Month: June 2017

Enlarge / A passenger places a laptop computer back into his bag after passing through a TSA check point at Salt Lake City International Airport. (credit: George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In a speech today, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said that airlines that don't get on board with new security procedures could see electronic devices banned on their airplanes—or be barred from flying the US altogether.

The Department of Homeland Security today said it will be demanding "enhanced security measures" for all commercial flights going into the US. The specific measures, which will be both "seen and unseen," aren't specified in a DHS fact sheet, but they generally include enhanced passenger screening, "heightened screening of personal electronic devices," and "deploying advanced technology, expanding canine screening, and establishing additional pre-clearance locations."

The new measures will affect 105 countries hosting approximately 280 airports, 180 airlines, and about 2,100 daily flights carrying 325,000 US-bound passengers.

Enlarge / Heavy equipment works in the lignite coal mine adjacent to Southern Co.'s Kemper County power plant near Meridian, Mississippi, U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014. Photographer: Gary Tramontina/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

Southern Company and Mississippi Power announced Wednesday afternoon that they would suspend all coal gasification operations at a Kemper County plant and simply use natural gas instead. The decision comes after the Mississippi Public Service Commission (MPSC) recommended that the plant burn only natural gas, which is cheaper at the moment.

The plant was supposed to be a cutting-edge demonstration of the power of “clean coal," and despite running five years late and more than $4 billion over budget, Kemper was able to start testing its coal gasification operations late last year. The plant used a chemical process to break down lignite coal into synthesis gas, or “syngas,” which was then fed into a generator. The syngas burns cleaner than pulverized lignite coal does. In addition, emissions were caught by a carbon capture system and delivered to a nearby oil field to help with oil extraction. That, Southern and Mississippi Power said, would reduce the greenhouse emissions of burning lignite by up to 65 percent.

But with only 200 days of gasification operations under its belt, Kemper identified more issues with its technology, including design flaws that caused leaks and ash buildup. Last week, the MSPC indicated that it would refuse to allow Southern to raise rates to cover Kemper’s continued construction and maintenance for gasification.

German Archaeological Institute

The monumental rock pillars of Göbekli Tepe date back over 11,000 years, and tower over a small hill in Turkey. Excavated just a couple of decades ago, these mysterious structures are part of the world's oldest known monumental religious complex. Each pillar is covered in hundreds of images, including carvings of humans and dangerous animals like snakes and scorpions. Surrounded by nested, winding walls, these pillars suggest a complex spiritual worldview shared by hunter-gatherers in the region who added to it for roughly 1,600 years. Now, a team of archaeologists have revealed that decorated human skulls were part of the Göbekli Tepe rituals.

German Archaeological Institute paleopathologist Julia Gresky and her colleagues write in in Science Advances about excavating bone fragments that suggest an ancient "skull cult" at the site. Though it sounds like something out of a pirate movie, a skull cult is simply an archaeological term that describes the ritualistic or religious alteration of multiple skulls.

Enlarge / The Supreme Court of California’s headquarters is also home to the 1st District in San Francisco. (credit: Coolcaesar)

On Wednesday, a California appeals court denied efforts to overturn a county court’s decision not to intervene in an ongoing dispute between the public defender’s office and the administrative arm of the Alameda County Superior Court itself. The dispute is over allegedly flawed court software.

The public defender, Brendon Woods, has argued since December 2016 that a recent upgrade is inadequate for Alameda County and has resulted in many mistaken jailings. In March 2017, a local judge rejected Woods’ demands to fix the software, which is known as Odyssey Court Manager and made by Tyler Technologies.

The 1st Appellate District, a state-level appeals court based in San Francisco, ruled that Woods lacked standing to bring the appeal “in his own right.” Even if there was standing, the plaintiffs did not establish that they would “suffer harm or prejudice in a manner that cannot be corrected on appeal.”

Enlarge / Code in Tuesday's attack, shown on the left, was altered to permanently destroy hard drives. (credit: Matt Suiche)

Tuesday's massive outbreak of malware that shut down computers around the world has been almost universally blamed on ransomware, which by definition seeks to make money by unlocking data held hostage only if victims pay a hefty fee. Now, some researchers are drawing an even bleaker assessment—that the malware was a wiper with the objective of permanently destroying data.

Initially, researchers said the malware was a new version of the Petya ransomware that first struck in early 2016. Later, researchers said it was a new, never-before-seen ransomware package that mimicked some of Petya's behaviors. With more time to analyze the malware, researchers on Wednesday are highlighting some curious behavior for a piece of malware that was nearly perfect in almost all other respects: its code is so aggressive that it's impossible for victims to recover their data.

In other words, the researchers said, the payload delivered in Tuesday's outbreak wasn't ransomware at all. Instead, its true objective was to permanently wipe as many hard drives as possible on infected networks, in much the way the Shamoon disk wiper left a wake of destruction in Saudi Arabia. Some researchers have said Shamoon is likely the work of developers sponsored by an as-yet unidentified country. Researchers analyzing Tuesday's malware—alternatively dubbed PetyaWrap, NotPetya, and ExPetr—are speculating the ransom note left behind in Tuesday's attack was, in fact, a hoax intended to capitalize on media interest sparked by last month's massive WCry outbreak.

Enlarge / The Ancestor is still a total jerk in new cutscenes and narration. (credit: Red Hook)

Darkest Dungeon's first-ever DLC, The Crimson Court, is going to be a hard sell for many players. That's not just a pun on the expansion's extreme difficulty, either, although there is plenty of that here.

For those new to the game—and perhaps looking at The Crimson Court as an excuse to hop aboard the crazy train—Darkest Dungeon is a brutal turn-based dungeon crawler. In-game time passes when you send bedraggled squads into the depths of different dungeons. Managing time, resources, and a revolving door of adventurers is a delicate balance that players either learn to walk or bow out of altogether.

The Crimson Court DLC isn't self-contained, which presents the expansion's first structural hurdle. You either need to start a new campaign or use an existing save where you don't mind turning that balance inside out with new enemies, objectives, and dangers.

Enlarge / Who’s a good little fatty? (credit: Getty | phatthanit_r)

Our loyal companions are packing on the pounds in step with us, a new study finds.

Surveying about 2.5 million dogs and 500,000 cats in the US during 2016, a group of researchers found that about one in three were overweight or obese. Looking over data from the last decade, the researchers say the new figures reveal a 169-percent increase in hefty felines and a 158-percent increase in chunky canines.

All the data is from researchers at Banfield, which runs a chain of veterinary hospitals across 42 states. The researchers surveyed animals that checked into one of Banfield’s 975 locations, putting them through a five-point physical and visual exam. Animals were considered overweight if their ribs were not clearly visible or easily felt and if their waists were also hard to see. Pets were dubbed obese if their ribs couldn’t be felt at all and they had no visible waist.

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This is one way to break the Ten Commandments.

An Arkansas man was arrested early Wednesday after police said he rammed his vehicle into a newly installed stone monument of the Ten Commandments at the Arkansas Capitol grounds. The man also streamed the toppling of the one-day-old structure live on Facebook.

Enlarge / An employee walks in a hallway at Google Canada's engineering headquarters in Waterloo, Ontario. (credit: Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A small Canadian firm has acquired an injunction against Google from the Supreme Court of Canada that is being called the first global de-indexing order.

Equustek, a Vancouver-based maker of networking devices, sued a former distributor called Datalink Technologies. Equustek accused Datalink of illegally re-labeling products and stealing Equustek intellectual property to make its own products.

Datalink initially denied the allegations but then left the province. It continues to do business, selling products worldwide from an unknown location, according to Canadian courts.