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An Anonymous Coward writes:

9front and here, the plan 9 distro, has released a new version.

The changelog lists some 50 or so bug fixes.

New Features

The project was started to remedy a perceived lack of devoted development resources inside Bell Labs.

New users frequently want to know whether 9front is superior to some other free UNIX-like operating system. That question is largely unanswerable and is the subject of countless (and useless) religious debates. Do not, under any circumstances, ask such a question on IRC or on a 9front mailing list.

Whether 9front is right for you is a question that only you can answer. 9front FAQ

Gentlemen, start your torrents!

Hugh Pickens writes:

Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. "We’re surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job," says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won’t make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. "Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations."

AnonTechie writes with an article from livescience.com:

Move over Large Hadron Collider. A new atom smasher could one day slam particles into each other at even more mind-bogglingly high-energy levels than the massive underground ring near Geneva, Switzerland.

The new system, called a Wakefield accelerator, could allow scientists to make tiny but powerful particle colliders that could fit on any university campus. That, in turn, could make it feasible to look for as-yet-unknown subatomic particles lurking in the universe.

The new accelerator was described (Nov. 5) in the journal Nature.

[Related]: Scientists progress toward plasma acceleration

[Source]: slac.stanford.edu

AnonTechie writes:

New research published in the journal Nature Communications, has demonstrated how glass can be manipulated to create a material that will allow computers to transfer information using light. This development could significantly increase computer processing speeds and power in the future.

The research by the University of Surrey, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and the University of Southampton, has found it is possible to change the electronic properties of amorphous chalcogenides, a glass material integral to data technologies such as CDs and DVDs. By using a technique called ion doping, the team of researchers have discovered a material that could use light to bring together different computing functions into one component, leading to all-optical systems.

"The challenge is to find a single material that can effectively use and control light to carry information around a computer. Much like how the web uses light to deliver information, we want to use light to both deliver and process computer data," said project leader, Dr Richard Curry of the University of Surrey.

"This has eluded researchers for decades, but now we have now shown how a widely used glass can be manipulated to conduct negative electrons, as well as positive charges, creating what are known as 'pn-junction' devices. This should enable the material to act as a light source, a light guide and a light detector - something that can carry and interpret optical information. In doing so, this could transform the computers of tomorrow, allowing them to effectively process information at much faster speeds."

The researchers expect that the results of this research will be integrated into computers within ten years. In the short term, the glass is already being developed and used in next-generation computer memory technology known as CRAM, which may ultimately be integrated with the advances reported.

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/features/new-research-lights-way-super-fast-computers

AnonTechie writes:

A reliable way of predicting the flow of traffic could be a great convenience for commuters, as well as a significant energy-saver. During an emergency evacuation following a natural disaster, reliable predictions of the best routes could even be a lifesaver. Now a team of researchers from MIT, the University of Notre Dame, and elsewhere has devised what they say is an effective and relatively simple formula for making such predictions.

The findings are reported in a paper in the journal Nature Communications by researchers including Marta Gonzalez, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering systems at MIT and Zoltan Toroczkai and Yihui Ren at Notre Dame.

The authors, all physicists by training, have been applying their knowledge of the computational modeling of complex systems to human-scale systems, such as traffic flows or the spread of disease. Their work has found patterns in these human systems similar to those seen in models of physical systems, the researchers say.

http://phys.org/news/2014-11-traffic.html

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/model-predicts-traffic-flow-1106

AnonTechie writes:

Last year, the US Supreme Court finally banned patents on human genes ( http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/supreme-court-blocks-patenting-of-genomic-dna/ ) after they were handed out by the US Patent and Trademark Office for decades.

The effort was powered by the ACLU and Public Patent Foundation, who gathered a group of plaintiffs who were paying high prices for the patented gene tests on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.

Now Canada is about to see a similar suit. The Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) has filed suit ( http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/CHEO.complaint.pdf ) (PDF) in Canadian federal court seeking to invalidate patents related to "Long QT syndrome," an inherited heart disorder that affects somewhere between 1 in 3000 and 1 in 5000 people. The patents were created at the University of Utah. That's the same US university that was connected to the landmark Myriad case. University of Utah got patents on the BRCA genes, and then licensed them exclusively to Myriad Genetics.

CHEO tests kids for Long QT along with more than 20 other genetic disorders. According to the lawsuit, it can't get certified by the Ontario government to do the test itself, because of patents owned by the University of Utah.

"Genes are not inventions," said Dr. Gail Graham of the hospital's genetics department during a press conference on Monday. "They belong to all of us."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/canadian-hospital-sick-of-us-test-monopoly-sues-to-stop-gene-patents/

Hugh Pickens writes:

Antonia Molloy reports at The Independent that scientists at the University of Montreal wanted to find out what exactly constitutes an atypical sexual fantasy or paraphilia and set out to define sexual deviation by grouping sexual fantasies according to how widespread they are. For example, dreaming about sleeping with two women is common, while fantasizing about having sex with an animal is not. “Clinically, we know what pathological sexual fantasies are: they involve non-consenting partners, they induce pain, or they are absolutely necessary in deriving satisfaction. But apart from that, what exactly are abnormal or atypical fantasies?” The scientists asked 1,517 Quebec adults (799 men and 718 women) to rank 55 different sexual fantasies, as well as to describe their own favorite fantasy in detail. Of this sample, 85.1 per cent were heterosexual, 3.6 per cent were homosexual and the remainder identified as neither of these. Overall, it was found that men had more fantasies than women and they also described these more vividly.

The number and taxonomy of paraphilias is under debate; one source lists as many as 549 types of paraphilias. The study found that thirty sexual fantasies were common for one or both genders. A significant proportion of women (30 per cent to 60 per cent) had fantasies involving elements of submission – but many also specified that they never wanted these to come true. By contrast, the majority of men did want their fantasies to become reality. One theory of sexual fantasies is that our fantasies are psychological mechanisms for coping with anxiety. "Our main objective was to specify norms in sexual fantasies, an essential step in defining pathologies," says Christian Joyal, lead author of the study. "And as we suspected, there are a lot more common fantasies than atypical fantasies."

Hugh Pickens writes:

John R. Gillis writes in the NYT that to those of us who visit beaches only in summer, beaches seem as permanent a part of our natural heritage as the Rocky Mountains but shore dwellers know that beaches are the most transitory of landscapes, and sand beaches the most vulnerable of all. Today, 75 to 90 percent of the world’s natural sand beaches are disappearing, due partly to rising sea levels and increased storm action, but also to massive erosion caused by the human development of shores. The extent of this global crisis is obscured because so-called beach nourishment projects attempt to hold sand in place(PDF) and repair the damage by the time summer people return, creating the illusion of an eternal shore. But the market for mined sand in the US has become a billion-dollar annual business, growing at 10 percent a year since 2008. Interior mining operations use huge machines working in open pits to dig down under the earth’s surface to get sand left behind by ancient glaciers.

One might think that desert sand would be a ready substitute, but its grains are finer and smoother; they don’t adhere to rougher sand grains, and tend to blow away. As a result, the desert state of Saudi Arabia brings sand for sandblasting all the way from Australia. Huge sand mining operations are emerging worldwide, many of them illegal, happening out of sight and out of mind, as far as the developed world is concerned. "We need to stop taking sand for granted and think of it as an endangered natural resource," concludes Gillis. "Beach replenishment — the mining and trucking and dredging of sand to meet tourist expectations — must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with environmental considerations taking top priority. Only this will ensure that the story of the earth will still have subsequent chapters told in grains of sand."

tonyPick writes:

The MIT Technology Review has an article on the release of Shadowcrypt.

Shadowcrypt is a (Chrome) browser extension which provides on the fly text encryption for existing web applications. The objective is to be simple to use for the average user and compatible with existing web services, such as GMail, Facebook and Twitter.

The technical detail of ShadowCrypt is described in a peer reviewed conference paper [pdf] which will be presented at the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Source is available on github.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The NYT reports that Microsoft says that it will give away a comprehensive mobile edition of Office that will do most of the most essential things people normally do with the computer versions of the product. By making an unabridged version of Office available for free on mobile, Microsoft is betting it can get even more people to start using the software, without stealing sales from the PC and Mac versions of the product, where it still makes truckloads of money. "We'd like to dramatically increase the number of people trying Office," says John Case, corporate vice president of Office marketing at Microsoft. "This is about widening the funnel."

Blackmoore writes:

Motherboard brings us These Are The Oldest Fossilized Muscles, and They Are Rewriting Prehistory

“In recent decades, discoveries of preserved trackways and chemical evidence in older rocks, as well as molecular comparisons, have indirectly suggested that animals may have a much earlier origin than previously thought," explained lead author Alex Liu in a statement.

"The problem is that although animals are now widely expected to have been present before the Cambrian Explosion, very few of the fossils found in older rocks possess features that can be used to convincingly identify them as animals," he said.

"Instead, we study aspects of their ecology, feeding or reproduction, in order to understand what they might have been.”

Blackmoore writes:

GnuPG 2.1.0 Supports ECC, Other Improvements

GnuPG 2.1 "Modern" has been released as a big improvement over the earlier GnuPG 2.0 release. GnuPG 2.1 brings support for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), merging of secret keys is now supported, support for PGP-2 keys has been dropped for security reasons, create/signing key improvements, improvements to handling key server pools, a new format is used for locally storing public keys, card support has been updated, X.509 certificate creation has been improved, and there's many other enhancements. Learn more about GnuPG 2.1 via its release announcement and its lengthy what's new page.

BradTheGeek writes:

The FBI announced that yesterday it arrested Blake Benthall, aka "Defcon," the alleged owner and operator of Silk Road 2.0. Benthall was apprehended in San Francisco and will be presented today in a federal court in SF before Magistrate Judge Jaqueline Scott Corley.
“As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise," Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. "Let’s be clear—this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will return as many times as necessary to shut down noxious online criminal bazaars. We don’t get tired.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/fbi-arrests-blake-defcon-benthall-alleged-operator-of-silk-road-2-0/
http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2014/operator-of-silk-road-2.0-website-charged-in-manhattan-federal-court

Hugh Pickens writes:

NBC News reports that a man wanted in the killing of a woman — and who may have posted photos online of her body on 4chan with details of the crime — is believed to have led police in Portland, Oregon, on a high-speed chase but has now turned himself in. The slain woman was found in an apartment in Port Orchard, Washington. Police are investigating images of a naked woman with red marks around her neck that were shared anonymously on the online forum 4chan. The photos were accompanied by the message: "Turns out it’s way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies." When other users questioned the authenticity of the pictures, which have now been deleted, a reply said: "Check the news for Port Orchard, Washington, in a few hours. Her son will be home from school soon. He'll find her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me." The Port Orchard Independent was among several local newspapers to quote police officers as saying the images appeared to have been posted before officers were called. Investigators said they were able to trace Kalac's cellphone. About 6:20 a.m. Tuesday, he sent two texts to a friend. According to the affidavit, the first read, "S--- is all f----d now. You'll see me in the news." The second read, "There will be no more me. ever, You'll read about it. That's all."

sudo rm -rf writes:

The International Consortium for Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reports

The landlocked European duchy has been called a “magical fairyland” for brand-name corporations seeking to drastically reduce tax bills.

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show.

These companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries.

The leaked documents can be found here.(requires flash)

Direct Link to Apple/iTunes 2011 tax return. (flash)