Oyster fishing is set to make a comeback in Wales after marine biologists reintroduced 40,000 oysters into Swansea Bay.

Grooves in the seafloor off South Carolina carved by icebergs. Jenna C. Hill

“Snowbirds” they are called—people who escape snowy winters in the northern US by seasonally migrating to second homes in Florida. Probably about the last thing they would like to see while walking along the beach is the ice following them south. At certain times just a handful of millennia ago, it turns out, they might have been surprised to find icebergs floating by the beaches.

When Earth’s climate was colder and an ice sheet covered Canada, impressive flotillas of icebergs were occasionally launched into the Atlantic during incidents known as “Heinrich events.” Each time a batch of icebergs and glacial meltwater were vomited out, the area around the North Atlantic experienced climatic consequences. It’s thought that the infusion of freshwater gummed up the conveyor belt of Atlantic Ocean circulation, disrupting the transport of heat throughout the entire ocean basin.

Heinrich events are usually seen in ocean sediment cores as layers of gritty sediment dropped from melting icebergs onto the fine mud of the seafloor. That’s even been seen as far south as Bermuda. Closer to North America’s eastern coast, trenches carved by the undersides of large icebergs have been spotted in the mud off Nova Scotia, New Jersey, and even the Carolinas.

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Michelle Lee, at right, signing a memorandum with the director general of IP Australia in September 2014. US Mission General

Michelle Lee, formerly Google's chief patent lawyer and currently acting director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, has been nominated by the Obama administration to be the next permanent USPTO director. Lee will be the first head of the patent office to have a background at an Internet company.

Lee's nomination comes months after the administration floated the name of Philip Johnson, a lawyer at Johnson & Johnson who was an outspoken opponent of patent reform. The idea of nominating Johnson evaporated after a negative response from tech companies.

Choosing Lee has won praise all around, although the pro-reform forces are likely happier than the anti-reform forces given her background at Google. Lee was one of the first corporate lawyers to be vocal about the problem posed by "non-practicing entities," also known as patent trolls.

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This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a list of the best technology to buy.
Read the original full article below at TheWirecutter.com.

After considering all the major laptops in its price range, I decided that if I had to buy a Windows laptop for $600 or less, I’d get the ~$580 version of the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 2 14.

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Radius

Citizenfour is filmmaker Laura Poitras' account of the first meetings between herself, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. It was first shown publicly last Friday, and it will open in theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco on October 24.

For those who have followed the news around the Snowden documents, even in small doses, Citizenfour isn't full of revelations (though there are a few surprises). But for viewers interested in surveillance, or the future of the Internet, or journalism—it won't matter. The film is riveting, and its power is in its source material.

Poitras filmed Snowden for 20 hours over eight days in his Hong Kong hotel, and her film has now given the world an unfiltered portrait of the man who, in the course of the year, became the West’s most wanted dissident.

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How could I refuse?

A few days ago, my wife messaged me a photo from a thrift shop with the question, "You want?" The picture was of a box of software still in shrinkwrap—SPRY Inc.'s Internet in a Box for Windows 95.

The answer was an obvious "OMG YES." I reviewed Internet in a Box back in 1993 when it was first released as an early adopter of independent local Internet dialup (using David Troy's Toad.Net). I spent endless hours connected with the software and my very first laptop PC, pulling down Hubble Telescope images from the Space Telescope Science Institute's Gopher server and raging at Usenet posts. Just the sight of the logo caused a wave of nostalgia to wash over me. It was a simpler time, a somewhat less user-friendly time. CompuServe was still a thing.

This particular box of software was, however, especially endearing. I used version 1.0 for several years before Toad.Net partnered with Covad and ran one of Baltimore's very first DSL connections into my house—allowing me to give up the dual ISDN connection I had for my connection to my employer. This was a bundle designed to bring the masses to the Internet, along with their photos, in 1995. Attached to the box was a Seattle FilmWorks one-use 35mm film camera, emblazoned with the CompuServe logo.

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Cyber attacks on large US companies result in an average of $12.7 million in annual damages, an increase of 9.7 percent from the previous year, according to the fifth Cost of Cybercrime report published by the Ponemon Institute on Wednesday.

The report, sponsored this year by Hewlett Packard’s Enterprise Security division, found that business disruption and information loss account for nearly three-quarters of the cost of cybercrime incidents. The study also confirmed that companies that make security a priority have lower costs associated with security incidents during the year. In particular, companies that use technology that helps flag potential intrusions into critical systems have lower costs, by an average of $2.6 million.

“Business disruption, information loss and the time it takes to detect a breach collectively represented the highest cost to organizations experiencing a breach,” Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said in a statement.

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Conal O'Rourke remains frustrated and baffled at his year-long saga with Comcast, which resulted in his losing his job. Cyrus Farivar

The California man who publicly accused Comcast of getting him fired from his job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) after he complained to the highest levels of Comcast about his year’s worth of billing errors, has made good on his threat to sue his former ISP. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco late Thursday.

Among other accusations, Conal O’Rourke is suing Comcast on allegations of violating the Cable Communications Act by disclosing his personal information to his employer, defamation, breach of contract, emotional distress, and unfair business practices.

“We don’t normally comment on pending litigation and as we have said, there were clear deficiencies in the customer service that we delivered to Mr. O’Rourke," Jenni Moyer, a Comcast spokesperson, told Ars in a statement.

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This piece originally appeared in Pro Publica.

This story has been updated to include a comment from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

On a recent Monday evening, two bearded young men in skinny jeans came to a parklet in San Francisco's trendy Hayes Valley neighborhood and mounted what looked like an art installation. It was a bright blue, oversized "suggestion box" for the Internet.

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All the recent talk of Haswell-E and high-end refreshes has obscured the more casual computing market. The Bay Trail platform uses Intel’s Atom based Silvermont cores and competes directly against AMD’s Kabini for integrated computing, digital signage and cheap computing models. Today we compare two mini-ITX Celeron J1900 based motherboards: the GIGABYTE J1900N-D3V at $85 and the ASUS J1900I-C at $92, as well as the SoC itself.

Hundreds of climate change protestors have attempted to disrupt shipments of coal from a port north of Sydney using their canoes, kayaks and surfboards to form a blockade.

Scientists from the University of Leicester say they may have solved one of the most enduring mysteries in modern physics: the nature of dark matter.

Google

Have you ever heard the expression, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"? It's a saying that extolls the virtues of diversification—always have a "Plan B." Judging by Google's messy and often-confusing product line, it's something the company takes to heart. Google likes to have multiple, competing products that go after the same user base. That way, if one product doesn't work out, hopefully the other one will.

The most extreme case of this has been Google's instant messaging solutions. At one point there were four different ways to send a text message on Android: Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Messaging (Android's SMS app), and Google Voice. Google Hangouts came along and eventually merged everything into a single instant messaging platform.

Mercifully, Google has a single, unified instant messaging program now, and all further IM efforts will be poured into this, right? Wrong. A report from The Economic Times of India says that Google is working on a fifth instant messaging program. This one reportedly won't require a Google account and will be aimed at Whatsapp. In KitKat Google removed the stock SMS app and used Hangouts for SMSes, but in Lollipop it is adding back an SMS client, so soon we could potentially be back up to three texting clients. The unified Hangouts update also added a second dialer app to Android, so now there is the main Google Dialer that was introduced in KitKat and a new Hangouts Dialer that makes VOIP calls. Users went from needing IM unity, having it, then chaotically clamoring for dialer unity.

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On Thursday, the Guardian reported that the developers of Whisper, a social media platform that allows individuals to post anonymous messages that can be seen by others based on a number of factors, isn’t all that anonymous after all. Whisper, which is advertised as “the safest place on the Internet,” tracks geolocation data of posters and uses their location data for a number of purposes—including censorship and reporting of posts from military bases to the Department of Defense. Whisper’s chief technology officer took to YCombinator’s Hacker News to defend the company against the report, but his explanation was torn apart by security and privacy experts in the discussion that followed.

Much like its competitor Secret, Whisper allows individuals to post anonymous messages overlaid on images or photos to share with others for comment. The application uses geolocation data to determine where the poster is and who should be able to see its contents.  It has become popular with a number of communities, including members of the military.

The Guardian was exploring a potential editorial relationship with Whisper, and staff from the news organization spent three days at Whisper’s offices in Los Angeles. While there, the Guardian team witnessed Whisper employees using an in-house geolocation tool to track posts made from various locations and found that the company is tracking specific Whisper users believed to be “potentially newsworthy,” including members of the military, government employees, and employees of companies such as Disney and Yahoo. The company also shares information about posters and their locations with the Defense Department, FBI, and the UK’s MI5, the Guardian’s Paul Lewis and Dominic Rushe reported.

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The "Apple SIM" allows AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, or EE support without switching SIM cards. Andrew Cunningham

Apple's iPad announcements today focused overwhelmingly on the iPad Air 2's thickness, its screen, and its internals, but it and the iPad Mini 3 got some other quieter upgrades too. One such upgrade is a new "Apple SIM," a nano SIM card that allows the cellular models to switch between multiple mobile carriers without changing the actual card. At launch the card supports AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and UK carrier EE. Though Apple is still selling Verizon-compatible iPads, the US' biggest carrier remains conspicuously (though perhaps not surprisingly) absent from the list.

One thing Apple is emphasizing with the SIM is that it can be used to secure short-term data commitments, rather than the regular monthly charges most cellular tablets generally assume. In theory, you can jump between carriers based on the one that's offering the data you need for the price you want, and you never have to swap out the SIM card to do it. Apple is also playing up the ability to buy data from international carriers when traveling, though obviously the carrier list will need to expand before this is practical.

Though the Apple SIM is launching in the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 3, we would expect it to start showing up in other Apple products eventually. Simplifying the product line instead of shipping carrier-specific versions of iPhones and iPads seems like the right move for Apple to make; let's hope carriers continue to climb on board.

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The expanding options for communicating over the Internet and the increasing adoption of encryption technologies could leave law enforcement agents “in the dark” and unable to collect evidence against criminals, the Director of the FBI said in a speech on Thursday.

In a post-Snowden plea for a policy more permissive of spying, FBI Director James B. Comey raised the specters of child predators, violent criminals, and crafty terrorists to argue that companies should build surveillance capabilities into the design of their products and allow lawful interception of communications. In his speech given at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, Comey listed four cases where having access to a mobile phone or laptop proved crucial to an investigation and another case where such access was critical to exonerating wrongly accused teens.

All of that will go away, or at least become much harder, if the current trend continues, he argued.

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This afternoon, AMD released their financial results for the third quarter, which ended September 27, 2014. While revenue was down slightly from Q2, the net income was positive for this first time this fiscal year. non-GAAP Earnings Per Share was $0.03, which missed analysts’ projections of $0.04. Earlier in the quarter projections were as high as $0.07 per share, but the Computing and Graphics segment was mixed this quarter due to “challenging market conditions” according to AMD.

Starting July 1st, 2014, AMD reorganized their reporting structure into two groups. The Computing and Graphics group focuses on desktop and notebook processors, chipsets, discrete desktop GPUs, and workstation GPUs. The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom group includes server processors, embedded processors, dense servers, semi-custom SoCs, engineering services, and royalties, which is pretty much every market AMD is in other than the traditional desktop/notebook market.

AMD Q3 2014 Financial Results (GAAP)   Q3'2014 Q2'2014 Q3'2013 Revenue (Billions) $1.43 $1.44 $1.46 Operating Income (Millions) $63 $63 $95 Net Income (Millions) $17 -$36 $48 Earnings Per Share $0.02 -$0.05 $0.06

Revenue for Q3 2014 was $1.43 billion, down just under 1% from Q2 2014’s $1.44 billion. As compared to Q3 2013, revenue was down 2%. Operating Income was $63 million (non-GAAP $66M) for the quarter, which is also down from the previous quarter and year-over-year. Net income was $17 million (non-GAAP $20M) for the quarter which is up from the $36 million loss last quarter, but down from $48 million profit in Q3 2013. Gross margin was flat from last quarter at 35%.

AMD Q3 2014 Financial Results (Non-GAAP)   Q3'2014 Q2'2014 Q3'2013 Revenue (Billions) $1.43 $1.44 $1.46 Operating Income (Millions) $66 $67 $78 Net Income (Millions) $20 $17 $31 Earnings Per Share $0.03 $0.02 $0.04

The Computing and Graphics segment revenue decreased 6% from last quarter and 16% year-over-year. AMD states the primary decrease is due to by lower chipset and GPU sales as compared to last quarter, and decreased notebook processor and chipset sales as compared to a year ago. The Operating Loss for the division was $17 million, which is up (or down, depending on how you look at negative numbers) substantially from the $6 million loss last quarter and $9 million loss in Q3 of last year.  The Average Selling Price (ASP) of CPUs/APUs actually increase sequentially and year-over-year. Discrete GPU ASP decreased over last quarter, but increased over the same period last year. The Computing and Graphics segment is a tough market for AMD right now. Intel is moving to 14 nm while AMD has to rely on Global Foundries and other fabs to attempt to catch up. This hampers their ability to match Intel on the performance per watt metric certainly. On the GPU front, NVIDIA just released the Maxwell based GTX 980 and 970, as well as the mobile counterparts which have shown impressive performance, and efficiency. Hopefully AMD can counter with some new products in the near term.

The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom division fared much better for Q3, with a 6% sequential gain in revenue and 21% year-over-year. Operating income for the quarter was $108 million which was up from the $97 million of Q2, and $92 million of Q3 2013. As with the last couple of quarters, AMD attributes the gains primarily due to increased sales of semi-custom SoCs. Their embedded revenue grew by “double digits” as compared to last quarter. Clearly AMD has found a niche here where they can use their expertise in new markets to shore up the company, and so far, it has been successful. In addition, AMD has closed two new Semi-Custom SoC designs this quarter which should help this division continue its growth.

Results Per Division   Q3'2014 Q2'2014 Q3'2013 Computing and Graphics Revenue (Millions) $781 $828 $925 Computing and Graphics Operating Income (Millions) -$17 -$6 $9 Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Revenue (Millions) $648 $613 $536 Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Operating Income (Millions) $108 $97 $92

In addition, AMD is also trying to cut costs by reducing their workforce by about 7% Currently, they have 10,149 employees as of the end of Q3, which means around 710 people will be cut from the company. Most of these cuts should be done by the end of Q4. AMD will then adjust their real estate footprint to accommodate the smaller workforce, which could mean additional infusions of cash from the sale of buildings. They are hoping to have savings of $9 million for Q4 and $85 million for FY 2015.

Their forecast for Q4 is not rosy either. AMD is expecting revenue to decrease 13% from Q3, plus or minus 3%. However they are also hoping to drop expenses from the current guidance of $420 to $450 million, to $385 million, which means they are hoping for a positive non-GAAP free cash flow.

Although AMD did miss investor earnings, they did not miss by much and the net result was a quarter where the company managed to turn a tiny profit, which is in stark contrast to the first couple of quarters for 2014. Unfortunately, AMD’s losses all stem from the desktop PC industry. Intel just had a record quarter, so there is certainly money to be made in this sector. We will have to see how Dr. Su, the new CEO of AMD, addresses this for the next quarter.

 

These days, most patent lawsuits are filed by so-called "patent trolls," which can't be counter-sued because they have no business other than litigation.

When a company files a patent lawsuit against a competitor, it can expect to be met with a counter-suit. That's exactly what happened when Sprint used 12 VoIP patents to sue Comcast in 2011. Yesterday, Comcast's counter-punch landed, hard.

Sprint got slapped with a $7.5 million jury verdict (PDF) for infringing three Comcast patents, after a Delaware trial ended. That's less than the $16.5 million Comcast lawyers had asked for, but simply by sticking it out through trial and winning, Comcast's point has surely been made: we're not an easy target, and we will hit back.

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Quick-snap! Now, Kinect-less Xbox One owners can do a few more cool system functions on the fly.

Microsoft's near-monthly streak of Xbox One updates continued on Wednesday with a substantial October update. The console maker had already teased the update's most intriguing feature in August when it announced a media-player app set to handle a staggering number of codecs—particularly the MKV container—and DLNA streaming from other devices on a home network.

XB1's new media player, like the system's Blu-ray player, must be loaded as a separate app. We were able to test it during a beta period, and it worked as advertised, meaning it allowed us to watch all of our favorite, legitimately acquired TV shows and films in crisp MKV format.

The update's other major addition, a quick-snap menu, can be accessed with a double-tap of the controller's home button. It focuses largely on functions that were formerly locked to voice control, including quick loads of previous games and apps and the ability to record your last 30 seconds of gameplay—which should make it easier for players who snapped up a cheaper, Kinect-less XB1 to multitask with the system.

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Microsoft is replacing a whole set of its IT-oriented conferences—TechEd, Management Summit, Exchange Conference, SharePoint Conference, Project Conference, and Lync Conference—with one new event: Ignite.

The first Ignite conference will be a five-day event in Chicago, running May 4-8, 2015. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will give the keynote speech with Brad Anderson (CVP Enterprise Client & Mobility), Joe Belfiore (CVP Operating Systems Group), Dave Campbell (CTO), Peggy Johnson (EVP Business Development), Chris Jones (VP), Julie Larson Green (Chief Experience Officer of "My Life and Work"), Gurdeep Singh Pall (VP Skype), and others.

With the announcement of Ignite, Microsoft has announced its full set of major 2015 conferences. The year will kick off with business event Convergence in Atlanta, March 16-19. Next is Build, once again in San Francisco, April 29-May 1. After Ignite, the final event will be Worldwide Partner Summit in Orlando, July 12-16.

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