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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Phys.org brings us news that the Coffee robusta tree's genome has been sequenced. Why does this matter? Well, unless you're anti-GMO or just anti-coffee:

Over the longer term, the identification of the coffee tree genome sequence opens up new possibilities for varietal improvement, knowledge of the specific functions of the genes (in particular those specific to coffee trees), the possibility of transferring results to other species, and refining diagnostic tools for the function of the plant.

It will facilitate the completion of applied projects, such as the selection or creation of coffee tree varieties with improved technological and/or qualitative characteristics; more resistant to environmental constraints and to bioagressors, such as for example orange leaf rust. In fact, this disease still has a considerable impact on coffee cultivation and the economy of small producer countries in Central America such as Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Lastly, it should help guide producers toward ecologically intensive agriculture.

Robotron writes:

Coinciding with the midterm elections yesterday were state ballots proposing the legalization of cannabis. All three territories where full legalization was tabled approved the measure, joining Washington state and Colorado in giving cannabis the nod. The narrowest vote was that of Alaska at a roughly 52 to 48 percent margin. Washington D.C. meanwhile saw the vote strongly tipped in favor at about 69% to 31% opposed. Buoyed by the news, advocates of legal cannabis are already contemplating the next round of state ballots in 2016.

The referendums come amid shifts in American opinions on marijuana in recent years that have energized efforts to legalize cannabis, a drug that remains illegal under federal law even as Colorado and Washington state have been given the go-ahead to experiment with legalization.

On the other side of the spectrum, a medical marijuana initiative in Florida was defeated with 58% in favor, 42% opposed; the initiative needed 60% to pass.

AnonTechie writes with an article from El Reg:

Efforts to squeeze the United Nations into the throne of the internet have been comprehensively defeated at a key meeting in South Korea. The result raises the possibility that after more than a decade of fighting, the threat of a UN takeover is a thing of the past.

After more than two weeks of negotiations at the United Nations' ITU Plenipotentiary meeting in South Korea ( http://www.itu.int/en/plenipotentiary/2014/Pages/default.aspx ), revised versions of four key internet resolutions have passed through the working group stage and will be formally approved in the next few hours by the meeting's plenary.

In each case, proposed changes that would have given the ITU (the International Telecommunication Union) greater authority over the internet's evolution, have been pulled out – and some additions had been made that give existing internet organizations a greater say in future discussions.

[...] It is still possible that China and/or Russia and/or parts of the Middle East will regroup and try to push for more global control. However, it seems far more likely after these negotiations that they will simply focus their efforts on their own territories.

Although the battle is not entirely over, the possibility of a de facto corporate takeover still exists if net neutrality is abandoned. What does SN think about this development?

tonyPick writes:

At Mic is an article on research on the statistics behind why all hipsters look the same, reporting on a paper by Jonathan Touboul, a mathematical neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris.

The paper is available on arXiv; The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same [PDF].

Originally spotted via Science news.

tonyPick writes:

Business Insider recently posted a slideshow on DIY Chinese Inventions (warning - single page with all the images). Alternative link.

There's a collection of sometimes neat and occasionally odd inventions, including a suitcase scooter, submarines, scrap metal robots and giant motorcycles amongst others.

The BI article is thin on details, and covers a the same inventions as this earlier Metro piece.

While one can recognise the desire to build things 'because you can', I've got to question why some of these projects were ever started in the first place. Still, it is amazing what can be done with a little ingenuity and a lot of effort.

gewg_ writes:

Roy Schestowitz at TechRights reports

The FBI does not even pretend not to be pursuing back doors; quite the contrary! It demands them and now insists on legislation that would make them mandatory. The same goes for the NSA, Microsoft's very special partner. Anyone who still thinks that back doors in encryption are within the realm of "conspiracy theory" must not have paid attention.

[...]Some months ago we showed that a former Microsoft engineer working on Windows BitLocker confirmed that the US government asks Microsoft for back doors and now we have more details on how this is done, courtesy of cryptology enthusiasts in Cryptome.

[...]When Microsoft speaks about security, it usually means "national security", i.e. the ability of the state to break security of software. It's about interception, not security. When Microsoft speaks about 'secure boot' it speaks about an antifeature in UEFI that enables the state to remotely brick computers, too.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Agilent Technologies has completed the spinoff of its electronics measurement business; shares of the new company, Keysight Technologies, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: KEYS) yesterday. Keysight, with $2.9 billion in annual sales, is headquartered in Santa Rosa CA, across the bay from the rented Palo Alto garage where William Hewlett and David Packard started the Hewlett Packard Company in 1939. It designs and manufactures electronic measurement devices for the aerospace, communications, and semiconductor industries; an overview of its product line is here.

The slimmed-down Agilent, which itself was created as a spinoff from Hewlett Packard in 1999, will focus on its life sciences measurement business, including the parts it acquired with Varian (originally a spinoff from Varian Associates, another historic Silicon Valley company) in 2010.

Agilent can perhaps be credited for starting the current trend of large Silicon Valley companies splitting into two. Since the Agilent breakup was announced in September 2013:

• eBay announced plans to spin off PayPal, partly in response to pressure from corporate raider Carl Icahn (Sept 2014)
• JDS Uniphase announced plans to separate its optical components and commerical lasers business from its networking operations business. (Sept 2014)
• HP announced plans to split into two companies, focusing on the enterprise (HP Enterprise) and PC/consumer electronics, respectively (Oct 2014)
• Symantec reportedly plans to break up into two pieces, one focusing on security software and the other on data storage. (Oct 2014)

n1 writes:

SecurityWeek reports:

Social media sites have become "the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists", a senior British spy said Tuesday, warning that some US technology companies are "in denial" over the issue.

Robert Hannigan, the new head of electronic spying agency GCHQ, used a Financial Times article to urge Silicon Valley big names to give security services more help in the fight against Islamic State (IS) jihadists.

[...] "However much they dislike it, they have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals," he wrote in the FT. "To those of us who have to tackle the depressing end of human behaviour on the Internet, it can seem that some technology companies are in denial about its misuse." The comments were backed by Downing Street as "important".

AndyTheAbsurd writes with an article from Clemson University:

Tangaroa writes:

In a recent post to the investigative reporting site DeepCapture, Mark Mitchell tells how that website was shut down by a court order for three months in 2011 after accusing businessman and charity owner Yank Barry of having ties to organized crime.

... a man named Altaf (Ali) Nazerali, who was an associate of Yank Barry, and who had founded a company called Imagis Technologies, the chairman of which was former FBI man Buck Revell, filed a libel lawsuit against DeepCapture and convinced a court in Canada to issue an injunction that shuttered DeepCapture for more than three months. The court in Canada issued this injunction before we even knew that Mr. Nazerali had filed a lawsuit against us, and without giving us an opportunity to defend what I had written about Mr. Nazerali and his associates.

The story gets weirder from there, with a controversy over whether Barry was the lead singer on the 1963 song "Louie Louie" and with Mitchell getting what sounded like a death threat from a U.S. Congressman. Deep Capture has a court date in April 2015 to defend itself against Nazerali's lawsuit.

sudo rm -rf writes:

Despite a lot of effort in the last 30 years, there is still no evidence of dark matter.

From wikipedia:

Dark matter cannot be seen directly with telescopes; evidently it neither emits nor absorbs light or other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level. It is otherwise hypothesized to simply be matter that is not reactant to light. Instead, the existence and properties of dark matter are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation, and the large-scale structure of the universe ... [and] is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the universe.

While the search was focused on exotic particles (with particle accelerators), researchers from Case Western Reserve University suggest that instead of WIMPS, weakly interacting massive particles, or axions, which are weakly interacting low-mass particles, dark matter may be made of not so exotic quarks and leptons. Forming lumps anywhere from a few grams to the size of a good asteroid, and probably as dense as a neutron star, or the nucleus of an atom.

Link to full paper [PDF].

Lagg writes:

The Internet Archive has started a new part of the site for hosting and doing webpage-based emulation of older arcade games.

As part of its continuing mission to catalog and preserve our shared digital history, the Internet Archive has published a collection of more than 900 classic arcade games, playable directly in a Web browser via a Javascript emulator.

The Internet Arcade collects a wide selection of titles, both well-known and obscure, ranging from "bronze age" black-and-white classics like 1976's Sprint 2 up through the dawn of the early '90s fighting game boom in Street Fighter II. In the middle are a few historical oddities, such as foreign Donkey Kong bootleg Crazy Kong and the hacked "Pauline Edition" of Donkey Kong that was created by a doting father just last year.

For some reason they aren't providing any download links for the ROMs for those of us who don't like web based video games. I did a bit of poking around and it looks like there is a way to get a zip file to download. After going to a given game's page, open the network monitor of your browser and grep "cors_get.php". This will link you to the actual ROM zip file that you can use with MAME. Enjoy.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Sarah Laskow writes at The Atlantic about the KAL 007 incident where the Soviet Union shot down a passenger plane on September 1, 1983, killing all 269 passengers including a US Congressman en route from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage. At first, the Soviet Union wouldn't even admit its military had shot the plane down, but the Reagan administration immediately started pushing to establish what had happened and stymie the operations of the Soviet Aeroflot airline. It is widely believed that Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was already well off course when the crew routinely radioed that it was over its proper ''way point,'' or checkpoint, at a 90-degree angle to Shemya Island in the West Aleutian chain. Ultimately, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet cut across the lower tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, where it was shot down by a Soviet fighter.

An anonymous coward writes:

The Washington Post and other sources report that ZEFS, a Russian business association that built a memorial to Steve Jobs, has now dismantled it following the announcement by Apple CEO Tim Cook that he's gay. The interactive memorial, shaped like a 2-meter tall iPhone, was unveiled on Jan. 9, 2013 in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad).

It was removed on Friday, and ZEFS announced in a public statement:

After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was dismantled pursuant to Russian federal law on the protection of children from information that promotes the denial of traditional family values.

tonyPick writes:

Over at the BBC is a report that the eLoran system has been installed at 7 ports in Britain.

The General Lighthouse Authorities have finished installing eLoran in seven ports along the east coast of Britain, completing the first phase of their roll out. It is now in place in Dover, Sheerness, Harwich and Felixstowe, Middleborough, Leith, Humber and Aberdeen.

[...] For now, eLoran is being tested for shipping, but it could also play a role on land for the vast array of systems that use GPS.

eLoran is a ground based system which uses 100kHz pulses and can operate as a complementary system to GPS for critical navigation systems in maritime applications in case of accidental failures or deliberate interference.

Also covered at phys.org and Digital Ship.