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Phoenix666 writes:

A flurry of the tech world's great and good signed up the Cloud Native Computing Foundation yesterday, and kicked off a technical board to review submissions – which will be tested and fattened up on a vast Intel-based "computer farm".

Vendors declared their intent to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this year, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Just to avoid confusion, the (cloud native) foundation reckons "Cloud native applications are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and microservices-oriented".

Hence the foundation said it "seeks to improve the overall developer experience, paving the way for faster code reuse, improved machine efficiency, reduced costs and increases in the overall agility and maintainability of applications".

Platinum members of the organisation include upstarts such as Cisco, Google, Huawei, IBM, Red Hat and Intel, as well as Docker, Joyent and CoreOS. And if you're concerned about user representation, you'll be pleased to know Goldman Sachs is a silver level member.

"Goldman Sachs is a silver level member." Are we comforted?

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Dr John writes:

A new study published in the journal Nature provides evidence that intrinsic risk factors contribute only modestly (less than ~10–30% of lifetime risk) to cancer development in humans. The researchers found that the more stem-cell divisions that occurred in a given tissue over a lifetime, the more likely it was to become cancerous. They said that though some cancers clearly had strong outside links – such as liver cancers caused by hepatitis C or lung cancer resulting from smoking – there were others for which the variation was explained mainly by defects in stem-cell division. The researchers showed that the correlation between stem-cell division and cancer risk does not distinguish between the effects of internal (genetic) and external (environmental) factors such as chemical toxicity and radiation. They also found that the rates of endogenous mutation accumulation by internal processes are not sufficient to account for the observed cancer risks. The authors conclude that cancer risk is heavily influenced by environmental factors.

Reporting at CNN, Washington Post, Medical News Today, and The Guardian.

Substantial contribution of extrinsic risk factors to cancer development [abstract]

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takyon writes:

A Puyallup, Washington man, Scott A. Orton, has been charged after making online death threats towards a biotechnology company involved with Planned Parenthood, such as "Kill StemExpress employees. I'll pay you for it" posted on a Fox Nation comment section:

A Washington man who allegedly threatened executives of a California biotech company that processed fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood faces prosecution in one of the rarest sorts of criminal cases – for violence threatened online.

The indictment stated that Scott A Orton, 57, had a record of online menacing of local journalists, city council members, fellow commenters and even FBI agents, dating back to at least 2009. The rare prosecution comes in the wake of a mass shooting in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic. Orton was arrested by federal agents in December for making an interstate threat to kill an executive of StemExpress.

The California firm was thrust into the spotlight when anti-abortion activists attacked the company's fetal tissue procurement practices and released highly edited, secretly filmed videos from inside Planned Parenthood. Orton's alleged comments threatened to hang a StemExpress executive with piano wire, on the Fox News website.

Two legal, registered guns were seized from Orton's home just days before three people were killed and nine injured by a shooter at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic.

PDFs of the Criminal Complaint and the Indictment.

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Phoenix666 writes:

An operating system used to manage firewalls sold by Juniper Networks contains unauthorized code that surreptitiously decrypts traffic sent through virtual private networks, officials from the company warned Thursday.

It's not clear how the code got there or how long it has been there. An advisory published by the company said that NetScreen firewalls using ScreenOS 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20 are affected and require immediate patching. Release notes published by Juniper suggest the earliest vulnerable versions date back to at least 2012 and possibly earlier. There's no evidence right now that the backdoor was put in other Juniper OSes or devices.

"During a recent internal code review, Juniper discovered unauthorized code in ScreenOS that could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen devices and to decrypt VPN connections," Juniper Chief Information officer Bob Worrall wrote. "Once we identified these vulnerabilities, we launched an investigation into the matter, and worked to develop and issue patched releases for the latest versions of ScreenOS."

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Phoenix666 writes:

"Inspector Sands to the control room, please." If you ever hear that at a British train station, don't panic. But you might appreciate knowing that this is a codeword meant to inform staff that there is an emergency somewhere in the building. The idea is to avoid causing alarm among commuters, but still get the message out to those trained to deal with the problem.
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Not all codes are alphanumeric. Some are visual, intended to be hidden in plain sight. As BBC Future discovered earlier this year, many banknotes feature a specific pattern of dots called the EURion constellation, placed there to prevent people from photocopying money. Many copiers and scanners are programmed to spot it.

Other visual codes are scrawled in the landscape around us. One surprising example is the series of signs known as "hoboglyphs" – a collection of symbols meant to provide information to travelling workers and homeless people. Among other things, these could indicate the quality of a nearby water source, or suggest whether the occupant of a house is friendly or not.
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And finally, the spray-painted squiggles you see on pavements in towns and cities all over the world adhere to codes understood by construction workers and engineers. A BBC News Magazine report recently revealed the meaning of many of these in the UK, and pointed out that different colours related to different types of cable or pipe. Blue meant a water system while yellow indicated gas lines and green labelled CCTV or data wiring.

They forgot to mention the secret masonic codes.

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Phoenix666 writes:

NASA's next Mars spacecraft has arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, for final preparations before a launch scheduled in March 2016 and a landing on Mars six months later.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built and tested the spacecraft and delivered it on Dec. 16 from Buckley Air Force Base in Denver to Vandenberg, on the central California Coast.

Preparations are on a tight schedule for launch during the period March 4 through March 30. The work ahead includes installation and testing of one of the mission's key science instruments, its seismometer, which is scheduled for delivery to Vandenberg in January.

"InSight has traveled the first leg of its journey, getting from Colorado to California, and we're on track to start the next leg, to Mars, with a launch in March," said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

The seismometer, provided by France's national space agency (CNES), includes a vacuum container around its three main sensors. Maintaining the vacuum is necessary for the instrument's extremely high sensitivity; the seismometer is capable of measuring ground motions as small as the width of an atom. A vacuum leak detected during testing of the seismometer was repaired last week in France and is undergoing further testing.

InSight's heat-probe instrument from Germany's space agency (DLR), the lander's robotic arm and the rest of the payload are already installed on the spacecraft.

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

A pair of researchers from the University of Valencia's Cybersecurity research group have found that if you press backspace 28 times, it's possible to bypass authentication during boot-up on some Linux machines.

The problem's not a kernel nor an operating system problem, but rather one in the very popular bootloader Grub2, which is used to boot an awful lot of flavours of Linux.

Essentially, if you enable Grub2's password protection during system startup, it won't do you much good--it can be easily defeated. (Luckily, the vast majority of distributions of Linux do not enable this by default.)

As Hector Marco and Ismael Ripoll explain in an advisory, hitting the backspace key 28 times at the [username prompt of the GRand Unified Bootloader] during power-up will produce a "rescue shell" under Grub2 versions 1.98 (December, 2009) to 2.02 (December, 2015).

[...] The researchers have also cooked up a fix, available here.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The study, Measuring online social bubbles, peered into anonymous data from 100,000 users over 3 and a half years -- a dataset that includes 18 million clicks on AOL search, and 1.3 billion tweets shared by over 89 million people.

Their data demonstrates that accessing information via social media exposed people to more of the same sources and fewer overall sources. Although most of the data demonstrates only a collective social bubble effect, the researchers used a couple of smaller data sets in which the clicks could be associated to individuals to suggest that the behavior found in the collective analysis parallels the behavior in the smaller sets quite well -- the individual is most likely experiencing the bubble effect that the larger dataset portrays.
...
There is no fighting the current of a trend as strong as the online network, but perhaps we need to introduce a new spin. Could social media introduce something like the "I'm feeling lucky" button on google? But in fact, things will probably continue deeper into the narrows, as the web gets smarter about what we clicked in the past and tries to deliver more of the same.

In other words, living in a bubble is comfortable, but ill-prepares you for understanding the real world.

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fliptop writes:

The University of Pennsylvania (Wharton School) recently published an interview with Ganesh Ayyar, CEO of Mphasis (a Bangalore-based IT services company owned by Hewlett-Packard) and marketing professor Jerry (Yoram) Wind. Summary:

The digital transformation of a company requires not a mere shuffling of the organizational chart, but rather a "chemical" change in the culture and business practices, says Ganesh Ayyar[...]. But it is easy to say and more difficult to do. One place to start is by encouraging experimentation through the celebration of failures, adds Wharton marketing professor Jerry (Yoram) Wind. Another is to learn to co-create with clients. As always, the CEO and other senior executives set the tone: The old command-and-control style of managing is becoming passe, replaced with a more collaborative model recognizing that good ideas can come from anywhere in the company.

There's a fair bit of business-speak to wade through, and Wind uses Apple as an example of "customer co-creation":

Think about what Apple has done with its ecosystem. There is no way they could have had the hundreds of thousands of apps out there [by making it] internally... You have to have a culture of win-win and be willing to share with the customer. I will take it one step further and talk about your comment on the customer - it is not only how important you are to the customers, but treating the relationship [as co-creators]... How do we co-create together? What is the role of the customer in co-creating?

If you really move to co-creation and everyone's organizations start getting into the culture of co-creation and it is a truly win-win, then you are on the way to winning in this transformation.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The headline feature for Wireshark 2.0, which was released on November 18, is the switch away from GTK+ and to the Qt framework, but there is more to it than just that. The bulk of the changes to Wireshark—the venerable free-software network packet sniffer that started out as Ethereal in 1998—come under the heading of user-interface improvements, but that leads to some improved functionality as well.

[...] At its core, Wireshark provides a way for users to capture packets on the local network, then to display them for analysis. The basic three-pane display, with a pane for a list of packets captured (i.e. the "Packet List" pane) and two that show details of the currently selected packet, looks much the same. The packet-specific panes show a decoded version of the packet that splits out various fields in it (Packet Details), while the other shows a hex and ASCII version of the packet (Packet Bytes). There is also a toolbar, display filter entry box, and a menu at the top...

[More after the break.]

takyon writes:

Companies are misleading European Union consumers about the efficiency of some light bulbs by making full use of tolerance thresholds allowed under current regulations:

Lightbulb manufacturers are misleading consumers about the brightness and energy use of their products by exploiting a loophole in European tests, lab results seen by the Guardian show. Ikea, Philips, GE and Osram are among the companies exaggerating energy performance up to 25% higher than that claimed on packaging, according to the Swedish Consumer Association tests. Ikea told the Guardian as a result it would refund customers who were dissatisfied with bulbs they had bought from its stores.

The discrepancy is caused by manufacturers taking advantage of leeways – known as "tolerances" in official testing procedures for bulbs. The Swedish tests, conducted between, 2012-14, found that a 42W Airam halogen lamp consumed 25% more energy than claimed on the label to achieve its declared 630 lumens of brightness. A GE 70W halogen bulb guzzled 20% more energy to reach its stated 1,200 lumens. A 28W Philips halogen bulb was found to be 24% less bright than claimed while Ikea's 53W and 70W bulbs both underperformed by 16%.

[...] There is nothing illegal about the mislabelling, which cuts across brands and ranges and affects the lightbulbs' advertised brightness per unit of energy – rather than their A-G energy label ratings. But the same whistleblower, who has two decades of experience in the industry, said that many companies manufactured products with lower-grade components knowing that they would fall short of the required wattage and lumens specifications, as his firm was now reluctantly doing. "The industry just follows the letter of the regulations, and they're not in line with today's technology," he explained. "The net result is that consumers are being cheated by the system and I'm fed up with it."

[...] The European tests for bulbs allow for a 10% tolerance threshold, meaning a bulb advertised as rated at 600 lumens, a measure of brightness, could in reality be 540 lumens. A 2-3% tolerance threshold would be fairer and easily doable at little extra cost to consumers, the Guardian's source said.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A Dutch appeals court ruled Friday that four Nigerian farmers may take their case against oil giant Shell to a judge in the Netherlands, in a landmark ruling involving multinational corporate governance.

"The Dutch courts and this court consider it has jurisdiction in the case against Shell and its subsidiary in Nigeria," Judge Hans van der Klooster said at the appeals court in The Hague.

The four farmers and fishermen, backed by the Dutch branch of environmental group Friends of the Earth, first filed the case in 2008 against the Anglo-Dutch company in a court case thousands of kilometres (miles) from their homes.

They want Shell to clean up devastating oil spills in four heavily-polluted villages in the west African country's oil-rich Niger Delta, prevent further spills and pay compensation.

The three-judge panel also denied Shell the power to take its decision before the Netherland's top court.

Multinational corporations often exploit limited national jurisdictions to circumvent laws. This case could pave the way to undo that.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Black holes at the heart of galaxies could swell to 50 billion times the mass of the sun before losing the discs of gas they rely on to sustain themselves, according to research at the University of Leicester.
...
Professor King calculated how big a black hole would have to be for its outer edge to keep a disc from forming, coming up with the figure of 50 billion solar masses.

The study suggests that without a disc, the black hole would stop growing, meaning 50 billion suns would roughly be the upper limit. The only way it could get larger is if a star happened to fall straight in or another black hole merged with it.

Professor King said: "The significance of this discovery is that astronomers have found black holes of almost the maximum mass, by observing the huge amount of radiation given off by the gas disc as it falls in. The mass limit means that this procedure should not turn up any masses much bigger than those we know, because there would not be a luminous disc.

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hemocyanin writes:

Merry Xmas surveilors, everything you ever wanted to unconstitutionally intercept and track cell phone communications of individuals or even thousands of people at once, can be had at great holiday prices in a never before seen catalog!

From the Intercept article:

The Intercept has obtained a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States.

The catalogue includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, as well as Boeing "dirt boxes" and dozens of more obscure devices that can be mounted on vehicles, drones, and piloted aircraft. Some are designed to be used at static locations, while others can be discreetly carried by an individual.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In November Ars revealed exclusive details about a daring mission to land on Jupiter's moon Europa, and now it has become the law of the land. The Congressional budget deal to fund NASA for the fiscal year 2016 includes $1.63 billion for planetary science, of which $175 million is designated for the "Jupiter Europa clipper mission." It has a target launch date of 2022.

But the new budget legislation does not stop there. It further stipulates, "This mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept." In other words, it's against the law to fly the mission to Europa without a lander.

The overall budget for NASA provides $19.2 billion for NASA in fiscal year 2016, about $700 million more than President Obama requested. "This number, this year, is the largest vote of confidence that Congress has ever given NASA," Texas Congressman John Culberson, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the space agency, told Ars. "There's enough money to do everything on their plate."

The Monolith is not going to be happy.

Original Submission