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takyon writes in with a story about new star formation. Science Magazine is reporting on research[Abstract, full article pay walled] published on 2 April, 2015 in the journal Science. The paper details observations of a protostar in the early phases of formation. The protostar, named W75N(B)-VLA 2 was first observed in 1996.

Radio telescope observations in 1996 showed little structure in the protostar, while new (2014) observations showed significantly more structure in the protostar. From the Science Magazine article:

In teenagers as in stars, the first years of life are times of great change. A massive protostar that lies about 4250 light-years from Earth has undergone a dramatic evolution over the course of just 18 years, a new study reveals. In 1996, when scientists used a radio telescope to observe a star-forming region dubbed W75N(B), one of the objects in that cloud—called VLA 2—had very little structure: Its magnetic field wasn’t oriented in any particular direction, and the ionized material streaming from the star—its version of solar wind—spewed outward at similar speeds in all directions. But observations last year hint that the protostar’s stellar wind was flowing more quickly from the object’s poles (relative speeds depicted in bluish ovoid in image above), and its magnetic field had become aligned with that of the larger cloud of gas and dust that surrounds it[Abstract].

...

Over the next few hundred thousand years, W75N(B)-VLA 2 will evolve into a star about six times the mass of our sun, team members estimate.

This story has also been covered by Astronomy.com, Phys.org, and the BBC.

AnonTechie writes:

A federal appeals court ruled (PDF) yesterday that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn't apply to Netflix, since the online video provider is "not connected to any actual, physical place."

Donald Cullen sued Netflix in March 2011, attempting to kick off a class-action lawsuit on behalf of disabled people who didn't have full use of the videos because they aren't all captioned. A district court judge threw out his lawsuit in 2013, and yesterday's ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upholds that decision.

The decision is "unpublished," meaning it isn't intended to be used as precedent in other cases. However, it certainly doesn't bode well for any plaintiff thinking about filing a similar case in the 9th Circuit, which covers most of the Western US.

At least one other court has come out the other way on this issue. Three months after Cullen filed suit, the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed an ADA lawsuit against Netflix in Massachusetts over the same issue. In that case, the judge found that Netflix was a "place of public accommodation" and would have to face the lawsuit against the disability rights group.

After the company lost the initial motion, Netflix settled the case with NAD, agreeing to pay $750,000 in legal fees and caption all of its videos by the year 2014.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/9th-circuit-rules-netflix-isnt-subject-to-disability-law/

NotSanguine writes:

Jacob Aron at New Scientist reports on new research based on data collected by NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer.

The research, presented on March 16, 2015 at the 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, details the discovery of a second "tail" of material trailing behind the moon.

According to the article, Anthony Colaprete theorizes that if the same processes are at work in other parts of the solar system, these techniques could provide a way to remotely characterize the surfaces of other celestial bodies.

Data from NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which spent seven months orbiting the moon in 2013 and 2014, has revealed a tail of nanoscale dust particles.

The finding follows the discovery of the first lunar tail in 1999, when ground-based telescopes spotted a faint stream of sodium gas stretching out behind the moon for hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

Anthony Colaprete, who is in charge of LADEE's spectrometer instrument, wanted to get a closer look at the sodium tail, so positioned LADEE on the dark side of the moon and pointed it away from the sun. The spectrometer works by looking at the patterns of light wavelengths that different substances emit or reflect. In this position, the instrument picked up the sodium, but there also seemed to be something else, a brighter signal in the blue and ultraviolet wavelengths.

mendax writes:

A Pew Research Center report has found that one in ten Americans access the Internet exclusively by using their smartphones:

10% of Americans own a smartphone but do not have broadband at home, and 15% own a smartphone but say that they have a limited number of options for going online other than their cell phone. Those with relatively low income and educational attainment levels, younger adults, and non-whites are especially likely to be "smartphone-dependent."

[...]

Some 13% of Americans with an annual household income of less than $30,000 per year are smartphone-dependent. Just 1% of Americans from households earning more than $75,000 per year rely on their smartphones to a similar degree for online access. 12% of African Americans and 13% of Latinos are smartphone-dependent, compared with 4% of whites.

Ars Technica points to other troubling signs about the state of broadband access in America:

US Census data from 2013 has previously shown that 24.9 million households out of 116.3 million nationwide have no Internet access, not even mobile broadband on a smartphone. In Detroit and some other cities, nearly 40 percent went without Internet service.

Nearly all Americans live in areas where they can buy broadband service if they could afford it, but Internet providers often don't compete against each other in individual cities and towns, keeping prices high. A new analysis by The Center for Public Integrity shows how broadband providers divide up territory in order to avoid competing against each other.

This is more of an "Ask Soylentils" question: A professor of mine once said in class that the digital divide between Internet "haves" and "have-nots" would eventually create serious social discord. Any thoughts on the subject?

Jim Profit writes:

Joyent announced a new platform for Docker deployment, where Docker instances are deployed into containers running directly on the hypervisor, called Triton.

Joyent is using their own Illumos-derived distribution, SmartOS, which combines features from Solaris, including ZFS, Zones, Dtrace, Crossbow and others, with SmartOS and Linux (via ABI translation) containers , alongside VMs (using their port of KVM), encapsulated into Solaris Zones.

They claim to offer better performance by removing some of the virtualization layer (and because of the supposed superior performance of their SmartOS hypervisor), and better security by using Solaris Zones and Crossbow network virtualization. You can even use Dtrace inside Linux containers.

Joyent also claims the data center can now be seen as a single, elastic Docker host, as the Docker API is implemented at the datacenter level via their SmartDatacenter software.

The environment is open source and available on github.

Is SmartOS and the platform built on top of it being marginalized because it's not Linux? What comparable virtualization/containerization platforms run on Linux?

Is this just an attempt by a niche-player to grab some attention?

takyon, zorax, and an Anonymous Coward all write:

Open Crypto Audit Project has completed "Phase II" (PDF) of its audit of the TrueCrypt source code. The security audit of TrueCrypt, a freeware disk encryption utility, was crowdfunded in October 2013, before the TrueCrypt Foundation's mysterious shutdown on May 28, 2014. In his blog post describing the findings, Matthew Green says:

The TL;DR is that based on this audit, Truecrypt appears to be a relatively well-designed piece of crypto software. The NCC audit found no evidence of deliberate backdoors, or any severe design flaws that will make the software insecure in most instances.

That doesn't mean Truecrypt is perfect. The auditors did find a few glitches and some incautious programming -- leading to a couple of issues that could, in the right circumstances, cause Truecrypt to give less assurance than we'd like it to.

The most significant issue found involved TrueCrypt continuing to generate keys in a rare instance where the Windows Crypto API fails to initialize. This is not necessarily insecure because TrueCrypt "still collects entropy from sources such as system pointers and mouse movements."

In addition to the RNG issues, the NCC auditors also noted some concerns about the resilience of Truecrypt's AES code to cache timing attacks. This is probably not a concern unless you're [performing] encryption and decryption on a shared machine, or in an environment where the attacker can run code on your system (e.g., in a sandbox, or potentially in the browser). Still, this points the way to future hardening of any projects that use Truecrypt as a base.

One project that could benefit from the audit's findings is VeraCrypt, a freeware fork of TrueCrypt licensed under the Microsoft Public License and also subject to the TrueCrypt License, which uses a substantial amount of TrueCrypt code. Matthew Green has speculated that the intent of the TrueCrypt developers' licensing and shutdown decisions was to stir uncertainty over the project and force new disk encryption projects to start from scratch.

For additional analysis of the audit, see the articles by ArsTechnica's Dan Goodin, the Register and Threatpost.

AnonTechie writes:

Phys.org is reporting on new research [Abstract, full article pay-walled] published in Physical Review Letters, from scientists at SUNY Buffalo which argues that the Information Paradox may not exist.

From the Phys.org article:

The "information loss paradox" in black holes—a problem that has plagued physics for nearly 40 years—may not exist. Shred a document, and you can piece it back together. Burn a book, and you could theoretically do the same. But send information into a black hole, and it's lost forever. That's what some physicists have argued for years: That black holes are the ultimate vaults, entities that suck in information and then evaporate without leaving behind any clues as to what they once contained.

But new research shows that this perspective may not be correct. "According to our work, information isn't lost once it enters a black hole," says Dejan Stojkovic, PhD, associate professor of physics at the University at Buffalo. "It doesn't just disappear."
Stojkovic's new study, "Radiation from a Collapsing Object is Manifestly Unitary," appeared on March 17 in Physical Review Letters, with UB PhD student Anshul Saini as co-author.

The paper outlines how interactions between particles emitted by a black hole can reveal information about what lies within, such as characteristics of the object that formed the black hole to begin with, and characteristics of the matter and energy drawn inside. This is an important discovery, Stojkovic says, because even physicists who believed information was not lost in black holes have struggled to show, mathematically, how this happens. His new paper presents explicit calculations demonstrating how information is preserved, he says.

Should this work be confirmed, it would be a boost for the concept of quantum determinism

wantkitteh writes:

Bit-Tech report:

The latest update to its popular 3DMark gaming benchmark introduces the API Overhead Feature Test, claimed to be the first independent method for measuring the differences in API overhead. Initially supporting DirectX 11 as a baseline and DirectX 12 and Mantle as overhead-reduced improvements, the test is near-unique in being more about comparing the performance of different APIs running on one system than different hardware running under the same APIs.

The test works, Futuremark has explained, by making a steadily increasing number of draw calls through each API. The result given at the end is the maximum number of draw calls per second achieved by the API before the frame rate of the rendered scene dropped below 30 frames per second. This test can then be repeated on the same hardware for each API, offering an insight into the improvements on offer.

1GB of VRAM and DirectX 11 feature support are required to enable the new tests. Both single- and multi-threaded tests for DirectX 11 can be specified. DirectX 12 is also supported, as is Mantle testing on AMD graphics hardware. No mention of OpenGL tests.

Anandtech have a more in-depth article on the new test, along with figures for a variety of graphics cards supported by varying numbers of CPU threads, on this page. In short: Direct X 11 is a major bottleneck for all graphics cards, especially AMD ones which both underperform against Nvidia cards and show no improvement with multi-threading. In Direct X 12, AMD cards generally outperform Nvidia cards by varying margins depending on how many CPU threads are available. Mantle performance is consistently slightly lower than Direct X 12 on AMD cards.

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have presented an argument that "the weakening of old memories may be an adaptive function, one that helps the brain integrate new memories with existing ones.":

Subjects were shown 144 pairs of pictures/words while in the fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine, and their brain activity was observed. Then, the subjects entered a learning phase, in which they were trained on 72 picture-word pairs, a subset of the initial 144. They were asked to construct a highly detailed association between the pictures and the words, using intricate mental imagery. They were then asked to learn a second set of associations for each word; these served as competition for the first set.

Brain activity is measured in discrete regions called voxels, a 3D pixel. To analyze the effects of the competing memories, the brain activity displayed during recall were analyzed to look for differences in which voxels showed activity.

The subjects were scanned in the fMRI machine four times. Once came after training with the first picture association, another after training with the second association. Then, they were scanned while being asked to recall the first association after having been trained on the second, which should interfere with it. As a control, they were scanned one final time when they were asked to distinguish the pictures they had studied from similar pictures they had not studied.

The finding supplies the greybeards in the server room with the perfect rejoinder to accusations of obsolescence: "My memory isn't failing me, it's adapting for new information..."

darkfeline writes:

Sixteen schools in Cheshire (UK) have sent letters to parents about letting their children play violent video games. The heads claim games such as Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty contain unsuitable levels of violence. They warned the parents that they may be reported for neglect. The head teachers state that playing such games or accessing certain social media sites can increase early sexualised behaviour in youngsters and leave them vulnerable to grooming for sexual exploitation.

[H]eadteacher Mary Hennessy Jones wrote:

“Several children have reported playing or watching adults play games which are inappropriate for their age and they have described the levels of violence and sexual content they have witnessed: Call Of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Dogs Of War and other similar games are all inappropriate for children and they should not have access to them. [...] If your child is allowed to have inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18-plus we are advised to contact the police and children’s social care as it is neglectful.”

Parents’ groups said

[...] reporting families for allowing children to play unsuitable computer games was a step too far.

“Accepting the huge concerns about these violent games and their effect on children, I think the schools are stepping outside the realm of what is probably acceptable,” said Margaret Morrissey, from the pressure group Parents Outloud. “It will be construed by many parents as a threat and it is not helpful. If schools want to get the support of parents and gain their confidence, threatening them with social services will not help.”

bradley13 writes:

Probably like lots of Soylentils, I help out a small company on the side. Every year, on behalf of the company, I get to complete a PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire. Depending on the answers to the questions, this can lead to further requirements, like an external network scan.

I'd like to share my experiences here, and ask if these are the same as what other Soylentils have encountered, because I find the whole process just beyond belief.

The company: In addition to a brick-and-mortar shopfront, they also have a webshop, and both accept credit cards. They receive a few orders from old-fashioned customers by mail and fax. The web-shop hands off to a payment portal. In-store purchases are handled with a (for Europe, at least) standard reader where the user inserts their card and enters their PIN. For mail/fax orders, the company uses a website from the payment processing service to enter the credit card transactions. All of these use the same payment processing company. It's all set up so that the company sees as little credit-card information as possible - basically, only what arrives on paper for the mail/fax orders.

The SAQ process gets crazier every year. This year I took it more seriously that usual, read every question, and if I couldn't answer "yes", then I selected "n/a" and entered a comment. The questionnaire is more than 70 pages long! Questions ask about everything from how the formal business processes are documented to how the router configuration files are backed up. Stuff that might make sense at a huge company like Amazon, but is completely irrelevant for a typical small merchant. Other questions are just irritating, for example, you are supposed to certify that users are forced to change their passwords every three months - imho a horrible security practice that would only ensure that people write their passwords on post-it notes.

On top of that, this year - no matter how I interpret the questions - the result is that I am supposed to pay for a quarterly network scan by an external company. This is apparently triggered by the PC that is used to enter credit card info into the payment portal. I did so, and the scan coughs up all sorts of "problems", for example, objecting to features of the router installed at the company (it's VPN capable, and offers an https-handshake with a Cisco self-signed certificate, oh horror).

I cannot believe that every little shop that accepts credit cards goes through this. Do most shops just blow this stuff off - blindly click yes-yes-yes to all the questions? Do other shops not even have to go through this, and we're somehow on a "bad boy" list? Really, I have no idea, but this process is just insane!

martyb writes:

For those who may have missed it, one of the April 1st stories contained a set of encoded puzzles for the community to decipher.

As the day went on, additional puzzles were added.

Unfortunately, the instructions were not clear. The intent was to have people reply in the comments with just their answers to the encoded questions. This generated some confusion when comments were posted with just the translation. This may have spoiled it for those who wanted to solve the puzzles on their own. I apologize for the confusion — I should have provided an example puzzle, decoding, and expected answer.

If you would like to play along without any spoilers, please refer to the original story with comments suppressed.

Today being another day, you now have your chance to show off your puzzle solving skills! Feel free to provide your translation, and more importantly, explain how you went about solving each puzzle. Command pipelines and/or programs are welcome!

I had a blast coming up with these puzzles, and thoroughly enjoyed following the discussions in the comments. I am looking forward to seeing how many different paths were taken to solving each of them! What challenges did you struggle with? Where did you get blocked? What was your 'aha!' moments in your attempts at solutions?

For your convenience, all nine puzzles are reproduced here after the break.

takyon writes:

The development of next-generation airships continues, but Hybrid Air Vehicles is struggling to get its Airlander 10 craft off the ground.

It could be the future of aviation, British eccentric genius on a grand scale, or possibly a bit of both. Secreted in a hangar a few miles south of Bedford sits the world’s largest aircraft: a hybrid of plane, balloon and hovercraft, an airship that the company modestly says will change the world. The Airlander 10 can fly for weeks, land virtually anywhere that’s flat, and burns just a fifth of the fuel of a conventional aircraft.

The Airlander is filled with helium, kept from leaking using a "super-tough skin" made of Vectran, Kevlar, and Mylar, but can also take off using aerodynamic lift like a conventional airplane. An earlier version was selected by the United States Army for the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle program, intended to provide surveillance for ground troops using unmanned blimps, but LEMV was cancelled in 2013.

Could this be the future of Airships? As one of the main investors, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson believes so:

I’m not expecting to get my money back any time soon, I just want to be part of it. Being a rock person, I could put it up my nose, or buy a million Rolls Royces and drive them into swimming pools, or I could do something useful. ... There are very few times in your life when you’re going to be part of something big.

AnonTechie writes:

In 1980, Walter Alvarez and his group at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered a thin layer of clay in the geologic record, which contained an unexpected amount of the rare element iridium. ( http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/03/09/alvarez-theory-on-dinosaur/ )

They proposed that the iridium-rich layer was evidence of a massive comet hitting the Earth 66 million years ago, at the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Alvarez group suggested that the global iridium-rich layer formed as fallout from an intense dust cloud caused by the impact. The cloud of dust covered the Earth, producing darkness and cold. In 1990, the large 100-mile diameter crater from the impact was found in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

The timing of this impact, together with the fossil record, have led most researchers to conclude that this collision caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many other forms of life. Subsequent studies found evidence of other mass extinctions in the geologic past, which seem to have happened at the same time as pulses of impacts, determined from the record of impact craters on the Earth. And these co-incidences occurred every 30 million years.

Why do these extinctions and impacts appear to happen within an underlying cycle? The answer may lie in our position in the Milky Way Galaxy.

http://theconversation.com/how-can-dark-matter-cause-chaos-on-earth-every-30-million-years-38075

AnonTechie writes about a novel development in the field of optical gyroscopes:

A pair of light waves - one zipping clockwise the other counterclockwise around a microscopic track - may hold the key to creating the world's smallest gyroscope: one a fraction of the width of a human hair. By bringing this essential technology down to an entirely new scale, a team of applied physicists hopes to enable a new generation of phenomenally compact gyroscope-based navigation systems, among other intriguing applications.

"We have found a new detection scheme that may lead to the world's smallest gyroscope," said Li Ge, a physicist at the Graduate Center and Staten Island College, City University of New York. "Though these so-called optical gyroscopes are not new, our approach is remarkable both in its super-small size and potential sensitivity."

[Abstract]: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-2-4-323