HughPickens.com writes The Guardian reports that following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, Pope Francis plans to publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology urging all Catholics to…

An anonymous reader writes On Christmas Eve, as the National Security Agency was releasing a report on NSA employees’ abuses of surveillance technology, Google was telling WikiLeaks about another sort of surveillance. According to a statement by WikiLeaks on Twitter,…

darkstar019 writes The Indian government has banned websites under the pretext that ISIS is using them for anti-Indian purposes. The list includes code sharing websites like Pastebin, Github and Sourceforge. As of now, these websites are still up. From the…

Siddharth Srinivas writes Park Sang Hak a North Korean democracy activist said he will start dropping 100,000 DVDs and USBs with Sony’s “The Interview” by balloon in North Korea as early as late January. He’s partnering with the U.S.-based non-profit…

An anonymous reader sends word that the U.S. Army may adjust some of its training practices and rules in order to attract the best “cyber warriors” available. “New U.S. Army cyber warriors could be spared the rigors of combat training…

An anonymous reader writes “Google’s security research database has after a 90 day timeout automatically undisclosed a Windows 8.1 vulnerability which Microsoft hasn’t yet patched. By design the system call NtApphelpCacheControl() in ahcache.sys allows application compatibility data to be cached…

An anonymous reader writes: Twilight Struggle tops BoardGameGeek’s ranking of user-rated board games, handily beating classics like Puerto Rico, Settlers of the Catan, and Risk. FiveThirtyEight has an article about the game’s design, and how certain design choices can affect…

An anonymous reader writes: Distributed denial of service attacks have become a big problem. The internet protocol is designed to treat unlimited amounts of unsolicited traffic identically to important traffic from real users. While it’s true DDoS attacks can be…

retroworks writes: Adam Minter documents the move of Chinese steel mills to Africa, and speculates that China’s years of incredible rates of economic growth may already be over. This one steel mill’s move to Africa, by itself, increases Africa’s production…

Zothecula writes: People often state that certain planets are too hot, cold or toxic to support life. The catch, however, is that those people are really just talking about life as we know it here on Earth. By that same…