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NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left, and US Representative Mike Honda, center, tour the NASA Ames SpaceShop. (credit: NASA)

Although it has been less than thrilled by NASA’s effective taboo on lunar exploration, Congress has adopted a good-cop approach toward the agency's asteroid-then-Mars human spaceflight plans during the last six years. In hearings, members have suggested that the space agency reconsider its human mission to an asteroid and perhaps work with Europe on some tentative plans to send humans to the surface of the Moon. But NASA hasn’t acquiesced to this gentle cajoling.

During the recent appropriations process in the House, as Ars reported in May, members exercised the power of the purse to more forcefully nudge NASA back toward the Moon as an interim step to Mars. Lawmakers zeroed out funding for the asteroid mission and encouraged NASA to “develop plans to return to the Moon to test capabilities that will be needed for Mars, including habitation modules, lunar prospecting, and landing and ascent vehicles.” After discussions with lawmakers, aides, and officials in the aerospace community since then, it has become clear this is no transient movement. Rather, the Moon-then-Mars plan has bipartisan support.

NASA’s prohibition on lunar exploration dates to 2010, when President Obama set NASA's human exploration program on a course to visit an asteroid by 2025 and then on to Mars in the 2030s. As for the Moon, then the short-term goal of NASA’s human spaceflight program, Obama said, “We’ve been there before.” Now House members see the end of Obama’s presidency looming and have found his go-it-alone approach toward Mars probably will not be supported by the next president—Republican or Democrat.

Controlling sensitive data is a continuing challenge for enterprises. Hackers are responsible for more than their fair share of data leaks, but accidental disclosure by employees of things like social security numbers and banking details is also significant: folders get shared with too many people, e-mail addresses are fat-fingered to inadvertently include people outside the organization, and so on. The use of cloud-based apps like Salesforce, Google Apps, and DocuSign makes control of data even more complex, as even on-premises data can be inadvertently placed online. This isn't always done with the IT department's knowledge or oversight, as users turn to useful services to help them do their jobs without involving IT.

Mountain View-based startup Egnyte is hoping to offer a solution with its new Egnyte Protect service. It provides access control and will soon enable selective encryption and control over data residency and retention, spanning both local storage and common cloud services. Protect uses features of the files—things like "created by the finance department" or "contains a social security number"—to apply rules to them. For example, any files containing social security numbers can be blocked from public sharing, or any file with financial data must be encrypted.

Egnyte Protect is a software-as-a-service offering, using cloud-provided compute resources to continuously classify and analyze documents and file activity. Rules are a mix of IT-configured manual policies and automated rules from large-scale data analytics. These rules can be somewhat flexible; for example, sending an administrative alert only on the second attempt to share private data (so that accidental clicks don't necessarily cause an escalation and intervention). The rules are applied regardless of whether files reside on premises or in the cloud and are used both for local applications and online ones.

Yahoo's once-iconic San Francisco billboard, pictured here in 2011. (credit: Scott Schiller)

Verizon is submitting a $3 billion (£2 billion) bid to purchase Yahoo's core Internet business, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites an anonymous source. Though at least one more round of bidding is expected, Verizon is reportedly the leading contender.

A Verizon spokesperson declined comment when contacted by Ars this morning.

Yahoo has been shopping itself around for months in an attempt to sell off just about everything except its valuable stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Yahoo is also looking to sell other assets including real estate and patents, but Verizon reportedly isn't interested in buying those.