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kaszz writes:

In UK a 39-year-old man has been convicted of possessing illegal cartoon drawings of young girls exposing themselves in school uniforms and engaging in sex acts. The case is believed to be the UK's first prosecution of illegal manga and anime images. Local media said that Robul Hoque was sentenced last week to 9-months' imprisonment, though the sentence is suspended so long as the defendant does not break the law again. Police seized Hoque's computer in 2012 and said they found nearly 400 such images on it, none of which depicted real people but were illegal nonetheless because of their similarity to child pornography. Hoque was initially charged with 20 counts of illegal possession but eventually pled guilty to just 10 counts.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Alastair Philip Wiper writes that at at 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built capable of carrying 18,000 20-foot containers. Its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece and it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. A U-shaped hull design allows more room below deck, providing capacity for 18,000 shipping containers arranged in 23 rows – enough space to transport 864 million bananas. The Triple-E is constructed from 425 pre-fabricated segments, making up 21 giant “megablock” cross sections. Most of the 955,250 litres of paint used on each ship is in the form of an anti- corrosive epoxy, pre-applied to each block. Finally, a polyurethane topcoat of the proprietary Maersk brand colour, “Hardtop AS-Blue 504”, is sprayed on.

Twenty Triple-E class container ships have been commissioned by Danish shipping company Maersk Lines for delivery by 2015. The ships are being built at the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko. The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and "could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland," writes Wiper. "Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place." The Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.” The vessels will serve ports along the northern-Europe-to-Asia route, many of which have had to expand to cope with the ships’ size. “You don’t feel like you’re inside a boat, it’s more like a cathedral,” Wiper says. “Imagine this space being full of consumer goods, and think about how many there are on just one ship. Then think about how many are sailing round the world every day. It’s like trying to think about infinity.”

tonyPick writes:

Over at Centauri Dreams is a piece by Andrew LePage on the questions over exoplanets around Centauri B, on the second anniversary of a (possible) detection.

Alpha Centauri (or α Centauri, if you prefer) is a binary star system, 4.37 light years from the Sun, and the closest star system to the Solar System. "Alpha Centauri A" is the primary star, "Alpha Centauri B" is the (slightly smaller) companion, and a planet, known as Alpha Centauri Bb was detected in October 2012 using data from the HARPS spectrograph.

However there is still some scepticism about about the the data and techniques used to establish the existence of Alpha Centauri Bb, and the Centauri Dreams article goes into detail about the background of the search, the findings to date and the current efforts.

c0lo writes:

mashable reports

Apple and Facebook are adding a new perk for female employees: Free egg freezing that would let them delay parenting for a few years.

Facebook started offering the service on Jan. 1. Apple plans to begin in January 2015, according to NBC News.

As women age, their likelihood of successful pregnancies begins to dip, though most women will remain fertile well into their thirties. Oocyte cryopreservation, a.k.a. egg freezing, is seen as a method of maintaining fertility over a longer period since younger eggs tend to be healthier.

Like IVF, egg freezing is typically not covered by an employer's health insurance. Egg freezing currently costs about $10,000 plus up to $1,000 a year for maintenance. (Facebook and Apple are both covering costs of egg freezing up to $20,000.) McCarthy says the success rates from a frozen egg match those of a fresh egg.

In other words, if you freeze your eggs at age 27 and then wait until age 35 to try in vitro fertilization, the egg will behave like a 27-year-old's. However, the results of an analysis published in August 2013 in the journal Fertility and Sterility indicate that the chances of a live birth after egg freezing for women 30 and older are less than 25%.

Is it me or does this actually say the 2 corporations would rather see their fairer-sex employees devote the years of their biological prime to the company?

gewg_ writes:

El Reg reports

Russian aerospace firm's kit fails on 46th mission

The embarrassing incident that two of Europe's Galileo satnav craft [landed] in the wrong orbit has been attributed to "a shortcoming in the system thermal analysis performed during stage design" for the launch [vehicle] Fregat's fourth stage, built by Russian aerospace outfit NPO Lavochkin.

As we reported back in August, two [failures] meant two Gallileo sats landed in the wrong orbit, causing much hand-wringing at the European Space Agency. The mess was later blamed on a software bug.

But Arianspace, the commercial launch operator that sent the birds aloft, now says that wasn't the case and that the mission's fourth stage was built to fail.

An internal investigation found that the three stages of the Soyuz launcher all performed as expected. But Fregat struck problems "at the beginning of the ballistic phase preceding the second ignition of this stage".

[...]failure was due to a temporary interruption of the joint hydrazine propellant supply to these [two attitude control] thrusters.

The interruption in the flow was caused by freezing of the hydrazine.

The freezing resulted from the proximity of hydrazine and cold helium feed lines, these lines being connected by the same support structure, which acted as a thermal bridge.

[...]sounds a bit like someone didn't properly account for how cold the launch vehicle would get, which froze its fuel, which in turn meant the rockets didn't fire enough or soon enough to get the satellites into the desired orbit.

This reminds me of the Space Shuttle that had been launched successfully many times, then in 1986 some suit at NASA decided that manufacturer's thermal specs for components didn't really matter.

Remember Feynman's glass of ice water?

Related:

UPDATE on Galileo Launch Injection Anomaly

Startup Proposes Rescuing the Galileo Satellites

tonyPick writes:

3ders.org has an article on the conclusion of a trial in Japan of a man for making a 3D printed gun.

kaszz writes:

A project on github claims that regardless how Apples OS X version 10.10 Yosemite is configured. Apple will collect your search requests when using Safari, tag requests in the file indexer Spotlight, phone home, tags requests in the Help application, collects any email address setup and so on. Leaving a long tail of identifying bread crumbs.

Commenters over at hackernews dispute this interpretation:

This is inaccurate alarmism. It shouldn't be surprising that the search bar makes autocomplete requests to Apple as you type.

However, it seemed suspicious to me that Apple would make it impossible, as the author claims, to type in the Safari address bar without sending queries to Apple. So, I fired up Charles proxy to confirm my suspicions.

I turned off "Include search engine suggestions" and "Include Spotlight Suggestions" in Safari search preferences. (Safari -> Preferences -> Search)

As I initially believed, no requests were sent whatsoever when typing in the address bar after those settings were disabled. Can we put out our pitchforks yet, or am I missing something?

Various other sites are reporting this as Apple collecting data irrespective of how settings are configured. Is this reaction a sign of how much distrust there is over security in the technology industry?

AnonTechie writes:

Facebook tell us how they keep passwords secure:

The Facebook Security team has always kept a close eye on data breach announcements from other organizations. Theft of personal data like email addresses and passwords can have larger consequences because people often use the same password on multiple websites. Unfortunately, it's common for attackers to publicly post the email addresses and passwords they steal on public 'paste' sites. Lots of household company names have experienced the unpleasant phenomenon of seeing account data for their sites show up in these public lists, and responding to these situations is time-consuming and challenging.

Our team wanted to do something to improve this situation, so we built a system dedicated to further securing people's Facebook accounts by actively looking for these public postings, analyzing them, and then notifying people when we discover that their credentials have shown up elsewhere on the Internet. To do this, we monitor a selection of different 'paste' sites for stolen credentials and watch for reports of large scale data breaches. We collect the stolen credentials that have been publicly posted and check them to see if the stolen email and password combination matches the same email and password being used on Facebook. This is a completely automated process that doesn't require us to know or store your actual Facebook password in an unhashed form. In other words, no one here has your plain text password. To check for matches, we take the email address and password and run them through the same code that we use to check your password at login time. If we find a match, we'll notify you the next time you log in and guide you through a process to change your password.

This is also covered by The Register.

AnonTechie writes:

In the UK, Internet trolls could face up to two years in jail under new laws, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has said. He told the Mail on Sunday quadrupling the current maximum six-month term showed his determination to "take a stand against a baying cyber-mob". Mr Grayling was speaking days after TV presenter Chloe Madeley suffered online abuse, which Mr Grayling described as "crude and degrading". She has welcomed the proposed laws but said social media should be regulated.

tonyPick writes:

Over at the The Free Internet Project is a short article on users leaving the South Korean instant messaging service Kakao Talk.

Kakao Talk is South Korea's leading smartphone messaging application, used by 35 Million people (70% of the population). However a government crackdown over "false and malicious online posts", and the issuing of warrants for over 2,000 user accounts, appears to have sparked a migration with application usage tracker Rankey.com reporting that 400,000 used have left the service.

A competing application, Telegram, based in Germany which uses end to end encryption and has no servers in S. Korea, stated (in the BBC article) that it received over 1.5 Million sign ups from South Korean users in 7 days.

Kakao talk are very sorry:

There are summaries of the story and background available from the BBC and DW, as well as Korean independent paper The Hankyoreh.

Fnord666 writes:

In a recent engadget article, Jon Fingas points out the following:

If you're planning to snag the new Mac mini and load it up with aftermarket memory, you may want to reconsider your strategy. Macminicolo owner Brian Stucki (among others) has discovered that the RAM in Apple's latest tiny desktop isn't upgradable, much as you'd expect with the company's laptops and the 21-inch iMac.

The bwFLA Emulation as a Service (EaaS) Project at the University of Freiberg has developed software to offer access to emulated software environments provided by multiple different emulators via a web browser. An example is available on their website with another available on the Rhizome Art Museum's site. The Emulation as a Service model may provide an attractive option for the owners of old software who are uncomfortable will selling old versions of their software directly but would like to open access to their back catalogs. It also promises to give those working to maintain access to historic digital content a new mechanism for providing off-site access to complex, interactive digital objects, as highlighted on the Library of Congress's Digital Preservation blog.

frojack writes:

Neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain, during critical periods of development, to easily change its structure in response to environmental stimuli, declines by adulthood. In humans this happens by age 6. From then on it gets progressively harder to restructure the brain to handle the creation of new synapses.

The Scientist reports on a new study that suggests that this decline is actively caused through out later life by the creation of of a certain protein in the brain. And suppressing that protein allows the brain to regain its neural plasticity.

The brain doesn't actually lose its ability to adapt or make new neural connections, rather that ability is suppressed, activity turned off. The switch has been found to be a paired-immunoglobulin–like receptor B (PirB) protein produced by the brain itself.

The study describes curing Lazy Eye in mice, by covering the "Good Eye". Which is exactly what is done in children. Caught early enough, the brain and visual cortex will adapt to this change in stimuli by building up the fine neuron structures so that the lazy eye will be resume development, and often achieve normal vision.

With the mice, they induced lazy eye intentionally, by covering one eye long enough to cause the brain to "abandon" it.

Later in the mouse's life they introduced an inhibitor to the PirB Protein, removing the suppression of the brain's Neuroplasticity, and then covering the good eye. They saw new functional synapses form, demonstrating that even when PirB is inhibited in a short, one-week time frame, new neuron connections—and recovery from lazy eye—is possible in an adult mouse.

Now Lazy Eye isn't that big of a problem in children if caught early, and lazy eye in mice is even less of a concern, except to the mice.

Rather, the focus of the research is restoring Neuroplasticity to the brain, to handle brain injury or illness later in life. By "turning back the clock" of the brain's developmental cycle, the ability of the brain to adapt itself may be restored long enough to "route around the damage".

Their study has shown that that mice without PirB are partly resistant to memory loss in an Alzheimer’s model. This suggests that maybe the same drug for vision loss could also work for Alzheimer’s disease.

[Title change to correct typo - Ed.]

Hugh Pickens writes:

Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was “This got hit by the ugly stick.” But Karjaluoto says that Apple’s decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.

Microsoft’s approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations—as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." Bu Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn’t later look upon as the right choice.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

This is old news, but still pretty neat for USA sports fans. It's an example of maps illuminating collections of data. Facebook published a fan map showing which NFL team "rules" each county across the USA, based on counts of "likes" by its user base. Evidently the Dallas Cowboys can make a case of being "America's Team" (the nickname they came up for themselves back in their glory years), despite having won exactly one playoff game over the past sixteen years (they're doing surprisingly well this year, though).

I thought of this map when I saw yesterday's tweet from Edward Tufte, statistician and author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information":

Earlier this year, Facebook published a similar county-by-county fan map for Major League Baseball.