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Phoenix666 writes:

So Apple's got its very own newsreader app, aptly called News. It will come natively installed on its iOS 9 mobile operating system this fall. This adds to the list of third parties that publishers have come to rely upon to distribute their stories. Apple says one of the most appealing things about News is stories will look and feel distinctive, as if they're coming directly from publishers' own sites, creating a sense of independent control over their own content.

And yet.

As with its Podcasts app, iTunes, and the App Store, News is Apple's app, which means Apple is the ultimate arbiter of what appears on it. Shortly after announcing News, the company released a publishing guide. So far, it seems targeted largely at developers testing the app and figuring out how to publish on it ahead of its official release. But the guide does say "channels" will need to be approved by Apple, meaning Apple will determine to some extent what is or is not allowed on News.

And this matters at a time when a few prominent tech companies are becoming the stewards of the news millions of people see, read, watch, and experience each day. Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are the entry point for many readers checking the news daily—not to mention Google News. And each has its own standards for what it will and will not allow to appear. Now that Apple has committed to becoming a publisher, another tech giant will be mediating the news that the public consumes. This means the standards Apple chooses to follow will have a direct impact on what millions of readers see—or don't see.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/apples-news-app-gives-power-decide-whats-news/

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

A security researcher has published attack code he said makes it easy to steal the iCloud passwords of people using the latest version of Apple iOS for iPhones and iPads.

The proof-of-concept attack exploits a flaw in Mail.app, the default iOS e-mail program. Since the release of version 8.3 in early April, the app has failed to properly strip out potentially dangerous HTML code from incoming e-mail messages. The proof-of-concept exploit capitalizes on this failure by downloading a form from a remote server that looks identical to the legitimate iCloud log-in prompt. It can be displayed each time the booby-trapped message is viewed.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/serious-ios-bug-makes-it-easy-to-steal-users-icloud-passwords/

Original Submission

tathra writes:

A law that was allegedly passed in response to corporate accounting scandals like Enron's and Worldcom's is now being used far outside of its original intentions:

A lot of Internet users delete their browser history and clear their cache and cookies.

It's just one of those things you do — some more often than others — if you own and use a computer.

"If you don't clear this information, it's there for someone to come along and retrieve — either by sitting down at your computer or remotely if you visit vicious websites or get a virus," said a Patrol Tech expert.

But the recent Boston Marathon bombing trial has brought to light a law, ratified in 2002, that could land you with a federal charge of obstructing justice for — wait for it — clearing your browser history.

Techdirt points out some of the serious problems with this chilling precedent:

In a hypothetical posed recently (containing a real-world example), finding yourself in possession of child pornography poses a serious dilemma. Possession is a crime, but so is destruction of evidence. Sarbanes-Oxley demands the preservation of evidence in "foreseeable" investigations, and child porn possession is one of those crimes no law enforcement agency ignores.

The article over at Dailykos covers the relevant section of the law, along with other details:

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

The spirit of this law seems to be just another way to criminalize spoliation, but like too many laws in the post-9/11 world its written overly broad and rarely, if ever, used for its stated purpose. It scares me to see that simply performing maintenance on your computer, or worse being the victim of a CP-rickroll, will land you in prison no matter what you do. Is there anything we can do to stop this creeping totalitarianism, or is the police state already so entrenched that the only option left is to abandon ship?

AnonTechie writes:

A military plane crash in Spain was probably caused by computer files being accidentally wiped from three of its engines, according to investigators. Plane-maker Airbus discovered anomalies in the A400M's data logs after the crash, suggesting a software fault. And it has now emerged that Spanish investigators suspect files needed to interpret its engine readings had been deleted by mistake.

This would have caused the affected propellers to spin too slowly. The aeroplane crashed near Seville, during a test flight on 9 May, killing four crew members on board. Several countries that had already accepted deliveries of the plane - including the UK - grounded them following the accident. However, Airbus has announced it plans to fly one of its own A400M aircraft at the Paris Air Show next week.

The latest revelations about the investigation were first reported by the Reuters news agency.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33078767

[Also Covered By]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/report-airbus-transport-crash-caused-by-wipe-of-critical-engine-control-data/

Phoenix666 writes:

Thanks to Carnegie Mellon University advances in brain imaging technology, we now know how specific concrete objects are coded in the brain, to the point where we can identify which object, such as a house or a banana, someone is thinking about from its brain activation signature.

Now, CMU scientists are applying this knowledge about the neural representations of familiar concepts by teaching people new concepts and watching the new neural representations develop. Published in Human Brain Mapping, the scientists have -- for the first time -- documented the formation of a newly learned concept inside the brain and show that it occurs in the same brain areas for everyone.

This novel research merges brain science and instructional innovation, two of Carnegie Mellon's university-wide initiatives -- BrainHub, which focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors, and the Simon Initiative, which aims to measurably improve student learning outcomes by harnessing decades of learning science research.

Another scary and exciting field in the offing. We'll both be able to scan new languages and skills into our heads and make sure our brainwashing techniques have taken effect.

ticho writes:

Uwe Boll, known to videogame fans as the director of numerous game-to-film adaptations, including Postal, Alone in the Dark, and House of the Dead, has released a profanity-laden rant aimed at crowdfunding. The video comes as a Kickstarter campaign attempting to fund production of his latest project, Rampage 3, limps toward its conclusion with less than half of its goal and fewer than four days remaining.

"Basically, my message is, f**k you," says Boll, "because it is so f**king absurd what retarded, amateur idiots [are] collecting money on that absurd website." Boll goes on to complain about the crowdfunding system's failure to deliver on his expectations.

With the campaign appearing doomed, Boll claims to have decided to give up on the project. Despite his opinion that it is, "an important film," Boll acknowledges, "nobody seems to care about Rampage 3, so, I guess I shouldn't do it, then."

Phoenix666 writes:

Sen. John McCain pens an opinion piece on Wired:

America's military technological advantage is eroding—and fast.

For the past decade, our adversaries have invested heavily in rapidly improving their militaries to counter our unique advantages. At the same time, the speed of globalization and commercialization means that advanced disruptive technologies are now—and increasingly will be—available to less sophisticated militaries, terrorist groups, and other non-state actors.

Maintaining our military technological advantage is about much more than a larger defense budget or a better fighter or submarine. These things are important, but to give our military the capabilities it needs to defend the nation, the Department of Defense must be able to access innovation in areas such as cyber, robotics, data analytics, miniaturization, and autonomy, innovation that is much more likely to come from Silicon Valley, Austin, or Mesa than Washington.

[...] There are those who say that even with changes like these, our nation's innovators simply aren't interested in doing business with the Pentagon. And after spending much of my career in Washington scrutinizing Pentagon business practices, I am not exactly surprised to hear such sentiments. But in the final analysis, I believe the brightest minds will always be driven to solve the world's toughest problems. These are the problems our military confronts every day. And these are the problems we can solve if we create an acquisition system that enables the Department of Defense to take advantage of the best minds, firms, and technologies that America and the world have to offer.

n1 writes:

The BBC reports:

One of the leading anti-virus software providers has revealed that its own systems were recently compromised by hackers.

Kaspersky Lab said it believed the attack was designed to spy on its newest technologies.

It said the intrusion involved up to three previously unknown techniques.

The Russian firm added that it was continuing to carry out checks, but believed it had detected the intrusion at an early stage.

Although it acknowledged that the attackers had managed to access some of its files, it said that the data it had seen was "in no way critical to the operation" of its products.

Additionally, an Anonymous Coward also provides an article from Der Spiegel, which says:

Analysts at Kaspersky's Moscow headquarters had already been familiar with important features of the malware that was being used against them. They believe it is a modernized and redeveloped version of the Duqu cyber weapon, which made international headlines in 2011. The cyber weapons system that has now been discovered has a modular structure and seems to build on the earlier Duqu platform.

In fact, says Vitaly Kamluk, Kaspersky's principal security researcher and a key member of the team that analyzed the new virus, some of the software passages and methods are "very similar or almost identical" to Duqu. The company is now referring to the electronic intruder as "Duqu 2.0." "We have concluded that it is the same attacker," says Kamluk.

When asked who they believe could be behind the software, Kaspersky officials are typically vague -- which is the typical attitude shown by international IT security vendors when it comes to the question of attribution. The modular Duqu arsenal is "extremely complex and very, very expensive," says Kamluk. "Cyber criminals are not behind this. We are probably dealing with nation-state attackers." As is often the case in the difficult search for the true originators of cyber attacks, which technology can easily cover up, the targets themselves could provide the best clues about who may have perpetrated the attack.

It also suggests that Israel could be behind the attack, although this seems rather speculative.

Phoenix666 writes:

There's plenty of interesting work going on trying to make large trucks more fuel efficient. One such example is the company Wrightspeed, which has been building range-extended electric powertrains that companies like Fedex can use to completely replace the conventional internal combustion bits on their existing trucks.

"[They have] all the things you need to make the vehicle go," Ian Wright told Ars. Wright is one of the original founders of Tesla but more recently has been focusing his attention on bigger vehicles, "since they burn so much fuel."

Wrightspeed's powertrain consists of electric motors (one for each drive wheel) powered by a battery pack, which can either be plugged in and charged from the grid or by the range-extender, a turbine capable of running on number of different liquid fuels. This replaces the diesel engine, transmission, propshaft, and differentials one might normally expect to find in something like a delivery truck.

Clean delivery trucks will be a major boon for urban air quality. The Bronx, for example, has one of the nation's highest rates of asthma, which many attribute to the semi traffic crossing the borough on the Cross Bronx Expressway.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.

What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate's very existence in the path was random. And what's more, it hadn't happened yet.

In other words, it was as if the helium particle "knew" whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first.

More here: http://secondnexus.com/technology-and-innovation/physicists-demonstrate-how-time-can-seem-to-run-backward-and-the-future-can-affect-the-past/

Also covered at: phys.org. An abstract is available; full report is pay-walled. The original news article is at Australian National University

takyon writes:

BBC News reports that chimpanzees in Guinea have been seen drinking naturally-occurring alcoholic sap in the wild:

Scientists studying chimpanzees in Guinea have seen evidence of long-term and recurrent ingestion of ethanol by apes. The 17-year study recorded chimps using leaves to drink fermented palm sap. Some drank enough alcohol to produce "visible signs of inebriation". The study - published in the journal Royal Society Open Science - revealed their tipple of choice is naturally fermented palm wine, produced by raffia palm trees.

In the Bossou area of Guinea, where this research took place, some local people harvest "palm wine" from the trees - tapping them at the crown, and gathering the sap in plastic containers, which they collect in the mornings and evenings. Researchers working in the area had already witnessed chimpanzees climbing the trees - often in groups - and drinking the naturally fermented palm sap. The chimps used drinking tools called leaf sponges - handfuls of leaves that they chew and crush into absorbent sponges, dip into the liquid and suck out the contents.

To work out the extent of the animals' indulging, the scientists measured the alcohol content of the wine in the containers and filmed the chimps' "drinking sessions". The research team, led by Dr Kimberley Hockings from Oxford Brookes University and the Centre for Research in Anthropology in Portugal, worked out that the sap was about 3% alcohol by volume. "Some individuals were estimated to have consumed about 85ml of alcohol," she said, "the equivalent to 8.5 UK units [approximately equal to a bottle of wine]".

takyon writes:

The Bilderberg meeting is an annual conference that brings together politicians, business leaders, financiers, lobbyists, academics, and some journalists from the U.S. and Europe. Participants at this year's Bilderberg meeting include Google's Eric Schmidt, VP of Engineering for Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis, libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel, UK Chancellor George Osborne, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg, and David Petraeus, who recently received a slap on the wrist after his powerful friends wrote letters of support urging a federal judge not to harshly sentence him for mishandling classified information.

There is no detailed agenda, with no resolutions or votes. "Thanks to the private nature of the conference, the participants are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions," Bilderberg says. "As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights." Critics argue its aim is more sinister and there are countless different flavours of conspiracy theory.

One topic not on the outline list to be discussed this year is the environment. The Breitbart website calls this "stupid". But the importance of the Bilderberg meeting is emphasised by the Guardian, which argues it's more influential than the G7 meeting of leading economies that took place at the weekend, finishing with a call for an end to the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century. The sense of importance is echoed in the Irish Times, which says the invitation for Michael O'Leary means he can now take "his place among the chieftains of the world". Bilderberg might be secretive, but it's unlikely to be quiet this year.

Lawrence Lessig attended the meeting in 2013.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In 1951, Denmark had resolved to improve living conditions in Greenland, its Arctic colony. Many people still made a living by hunting seal, only a small percentage spoke Danish, and tuberculosis was widespread.

The best way to modernise the island was to create a new type of Greenlander, the Danish authorities decided, so they sent out telegrams to priests and headteachers asking them to identify intelligent children between the ages of six and 10. The plan - formed with the help of the charity Save the Children Denmark - was to send them to foster families in Denmark so they could be re-educated as "little Danes".

Denmark, the colonial master over Greenland, decided to remove a group of 22 intelligent Inuit children from their families and relocate them to Denmark for re-education. The children were first quarantined and then placed in foster families. The next year part of them were returned to Greenland but they were placed instead of their homes to an orphanage where they were not allowed to use their mother tongue. Instead of becoming some new wonderful breed of citizens many of the subjects became alcoholics and died young.

[A female reporter looking at this event] received a letter from the Danish Red Cross in 1998 in which it said it "regretted" its role in the episode.

Finally, in 2009, Save the Children Denmark apologised too. But an internal investigation showed that some of the documents detailing the organisation's involvement have disappeared - Save the Children admits they could have been deliberately destroyed.

"When we look at what happened, it was a clear violation of children's fundamental rights. There's hardly a rule that hasn't been broken here," says Mimi Jacobsen, secretary general of Save the Children Denmark. "Their well-being was set aside in favour of a project. They meant well, but it all went terribly wrong. I suppose the thinking at the time was that they wanted to educate and improve Greenlanders to give them a better future."

The Danish Government has not yet apologized for this experiment. Greenland now has it's own parliament which decides upon and administers internal matters, but Denmark retains control over constitutional affairs, foreign relations and defence.

Phoenix666 writes:

MakerBot's 3-D printers will soon be able to produce items that look like bronze, limestone, and wood, thanks to a new line of plastic-based composite materials shipping later this year. But the launch may be too little, too late: Entrepreneurs and artists interested in working with metal and wood are already embracing desktop milling machines that can handle the real deal.

The calculation is simple: Buy a MakerBot Replicator, the leading desktop 3-D printer, for $2,889, and you can produce plastic prototypes or the kind of trinkets that you might find in a Happy Meal. Buy a small-scale milling machine like the Othermill, which retails for $2,199, and you can make jewelry and mechanical parts out of everything from aluminum to walnut.

"Once you can cut metal, you can make things that last," says Danielle Applestone, chief executive of Other Machine Co. "For the first couple of months that I was working here, I was scared of cutting with metal. It was louder, I was worried I was going to break the tool. But as soon as I jumped in, it quickly became like wax to me."

"Metal is power, it really is," she says. "You don't go back."

It should be noted that MakerBot's base model also went from $400 to almost $3K when Stratasys acquired them.

takyon writes:

Western Digital subsidiary HGST has announced the Ultrastar Archive Ha¹⁰, a 10 terabyte helium-filled shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drive. It rotates at 7,200 RPM and has a 256MB cache.

HGST has also released libzbc, "a simple library providing functions for manipulating disks supporting the Zoned Block Command (ZBC) and Zoned-device ATA command set (ZAC)."

The new drive is intended for enterprise bulk storage that is infrequently accessed. SMR tracks are partially overlapped which can hurt drive performance. The Ha¹⁰ has lower sequential write speeds than the He⁸. Seagate has already released 8 TB SMR drives.

What's next? 12 TB? 16 TB? HAMR?