Regulators in Germany wonder whether the social network may be abusing market power by not being clear with consumers about how its using their data. Privacy advocates have argued that Facebook, along with a handful of other companies, is leveraging its dominance as a social network to harvest personal information, effectively trampling on privacy laws. The German probe, announced today, will investigate the violation of data protection provisions.

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, it was reported that the mystery of fast radio bursts were solved, and that they were due to the merger of a neutron star with another collapsed object, well outside of our galaxy. However, not only was that analysis fundamentally flawed, but a new paper out today identifies fast radio bursts that repeat, a dealbreaker for the merger scenario. Instead, it's thought that these events come from the evolution of young neutron stars, as the data show an extragalactic but non-transient origin for these bursts. Planned follow-up observations plan on identifying the source locations as well as their true nature, and discerning whether all fast radio bursts have the same origin, or whether there are multiple different classes.

An anonymous reader writes: Nobody likes being monitored. But even if you suspected your company is following your activities on the iPhone, would you know where to check? In the next iteration of its smartphone operating system, iOS 9.3, Apple is looking to make this an easier task. According to Reddit user MaGNeTiX, the latest beta of iOS 9.3 has a message telling users their iPhone is being supervised. The message is as prominent as can be, both on the device's lock screen and in the About section. "This iPhone is managed by your organization," the message on the lock screen says. And in the About screen, you get a little more detail, with a message saying your iPhone's supervisor can monitor your Internet traffic and locate your device.

Quince alPillan writes: Announcing what it calls "the first cyber bug bounty program in the history of the federal government," the Department of Defense says it's inviting vetted hackers to test the security of its web pages and networks. Vetted hackers will need to pass a background check and will be attacking a predetermined system that is not a part of critical operations. This program is being put together by the Digital Defense Service, launched last fall.

mmoorebz writes: Microsoft is recognizing the increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on enterprises, which is why it is taking a new approach to protect its customers. Today it announced its new post-breach enterprise security service called Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, which will respond to these advanced attacks on companies' networks. Attackers these days are using social engineering and zero-day vulnerabilities to break into corporate networks. According to Microsoft, thousands of attacks were reported in 2015 alone. The company found that it currently takes an enterprise more than 200 days to detect a security breach, and 80 days to contain it. When there is such a breach, the attackers can steal company data, find private information, and damage the brand and customer trust in the company.

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli forces mounted a rescue mission in a Palestinian neighborhood after gun battles erupted when two soldiers mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.The clashes late Monday in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. According to initial Israeli reports, the two soldiers said they had been using Waze, a highly touted Israeli-invented navigation app bought more than two years ago by Google. The smartphone app, which has a settings option to 'avoid dangerous areas,' relies on crowdsourcing to give users the fastest traffic routes.

alphadogg writes: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, whose names have been linked since their seminal paper introduced the concepts of public key encryption and digital signatures some 40 years ago, have been named winners of the $1M A.M. Turing Award for 2015 (a.k.a., the 'Nobel Prize of Computing'). The work of Diffie, formerly chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has had a huge impact on the secure exchange of information across the Internet, the cloud and email.

Community manager Rikki Endsley writes: The open source label was created back in 1998, not long after I got my start in tech publishing. Fast forward to late 2014, when I was thinking about how much open source technologies, communities, and business models have changed since 1998. I realized that there was no easy way (like a yearbook) to thumb through tech history to get a feel for open source. Sure, you can flip through the virtual pages of a Google search and read the "Best of" lists collected by a variety of technical publications and writers, much like you can thumb through newspapers from the 1980s to see how big we wore our shoulder pads, neon clothing, and hair back then. But neither research method is particularly efficient, nor do they provide snapshots that show diversity within communities and moments of time. The idea behind the Open Source Yearbook is to collaborate with open source communities to collect a diverse range of stories from the year. We let the writers pick the criteria, which means the yearbook isn't just full of the fastest, most popular, smartest, or best looking open source solutions. Instead, the yearbook offers a mix of open source solutions and projects, from a range of writers and communities, to offer a well-rounded (albeit incomplete) glimpse at what open source communities and projects looked like in 2015. The yearbook is now available for a free download.

An anonymous reader writes: Two open-source libraries used in the Mars Rover software have been integrated in the source code of a malware family (nicknamed Rover) used as part of a cyber-espionage campaign against the Indian government (Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan). The two libraries are OpenCV and OpenAL, two libraries for processing image and audio information. As such, the Rover malware can take screenshots, record video and audio.

MarkWhittington writes: Researchers at MIT have developed a gossamer thin solar cell that is made of layers of flexible polymers. The cell is so light that it can rest on a soap bubble without breaking it. As a bonus, the thin, light cells puts out 400 times more power than the standard, glass covered photovoltaic cells, at about six watts per gram. According to the researchers, this new development could help power the next generation of portable electronic devices.

coondoggie writes: NASA wants to put a supersonic passenger jet back in the sky that promises to a soft thump or supersonic heartbeat as the agency called it - rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with such high-speed flight. The 'low-boom' aircraft known as Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) will be built by a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. It will cost $20 million to develop baseline aircraft requirements and a preliminary aircraft design.

sciencehabit writes: Scientists have known for several years now that stars, galaxies, and almost everything in the universe is moving away from us (and from everything else) at a faster and faster pace. Now, it turns out that the unknown forces behind the rate of this accelerating expansion - a mathematical value called the cosmological constant - may play a previously unexplored role in creating the right conditions for life. That is the conclusion that a group of physicists who studied the effects of massive cosmic explosions, called gamma ray bursts, on planets made. They found that when it comes to growing life, it's better to be far away from your neighbors - and the cosmological constant helps thin out the neighborhood.

HughPickens.com writes: Taking a page from the Uber playbook, Christopher Palmeri writes that Disney's six parks in Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California, are raising the cost to visit its theme parks as much as 20 percent during the busiest times of year and lowering them on typically slow days. Previously, the parks charged the same price for a one-day pass any time of year. "The demand for our theme parks continues to grow, particularly during peak periods," the company said. "In addition to expanding our parks, we are adopting seasonal pricing on our one-day ticket to help better spread visitation throughout the year." The move is designed to help manage traffic at the parks, which had record visits in the final three months of 2015. Busy days at Disney's amusement parks cause long lines for customers, and even gate closures. Dynamic pricing is meant to financially incentivize customers to choose less-busy days, spread out attendance, and to make as much money as possible on days when the park is historically expected to be full. It is also likely to boost Disney's total revenue since most visitors will pay more for their tickets.

One reason Disney may expect bigger crowds this year is the upcoming Star Wars theme park expansion which includes a virtual reality ride that allows guests to control the Millennium Falcon in an aerial battle with the First Order. "Star Wars is, for lack of a better word awesome," said Harrison Ford. "I'm so blessed that I had the opportunity to be a part of it. To walk in these iconic locations. And soon, you'll be able to do that as well. Not in a galaxy far, far away, but in a place close to home."