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Phoenix666 writes:

[Editor's Note: This happened on Friday, October 9, 2015]

It's not you – it's Google. The web giant's Docs cloud has fallen off the internet, leaving US office workers eyeing up the boozer early.

The in-browser word processor is offline around the world, and returns a 502 error when accessing it. Google Drive is also struggling to stay up, it seems.

The alleged productivity suite went down around 1145 PT (1845 UTC). While peeps in Europe, Australia and elsewhere left their desks ages ago, it's not quite the weekend yet in the Americas. Perhaps Google's software has taken off early for the Columbus Day Weekend.

As hot salty tweets about the outage fell upon the web like a tropical rainstorm, the advertising goliath's status dashboard claimed everything was A-OK. It now acknowledges that engineers are looking into problems with Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom and Realtime API.

Sorry, everyone, it was me. Went to use Google Docs for the first time in 9 months yesterday, so naturally it crashed. Did anybody lose anything?

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The NetBSD Project has announced the release of version 7 of the operating system, which is known for its portability.

Acceleration, with a direct rendering manager (DRM) and kernel mode-setting (KMS), is now available on recent Intel and Radeon graphics chips.

The new version ships with a daemon, blacklistd, which can block unwanted network connections.

The installer now supports GPT-partitioned disks.

ARM multiprocessing is now possible, and several ARM-based single board computers are now supported.

NetBSD now has an experimental port to certain Psion PDAs.

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Phoenix666 writes:

That was the case in England, where the National Crime Agency (NCA) last year arrested 33-year-old Stefan Rigo of Leeds as part of an international effort to take out the major RAT (Remote Access Trojan) vendors. In May 2014, the FBI arrested the alleged ringleaders behind Blackshades, a sophisticated RAT widely available online for $40. Several months later, the NCA caught up with Rigo, a Blackshades user who had purchased the RAT using his ex-girlfriend's identity. A search of Rigo's computers revealed "a series of images that involved people engaged in sexual acts over Skype or in front of their computers," according to an NCA statement.

An NCA spokesperson told the BBC that the agency had confirmed the identities of 14 spy victims, none of whom were aware of the voyeurism. (Other victims may simply have been unidentifiable.) In addition, half of the 14 knew Rigo personally—he had apparently made special efforts to infect [the computers of] female friends and acquaintances, a supremely personal violation, and then spied on them for hours at a time.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

There's a fairly robust community that builds and launches water rockets. You know, regular rockets in pretty much every way except for the fact that they use pressurized water and air to launch into the sky. One such water rocket from a South African team of students​ at the University of Cape Town just broke the world altitude record with it's most recent attempt.

The university team managed to grab the record thanks in part to an extremely lightweight frame. The rocket's frame weighs just over three pounds counting the on-board camera, parachute system, flight computer, and carbon fiber skeleton. The team had tried for the record two times before but had been plagued by equipment failure and air leaks. The third time took.​

The group launched their rocket, which clocks in at around nine feet in height, two different times on August 26th to get an average between the two. The first made it to 2,740 feet and the second to 2,707 feet for a world record of 2,723 feet, averaged. That handily beat the previous 2,044 foot record, set in 2007 by a U.S. group​.

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Phoenix666 writes:

If you have diabetes, or cancer or even heart problems, maybe you should blame it on your dad's behaviour or environment. Or even your grandfather's. That's because, in recent years, scientists have shown that, before his offspring are even conceived, a father's life experiences involving food, drugs, exposure to toxic products and even stress can affect the development and health not only of his children, but even of his grandchildren.

But, despite a decade of work in the area, scientists haven't been able to understand much about how this transmission of environmental memories over several generations takes place. McGill researchers and their Swiss collaborators think that they have now found a key part of the molecular puzzle. They have discovered that proteins known as histones, which have attracted relatively little attention until now, may play a crucial role in the process.

They believe that this finding, which they describe in a paper just published in Science, has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of how we inherit things. That's because the researchers show that there is something apart from DNA that plays an important role in inheritance in general, and could determine whether a father's children and grandchildren will be healthy or not.

"your dad's behavior or environment"...Heraclitus's maxim, "ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων" ("Character is destiny"), sounds like it's your kids' destiny, too. Put the donut down.

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Yog-Yogguth writes:

Not long after the first week since March 2014 without any new confirmed Ebola cases (World Health Organization (WHO) Ebola situation report from the 7th of October 2015) several sources across the world including the Royal Free London hospital report that nurse Pauline Cafferkey who previously contracted Ebola in December 2014 has been flown by military aircraft from Scotland to the isolation ward of the Royal Free Hospital in London. The Ebola virus has been detected in her body despite the previous recovery ending in January 2015 and she is now in a serious medical condition.

Royal Free hospital statement:

In May 2015 US doctor Ian Crozier was discovered to still have Ebola virus in his eye fluid despite being thought to have made a full recovery. There are no details on whether the same is the case with nurse Cafferkey.

In the article from the Telegraph doctor Nathalie MacDermott of Imperial College London explained that there are cases of acute eye inflammation in the Ebola hit areas of Africa and that it has not been possible to test those for the Ebola virus yet. The article has more details and quotes on lasting Ebola infection and related health problems in survivors.

According to the WHO there has been 28421 likely cases of Ebola with 11297 reported deaths (numbers taken from the previously linked report) and thus it is likely that there are close to 17000 survivors. The WHO situation report has a lot more detailed information.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Sales of personal computers have been declining for so long — 14 consecutive quarters — that it's hard remember a time when PCs ruled the tech world. Now Nick Wingfield writes in the NYT that Microsoft is leading the way on a mission to re-ignite the PC Market by taking the once-unthinkable step of competing with its hardware partners, like Dell and HP, by making its own computers, starting with its Surface tablet. This week, Microsoft dived even further into the business with a laptop device, the Surface Book. "Initiatives like Surface and Surface Book have helped the industry wake up and say, 'We've got to make the industry cool and sexy again,' " says Frank Azor. The stated reason that Microsoft got into the PC hardware business three years ago, with the original Surface, was not to put PC companies out of business - but to better illustrate the capabilities of its software, providing devices that would inspire PC makers to be more innovative. "They needed to reignite the PC market," says Rahul Sood. "The only company in the world who can do that is Microsoft."

One of the most remarkable things about Microsoft's growing presence in the hardware business is that it has not led to open revolt among its partners. Initially, many of them were not happy about Microsoft's moves, complaining in private. "It's positioned as a laptop, very squarely against the MacBook Pro as an example. But that could also be extended to a Dell XPS 13, or an HP x360," says Patrick Moorhead. One reason there hasn't been more pushback from OEM's is that Microsoft's Surface business is still relatively small. Another is that the money Microsoft has poured into marketing Surface has raised the broader profile of Windows PCs. While Microsoft obviously risks alienating its partners, it's doing so with a much bigger fight in mind. "Right now Microsoft really believes that it has to have a combined hardware, software, and services play to go up against the likes of Apple," says Moorhead. "That's why it's doing this. That's why it's taking such an aggressive stance now, moving to laptops."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the Tunisian civic group collective that has preserved their country on the path to democracy, unlike all the other "Arab Spring" countries:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/09/447213344/how-tunisias-quartet-saved-a-country-from-civil-war-and-won-the-nobel-peace-priz

Tunisia is where "Arab Spring" started, and, as it stands now, it's the only country making it work.

Tunisia's National Dialogue Quartet beat out Pope Francis and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel — and 270 other candidates — to take the prize, which the Nobel Committee said had guaranteed "fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief."

But that left many people wondering: Who is this group that operates without a leader and that is so committed to unity that its prize is listed as a solitary award, instead of a four-way split?

The short(-ish) answer is that the Quartet is a mix of civil society groups — labor, business, human rights and legal groups — whose leaders became mediators between Tunisia's Islamists and secularists and saved their country from civil war.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Excavations at the site of one of the Spanish conquistadors' worst defeats in Mexico are yielding new evidence about what happened when the two cultures clashed—and a native people, at least temporarily, was in control.

Faced with strange invaders accompanied by unknown animal species, the inhabitants of an Aztec-allied town just east of Mexico City reacted with apparent amazement when they captured a convoy of about 15 Spaniards, 45 foot soldiers who included Cubans of African and Indian descent, women and 350 Indian allies of the Spaniards, including Mayas and other groups.

According to artifacts found at the Zultepec-Tecoaque ruin site, the inhabitants of the town known as Texcocanos or Acolhuas carved clay figurines of the unfamiliar races with their strange features, or forced the captives to carve them. They then symbolically "decapitated" the figurines.

"Later, those in the convoy were apparently sacrificed and eaten." No word if the diners experienced Cortez's Revenge.

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AnonTechie writes:

The researchers' conclusions are drawn from a database they assembled of more than 6 million scholarly publications in biomedicine and chemistry.

The traditional pressure in academia for faculty to "publish or perish" advances knowledge in established areas. But it also might discourage scientists from asking the innovative questions that are most likely to lead to the biggest breakthroughs, according to a new study spearheaded by a UCLA professor.

Researchers have long faced a natural tension and trade-off when deciding whether to build on accumulated knowledge in a field or pursue a bold new idea that challenges established thinking. UCLA assistant professor of sociology Jacob Foster and his co-authors describe it as a conflict between "productive tradition" and "risky innovation."

To study this tension, Foster and his colleagues assembled a database of more than 6.4 million scholarly publications in the fields of biomedicine and chemistry from 1934 to 2008. They then analysed whether individual publications built on existing discoveries or created new connections — in effect, creating a map of the growing web of scientific knowledge. Finally, they correlated each of the two broad strategies with two types of reward: citations in subsequent research and more substantial recognition conferred by 137 different scholarly awards.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/pressure-to-publish-or-perish-may-discourage-innovative-research-ucla-study-suggests

[Also Covered By]: Phys.org

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Last August, the seasonal harmful algal blooms (HABs) in Lake Erie grew so extreme that they poisoned the water system in Toledo, Ohio, leaving nearly half a million residents without drinking water. But a few researchers at the time collected some of the toxic HABs, and have now shown that, by heating them at temperatures of 700-1000 °C in argon gas, the HABs can be converted into a material called "hard carbon" that can be used as high-capacity, low-cost electrodes for sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries.
[...]
"Harmful algal blooms, caused by cyanobacteria (or so called 'blue-green algae'), severely threaten humans, livestock, and wildlife, leading to illness and sometimes even death," Deng told Phys.org. "The Toledo water crisis in 2014 caused by HABs in Lake Erie is a vivid example of their powerful and destructive impact. The existing technologies to mitigate HABs are considered a 'passive' technology and have certain limitations. It would significantly and broadly impact our society and environment if alternative technologies could be developed to convert the HABs into functional high-value products."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The first ancient human genome from Africa to be sequenced has revealed that a wave of migration back into Africa from Western Eurasia around 3,000 years ago was up to twice as significant as previously thought, and affected the genetic make-up of populations across the entire African continent.

The genome was taken from the skull of a man buried face-down 4,500 years ago in a cave called Mota in the highlands of Ethiopia -- a cave cool and dry enough to preserve his DNA for thousands of years. Previously, ancient genome analysis has been limited to samples from northern and arctic regions.
...
The ancient genome predates a mysterious migratory event which occurred roughly 3,000 years ago, known as the 'Eurasian backflow', when people from regions of Western Eurasia such as the Near East and Anatolia suddenly flooded back into the Horn of Africa.

The fascinating window into pre-history that DNA has opened, widens.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The newly leaked "Intellectual Property [Rights] Chapter" of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), presumed by WikiLeaks to be the finalized version, contains the same worrying provisions that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been warning against for years:

If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rights holders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever.

[...] Perhaps the biggest overall defeat for users is the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years (QQ.G.6), despite a broad consensus that this makes no economic sense, and simply amounts to a transfer of wealth from users to large, rights-holding corporations. The extension will make life more difficult for libraries and archives, for journalists, and for ordinary users seeking to make use of works from long-dead authors that rightfully belong in the public domain.

[...] The provisions in QQ.G.10 that prohibit the circumvention of DRM or the supply of devices for doing so are little changed from earlier drafts, other than that the opposition of some countries to the most onerous provisions of those drafts was evidently to no avail. For example, Chile earlier opposed the provision that the offense of DRM circumvention is to be "independent of any infringement that might occur under the Party's law on copyright and related rights," yet the final text includes just that requirement.

The odd effect of this is that someone tinkering with a file or device that contains a copyrighted work can be made liable (criminally so, if wilfullness and a commercial motive can be shown), for doing so even when no copyright infringement is committed. Although the TPP text does allow countries to pass exceptions that allow DRM circumvention for non-infringing uses, such exceptions are not mandatory, as they ought to be.

The analysis goes on to bash the TPP's provisions on criminal enforcement, civil damages, trade secrets, domain-name registrant contact information, and ISP liability. Public Citizen's analysis focuses on pharmaceutical monopoly rights and biologic drugs (in particular, "biosimilars").

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

On Wednesday, a jury in Sacramento, California, found Matthew Keys, former social media editor at Reuters and an ex-employee of KTXL Fox 40, guilty of computer hacking under the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act.

In 2010, Keys posted login credentials to the Tribune Company content management system (CMS) to a chatroom run by Anonymous, resulting in the defacement of an LA Times article online. The defacement was reversed in 40 minutes, but the government argued the attack caused nearly a million dollars in damage.

"The government wanted to send a clear message that if you want to cover a group they don't agree with, and you're not complicit with them [the government], they will target you," Keys told me after the trial.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Cigarette smoking and heavy alcohol use cause epigenetic changes to DNA that reflect accelerated biological aging in distinct, measurable ways, according to research presented at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2015 Annual Meeting in Baltimore.

Using data from the publicly available Gene Expression Omnibus, Robert A. Philibert, MD, PhD and colleagues at the University of Iowa and other institutions analyzed patterns of DNA methylation, a molecular modification to DNA that affects when and how strongly a gene is expressed. Prior research had shown that methylation patterns change in predictable ways as people age, as well as in response to environmental exposures, such as cigarette smoke and alcohol. In these earlier studies, Dr. Philibert's laboratory identified two specific locations in the genome, base pairs cg05575921 on the AHRR gene and cg23193759 on chromosome 10, at which methylation levels were highly associated with smoking and alcohol consumption, respectively.

Perhaps we can come up with a tailored drug that imprints methylation patterns for behaviors we'd like to acquire.

Original Submission