An anonymous reader writes with this story from the New York Times, excerpting "After three years of planning, an immigrant rights group in Jackson Heights is set to start a smartphone app for day laborers, a new digital tool with many uses: Workers will be able to rate employers (think Yelp or Uber), log their hours and wages, take pictures of job sites and help identify, down to the color and make of a car, employers with a history of withholding wages. They will also be able to send instant alerts to other workers. The advocacy group will safeguard the information and work with lawyers to negotiate payment." Adds the submitter: "Although I completely support the app, personally, I see this encountering some significant legal challenges. Hope they've lawyered up." Though the use case is different, this is similar in spirit to "cop watch" apps, like Cell411 and the ACLU's Mobile Justice. (And of course there's Periscope.)

v3rgEz writes: As the saying goes, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn't mess with it. This is doubly true for computers and quadruply true for government computers. This lends itself to an obvious question: what's the government computer most in need of an upgrade? MuckRock has launched a new FOIA project to find out, and has already started receiving some interesting results.

Zothecula writes: 3D printers have opened up all kinds of possibilities when it comes to turning digital blueprints into real word objects, but might they also enable new ways to pilfer intellectual property? Amid all that mechanical whirring, these machines emit acoustic signals that give away the motion of the nozzle, new research has found. And by discreetly recording these sounds, scientists say it is possible for sneaky characters to deduce design details and reverse engineer printed objects at a later date.

An anonymous reader writes: While climate change talks progress on how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, an interdisciplinary team of scientists have worked out a way to reduce carbon dioxide already existing in the atmosphere. The focus is on the batteries used by electric automobiles. Researchers have found out that the graphite electrodes in the lithium-ion batteries could be replaced with carbon electrodes sourced from atmospheric carbon dioxide. The experiment started with the use of a solar-thermal electrochemical process (STEP) to convert carbon dioxide into carbon. STEP uses solar energy as the source of the thermal and electrical energy required for the dissolution of the atmospheric carbon dioxide to its constituent elements -- carbon and oxygen. The team then used the carbon generated to create carbon nanotubes/nanofibers. They then incorporated these carbon nanotubes into lithium-ion batteries by using them as the positive electrode or anode. While the carbon is used in the manufacture of carbon nanotubes, the oxygen is channeled back to the generator to boost the combustion efficiency of the generator. The increased efficiency will balance the electricity consumption of STEP. In the end, the fossil fuel electrical power plant could have zero net carbon dioxide emissions.

1sockchuck writes: As the Open Compute Project turns five, it is growing beyond its roots in hyperscale data centers. The path to a larger market ran through a Rackspace data center in northern Virginia, where the open source servers and racks- which were originally developed at Facebook — were adapted for use in a commercial data center with traditional power distribution. Rackspace, which is using Open Compute servers to power its managed cloud platform, worked closely with OCP vendors like Quanta, Wistron, Delta and Cloudline (HPE/FoxConn) to develop racks and servers that could be productized so other companies can use open hardware in colocation environments. The Open Compute Project will discuss its progress next week at its annual summit in San Jose.

mdsolar writes: A group of engineers in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission say they have identified a design flaw in nearly all nuclear reactors in the country that should result in their mandatory shutdown unless operators fix the problem, Reuters reports. In late February, the engineers petitioned the NRC to order immediate enforcement actions to correct the design flaw, which they say could result in damage to cooling systems and ultimately lead to an emergency situation. The filing asks the agency to respond by March 21 and is a part of a standard NRC process, according to the news outlet. The filing stems from an incident in January 2012, when Exelon's Byron 2 unit in Illinois experienced an automatic reactor trip from full power after an undervoltage condition was detected. The unit was shut down for a week, in what is known as an open phase condition created by an unbalanced voltage. The NRC engineers say such an event could cause an electrical short, reducing the abilituy of cooling systems to operate.

Soulskill writes: In a recent Facebook post, AMD's Robert Hallock hinted that the company is working on a standardized solution for external GPUs. When people are looking to buy laptops, they often want light, portable machines — but smaller devices often don't have the horsepower to effectively run games. Hallock says, "External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardized connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc." The article points out that the Thunderbolt 3 connector already (kinda) solves this problem, providing up to 40Gbps of bandwidth over a single connector. Still, I find external GPUs intriguing. I like the idea of having a light laptop when I'm moving around, but a capable one when I sit down at home to play a game. It'd also be nice to grab my desktop's GPU when I want to game on my laptop in the living room. Standardization may turn out to be important for GPU-makers if VR ends up taking off. The hardware requirements for those devices are fairly steep, and it'd facilitate adoption if graphics power was more easily expandable.

mdsolar writes: A gloop of bird poop was responsible for shutting down the Indian Point nuclear plant for a few hours last December, according to a state-commissioned report into the incident. The Westchester power plant automatically shut down on Dec. 14, 2015 when a string of dropping from a "large bird" fell into some of the plant's electrical equipment and caused the reactor's automatic shut down to trip, according to findings by Entergy, the company that runs the plant. "Damage was caused by a bird streamer. Streamers are long streams of excrement from large birds that are often expelled as a bird takes off from a perch," company officials said in the report, ordered by Gov. Cuomo. Last December's unplanned shut down was the 13th since June 2012.

itwbennett writes: Cisco Systems has released critical software updates for its Nexus 3000 and 3500 switches to remove a default administrative account with static credentials that could allow remote attackers access to a bash shell with root privileges, meaning that they can fully control the device. The account is created at installation time by the Cisco NX-OS software that runs on these switches and it cannot be changed or deleted without affecting the system's functionality, Cisco said in an advisory. The affected devices are: Cisco Nexus 3000 Series switches running NX-OS 6.0(2)U6(1), 6.0(2)U6(2), 6.0(2)U6(3), 6.0(2)U6(4) and 6.0(2)U6(5) and Cisco Nexus 3500 Platform switches running NX-OS 6.0(2)A6(2), 6.0(2)A6(3), 6.0(2)A6(4), 6.0(2)A6(5) and 6.0(2)A7(1).

Lucas123 writes: By 2020, surgical robotics sales are expected to almost double to $6.4 billion, at the same time robots are becoming easier to use. One new robot is so easy to use that even med students can achieve proficiency with a few tries, according to Umamaheswar Duvvuri, director of head and neck surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The robot, a snake-like endoscope that can be directed into any shape through the relative orientations of its linkages, requires only one incision, reducing the number from several involved in typical laparoscopic procedures. Older, and more popular surgical robotic systems, such as the da Vinci Surgical System, are now being tested by physicians who are at controls more than 1,000 miles away. Probably a lot of the same misgivings that people have about autonomous cars apply here, too.

Freshly Exhumed writes: A series of posts on the Project Sputnik developers' forum at Dell indicate that hardware on a soon to be released XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop will support Thunderbolt 3 USB Type C, which has been tested on the device with video and USB 3.1 on non-dock devices, although Dell's Type C docks are not yet supported. Intel has already implemented Thunderbolt 3 drivers in the Linux kernel, so this Dell initiative represents a first for a physical implementation on a consumer platform.

Lucas123 writes: Samsung announced it is now shipping the world's highest capacity 2.5-in SSD, the 15.38TB PM1633a. The new SSD uses a 12Gbps SAS interface and is being marketed for use in enterprise-class storage systems where IT managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch drive. The PM1633a sports random read/write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS, respectively. It delivers sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,200MBps, the company said. The SSD can sustain one full drive write (15.38TB) per day, every day over its life, which Samsung claims is two to ten times more data than typical SATA SSDs based on planar MLC and TLC NAND flash technologies. The SSD is based on Samsung's 48-layer V-NAND (3D NAND) technology, which also uses 3-bit MLC flash. Also at Hot Hardware

AmiMoJo writes: VESA has finalized and released the DisplayPort 1.4 spec, which can drive 60Hz 8K displays and supports HDR color modes at 5K and 8K. The physical interface used to carry DisplayPort data -- High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3), which provides 8.1Gbps of bandwidth per lane -- is still the same as it was in DisplayPort 1.3. The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a "visually lossless" form of compression that VESA says "enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio." This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR "deep color" over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables. USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too.

New submitter ricardinho writes: Research done at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, shows that paying thousands of dollars for a professional drone does not guarantee that the device will be hack proof. These professional drones are commonly used across various industries to perform daily critical operations, such as surveillance and recon missions by law enforcement authorities. During his research, student Nils Rodday discovered that a professional drone could be compromised in multiple ways (PDF). One of these attack vectors investigated by the student is much more sophisticated than those used to compromise recreational drones that cost few hundreds of dollars and are not expected to be strongly secured. By reverse engineering the drone's operation and firmware, the student found ways to obtain key information that is used to validate the communication on the telemetry link between the drone and its remote controllers. This allowed for a Man-in-the-Middle attack in which the hacker could take full control of the attacked drone from a distance of up to 2 km. Manufacturers of professional drones are blindly trusting XBee chips for the communication between devices. These chips however are not meant to be used in sensitive devices and this flaw can compromise any sort of operation that the drones are deployed for. In addition, the solution is not simple since a firmware update patch cannot be simply released, but manufacturers have to actually recall the devices for in-house upgrades. Perhaps even more surprising is the cost of the described attack: 40 dollars is enough for an attacker to take full control of a $30,000 drone. Nils will explain and demonstrate his hacking into a professional drone during talks at RSA conference in San Francisco and Black Hat Asia in Singapore.

New submitter Serzen writes: According to The Guardian, Microsoft is planning to end fixed console hardware for the Xbox One as a move towards one ecosystem running Unified Windows Applications. The head of the company's Xbox division, Phil Spencer, said that the Universal Windows Platform would be central to the company's gaming strategy. "That is our focus going forward," he told reporters. "Building out a complete gaming ecosystem for Universal Windows Applications." What this could mean is that the Xbox One becomes more like a PC, with Microsoft releasing updated versions at regular intervals with more powerful processors and graphics hardware. In theory, because games will be written as UWAs, older titles will remain compatible with the new machines.

WheezyJoe writes: According to the US Energy Information Administration, solar, wind, and gas dominate new US generating capacity in 2016. This year is notable because it will see the first new nuclear plant brought online in 20 years, contributing 1.1 GigaWatts to the grid. But that contribution will be dwarfed by renewable power sources, which together account for nearly two-thirds of 2016's new capacity. Part of the boom in renewables came because the tax incentives for their installation were in danger of expiring, so utilities rushed to get projects through the pipeline ahead of the end of the year. 9.5GW of capacity is expected to come online from solar -- more than the past three years combined. Another 6.8GW is expected from planned additions of wind power, largely spread across the Great Plains. Of new fossil fuel plants, the vast majority are going to be burning natural gas; there are no planned additions of coal plants.

szczys writes: The NTSC standard has effectively been replaced by newer digital standards, but most televisions still work with these signals. This can be done through a composite video connection, but more fun is to broadcast video directly to your television's analog tuner. This is what cnlohr has been working on, using a lowly ESP8266 module to generate and transmit the color TV signal. This board is a $3 Wi-Fi module. But the chip itself has a number of other powerful peripheral features, including I2S and DMA. This hardware makes it possible to push the TV broadcast out using hardware, taking up only about 10% of processor time. Even more impressive, cnlohr didn't want to recompile and flash (which is a relatively slow process) during prototyping so he used a web worker to implement browser-based development through the chip's Wi-Fi connection. Speaking of chip-abuse in the interest of hyperlocal signal propagation, reader fulldecent writes to point out a project on GitHub that "allows transmission of radio signals from a computer that is otherwise air gapped. Right now this could be useful for playing a quick tune or for pranks. But there are more nefarious uses as this could also be used to exfiltrate information from secure networks."

An anonymous reader writes: Imagine a future where instead of siting through fire alarms with your fingers in your ears, a robot come comes to greet you and guide you out of the building. Researchers at Georgia Tech created an emergency guidance robot and then looked at whether or not people would follow the robot during an emergency. 'The research was designed to determine whether or not building occupants would trust a robot designed to help them evacuate a high-rise in case of fire or other emergency. But the researchers were surprised to find that the test subjects followed the robot's instructions – even when the machine's behavior should not have inspired trust.' The robot first guided people to a meeting room. In some conditions the robot broke along the way to the meeting room. Then, unbeknownst to the subjects, the researchers filled the hallway with smoke and set off the fire alarms. Given the option of going out the way they came or following the robot down an unknown hall, nearly all followed the robot.

MojoKid writes: Even for mainstream users, it's easy to feel the differences between using a PC that has an OS installed on a solid state drive versus a mechanical hard drive. Also, with SSD pricing where it is right now, it's also easy to justify including one in a new configuration for the speed boost. And there's obvious benefit in the enterprise and data center for both performance and durability. As you might expect, Google has chewed through a healthy pile of SSDs in its data centers over the years and the company appears to have been one of the first to deploy SSDs in production at scale. New research results Google is sharing via a joint research project now encompasses SSD use over a six year span at one of Google's data centers. Looking over the results led to some expected and unexpected findings. One of the biggest discoveries is that SLC-based SSDs are not necessarily more reliable than MLC-based drives. This is surprising, as SLC SSDs carry a price premium with the promise of higher durability (specifically in write operations) as one of their selling points. It will come as no surprise that there are trade-offs of both SSDs and mechanical drives, but ultimately, the benefits SSDs offer often far outweigh the benefits of mechanical HDDs.

New submitter Firx writes: My university department has a tradition of selling its used computers and/or repurposing them with Linux for graduate students and science computer labs. With Windows no longer requiring one be able to disable secure boot, my department is writing up a procurement policy to ensure future machines we buy will still have this feature. Part of the draft motion reads: "Be it resolved that computers running or intending to run Microsoft Windows purchased by the department which boot using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) have the ability to disable the Secure Boot features for both local hard drive and network booting." Is there something further we should be including here and what is the best way to explain the need for this policy to colleagues less technically literate?