SoylentNews

Magic Oddball writes:

The Atlantic recently published an interesting in-depth article on the history of the Prodigy network, its cultural impact, and efforts to restore files by reverse-engineering the software in hope of showing people what it was like.

[When Prodigy Classic was discontinued], the written record of a massive, unique online culture, including millions of messages and tens of thousands of hand-drawn pieces of digital art, seemingly vanished into thin air. ... It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords.

Fifteen years later, a Prodigy enthusiast named Jim Carpenter has found an ingenious way to bring some of that data back from the dead. With a little bit of Python code and some old Prodigy software at hand, Carpenter, working alone, recently managed to partially reverse-engineer the Prodigy client and eke out some Prodigy content that was formerly thought to have been lost forever.

The ultimate goal is to re-create it online live, but for now the focus is going to be on building a screenshot directory. Since each member's install directory only has the pages that they visited, though, he needs as many of them as people can track down. The detailed project FAQ has (among many other things) instructions on what to do if you find a Prodigy directory. (The FAQ also says, for those wondering: "Jim's code is not ready for release yet, but he hopes to polish it up enough to put up on GitHub soon.")

wantkitteh writes:

A one week emergency process to pass laws to fill the legal gap left behind by the striking down of the EU Data Retention Directive has resulted in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill being passed in the House of Commons. The bill received support from all three major parties and was passed with a huge majority, despite criticism for the process and content of the bill:

"The government won a large majority of 387 on its proposed Commons timetable for the legislation, as MPs agreed by 436 votes to 49 to complete consideration of the bill in one day. MPs subsequently approved the general principles of the bill at second reading by 498 votes to 31, a government majority of 467. It later passed its third and final reading by a comparable margin of 416 votes."

During the very short lead time between the announcement of the bill and it's reading in the House of Commons, senior labour leadership expressed support for the content of the bill but reservations about the speed of the process. The Conservative MP David Davis made a speech in the House of Commons in which he also criticised the process, describing it as "entirely improper", likening it to "democratic banditry resonant of a rogue state", and accusing infighting between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat factions of the ruling coalition of causing the three month.

The legislation also drew fire from many civil liberties groups and commentators. The Open Rights Group post a scathing analysis of the bill criticising the emergency nature of the bill and asserting that the bill will significantly extend data retention scope and enforcement jurisdiction, to the contrary of previous assurances by Home Secretary Theresa May that the bill would closely replicate the powers of the withdrawn EU Data Retention Directive. Isabella Sankey, the Policy Director for Liberty commented on the group's blog that this was a closed-doors agreement between the party leaders designed to evade democratic oversight and pass legislation equivalent to the previously abandoned Draft Communications Data Bill, otherwise known as the "Snooper's Charter".

The bill has now moved on the House of Lords, where it must also be approved before it becomes law.

UPDATE 17-07-14: The bill has now cleared the House of Lords and is becoming law. The criticism to the timetable for passing it has resulted in the insertion into the bill by the opposition of a six-monthly requirement for the Interception of Communications Commissioner to report on usage of the powers granted and to ensure that "same as the EU DRD" does genuinely mean that. It also means the EU Court of Justice's assertion that the EU DRD "[entailed] a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data, without that interference being limited to what is strictly necessary" now applies to this new law as well.

AnonTechie writes:

After years of cyberattacks on the networks of high-profile government targets like the Pentagon, Chinese hackers appear to have turned their attention to far more obscure federal agencies.

Law enforcement and cybersecurity analysts in March detected intrusions on the computer networks of the Government Printing Office and the Government Accountability Office, senior American officials said this week.

The printing office catalogs and publishes information for the White House, Congress and many federal departments and agencies. It also prints passports for the State Department. The accountability office, known as the congressional watchdog, investigates federal spending and the effectiveness of government programs. From the article:

The attacks occurred around the same time Chinese hackers breached the networks of the Office of Personnel Management, which houses the personal information of all federal employees and more detailed information on tens of thousands of employees who have applied for top-secret security clearances.

Some of those networks were so out of date that the hackers seemed confused about how to navigate them, officials said. But the intrusions puzzled American officials because hackers have usually targeted offices that have far more classified information.

It is not clear whether the hackers were operating on behalf of the Chinese government. But the sophisticated nature of the attacks has led some American officials to believe that the government, which often conducts cyberattacks through the military or proxies, played a role.

FakeBeldin writes:

Former Front National (French extreme right) local politician Anne-Sophie Leclere posted a picture on Facebook with on the one side a young monkey, and on the other the French minister of Justice Christiane Taubira - a black woman. Caption: "At 18 months - now". (replica of the offensive image, with the convicted politician on the right.) She removed the the post a few days later. A month and a bit later, she was expelled from 'Front National'.

The case was tried in Cayenne - the home 'departement' or county of the Justice Minister. (Cayenne is, of course, the capital of French Guiana - an Overseas Territory administered by France) No one there was willing to act as the defense lawyer. Result: 9 months jail and 50,000 euro fine (the English article says 5,000 euro, but French sources put it at 50,000.) Even French anti-racist organisations publicly state to being surprised by the severity of this sentence.

What is your take? Is 470 by 250 pixels enough to jail anyone?

[Editor's note: The offence is "incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence". The Justice Minister has opted not to take any private legal action. This action was initiated by the Paris Prosecutor's Office in October 2013.]

bugamn writes:

ArsTechnica provides an interesting article on blood types. They explain what are the build types, why do they manifest and follow with possible explanation for their origins, and a whole lot more besides.

Different antigens explain the different types, as well as the relations between donors. This is the reason type O is the universal donor, while AB can receive blood from practically anyone, but can donate only for people with AB blood. According to research, those types were caused by mutations on the gens responsible for the creation of antigens in the blood cells, while the antigens themselves were probably useful as means of resistance to certain diseases.

From the article:

The most striking demonstration of our ignorance about the benefit of blood types came to light in Bombay in 1952. Doctors discovered that a handful of patients had no ABO blood type at all - not A, not B, not AB, not O. If A and B are two-story buildings, and O is a one-story ranch house, then these Bombay patients had only an empty lot.

Since its discovery, this condition - called the Bombay phenotype - has turned up in other people, although it remains exceedingly rare. And as far as scientists can tell, there's no harm that comes from the Bombay phenotype. The only known medical risk it presents comes when it's time for a blood transfusion. They can only accept blood from other people with the same conditions. Even blood type O, supposedly the universal blood type, can kill them.

The Bombay phenotype proves that there's no immediate life-or-death advantage to having ABO blood types. Some scientists think that the explanation for blood types may lie in their variation. That's because different blood types may protect us from different diseases.

frojack writes:

According to the Google+ Page, Google is finally giving up on forcing everyone to user their real names to join Google+.

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.

I know many folks that refused to join Plus, just because of the restrictions and the fact that they *cough* suggest you to anyone in your contacts. They've given up on youtube comments, app store ratings, and a dozen other things that require Plus accounts.

Some might now join, though most probably won't simply because Google was so darn stubborn about this for so darn long.

What say the Soylentils?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The UK Govt completed a study (pdf) to determine which mind-set used the most electricity. To everyone's surprise it was people who identified themselves as "green". The Telegraph reports:

"Taken all together, householders who strongly agreed they were not worried about climate change because it was too far in the future in fact used less electricity rather than more, counter to the hypothesis that households concerned about climate change use less electricity."

"This means that policy makers cannot rely on stated behaviours alone in assessing the extent to which households turn off unused appliances," the report noted.

The findings will strengthen the case of those who argue that more coercive methods are needed if people's energy consumption is to be reduced.

gewg_ writes:

From FCC Press Secretary, Kim Hart:[1]

"The deadline for filing submissions as part of the first round of public comments in the FCC's Open Internet proceeding arrived today. Not surprisingly, we have seen an overwhelming surge in traffic on our website that is making it difficult for many people to file comments through our Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS). Please be assured that the Commission is aware of these issues and is committed to making sure that everyone trying to submit comments will have their views entered into the record.

Accordingly, we are extending the comment deadline until midnight Friday, July 18. You also have the option of emailing your comments to openinternet@fcc.gov and your views will be placed in the public record."

It appears that you have until 11:59:59 Thursday, July 17, 2014 (Washington DC time I'm assuming)... Or did I read the bureaucrat's unclear timetable wrong?

The proceeding number is 14-28 — Gizmodo has a page on this as the direct link, "might not work every time."

[1] I would think that the Federal Communications Commission could do better than to put up a page with 97 coding errors.

frojack writes:

Pacific Standard is running an article that suggests that the tendency for the current ruling party to lose House or Senate seats in mid-term, has little to do with politics or the loss of faith in the party in power.

Citing an article by Lynn Vavreck, a Professor at UCLA, research of voters switching their allegiance in midterms found about 6% for either party actually switched. Usually this means the ruling party loses more votes to switching because 6% of a big number is more than 6% of a smaller number. But that isn't typically enough to cause House or Senate seats to change hands.

However, the same study indicated the ruling party voters tends to play hooky in midterms at a much higher rate (28% in recent years) compared to the other parties (17%).

So congressional seat losses are due more to boredom and over confidence of the ruling party than any actual dissatisfaction and voter revolt.

Midterms typically show 20 percent lower turn out than presidential elections, and it's been that way for decades. The moderate voters tend to sit out midterms, leaving the contest to more polarized voters.

AnonTechie writes:

From Popular Science:

You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, the Wall Street Journal reports.

But how can a bot write so many articles, and do it coherently? As Johansson--a science teacher with degrees in linguistics, civil engineering, economics and particle physics--explained to the WSJ, the bot scrapes information from various trusted sources, and then cobbles that material together, typically into a very short entry, or "stub." Many of the articles cover the taxonomy of little-known animals such as butterflies and beetles, and also small towns in the Philippines (his wife is Filipino).

Johansson's creation, known as Lsjbot, is certainly not the only bot to write articles meant for human eyes. For example, the Associated Press just announced that it will use robots to write thousands of pieces, and other news outlets use programs to write articles, especially finance and sports stories. And on Wikipedia, half of all of the edits are made by bots.

lhsi writes:

A phase-changing material could be used in low-cost robots to allow them to switch between hard and soft states. The material is made from a flexible open-cell foam coated in wax that can achieve significant ranges of stiffness, strength, and volume [Abstract].

The material developed by Anette Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at MIT, and her former graduate student Nadia Cheng, alongside researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and Stony Brook University could be used to build deformable surgical robots. The robots could move through the body to reach a particular point without damaging any of the organs or vessels along the way.

Robots built from the material, which is described in a new paper in the journal Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, could also be used in search-and-rescue operations to squeeze through rubble looking for survivors, Hosoi says.

To build a material capable of shifting between squishy and rigid states, the researchers coated a foam structure in wax. They chose foam because it can be squeezed into a small fraction of its normal size, but once released will bounce back to its original shape.

The wax coating, meanwhile, can change from a hard outer shell to a soft, pliable surface with moderate heating. This could be done by running a wire along each of the coated foam struts and then applying a current to heat up and melt the surrounding wax. Turning off the current again would allow the material to cool down and return to its rigid state.

In addition to switching the material to its soft state, heating the wax in this way would also repair any damage sustained, Hosoi says. "This material is self-healing," she says. "So if you push it too far and fracture the coating, you can heat it and then cool it, and the structure returns to its original configuration."

taylorvich writes:

In Lower Manhattan, a busy banker stuffs herself with overly rich restaurant fare ordered off Seemless.com. In Frankfurt, a manager slops generous portions of the canteen's stew onto his lunch plate.

In Mumbai, an insurance analyst sits down to a healthy home-cooked meal, still warm from the stove where it was prepared by his wife or mother.

Remarkably, its age-old tradition of home-cooked meals - delivered on wheels - has resisted the momentum of change.

The dabbawalas, as they're known, are the men who make it possible. They have cemented their place in Mumbai's colorful tapestry. They deliver lunch from home to the office or school every day, monsoon or shine.

Their system has been awarded a six sigma level of efficiency. That means they make around one mistake in every six million deliveries.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

Google has announced their "Project Zero" security team:

Security is a top priority for Google. We've invested a lot in making our products secure, including strong SSL encryption by default for Search, Gmail and Drive, as well as encrypting data moving between our data centers. Beyond securing our own products, interested Googlers also spend some of their time on research that makes the Internet safer, leading to the discovery of bugs like Heartbleed.

The success of that part-time research has led us to create a new, well-staffed team called Project Zero.

You should be able to use the web without fear that a criminal or state-sponsored actor is exploiting software bugs to infect your computer, steal secrets or monitor your communications. Yet in sophisticated attacks, we see the use of "zero-day" vulnerabilities to target, for example, human rights activists or to conduct industrial espionage. This needs to stop. We think more can be done to tackle this problem.

Project Zero is our contribution, to start the ball rolling. Our objective is to significantly reduce the number of people harmed by targeted attacks. We're hiring the best practically-minded security researchers and contributing 100% of their time toward improving security across the Internet.

TGV writes:

Doing a "safe search" for e.g. "great tits" (which is a kind of bird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tit) used to suppress pictures of naked breasts. That, surely, was the point of 'Safe Search', but it appears to be no longer the case. Now it just removes the word "tits" from the search. And indeed, searching in safe mode for "great breasts" produces NSFW material. The word lists seems global: the localized google page suppresses the same terms as google.com: "tits", "tetas", etc. What gives? Why would they do something like that? I couldn't find anything on their blog pages.

Source of the discovery: http://what.thedailywtf.com/t/google-safe-search-is-a-barrier-to-ornithology/1572

[Editor's Note: Using Google in UK and France appears to work exactly as it did before, showing the expected ornithological results and no NSFW links. Perhaps this is not quite as simple an explanation as the submitter first thought.]

c0lo writes:

Jean Louis Gassée (I'll mention here only the creation of BeOS as one of his achievements) runs a piece of opinion on his blog, stating that Satya Nadella's latest message to the Microsoftians show his dire need for an editor. A 3000+ words message, full of MBA-speak my engineering mind had huge difficulties in staying awake while trying to read it, so I'm highly obliged to Gassée in his attempt to analyze the text and extract a possible/plausible "translation":

With all this in mind, let's see if we can restate Nadella's message to the troops:


This is the beginning of our new FY 2015 and of a new era at Microsoft.
I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is the old Devices and Services mantra won't work.
For example: I've determined we'll never make money in tablets or smartphones.

So, do we continue to pretend we're "all in" or do we face reality and make the painful decision to pull out so we can use our resources including our integrity to fight winnable battles? With the support of the Microsoft Board, I've chosen the latter. We'll do our utmost to minimize the pain that will naturally arise from this change. Specifically, we'll offer generous transitions arrangements in and out of the company to concerned Microsoftians and former Nokians.

The good news is we have immense resources to be a major player in the new world of Cloud services and Native Apps for mobile devices. We let the first innings of that game go by, but the sting energizes us. An example of such commitment is the rapid spread of Office applications and related Cloud services on any and all mobile devices. All Microsoft Enterprise and Consumer products/services will follow, including Xbox properties.

I realize this will disrupt the status quo and apologize for the pain to come. We have a choice: change or be changed.


Stay tuned.

Or words (about 200) to that effect.