news.buyenne.com

(credit: Getty Images | Vitalii Tkachuk)

The US Federal Communications Commission is trying to figure out exactly how much trouble is being caused by radio noise.

Many devices emit radio frequency energy that could interfere with radio services and increase the "radio spectrum noise floor," essentially the sum of all unwanted signals. The FCC is planning to study changes to the noise floor from human-made sources over the past 20 years.

It's commonly believed that "the noise floor in the radio spectrum is rising as the number of devices in use that emit radio energy grows," but the FCC said it hasn't found much quantitative data to support this presumption. As a first step toward the FCC producing such a study, the commission last week asked the public for input on the proper design of the study and input on the problem itself.

The Musudan intermediate range ballistic missile. Five out of six of these missiles have failed in test launches over the past three months. The sixth may or may not have been an improvement.

After repeated failed tests of its intermediate range ballistic missile over the past few months, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) attempted this morning to once again demonstrate its ability to strike with nuclear weapons, launching two Musudan missiles within four hours. The first missile traveled a mere 95 miles (about 150km) before crashing into the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula.

The second flew a more impressive 250 miles (about 400km). There is some disagreement about whether that launch was a complete success, however. North Korea did not previously announce the test or issue a warning to the UN's civil aviation authority of the launches, so it is possible that the missile was aimed at an intentionally closer target area. The real measure of whether the test qualified as a success would be its trajectory—if the missile reached a sufficient altitude to reach more distant targets.

The Musudan, also known as the BM-25, has been estimated previously to have a range of between 2,500 and 4,000km (1,500 to 2,500 miles). Based on 1960s-era Soviet technology with some homegrown tweaks (including a larger fuel supply for extending range), kits for the Musudan were allegedly sold to Iran by North Korea. But despite the fact that North Korea has had Musudan missiles for over a decade, there have been no flight tests of the system in the past—likely because the North Korean regime believed that the Soviet-era design was already proven to be reliable.

Enlarge / macOS Sierra is a big branding change for a typical iterative OS release. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When Apple runs through its operating system announcements at WWDC, the OS X part of the show is pretty much the only instance when the company spends any time talking about a product name.

The Mac has long since ceased to be Apple's most important product, but the company has kept up the tradition of slapping a secondary name on each OS release, something separate from the version number and the "OS X" or "Mac OS X" branding. Often, those names are used to set expectations about the release. Snow Leopard is a refinement of Leopard. Mountain Lion is a refinement of Lion. El Capitan is a refinement of Yosemite.

It's tempting to read the "macOS" rebranding as some grand statement about the Mac, but, truth be told, "Sierra" is more indicative of what we're getting. The name comes from a mountain range that encompasses Yosemite and El Capitan rather than moving away from them. It's another year of building on Yosemite's foundation, another year of incremental change, and another year of over-saturated mountain wallpapers.

Picking the right classification made easy.

Today, Microsoft announced Azure Information Protection (AIP), a new system to help protect sensitive data even as it moves between applications and organizations. AIP builds on the existing Azure Rights Management (RMS) system to add data labelling and classification to ensure that the right protection policies are applied to sensitive data at the time it is created, to help restrict data leaks.

Azure RMS provides a cloud-based system for performing rights management of sensitive information. With RMS, documents are encrypted and restricted in various ways; opening them requires authentication against Azure Active Directory (AD), allowing the usage of the documents to be tracked and recorded. Once opened, the documents can have their usage restricted to prevent, for example, printing or editing.

Unlike a traditional password-protected document, where knowing the password is sufficient to give permanent access to the file, the online authentication used by RMS means that access can be controlled on a more continuous basis. Accounts showing suspicious behavior such as impossible travel (where logins are made from different places around the world faster than one could travel between those places) can be locked out, blocking access to protected data.

Artist's conception of the galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2, the subject of this study. Green represents the light that indicates the presence of ionized oxygen; purple shows ionized hydrogen.

In a new study, researchers describe observations of a distant galaxy, far enough away to be seen as it was a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang (As of this writing, it’s been about 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang). These observations turned up both the most distant oxygen ever observed and new clues about the cosmic phase shift known as reionization.

Early in the Universe’s history, there were no stars and little of any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. When the first stars began to appear, they made two changes in the Universe around them. First, they began to create some of the heavier elements. Second, they started ionizing the hydrogen gas, stripping the electrons off it and leaving it electrically charged.

This second process is called reionization, since hydrogen started out ionized after the Big Bang, and only turned neutral after the Universe cooled. We don't fully understand the reionization era of the Universe’s history, making it a major point of study.