Comedians Paul McCaffrey and Tiff Stevenson discuss how comedy is created.

It was bound to happen. After 4+ years of running multiple NAS units 24x7, I finally ended up with a bricked NAS. Did I lose data? Were my recovery attempts successful? If so, what sort of hardware and software setup did I use? How can you prevent something like that from happening in your situation? Read on to find out.

The world's only two flying Lancasters have been united with a Vulcan bomber in a formation flight described as a "never to be repeated" event

President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela has announced a mandatory fingerprinting system in supermarkets to combat food shortages and smuggling.

Russian EU food sanctions hit just before the Polish apple crop harvests leaving farmers with a glut of unsold fruit.

The United Nations' Human Rights chief has strongly condemned the UN's Security Council for what she called a failure to deal with conflicts.

Heavy rain is delaying a search for more than 50 people believed buried under a landslide on the edge of the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Gibraltar is planning to banish some of its Barbary macaque population which have become too cheeky or aggressive

Gibraltar is planning to banish some of its Barbary macaque population which have become too cheeky or aggressive

Daniel Genkin et al.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have demonstrated an attack against the GnuPG encryption software that enables them to retrieve decryption keys by touching exposed metal parts of laptop computers.

There are several ways of attacking encryption systems. At one end of the spectrum, there are flaws and weaknesses in the algorithms themselves that make it easier than it should be to figure out the key to decrypt something. At the other end, there are flaws and weaknesses in human flesh and bones that make it easier than it should be to force someone to offer up the key to decrypt something.

In the middle are a range of attacks that don't depend on flaws on the encryption algorithms but rather in the way they've been implemented. Encryption systems, both software and hardware, can leak information about the keys being used in all sorts of indirect ways, such as the performance of the system's cache, or the time taken to perform encryption and decryption operations. Attacks using these indirect information leaks are known collectively as side channel attacks.

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Nadir Godrej, a top executive at one of India's biggest businesses, turns to poetry to describe the challenges facing India's economy.

Version:next-20140822 (linux-next) Released:2014-08-21

Two American aid workers infected with Ebola in Africa has been released from hospital after treatment in the United States.

Yoav F On a mobile application, users typically have a single choice to protect their privacy: install the application or not.

The binary choice has left most users ignoring permission warnings and sacrificing personal data. Most applications aggressively eavesdrop on their users, from monitoring their online habits through the device identifier to tracking their movements in the real world via location information.

Now, a research group at North Carolina State University hopes to give the average user a third option. Dubbed NativeWrap, the technology allows Web pages to be wrapped in code and make them appear as a mobile application, but with user-controlled privacy. Because many applications just add a user interface around a Web application, the user should have equivalent functionality for many wrapped apps, said William Enck, assistant professor in the department of computer science at North Carolina State University.

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A parasite queen (left) and the queen of the ants it preys on. Note the two scale bars both represent one millimeter, indicating the parasites' relatively small size. University of Rochester

We tend to think of parasites as creatures that attach themselves to their hosts or worm their way inside, consuming the hosts' resources directly from their bodies. But there are other parasites that steal from their hosts simply by freeloading off them. The classic example is the cuckoo, which lays eggs in the nests of other birds, who then happily feed the cuckoo's offspring as if they were their own.

A successful strategy like that is hard for evolution to pass up. So it really wasn't a surprise to find out that there are also parasitic species of ants, ones that breed within the nests of other ants and raise their offspring using the resources provided by the hosts. Now, researchers have developed evidence that at least one of those species evolved within the nests that they now occupy.

The parasitic ant in question has the evocative name Mycocepurus castrator. It lives off the hard work of a related leaf-cutter ant named Mycocepurus goeldii. Although the host species is distributed widely within South America, M. castrator has a much narrower range—a single stand of eucalyptus trees conveniently located on the campus of Sao Paulo State University in Brazil.

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There have been fierce clashes between militia and international peacekeepers in the capital of Central African Republic.

Netflix via IMDB

An IP address used by staff at the US House of Representatives has been banned from editing Wikipedia for 30 days. It's the second such punishment for would-be anonymous House Internet users in less than a month.

The first ban was imposed for 10 days after a series of "disruptive" edits, including a change to the entry about the website Mediaite to describe it as a "sexist transphobic news and opinion blog."

Now the same IP address has been condemned by editors for making several controversial edits on articles related to transgender issues. Last night, a Wikipedia administrator imposed a month-long ban, with some editors asking for harsher measures.

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Left: Google's prototype car. Right: the eventual final design. Google

Traditionally, Google's self-driving car prototypes have taken existing cars from manufacturers like Toyota and Lexus and bolted on the self-driving car components. This is less than ideal, since it limits the design possibilities of the car's "vision" system and includes (eventually) unnecessary components, like a steering wheel and pedals.

However, Google recently built a self-driving car of its own design, which had no human control system other than a "go" button. The California DMV has now thrown a speed bump in Google's car design, though, in the form of new testing regulations that require in-development self-driving cars to allow a driver to take “immediate physical control” if needed.

The new law means Google's self-designed car will need to have a steering wheel and gas and brake pedals while it is still under development. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google will comply with the law by building a "small, temporary steering wheel and pedal system that drivers can use during testing" into the prototype cars. The report says California officials are working on rules for cars without a steering wheel and pedals, but for now, a human control system is mandatory.

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Beta users will also get a new build of iTunes 12. Andrew Cunningham

Apple has just released the first update to the OS X Yosemite Public Beta, about a month after the first beta shipped. If you skipped the first beta but would like to give this one a try, Apple's sign-up page still appears to be accepting new testers (the company said that it would close the program down after the first million sign-ups, a number that apparently hasn't been hit yet).

The build number of the new beta indicates that it's roughly the same as Yosemite Developer Beta 6, which was released earlier this week to registered iOS and OS X developers. The first public beta was more or less identical to Developer Beta 4.

In the space of those two developer betas, Apple has been working to squash out bugs and has further Yosemite-ized more traditional OS X components. The volume and brightness overlays have been changed to match the frosted translucent look used elsewhere in the OS, and Apple added a new batch of Yosemite-themed wallpapers. Additional application and System Preferences icons have also been redesigned to match Yosemite's simpler, "flatter" look.

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Wikimedia Commons

United States copyright regulators are agreeing with Wikipedia's conclusion that a monkey's selfie cannot be copyrighted by a nature photographer whose camera was swiped by the ape in the jungle. The animal's selfie went viral.

The US Copyright Office, in a 1,222-page report discussing federal copyright law, said that a "photograph taken by a monkey" is unprotected intellectual property."The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit," said the draft report, "Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition." [PDF]

The report comes two weeks after Wikimedia, the US-based operation that runs Wikipedia, announced that the public, not British photojournalist David Slater, maintains the rights to the selfie and the other pictures the black macaca nigra monkey snapped. The monkey hijacked the camera from Slater during a 2011 shoot in Indonesia and took tons of pictures, including the selfie.

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