palaeoecologist, the research team was initially shocked to realize the fact that the appearance of the Australia's first human inhabitant overlapped with the existence of the giant apex predator lizards around the same time. The findings of the team were based on the discovery of the lizard fossils.

For a long time the copyright held over the song "Happy Birthday to you" has been held up by those opposed to copyright in its current form as a clear example of copyright abuse. The song is based on a tune written before 1893 by Mildred Hill and Patty Hill titles "Good Morning to All". Today the copyright for this song is claimed to be held by Warner/Chappell Music. Two years ago Warner/Chappell Music attempted to collect royalties from a company working on a documentary film. In a judgement handed down by U.S. District Judge George H. King the original copyright only covered the musical arrangement not the lyrics and the Happy Birthday song is now in the public domain.

Russian antitrust authorities ruled on Monday that Google had abused its dominant market position with Android, its mobile operating system, by favoring the company’s own services over those of rivals, including Yandex, a Russian competitor. Unlike in other parts of the world, where Google has outmuscled domestic search rivals, Yandex still holds more than a 50 percent market share in Russian online search

A major test case is underway in Ohio, where a utility company is trying to undo deregulation in an attempt to keep expensive and aging coal and nuclear plants on-line. FirstEnergy pushed hard for deregulation back in 2008 and got a $6 billion payout from consumers to cover its stranded assets. Now, the company says it wants to be guaranteed revenues from expensive coal and nuclear power generation. Critics of the plan say this amounts to a public subsidy for FirstEnergy. In fact, Barrett says, “calculations have been done that say over a 15-year [period], consumers of electricity might end up subsidizing FirstEnergy to the tune of some $3 billion." In essence, FirstEnergy now believes the deregulation it once fought for should be scrapped.

On September 15, 1995, Hackers was released in the theaters to a relative thud, recovering less than half its production budget at the box office. But the tale of a group of high school hackers—with cool-sounding hacker handles like “Zero Cool” and “Acid Burn”—stumbling upon a grand corporate conspiracy found a second life on home video, becoming a cult classic two decades later.

The Federal Communications Commission recently announced which telecom companies will receive federal subsidies through the Connect America Fund to bring 10Mbps Internet service to parts of rural America. Surprisingly, Verizon Communications refused the funds entirely, in comparison to chief competitor AT&T, which will receive $427 million in funding even though it argued last year that rural customers don't need Internet service better than the old standard of 4Mbps downstream. Verizon Communications turned down a reported $568 million (over six years) in federal funds to bring broadband to 270,000 locations in Washington, DC, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia.”

A federal appeals court in San Francisco today affirmed that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a DMCA takedown notice. The ruling came in Lenz v. Universal, often called the “dancing baby” lawsuit. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents Stephanie Lenz, who—back in 2007—posted a 29-second video to YouTube of her children dancing in her kitchen. The Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy” was playing on a stereo in the background of the short clip. Universal Music Group sent YouTube a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming that the family video infringed the copyright in Prince’s song. EFF sued Universal on Lenz’s behalf, arguing that Universal abused the DMCA by improperly targeting a lawful fair use.

Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, any company wanting to make robocalls to consumers must obtain “prior express written consent.” Additionally, the consumer must not be required to agree to accept these calls “as a condition of purchasing any property, goods, or services.” But the FCC says First National Bank and Lyft violated these rules by telling people that if they wanted to be customers of these businesses, they had to accept robocalls or spam texts.

SpaceX plans to keep its Falcon 9 rocket grounded longer than planned following a launch accident in June that destroyed a space station cargo ship. "We’re taking more time than we originally envisioned, but I don’t think any one of our customers wants us to race to the cliff and fail again,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said. The cause of the June accident is "an easy problem to go fix," Shotwell said, adding the company would take extra time to "make sure we’re not seeing something like that anywhere throughout the vehicle or the supply chain.”

The debate over LTE-Unlicensed is heating up after the Wi-Fi Alliance asked the Federal Communications Commission to postpone equipment testing that uses unlicensed spectrum until the Wi-Fi industry group can run its own tests to make sure that the technology does not interfere with traditional Wi-Fi. Recently, U.S. carriers Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US teamed up with major equipment manufacturers Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Qualcomm to write its own letter urging the FCC to oppose the Wi-Fi Alliance’s proposal, which could halt Verizon Wireless’ plans to begin deploying LTE-U in the 5 GHz band beginning in 2016, as well as T-Mobile US’ goal of using the technology in its smartphones by the end of this year.

Most people think the quest to electrify rural parts of the US was something that happened in the 1950s, but remote Alaskan villages still depend on flying-in barrels of diesel, priced as high as $10 per gallon, to power generators, with electricity prices of more than 40 cents per kilowatt hour — and that’s after state subsidizes to equalize energy costs. “The last thing people who live in a place known for cold, dark and distance need is higher energy prices.”

Now that Amazon Prime is allowing offline video playback on iOS and Android devices, Netflix needs a better explanation for why it won’t do the same. Previously, Netflix has argued that fast, ubiquitous Wi-Fi access would eventually make offline playback irrelevant. But in 2015, on-the-go users still struggle with getting connected, whether it’s on a plane with Wi-Fi that’s too slow, or in a car where a few hours of streaming on mobile broadband can burn through your data cap.

Since 2009, Google self-driving cars have been in 16 crashes, mostly fender-benders. Google claims a human was at fault in every single case. While quick to blame human drivers and even to label them as “idiotic” Google admits the need for “smoothing out” the relationship between the car’s software and humans. Google cars regularly take quick, evasive maneuvers or exercise caution in ways that are both cautious, but also out of step with the other vehicles on the road, clashing with actual human behavior.

A few years ago, Google tested a new kind of "native" ad in Gmail that sat at the top of the inbox and mostly looked like a regular email. They appear both in the mobile versions of Gmail and on the web. Now, Google is opening up these ads to all advertisers, to purchase directly from AdWords. Advertisers will be able to use the standard AdWords targeting options and work from several templates to build their own native Gmail ads that can feature single images, videos, forms, phone numbers and call-to-action buttons.

Erle Robotics has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for what it claims is the "first smart robotic spider powered by Snappy Ubuntu Core". Developers can create apps using the open source Robot Operating System (ROS), and distribute/sell them through Erle Robotics' apps store. The six-legged "spider" weighs just over 2 kilograms (4.4lbs) and has 45 minutes of autonomy. Powering the system is a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU with 1 GB of RAM; the Erle-Spider comes with a gravity sensor, gyroscope, digital compass, pressure sensor, and temperature sensor. "This robot provides connectivity through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G networks, etc. then the people can control it through their mobile phones, joysticks, laptops, tablets, etc. and this can even act as a hot spot for Wi-Fi".

The gurus behind the popular and respected Linux kernel hardening effort Grsecurity will stop providing their stable patches to the public. In future, only paying sponsors will get access to stable patches to shore up their kernels' defenses. The test series, unfit for production use, will however continue to be available, to avoid impacting the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities. The project’s full source code will still be released to the public at large, but non-sponsors will have to pick through every update to find out what’s applicable to them.

Mozilla is relaunching its new Thimble online code editor, an upgraded tool for teaching and learning web literacy in a simple, hands-on and visual fashion. Thimble is an online code editor that makes it easy to create and publish your own web pages while learning HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Thimble lets users to write and edit HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the left side of their screen, and watch their code come to life on the right. Learners can start with simple remixes, changing words and images on a page to familiarize themselves with code and build confidence. Learners can also work their way toward creating entire web pages from scratch. Thimble is free and open source.

Linus has been busy toiling away on the next version of the Linux kernel, and now version 4.2 has finally been released. It brings some goodies worth having. The ChaCha20 stream cipher and the Poly1305 authenticator (see RFC 7539) are supported, and there's a new RSA implementation. The default crypto random number generator API is now DRBG. LinuxPlanet notes that there's support for security module stacking. Linux 4.2 uses CPU execution jitter to help seed its improved random number generator, a feature called “jitter entropy RNG” on the basis that sushi should be called “cold dead fish”.

Traveling around space can be hard and require a lot of fuel, which is part of the reason NASA has a spacecraft concept that would hitch a free ride on one of the many comets and asteroids speeding around our solar system at 22,000 miles per hour (on the slow end). Comet Hitchhiker, developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would feature a reusable tether system to replace the need for propellant for entering orbit and landing on objects.

In an open letter to T-Mobile customers with an unusually furious tone, CEO John Legere announced an immediate crackdown on 3,000 users engaging in unauthorized tethering on "unlimited 4G LTE" data plans, calling the practice "stealing data". He claims the affected users are "hacking" and "using workarounds to conceal their tethering usage" to circumvent the 7 GB cap on tethered ("Mobile HotSpot") data, allowing them to use as much as 2 terabytes of data in a month, and this behavior "could eventually have a negative effect" on other T-Mobile customers. "Customers who continue to do this will be warned, then lose access to our Unlimited 4G LTE smartphone data plan, and be moved to an entry-level limited 4G LTE data plan."

This morning, Wikipedia parent organization Wikimedia announced they have banned 381 user accounts that were engaging in “undisclosed paid advocacy.” In other words, they were posting promotional articles to the user-editable online encyclopedia, without revealing that they were paid to do so. The articles being posted were related to businesses, business people or artists, and they often included biased or skewed information alongside unattributed material and potential copyright violations. As a result of the investigation, editors on the site have also deleted 210 articles that were created by these accounts.

The New Horizons spacecraft – currently 3 billion miles [4.9 billion kilometers] from Earth – is just starting to transmit the bulk of the images and other data, stored on its digital recorders, from its historic July encounter with the Pluto system. Now, NASA scientists have revealed plans to send the spacecraft on another survey mission to a distant and small Kuiper Belt object (KBO), dubbed 2014 MU69, around one billion miles away from Pluto.

Apple now works with PayAnywhere, a mobile credit card reader, accept Apple Pay payments for businesses and individuals.

FreeBSD hackers Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy surprised an audience of Bay Area FreeBSD Users in August 2015 by laying out their version for a new architecture, based vaguely on BSD but with a microkernel and an event-driven framework consisting of something like libdispatch and launchd. Those are big changes if you are familiar with what FreeBSD has looked like for all of its life.

The article comes out of the Australian press, but unless there's something truly unique about the Australian job market, it's almost certainly true elsewhere as well: a recent study shows more than half of young Australians are receiving college education to persue careers that will soon no longer exist. Thank robotics, industry consolidation, and the nature of the markets for the shrinking number of ways you will some day be able to earn a living.

Windows 10 might be a welcome respite from recent, unloved versions of Microsoft's flagship operating system, but it's now well-known that Win10 captures an unusually large amount of user data and sends it back to Microsoft. That might have passed muster 20 years ago (happy birthday, Windows 95!) but customers these days are increasingly aware and concerned over their personal data and what becomes of it.

Work in just about any big office and you have almost certainly been subjected to a semi-built corporate Sharepoint site your boss or the HR department hopes you will use rather than circulating important documents via email. And if you are like most tech-savvy folks, you have found it bafflingly difficult to use.

Japan is home to an extremely important vessel: it's the ship that lays the trans-oceanic cables that form the backbone of telecommunication, that is, the Internet. Satellites play an increasingly important role in shipping packets, but the bulk of the connections pass through underwater cables.

If you are frustrated with your smartphone's soft keyboard, you aren't alone. Despite their advocates, many gadget-users feel more productive on a physical keyboard, and that means there's a market for innovative or high quality ones.

It's hard not to look at one of Samsung's flagship phablets without feeling a pang of nostalgia for Palm's products back in the day, stylus and graffiti handwriting recognition and all. Samsung bucked the trend as Steve Jobs defiantly maintained, "if your device has a stylus, you have failed." Instead, Samsung's Note line of devices use an integrated, touch-sensitive stylus to permit new applications and unlock new ways of interacting with software.

With the rise of mobile computing came a swell of frustration by people who preferred their fancy, personal devices to the locked-down devices (if any) provided for them at work. Eventually, corporations relented, opening the door to a plethora of "bring your own device" policies that IT staff detest owing to increased security risk and the unacceptable co-mingling of personal and private data.