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Phoenix666 writes:

Caspar Bowden, a leading British privacy advocate most well known for foreshadowing the revelations made by Edward Snowden, died of a fast-spreading skin cancer on Thursday in southern France, where he lived, his wife Sandi announced on Twitter. He was 53.

Bowden was an outspoken figure who worked for Microsoft and advised the British government and the European Union. He was traveling the world to speak about privacy at conferences.

At a hacker festival in France in May 2013, Bowden warned that European phone calls, emails and any kind of data could be watched by U.S. authorities without a warrant. A few weeks later, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the existence of a massive surveillance program.

I have seen Walls of Honor for famous statesmen, baseball players, civil rights leaders, scientists, and even computing pioneers, but not yet for pioneers of digital liberty. This guy should be on it.

throckmorten writes:

From Ars: "Spyware service provider Hacking Team orchestrated the hijacking of IP addresses it didn't own to help Italian police regain control over several computers that were being monitored in an investigation"

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/hacking-team-orchestrated-brazen-bgp-hack-to-hijack-ips-it-didnt-own/

Over a six day period in August 2013, Italian Web host Aruba S.p.A. fraudulently announced its ownership of 256 IP addresses into the global routing system known as border gateway protocol, the messages document. Aruba's move came under the direction of Hacking Team and the Special Operations Group of the Italian National Military Police, which was using Hacking Team's Remote Control System malware to monitor the computers of unidentified targets. The hijacking came after the IP addresses became unreachable under its rightful owner Santrex, the "bullet-proof" Web hosting provider that catered to criminals and went out of business in October 2013, according to KrebsOnSecurity.

It's not clear from the e-mails, but they appear to suggest Hacking Team and the Italian police were also relying on Santrex. The emails were included in some 400 gigabytes of proprietary data taken during last weekend's breach of Hacking Team and then made public on the Internet.

With the sudden loss of the block of IP addresses, Italy's Special Operations Group was unable to communicate with several computers that were infected with the Hacking Team malware. The e-mails show Hacking Team support workers discussing how the law enforcement agency could regain control. Eventually, Italian police worked with Aruba to get the block—which was known as 46.166.163.0/24 in Internet routing parlance—announced in the BGP system as belonging to Aruba. It's the first known case of an ISP fraudulently announcing another provider's address space, said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, which performs research on Internet performance.

Also covered by Brian Krebs:

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/hacking-team-used-spammer-tricks-to-resurrect-spy-network/

c0lo writes:

Quanta Magazine reports:

"This is a big shock," said Suchitra Sebastian, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Cambridge whose findings appeared today in an advance online edition of the journal Science. Insulators and metals are essentially opposites, she said. "But somehow, it's a material that's both. It's contrary to everything that we know."

The material, a much-studied compound called samarium hexaboride or SmB6, is an insulator at very low temperatures, meaning it resists the flow of electricity. Its resistance implies that electrons (the building blocks of electric currents) cannot move through the crystal more than an atom's width in any direction. And yet, Sebastian and her collaborators observed electrons traversing orbits millions of atoms in diameter inside the crystal in response to a magnetic field — a mobility that is only expected in materials that conduct electricity.

...

Amazingly, the observed deviation from the Lifshitz-Kosevich formula was presaged in 2010 by Sean Hartnoll and Diego Hofman, both then at Harvard University, in a paper that recast strongly correlated materials as higher-dimensional black holes, those infinitely steep curves in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. In their paper, Hartnoll and Hofman investigated the effect of strong correlations in metals by calculating corresponding properties of their simpler black hole model — specifically, how long an electron could orbit the black hole before falling in. "I had calculated what would replace this Lifshitz-Kosevich formula in more exotic metals," said Hartnoll, who is now at Stanford University. "And indeed it seems that the form [Sebastian] has found can be matched with this formula that I derived."

Other links:

• topological insulators (insulator in its interior but whose surface contains conducting states),
• SmB₆ as topological insulator,
• arxiv entry of the cited article

Phoenix666 writes:

This fall, the start-up Vapor Communications, for example, will introduce several devices to include subtle scents with books, movies and clothing. And the company will start mass production of its oPhone Duo, a tabletop device that can emit scents based on how an iPhone photo is labeled.

Another company, Scentee, already has a scent product on the market. The product, also called Scentee, is a cartridge that plugs into a smartphone's headphone jack. It can be set up with an app to emit a puff of fragrance when a text message or email arrives.
...
All of the products depend on a small pellet called an oChip — the "o" in the product names is for olfactory. In the oPhone, each chip contains from one to four aromas. The chips are sold in packets of eight, grouped into "families" of similar smells, called Coffee, Foodie and Memory. A person who wants to describe the smell of a pasta sauce, for example, could choose notes of tomato, rosemary and parsley, which would then command the player to position those chips so the air would flow over them, combining the scents.

Adding smell to entertainment would make it immersive, but do you really want to experience the odors when our heroes get trapped in the trash compactor on the Death Star?

takyon writes:

The TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers for June 2015 has been released. China's Tianhe-2 remains the leader with 33.86 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. It has topped the list since June 2013. The only new supercomputer in the top 10 is the Shaheen II in Saudi Arabia, a 5.536 PFlop/s Cray XC40 system using 196,608 Intel Xeon E5-2698v3 cores.

The Platform has an analysis of the results. Although performance growth is slowing, pre-exascale supercomputers (100+ petaflops) can be expected within the next two to three years. The U.S. Department of Energy's Aurora supercomputer will deliver 180 petaflops of performance in 2018. Around the same time, the Summit supercomputer is expected to reach 150-300 petaflops while Sierra will reach 100+ petaflops. ~1 exaflop supercomputers are expected to appear around 2018-2022.

The June 2015 Green500 list ranking supercomputers by megaflops per watt will be available sometime later in the month. Here is the November 2014 Green500 list. The Piz Daint supercomputer appears within the top 10 on both lists.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Guam's war against the coconut rhinoceros beetles, which have ravaged many coconut trees, has become more challenging, an expert said.

At stake in the battle against the beetles is the survival of the remaining coconut trees on the island, which aren't just a source of food. They're also a vital part of Guam's image as a tropical island, the Pacific Daily News reported Sunday.

One challenge that has set back ongoing efforts to try to eradicate the coconut rhinoceros beetles is the recent discovery that the virus Oryctes nudivirus, which is being used as a biological agent to kill the beetles, isn't as effective as expected, said Aubrey Moore, an entomologist, an associate professor at the University of Guam and a leading expert on the issue.

The virus, which attacks only rhinoceros beetles, typically reduces damage caused by coconut rhinoceros beetles by up to 90 percent, and population suppression lasts indefinitely, Moore stated.

But there's a problem with the use of the virus on Guam's beetles. Guam's coconut rhinoceros beetles seemed to have developed an immunity to the virus, so the next step is to try to find a more effective biological control agent, possibly another strain of virus, Moore said.

Researchers at AgResearch, a leading research institute for New Zealand's agriculture industry, and UOG, recently have discovered that the Guam rhinoceros beetles are "genetically different" from other coconut rhinoceros beetle populations and they are resistant to all available strains of (Oryctes nudivirus, or OrNV)," Moore said.

c0lo writes:

Julien Voisin blogs:

Today, I updated my Firefox, and had a new icon on my toolbar: pocket. I took at quick look at the ToS and privacy policy; here is my tl;dr:

Read it Later, Inc. is collecting a lot of intimate information and is tracking you.

When you share something through Pocket with a friend, the emails contains spying material using malware-like techniques to track your friends.

They are sharing those information with trusted third parties (Could be anyone they are doing business with.).

The policy might change, and it's your responsibility to check Pocket's website to see if it has.

[...] The Pocket implementation is not an extension (while it was available as an extension), it's implemented in Firefox. You can not remove it, only disable it, by going in about:config, since this option is not available in the preferences menu.

What the hell is pocket? on Mozilla's site:

The Pocket for Firefox button lets you save web pages and videos to Pocket in just one click. Pocket strips away clutter and saves the page in a clean, distraction-free view and lets you access them on the go through the Pocket app. All you need is a free account, an Internet connection and the Pocket button.

c0lo writes:

The leak is here.

First announced on reddit

[Ed. addition]

What is the TTIP?

It's the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

TTIP is the biggest free-trade agreement ever, it's being discussed for quite a while now between Europe and the US. The discussions have been critizised for their lack of transparency and a lot of people fear that industry regulations will be lower after the agreement diminishing rights of citizens. Since the outcome will affect 820 million people, we're investigating it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership

According to the reddit discussion, a number of the documents have already been made public.

[Ed. update: Typo fix and revised the link to the correctiv.org web site to point to the English version; removed text pertaining to the German version.]

takyon writes:

PandoDaily's Mark Ames has published a paywalled article [archive] entitled "Shillers for killers: Revealed: How the tobacco industry paid journalists, scientists, activists and lawyers to cover up the most deadly crime in human history." The article draws upon a new round of documents that was recently added to the University of California San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. The library contains 14 million documents and is growing, as noted on the Library's blog. Some bits are more relevant to our community.

In 1994, marketing director at the RJ Reynolds tobacco company wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to discuss topics related to protecting tobacco advertising on the Internet. Later that year, EFF's executive director sent a proposal to RJ Reynolds's direct marketing manager, Peter Michaelson, soliciting money to fund an EFF project that would oppose government regulations on commercial tobacco advertising on the Web. An alternative plan is suggested:

"We are also prepared to pursue a legal test of this alternative approach to regulation. For example, if MARC [RJR's direct marketers] or RJR decided to put one or another sponsored on-line service up on the Internet or via America-on-Line or other on-line service, the white paper could become the basis of a legal brief challenging the constitutionality of any governmental effort to block the programming on the basis of current advertising bans in electronic media... We have not budgeted for this alternative at this point."

Years before Glenn Greenwald teamed up with Laura Poitras and whistleblower Edward Snowden to expose the NSA, he worked as a lawyer for Wachtell Lipton, a law firm that sued ABC-TV for $10 billion and helped to gag smoking industry whistleblowers. This had a chilling effect on CBS, which prevented the airing of a 60 Minutes program covering Merrell Williams and Jeffrey Wigand until the next year. These events were covered by the 1996 Frontline documentary "Smoke In The Eye" [Internet Archive] and Wigand's story inspired the 1999 film, The Insider.

HughPickens.com writes:

Steven I. Weiss writes in The Atlantic how game theory can shed light both on what is happening in Washington and on how the bargaining power of its negotiating parties may evolve over time and comes to the conclusion that hypocrisy is essential to the functioning of Congress - in fact it's the only tool legislators have after they've rooted out real corruption. "Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member," writes Congressman Barney Frank in his new memoir, Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage. For legislators, cooperation is a form of political currency. They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts: "Because parliamentary bodies have to arrive at binding decisions on the full range of human activity in an atmosphere lacking the structure provided by either money or hierarchy, members have to find ways to bring some order out of what could be chaos," writes Frank. So trading votes, also known as logrolling, is how the business of politics is conducted. "Once you have promised another member that you will do something—vote a certain way, sponsor a particular bill, or conduct a hearing—you are committed to do it." According to Frank legislators have to act in ideologically inconsistent ways in the short run if they want to advance their larger objectives in the long run, as those larger objectives can only be achieved with teamwork. And the other members of their legislative team are only going to play ball with them if they know that they'll take one for the team, that they'll vote for something they don't like because the team needs it.

Game theory sets out conditions under which negotiating parties end up cooperating, and why they sometimes fail to do so. It does so based on analyzing what drives individuals in the majority of bargaining situations: incentives, access to information, initial power conditions, the extent of mutual trust, and accountability enforcement. Instead of seeing political flip-flopping as a necessary evil, Frank suggests it is inherent to democracy and according to Frank if there's any blame to be doled out in connection with political hypocrisy, it's to be placed on the heads of voters who criticize legislators for it, instead of accepting it as a necessary part of democratic politics. "Legislators who accommodate voter sentiment are denounced as cowardly, and those who defy it are just as fiercely accused of rejecting democratic norms," writes Frank. "I will run for office and I will tell you what I think, and then I will go ahead and do what I think right, and if you don't like what I'm doing, then you can kick me out."

Phoenix666 writes:

An artist has written an algorithm to represent UN refugee data as sound, along with a visual accompaniment to show migration patterns as they have evolved over the past 40 years.

The song composition is entirely algorithmic and is composed of the following building blocks:

1. Each year between 1975 and 2012 correlates to a 4-second segment in the song.
2. The annual global aggregate volume of refugee migration controls the quantity of instruments playing. The higher the volume of refugee migration, the more instruments are added to the song.
3. The annual average distance of refugee migration controls the duration and pitch of the instruments. Longer distances yield instruments that play longer and lower-pitch notes.
4. The annual amount of countries with 1000+ refugees control the variety of instruments playing, where the more countries with 1000+ refugees, the more variety of instruments are playing in the song.

Interesting project, but it probably demonstrates why people who want to make sense of big data sets work on data visualization.

DarkMorph writes:

Nintendo Co., Ltd. has published a document on their Japanese webpage [document in English] stating that their most recently appointed CEO has passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth. Iwata was known for his work at HAL Laboratories in his early career, his success as CEO as denoted by the financial flourishment by Wii sales, and the fact that he was the first appointed president with no blood or marital association to the Yamauchi family that started the company in 1889.

Wikipedia

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes with an article from Phys.org:

Boeing has patented a laser powered propulsion system for airplanes. A number of sites reported on the patent, with eye-rubbing headlines that told the story. BusinessInsider headline read, "Boeing just patented a jet engine powered by lasers and nuclear explosions." Benjamin Zhang said the US Patent and Trademark Office approved Boeing's application for a laser and nuclear-driven airplane engine.

Zhang noted that presently the Boeing Dreamliner is powered by multiple turbofan engines with their fans and turbines in place to compress air and ignite fuel to provide thrust. The engine presented in Boeing's patent application takes another route. Zhang said the laser engine may also be used to power rockets, missiles, and spacecraft.

The new engine would work "by firing high-power lasers at radioactive material, such as deuterium and tritium," said BusinessInsider. "The lasers vaporize the radioactive material and cause a fusion reaction—in effect a small thermonuclear explosion," said the article. "Hydrogen or helium are the exhaust byproducts, which exit the back of the engine under high pressure. Thrust is produced."

In this approach the inside wall of the engine's thruster chamber coated in uranium 238 reacts with the neutrons from the nuclear reaction and generates immense heat. "The engine harnesses the heat by running coolant along the other side of the uranium-coated combustion chamber," said Zhang. "This heat-energized coolant is sent through a turbine and generator that produces electricity to power the engine's lasers."

Three inventors named in the patent application are Robert Budica, James Herzberg and Frank Chandler of California. The applicant is listed as The Boeing Company in Chicago. The patent was filed in 2012.

Phoenix666 writes:

Fiber-reinforced rocks discovered at the site of Italy's dormant Campi Flegrei volcano are similar to a wonder-material used by the ancients to construct enduring structures such as the Pantheon, and may lead to improved construction materials.
...
Once again, the drill cores provided the crucial clue. The samples showed that the deep basement of the caldera—the "wall" of the bowl-like depression—consisted of carbonate-bearing rocks similar to limestone, and that interspersed within the carbonate rocks was a needle-shaped mineral called actinolite.

"The actinolite was the key to understanding all of the other chemical reactions that had to take place to form the natural cement at Campi Flegrei," said Kanitpanyacharoen, who is now at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.
...
Pozzuoli was the main commercial and military port for the Roman Empire, and it was common for ships to use pozzolana as ballast while trading grain from the eastern Mediterranean. As a result of this practice, volcanic ash from Campi Flegrei-and the use of Roman concrete-spread across the ancient world. Archeologists have recently found that piers in Alexandria, Caesarea, and Cyprus are all made from Roman concrete and have pozzolana as a primary ingredient.

Interesting stuff, and somewhat reminiscent of the discovery that Damascus steel was so strong because the process created carbon nanotubes.

Non-javascript version of the story is available at: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/july/concrete-roman-volcano-071015.html

Phoenix666 writes:

Thousands of Apple Macbook owners are campaigning for action over reported issues with the laptop's retina screen. They are reporting "horrific stains" spreading across screens, in the forms of spots and patches.
...
A website called "Staingate" has been set up by a group unhappy with Apple's response.

Some of them say they have been told they will have to pay $800 (£519) for repair work, the Staingate website states.

A Facebook group formed by people experiencing problems with their Macbook screens has 1,752 members, and Staingate claims to have been contacted by more than 2,500 people so far. US legal firm Whitfield Bryson & Mason has contacted the Facebook group offering to investigate.

Its 2013 models seem to be worst affected, but there are online forums discussing the problem dating back to 2009.

People do pay a premium for Apple hardware, perceiving them as higher-end. Take a look at the images of screen damage—is their anger justified?