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Phoenix666 writes:

"I never expected a money success," said Tolkien, pacing the room, as he does constantly when he speaks. "In fact, I never even thought of commercial publication when I wrote The Hobbit back in the Thirties.

"It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

The piece is a pleasant read about the greatest fantasy writer of all time.

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mendax writes:

Or so El Reg is telling us:

Apple's Windows apps have leapfrogged Oracle Java as the biggest security risk to PCs in the US, according to a study by vulnerability management outfit Secunia (now a Flexera Software company). [...]

Secunia's latest quarterly report, seen by The Reg, is a snapshot of software security on PCs used by folks in the US and 14 other countries. For the first time in four consecutive quarters, Java 7 isn't topping the list of most dangerous programs: Apple apps have taken the lead in the third quarter of 2015. [...]

Apple QuickTime 7.x and Apple iTunes 12.x top the list as the most exposed applications on US Windows PCs – a lot of people use them and not a lot of people are patching, in other words.

I thought the greatest risk to Windows PC users was the fact that Windows is installed on it. This seems to continue with Windows 10 according to this story also from El Reg.

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An Anonymous Coward offers the following:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/28/its-ok-to-hack-your-own-car-us-copyright-authorities-rule

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Phoenix666 writes:

On Wednesday morning, NASA's Cassini space probe will whiz by Enceladus, making its second-to-last passage of the icy moon—and its most valuable yet. The spacecraft has already flown by Enceladus 20 times, not to mention making observations of Saturn and its other satellites over the last 11 years. But tomorrow's flyby will take Cassini within 30 miles of the surface, and straight through its mysterious geysers, which are fueled by a subsurface ocean that could potentially harbor life.

Speeding along at 19,000 mph, the probe will hurtle through the geyser's plumes around 1 pm Eastern time, furiously capturing samples and images in an attempt to characterize the moon's internal ocean. Those measurements will tell NASA's scientists more about the hydrothermal reactions and organic molecules under the moon's icy surface. "It'll be over in an instant," says Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Phoenix666 writes:

It's amazing the sources some journalists use to find leads. Oftentimes it's a LinkedIn profile where an engineer reveals an undisclosed product. But in this case, it's a shipping company.

The eagle-eyed folks at WCCFTech spotted something strange in the shipping manifests for Zauba, an Indian shipping firm. The entry is an AMD product codenamed "Magnum," with references to FPGA and DTV, two acronyms that don't usually go together.

The entry in question reads "PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD ASSEMBLY-AMD MAGNUM FPGA PROTOTYPEBOARD FOR DTV P/N .102-B25432-00 (FOC)."

Another clue from the manifest is that it originated in Canada. ATI Technologies, the GPU maker AMD acquired in 2006, was a Canadian firm and a great deal of GPU research and development is still done at the Markham, Ontario office. So this product was led by the GPU team, not the CPU team.

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maxwell demon writes:

The BBC reports:

A series of amendments to a regulation on how internet traffic is managed in Europe were all rejected by MEPs.

Proponents of net neutrality, who demand that web traffic be treated equally by networks, have already criticised the move.

The existing legislation, which was accepted, will be developed into regulations.

[...]

Although some campaigners had suggested there might be growing support for the amendments within the parliament, all were voted down in large majorities.

It is thought that many MEPs would have been reluctant to begin a process of amending the regulation given that it might have delayed another aspect of the rules - the abolition of mobile data roaming charges.

Later on they detail the problems of the rules that have been adopted:

Part of the problem with the rules in their current form, argued Joe McNamee at the European Digital Rights campaign group, is that they are ambiguous.

"As the text currently stands there is no indication as to how much abuse of dominance would be permissible under this arrangement," he told the BBC.

The sort of scenarios that could impact internet use include the creation of "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" - traffic prioritised depending on fees paid by content providers - or the creation of "zero ratings" in which some services may be accessed without using up any of the internet user's data quota.

In Belgium, for example, some mobile phone companies currently allow unlimited access to Twitter and Facebook while all other data usage is part of a monthly plan. In a few countries such as the Netherlands, such practices are not allowed.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Economist notes of a possible new medication to fight malaria:

IVERMECTIN, a drug employed for the treatment of worm infections, has a side effect. It has been known since the 1980s that it kills arthropods (ticks, mites, insects and so on) foolish enough to bite someone treated with it. That has led some researchers to wonder if it might be deployed deliberately against the mosquitoes which transmit malaria. Preliminary studies suggested so. Mosquitoes do, indeed, get poisoned when they bite people who have taken the drug. Moreover, even if a mosquito does not succumb, ivermectin imbibed this way is often enough to kill any malarial parasites it is carrying.

It's one thing to protect yourself from malaria, but the notion that the buggers will likely croak for biting me is quite enticing.

I googled and found the studies mentioned at MalariaJournal.com and at researchgate.net. The full text of the study can be downloaded here.

The second study mentioned in the article can be read at pubfacts.com, with a full text of the study downloadable from here.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A study conducted by a team of researchers from the U.K., Tanzania and the U.S. has found an example of polygynous marriage that does not appear to be harmful to women or children. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers outline their study of people living in villages in Tanzania, and why they believe organizations such as the UN need to modify their stance on the practice to better take account of cultural practices.

Polygny is a term used to refer to marriage systems where males can have more than one wife, while polygamy refers to the actual practice of it. In this new study, the researchers looked into the question of whether a polygnynous marriage is in fact harmful to women or children as has been assumed by many in the international community. They looked at 3,500 households in villages in Tanzania, noting the occurrences of polygnynous marriage versus monogamous marriage and the standard of living for those women and children.

In looking at their data, they found that first wives—women who were the first to marry a man with several wives, tended to have better nutrition as did their children, than women in monogamous marriages and their children. Later wives and their children fared on average as well as monogamous wives and their children, but not as well as first wives. This, the team claims, shows that not all instances of polygynous marriage are harmful to women or children—it shows that in some cases, it can actually be a practice that women can use to better their lives and that of their children. It is a matter of wealth and the rules that govern a society—if women cannot own land or other resources, for example, or take a job, as was the case in the Tanzanian villages, they will likely do better in life if they are able to attract and marry a man with some degree of wealth, which in some cases may mean, a man with multiple wives.

How do the husbands fare?

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frojack writes:

It turns out you can hide an entire brewery (or not even have a brewery) and pretend to produce a craft beer, advertise it as such, and it's not even against the law. For years, Blue Moon Brewing Co. has been passing off its beers as "microbrews", or "craft beers", while curiously building market share beyond what a craft brewery could actually produce. The catch is that Blue Moon is semi-secret brand of MillerCoors LLC. CourtHouseNews reports:

Parent started a class action law suit against MillerCoors in San Diego state court, claiming deceptive practices and misrepresentation in violation of California's Consumers Legal Remedies Act; untrue and misleading advertising in violation of California's false advertising law; and unlawful, fraudulent and unfair business practices in violation of California's unfair competition law.

MillerCoors managed to get the case moved to federal court, and the judge handed MillerCoors a slam dunk win on all counts. MillerCoors found specific loopholes in California law that allowed them to produce beer under "fictitious names" if they just register those names on the official "fictitious names" registry. The plaintiff has 30 days to amend the complaint after the judge's final order.

"gewg_" writes:

Common Dreams reports

A federal court on [October 26] ruled that a Michigan man can challenge his inclusion on the government's "No Fly List", in a move that is being celebrated as a victory for the hundreds of U.S. citizens assigned to that secretive list, as well as the countless Arab-Americans routinely subjected to similar racial profiling.

Reversing a previous district court ruling, [6th] Circuit Judge Julia Smith Gibbons ordered (pdf) "further proceedings" in the case of Saeb Mokdad, a Lebanese-American who since September 2012 has been prohibited three times from boarding a plane to visit his family in Lebanon.

[...] There are currently as many as 47,000 people currently on the U.S. government's "No Fly List" according to documents[1] leaked to The Intercept last year, including 800 Americans.

[1] Content is behind scripts.

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fliptop writes:

Citigroup is testing two concept ATMs from Diebold that will scan a customer's eyes using their cell phone:

The first concept, dubbed "Irving", uses the customer's phone camera to scan their iris instead of having them type in their personal ID number. Diebold estimates that the cash withdrawal process could be shortened to just 10 seconds with this method. The second concept, known as "Janus", is a double-sided ATM that also does away with the card reader. Instead, it can email or text receipts to the user.

Despite growing demand, Citigroup doesn't appear to be in that much of a hurry:

"Larger players sometimes like to wait on the sidelines a little longer to see if a product has merit before investing in it," Javelin analyst Daniel Van Dyk told the WSJ.

The company's reticence is in part due to questions about whether the general banking public is willing, or even able, to submit to regular biometric scans in order to access their hard-earned cash.

Regardless, companies like Citigroup are in the proverbial catbird seat since young people think national banks offer the best mobile services.

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Yog-Yogguth writes:

Ravens are known to be smart and IFLScience has a good summary of a new study which shows ravens recognize cheaters and won't trust them to the extent of refusing to cooperate with them if they have been cheated badly enough, and also that the cheaters were likely to try to cheat again if given another chance.

Nine young ravens, six of them male and three female, were gradually familiarized with the experimental setup before first being put through 600 trials where they got to freely choose who to cooperate with. Later through a few hundred more trials in total each raven was tested on the same task with each other raven in turn (i.e. no free selection of cooperation partner) as well as on their own to see if they would try the same experiment even when cooperation and success was impossible. They also tried to test for the importance of a raven observing the cooperating partner during the trial with much poorer results showing that while the ravens often cooperated successfully in the previous trials most of them hadn't really understood the details of how the cooperation — or the experiement or both — worked.

The ravens were shown to be the most successful when they were in pairs of one male and one female and also when there was a larger difference in the hierarchy of dominance between the cooperating ravens. The success rate for self-selected pairs was 66.2% while the success rate for assigned partners was only 27.3%. 84.38% of the ravens pulled the string in the control trials without a partner where it could not result in a reward (then again it seems there was nothing lost by trying and no reason why they shouldn't try even on the slimmest chance it might work even if they realized it shouldn't).

Link to the full paper "Tolerance and reward equity predict cooperation in ravens" in Nature, also available as a PDF (635 KB). It's eleven pages long and filled to the brim with information.

The most surprising to me is that ravens apparently love cheese :)

Hat tip to Schneier's blog which mentioned the story.

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Runaway1956 writes:

Your antivirus software is watching you. A recent study shows that popular antivirus applications like Avast assign your computer a unique identifier and send a list of all web addresses you visit to the manufacturer. If the antivirus finds a suspicious document, it will send the document to the antivirus company. Yes, your antivirus company might have a list of web pages you've visited along with your sensitive personal documents!

http://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/avc_datasending_2014_en.pdf (PDF Download) pretty charts comparing a variety of specific data reporting between vendors and products, https://www.bof.nl/live/wp-content/uploads/Letter-to-antivirus-companies-.pdf (PDF download) I believe this is the original open letter which led to the charts PDF

"According to a top-secret GCHQ warrant renewal request written in 2008 and published today by The Intercept, the British spy agency viewed Kaspersky software as an obstruction to its hacking operations and needed to reverse engineer it to find ways to neutralize the problem. Doing so required obtaining a warrant."

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2106783/project-camberdada.pdf (PDF Download) purports to be a top secret document outlining the interception to malware reporting to AV providers

So - how valuable is an AV program? Is your AV transmitting data to the NSA? Does your AV provide a "backdoor" into your computer?

Much has been said about the advisability of running an AV on *nix. Much has been said about the inherent security of *nix. Right now, I'm somewhat happy/relieved that I am NOT running any proprietary antivirus programs.

Disclaimer: I am reading a fascinating work of fiction, which postulates that your antivirus shares data with the NSA. Given that postulation, I went looking for information. I'll be more than happy to disclose the title and author in the comments section - just ask!

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://hackaday.com/2015/10/21/nurses-create-in-a-medical-makerspace/

University of Texas Medical Branch and an MIT initiative have joined forces to create the first maker space in a hospital. Often nurses see things that would make their jobs easier or a patient's care better and now they can create custom solutions to those problems. They aim to spread this to other hospitals and form a community of medical makers.

Although there are many skilled and dedicated types of health care professionals, nurses are often the main point of contact between the medical establishment and a patient. You will probably spend more time with your nurse–especially in a hospital setting–than any other health care provider. Every patient's needs are different, so it isn't surprising that nurses sometimes improvise unique solutions to help their patients be more comfortable or recover faster.

That's the idea guiding an innovative program called MakerNurse–an initiative backed by MIT and the Robert W. Johnson Foundation. The idea is to encourage nurses to be makers. One of the project's cofounders, Anna Young, had found nurses in Central America making do with what they had on hand and naturally acting as makers. "We saw a nurse repair a stethoscope diaphragm with an overhead transparency," she said. Young noted that often nurses didn't realize the significance of their making–it was just how they got through the day.

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Ethanol-fueled writes:

Postdoctoral fellow John Edgar Browning, who has spent his entire academic life studying the depiction of vampires in film and literature, originally thought that there must be something deranged about real people who identify with the characters that seem more suited to horror movies than a historic district in Louisiana.

"Until 2009, the only area of vampire studies that I hadn't approached was real vampires, said Browning, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I think I subconsciously saved it for last because I just thought what a lot of people think: that they must be crazy and have read too much fictional work about vampires.

The vampires whom Browning spoke with claim they can't control their urges, which amount to a need for around two or three feedings [ note: "feeding" is one of many specific terms the vampire community uses ] a week. If ample blood is on offer, they might refrigerate it and later combine it with other ingredients, like tea.

According to Browning, symptoms of vampirism start to manifest around puberty, when those who later become reliant on ingesting blood find themselves physically "drained" for no discernible reason. They usually discover accidentally that blood offers a remedy: They might bite their lip, for instance, and realize that swallowing the metallic liquid between their teeth gives them an instant burst of energy.

When Browning started his research, he was most surprised to discover that most of the community members didn't have an extensive knowledge of how vampires are portrayed in popular culture. Once, when he mentioned an episode of "True Blood," he said, "no one knew what I was talking about."

This lack of awareness indicated to him that the vampires weren't super-fans who had simply taken their obsession with fantasy narratives to an extreme. Rather, they were normal people with routines no different from everyone else.

No different, that is, with the exception of one grisly drinking habit.

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