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Arthur T Knackerbracket found the following story on The Register:

Discontinued on-the-fly disk encryption utility TrueCrypt was unable to keep out the FBI in the case of a US government techie who stole copies of classified military documents. How the Feds broke into the IT bod's encrypted TrueCrypt partition isn't clear.

It raises questions about the somewhat sinister situation surrounding the software team's sudden decision to stop working on the popular project last May.

US Air Force sysadmin Christopher Glenn was sent down for 10 years after stealing military documents relating to the Middle East, in addition to copying emails controlled by the commander of a special unit that conducts military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as we reported.

Glenn, 34, had secret-level clearance, and worked at the Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras installing and maintaining Windows 7 systems when he swiped copies of the classified files. He was arrested, charged, and appeared before a court in the southern district of Florida, where he admitted breaking the US Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced on Friday.

According to the Sun Sentinel , the court heard a claim by Gerald Parsons, an army counterintelligence expert, that the FBI had managed to access a concealed and encrypted hard-drive partition within which Glenn had hidden the stolen files.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC writes about a hypersonic plane concept patented by Airbus. With the mix of engine types, comparatively exotic fuel, it sounds like those tickets might get really expensive. We'll see if this ever flies, and if so, whether it will be a commercial success, unlike the supersonic Concorde. On the military end, things might be of more interest...

According to the documents, the jet would reach speeds as high as Mach 4.5, or four-and-a-half times the speed of sound. That compares to Mach 2 for Concorde.

The patent application says that the aeroplane would use a variety of engines that would serve different purposes and power would come from hydrogen stored onboard.

Two turbojets under the fuselage and a rocket motor in the rear would be used during take-off. It would lift off vertically like a Space Shuttle. Once launched, the turbojets would be shut down and retracted and the rocket motor would then kick in to climb to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet. Then ramjets, more usually used on missiles, would be ignited and the flight would reach a top speed of Mach 4.5.

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Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica has a fun project--hacking a TRS-80 to get online:

The true test of a man's patience is crimping pins onto the end of a cable that leads to building a custom serial cable—especially if it's the first time you've even handled a serial cable in a decade. So as I searched under my desk, using my phone for a flashlight, I wondered whether I had finally found the IT project that would send me over the edge. On a recent day, I set out to turn my recently acquired vintage Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer into a working Internet terminal. And at this moment, I crawled on the floor looking for a DB-25 connector's little gold pin that I had dropped for the sixth—or maybe sixteenth—time.

Thankfully, I underestimated my patience/techno-masochism/insanity. Only a week later, I successfully logged in to Ars' editorial IRC channel from the Model 100. And seeing as this machine first saw the market in 1983, it took a substantial amount of help: a Raspberry Pi, a little bit of BASIC code, and a hidden file from the website of a certain Eric S. Raymond.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found this during his wanderings:

Russia pressed a claim at the United Nations Tuesday for an additional 1.2 million square kilometres (463,000 square miles) of Arctic shelf, stepping up a race for the region's hydrocarbon and mineral wealth.

In a submission to back a 2001 claim at the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, Russia said research showed it had rights over the swathe—an area the size of South Africa.

This would include the North Pole and potentially give Russia access to an estimated 4.9 billion tonnes of hydrocarbons, according to government estimates. The Arctic has become a theatre for rival claims over a sea floor believed to be rich in minerals, oil and gas. Under international law, a country has exclusive economic rights over the continental shelf within a 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometre) radius from its coast. However Arctic nations have been jostling to claim greater areas. They have been spurred by the shrinkage of Arctic sea ice, which opens up the potential for new transport routes and mineral and energy exploitation.

Russia says extensive research spanning several years proves its continental shelf extends far beyond the 200-nautical-mile radius.

Its claim includes the Mendeleev Rise as well as the Lomonosov Ridge, which Denmark and Canada also say is theirs. Russia argues they, like the North Pole, are part of the Eurasian continent. Russia previously submitted a claim to the UN commission in 2001 but was told it lacked supporting scientific data. The commission returned the document—which was mostly based on Soviet-era studies—with over 160 recommendations, said Viktor Poselov, a deputy director of research at the VNII Okeangeologia Institute in Saint Petersburg, which worked on both the initial and updated claim. Over the last decade, nine expeditions, each costing up to a billion rubles ($16 million, 14.6 million euros), ventured into the Arctic to collect seismic data and map the ocean floor over tens of thousands of kilometres, he said.

If the new proposal is accepted by the UN commission, Russia would not only gain the right to the mineral deposits but also have an argument in favour of expanding its frontiers, Poselov told AFP.

"We would set a border that would limit other states from accessing this area," he said.

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mendax writes:

What has been long suspect and almost expected since it was discovered last week has now been confirmed. The flaperon found on a beach on the French island of Réunion is definitely from that missing airliner:

Experts have determined that the aircraft part that washed up on the island of Réunion last week is definitely from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia announced in the early hours of Thursday (Wednesday afternoon Eastern time).

The part, known as a flaperon, was flown from Réunion, near Madagascar, to a laboratory in Toulouse, France, where Malaysian, Australian and French officials gathered on Wednesday to examine it, along with representatives from Boeing.

One mystery solved. Many more to go.

BBC.

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AnonTechie writes:

A new, government-backed study [PDF] answers a question that has been on the minds of some Americans amid this summer's headlines from Charleston, Chattanooga, and Lafayette. According to the research, mass public shootings are indeed occurring more frequently than ever before in the United States.

The findings, published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) last week, show that the average rate of mass public shootings has increased from one incident per year in the 1970s to 4.5 incidents per year from 2010 through 2013. The numbers corroborate a 2014 report from Mother Jones. Scholars from the Harvard School of Public Health and Northeastern University independently analyzed data that Mother Jones had collected, and the results showed a marked rise in the frequency of mass shootings in the last three decades. Notwithstanding the recent cluster of high-profile incidents, the CRS report also finds that over the past 14 years, the rate of increase has tapered off.

http://www.thetrace.org/2015/08/mass-shootings-congressional-report/

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Arthur T Knackerbracket grabs the following from TheRegister:

The leader of the FFmpeg open source project has resigned amid ongoing turmoil among the project's developers.

On Friday, [Michael] Niedermayer announced via the FFmpeg mailing list that he was resigning his role as the project's lead maintainer, largely due to the ongoing schism among its developer community:

will i ever return ? ... i might ..., if theres a nice and friendly environment, no hostile forks or at least none i have to interact with. But i will certainly not return as leader, this is not really a role i ever truly liked, more one i ended up with.

Trouble first arose among the FFmpeg developers in 2011, when a group of contributors decided to fork the project's code into a new project called Libav.

The exact reasons for the schism are hard to decipher. A lot of it seems to boil down to personal bad blood and conflicts over project management, rather than disagreements about technical matters. The fork has proven to be one of the more contentious in open source history.

In his resignation letter, Niedermayer said the ongoing pressures that resulted from FFmpeg and Libav being maintained as separate projects was one of the main factors in his decision to step down:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket looks at this item from the BBC:

The British Museum is running a trial of virtual reality technology with a view to offering it as a permanent tool to explore its collection.

Families will be invited to navigate a virtual reality Bronze Age roundhouse and interact with 3D scans of objects. In June, London's Natural History Museum also started using VR technology. Both museums are using Samsung Gear VR headsets.

Only visitors aged 13 or over will be allowed to use the headsets in the British Museum. Families with younger children can use a Samsung Galaxy tablet or enter a dome with an interactive screen.

Visitors will be able to explore different interpretations of how the objects might have been used in the past. Among those on display will be two gold bracelets, discovered at a site in Gloucestershire, and treasures that the museum has not yet acquired. Other objects include a bronze dagger that was not intended for practical use because the blade was never sharpened and a bronze loop - believed to be a bracelet.

Chris Michaels, head of digital and publishing at the British Museum, said: "It gives us the chance to create an amazing new context for objects in our collection, exploring new interpretations for our Bronze Age objects."
[...]
Emily Smith, Head of Audience Development at the Natural History Museum, told the BBC: "The VR experience has been hugely popular with visitors. "We've increased the number of slots and are now running the experience daily in response to demand. Visitors have even been bursting into spontaneous applause at the end of the showings."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket brings us a laugh from The Register:

Aleksandar Vulovic, czar of the Serbian state lottery, has resigned from his position after winning numbers were mysteriously broadcast on television before they had been drawn.

Allegations of fraud abound on every hand following the incident, reports the Associated Press.

In what was presented to the public as a live broadcast on Tuesday evening, one of the numbers in the winning combination was revealed before the number appeared to be drawn.

"That sparked accusations that the numbers had been chosen in advance," according to AP.

Vulovic has denied there was any dodginess and explained that the incident was due to a "technical mistake".

He added that he was stepping down from his position, not out of guilt, but out of "moral obligation".

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"gewg_" writes:

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

Users of the Pale Moon web browser who try to install the popular adblocking extension Adblock Plus won't be able to do so anymore as it was added to the blocklist by the Pale Moon team.

Pale Moon users who have it installed may have noticed that it is no longer enabled either.

[...] The Pale Moon forum is usually a good place to start--reveals that the team decided to add Adblock Plus to the blocklist because of incompatibilities with Pale Moon.

I've put it in the blocklist because it has started giving severe usability issues (see the threads with "large bar with red text at the bottom of the browser" etc.). ABP should not be used on any v25+ version of Pale Moon because it's not compatible.

The compatibility issues seem to be mostly interface related when Adblock Plus is running in Pale Moon.

Moonchild, the lead developer of Pale Moon suggests to use an alternative such as uBlock, uBlock Origin, or Adblock Latitude instead. The latter is a fork of Adblock Plus that is developed and maintained specifically for Pale Moon.

[...] The most recent Adblock Plus update is also incompatible with Firefox versions prior to 29 due to the extension's support of "standard-conformant JavaScript generators syntax". This means that pre-Firefox 29 users won't be able to use Adblock Plus as well.

In the comments, Jojo says

I never noticed any problem with ABP

and Sven replies

That is exactly the problem. ABP works to a large extent but has caused a bunch of smaller and larger issues over the last couple of weeks or even month (in fact it was never compatible with Pale Moon 25). Many people didn't notice that it was related to ABP until they came to the forum and were told to switch [off of] ABP.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Temperatures are set based on formulas that aimed to optimize employees' thermal comfort, a neutral condition of the body when it doesn't have to shiver to produce heat because it's too cold or sweat because it's too hot. It's based on four environmental factors: air temperature, radiant temperature, air velocity and humidity. And two personal factors: clothing and metabolic rate, the amount of energy required by the body to function.

The problem, according to a study in Nature Climate Change on Monday, is that metabolic rates can vary widely across humans based on a number of factors -- size, weight, age, fitness level and the type of work being done -- and today's standards are based on the assumption that every worker is, you guessed it, a man.

Or if you want to be really specific, a 40-year-old, 154-pound man.
...
Kingma and van Marken Lictenbelt's work builds on research out of Japan which found that the neutral temperature for Japanese women was 77.36 degrees (Fahrenheit) while it was 71.78 for European and North American males.

5.58 degrees is a significant difference. Is it better for half the people in the office to be sweaty than half the people in the office to be chilly?

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takyon writes:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given its first approval to a 3D-printed drug. Aprecia Pharmaceuticals has created a new version of Spritam (levetiracetam), a seizure medication, and it is expected to hit the market in Q1 2016:

The FDA had previously approved medical devices made with 3-D printing. The company that makes Spritam says the 3-D-printed version of the drug allows it to dissolve more quickly, which makes it easier to swallow.

Another benefit of the process, says Aprecia, the drug's maker, is that it allows a high drug load — up to 1,000 mg — to be delivered in a single dose. The 3-D printing process creates a pill that has "a porous formulation that rapidly disintegrates with a sip of liquid," the company says.

Aprecia says it based its printing platform on technology that originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The FDA has previously approved 3D-printed medical devices, but no 3D-printed drugs. Levetiracetam is available as a generic medicine in the U.S. and UK.

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kurenai.tsubasa writes:

Multiple sources report that Super Typhoon Souledor, which is currently projected to develop into a class 5 typhoon, is set to make landfall over the eastern coast of China on Friday night, August 7th. A super typhoon is defined as a typhoon with winds in excess of 150 mph/241 km/h. On August 4th, around 06:00 UTC (2:00 AM EDT/2:00 PM CST¹) Souledor was 1162 miles/1870 km east-southeast of Taipei and moving at a speed of 12 mph/20 km/h in a west-northwestly direction.

Late Saturday night, Soudelor, which was a class 1 typhoon at the time, devastated Saipan. (Google Maps link for those of us who are a bit fuzzy on our Pacific island geography.) The Huffington Post writes:

An estimated 350 people had been placed in emergency shelters, and at least 60 people are being treated for lacerations as of Monday, August 3rd local time.

Weather Underground provides more in-depth data and information about previous typhoons in 2015. More information about tropical cyclone scales is available on Wikipedia.

¹ China Standard Time

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Phoenix666 writes:

Nobody likes skimping on sleep, but chances are you've done it. Whether to study for an exam, finish a tough project, or simply because you got stuck in an airport, pulling an all-nighter happens.
...
But with all that in mind, there are steps you can take to minimize the damage and treat your body (and brain) as well as possible under bad circumstances. Here's how to survive the night—and recover ASAP.
...
1. Bank sleep ahead of time.
2. Get any amount of shut-eye.
3. Bring on the lights.
4. Keep your room temperature moderate.
5. Skip the sugar and snack on protein and carbs.
6. Drink a little coffee—and a lot of water.
7. Get up and walk around.

The article also has tips for surviving the next day after an all-nighter. Do Soylentils have any techniques not listed to help them through all-nighters?

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takyon writes:

A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that an "ag-gag" law is unconstitutional. For those unfamilar, an ag-gag law, as defined by the article is "[a law that] outlawed undercover investigations of farming operations, is no more. A judge in the federal District Court for Idaho decided Monday that it was unconstitutional, citing First Amendment protections for free speech". As reported:

Laws in Montana, Utah, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa have also made it illegal for activists to smuggle cameras into industrial animal operations. But now those laws' days could be numbered, according to the lead attorney for the coalition of animal welfare groups that sued the state of Idaho.

"This is a total victory on our two central constitutional claims," says University of Denver law professor Justin Marceau, who represented the plaintiff, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, in the case. "Ag-gag laws violate the First Amendment and Equal Protection Clause. This means that these laws all over the country are in real danger."

"Ag-gag" refers to a variety of laws meant to curb undercover investigations of agricultural operations, often large dairy, poultry and pork farms. The Idaho law criminalized video or audio recording of a farm without the owner's consent, and lying to a farm owner to gain employment there to do an undercover investigation.

Previously: Dairy Lobbyist Crafted Idaho's "Ag-Gag" Legislation.

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darkfeline sends news of a zero-day vulnerability in fully-patched OS X systems:

Hackers are exploiting a serious zero-day vulnerability in the latest version of Apple's OS X so they can install adware applications without requiring victims to enter system passwords, researchers said. As Ars reported last week, the privilege-escalation bug stems from new error-logging features that Apple added to OS X 10.10. Developers didn't use standard safeguards involving additions to the OS X dynamic linker dyld, a failure that lets attackers open or create files with root privileges that can reside anywhere in the OS X file system. It was disclosed last week by security researcher Stefan Esser. On Monday, researchers from anti-malware firm Malwarebytes said a new malicious installer is exploiting the vulnerability to surreptitiously infect Macs with several types of adware including VSearch, a variant of the Genieo package, and the MacKeeper junkware. Malwarebytes researcher Adam Thomas stumbled on the exploit after finding the installer modified the sudoers configuration file. In a blog post, Malwarebytes researchers wrote:

[...] The real meat of the script, though, involves modifying the sudoers file. The change made by the script allows shell commands to be executed as root using sudo, without the usual requirement for entering a password.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Various sight recovery therapies are being developed by companies around the world, offering new hope for people who are blind. But little is known about what the world will look like to patients who undergo those procedures.

A new University of Washington study seeks to answer that question and offers visual simulations of what someone with restored vision might see. The study concludes that while important advancements have been made in the field, the vision provided by sight recovery technologies may be very different from what scientists and patients had previously assumed.
...
"Electrically stimulating the retina excites all of these cells at the same time, which is very different from how these cells respond to real visual input."

There are similar issues with optogenetics, Boynton said. "The optogenetic proteins that are currently available produce sluggish responses over time, and they are limited in the number of different cell types that they can separately target," he said.

These limitations in both technologies mean that patients may see fuzzy, comet-like shapes or blurred outlines, or they may experience temporary visual disappearances if an object moves too fast.

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kurenai.tsubasa writes:

On July 28, popular website Yahoo! became the one of the latest websites targeted by malicious ads that redirect to the Angler Exploit Kit, which attempts to take advantages of security holes in Adobe Flash. Yahoo! has an estimated 6.9 billion visitors per month.

From The New York Times:

Malwarebytes and Business Insider provide more information about this specific incident.

Yahoo! became aware of the attack on August 3 and has released a statement indicating their team has "taken action" (shortened):

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takyon writes:

According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel is doubling referral bonuses for women, minorities and veterans. Employees can receive $4,000 bonuses for suggesting candidates that meet the company's diversity goals. Intel had previously pledged $300 million over the next five years to address "Silicon Valley's disappointing diversity numbers," and has set a goal of "full representation" of women and under-represented minorities by 2020:

The new programs at Intel and across the tech sector come as companies report little-changed diversity numbers. Intel's diversity statistics for 2014 showed 24 percent of Intel employees are female. The company is also predominantly white and Asian, with only 3.5% black and 8% Latino employees. The company did not include statistics about veterans in its report.

Christine Dotts, a spokeswoman for Intel, said in an email that higher recruiting bonuses have been used by the company in the last decade, but she declined to comment on when or how much the bonuses were for.

Also at The Register.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket warns:

On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a three-part Series published in The Lancet looks at the enduring radiological and psychological impact of nuclear disasters, including the most recent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in 2011. The Series provides vital information for the public health planning of future disasters to protect the millions of people who live in areas surrounding the 437 nuclear power plants that are in operation worldwide.

[...] In one of the Series papers [Paper 2], radiological protection experts led by Dr Koichi Tanigawa of Fukushima Medical University, Japan, discuss an often overlooked aspect of nuclear disasters—the psychological burden of those living in the regions affected by the accident. In 2006, the UN Chernobyl Forum report concluded that the accident's most serious public health issue was the adverse effects on mental health, an effect made worse by poor communication about the health risks associated with reported radiation levels. Rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder remain elevated 20 years after the accident. Similar problems were seen after Fukushima, with the Fukushima Health Management Survey reporting that the proportion of adults with psychological distress (14.6%) was almost five times higher among disaster evacuees compared to the general population (3%). The authors also highlight how repeated evacuation and long-term displacement resulted in severe health-care problems for the most vulnerable, with deaths among elderly people increasing threefold in the first three months following evacuation.

According to Dr Tanigawa, "Although the radiation dose to the public from Fukushima was relatively low, and no discernible physical health effects are expected, psychological and social problems, largely stemming from the differences in risk perceptions, have had a devastating impact on people's lives."

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Phoenix666 writes:

Armed only with conversation software, the machine lasted just two weeks relying on the kindness of strangers to forward its journey. The US proved too much despite HitchBOT successfully traversing Canada and parts of Europe in 2014.

However, there may be a happy ending yet. Not willing to let robot violence scar its city, hackers and makers in Philadelphia are reaching out to the HitchBOT team to offer new life to the fallen Canadian after hearing about the robot violence.

"We'll say that at this moment, if we get the OK from the creators to repair or replace the needed parts for HitchBOT, we'll be happy to do so," wrote Georgia Guthrie, executive director for a local makerspace called The Hacktory. "If not, we understand... and we may just build ourselves a HitchBot2 to send along on its journey. We feel it's the least we can do to let everyone, especially the Robot community, know that Philly isn't so bad."

Perhaps one day they may become known to all robotkind as "Good Philadelphians."

Previously: The Hitchhiking Robot Experiment Did Not Do So Well

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