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cafebabe writes:

ScienceDaily reports that:

Colorectal cancer has been linked to carbohydrate-rich western diets, but the underlying mechanisms have been unclear. A new study shows that gut microbes metabolize carbohydrates in the diet, causing intestinal cells to proliferate and form tumors in mice that are genetically predisposed to colorectal cancer. Treatment with antibiotics or a low-carbohydrate diet significantly reduced tumors in these mice, suggesting that these easy interventions could prevent a common type of colorectal cancer in humans.

Carbohydrates account for about half of the daily caloric intake of adults on a western-style diet, and previous studies have linked carbohydrate-rich diets to colorectal cancer in humans. This type of cancer is also frequently associated with mutations in a tumor suppressor gene called APC as well as the MSH2 gene, which plays a critical role in repairing DNA damage. However, it has been unclear why mutations affecting the DNA repair pathway are much more common in colorectal cancer compared with other cancers. Because gut microbes also contribute to the development of colorectal cancer, Martin and his team suspected that they could interact with diet to explain how the mutations could cause this type of cancer.

cykros writes:

Despite there being years worth of security experts advising users (from Grandma to government officials) to use passwords with high entropy, and each only for one account, researchers from Microsoft as well as one from Carleton University have published a paper (pdf) suggesting exactly the opposite. Their rationale is that the use of higher entropy passwords everywhere lowers the average strength of passwords overall, with users struggling to remember them all, and that the better approach is to use weak, easy to remember passwords at the majority of unimportant sites (or rather, a single password for such sites), reserving stronger passwords for more sensitive sites such as those with financial information or presumably primary email accounts.

From the paper:

"The rapid decline of [password complexity as recall difficulty] increases suggests that, far from being unallowable, password re-use is a necessary and sensible tool in managing a portfolio," the trio wrote.

"Re-use appears unavoidable if [complexity] must remain above some minimum and effort below some maximum."

More at The Register.

What do Soylenters think? Is Microsoft onto something here? Or is this just laziness being taken to a formal level? Or worse, bad advice being deliberately doled out to aid in Big Brother data slurping?

crutchy writes:

"The purported iPhone 6 sapphire display panel came off worse in an encounter with a sheet of sandpaper in a new video test, ending hopes the new screen tech would be completely scratch-proof.

After taking a knife and keys to the display with no negative impact, YouTuber Marques Brownlee decided to get serious with some rather coarse sandpaper, in his latest post. Compared with the Gorilla Glass iPhone 5S display, the iPhone 6 emerged from the battle in better shape, showing the new material is indeed tougher, but by no means invulnerable."

The full article from techradar.com is here.

cafebabe writes:

The BBC suffered a sustained partial outage over the weekend. Described as a "major incident", it affected the website and video on demand service, iPlayer. From an interim statement updated on Monday afternoon, BST:

Internal logs of the incident and how it was handled showed that database administrators, network engineers and system analysts were all called on to see if they could diagnose the problem and fix it.

Work continued throughout the weekend to try to stabilise the servers and database supporting the iPlayer and many other BBC services.

The final fixes for the problems were expected to be applied on 21 July when the vast majority of people should be able reach the web-based video services as normal.

The BBC said it would issue a statement when it knew more about the cause of the glitches.

azrael writes:

The Telegraph reports on Amazon's unveiling of their new service (video) called Kindle Unlimited. This is a netflix-like service for kindle ebooks. For $9.99 a month subscribers will be able to read all the books they want just so long as they're covered by the service. This will include all Amazon self-published books and in total covers about 600,000 titles.

Amazon already allowed people with an Amazon Prime subscription to 'loan' one book a month from its Prime Lending Library. Extending this scheme to give subscribers unlimited access to ebooks for a fixed monthly fee puts it in direct competition with services like Oyster and Scribd, which offer unlimited access to 500,000 and 400,000 books respectively.

Last month, Amazon launched a music streaming service for its Prime customers in the US, called Prime Music, to rival Spotify. It also offers a video streaming service called Prime Instant Video - its answer to Netflix.

Note that this doesn't actually extend Amazon Prime and is a completely separate service.

AnonTechie writes:

Tech pioneers in the US are advocating a new data-based approach to governance - 'algorithmic regulation'. But if technology provides the answers to society's problems, what happens to governments ?

What is Algorithmic Regulation? Well, here and here are two attempts to explain it. For example: the "smartification" of everyday life follows a familiar pattern: there's primary data - a list of what's in your smart fridge and your bin - and metadata - a log of how often you open either of these things or when they communicate with one another. Both produce interesting insights: cue smart mattresses - one recent model promises to track respiration and heart rates and how much you move during the night - and smart utensils that provide nutritional advice.

In addition to making our lives more efficient, this smart world also presents us with an exciting political choice. If so much of our everyday behaviour is already captured, analysed and nudged, why stick with unempirical approaches to regulation? Why rely on laws when one has sensors and feedback mechanisms? If policy interventions are to be - to use the buzzwords of the day - "evidence-based" and "results-oriented," technology is here to help.

This new type of governance has a name: algorithmic regulation. In as much as Silicon Valley has a political programme, this is it. Tim O'Reilly, an influential technology publisher, venture capitalist and ideas man (he is to blame for popularising the term "web 2.0") has been its most enthusiastic promoter. In a recent essay that lays out his reasoning, O'Reilly makes an intriguing case for the virtues of algorithmic regulation - a case that deserves close scrutiny both for what it promises policy-makers and the simplistic assumptions it makes about politics, democracy and power.

c0lo writes:

Wired reports that Ladar Levison (of Lavabit fame) hired the convicted ex-hacker Stephen Watt to create DarkMail — a set of protocols and servers which apply a similar approach as onion routing to the email metadata (sender and recipients) and would still enable the existing email clients go "dark".

The internet is littered with burgeoning email encryption schemes aimed at thwarting NSA spying. Many of them are focused on solving the usability issues that have plagued complicated encryption schemes like PGP for years. But a new project called Dark Mail plans to go further: to hide your metadata.

The project has made for an interesting pairing between Texas technologist Ladar Levison and convicted hacker Stephen Watt, whom he's hired to help develop the code. Both have had previous battles with the government in very different ways.

The project is composed of several parts: an email client called Volcano; server software called Magma Classic and Magma Dark; and the Dark Mail, or Dmail, protocol, which they're designing to replace existing protocols for sending and retrieving email that don't hide metadata.

"If you trust your server, you can use Outlook and the server will handle everything for you," Levison says. "The preference would be that you use the Dark Mail client, but I understand that this is not even a possibility for some organizations."

Dark Mail is modeled loosely on TOR — The Onion Router... With Dark Mail, there are primarily two main servers involved in an email transaction: the sender's domain and the recipient's. And although the sender's server can identify the source from which the email was sent, it doesn't know the recipient, just the recipient's domain. The server at the recipient's domain decrypts the "to:" field to deliver the correspondence to the right account, but doesn't know who sent the email — just the domain from which it came.

Seems like in the today's society one need to rely on outlaws to claim back some freedom (as in: being an honest citizen is no longer enough to guarantee it).

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All Cheerleaders Die writes:

One artist is using a modified form of "graffiti" to protest the NSA. Early this morning in Berlin, self-proclaimed "guerrilla marketing expert" Oliver Bienkowski used a powerful projector mounted in a cargo van to light up the side of the US Embassy. The projection emblazoned the Embassy with a silly illustration of President Obama and a warning for all to see: "NSA in da House."

crutchy writes:

"Microsoft has pulled the plug on the Android mobile operating system, discontinuing its Nokia X smartphone products less than five months after it launched them."

"Microsoft will consolidate its Smart Devices and Mobile Phones business units into one Phone business."

"A number of facilities in Beijing, San Diego and Hungary will be scaled back, and production will be concentrated in Hanoi, Vietnam. Engineering efforts will continue to be concentrated in Finland."

"About 12,500 Nokia staff are losing their jobs because of the restructuring, out of a total of 18,000 redundancies at Microsoft."

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240224811/Microsoft-ditches-Android-after-four-month-fling

crutchy writes:

Techradar reports on a scheme, announced earlier this year, on plans for Internet Service Providers to notify their customers about alleged and unproven infringement of copyright.

A new scheme aimed at redeeming the UK's illegal file-sharers from their law-breaking ways will see emails sent out to persistent offenders from next year.

The government-brokered Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP), agreed between ISPs and organisations representing content creators, hopes to educate web users, alerting them to file-sharing illegality.

Offenders will receive up to four emails a year under the scheme, but no further action will be taken if they send those warnings directly to the trash can and continue illegally downloading music, movies and books.

BT, TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin have already signed up for the Vcap scheme with several smaller ISPs expected to do so soon.

Homonymous Coward writes:

Filecoin (whitepaper [PDF]) is a distributed electronic currency similar to Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin's computation-only proof-of-work, Filecoin's proof-of-work function includes a proof-of-retrievability component, which requires nodes to prove they store a particular file.

The Filecoin network forms an entirely distributed file storage system, whose nodes are incentivized to store as much of the entire network's data as they can. The currency is awarded for storing files, and is transferred in transactions, as in Bitcoin.

Files are added to the network by spending currency. This produces strong monetary incentives for individuals to join and work for the network. In the course of ordinary operation of the Filecoin network, nodes contribute useful work in the form of storage and distribution of valuable data.

crutchy writes:

Space Station Cargo Ship Activities to Air on NASA TV.

NASA Television will broadcast live the departure of an unpiloted Russian cargo spacecraft from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday, July 21, and the launch and docking of its replacement Wednesday, July 23.

ISS Progress 55 arrived at the orbiting laboratory in April and will undock from the space station's Pirs docking compartment at 5:44 p.m. EDT on July 21. NASA TV coverage of the undocking will begin at 5:30 p.m. The cargo ship will undergo several days of engineering tests in orbit before being commanded to reenter Earth's atmosphere during which it will burn up over the Pacific Ocean.

On July 23, the ISS Progress 56 resupply ship will launch at 5:44 p.m. from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (3:44 a.m. local time on July 24), with about 5,700 pounds of food, fuel and supplies for the station's Expedition 40 crew. Launch coverage begins at 5:30 p.m. Progress 56 will make its four-orbit, six-hour trip to the space station and dock at 11:30 p.m. Docking coverage will begin at 11 p.m.

AnonTechie writes:

Businessweek brings us news of How to Get Ahead by Speaking Vaguely. Projecting power is incredibly simple: just communicate in abstractions. Details convey weakness.

In one of the seven experiments, participants read quotes from a politician who described an earthquake as killing 120 and injuring 400; later, when he simply said it was a national tragedy, subjects thought he was a better leader.

An author of the study, Cheryl J. Wakslak (University of Southern California), cautions however against meaningless business jargon — words such as "ideaate" and "deliverables" that some workers resort to when trying to seem impressive. "Being completely vague will just make you sound stupid," she explains. "Bulls———is best when it has a kernel of truth in it."

The report was published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the full report is available at Using Abstract Language Signals Power (pdf)