Ransomware can lock up your computer, costing hundreds of pounds.Photograph: Alamy A number of major news websites have seen adverts hijacked by a malicious campaign that attempts to install “ransomware” on users computers, according to a warning from security researchers Malwarebytes . The attack,…

The next resupply mission for the International Space Station (ISS) will include the kit needed to light a fire in a spacecraft. And NASA plans to strike a match and make it happen. The fire's a NASA idea: it knows that fire in space is dangerous but doesn't know how fire behaves in a zero gravity…

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The New York Times ran a piece about Bernie Sanders Monday, a sort of left-handed compliment of a legislative profile. It was called “ Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years Via Legislative Side Doors .” I took notice of the piece by Jennifer Steinhauer because I wrote essentially the same…

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korea's highest court sentenced an American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion on Wednesday, weeks after authorities presented him to media and he tearfully confessed that he had tried to steal a propaganda banner. Otto Warmbier, a…

North Korea has sentenced an American college student to 15 years’ hard labour after finding him guilty of “crimes against the state”, in a ruling that is certain to increase tensions with Washington. Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old economics student at the University of Virginia, was found guilty of…

in Education, Film | July 29th, 2013 48 Comments Advertisement I’m sure you’ve heard by now: wealthy, successful film director Spike Lee hopes to fund his next film via a Kickstarter campaign . Yes, that’s right, he wants you to pay for his art. His campaign, perhaps needless to say, is hardly…

Once again, hacktivist collective Anonymous has threatened to take down 2016 presidential hopeful Donald Trump, this time declaring "total war" on the GOP frontrunner. Anonymous' war plan against Trump includes dismantling the candidate's online presence and digging for dirt on the business tycoon…

The first ever all-female flight deck crew for Royal Brunei Airlines has operated a plane from Brunei to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Although it was a milestone for the airline, the pilot crew touched down in a country where women are still not allowed to drive a car. To mark Brunei’s National Day,…

This drawing comes from a video that explains to scientists how it could be possible to publish quickly online without alienating oneself from the traditional journal system. Credit Asapbio.org/Yourekascience.org On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize…

David Greene talks to former national security official Richard Clarke about the fight between Apple and the FBI. The FBI wants an iPhone that was used by one of the San Bernardino shooters unlocked. DAVID GREENE, HOST: In the long debate over an iPhone, there has been a voice missing - President…

Archimedes pointed out that with a lever he could move the world. He most likely would have been surprised to learn that a team of six microrobots, weighing just 3.5 ounces in total, could pull a car weighing 3,900 pounds. Let's all Pull Together: Team of µTug Microrobots Pulls a Car Credit Video by…

Jamie Gilt, who has built a thriving web presence on the argument that guns are perfectly safe around kids, was shot by her young child.Photograph: Facebook/Jamie Gilt T his week, in my country, considered by some of its more embarrassing denizens to be the “greatest country in the world”, an…

People living in the Canadian province of Ontario could soon start receiving an unconditional allowance each month, with the government this week announcing that it'll begin trialling a pilot version of universal basic income in 2016. The idea is that by giving everyone a set amount of money…

The pioneering Bay Area punk band Dead Kennedys are now elder statesmen of the music industry. Contributed In the 38 years that have passed since the Dead Kennedys began to carve a path into the history of punk rock, the world has experienced many changes. President Reagan came and went, the iPhone…

Drought-hit land in Thailand. Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, says the global temperatures for February are ‘unprecedented’.Photograph: Rungroj Yongrit/EPA February smashed a century of global temperature records by a “stunning” margin, according to…

Surveillance capitalism does not erode these decision rights –– along with their causes and their effects –– but rather it redistributes them. Instead of many people having some rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social…

Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to both your health and productivity. Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. But results from one study impress just how bad a cumulative lack of sleep can be on performance. Subjects in a lab-based sleep study who were allowed to get only six hours of sleep a night…

pronounced you-block origin ( /ˈjuːˌblɒk/ ) — you decide what enters your browser. An efficient blocker add-on for various browsers. Fast, potent, and lean. uBlock Origin is NOT an "ad blocker": it is a wide-spectrum blocker -- which happens to be able to function as a mere "ad blocker". The default…

The man behind Team GhostShell — the hacker collective behind some of the biggest cyber attacks in recent memory, including attacks on the FBI, NASA and the Pentagon as well as a leak that saw 2.5 million Russian “government, educational, academic, political and law enforcement” accounts compromised…

Source: Plainpicture Source: Plainpicture When Daniel Rigmaiden was a little boy, his grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea, used to drive him along the roads of Monterey, California, playing him tapes of Ronald Reagan speeches. Something about the ideals of small government and personal…

In an American election season that’s turned into a bonfire of the orthodoxies, one taboo survives pretty much intact: Budget deficits are dangerous. A school of dissident economists wants to toss that one onto the flames, too. It’s a propitious time to make the case, and not just in the U.S.…

February 4, 2016 GOP seen as favoring the rich over middle class, poor; mixed views on which class the Democratic Party favors At a time when the middle class in the United States is losing ground, most Americans say the federal government provides too little help to this segment of society. A…

The following story was written by Reddit user ehwut in /r/blastfromthefuture , and is being distributed here with permission. Lightly edited for this venue. You may notice that the style slips in and out of newsiness — I must chasten you to remember that the journalistic habits of 2064 will differ…

In Saturday’s edition of the New York Times, Matt Apuzzo reports that the Department of Justice is locked in a “prolonged standoff” with WhatsApp. The government is frustrated by its lack of real-time access to messages protected by the company’s end-to-end encryption . The story may represent a…

Thuan Pham, Chief Technology Officer at Uber Technologies, Inc. Photo credit: TheInformation It was in 1979 that Thuan Pham left on a refugee boat from Vietnam, a country torn by a two-decade long war . On the 60-meter boat were 10-year old Thuan, his mother, a young brother, and about 370 other…

Minecraft is to become a testing ground for artificial intelligence experiments. Microsoft, owner of the popular video game, revealed that computer scientists and amateurs will be able to evaluate and develop AI software using its virtual landscapes from July. The company says Minecraft is more…

Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed. He had been running a simulation of an evolving planet, when suddenly oxygen started accumulating in the virtual planet’s atmosphere. Up the…

The air was as crisp as a hundred dollar bill, on April 27, 1936. A southwesterly breeze filled the bright white sails of the pleasure boats sailing across the San Francisco Bay. Through the cabin window of a ferryboat, a man studied the horizon. His tired eyes were hooded, his dark hair swept…

Update: With the release of the Panama Papers , a reliable means of exposing corruption and the methods of money laundering and tax evasion are now even more important. Web scraping provides an avenue to find, collate, and organize data without relying on information leaks . Paid political influence…

Credit: Charles Rondeau/ public domain A team of Japanese scientists has found a species of bacteria that eats the type of plastic found in most disposable water bottles. The discovery, published Thursday in the journal Science , could lead to new methods to manage the more than 50 million tons of…

A new study confirms what many Americans already knew deep in their hearts: We're not good at math. Not only that, but when it comes to technology skills, we're dead last compared with other developed countries. The PIAAC study — the Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies — looks…

Do you have normal sexual tastes? A new study suggests sexual fantasies, urges and behaviours that are often considered abnormal are actually quite common among the general population, raising questions about how psychiatrists and psychologists define what is sexually normal or not. The study,…

The various branches of the establishment are frequently criticized for not understanding, or even caring about, the critically important fields of privacy and security. In just one image, the New York Post shows just how bad the situation is with this ignorance. When I was in the European…

I'm in London for Kubecon right now, and the hotel I'm staying at has decided that light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets. One was embedded in the wall, but the two next to the bed had convenient looking ethernet cables plugged into the wall. So. I…

Best buds (Picture: TV Globo) Today’s most heartwarming story is brought to you from a beach in Brazil. It’s the story of a South American Magellanic penguin who swims 5,000 miles each year to be reunited with the man who saved his life. Retired bricklayer and part time fisherman Joao Pereira de…

In thus June 6, 2013 file photo, a sign stands outside the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File) A while back, we noted a report showing that the “sneak-and-peek” provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security…