eEye Security Advisory - eEye Digital Security has discovered a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Windows kernel that could allow any code executing on a Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 system to elevate itself to the highest possible local privilege level (kernel).

There exists an unauthenticated SEH based vulnerability in the HTTP server of Sync Breeze Enterprise version 10.1.16, when sending a GET request with an excessive length it is possible for a malicious user to overwrite the SEH record and execute a payload that would run under the Windows NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM account. The SEH record is overwritten with a "POP,POP,RET" pointer from the application library libspp.dll. This exploit has been successfully tested on Windows XP, 7 and 10 (x86->x64). It should work against all versions of Windows and service packs.

South African Energy Minister Tina Joemat-Pettersson said her department wants to address weaknesses in the process of commissioning renewable-power projects.

The European Union is seeking to speed up the creation of a common energy market to help its shift to a low-carbon economy and boost security of energy supplies amid a natural-gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine.

The U.K. Green Investment Bank is set to tie up the first investments in a $1.6 billion fund by the end of March, part of Britain’s push to cement its dominance in offshore wind power.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government will negotiate with the opposition to cut Australia’s renewable energy target and exempt industries such as aluminum and copper smelting.

European Union leaders backed the most-ambitious carbon emissions goals of any major economy, in a bid to crank up pressure on the U.S. and China ahead of climate talks in December.

Humans are causing irreversible damage to the planet from burning fossil fuels, the biggest ever study of the available science concluded in a report designed to spur the fight against climate change.

President Barack Obama pledged deeper U.S. cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions and China will for the first time set a target for capping carbon emissions under an agreement between the world’s two biggest economies.

The U.S. expects to earn $5 billion to $6 billion from a federal loan program, bolstering President Barack Obama’s decision to back low-carbon technologies.

While OPEC is helping drive down global prices for crude, it’s having less success squeezing the $250 billion clean power industry.

We here at RenewableEnergyWorld.com would like to send a big "thank you" to our blogging community. Year after year, bloggers contribute content that is filled with valuable insights, up-to-date news, innovative project highlights and cool new technology updates. RenewableEnergyWorld.com bloggers are truly a crucial part of our website.

The online community of readers who visit RenewableEnergyWorld.com is an important aspect of the news and information that we offer renewable energy stakeholders. We often post news that we feel will get people to view important topics from new angles, offering insights and opinions about technology, policy and more. Often that leads to engaging and informative discussions that add even more value to the article that we have posted.

Serbia seeks to unblock investment in renewable energy after adopting legislation that opens gas and power markets in line with European Union guidelines.

At the close of each year, we like to take a look back to see which stories made an impact on our readers. This year's most read articles show the many twists and turns that the industry took this year and reveal interesting trends for us as editors and for other industry insiders.

As the holidays wind to a close and we ring in the new year, sit back and relax with your favorite libation and enjoy our most popular videos of the year. We guarantee you will learn something new.

California Governor Jerry Brown proposed spending $59 billion to fix crumbling roads and raising the state’s renewable energy mandate to 50 percent.

A 2013 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found 3.4 million green jobs in the United States at the end of 2011. This is the latest data available from BLS, due to the elimination of its Green Careers program. On March 1, 2013, the across-the board spending cuts referred to as sequestration, required by the amended Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act, came into effect. As part of those budget cuts, BLS stopped offering all “measuring green jobs” products.

President Obama has been under intense scrutiny for what he would do about climate change ever since he was elected in 2008. Part of that scrutiny takes place during his State of the Union Speech, when renewable energy proponents search for key words about solar and wind energy and count how often he mentions "climate change."

The UN climate conference in Lima set the stage for Paris in 2015. Next year’s accord is to provide a working, albeit not a final, answer to the question: Is it possible to keep global warming at or below the 2 degree Celsius limit? This limit is considered the boundary beyond which the negative climatic, economic and social consequences of climate change are thought to become intolerably severe and potentially irreversible.

Actress Natalie Portman, environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and other high-profile Harvard University alumni are calling for demonstrations to urge divestment from fossil fuels.

The annual outlook issue of Renewable Energy World magazine is our attempt to predict what will happen within the renewable energy industry over the course of the year. To do this, we went straight to the top of major renewable energy companies, asking CEOs and presidents to tell us where they are devoting their company resources in order to capitalize on some of the market growth that they expect to see in 2015.

Sen. Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay) has filed a bill that would eliminate Texas’ Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) – a policy that has catapulted Texas to world leadership in wind energy and strengthened Texas’ energy diversity. In addition to terminating the RPS at the end of the year, SB 931would make it more difficult to build renewable energy infrastructure. The argument behind the bill is that because Texas has achieved its RPS goals it’s time to move on. Sounds reasonable, right? Well…

Ormat is a successful developer of geothermal energy projects. Two former employees have brought a lawsuit alleging that Ormat made inaccurate 1603 Cash Grant submissions to obtain grants for projects that should not have qualified for such grants.

Alternative energy mutual funds are continuing to recover from a slump which started in fall 2014. Annual returns range greatly, though, from a high of 15.6 percent for Brown Advisory Sustainable Growth (BIAWX), to a low of -15.8 percent for Guinness Atkinson Alternative Energy (GAAEX). The large 12-month drop by GAAEX was precipitated by painful losses in some of its top weighted holdings.

Australia’s largest electricity producer committed to close its coal-fired power plants within 35 years as part of an effort to cut the nation’s dependence on the fossil fuel.

Last June, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed the first ever national carbon pollution standards for existing power plants. Fossil fuel-fired power plants account for almost 40% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, making them the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the nation and one of the single largest categories of greenhouse gas sources in the world.

A $2 trillion push in the U.S. to blend renewable energy into the power supply and fortify transmission lines against extreme weather means that Americans must act more like Europeans to keep their power costs down.

Europe’s utilities are re-evaluating their business models due to the energy transition. Members of POWER-GEN Europe’s Advisory Board consider how a reliance on fossil fuels is no longer politically desirable, forcing utilities to transform their portfolios to adapt to radical change.

North Rhine-Westphalia, the German state that’s home to utilities RWE AG and EON SE, is losing its standing as the country’s powerhouse as wind and solar energy begin to displace conventional sources.

Electricity consumers in the western state, which has one-third of Germany’s installed conventional power capacity, last year paid 3.1 billion euros ($3.5 billion) more to subsidize clean energy generation than producers there were awarded, the BDEW utility lobby said in a report Tuesday. The biggest recipient was Brandenburg in the east with a positive balance of 838 million euros.

The European Commission raised concern that the U.K. and France may not meet their 2020 renewable energy targets, saying the two countries should examine whether they’re doing enough to reach the goals.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, Democrat, has proclaimed “July 13-17, 2015 to be Oregon Wave Week in Oregon and encourages all Oregonians to join in this observance.”

Publicly, the United Nations climate-change talks look mired in disputes over everything from money to the length of the proposed agreement.

In a lopsided 23-3 vote, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee voted yesterday to extend a number of renewable energy production tax credits through the end of 2016. The vote allows developers of wind, geothermal, biomass, landfill gas, incremental hydroelectric, and ocean energy to take advantage of federal tax credits for projects begun before December 31, 2016.

Chief among big renewable winners was the wind energy industry, which received extensions to the Production Tax Credit (PTC) and the Investment Tax Credit (ITC). If passed, wind farms would qualify for a 2.3-cent-per-kilowatt-hour (kWh) credit through the end of 2016.

Reykjavik Geothermal, the Icelandic company that’s helped build power plants in more than 30 countries, agreed to develop as much as 1,000 megawatts of projects in Ethiopia over the next 10 years.