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Nerdfest writes:

The next shot in the advertising/blocking war. AdNauseam is a FireFox plug-in, currently in beta, that works in conjunction with AdBlock and clicks ads while it blocks them.

The project was "initiated" by Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University.

As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with Ad Block Plus, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.

They also state "AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas".

Will this help things with online advertising, or make them worse, assuming that's possible?

tonyPick writes:

Over at Science is a story on the attempts of Wayne State University cancer researcher Falzul Sarkar to sue PubPeer commenters for defamation.

Fazlul Sarkar, a cancer researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, had threatened legal action after the University of Mississippi rescinded its offer of a tenured, $350,000-per-year position. Sarkar, who remains employed at Wayne state, claimed that anonymous comments suggesting misconduct in his research caused the university to revoke its offer.

Although Sarkar is not suing PubPeer itself he is attempting to force the site to hand over identifying information on the anonymous commenters. From an article in Retraction Watch.

Sarkar’s attorney acknowledges that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects PubPeer itself from a suit. He will try, however, to convince a court that PubPeer has an obligation to turn over commenters’ identifying information. The argument here is that the site allowed comments that violated its own policy, and that some of the comments referred to a complaint filed with Wayne State that should have been kept confidential.

There are more details in an article over at Retraction Watch which also has an earlier background article.

lhsi writes:

Professors, students and alumni from the University of Texas at Dallas have created a mod for Minecraft that allows players to craft objects out of more complex elements.

With “Polycraft World,” the millions of “Minecraft” players worldwide will now be able to incorporate the properties of many materials — chemical elements and compounds — into game action. For example, said Dr. Walter Voit, players could harvest natural rubber from trees, thwart enemies using flamethrowers and jetpacks, explore underwater biomes by scuba diving, or rapidly travel through virtual worlds on pogo sticks wearing custom-molded running shoes.

Voit, a faculty member in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, is co-creator of the modification, or mod as video gamers refer to the kit.

“The accessibility and popularity of ‘Minecraft’ makes it a great tool as an educational platform,” said Voit, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering and bioengineering. “Using our ‘Polycraft World’ mod, people of all ages will have an opportunity to navigate materials science, including metallurgy and polymer chemistry, in a fun, creative self-paced environment.”

It is available at http://polycraft.utdallas.edu/Main_Page.html

gewg_ writes:

The European Union's interoperability page reports:

In just three days, the Swiss open source community Wilhelm Tux reached its crowdfunding target of 10,000 CHF (about 8000 euro) to add support for digital signatures in PDF documents. The feature will be added to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity tools. The project is awarded to Collabora, an open source IT service provider, which will deliver the new functionality in April.

The Swiss open source group began raising funds on 13 October. The campaign will allow users of LibreOffice to create PDF documents with digital signatures, conform to PDF/A signature standards. This is a requirement to creating PDF documents that can be legally binding.

Electronically signed PDFs can be legally binding when the signature is accompanied by a timestamp, explains Markus Wernig, the group's chairman. The open source group hopes to be able to fund this as well, if further donations come in.

The idea for the crowdfunding campaign was conceived at the LibreOffice Conference, which took place in Bern in early September. The open source group writes that a discussion on the feature attracted a lot of interest at the conference. "Digital signatures are important for being able to verify the authenticity of a document."

[...]The past few years, Swiss, German, and French public administrations have paid for comparable software development projects to improve open source office productivity.

Have any Soylentils been involved in FOSS development work where there was a bounty?

cafebabe writes:

As reported here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere, the previously discussed rights to the ebola.com domain were offered for US$150,000.

Well, Russian owned Weed Growth Fund bought it for US$200,000. However, US$50,000 is in cash and US$150,000 is is the form of 19,192 shares in Cannabis Sativa, Inc..

The plan is to use ebola.com to publish inside information and coverups related to Ebola treatment. However, it may be a conspiracy theorist paradise given the stated belief that marijuana may aid Ebola treatment.

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands and the University of Central Florida (CREOL) in the USA, report in the journal Nature Photonics the successful transmission of a record high 255 Terabits/s over a new type of fibre allowing 21 times more bandwidth than currently available in communication networks (Abstract). This new type of fibre could be an answer to mitigating the impending optical transmission capacity crunch caused by the increasing bandwidth demand.

[Car Analogy]: The new fibre has seven different cores through which the light can travel, instead of one in current state-of-the-art fibres. This compares to going from a one-way road to a seven-lane highway. Also, they introduce two additional orthogonal dimensions for data transportation – as if three cars can drive on top of each other in the same lane. Combining those two methods, they achieve a gross transmission throughput of 255 Terabits/s over the fibre link. This is more than 20 times the current standard of 4-8 Terabits/s.

NotInHere writes:

According to its Mozilla wiki page, the Open Standard will "explore the role of openness and transparency in all aspects of society". Since the writing of that wiki page, the article "Welcome to The Open Standard" has been published, so The Open Standard (how it got its name here) is officially launched.

From its start, Mozilla has advocated for the open, transparent and collaborative systems at work in our daily lives. This is the next step in that mission.

We advocate that open systems create healthier communities and more successful societies overall. We will cover everything from open source to open government and the need for transparency; privacy and security, the “Internet of Things” vs. “pervasive computing”, to education and if it’s keeping up with the technological changes. The bottom line? Open is better.

This is just the beginning. Over the next few months, The Open Standard will open itself to collaboration with you, our readers; everything from contributing to the site, to drawing our attention to uncovered issues, to crowdsourcing the news.

frojack writes:

Wired.com is reporting that on the Colombia-Ecuador border, ancient volcanoes that have had no historically recorded eruptions and probably no eruptions at all for than 10,000 years, are now showing significant signs of heating up.

The Cerro Negro de Mayasquer and Cerro Chiles volcano complex, and the associated mountain range have had over 4300 quakes (mostly small) in the last 24 hours.

The governments on both sides of the borders have already evacuated 12,000 residents, and are preparing for what could be dramatic eruptions, and extended dislocated populations.

Without much recent eruptive record at Cerro Negro de Mayasquer and Chiles, it is hard to even speculate what kind of eruption might occur. Most of the youngest lava flows are andesite and dacite, which can also erupt explosively.

(Mt St. Helens dome was principally Dacite. Andesite is characteristic of subduction zones.)

The quakes are relatively shallow, 3 to 5 km deep, the mountains are deforming according to instruments, and wells in the area have become contaminated by sulfur and iron. All of these are signs of rising magma.

USGS Earthquake map here.

jimbrooking writes:

Elon Musk was recently interviewed at an MIT Symposium. An audience asked his views on artificial intelligence (AI). Musk turned very serious, and urged extreme caution and national or international regulation to avoid "doing something stupid" he said.

"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon", said Musk. "In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like, 'Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon.' Doesn't work out."

Read the story and see the full interview here.

hubie writes:

A sunspot about the size of Jupiter is currently rotating across the face of the Sun. It is the largest active region seen since the last solar cycle and has the potential to produce a lot of powerful solar flares. The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory has some impressive shots of the flares produced so far.

melikamp writes:

According to the ESO Science Release, a French team of astronomers has studied nearly 500 individual comets orbiting the star Beta Pictoris and has discovered that they belong to two distinct families of exocomets: old exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and younger exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects.

azrael writes:

Wired reports on Google's vision for a new modular phone:

Project Ara is Google’s attempt to reinvent the cellphone as we know it. Instead of a slab of glass and metal that you have no ability to upgrade, save for buying a new device, it’s an attempt to launch a phone where all of the main components are interchangeable via modules that click in and out, attaching via electro-permanent magnets.

When Ara devices do hit the streets, they will only be as good as their support network. For the support to work, you’ve got to have a lot of modules, and a lot of access to those modules. Project Ara needs a network of retail stores where people can do things like pick up a new screen. It also needs enough developers making modules to sustain that kind of retail presence — and it needs it globally.

Nerdfest writes:

Jeffery Paul, a Berlin security researcher has a complaint about the latest OS X version:

"Fast forward to 10.10. Presumably to support Continuity, current document state is no longer only saved locally - those in-progress (not yet explicitly “saved”) documents live in iCloud Drive, so that they can be opened on other devices without ever having to hit “save”. This is useful, however, all of my previous open files have now been synchronized to Apple servers.

Notice that all of my locally-stored, “unsaved” documents open in my text editor have now been uploaded in full to a partner in NSA’s PRISM program. This happens for all applications (think iA Writer, Pixelmator, etc.) that had saved application state. Any open and yet-unsaved document within an app is now silently and automatically uploaded to iCloud Drive, and, by extension, the government.

Apple has taken local files on my computer not stored in iCloud and silently and without my permission uploaded them to their servers - across all applications, Apple and otherwise.

jbWolf writes:

Science Daily has an article about intonations in sign language.

Like the intonation of individual spoken languages, sign languages also have their own unique "sound," and, as with spoken languages, the intonation of one community's language is different from that of another community, according to a new study at the University of Haifa. "Our discovery that sign languages also have unique intonation patterns once again demonstrates that sign languages share many central properties with spoken languages. It turns out that intonation is an essential component of any human language, including languages without sound," explained Prof. Wendy Sandler, who led the study.

On a personal note, I find it interesting to compare this to emoticons and acronyms like LOL or ROFL in an email setting as well.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Clifford Davis reports that seven out of 10 young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible to become soldiers primarily due to three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories.

"There's a reliance on an ever-smaller group of people to serve and defend the country," says Maj. Gen. Allen Batschelet, "What do we do about that and how do we address that concern?"

While cognitive and moral disqualifications have held steady, weight issues account for 18% of disqualifications, and the number is rising steadily, according to Batschelet. It's projected to hit 25% by 2025, which Batschelet calls "troubling."