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sigma writes:

Business Insider had two stories about Android recently, one trumpeting in full capitals "ANDROID SALES ARE IN DECLINE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER", the other claiming "Apple is now an existential threat to Android". Other publications like Forbes have frequent vitriolic articles about Google's Open Source mobile OS and fulsome praise for Apple and its iPhone.

So why does MSM (MainStream Media) love iOS and hate Android? Is it purely advertising-revenue driven or is there a deeper underlying reason?

http://www.businessinsider.com/android-sales-in-decline-for-first-time-ever-2015-2
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-is-an-existential-threat-to-android-2015-2

Hugh Pickens writes:

Are you, your family, or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? Now you can find out as The Intercept reports that a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center titled "Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts,” lets police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as: “Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,” “Talk of Harming Self or Others,” and “Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity).” The ranking system is supposed to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies. Families are judged on factors such as “Aware[ness] of Each Other’s Activities,” as well as levels of “Parent-Child Bonding,” (PDF) and communities are rated by access to health care and social services, in addition to “presence of ideologues or recruiters” as potential risk factors. A low score in any of these categories would indicate a high risk of “susceptibility to engage in violent extremism,” according to the document. Users of the guide are encouraged to plot the scores on a graph to determine what “interventions” could halt the process of radicalization before it happens.

Experts have suggested that intervention by law enforcement or other branches of the government in individuals’ lives, particularly young people, based solely based on the views they express, can potentially criminalize constitutionally protected behavior. “The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical and social service employees to rate the communities, individuals and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face,” says former FBI agent Mike German calling the criteria used for the ratings “subjective and specious.” Arun Kundnani questions the science behind the rating system. “There’s no evidence to support the idea that terrorism can be substantively correlated with such factors to do with family, identity, and emotional well-being," says Kundnani. "“It is obvious that, in practice, [this] would mostly only be applied to Muslim communities."

For those, like myself, trying to work out if this story is worth reading, I'll tell you that 'npm' is the package manager for node.js, and io.js is an npm compatible platform originally based on node.js. If you are still confused then perhaps this story is not going to excite you too much, but for the others:

An Anonymous Coward writes of a story from earlier this week:

Too little, too late? With io.js gaining popularity and mindshare, Joyent has attempted to regain some hipster buzz and community standing by creating the Node.js Foundation. Unmentioned in their press release was the catalyst -- io.js, the fork with an open governance model, was unmentioned and uninvited.

Javascript: a language designed to punch the monkey. Something went horribly wrong and now people are trying to use it everywhere.

Node.js: A server-side platform built on Google's v8 javascript engine for "less-than-expert programmers".

io.js: A fork of node.js operating under an open governance model with a focus on a modern features and a more predictable release cycle.

kebes writes:

For the movie Interstellar, the FX team at Double Negative Visual Effects partnered with physicist Kip Thorne to generate realistic visualizations of the rapidly-spinning black hole featured in the film. They have just published a scientific paper detailing how this was done: Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar (full-text is freely-available through open access). See also a brief summary at Science Magazine.

The team used ray-tracing to compute the trajectories of ray-bundles through the highly curved space-time around the spinning black hole. They explain the features seen in proximity of the event horizon: caustics and distorted/duplicated images of stars due to the intense gravitational-lensing of the black hole, as well as "frame-dragging" of space-time around the black hole, due to its fast rotation. They also provide movies from the point-of-view of a camera orbiting the black hole. The later parts of the paper describe the artistic choices made when depicting the black hole in the movie, where an accretion disk of hot-matter around the black hole's equator is distorted into multiple 'halos'.

tonyPick writes:

Spotted over at Bad Astronomy is the news that Feb 11th was the fifth anniversary of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory(SDO).

The article links to a NASA compilation of SDO footage

Further images and information are available at the Official NASA SDO site.

c0lo writes:

The Intercept reveals that, while Western countries demonize hackers, they secretly use them for intel purposes

The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their top secret documents.
...

By looking out for hacking conducted “both by state-sponsored and freelance hackers” and riding on the coattails of hackers, Western intelligence agencies have gathered what they regard as valuable content. [...] The hackers targeted a wide range of diplomatic corps, human rights and democracy activists, and even journalists:

INTOLERANT traffic is very organized. Each event is labeled to identify and categorize victims. Cyber attacks commonly apply descriptors to each victim – it helps herd victims and track which attacks succeed and which fail. Victim categories make INTOLERANT interesting:

• A = Indian Diplomatic & Indian Navy
• B = Central Asian diplomatic
• C = Chinese Human Rights Defenders
• D = Tibetan Pro-Democracy Personalities
• E = Uighur Activists
• F = European Special Rep to Afghanistan and Indian photo-journalism
• G = Tibetan Government in Exile

...

GCHQ created a program called LOVELY HORSE to monitor and index public discussion by hackers on Twitter and other social media...

Among others, GCHQ monitored the tweets of reverse-engineer and Google employee, Thomas Dullien. Fellow Googler Tavis Ormandy, from Google’s vulnerability research team Project Zero, is featured on the list, along with other well known offensive security researchers, including Metasploit’s HD Moore and James Lee (aka Egypt) together with Dino Dai Zovi and Alexander Sotirov, who at the time both worked for New York-based offensive security company, Trail of Bits (Dai Zovi has since taken up a position at payment company, Square). The list also includes notable anti-forensics and operational security expert “The Grugq.”

Two Soylentils wrote in with news that US carriers must now unlock phones upon request, with some restrictions.

Wireless Carriers Must Now Unlock Your Phone When Your Contract is Fulfilled

Hugh Pickens writes:

Andrew Moore-Crispin reports that beginning this week, as result of an agreement major wireless carriers made with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in late 2013, wireless carriers in the US must unlock your phone as soon as a contract term is fulfilled if asked to do so unless a phone is connected in some way to an account that owes the carrier money. Carriers must also post unlocking policies on their websites (here are links for AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile), provide notice to customers when their devices are eligible for unlocking, respond to unlock requests within two business days, and unlock devices for deployed military personnel. So why unlock your phone? Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on any compatible network, regardless of carrier which could result in significant savings. Or you could go with an MVNO, stay on the same network, and pay much less for the same cellular service.

February 11, 2015: Smartphone Independence Day in USA

"gewg_" writes:

The Register reports

American mobile owners can now legally unlock their smartphones again from their network carriers--provided you've finished paying for them.

Phone unlocking, allowing it to subscribe to a different network, was perfectly legal in the US until 2012, when the practice was banned in a review of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by the Librarian of Congress. The surprise shift outlawed the legal practice and set the internet aflutter.

An online petition to the White House garnered at least 100,000 signatures. President Obama urged Congress to act on the matter, saying his hands were tied.

18 months later the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act was passed and signed by the President, but by that time the telcos had already agreed to unlocking privately.

From today all phones, as well as tablets, can be instructed to subscribe to any network, provided the device is compatible with the telco's cell towers.

[...]the new rules are important because they allow resellers to unlock handsets before sales, meaning customers will get more handsets to choose from and--[we hope]--some cheaper deals as well.

In their page What you need to know about the new phone unlocking rules, Greenbot notes

If you're already a customer of the carrier you're contacting, you won't have to pay a thing, but if you're a former customer, you'll probably have to pay a minor fee of some sort. So get your phone unlocked BEFORE you cancel service!

Military personnel can have their phones unlocked for free as long as they have proof of deployment orders, regardless if they're currently a customer or not.

Two submissions have been received on the same subject:

Droughts, Resultant Shortages, and the Future

Geezer writes:

Scientific American is running a story http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-droughts-will-be-the-worst-in-1-000-years1/ on how some experts at NASA and UC Davis are predicting that a period of extreme drought expected in North America will be even worse than originally estimated.

Setting aside arguments about global warming (the drought is coming according to climatologists; "why?" is moot at this stage), given the precarious world economy, what ramifications can we reasonably expect from the resultant food shortages and escalating prices? Is there anything to be done now to mitigate the effects?

Today’s Drought in the West is Nothing Compared to What May be Coming

hoochiecoochieman writes:

The western US states have been suffering from a severe drought. But what if this is only a sample of what's yet to come?

According to the Washington Post, the data indicate that something called a "megadrought" may come to the Western US this century. A megadrought is a sustained drought that spans a generation. It has already happened before, the last time in the Middle Ages, and it had natural causes. But this time, man-made global warming seems to be the cause, and it will affect tens of millions of people living in the affected areas.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/todays-drought-in-the-west-is-nothing-compared-to-what-may-be-coming/2015/02/12/0041646a-b2d9-11e4-854b-a38d13486ba1_story.html

LancePodstrong writes:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Legislators in Puerto Rico are debating a bill that would fine parents of obese children up to $800 if they don’t lose weight. The bill aims to improve children’s well-being and help parents make healthier choices, Sen. Gilberto Rodriguez said in a statement issued Monday.

Public hearings for the bill are scheduled to begin Friday.

If approved, public school teachers would flag potential obesity cases and refer them to a counselor or social worker, depending on the severity of the case. Health Department officials would then meet with the parents and determine whether the obesity is a result of bad eating habits or a medical condition. They also would create a diet-and-exercise program combined with monthly visits to ensure it’s being followed.

After six months, officials would evaluate the child again, with parents possibly facing between $500 and $800 in fines if the situation does not improve within another six months to a year.

DeathMonkey writes:

The Washington Post ran a story earlier this week about a new NASA composite image of the "Dark Side" of the moon.

Thanks to NASA, we now know what the solar system looks like, centered on a view of the moon's far side. The computer-generated time-lapse gives two views of the lunar cycle from the side of the moon we never see from Earth.

Although it doesn't appear to spin from Earth's perspective, the moon does rotate, once about every 27 days. That's also approximately the same amount of time it takes the moon to orbit the Earth, once. The phenomenon is called synchronous rotation. In all, about 59 percent of the moon is visible from Earth over the course of an orbit. We never ever see 41 percent of the moon - the side that many call "dark."

But the "dark" side of the moon has always, from its perspective, gotten plenty of light. When Earth sees a waning crescent, the far side is nearing fullness.

Hugh Pickens writes:

"Who still smokes?" as Denise Grady reports at the NYT that however bad you thought smoking was, it’s even worse. A new study has found that in addition to the well-known hazards of lung cancer, artery disease, heart attacks, chronic lung disease and stroke, researchers found that smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. “The smoking epidemic is still ongoing, and there is a need to evaluate how smoking is hurting us as a society, to support clinicians and policy making in public health,” says Brian D. Carter, an author of the study. “It’s not a done story.” Carter says he was inspired to dig deeper into the causes of death in smokers after taking an initial look at data from five large health surveys being conducted by other researchers. As expected, death rates were higher among the smokers but diseases known to be caused by tobacco accounted for only 83 percent of the excess deaths in people who smoked. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really low,’ ” Mr. Carter said. “We have this huge cohort. Let’s get into the weeds, cast a wide net and see what is killing smokers that we don’t already know.” The researchers found that, compared with people who had never smoked, smokers were about twice as likely to die from infections, kidney disease, respiratory ailments not previously linked to tobacco, and hypertensive heart disease, in which high blood pressure leads to heart failure. "The Surgeon General's report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off," concludes Carter adding that the figure may be closer to 540,000.

martyb writes:

A recent comment thread here considered SoylentNews' headline capitalization policy. As this has been an ongoing challenge for submitters and editors alike, I'd like to throw this out to assess the SoylentNews community's view on it.

For background, consider that our policy is basically Title Case. Alternatives include: sentence case, initial caps, all caps, and small caps. These variations are well-described in that Wikipedia article, and especially in the section Headings and Publications.

Of course, the devil is in the details! If we were to naïvely use initial caps throughout, it would produce "The Doj And The Fbi Seek Answers". If, instead, we folded everything to lowercase and capitalized the first word, we would have "The doj and the fbi seek answers". So, there would need to be some need to preserve, by default, all words that arrive as all-caps. One would also need to make specific allowances for "iPad" and "iPhone" as well as "Apple Computer" and "Isaac Newton's apple".

I fail to see a simple algorithmic solution to the problem that produces an aesthetically pleasing result. But, maybe there is something that can get us most of the way there coupled with a simple ad hoc solution employing manual capitalization of proper nouns, 'initialisms', and acronyms.

So, what say you fellow Soylentils? Pseudo-code solutions are welcome!

Two stories today about Press Freedom:

Abrupt decline in global media freedom

sigma writes:

Freedom of information defenders, Reporters Without Borders (aka Reporters Sans Frontières, or RSF) have released their 2015 World Press Freedom Index showing that information control has become the weapon du jour for increasingly militant governments and corporations. The report identified an eight percent increase in violations of freedom of information in 180 countries in 2014 compared to the 2013.

Christophe Deloire, head of the Paris-based RSF commented “There has been an overall deterioration linked to very different factors, with information wars, and action by non-state groups acting like news despots”

http://en.rsf.org/world-press-freedom-index-2015-12-02-2015,47573.html

USA Drops to 49th in World Press Freedom Rankings

"gewg_" writes:

Glenn Greenwald reports via The Intercept

Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group's 2015 ranking[1] was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.

That is the lowest ranking ever[1] during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd).

The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana. Some of the U.S.'s closest allies fared even worse, including Saudi Arabia (164), Bahrain (163), Egypt (158), the UAE (120), and Israel (101)

[...]To explain the latest drop for the U.S., the press group cited the U.S. government's persecution of New York Times reporter Jim Risen, as well as the fact that the U.S. "continues its war on information in others, such as WikiLeaks." Also cited were the numerous arrests of journalists covering the police protests in Ferguson, Missouri (which included The Intercept's Ryan Devereaux, who was tear-gassed and shot with a rubber bullet prior to his arrest).

[1] Content is behind scripts.

DeKO writes:

For many people, the Titanic is only remembered for its tragic accident; but Bill Hammack (aka engineerguy) takes us on a tour through the fascinating engineering details that build not only the famous ship, but also its more successful siblings:

Bill shares fascinating images and information gleaned from the 1909 to 1911 editions of the Journal The Engineer. It includes photos of the construction of the Titanic and its twin the Olympic, the launching of these Olympic-class ships, and accidents that occurred. The video includes engineering details of the ship’s engines, steering mechanism, and propellers.

Bill made the [presentation] to some geek news sites a while back with an interesting analysis of a 100 year old mechanical computer that performed Fourier analysis.

ticho writes:

Duncan Epping, the Chief Technologist working for VMware, writes in his blog Yellow Bricks with an announcement of version 6.0 of the widely-used vSphere enterprise virtualization product.

Main touted features are:

• Virtual Volumes aka a “Virtual SAN”-alike policy-based management for traditional storage systems
• Long Distance vMotion
• Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion
• vMotion L2 adjacency restrictions are lifted!

And lots of other improvements to vSphere's high availability and management features.

The following few posts on his blog all deal with meatier details, topic by topic.