The Insider News

The Atlantic[^]:

As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?

Reuters[^]:

Oct 15 Yahoo's next step in password security is to eliminate them altogether.

Starting on Thursday, the company announced, users of the Yahoo Mail app on both iOS and Android will have access to a new service called Yahoo Account Key, which uses smartphones to verify identities in lieu of traditional passwords.

Engadget[^]:

The US wireless regulator (FCC) only seems to have figured that out recently, and is not happy with your ability to boost the signal power excessively on such devices.

"The palm-sized sequencer gives researchers the power to analyse DNA almost anywhere, and could help track disease outbreaks, run checks on food, and combat the trafficking of endangered animals.

The gadget marks a major step towards what Mark Akeson, a co-inventor at the University of California Santa Cruz, called "the democratisation of sequencing", where anyone can gather and process DNA samples for themselves.

... The 10cm-long, 90g device, named MinION by its British developers, Oxford Nanopore, has already been used by some scientists. In April, a team in Guinea read the genomes of 14 Ebola samples within 48 hours of them being taken from patients. Early next year, astronauts are due to use gadget to read DNA for the first time on the International Space Station."

BetaNews[^]:

We've all become used to the idea of ads online -- it's something that has become part and parcel of using the internet -- but in Windows? If you've updated to build 10565 of Windows 10, you're in for something of a surprise: the Start menu is now being used to display ads.

The Sydney Morning Herald[^]:

It has been called the most bizarre star in our galaxy and some think it just might be home to high-tech aliens.

The unlikely suggestion that aliens live in this star system is being taken so seriously that a team of astrophysicists wants to train a radio telescope in its direction to determine if any signals could indicate advanced extraterrestrial life.

Ars Technica[^]:

For years, privacy advocates have pushed developers of websites, virtual private network apps, and other cryptographic software to adopt the Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange as a defense against surveillance from the US National Security Agency and other state-sponsored spies. Now, researchers are renewing their warning that a serious flaw in the way the key exchange is implemented is allowing the NSA to break and eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

Slate[^]:

A paper by a team of astronomers is getting some notice because of aliens.