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Based on anonymized data collected from users of an app designed to check for a newly revealed vulnerability in many Android devices, Check Point has discovered that at least one application currently in the Google Play store is exploiting the vulnerability to gain root access to the Android OS — and bypassing Google’s security scans of Play applications to do so.

Scientists' understanding of the El Nino phenomenon - in which a reversal of warm and cool currents in the Pacific Ocean brings wet weather to America's West Coast and elsewhere while areas used to monsoon rainfall remain dry - is better than ever. But that hasn't helped our ability to accurately predict El Nino years, and of course even prediction does nothing for mitigating the sometimes disastrous effects.

Adobe's Flash has earned a reputation for insecurity through a litany of vulnerabilities through the years since its inception in the late 1990s. But it hasn't made many friends among users, either, who are increasingly either turned off by bandwidth-sucking video advertisements, or are nervous that running Flash adverts leaves your machine open to all sorts of vulnerabilities.

Smartwatches are here, but are they here to stay? Given short battery life and - for the moment, limited use cases - Google, Apple, and the others are in a race to build or have built apps that make your smartwatch a must-have item.

A recent discovery by UCLA researchers might make a big difference to people who suffer strokes. In the treatment of stroke patients, time really is brain: A few minutes can mean the difference between patients living independently or suffering debilitating disabilities.

Mozilla has been rethinking its add-on architecture for browser extensions, and has just made an announcement that may have profound implications for developers and browser users everywhere:

Tor has its advocates, and it's certainly our best chance at ensuring a modicum of privacy online. But it's got vulnerabilities of its own.

Our Monday poll is essentially a blatant pitch by zafiro17 for site feedback. I personally bounce among several sites for my tech news but always find myself back at Pipedot, and that got me thinking about what I like about the site that keeps me coming back for more. In this Borda poll you'll find choices related to the subject matter and the community, but also a small subset of some of the technical innovations that make Pipedot unique. Rank your choices from 1 (the strongest reason I like the site) and continue downward, assigning 2 to your second strongest preference, and so on.

In the wake of a stolen Xbox being tracked down via wireless controllers, Microsoft has updated the Windows 10 terms and conditions such that they “may automatically check your version of the software and download software update or configuration changes, including those that prevent you from accessing the Services, playing counterfeit games, or using unauthorised hardware peripheral devices.”

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to require that phone companies warn residential customers three months before they abandon a landline/copper network. The rules would prohibit companies from retiring a copper network through neglect. Phone and cable companies would also have to warn customers with newer technologies that the phone will go out with the power, so people can get replacement alarms and backup batteries if necessary.

An Australian court has ruled that people accused of illegally downloading the film Dallas Buyers Club cannot be requested to pay more than the cost of a legitimate copy of the film. As a precaution, Justice Nye Perram will also require the company to pay a AU$600,000 bond before requiring the targeted ISP to release identifying details of the alleged infringing parties, as the company has no presence in Australia.

Famed phone leaker @evleaks is at it again, this time with a few more shots of BlackBerry's forthcoming Venice handset. Venice is a slider phone that sports a large touchscreen display and runs Android instead of Blackberry's proprietary BB10 operating system. It slides up to reveal a physical QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode, giving owners of the device the best of both worlds, or so BlackBerry hopes. The Canadian outfit has been struggling for the past several years, and is hoping Venice will change that. The company built a reputation that was based in part on excellent hardware keyboards, and though the mobile market has moved to touchscreens, there are still many users who prefer the feel of a physical plank. Venice will give users a choice between the two input methods. Venice has been "confirmed" to launch in November on all four national U.S. wireless carriers -- Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint.

Energy efficiency investments are widely popular because they are believed to deliver a double win: saving consumers money by reducing the amount of energy they use, while cutting climate-forcing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants harmful to human health. But a new study by a team of economists finds residential energy efficiency investments may not deliver on all that they promise. Through a randomized controlled trial of more than 30,000 households in Michigan – where one-quarter of the households were encouraged to make residential energy efficiency investments and received assistance – the economists find that the costs to deploy the efficiency upgrades were about double the energy savings.

NASA robots may climb the walls of the International Space Station one day using grippers inspired by the super-adhesive feet of geckos. Scientists at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, are developing a "gecko gripper" system that could help robots inspect and repair the space station's exterior, and perhaps conduct a wide range of activities in Earth orbit.

Trying to get back to a 'new poll every Monday' routine, if possible, and I've hit the ground running with a vague, poorly-organized question about where we'd like to see some more innovation. Probably could have put more thought into categories and parameters for the question, but fire away: the world could use some improvement; where shall we begin? Curious to hear the debate. Enjoy!

Advances in robotics are entering a new phase of complexity, including in the essential balance feedback response area of research, which is essential to mobility. Check out HERMES, as just one example:

While companies look to deliver packages in a matter of minutes using drone technology, NASA engineers are exploring ways to bring similar "on-demand mobility" to people. In less than a decade, small commuter airlines could be flying electric planes. And as aircraft design and battery technology progress to extend even greater ease of use to the public, the sky would literally become the limit.

As stocks of Silicon Valley companies soar and revenues are growing, institutional shareholders are typically reluctant to rock the boat by questioning a company's managers. But some grumpy investors have been sending messages of frugality to maturing tech companies such as Oracle, Salesforce.com and Yahoo, whose executives rake in record-setting compensation packages each year. Their high pay is inviting emerging dissent.

The Black Hat Conference of 2015 just concluded in Las Vegas, and they've got a lot to show for it. If you're not familiar with Black Hat, they are:

Despite the immense potential of solar energy, at present, roof-mounted photovoltaic panels are able at best to capture about 20% of the available energy. And that despite research that has led to gains! To improve energy generation, you either increase solar panel efficiency, or increase their coverage. Enter a Silicon Valley startup named "Ubiquitous Energy."

Wishing the airline industry could get its act together to innovate around security hassles? Don't give up hope yet!

Consumer Reports is sounding the early warning alarm that if the FCC adopts the upcoming ATSC 3.0 standard, expected to be completed in 2017, current TVs will go dark. ATSC 3.0 will be a completely new standard and incompatible with current broadcast systems. It is supported by a broad coalition of influential corporations, who are likely to aggressively push for adoption of the standard. Improvements include 4k/Ultra HD video, immersive audio, single frequency network technology, IP-based content, and much greater reception tolerance (eg. mobile, tunnels, etc.). Also, emergency alerts will including a digital wakeup bit that will power up your TV automatically and inform you of critical information, with maps, graphics, video, and text.

Flip phones were all the rage in the 1990s - they were the ultimate fashion accessory. And despite being overtaken by smartphones the world over, the flip phone paradoxically remains very popular in technology-obsessed Japan. Flip-phone shipments rose 5.7 percent in 2014, while smartphone shipments fell 5.3 percent, down for a second year. The handsets have been dubbed 'Galapagos' phones because they have evolved to meet unique Japanese standards and tastes. This may also be attributable to users in Japan paying some of the highest smartphone fees among developed nations, while flip-phone rates are among the lowest. Many Japanese, accustomed to years of deflation, are content with old-style flip-phones offering voice calling, email and basic Internet services. Also, Japanese electronics companies Panasonic Corp and NEC Corp have pulled out of the consumer smartphone business, unable to compete with Apple and Samsung, but they still make flip-phones, competing in a crowded competitive market.

Over at Microsoft, they have a new browser called Edge that is part of Windows 10, and they’d really like everyone to use it. Edge replaces Internet Explorer, which has fallen from a peak of about 95% usage share during 2003 to as low as 13% today. The new version of Windows steamrolls over a user’s preferred application settings and makes Microsoft’s Edge browser the default. "[T]he design of the whole upgrade experience and the default settings APIs have been changed to make this less obvious and more difficult,” Mozilla CEO Beard explains in an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Windows 10 is a free upgrade for current home users of Windows 7 or 8, which means that it’s sure to become popular.

Micah Lee from The Intercept wants to remind you that all your communications are being spied on, and offers tips on how you can chat securely and anonymously, particularly with journalists, as NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden did. His tips amount to: using Tor, Jabber, and OTR (Off-the-Record messaging), while creating disposable accounts that can't be linked back to you. He includes some specifics for various operating systems, and a number of important tips and caveats, such as:

Researchers at security firm Zimperium identified a bug (really, a series of bugs) that puts some 950 million Android phones at risk of hacking, called it "the mother of all Android vulnerabilities." If you are an Android user, the chances that your phone is vulnerable are about 95 percent. No one has exploited the vulnerability and actually hacked someone's phone -- at least, not yet. The security firm shared the information with Google back in April, along with a suggested patch. Hackers could take advantage of it by sending you a multimedia message (MMS) containing malware. Once received, it would give them complete control over the handset and allow them to steal anything on it, such as credit card numbers or personal information.

After three years of field trials in China, a group of international scientists led by Chuanxin Sun at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in collaboration with Chinese and American scientists, have developed a new type of genetically modified rice that could boost food sustainability while fighting climate change..

Despite the fact that drivers frequently use in-car apps from Google and Apple, several carmakers including Volkswagen and Ford are refusing to let the industry juggernauts access private customer information in exchange. If you thought that the companies were doing so out of concerns for their consumers, you’d be wrong. Automakers want to keep such information for their own purposes. This came to light when Reuters published a recent report highlighting the potential windfall that car manufacturers refusing to partake could be missing out on procuring, estimated to be around $40 billion.

Now that systemd is uneventfully running the latest releases of major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, you might imagine that opposition to it is melting away -- but you'd be wrong. Instead, the rumors are as common as ever. Devuan, the anti-systemd fork of Debian, is still trudging towards a release while making the same arguments as ever. Devuan's home page asks: Have you tried to opt-out of the systemd change in Debian and stay with sysvinit? You will quickly notice that "Debian offers no choice." Yet a search quickly unearths instructions for making an install image without systemd and for removing systemd from your system.

For the first time ever, natural gas trumped coal as the top source of electric power generation in the U.S. In April, roughly 31 percent of electric power generation came from natural gas, whereas coal accounted for 30 percent. It's a dramatic difference from April 2010, when coal accounted for 44 percent of the mix and natural gas just 22 percent. In last 18 months, 17 gigawatt hours of coal-fired capacity has been retired completely, much of it already replaced by gas generation. "It could be the beginning of the end for the current fleet of coal plants."

When Microsoft announced its deal to acquire Nokia’s mobile phone business, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive at the time, boasted that the deal was a “bold step into the future.” But on Wednesday, Microsoft’s current chief executive, Satya Nadella, sought to leave that deal in the past. He announced a broad rethinking of the company’s phone strategy, a change that includes cutting up to 7,800 jobs, mostly from the phone business, and writing off nearly all of the value of its Nokia acquisition. The move is a clear acknowledgment that the deal was a multibillion-dollar strategic blunder by Mr. Ballmer, who had envisioned it as a way to make Microsoft more competitive in the mobile market.

Solar Impulse 2 has successfully landed in Hawaii after completing its audacious five-day journey across the Pacific Ocean. The mission, which has been dogged by recent delays, touched down safely at Kalaeloa Airport with Swiss pilot André Borschberg in the cockpit. He had endured more than 100 hours alone in the plane with minimal sleep during the flight - smashing the record for the longest solo flight in aviation history by two days. The plane had originally been intended to fly straight from China to Hawaii, but worsening weather on the way meant Borschberg had to abort and land in Japan. Bad weather had also kept the plane grounded in China for several weeks longer than intended.

Native to the forests of Borneo, Nepenthes hemsleyana feeds on bat guano, which provides the plant with all the nutrients it needs, minus the hassle of digestion. To that end, N. hemsleyana has developed special structures that reflect bats’ ultrasonic calls back to them – an ability that helps the plant attract bats to roost in its pitcher so that it can feast on the animal’s feces, a new study has found. The signals are specific to the bat species Kerivoula hardwickii, making it easier for the bats to find their partner plant.

After restarting to run at higher power than ever, the Large Hadron Collider has made its first proper discovery. Today, a team of scientists announced that they’ve found a new class of sub-atomic particles known as pentaquarks, a particle composed of four quarks and an antiquark.

A Ukrainian nonprofit organization, started in 2012 as a watchdog for human rights and democratic development in Ukraine, had its website temporarily taken offline by a subsidiary of the U.S.-based registrar company GoDaddy.com at the behest of the Russian government.

Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo from 2002, died of a tumor Saturday at Kyoto University Hospital, after a lengthy illness. He was 55. He had not been seen recently at game events, such as E3 in Los Angeles, where he was usually a participant. The announcement drew a flood of emotional tributes from game fans and industry rivals.

Microsoft has become The OpenBSD Foundation's first ever Gold contributor ($25,000 to $50,000), in large part due to the OpenSSH project. The donation was made following the PowerShell's Team's blog last month, announcing their future plans to implement the widely requested SSH protocol. In recent years, and attributed to change in leadership, Microsoft has done an about face in support of open-source, beyond just pushing .NET.

As of today, the press statement is out for the release of Oracle's VirtualBox 5.0. This comes 4-6 months after an inquiry started about whether Oracle had abandoned further development of VirtualBox following 2013's v4.3. Infoworld's April 2, 2015 review of the VB 5.0 beta states "don't expect anything truly revolutionary... but its main advantage over VMware remains with its offer of a free incarnation of many of the same core features."

The most expensive weapon in history, the U.S. Air Force's $350 billion F-35 stealth jet was outperformed by an F-16 (designed in the early 1970s) in a mock dogfight. The F-35 test pilot said new plane was too cumbersome to dodge enemy fire, and deemed it totally inappropriate for fighting aircraft within visual range. U.S. military leaders have extolled the virtues of the F-35 jets. Marine Lt Gen. Robert Schmidle said the planes were like flying computers and that they could detect an enemy five to 10 times faster than the enemy could detect it.

DuckDuckGo announced they hit a milestone, surpassing the 10 million daily query mark on June 22, 2015. DuckDuckGo saw 10,218,617 queries on June 22nd alone. The company gives credit to that surge in users based on them being a privacy focused search engine. Gabriel Weinberg wrote, “we’re proud to be helping so many people take back their privacy.” DuckDuckGo has grown 600% since Edward Snowden's NSA surveillance news broke two years ago. And yet only a few percent of people have even heard of DuckDuckGo and other private alternatives.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a proposal to explore including broadband as part of a decades-old program that subsidizes phone service for low-income consumers. The plan would expand the government's Lifeline program — created 30 years ago to help financially struggling Americans access basic telecommunication services — to include broadband Internet access. The commission must now figure out the specifics of incorporating broadband into Lifeline, after which another vote will be held. As expected, Republicans opposed extending the phone subsidy, arguing that the program has been subjected to fraud and abuse.

The rise of ad blocking is becoming a serious problem for digital media companies. And for Google, it's turning into a multi-billion dollar issue. PageFair, a company that works with publishers to measure the cost of ad blocking and to help them display less intrusive advertising that can be whitelisted by the ad blockers, estimates that Google lost out on $6.6 billion in global revenue to ad blockers last year. To put that into context, that's 10% of the total revenue Google reported in 2014.

While HDCP 2.2 was developed to defeat media pirates, it has far more potential to thwart ordinary folks who just want to enjoy a movie in the privacy of their home. With current versions of HDCP rendered ineffective and all manner of 4K content on the horizon, Hollywood decided it needed stronger security. Cryptanalysts demonstrated HDCP to be breakable three years before the FCC approved it as a "Digital Output Protection Technology" in 2004. By 2010, a master key that effectively neutralized HDCP v1 was leaked. Versions 2.0 and 2.1 were summarily cracked as well. The main difference with 2.2 is the encryption systems used in the handshake are more complex than in prior versions. HDCP 2.2 is not backward compatible with the previous versions of HDCP that are currently used by most of the HD devices in all our homes. Having a non-HDCP 2.2 sound bar or AV receiver in your home theater system will be enough to terminate the handshake.

SpaceX's perfect launch record came to an end, today, as an unmanned cargo ship destined for the International Space Station exploded minutes after launching from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday morning. The 208-foot-tall (63-meter) rocket was the company's 19th Falcon 9 launch since its 2010 debut, including six previous cargo runs for NASA under a 15-flight contract worth more than $2 billion.

In two new studies, a team of researchers led by hydrologists from the University of California, Irvine assessed the depletion of groundwater on a global scale using readings from NASA's GRACE satellites. The satellites monitor changes in Earth's gravity and act as a "scale in the sky," measuring shifts in the total amounts of water, both above and below ground. They concluded that likely much less water remains in aquifers than previously estimated. Groundwater is the primary source of water for about 2 billion people.

Shaun W. Bridges, a computer crime expert and a former Secret Service special agent who helped bring down Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, will plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering for skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars in bitcoin and routing the money to his own accounts, according to federal court documents.

Artificial neural networks have spurred remarkable recent progress in image classification and speech recognition. But even though these are very useful tools based on well-known mathematical methods, we actually understand surprisingly little of why certain models work and others don’t. How do you check that the network has correctly learned the right features? One way to visualize what goes on is to turn the network upside down. Neural networks that were trained to discriminate between different kinds of images have quite a bit of the information needed to generate images too. It can help to visualize the network’s representation. in some cases, this reveals that the neural net isn’t quite looking for the thing we thought it was.

The past three years have been the driest in California history dating to the 1849 Gold Rush. Low snow-pack, combined with 2014 being the hottest year in history in the state, exacerbated the situation. With all the attention focused on California's water woes, an observer might conclude that the Golden State's drought is the exception. It isn't. Forty states expect to see water shortages in at least some areas in the next decade. In a 2013 survey by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), state water managers from around the country said they expect freshwater shortages to continue into the next decade, even under "average" conditions.

This week will mark a first for Washington, as the state breaks ground in construction for their inaugural animal overpass. Interstate 90 in the Northwest cuts through the forests and mountains of the region, having long proved dangerous and fatal for wildlife. Now, the Department of Transportation will begin building a 150 foot-long structure freeway overpass designed specifically for all animals to endure safe passage, set to open in 2019.

Hackers can easily break into Samsung Galaxy phones and spy on the entire life of their users. A vulnerability in software on the phones lets hackers look through the phones’ camera, listen to the microphone, read incoming and outgoing texts and install apps, according to researchers. The hack works by exploiting a problem with the Samsung IME keyboard, a re-packaged version of SwiftKey that the company puts in Samsung Galaxy keyboards. That software periodically asks a server whether it needs updating — but hackers can easily get in the way of that request, pretend to be the server, and send malicious code to the phone.