SoylentNews

wantkitteh writes:

Ars Technica reports that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement debate and vote due to be held at the EU Parliament on Wednesday 10th June were postponed at the last minute following an MEP revolt over the back-door inclusion of the controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses:

Things began yesterday, when an e-mail was sent to MEPs on behalf of Martin Schulz, the President of the European Parliament. It informed them that the text on TTIP agreed by the European Parliament's trade committee (INTA) a fortnight ago would not be voted on as previously agreed. The reason given was that there were so many amendments to the text—more than 200—that it was not possible to consider them in the plenary session. Schulz was therefore asking the INTA committee to re-work the text, taking into account some of the amendments, and discarding others.

Although the European Parliament vote on the TTIP text was cancelled, the plan was to continue with the debate today. But in yet another surprise, early this morning the MEPs voted by an extremely narrow margin—183 in favour and 181 against—to postpone the debate as well. The earliest that these could now take place is July, although they may be pushed into autumn.

Underlying these moves is a growing discontent among the left-wing S&D group with the INTA committee's compromise text, particularly the way it left open the door for the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. One amendment to the committee's text, which called for the European Parliament to "oppose the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in TTIP," was gaining support among S&D MEPs.

ISDS is a mechanism by which commercial entities can extract financial compensation from governments who have made any of their activities, or planned future ventures, illegal. The inclusion of ISDS clauses in the NAFTA trade agreement has lead to Canada being sued by an oil company for $250million after various provinces banned fracking, Mexico being sued by a waste disposal company for $16.7million for keeping a dump site closed due to concerns over water supply contamination, as well as the US being sued by a fuel company for $1billion after California banned the use of a fuel additive also over water supply contamination concerns, along with hundreds of other suits against all three nations.

iWantToKeepAnon writes:

Matthew Inman over at The Oatmeal announced a documentary about Nikola Tesla called Tower to the People.

You may recall that Inman started a crowd funding campaign to save Tesla's Lab. Joseph Sikorski, who donated $33,000 back in 2012, directed the film. The movie is finished, but he's seeking funds to get it distributed and raise awareness about Nikola Tesla and their science center. If you want to support the film, please back the project or share this image.

For more background on Nikola Tesla, check out this entertaining and informative Ted talk.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Noah Remnick writes in the NYT that as the clock ticks on Richard Matt and David Sweat who escaped from maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility last weekend, experts say the two escaped killers are increasingly likely to evade capture for a substantial period. "A lot of escapes are spontaneous and the guys get tripped up because they don't know where to go," says Terry Pelz. "These guys know where to go. Most guys get caught after a few hours because they don't have a plan. These guys planned their escape and planned it well, so it could take much longer to catch them." Experts say there are some cardinal rules for living off the grid. "Your first priority is finding a secure place and a source of money," says Darrin Giglio. "You don't want anything traceable, so you'll either have to establish a new identity or get paid off the books, maybe as a day laborer."

Cellphone, credit cards, and surveillance cameras have added new layers of complication and possibility for both fugitives and law enforcement. "If they're smart, fugitives can really take advantage of technology," says Frank Ahearn, a New York-based skip-tracer turned skip-maker and author of "How to Disappear". "They can buy prepaid cellphones and credit cards. Their apartments, cars and bank accounts can be set up under anonymous corporations. They can live almost entirely virtually. That wasn't possible in the past." To combat such trickery, police departments have access to increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching forms of search and surveillance. "It's easier than ever to comb through enormous amounts of data. And with surveillance cameras all over the place, the only way to avoid detection might be changing appearance. Some people even get plastic surgery," says Giglio. "It's like being in the witness protection program. To be successful, you have to give up your entire past. Most people can't do that." Under such agonizing circumstances, there is no shortage of ways to blunder. Escapees often return home or place phone calls to friends and family members, whom the police might be tracking. Other times it is an escapee's suspicious behavior that tips off bystanders. "A lot of inmates who are legitimately released encounter a confusing new life," says Pelz. "They don't know how to drive cars, use cellphones, use credit cards. They need to re-educate themselves. That can trip up escapees too. Even if it's a well-planned escape, people get sloppy."

takyon writes:

UK Home Secretary Theresa May is continuing a trend of ignoring science advisers when it comes to drug policy:

Home Secretary Theresa May and her statutory advisers on drug policy look to be heading for a showdown over government plans to deal with so-called "legal highs". Some members of The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) are understood to be furious that they were not consulted on proposed legislation for a blanket ban on psychoactive substances. The relationship between the ACMD and ministers in various governments has long been strained. There have been sackings and mass resignations in the last few years, amid claims that expert scientists were being bullied and ignored because their advice didn't coincide with government policy.

Questions are now being asked as to whether the ACMD is being edged out of the drugs debate - 44 years after a Conservative government set it up to ensure science rather than politics dictated policy. In the House of Lords yesterday, a number of peers demanded to know why ministers had not asked the ACMD's opinion before drawing up the controversial Psychoactive Substances Bill.

"It is actually a legal requirement set out in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 that the ACMD must be consulted before alterations to the Act or new legislation is brought in," Labour peer Lord Rea told the House. "Instead, a specially appointed expert panel was set up by the Home Office. I can only suggest that this was done because the opinion of the ACMD is often not exactly welcomed by the Home Office".

The principle which underpinned the drugs debate in the UK at that time [in 1971] was the longstanding and broadly accepted view that addicts were ill and required treatment rather than punishment. Known as the "British system", ministers felt a medical science-led approach was preferable to US-style prohibition. Roll the clock forward four decades and the government view seems to have turned around entirely in responding to the threat from so-called "legal highs". The bill to outlaw NPS prohibits everything "capable of producing a psychoactive effect" unless it is specifically exempted - and there are concerns that the proposals are being introduced without proper consultation with health experts.

A blanket ban on psychoactive legal highs with prison sentences of up to seven years was featured in the Conservative Party's election manifesto and the Queen's Speech.

hubie writes:

NASA has released a dramatic new video of the dwarf planet Ceres.

The black-and-white animation lets viewers fly around the mysterious orb from an altitude of 8,400 miles, compressing the nine-hour Cererian day into 75 seconds. It was assembled from 80 images taken by the space agency's Dawn spacecraft.

You can read about the video or just go straight to it.

Presumably to make the video more dramatic, they exaggerated the vertical profile by a factor of two and they added a star field to the background.

takyon writes:

A Belgian woman has become the first to give birth to a child after having ovarian tissue that was removed and frozen nearly 14 years earlier transplanted back into her body:

The 27-year-old had an ovary removed at age 13, just before she began invasive treatment for sickle cell anaemia. Her remaining ovary failed following the treatment, meaning she would have been unlikely to conceive without the transplant. Experts hope that this procedure could eventually help other young patients. The woman gave birth to a healthy boy in November 2014, and details of the case were published on Wednesday in the journal Human Reproduction.

The woman, who has asked to remain anonymous, was diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia at the age of five. She emigrated from the Republic of Congo to Belgium where doctors decided her disease was so severe that she needed a bone marrow transplant using her brother's matching tissue. But before they could begin the bone marrow transplant, they needed to give her chemotherapy to disable her immune system and stop it from rejecting the foreign tissue. Chemotherapy can destroy the ovarian function, so they removed her right ovary and froze tissue fragments. At that time, she was showing signs of puberty, but had not yet started her periods. Her remaining ovary failed at 15. Ten years later, she decided she wanted to have a baby, so doctors grafted four of her thawed ovarian fragments onto her remaining ovary and 11 fragments onto other sites in her body. The patient started menstruating spontaneously five months later, and became pregnant naturally at the age of 27.

Phoenix666 writes:

Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including "mods" that leverage the games' simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.

Called the Digital Manufacturing Commons (DMC), and sponsored by a collection of universities and major manufacturers through UI Labs' Digital Manufacturing Design and Innovation (DMDI) Institute, the platform puts design, modeling, and simulation tools in reach of collaborative teams of all sizes, and allows designs to be "compiled" and tested like software projects before being prototyped in the physical world. If it gets traction, the software could open up the rapidly growing "digital manufacturing" space to allow even the smallest maker teams to partner with the largest manufacturing and distribution companies, allowing gadget-makers to scale into global players.

At this week's Big M Manufacturing Conference in Detroit, GE and UI Labs—a research center funded by a public-private partnership to help advance manufacturing technology—announced the roll-out of the Digital Manufacturing Commons, which GE Research Global Technology Director for Manufacturing and Materials Technologies Christine M. Furstoss said is "like massive multi-player online (MMO) gaming meeting the real world of manufacturing."

takyon writes:

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found a way to assemble DNA nanostructures without a water-based solvent:

[They discovered] that adding a small amount of water to their solvent increases the assembly rate and provides a new means for controlling the process. The solvent may also facilitate the production of more complex structures by reducing the problem of DNA becoming trapped in unintended structures.

The research could open up new applications for DNA nanotechnology, and help apply DNA technology to the fabrication of nanoscale semiconductor and plasmonic structures.

"DNA nanotechnology structures are getting more and more complex, and this solvent could help researchers that are working in this growing field," said Nicholas Hud, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "With this work, we have shown that DNA nanostructures can be assembled in a water-free solvent, and that we can mix water with the same solvent to speed up the assembly. We can also take the structures that were assembled in this solvent mixed with water – remove the water by applying vacuum – and have the DNA structures remain intact in the water-free solvent."

The assembly rate of DNA nanostructures can be very slow, and depends strongly on temperature. Raising the temperature increases this rate, but temperatures that are too high can cause the DNA structures to fall apart. The solvent system developed at Georgia Tech adds a new level of control over DNA assembly. DNA structures assemble at lower temperatures in this solvent, and adding water can adjust the solvent's viscosity, which allows for faster assembly compared to the water-free version of the solvent.

"This solvent changes the rules," said Isaac Gállego, a postdoctoral researcher in Hud's lab and the paper's first author. "We now have a tool that controls DNA assembly kinetics and thermodynamics all in one solvent. This solvent also offers enhanced properties for nanotechnology and for the stability of these nanomaterials in solution."

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers have found a way to 3D print structures of copper and gold, by stacking microscopically small metal droplets. These droplets are made by melting a thin metal film using a pulsed laser. 3D printing is a rapidly advancing field, that is sometimes referred to as the 'new cornerstone of the manufacturing industry'. However, at present, 3D printing is mostly limited to plastics. If metals could be used for 3D printing as well, this would open a wide new range of possibilities. Metals conduct electricity and heat very well, and they're very robust. Therefore, 3D printing in metals would allow manufacturing of entirely new devices and components, such as small cooling elements or connections between stacked chips in smartphones.

Researchers from FOM [Ed: No expansion given] and the University of Twente now made a major step towards high-resolution metal printing. They used laser light to melt copper and gold into micrometre-sized droplets and deposited these in a controlled manner. In this method, a pulsed laser is focused on a thin metal film. that locally melts and deforms into a flying drop. The researchers then carefully position this drop onto a substrate. By repeating the process, a 3D structure is made. For example, the researchers stacked thousands of drops to form micro-pillars with a height of 2 millimetres and a diameter of 5 micrometres. They also printed vertical electrodes in a cavity, as well as lines of copper. In effect, virtually any shape can be printed by smartly choosing the location of the drop impact.

3D printing metal is so yesterday. Graphene and carbon nanotubes are where it's at.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Washington Post:

"We will not ban questionable subreddits," Reddit's then-CEO, Yishan Wong, wrote mere months ago. "You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create."

But in an apparent reversal of that policy, and in an unprecedented effort to clean up its long-suffering image, Reddit has just banned five "questionable subreddits."

The site permanently removed the forums Wednesday afternoon for harassing specific, named individuals, a spokesperson said. Of the five, two were dedicated to fat-shaming, one to transphobia, one to racism and one to harassing members of a progressive video game site.

Unsurprisingly, a vocal contingent of Redditors aren't taking the changes well: "Reddit increases censorship," read one post on r/freespeech, while forums like r/mensrights and r/opieandanthony theorized they would be next.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has released a report claiming that U.S. tech companies have lost $35 billion in sales as a result of "failure of U.S. policymakers to address surveillance concerns" after the release of the first Snowden documents in 2013.

ITIF recommends that policymakers:

* Increase transparency about U.S. surveillance activities both at home and abroad.

* Strengthen information security by opposing any government efforts to introduce backdoors in software or weaken encryption.

* Strengthen U.S. mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs).

* Work to establish international legal standards for government access to data.

* Complete trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership that ban digital protectionism, and pressure nations that seek to erect protectionist barriers to abandon those efforts.

Original Submission

StingRay in the UK: British Invasion of Privacy

takyon writes:

Stingray cell site simulators (IMSI catchers) have been discovered in London according to an investigation by Sky News:

Sky News used software made by GMSK Cryptophone, a German security company, to look for the tell-tale signs of Stingray activity. Over three weeks, Sky News discovered more than 20 instances in London. The CEO of Cryptophone, Bjoern Rupp, said: "The abnormal events that Sky News had encountered can clearly be categorised as strong indicators for the presence of IMSI catchers in multiple locations."

Sky News has published its complete data logs here [50MB+]. This is believed to be the first direct evidence of Stingray use in the UK.

In November, The Times reported that the Metropolitan Police Service, the UK's largest police force, was using Stingray technology, citing anonymous sources. And according to The Guardian, the Metropolitan Police paid £143,455 for the surveillance equipment in 2009.

Despite repeated Freedom of Information requests, including by Sky News, the Met neither confirms nor denies that the force uses IMSI catchers. Asked directly about the force's use of stingrays by Sky News, Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met commissioner and the UK's most senior police officer, said: "We're not going to talk about it, because the only people who benefit are the other side, and I see no reason in giving away that sort of thing. If people imagine that we've got the resources to do as much intrusion as they worry about, I would reassure them that it's impossible."

Keith Bristow, the director-general of the National Crime Agency, also told Sky News: "Some of what we would like to talk about to get the debate informed and logical, we can't, because it would defeat the purpose of having the tactics in the first place. Frankly, some of what we need to do is intrusive, it is uncomfortable, and the important thing is we set that out openly and recognise there are difficult choices to be made."

Bruce Schneier on Increasing Use of Stingray

kadal writes:

Bruce Schneier has an article on increasing use of Stingray:

[Stingray] is the code name for an IMSI-catcher (IMSI = International Mobile Subscriber Identity), which is basically a fake cell phone tower sold by Harris Corporation to various law enforcement agencies. (It's actually just one of a series of devices with fish names -- Amberjack is another -- but it's the name used in the media.) What is basically does is trick nearby cell phones into connecting to it. Once that happens, the IMSI-catcher can collect identification and location information of the phones and, in some cases, eavesdrop on phone conversations, text messages, and web browsing.

There are dozens of these devices scattered around Washington, DC, and the rest of the country run by who-knows-what government or organization. Criminal uses are next.

He has been remarkably consistent about his main point:

We have one infrastructure. We can't choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don't. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy. We can be secure from everyone, or vulnerable to anyone.

"gewg_" writes:

TechDirt reports:

[Congresswoman] Sheila Jackson-Lee submitted a House Resolution honoring Frankie Knuckles, the pioneering House DJ (and, here, we no longer mean "House of Representatives") who passed away last year. Such resolutions are pretty typical and a nice honor, if fairly meaningless overall. Still, it seems somewhat bizarre that in a resolution honoring Knuckles, who won the first ever "Remixer of the Year" Grammy back in 1998, that Jackson-Lee used it as a reason to argue for stronger copyright protections.

Original Submission

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