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darkfeline writes:

From ArsTechnica:

Federal prosecutors have said that they are moving forward in their attempt to compel Apple to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7, even after the defendant in a felony drug case has now pleaded guilty.

The judge in the case, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, said in a Friday court filing that he is confused.

...

If Feng's phone had iOS 8 or later installed—as 90 percent of iPhones do—this entire issue would likely be moot, as Apple now enables full encryption by default. In September 2014, Apple specifically said the move happened "so it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."

Citing an 18th-century law known as the All Writs Act, federal prosecutors had gone to the judge, asking him to force Apple to unlock the phone. At its core, this federal law simply allows courts to issue a writ, or order, which compels a person or company to do something.

In the past, feds have used this law to compel unnamed smartphone manufacturers to bypass security measures for phones involved in legal cases. The government has previously tried using this same legal justification against Apple as well.

However, for the first time, the judge invited Apple into the courtroom to present arguments as to why the judge should not order it to comply. Apple has made a compelling argument as to why it should not be forced to do the government's bidding.

"The government's proffered reading of the All Writs Act, if carried to its logical conclusion, leads to disquieting results," Ken Dreifach, an attorney representing Apple, wrote in his reply to the government earlier this month.

"For example, if the government wanted to crack a safe, it could require the safe's manufacturer to take possession of, or even travel to the location of, that safe and open it," he continued. "If the government wanted to examine a car, it could send the car to the manufacturer and require the manufacturer to perform the examination. The government could seemingly co-opt any private company it wanted to provide services in support of law enforcement activity, as long as the underlying activity was authorized by a warrant. The All Writs Act does not confer such limitless authority."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From Yahoo Finance:

Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy.
For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.

And they're still dreaming.

But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.

Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.

The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the W7-X.
[...]
Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of W7-X on Youtube.

Additional information can be found at this referenced article from Science .

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"exec" writes:

From Times of Israel :

Architects and scientists from Egypt, France, Canada and Japan will use modern infra-red technology and advanced detectors to map two pyramids at Giza and the two Dahshur pyramids, south of Cairo.

"This special group will study these pyramids to see whether there are still any hidden chambers or other secrets" inside them, Minister of Antiquities Mamduh al-Damati announced at a news conference.

"These engineers and architects will conduct the survey using non-destructive technology that will not harm the pyramids," he said.

Experts said the study, known as "Scan Pyramids," will also be a fresh attempt to understand how the monuments were built in the first place.

The article goes on to to tell us that the "infra-red and muon" scanning will look at four pyramids from the outside, and very likely will also be used from the inside of King Tutankhamun's tomb to look for a secret chamber where they are hoping to find the mummy of the legendary beauty Queen Nefertiti.

-- submitted from IRC

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Phoenix666 writes:

Two-thirds of the world's population under 50 have the highly infectious herpes virus that causes cold sores around the mouth, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday, in its first estimate of global prevalence of the disease.

More than 3.7 billion people under the age of 50 suffer from the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), usually after catching it in childhood, according to a the WHO study.

That is in addition to 417 million people in the 17-49 age range who have the other form of the disease, HSV-2, which causes genital herpes.

According to TechInsider :

One of the biggest issues is that public-health efforts have focused primarily on preventing HSV-2 infections, the researchers write, not HSV-1 infections. But the latter can actually pose more serious risks than just cold sores.

What's more, according to the new report, is that sexually transmitted HSV-1 is on the rise, especially in the Americas, Europe, and the Western Pacific.

Aside from those cold sores, HSV-1 is the most common cause of sporadic encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). And while this brain infection is very rare, it kills more than 50% of those infected if left untreated, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The original WHO study was published on October 28, in the journal Plos One.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

You can now order zombies using your ride-sharing app. In New York and San Francisco, Lyft has arranged for actors dressed as zombies to appear at your desired location this Halloween. Meanwhile, CareerBuilder has analyzed data about America's 53 largest cities to determine which one is most likely to survive a zombie attack, weighting 8 factors including the percentage of engineers in the population and the number of small arms manufacturers.

Exploiting the popular fascination with zombies has apparently become a new Halloween tradition for everyone from job-finding sites to self-published authors. One blog even notes the number of zombie-themed ebooks in Amazon's Kindle Store has doubled every year since 2011, peaking this year at 15,659 different titles.

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Phoenix666 writes:

MIT's Tangible Media Group, part of MIT Media Lab, has a project called bioLogic that is working on growing actuators rather than manufacturing them:

The roots of their research can be dated back to the past with the discovery of a bacteria Bacillus subtilis natto; the microorganism lived inside dry rice stalks and were in turn woven into bags for soybeans .

This bacteria became an established fermentation tool for the preparation of nattō, a soybean-based dish in Japan.

Now they are using the bacteria in a new way—it becomes a nanoactuator that expands and shrinks based on atmospheric moisture or the sweat of the skin. As Gizmodo wrote, the team was interested in the possibilities: "if natto's expansion and contraction could be carefully calibrated, perhaps it could act more like a machine than an unpredictable organism. Perhaps it could act more like an actuator."

Natto's key feature as a food is a slimy mucus drooled over rice. Perhaps that will be more pleasant to wear than eat.

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/dont-count-on-starttls-to-automatically-encrypt-your-sensitive-e-mails/

This isn't really new news, but improperly configured mail services result in lots of privacy holes across the Internet.

STARTTLS is used to upgrade an unencrypted connection to an encrypted SSL/TLS connection. The problem is that if the upgrade fails, many mail clients will proceed to send mail on the unencrypted connection.

For any sysadmins (technical info):

Unfortunately, the situation is somewhat sticky. I suggest reading carefully the TLS/SSL section of https://wiki.debian.org/PostfixAndSASL as well as the STARTTLS RFC http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2487

Public email servers should not require STARTTLS (that is, encryption) on port 25 (smtp). Furthermore, there is no guarantee that all of the mail servers during transit of an email use encryption. Thus, you should assume your email is transmitted unencrypted, until a better solution emerges. You can always use OpenPGP to encrypt the body of your email, which should become commonplace shortly after Hurd achieves market dominance.

Editors Note: How to articles for various flavors of Microsoft Exchange can be found at MSExchange.org.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As the March kickoff for the weeks-long 2016 South By Southwest (SXSW) festival approaches, its disparate sections—music, film, and interactive—have begun announcing confirmed panels, speakers, and showcases. SXSW Interactive appeared prepared to host a panel about the hot-button topic of online harassment and abuse, but that plan changed on Monday when a festival director officially announced that the panel, along with another tangentially related panel, had been canceled due to allegations of "numerous threats of on-site violence."

SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest posted the news at the festival's official blog, though Forrest didn't confirm whether the threats were linked to both panels that he confirmed received the axe: "SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community" and "Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games." After describing SXSW as a home for "diverse ideas," Forrest also described a desire to maintain "civil and respectful" dialogue.

"If people can not agree, disagree, and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment, then this marketplace of ideas is inevitably compromised," Forrest wrote. "Maintaining civil and respectful dialogue within the big tent is more important than any particular session."

And then, just a few days later, we have this report that the panels were restored:

South by Southwest's organizers reversed course Friday and scheduled a summit about gaming-related Internet harassment, after criticism for canceling similar sessions at next year's event due to threats of violence at the festival.

"Earlier this week we made a mistake," Hugh Forrest, director of the SXSW Interactive Festival, said in a statement on its website. "By canceling two sessions we sent an unintended message that SXSW not only tolerates online harassment but condones it, and for that we are truly sorry."

[...] "While we made the decision in the interest of safety for all of our attendees, canceling sessions was not an appropriate response," SXSW's Forrest said, adding the organizers had worked with authorities and security experts. "Online harassment is a serious matter and we stand firmly against hate speech and cyberbullying."

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frojack writes:

When it comes to telling someone an address, words beat numbers and letters.

One company is betting that using words to designate a location might be a whole lot easier and quicker in a digital world than using Longitude and Latitude or street addresses. While their system seems unlikely to be widely adopted it does have a certain appeal when combined with a smartphone. Passing addresses to drivers on the road (or friends for a party) can be kind of tricky. Unless you can send it electronically, the chances of remembering a spoken address is slim, and remembering longitude and latitude long enough to write it down or key it into your GPS is zero.

However remembering browser.tapes.outing or limbs.pinning.honk is pretty easy. You don't even have to write them down. Hint: click satellite view to see what those places have in common. You can keep three words in your head long enough to key them into an app, and zoom directly to the address on your smart phone.

The system was developed by What3Words and is already being used in Geographical Information Systems, and other earth mapping applications where there aren't convenient ways to exchange geo-coordinates verbally.

what3words is a universal addressing system based on a 3mx3m global grid.

Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address.

Their geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses & vice-versa.

Using words means non-technical people can find any location accurately and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.

People's ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect whilst your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes, that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.

The company says "We want to give everyone in the world the ability to talk about a precise location as easily as possible." (And by "Give" they mean "Sell".)

There are free Android and iOS apps available from Navmii allowing users to navigate using a simple 3 word address.

Will it catch on? Betteridge says no, but if Google or Apple takes an interest it might become "a thing".

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takyon writes:

Small investors could be permitted to invest in startups online under new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules:

America's financial watchdog says anyone with spare cash will be able to buy a slice of a startup online without having to fill out mountains of paperwork.

Until now, if you fancied plowing some of your savings into a fledgling biz — say a trendy but privately held San Francisco tech startup — there are all sorts of requirements and red tape you must overcome, all pretty much put in place after the 1929 US stock market crash.

Under new rules from the SEC, a startup can raise $1m a year by selling stock in itself to investors, although the individual amounts will be regulated. Those with an annual income of up to $100,000 can spend either $2,000 a year or five per cent of their net worth in startups, or 10 per cent if they make more than a hundred grand.

"There is a great deal of enthusiasm in the marketplace for crowdfunding, and I believe these rules and proposed amendments provide smaller companies with innovative ways to raise capital and give investors the protections they need," said SEC chairwoman Mary Jo White. "With these rules, the Commission has completed all of the major rulemaking mandated under the JOBS Act."

From the SEC release:

The new crowdfunding rules and forms will be effective 180 days after they are published in the Federal Register. The forms enabling funding portals to register with the Commission will be effective Jan. 29, 2016. [...] The SEC is seeking public comment on the proposed rule amendments for a 60-day period following their publication in the Federal Register.

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AnonTechie writes:

It's probably best to get the bad news out of the way first. The so-called scientific method is a myth. That is not to say that scientists don't do things that can be described and are unique to their fields of study. But to squeeze a diverse set of practices that span cultural anthropology, paleobotany, and theoretical physics into a handful of steps is an inevitable distortion and, to be blunt, displays a serious poverty of imagination. Easy to grasp, pocket-guide versions of the scientific method usually reduce to critical thinking, checking facts, or letting "nature speak for itself," none of which is really all that uniquely scientific. If typical formulations were accurate, the only location true science would be taking place in would be grade-school classrooms.

Scratch the surface of the scientific method and the messiness spills out. Even simplistic versions vary from three steps to eleven. Some start with hypothesis, others with observation. Some include imagination. Others confine themselves to facts. Question a simple linear recipe and the real fun begins. A website called Understanding Science offers an "interactive representation" of the scientific method that at first looks familiar. It includes circles labeled "Exploration and Discovery" and "Testing Ideas." But there are others named "Benefits and Outcomes" and "Community Analysis and Feedback," both rare birds in the world of the scientific method. To make matters worse, arrows point every which way. Mouse over each circle and you find another flowchart with multiple categories and a tangle of additional arrows.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/10/28/scientific-method-myth/

Excerpted from NEWTON'S APPLE AND OTHER MYTHS ABOUT SCIENCE, edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, published by Harvard University Press.

[See our earlier discussion: Have Some Physicists Abandoned the Empirical Method? - Ed.]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The wearable tech industry will treble inside the next five years – with a whopping 245 million devices expected to ship in 2019.

That's according to CCS Insight's Wearables Forecast, Worldwide, 2015-2019, which states that the shipments for 2015 will be around 84 million units. That's a growth in monetary value of 64 per cent; from $15 billion in 2015 to $25 billion in 2019.

The analyst states fitness and activity trackers will account for more than half of the 2019 market in terms of units shipped, but smartwatches will make up more than 50 per cent of the revenue.

Smartwatches are obviously more expensive than fitness bands – especially given the decreasing prices of the latter thanks to budget-friendly brands like Xiaomi. The Chinese company has $15 tracker currently on sale – the Mi Band. The report claims that China overtook the US to become the biggest market for fitness trackers in 2015.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The "jump threading" compiler optimization (aka -fthread-jump) turns conditional into unconditional branches on certain paths at the expense of code size. For hardware with branch prediction, speculative execution, and prefetching, this can greatly improve performance. However, there is no scientific publication or documentation at all. The Wikipedia article is very short and incomplete.

The linked article has an illustrated treatment of common code structures and how these optimizations work.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

CNN reports that the US Navy launched four armed F/A-18 fighter jets to intercept two Russian Tu-142 Bear aircraft that were flying near the 100,000-ton aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan while it was participating in a bilateral training exercise with South Korea in the Pacific Ocean. "It is standard operating procedure for U.S. planes to escort aircraft flying in the vicinity of U.S. Navy ships," says Navy Cmdr. William J. Marks. "This type of interaction is not unprecedented. Overall I would characterize the interaction as safe." The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered USS Reagan is essentially a floating airport, complete with an air traffic control center that tracks and communicates with nearby aircraft. When the carrier engages in flight operations, it institutes a carrier control zone, which extends up to 2,500 feet and within a five-mile radius, according to the Navy's flight training instruction carrier procedures.

The lack of communication by the Russian aircraft conflicted with general aviation practice. Even commercial airports of any significant size generally expect two-way radio contact when aircraft fly as close as the Russians did, according to international aviation guidelines. Encounters such as these were common during the Cold War. They subsided with its end but picked up again under current Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Over the last few years and particularly this year and last year, with the start of the Ukraine crisis, Russia has picked up the number of sorties," says Nick de Larrinaga. adding that Putin wants to show Russia is "still a global military power and a force to be reckoned with."

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

It may look like something you'd use for target practice, but this is a new kind of sensor that can detect the presence of all kinds of light—and reacts to it in super-quick time, too.

In fact, the graphene sensor is, according to the researchers that built it, the first time that a single detector has been able to monitor such a huge swathe of electromagnetic spectrum— from visible light, through infrared radiation, and right through to terahertz radiation. It was built by a team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf labs in Germany.

The target-like pattern is in fact an antenna, with the different length scales providing the ability to detect different frequencies across the spectrum. They funnel the sensed radiation to the center, where it's focused on a tiny flake of graphene sat atop a piece of silicon carbide. In the past, the materials used at the center of such antennae haven't been sensitive across a wide range of frequencies—but fortunately graphene is.

http://gizmodo.com/this-graphene-detector-monitors-all-forms-of-light-and-1739578134

[Abstract]: https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-23-22-28728

[Also Covered By]: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151027123344.htm

Original Submission