Andreas Beer

When people talk about reducing their “carbon footprint,” transportation and energy use in the home usually get all the attention. Diet deserves to be a part of that conversation, too, however. The global agricultural system is complex, and not all food choices are created equal in terms of their impact on climate and their use of resources.

Agriculture accounts for roughly 12 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Population growth obviously increases the demand for agricultural production, but there’s another important trend as well—the rising consumption of meat. People in many developing nations are eating more meat as they gain the means to afford it. This is significant, as meat is a sort of demand multiplier because of the crops needed to feed livestock. A field of corn, for example, may be able to feed x number of people, but it can feed far fewer if it’s used to raise cattle.

The animal part of our diet is a significant portion of the agricultural system. Animal feed requires the output of 40 percent of US cropland—and if you include pastureland for grazing, it accounts for 40 percent of all US land. Feed also uses 27 percent of total irrigation and half of the nitrogen fertilizer used, and it contributes about five percent of total greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

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EA

For all the ways that digital distribution has revolutionized how we get games, the actual process of buying those games in the console space has mostly changed very little—it's still a matter of paying up front and downloading a game that you can play "forever." EA announced today that it is throwing that model on its head by offering an "EA Access" subscription to Xbox One owners. The program gives access to some of the publisher's older titles and a discount on future purchases.

For $5 a month, or the much more economical price of $30 a year, EA Access will let subscribers download four titles from what the publisher is calling the "EA Vault": FIFA 14, Madden 25, Peggle 2, and Battlefield 4. Subscribers will also get 10 percent off all digital content from EA, including full game downloads and DLC content like Battlefield 4 Premium and FIFA Ultimate Team (though Titanfall is explicitly excluded in the fine print). EA Access also grants trial access to upcoming games "up to five days before the release date," with progress that will carry over to the full release if and when you purchase it.

It's an interesting bundling move, and it's one that could be a good deal for players that don't already own any of the offered legacy titles. But a lot of the long-term value will depend on the specific implementation going forward. It's currently unclear when EA will add new games to the Vault, for instance, and it seems unlikely that brand new releases will be given away for "free" until they stop generating significant sales to standard purchasers (EA just says that the Vault will see "more titles being added soon").

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NSF

Today, the president's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) released a report that describes the costs that would ensue if the world fails to get its greenhouse gas emissions under control. The report doesn't break new ground, but it neatly summarizes the current state of economic analysis on carbon emissions. The report suggests that allowing the Earth to warm by three degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels (we've already used up one of those three degrees) would entail costs of $190 billion every year, with the price rising steeply thereafter.

But the report also lays out the case that acting sooner rather than waiting makes better economic sense. And it notes that any action at all would function as an insurance policy against some of the more extreme scenarios that haven't been ruled out.

The White House's CEA is meant to be a clearinghouse for national economic data. Various other government agencies prepare reports on things like the GDP and employment rate; the CEA aggregates this data, prepares reports on the general state of the economy, and analyzes the implications for the president's economic policies.

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Today's launch of the new SHIELD Tablet with NVIDIA's Tegra K1 SoC has muddied up the tablet waters a bit. We've posted our full coverage of the device, but for those looking for a short summary of the SHIELD Tablet – and whether it's worth buying or not – here's the synopsis of NVIDIA's latest entry into the mobile gaming market.

At its core, the SHIELD Tablet is a fully functional 8" Android tablet, which is quite a change from the initial SHIELD handheld gaming device. Of course it comes with NVIDIA's latest Tegra K1 processor, a quad-core ARM Cortex A15r3 CPU with a 192 CUDA core Kepler-derived GPU and 2GB DDR3L-1866. Storage options are currently 16GB or 32GB, and a microSD slot for additional storage. The display is a 1920x1200 IPS panel, and though it has a somewhat limited color gamut it's a decent if not exceptional display overall. Connectivity consists of 2x2 stream 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, with optional LTE support also available. The 16GB model comes with WiFi only while the 32GB model is equipped with LTE. A capacitive DirectStylus 2 also comes standard on both models.

The overall build quality and design are definitely improved over the Tegra Note 7, with a premium feel that was previously lacking. In many ways, it feels like a larger variant of the Nexus 5, and as an owner of a Nexus 5 that's pretty high praise. NVIDIA has also provided stereo front-facing speakers that sound better than those in most tablets. The only problem is that the SHIELD Tablet is rather heavy compared to the competition – it weighs 390g, compared to 294g for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4, but you get better performance with the added weight.

While there's certainly plenty of hyperbole involved with NVIDIA referring to the K1 as having supercomputing roots, from a pure performance perspective the K1 GPU delivers the goods, topping the charts in most of our graphics benchmarks. The CPU side of the equation isn't quite as impressive; it's faster than the previous generation Tegra 4, but given differences in platform, OS, etc. it can be difficult to draw firm conclusions. In general, you can expect somewhere around 5-25% better CPU performance than the Tegra 4, and the K1 tops most of the CPU charts and is at worst competitive with other leading SoCs. About the only potential weaknesses are in the NAND performance (random write is a bit low), and battery life takes a step back from the earlier SHIELD (though that's with a smaller battery) – and under heavy gaming workloads it can be less than three hours depending on the game. That's sort of the price you pay if you want maximum gaming performance from a tablet, though: battery life is going to take a hit when running full tilt.

NVIDIA has put quite a bit of effort into the software side of things as well. Besides all the usual Android tablet features – which basically work as expected – you get ShadowPlay support (record and/or stream your gaming sessions), GameStream (either local or remote is in beta), and access to GRID gaming as well. We've covered all of these previously, and there's nothing really new to add: they all work and offer features that you can't find on other tablets. If you're in the market for a tablet that can function as a portable gaming system, your options are quite limited.

The base price for the SHIELD Tablet is actually quite good, all things considered: $299 will get you one of the fastest Android tablets around, but don't forget the accessories. There's the DirectStylus 2, SHIELD wireless controller, and SHIELD Tablet cover. While you get a DirectStylus 2 with every SHIELD Tablet (a replacement stylus will set you back $20), the wireless controller is a $60 accessory and the magnetic cover is another $40 accessory. The cover isn't strictly necessary, but as someone that has used quite a few tablets without covers, over time getting some sort of cover is highly recommended, and the SHIELD Cover is a high quality cover that meshes well with the tablet. The wireless controller is a different matter: if you're looking at this as a gaming device, it's basically a required accessory. There are many Android games that are designed for a touchscreen, but if you want to use GameStream or play any of the games optimized for a gaming controller, you'll need the SHIELD wireless controller.

Taken as a complete package, then, you're looking at $400 for the 16GB WiFi model with accessories and $500 for the 32GB LTE model. You can argue that's too much, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but if you like the idea of a portable gaming tablet you don't really have many other choices. You can get the older NVIDIA SHIELD for $200, but that's half the price for basically half the performance and it was never really that useful except as a gaming device. The SHIELD Tablet on the other hand can function perfectly well as a tablet, and you only need to bring out the controller for times when you want to play games.

Ultimately, the SHIELD Tablet is a far more versatile solution than the original SHIELD, and if you're in the market for a new tablet it's still worth considering even if you don't care much about the gaming aspects – you can always add the controller at a later date. It might be a bit heavy compared to other options, but the performance and features definitely help set it apart. Unless you're particularly committed to a specific vendor for your devices, the SHIELD makes for a good addition to the Android family.

Gallery: Short Bytes: NVIDIA's SHIELD Tablet

Iron Dome

The technology behind Iron Dome, the missile defense system Israel has been using since 2011, was allegedly stolen by Chinese military hackers.

That claim was made by Cyber Engineering Services to Brian Krebs of security news site Krebs On Security, and it identifies Elisra Group, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems as the three defense companies that were compromised during the cyber assault. The perpetrators, Cyber Engineering Services says, are the same ones behind a spate of attacks that have come to light in the past few years, all attributed to Unit 61398, a Shanghai-based arm of the Chinese army. The five Chinese military officers indicted by the US earlier this year for allegedly hacking energy firms in the country also belong to the same unit.

The hacks took place from October 2011, some six months after Iron Dome became operational, and continued up until August 2012. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has said that many hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza, particularly during the current military operation and a series of clashes in 2012, have been scuppered by the system, which is thought to be one of the most effective missile-defense technologies in the world.

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The BBC's Jonathan Beale says artillery fire from the Ukraine military seems to be intensifying in Donetsk.

This isn't the only way Instagram and sheep are related. Sean Gallagher

Stevie Graham, a London-based developer, recently submitted a bug report to Facebook outlining what he saw as a security vulnerability in Instagram that would allow someone to hijack a user’s session based on data captured over a public Wi-Fi network. When he was told that he wouldn’t get a bug bounty from Facebook, which owns Instagram, he tweeted about it—and set about building a proof-of-concept tool to exploit it. “Denied bug bounty. Next step is to write automated tool enabling mass hijacking of accounts,” he wrote. “Pretty serious vuln, FB. please fix.”

As we reported in our recent coverage of mobile application privacy holes, Instagram uses HTTP for much of its communications, passing the user’s account name and an identifying account number in the clear. And as Graham demonstrated, there are other pieces of data sent between Instagram’s iOS client and the service that are passed in the clear. Even though the user’s credentials are submitted using a secure connection, information passed back by Instagram’s application interface to the phone client provides a cookie that can be used on the same network without reauthentication to connect via the Web to Instagram as that user and gain access to private messages and other data. “Once you have a cookie, any endpoint can be authenticated with the cookie, HTTPS or HTTP,” he wrote. Graham said that he has known about the flaw for years.

Graham posted the following steps to reproduce his findings:

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Oyvind Solstad

When the US Supreme Court decided the Alice v. CLS Bank case last month, it was a signal that courts should be throwing out a lot more patents for being too abstract to be legally valid. Groups seeking patent reform and tech companies rejoiced, hoping the decision would knock out more of the patents wielded by so-called "patent trolls," whose only business is litigation.

The fallout from this year's biggest patent decision is still taking shape, and it won't be affecting just fly-by-night patents owned by trolls. Defendants in corporate patent battles are hoping to use the Supreme Court decision to their advantage as well. Now, Alice v. CLS has come up in Apple v. Samsung, the highest-profile patent battle in recent years. Just two weeks after the decision came down, Samsung lawyers have filed a brief stating their belief that the Supreme Court ruling knocks out two Apple patents used to score a second $120 million verdict against them earlier this year.

Apple's universal search patent and "swipe-to-unlock" patent are exactly the type of basic ideas, surrounded with "do it on a computer" language, that the US Supreme Court rejected, say Samsung lawyers.

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They say you never forget your first computer. For some of us, it was a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe. For others, it was a Pentium 233 running Windows 95. Regardless of the hardware, the fond memories of wonder and excitement are universal. For me, I'll never forget the night my father brought home our first computer, a Tandy 1000. more>>

Opportunity passes Lunokhod Crater on its trip to Marathon Valley. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

Before the big publicity splash made by the Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity, the big stars on Mars were the two Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The pair of 400 lb (185 kg) semi-autonomous machines were dropped onto Mars in January 2004 and were initially designed with an operational lifespan of 90 sols (a sol is a Martian day, equivalent to about 24 hours and 39.5 minutes), but they managed to drastically exceed that lifespan through careful piloting and resource management. In fact, although Spirit fell silent in March 2010, Opportunity continues to be responsive—and as of yesterday, it has traveled 25.01 miles (40.25 km) across the Martian surface, setting a new record for off-world travel.

Distances driven by other off-world vehicles. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The previous record dates back to 1974 when the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover zipped across about 24.2 miles (39 km) of dusty lunar terrain in about four months. Opportunity’s progress has been much slower, due to a combination of a low travel speed (usually about 10 mm per second, with a top speed of 50 mm per second, about 600 feet per hour) and regular stops to perform observations.

In the ten years that Opportunity has cruised the Martian craters and valleys, the faithful robot has contributed tremendously to our understanding of the composition and history of Mars, including transmitting back data that provides significant support to the idea that Mars once had oceans of liquid water.

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The British Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has started to replace advertising on copyright-infringing websites with official warnings telling users that the site is under criminal investigation.

The sites in question are those that have been identified as hosting copyright-infringing content and reported to PIPCU by rights holders. Officers from the unit evaluate the sites to verify that they are infringing copyright. They then contact the site owner to give them the opportunity to "correct their behavior" and operate legitimately. If that fails, PIPCU can get the site taken down by contacting the domain registrar, replacing the site's ads with the scary warnings, or adding the sites to the infringing website list. When a site is added to that list, the information is fed back to a group of 60 marketing agencies, advertising technology companies, and brands responsible for placing ads, and they are then asked to stop placing ads on those sites.

In order to get PIPCU's banners onto the copyright infringing sites, the police have partnered with content verification company Project Sunblock. Project Sunblock maintains the list of infringing websites and then makes sure that when clients' advertisements are going to be delivered to one of those sites, the police banners are served as a replacement. Neither Project Sunblock nor the police pay for this ad placement; they simply serve an alternative ad. Project Sunblock then reports back to the client which ads have been blocked and on how many occasions.

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The 2013 Retina MacBook Pro is getting a minor refresh. Andrew Cunningham

2014 has been a lackluster year for new Mac hardware refreshes—the year is half gone, and all we've gotten is a MacBook Air that's a little cheaper and a tiny bit faster and an iMac that's a little cheaper and a lot slower. Now the Retina MacBook Pro line is getting in on the kind-of-refreshed fun with some mild spec bumps that don't radically change the models released back in 2013.

Let's begin with the 15-inch models. The base prices remain the same across the board for these, but you now get the maximum 16GB of RAM standard with the 15-inch MBP instead of as a $200 add-on. The CPU in the $1,999 model also gets a small bump, from a 2.0GHz (3.2GHz Turbo) quad-core Core i7-4750HQ to a 2.2GHz (3.4GHz Turbo) i7-4770HQ. These CPUs are identical save for their clock speeds—the latter chip is part of Intel's mid-cycle "Haswell refresh" line, which gives OEMs an extra 100 or 200MHz without raising the price.

The higher-tier model doesn't get as substantial a boost as the entry-level model, but you do get a small price cut from $2,599 to $2,499. You get the same computer as before, except with a 2.5GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) i7-4870HQ instead of a 2.3GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) i7-4850HQ. For another $200 on top of that, you'll get a 2.8GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) i7-4980HQ instead of a 2.4GHz (3.6GHz Turbo) i7-4950HQ. These are decent clock speed bumps, though if you were on the fence about upgrading to the previous 2013 models, they don't really alter the equation.

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Android minus the Google Apps. We've got some work to do. Ron Amadeo

Android is a Google product—it's designed and built from the ground up to integrate with Google services and be a cloud-powered OS. A lot of Android is open source, though, and there's nothing that says you have to use it the way that Google would prefer. With some work, it’s possible to turn a modern Android smartphone into a Google-less, completely open device—so we wanted to try just that. After dusting off the Nexus 4 and grabbing a copy of the open source parts of Android, we jumped off the grid and dumped all the proprietary Google and cloud-based services you'd normally use on Android. Instead, this experiment runs entirely on open source alternatives. FOSS or bust!

Before we begin, we have a few slight notes. FOSS stands for "free and open source software," and when we say "free" we don't mean free of cost, but free of restrictions. It's software that we can do whatever we want to, including copy, modify, and redistribute.

But, wait... did we say we'd dump "all" services? Not going to happen. Almost instantly, we had to compromise our open source ideals due to hardware. The SoC in the Nexus 4 is made by Qualcomm, and many of the drivers for it are closed source (this is the case with nearly all smartphones, not just our sacrificial Nexus 4). The firmware and drivers for the cellular modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and camera are closed source, too. The CyanogenMod repository has a list of closed source drivers in each device branch called "proprietary-blobs.txt." You can see the list for our Nexus 4 here, which is 184 items long.

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While I talked about this in the launch article, the SHIELD Tablet is very much the culmination of lessons learned from 2013. While the Tegra Note 7 was a decent tablet, it had to eke out a profit through hardware sales against competition that was willing to sell their tablets with no profit on hardware. While the SHIELD portable was a good portable gaming device, it was far too specialized to be anything but a gaming device. Without an established gaming ecosystem, NVIDIA struggled against established competitors.

As a result, NVIDIA is the first to launch a serious gaming tablet running Android. While gaming tablets have been done before, they’ve been few and far between. It’s always been technically possible to take a high end tablet and make it usable for gaming, but for the most part these attempts are marred by either the need for root or an application that requires extensive work on the part of the user to create proper control profiles for each game. In addition, the SoC in the tablet is often underequipped for intensive 3D gaming.

That’s where the SHIELD tablet comes in. With Tegra K1, a dedicated controller, 2x2 WiFi, and a huge amount of custom software, there’s definitely a lot of ground to cover. Once again, while the SHIELD tablet is a gaming device, it must also be a good tablet. To that end, NVIDIA has tried to differentiate this tablet with DirectStylus 2 and dual front facing speakers/bass reflex ports. To find out how this device does, read on for the full review.

Andrew Harding reports on the ongoing violence in the Central Africa Republic.

A slide from next week's Black Hat talk titled Android Fake ID vulnerability. Bluebox Security

The majority of devices running Google's Android operating system are susceptible to hacks that allow malicious apps to bypass a key security sandbox so they can steal user credentials, read e-mail, and access payment histories and other sensitive data, researchers have warned.

The high-impact vulnerability has existed in Android since the release of version 2.1 in early 2010, researchers from Bluebox Security said. They dubbed the bug Fake ID, because, like a fraudulent driver's license an underage person might use to sneak into a bar, it grants malicious apps special access to Android resources that are typically off-limits. Google developers have introduced changes that limit some of the damage that malicious apps can do in Android 4.4, but the underlying bug remains unpatched, even in the Android L preview.

The Fake ID vulnerability stems from the failure of Android to verify the validity of cryptographic certificates that accompany each app installed on a device. The OS relies on the credentials when allocating special privileges that allow a handful of apps to bypass Android sandboxing. Under normal conditions, the sandbox prevents programs from accessing data belonging to other apps or to sensitive parts of the OS. Select apps, however, are permitted to break out of the sandbox. Adobe Flash in all but version 4.4, for instance, is permitted to act as a plugin for any other app installed on the phone, presumably to allow it to add animation and graphics support. Similarly, Google Wallet is permitted to access Near Field Communication hardware that processes payment information.

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Version:next-20140729 (linux-next) Released:2014-07-29

Earlier this month Intel introduced new models in their lineup of Haswell mobile CPUs. With the Haswell manufacturing process having matured since its initial launch, Intel was able to bump clock speeds by 200MHz on a handful of their laptop CPUs and those chips have found their way into a refreshed lineup of Macbook Pro laptops from Apple. This update brings CPU speed boosts, and more RAM in the base 13" and 15" models. The new CPU and memory specifications for Apple's new lineup are shown below.

MacBook Pro with Retina Display Lineup Model 13-inch (base and mid-tier) 13-inch (flagship) 15-inch (base) 15-inch (flagship) Old CPU 2.4GHz Core i5-4258U 2.6GHz Core i5-4288U 2.0GHz Core i7-4750HQ 2.3GHz Core i7-4850HQ New CPU 2.6GHz Core i5-4278U 2.8GHz Core i5-4308U 2.2GHz Core i7-4770HQ 2.5GHz Core i7-4870HQ Old Memory 4GB DDR3L 8GB DDR3L 8GB DDR3L 16GB DDR3L New Memory 8GB DDR3L 8GB DDR3L 16GB DDR3L 16GB DDR3L

The first thing to make note of is that the CPU speed has been increased by 200MHz across the board. The highest end CTO (configure-to-order) 15" model which is not shown now comes with Intel's Core i7-4980HQ with a base clock of 2.8GHz and max turbo clock of 4.0GHz. The other important thing to note is that the amount of RAM in the entry-level models has been doubled from 4GB to 8GB on the 13", and from 8GB to 16GB on the 15". This is a change that is nice to see brought to the 13" Macbook Pro with Retina display. Originally the entire 13" line had 8GB of RAM and the 4GB model was introduced to reach a lower price point during Apple's Haswell refresh. Now the entry level model once again has 8GB of RAM like the higher end versions.

The new models are available to purchase now on Apple's website for the same prices as the previous generation and are all available to ship within 24 hours.

Amphetamine drugs worth millions of pounds were sent by international parcel courier from the UK to Australia.

Diana Mather and Rosamund Urwin discuss who it is appropriate to invite to the cinema to watch Fifty Shades of Grey.