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Who wouldn't want to see space from the comfort of a balloon capsule? (credit: World View)

There are balloon rides, and then there are balloon rides. And although it may sound like something out of a Jules Verne novel, a company called World View says it will begin taking passengers to the edge of outer space by the end of 2017. In a step toward that goal on Tuesday, company officials confirmed that the first flights will take place in southern Arizona near the Tucson International Airport.

World View plans to fly six passengers in a pressurized cabin to an altitude of 30km, where they will remain for a couple of hours. The generally accepted boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is 100km, known as the Kármán line. However, at 30km, or about 100,000 feet, the balloon will have risen above 99 percent of Earth’s atmosphere and afford fine views of the planet’s curvature and the blackness of space. The company has priced tickets at $75,000 per person for an experience that will last four to six hours in total.

The company is relying on established technology, as well as new innovations, to bring humans to the edge of space. Weather balloons have flown into the stratosphere for nearly a century. High altitude balloons, like the one World View will use, are made of a high performance polyethylene film. When inflated with helium, at its maximum altitude, World View’s balloon will be about the size of a football field.

San Francisco has a famous bridge that was designed to look like the Cisco logo. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Build developer conference will be in San Francisco once again, on March 30 to April 1. In spite of costing a little more this year, $2,195 (~£1,550) to last year's $2,095 (~£1,480), the conference sold out in record time. All tickets were gone within one minute. During the brief moment that tickets were available, there was much grumbling about site malfunctions and getting immediately placed onto the waiting list. That high traffic surge appears to be the reason why.

For everyone who didn't get tickets, the majority of the event will be streamed live, and session videos will no doubt be posted online. Steve Guggenheimer, the chief evangelist of Developer Experience, says that for next year, Microsoft is trying to get more attendee capacity. But that'll be too late for this spring's event.

Few details aside from the venue—the Moscone Center—and dates are currently known. Microsoft has yet to publish an agenda for the developer-focused event. The only thing we do know is that, unlike events of the past, there apparently won't be any hardware giveaways for attendees. This is sure to be a disappointment to anyone hoping to pick up a HoloLens headset from their trip to California. Instead, attendees are promised a "deeper technical experience for developers," though precisely what this means is unclear. Our hope is that it means better catering, which has been a particularly weak point of the last couple of Build events.

(credit: amalthya)

For almost three years, millions of servers and smaller devices running Linux have been vulnerable to attacks that allow an unprivileged app or user to gain nearly unfettered root access. Major Linux distributors are expected to fix the privilege escalation bug this week, but the difficulty of releasing updates for Android handsets and embedded devices means many people may remain susceptible for months or years.

The flaw, which was introduced into the Linux kernel in version 3.8 released in early 2013, resides in the OS keyring. The facility allows apps to store encryption keys, authentication tokens, and other sensitive security data inside the kernel while remaining in a form that can't be accessed by other apps. According to a blog post published Tuesday, researchers from security firm Perception Point discovered and privately reported the bug to Linux kernel maintainers. To demonstrate the risk the bug posed, the researchers also developed a proof-of-concept exploit that replaces a keyring object stored in memory with code that's executed by the kernel.

The vulnerability is notable because it's exploitable in a wide array of settings. On servers, people with local access can exploit it to achieve complete root access. On smartphones running Android versions KitKat and later, it can allow a malicious app to break out of the normal security sandbox to gain control of underlying OS functions. It can also be exploited on devices and appliances running embedded versions of Linux. While security mitigations such as supervisor mode access prevention and supervisor mode execution protection are available for many servers, and security enhanced Linux built into Android can make exploits harder, there are still ways to bypass those protections.

(credit: UNICEF)

Children as young as seven years old are working for up to $2 daily mining in dangerous conditions to gather cobalt used in lithium batteries for 16 multinational corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, and others, according to Amnesty International.

If true, a report by the human rights group about mining conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo counters claims by gadget producers that child labor is not involved in their production stream. The report said at least 80 miners have died in the past year in the DRC, which produces about half the world's cobalt. Unicef estimates that there are as many as 40,000 child miners in the region. Amnesty International interviewed dozens of workers, who usually wear no protective clothing while toiling long hours.

A 14-year-old orphan named Paul said he works so long underground that "I had to relieve myself down in the tunnels," according to the report. "I would spend 24 hours down in the tunnels. I arrived in the morning and would leave the following morning," the boy told Amnesty International.

The Samsung Galaxy S III, released in mid-2012, is the newest phone involved in yesterday's injunction. (credit: SamsungTomorrow)

One month from now, Samsung will be banned from selling certain smartphones in the US. The phones involved are so old, however, that the legal order will not affect the marketplace in a meaningful way.

The injunction by US District Judge Lucy Koh is part of the long-running Apple v. Samsung lawsuits, which began nearly five years ago. In the second lawsuit, a jury awarded Apple $120 million, but Koh didn't grant an injunction against Samsung's infringing phones. Last September, she was overturned by the Federal Circuit.

Yesterday, Koh entered the injunction order (PDF) as the higher court mandated. Still, the banned phones and features are fairly irrelevant to the Samsung of today.

With Netflix saying it intends to disable video when customers use VPN services, VPN providers are criticizing the online video company and vowing to evade any measures designed to prevent their use.

Under pressure from content owners, Netflix said last week that it will step up enforcement against subscribers who use VPNs, proxies, and unblocking services to view content not available in their countries. But even Netflix acknowledges that it's "trivial" for VPN providers to avoid blocks by switching IP addresses, and VPN providers say they're ready.

“Unfortunately, many legitimate paid subscribers will be left in the dark as an unavoidable outcome of overreaching IP blocks," TorGuard's Ben van der Pelt told TorrentFreak in an article yesterday. “TorGuard is monitoring the situation closely and we have recently implemented new measures that can bypass any proposed IP blockade on our network. VPN users who encounter Netflix access problems are encouraged to contact us for a working solution."