news.buyenne.com

SAN FRANCISCO—A jury of ten men and women has been selected for the second Oracle v. Google copyright trial, and opening statements will be heard here tomorrow morning.

The trial is expected to last about a month. If Oracle wins, damages could be in the billions.

The jury includes an employment coordinator, a lawyer who works for local government, a former aerospace CFO, an HR professional, an electrician, a retiree, a homemaker, and a product manager for a local power company.

(credit: LHCb)

After more than a month of checking out the equipment, the Large Hadron Collider is set to return to the frontiers of particle physics. This will be the second run at higher energies after a few years at lower energy and a couple years of upgrades. The plan for this year is to increase the frequency of high-energy collisions in order to get a better view of the Higgs boson and pursue the search for new particles.

After suffering a catastrophic failure early in its history, the LHC was run for several years at energies that created collisions at seven or eight Tera-electronVolts. This was followed by an extended shutdown that upgraded hardware and fixed the defects that caused the earlier failure. Last year's physics run was the fist at 13TeV, and the collider's operators were relatively cautious as they learned how to control the machine at these higher energies.

The new energies provide two major advantages. Since new particles are created by converting energy to matter, the higher the energy, the heavier the particles you can produce. And some analyses have been finding hints that there might be a new particle in the neighborhood of 750 Giga-electronVolts—nearly 800 times the mass of the protons that were smashed to create it.

(credit: SPUR)

Uber and Lyft said Monday they are suspending their ride-hailing services in Austin—the home of the South by Southwest festival—in the wake of a driver-fingerprinting fracas.

The companies had said they would bail on the tech hub if voters rejected Proposition 1 to repeal regulations in a dispute that is likely to play itself out in other areas. It's a legal fight that is a victory for taxi cab companies, which have been hit hard by ride-hailing companies.

Nearly 56 percent of voters rejected Proposition 1 on Saturday. The companies spent a combined $8 million in a failed bid to get it passed. The measure would have repealed earlier regulations for transportation network company drivers to pass a driver-history background check and a fingerprint background check. The fingerprints eventually make their way to the FBI. The companies said the regulations were making it too difficult to follow their business models.

This wizard greets visitors to ImageMagick's website. (credit: ImageMagick)

Attackers have wasted no time targeting a critical vulnerability that could allow them to take complete control over websites running a widely used image-processing application, security researchers said.

As Ars reported last week, a vulnerability in ImageMagick allows hackers to execute code of their choice on webservers that use the app to resize or crop user-uploaded images. Over the past few days, security researchers said, attackers have begun uploading booby-trapped images in an attempt to exploit the vulnerability, which is indexed as CVE-2016-3714. CloudFlare, a content delivery network that helps secure and optimize websites, has updated its Web application firewall to block exploits in an attempt to protect customers who have yet to patch the remote code-execution threat.

"We began watching the exploitation of CVE-2016-3714 as soon as the WAF rule went live across our network," CloudFlare researcher John Graham-Cumming wrote in a blog post published Monday. "The bad news is that this vulnerability is being actively used by hackers to attack websites."

Even turtles need more than 4Mbps. (credit: Comcast)

Four US senators say that the Internet speed standard for a government grant program shouldn't be stuck at 4Mbps.

The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities, but it uses a speed standard of just 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Even that speed is an increase over the 3Mbps (download and upload combined) standard the program used until just a few weeks ago.

US Senators Angus King (I-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) say that the USDA didn't raise the standard high enough. In a letter last week to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, the senators questioned the decision to set the grant program's speed threshold below the 10Mbps/1Mbps standard used by a separate USDA loan program.

On the 3,000-year-old mummy's neck, you can see two seated baboons on either side of a wadjet eye (top row), which is a symbol of protection.

5 more images in gallery

Covered in more than 30 tattoos of flowers, animals, and sacred symbols, this 3,000-year-old mummy is one of the most unusual that archaeologist Anne Austin has ever seen. Though other mummies have been found with abstract markings like dots tattooed on their skin, no one had ever seen figurative drawings like these. Austin and her colleagues were stunned. The mummy, found in a village called Deir el-Medina, was once a woman who proudly inked sacred wadjet eyes on her neck, shoulders, and back, lotus blossoms on her hips, and cows on her arm. Her village was home to artisans who worked in the nearby Valley of the Kings, where they would have carved elaborate sculptures and inscriptions for pharaohs and gods.

It's not clear what the tattoos meant nor why this particular woman had so many of them. But Austin speculates that they had religious significance, particularly the eyes and the cows, which may have been a reference to the goddess Hathor. "Any angle that you look at this woman, you see a pair of divine eyes looking back at you," she told Nature after presenting her work at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. She first discovered the tattoos when she saw the eye and baboons clearly visible on the mummy's neck. Suspecting there might be more, she used infrared imaging to see ink that had penetrated the woman's skin but was no longer visible due to dark resins used for mummification. This is the same technique that scientists used to discover the tattoos on the body of Ötzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old body that was accidentally preserved in ice for thousands of years. Ötzi had more than 60 tattoos created with ash that were entirely abstract, mostly horizontal lines on parts of his body where joint swelling suggests that he would have been suffering pain.

When Austin used infrared imaging, she was able to find many tattoos that were previously hidden. The tattoos on the woman's back became visible, and Austin and her colleagues used image reconstruction software to correct distortions that were introduced when the mummy's skin shrank over time. Once the tattoos were stretched, she could clearly see the two cows on the woman's arm and many other images. Some of the tattoos, she says, were in places where it would have been extremely painful to be tattooed, especially because the process would have been very slow in ancient times. They were also clearly created by someone else, since many were on the woman's back. These facts suggest the tattoos may have had deep cultural significance. There is also evidence that some of the tattoos were faded, so the woman was probably getting new ink for many years as older tattoos faded.

(credit: US EIA)

US carbon emissions were down slightly in 2015, continuing a period in which economic growth has been accompanied by relatively flat emissions. Compared to 2005, however, the current numbers represent a 12 percent drop. The Energy Information Agency (EIA) indicates this has largely been caused by the transition from coal to natural gas.

US carbon emissions saw a significant drop during the 2008-2009 economic crisis, driven largely by falling economic activity. As the economy began to rebound in 2010, so did carbon emissions. But succeeding years have seen a series of relatively minor ups and downs—the current numbers represent a drop of about two percent compared to 2014. Notably, the emissions are also below those at the height of the economic crisis in 2009.

That's rather significant, as economic growth has been consistently in the neighborhood of two percent since 2010. This provides a strong indication that, for the moment at least, the US has decoupled economic growth from carbon emissions. Overall, the economy is up about 15 percent since 2005 when inflation is taken into account.