Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: Vintage Architecture)

On Friday morning, Bloomberg reported that it had seen a copy of a questionnaire sent by the Trump transition team to the Department of Energy (DOE). The questionnaire includes 75 questions directed at the DOE and the Energy Information Agency (EIA), as well as any labs underneath the DOE’s purview. The New York Times then obtained and published a copy of the document.

Although the questions are broad in nature, they seem to set the department up for budget and staffing cuts. They also appear to favor nuclear power and fossil fuel.

Questions that address cuts to the DOE’s mission include: “Which Assistant Secretary positions are rooted in statute and which exist at the discretion and delegation of the Secretary?”, as well as “If the DOE’s topline budget in accounts other than the 050 account were required to be reduced 10% over the next four fiscal years (from the FY17 request and starting in FY18), does the Department have any recommendations as to where those reductions should be made?” A 050 account indicates national defense spending.

Enlarge / Georgia politician Brian Kemp reads at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony in the state. (credit: Georgia.gov)

Accusations that the US Department of Homeland security tried to hack Georgia's voter registration database are running rampant. But until officials from that state's Secretary of State office provide basic details, people should remain highly skeptical.

The controversy erupted after Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp sent and publicly released a letter addressed to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson. In it, Kemp made a series of statements so vague in their technical detail that it's impossible to conclude any kind of hacking or breach—at least as those terms are used by security professionals—took place.

"On November 15, 2016, an IP address associated with the Department of Homeland Security made an unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Georgia Secretary of State's firewall," Kemp wrote. "I am writing you to ask whether DHS was aware of this attempt and, if so, why DHS was attempting to breach our firewall."

Enlarge / An artist's conception of a mission to return a sample from the South Pole of the Moon. (credit: NASA)

NASA has formally asked planetary scientists to submit proposals for the next New Frontiers mission, a program that will provide approximately $1 billion for a spacecraft and science program to answer a fundamental question about the Solar System.

The "announcement of opportunity" posted on a government procurement site seeks proposals for six different mission concepts desired by the planetary science community. They are ambitious, ranging from bringing samples back from a comet or the Moon's south pole to visiting ocean worlds and a Venus lander that would perform a suite of experiments on that mysterious world's surface:

• Comet Surface Sample Return
• Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return
• Ocean Worlds (Titan and/or Enceladus)
• Saturn Probe
• Trojan Tour and Rendezvous
• Venus In Situ Explorer

Karen Apricot

On Saturday December 10, Louisiana residents will cast their final ballots for the last unclaimed Senate seat of the 2016 elections. The two candidates remaining are a Democrat and a Republican, though partisan differences within the state have varied with national politics. (See Governor John Bel Edwards, a gun-supporting Democrat, as one example.) However, the ideological differences between these two would-be senators are made more stark by the fact that in vulnerable and flood-prone Louisiana, there’s still disagreement on whether to accept climate change as human-made.

This runoff is happening now because of Louisiana's quirky state election rules: Louisianans originally cast their vote for Senate in a non-partisan primary in November. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, then the state holds a runoff election in early December between the top two candidates.

A 45-year-old California man pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to ripping off $4.8 million from his employer. Notably, the man admitted to spending $1 million of that bonanza on Game of War.

The mobile-phone game is developed by Machine Zone and heavily advertised by model Kate Upton. It's one of the top-grossing mobile games in the world, according to Adweek. And now we know why, at least in part.

Kevin Lee Co admitted in Sacramento federal court that,from May 2008 to March 2015, he embezzled nearly $5 million from his controller job at a heavy-equipment company called Holt California. He admitted in his guilty plea (PDF) to spending "approximately $1 million" on Game of War. He also admitted to getting plastic surgery and buying season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers and the Sacramento Kings. The record also showed Co bought "luxury cars" and a golf club membership.

Enlarge (credit: Schöning/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Last month, Adblock Plus maker Eyeo GmbH won its sixth legal victory in German courts, with a panel of district court judges deciding that ad-blocking software is legal despite German newsmagazine Der Spiegel's arguments to the contrary. Now, the reasoning of the Hamburg-based panel of judges has been made public.

The legal arguments made by Spiegel Online, outlined in an unofficial English-translated copy (PDF) of the judgment, courtesy of Eyeo, argued it was making a "unified offer" to online consumers. Essentially, that offer is: read the news content for free and view some ads. While Internet users have the freedom "not to access this unified offer," neither they nor Adblock Plus have the right to "dismantle" it. Eyeo's behavior thus amounted to unfair competition, and it could even wipe the offer out, Spiegel claimed.

"The Claimant [Spiegel] argues that the Defendant’s [Eyeo's] business model endangers the Claimant’s existence," reads the judgment. Because users aren't willing to pay for editorial content on the Web, "it is not economically viable for the Claimant to switch to this business model."

(credit: Tom Lohdan)

At an event today hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, White House terrorism and homeland security advisor Lisa Monaco announced that President Barack Obama had ordered a "full review" of the campaign of cyber-attacks against the Democratic Party, the campaign organization of Hillary Clinton, and other politicians and state election officials' websites during the 2016 presidential campaign. Monaco said that the results of the review would be released to Congress before President Obama left office.

"The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process," Monaco said, "and to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders, to include the Congress."

The announcement comes after a call from both Republicans and Democrats on December 7. At a Heritage Foundation event on Wednesday, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, (R-Texas) called for "consequences" for Russia's interference in the election. “If we don’t respond and show them that there are consequences," he said, "the bad behavior will continue… our democracy itself is being targeted.”