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(credit: Jeremy Brooks )

Congressional oversight leaders are requiring most federal agencies to audit their networks to see if they use Juniper-manufactured firewalls that for four years contained an unauthorized backdoor for eavesdropping on encrypted communications.

Members of the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform gave the agencies until February 4 to produce documents showing whether they use Juniper's NetScreen line of firewall appliances. The committee is also requiring agency heads who used the vulnerable devices to show how they learned of the eavesdropping threat and whether they fixed it prior to the release of last month's patch. That update removed the unauthorized code from ScreenOS, the operating system that manages NetScreen firewalls.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the chief oversight body for the US House of Representatives, with broad authority to investigate most matters pertaining to federal agencies. Committee members informed agency heads of the eavesdropping-related investigation involving Juniper hardware in letters dated late last week.

Greetings, Arsians!

Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to share that will change how you work and play for the better. One of the highlights is the Dell Latitude 15 3000 laptop that you can now get for just slightly more than $700. Originally $1,227, this laptop features an Intel Core i7 processor, a 15.6-inch HD display, 8GB of RAM, and a 2GB Nvidia GPU to help you get work done as efficiently as possible.

On the flip side, there are also deals on games for when you need a break, including a $370 PS4 bundle and $20 of games, including Fallout 4, Deadpool, and others.

(credit: Jeffrey)

Over 90 percent of the heat energy added to Earth’s climate system by human activities has gone into the ocean, in part because, well, it's awfully big.

That awful-bigness makes monitoring all that heat energy a real challenge. A new study led by Peter Gleckler and Paul Durack at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory compiled as much data as possible and compared it to climate model simulations. The comparison not only shows that the ocean's warming can only be explained by human impacts (surprise!) but also highlights just how quickly global warming is occurring outside of our view.

Although a large number of automated floats have been measuring temperatures in the upper 2,000 meters of the ocean for over a decade now, ship-based measurements from the past are more sparse. And the deeper the water, the fewer the available measurements. Because of this, studies analyzing the cause of ocean temperature changes have mainly stuck to the upper 700 meters. For this study, the researchers pulled together some more data—including the Challenger Expedition from the 1870s—in order to make deep ocean comparisons more worthwhile.

There are worse ways to spend a couple of days. (credit: Game Science Center Berlin)

Virtual reality headset makers are quick to claim that they have solved the widely reported problems with nausea and "VR sickness" that plagued earlier hardware. But if actions speak louder than words, one artist's 48-hour, reportedly nausea-free stint in an HTC Vive headset speaks pretty highly of the comfort and immersion of the VR device.

"I had no physical problems, no burning eyes, killing headaches or nausea," Thorsten Wiedemann, the founder and artistic director of the A MAZE Festival, told Vice after spending two straight days in a Vive headset for an art project called Disconnected earlier this month. While a panic attack in the 25th hour almost caused Wiedemann to drop out, the rest of the Wiedemann's extended time in VR went off uneventfully, as you can see from livestreamed footage archived on Game Science Center Berlin's YouTube channel.

Wiedemann didn't spend two whole days wandering around virtual reality in fuzzy pink pajamas to prove the safety and comfort of the hardware, though. As Wiedemann told Vice, the project was an early test of what he believes will be a common pastime in 2026, when it will be "normal that you jump into VR to meet your international friends in Social VR Rooms and go on crazy adventures together. But a long trip will be still special and could be understood as a controlled drug experience."