Month: August 2018

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Chrome 69, due to be released on September 4, is going to take the next step toward phasing out support for Adobe's Flash plugin.

Chrome started deprecating Flash in 2016, defaulting to HTML5 features and requiring Flash to be enabled on a per-site basis. Currently, that setting is sticky: if Flash is enabled for a site, it will continue to be enabled across sessions and restarts of the browser.

That changes in Chrome 69—Flash will have to be enabled for a site every time the browser is started. This means that Flash content will always need positive, explicit user permission to run, making the use of the plugin much more visible—and much more annoying.

WaveSense

The research conducted at the country's National Laboratories is usually highly classified and specifically aimed at solving national security problems. But sometimes you get a swords-into-ploughshares moment. That's the case here, as a startup called WaveSense looks to apply technology originally developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory to detect buried mines and improvised explosive devices for use in self-driving cars.

If you want a car to drive itself, it has to know where it is in the world to a pretty high degree of accuracy. Until now, just about every variation of autonomous vehicle we've come across has done that through a combination of highly accurate GPS, an HD map, and some kind of sensor to detect the environment around it. Actually, you want more than one kind of sensor, because redundancy is going to be critical if humans are going to trust their lives to robot vehicles.

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In the last few weeks, a renewed bout of legal action from Nintendo has led to the shutdown of a handful of ROM sites, which previously let users download digital, emulation-ready copies of classic games. This has, in turn, led to a lot of good discussion about the positive and negative effects this kind of ROM collection and distribution has brought to the gaming community.

From a legal standpoint, it's hard to defend sites that revolve around unlimited downloads of copyrighted games. As attorney Michael Lee put it in a recent blog post, "this is classic infringement; there is no defense to this, at all." But as Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi tweeted, "there is no alternative BUT piracy for, like, 99 percent of video game history" due to "the completely abysmal job the video game industry has done keeping its games available."

But what if there might be a middle ground that could thread the needle between the legality of original cartridges and the convenience of emulated ROMs? What if an online lending library, temporarily loaning out copies of ROMs tied to individual original cartridges, could satisfy the letter of the law and the interests of game preservation at the same time?

Enlarge / Smokestacks at Pacificorp’s 1,000MW coal-fired power plant on October 9, 2017 outside Huntington, Utah. (credit: George Frey/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the Trump administration proposed a replacement rule for former president Obama's Clean Power Plan, and its details favor coal power plant owners.

On Monday night, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a proposed rule, called the "Affordable Clean Energy Rule," which would direct states to inventory their power plants and come up with a plan to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions of individual plants. By contrast, the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan established targets for emissions across each state's energy sector, a move that would have incentivized the industry to leave behind the highest-carbon-emitting power sources, like coal.

The Trump administration has argued that the EPA can't use the Clean Air Act to set emissions levels for the energy industry in general but instead could regulate emissions at each individual source of emissions. The argument has not yet been tested in court, although opposition to the rule proposed today may give the administration a chance to try it out.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during the Moscow Urban Forum 2018 on July 18, 2018 in Moscow, Russia. (credit: Getty Images | Mikhail Svetlov )

Russia has denied any knowledge of a spear phishing attempt that allegedly mimicked the domains of the US Senate and two US-based think tanks.

Russia's denial came after Microsoft said it detected and shut down the campaign.

"Last week, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) successfully executed a court order to disrupt and transfer control of six Internet domains created by a group widely associated with the Russian government and known as Strontium, or alternatively Fancy Bear or APT28," Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith wrote in Microsoft's announcement Monday. "We have now used this approach 12 times in two years to shut down 84 fake websites associated with this group."

When Sony offered us access to one of its "500 Million Limited Edition PS4 Pro" consoles—made to commemorate 500 million PlayStation systems sold since 1995—we initially didn't see much point. Sure, the translucent navy blue casing seemed pretty cool to look at, and the limited run of 50,000 units give the unit a collectible cachet. Inside, though, the "new" system is exactly like the PS4 Pro we already reviewed back in 2016, but now with a 2TB hard drive.

Then we remembered that we're always looking for giveaways for our next Charity Drive sweepstakes and figured that a relatively rare PS4 console would make a great prize for a deserving reader. So before we pack this exclusive PS4 Pro in the prize closet until the holiday season, we popped open the box to take a few quick pictures of what's inside. Enjoy gawking at the gallery above and dreaming of winning this very unit in a few months!

Enlarge (credit: Hildebrand et al. 2018)

Large monumental cemeteries line the shores of Kenya’s Lake Turkana: hundreds of tightly-packed graves beneath round stone platforms ringed with boulders and basalt columns, each flanked by its own chain of smaller stone circles and cairns. To learn more about the people who built it, archaeologists recently excavated parts of the largest and oldest of these monuments, and surveyed the site with ground-penetrating radar. The results suggest that Kenya’s ancient herders constructed them as a communal effort to cope with an unstable environment and a shifting cultural frontier.

A crowded ancient cemetery

Around 5,000 years ago (according to radiocarbon dating of burials), people started clearing away deep drifts of beach sand on a peninsula jutting out into Lake Turkana, digging down to the sandstone bedrock and shoring up the sides with large, flat slabs of sandstone. Then they started digging into the soft sandstone floor of the 30 meter-wide pit, carving out shallow, closely-spaced graves.

Archaeologist Elisabeth Hildebrand of Stony Brook University and the Turkana Basin Institute and her colleagues excavated a 2m by 2m test area in the center of the pit and another at the edge. Based on the number of people buried in just those two small spaces, they estimate that the crowded cemetery at the heart of the Lothagam North Pillar Site holds at least 580 graves.