Month: November 2017

Enlarge / A Texas flag flies at half mast during prayer services at the La Vernia High School Football stadium to grieve the victims killed at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. (credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Texas authorities have recently gotten formal permission from a state judge to search the deceased Sutherland Springs shooter’s seized iPhone SE and LG candybar-style phone. In addition, the Texas Rangers have also submitted a formal request to Apple in order to access Devin Patrick Kelley’s iCloud data.

On November 7, Kelley shot and killed 26 people and wounded 20 others when he opened fire during a service at a church approximately 35 miles southeast of San Antonio.

According to court documents published for the first time by the San Antonio Express-News on Monday, Texas Rangers got a warrant approved to search the two devices on November 9. The newspaper also reported that four e-mail accounts are known to be associated with Kelley: thelifeofdevin@gmail.com, devinkelley1991@gmail.com, sevenup555@yahoo.com, and kelleydevin1991@gmail.com.

Enlarge / During the Ordovician, life was literally great. Multicellular plants and animals diversified and moved into ecological niches throughout the globe. This is probably what it was like on a typical Ordovician day, hanging out with cephalopods, crinoids, and coral at the edge of a supercontinent that covered the South Pole. I think a colony of graptolites is floating in the distance. (credit: Fritz Geller-Grimm)

Over half a billion years ago, during the Cambrian geological period, life on Earth started to get a lot more interesting. Thanks to the rise in free oxygen generated mostly by photosynthesizing algae, lifeforms could draw much more energy out of the environment. That meant the rise of multicellularity and the beginnings of a world full of the macro-sized plants and animals we know and love. That moment, full of weird-ass animals like Anomalocaris, is called the Cambrian Explosion.

The Cambrian Explosion gets a lot of play because it was the first time multicellular creatures ruled the planet. What few people (other than geologists and paleontologists) realize is that there was an even crazier time for early life. It came during the Ordovician period, right after the Cambrian came to a close 485 million years ago. The Ordovician Radiation, also called the Great Ordovician Diversification Event (GOBE), saw a quadrupling of diversity at the genus level (that's the category one step above species). Life also started occupying new ecological niches, clinging to plants floating in the ocean's water column and burrowing deep into the seabed.

Like the Cambrian, the Ordovician was a period when all of life still existed underwater. Most of the continents had formed a supercontinent called Gondwana over the south pole, creating the largest tropical coastline in our planet's history. (There were no polar ice caps during this period.) The warm coastal waters surrounding Gondwana were perfect for new kinds of animals, like brachiopods, crinoids, ostracodes, cephalopods, corals, and bryozoans. Plus, everybody's favorite Cambrian animal, the trilobite, diversified like crazy and moved into many new habitats during this time.

Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Trump administration's Department of Justice (DOJ) today filed a lawsuit to block AT&T's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Inc.

AT&T has been the nation's largest pay-TV company since it acquired DirecTV in 2015. Acquiring Time Warner and its stable of popular TV programming would give the company too much control over programming and distribution, the DOJ said.

Together, AT&T and Time Warner would attempt to impede competition from online video distributors and raise prices on rivals that want access to Time Warner programming, the DOJ alleged.

Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Trump administration's Department of Justice (DOJ) today filed a lawsuit to block AT&T's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Inc.

AT&T has been the nation's largest pay-TV company since it acquired DirecTV in 2015. Acquiring Time Warner and its stable of popular TV programming would give the company too much control over programming and distribution, the DOJ said.

Together, AT&T and Time Warner would attempt to impede competition from online video distributors and raise prices on rivals that want access to Time Warner programming, the DOJ alleged.

Enlarge (credit: Steven Englehardt)

If you have the uncomfortable sense someone is looking over your shoulder as you surf the Web, you're not being paranoid. A new study finds hundreds of sites—including microsoft.com, adobe.com, and godaddy.com—employ scripts that record visitors' keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior in real time, even before the input is submitted or is later deleted.

Session replay scripts are provided by third-party analytics services that are designed to help site operators better understand how visitors interact with their Web properties and identify specific pages that are confusing or broken. As their name implies, the scripts allow the operators to re-enact individual browsing sessions. Each click, input, and scroll can be recorded and later played back.

A study published last week reported that 482 of the 50,000 most trafficked websites employ such scripts, usually with no clear disclosure. It's not always easy to detect sites that employ such scripts. The actual number is almost certainly much higher, particularly among sites outside the top 50,000 that were studied.