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Phoenix666 writes:

Owners of New York City's taxi "medallions" filed a lawsuit (PDF) against city regulators today, saying their business has been devastated by the decision to allow companies like Uber to compete using "E-hail" services.

A medallion is required to operate a New York City yellow taxicab, the only type of vehicle allowed to accept passengers who hail cabs on the street. Until recently, those medallions could sell for over $1 million. Companies like White & Blue Group, one of the plaintiffs in the case, managed fleets of licensed taxicabs by leasing out the medallions.

According to the suit, White & Blue Group, which manages the largest fleet of leased taxicabs in New York, "has seen its monthly leasing income drop as much as 50% in the past year," and has been forced to idle as much as 20 percent of its fleet each day. The complaint was filed today and reported earlier by Reuters.

Extortionists crying about losing money is about the saddest sight in the world.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The first sequencing of ancient genomes extracted from human remains that date back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic period over 13,000 years ago has revealed a previously unknown "fourth strand" of ancient European ancestry.

This new lineage stems from populations of hunter-gatherers that split from western hunter-gatherers shortly after the 'out of Africa' expansion some 45,000 years ago and went on to settle in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia today.

Here these hunter-gatherers largely remained for millennia, becoming increasingly isolated as the Ice Age culminated in the last 'Glacial Maximum' some 25,000 years ago, which they weathered in the relative shelter of the Caucasus mountains until eventual thawing allowed movement and brought them into contact with other populations, likely from further east.

This led to a genetic mixture that resulted in the Yamnaya culture: horse-borne Steppe herders that swept into Western Europe around 5,000 years ago, arguably heralding the start of the Bronze Age and bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills, along with the Caucasus hunter-gatherer strand of ancestral DNA - now present in almost all populations from the European continent.

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Phoenix666 writes:

American federal investigators are having a hard time hiring computer-savvy staff, according to a memo from the Inspector General for the US Department of Justice.

"Even as it works to expand the ranks of its cybersecurity team, the department continues to face challenges recruiting and retaining highly qualified candidates to do this work," the memo [PDF] states.

Last year the FBI got the authorization and budget to hire 134 computer scientists for online investigations. We're told the agency could only find 82 people interested in working for Uncle Sam. As a result, five of the FBI's regional 56 Cyber Task Force teams don't have a computer specialist on hand.

Why are they having so much trouble?

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Phoenix666 writes:

It's no longer surprising to encounter 100-foot pinwheels spinning in the breeze as you drive down the highway. But don't get too comfortable with that view. A Spanish company called Vortex Bladeless is proposing a radical new way to generate wind energy that will once again upend what you see outside your car window.

Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity. But it goes about it in an entirely different way.

Instead of capturing energy via the circular motion of a propeller, the Vortex takes advantage of what's known as vorticity, an aerodynamic effect that produces a pattern of spinning vortices. Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind. And for good reason: With enough wind, vorticity can lead to an oscillating motion in structures, which, in some cases, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, can cause their eventual collapse.

Less efficient than traditional wind turbines, but quiet and don't kill birds.

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Phoenix666 writes:

For many years, the consensus was that the human brain couldn't generate new cells once it reached adulthood. Once you were grown, you entered a state of neural decline. This was a view perhaps most famously expressed by the so-called founder of modern neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. After an early interest in plasticity, he became sceptical, writing in 1928, "In adult centres the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated. It is for the science of the future to change, if possible, this harsh decree." Cajal's gloomy prognosis was to rumble through the 20th century.

[...] This, then, is the truth about neuroplasticity: it does exist, and it does work, but it's not a miracle discovery that means that, with a little effort, you can turn yourself into a broccoli-loving, marathon-running, disease-immune, super-awesome genius. The "deep question", says Chris McManus, Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at University College London, is, "Why do people, even scientists, want to believe all this?" Curious about the underlying causes of the neuroplasticity craze, he believes it is just the latest version of the personal-transformation myth that's been haunting the culture of the West for generations.

[...] Even the people whose lives are being transformed by neuroplasticity are finding that brain change is anything but easy. Take recovery from a stroke. "If you're going to recover the use of an arm, you may need to move that arm tens of thousands of times before it begins to learn new neural pathways to do that," says Downey. "And, after that, there's no guarantee it's going to work." Scott says something similar about speech and language therapy. "There were dark days, say, 50 years ago, where if you'd had a stroke you didn't get that kind of treatment other than to stop you choking because they'd decided it doesn't work. But now it's becoming absolutely clear that it does, and that it's a phenomenally good thing. But none of it comes for free."

On the other hand, the new brain hackers are using electro-stimulation to make it easier to re-wire pathways.

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gman003 writes:

From Techdirt and The Intercept :

In the wake of the tragic events in Paris last week, encryption has been a useful bogeyman for those with a voracious appetite for surveillance expansion. Like clockwork, numerous reports have circulated in the days since, blaming everyone from Snowden to Sony for letting the attackers make their plans in secret, protected by encryption.

"Yet news emerging from Paris, as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January — suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted." The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use encryption whatsoever.

That's not to say dangerous organizations like ISIS don't use encryption, and won't do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption, or at least should. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe -- is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A U.S. senator plans to introduce legislation that would delay the end of the bulk collection of phone metadata by the National Security Agency to Jan. 31, 2017, in the wake of security concerns after the terror attacks last Friday in Paris.

Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, believes that the termination of the program, scheduled for month-end under the USA Freedom Act, "takes us from a constitutional, legal, and proven NSA collection architecture to an untested, hypothetical one that will be less effective."

The transition will happen in less than two weeks, at a time when the threat level for the U.S. is "incredibly high," he said Tuesday.

The obvious answer to doing something that doesn't work is to do more of that something.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at the Salk Institute found a drug candidate aimed at preventing Alzheimer's disease also appeared to have anti-aging benefits such as better memory and cognition, and better physical health, when tested on mice. The research has been published in the journal Aging .

The drug, developed by the Salk Institute team, is called J147. It was specifically designed to combat one of the major risk factors in 99 percent of Alzheimer's cases, old age. However, it was only designed to target one specific factor of old age, neurotoxicity. This is the exposure to toxic substances that damage nervous tissue and neurons, and is a major cause of Alzheimer's, which is estimated to affect up to 46.8 million people worldwide.

"Initially, the impetus was to test this drug in a novel animal model that was more similar to 99 percent of Alzheimer's cases," says lead author Antonio Currais, a member of Professor David Schubert's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at Salk. "We did not predict we'd see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters."

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tt0102511 writes:

In 2012 John Brennan protested the TSA by stripping nude in an Oregon airport, his actions were ruled a fully legal protest under Oregon law. Despite that ruling, the TSA insists on fining him $500.

Brennan is appealing the fine to the 9th circuit court with the intent of putting the TSA's often extra-legal administrative decisions under constitutional scrutiny. It's going to cost him $15,000. So far he's raised $9,000 with 3 more days to go.

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The New York Times Quietly Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Attacks

Phoenix666 writes:

Questions about how the terrorists behind Friday’s attacks in Paris managed to evade electronic surveillance have fueled worrisome speculation in Europe and in the U.S. from intelligence experts, lawmakers and the press — including The New York Times, which on Sunday quietly pulled from its website a story alleging the attackers used encrypted technology.

On Sunday, the Times published a story citing unidentified “European officials” who told the outlet the attackers coordinated their assault on the French capital via unspecified “encryption technology.”

“The attackers are believed to have communicated using encryption technology, according to European officials who had been briefed on the investigation but were not authorized to speak publicly,” the article, which has since been removed, stated.

“It was not clear whether the encryption was part of widely used communications tools, like WhatsApp, which the authorities have a hard time monitoring, or something more elaborate. Intelligence officials have been pressing for more leeway to counter the growing use of encryption.”

Sorry, Grey Lady, after the past decade of shilling for the Powers-That-Be, the credibility ship has sailed...

ISIS Encrypted Communications with Paris Attackers

frojack writes:

And So it Starts. ArsTechnica is carrying a story where they quote from a story in The New York Times the speculation of an un-named French Official:

Ars points out that there is still no evidence of encryption used, and in any event, there were lots of digital tracks (meta data) left by these terrorists with communication between Belgium and Syria.

[More after the break.]

arslan writes:

Micah Lee from The Intercept sat down with Edward Snowden in Moscow last week to talk about privacy. Some of the responses from Snowden sound like good advice and is not too technical that most laymen would be unable to understand and adopt with a little research. What does the Soylent community think about his advice? Are there any poor recommendations there that should be called out or additional things that people should think about?

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AnonTechie writes:

THE TRADE IN the secret hacker techniques known as “zero day exploits” has long taken place in the dark, hidden from the companies whose software those exploits target, and from the privacy advocates who revile the practice. But one zero-day broker is taking the market for these hacking techniques into the open, complete with a full price list.

In an unprecedented move Wednesday, the zero-day broker startup Zerodium published a price chart for different classes of digital intrusion techniques and software targets that it buys from hackers and resells in a subscription service to customers that include government agencies. The list, which details the sums it pays for attack methods that effect[sic] dozens of different applications and operating systems, represents one of the most detailed views yet into the controversial and murky market for secret hacker exploits. “The first rule of [the] 0days biz is to never discuss prices publicly,” Zerodium CEO Chaouki Bekrar wrote in a message to WIRED prior to revealing the chart. “So guess what: We’re going to publish our acquisition price list.”

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/heres-a-spy-firms-price-list-for-secret-hacker-techniques/

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Phoenix666 writes:

When a green architect does a particularly good job, you'll know it by the bling: the silver, gold, and platinum LEED certifications that emblazon buildings' exteriors. But the best eco-conscious constructions don't need a seal of approval—and their builders probably wouldn't appreciate it anyway. Mound termites, native to Africa, South Asia, and Australia, are pros at building self-regulating structures that maintain oxygen levels, temperature, and humidity. And now human architects and engineers want to adapt that ingenuity for their own designs.
...
How does the mound dissipate air through its network of holes? As the sun moves through the sky during the day, the air in the thinner chimneys on the outer edges of the mound heat up quickly, while the air in the mound's big, central chimney stays relatively cool. Hot air rises up through the outer chimneys and cool air in the central chimney sinks, circulating air continuously—injecting oxygen and flushing out carbon dioxide. At night, the flow reverses as the outer chimney air cools down quicker than the inner chimney air.

Mimicking termites' strategies, architects and engineers can drastically improve energy efficiency in buildings. Take Mick Pearce, a Zimbabwean architect who designed the award-winning Eastgate Center in Harare, Zimbabwe. Similar to termite mounds, the concrete outer walls of Eastgate are porous. As wind blows through the tunnels on a hot day, the concrete sucks up the heat, cooling the wind before it whooshes into the shopping center. Fans flush the heat out of the concrete at night so it will be ready to store more heat the next day. Following termites' lead, Pearce cut energy use down to about 10 percent of a normal building that size.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Pieces from a mysterious board game that hasn't been played for 1,500 years were discovered in a heavily looted 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China.

There, archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board. The tile when reconstructed was "decorated with two eyes, which are surrounded by cloud-and-thunder patterns," wrote the archaeologists in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics.

We finally know what happened to Andy when he disappeared after casting Time Warp...

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Phoenix666 writes:

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The preview is available at www.nasa.gov.

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

[Editors Note: The link provided in the article takes you to the NASA homepage. This link will take you direct to the HD previews of the Apollo 11 moonwalks.]

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