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Marneus68 writes:

After the recent launch of Bittorent Sync and the Bittorent Bleep, Bittorent Inc. is reportedly working on a distributed web browser called Maelstrom.

The project that aims to "power a new way for web content to be published, accessed and consumed" is in alpha and only accessible with an invite.

While very interesting, this project raises many questions. How is this "distributed web browser" made? Is the DNS lookup distributed among users too? Is this going to become a new protocol and is it going to be open?

Sadly, if you're not on the alpha there's not much you can deduce from the little blurb on their blog.

Is anyone on Soylent News on the alpha yet? Anyone tried to do a bit of tinkering to see how it works?

The full announcement available here. Additional coverage can be found here and here.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Microsoft has patched 25 software vulnerabilities--including bugs that allow hackers to hijack PCs via Internet Explorer, Word and Excel files, and Visual Basic scripts.

Microsoft said its December's edition of Patch Tuesday includes critical fixes for Windows, Office and Internet Explorer as well as a patch for Exchange.

MS14-80: Addresses 14 security flaws in Internet Explorer, including various remote-code execution vulnerabilities and an ASLR bypass. The patch is considered a low risk for Windows Server systems, but critical for desktops, laptops and tablets. All the flaws were privately reported, and credit was given to various independent researchers as well as the HP Zero Day Initiative, Qihoo 360 and VeriSign iDefense Labs.

MS14-81: Two vulnerabilities in Word and Office Web Apps that allow an attacker to remotely execute code on targeted systems if the victims open booby-trapped documents. This update also applies to users running Office for Mac. Credit was given to Google Project Zero researcher Ben Hawkes, who privately reported the flaws to Microsoft. Rated as Critical.

MS14-84: A remote-code execution vulnerability (CVE-2014-6363) in the Windows VBScript engine can be exploited via a specially crafted webpage. Credit for discovery was given to SkyLined and VeriSign iDefense Labs. Rated as Critical.

The article also mentions Adobe software and Linux. Are any Soylentils running that combination?

Blackmoore writes:

Ars Technica - US Navy approves first laser weapon for operation aboard Persian Gulf ship

On Wednesday the Office of Naval Research (ONR) announced that it would approve an experimental laser weapon for use on the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf. The laser weapon system is part of a $40 million research program to test directed energy weapons, and it is the first to be officially deployed and operated on a naval vessel.

Although the laser weapon system is not as powerful as other weapons aboard the Ponce, Christopher Harmer, senior naval analyst with the Institute for the Study of War told The Wall Street Journal that the directed energy of the laser aimed at a target would “cause a chemical and physical disruption in the structural integrity of that target.” Harmer added that the advantage of the laser weapon system is that it can disable many oncoming targets without needing to reload ammunition: “as long as you've got adequate power supply and adequate cooling supply.”

Welcome to the future that Anime promised.

tonyPick writes:

Version 1.4 of the Go Language has just been released:

The major news in this release is that it adds official support for Android platforms, and it's now possible to write Android applications using pure Go code.

Full release notes have more details.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there’s a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can’t see the musicians’ faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.

Finally along with knowledge, we’re governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we’re familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf’s law. One of the reasons that “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” substituted for Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It’s much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.

microtodd writes:

So I suddenly realized, I've never installed AdBlock on my Chrome install, which is why I, um, see so many ads. So I decided to install an ad blocker using the Chome Appstore. But I discovered many, many AdBlockers, all with similar names and all claiming to be "The original, the #1, the most widely-used, etc".

There's...

• AdBlock: getadblock.com
• AdBlock Plus: adblockplus.org
• Adblock Super: arena.robots@gmail.com
• AdBlock Plus for Chrome: NetClean Development
• AdBlock Plus (again?): prodovvnnet.info
• Adguard AdBlocker: adguard.com

They are all free, so what gives? I'm honestly leery because my mind goes to shovelware "productivity" apps that really just serve to harvest your data or serve you even more ads. Why would so many people, including for-profit companies, offer AdBlock for free? What am I missing here? Are there really that many altruistic people in the world?

(It reminds me of that funny Seinfeld episode.)

Oh, and if anyone knows which Adblock is the "right" one to install, please let me know. Thanks!

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Supreme Court of the United States has issued a unanimous decision that security screenings after the work day, regardless of the amount of time they take to perform, do not qualify for remuneration. The decision focuses on the Portal-To-Portal Act of 1947 which defines a workday that specifically excludes those activities "incidental" to an employee's primary responsibilities.

NotSanguine writes:

The ROSINA instrument aboard the ESA probe Rosetta analyzed water vapor from comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and determined that the deuterium/hydrogen isotope ratio was more than three times greater than that of water found on Earth.

The article, published today on the ESA website, references a paper (abstract only, full paper paywalled) also published today in the journal Science.

From the ESA website:

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has found the water vapour from its target comet to be significantly different to that found on Earth. The discovery fuels the debate on the origin of our planet’s oceans.

The measurements were made in the month following the spacecraft’s arrival at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 6 August. It is one of the most anticipated early results of the mission, because the origin of Earth’s water is still an open question.

While no definitive answers have been found (it is science, after all), the results are sure to fuel the debate about the origins of the Earth's water and will, no doubt, garner new speculation about its source(s).

Hugh Pickens writes:

Count natural family planning among the ways young people are hearkening back to the practices of their grandparents as Olga Khazan reports at The Atlantic that new apps are letting women know if they can have sex with their partners without a condom or a contraceptive pill using calendar-based contraception. The underlying motive is not so much trendiness as it is a dissatisfaction with the Pill, which is still the most common form of birth control for women. In a recent CDC study of 12,000 American women, 63 percent of women who stopped using the Pill did so due to its side effects (PDF). And while as of 2010, only about 22 percent of women used “periodic abstinence," an umbrella term that includes counting days, measuring temperature, and tracking cervical mucus to predict fertility, their ranks may grow as new apps and other technologies make it easier to manage the historically error-prone task of measuring, recording, and analyzing one’s cycle in order to stay baby-free.

CycleBeads, for example, is an iPhone app that allows women to track fertility based on the Standard Days Method, a system developed by Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health in which specific days of each woman’s cycle are considered infertile. While the method is not as effective for women who have cycles outside of the 26-32 day range, Leslie Heyer says that its success rate is about 95 percent for “perfect use” and 88 percent for “typical use,” which would mean it beats condoms and falls just short of the Pill. “At first [my husband and I] were worried,” says Kate, a woman who began using CycleBeads nearly three years ago after experiencing weight gain and moodiness on the Pill, “but then we got used to it and have grown to trust it. I honestly can't imagine ever going back on the Pill.”

lhsi writes:

http://torrentfreak.com/uk-users-need-27-services-to-get-most-popular-films-report-finds-141208/

If UK Internet users want access to most recent popular film content they'll need to remember a lot of passwords. A new survey from KPMG has found that while overall availability is good, users wanting the best will have to use to a patience-challenging 27 services

Hugh Pickens writes:

The LA Times reports that Ls Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed the most ambitious seismic safety regulations in California history that would require owners to retrofit thousands of buildings most at risk of collapse during a major earthquake. "The time for retrofit is now," says Garcetti, adding that the retrofits target buildings “that are known killers. Complacency risks lives. One thing we can’t afford to do is wait.” The mayor’s plan calls for thousands of wood buildings to be retrofitted within five years, and hundreds of concrete buildings to be strengthened within 30. The retrofitting requirements must be approved by the City Council, and would have to be paid for by the building owners, with the costs presumably passed on to tenants and renters. The costs could be significant: $5,000 per unit in vulnerable wooden buildings and $15 per square foot for office buildings, Business owners, who have expressed concern in the past that these kinds of programs may be unaffordable, said the cost of retrofitting some buildings could easily exceed $1 million each. “This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector,” says Garcetti. “But we cannot afford not to do it.”

The last major earthquake in Los Angeles was the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake, which killed close to 60 people in 1994. But it was not close to the catastrophe that seismologists predict if there is a major shift on the San Andreas fault, and the fact that it has not produced a major quake in recent years has fed a sense of complacency. Seismologists now say a 7.5-magnitude event on the Puente Hills would be "the quake from hell" because it runs right under downtown Los Angeles and have estimated that would kill up to 18,000 people, make several million homeless, and cause up to $250 billion in damage. “We want to keep the city up and running after the earthquake happens,” says Lucy Jones aka "The Earthquake Lady," a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey and something of a celebrity in a city that is very aware of the potential danger of its location. “If everything in this report is enacted, I believe that L.A. will not just survive the next earthquake, but will be able to recover quickly.”

ghost writes:

OpenBSD has taken it upon themselves to fix (or break, depending on your perspective) incorrect random number generation. Now Ted "tedu" Unangst has provided some examples of how not to generate random numbers. You won't believe the shit some programmers do!

tonyPick writes:

Spotted over at The Scientist is the report that the winning bidder will return Watson's Nobel prize medal following the auction last week.

It turns out that James Watson’s Nobel Prize medal, which he won in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of DNA, will be staying with the biologist after all. The Russian entrepreneur Alisher Usmanov, who paid $4.1 million for the medal at an auction last week (December 4), will return the prize to its original owner, The New York Times reports.

The New York Times' report adds:

Mr. Usmanov said his father had died of cancer, so he valued Dr. Watson’s contributions to cancer research. “It is important for me that the money that I spent on this medal will go to supporting scientific research,” [Usmanov] said, “and the medal will stay with the person who deserved it.”

janrinok writes:

Phys.org has a report regarding the use of molybdenum sulfide (MoS2) [sic - I think that should be molybdenum disulfide] as a catalyst when spliting water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen:

Hydrogen could be an important source of clean energy, and the cleanest way to produce hydrogen gas is to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But the catalyst currently used to facilitate this water-splitting reaction is platinum. And that's a problem. When an electric current is run through water, it can split some of the water molecules. A catalyst lowers the amount of energy needed to split those molecules, and platinum is really, really good at this. But platinum is also really, really expensive – much too expensive for widespread use in hydrogen production.

So, researchers have long viewed molybdenum sulfide (MoS2) as a promising, much cheaper alternative to platinum. The drawback is that MoS2's catalytic performance is far worse than platinum's. To get around that problem, researchers have been trying to find ways to improve MoS2's catalytic performance. And now they may be on to something.

"The biggest stumbling block to improving MoS2's performance has been a lack of understanding of the connection between the material's performance and its composition and structure," says Linyou Cao, senior author of a new paper on the subject and a materials science and engineering researcher at NC State. "We're now able to shed some light on that connection."

In molybdenum sulfide, the ratio of sulfur atoms to molybdenum atoms can range from two to three. As a result, many researchers wondered if the precise composition of the material could affect its catalytic performance.

According to a new paper from Cao and his team, it doesn't. But the crystalline structure of the material does.

janrinok writes:

A report found on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website details some rather alarming results of test that they have recently conducted:

Firefighters rely on the radios to report their location and to communicate with other first responders as well as the incident command post or communications center. Performance problems with portable radios have been identified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as contributing factors in some firefighter fatalities.

All seven of the firefighter portable radios tested by NIST failed to perform properly within 15 minutes when exposed to temperature levels encountered in “fully involved” fires, as when all the contents in a room or structure are burning. Four of the hand-held radios stopped transmitting, and three experienced significant “signal drift,” rendering the radios unreliable for communication.

The failures occurred while the radios were subjected to a temperature of 160 degrees Celsius (320 degrees Fahrenheit), termed Thermal Class II conditions. The temperature is representative of a fully involved fire or conditions outside a room when its contents burst into flames simultaneously, a phenomenon known as flashover.

During the post-test cool-down period, three of the radios did not recover normal function.

However, as someone with no specialist knowledge of the fire-fighting profession, I do wonder howmany firefighters have to be able to withstand 160 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes. Does the rest of the fireman's equipment continue to work after such an extreme test? I know that firemen may have to cope with a lower temperature for a much longer period, or perhaps even higher temperatures for a brief period, but I am not certain if the test is a realistic one or a test until destruction/inoperability. The NIST report states that the tests should be 'realistic and reliable' - but doesn't actually state that these test meet that requirement.