Gas company hit with wrongful death suit over massive natural gas leak

Family claims the demise of a woman with lung cancer was hastened by SoCal Gas.

Protesters and attendants at an Aliso Canyon community meeting. (credit: Cal OES)

In late January, an elderly woman with lung cancer died in the community of Porter Ranch just north of Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, her family sued Southern California Gas Company (PDF) for wrongful death in connection with a massive natural gas leak that started in the area in late October.

The woman, Zelda Rothman, was diagnosed in spring 2015, several months before the leak started. While the family isn’t asserting that Rothman’s lung cancer was caused by the gas leak, they claim that the leak hastened her death.

Rothman lived less than three miles from the leak, the complaint states, attributing her alleged undoing to her proximity. “Continuously leaking gas exacerbated Ms. Rothman’s condition and disrupted her already fragile health. The gas replaced precious oxygen in the air that she breathed, causing her to suffer from difficult and labored breathing.” Eventually, Rothman had to be placed on an oxygen tank 24 hours a day. The gas also allegedly caused “intense headaches and migraines, among other symptoms.”

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Hey, drone owners! Don’t fly at the Super Bowl

Oh, and there’s a new app to tell you about temporary flight restriction zones.

Do not be trying to get aerial shots of Peyton Manning. Thanks, the FAA. (credit: Kevin Baird)

Hey, all you newly minted unmanned air vehicle enthusiasts out there (and especially those of you in the San Francisco Bay area)! The Know Before You Fly campaign has an important message for you: don't bring (or fly) your drone to Super Bowl 50. The campaign—a joint effort of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—is urging drone and model aircraft owners to respect the temporary flight restrictions (TFR) covering everywhere in a 32-mile radius around Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on February 7.

The FAA usually places restrictions on the airspace around any major event with attendance of 30,000 people or more, including sporting events and concerts. But because of its high-security profile, the Super Bowl is getting a much larger no-fly zone than usual. The Super Bowl TFR, which lasts from 2:00pm Pacific Time until midnight, covers almost all of the Bay Area, including all of San Francisco and Oakland to the north and Santa Cruz and most of the northern Monterey Bay coast to the south.

Super Bowl Sunday's flight restriction zone (the two red concentric circles) are a no-fly zone for drones or model aircraft of any kind.

The Know Before You Fly campaign, which operates the website for registering new drones under the FAA's recently announced regulations, is part of a broader effort by the FAA and its industry and nonprofit partners to reduce the risk of drones interfering with commercial and government aircraft or injuring people on the ground. The FAA has also launched a mobile app, called B4UFLY, to allow drone operators to check for TFRs where they are, based on geolocation data. Hint: if you live in a major urban area, you are probably in a restricted flight area, since any hospital or other facility with a helicopter pad qualifies as an "airport" for FAA purposes. The app is in Apple's iOS App Store, and an Android version is in testing now through the Google Play Store (though Ars was unable to access the test version).

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Android Wear goes Marshmallow, gains new gestures, voice commands

Android Wear goes Marshmallow, gains new gestures, voice commands

Google’s smartwatch platform is getting a little smarter. The company has announced that a new version of Android Wear is starting to roll out, and it’s based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow (API 23 SDK). Among other things, this means you can use the speakers on Android Wear watches that have them. Google has also announced […]

Android Wear goes Marshmallow, gains new gestures, voice commands is a post from: Liliputing

Android Wear goes Marshmallow, gains new gestures, voice commands

Google’s smartwatch platform is getting a little smarter. The company has announced that a new version of Android Wear is starting to roll out, and it’s based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow (API 23 SDK). Among other things, this means you can use the speakers on Android Wear watches that have them. Google has also announced […]

Android Wear goes Marshmallow, gains new gestures, voice commands is a post from: Liliputing

Nintendo puts its sleep-tracker plans to sleep

First part of the new “Quality of Life” initiative isn’t product-ready.

Tellingly left out of this old Nintendo flow chart: the part where it becomes an actual product.

Remember a little over a year ago when Nintendo announced it was taking some of its focus off of making video games and consoles to develop a "Quality of Life" sensor that monitors your sleep? That was weird, right? Apparently, Nintendo has come to this conclusion too, and the company has officially put the effort on hold.

"In regards to the Quality of Life [device], which was not mentioned in any of today’s questions, we do not have the conviction that the sleep-and-fatigue-themed [device] can enter the phase of actually becoming a product,” Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima said during an investors Q&A session (translated by Wired). "We no longer have any plans to release it by the end of March 2016."

The remarks echo similar comments Kimishima made to the Japanese newspaper Asahi (as translated by Kotaku), where he said the sleep-tracker is "not yet at the level of a Nintendo product. If we can release it, we’ll release it. If we can’t, then we’ll examine things further."

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Android Wear gets wide Marshmallow rollout, adds speaker and LTE support

After debuting on a disastrous LG watch, other devices will finally get the update.

The speaker-equipped Android Wear devices: The Huawei Watch (left) and ASUS ZenWatch 2 (49mm) (right). (credit: Google)

The Android 6.0 Marshmallow update for Android Wear is back. The update debuted on the disastrous LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE in November, but due to "image quality issues" LG pulled the watch from the market after only six days. The Marshmallow Android Wear update seemed to go down with the Watch Urbane, and the update went missing in action for the last two months. According to a post on the Official Android Blog, it's now back and will now roll out to "all Android Wear watches over the next few weeks."

Other than the update to a new base of Android, the new version of Android Wear adds the ability to send an instant message with your voice while specifying the service you want to use. For instance, it's now possible to command "OK Google, Send a WhatsApp message to Nathan: I’ll be right there." Google notes you can currently call out Google Hangouts, Nextplus, Telegram, Viber, WeChat, and WhatsApp by name.

The other big update feature will require extra hardware: Android Wear now supports speakers. If you have a watch with a speaker, you can listen to audio messages and make calls directly from the watch. (There's no word on audio notifications, though.) Some watches currently on the market actually planned ahead for this and included speakers. Both the Huawei Watch and ASUS ZenWatch 2 (49mm) have included dormant speakers for instance, and with the update these should wake up and function.

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Mysterious spike in WordPress hacks silently delivers ransomware to visitors

Researchers still aren’t sure how the sites are getting compromised.

If you're a gamer (or anyone else), this is not a screen you want to see. (credit: Bromium Labs)

It's still not clear how, but a disproportionately large number of websites that run on the WordPress content management system are being hacked to deliver crypto ransomware and other malicious software to unwitting end users.

In the past four days, researchers from three separate security firms have reported that a large number of legitimate WordPress sites have been hacked to silently redirect visitors to a series of malicious sites. The attack sites host code from the Nuclear exploit kit that's available for sale in black markets across the Internet. People who visit the WordPress sites using out-of-date versions of Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Silverlight, or Internet Explorer can then find their computers infected with the Teslacrypt ransomware package, which encrypts user files and demands a hefty ransom for the decryption key needed to restore them.

"WordPress sites are injected with huge blurbs of rogue code that perform a silent redirection to domains appearing to be hosting ads," Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. "This is a distraction (and fraud) as the ad is stuffed with more code that sends visitors to the Nuclear Exploit Kit."

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Epic announces VR updates for Unreal Editor, predicts VR editing future

“Every piece of 3D software we use today will move to VR as quickly as possible.”

The battle for the next big thing in virtual reality isn't just raging among headset makers; there's also a battle over the 3D engines that power those experiences. Though most of the leading 3D engine makers offer robust support for burgeoning VR platforms, our anecdotal experience has seen creators leaning heavily toward the Unity engine. In total, 11 out of the 12 demos we tried out at last week's major HTC Vive Pre VR event took that route.

Epic Games, the creators of the popular Unreal Engine, want in on that action. On Wednesday, the company announced an ace up its sleeve: full inside-of-VR support. The feature, which will receive its first public demo during March's Game Developers Conference, will allow any owner of a motion-tracked VR system on a PC (meaning, HTC Vive or Oculus Touch) to warp into their in-development 3D worlds and edit them using nothing more than those systems' handheld controllers.

Unreal Engine VR proof of concept.

"As soon as we got our hands on the first Oculus, we were intrigued by the possibilities," Epic Technical Director Mike Fricker said in an interview with Ars. "[Co-founder] Mark Rein came to us in 2013 with the first Oculus DK1 and asked about getting an editor in VR."

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Space experts warn Congress that NASA’s “Journey to Mars” is illusory

Testimony says NASA lacks the financial resources and technology to do the mission.

House Republican Brian Babin chaired a hearing in which experts said NASA's plans for Mars lacked real substance. (credit: NASA)

For the last half-decade, NASA has resolutely declared that it has embarked on a Journey to Mars. Virtually every agency achievement has, in one way or another, been characterized as furthering this ambition. Even last summer when the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said it represented “one more step” on the Journey to Mars.

But as the end of President Obama’s second term in office nears, Congress has begun to assess NASA’s Mars ambitions. On Wednesday during a House space subcommittee hearing, legislators signaled that they were not entirely pleased with those plans. Comments from lawmakers, and the three witnesses called to the hearing, indicate NASA’s Journey to Mars may receive some pushback in the next year or two.

Some of the most critical testimony came from John Sommerer, a space scientist who spent more than a year as chairman of a National Research Council technical panel reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight activities. That panel’s work, summarized in a 2014 report titled Pathways to Exploration, considered possible pathways to Mars.

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MPAA Takes Over Popcorn Time Domain

The MPAA is now the owner of Popcorntime.io, the domain name which was the home of the most used Popcorn Time fork up until last November. The change of ownership suggests that the Hollywood group reached a settlement with one of the key developers, but has yet to comment on the recent developments.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

popcorntLate last year the main Popcorn Time fork, operating from the PopcornTime.io domain name, shut down its website unexpectedly.

The MPAA took credit for the fall announcing that it had filed a lawsuit against several of the developers in Canada. In response to these legal threats several key developers backed out.

Since the initial announcement there haven’t been any official updates on the case. TorrentFreak learned, however, that several of the accused developers have been negotiating a deal to settle the dispute out of court.

This week came the first public signs that the case is indeed moving towards a resolution. On Tuesday the PopcornTime.io domain changed ownership from Popcorn Time developer and defendant David Lemarier, to the MPAA.

This means that Hollywood is now officially in control of what was once the most popular Popcorn Time domain.

Whois Popcorntime.io

popio

TorrentFreak reached out to the MPAA and Lemarier for more details several days ago, but both have yet to reply. The other defendants we contacted preferred not to comment on the case.

From the information we were able to gather in recent weeks it appears that the movie studios prefer a settlement over a full court battle. Perhaps to save costs, perhaps to avoid attracting more attention to the Popcorn Time phenomenon.

This would be similar to how they approached their case against YIFY/TYS, which was arguable the most prominent piracy group of the past half decade. However, instead of taking the operator to court the movie studios quickly arranged an out of court settlement.

With the PopcornTime.io domain now in the hands of the MPAA it is safe to conclude that this fork is not coming back.

Previously the software’s developers maintained that they were not involved in any infringing activity. Theoretically, some of the accused may still choose to put up a fight but considering the recent developments this has become less likely.

Meanwhile, several other Popcorn Time forks continue to operate, launching new features and services as if nothing ever changed.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Deals of the Day (2-04-2016)

Deals of the Day (2-04-2016)

There’s no shortage of 2-in-1 Windows tablets on the market, but it’s hard to find a model with 4GB of RAM, a Wacom digitizer pen, and a full HD display for under $400… but today that’s just what Newegg is offering. Mytrix isn’t a brand I’m familiar with, but on paper, the company’s Complex 11T […]

Deals of the Day (2-04-2016) is a post from: Liliputing

Deals of the Day (2-04-2016)

There’s no shortage of 2-in-1 Windows tablets on the market, but it’s hard to find a model with 4GB of RAM, a Wacom digitizer pen, and a full HD display for under $400… but today that’s just what Newegg is offering. Mytrix isn’t a brand I’m familiar with, but on paper, the company’s Complex 11T […]

Deals of the Day (2-04-2016) is a post from: Liliputing