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c0lo writes:

Speigel International publishes an interview with Julian Assange. Some selections:

With a banking blockade, WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances. The blockade happened in a completely extrajudicial manner. We took legal measures against the blockade and we have been victorious in the courts, so people can send us donations again.

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Yes, a few months back we launched a next-generation submission system and also integrated it with our publications.
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We are drowning in material now. Economically, the challenge for WikiLeaks is whether we can scale up our income in proportion to the amount of material we have to process.

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Please imagine for a moment the German government complains about being spied on and the Americans just say: Okay, we will give you more stuff, which they have stolen from France. When the French complain, they get more stuff, which was stolen from Germany. The NSA spends a lot of resources obtaining information, but throwing a few crumbs to France and Germany when they start whining about being victims costs nothing, digital copies cost nothing.
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The British GCHQ has its own department for such methods called JTRIG. They include blackmail, fabricating videos, fabricating SMS texts in bulk, even creating fake businesses with the same names as real businesses the United Kingdom wants to marginalize in some region of the world, and encouraging people to order from the fake business and selling them inferior products, so that the business gets a bad reputation.

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Australia, my home country, has also announced a criminal investigation against us this week for revealing a gag order used to cover up a major international bribery case involving heads of state.
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The transition of the German public opinion is interesting. A study in 2010 found that 88 percent of Germans appreciate the US government; after the disclosure about the NSA, the rate dropped to 43 percent... At the same time, German public support for WikiLeaks is significant and even quite mainstream.

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James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, formally approved the policy to target the German government. There were three areas that were targeted in the material we have published so far: German political affairs, European policies and economic affairs.
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Yes, you can observe real policies -- that the United States government was very interested in the idea that Germany would propose a greater role for China in the International Monetary Fund, for example. An executive decision can be taken: Kill that idea of Merkel's before it learns to crawl, because the US sees China helping Europe as a threat to its dominance.
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Over the last two years, we already have become specialists for the three extremely important trade agreements, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TP). WikiLeaks has become the place to go to leak parts of these agreements that are now under negotiation. These agreements are a package that the US is using to reposition itself in the world against China by constructing a new grand enclosure.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner have announced Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that will increase the intensity of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or their signals):

Speaking at the launch, Prof Hawking said: "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. "Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos - unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer - to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."

Those behind the initiative claim it to be the biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. They plan to cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programmes and scan five times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster. It will involve access to two of the world's most powerful telescopes. - the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Yuri Milner is known for his creation and funding of Breakthrough Prizes, which award $3 million to researchers for achievements in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics. Also reported at Washington Post, NPR, El Reg, and Scientific American.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A new set of gliders is being developed by a group of 19 European research organizations that will be able to go deeper than any other underwater robots have gone before, to 5,000 meters below the surface. The gliders will be chock full of onboard sensors that will take continuous samples of the water there, gathering data about the ecosystems down there as well as monitoring the water for pollution.

From the scientist's perspective more, better data is always a good thing. But scientists who need to compete for funding rarely keep that data to themselves and trumpet it in the public arena. The chance these undersea gliders could produce endless "The Oceans Are Dying!" memes is non-zero.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Currently, the world's most powerful supercomputers can ramp up to more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or a petaflop. But computing power is not growing as fast as it has in the past. On Monday, the June 2015 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world revealed the beginnings of a plateau in performance growth.
...
The development rate began tapering off around 2008. Between 2010 and 2013, aggregate increases ranged between 26 percent and 66 percent. And on this June's list, there was a mere 17 percent increase from last November.
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Despite the slowdown, many computational scientists expect performance to reach exascale, or more than a billion billion operations per second, by 2020.

Hmm, if they reach exascale computing will the weatherman finally be able to predict if it's going to rain this afternoon? Because he sucks at that now.

Original Submission

evilcam writes:

KrebsonSecurity is reporting that the online "cheating" site AshleyMadison.com (and other sites run by the Avid Life Media group) has been hacked with user information compromised by a group called the Impact Team.

The group is threatening to release all data online as a result of alleged lies the ALM group told members unless the sites are entirely shut down.

"Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It's also a complete lie," the hacking group wrote. "Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed."

AshleyMadison.com does offer a $20 "Full Delete" option for a users profile, as detailed in this ArsTechnica article from 2014. Obviously, this "Full Delete" is now useless, as the information is already (allegedly) in the hands of the hackers.

Is this a case of altruistic hacking or a possible case of revenge?

Original Submission

Slartibartfast poses a question for the SoylentNews community:

I'm a member of the ISCA BBS; in days of yore, this stood for the [University of] Iowa Student Computer Association, though ties with its namesake were broken about a decade ago. In its heyday in the early 90's, the ISCA often had 1300+ simultaneous users online, and hundreds more queued to get on, only limited by the lowly T1 and the HP DOMAIN Unix system on which it ran.

In the years since, usage has dropped and at any given moment, there may be 10 or 20 concurrent users. As one might guess, the appeal of a text-based Citadel BBS doesn't have the same draw that it did 20+ years ago. Despite this, it's still very much a live (though dramatically diminished) system. I am sure that there are still those "out there" who no doubt would enjoy a trip to retroville, and an infusion of fresh blood would be fun for all.

So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to go out and get them? I'd be willing to throw some money at it if I thought the odds of success were reasonable.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has the following offering:

Imagine a security researcher has plucked your customer invoice database from a command and control server. You're nervous and angry. Your boss will soon be something worse and will probably want you to explain who pulled off the heist, and how.

But only one of these questions, the how, is worth your precious resources; security experts say the who is an emotional distraction.

Thats my takeaway after exploring the cyber crime attribution debate for several months, and although it's not the industry's unanimous position: defence intelligence officials, top security thinkers, serving CISOs, ex-cops, and former bank boffins speaking don't entirely agree on on the value of pinning a hack on an individual or group.

A case in point: top security boffins from security firm FireEye -- which carves a name for itself identifying malware groups -- offered polarised opinions on the worth of attribution in two articles posted within 10 days on the very same news site.

That difference of opinion between two senior security people in one of the world's top infosec firms shows that while identifying actors is simultaneously a difficult and expensive diversion of resources, it can also identify how attacks were executed.

Threat intelligence marketers and executives are two forces driving the need for actor attribution. The former is riding something of an industry boom and has irked William Peteroy, owner of startup ICEBRG, and a former security incident responder at Microsoft and technical director of the US Department of Defence's offensive hacker red team.

He and Microsoft mate Paul McKitrick detailed at the Kiwicon conference in Wellington last year what they see as the snake oil elements of threat intelligence, including unnecessary bolt-ons, feeds, and emphasis on actor attribution.

"Attribution has largely become an exercise in scaring potential customers with marketing fear uncertainty and doubt," Peteroy says. "Our main goal in that part of the talk was to call out a lot of the FUD around threat intelligence marketing; specifically we feel like it places emphasis on attribution and quantity rather than actionable components like context and confidence."

Source: SANS whitepaper [PDF]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

New research suggests that U.S. climate change, and the unpredictable temperature swings it can bring, may boost death rates in seniors.

"Temperature variability emerges as a key feature in the potential impacts of climate change. The take-home message: Unusual temperature is bad for people's health," said study author Liuhua Shi, a graduate student in the department of environmental health at Harvard's School of Public Health in Boston.

Scientists have long been debating the health effects of climate change, and the general assumption is that it will make people sicker through more extreme heat, more flooding and more polluted air.

Shi and colleagues launched their study in the New England area to better understand how weather affects death rates. "Many studies have reported associations between short-term temperature changes and increased daily deaths," Shi said. "However, there is little evidence to date on the long-term effect of temperature."

The researchers looked at Medicare statistics regarding 2.7 million people over the age of 65 in New England from 2000 to 2008. Of those, Shi said, 30 percent died during the study.

The researchers found death rates rose when the average summer temperature rose significantly, and death rates dropped when the average winter temperature rose significantly.

The researchers believe the increased risk in the summer is due to an increase in the variability of temperatures. According to Shi, "climate change may affect mortality rates by making seasonal weather more unpredictable, creating temperature conditions significantly different to those to which people have become acclimatized."

On the other hand, warmer winter temperatures caused by climate change could actually reduce deaths, the researchers added.

The study appears in the July 13 issue of Nature Climate Change.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket suggests the following story from Phys.org:

To fight a pathogen that's highly resistant to antibiotics, first understand how it gets that way.

Klebsiella pneumoniae strains that carry a particular enzyme are known for "their ability to survive any antibiotics you throw at them," said Corey Hudson of Sandia National Laboratories in California.

Using Sandia's genome sequencing capabilities, Hudson and colleagues Robert Meagher and Kelly Williams, along with former postdoctoral employee Zach Bent, identified several mechanisms that bacteria use to share genes and expand their antibiotic resistance. They found that in some cases, bacteria can receive a new set of genes all at once and in the process become pathogenic.

To better understand how the process works, they focused on the large mobile DNAs, such as plasmids, which exist as free DNA circles apart from the bacterial chromosome, and genomic islands, which can splice themselves into the chromosome. These mobile DNAs are major mechanisms for evolution in organisms that lack a true nucleus. Genomic islands and plasmids carry genes that contribute to everything from metabolism to pathogenicity, and move whole clusters of genes all at once between species.

Identifying how genomic islands move and their effect on bacterial physiology could lead to new approaches to bypass bacterial defenses, Hudson said.

Eventually, the effort might lead to a way to predict new pathogens before they emerge as public health threats.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) employee, only known so far as "Lim", has been found dead in his car after an apparent suicide. He left a will confirming details of the use of software from Italian firm Hacking Team. However, he denied that the software was used to spy domestically, as opposition legislators believe. The man admitted to deleting important information about the hacking.

It has emerged that mobile phones were tracked and monitored just before the presidential election in 2012. Government and NIS officials have denied opposition claims that the spyware — bought from an Italian company — was used to monitor South Koreans in general. They insist that its purpose was to boost the country's cyber-warfare capabilities against North Korea.

The BBC's Stephen Evans, in South Korea, says that the note left by the dead man implies that phones were monitored only to keep tabs on people connected to North Korea and not to besmirch opponents of the right-of-centre president. The spy agency had a scandalous reputation in the years before South Korea embraced democracy in the 1980s, and was involved in abductions and killings. The modern NIS is not accused of such serious offences but has nevertheless been embroiled in several scandals, including election meddling. Opposition politicians allege that it is not politically neutral, breaks the law and is a political tool for sitting presidents. Last week the Supreme Court ordered a review of the conviction of former NIS head Won Sei-hoon, who was sentenced to three years in jail in February for trying to influence the results of the 2012 presidential election.

South Korean NIS chief Lee Byoung Ho recently admitted to "exploring" the purchase of Hacking Team software to intercept communications using the popular Kakao Talk smartphone chat app, but didn't confirm making a purchase and claimed the agency only intended to monitor North Korean agents. The Korea Observer has described leaked Hacking Team emails with a Korean client interested in purchasing Remote Control System (RCS) software from the company.

Original Submission

carguy writes:

http://m.hitchbot.me/usa/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/17/can-robots-trust-humans-a-hitchhiking-bot-will-find-out/

It made it across Canada last summer, will motorists help it in the USA?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Scientist reports that University of Tokyo researchers have created a CRISPR-Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats using CRISPR associated protein 9) enzyme for gene editing that only works when activated by blue light. Photoactivatable CRISPR-Cas9 offers greater precision and control of gene editing:

Recently, University of Tokyo chemist Moritoshi Sato and his colleagues developed pairs of photoswitching proteins called Magnets, which use electrostatic interactions to come together when activated by light. The team has also used photoactivatable technology to develop a light-activated CRISPR-based transcription system to target specific genes for expression. Now, Sato's group has taken this one step further, using its Magnet proteins to create a photoactivatable Cas9 nuclease (paCas9) for light-controlled genome editing.

"The existing Cas9 does not allow to modify genome of a small subset of cells in tissue, such as neurons in the brain," Sato told The Scientist in an e-mail. "Additionally, the existing Cas9 often suffers from off-target effects due to its uncontrollable nuclease activity.... We have been interested in the development of a powerful tool that enables spatial and temporal control of genome editing."

The researchers created paCas9 by first splitting the Cas9 protein into two inactive fragments. They then coupled each fragment with one Magnet protein of a pair. When irradiated with blue light, the Magnets come together, bringing with them the split Cas9 fragments, which then merge to reconstitute the nuclease's RNA-guided activity. Importantly, the process is reversible: when the light is turned off, the paCas9 nuclease splits again, and nuclease activity is halted. "Such an on/off-switching property of paCas9 is the most important breakthrough previously unattainable," Sato said.

HughPickens.com writes:

Janet N. Cook, a church secretary in Virginia, had been a widow for a decade when she joined an Internet dating site and was quickly overcome by a rush of emails, phone calls and plans for a face-to-face visit. "I'm not stupid, but I was totally naïve," says Cook, now 76, who was swept off her feet by a man who called himself Kelvin Wells and described himself as a middle-aged German businessman looking for someone "confident" and "outspoken" to travel with him to places like Italy, his "dream destination." But very soon he began describing various troubles, including being hospitalized in Ghana, where he had gone on business, and asked Cook to bail him out. In all, she sent him nearly $300,000, as he apparently followed a well-honed script that online criminals use to bilk members of dating sites out of tens of millions of dollars a year.

The New York Times reports that internet scammers are targeting women in their 50s and 60s, often retired and living alone, who say that the email and phone wooing forms a bond that may not be physical but that is intense and enveloping. Between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2014, nearly 6,000 people registered complaints of such confidence fraud with losses of $82.3 million, according to the federal Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Older people are ideal targets because they often have accumulated savings over a lifetime, own their homes and are susceptible to being deceived by someone intent on fraud. The digital version of the romance con is now sufficiently widespread that AARP's Fraud Watch Network has urged online dating sites to institute more safeguards to protect against such fraud. The AARP network recommends that dating site members use Google's "search by image" to see if the suitor's picture appears on other sites with different names. If an email from "a potential suitor seems suspicious, cut and paste it into Google and see if the words pop up on any romance scam sites," the network advised. The website romancescams.org lists red flags to look for to identify such predators, who urgently appeal to victims for money to cover financial setbacks like unexpected fines, money lost to robbery or unpaid wages.

Most victims say they are embarrassed to admit what happened and they fear that revealing it will bring derision from their family and friends, who will question their judgment and even their ability to handle their own financial affairs."It makes me sound so stupid, but he would be calling me in the evening and at night. It felt so real. We had plans to go to the Bahamas and to Bermuda together," says Louise Brown. "When I found out it was a scam, I felt so betrayed. I kept it secret from my family for two years, but it's an awful thing to carry around. But later I sent him a message and said I forgave him."

bitshifter writes:

Dmitry Lopatin, a 26-year-old scientist who invented a cheap new kind of solar battery, has come across an unexpected obstacle. He was slapped with a three-year suspended jail sentence, for using banned materials in his invention. The researcher was facing 11 years behind bars, but the prosecutor's office dealing with the case agreed that a suspended sentence would suffice, the TASS news agency reported.

From rt.com:

Lopatin got in trouble with the authorities for using a solvent called gamma-Butyrolactone in order to make his solar batteries. It turned out this was a banned substance in Russia. He had placed a mail order for the solvent from China, and he was arrested when he went to collect it from the post office in June.

The researcher had tried to use a different substance, but found that it was too toxic to work with.

"In my work I was using a solvent which is toxic and can cause cancer. That is why I tried to find a substitute. I found one via the Internet and ordered it," he told RT.

"A month and a half later the parcel reached customs and I was called in and detained. Police launched a criminal case against me and I was interrogated. There were several court hearings. I chose to order from China because of the strict laws there. I had no idea that in China I could order a solvent which is banned in Russia."

Given that he is a researcher, is the use of the banned substance reasonable?

c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcasting Corporation carries a piece of analysis/commentary on the societal ethics of advertising. I found it fascinating by the depth of arguments (true, there is a bias, but it's likely that most of us soylents share it); do take your time to read it in full, my attempts to summarize it below is bound to fail:

Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.

Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.

First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.

Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.

A classic market failure

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good — access to your attention — doesn't reflect its full social cost.

...Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.

...It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good.