Month: March 2017

Intel

Intel is positioning its new Optane technology as the next big advancement in computer storage after SSDs, and today it's announcing the first consumer product based on the technology. The "Intel Optane Memory" drives are 16GB and 32GB M.2 sticks that can be paired with a larger SSD or HDD to speed up total system performance. Intel's Rapid Storage Technology allows your PC to see the two drives as one storage volume, and the software automatically caches important data to the faster drive.

The Optane Memory drives will be available to order on April 24th. A 16GB drive costs $44 while a 32GB drive costs $77.

Enlarge / US House of Representatives on October 29, 2015. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The US House of Representatives could vote tomorrow on whether to eliminate privacy rules that would have forced ISPs to get your consent before selling Web browsing history and app usage history to advertisers. The Senate voted to kill the rules on Thursday, so all that's left are decisions by the House and President Donald Trump.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) placed the legislation on the schedule for Tuesday. Legislative business is scheduled to begin at noon.

The legislation is S.J. Res. 34, a resolution invoking the Congressional Review Act in order to invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's privacy rules and prevent the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future. The Senate vote was 50-48, with Republicans voting to kill the privacy rules and Democrats voting to preserve them.

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On March 25, security researcher Kevin Beaumont discovered something very unfortunate on Docs.com, Microsoft's free document-sharing site tied to the company's Office 365 service: its homepage had a search bar. That in itself would not have been a problem if Office 2016 and Office 365 users were aware that the documents they were posting were being shared publicly.

Unfortunately, hundreds of them weren't. As described in a Microsoft support document, "with Docs.com, you can create an online portfolio of your expertise, discover, download, or bookmark works from other authors, and build your brand with built-in SEO, analytics, and email and social sharing." But many users used Docs.com to either share documents within their organizations or to pass them to people outside their organizations—unaware that the data was being indexed by search engines.

You can probably see where I'm going with this and https://t.co/3TC07CB8gE. pic.twitter.com/zCJAcNNx3a

— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) March 25, 2017

Within a few hours, Beaumont, a number of other researchers, and Ars found a significant number of documents shared with sensitive information in them—some of them discoverable by just entering "passwords" or "SSN" or "account number."

Bigfoot cares for its young. (credit: Katy Kristin)

The world as a whole has become increasingly reliant on science to provide its technology and inform its policy. But rampant conspiracy theories, fake news, and pseudoscience like homeopathy show that the world could use a bit more of the organized skepticism that provides the foundation of science. For that reason, it has often been suggested that an expanded science education program would help cut down on the acceptance of nonsense.

But a study done with undergrads at North Carolina State University suggests that a class on scientific research methods doesn't do much good. Instead, a class dedicated to critical analysis of nonsense in archeology was far more effective at getting students to reject a variety of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. And it worked even better when the students got their own debunking project.

The study, done by Anne Collins McLaughlin and Alicia McGill, lumps together things like belief in astrology, conspiracy theories, and ancient aliens, calling them "epistemically unwarranted." Surveys show they're widely popular; nearly half the US population thinks astrology is either somewhat or very scientific, and the number has gone up over time.