SoylentNews

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with this story from phys.org:

If governments are serious about the global warming targets they adopted in Paris, scientists say they have two options: eliminating fossil fuels immediately or finding ways to undo their damage to the climate system in the future.

The first is politically impossible—the world is still hooked on using oil, coal and natural gas—which leaves the option of a major cleanup of the atmosphere later this century.

Yet the landmark Paris Agreement, adopted by 195 countries on Dec. 12, makes no reference to that, which has left some observers wondering whether politicians understand the implications of the goals they signed up for.

"I would say it's the single biggest issue that has to be resolved," said Glen Peters of the Cicero climate research institute in Oslo, Norway.

Scientists refer to this envisioned cleanup job as negative emissions—removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than humans put in it.

Right now we're putting in a lot—about 50 billion tons a year, mostly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

There are methods to achieve negative emissions today but they would need to be scaled up to a level that experts say could put climate efforts in conflict with other priorities, such as eradicating hunger. Still, if the Paris climate goals are to be achieved, there's no way to avoid the issue, said Jan Minx of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate change in Berlin.

"My view is, let's have this discussion," he said. "Let's involve ourselves in developing these technologies. We need to keep learning."

The Paris Agreement was historic. For the first time all countries agreed to jointly fight climate change, primarily by reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Governments vowed to keep global warming "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial times. But even 2 degrees of warming could threaten the existence of low-lying island nations faced with rising seas. So governments agreed to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), which is just half-a-degree above the global average temperature this year.

That goal is so ambitious—some would say far-fetched—that there's been very little research devoted to it. In Paris, politicians asked scientists to start studying how it can be done.

Original Submission

Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with a story from Computerworld:

If you work in finance or accounting and receive an email from your boss asking you to transfer some funds to an external account, you might want to think twice.

That's because so-called "whaling" attacks -- a refined kind of phishing in which hackers use spoofed or similar-sounding domain names to make it look like the emails they send are from your CFO or CEO -- are on the rise, according to security firm Mimecast.

If fact, 55 percent of the 442 IT professionals Mimecast surveyed this month said their organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling attacks over the past three months, the firm reported on Wednesday.

Those organizations spanned the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Australia.

Domain-spoofing is the most popular strategy, accounting for 70 percent of such attacks, Mimecast said; the majority pretend to be the CEO, but some 35 percent of organizations had seen whaling emails attributed to the CFO.

"Whaling emails can be more difficult to detect because they don't contain a hyperlink or malicious attachment, and rely solely on social engineering to trick their targets," said Orlando Scott-Cowley, a cybersecurity strategist with Mimecast.

Original Submission

Max Hyre writes:

Well, not precisely calling a supernova, but good enough to be exciting. A massive cluster is between us and the supernova, resulting in gravitational lensing. An article in astronomy.com says:

Many stars end their lives with a with a bang, but only a few of these stellar explosions have been caught in the act. When they are, spotting them successfully has been down to pure luck — until now. On 11 December, 2015, astronomers not only imaged a supernova in action, but saw it when and where they had predicted it would be. As the matter in the cluster [bending the light] — both dark and visible — is distributed unevenly, the light creating each of these images takes a different path with a different length [and taking a different time to reach Earth].

The supernova was seen in one of the images a year ago. It implies that the watchers were able to calculate the paths the light took, and predict when the supernova would appear in another image — and got it right. So, the takeaway is that no, they weren't able to make the prediction based on the instablility of the star, but they were able to calculate gravitational effects and predict the supernova would show elsewhere this month. Isn't that enough?

[Editor's Note: I realize that this covers much of the same material as this story from November, but in reading over the links provided here, they were more understandable to those of us with little understanding of the subject matter. - CMN]

[Editor's Note: Changed title from "The First Predicted Supernova" to "The First Predicted Supernova Appearance by Gravitational Lensing" - CMN]

Original Submission

"exec" writes in with this article from The Register:

-- submitted from IRC

Alonzo Knowles, 23, allegedly bragged he had infiltrated the email inboxes of people in the worlds of showbiz and sports – either by tricking them into handing over their account passwords in phishing emails, or by sending them malware that infected their PCs and snooped on their logins.

Ironically, the phishing emails were dressed as security alerts warning the victims their accounts had been hacked, and that if they sent over their passwords, someone in tech support would put everything right, we're told.

Knowles did not always target celebrities directly, it is claimed, but instead noted which friends they were photographed with in gossip magazines, and went after those pals instead. Once in their accounts, it's alleged, he rifled through their inboxes to get the celebs' contact details.

The Homeland Security charging documents [PDF] are available for perusal as well.

Original Submission

requerdanos writes:

Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has taken steps to refute the notion of many in the music publishing industry that each digital copy has a certain value--upon which should be based damages if someone is found to have committed copyright infringement.

Sunde has built a machine from a Raspberry PI, called Kopismashin, designed to make copies of single tracks at the rate of 100 copies per second [and drops them to /dev/null].

"I want to show the absurdity on the process of putting a value to a copy.... [F]ollowing their rhetoric and mindset it will bankrupt them," says Sunde.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht creates nearly identical "designer snowflakes" by precisely controlling growth conditions such as temperature, humidity, positioning, and air flow. Here's a 60 second explanation on YouTube.

Here are few articles by Libbrecht:

[More after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

CGI.pm has been removed from the core Perl distribution. From 5.22, it is no longer included in a standard Perl installation.

There are good technical reasons for this. CGI is a dying technology. In 2015, there are far better ways to write web applications in Perl. We don't want to be seen to encourage the use of a technology which no-one should be using.

This does lead to a small problem for us though. There are plenty of web hosting providers out there who don't have particularly strong Perl support. They will advertise that they support Perl, but that's just because they know that Perl comes as a standard part of the operating system that they run on their servers. They won't do anything to change their installation in any way. Neither you nor I would use a hosting company that works like that – but plenty of people do.

The problem comes when these companies start to deploy an operating system that includes Perl 5.22. All of a sudden, those companies will stop including CGI.pm on their servers. And while we don't want to encourage people to use CGI.pm (or, indeed, the CGI protocol itself) we need to accept that there are thousands of sites out there that have been happily using software based on CGI.pm for years and the owners of these sites will at some point change hosting providers or upgrade their service plan and end up on a server that has Perl 5.22 and doesn't have CGI.pm. And their software will break.

What say you, fellow Soylents? How would you suggest "end-of-life"ing CGI.bin?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As you probably already know, Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign was involved in some recent hijinks involving improper access to campaign data from the Hillary Clinton campaign, after a buggy software patch applied by the contractor maintaining the Democratic Party's voter database, NGPVAN, inadvertently opened a data firewall. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) suspended the Sanders' campaign access to Democratic voter lists (a subscription that the campaign had paid for); Sanders responded by suing the DNC; after a brief negotiation, the DNC restored the Sanders campaign access; and Sanders apologized to Clinton for the hack in Saturday night's debate. Clinton accepted the apology, and noted that most Americans don't care anyway.

Present company (possibly) excepted. Veteran Democratic campaign consultant David Atkins, who evidently has hands on experience using the software in question, pieced together what he thinks happened; including useful background on NGPVAN's software and its use by the Democratic party.

Atkins' bottom line:

Atkins also had some choice words for DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, agreeing with David Axelrod (Obama's former chief campaign strategist) that the DNC overreacted.

DNC CEO Amy Dacey blogged that the suspension of access to Sanders wasn't punitive:

Original Submission

tt0268978 writes:

The greatest fear of many patients receiving therapy services is that somehow the details of their private struggles will be revealed publicly.

[...] Short Hills Associates in Clinical Psychology, a group based in New Jersey, has filed dozens of collections lawsuits against patients and included in them their names, diagnoses and listings of their treatments.

[...] In cases in which the patients were minors, the practice sued their parents and included the children's names and diagnoses.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA, allows health providers to sue patients over unpaid debts, but requires that they disclose only the minimum information necessary to pursue them.

Still, the law has many loopholes, which ProPublica has been exploring in a series of articles this year. One is that HIPAA covers only providers who submit data electronically — and apparently Short Hills Associates does not.

Who would have guessed that using paper instead of electronic records would make disclosure of confidential medical information more likely?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Yahoo Autos reports that Google and Ford will be teaming up for a joint venture that will commercialize autonomous vehicle technology. The venture will be formally announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January:

By pairing with Google, Ford gets a massive boost in self-driving software development; while the automaker has been experimenting with its own systems for years, it only revealed plans this month to begin testing on public streets in California. Google has 53 test vehicles on the road in California and Texas, with 1.3 million miles logged in autonomous driving.

By pairing with Ford, the search-engine giant avoids spending billions of dollars and several years that building its own automotive manufacturing expertise would require. Earlier this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company was looking for manufacturing partners that would use the company's self-driving system, which it believes could someday eliminate the roughly 33,000 annual deaths on U.S. roads.

While exact details of the partnership were unclear, it's understood the venture would be legally separate from Ford, in part to shield the automaker from liability concerns. Questions of who will be responsible for any crashes involving self-driving cars have been seen as a major hurdle to putting them on the road; earlier this year, Volvo said it would accept responsibility for crashes in autonomous mode, a pledge followed by Google and Mercedes-Benz.

The deal is understood to be non-exclusive; Google has been talking to several other automakers for some time about using its self-driving systems. Most major automakers and several auto parts suppliers are developing their own self-driving controls as well, with a few—Nissan, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz among them—promising advanced vehicles for customer sales by 2020.

Related: Uber vs. Google: The Race to Monetize Autonomous Vehicles
In Pilot Programs, Ford Embraces a World Where not Everyone Owns a Car
Ford Investing $4.5 Billion to Bring Electrification to 40% of Its Vehicles by 2020
Ford to Test Autonomous Cars in California in 2016
Is California Overregulating Driverless Cars?

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The drugs of tomorrow may be discovered by computers. A proof-of-concept study published December 23 in Cell Systems demonstrates that with the right input of data about infectious yeast, a machine algorithm can learn to identify combinations of existing and previously unknown compounds that can work together as antifungal agents. While the method needs to be perfected, it's a new approach to combat infectious disease with the potential to rapidly identify combinations of agents that might help overcome drug resistance.

Many areas of research now use machine learning to find patterns in complex datasets; for example, in pattern recognition of images on the web or in robotic control systems. "This trend has recently exploded in the biosciences, where increasingly machine learning is used to help researchers to make sense of enormous genome-scale datasets," says co-first author Jan Wildenhain, a systems developer at the University of Edinburgh. "The amount of biological data has simply become too large and complex to be processed by human intuition alone."

The researchers' first attempt at a machine learning algorithm was made with brewer's yeast (S. cerevisiae), because it is the only yeast that has had its genetic network mapped out. So although drug-resistant bacteria are the current prevailing public health concern, the model yeast system provides a larger and more informative dataset for this type of study.

http://phys.org/news/2015-12-chemical-combos-pathogenic-yeast.html

[Abstract]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405471215002173

Original Submission

takyon writes:

MarketWatch reports on the prospect of more semiconductor companies being swallowed up after a record $119 billion worth of deals in 2015:

Chip mergers will hit a record in 2015, as the lower cost of debt, higher manufacturing costs and a maturing industry fueled more than $119 billion worth of deals. That total reflects 23 deals worth more than $100 million, compared with 24 deals in 2014 valued at $24 billion, according to Morgan Stanley.

Industry executives and bankers say the industry needs to consolidate to get stronger. Growth is slowing and the physical limitations in designing thinner and more minute silicon transistors are making it harder to keep pace with Moore's Law, an observation and prediction by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors and computing power on a semiconductor would double about every two years. As companies struggle to innovate and keep pace with Moore's Law, sales of silicon-based semiconductors have followed suit.

"If you look at semiconductor end sales in this century, we have only seen a 5% compounded annual growth rate," said Alex Lidow, chief executive and co-founder of privately held Efficient Power Conversion Corp. "It's clearly showing signs of an end market that is very large and very mature and in the same time, the cost for a new facility or new product has skyrocketed. [...] Anything under $4 billion market cap is not going to be here tomorrow," said Lidow, who claimed to be part of dozens of acquisitions in his previous role as CEO of International Rectifier, which was purchased by Infineon Technologies AG earlier this year.

[More after the break.]

Phoenix666 writes:

The door to mass-market virtual reality is about to burst open. Engineers have solved most of the hardware challenges, driven down the price to just a few hundred dollars, done extensive testing, and gotten software tools into the hands of creative developers. Store shelves will soon be teeming with head-mounted displays and hand controllers that can paint dazzling virtual worlds. And then the first wave of VR immigrants will colonize them.

You might think the first adopters will be gamers, but you'd be wrong. The killer app for virtual reality will more likely be something to enhance ordinary social experiences—conversations with your loved ones, a business meeting, a college class—but carried out with a far richer connection than you could establish by texting or talking or Skyping.

Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his coauthors predicted in these pages in 2011 that such "social VR" was on the horizon. "Current social networking and other online sites," they wrote, "are just precursors of what we'll see when social networking encompasses immersive virtual-reality technology. When people interact with others for substantial periods of time, much as they do now on Facebook but with fully tracked and rendered avatars, entirely new forms of social interaction will emerge." With the variety of head-mounted displays—including the Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR, and the HTC Vive—going on sale later this year, that future is now here.

Prediction: hacking avatars to get through long meetings will become a "thing."

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

Right now, Microsoft is inspiring horror stories with "forced upgrades" and/or incessant nagging to upgrade to Windows 10. Yet more horror stories are being generated with the invasive "telemetry", and the personalized advertising found within the OS.

In recent weeks, the wife has complained about the Windows 10 nag. She runs Win7 Home Premium, and got the nag until I "fixed" it. I run Win7 Pro in my virtual machines, and I don't get the nag. I got the telemetry updates, but not the nag.

Those of us over a certain age remember the original separation between enterprise grade Windows NT (NT3, NT4, Win2000) and the consumer grade Windows (Win 1, 2, 3, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE and Millenium) until they were joined together with WinXP. With WinXP, we saw the same OS used for consumer and enterprise, with advanced features enabled in Pro and Enterprise, and the same features disabled in consumer versions.

So, here we are today, with MS trying to phase out Win7, and force feeding Windows 10 to the world.

Going forward - is MS also going to force feed Win10 to the professional/enterprise world? Or, will they send the consumer and enterprise OS's down divergent paths? Are we going to see insecurity built into the consumer line of products, and better security and features built into the professional lines?

What does the future hold? Any guesses?

http://betanews.com/2015/09/16/microsoft-refuses-to-answer-questions-about-forced-windows-10-downloads/

Original Submission

http://store.steampowered.com/ has been taken offline because a DDOS attack was allowing users to see random other users account profiles.

There are reports of seeing pages displayed in different languages (Russian, English, German, etc.) as well as the display of other people's account details such as email address, account balance, friends, etc.

Other coverage:

• Gaming souk Steam spews credit cards, personal info in Xmas Day security meltdown
• Steam Goes Nuts, Offers Access To Other People's Accounts [UPDATE]
• Is something wrong with Steam?
• Steam Is Randomly Logging Users Into Other People's Accounts And Exposing Their Information [Update]
• Steam Is Going Haywire, People Can Access Others' Accounts [Updated]

UPDATE [2015/12/26-00:03:00]: There are reports that the Steam store was taken offline. Further, I have seen reports that the Steam store is now back up, but some people report still being unable to login.

Original Submission