An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein released the official version of their anti-encryption bill today after a draft appeared online last week. The bill, titled the Compliance with Court Orders Act 2016, would require tech firms to decrypt customers' data at a court's request. The bill is not expected to get anywhere in the Senate. President Obama has also indicated that he will not support the bill, Reuters reports. The bill requires legislation requires communications services to backdoor their encryption in order to provide "intelligible information or data, or appropriate technical assistance to obtain such information or data." Sen. Feinstein stated, "The bill we have drafted would simply provide that, if a court of law issues an order to render technical assistance or provide decrypted data, the company or individual would be required to do so. Today, terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts, even in the face of a court order. We need strong encryption to protect personal data, but we also need to know when terrorists are plotting to kill Americans."

An anonymous reader writes: Peabody Energy Corp filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Wednesday after a sharp drop in coal prices left it unable to service debt of $10.1 billion, much of it incurred for an expansion into Australia. As demand for metallurgical coal fell, particularly in China, Peabody's financial woes intensified. The company took a $700 million write-down on its Australian metallurgical coal assets last year. At home, the U.S. shale boom of the past few years made natural gas competitive with thermal coal, and the Obama administration's environmental regulations raised operational costs. Mr. Peabody's coal train might not be hauling away any more of paradise. Peabody, the world's biggest private-sector coal producer, said it expected its mines to continue to operate as usual and said its Australian assets were excluded from the bankruptcy. "This process enables us to strengthen liquidity and reduce debt, build upon the significant operational achievements we've made in recent years and lay the foundation for long-term stability and success in the future," Peabody Chief Executive Officer Glenn Kellow said in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: In one of the largest U.S. strikes in recent years, nearly 40,000 Verizon workers walked off the job on Wednesday after contract talks hit an impasse. The event got a boost as U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders joined them at a Brooklyn rally ahead of the New York primary next week. The strike was called by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that jointly represent employees with such jobs as customer services representatives and network technicians in Verizon Communications Inc's traditional wireline phone operations. The strike could affect service in Verizon's Fios Internet, telephone and TV services businesses across several U.S. East Coast states, including New York, Massachusetts and Virginia. Verizon and the unions have been talking since last June over the company's plans to cut healthcare and pension-related benefits over a three-year period. The workers have been without a contract since its agreement expired in August. Issues include healthcare, offshoring call center jobs, temporary job relocations and pensions.

Erin Kelly, reporting for USA TODAY: A key House panel voted Wednesday to pass an email privacy bill that would stop the government from being able to read Americans' old emails without a warrant. The House Judiciary Committee voted 28-0 to approve the Email Privacy Act, a bipartisan bill that would replace a 1986 law that allows government investigators to peruse emails at will if the communications are at least six months old. The bill would require federal officials to obtain a warrant before they can read or view emails, texts, photos or instant messages -- regardless of when the data was sent. "Today is a great day for not only the Fourth Amendment advocates who have fought long and hard to move the Email Privacy Act, but also for all Americans, who are one step closer to having private and secure digital communications," said Rep. Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., the lead sponsor of the bill along with Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.

An anonymous reader writes: Hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers will now have an easier path to getting their loans discharged, the Obama administration has announced. The Department of Education will send letters to 387,000 people they've identified as being eligible for a total and permanent disability discharge, a designation that allows federal student loan borrowers who can't work because of a disability to have their loans forgiven. The borrowers identified by the Department won't have to go through the typical application process for receiving a disability discharge, which requires sending in documented proof of their disability. Instead, the borrower will simply have to sign and return the completed application enclosed in the letter.

An anonymous reader shares an insightful story on Buzzfeed News: Mark Zuckerberg isn't running for president of the United States, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On Tuesday morning, the Facebook CEO kicked off the company's annual developers conference in San Francisco with a glancing shot at Donald Trump, followed by a reiteration of the company's oft-repeated pledge to bring the world together. Zuck's not alone. Last month Apple CEO Tim Cook led his keynote with a similar stump-speech vibe. He dove right into the company's national security and privacy fight against the FBI. Two weeks ago Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told attendees of the company's annual Build developers conference of plans to "move our society forward," asking "profound questions" of his developers:"Is technology empowering people or is it displacing us? Is technology helping us preserve our enduring values such as privacy, or is it compromising it?" Google CEO Sundar Pichai hasn't delivered his big keynote yet (it's coming up May 18), but late last year he issued an open letter in support of Muslims after Donald Trump suggested he'd blanket-ban the religious group from entering the United States. Welcome to 2016: where tech's biggest leaders are no longer selling themselves as innovators, creative geniuses, or domineering tycoons, but as world leaders -- statesmen shaping the course of human history.According to a report from last month, several tech executives -- including Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Sean Parker -- met recently to discuss how to "stop Donald Trump." Musk, however, later refuted such reports.

MarkWhittington quotes a report from Blasting News: Elon Musk and the people at SpaceX are rightly basking in the afterglow of finally landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on a drone barge in the Atlantic. The same flight delivered an expandable module built by Bigelow Aerospace to the International Space Station. But, as Ars Technica points out, the launch, landing, and arrival at the space station would not have taken place had it not been for the generosity of NASA. George W. Bush began the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which commercialized first cargo and then crew flights to and from the ISS. Four years later, SpaceX, having endured a number of launch failures of its small Falcon 1 rocket, was running out of cash. They were teetering on the brink of financial ruin as they were trying to develop a much larger and more complex Falcon 9 that would compete with more established launch vehicles such as the Atlas 5 and the Delta 4. Then NASA announced the initial contracts for COTS cargo flights. SpaceXâ(TM)s share was $1.6 billion. The NASA contract saved the company and allowed it to press on with building the Falcon 9 and the Dragon and then successfully compete for the Commercial Crew contracts.

An anonymous reader writes: More than 13,000 Amazon customers (including upwards of 5,000 Amazon Prime subscribers), have signed a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos calling for the company to stop selling Trump's line of menswear. UltraViolet Action is the organization hosting the petition, which calls for Amazon to "stop profiting off of [Trump's] brand of hate." The letter reads: "Donald Trump has consistently lobbed racist, sexist, and xenophobic attacks against entire groups of people, encouraged violence and vitriol against his political enemies and perpetuated a culture of violence against women. Amazon.com should want to distance themselves from this hateful rhetoric, but instead, they're profiting off his brand," explained Karin Roland, Chief Campaigns Officer at UltraViolet, in a statement. "Jeff Bezos needs to listen to his customers and ensure that Amazon doesn't profit off of Trump hate, and take immediate steps to dump Trump." If Amazon does take action, they wouldn't be the first. Macy's stopped carrying Trump's products last summer, and Univision and NBC cut ties with Trump over his statements as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MSNBC: CIA Director John Brennan told NBC News in an exclusive interview that his agency will not engage in harsh "enhanced interrogation" practices, including waterboarding, which critics call torture -- even if ordered to by a future president. "I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure," Brennan said. The CIA used waterboarding and other techniques on terrorist suspects after the 9/11 attacks. But in January 2009, President Obama banned the practices in his first few days in office with an executive order. When asked specifically about waterboarding Brennan could not have been clearer. "Absolutely, I would not agree to having any CIA officer carrying out waterboarding again," he said. Donald Trump is a staunch supporter of torture, saying he would bring back waterboarding and "a hell of a lot worse" to retrieve information from potential terrorists. Ted Cruz says he would "not bring [waterboarding] back in any sort of widespread use" by rank and file soldiers and agents, but as President he would "use whatever enhanced interrogation methods to keep this country safe."

An anonymous reader writes: In 1936 a reporter watched Donald Trump's uncle John, an MIT professor of engineering, as he was struck by two high-voltage sparks while demonstrating the grounding of an new X-ray machine which could generate a million volts of power. And immediately after Nikola Tesla's death in 1943, the FBI called John G. Trump to review the scientific papers Tesla left behind, according to a new article in The New Yorker. They joke that now John's nephew Donald "seldom sounds as ungrounded as when he invokes Professor Trump, the younger brother of his father, Fred," while campaigning for president. But while comparing the candidate's statements to the historical record, they conclude that "John Trump really does seem to have been a brilliant scientist," noting that he performed both radar and short-wave research for the allies during World War II and helped design medical X-ray machines.

schwit1 writes: "The database of the Philippine Commission on Elections has been breached and the personal information of 55 million voters potentially exposed in what could rank as the worst ever government data breach anywhere," according to Infosecurity Magazine.
The magazine attributes an initial web site breach to Anonymous, who were reportedly trying to persuade the commission to enable more security features on their automated vote-counting system before upcoming national elections on May 9. A second group named LulzSec Pilipinas then later posted the entire voter database online.

Trend Micro wrote that "Every registered voter in the Philippines is now susceptible to fraud and other risks after a massive data breach leaked the entire database of the Philippines' Commission on Elections." They report that the breached data even included 15.8 million fingerprint records, as well as 1.3 million records for overseas Filipino voters, including their passports' numbers and expiration dates, all stored in plain text.

An anonymous reader writes: In what seems like an April Fools' Day prank story but is surprisingly real, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, says that he has convinced Hillary Clinton to declassify as many documents as possible related to Area 51 and UFOs. On the matter of alien visitation, Clinton has previously stated that "I think we may have been [visited already]. We don't know for sure." Meanwhile, Democratic rival Bernie Sanders has been dismissive of UFO talk. And on the other side of the isle, everyone surely already knows how likely Republican nominee Donald Trump feels about illegal aliens. "The U.S. government could do a much better job in answering the quite legitimate questions that people have about what's going on with unidentified aerial phenomena," said John Podesta, who was also a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

An anonymous reader writes: A report entitled "The Online Trade of Light Weapons in Libya" on Thursday revealed machine guns, grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles are being traded in Libya via Facebook. Some of the weapons include those supplied by the U.S. allies to their Libyan proxies, while most come from raids by militants on the arsenals of former Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. "Many of the players in this new market began to use new technologies to hawk their wares," the paper says. Online sales from social media platforms such as Facebook "are one of the tools currently being used for this purpose." Machine guns made up the bulk of the Facebook offers, including six Soviet-made 12,7mm DShKMs, 11 14,5mm KPVs, and one Belgian 12,7mm FN Browning M2-type heavy machine gun. Large-caliber anti-material sniper rifles and a handful of other weapons have also been advertised on Facebook, according to the research.

An anonymous reader writes: Russia President Vladimir Putin says he has no links to offshore accounts unveiled in the Panama Papers. Moreover, Putin believes that these leaks are part of Western efforts to weaken Russia. As ABC News reports, Putin criticised Western media for involving his name in offshore business even though his name didn't feature in any of the leaked documents. Speaking in St Petersburg, Putin added that it certainly seems like a US-led disinformation campaign waged against Russia. Putin also defended a cellist friend who was named as the alleged owner of an offshore company, noting that his friend is a philanthropist.People in Russia, sadly, don't seem to care much about Panama Papers. As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, most Russians haven't heard of -- or don't care about -- the Panama Papers. The media house interviewed 30 people on the street, of which it found only 1 person thought it was wrong. (video).

Omar Valdimarsson, reporting for Bloomberg: The Panama secrecy leak claimed its first scalp after Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned following revelations about his personal finances. The decision was announced in parliament after the legislature had been the focus of street protests that attracted thousands of Icelanders angered by the alleged tax evasion of their leader. Gunnlaugsson, who will step down a year before his term was due to end, gave in to mounting pressure from the opposition and even from corners of his own party. The Panama documents leak, printed in newspapers around the world, showed that the 41-year-old premier and his wife had investments placed in the British Virgin Islands, which included debt in Iceland's three failed banks. An article on The Guardian sheds more light on this: The leaked documents from the Mossack Fonseca law firm show Gunnlaugsson and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir, bought a British Virgin Islands-based offshore company, Wintris Inc, in December 2007 to invest her share of the proceeds of the sale of her father's business, Iceland's only Toyota importer. Gunnlaugsson sold his 50% stake to his wife for a symbolic $1 at the end of 2009, eight months after he was elected to parliament as an MP for the centre-right Progressive party. He failed, however, to declare an interest in the company either then or when he became prime minister in 2013. His office has said his shareholding was an error due simply to the couple having a joint bank account and that it had "always been clear to both of them that the prime minister's wife owned the assets." The transfer of ownership was made as soon as this was pointed out, a spokesman said. The prime minister denies he was required to declare an interest.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Washington Post: More deaths from extreme heat. Longer allergy seasons. Increasingly polluted air and water. Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and ticks spreading farther and faster. Those are among the health risks that could be exacerbated by global warming coming decades, the Obama administration warned in a new report Monday. The study, more than 300 pages long and several years in the making, focuses on what the White House has described as one of the gravest threats to the nation: major health problems associated with climate change. It details direct effects, such as the potential for worsening air quality to trigger thousands more premature deaths from respiratory problems or an uptick in annual deaths from crushing heat waves. While every American could be affected, administration officials said Monday, the brunt of the harm is most likely to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, children, the poor, the elderly, minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities.

An anonymous reader writes: For those of you who have traveled through U.S. airports in recent years, you may have noticed the Transport Security Administration (TSA) use a Randomizer app to randomly search travelers in the Pre-Check lane. The app randomly chooses whether travelers go left or right in the Pre-Check lane so they can't predict which lane each person is assigned to and can't figure out how to avoid the random checks. Developer Kevin Burke submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking for details about the app. The documents he received reveals the TSA purchased the Randomizer iPad app for $336,413.59. That's $336,413.59 for an app, which is incredibly simple to make as most programming languages of choice have a randomizing function available to use. What may be even more intriguing is that the contract for the TSA Randomizer app was won by IBM. The total amount paid for the project is actually $1.4 million, but the cost is not broken down in Burke's documents. It's possible IBM supplied all the iPads and training in addition to the app itself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: The entire Turkish citizenship database has allegedly been hacked and leaked online. A website with purportedly leaked details of 49,611,709 Turkish citizens is online and allegedly gives the following details of each citizen -- including the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan: National Identifier (TC Kimlik No), First Name, Last Name, Mother's First Name, Father's First Name, Gender, City of Birth, Date of Birth, ID Registration City and District, and Full Address. The apparent hack seems to be politically motivated. The website reads: "Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure?" The hack amounts to about 6.6GB worth of uncompressed files, which may make it one of the biggest data leaks of its kind in history. While The Register has also reported on the leak, some claim the leak has correct information but is just a decrypted version of data that was leaked over a couple of months ago. Specifically, the info contains data of Turkish citizens who voted in 2009 elections.

An anonymous reader writes: A propaganda app developed by the Taliban was live on the Google Play store for two days before being removed, raising questions about Google's app review process, which includes a combination of human editors and algorithms. According to a Taliban spokesperson speaking with Bloomberg, the app was "part of our advanced technological efforts to make more global audience." Its creation signaled how the group was expanding its use of technology to reach a wider audience. When the app was first removed two days after it went live, the Taliban claimed it was due to "technical issues." In actuality, Google removed the app itself, as it was in violation of its policy that bans apps promoting hate speech, violence and illegal activities. The app's publication is a high-profile example of a failure in Google's app review process, and one that raises questions about how thorough its human reviewers are with the apps they test. The company announced last March that it had actually begun using algorithms along with an internal team of reviewers to analyze apps for policy violations prior to publishing. It said apps would be reviewed by this team, hands-on, before the apps go live on Google Play. Since Google relies heavily on its community of users and developers to flag apps for additional review, some apps are bound to fall through the cracks, leaving Google to reactively ban them instead of prohibit their publication in the first place. It's fair to say Google's review process isn't perfect and could use some tweaking.

An anonymous reader quotes an article on Herald Scotland: Scotland has met a key target for renewable energy consumption, according to official figures. Statistics published by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change show 57.7% of Scottish electricity consumption came from renewables in 2015 -- 7.7% ahead of the 50% target. The SNP welcomed the figures and pledged to bring forward plans to go further if re-elected in May. Deputy First Minister and SNP campaign director John Swinney said: "The SNP have long championed green energy and these new figures show the huge progress we have made - but we are determined to go even further.