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An Anonymous Coward writes:

I always found the denials of this to be bizarre:

Given the intrusive nature of government surveillance, Mozilla—with its dedication to privacy and independence from corporate and government interests—should be more vital than ever. But in the age of social media and mobile devices, it has struggled to maintain relevance and failed to transition to a world where the desktop browser is fading in importance. Mozilla hasn't even dented the mobile market with mobile versions of its browser or its Firefox OS smartphone operating system. And the organization has done little to counteract Facebook's expanding influence. What's more, its foothold on the desktop continues to slip as Google Chrome grows in popularity.

[...] The good news is Mozilla has found some partnerships to supplement its search revenue. For example, the company quietly integrated the "read-it-later" service Pocket into Firefox along with a video conferencing feature powered by European telco Telefonica earlier this year. Although the company emphasizes that Pocket and Telefonica didn't pay for placement in the Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. chief legal and business officer Denelle Dixon-Thayer told WIRED that Mozilla has revenue sharing arrangements with both companies.

Also at Ghacks.

takyon: Mozilla retires Firefox's sponsored tiles, hunts for new revenue streams

Previously: Mozilla Integrates Proprietary Pocket Plugin
Warning - Firefox Has You in the Pocket

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From vice.com:

After the recent Paris terror attacks, French law enforcement wants to have several powers added to a proposed law, including the move to forbid and block the use of the Tor anonymity network, according to an internal document from the Ministry of Interior seen by French newspaper Le Monde [Caution: Link in French].

That document talks about two proposed pieces of legislation, one around the state of emergency, and the other concerning counter-terrorism.

Regarding the former, French law enforcement wish to "Forbid free and shared wi-fi connections" during a state of emergency. This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public wi-fi networks.

As the latter, law enforcement would like "to block or forbid communications of the Tor network." The legislation, according to Le Monde, could be presented as early as January 2016.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Colorado State University chemists have created a biodegradable polymer that can be heated back to monomer form:

The textbooks and journals (and especially the oil companies) said making a completely recyclable, biodegradable, petroleum-free polymer couldn't be done. But Colorado State University chemists have done it — paving a potential new road to truly sustainable, petroleum-free plastics. Just reheat it for an hour and it converts back to its original molecular state, ready for reuse. Their starting feedstock: a biorenewable monomer that textbooks and journal papers had declared non-polymerizable, meaning it could not be bonded into the large molecules (polymers) typically required for use as a material.

"More than 200 pounds of synthetic polymers are consumed per person each year — plastics probably the most in terms of production volume. And most of these polymers are not biorenewable," said Colorado State professor of chemistry Eugene Chen. "The big drive now is to produce biorenewable and biodegradable polymers or plastics. That is, however, only one part of the solution, as biodegradable polymers are not necessarily recyclable, in terms of feedstock recycling." There are several biodegradable plastics on the market today, chief among them a starch-based material made from polylactic acid, or PLA. Compostable cups, cutlery and packaging in dining halls are made from PLA. They're biodegradable, but they're not truly recyclable — once made, they can't be completely reconstituted into their original monomeric states without forming other, unwanted byproducts.

[More after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

Recursion schemes are elegant and useful patterns for expressing general computation. In particular, they allow you to 'factor recursion out' of whatever semantics you may be trying to express when interpreting programs, keeping your interpreters concise, your concerns separated, and your code more maintainable.
...
In this article I want to avoid building up the machinery meticulously and instead concentrate mostly on understanding and using Edward Kmett's recursion-schemes library, which, while lacking in documentation, is very well put together and implements all the background plumbing one needs to get started.

In particular, to feel comfortable using recursion-schemes I found that there were a few key patterns worth understanding:

        --Factoring recursion out of your data types using pattern functors and a fixed-point wrapper.
        --Using the 'Foldable' & 'Unfoldable' classes, plus navigating the 'Base' type family.
        --How to use some of the more common recursion schemes out there for everyday tasks.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Tom Simonite writes at MIT Technology Review that the Wikimedia Foundation is rolling out new software trained to know the difference between an honest mistake and intentional vandalism in an effort to make editing Wikipedia less psychologically bruising. One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000.

Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians' complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers' mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy. The new ORES system, for "Objective Revision Evaluation Service," can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not. ORES can allow editing tools to direct people to review the most damaging changes. The software can also help editors treat rookie or innocent mistakes more appropriately, says Aaron Halfaker who helped diagnose that problem and is now leading a project trying to fight it. "I suspect the aggressive behavior of Wikipedians doing quality control is because they're making judgments really fast and they're not encouraged to have a human interaction with the person," says Halfaker. "This enables a tool to say, 'If you're going to revert this, maybe you should be careful and send the person who made the edit a message.'"

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From The New Yorker:

An hour before Bradley's appointment, Muizelaar had received tantalizing news about a patient on whom he had performed an exceedingly unusual procedure. The previous month, he had operated on Patrick Egan, a fifty-six-year-old real-estate broker, who also suffered from glioblastoma. Egan was a friend of Muizelaar's, and, like Terri Bradley, he had exhausted the standard therapies for the disease. The tumor had spread to his brain stem and was shortly expected to kill him. Muizelaar cut out as much of the tumor as possible. But before he replaced the "bone flap"—the section of skull that is removed to allow access to the brain—he soaked it for an hour in a solution teeming with Enterobacter aerogenes, a common fecal bacterium. Then he reattached it to Egan's skull, using tiny metal plates and screws. Muizelaar hoped that inside Egan's brain an infection was brewing.

[...] For four weeks, Egan lay in intensive care, most of the time in a coma. Then, on the afternoon of November 10th, Muizelaar learned that a scan of Egan's brain had failed to pick up the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. The pattern on the scan suggested that the tumor had been replaced by an abscess—an infection—precisely as the surgeons had intended. "A brain abscess can be treated, a glioblastoma cannot," Muizelaar told me. "I was excited, although I knew that clinically the patient was not better."

So the idea is that we use something bad we can cure to infect and kill something we cannot cure?

Original Submission

Porsche has just announced the Mission E, their first-ever electric vehicle. A prototype was unveiled at the Frankfurt motor show in September, but the board of Porsche AG (which is owned by Volkswagen) has only now approved it for mass production. They're planning to start selling it by the end of the decade.

The Mission E concept car celebrated its premiere at the Frankfurt International Motor Show (IAA) in September. Visitors were gripped above all by its highly emotional design. Living up to the buzzword of 'E-Performance', the technological trailblazer combines outstanding driving performance with trendsetting day-to-day practicality. The four-door car with four individual seats has a system power output of over 440 kW (600 PS). The vehicle will thus achieve both acceleration of 0 to 100 km/h in under 3.5 seconds and a range of more than 500 kilometres. Charged via an 800-volt charger unit specially developed for the car, which is twice as powerful as today's quick-charge systems, the lithium-ion batteries integrated within the vehicle floor have enough power again for 80 percent of the range after just 15 minutes. The vehicle can optionally be 'refuelled' wirelessly by induction via a coil set into the garage floor.

A price has not been announced, but Top Gear speculates that it will be in the neighborhood of £100,000 ($150,000).

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

Hackaday reports

KiCad 4.0 has just been released.

[...] If you've been using the old "stable" version of KiCad (from May 2013!), you've got a lot of catching-up to do.

The official part footprint libraries changed their format sometime in 2014, and are all now hosted on GitHub in separate ".pretty" folders for modularity and ease of updating. Unfortunately, this means that you'll need to be a little careful with your projects until you've switched all the parts over. The blow is softened by a "component rescue helper" but you're still going to need to be careful if you're still using old schematics with the new version.

The most interesting change, from a basic PCB-layout perspective, is the push-and-shove router. We're looking for a new demo video online, but this one from earlier this year will have to do for now. We've been using various "unstable" builds of KiCad for the last two years just because of this feature, so it's awesome to see it out in an actual release. The push-and-shove router still has some quirks and doesn't have all the functionality of the original routers, though, so we often find ourselves switching back and forth. But when you need the push-and-shove feature, it's awesome.

If you're doing a board where timing is critical, KiCad 4.0 has a bunch of differential trace and trace-length tuning options that are something far beyond the last release. The 3D board rendering has also greatly improved.

Indeed, there are so many improvements that have been made over the last two and a half years, that everybody we know has been using the nightly development builds of KiCad instead of the old stable version. If you've been doing the same, version 4.0 may not have all that much new for you. But if you're new to KiCad, now's a great time to jump in.

Previous: CERN is Getting Serious About Development of the KiCAD App for Designing Printed Circuits

Original Submission

davester666 writes:

From the BBC:

3D printing: Company will turn your head into chocolate lollipops

A start-up company based in London is offering to print out chocolate lollipops modelled on customer's heads.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34963592

Alternatively, you can give one to your boss with the suggestion "Suck my head."

Original Submission

ticho writes:

Over the past few months, [sucuri.net's] security operations group have identified and mitigated an increasing number of DDoS attacks tied to extortion attempts from different cyber crime groups, including DD4BC, Armada Collective and a few more unnamed ones. These DDoS extortion attempts are starting to exploit smaller websites that may be less able to defend themselves.

[A] ransom email is followed by a small scale DDoS attack that can last from 30 to 60 minutes. After 24 hours, if the ransom is not paid, the attacks increase and can last many hours.

Even though the media and security companies were already talking about this DDoS extortion threat, for most webmasters it felt like a foreign threat only affecting very large institutions and financial websites.

However, over the course of the last couple of months, we started to see an increasing number of extortion attempts against more average-sized sites. Everything from forums, small e-commerce and even some online gaming properties started receiving the threats and being DDoS'ed.

The price to stop this new wave of attacks also went down significantly, to just 2 Bitcoins ($700 USD). We are seeing these new DDoS ransom attempts more and more from what seems like an unnamed copy-cat group.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers want to wire the human body with sensors that could harvest reams of data — and transform health care.
...
Working with researchers at Linköping University in Sweden, Gustafsson's team has developed skin-surface and implanted sensors, as well as an in-body intranet that can link devices while keeping them private. Other groups are developing technologies ranging from skin patches that sense arterial stiffening — a signal of a looming heart attack — to devices that detect epileptic fits and automatically deliver drugs directly to affected areas of the brain.

These next-generation devices are designed to function alongside tissue, rather than be isolated from it like most pacemakers and other electronic devices already used in the body. But making this integration work is no easy feat, especially for materials scientists, who must shrink circuits radically, make flexible and stretchable electronics that are imperceptible to tissue, and find innovative ways to create interfaces with the body. Achieving Gustafsson's vision — in which devices monitor and treat the body day in, day out — will also require both new power sources and new ways of transmitting information.

Hot on the heels of the other day's story about how doctors don't know what to do with the data from fitness trackers, is this more of the same, ie. a mass of data doctors can't use, or a fundamentally different quality of data that would be useful?

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

The NYT reports that Hillary Clinton spoke at the Brookings Institution's annual Saban Forum on Sunday and said that the Islamic State had become "the most effective recruiter in the world" and that the only solution is to engage American technology companies in blocking or taking down militants' websites, videos and encrypted communications. "We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS. We need Silicon Valley not to view government as its adversary. We need to challenge our best minds in the private sector and work with our best minds in the public sector to develop solutions that would both keep us safe and protect our privacy," said Clinton. "We should take the concerns of law enforcement and counterterrorism professionals seriously. They have warned that impenetrable encryption may prevent them from accessing terrorist communications and preventing a future attack. On the other hand we know there are legitimate concerns about government intrusion, network security, and creating new vulnerabilities that bad actors can and would exploit."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Google has launched its first wi-fi network in Uganda's capital Kampala, as part of a project to broaden access to affordable high-speed internet.

The company is making the broadband wireless network available to local internet providers, who will then charge customers for access.

The web giant says the network is now live in 120 key locations in Kampala.

Official statistics show Uganda has about 8.5 million internet users, making up 23% of the population.

[...] The wireless network forms part of a wider project to improve web infrastructure in Africa, which has seen Google lay 800km (500 miles) of cables in Uganda to establish a fibre optic network.

There are now plans to expand the project to the Ghanaian cities of Accra, Tema and Kumasi.

Hooray. Another third-world nation will be able to leapfrog the data throughput available in New York City, the world financial capital.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Business Insider has a pair of articles about generation nicknames in the USA and the rest of the First World, and (conversely) nicknamed generations. The first discusses a Goldman Sachs report that attempts to characterize the members of "Generation Z". If you're a bit challenged as far as remembering exactly what age groups these nicknames refer to, the piece has an excellent chart breaking out the generations by age, and then by population count (in the USA). Details of Goldman's Gen Z portrait are sketchy, but it seems that one point is that GS previously seemed fascinated by the Millenials, the generation that came before Gen Z.

The second article is a proposal by demographer Mark McCrindle for the nickname of the new generation, whose early members are being born as you read this.

Coincidentally, TIME is running a story on how the generation nicknames came about; I was surprised to see longtime NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw being credited with coming up with the 'Greatest Generation' moniker. An older article (from googling) covers similar ground.

Original Submission

Robotron writes:

India is now generating more than 5 gigawatts of solar power: roughly 90% of that total is from solar power plants, with the other 10% coming from privately mounted rooftop panels. The momentum is likely to build further, with Vinay Rustagi - Managing Director of solar consultancy company Bridge to India - totting up the energy outputs of solar projects presently at various stages of commission at 15.7 GW. Ambitiously, India's central government wants a total of 100 gigawatts of solar generation by 2022, while as of July 2015 the entirety of India's power generation amounts to about 276 gigawatts.

Original Submission