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Hugh Pickens writes:

The Chicago Sun Times reports that in a disturbing California Bay Area trend, parents wary of vaccinating their kids are considering having their unvaccinated children attend measles parties with those who are infected. The idea is the same as a chicken pox party. Parents bring their children to these gatherings to get them sick once so they won’t have to deal with the virus again. Except, most cases of chicken pox aren’t deadly. Marin County Public Health Officer Matt Willis says that although his office has received no reports of such parties, officials have fielded several calls from parents asking about the benefits of "natural immunity," or the idea that immunity gained from contracting a disease is superior to immunity conferred through vaccination. Measles is a serious illness that can cause brain swelling, long-term neurological effects and even death, Willis says. Plus, he added, there is no evidence that immunity gained through becoming sick with measles is any better than vaccine-imparted immunity. "Any parents who are considering this, they should have a look at a child who’s really sick with measles, and I think they’d change their minds."

Willis and other health officials suspect the concept of a measles party may have grown out of "pox parties," which were popular in the 1980s, before the chickenpox vaccine was widely available. Some parents, reports said, even arranged to pay strangers for licked lollipops, saliva or other items from infected children. Willis says he still hears reports of “pox parties” occurring in Marin today, even though a chickenpox vaccine has been available for more than two decades. "It was not a good idea then, and it's still not a good idea," says Wilbert Mason.

srp writes:

By way of comp.risks I noticed this fun tale. Over at Medium Engineering they have a story about a bug report where a particular character from the Polish alphabet, Ś, wasn't showing up in their editor. "The curious case of the disappearing Polish Ś — One keyboard bug three decades in the making." Here's the bug report:

“I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

How they found and fixed the bug, and the history behind it, makes for a fun read.

Gordon Shure writes:

Veteran author and longtime Silicon Valley resident Andrew Keen has stepped up his criticisms of the Internet. Describing the net as a platform that has devolved from its initial ideals and promise into a vehicle of monopolistic, manipulative and exploitative practices, a Guardian article summarizes views now gaining traction. By using Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber or any other online giant, are we striking a Faustian pact, behind which lays a mass of suffering, surveillance and ruthless harvesting?

Keen supports his arguments by mentioning that even online businesses that cite individual collaboration, those of the 'sharing' economy, are mere cynical fronts for firms already valued in the billions. As money has been sucked out of retail, transportation, photography, research and other industries into the coffers of new Internet giants, the net result has been losses of jobs and the compromise of working conditions. As for the Internet's much-touted 'individual empowerment', Keen counters with the rise of mob mentality - “Rather than creating more democracy, it’s empowering the rule of the mob. Rather than encouraging tolerance, it’s unleashed such a distasteful war on women that many no longer feel welcome on the network". Keen's book - The Internet is not the Answer - is, a touch ironically, available on Amazon.

martyb writes:

According to this New Scientist article "Wave function gets real in quantum experiment":

For nearly a century physicists have argued about whether the wave function is a real part of the world or just a mathematical tool. Now, the first experiment in years to draw a line in the quantum sand suggests we should take it seriously.

The wave function helps predict the results of quantum experiments with incredible accuracy. But it describes a world where particles have fuzzy properties – for example, existing in two places at the same time. Erwin Schrödinger argued in 1935 that treating the wave function as a real thing leads to the perplexing situation where a cat in a box can be both dead and alive, until someone opens the box and observes it.

[...] In a complicated setup that involved pairs of photons and hundreds of very accurate measurements, the team showed that the wave function must be real: not enough information could be gained about the polarisation of the photons to imply they were in particular states before measurement.

There are a few ways to save the epistemic view, the team says, but they invite other exotic interpretations. Killing the wave function could mean leaving open the door to many interacting worlds and retrocausality – the idea that things that happen in the future can influence the past.

The results leave some wiggle room, though, because they didn't completely rule out the possibility of some underlying non-fuzzy reality. There may still be a way to distinguish quantum states from each other that their experiment didn't capture. But Howard Wiseman from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, says that shouldn't weaken the results. "It's saying there's definitely some reality to the wave function," he says. "You have to admit that to some extent there's some reality to the wave function, so if you've gone that far, why don't you just go the whole way?"

Additional (and quite readable) coverage at The Register: "They've finally solved it: Schrödinger's cat is both ALIVE AND DEAD".

Abstract at arxiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6213 with a link to the full report (pdf).

GlennC writes:

Just in time for Valentine's Day, BBC News Magazine publishes an article which combines bits of statistics, data analysis, and online dating to provide a "love formula."

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31168242

Looking for the ideal partner? Wondering if your relationship will last? They're common questions as Valentine's Day approaches - so how do you find the right person and keep them? Hannah Fry, author of The Mathematics of Love, says three things make the magic formula:

1. Be proud: Play up to whatever makes you different
2. Be proactive: Go out and get what you want
3. Be provokable: Speak up if something bothers you

There's a picture of a pretty girl in TFA, if that matters.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I would like some advice for internal firewall rules. For a long time, my organization had no internal firewalls. I am in the process of changing that, building them inclusively. My organization's DBAs want any database server to be able to make a database connection to any other database server on the network. The databases are various versions of Oracle. The database servers serve a wide range of applications, many of them unrelated. None of the database servers are reachable from the internet, but they can reach out to the internet in a similar manner to how consumer routers work. There are some cases where applications use data from multiple databases. The DBAs want to be able to easily copy and move things around. I'm not sure how often they do this, and if this type of connectivity is much more convenient than other means. I will admit I don't know much about how Oracle handles access control. What vulnerabilities, if any come with allowing this connectivity? How does having this connectivity benefit DBAs and to what extent?

dyingtolive writes:

"After almost two years “in the making” we’re thrilled to announce the availability of the Arduino IDE 1.6.0. The latest version of the development environment used by millions of people across the globe brings about a lot of improvements.

Since the day we started developing the first 1.5 version we have received a lot of feedback, suggestions and contributions from our vibrant community and we would like to thank you all for your passion and good will: thank you everyone, you rock! :-)"

http://blog.arduino.cc/2015/02/09/arduino-ide-1-6-is-released-download-it-now/

The post goes on to list some rather neat features (Network upload for Yun devices) that do make it look like a solid release.

Appalbarry writes:

As reported in the Toronto Star, climate scientist Andrew Weaver has won a closely watched defamation lawsuit against the National Post, after a B.C. Supreme Court found the newspaper was “careless or indifferent to the accuracy of the facts.” Weaver sued the newspaper, its publisher and several writers over four columns that were published in late 2009 and early 2010, which he alleged implied he was “untrustworthy, unscientific and incompetent".

Of possibly greater interest though, this is the first court decision in Canada to address the issue of whether a newspaper can be liable for reader postings on its website. The judge sided with the Post, which had argued it was not the publisher of the comments, and had removed them.

The full court decision makes the following points:

The defendants argue there is no evidence of awareness and no evidence that the National Post or any of its columnists were involved as an editor of any words in the reader posts. They maintain the National Post has a passive instrumental role in the dissemination of the reader postings or took no deliberate action amounting to approval, adoption, promotion or ratification of the contents of the reader posts ... Once the defendants became aware of the comments in the reader postings and received a complaint, they were then taken down. The volume of postings is such it would not be realistic to expect the defendant to pre-vet every posting

Subsentient writes:

A new trojan for Linux, believed to have originated from China, is attacking servers.

From the article:

The malware, dubbed Xnote, gets delivered on the target computer after the attackers mount a successful brute force attack and establish an SSL connection with the machine.

First, Linux.BackDoor.Xnote.1 sends information about the infected system to the server. It then goes into standby mode and awaits further instructions. If the command involves carrying out some task, the backdoor creates a separate process that establishes its own connection to the server through which it gets all the necessary configuration data and sends the results of the executed task," the researchers explained.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jean-Louis Gassée writes at Monday note that Apple’s most recent quarterly numbers broke a number of laws:

Law 1: Larger size makes growth increasingly difficult. The Law of Large Numbers predicts the eventual flattening of extraordinary growth. "And yet, last quarter, Apple revenue grew 30%, breaking the Law and any precedent," writes Gassée. "iPhone revenue, which grew 57%, exceeded $51B in one quarter — close to what Google achieved in its entire Fiscal 2014 year." Apple’s recent numbers show, the iPhone seems immune to modularity threats.

Law 2: Everything becomes a commodity. As products are standardized, margins suffer as competitors frantically cut prices in a race to the bottom with the PC clone market serving as a good example. "At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a rising Average Selling Price (ASP) means customers are freely deciding to give more money to Apple," says Gassée. "We’re told that this is just a form of Stockholm Syndrome, the powerless customer held prisoner inside Apple’s Walled Garden." Yet according to Tim Cook “…fewer than 15% of older iPhone owners upgraded to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The majority of switchers to iPhone came from smartphones running Google Inc.’s Android operating system.” Apple’s recent numbers show, the iPhone seems immune to modularity threats.

Law 3: Market share always wins. With a bigger market share comes economies of scale and network effects leaving minority players condemned to irrelevance and starvation. Yet despite its small unit share (around 7% worldwide, higher in the US), Apple takes home about half of all PC industry profits, thanks to its significant ASP ($1,250 vs $417 industry-wide in 2014, trending down to $379 this year).

Law 4: Modularity Always Wins. In the end, modularity always defeats integration. Clayton Christensen points out that in the PC clone market, modularity allowed competitors to undercut one another by improving layer after layer, smarter graphic cards, better/faster/cheaper processing, storage, and peripheral modules. Yet, as Apple’s recent numbers show, the iPhone seems immune to modularity threats.

"I have no trouble with the Law of Large Numbers, it only underlines Apple’s truly stupendous growth and, in the end, it always wins. No business can grow by 20%, or even 10% for ever. But, for the other three, Market Share, Commoditization, and Modularity, how can we ignore the sea of contradicting facts?" concludes Gassée. "As Apple continues to “break the law”, perhaps we’ll see a new body of scholarship that provides alternatives to the discredited refrains. As Rob Majteles tweeted: “Apple: where many, all?, management theories go to die?"

martyb writes:

from the sounds-expensive dept

To what lengths or expense will audiophiles go to get the cleanest, bestest sound? The Register has a story "$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience" that takes it to 11! From the article:

Got £6,899 (US$10,500) to spare and worried that a Cat-6 Ethernet cable is keeping you from hearing the very best of your NAS-stored collection of MP3s? Fear not, your moment has come, with this work of wonder from Audio Quest.

Among other digs at the breathless claims for this ultra-high-end cable, El Reg notes (and debunks) this claim:

Pay close attention to how you plug in the “ultra-performance RJ45 connector made from silver”, because these are directional Ethernet cables (apparently in ignorance that in the digital sphere, frames travel both way on the cables).

Looks like the Monster Cable company has a challenger for over-priced cables.

As much as I would like to think otherwise, there are at least some people who believe such claims and pay such high prices. Have you worked some place where the-powers-that-be insisted on buying over-spec'ed tech? How did it turn out?

Phoenix666 writes:

IT expert Herve Falciani has exposed massive tax fraud at HSBC:

HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.

Among the revelations, HSBC’s Swiss private bank:

• Routinely allowed clients to withdraw bricks of cash, often in foreign currencies of little use in Switzerland.
• Aggressively marketed schemes likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes.
• Colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from their domestic tax authorities.
• Provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen and other high-risk individuals.

Although tax authorities around the world have had confidential access to the leaked files since 2010, the true nature of the Swiss bank’s misconduct has never been made public until now. Hollywood stars, shopkeepers, royalty and clothing merchants feature in the files along with the heirs to some of Europe’s biggest fortunes.

We hear a lot about how Sergei Brin, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and other tech luminaries have changed and can change the world; Now Snowden, and Falciani are showing us how to shake it up. More than that, perhaps, they are showing us techs how to be heroes.

At the center of every enterprise on planet Earth today there are tech people who know everything, every secret. What would happen if we did like those two? What would happen if we didn't just reveal, but took other, active steps, like those which SEC regulator Carmen Segarra took?

WizardFusion writes:

The BBC has said that Samsung has issued a warning to its customers over their smart TVs, saying that people shouldn't talk about personal information in front them. When using the voice activation feature of the smart TV, it will listen to everything you say and may share that with Samsung and third parties.

This only came to light when The DailyBeast posted a new story pointing out part of the privacy policy...

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party"

Corynne McSherry, an IP lawyer for EFF, told The DailyBeast that the "third party" was probably the company providing speech-to-text conversion for Samsung. They also said: "If I were the customer, I might like to know who that third party was, and I’d definitely like to know whether my words were being transmitted in a secure form."

c0lo writes:

The Oncotarget journal (open access) publishes an article (CC Attribution license - full text PDF and HTML available) which shows that 5 classes of antibiotics, already known and approved, can be used to fight 8 types of cancers; as such, the authors literally propose to treat cancer as any infectious disease. Abstract follows:

Here, we propose a new strategy for the treatment of early cancerous lesions and advanced metastatic disease, via the selective targeting of cancer stem cells (CSCs), a.k.a., tumor-initiating cells (TICs). We searched for a global phenotypic characteristic that was highly conserved among cancer stem cells, across multiple tumor types, to provide a mutation-independent approach to cancer therapy. This would allow us to target cancer stem cells, effectively treating cancer as a single disease of “stemness”, independently of the tumor tissue type. Using this approach, we identified a conserved phenotypic weak point – a strict dependence on mitochondrial biogenesis for the clonal expansion and survival of cancer stem cells. Interestingly, several classes of FDA-approved antibiotics inhibit mitochondrial biogenesis as a known “side-effect”, which could be harnessed instead as a “therapeutic effect”. Based on this analysis, we now show that 4-to-5 different classes of FDA-approved drugs can be used to eradicate cancer stem cells, in 12 different cancer cell lines, across 8 different tumor types (breast, DCIS, ovarian, prostate, lung, pancreatic, melanoma, and glioblastoma (brain)). These five classes of mitochondrially-targeted antibiotics include: the erythromycins, the tetracyclines, the glycylcyclines, an anti-parasitic drug, and chloramphenicol. Functional data are presented for one antibiotic in each drug class: azithromycin, doxycycline, tigecycline, pyrvinium pamoate, as well as chloramphenicol, as proof-of-concept. Importantly, many of these drugs are non-toxic for normal cells, likely reducing the side effects of anti-cancer therapy. Thus, we now propose to treat cancer like an infectious disease, by repurposing FDA-approved antibiotics for anti-cancer therapy, across multiple tumor types. These drug classes should also be considered for prevention studies, specifically focused on the prevention of tumor recurrence and distant metastasis. Finally, recent clinical trials with doxycycline and azithromycin (intended to target cancer-associated infections, but not cancer cells) have already shown positive therapeutic effects in cancer patients, although their ability to eradicate cancer stem cells was not yet appreciated.

BK writes:

The Telegraph reports "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever"

From the article:

"When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified."

It seems that the norm in science may well be to cherry pick the results, but the story points to evidence that some climate data may have been falsified to fit the theory.

Sure, it's clickbait, but we've recently discussed cases where science and scientific consensus has gotten it so very wrong. Can we trust the science if we can't trust the data?