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Hugh Pickens writes:

Erik Wemple writes at the Washington Post that Fox News recently took the controversial step of posting a horrific 22-minute video online that shows Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh being burned to death warning internet users that the presentation features "extremely graphic video." "After careful consideration, we decided that giving readers of FoxNews.com the option to see for themselves the barbarity of ISIS outweighed legitimate concerns about the graphic nature of the video," said Fox executive John Moody. "Online users can choose to view or not view this disturbing content."

But Fox's decision drew condemnation from some terrorism experts. "[Fox News] are literally — literally — working for al-Qaida and ISIS's media arm," said Malcolm Nance. "They might as well start sending them royalty checks." YouTube removed a link to the video a few hours after it was posted, and a spokesperson for Facebook told the Guardian that if anyone posted the video to the social networking site it would be taken down. CNN explained that it wouldn't surface any of the disturbing images because they were gruesome and constituted propaganda that the network didn't want to distribute. "Does posting this video advance the aims of this terror group or hinder its progress by laying bare its depravity?" writes Wemple. "Islamic State leaders may indeed delight in the distribution of the video — which could be helpful in converting extremists to its cause — but they may be mis-calibrating its impact. If the terrorists expected to intimidate the world with their display of barbarity, they may be disappointed with the reaction of Jordan, which is vowing "strong, earth-shaking and decisive" retaliation."

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Yeah, this is actually happening.

If you’ve been following the news cycle over the past few days, you’ve likely heard the “controversy” surrounding Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) over his support for voluntary vaccination. With the 2016 Iowa Caucuses less than a year away, reporters were urgent to ask every potential presidential contender his or her opinion on the matter. Additionally, the press corps made sure to bring the issue up on Tuesday. However, perhaps to their surprise, Press Secretary Josh Earnest refused to say that President Obama would endorse mandatory vaccination. Asked the question at least 9 different times, Earnest would only say that Obama strongly urged all parents to vaccinate their children and that there should be no need for a federal law.

So, we should be hearing the mainstream media mocking the President for being an anti-vaxer any minute now, right?

slash2phar writes:

RadioShack filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Thursday, and said in a statement that an affiliate of Standard General, its lender and largest shareholder, would acquire between 1,500 and 2,400 of its 4,100 stores. Wireless company Sprint Corp said it would operate as many as 1,750 of those stores, occupying about one-third of each selling "mobile devices across Sprint's brand portfolio as well as RadioShack products, services and accessories".

RadioShack over the past year tried to avoid bankruptcy by closing 400 stores and reducing workforce by 19 percent, court documents show. It changed its logo, reduced store clutter and tried to connect with tech-savvy shoppers through brighter "concept stores" featuring interactive displays.

See also our story here from 2 days ago.

tonyPick writes:

ProPublica has an article on Werner Koch, author of GnuPG, and his difficulties in getting funding.

The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.

Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

Although Werner appears to have resolved his issues, with a grant from the Linux Foundation and various donations, this article does provide a history of GnuPG and raise the issues around the funding of some key software infrastructure.

Also covered at Hackernews and LWN.

chromas writes:

AI and evolution researcher Randal S. Olson has a write up about his attempt at one-upping Slate’s foolproof strategy for finding Waldo.
 
From Randal's article:

As I found myself unexpectedly snowed in this weekend, I decided to take on a weekend project for fun. While searching for something to catch my fancy, I ran across an old Slate article claiming that they found a foolproof strategy for finding Waldo in the classic “Where’s Waldo?” book series. Now, I’m no Waldo-spotting expert, but even I could tell that the strategy they proposed there is far from perfect.

That’s when I decided what my weekend project would be: I was going to pull out every machine learning trick in my tool box to compute the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo. I was going to crush Slate’s supposed foolproof strategy and carve a trail of defeated Waldo-searchers in my wake.

Randolph Carter writes:

Reported on http://novysan.com/magic and confirmed here: http://www.media.mit.edu/about/academics/class-schedule

'When Aleister Crowley defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” he might as easily have been describing technology. In fact, “magic” is still the word we use to encompass the wonders of a new technology before it becomes ubiquitous. '

Course Description

"With a focus on the creation of functional prototypes and practicing real magical crafts, this class combines theatrical illusion, game design, sleight of hand, machine learning, camouflage, and neuroscience to explore how ideas from ancient magic and modern stage illusion can inform cutting edge technology. Students will learn techniques to improve the presentation, display, and interface of their projects as well as gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural traditions that shape user expectations of technology. Topics will include: Stage Illusion as Information Display, The Neuroscience of Misdirection, Magical Warfare: Camouflage and Deception, Magic Items and the Internet of Things, Computational Demonology, Ritual Magick as User Experience Design. Guest lecturers and representatives of Member companies will contribute to select project critiques. Requires regular reading, discussion, practicing magic tricks, design exercises, a midterm project and final project."

Uncle Al would have been so proud.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I know you always wondered, finally The Guardian has the answer!

From...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/05/selfies-sexism-women

"Women in particular seem to be fans of the selfie. In a way, documenting themselves becomes a method for expressing and documenting their own lives, something that has tremendous value for people who often feel marginalised and cut out of mainstream conversations. Women’s lives are treated like they don’t matter and the details of their lives are dismissed as unimportant girl stuff – which is why women who post pictures of what they’re baking, of their children, of their gardens and homes, and other errata of their lives are often treated like garbage. Unlike those serious Instagram photographers who publish sunsets and macros of flowers and other artfully composed things. Those images may be beautiful and some may convey information about the life of the photographer just like those produced by women documenting their lives, but somehow a portrait of a running river has more value than a picture of a kitchen filled with canning supplies."

chromas writes:

Anthem Inc. stored the Social Security numbers of 80 million customers without encrypting them, the result of what a person familiar with the matter described as a difficult balancing act between protecting the information and making it useful.

The risks became clear last week, when Indianapolis-based Anthem discovered that hackers had broken into the database and made off with information on tens of millions of consumers, likely making it the largest computer breach disclosed by a health-care company.

However, Ars Technica points out that, even encrypted, the data would still be accessible:

In a case like the Anthem breach, the really sensitive databases are always in use. This means that they're effectively decrypted: the database management systems (DBMS) are operating on cleartext, which means that the decryption key is present in RAM somewhere. It may be in the OS, it may be in the DBMS, or it may even be in the application itself (though that's less likely if a large relational database is in use, which it probably is). What's to stop an attacker from obtaining that key, or perhaps from just making database queries?

mendax writes:

The New York Times published an interesting article about bedbugs, those pesky critters which were once the bane of human existence and are quickly becoming a major pest once again:

In the closing sentence of “The Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin marvels at the process of evolution, observing how “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Few people would describe bedbugs as most beautiful or most wonderful. Yet this blood-feeding pest may represent an exceptional chance to observe the emergence of Darwin’s “endless forms”: New research indicates that some bedbugs are well on their way to becoming a new species.

LancePodstrong writes:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/05/coca-cola-makeithappy-gakwer-mein-coke-hitler

Coca-Cola has been forced to withdraw a Twitter advertising campaign after a counter-campaign by Gawker tricked it into tweeting large chunks of the introduction to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
...
In a press release, Coca-Cola said its aim was to “tackle the pervasive negativity polluting social media feeds and comment threads across the internet”.

But Gawker, noticing that one response had the “14 words” white nationalist slogan re-published in the shape of a dog, had other ideas.

The media company’s editorial labs director, Adam Pash, created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, and set it up to tweet lines from Mein Kampf and then link to them with the #MakeItHappy tag – triggering Coca-Cola’s own Twitter bot to turn them into cutesy pictures.

The result was that for a couple of hours on Tuesday morning, Coca-Cola’s Twitter feed was broadcasting big chunks of Adolf Hitler’s text, albeit built in the form of a smiling banana or a cat playing a drum kit.

The bot made it as far as making Coke tweet the words “My father was a civil servant who fulfilled his duty very conscientiously” in the shape of a pirate ship with a face on its sails – wearing an eyepatch – before Coca-Cola’s account stopped responding.

"gewg_" writes:

Tom's Hardware reports

[VideoLAN Client] tends to have better codec and format support than most players out there, offering MKV, MP4, AVI, Ogg, MOV, FLAC, TS, M2TS, and AAC. It's also open source and free.

[February 5], we got the news that VLC 1.0 has finally been released as stable, losing the beta tag. VLC will continue to keep a beta branch for the braver users who want to get all the latest updates first and help the group behind the open source organization, VideoLAN, to discover and fix the bugs in the new versions.

[...]From the changelog in the Play Store is the following statement:
"This release fixes ARMv8 processors, Android 5.0 crashes, and minor improvements. The 0.9.x series is major release with hardware decoding and a new interface available in dark or white colors. It integrates DVD iso and menu support, an equalizer, playlist management, Widi [sic] screens support, and updated SD cards detection. Hardware acceleration is now enabled by default on 4.3+ and has better subtitles support. Software decoding has been accelerated too."

VLC 1.0 for Android can be downloaded[1] from the Play Store now.

[1] A blank page now. Google Search is no help.

ah.clem writes:

ESA’s Rosetta probe is preparing to make a close encounter with its comet on 14 February, passing just 6 km from the surface.

Yesterday was Rosetta’s last day at 26 km from Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, marking the end of the current orbiting period and the start of a new phase for the rest of this year.

Today, Rosetta is moving into a new path ahead of a very close encounter next week. First, it will move out to a distance of roughly 140 km from the comet by 7 February, before swooping in for the close encounter at 12:41 GMT (13:41 CET) on 14 February. The closest pass occurs over the comet’s larger lobe, above the Imhotep region.

Read the update from the ESA here.

DeathMonkey writes:

The Times Gazette is reporting on a sea slug that is able to perform photosynthesis to supply itself with food from sunlight.

According to Pierce and his team of researchers, “Here, we have used fluorescent in situ hybridization to localize an algal nuclear gene, prk, found in both larval and adult slug DNA by PCR and in adult RNA by transcriptome sequencing and RT-PCR. The prk probe hybridized with a metaphase chromosome in slug larvae, confirming gene transfer between alga and slug.”

The emerald sea slug exploits a process known as kleptoplasty – whereby it steals chloroplasts from V. litorea and then embeds these into its own digestive system to enable it manufacture its own food like plants do.

"gewg_" writes:

from the broken-rules-allow-a-peek-at-history dept.

El Reg notes

Top secret documents devised by Alan Turing, which should have been destroyed under wartime rules, have been found during renovations of Bletchley Park where they were used in roof cavities to stop draughts.

The documents have been identified as 'Banbury sheets', papers punched with holes to allow manual comparison of enciphered texts. Turing devised the sheets as part of his efforts to crack Nazi naval communications. [They] were found jammed into holes in the ceiling of Hut 6. Conditions in the room were known to be poor, leading code breakers there to stuff wastepaper into holes to keep out the cold.

Milton Keynes Web reports

Top secret documents used to break the Nazi's Enigma Code were found during the restoration of Hut 6, which housed the unit dedicated to breaking German army and air force messages.

The papers, found in 2013, were [freeze-dried] to prevent further decay before being cleaned and repaired.

The exhibition is called The Restoration of Historic Bletchley Park and the panels show the processes that were undertaken such as the paint analysis.

Amongst the fragmented codebreaking documents located in the roof of Hut 6 were also parts of an Atlas, a pinboard, and a fashion article [from] a magazine.

[...]The documents also included the only known examples of Banbury sheets, a technique devised by the mathematician Alan Turing to accelerate the process of decrypting Nazi messages. No other examples have ever been found.

All the findings are unique, as all documentary evidence from the codebreaking process was supposed to be destroyed under wartime security rules.

Fnord666 writes:

An article on pymnts.com says that two fraud analysts for Capital One have been charged with engaging in insider trading by the SEC. According to the article, Bonan and Nan Huang used their access as fraud analysts to gather non-public sales data about publicly traded companies and used that information to buy call and put options prior to quarterly reports. This resulted in a $2,826,500 profit over three years of activity. According to an article on Reuters, a federal judge has signed a temporary restraining order freezing the brokerage and bank account assets of the two former staff members. The case is Securities and Exchange Commission v. Huang, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 15-269.