Gene Amdahl in March 2008

Pkivolowitz via Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CC BY 3.0

Gene Amdahl, the man credited with pioneering mainframe design at IBM, died on Tuesday at the age of 92. Growing up without electricity in South Dakota, Amdahl went on to study engineering physics and theoretical physics. When he was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, he developed an early digital computer known as the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer for his PhD thesis.

Amdahl joined IBM right after he graduated, having been recruited while in school. He was instrumental in developing IBM's mainframe system, known as the System/360 series. It was introduced at a shareholder's meeting on April 7, 1964, and became the most successful line of mainframe systems for IBM. And indeed, the design and architecture was evident in computers for decades to come.

Amdahl worked at IBM for six years, before leaving to forge his own path. He went on to found a rival company called the Amdahl Corporation in 1970 which built faster, cheaper hardware that was compatible with IBM software, and it became the first company to truly compete with IBM. The corporation became part of Fujitsu in 1997 and is no longer a stand-alone company, but the Computer History Museum notes that Amdahl at one point captured about one-fifth of the market. The path wasn't always paved with gold, though. Amdahl's later ventures, Trilogy Systems, and the Andor Corporation never saw the same success.

You can read an oral history Amdahl gave about his life in the late 1980s here.

Precision Hawk Drone

Precision Hawk

On Monday, the FAA is going down to North Carolina to see if drones can learn to avoid obstacles. The tests will take place at Butner, about 200 miles away from where the Wright Brothers first flew, and the milestone in aviation they’ll mark is much more modest. The brothers proved planes could fly with people on board. On Monday, the FAA wants to prove planes without people can fly themselves safely.

Specifically, the tests focus on first-person-vision flights, where a pilot steers the drone beyond their line of sight using video streamed from the drone itself to either a screen or headset. The FAA’s draft drone rules prohibit flights beyond line of sight, which limits drone use to where a pilot can be. The goal is to keep drones from crashing into other objects. The rules also in effect constrain how far drones can fly. So on Monday, the FAA will work with Precision Hawk drones to see if technology that avoids obstacles can allow an alternative solution.

Technology Review writes:

Precision Hawk was chosen by the FAA because it is developing such a technology. It can have a drone automatically take action such as landing or turning around if it gets too close to a forbidden area such as an airport, or if a conventional aircraft suddenly appears. The company’s system, called LATAS, for low-altitude tracking and avoidance system, can use the Verizon cellular network, satellite links, or standard aircraft location beacons to monitor and communicate with drones.

To test the LATAS system a paraglider pilot will fly at piloted drones, seeing how long it takes for the drone pilot to break contact. After that human baseline, they’ll test the software to see if it can move the drones out of a collision course faster.

If the tests work, the FAA’s Pathfinder program may prove well-named indeed, as it clears an avenue for long-range commercial drone flights in the future.

[MIT Technology Review]

Ambylz treat ambylopia, or lazy eye.

Courtesy Ambylz

For the 2 to 3 percent of children with amblyopia, or lazy eye, treatment options aren’t great. Since the characteristic poor vision is usually a result of weakened signals from the eye to the brain, kids have to wear patches for several hours per day or take drops to strengthen the weaker eye. That can stress kids out or alienate them from their peers—as one organization’s web site notes, “Patching during school hours gives the class an opportunity to learn valuable lessons about accepting differences between children.” The children wearing the patches would probably disagree; many of them refuse treatment.

That’s why researchers have developed high-tech glasses, called Amblyz, which can be programmed to treat lazy eye. The results of the first clinical trial assessing their efficacy were presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Amblyz works because its lenses contain programmable LCDs. If a doctor suggested that a child wear a patch for two hours per day, for example, the lens over the lazy eye would go dark for a few seconds out of every 30 seconds during that time, effectively working as a patch. And since children with amblyopia often have other vision problems such as astigmatism or nearsightedness, Amblyz corrects their vision when not occluding it.

A child wearing Ambylz

Courtesy Ambylz

In the study, researchers compared the efficacy of Amblyz versus traditional patching on 33 children ages three to eight with moderate amblyopia. Over the course of three months, one group wore the patch for two hours per day, while the other wore Amblyz for four hours per day. At the end of the trial, both groups showed similar improvement—no matter which treatment they received, the children were able to see an average of two more lines on a reading chart.

Amblyz isn’t the only project seeking creative solutions to treating lazy eye—in recent years several teams of researchers have createdvideo games that claim to strengthen the lazy eye. Amblyz is different, however, because the Food and Drug Administration has approved it as a medical device. At $450 per pair, however, Amblyz may not be a financial possibility for most families. Those children might have to make do with a traditional patch until something more affordable comes along.

F-35

U.S. navy, via FlickrCC BY 2.0

How expensive is the most expensive stealth fighter ever made by the United States? The three versions of Lockheed Martin’s stealth fighter range in value from a low $108 million for the Air Force’s F-35A through $129 million for the Navy’s F-35C, and up to $134 million for the Marine Corps’s vertical takeoff F-35B. That’s a sort of incomprehensible number, especially since the Pentagon plans to order over 2,4000 of them altogether. To better get a grasp on the cost (and as a joke), Johns Hopkins graduate student Kedar Pavgi tweeted a conversion of winning bids at an art auction in terms of F-35s:

Before starting at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Pavgi worked in journalism at the publications GovExec and DefenseOne, giving him some familiarity with the plane and long-running debates over its astronomical cost. To reach his calculations for the price of an F-35, Pavgi took the estimates from the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter program head, and averaged them to roughly $123 million apiece.

Perhaps sensing the popularity of this calculation, and urged on by others (full disclosure: including myself), Pavgi created a simple site that takes in costs and spits them out in terms of stealth fighters. For example, New York’s One World Trade tower costs roughly $3.8 billion, which is equivalent to almost 31 F-35s. The International Space Station, with a cost of $107 billion (total, shared among several countries and across thirty years) is the same as 867 F-35s. Triple Deuce, the world’s largest and most expensive yacht at $1 billion, is 8 stealth jets. As noted on Twitter, the 2016 budget for Feed the Future, the “U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative,” is $978 million, or just shy of 8 planes.

“Guns and butter” is a popular simplification in both political science and economics about how nations can choose to spend money. In 2015, American consumers spent almost $2 billion on butter, or about 15.5 F-35s.

Have fun with the calculator!

Illustration Of Soviet Almaz Space Station

NASA, via Wikimedia Commons

Officially, space is a weapons-free zone. As spelled out in the United Nations Outer Space Treaty, the heavens beyond earth are to remain free of weapons, weapons testing, and fortification. Both the United States and The Soviet Union signed the treaty, but it’s hard for weapons inspectors to go to space to confirm. Rumored for decades, a 1970s Soviet space cannon was earlier this year finally revealed on Russian television.

Originally built for Russia’s Tu-22 Blinder supersonic bomber, the R-23 gun was mounted in the plane’s tail as a deadly surprise for any pursuing jet fighters. The gas-powered gun could fire 23mm rounds incredibly quickly. It’s a variant of this gun that made it to space, on board one of the Soviet Union’s Almaz military reconnaissance space stations.

From Anatoly Zak, writing at Popular Mechanics:

Only after the fall of the USSR did Russian sources revealed that the cannon had actually fired in orbit. It happened on Jan. 24, 1975, onboard the Salyut-3 space station. Worried about how firing a giant cannon would impact the outpost itself, Soviet officials scheduled the test firing just hours before the planned de-orbiting of the station, and long after the departure of the crew on July 19, 1974. The outpost ignited its jet thrusters simultaneously with firing the cannon to counteract the weapon's powerful recoil. According to various sources, the cannon fired from one to three blasts, reportedly firing around 20 shells in all. They burned up in the atmosphere, too.

Read the full story there, and be sure to check out the painstakingly rendered images of the gun itself.

[Popular Mechanics]

Parrot Bebop 2

Promotional image of Parrot's new consumer drone, the Bebop 2.

French drone-making company Parrot, perpetual underdog to the Chinese drone giant DJI, has announced the next generation of its flagship Bebop camera drone: the Bebop 2.

According to CNET, the Bebop 2 is aimed at consumers who want a drone that requires no setup and can basically fly right out of the box. It weighs just over a pound, can reach 330 feet in 18 seconds, and can stay airborne in winds of up to 40 miles-per-hour, according to Parrot.

It promises a starting flight time of 25 minutes from a full battery charge. The camera, identical to that of previous models, can record up to 8 GB of 1080p video, and it now comes with a design that better protects the lens.

Rather than using a gimbal to stabilize a camera pod, as on many competing drones, the camera on the Bebop 2 is mounted right in the body of the drone, and relies on balancing software to ensure a smooth, steady image capture.

The Parrot Bebop 2 will go on sale in the united States on December 14th, with a starting price of $550. Perfect timing for the holidays, so be sure to pair it with this primer on responsible drone flying. And, um, maybe some French lessons, as that’s the language used on the current tutorial site for the Bebop 2.

[CNET]

Asteroid Harvesting

Deep Space Industries

According to international treaties, no country is allowed to own things like moons or asteroids. But what about a company?

A new bill would allow space mining companies to own pieces of space. Although they couldn't own a whole asteroid, for example, the bill would ensure that space mining businesses would legally own the resources they extract from that asteroid.

Last week the bill passed in the Senate with a few amendments, and yesterday those amendments were accepted in the House of Representatives. Now the bill is off to the Oval Office, where space policy experts predict President Obama will sign it into law.

A Controversial Bill

Before space mining companies invest too heavily in developing the technologies to pull minerals from asteroids, they want to be sure they'll be legally able to own the materials they extract. Probably they would if it went to court, but it's always helpful to have things in writing.

The space mining provision that would start to define those rights is tacked onto a larger bill that deals with a lot of other issues regarding private space exploration--including who you're allowed to sue if you get hurt on a private spaceship.

The Act would also renew the private spaceflight industry's "learning period," wherein regulations are relaxed in favor of encouraging growth. At the moment that grace period has already expired, and technically the FAA could begin regulating private spaceflight any day now--which is one reason why Congress wants to push the bill through quickly.

The asteroid mining portion of the bill has been controversial from the start, with some space lawyers opining that it was added on at the last minute and lacking in detail.

"Academia is pretty much split right down the middle on this."

Others think there should have been more discussion both in a science committee as well as within the international community before trying to push this law through.

Policy wonks are divided on whether the U.S. actually has the ability to give companies property rights in space, since the U.S. technically doesn't own those resources itself.

Frans von der Dunk, a space law professor at the University of Nebraska, compares space to the high seas--everybody owns it, but fishermen don't have to apply to an international authority to go out and fish. "Freedom of activity is the baseline and limitations to such freedoms," such as preventing pollution and over fishing, "should principally be agreed upon at the international level."

"Academia is pretty much split right down the middle on this," Michael Listner, lawyer and founder of the consulting firm Space Law and Policy Solutions, told Popular Science during an interview in September. "When you have that much dissent, you have to talk about it."

Concept art

Robotic asteroid mining might look like this.

Deep Space Industries

How Will The President Respond?

Compared to Republicans, Democrats have generally been less enthusiastic about the space resources bill, favoring more scientific discussions first. However, President Obama has been supportive of private space exploration up to now.

"I do not suspect any hiccups at this stage," says von der Dunk.

Listner, too, thinks the President is likely to sign the act into law, if only to make sure the other provisions get enacted in a timely manner.

He may have some concerns with the space mining portion, though, and Listner thinks he could resort to a signing statement. "The signing statement is not a veto but [the President's] way to comment on provisions of a bill, and in some cases diminish the effect of the bill. It's very possible that he may sign it into law, but put a signing statement in there addressing the resource part."

Update November 17, 2015 at 4:15 pm Eastern: This post was updated with comments from Frans von der Dunk.

It's not often that a Mars rover gets to enjoy a day of fun in the sand and sun. But later this week, NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover will explore a sand dune, marking the first time that scientists on Earth will get a close-up view of dunes on another planet.

Curiosity is currently on its way to a line of dunes called the Bagnold Dunes, located on the northwestern side of Mount Sharp on the eastern side of the planet. Once it arrives, the rover will scoop up some sand for testing, and will dig into the interior of the two-story dune with its wheels.

Map of Mars Curiosity Rover location on November 17, 2015

This image of Mars was captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite above the planet, using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The image has been annotated to show the path taken by Mars Curiosity Rover across the planet's surface from its landing in 2012 to November 2015. The Curiosity Rover is about to embark on another first: studying the first moving dunes on another world, known as the Bagnold Dunes, named in honor of British army engineer Ralph Bagnold, who pioneered the study of dune movement.

"These dunes have a different texture from dunes on Earth," Nathan Bridges said in a statement. "The ripples on them are much larger than ripples on top of dunes on Earth, and we don't know why. We have models based on the lower air pressure. It takes a higher wind speed to get a particle moving. But now we'll have the first opportunity to make detailed observations."

These are the first active dunes visited anywhere other than Earth. Scientists believe that the Bagnold Dunes can move by about 3 feet a year.

The gif below shows movement on Dune 2 of the Bagnold dunes. The animation shows the dune in two different pictures taken four years apart by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Understanding how dunes behave and are created on Mars will give researchers a better insight into how sandstones formed on the Red Planet.

Sandstones, and other sedimentary rocks are formed from layers of particles (like sand) that have been compacted into rock, usually after being moved around by wind or water. Sedimentary rocks often contain information about the past climate of an area. Here on Earth, sandstones formed by wind in a hot, dry environment, have a very different structure than sandstones built by a river or a delta.

But scientists aren't sure whether the same rules that hold true on Earth hold true on a planet with less of an atmosphere and less gravity. In those conditions, sand grains on Mars might move differently, throwing off our conclusions of Mars' past environments. Researchers hope that close observations of an active dune will provide more information into Mars' geology—and through that, to Mars' past climates.

Just like Christmastime, McRib season happens only once per year. That ephemerality (plus the promise of deliciousness) was enough motivation for YouTube star Michael Jones to do something that fast-food teetotalers might call extreme—he made what he calls a “McRib stack,” a sandwich consisting of the inside of 10 McRib sandwiches crammed between two paltry-seeming slices of bread. Most people know the risks of eating too much fast food over a long period—obesity, heart disease, increased blood pressure—but what happens to the body when you consume a ton of fast food all at once?

One McRib sandwich contains 500 calories, which is 40 percent of the daily recommended value of fat (24 grams), and 41 percent of the daily value for sodium (980 milligrams). That’s all just slightly less than a Big Mac, and about half of the calories, fat, and sodium in a Burger King Double Whopper with cheese. But by most measures, the sandwich isn’t considered healthy. The sandwich Jones consumed had 10 times the calories, fat, and sodium, and was the equivalent nutritional value of several days’ worth of a healthy diet, depending on how you measure it.

If you eat 10 McRib sandwiches, the first thing that will probably happen is that you will feel ill, says Leslie Bonci, a registered dietician based in Pittsburgh. The levels of triglycerides, or fat in your blood, will spike—elevated triglycerides are a secondary risk factor for heart disease, “no matter if you’re 82 or 22,” Bonci says. So much food at once will also raise your blood pressure. “When you consume all that at once, it puts the body in a state of stress,” Bonci says. The sodium will make you thirsty but prevent your gut from absorbing the water, making you bloated and puffy. If you have a history of acid reflux, you’re going to be pounding the antacids for a few hours at least, Bonci says, because of all the fat you’re consuming. And if you have pancreatitis, the last thing you’d want to do is overload your system with that much fat and sodium.

Luckily, just one sandwich probably won’t have many permanent effects. If you step on the scale the next day and see a big increase, it’s probably mostly water. The discomfort will likely cease after about 24 hours.

If you’re dying to get your hands on a McRib (or 10), Bonci suggests consuming in moderation. Just have one, and freeze the rest to eat once the McRib is gone from restaurants yet again. Or better yet, bring nine friends to share the 10 sandwiches with you. “Just because a sandwich is a bargain for your wallet doesn’t mean it’s a bargain for your body,” Bonci says.

A Denisovan molar, found in a cave in Siberia.

Bence Viola

DNA analysis of an ancient tooth found in a Siberian cave has shown that the tooth is from a species of hominin—known as the Denisovans—that are thought to have lived alongside humans and Neanderthals. The results were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prior to this discovery, evidence for the existence of Denisovans came only from another tooth and a tiny finger bone found in the same cave back in 2008. In 2010, a team of Russian scientists identified them as belonging to the same species, but one new to science. The researchers named the species after the cave in which it was found--Denisova cave.

Now, with the help of this new tooth, scientists believe that the Denisovans were alive 60,000 years earlier than previously thought, providing evidence that early Homo sapiens lived alongside many other human-like species, including the Denisovans, Neanderthals, and other yet-to-be discovered species.

The new tooth—called Denisova 8—was incredibly large for a hominin tooth and had huge roots that suggest the owner may have had a very large jaw.

However, the discovery leaves many mysteries. It's hard to tell very much from just a few teeth and one tiny bone, so researchers are still left guessing as to what the Denisovans looked like, how long they lived in that area, and more.

The tooth did provide some new and important clues. The researchers estimate that the tooth is about 110,000 years old, making it clear that the Denisovans lived or travelled to that area of Siberia around that time. Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto who performed the dental analysis for the new study, told The New York Times that the Denisovans had to have been very resourceful to survive the harsh climate of the area.

The entrance to Denisova Cave in Siberia.

Bence Viola

From the tooth's DNA, the researchers found that the Denisovans had almost as much genetic diversity as modern Europeans, and much more than Neanderthals. This adds evidence to the hypothesis that the Denisovans travelled south from Siberia--the remnants of the Denisovans can be seen in modern humans, contributing about five percent of the genome of modern Melanesians, reports National Geographic.

Much of the information about the Denisovans, including where else they lived and what other possible species they may have bred with, is still unknown and will likely require much more fossil evidence to speculate. However, given that this species was only discovered five years ago, there remains a hopeful possibility that more fossils will be discovered in the coming years and decades.

MIT is all about the future, but during a recent construction project on MIT's new nanotechnology laboratory (known as MIT.nano), builders came across a blast from the past: a glass capsule filled with strange objects.

The time capsule had been buried by MIT students in 1957, during the dedication of building 26, which houses Compton Laboratories. The capsule contained papers and scientific odds and ends.

The time capsule has been in the ground for 58 years, but it was supposed to be in place for much longer. Originally, the time capsule was supposed to stay put until 2957, and was constructed of glass in the hopes that unlike metal or wood, rust and rot would not affect the capsule or the items within.

Watch the video above to see how the glass capsule was assembled, and hear the stories of the people who assembled the capsule.

Taser

Marcelo Freixo via Flickr, CC by 2.0

Tasers, weapons that fire electrodes to shock and debilitate assailants, are used in more than 100 countries and by 500,000 law enforcement agents in the United States alone. They are touted as a safe way to incapacitate suspects who are aggressively resisting arrest, obviating the need for police officers to use brute force. But Tasers may not be so safe, after all—new evidence shows that they may lead to fatal cardiac events, according to a report published today in the British Medical Journal. That’s especially chilling because reports in recent years show that police are deploying the weapons too frequently, putting people’s lives in danger.

Most of the tests conducted on Tasers have been on the X26 model, the one that is most common among law enforcement agents; it can reach a suspect from 35 feet away. Some of the risks associated with Tasers have been well documented; the shocks can induce seizures, collapse lungs, cause skin burns or eye damage, and result in injuries to muscles, joints or tendons. Unsurprisingly, the biggest issues result from suspects’ uncontrolled falls, which can result in head injuries and death—Amnesty International says that Tasers have caused 490 deaths between 1990 and 2012, according to the Chicago Tribune.

But the science has been less clear on Tasers’ possibly lethal effects on the heart. Extended shocks have led to issues with hearts’ rhythm, specifically arrhythmias and ventricular fibrillation, or rapidly accelerating heartbeat. And though there have been some safety tests, many haven't addressed these conditions in settings that could mimic the real world. This might be because the weapon’s manufacturer commissions many of the safety studies, as the BMJ report notes, so they may not be as objective as they should. In the past few years, the manufacturer has come under fire for failing to properly warn officers of the consequences of deploying Tasers for too long and recently lost a lawsuit when a 17-year-old suspect died of ventricular fibrillation after being tased for 37 seconds.

These questionable and dangerous health consequences probably aren’t enough to convince law enforcement agencies to stop using Tasers altogether—they can be useful tools if properly deployed. But they should at least be enough to warrant a reform on how officers are trained so that they use the weapons more sparingly and responsibly. That reform is long overdue anyway; a 2011 report from the U.S. Justice Department determined that officers use Tasers too frequently and inappropriately, often on patients who are mentally ill. So while the BMJ report indicates that Tasers can be lethal, these reports show that it’s not the weapon itself that is the main problem, it’s how the weapon is being used.

Google+

india_7/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

When Gmail launched in 2004, I remember thinking how silly it was that Google, a search engine, was trying to compete with the giants of email like AOL and Hotmail. When I finally got an invitation to the closed beta though, I saw immediately that Gmail was a game-changer.

Seven years later, in June 2011, I had just finished my first year of college and couldn’t wait to see how Google+ would change the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Within 10 minutes of setting up my profile though, I was over Google’s fourth attempt at a social network. On the rare occasions I use my G+ profile in my personal life, it’s almost exclusively because it’s required to do Google Hangouts (another Google product I feel does its job better than competitors). Gmail and Hangouts show that Google is capable of products besides its search engine, but Google+ hasn’t been one of those in the last four years.

So when I saw an announcement on Google’s official blog today that G+ had a new user interface across all platforms, I felt that familiar twinge of hope for Google’s ailing social network. The two newest, and biggest, changes deal with how users are called Communities and Collections.

In a separate G+ post, Product Director Luke Wroblewski explains the new features and how they’re being used:

Collections let you immerse yourself in content about topics like surfing (goo.gl/vvv5QD) or tiny tilt-shift photography scenes (goo.gl/nWyicL). Communities enable groups of people with the same interests to join up and geek out on anything from Game of Thrones (goo.gl/aaqtgq) to Painting (goo.gl/kmlM7m). With Collections and Communities, discovering amazing things is simple: just follow or join whatever happens to pique your interests.

If you're one of the 2.5-million people that has a Google+ account, you can opt-in now for the latest attempts to keep the “social layer across all of Google's services” relevant. (As early as 2012, Google had given up on calling G+ a social network.) And if you're feeling lonely there, be sure to follow Popular Science on Google+.

October

A map of temperature anomalies during October. Red shows the biggest deviation from the standard (temperatures recorded between 1951 and 1980).

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

If you've been wondering why your coats stayed in the closet and your heater remained off for the first part of fall, wonder no more. This October was the warmest on record. Ever.

Last month beat out all the other Octobers to get the title of hottest October since record-keeping began in the late 1800's. It was also the highest deviation from 'normal' global temperatures. Those temperatures were recorded between 1951 and 1980, and are averaged to get a general baseline. The data comes from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which looks at temperature changes over long periods of time (decades as opposed to days).

If it sounds like a familiar story, that's because it is. Last winter was one of the warmest on record, even with all the snow. 2014 and 2012 were also record-breaking years, and with the addition of October to its already hot lineup, 2015 is likely to surpass both.

Extreme heat is now 4 times more likely than it was before the industrial revolution, and that shows no signs of stopping.

Finn And Han Solo In Force Awakens

Screenshot by author, from Facebook

In less than a month, on December 18, 2015, Star Wars: The Force Awakens will open in American theaters. The seventh film in the beloved and tragically uneven space opera series brought back many old favorite characters from the first trilogy, but it’s not just a vehicle for aging smugglers. The Force Awakens introduces several new characters, including John Boyega’s "Finn." As we've seen in previous trailers and teasers, Finn wears stormtrooper armor, yet (likely) becomes a Jedi. The latest spot, released on Facebook last night, shows Finn facing off against another stormtrooper with a lightsaber-proof staff:

As Brian Fung noted at the Washington Post, this means that a least one odd part of the prequels (and, before that, Star Wars novels) is returning to the big screen: a lightsaber-resistant eletrostaff. We are exactly this excited about it:

Finn can also be seen briefly manning the Millennium Falcon's gun turret.

Watch the full spot below:

Seeing Red

Youtube Red is a bold step for the streaming service. Let's hope they don't go the route of Hulu and its subscription service Hulu Plus...

Youtube

For the moment, it's impossible for YouTube to completely stop users from uploading video content that potentially infringes copyright of other video and music creators. But Google's massively popular video streaming site does a fairly good job of finding copyrighted material, and paying creators of those videos with its Content ID system.

But many people also upload clips of copyrighted material to YouTube in a way that enhances or transforms the content into something new, such as critiques:

...parodies:

...or Autotuned remixes:

This is called “fair use,” and it is legal in the United States. And now YouTube will do more than allow it: it will actually provide some financial support to defend video creators who have made videos that qualify for "fair use" exemptions, yet who are nonetheless sued by other copyright owners for infringement. Think of a movie critic or analysis vlogger who makes videos that use clips of major Hollywood blockbusters with voice-over discussing them; if a Hollywood studio tries to sue this person, YouTube could now pay lots of money to help defend them.

In an official YouTube blog post today, YouTube's legal director Fred von Lohmann says the company will “now protect some of the best examples of fair use on YouTube.”

With permission of the video creators, YouTube will “keep the videos live on YouTube in the U.S., feature them in the YouTube Copyright Center as strong examples of fair use, and cover the cost of any copyright lawsuits brought against them.”

Though the blog post does not state how much YouTube is willing to pay to protect these videos, both TechCrunch and VentureBeat report it will pay up to one million dollars.

Google will not legally protect all content creators, but they will “continue to resist legally unsupported [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedowns as part of our normal processes.” Von Lohmann hopes that, "in addition to protecting the individual creator, this program could, over time, create a 'demo reel' that will help the YouTube community and copyright owners alike better understand what fair use looks like online and develop best practices as a community.”

That's a win both for YouTube, which has an incentive to encourage creators to upload more content so it can continue to be the leader in user-generated streaming video around the web (and earn ad dollars from pre-roll in front of these videos), as well as for video creators, who now can feel safer making the kinds of movies they want.

Google Hangouts

Google

Users of Google Hangouts, Google’s video conferencing app, have long complained that only those with Gmail or Google+ accounts could use the service. Google answered those complaints today by introducing a “guest” mode, which will allow hosts to invite anyone to a Hangouts session.

Hangouts organizers still need a Google account. But once they launch their Hangout, they can invite “external guests” (that's the term Google is using for anyone without a Google account) to join the conference via Google Calendar. The guest(s) will click on a link in the invitation, enter their name when prompted and can start chatting without creating accounts on Gmail or the newly-renovated Google+.

External guests can join on any web or mobile platform, and have to be approved (and can be kicked out at any time) by the organizer. The feature is still rolling out, so if you can’t access it yet, you’ll should be able to by the end of the week.

While an obvious plus for current Google Hangouts users, the new capability will probably also further spur adoption of Google Hangouts as a video conferencing and video chatting option, and provides an especially compelling alternative to other rival video chatting platforms such as FaceTime, which requires all participants to use an Apple device, for example.

New Facebook Breakup Tools

Facebook

Being constantly connected to the world is great, except when your world revolves around someone you don’t want to see anymore. Facebook is trying to fix that though, and announced a new tool today that will “help people manage how they interact with their former partners on Facebook after a relationship has ended.”

Now when Facebook users update their relationship status after a breakup, they’ll be asked if they’d like to see less of their ex without having to unfriend or block them. Using this option will stop your ex’s posts from making it to your News Feed and won’t suggest their name as someone to tag in your photos.

Change Your Past Posts

Facebook

You can also limit which of your content your exes can see, and edit or untag yourself from any (or every) past post you share with them. While you could do all of this before, this new tool guides you through the process and can edit posts and tags in batches, so you don't have to go through every individual post if you decide to stay connected to your ex. All of these features are totally optional though, so if you end with someone on good terms, you can leave things as they are.

The feature is currently only being tested in the United States on mobile devices, but will be released to the general public in the future.

Carnegie Mellon University

Tomwsulcer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0

It is easy to forget, in our social age of public profiles and constantly tracked online presence, but there are parts of the internet that still offer obscurity. Tor, an identity-cloaking tool initially funded in part by DARPA and still funded to this day in part by the United States State Department, offers a form of protection for anyone online who wants to stay anonymous, like political dissidents abroad or law-avoiding drug sellers in the United States.

But activity conducted through Tor isn’t entirely untraceable, and there’s increasing evidence that, in exchange for cash, a security research team at Carnegie Mellon turned over information to legal authorities that led to several arrests.

Tor lets people use the internet anonymously by routing data through some of the many nodes in a complex network, obscuring the start point and end point. Built from an idea in the mid-1990s to let government officials securely communicate on civilian internet networks without revealing their location, Tor was one of many tools used by activists during the Arab Spring protests of 2011 to communicate while avoiding government scrutiny. Existing Tor nodes include such innocuous sites as public libraries in New Hampshire and research universities, and the network is supported by many digital rights activists as a tool to protect personal freedoms online.

No system is without flaws, and it's through one of these that a Brian Richard Farrell was arrested in Seattle and “charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine,” on the online darkweb marketplace known as Silk Road 2.0 How was he found? His legal case is ongoing, and Farrell’s defense pointed to a breach in Tor for the information that revealed his identity. Motherboard reports:

“On October 12, 2015, the government provided defense counsel a letter indicating that Mr. Farrell's involvement with Silk Road 2.0 was identified based on information obtained by a 'university-based research institute' that operated its own computers on the anonymous network used by Silk Road 2.0,” the motion reads.

In response to this letter, the defense asked for additional discovery evidence and information to determine the relationship between this institute and the government, as well as the means used to identify Farrell “on what was supposed to operate as an anonymous website.”

The maintainers of the Tor project knew their network was attacked last year. In a statement published in response to the recent revelations, the Tor project claims such an attack threatens the very civil liberties of the web:

There is no indication yet that they had a warrant or any institutional oversight by Carnegie Mellon's Institutional Review Board. We think it's unlikely they could have gotten a valid warrant for CMU's attack as conducted, since it was not narrowly tailored to target criminals or criminal activity, but instead appears to have indiscriminately targeted many users at once.

Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users.

This attack also sets a troubling precedent: Civil liberties are under attack if law enforcement believes it can circumvent the rules of evidence by outsourcing police work to universities. If academia uses "research" as a stalking horse for privacy invasion, the entire enterprise of security research will fall into disrepute. Legitimate privacy researchers study many online systems, including social networks — If this kind of FBI attack by university proxy is accepted, no one will have meaningful 4th Amendment protections online and everyone is at risk.

The Tor Project also claims that friends in the security community informed them that the FBI paid Carnegie Mellon $1 million for the attack.

Carnegie Mellon houses CERT, the Computer Emergency Response Team. Decades old, CERT’s stated mission is “improving the security and resilience of computer systems and networks,” and in that work they partner with “government, industry, law enforcement, and academia.” In 2014, CERT reportedly carried an attack on the Tor network that lasted from January 30th to July 4th. (The following sequence of events come from Princeton Director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy Ed Felten’s timeline of the attack, published on July 31, 2014) The attack strategy including adding 115 new nodes to the network, which likely enabled the owners of those nodes to monitor Tor traffic in an unprecedented way. CERT researchers submitted an abstract on this style of attack and were scheduled to speak at the Black Hat hacker conference that year, before the presentation was canceled on account of the material not being cleared for release by Carnegie Mellon.

At the time, Felten wrote:

I’m hard pressed to think of previous examples where legitimate researchers carried out a large scale attack lasting for months that aimed to undermine the security of real users. That in itself is ethically problematic at least. The waters get even darker when we consider the data that the researchers might have gathered—data that would undermine the security of Tor users.

On Monday, security researcher Bruce Schneier said the attacks undermine CERT’s role as responsible steward of the internet. He wrote:

The behavior of the researchers is reprehensible, but the real issue is that CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has lost its credibility as an honest broker. The researchers discovered this vulnerability and submitted it to CERT. Neither the researchers nor CERT disclosed this vulnerability to the Tor Project. Instead, the researchers apparently used this vulnerability to deanonymize a large number of hidden service visitors and provide the information to the FBI.

Yesterday, Carnegie Mellon released a brief statement on the accusations:

There have been a number of inaccurate media reports in recent days regarding Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute work in cybersecurity.

Carnegie Mellon University includes the Software Engineering Institute, which is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) established specifically to focus on software-related security and engineering issues. One of the missions of the SEI’s CERT division is to research and identify vulnerabilities in software and computing networks so that they may be corrected.

In the course of its work, the university from time to time is served with subpoenas requesting information about research it has performed. The university abides by the rule of law, complies with lawfully issued subpoenas and receives no funding for its compliance.

At best, that’s a very tepid denial, focused more on the accusations of payment than on the actions taken by the university itself. At worst, it means the people using Tor to protect their identity, no matter the nature of their activity online, might be putting their faith in a compromised system, and one that reveals more information to law enforcement than it obscures.

Adele '25' Album Release

The popular singer will not bring her latest album to music streaming options

The release of Adele’s upcoming album "25" will bring tear-inducing songs to the stereo systems and the earbuds of millions. But users of Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming methods have something else to cry about regarding the latest piece of news surrounding the “Hello” album. The New York Times reports that Adele’s latest EP will not make its way to streaming sites or apps.

Similar to Taylor Swift’s choice not to make use of Spotify, Adele has opted to forgo streaming altogether when the album is released tomorrow on Friday, November 20.

While streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music provide an easy way for fans to listen to virtually unlimited numbers of songs at one low monthly price, the business model has come under fire as of late due to low returns for the artists involved. Unless you’re a mega star like Adele, making even minimum wage off your music is tough. But if you are Adele, there are benefits to ditch the streaming route too.

Having fans purchase your album outright ensures, as an artist, that you get the most bang for your buck—especially when a record first launches. With the prevalence music piracy (Adele's album has already leaked online as of this writing), artists are trying every method possible to not only get fans excited for the album, and to get them to buy it.

Some efforts in this realm have worked really well, like Beyoncé's surprise self-titled album relased exclusively to iTunes in 2013, which used a well-kept secret to build hype. The album being available only on iTunes further allowed Queen Bey to squeeze every last cent out of fans. That plan that was later replicated by Drake, U2, Skrillex and others (though U2 saw a backlash when the album appeared for free on people's iTunes accounts and couldn't easily be removed).

Adele’s reluctance to release her album on streaming may not be the most popular choice with fans. But with this being the first Adele album in four years, fans of the singer may have so much pent up Adele-desperation that they won’t mind, or even notice, paying the $10 or more to purchase the album outright.

With a record-breaking 1.1 million copies of the single "Hello" already sold, Adele is in great shape to move a massive amount of music come time for the release of "25." In a world where many have grown up not paying for music or, at the very least, are only willing to pay 10 bucks each month for access to it all, cases like Adele prove that—while maybe inconvenient—fans are still willing to pay for quality.

(Update: Spotify has sent Popular Science a statement)

"We love and respect Adele, as do her 24 million fans on Spotify. We hope that she will give those fans the opportunity to enjoy 25 on Spotify alongside 19 and 21 very soon."