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youngatheart writes:

London's black cabs have promised to bring "chaos, congestion and confusion" to London as a protest against the growing presence of smartphone taxi service Uber. They are planning for 10,000 drivers to meet at a London landmark (which hasn't been named yet) in early June.

Steve McNamara, LTDA's [Licensed Taxi Drivers Association] general secretary, told the BBC: "I anticipate that the demonstration against TfL's [Transport for London's] handling of Uber will attract many many thousands of cabs and cause severe chaos, congestion and confusion across the metropolis."

This amid lawsuits in some places and drivers being fined in others.

Angry Jesus writes:

Starting in 2008 Japanese astronauts brought some cherry tree seeds to the International Space Station. Upon return, there have been about 15 plantings and at least 5 of them seem to be maturing at an accelerated rate, growing very fast and blooming about 6 years ahead of schedule. Unfortunately the plantings were not part of an experiment, so there are no control trees to compare them with. From the story:

Tomita-Yokotani, a plant physiologist, said it was difficult to explain why the temple tree has grown so fast because there was no control group to compare its growth with that of other trees. She said cross-pollination with another species could not be ruled out, but a lack of data was hampering an explanation.

"Of course, there is the possibility that exposure to stronger cosmic rays accelerated the process of sprouting and overall growth," she said. "From a scientific point of view, we can only say we don't know why."

AnonTechie writes:

Whether New York City can constitutionally use GPS devices to monitor cab drivers' movements and fares landed before a federal appeals court Thursday. The appeal spotlights the growing reach of tracking technology, which has been used to monitor everybody from public school students to garbage collectors, truckers, and now cab drivers. Nobody doubts that some cabbies overcharge tourists and those unfamiliar with New York's terrain. But what is being questioned is whether the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission can fine or fire drivers with data obtained from GPS devices that were installed without court warrants. The specific case before the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals concerns driver Hassan El-Nahal, who was accused of overcharging passengers. He lost and regained his taxi license several times. He sued on behalf of himself and others who were fined or who lost their taxi license due to information gathered from GPS devices. The trackers were installed on licensed cabs in 2007, and among other things, they monitor trip routes, trip times, and fees. A federal judge ruled against El-Nahal, and he appealed.

Blackmoore writes about two articles here:

Ars Technica with Comcast is the one who should pay for network connections, Cogent claims Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer made a different argument, saying that Comcast is the one who should be paying for connectivity. He did so while testifying in front of a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Comcast's planned acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

Schaeffer pointed to the fact that Comcast is not considered to be a so-called "Tier 1" network. There are a dozen or so Tier 1 networks that make up the closest thing the Internet has to a backbone. Tier 1 networks can reach every part of the Internet simply by peering with one another. Other networks buy "transit" in order to access the rest of the Internet. Peering is a point-to-point connection only, which doesn't necessarily guarantee passage of traffic to any networks beyond the two involved in the connection.

and

Tom's guide with The Case Against Time Warner-Comcast Just Got Stronger

The broadband ISPs "are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil [sic] the requests their customers make for content," wrote Mark Taylor, vice president of content and media at Level 3 Communications, in a blog post yesterday (May 5) entitled "Observations of an Internet Middleman."

eldritch Level 3 is perhaps the most important Internet company you've never heard of. It is a top "backbone" provider, ensuring fast, fat connections among the local networks of dozens of other Internet-related companies across the world. Level 3 carries tremendous authority on Internet traffic matters, and for it to accuse consumer-level ISPs of throttling traffic is a bit like God, or at least the federal government, speaking.

I think we know this Frankenstien's monster will be allowed to proceed. Do you have any rage left that I can borrow?

frojack writes of something slightly different - but when you see the pictures I hope that you will be as impressed as I was:

Gizmodo featured a story about Match Stick Artist Patrick Acton and his 1/26 scale model of the International Space Station. The model took 82,000 matchsticks, 8 gallons of glue and 1,950 hours of perseverance. The entire project included a Second set of ISS modules at 1/13 scale, with cutouts that show all the details within the station. The level of detail is amazing, as is the size: ISS is 13 feet by 9 feet.

It turns out this isn't Pat's first rodeo, and he runs the Matchstick Marvels Museum in Gladbrook Iowa, just to house his many projects - probably upon Mrs. Acton's insistence. He has modeled over 68 projects over the years, from a simple Church to Hogwarts, and Notre Dame Cathedral.

He estimates he has used over 4 million match sticks. After nearly ten years of model building and cutting the heads off 100,000 matchsticks, Acton contacted the Ohio Blue Tip Company and learned matchsticks could be purchased without the sulfur tip. He now buys them direct from the source saving himself the fire hazard of removing the tips.

AnonTechie writes:

The UN is about to debate killer drone ethics. Can Skynet withstand the slow, grinding fury of a Committee?

In an effort to stop killer drones before they start, humanity is about to unleash its most fearsome weapons: a long, drawn out bureaucratic process and a committee. Both weapons will be brought to bear by the United Nations' which will next week stage an "informal Meeting of Experts" to discuss the questions related to emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS)". From the article:

lhsi writes:

A deal to send educational anti-piracy letters to ISP customers who are infringing copyright is nearing completion, after years of debate between ISPs and entertainment industry bodies. The actual plan is a lot weaker than the original desires of the entertainment industry, who have also agreed to pay £750,000 to each participating ISP towards the setup of their system (or 75% of the total cost, whichever is smaller), while also paying £75,000 (or 75% of the total) a year to cover administration costs.

The first letters - known as "alerts" - are expected to be sent out in 2015.

The deal has been struck with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents the British music industry, and the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which covers film.

The bodies had originally suggested the letters should tell repeat infringers about possible punitive measures.

They also wanted access to a database of known illegal downloaders, opening the possibility of further legal action against individuals. However, following almost four years of debate between the two sides, the final draft of the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (Vcap) contains neither of those key measures.

Bytram writes:

Ars Technica reports that four weeks after its disclosure huge swaths of the Internet remain vulnerable to Heartbleed. The article suggests that over 300,000 servers remain vulnerable.

What steps have you taken to protect yourself from this bug? What browser addons have you installed? Have you checked/updated the firmware on your home router? If you work in IT, what has the reaction been? Has your site been compromised? Has vulnerable code been updated, new keys genned, new certificates obtained, and old ones revoked?

Since the OpenSSL library is now undergoing a security review and a fork of it is underway as LibreSSL, it is possible that other vulnerabilities will be discovered. Then what? How likely is it that we will need to repeat this cleanup effort?

(more after the break)

AnonTechie writes:

An inadvertent data leak that stemmed from a physician's attempt to reconfigure a server cost New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center $4.8 million to settle with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The hospitals and HHS announced the voluntary settlement, which ends an inquiry into the incident, on Wednesday.

AnonTechie writes:

The California Senate on Thursday voted to approve a state measure requiring smarter anti-theft security on smartphones, reversing its decision last month to reject the bill. The proposal, introduced by State Senator Mark Leno and sponsored by George Gascon, San Francisco's district attorney, requires a so-called kill switch (which would render a smartphone useless after it was stolen) on all smartphones sold in California. The bill passed with a final count of 26 to 8 in favor. It now requires approval from the California State Assembly and, eventually, California Governor Jerry Brown, who could review the bill around late August.

starcraftsicko writes:

The New Hampshire Supreme Court recently struck down a law that restricts potentially offensive vanity license plates. According to Seacoast Online:

In a unanimous decision, the state Supreme Court agreed with the arguments of David Montenegro, who wanted the vanity plate reading "COPSLIE" to protest what he calls government corruption.

State law prohibits vanity plates that "a reasonable person would find offensive to good taste." But the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union argued that the law is unconstitutionally vague and gives too much discretion to a person behind a Department of Motor Vehicles counter.

Live free or...

Blackmoore writes:

Ars technica looks at Fortran, and some new number crunching languages in Scientific computing's future: Can any coding language top a 1950s behemoth?

This state of affairs seems paradoxical. Why, in a temple of modernity employing research instruments at the bleeding edge of technology, does a language from the very earliest days of the electronic computer continue to dominate? When Fortran was created, our ancestors were required to enter their programs by punching holes in cardboard rectangles: one statement per card, with a tall stack of these constituting the code. There was no vim or emacs. If you made a typo, you had to punch a new card and give the stack to the computer operator again. Your output came to you on a heavy pile of paper. The computers themselves, about as powerful as today's smartphones, were giant installations that required entire buildings.

Papas Fritas writes:

Marguerite Reardon writes at Cnet that within a week of Google's declaration last spring that it planned to build a fiber network in the city of Austin, AT&T announced its own Austin fiber network and in less than a year's time, AT&T and local cable operator Grande Communications have beaten Google to market with their own ultra-high speed services using newly built fiber networks. AT&T maintains it has been planning this fiber upgrade for a long time, and that Google's announcement didn't affect the timing of its network but Rondella Hawkins, the telecommunications and regulatory affairs officer for the city of Austin, said she had never heard about AT&T's plans before Google's news came out. Hawkins was part of the original committee that put together Austin's application to become the first Google Fiber city. "Our application for Google would have been a good tip-off to the incumbents that we were eager as a community to get fiber built," says Hawkins. "But we never heard from them. Until Google announced that it was going to deploy a fiber network in Austin, I was unaware of AT&T's plans to roll out gigabit fiber to the home." Grande Communications' CEO Matt Murphy admits that without Google in the market, his company wouldn't have moved so aggressively on offering gigabit speeds. It also wouldn't be offering its service at the modest price of $65 a month, considering that the average broadband download speed sold in the US is between 20Mbps and 25Mbps for about $45 to $50 a month.

It's not surprising, then, that in every city in AT&T's 22-state footprint where Google is considering deploying fiber, AT&T also plans to bring GigaPower. That's a total of 14 markets, including Austin, the Triangle region of North Carolina, and Atlanta, home to AT&T's mobility division. While AT&T refuses to acknowledge that its gigabit fiber plans are answering the competitive challenge posed by Google Fiber, others say that Kansas City may have been a wake-up call. "I think all the providers have learned some valuable lessons from Google's Kansas City deployment," says Julie Huls, president and CEO of the Austin Technology Council. "What Google did instead was say, 'We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,'" says Blair Levin. "And that's what's so disruptive about it."

qwade writes:

After a 15 year effort, scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California have successfully added two letters to the usual DNA alphabet of adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G) common to all natural life on Earth. The new X-Y bases, d5SICS and dNaM, were inserted into an Escherichia coli bacterium where they replicated successfully for a week. When the supply of foreign nucleotides ran out, the engineered bases were replaced with natural ones.

From the article:

"What we have now is a living cell that literally stores increased genetic information," says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who led the 15-year effort.

Romesberg's group is working on getting foreign DNA to encode proteins that contain amino acids other than the 20 that together make up nearly all natural proteins. Amino acids are encoded by 'codons' of three DNA letters apiece, so the addition of just two foreign DNA 'letters' would vastly expand a cell's ability to encode new amino acids. "If you read a book that was written with four letters, you're not going to be able to tell many interesting stories," Romesberg says. "If you're given more letters, you can invent new words, you can find new ways to use those words and you can probably tell more interesting stories."

Potential uses of the technology include the incorporation of a toxic amino acid into a protein to ensure that it kills only cancer cells, and the development of glowing amino acids that could help scientists to track biological reactions under the microscope.

Researcher Steven Benner, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is attempting to engineer cells that can make the foreign bases from scratch, obviating the need for a feedstock.

The efforts of Benner bring to mind the immortal quote from Jurassic Park by Dr. Ian Malcolm: "Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."

lhsi writes:

An exoskeleton that can be controlled from brain activity will be demonstrated at the opening ceremony of the world cup in Brazil on June 12th.

The exoskeleton was developed by an international team of scientists as part of the Walk Again Project and is the culmination of more than a decade of work for Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist based at Duke University in North Carolina.

damnbunni writes:

Last month Yahoo updated their DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) policy basically telling servers to reject all Yahoo email that fails DMARC. In theory this reduces spam, by making sure Yahoo addressed emails actually come from Yahoo. But it also means that you can no longer use a Yahoo address to post to most mailing lists, and you can't use your own or your ISP's SMTP server for Yahoo mail (for instance, sending Yahoo mail from Outlook or Thunderbird).

Yahoo has a solution - but how many home users will be able to do this without technical help is questionable.

(Thanks to Grant Hutchinson on the NewtonTalk list for bringing this to my attention!)

[Ed's Comment: How many of our community have been affected by this and have you found any other solutions to get around the problem?]