What comes up might go back down. Pete Markham

As we transition away from fossil fuels, one way for us to have our cake and eat it too is to capture the CO2 before it reaches the atmosphere and stick it back down in the ground. That can be done by pumping it into the same reservoirs that once held oil and gas or into deep, saline aquifers. While that CO2 will gradually dissolve and eventually form carbonate minerals, in the meantime, you’re relying on the integrity of the rocks to provide the container that keeps the CO2 locked away.

Injecting CO2 beneath the seafloor is also an attractive option, but questions have remained about the ecological effects of a CO2 leak on the ocean floor. A newly published study created an artificial leak off Scotland’s western coast to measure its impact; the work was done by a large group of researchers led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory’s Jerry Blackford, the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s Henrik Stahl, and the University of Southampton’s Jonathan Bull.

They drilled a horizontal borehole out to a point 11 meters (slightly more than 36 feet) below the seafloor, beneath twelve meters of water. They monitored and sampled that area while injecting CO2 for about five weeks. The injection started out slow, increasing over time. Without a barrier to keep it below the seafloor, some of the CO2 escaped upward.

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Following up on the incredible success of smartphones, tablets, and other handheld-size mobile devices, device manufacturers have been toying with ideas on what comes next. A common theme across many of these ideas has been the Internet of Things concept, which sees microcontrollers and Internet connectivity embedded into increasingly small or otherwise unusual devices where network connectivity wasn’t present before. From a technology perspective this is an exercise in seeing what you can do with products and environments where everything is networked, and meanwhile from a market perspective this is about driving the next wave of market growth for chip and device manufacturers.

But while the IoT concept seems simple on the surface – just put a chip in everything – what device makers have found out is that they have yet to discover what a good implementation would look like and what parts they need to build it. For that reason we have seen numerous companies toy with the IoT concept over the last year, launching new hardware components such as Intel’s Edison and the ARM Cortex-M7, or software components like MediaTek’s LinkIt. Which brings us to today’s news from ARM and their latest IoT project.

Being announced today at ARM TechCon 2014, ARM is unveiling their “mbed” (all lower case) IoT Device Platform, which is ARM’s new software platform for IoT devices and the servers feeding them. mbed is a surprisingly blunt project from ARM, who thanks to the success of their platform and their work over the years on their Cortex-M series of CPUs already has most of the hardware in place. Confident in their hardware, ARM is seeking to tackle what they see as the current issue holding IoT back: software.

The mbed platform is a combination of client and server software, consisting of a lightweight OS for client devices – mbed OS – and the matching server software to interact with it, the mbed Device Server. Like ARM’s hardware IP, both mbed OS and mbed Device Server are intended to be building blocks for finished products. Specifically, the idea being that developers will take the mbed components and build the application logic they need on top of a solid software foundation provided by ARM. By providing the OS and Device Server with the necessary support for various networking, wireless, and security standards built in, then as ARM’s thinking goes IoT software development will be dramatically simplified as ARM will have taken care of the hard parts, leaving developers free to focus on the application logic itself, reducing development costs and the time to market

For the mbed OS component, the OS is a lightweight, low-power kit OS designed to run on Cortex-M processors. ARM for their part will build in the necessary hardware features and even some common libraries, with a focus on providing building blocks for developers looking to design finished products. At this point ARM’s announcement predates the software by a bit, so mbed OS is still under development with early access for partners in this quarter with a shipping version in 2015.

Meanwhile the mbed Device Server is essentially a software bridge designed to allow the mbed OS devices to interact with web services. Unlike the stand-alone OS, Device Server is intended to be integrated into larger (cloud) server setups, with Device Server providing the means for the easy interaction with and management of mbed OS clients. As ARM likes to note the Device Server is based around open standards, with the idea being that they’re providing another kit (this time for the server) to give developers a place to start rather than creating a closed ecosystem around the mbed OS and Device Server components. Finally, unlike the OS, the Device Server is already running and available to developers.

In the short term mbed is all about kickstarting the IoT market, which is a big reason as to why ARM is giving away large chunks of it for free. The mbed OS is entirely free, and the Device Server is free for development. Only production setups running Device Server would need to pay a license fee. ARM wants to get mbed spread as widely as possible, and with their strong position in the hardware market they are more than willing to give away the software if it will spur on IoT hardware sales. Or as they see it, the time it takes to develop good software is currently gating the sales of products incorporating their IoT-focused hardware.

Looking at the bigger picture, while ARM has the right idea overall they are not the only company pursuing this software/toolkit market. Intel’s Edison platform ships with its own OS, and MediaTek’s LinkIt platform also includes its own LinkIt OS for many of the same purposes. However in all of these cases ARM and other companies can only provide the building blocks; they still must rely on developers to put together the killer app that will jumpstart the market. Largely for this reason the potential success for the IoT market is out of the hands of ARM and other hardware IP providers, but by providing a solid set of building blocks and working with a very large set of partners such as Marvell and Freescale, they are doing what they can to make that success happen.

A rare clouded leopard has been hand-reared in the bathroom of a zookeeper after she was rejected by her mother.

From left, the Moon in visible light, a terrain map, and a map of the gravity anomalies. View is centered over the Oceanus Procellarum. Note the strong linear features in the gravity image. NASA/Colorado School of Mines/MIT/JPL/Goddard Space Flight Center

The side of the Moon that faces us is dominated by a series of mares, or seas. These aren't water-filled seas teeming with moonsharks, however. Instead, they're filled with darker rock, thought to be the product of impacts that unleashed a flood of magma onto the surface of the Moon.

The largest of these features was apparently too big to be a mare, and it has picked up the name Oceanus Procellarum. It truly is massive, at about 2,500 kilometers across (for contrast, the Moon is 3,500 km in diameter). It has been interpreted as the remains of an even larger impact basin, but data from the lunar GRAIL mission has now called that theory into question. The new information suggests that Oceanus Procellarum may be the one case where the Moon's own internal heat drove massive volcanic eruptions.

GRAIL involved two satellites orbiting the Moon, with the distance between them being constantly monitored. As they zoom above denser features in the Moon's crust, the leading satellite will accelerate slightly, increasing the separation. Over multiple orbits, this builds a gravity map of the Moon, revealing details of its inner structure that could otherwise only be inferred from surface features. (The mission was based on the successful GRACE satellites that orbit Earth, coming to an end in 2012.)

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US Attorney General Eric Holder North Charleston

Attorney General Eric Holder, the US top law enforcement official, said it is "worrisome" that tech companies are providing default encryption on consumer electronics. Locking the authorities out of being able to physically access the contents of devices puts children at risk, he said.

"It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy,” Holder said during a Tuesday speech before the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online conference. “When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children. It is worrisome to see companies thwarting our ability to do so."

Holder's remarks, while he did not mention any particular company by name, come two weeks after Apple announced its new iPhone 6 models would be equipped with data encryption that prevents authorities from accessing the contents of the phone. At the same time, Google said its upcoming Android operating system will also have default encryption.

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A sample Sway presentation, viewed from a Web browser.

The day after giving a preview of the next version of Windows, Microsoft has revealed another part of its play to take its desktop to the cloud—an upcoming addition to the Office suite called Sway. Designed to build Web-based interactive presentations, Sway is now available as an invitation-only preview. A tool designed for a new form of Web presentations and story-telling, Sway will run as a combination of client applications and back-end cloud services to intelligently assemble and format content.

Sway creates “sways”—multimedia, animated, interactive presentations that live within a Web container—that can be created, published and viewed from any connected device with access to Microsoft’s OneDrive service. Sway will allow users to use any device to collect or input images, text, and other media through native applications or a Web interface. Users can also grab content from other Web sources, including social media. Facebook and Twitter posts can be dragged and dropped directly into presentations.

Since its interface is Web-based, Sway will be able to run across multiple platforms, including Apple and Android mobile devices. Images and other content added to a Sway document will be stored in a OneDrive account folder.

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Microsoft released a technical preview of Windows 10 this morning, and it's available for download here.

System requirements are a 1GHz or faster processor, 1GB of RAM for 32-bit systems or 2GB for 64-bit systems, 16GB of free hard disk space, and a Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with a WDDM driver. In other words, anything that's capable of running Windows 8.1 can be moved to Windows 10. You can upgrade to the Windows 10 preview from either Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1.

It's free, as long as you sign up for the Windows Insider Program with a Microsoft account. The 32-bit download is 3.16GB while the 64-bit one is 4.10GB. Although Microsoft makes a version of Windows for ARM devices, the preview is x86-only. The preview will expire on April 15, 2015, with Microsoft releasing the final version of the OS sometime after that.

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Nick Thompson

Programming costs are so high today that even Comcast complains about the expense. What of small Internet service providers who lack the negotiating power of the nation's largest TV and broadband company?

Some of them are dropping channels or exiting the pay-TV business altogether, says a new article in The Wall Street Journal.

"I think the TV model is broken," BTC Broadband President Scott Floyd told the newspaper. BTC stopped offering TV late last year while continuing to sell Internet and phone service.

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Despite Valve's longstanding push to increase the profile of Linux gaming (and the Linux-based SteamOS that is still hanging out in beta), the growing list of Linux games on Steam remains dominated by smaller, independent titles and a few ports of big-name classics. So it's worth paying attention to the fact that 2K Games has announced that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel will have full Linux/SteamOS support on the same day it launches on Windows machines and consoles, October 14. The announcement comes alongside news that 2K has also released a port of Borderlands 2 for SteamOS, and it's offering the older game at a 75 percent discount to celebrate.

Getting major publishers to launch such heavily promoted, AAA games on Linux concurrently with Windows is going to be key to convincing PC gamers to make the switch to one of many Linux-based Steam Machines if and when they finally launch next year. So far, though, big-name publishers have yet to make Linux versions of their biggest titles a priority, despite Steam's work on tools to make such Linux ports less difficult. Aside from Borderlands, the biggest upcoming release Linux gamers can really point to is Firaxis' Civilization: Beyond Earth, which will be coming to Linux "at a later date" than the Windows release.

This isn't exactly how the Linux community saw things going when Steam for Linux was officially launched back in February of 2013. As Ubuntu developer Canonical's director of consumer applications David Pitkin said at the time, "we expect a growing number of game developers to include Ubuntu among their target platforms. We're looking forward to seeing AAA games developed with Ubuntu in mind as part of a multi-platform day and date release on Steam."

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This post originally appeared on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website. The author, Dave Maass, is a media relations coordinator and investigative researcher for EFF.

For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.

Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out hundreds of thousands of copies of the disc to parents for free at schools, libraries, and community events, usually as a part of an “Internet Safety” outreach initiative. (You can see the long list of ComputerCOP outlets here.) The packaging typically features the agency’s official seal and the chief’s portrait, with a signed message warning of the “dark and dangerous off-ramps” of the Internet.

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The Xen Project has published a security advisory that could affect millions of virtualized servers running in Amazon’s cloud and other public hosting services. A flaw in the Xen hypervisor could allow a malicious fully virtualized server to read data about other virtualized systems running on the same physical hardware or the hypervisor hosting the virtual machine. The malicious system could also potentially crash the server hosting the virtual machines. A patch, which was privately disclosed last week under embargo, has been issued to correct the issue.

Xen is used by a number of public and private cloud providers to support infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Rackspace, and some configurations of the OpenStack cloud provisioning environment. The flaw, discovered by Jan Beulich at SUSE, affects servers configured to support hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) mode virtualization. HVM lets operating systems use hardware extensions that give them faster access to the physical server’s hardware, and it uses software emulation of other Intel platform hardware to allow those operating systems to run without modification. Windows virtual machines running on Xen require HVM support.

The bug, introduced in versions of Xen after version 4.1, is in HVM code that emulates Intel’s x2APIC interrupt controller. While the emulator restricts the ability of a virtual machine to write to memory reserved specifically for its own emulated controller, a program running within a virtual machine could use the x2APIC interface to read information stored outside of that space. If someone were to provision an inadvertently buggy or intentionally malicious virtual machine on a server using HVM, Beulich found that VM could use the interface to look at the physical memory on the physical machine hosting the VM reserved for other virtual machines or for the virtualization server software itself. In other words, an "evil" virtual machine could essentially read over the shoulder of other virtual machines running on the same server, bypassing security.

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12 more bodies have been recovered by rescue workers from from Mount Ontake, bringing to 48 the number of those killed by Saturday's volcanic eruption.

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS brings Nintendo's long-running fighter franchise to a portable system for the first time. Screenshots in this review have been upscaled from the 3DS' native 400×240 resolution to show detail. Andrew Cunningham

To say Super Smash Bros. is a big franchise for Nintendo is an understatement. Since its launch on the Nintendo 64, the games have regularly ranked at or near the top of all-time sales lists for their respective consoles. Like Mario Kart, they often serve as important system-sellers that prompt additional sales bumps for the back catalogue.

This time around, Nintendo is extending the franchise to a portable system for the first time. Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS (a title that could surely be made shorter and better, but this isn't a review of the name) needs to take a fast, four-player fighter that has always had a whole TV to spread out on and squeeze it down to fit the 3DS' twin screens.

I didn't really care for the 3DS version of the game at E3, which was shown off alongside the upcoming Wii U version. Playing it on the small screen for a week has slowly changed my opinion, though. This one won't be a favorite of the hardcore set that keeps the Gamecube controller alive, but it's a surprisingly competent port and a good way to give Smash a reach that it just isn't going to have on the chronically sales-challenged Wii U.

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A web registration bug that affected more than 60,000 organ donation registrations certainly couldn't have helped these Ontario percentage numbers.

Yesterday, the government of Ontario put out a giant, public call to correct a web registration error that resulted in over 60,000 inaccurate organ donation applications.

According to a letter sent to affected province citizens by ServiceOntario, the error went unnoticed for nearly 18 months, and it centered around wrongly recorded "exclusions," meaning organs that someone would rather not allow to be harvested after death. In particular, the letter stated that web users who'd opted into all organ donations were still registered as "excluding" their pancreas.

The letter assured users that their personal information had not been compromised in any way, but it did not further clarify how other wrongful exclusion requests might have been registered by the beadonor.ca site between March 23, 2013 and September 19, 2014. In a report by the Toronto Star, Ronnie Gavsie, the president of the affected web site's operator, insisted that “no donation opportunities were lost” during that span of time, nor were any organs incorrectly donated. Upon discovering the error earlier this month, the government of Ontario shut beadonor.ca down to investigate, waiting until Tuesday to inform the public of its findings.

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In an indictment unsealed today, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged four men with stealing information from the US Army, Microsoft, and a host of other game developers. Two of the charged men pleaded guilty on Tuesday.

The unsealed indictment—which was returned by a federal grand jury in April—alleges that starting in 2011, the four men targeted Microsoft and stole “Log-In Credentials, Trade Secrets, and Intellectual Property pertaining to its Xbox gaming system,” specifically the still-in-development Xbox One.

The four men also allegedly turned to Epic Games and used SQL injection attacks “and other incidents of unauthorized access” like stolen passwords to pilfer “unreleased software, source code, and middleware” from the upcoming Gears of War 3 title.

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"Revenge porn" is a term that has developed over the last few years to refer to the posting of nude images without the consent of those in the pictures. After a spate of publicity surrounding some of the bad actors in this business, several states have passed laws outlawing "revenge porn" and applying penalties.

Now, a coalition of businesses and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a lawsuit (PDF) challenging the anti-revenge-porn laws. They've picked Arizona as their battleground. One of the lead lawyers on the case, Michael Bamberger, told the National Law Journal that Arizona's law is "probably the most egregious," because it has no requirement that the images even be malicious, and an exemption for images taken in a "commercial or public setting" is vague.

"This is a supposed revenge-porn statute that does not require revenge," said Bamberger.

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One of the things shown off in the Continuum video: A modified Start screen, that incorporates elements of the Start menu.

The most important thing that Microsoft showed at its Windows 10 unveiling in San Francisco today won't actually be in the Technical Preview that's shipping tomorrow.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of the operating systems group, showed a video of what he called a "design motion study" of a feature he called Continuum.

The Continuum design study.

With Windows 8 and 8.1, a wealth of hybrid machines that in one way or another act like tablets and laptops—machines such as the Lenovo Yoga and Surface Pro—hit the market, and Microsoft says that they've been very popular among their buyers. However, those buyers somewhat fell between the cracks.

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The Start menu is back where it used to be, but now includes traditional desktop elements alongside the live tiles designed for tablets.

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As announced earlier today, the next version of Windows is Windows 10. Skipping right over Windows 9, Microsoft is trying to blend the best bits of the desktop-centric Windows 7 with the best parts of the tablet-centric Windows 8. Microsoft isn't quite going up to eleven yet, but it's close.

Instead of the full-screen Start screen of Windows 8, there's a Start menu that will look familiar to Windows 7 users while adding the live tiles created for Windows 8. Windows 10 features new options for re-sizing windows, multiple desktops, and a convenient "task view" to switch between them. The Windows command prompt is also being dragged into the 21st century.

Microsoft focused a lot today on how it's improving the desktop, but that doesn't mean Windows isn't for tablets anymore. A touch-screen device that docks with a keyboard, for example, will switch from desktop mode to tablet mode depending on whether it's attached to the keyboard or disconnected.

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The Dallas Morning News is reporting that we've now seen the first case of Ebola infection diagnosed within the US. Although patients were previously brought back to the US for treatment following infection in West Africa, this is the first case we know of where the infected individual traveled back on their own, possibly unaware that they were infected.

According to the article, the patient is currently being kept in isolation at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas after doctors found that he had symptoms consistent with Ebola and had recently been to West Africa. Blood samples were shipped to the CDC for testing yesterday, which led to today's results.

Details are scarce at the moment, but it's safe to assume that health officials are trying to track back to the individuals that were in contact with the patient since his return from overseas. This will allow them to be monitored and treated quickly if symptoms should emerge. Depending on the exact details of when the patient traveled, it could be possible to keep the virus from spreading to other patients within the US.

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In late September, advertisements appearing on a host of popular news and entertainment sites began serving up malicious code, infecting some visitors' computers with a backdoor program designed to gather information on their systems and install additional malicious code.

The attack affected visitors to The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Hindustan Times, Internet music service Last.fm, and India-focused movie portal Bollywood Hungama, among other popular sites. At the center of the malware campaign: the compromise of San Francisco-based Internet advertising network Zedo, an advertising provider for the sites, whose network was then used to distribute malicious ads.

For ten days, the company investigated multiple malware reports, retracing the attacker's digital footsteps to identify the malicious files and shut the backdoor to its systems.

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