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Phoenix666 writes:

The Hill reports:

[...] Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill. It won't stop hackers. Instead, it essentially legalizes all forms of government and corporate spying.

Here's how it works. Companies would be given new authority to monitor their users -- on their own systems as well as those of any other entity -- and then, in order to get immunity from virtually all existing surveillance laws, they would be encouraged to share vaguely defined "cyber threat indicators" with the government. This could be anything from email content, to passwords, IP addresses, or personal information associated with an account. The language of the bill is written to encourage companies to share liberally and include as many personal details as possible.

That information could then be used to further exploit a loophole in surveillance laws that gives the government legal authority for their holy grail -- "upstream" collection of domestic data directly from the cables and switches that make up the Internet.

[...] CISA would create a huge expansion of the "backdoor" search capabilities that the government uses to skirt the 4th Amendment and spy on Internet users without warrants and with virtually no oversight.

All of this information can be passed around the government and handed down to local law enforcement to be used in investigations that have nothing to do with cyber crime, without requiring them to ever pull a warrant. So CISA would give law enforcement a ton of new data with which to prosecute you for virtually any crime while simultaneously protecting the corporations that share the data from prosecution for any crimes possibly related to it.

Will CISA be used against the guilty, or the innocent?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Sony's profits have more than tripled year-on-year in the April to June quarter (PDF link), thanks to strong sales of camera sensors and the PlayStation 4, which has now sold 25.3 million units globally to date. The company's overall net profit rose to ¥82.4 billion yen (£425 million, $664 million), significantly surpassing market expectations.

Sony moved three million PS4s during the quarter, while peripheral and software shipments also increased, leading to the division's 12.1 percent increase in sales to ¥288.6 billion (£1.4 billion, $2.3 billion), and an operating profit of ¥19.5 billion (£100 million, $160 million). The PS4 has taken a significant lead in the console market, massively outselling the rival Xbox One and Nintendo Wii U, the latter of which has sold just 10 million units.

Sony's devices division—which makes the camera sensors in high-end phones from Samsung and Apple—continues to grow. The unit saw a 35.1 percent increase in sales to ¥237.9 billion (£1.2 billion, $2 billion). Sales to external customers—i.e., those high-end phone makers—increased 41.2 percent year-on-year.

takyon: Ars also notes that 3 million PS4 consoles were shipped from April through June, compared to an estimated 1 million Xbox One consoles (Microsoft reports Xbox One and Xbox 360 sales together), and 470,000 Wii U consoles.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Geoff Ralston has an interesting essay explaining why is likely that electric car penetration in the US will take off at an exponential rate over the next 5-10 years rendering laughable the paltry predictions of future electric car sales being made today. Present projections assume that electric car sales will slowly increase as the technology gets marginally better, and as more and more customers choose to forsake a better product (the gasoline car) for a worse, yet "greener" version. According to Ralston this view of the future is, simply, wrong. - electric cars will take over our roads because consumers will demand them. "Electric cars will be better than any alternative, including the loud, inconvenient, gas-powered jalopy," says Ralston. "The Tesla Model S has demonstrated that a well made, well designed electric car is far superior to anything else on the road. This has changed everything."

The Tesla Model S has sold so well because, compared to old-fashioned gasoline cars it is more fun to drive, quieter, always "full" every morning, more roomy, and it continuously gets better with automatic updates and software improvements. According to Ralston the tipping point will come when gas stations, not a massively profitable business, start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. When that happens even more gasoline car owners will be convinced to switch. Rapidly a tipping point will be reached, at which point finding a convenient gas station will be nearly impossible and owning a gasoline powered car will positively suck. "Elon Musk has ushered in the age of the electric car, and whether or not it, too, was inevitable, it has certainly begun," concludes Ralston. "The future of automotive transportation is an electric one and you can expect that future to be here soon."

Original Submission

DrMag writes:

By executive order, President Obama is asking US Scientists to build the next world's fast computer:

Some have been quick to point out the challenges for accomplishing this feat.

What other problems do you foresee? Is there anything about today's technology that limits the speed of a supercomputer? What new technologies might make this possible?

Original Submission

patella.whack writes:

The Intercept has a recent article: Local Governments Increasingly Poking Through Your Garbage:

Civil libertarians are worried about an increasingly common form of domestic surveillance that...has to do with looking through your garbage... [G]arbage trucks now have the ability to record the contents of your trash cans on video to inspect each object. The ACLU says, "While encouraging residents to recycle is commendable, any program involving the government's systematic monitoring of citizens crosses a line. The contents of your trash can be surprisingly revealing." [emphasis mine] In some cities, trash cans are monitored with RFID devices to determine who is actually putting their recycling bin out on the curb. Prizes are given, or fines can be levied if a threshold limiting recyclable content in trash is exceeded, although none have been issued yet. "It's very crazy. Also not entirely surprising given the prevalence of surveillance technologies. Nothing is safe, not even our trash."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

In a surprise move, former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have signed a three-year deal with Amazon for a new motoring show. Earlier rumours suggested that the trio—who left the program earlier this year when Clarkson was let go as a consequence of punching a producer—would sign a deal with rival streaming service Netflix.

While the show being created for Amazon Prime—which requires a yearly subscription of £79 in the UK and $99 in the US—doesn't currently have a name, the company has confirmed that it will go into production shortly and launch in 2016. If you don't want Prime's free shipping, you can get Amazon Instant Video on its own with a (slightly) cheaper monthly subscription (£5.99 in the UK). The show will form part of Amazon Prime's original programming line-up, which currently includes the Steven Spielberg produced Extant, and Ridley Scott's The Man in the High Castle.

Landing the ex-Top Gear presenters, as well as ex-producer and creative force behind the show Andy Wilman, is quite the coup for Amazon. At its peak, Top Gear was the most watched factual program in the world, with a global audience of around 350 million people a year. Even if only a few of those people pay to join Prime, Amazon could be looking at making a very large sum of money.

Will you watch?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Rice serves as the staple food for more than half of the world's population, but it's also the one of the largest humanmade sources of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Now, with the addition of a single gene, rice can be cultivated to emit virtually no methane from its paddies during growth. It also packs much more of the plant's desired properties, such as starch for a richer food source and biomass for energy production, according to a study in Nature.

With their warm, waterlogged soils, rice paddies contribute up to 17 percent of global methane emissions, the equivalent of about 100 million tons each year. While this represents a much smaller percentage of overall greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, methane is about 20 times more effective at trapping heat. SUSIBA2 rice, as the new strain is dubbed, is the first high-starch, low-methane rice that could offer a significant and sustainable solution.

Researchers created SUSIBA2 rice by introducing a single gene from barley into common rice, resulting in a plant that can better feed its grains, stems and leaves while starving off methane-producing microbes in the soil.

"Researchers created SUSIBA2 rice by introducing a single gene from barley into common rice." So, does it ferment to sake, or beer?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found this:

An exotic material called gallium nitride (GaN) is poised to become the next semiconductor for power electronics, enabling much higher efficiency than silicon.

In 2013, the Department of Energy (DOE) dedicated approximately half of a $140 million research institute for power electronics to GaN research, citing its potential to reduce worldwide energy consumption. Now MIT spinout Cambridge Electronics Inc. (CEI) has announced a line of GaN transistors and power electronic circuits that promise to cut energy usage in data centers, electric cars, and consumer devices by 10 to 20 percent worldwide by 2025.

Power electronics is a ubiquitous technology used to convert electricity to higher or lower voltages and different currents—such as in a laptop's power adapter, or in electric substations that convert voltages and distribute electricity to consumers. Many of these power-electronics systems rely on silicon transistors that switch on and off to regulate voltage but, due to speed and resistance constraints, waste energy as heat.

CEI's GaN transistors have at least one-tenth the resistance of such silicon-based transistors, according to the company. This allows for much higher energy-efficiency, and orders-of-magnitude faster switching frequency—meaning power-electronics systems with these components can be made much smaller. CEI is using its transistors to enable power electronics that will make data centers less energy-intensive, electric cars cheaper and more powerful, and laptop power adapters one- third the size—or even small enough to fit inside the computer itself.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change electronics and to really make an impact on how energy is used in the world," says CEI co-founder Tomás Palacios, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology.

[...] While GaN transistors have several benefits over silicon, safety drawbacks and expensive manufacturing methods have largely kept them off the market. But Palacios, Lu, Saadat, and other MIT researchers managed to overcome these issues through design innovations made in the late 2000s.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket learns that plants have feelings too:

University of Adelaide research has shown for the first time that, despite not having a nervous system, plants use signals normally associated with animals when they encounter stress.

Published today in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology reported how plants respond to their environment with a similar combination of chemical and electrical responses to animals, but through machinery that is specific to plants.

"We've known for a long-time that the animal neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is produced by plants under stress, for example when they encounter drought, salinity, viruses, acidic soils or extreme temperatures," says senior author Associate Professor Matthew Gilliham, ARC Future Fellow in the University's School of Agriculture, Food and Wine.

"But it was not known whether GABA was a signal in plants. We've discovered that plants bind GABA in a similar way to animals, resulting in electrical signals that ultimately regulate plant growth when a plant is exposed to a stressful environment."

By identifying how plants respond to GABA the researchers are optimistic that they have opened up many new possibilities for modifying how plants respond to stress.

"The major stresses agricultural crops face like pathogens and poor environmental conditions account for most yield losses around the planet - and consequently food shortages," says co-lead author Professor Stephen Tyerman.

"By identifying how plants use GABA as a stress signal we have a new tool to help in the global effort to breed more stress resilient crops to fight food insecurity."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Three former intelligence and defense officials have published an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting encryption and rejecting the Department of Justice and FBI Director Comey's campaign to weaken encryption using backdoors or key escrow:

Mike McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and director of national intelligence. Michael Chertoff is a former homeland security secretary and is executive chairman of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk management advisory firm with clients in the technology sector. William Lynn is a former deputy defense secretary and is chief executive of Finmeccanica North America and DRS Technologies.

More than three years ago, as former national security officials, we penned an op-ed [paywall] to raise awareness among the public, the business community and Congress of the serious threat to the nation's well being posed by the massive theft of intellectual property, technology and business information by the Chinese government through cyberexploitation. Today, we write again to raise the level of thinking and debate about ubiquitous encryption to protect information from exploitation.

[...] Today, with almost everyone carrying a networked device on his or her person, ubiquitous encryption provides essential security. If law enforcement and intelligence organizations face a future without assured access to encrypted communications, they will develop technologies and techniques to meet their legitimate mission goals.

TechDirt speculated that the Washington Post "unpublished" the editorial, but the Post reuploaded the story, saying that a "production error" had caused it to be posted prematurely.

At the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently went off the "Going Dark" script:

FBI Director James Comey, who opened the annual Aspen conference on Wednesday night, warned that his agency is "going dark" because of the use of unbreakable end-to-end encryption. It's an argument Comey has been making for months now. Johnson's comments were a reminder that authorities can see plenty.

"We have developed good capabilities to detect plotting, to detect efforts to do something bad in our homeland," he said. He then added that he wasn't disputing Comey's conclusion. "Um, we do have the problem of going dark that Jim talked about last night, very definitely."

Original Submission

janrinok writes with news of a report (by Michael McNally) concerning a critical defect in BIND:

https://www.isc.org/blogs/about-cve-2015-5477-an-error-in-handling-tkey-queries-can-cause-named-to-exit-with-a-require-assertion-failure/

As the security incident manager for this particular vulnerability notification, I'd like to say a little extra, beyond our official vulnerability disclosure about this critical defect in BIND [Wikipedia].

Many of our bugs are limited in scope or affect only users having a particular set of configuration choices. CVE-2015-5477 does not fall into that category. Almost all unpatched BIND servers are potentially vulnerable. We know of no configuration workarounds. Screening the offending packets with firewalls is likely to be difficult or impossible unless those devices understand DNS at a protocol level and may be problematic even then. And the fix for this defect is very localized to one specific area of the BIND code.

The practical effect of this is that this bug is difficult to defend against (except by patching, which is completely effective) and will not be particularly difficult to reverse-engineer. I have already been told by one expert that they have successfully reverse-engineered an attack kit from what has been divulged and from analyzing the code changes, and while I have complete confidence that the individual who told me this is not intending to use his kit in a malicious manner, there are others who will do so who may not be far behind. Please take steps to patch or download a secure version immediately.

This bug is designated "Critical" and it deserves that designation.

The existence of this bug was announced 'in-house' on 28 July but is announced publicly today. Apologies for releasing my own story [submission].

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In this wide ranging interview, Steven Wolfram [creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha] talks about what he's been thinking about for the last 30+ years, and how some of the questions he's had for a long time are now being answered.

I looked for pull quotes, but narrowing down to just one or two quotes from a long interview seemed like it might send the SN discussion down a rabbit hole... if nothing else, this is a calm look at the same topics that have been all over the press recently from Hawking, Musk and others.

One interesting topic is about goals for AIs -- as well as intelligence (however you define it), we humans have goals. How will goals be defined for AIs? Can we come up with a good representation for goals that can be programmed?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket spotted the following stardust:

The chemical element lithium has been found for the first time in material ejected by a nova. Observations of Nova Centauri 2013 made using telescopes at ESO's La Silla Observatory, and near Santiago in Chile, help to explain the mystery of why many young stars seem to have more of this chemical element than expected. This new finding fills in a long-missing piece in the puzzle representing our galaxy's chemical evolution, and is a big step forward for astronomers trying to understand the amounts of different chemical elements in stars in the Milky Way.

A team led by Luca Izzo (Sapienza University of Rome, and ICRANet, Pescara, Italy) has now used the FEROS instrument on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, as well the PUCHEROS spectrograph on the ESO 0.5-metre telescope at the Observatory of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santa Martina near Santiago, to study the nova Nova Centauri 2013 (V1369 Centauri). This star exploded in the southern skies close to the bright star Beta Centauri in December 2013 and was the brightest nova so far this century - easily visible to the naked eye.

The very detailed new data revealed the clear signature of lithium being expelled at two million kilometres per hour from the nova. This is the first detection of the element ejected from a nova system to date.

Co-author Massimo Della Valle (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Naples, and ICRANet, Pescara, Italy) explains the significance of this finding: "It is a very important step forward. If we imagine the history of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way as a big jigsaw, then lithium from novae was one of the most important and puzzling missing pieces. In addition, any model of the Big Bang can be questioned until the lithium conundrum is understood."

Original Submission

maxwell demon writes:

Electricity companies increasingly install smart meters in order to stabilize the grid. The idea is simple: When there is high supply, the price goes down, while when there is little supply, prices go up. People therefore are more likely to wait for cheaper prices, thus the demand in low-supply times is reduced, and the demand in high-supply times is increased, resulting in a better match of supply and demand, and thus a more stable grid.

However now research at the University of Bremen shows that the smart meters may actually have the opposite effect. From the phys.org article:

"Our work examines the, at first sight, great idea to use smart electricity meters to dampen fluctuations in the electricity power nets," Stefan Bornholdt at the University of Bremen told Phys.org. "However, we find that under some conditions, consumers with such meters start competing and create a new artificial market which exhibits properties of real markets, such as bubbles and crashes. Thus, instead of dampening out fluctuations, it may create new ones. In this way, interacting smart meters may generate chaos instead of stability."

The mechanism they describe as follows:

"When laundry piles up, users (or algorithms in advanced machines) can adapt the threshold to a higher allowed price. When the fluctuating price then drops after a while from higher levels, those consumers who postponed their activity will then join the 'happy hour' of cheap electricity, leading to an avalanche of demand (reminding of some crowded bars at happy hour). This is a dynamic phenomenon which econophysics models, but not standard economic models, can represent."

The original article in Physical Review E is also freely available from arXiv.org.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Lisa Rein writes in the Washington Post that a new government review of what the Chinese hack of sensitive security clearance files of 21 million people means for national security is in — and some of the implications are quite grave. According to the Congressional Research Service, covert intelligence officers and their operations could be exposed and high-resolution fingerprints could be copied by criminals. Some suspect that the Chinese government may build a database of U.S. government employees that could help identify U.S. officials and their roles or that could help target individuals to gain access to additional systems or information. National security concerns include whether hackers could have obtained information that could help them identify clandestine and covert officers and operations (PDF).

CRS says that if the fingerprints in the background investigation files are of high enough quality, "depending on whose hands the fingerprints come into, they could be used for criminal or counterintelligence purposes." Fingerprints also could be trafficked on the black market for profit — or used to blow the covers of spies and other covert and clandestine officers, the research service found. And if they're compromised, fingerprints can't be reissued like a new credit card, the report says, making "recovery from the breach more challenging for some."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Reddit's head of community, Jessica Moreno, has left the company. She is the fourth senior female employee to exit in less than a month.

Moreno and her husband, former Reddit product boss Dan McComas, joined the company in 2011 when their gift-exchange service, RedditGifts, was acquired by Reddit. Reddit and Moreno confirmed news of the departure to Re/code in separate statements provided by the company, saying that Moreno plans to return to Salt Lake City to spend time with her family. Neither Moreno nor Reddit specified who would replace her, but Moreno said she's "working with [CEO] Steve [Huffman] on a transition plan."

In her statement, Moreno didn't mention anything related to gender discrimination. Her exit is the latest by a female higher-up at the social news site at a time when the company's efforts to rein in the most toxic elements of its community have been in the spotlight.

Human group dynamics are mysterious. Did Moreno leave because there is real gender discrimination at Reddit that she's reacting to, or is it a lemming effect, where some will jump off the cliff because the one ahead of them in line did? Or is she a statistical quirk, having had her company acquired by Reddit and now deciding to move on, and the world reads deeper meaning into it because of the timing?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes with a feel-good story:

When he was just 2-years old, he underwent a quadruple amputation after suffering a life-threatening infection in his bloodstream that caused multi-organ failure.

He spent years on dialysis until — at age 4 — he was given a kidney from his mother.

Despite his struggle, which he said included some teasing from classmates, he made the most with what he had while learning how to do such ordinary tasks like holding a fork, write and strum a guitar.
...
  While waiting for a donor match, Zion's doctors practiced the exact procedure on cadavers. When the surgery finally took place they then connected his forearm's bones to the donor's with steel plates and screws.

The arteries and veins were then joined before blood was permitted to flow. Each muscle and tendon was then rejoined followed by the nerves.

Dr. L. Scott Levin, director of the Hand Transplantation Program at the children's hospital, recalled watching Zion's new hand turn pink from the successful blood flow. "That hand was now alive," he told NBC. "That became, instantly, part of Zion's circulation, no different than my hand or your hand."

Someday this kind of medical miracle will become commonplace. Today, we can all stop and be thankful that the anti-science crowd has not yet won.

[Ed: A BBC News broadcast within the last hour contained an interesting snippet - because the hand and forearm are alive, and to all intents and purposes belong to Zion's body, they are expected to grow normally as he grows.]

Ed: Headline changed - it is not the first double hand transplant. (JR)]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Washington cybersecurity bill [protesters] are hitting Congress where it hurts: right in the fax machine.

Protesters have programmed eight separate phone lines to convert emails sent from a handy box at FaxBigBrother.com (as well as tweets with the hashtag #faxbigbrother) to individual faxes and send them to all 100 members of the US Senate.

The rationale, said Evan Greer of activist group Fight for the Future, is that Congress doesn’t appear to understand technology invented in the current century.

“Groups like Fight for the Future have sent millions of emails, and they still don’t seem to get it,” said Greer. “Maybe they don’t get it because they’re stuck in 1984, and we figured we’d use some 80s technology to try to get our point across.” All 100 members of Congress will receive each of the faxes.
...
Do US senators really use their fax machines that often, though? “Yes, sadly,” one former Senate staffer told the Guardian. They love their pagers as well. Faxes “all get digitized by the time they get to the office, though”, which bodes ill for senatorial email inboxes.

And why is 1979’s hottest tech trend still so popular on Capitol Hill? “One thing that makes faxes – and pagers, for that matter – still good tech is that they are analog and difficult to search. Members love them, especially to transmit data for things like campaign financing records.”

… so, if you're looking for an explanation for why government does things the way it does, the explanation that assumes maximum weasel … factor is nearly always correct?

Phoenix666 writes:

For more than half a century tide gauges have indicated that the Chesapeake Bay’s sea level has been rising twice as much as the global average and faster than anywhere else on the East Coast. Geologists have hypothesized that the land in this part of the country was once pushed up by a prehistoric ice sheet to the north and is now settling back down since the ice melted.

Now a new study by a group of geologists from the University of Vermont and the U.S. Geological Survey have confirmed that hypothesis through research using extensive drilling in the coastal plain of Maryland. The study concludes that, indeed, the land under the Chesapeake Bay is sinking quickly and the researchers project that Washington, D.C. could drop by six or more inches in the next century.

"This falling land will exacerbate the flooding that the nation's capital faces from rising ocean waters due to a warming climate and melting ice sheets," notes a press statement for the study, "accelerating the threat to the region's monuments, roads, wildlife refuges, and military installations."

The article contains no tips on how we can accelerate the subsidence.

The new research was conducted by a team of geologists from the University of Vermont, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other institutions. The results were presented online July 27 the journal GSA Today.

[Historical background data and information can be found at the U.S. National Geodetic Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey. - Ed.]

Arthur T Knackerbracket found this story which appears to have slipped the net:

The U.S. Census Bureau said a data breach early last week did not expose survey data it collects on households and businesses.

The leak came from a database belonging to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, which collects audit reports from government agencies and other organizations spending federal grants, wrote John H. Thompson, the Census Bureau’s director, on Friday.

The exposed information included the names of people who submitted information, addresses, phone numbers, user names and other data, he wrote.

A group calling itself Anonymous Operations posted a link on Twitter leading to four files. The cyberattack was allegedly in protest of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, two pending trade agreements that have been widely criticized.

Thompson wrote the attackers gained access through a configuration setting. The database was on an external IT system that is separated from an internal system that stores census data, he wrote. "Over the last three days, we have seen no indication that there was any access to internal systems" Thompson wrote.