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Blackmoore writes:

It's a slow news day - and so we're seeing a lot of Gift guides posted on other sites..

But we're not going to give you a gift guide - We'll leave this for everyone to discuss here.

So what are you giving, or what would like to give out this holiday season?


(if you want to gift SoylentNews you can Subscribe here or get some swag at The Soylent News Swag store

frojack writes:

The Register says that for the second year in a row scientists from a variety of fields have joined together to urge the world to embrace nuclear power instead of the single minded focus on renewable energy. Last year the group included four scientists. This year it includes 66 from a far more diverse set of disciplines.

This year's letter pleads with the "green movement" to get over their objections to nuclear power, and face the facts that the "renewables only" approach cannot possibly succeed.

Their open letter reads in part:

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Congress [just] passed a bill that could result in complete, national data on police shootings and other deaths in law enforcement custody.

Right now, we have nothing close to that. Police departments are not required to report information about police to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Some do, others don't, others submit it some years and not others or submit potentially incomplete numbers, making it near-impossible to know how many people police kill every year. Based on the figures that are reported to the federal government, ProPublica recently concluded that young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.

Under the bill awaiting Obama's signature, states receiving federal funds would be required to report every quarter on deaths in law enforcement custody. This includes not [only] those who are killed by police during a stop, arrest, or other interaction. It also includes those who die in jail or prison. [Additionally,] it requires details about these shootings including gender, race, as well as at least some circumstances surrounding the death.

tonyPick writes:

Hackaday has an article on Home computing in 80's Czechoslovakia.

As a Soviet satellite state, part of the former Eastern Bloc, then the personal history of 80's computing presented in this article is a fascinating insight for those of us that grew up in the "parallel" scene in the west.

"gewg_" writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

The former president of the company that contaminated drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians this past January has been arrested on criminal fraud charges, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation complaint(PDF) unsealed Monday.

Former Freedom Industries president Gary Southern was charged with bankruptcy fraud, wire fraud, and lying under oath during the company's bankruptcy proceedings following the massive spill--a 10,000 gallon dump of a coal-cleaning chemical called crude MCHM into the Elk River. FBI Special Agent James F. Lafferty said in a sworn affidavit that Southern, in an attempt to protect his personal fortune of nearly $8 million and shield himself from lawsuits, developed a scheme to distance himself from the company and "deflect blame" to other parties.

Related:
Massey CEO Indicted for Acts Resulting in Coal Mine Explosion that Killed 29

Ars Technica writes:

link: Some 100,000 or more WordPress sites infected by mysterious malware

About 100,000 or more websites running the WordPress content management system have been compromised by mysterious malware that turns the infected sites into attack platforms that can target visitors, security researchers said.

The campaign has prompted Google to flag more than 11,000 domains as malicious, but many more sites have been detected as compromised, according to a blog post published Sunday by Sucuri, a firm that helps website operators secure their servers. Researchers have yet to confirm the cause of the infection, but they suspect it's related to a vulnerability in Slider Revolution, a WordPress plugin, that was disclosed in early September. Update: In a new blog post published after Ars went live with this brief, Sucuri says it has confirmed the so-called "RevSlider" vulnerability is the culprit.

The code causes pages to download the malicious payload from hxxp://soaksoak.ru/xteas/code. Judging from some of the reader comments, some administrators were surprised to find that the sites they oversee were infected. Sucuri's free site check scanner will detect sites that are actively compromised. Disinfection involves removing malicious code added to a script located at wp-includes/template-loader.php. WordPress admins who use the Slider Revolution plugin should also ensure it's up to date, but Sucuri noted the difficulty of getting all websites to universally apply the fix.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

link: Wired - Tech Giants Rally Around Microsoft to Protect "Your" Data Overseas

At issue is the government’s claim that a warrant obtained from a U.S. court under the authority of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is sufficient to force Microsoft to hand over data stored on a server in Ireland. Microsoft insists the warrant is illegal and has no authority outside the U.S. After a district court rejected that argument in July, the company appealed.

Today multiple groups (.pdf), including 28 technology and media companies, 23 trade and civil liberties groups and 35 computer scientists put their names to 10 amicus briefs filed in support of Microsoft. The companies include Verizon, Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Salesforce, HP, eBay, Infor, AT&T, and Rackspace.

“[W]e have submitted this brief in order to turn back an unlawful overreach by the U.S. government,” Verizon wrote in its reason for filing the brief. “The U.S. Supreme Court has reiterated many times that U.S. statutes are presumed not to have extraterritorial application unless Congress ‘clearly expressed’ its ‘affirmative intention’ to the contrary.”

tonyPick writes:

ACM Queue has a paper on Scalability Techniques for Practical Synchronization Primitives by Davidlohr Bueso of SUSE.

This article gives an overview of the design of the Linux kernel locking mechanisms, and details some of the decisions made to improve scalability on real high end systems:

Spotted at Linux Weekly News

tt0108162 writes:

In a very minor victory on the road to preventing a dystopian future of pervasive surveillence, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Edward Shea ruled that warrantless and constant covert video surveillance of someone's rural front yard is contrary to the public's reasonable expectation of privacy and violates Defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. Thanks go to the EFF for submitting an amicus brief in the case.

Freebirth Toad writes:

One of the last intellectual bastions of human dominance over computers has been Go. But a new breakthrough at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland using neural networks looks to change this soon.

The way they have approach this is by using a vast database of Go games to train a neural network to find the next move. Clark and Storkey used over 160,000 games between experts to generate a database of 16.5 million positions along with their next move. They used almost 15 million of these position-move pairs to train an eight-layer convolutional neural network to recognize which move these expert players made next. This was a process that took several days.

They then used the rest of the dataset to test the neural network. In other words, they presented the network with a board position from a game and asked it to pick the next move. Clark and Storkey say that the trained network was able to predict the next move up to 44 percent of the time "surpassing previous state of the art on this task by significant margins."

Hugh Pickens writes:

Lex Berko writes in The Atlantic that although webcasting has been around since the mid-1990s, livestreamed funerals have only begun to go mainstream in the last few years and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA) has only this year introduced a new funeral webcasting license that permits funeral homes to legally webcast funerals that include copyrighted music. The webcast service’s growing appeal is, by all accounts, a result of the increasing mobility of modern society. Remote participation is often the only option for those who live far away or have other barriers—financial, temporal, health-related—barring them from attending a funeral. “It’s not designed to replace folks attending funerals,” says Walker Posey. “A lot of folks just don’t live where their family grew up and it’s difficult to get back and forth.” But some funeral directors question if online funerals are helpful to the grieving process and eschew streaming funerals live because they do not want to replace a communal human experience with a solitary digital one. What happens if there’s a technical problem with the webcast—will we grieve even more knowing we missed the service in person and online? Does webcasting bode well for the future of death acceptance or does it only promote of our further alienation from that inevitable moment? “The physical dead body is proof of death, tangible evidence that the person we love is gone, and that we will someday be gone as well,” says Caitlin Doughty, a death theorist and mortician. “To have death and mourning transferred online takes away that tangible proof. What is there to show us that death is real?”

sigma writes:

Security professionals and hackers attending the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITBSecConf 2014) learned that online communities like Reddit, Twitter, Slashdot (and very likely SN) are being actively manipulated by teams of sockpuppets. At the HITB event, Haroon Meer and his team from South African-based Thinkst, an applied research company that focuses on information security, spoke about how certain parties – whether individuals with mischief in mind, organisations with vested interests, or certain nation-states – have been using false identities to control online conversations. More importantly, they also collected forensic evidence that such tampering has been going on.


“It’s the concept of rent-a-crowd, brought to the Internet age using sock puppets – essentially accounts that are created online that don’t really represent real people, and are used to sway people’s opinions in forums and other online get-togethers,” Meer said.


The full text of the talk is available at Weapons of Mass Distraction: Sock Puppetry for Fun and Profit , and you can read more at: http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations/

PiMuNu writes:

FTFA:

An x-ray feature recently detected by different astronomy groups may be the long-awaited signature of dark matter.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton are satellite telescopes that were both launched in 1999. Shortly after their first science results were released, it was shown that these x-ray astronomy missions could provide a test of certain dark matter theories through observations of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. In particular, dark matter particles with mass in the kilo-electron-volt (keV) mass range could decay into x-ray photons with keV energy. The leading particle dark matter candidate for this x-ray signature is a sterile neutrino.

There are a few experiments which have attempted to detect sterile neutrinos, but none have produced conclusive results for or against. LSND measured a non-standard model signal at 99% significance (not enough for a discovery); but subsequent attempts to validate their measurements have failed. On the other hand, no one has quite been able to shake the feeling that there is something weird going on... and a few more experiments have been proposed to try to resolve this

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

University of Manchester researchers reckon they've eliminated one of the mechanisms that might have linked mobile phones to cancer. The research is also bad news for those who think power lines are cancer-carriers.

Dr Alex Jones in the University's School of Chemistry led a team examining whether weak magnetic fields affected flavoproteins. Since this protein class handles DNA repair, among other things, it was a favourite candidate for those who believed that the weak magnetic fields associated with phones and power lines are dangerous to health.

The research, to appear in the Royal Society journal Interface, was unable to observe any reaction involving flavoproteins that would occur in the human body.

[...]one of the roles of flavoproteins is to transfer electrons from one place to another. These are referred to as electron transfer flavoproteins, and their activities assist in processes like oxidation.

The electron transfer process involves the creation of chemicals called radical pairs and these had been put forward as a mechanism by which weak magnetic fields might interact with cells--but [...] the research "suggests the correct conditions for biochemical effects of WMFs are likely to be rare in the human body".

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Lenovo is recalling about 500,000 AC power cords for its B, G, and V-series laptops and IdeaPads--after 15 cases were reported of the cables overheating, sparking, melting, and burning.

"Only the AC Power Line Cord is being recalled," Lenovo said on its global recall website.[1]

"The Adapter that connects to the computer is not being recalled. Do not discard the adapter. Lenovo apologizes for the inconvenience caused by this issue. Shipment of quality products always has been and continues to be the foremost concern."

The power cords were sold between February 2011 and June 2012, and are easy to identify. They are black and have LS-15 printed on the head. Lenovo's website also has a serial number checker for identification.

So far there have been no reports of the power cables burning up in the US, but 15 cases have been logged in Asia, with no injuries. The cause of the problem is dodgy insulation in the power cord itself which degrades over time and allows the cables to overheat.