feed on feeds - 2019/01/09 - items 0 to 15

Brazilian president slams freshly-minted global accord, saying rules will be made 'without external influence'.

Astronomers have detected 13 high-speed bursts of radio waves coming from deep space -- including one that regularly repeats. While the exact sources remain unknown, the new bevy of mysterious blasts does offer fresh clues to where and why such flashes appear across the cosmos. From a report: Fast radio bursts, as they are known to scientists, are among the universe's most bizarre phenomena. Each burst lasts just thousandths of a second, and they all appear to be coming from far outside our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Since these bursts were discovered in 2007, their cause has remained a puzzle. Based on estimations of the known range of their frequencies and an understanding of activity in the universe, scientists expect that nearly a thousand of them happen every day. But to date, only a handful have been found. Now, a team using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, has announced the additional 13 new detections, including an especially rare repeating burst. Until now, only one other repeating fast radio burst was known to exist. "The repeater," as it being called, and its 12 counterparts came from a region of space some 1.5 billion light-years away, the team reports today in the journal Nature. All 13 new bursts have the lowest radio frequency yet detected, but they were also brighter than previously seen fast radio bursts, leading the team to think the low frequency has something to do with the sources' environment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump says he told top Democrats 'bye-bye' after they said they would not fund a border wall if he ended the shutdown.

President Donald Trump made a televised address on Tuesday on the issue of the proposed border wall.

A feature of the Google search engine lets threat actors alter search results in a way that could be used to push political propaganda, oppressive views, or promote fake news. From a report: The feature is known as the "knowledge panel" and is a box that usually appears at the right side of the search results, usually highlighting the main search result for a very specific query. For example, searching for Barack Obama would bring a box showing information from Barack Obama's Wikipedia page, along with links to the former president's social media profiles. But Wietze Beukema, a member of PwC's Cyber Threat Detection & Response team, has discovered that you can hijack these knowledge panels and add them to any search query, sometimes in a way that pushes legitimate search results way down the page, highlighting an incorrect result and making it look legitimate. The way this can be done is by first searching for a legitimate item, and pressing the "share" icon that appears inside a knowledge panel.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Saudis fear taking off in private jets as the government aims to collect over $100bn from wealthy citizens.

Scientists analysing data say chances bursts are caused by intelligent life are low, but origins remain a mystery.

The threat comes as pressure mounts on Trump over the ongoing partial shutdown of the US government.

Constitutional Court's decision comes days after President Morales suspends UN-backed anti-corruption graft commission.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The 2016 arrest of a former National Security Agency contractor charged with a massive theft of classified data began with an unlikely source: a tip from a Russian cybersecurity firm that the U.S. government has called a threat to the country. Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab turned Harold T. Martin III in to the NSA after receiving strange Twitter messages in 2016 from an account linked to him, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation. They spoke with POLITICO on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss the case. The company's role in exposing Martin is a remarkable twist in an increasingly bizarre case that is believed to be the largest breach of classified material in U.S. history. It indicates that the government's own internal monitoring systems and investigators had little to do with catching Martin, who prosecutors say took home an estimated 50 terabytes of data from the NSA and other government offices over a two-decade period, including some of the NSA's most sophisticated and sensitive hacking tools. The revelation also introduces an ironic turn in the negative narrative the U.S. government has woven about the Russian company in recent years.