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(credit: David Stanley)

About 1.3 million IP addresses—including those used by Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, and Yelp—are turning users of the Tor anonymity network into second-class Web citizens by blocking them outright or degrading the services offered to them, according to a recently published research paper.

Titled "Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users," the paper said 3.67 percent of websites in the Alexa 1,000 discriminated against computers visiting with known Tor exit-node IP addresses. In some cases, the visitors are completely locked out, while in others users are required to complete burdensome CAPTCHAs or are limited in what they can do. The authors said the singling out was an attempt by the sites to limit fraud and other online crime, which is carried out by a disproportionately high percentage of Tor users. In the process, law-abiding Tor users are being treated as second-class Web citizens.

"While many websites block Tor to reduce abuse, doing so inadvertently impacts users from censored countries who do not have other ways to access censored Internet content," the authors wrote.

(credit: Apple)

Apple's Siri personal assistant will finally be coming to OS X 10.12 when the OS is released later this year, according to a report from 9to5Mac. According to the report, a Siri icon will live in the menu bar in the upper-right corner of the screen along with icons for Spotlight, the Notification Center, and other features. Users will also be able to use a keyboard shortcut to bring up Siri, which will be an optional feature that can be enabled during first-time setup or in System Preferences (much as it works in iOS today).

Microsoft's Cortana feature made a similar jump from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 last year, and Google supports its "OK Google" voice commands in Chrome OS as well.

Since launching on the iPhone 4S in 2011, Siri has become a mainstay in most of Apple's products; it spread to the iPad relatively quickly, it came to the Apple TV when it was refreshed last year, and it's a primary input method for the Apple Watch. OS X already supports an optional Dictation feature for turning speech into text—in other words, the feature is a natural and long-awaited addition to the Mac platform.

Ron Garan at the One Young World summit. (credit: Fragile Oasis)

One of the most frustrating things about being an astronaut, fliers often say, is being unable to share the incredible experience of seeing our world from above with the rest of us. Astronauts go to space and then come back talking about things like seeing no borders, spaceship Earth, and the need to protect our planet both because of its beauty and fragility.

Perhaps no astronaut has taken this to heart more than Ron Garan, who left NASA in 2014 to work full time on sharing this unique perspective of the planet. Garan believes deeply in the “transformative power” of the big picture and how it compels people to address the challenges facing humanity back on Earth.

But Garan’s websites, book, and documentary film can do only so much to help people see this bigger picture. Each medium has its limitations. Really, there’s no substitute for being there and seeing it with one's own eyes. So on Tuesday, Garan announced he’s joining World View, a company that will use balloons to loft passengers above 100,000 feet, as the company’s chief pilot.