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AnonTechie writes:

As a reward for his extensive cooperation helping prosecutors hunt down his fellow hackers, the government is seeking time served for the long-awaited sentencing of top LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, also known as "Sabu." After delaying his sentencing for nearly three years, the government has asked a federal court to sentence Monsegur to time served - just seven months - calling him an "extremely valuable and productive cooperator" in a document that details for the first time his extensive cooperation [PDF] providing "unprecedented access to LulzSec."

Monsegur, who has long been despised by members of LulzSec for his reported snitching, faced a possible sentence of between 259 and 317 months (21 years 7 months and 26 years 5 months) imprisonment under U.S. sentencing guidelines. But the U.S. Probation Office and prosecutors have asked for a reduced sentence "without regard to the otherwise applicable mandatory minimum sentence in this case" in a motion submitted to the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York on Friday.

lhsi writes:

Research labs in universities receive substantial funding from governments. Crowdfunding will never surpass that. But instead of thinking about crowdfunding as a replacement for government and state funding, we must look at it as an alternative source that helps the public to influence government-supported activities in higher education.

The sort of money raised via crowdfunding route is modest. Only a handful projects have got more than US$500,000. My lab alone spends about US$800,000 per year to pay for materials, salaries and travel for around ten graduate students. So it is clear that crowdfunding cannot replace conventional funding. However, an article discusses the options that might be considered for this particular avenue of funding, and crowdfunding is being looked at as a supplemental stream.

This is an alternate stream of funding that can allow scientists, especially young researchers, to do things differently. Crowdfunded projects often add to the kind of science that is already being done, rather than take away projects that could otherwise receive government funding.

Governments fund science for two main reasons: to find solutions to societal problems and to educate the next generation of engineers and scientists to keep solving such problems. But in recent years, the amount of money invested by governments in the US and the UK has been declining. The pool of ideas actually supported becomes smaller with little to no feedback from the general public.

Crowdfunding research allows the public to turn this around by enabling scientists to find support for projects not on the radar of typical funding agencies, yet enjoying sufficient public interest. This category of research is probably the most obviously deserving of crowdfunding and has already enabled many documentaries, research excursions, and books, often by providing exclusively ideological or intellectual rewards.

Fluffeh writes:

The three largest BitTorrent trackers(OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and Istole.it) have banned the IP-ranges of several major hosting companies. The move aims to make it harder for anti-piracy outfits and other information gathering outfits to snoop on file-sharers. Unfortunately, the changes also mean that users of some VPNs, proxies and seedboxes can no longer connect.

The trackers provide a useful function for the public, but are also used by copyright holders to track down pirates. This includes the companies that are used for the various "strikes" initiatives around the world, and various copyright trolls.

To make these increasing snooping efforts more difficult, the tracker operators have decided to take a drastic measure. The three top trackers have all implemented a ban list which includes the IP-address ranges of many of the larger hosting providers, which are frequently used by anti-piracy firms. The measure is not the silver bullet that will stop all anti-piracy outfits, but it's certainly not making it any easier to monitor file-sharers. So for once, they will be the ones who have to circumvent a blockade.

Magic Oddball writes:

Last October, the FDA announced (with little media coverage) that it was investigating a problem with dog treats sickening or killing pets. It has now released an official update stating the problem seems to be with certain treats (and possibly ingredients) imported from China:

Since 2007, FDA has become aware of an increasing number of illnesses in pets associated with the consumption of jerky pet treats ... The reports involve more than 5,600 dogs, 24 cats, three people and include more than 1,000 canine deaths. About 60 percent of the reports are for gastrointestinal illness (with or without elevated liver enzymes) and about 30 percent relate to kidney or urinary signs. The remaining 10 percent of cases involve a variety of other signs, including convulsions, tremors, hives, and skin irritation.

The illnesses have been linked to many brands of jerky treats. The one common factor the cases share is consumption of a chicken or duck jerky treat or jerky-wrapped treat, mostly imported from China. [It also points out that the label won't note if the ingredients were imported from China, so this may explain the non-imported cases.]

The report goes on in interesting detail about the tests they're running with their findings thus far, and includes links to PDFs of the reports describing each case they've investigated. It also includes advice to pet owners on handling the situation, including what to do if they believe one of their pets has been affected. (Hopefully nobody here has a pet sickened by the treats, so this can serve as a warning rather than an explanation.)

Fluffeh writes:

Cinavia's anti-piracy technology relies on a unique type of watermarking that allows it to remain present in pirated movies despite re-recording, transcoding, compression, or other type of transfer. Support for the technology has been mandatory for all hardware and software Blu-ray players since 2012, which causes headaches for many pirates every day. Pirated movies protected by Cinavia work at first, but after a few minutes playback is halted and a warning notice appears on the screen instead.

However, after several years DVD-Ranger has now solved the puzzle. "We have improved DVD-Ranger for use with torrent files. Now DVD-Ranger CinEx HD can remove Cinavia from downloaded torrent video files such as avi, mkv, mp4, mov and others." DVD-Ranger's Ingo Forster explains. "In our country it is only forbidden to develop and sell software that circumvents copy protection. The law doesn't mention digital watermarks. So is it legal? Definitely." Forster notes.

In any case, DVD-Ranger's breakthrough is likely to cause concern at Verance, the company where Cinavia is developed. Perhaps it's the start of a new watermarking arms race?

AnonTechie writes:

MIT figures out how to give the moon broadband - using lasers.

Four transmitting telescopes in the New Mexico desert, each just 6 inches in diameter, can give a satellite orbiting the moon faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get. The telescopes form the earthbound end of an experimental laser link to demonstrate faster communication with spacecraft and possible future bases on the moon and Mars. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will give details about the system and its performance next month at a conference of The Optical Society.

Test results have been promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power.

lhsi writes:

https://peerj.com/articles/380/

Cleaning criteria is often used on data to remove extreme values that may represent measurement or data-entry errors. There are different cleaning criteria that can be used for malnutrition prevalence estimates and studies on the subject don't have to specify which was used.

This study applied 5 different cleaning criteria to different datasets to compare how many entries were removed.

Choice of cleaning criteria had a marked effect: SMART were least inclusive, resulting in the lowest reported malnutrition prevalence, while WHO 2006 were most inclusive, resulting in the highest. Across the 21 countries, the proportion of records excluded was 3 to 5 times greater when using SMART compared to WHO 2006 criteria, resulting in differences in the estimated prevalence of total wasting of between 0.5 and 3.8%, and differences in severe wasting of 0.4-3.9%. The magnitude of difference was associated with the standard deviation of the survey sample, a statistic that can reflect both population heterogeneity and data quality.

The authors recommend that future papers should indicate which cleaning criteria is used to assist in analysis and comparison of results. They also note that the current trend to electronic data collection may be particularly useful for nutrition surveys as extreme data values could potentially be validated in the field, reducing or eliminating the need for data exclusion during analysis.

Angry Jesus writes:

Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, recently shot a video set to music published under the CC-BY-NC Creative Commons license which, when he uploaded it to Youtube, got hit with multiple Content-ID takedowns. His experience demonstrates how Youtube's system has stacked the deck against independent creators. When even a VP of an S&P 500 company can't tame the beast, the little guys have no chance at all.

sgleysti writes:

Wired has a nice story on a crypto party organized by Edward Snowden shortly before he leaked the NSA documents. He used the same e-mail address to organize this crypto party that he used to contact Glenn Greenwald for the first time, which happened to be 11 days prior to the party. He had even been running Tor exit nodes at the time.

A crypto party is an open, free, and public tutorial on the use of cryptographic technologies, such as Tor, GPG, TrueCrypt, Tails, and others. It looks like a brilliant and practical way to overcome the learning curve of good security.

AnonTechie writes:

Tim Palmer, a climate scientist and professor at the University of Oxford in the U.K., has published a somewhat controversial Perspective piece in the journal Science. In it, he theorizes that heavy thunderstorms in the western tropical Pacific (due to global warming) this past winter caused changes to the flow pattern of the jet stream, which resulted in the "polar vortex" that chilled the northern part of North America for the first four months of 2014. The winter of 2014 was cold in the U.S., of that there was no doubt. Subzero temperatures became the norm and heating bills skyrocketed. At the time, very few who experienced it were blaming it on global warming, but that may very well have been the cause anyway, Palmer suggests--despite the fact that global temperatures haven't been rising lately.

The abstract (and link to paywalled journal article) can be found at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6186/803

Anonymous Coward writes:

The Guardian newspaper was responsible in part for ensuring that Snowden's data, acquired from NSA, reached the public. The UK Government ensured that the data held by the newspaper was destroyed and sent GCHQ personnel to oversee the destruction process. But, rather than just concentrating on the obvious data storage devices they also insisted on the destruction of some parts of the computer considered entirely innocuous: "such as the keyboard, trackpad and monitor, [which] were targeted along with apparently trivial chips on the main boards of laptops and desktops." So,the question now being asked is what does GCHQ know about our devices that we don't.

There are some ideas being floated but the article invites suggestions from others, specifically: "We welcome any thoughts from individuals who have an understanding of these components and what their storage capabilities are, and for what purposes. We hope to achieve some much needed transparency about what our devices do and how the unseen components on the inside might betray our privacy."

AnonTechie writes:

It seems that Cash-Starved NASA May Have to Nix 1 Space Telescope to Save Others:

Based on the findings of an independent review panel (pdf), NASA has taken stock of its fleet of orbiting astrophysics telescopes and decided which to save and which to shutter (pdf). Among the winners were the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Kepler planet-hunting telescope, which will begin a modified mission designed to compensate for the recent failure of two of its four stabilizing reaction wheels. The infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, however, may be deactivated due to lack of funding. And a bid to convert data collected by the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) into a format usable for astrophysics was also deemed too expensive. (The NEOWISE mission hunts for near-Earth asteroids that might pose a collision risk to our planet and is funded through NASA's Planetary Science Division.)

kaszz writes:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley report that graphene can be used to build superior speakers (paper). They made their loudspeakers from a 30 nm thick, 7 mm wide sheet of graphene that they had grown using chemical vapour deposition (CVD). They then sandwiched this diaphragm between two actuating perforated silicon electrodes coated with silicon dioxide to prevent the graphene from accidentally shorting to the electrodes at very large drive amplitudes. The device was found to be comparable, if not better, at 20 Hz to 20 kHz than a high-quality commercial earphone of similar size, the Sennheiser® MX-400. This speaker technology can be driven with a few nano-amps because it does not need to be artificially damped. The technique for fabricating the speaker could easily be scaled up to produce even larger-area diaphragms and thus bigger speakers. This speaker also works as a microphone too.

An anonymous coward writes:

It's been a widely held assumption that urine is sterile. But now researchers have obtained evidence that urine is not sterile even when collected directly from the bladder of healthy women.

More than 70 percent of the urine samples contained bacteria, including at least 33 types of bacteria (at the genus level) in normal urine. Women with overactive bladders had more types of bacteria in their urine (77 genera), including four species found only in overactive bladder patients.

Similar for other parts of the body:

Last year, in fact, researchers reported finding soil bacteria in people's brains. The researchers were studying whether people with a compromised immune system from HIV/AIDS might be prone to brain infections. Instead, they found that all the brains they looked at contained bacteria, regardless of HIV status.

lhsi writes:

A survey of registered randomised trials on vaccines found that there was often a delay before publication of the results, and sometimes no publication found at all. Delay to publication between non-industry and industry sponsored trials did not differ, but non-industry sponsored trials were 4.42-fold (P=0.008) more likely to report negative or mixed findings. Negative results were reported by only 2% of the published trials.

Trials not sponsored by industry were more likely to report negative or mixed results than industry-sponsored trials (32% (7/22) vs. 7% (11/154)).

Our empirical evaluation found that after a median of 26 months from completion, about half of the registered randomized trials on five vaccines had been published, and no information was available in the peer reviewed literature for almost two thirds of the entire sample of patients who had been randomized in these vaccine trials.