SoylentNews

Angry Jesus writes:

In contrast to the recent story about canadian ISP's colluding with law enforcement to secretly hand over millions of customer records with little to no court supervision, a number of US internet companies have started to either insist on warrants or at least notify users. Credit goes to Snowden for raising general awareness of privacy issues and the EFF for their Who Has Your Back? campaign to report on corporate privacy and transparency policies.

cornholed writes:

As reported by CNET and other news publishers, a major flaw has been found in the login tools OAuth and OpenID, used by many websites and tech titans including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, among others. Wang Jing, a Ph.D student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, discovered that the serious vulnerability Covert Redirect flaw can masquerade as a login popup based on an affected site's domain. Covert Redirect is based on a well-known exploit parameter.

cornholed writes:

As reported by phys.org:

The stage is set for a new, super-heavy element to be added to the periodic table following research published in the latest Physics Review Letters. Led by researchers at Germany's GSI laboratory, the team created atoms of element 117, matching the heaviest atoms ever observed, which are 40 per cent heavier than an atom of lead.

AnonTechie writes:

The Food That Mysteriously Makes You Feel Full, Explained

Scientists have figured out the reason fiber is such a wonder food: It contains an anti-appetite molecule called acetate. Acetate, the researchers discovered, is naturally released when fiber is digested in the gut, and when it's released, it is taken to the brain where it signals us to stop eating.

Fiber has long been known to satiate appetite and keep us full for longer, but previous research supposed the reason was that it takes longer to digest, keeping us satisfied for longer after we've stopped eating. But this new research published in the journal Nature Communications shows that the acetate released when we digest roughage lowers our appetites when it gets directly into our bloodstream, colon or brain.

The researchers looked at a dietary fiber called inulin, which comes from chicory and sugar beets, and is often present in cereal bars. They fed mice a diet high in fat with additional inulin. These mice ate less and gained less weight than mice who did not consume inulin, and when the scientists took a deeper look, they discovered that the inulin-eating mice had higher levels of acetate in their gut. So, they used PET scans to track the inulin through the mice.

They discovered that the acetate traveled from the colon to the liver and heart, and finally made it to the the area of the brain that deals with hunger, the hypothalamus region. Using more imaging, they determined that the acetate accumulates and spurs chemical reactions in the brain that send signals that suppress hunger.

An Anonymous Coward sends us 2 URL links, both supposedly being proposed by Anonymous (the organisation), but little else. The first is advocating a move to 'anonymous encrypted radio communications, and the second to the supposed benefits that the new communications would provide.

Now, to make a story out of this, I will have to act both as editor and submitter, which is something that we normally frown upon here at Soylent News.

The first article explains that the system being proposed is based on the Ham radio open-source project Fldigi. It goes on to explain:

You're not going to get fast communications out of AirChat, since it takes the world back to the days of encoding data over voice channels. The group says "We traded bandwidth for freedom, or to be more exact we traded bandwidth for freedom, simplicity and low cost".

The aim of its AirChat is to give activists a way to communicate directly, without using Internet or cellular infrastructure, the project page at github says. The Anonymous contribution to the world of ham packet radio is twofold, the group says: to anonymise the communication, since ham packet radio doesn't have anonymity built in; and to ignore spectrum and user licensing.

The latter carries a risk, but AirChat's author or authors believe it's justifiable. Beyond the project's rhetoric about 'evil organisations like the FCC', it is reasonable to think that an activist communicating from a trouble spot doesn't have time to obtain a ham radio license before they start communicating (and anyhow, doing so doesn't let you preserve anonymity).

kaszz writes:

Sony researchers have succeeded to increase the capacity of magnetic tape by increasing the areal data density by 74 times. This could make 185 TB tape cartridges a reality and can be compared to the latest generation LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open) that has a density of 310 gigabits per square centimeter, or 2.5 TB uncompressed data per cartridge. There's more:

Used for storage since the first digital computers, magnetic tape has been eclipsed by hard disk drives and flash drives as a medium in recent years but is still in use to preserve critical information over the long term in data centers, corporate archives and other facilities.

To make the new recording material, Sony used a kind of vacuum thin film-forming technology called sputter deposition. The process involves shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate, which produces layers of magnetic crystal particles. By tweaking the sputter conditions and developing a soft magnetic underlayer on the film, the manufacturer was able to create a layer of fine magnetic particles with an average size of 7.7 nanometers.

At the Intermag Europe 2014 international magnetics conference starting in Germany on May 4, Sony will describe the new technology in a presentation with IBM, which helped measure the new density. Sony said it wants to advance the thin-layer deposition technologies and commercialize the new tape, but it did not say when such a product could appear on the market.

AnonTechie writes:

Scientists find a winning strategy for rock-paper-scissors. A new study (PDF) applies statistics, probability, and psychology to RPS.

From Ars Technica:

A group of researchers from Chinese universities have written a paper about the role of psychology in winning (or losing) at rock-paper-scissors. After studying how players change or keep their strategies during multiple-round sessions, they figured out a basic rule that people tend to play by that could potentially be exploited. The researchers took 360 students, broke them into groups of six, and had them play 300 rounds of rock-paper-scissors in random pairings. The students received small amounts of money each time they won a round. As they played, the researchers observed how the players rotated through the three play options as they won or lost.

AnonTechie writes:

Police use new tool to source crowds for evidence:

Authorities are employing a new crowdsourcing tool to help with a Southern California investigation into an annual party gone awry last month that left dozens of people injured including several police officers. The new online and mobile app is called LEEDIR, and it can be activated after a major emergency to allow people to send pictures and videos from their smartphones to investigators. Proponents say the crowdsourcing system gives authorities a secure, central repository for the countless electronic tips that come during a crisis. And since it uses remote database servers that police access online, floods of data won't cause system crashes or be expensive to store. Privacy advocates criticize the app as overly broad, saying it subjects innocent people to police scrutiny and probably won't produce much good evidence.

AnonTechie writes:

Inside the quest to conquer addictive drugs.

Opioid addiction can be seen as an infinite loop, a bug in the brain's programming. Take drug. Feel better. Come down. Repeat. Of the people who use opioid drugs recreationally, between 8 and 23 percent become addicted-sometimes fatally. That's true whether the opioid drug is strictly prohibited, such as heroin, or a prescription painkiller that people use illegally, such as OxyContin or Vicodin. A smaller proportion of people who take prescription painkillers get hooked - less than 1 percent of people with no prior history of addiction. From the article:

In the United States, the world's largest consumer of all types of drugs, these numbers add up: More than 2 million people are currently addicted to opioids, and nearly 5 million have taken them recreationally in the past month and may be at risk. Consequently, scientists have been searching for a "non-addictive opioid" since the 1800s - desperately seeking a compound that can match these drugs - peerless pain relief without becoming irresistible.

Some elements of the addictive loop are well understood. The primary factor being that the drugs feel alluring, dreamy, and blissful to a fraction of the people who take them. Meanwhile, about 15 percent strongly dislike them, according to research on healthy volunteers.

AnonTechie writes:

Here's 100 Years of Proof That Girls Are Better Students Than Boys. In all subjects, even math and science.

In 2006, Newsweek magazine declared it, loud, on their cover: America's boys were in crisis. Boys were falling behind their female counterparts in school. They were getting worse grades, lagging on standardized tests, and not attending college in the same numbers as girls. "By almost every benchmark," Peg Tyre, the author of the cover story, wrote, "boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind." And so it began-the end of men, but also an ongoing conversation on how to better boys' performance in the classroom. From the article:

This "boy crisis," however, was based on an assumption: that males had previously been on top. Granted, there was evidence to support that idea. For one, educational institutions for most of modern history have been openly sexist, favoring boys. And traditionally, males had outperformed girls in standardized tests and in math and science. But "by the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math, and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry," Tyre wrote.

AnonTechie writes:

NASA decides on crowdsourced Tron look for Mars Z-2 spacesuit. It's smooth, futuristic, and glows blue-but does it come with a fancy disc?

NASA announced today that it has finalized the look for its new Mars-bound Z-2 space suit. The design was selected by the public in a vote, and the winning design was one of three showcased by the agency.

The new suit is the latest in NASA's Z-series of suits. These are a far cry from the simple pressure suits worn by the Mercury astronauts in the 1950s-today's suits aren't so much suits as person-shaped spaceships. The Z-series suits are being designed to function both in space and also on the ground on other worlds, most notably the moon and Mars. The major design focuses of the Z-series, and the Z-2 in particular, are mobility and ease of use. Since the earliest days of space travel, suited astronauts needed to cope with the tremendous physical burden of working inside what is essentially a rigid pressurized balloon; an air-filled space suit resists bending, and multi-hour spacewalks can be exhausting. Future suits like the Z-series try to help out their occupants with new materials and clever joint designs, not to mention by allowing astronauts to vary their pressurization level.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/nasa-decide s-on-crowdsourced-tron-look-for-mars-z-2-spacesuit /

AnonTechie writes:

How can we really promote democracy?

From The Boston Globe:

One lesson of the Arab Spring: We're putting billions of dollars into efforts that may not help. Of all the authoritarian Arab states researchers studied, only one now meets the standards of electoral democracy.

The foreign policy driven by this belief is known as "democracy promotion," and has long been an explicit goal of Western governments. At least since the 1950s, institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have aimed to promote democratic values in the economic and political life of developing countries.

The favored method is a top-down approach: Democracy-promotion groups funnel money to nascent political parties and help train people to run the institutions considered central to democracy, from elections commissions to associations for judges and lawyers. Western advisers push democratic ideas and try to strengthen local civic organizations. Then, when the opportunity for a new government arises, the wisdom goes, we have only to step back and watch citizens embrace it.

An anonymous coward writes:

National Geographic has an article which brings attention to a study.

Couzin and Kao put together a series of mathematical models that included correlation and several cues. In one model, for example, a group of animals had to choose between two options- think of two places to find food. But the cues for each choice were not equally reliable, nor were they equally correlated.

Small groups did better than individuals. But bigger groups did not do better than small groups. In fact, they did worse. A group of 5 to 20 individuals made better decisions than an infinitely large crowd.

Angry Jesus writes:

Techdirt reports on a national trend of banks canceling the personal accounts of people working in the adult entertainment industry. It seems that the Dept of Justice has started a program called "Operation Choke Point" where they threaten banks with increased regulatory burden for any accounts associated with a list of legal businesses that they feel have a high rate of associated fraud even if the accounts have no suspicion of wrong doing .

Seems like they started the beta test with Wikileaks, moved on to the file lockers, usenet servers and even VPN providers and are now going mainstream. Does this mean that the industry will end up at the forefront of technology development and bring an alternative payment method to the masses?

Anonymous Coward writes:

The Times of Israel reports on some comments Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu made during a photoshoot.

Another unseen voice then tells Netanyahu that "if you did not take a picture, it's as if you didn't live," or take part, in the occurrence.

"I've lived and did not take a picture," the prime minister responds. He then comes to the realization that he holds the minority opinion on the matter.

"I'm the only one here without all these electronic devices, I'm a free man, and you all are slaves," he concludes. "You are slaves!"

Anonymous Coward writes:

After nearly five years of development, Tails, a Debian-based distribution known for its strong privacy features and pre-configured for anonymous web browsing, has reached version 1.0.

The announcement from Distrowatch.com:

Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.0, is out. Version 1.0 is often an important milestone that denotes the maturity of a free software project. The first public version of what would become Tails was released on June 23 2009, when it was called Amnesia. That was almost five years ago. Tails 1.0 marks the 36th stable release since then. Since then we have been working on the many features we think are essential both in terms of security and usability: USB installer; automatic upgrades; persistence; support for Tor bridges and other special Tor configuration; MAC address spoofing; extensive and translated documentation.

Read the rest of the release announcement for a full changelog and a note on future plans.

GoonDu writes:

This article started off with an introduction to superbugs before proceeding to talk about the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, specifically the microbe USA300, and how the epidemic is spreading to households as well.

While the presence of Staph on skin has always put people at risk for infection, two features make CA-MRSA (community associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) riskier. It can cause severe disease in previously healthy people. In about one in every ten cases, CA-MRSA infections lead to deadly pneumonia, severe sepsis, or the dreaded "flesh-eating disease" (aka necrotizing fasciitis). They also have the ability to spread rapidly, which has helped propel them to a global epidemic.

The bacteria spreads by contact, which makes it easy to spread amongst family, as sharing common household items, like a door knob, counts. To make matters worse, research shows that it is able to evolve into a more harmful version.

Tracing the bug by whole-genome sequencing, researchers managed to "determine that USA300 first arose around 1993. The molecular signatures allowed them to also home in on the geographic location where this happened, which they determined to be right in Columbia's neighborhood: northern Manhattan."