Month: February 2016

Invited witnesses prepare to testify about climate science and the Paris agreement.

Tuesday saw yet another congressional science committee hearing on the topic of climate change. At least the topic of this hearing, convened by House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), was ostensibly focused on policy rather than arguing the science. The title was “Paris Climate Promise: A Bad Deal for America.” Of course, climate science still took some shots along the way.

Rep. Smith opened the hearing with what would be a recurring theme: the Paris agreement will damage the economy without much climate benefit. But Smith couldn’t resist bringing up his ongoing feud with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He said:

An example of how this administration promotes its suspect climate agenda can be seen at the National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration. Its employees altered historical climate data to get politically correct results in an attempt to disprove the eighteen year lack of global temperature increases.

NOAA conveniently issued its news release that promotes this report just as the administration announced its extensive climate change regulations. NOAA has refused to explain its findings and provide documents to this Committee and the American people. The people have a right to see the data, evaluate it, and know the motivations behind this study.

Here's a quick review: There’s no evidence that NOAA scientists did anything but their jobs, there is no eighteen-year lack of global temperature increases, the update to NOAA’s dataset had been in the works for years, NOAA provided Smith with personal explanations of how the work was done and why, all the data has been publicly available all along, and NOAA has provided him with the e-mails between staff (but not scientists) he demanded.

Miss me?

Nearly a year after promising to "completely stop talking to the press," famed game designer Peter Molyneux is... talking to the press. Specifically, he's breaking his silence in a wide-ranging and reflective interview with Eurogamer to promote Godus Wars, a new real-time strategy twist on the faltering god game.

To be fair, a year is a long time for a serial over-promiser like Molyneux to keep publicly quiet about what he's working on. The direct cause of the long silence, as Molyneux himself admits directly to Eurogamer, was a February 2015 Rock Paper Shotgun interview that led off with the blunt question "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?"

"It was one of the most bruising moments of my life," Molyneux told Eurogamer. "My world changed after that interview. ... That was the point where I said, this is just not going to work. To be called a pathological liar, which he said at the start... it's just not going to work, because how do you ever gain people's trust and belief after a journalist says that?"

(credit: Lynn Friedman)

Comcast has been steadily losing cable TV subscribers for years, but it turned things around in the most recent quarter by adding 89,000 video customers.

The 89,000 net additions in Q4 2015 was Comcast's best result on the video subscriber front in eight years, according to today's earnings release. Comcast did lose 36,000 video customers over the entire year, but even that was "the best result in nine years," Comcast said.

The broadband business continued to boom, meanwhile, with net additions of 460,000 in the quarter and 1.4 million for the year. Overall, Comcast now has 22.3 million video customers, 23.3 million Internet customers, and 11.5 million phone customers. The phone business added 139,000 subscribers in the quarter and 282,000 during the full year. Many of the additions came from existing customers adding a service. Comcast's total customer base increased by 281,000 in the quarter and 666,000 in 2015 for a new total of 27.7 million.

(credit: Check Point Software)

eBay has no plans to fix a "severe" vulnerability that allows attackers to use the company's trusted website to distribute malicious code and phishing pages, researchers from security firm Check Point Software said.

The vulnerability allows attackers to bypass a key restriction that prevents user posts from hosting JavaScript code that gets executed on end-user devices. eBay has long enforced the limitation to prevent scammers from creating auction pages that execute dangerous code or content when they're viewed by unsuspecting users. Using a highly specialized coding technique known as JSFUCK, hackers can work around this safeguard. The technique allows eBay users to insert JavaScript into their posts that will call a variety of different payloads that can be tailored to the specific browser and device of the visitor.

"An attacker could target eBay users by sending them a legitimate page that contains malicious code," Check Point researcher Oded Vanunu wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "Customers can be tricked into opening the page, and the code will then be executed by the user's browser or mobile app, leading to multiple ominous scenarios that range from phishing to binary download."