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The title says it all, but it’s not something you would expect to hear directly from Microsoft. The company decided to completely jettison Internet Explorer from the upcoming Windows 10 in favor of its new Project Spartan browser. The main complaint about IE was dragging the vestiges of older Internet Explorer versions that were non-compliant, creating unnecessary problems for new versions of IE (10/11).

Recent versions of IE have included various backward-compatibility modes that force the browser to repeat the errors of earlier versions.

Windows 10 impending release date is getting closer each month and more information is being released on what to expect from the new OS. From the WinHec Conference, we now know that Windows 10 will havenative support for the new USB 3.1 Type-C right out of the gate.

Seeing that Windows 10 will ship in a few months and Type-C has already been approved, it makes perfect sense that the company will support the new connector natively from day one.

This has to be the creepiest story of the week. An Italian Neurologist, Dr. Sergio Canavero has outlined hishead transplant procedure in a medical paper submitted to the Surgical Neurology International. The paper outlines the techniques and the prognosis for a full recovery within a year. The good doctor is looking for a few good test subjects if you are interested in getting ahead.

And that's all without even taking into account the ethical considerations: in order to have the best chance of success, the donor body has to be still technically living. This also means that donor bodies -- even if the procedure could be approved -- would be in very short supply. Unsurprisingly, the concept leaves many uncomfortable.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Las Vegas mother of four killed in a road rage shooting last week got in her car with her adult son and his gun and drove around their neighborhood looking for the assailant who ended up shooting her in a residential cul-de-sac, police said Tuesday.

In a change from earlier accounts, police Lt. Ray Steiber said 44-year-old Tammy Meyers had her teenage daughter run in the house to fetch her armed son, who then went with her as she drove to find the driver who had earlier stopped his car in front of hers, got out and approached her with angry words.
"Mrs. Meyers is scared, but she's upset," Steiber said, adding that the intent appeared to be "so they can find who frightened them on the roadway."

"I would never say that anybody went looking for trouble," Steiber said when asked to characterize Tammy Meyers' five-to-10 minute drive through the neighborhood. He said she found, and for a time followed, the vehicle she had apparently been looking for.

A Wyoming woman who lost her husband of 28 years to brain cancer last year was shocked to receive a special gift from him this Valentine's Day.

Shelly and Jim Golay of Casper, Wyoming, met at church in 1984. They had a "fairy tale romance" and even went to Disneyland in California for their honeymoon, Shelly Golay told ABC News today.
Her husband was "very much a family man," Golay, 52, said, adding that they have two children, now 27 and 25.

The family has owned Rocky Mountain Industrial Supply, an industrial and safety distribution company, since 2007.

You Soon Might Be Able to Design Your Nike Shoes in Virtual Reality

Say goodbye to boring sneakers designed in regular, no good, boring reality! (Photo: Nike)

Take a moment to recall the last thing you drew in MS Paint. Now imagine it stamped on a shoe that you shaped in thin air with a similar toolbar. How does that make you feel?

Be sure to contemplate that image, because you may soon have an opportunity to make it a reality. Per a report from Quartz, Nike was recently awarded a patent for an invention that would let you custom-design a pair of kicks via projected virtual reality.

Here’s what we can discern from the wording and images in the official filing: Say you think you’re supertalented, with enough chops to design your own shoe line. (Me too, Kanye, hiiii!) You’ll get cozy with your computer at a desk, along with what the patent refers to as an “interacting device” (the patent makes it look like a stylus) and a disembodied mannequin’s foot. Then you’ll slip on a pair of virtual reality goggles. The patent doesn’t specify which devices Nike’s Matrix shoe will be designed for, but the obvious contestant here is Microsoft’s trippy new HoloLens. Unlike most other virtual reality headsets, the HoloLens comes with a virtual toolbox that allows you to build stuff in empty space and then 3D-print it.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is amending its regulations for weapons sales to allow the export of armed military drones to friendly nations and allies.

The State Department said Tuesday the new policy would allow foreign governments that meet certain requirements — and pledge not to use the unmanned aircraft illegally — to buy the vehicles that have played a critical but controversial role in combating terrorism and are increasingly used for other purposes. Recipient countries would be required to sign end-use statements certifying that the drones would not be used for unlawful surveillance or force against domestic populations and would only be used in internationally sanctioned military operations, such as self-defense.
Each sale would be reviewed individually and the pledges would be monitored for compliance, the department said in a statement.

This 'Flying Mega-Yacht' May Be the Nicest Plane Ever

TSA guards with cold hands who insist on patting you down. Babies who spend the entire flight screaming in a piercing five-octave range. Flight delays so long you actually could have saved time walking.

All of those indignities we would happily bear, if only we could take all of our flights on this plane.

A ridiculously tricked-out Boeing 747-8, whose interior was refurbished by Washington-based Greenpoint Technologies, has just been delivered to an unidentified private owner. According to the Robb Report, it’s the first Boeing 747-8 (which is Boeing’s largest passenger jet) to receive Greenpoint’s VIP treatment. And it is stunningly luxurious.

(CNN)Anna Jacks checks her baby's forehead over and over again. Is he hot? Does he have a rash? Is his nose still runny?

Her son has been sick before, but this time it's different: Last week Eli was at a Phoenix Children's Hospital clinic with a woman who had the measles, which spreads easily from person to person. Now he's showing signs of the virus, such as runny nose and cough and fatigue.

At 10 months old, Eli is too young to get vaccinated and would be especially vulnerable to serious complications of measles, such as deafness and brain damage or even death. But his parents have an even bigger worry. If Eli does have the measles, he could give it to his 3-year-old sister, Maggie, who has leukemia.

No, it’s not Doc Brown and his DeLorean, but a team of physicists at the University of Queensland, Australia that have built not a time machine, but instead built a time machine simulator that will mimic a quantum particle passing through a closed time-like curve (CTC) creating identical particles that are able to interact with each other. November 5, 1955 here we come.

Time travel isn't possible yet, but this simulation means it could be. The experiment also fit both the laws of general relativity and quantum mechanics, demonstrating that the two bodies of law could actually be compatible.

Who knew that all you needed for your startup to be successful was a short name. Here comes the rush of new businesses with single digit names.

With companies, particularly in tech, there has been a tendency to form names by misspelling common words, dropping vowels, or appendly "ly" (think: Flickr, Feedly, Pinterest, and so on). While the study in Science only examined name length in terms of number of words, Stern says the principles of eliminating letters are probably the same. "Firms are looking for names that are easy to remember, that will come up in a search," he says.

The NSA would like to personally thank hackers everywhere for all they do to help the agency.

The National Security Agency and its intelligence partners are reportedly sifting through data stolen by state-sponsored and freelance hackers on a regular basis in search of valuable information. Despite constantly warning about the threat of hackers and pushing for their prosecution, the intelligence agencies of the U.S., Canada and the U.K. are happy to ride their coattails when it serves their interests.

(CNN Money) The popular TurboTax software has temporarily stopped processing state tax refund filings in all states after reports of fraud increased.

Criminals may be using identity information (like a Social Security number) that was stolen from somewhere else to file fake returns via TurboTax and collect refunds.
In Minnesota and Utah, for example, some taxpayers recently logged into TurboTax and saw that a return has already been filed under their name.

Intuit (INTU), the company that owns TurboTax, said that itself has not been breached, but an investigation is ongoing. About 29 million people used TurboTax to file their tax returns last year.

(CNN)—What happened to Maddie, a mom of two boys, one afternoon has no doubt happened to countless other parents across the country.

Maddie's computer was out of juice, so she hopped on her 15-year-old son's laptop. She looked at the history of something she was working on and then, bam. There were links to 40 porn sites with topics too racy for me to print.

"I was freaking out," said Maddie, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy and her son's.

She immediately did something she has never done before during her nearly two decades as a parent: called her husband out of an extremely important client meeting.

"I thought, 'Oh, my God, we need to talk about this,' " Maddie said. "There's nothing I can't handle with the kids. ... This I cannot handle," she added, remembering how she felt at the time.

Why Facebook parenting can backfire

Arizona police release an officer's bodycam footage taken shortly before a deadly shooting. Everything seems calm, until a suspect in an alleged domestic violence incident pulls out a gun. Should the video have been released at all?

Footage of police officers behaving imperfectly has emerged more than once now that almost everyone has a cell phone.

It makes for news. It keeps people on their guard for what might happen. It feeds into people's need for justice.

Yet, there's another side to policing. It's one where officers are out every day, never entirely knowing whether a situation might turn in an awful direction, never knowing whether an individual who seems calm might suddenly not be.

If your chief creative officer gets up on stage and tells the world that your games are "too hard to learn," you might want to take a long, hard look at the games you are making.

"Our games are actually still too hard to learn," Hilleman said during an on-stage interview at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas. "The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game." LINK

With the introduction of the Q60 Concept at the 2015 Detroit Auto Show, Infiniti gave us a tantalizing glimpse at what could become the next generation of its popular luxury sport coupe.

For years, the Infiniti coupe has been one of the most popular entry level luxury cars on the market. The Q60's high style, features, and performance — all at a reasonable price — made it one of the go-to options for young professionals and older buyers alike.

Deep in the heart of flying-saucer land, a real estate agent is peddling conspiracy theorists' dream home.

This Atlas-F nuclear missile silo — decommissioned, of course — is one of a dozen around Roswell, New Mexico, a remote town best known as the site of a supposed flying-saucer crash in 1947. (Almost 50 years later, the Air Force revealed that the wreckage was actually an atomic-age spy contraption meant to detect minute atmospheric evidence of Soviet nuclear test blasts on the other side of the planet.)

Century 21 agent Jim Moore, who's marketing the 25-acre property, recently gave the New York Times a silo tour. He told the paper that the property is already under contract, for close to its $295,000 asking price.

A banker comes in from the cold
Edwin ‘Ed’ Hale Sr. at home in Sparrows Point, Md.

BALTIMORE—Edwin “Ed” Hale Sr., a retired bank executive known locally for his sharp-elbowed approach to business, installed video surveillance on his 186-acre farm and still sleeps with a sawed-off shotgun by his bed.

His friends, former employees and even his own daughters were shocked to learn in his recently published biography that he had ample reason to do so: The former chief executive and chairman of Bank of Baltimore says he worked covertly for the Central Intelligence Agency for almost a decade in the 1990s and early 2000s.
During that time, he said, he spoke regularly with a CIA handler and allowed the agency to create a fake company under his corporate umbrella, which included shipping and trucking companies he ran at the same time he led the bank. Operatives in the field used the fictitious firm as cover when traveling the world, complete with business cards and hats. Mr. Hale said he worked under “nonofficial cover,” in which his identity was unassociated with the U.S. government.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Pacific Coast Yachts is delighted to offer you an exclusive opportunity to purchase a unique piece of maritime history for a rock-bottom price. After being pressed into service in 1996, Lockheed Martin's experimental naval vessel, the Sea Slice, is now being offered into private hands. Yes, it may look like a catamaran, folks, but this craft actually uses Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull technology, where the ballast is kept beneath the water for enhanced stability. In fact, friends, the Sea Slice is significantly more stable than other vessels of its size, making it perfect for entertaining guests on deck.

The Storm eBike: An Inexpensive Answer to Gridlock?

Photo: Storm eBike

Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic again? Tired of being crammed like cattle into a subway car?

An Indiegogo campaign launching Monday may help change that. The Storm eBike is a basic two-wheeler with a battery-powered motor that could make your daily commute a breeze.

Read our followup story: A $500 eBike? Not so fast.

“It’s the Tesla of bicycles,” says company co-founder Storm Sonders (yes, that’s his real name). But the Storm eBike doesn’t come with a Tesla-like price. At an introductory price of $499, it lives at the low end of the range for electric bikes, which can cost $3,000 or more.

Ever wanted to know what it takes to mine $1.5 million worth of bitcoin in a month? You'll find all your answers in this video.

This guy made 47,000 Wikipedia edits to fix one error...over and over and over.

Henderson has made more than 47,000 edits to Wikipedia correcting a single grammatical error, when writers use 'comprised of' instead of 'consists of'. That particular error irritates Henderson so much that he spends an hour a week fixing it on the online encyclopedia – and has done since 2007.

This January 25, 2015 photo appears to show a Chinese made CH-3 drone, owned by Nigeria, which has crash landed upside down. The two AR-1 ATGMs attached to its wing pylons suggest that Nigeria is turning to drone strikes as the bloody war against Boko Haram continues.

As the brutal Boko Haram insurgency has entered its 7th year in Nigeria, the relationship between the government and China has deepened. In many ways it is a match of needs.

Riyadh (AFP) - Saudi Arabia's new King Salman on Thursday further cemented his hold on power, with a sweeping shakeup that saw two sons of the late King Abdullah fired, and the heads of intelligence and other key agencies replaced alongside a cabinet reshuffle.

The announcement came a week after Salman acceded to the throne following the death of Abdullah, aged about 90."Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud issued a royal order today, relieving Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, Chief of General Intelligence, of his post," the official Saudi Press Agency said.

Rep. Molly White asks Muslim visitors to pledge allegiance to America

The Texas and Israeli flags are waved by protesters who gathered to disrupt and heckle a group gathered for a Texas Muslim Capitol Day rally, Thursday...

A newly elected Texas state lawmaker is under fire for a divisive Facebook post asking Muslim visitors attending an event at the state capitol in Austin to pledge allegiance to the United States.

The event, Texas Muslim Capitol Day, was organized by the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Bill Gates Is Worried About the Rise of the Machines

He may be one of the world’s pivotal computing pioneers, mentioned in the same exuberantly geeky breath as Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Tim Berners-Lee. His technological exploits may have earned him over $80 billion, making him the world’s richest man. Yet even Bill Gates is somewhat concerned about the potentially destructive power of technology.

In a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Wednesday afternoon, Microsoft’s former CEO fielded an array of questions ranging from the banal (“Do you have a pet?”) to the cringeworthy (“Star Trek or Star Wars?”) to the painfully esoteric.

A new era of peace and prosperity is upon us! Remember how great things were after they changed the broadband definition last time? There was dancing in the streets, streaming content everywhere and unlimited access to porn. Wait....

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to change the definition of broadband internet in the United States. This change, passed by FCC commissioners by a 3-2 vote, raises the minimum download speeds for broadband from 4 Mbps to 25 Mbps and minimum upload speeds from 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps. If the speeds they provide don’t reach this standard then internet service providers cannot call those connections "broadband."

Valve announced today that it has paid out over fifty seven million dollars to the people who create content for its games (hats

).

When we launched the Workshop late in 2011, we expected that it would grow, but not that it would grow this much, this quickly. So far, the total payments made to individuals for the creation of in-game items sold in Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have passed $57 million. This money was earned by over 1,500 contributors spread out across 75 countries.

Worldwide shipments of over one billion? Wow! That is a lot of Android phones.

For the first time ever, worldwide shipments of smartphones packing Android exceeded 1 billion units in 2014, a significant gain from the 780.8 million units that shipped around the world in 2013, researcher Strategy Analytics announced Thursday. Android dwarfed its second-place competitor, Apple's iOS, which mustered 192.7 million worldwide shipments in 2014.

We've been fighting off scumbag malware makers at every turn for years and now we have to worry about them targeting our games?

Gaming accounts are one of the hottest targets for black hats as we roll into 2015. Any form of financial investment in gaming – from paid memberships to rare in-game items – make consumers a prime target for hackers and scammers. Even if they’re locked down tight, criminals can still make use of personal information by going after platform holders and developers and stealing from the source.

Wait, Canada actually has a spy agency?

Canada's electronic spy agency sifts through millions of videos and documents downloaded online every day by people around the world, as part of a sweeping bid to find extremist plots and suspects, CBC News has learned.

How does Netflix know what you are watching? This blog post explains everything and it even has a diagram to help you understand how it works all (sorta).

Our system needs to know each member’s entire viewing history for as long as they are subscribed. This data feeds the recommendation algorithms so that a member can find a title for whatever mood they’re in. It also feeds the "recent titles you’ve watched" row in the UI. What gets watched provides key metrics for the business to measure member engagement and make informed product and content decisions.

If you are a Linux user there is a good chance there is a GHOST in your machine. If you haven't done so already, make sure you patch your box as soon as possible.

"GHOST poses a remote code execution risk that makes it incredibly easy for an attacker to exploit a machine. For example, an attacker could send a simple email on a Linux-based system and automatically get complete access to that machine," said Wolfgang Kandek, Qualys's CTO in a statement. "Given the sheer number of systems based on glibc, we believe this is a high severity vulnerability and should be addressed immediately. The best course of action to mitigate the risk is to apply a patch from your Linux vendor."

Good news! Google Fiber is coming to four more cities across the US. Bad news! Unless you live in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville or Raleigh-Durham you are still out of luck.

Now, Google Fiber is live in Kansas City, Provo and Austin, and we've started to see how gigabit Internet, with speeds up to 100 times faster than today’s basic broadband, can transform cities. It can give them new platforms for economic development and new ways of using technology to improve life for their citizens. And, around the country, it seems to be catching on.

We've been asking this question since the iPad first came out.

Five years after its debut, the iPad faces an existential dilemma. No one knows what it’s good for. When Apple unveiled its tablet, the value proposition was relatively straightforward. At that time, you had your iPhone 3GS with its tiny screen, and your MacBook with its two-hour battery life. Those products left a nice big swath of casual use cases in-between for a third device to take care of.

Check it out, this is like Google Fiber for your brain.

I'm not going to debate whether or not "video game addiction" is a real thing or not, I'm just saying that, in the grand scheme of things, there are worse addictions to have.

Experts estimate that more than 3 million Americans between eight and 18 could be suffering from video game dependency. And medical authorities are finally noticing. The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders recently christened the phenomenon as "internet gaming disorder."

Following the story we posted last week (here), it looks as though Valve has now banned two teams that were also caught cheating.

"We can confirm, by investigating the historical activity of relevant accounts, that a substantial number of high valued items won from that match by Duc "cud" Pham were transferred (via Derek "dboorn" Boorn) to iBUYPOWER players and NetCodeGuides founder, Casey Foster," Valve's post states.

Atlanta (CNN)Two bodies, one male and one female, were recovered Monday in the case of a Marietta, Georgia, couple, who went missing after contacting a car seller on Craigslist.

The bodies have not yet been identified, said Telfair County Sheriff Chris Steverson. He said the couple's car was also found submerged in a nearby lake.

"It's not the outcome we had hoped for but, obviously, it's the one we have to deal with," Steverson said. "We'll analyze the vehicle, the bodies and hopefully we can come to some conclusion as to how they met their fate."

Earlier Monday, the suspect sought in the case who had posted a Craigslist ad turned himself in, the Telfair County Sheriff's Office said on its Facebook page.

Authorities have said that Ronnie "Jay" Adrian Towns, 28, was wanted on charges of giving false statements and criminal attempt to commit theft by deception. His family was integral in securing his surrender, Steverson said.

'Deceptive' communication

Elrey "Bud" Runion, 69, and his wife, June, 66, placed an ad looking for a 1966 Mustang on the advertisements website and contacted a car seller on Craigslist.

They drove to the South Georgia town of McRae from Marietta, an Atlanta suburb, on Thursday to meet someone who responded to the ad, relatives said.

No one has heard from them since.

I'm not saying it's time to bust out the tinfoil hats but right now might be a good time to at least start wrapping your car in it.

The system collects data about vehicle movements, including time, direction and location, from high-tech cameras placed strategically on major highways. Many devices also record visual images of drivers and passengers, which are sometimes clear enough for investigators to confirm identities.

Sports Illustrated has laid off all six of its staff photographers and will rely more on freelancers.

Brad Smith, director of photography for Sports Illustrated, spoke about the move Friday in a report from the National Press Photographers Association.

Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings.

Super-hydrophobic materials are desirable for a number of applications such as rust prevention, anti-icing, or even in sanitation uses. However, as Rochester’s Chunlei Guo explains, most current hydrophobic materials rely on chemical coatings.

Honestly, with all the security shenanigans between Google and other tech giants this week, I half expected Microsoft or Apple to come out with the 60+ fixes issued today for Chrome 40. Now that would have been funny.

Google announced on Wednesday the release of Chrome 40 for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The latest update for the popular Web browser (40.0.2214.91) includes a total of 62 security fixes. According to the search giant, external researchers reported 26 vulnerabilities, 17 of which are high severity issues.

You have to watch this video of a Pro CS:GO player getting busted for cheating live online. Thanks to cageymaru for the link to the laugh.

This is strange, I thought people liked having the government share their personal information with any ol' company?

Bowing to an outcry over privacy, the Obama administration reversed itself Friday, scaling back the release of consumers' personal information from the government's health insurance website to private companies with a commercial interest in the data.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese health authorities on Wednesday described the gender imbalance among newborns as "the most serious and prolonged" in the world, a direct ramification of the country's strict one-child policy.

The statement will add to growing calls for the government to scrap all family planning restrictions in the world's most populous nation, which many scholars say faces a demographic crisis.

The officer in charge of the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been fired for a “loss of confidence” after he allegedly had an affair with a woman whose husband was recently found dead in the waters off the base.

Captain John Nettleton was relieved of command on Wednesday by Rear Adm. Mary M. Jackson, commander of Navy Region Southeast, “due to loss of confidence in Nettleton's ability to command,” according to a statement from the Navy.

The statement declined to give additional details because of an ongoing investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which is focused on the death of Christopher Tur, a civilian employee at the Navy Exchange on the base who had moved to Guantanamo with his family in June 2011.

Vladimir Putin looked less than thrilled when watching a slow-moving military robot riding a four-wheeler. Hey, not all cyborg bikers look like the Terminator.

This Russian robot looks like more Daft Punk than combat ready.

Russia's president Vladimir Putin -- nicknamed Superputin -- pilots jets, drives racecars, rides horses, tranquilizes polar bears, fishes shirtless in freezing Siberian rivers and is a martial arts master in Judo.

Warning alarms in AirAsia flight QZ8501 were "screaming" as the pilots desperately tried to stabilise the plane just before it plunged into the Java Sea last month, a crash investigator said Wednesday.

"The warning alarms, we can say, were screaming, while in the background they (the pilot and co-pilot) were busy trying to recover," the investigator said, adding the warnings were going off "for some time".The noise of several alarms -- including one that indicated the plane was stalling -- can be heard going off in recordings from the black box in the Airbus A320-200's cockpit, the investigator told AFP, requesting anonymity.

The investigator, from Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC), added that the pilots' voices were drowned out by the sound of the alarms.

Thank you, Microsoft. Thank you for throwing a crazy augmented reality announcement into a standard operating system event. Thanks for thumbing your nose at Google (which just gave up on the first version of Google Glass), and showing us Microsoft HoloLens. It is surely the most unexpected announcement to come out of Microsoft in years — maybe ever.

(Photo: Microsoft)

Bill Gates sat down with Wired to discuss a variety of topics, including his fifteen year plan. On a related note, Bill Gates also drank poop water with Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show:

"We want to give global citizens a way to lend their voice, urging governments, companies, and nonprofits to make these issues a priority," the letter explains. In particular, the Foundation will ask its Global Citizens to push for a meaningful reboot of the UN’s Millennium Goals, and to hold their governments accountable for meeting those targets. It’s a surprisingly populist approach for the Foundation, which has tended to turn to billionaires for the bulk of its support.

I'm not sure how accurate the statistics in this article are. I mean, those kinds of numbers would make Facebook the leading cause of divorce among adults (that cheat).

The law firm revealed that many of their cases revolved around the fact that people had used the site to track down and get back in touch with exes, or posted information that contradicted claims about their finances.

Share your Netflix password with a friend? That's a trip to the big house.

"Under the new proposal, sharing your HBO GO password with a friend would be a felony," Nate Cardozo, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, told an audience of researchers and IT pros Saturday (Jan. 17) at ShmooCon 2015, a security conference held annually in Washington, D.C.

I was about to ask how this can even be legal and then I realized this is an actual law that went into effect on January 1st in Illinois.

If your child has an account on a social networking website, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ask.fm, etc., please be aware that State law requires school authorities to notify you that your child may be asked to provide his or her password for these accounts to school officials in certain circumstances.

If this video of old people playing GTA V doesn't make you smile, I don't know what will.

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN)On a bright, clear morning in April 2013, two professional poker players from California were heading west on Interstate 80 in rural Iowa when they were stopped by two Iowa State Troopers.

Before that stop was over, the officers had seized $100,000, which the men said was money to play poker. The troopers also called ahead to California authorities, who raided the men's homes and ultimately indicted one of them, John Newmerzhycky, on a charge of illegal possession of drug paraphernalia.

If this sounds unusual and way out of the ordinary, it isn't. The seizure is just one of thousands of highway stops that state and local authorities call "interdictions:" Roadside stops aimed at catching drug dealers or even terrorists, but which can also result in cash seizures alone with no criminal charges attached.

According to a pair of not-so-subtle teases, Xiaomi will launch a new flagship smartphone on Jan. 15. One of those announcements implied this Chinese-made device could launch in two variations and be its thinnest smartphone yet.

Leaving little to the imagination, Xiaomi's two teasers read "As ___ as paper" and "___ is better than one." This suggests that Xiaomi's next phone, rumored to be called the Mi 5 or Mi 4s, could arrive in two ultra-slim flavors.

Sick and tired of grinding away in Destiny? This guy has it all figured out.

VIDEO

VIDEO

(CNN)One military wife recalls staying up all night and deleting every Facebook picture of her children, every post that mentioned them or where they went to school. She Googled herself, trying to figure out how easy it would be to find where the family lived. In the morning, she went to her car and scraped the military decal off the front window.

As the spouse of a Special Forces soldier, she's always tried to be conscious of how much she advertises that she and her three young children are a military family.

"It's hard because I am so proud of what my husband does, but lately so many spouses that I know are actually scared that they could be targets of ISIS or someone who sympathizes with ISIS," she said, asking that CNN keep her name out of the story for that reason.

This week brought the latest in a string of attacks that members of military families say has spooked them into quietly changing the way they operate online and in real life.

Now that ATLAS doesn't have to be plugged in anymore we are all screwed. Damn you DARPA!!!

DARPA revealed upgrades to its Atlas robot on January 20, 2015. The robot was redesigned for DARPA by Boston Dynamics, with the goal of improving power efficiency to better support battery operation. Approximately 75 percent of the robot was rebuilt; only the lower legs and feet were carried over from the original design. The upgraded robot will be used by up to seven teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge

It’s technically a stroller but this incredible new handmade piece of hardware more closely resembles the Tumbler.

The team of craftsmen over at Super-Fan Builds has done it again, designing and building a reinforced replica of the Batmobile from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy into a working baby stroller.

The winner of the $270 million Mega Millions jackpot in Illinois on Friday has not yet come forward. But Alex Snelius already has some strong, if unsettling, advice. Snelius won the lottery back in 2000, taking home over $18 million. He never thought it would be a “curse.” “It’s a curse, it’s a curse, believe me it’s a curse,” he says. “One thing I would eliminate: friends and relations, because they’re [the] worst enemy of all, the friends and relations.” Even now, Snelius gets hundreds of letters each month from strangers seeking cash, but it’s friends and family who left him in a lurch after loaning out $3 million. “They cannot pay,” Snelius said. “Some of them filed, even, bankruptcy, you know? So what are you gonna do?” For 15 years now, Snelius has donated $100 to White Sox Charities for each Sox home run, all to honor Ursula, his late wife. He’s given away another $3 million to various charities, including Catholic causes. For his generosity, Cardinal Francis George presented him with an honorary zucchetto. “Right now, if I could win the lottery again, I’d probably give it all away,” Snelius says. And yes, Snelius still plays the lottery, for just that reason. “Give it to charity. That’s the most important thing,” he says. Snelius is a 78-year-old Lithuanian immigrant who retired from the trucking business. He says that’s another mistake. To keep sharp, he says, keep working. Snelius beat odds of 175 million to one to win his big prize and he still plays because there’s no reason that lightning couldn’t strike twice. VIDEO

Michael Moore has taken to Twitter to share his thoughts on snipers.

The Fahrenheit 9/11 director wrote that he grew up being told that snipers are cowardly. "My uncle killed by sniper in WW2," Moore wrote. "We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot you in the back."

Read MoreBox Office: How 'American Sniper' Played Like a Superhero Movie
"Snipers aren't heroes," he continued. "And invaders are worse."

Moore spoke directly about director Clint Eastwood's film American Sniper on his Facebook page. He praised the film for star Bradley Cooper's performance and for its antiwar sentiment, but he also wrote: "Too bad Clint gets Vietnam and Iraq confused in his storytelling. And that he has his characters calling Iraqis 'savages' throughout the film."

An AirAsia plane that crashed into the Java Sea last month with 162 people on board climbed faster than normal and then stalled, the Indonesian transport minister said Tuesday.

Flight QZ8501 went down on December 28 in stormy weather, during what was supposed to be a short trip from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

Indonesia's meteorological agency has said bad weather may have caused the crash, and investigators are analysing the data from the jet's black boxes before releasing a preliminary report.

http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/tiO_RVnHwl3ZnDG7tWPgOQ--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NQ--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/Reuters/Tesla-P85D-v-Challenger-Hellcat-StreetCarDrags-YouTube_opt-e1421767393725.jpg

Two cars claiming to be the fastest production models ever built in their classes finally went head-to-head for the heavyweight championship this weekend in a showdown between Dodge’s Hellcat line and Tesla’s new AWD Model S.

Dodge claims its 2015 Challenger Hellcat is the fastest production model muscle car ever made, while Tesla staked the same claim in the overall sedan category for its dual-motor P85D when it was unveiled last fall (Dodge boasts the same of its 4-door Charger Hellcat).

The Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press International were hacked Friday. Both companies tweeted that a war had broken out between the United States and China.

At 1 p.m. ET, the Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) accounts of both companies reported that the Chinese military had fired a missile on a U.S. warship, sparking a full-blown battle. They also claimed the U.S. Federal Reserve was to make an emergency announcement about interest rates.
Within minutes, The New York Post erased most of the messages on Twitter. UPI's tweets, however, remained up.

These are not the best of times to be one of China's massive, state-owned steel mills. The domestic economy is slowing, competition is increasing, and there's widespread disgust and impatience with the smog pouring out of their stacks. In short, their lucrative business model for the past three decades is slowly dying. So what’s a manager of a Chinese steel mill to do?

One surprisingly popular option is to bid China goodbye. In November, Hebei Iron & Steel Co Ltd, a provincial-owned company and China’s largest steelmaker by production, announced that it was moving 5 million tons of its annual production -- roughly 11 percent of the 45 million tons of steel it makes every year -- to South Africa. According to press reports, it won’t be going abroad alone. By 2023, Hebei Province -- China’s most polluted province -- plans to export 20 million tons of steel, 30 million tons of cement and 10 million weight boxes of glass capacity (a weight box equals roughly 50 kilograms) to points still not named.

At first glance, the export of excess industrial capacity wouldn’t appear to make much business sense. As Bloomberg News noted two weeks ago, Hebei Iron & Steel’s South African mill will be “equivalent to two-thirds of that nation’s output last year, and a third of continental Africa’s.” In other words, it's not clear there's much demand in these new locales for the Chinese steel giant's plentiful wares. Why, then, are they doing it?

If this isn't quote of the day, I don't know what is.

"Throughout all of this, I think the biggest mistake we consistently made was that we were arrogantly deaf to problems raised by a vocal minority of players," Titov told Gamasutra. There was a lot of hate out there on the web being aimed toward us, the studio, and the game. Today, I realize that there was plenty of reason for that hate, but at the time, we were foolish and thought that we didn't have to listen to or respond to 'haters.'" LINK

Hands down, the biggest "losers" when it comes to privacy was the general public.

But you were also the biggest loser this year in terms of privacy and security. Ongoing revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance have made it clear that the intelligence agency, and its spy partners in the UK and elsewhere, will not rest until they’ve seized or deciphered every bit of your data. LINK

The Pew Research Internet Project has put out an interesting report on technology's impact on workers. The findings? Among other things, workers in the US say they need e-mail more than a landline and social media is worthless in the workplace.

The high value of email comes despite the challenges of the past generation, including threats like spam and phishing and competitors like social media and texting. Surprisingly, landline phones outrank cell phones for these internet-using workers. Social media is very low in importance. LINK

Turtle Rock Studios wants $60. This shouldn’t be surprising: $60 is the going rate for a modern AAA game, and Turtle Rock is making one, namely, Evolve, its upcoming 4 v 1 asymmetrical shooter. Their only problem is that they don’t want to have to wait until they’ve actually made a game to get your $60, which just sounds like a pain. So they’ve cooked up a little pre-purchase bonus, wherein you can skip all of the normal progression mechanics in the game and unlock some top characters right off the bat. It comes with the tacit implication that everyone who doesn’t pre-purchase the game is playing a more boring or, at least, less fun version of the game, but if we need to cripple games to incentivize pre-ordering, then so be it. It’s like F2P, minus the F.

DALLAS (Reuters) - A U.S. Army soldier who just returned from West Africa and was self-monitoring for Ebola symptoms was found dead on Tuesday near the Texas base where he was posted, Fort Hood officials said.

Army officials said initial screening results showed the soldier was not infected with Ebola. A more conclusive test was underway "and results will be released when complete to confirm the preliminary findings," they said in a statement.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel made a pitch Tuesday for funding of a new long-range bomber to replace the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and bolster the nation's nuclear triad of bombers, missiles, and submarines.
"The one thing we cannot fall behind in is modernization. That has to start now," Hagel said of the program to develop and field a new long-range bomber for the 2020s.
"I think the long-range strike bomber is absolutely essential to keep our deterrent edge as we go into the next 25 years," Hagel told reporters after a town-hall meeting with airmen at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, home to the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.
Last summer, the Air Force opened a competition to build the new air

To an audience full of auto-industry executives in Detroit, Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Elon Musk made a few bold statements on Tuesday: Tesla is growing, will turn a profit eventually, and was doing so in large part because the rest of the industry didn't want to build electric cars — at least ones that people would buy.

In a rare question and answer session at the Automotive News World Congress, Musk said he envisioned Tesla building "a few million vehicles" per year by 2025 — compared to less than 100,000 today. He said Tesla was only unprofitable because it was ramping up production for one new model, designing another and building a $5 billion battery factory, with regular profits expected by the time it launched a new small vehicle in 2020.

Report shows deep Secret Service problems.

Washington (CNN)Top Secret Service officials are out of their jobs following months of scandal at the law enforcement agency, sources said on Wednesday.

Four senior officials -- responsible for investigations, technology, protections and public affairs -- are being asked to leave their posts, though they could still technically stay with the Secret Service, a person at the agency said.

Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigns

The four officials identified by the source: Dale Pupillo, Jane Murphy, Paul Morrissey, and Mark Copanzzi.

Apple has apparently decided to end its "single of the week" promotion after an eleven year run. No more free ride for you!

Apple has seemingly ended its weekly iTunes "Single of the Week" promotion that gave out a free music single download each week on the iTunes storefront. As noted by Business Insider, a member of the Apple discussion forums claims an Apple support employee informed him the company decided to drop the weekly promotion.

Pages

Rep. Molly White asks Muslim visitors to pledge allegiance to America

'Deceptive' communication

Sports Illustrated has laid off all six of its staff photographers and will rely more on freelancers.

The Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press International were hacked Friday. Both companies tweeted that a war had broken out between the United States and China.

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