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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Martin Shkreli, the head of Turing Pharamaceutical who rose to fame by jacking up a 60-year-old generic drug's price by 5500%, has been reported to be arrested by the FBI for securities fraud.

At Bloomberg and a shorter version from NPR.

In the case that closely tracks that suit, federal prosecutors accused Shkreli of engaging in a complicated shell game after his defunct hedge fund, MSMB Capital Management, lost millions. He is alleged to have made secret payoffs and set up sham consulting arrangements. A New York lawyer, Evan Greebel, was also arrested early Thursday. He's accused of conspiring with Shkreli in part of the scheme.

Goes to show you, if you are gonna be evil, try to stay below the radar.

Previously: Cost of Daraprim Medication Raised by Over 50 Times
Drug Firm Offers $1 Version of $750 Turing Pharmaceuticals Pill

Original Submission + Alternate Submission by Fnord666

jdavidb writes:

Don't underestimate the power of the Force ... or inflation. Box-office analysts predict that in dollar terms, The Force Awakens will be the biggest earning movie with Star Wars in its name. But such measurements almost always fail to account for inflation. In real dollar terms, none of the sequels/prequels have surpassed the original Star Wars (later subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Snowden files have revealed the location and role of the PRESTON surveillance facility in London:

The "Big Brother" comprehensive national database system feared by many MPs has been built behind their backs over the last decade, and even has a name for its most intrusive component: a central London national phone and internet tapping centre called PRESTON.

PRESTON, which collects about four million intercepted phone calls a year, has also recently been used to plant malware on iPhones, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The phones were then targetted for MI5 "implants" (malware), authorised by a ministerial warrant.

The location and role of the PRESTON tapping centre has never previously been publicly identified, although published Crown Prosecution Service guidance to senior prosecutors refers to secret "Preston briefings" which they can be given if tapping evidence in a case they are prosecuting reveals that a defendant may be innocent. (The guidance also notes that the briefing may be given after exculpatory intercept evidence has been destroyed.)

Located inside the riverside headquarters of the Security Service, MI5, in Thames House, PRESTON works alongside and links to massive databases holding telephone call records, internet use records, travel, financial, and other personal records held by the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC), a little known intelligence support agency set up by Tony Blair's government in a 1999 plan to combat encryption and provide a national centre for internet surveillance and domestic codebreaking.

[...] David Davis MP told The Register this week that "much of the debate for the last 15 years appears to have been a charade about data that the government very likely already held. It is also clear that the legislation that the government relied upon was being interpreted in ways that Parliament never imagined."

Original Submission

frojack writes:

The Economist is carrying a free story (free except for the annoying subscribe pop-up) about a French slave trading ship that crashed into a reef and sunk just off of the tiny island named "Île de Sable" on July 31st 1761.

The Island is a tiny mountain top of sand 500 miles east of Madagascar. The island was subsequently re-named Tromelin Island (google map link) for reasons explained in the article. Zoom in and out again to see just how desolate a place this still is.

The shipwrecked French crew, built a boat out of the wreckage of their ship, with the help of some of the slaves. The boat they built, for lack of materials, could accommodate only about half of the people stranded. So all 123 Frenchmen climbed into the boat, left the 88 remaining slaves (out of an original 160 or more), and sailed off toward Madagascar, with a promise to return.

The article is the story of how that promise was not kept, not entirely the fault of the French First Officer, who pleaded for a ship to rescue the slaves, but was rebuffed at every turn. Too busy worrying about the British fleet was the excuse.

Finally in November 1776, 15 years after the shipwreck, with the British Fleet otherwise distracted, a French ship arrived and rescued the last seven remaining survivors (all women except a 8 month old baby boy) from the island.

The story is an interesting read, and documents how easy it was to be callously abandoned in that day and age. (Not nearly as callous as being sold into slavery by your own disaffected relatives, mind you!).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Philips has backed down over its plan to keep out third-party bulbs from its Hue smart lighting system:

Dutch electronics giant Philips has been forced into an embarrassing U-turn over its plans to lock out third-party suppliers of light bulbs for its Hue smart lighting system. [...] Philips' customers have staged a very noisy protest at the move and the firm has backed down. In a statement on the Hue Facebook page, Philips gave a somewhat ungracious explanation about why it had reversed its earlier decision.

"We recently upgraded the software for Philips Hue to ensure the best seamless connected lighting experience for our customers. This change was made in good faith," Philips said. "However, we under-estimated the impact this would have on a small number of customers who use lights from other brands which could not be controlled by the Philips Hue software. In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system."

Previously: Lightbulb DRM: Philips Locks Purchasers Out Of 3rd-Party Bulbs With Firmware Update

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Sewell Chan reports at The New York Times that Britain's highest court has unanimously rejected an attempt by Donald J. Trump to block the construction of a wind farm near his luxury golf resort in northeast Scotland. Trump has vowed to stop further development on the project if the offshore wind farm — 11 turbines, which would be visible from the golf resort 2.2 miles away — goes forward. Trump spokesman George A. Sorial denounced the ruling as "extremely unfortunate for the residents of Aberdeen and anyone who cares about Scotland's economic future" adding that the wind farm will "completely destroy the bucolic Aberdeen Bay and cast a terrible shadow upon the future of tourism for the area. History will judge those involved unfavorably, and the outcome demonstrates the foolish, small-minded and parochial mentality which dominates the current Scottish government's dangerous experiment with wind energy."

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, withdrew Trump's status as a business ambassador to Scotland last week after Trump called for Muslims to be barred from entering the United States. Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen has stripped Mr. Trump of an honorary degree it awarded him in 2010. Trump's mother was born in Scotland and moved to the United States in the 1930s. "I think I do feel Scottish," said Trump at one time.

Original Submission

TheUnknownCoder writes:

A judge in Sao Paulo has ordered WhatsApp to shut down for 48 hours, starting at 9PM Eastern tonight.

WhatsApp is the single most used app in Brazil, with about 93 million users, or 93% of the country's internet population. It's a particularly useful service for Brazil's youth and poor, many who cannot afford to pay the most expensive plans on the planet.

Brazilian telco's have been lobbying for months to convince the government that WhatsApp's voice service is unregulated and illegal (not entirely unlike the taxi industry's posture on Uber), and have publicly blamed the "WhatsApp effect" for driving millions of Brazilians to abandon their cell phone lines.

A WhatsApp shut-down would be akin to taking half the country off the electricity grid because of an industry squabble over the impending threat of solar power.

Update: Brazil court lifts suspension of Facebook's WhatsApp service

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TAILS Linux 1.8 is out (Dec 15, 2015)

For those that are not familiar, Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly. Tt is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux.

Tails comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite, image and sound editor, etc.

Some helpful links on the Tails site:

Tials Homepage
Tails version 1.8 abbreviated changelog
Tails Security Holes in version 1.7
Tails Downloads
Tails on Twitter
Tails version 1.8 complete changelog

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Sanskrit, Tibetan, Gujarati, and Glagolitic were among 50 handwritten languages researchers used to test a computer program that proved to be as good, or better, than humans at recognizing the figures – a cognitive step for machines, and a leap forward for the potential that coders could build more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the future.

The program, developed by three researchers whose findings were published last week in Science, can recognize handwritten drawings after only viewing the figures a few times and also passed a basic Turing test.

Bad news for outsourcing centers in Gujarat. Hyderabad still safe.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In a six-six vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has declined to review en banc its June ruling in Turkmen v. Ashcroft. In June, the court had said that people held by the federal government in connection with the 9-11 attacks can sue federal officials for Bivens damages resulting from violations of the detainees' constitutional rights.

The case was originally filed in 2002 and may next be brought to the Supreme Court. The Center for Constitutional Rights is representing the plaintiffs. The order denying rehearing, and other documents about the case, are available on its site.

news reports:

• Bloomberg BNA‎
• Courthouse News

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The New York Times reports that Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland has decided to perform up to 60 penis transplants on "men injured in combat."

The operation is experimental, and only two previous attempts have been reported: an unsuccessful one in China, and a successful one in South Africa. Because the procedure is so rare, the medical team will be seeking explicit consent from the families of organ donors, who may not have contemplated the use of their penises in this manner. One physician noted that, should the transplantation program meet with success, there will be interest in the surgery by transgender people.

A Department of Defense database shows that "from 2001 to 2013, 1,367 men in military service suffered wounds to the genitals in Iraq or Afghanistan."

additional coverage:

• Business Insider
• RT
• Voice of America
• Johns Hopkins University
• New York Magazine
• Baltimore Sun

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Su-Chun Zhang, a pioneer in developing neurons from stem cells at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has created a specialized nerve cell that makes serotonin, a signaling chemical with a broad role in the brain.

Serotonin affects emotions, sleep, anxiety, depression, appetite, pulse and breathing. It also plays a role in serious psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

"Serotonin essentially modulates every aspect of brain function, including movement," Zhang says. The transmitter is made by a small number of neurons localized on one structure at the back of the brain. Serotonin exerts its influence because the neurons that make it project to almost every part of the brain.

Generation of serotonin neurons from human pluripotent stem cells [abstract]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Using data from a 3053-meter-long core of ice and bedrock collected from the center of the island in 1993, Schaefer's team has found valuable clues to what the period held. In particular, the 1.55 meters of bedrock at the core's base revealed much about the island's history of glaciation, Schaefer says, in atoms that chronicle exposure to the elements. Earth's surface is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, high energy particles streaming into Earth from space. They collide with atoms in Earth's atmosphere as well as in the uppermost centimeters of its rocks, producing new particles. Some of those particles have a particularly useful set of properties: They don't naturally occur in the rocks, and they are radioactive. Thus, they can act as a sort of clock, marking time since the rocks were last ice free and exposed to the atmosphere.

Schaefer and his colleagues measured the abundance of two cosmogenic isotopes, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, in grains of the mineral quartz that they found within the bedrock. Each isotope is produced at a different rate by cosmic rays and has a different half-life. Once the rocks are no longer exposed to the atmosphere—for example, buried by ice—the ratio of 26Al to 10Be in the rocks changes because of their differing half-lives. Schaefer and his team found that the ratio in the bedrock was simply too low for the site to have remained buried continuously over the last 1.25 million years—suggesting that it had been exposed and ice free at least once during that time.

Schaefer says he is certain the findings show that Greenland was ice free at one point

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The same government that is fighting against the use of encryption by its citizens has approved use of Silent Circle's app, which allows users to make end-to-end encrypted phone calls from iPhones, iPads, and Android devices:

The certification follows other major software makers, including BlackBerry and Apple, whose software is also allowed to be used for low-level secure work.

[...] The certification may benefit users in government, but it's the same administration that's spent the past year fighting Silicon Valley against encryption.

Some have called for backdoors to be put in encryption, despite calls from the security and academic community saying it would defeat the very point of scrambled data. Others have called on greater cooperation between the US government and tech companies.

Irony much?

Related: Blackphone V2
Security-Conscious Blackphone Found to Have Basic SMS Vulnerability
Silent Circle Blackphone - Out in June for $630 US

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.

A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!

For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.

Original Submission