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The researchers suspect they've reached a region of the solar-interstellar boundary that nobody had predicted. In this area, the magnetic field lines of the Sun link up with those of the interstellar field. Scientists are calling this linkage a "highway" for particles to travel along. It lets solar wind particles escape more readily, causing the drop in their intensity. And it opens the door for low-energy cosmic rays to slip in to our Solar System, which is why Voyager 1 is seeing so many of them. According the researchers at the press conference that announced these results, most steady-state models of the Solar System failed to predict anything like this. A few models did have a feature like this, but it was only a transient one that appeared at certain times of the solar cycle.

Starting tomorrow, Microsoft will launch a Windows Insider Program that will give users who are comfortable with running very early beta software access to Windows 10. This first preview will be available for laptops and desktops. A build for servers will follow later.

The company went on to detail that its new operating system will have a tailored user experience between different screen sizes — that’s to say that if you are on a smaller device, you will see a different sort of user interface. The code will run across all device categories: “One product family. One platform. One store.”

The way we currently reach other worlds with our present technology — or any remote location in the Universe — involves three distinct stages:The initial launch, which overcomes the Earth’s gravitational binding energy and starts our spacecraft off with a reasonably large (on the order of a few km/s) velocity relative to the Earth’s motion around the Sun.On-board course corrections, where very small amounts of thrust accelerate the spacecraft to its optimal trajectory.And gravity assists, where we use the gravitational properties of other planets in orbit around the Sun to change our spacecraft’s velocity, either increasing or decreasing its speed with every encounter.It’s through the combination of these three actions that we can reach any location — if we’re patient and we plan properly — with only our current rocket technology.

The initial launch is a very hard part right now. It takes a tremendous amount of resources to overcome the Earth’s gravitational pull, to accelerate a significant amount of mass to the Earth’s escape velocity, and to raise it all the way up through the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Food and Drug Administration has already approved his technique for human trials, and he has secured funding from the Army to conduct the feasibility phase. Dr. Rhee is currently lobbying for funds to conduct a full trial. If he’s successful human trials could begin as early as next year.

What Dr. Rhee hopes to test on humans is a method he worked out for the past couple decades on pigs. Patients would be injected with a cold fluid to induce severe hypothermia. Clinically hypothermia is characterized by the drop of a person’s body temperature from its normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celcius) to lower than 95 degrees (35 C). Below 95, the heart, nervous system and other organs begin to fail. The strict range is indicative of a metabolic system with strict temperature requirements for proper function (death waits only a few degrees the other way as well). Dr. Rhee’s method involves injecting patients with a cold fluid that would bring the body’s temperature down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 C). Sounds chilling, but when he induced the extreme hypothermia in pigs they came out just fine. Heart function, breathing, and brain function was completely normal.

Dr. Rhee is no stranger to high-stakes medicine. The native South Korean was trained at the Uniformed Services University Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland. Following a fellowship in trauma and critical care at the University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center he served in the US Navy as director of the University of South California’s Navy Trauma Training Center at Los Angeles County. He was then sent to Afghanistan where he was one of the first surgeons at Camp Rhino. Later he started the first surgical unit at Ramadi, Iraq. His cool under fire was on display nationally as he performed surgery on US Representative Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot through the skull in the Tucson shootings this past January. His experience with induced hypothermia came into play the night of the shootings when Dr. Rhee removed part of the congresswoman’s skull. The wound had raised her body temperature and began “cooking the brain.” He used a device to cool Rep. Giffords’ skin.

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

between 2008 and 2010

The Exploitation process relied upon a Java vulnerability (CVE-2013-2460) and after getting dropped into the target computer system, the malware detects the Java version installed on the operating system and based upon it requests the suitable exploit.

The two main components of Uroburos are - a driver and an encrypted virtual file system, used to disguise its nasty activities and to try to avoid detection. Its driver part is extremely complex and is designed to be very discrete and very difficult to identify.

The virtual file system can’t be decrypted without the presence of drivers, according to the Gdata’s analysis explained in the PDF.

Currently under development is a BitTorrent-powered browser that will enable users to store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other sites without need for central hosting. This means sites will be able to exist in a new and decentralized form with no reliance on a public-facing website. In a message to “BREIN and friends,” The Pirate Bay cautions that while closing down domains may be an irritant today, that loophole won’t be open forever.

Researchers on Thursday discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the widely used command-line shell GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), dubbed "Shellshock" which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide, and may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet that is currently trying to infect other servers as well.

We tend to think of such events as occasional, inconvenient blips. But in fact they are becoming increasingly common, and will only get more frequent and severe. This is because our electricity systems are more fragile than is commonly supposed, and are getting frailer. Unless we act, blackouts will become a regular, extremely disruptive part of everyday life.

The vulnerability of such systems is demonstrated by the Italian blackout of 2003. The event began when a falling tree broke a power line in Switzerland; when a second tree took out another Swiss power line, connectors towards Italy tripped and several Italian power plants failed as a result. Virtually the whole country was left without power. It says something when a nation can be brought to a halt by two trees falling outside its borders.

A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally.

In order to victimize any computer, all you need to do is wear a special digitizer wristband and touch the exposed part of the system. The wristband will measure all the tiny changes in the ground electrical potential that can reveal even stronger encryption keys, such as a 4,096-bit RSA key.

in some cases, you don't even have to touch the system directly with your bare hands. You can intercept encryption keys from attached network and video cables as well. Researchers called it a side-channel attack.

Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any "help" from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn't been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.

And that's the thing. The internet works just fine. The only reason to "fix" it, is to "break" it in exactly the way the ITU wants, which is to favor a few players who have done nothing innovative to actually deserve it.

This is hardly a surprise, but similar to the Joel Tenenbaum case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset (the other person sued for copyright infringement for using a file sharing system), has lost again. The appeals court (8th Circuit) has ruled that $9,250 per song infringed is perfectly reasonable and that the judge in the case, Michael Davis, erred in calling for a new trial after the initial jury verdict (the first of three). There were a number of procedural issues here, and it's worth pointing out that Thomas-Rasset herself more or less asked the court to bring back this first verdict and focus on the Constitutionality of the damages amount. So, the whole mess with the three separate district court trials sort of gets swept under the rug. However, the court simply isn't buying Thomas-Rasset's claim that the statutory damages are unconstitutionally punitive and a violation of due process. Basically, it says that the fact that statutory damages are completely out of whack with actual damages doesn't matter, because the point of statutory damages is that they're disconnected from actual damages on purpose (because, in theory, they're put in place because actual damages are difficult to assess).

Free and Open Another reason there are so many audio codecs: silly licensing restrictions. Would you base a business on technology a competitor controls? That's why the Opus specification and complete source are Free, Open, and available for any use whatsoever without IP restrictions, explicit licensing or royalties. Opus was developed and tested in a public, fully transparent process within the IETF, proof that open collaboration can produce a better audio codec than proprietary, secretive, patent-encumbered systems. Open standards benefit-- and benefit from-- open source organizations and traditional commercial software companies alike. Opus itself is the result of a collaboration including Broadcom, Google, the IETF, Microsoft (through Skype), Mozilla, Octasic and Xiph.Org.