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Fnord666 writes:

According to a news article on cleveland.com, starting Monday June 1st, Amazon began collecting sales tax from Ohio consumers.

Ohio retailers and retail associations have spent years trying to persuade Congress to pass laws requiring online retailers to collect and remit the same state sales taxes that brick-and-mortar stores are required to.

"What great news for Ohio," said Gordon Gough, president and chief executive of the Ohio Council of Retail Merchants, which represents more than 6,400 members. His group is applauding the fact that not only is Amazon making a substantial commitment to the state by creating 1,000 jobs here, but "they're going to come to Ohio and play by the same rules as all the other retailers."

According to Gough "Ohio will become the 25th state where the online retailer collects sales tax." The article goes on to say that "In exchange, the Ohio Tax Credit Authority gave Amazon an exemption on sales taxes for equipment purchases at the data centers and a payroll tax credit for new jobs, according to Bloomberg News. The incentives are valued at about $81 million over 15 years."

Hugh Pickens writes:

There are some good reasons it's been 37 years since the last triple-crown winner as Lexi Pandell wrote on June 3 that post-race recovery is no joke for a thousand-pound animal that can run more than 40 miles per hour. There are two weeks between the Derby and the Preakness, and three weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont. That tight schedule—and the super-specific needs of racehorses—means horses competing in the grueling back-to-back-to-back Triple Crown races have a big disadvantage against fresh horses. First, as a horse races, its muscles produce lactic acid. In humans, glycogen recoup takes about 24 hours. But horses take several days to process lactic acid and restore glycogen reserves. Trainers make sure their charges drink plenty of water and sometimes even use intravenous fluids to aid that repair process. Secondly, in addition to being the last race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes is also the longest. That's no easy feat, even for a racehorse. When a horse runs a tough race (or has a new workout at a longer distance), its muscles break down. Then, during rest, they reknit and adapt. A horse that has skipped the Preakness, however, has the luxury of time. Mubtaahij, who some picked to win the Belmont, had plenty of rest so he could be pushed for hard workouts two weeks prior to the Belmont.

Finally, at different points in its stride, a galloping horse puts all its weight on a single leg. That limb bears three times more weight than usual when galloping on a straightaway and, thanks to centrifugal force, a load five to 10 times greater on turns. This translates to skeletal microdamage. Race a horse during that critical period and you increase the risk of serious injuries mid-race. Two weeks [seven years] ago, vets were forced to euthanize the promising gray thoroughbred filly, Eight Belles, when she collapsed on the track after completing the race at Churchill Downs, suffering from two shattered ankles in her front legs. A fresh horse won't face any of those problems. Even a horse that ran in the Derby but skipped the Preakness will have five weeks to rest, and plenty of time for normal skeletal damage to repair, before the Belmont. "So, American Pharoah [sic], it'd be awesome if you win the Triple Crown, but you probably won't," concluded Pandell. "It's not your fault. It's science and those pesky fresh horses." Science was wrong.

[Ed note: The proper spelling of the title for an ancient Egyptian king is "Pharaoh." This ABC News story American Pharoah Rides Misspelled Name to Brink of History notes the registered name for the horse is "American Pharoah" and provides some background on how that came to be.]

We are having some difficulties with the site at the moment. We are aware that there is an error being presented about our certificate being expired. We are working on it and appreciate your patience while we iron this out.

Interim measure #1: try to use the non-secure link to the site http://soylentnews.org
Interim measure #2: Accept the expired cert, but be sure to uncheck the 'Permanently store this exception' checkbox (this may not be available to you on very recent versions of Firefox).

If you have other suggestions on workarounds, please submit as a comment. Be certain we are doing all we can to get the site back up and running!

[Update] NCommander reports that: "New SSL certificate has been installed and the site no longer generates certificate errors. I'm continuing to do work to get performance for Firefox to be decent."

[Update 2]: A revised frontend proxy is nearly operational and ready to go into service which will resolve performance issues for firefox

takyon writes:

The European Parliament is debating a passenger name record (PNR) law that would store information collected by airlines about passengers, including email addresses, credit card details, phone numbers, and meal choices (halal, kosher, etc), for use by security services. The proposal was rejected last year, but it is now back with over 800 amendments, some of which call for the proposal to be scrapped altogether:

Europarl's resident "Mr Data" said there is no proof that data retention stops terrorism. In an impassioned speech, German Green MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht said it was "a scandal" that member states and the European Commission were still pushing for this law even after the European Court of Justice ruled blanket data retention illegal.

Mocking the position of the European People's Party, he said: "Criminals adjust to retention loopholes, so why don't we keep the data for 100 years? Or why don't we retain data on train passengers? I could travel throughout Europe by train, am I not then a huge security threat? Or by car? Why don't we track cars? Why don't we just tape everything everyone does all the time? That is your [EPP] agenda."

Britain's police forces retain the data of all persons arrested by them for 100 years, whether or not they are ever charged with a crime or found guilty.

Dutch MEP Sophie In't Veld also rejected EPP claims that storage of passenger data would have prevented the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris earlier this year.

However, Swedish MEP Kristina Winberg of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, which includes British political party UKIP, said she didn't "feel safe in my own country" and that PNR data retention was necessary. British Conservative MEP Timothy Kirkhope added: "I am still convinced of the necessity and proportionality of the instrument. The threats we face are real and we need to find solutions."

The EDRi (European Digital Rights) has sent postcards to all EU MEPs.

AnonTechie writes:

Exams are stressful, so it's understandable that some people would want to circumvent the hard work of studying by instead cheating. For students taking the national university entrance exams in China, there's now one more little thing to worry about: drones, deployed to catch cheaters.

The drone is a hexarotor and, as reported by China's state-owned ECNS news service, it will scan for suspicious radio signals from exam-takers. While that won't stop any cheaters who use low-tech methods to get around difficult questions, it will detect any number of advanced methods that rely on the test-taker exchanging information with a second party outside the exam room. These methods include cameras hidden in glasses with transmitters hidden in water bottles, cell phones hooked up to flesh-colored wireless headphones, and pen cameras that film the exam-takers' test.

The anti-cheating drone hovers at 1600 feet above the ground, and can travel 3000 feet from where it's deployed. If it eavesdrops on a radio signal from one of these devices, the drone forwards the location to operators, who can see where that exam taker is on their mobile device. Cheaters who get caught can face legal penalties. ECNS states that the exam drone led to the arrest of 9 suspects in 2014.

http://www.popsci.com/anti-cheating-drone-will-watch-exam-takers-china

[Also Covered By]: Quartz, Daily Mail, Washington Post, and Wired UK.

"ticho" writes:

Rare clouds high in the Earth's atmosphere turned the night's sky a vivid blue yesterday as summer sunlight was scattered by tiny ice crystals. Pictures captured in northern England show the midnight skies illuminated with an electric blue colour.

The phenomenon was caused by rare noctilucent clouds - extremely small ice crystals that form in the mesopause - that sit more than 47 miles (75km) above the Earth's surface. These clouds, which are the highest in the Earth's atmosphere, scatter the sunlight as it dips low in the sky, creating an eerie glow. They usually occur in the weeks around the summer solstice when sunlight dips just below the horizon to illuminate the clouds.

More at sott.net.

takyon writes:

Another day, another U.S. law enforcement official calling for regulation and weakening of encryption. This time, Michael Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, has told Congress that Internet communication services are helping ISIS/ISIL and other terrorist groups as they are now "Going Dark," and the FBI needs a "front door":

As far as the FBI is concerned, private companies must "build technological solutions to prevent encryption above all else," the Washington Post reports Steinbach as saying. That's a pretty sharp reverse ferret from the FBI, which four years ago was recommending encryption as a basic security measure. But Steinbach said evildoers are hiding behind US-made technology to mask their actions.

Steinbach told the committee that encrypted communications were the bane of the agency's efforts to keep the American public safe from terror. But the FBI wasn't insisting on back door access to encryption; rather, it wants companies to work directly with law enforcement where necessary. "Privacy above all other things, including safety and freedom from terrorism, is not where we want to go," Steinbach said. "We're not looking at going through a back door or being nefarious."

Instead the FBI wants a front door; a system to allow it to break encryption created by US companies. Understandably, US tech firms aren't that keen on the idea, since "we have borked encryption" isn't much of a selling point.

takyon writes:

The Washington Post reports that federal regulators are likely to approve AT&T's $49 billion purchase of DirecTV in coming weeks, in exchange for several promises, including temporary acceptance of some of the Federal Communications Commission's proposed "Open Internet" net neutrality rules:

Among the deal's so-called conditions is expected to be something fairly simple. AT&T is prepared to accept aspects of the net neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission earlier this year, according to people familiar with the negotiations, who declined to be named because the deliberations are private.

AT&T has publicly opposed making the agency's newest net neutrality rules a condition of the acquisition. It said when it first proposed the merger that it was prepared to abide by an older version of net neutrality. But in negotiations with the FCC, which must approve the deal, AT&T may be willing to go further.

If AT&T ultimately followed the newer rules for Internet providers, it would be committing to at least three things. It would honor the FCC's ban on the slowing of Web sites, as well as a ban on blocking Web sites. It would also comply with a ban against taking payments from Web site operators to speed up their content, a practice known as "paid prioritization."

It is unclear how long AT&T would be required to abide by such a commitment, said the people familiar with the plans.

AT&T is part of an industry coalition suing to roll back the net neutrality rules. But if regulators approve the deal with an AT&T commitment to net neutrality, the company would be bound by the rules for the duration of the agreement no matter what happens to the court case.

Original Submission

bradley13 writes:

After seeing problems with the Red Cross response local storm relief (example: 40% of available emergency vehicles used for press conferences), reporter Laura Sullivan decided to look into what happened in Haiti, where the American Red Cross collected a whopping $500 million in donations.

Her report is damning. The largest proportion of these were to go into housing. The Red Cross built...wait for it...six houses. In one area where the Red Cross promised to spend $24 million, and even printed a brochure exclaiming over all that they accomplished, the local residents are unaware of any Red Cross activity.

Meanwhile the Red Cross refuses to provide more than a very high level overview of their projects. No financial figures are provided that would allow one to figure out how much of that $500 million was actually spent on relief, and where the rest of it went.

takyon writes:

Scientists have created rat forelimbs with "functioning vascular and muscle tissue" using techniques previously used to create bioartificial organs:

The composite nature of our limbs makes building a functional biological replacement particularly challenging," explains Harald Ott, MD, of the MGH Department of Surgery and the Center for Regenerative Medicine, senior author of the paper. "Limbs contain muscles, bone, cartilage, blood vessels, tendons, ligaments and nerves – each of which has to be rebuilt and requires a specific supporting structure called the matrix. We have shown that we can maintain the matrix of all of these tissues in their natural relationships to each other, that we can culture the entire construct over prolonged periods of time, and that we can repopulate the vascular system and musculature."

The current study uses technology Ott discovered as a research fellow at the University of Minnesota, in which living cells are stripped from a donor organ with a detergent solution and the remaining matrix is then repopulated with progenitor cells appropriate to the specific organ. His team and others at MGH and elsewhere have used this decellularization technique to regenerate kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs from animal models, but this is the first reported use to engineer the more complex tissues of a bioartificial limb.

The research team then cultured the forelimb matrix in a bioreactor, within which vascular cells were injected into the limb's main artery to regenerate veins and arteries. Muscle progenitors were injected directly into the matrix sheaths that define the position of each muscle. After five days in culture, electrical stimulation was applied to the potential limb graft to further promote muscle formation, and after two weeks, the grafts were removed from the bioreactor. Analysis of the bioartificial limbs confirmed the presence of vascular cells along blood vessel walls and muscle cells aligned into appropriate fibers throughout the muscle matrix.

[...] The research team also successfully decellularized baboon forearms to confirm the feasibility of using this approach on the scale that would be required for human patients.

kaszz writes:

Intel has often been portrayed as the golden child within the Linux/BSD community and by those desiring a fully-free system without tainting their kernel with binary blobs while wanting a fully-supported open-source driver. The Intel Linux graphics driver over the years hasn't required any firmware blobs for acceleration, compared to AMD's open-source driver having many binary-only microcode files and Nouveau also needing blobs — including firmware files that NVIDIA still hasn't released for their latest GPUs. However, beginning with Intel Skylake and Broxton CPUs, their open-source driver will now too require closed-source firmware. The required "GuC" and "DMC" firmware files are for handling the new hardware's display microcontroller and workload scheduling engine. These firmware files are explicitly closed-source licensed and forbid any reverse-engineering. What choices are left for those wanting a fully-free, de-blobbed system while having a usable desktop?

Time to revive the Open Graphics Project...?

(those binary blobs may contain root kits)

Earlier tonight, I modified our varnish rules to redirect all traffic to https://soylentnews.org if they came in as plain HTTP. Unfortunately, due to dropping SSLv3 support to prevent POODLE attacks, IE6 clients will no longer be able to reach SoylentNews. If this seriously inconveniences a large number of users, we may go through the trouble of whitelisting IE6 to drop down to HTTP only.

In addition, I applied an experimental update to production to try and clear as many errors as possible from the Apache error logs, in an attempt to continue isolating any remaining bugs and slowdowns. I also ripped out more dead code related to FireHose, Achievements, and Tags. As such, site performance appears to roughly be back to where it should be, and I have yet to see any 500 errors post-upgrade (though I concede that said update has only been up for about 2 hours at this point).

Tor traffic is set to bypass HTTPS due to the fact there is no way to prevent a self-signed certificate warning, and by design, tor both encrypts and authenticates hosts when connecting to them. A few lingering issues with the tor proxy were fixed with most recent code push, and the onion site should be back to functioning normally

P.S. I'm aware that the site is generating warnings due to the fact we use a SHA-1 based certificate. We will be changing out the certificate as soon as reasonably possible.

takyon writes:

A former Australian Federal Police counter-terrorism officer has pleaded guilty to two counts of stalking using restricted databases:

The officer, Roman Eiginson, stood trial for stalking an ex who had left him when he married a Russian woman. As the Canberra Times reports, 53-year-old Eiginson is a former Soviet soldier who came to Australia in the early 1990s and joined the AFP in 2001.

Eiginson used the AFP's PROMIS (Police Realtime Online Management System) database to get the addresses of the ex-girlfriend and her new partner. Due to face six charges in the ACT Magistrates Court yesterday, Eiginson entered his guilty plea to two charges and the prosecution offered no evidence on the others, the Canberra Times reports.

The AFP is one of the most prominent supporters of mass data retention in Australia, but this isn't the first time in recent years it's had trouble policing its own officers' handling of data. In 2014, an officer in NSW was charged with a range of offences including two counts of divulging proscribed information, and four counts of unauthorised access to data.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write in the NYT that two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, recently published a controversial piece called "Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics" that criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today's most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are "sufficiently elegant and explanatory." Whether or not you agree with them, Ellis and Silk have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given physics its credibility:

Chief among the 'elegance will suffice' advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the 'only game in town' capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the 'many worlds' version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts. These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.

Richard Dawid argues that physics, or at least parts of it, are about to enter an era of post-empirical science. "How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally?" ask Frank and Gleiser. "Are superstrings and the multiverse, painstakingly theorized by hundreds of brilliant scientists, anything more than modern-day epicycles?"

takyon writes:

The brain's reaction to certain words could be used to replace passwords, according to a study by researchers from Binghamton University in New York:

In "Brainprint," a newly published study in academic journal Neurocomputing, researchers from Binghamton University observed the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms, such as FBI and DVD. They recorded the brain's reaction to each group of letters, focusing on the part of the brain associated with reading and recognizing words, and found that participants' brains reacted differently to each acronym, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer with 94 percent accuracy. The results suggest that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person's identity.

According to Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor of psychology and linguistics at Binghamton University and co-author of "Brainprint," brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancellable and cannot be stolen by malicious means the way a finger or retina can.

Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor at Binghamton University's departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering, doesn't see brainprint as the kind of system that would be mass-produced for low security applications (at least in the near future) but it could have important security applications.

"We tend to see the applications of this system as being more along the lines of high-security physical locations, like the Pentagon or Air Force Labs, where there aren't that many users that are authorized to enter, and those users don't need to constantly be authorizing the way that a consumer might need to authorize into their phone or computer," Jin said.

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and Binghamton University's Interdisciplinary Collaboratino Grants (ICG) Program.