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(credit: Ian Britton)

French police are investigating the suicide death of a woman who threw herself under a train Tuesday and live-streamed her death on Periscope. The woman was killed at the Égly station, just south of Paris on the C line of the R.E.R. train system.

The 19-year-old woman's name has not been released. "This person allegedly sent an SMS to one of her close relations, several minutes before her death, to announce her intentions," Eric Lallement, a local prosecutor, said in a statement. "Furthermore, she allegedly made statements to Internet users, via the Periscope application, to explain her act."

The woman is said to have named a person she claims had recently raped her before she committed suicide.

(credit: Blakegripling ph)

Allwinner, a Chinese system-on-a-chip company that makes the processor used in many low-cost Android tablets, set-top boxes, ARM-based PCs, and other devices, apparently shipped a version of its Linux kernel with a ridiculously easy-to-use backdoor built in. All any code needs to do to gain root access is send the text "rootmydevice" to an undocumented debugging process.

The backdoor code may have inadvertently been left in the kernel after developers completed debugging. But the company has been less than transparent about it: information about the backdoor was released and then apparently deleted through Allwinner's own Github account. The kernel, linux-3.4-sunxi, which was originally developed to support Android on Allwinner's ARM processors for tablets, has also been used to develop a community version. The kernel was also the basis for porting over various versions of Linux to Allwinner's processors, which are used in the Orange Pi and Banana Pi micro-PCs (developer boards compatible with Raspberry Pi) along with a number of other devices.

The way Allwinner has distributed its Linux kernel has been frustrating to many developers. The company has not encouraged or participated in community development and has been accused of numerous violations of the GPL license for the Linux kernel. The kernel "drops" by Allwinner include a number of binaries that are essentially closed source, as well as code released under other licenses—largely to support the graphics engines of its processors.

NASA's SOFIA observatory in red skies above Earth, not Mars. (credit: NASA)

Mars today is a cold, dead world because it lost its magnetic field more than 4 billion years ago. Once the magnetic field was gone, the solar wind began stripping away a Martian atmosphere that was once as thick as that of Earth. Even today the red planet loses about 100 grams of its thin atmosphere each second.

In the 1970s, the Viking lander measured what was left of the Martian atmosphere after billions of years of being ravaged by the solar wind, and it found a composition of 95 percent carbon dioxide, with tiny amounts of nitrogen and oxygen, as well as traces of argon, hydrogen, and other gases. But because these amounts are so small they haven't been measured again until now.

NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a modified Boeing 747 aircraft that makes observations at up to an altitude of 45,000 feet, has again detected oxygen in the upper atmosphere of Mars. "To observe the far-infrared wavelengths needed to detect atomic oxygen, researchers must be above the majority of Earth’s atmosphere and use highly sensitive instruments, in this case a spectrometer. SOFIA provides both capabilities," said Pamela Marcum, a project scientist with the research aircraft.

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Laptop & Desktop Computers

"Perhaps you should switch to another cable company… oh, that's right, we're the only one in town." (credit: Viacom)

A cable lobby group that represents more than 900 small and medium-size providers is angry that Charter Communications will be competing against other cable companies.

Cable providers usually avoid each other's territory, choosing not to "overbuild" in cities and towns where other cable networks already exist. But Charter agreed to bring some competition to the cable market in exchange for the Federal Communications Commission's approval of its purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Specifically, Charter will deploy high-speed broadband to at least 2 million residential and small business locations, of which at least 1 million must be in areas served by at least one other provider.

Naturally, cable companies aren't happy about facing competition. The American Cable Association (ACA), the lobby for smaller providers, said yesterday that it is "troubled" by the FCC's overbuilding requirement on Charter. But instead of just arguing that competition will hurt small cable companies, the ACA also claims that competition will be bad for customers.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

For the past month, people infected with the CryptXXX ransomware had a way to recover their files without paying the hefty $500 fee to obtain the decryption key. On Tuesday, that reprieve came to an end.

Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said in a blog post that version 2.006 has found a way to bypass a decryption tool that has been freely available for weeks. The tool was provided by Kaspersky Lab and was the result of flaws in the way CryptXXX worked.

The crypto ransomware update effectively renders the Kaspersky tool useless, Proofpoint said. It did this with the use of zlib, a software library used for data compression. The new version also makes it harder to use the Kaspersky tool by locking the screen of an infected computer and making it unusable until the ransom is paid.