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Phoenix666 writes:

It's a race befitting the goal of moving passengers and cargo at the speed of sound: Three Southern California companies are building separate test tracks to see how well the "hyperloop" transportation concept works in the real world.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk breathed life into the hyperloop in 2013, when he proposed a network of elevated tubes to transport specially designed capsules over long distances. Top speed: about 750 mph.

Though momentum to build a hyperloop has been growing since, the concept dates back decades.

Capsules would float on a thin cushion of air and use magnetic attraction[sic] and solar power to zoom through nearly airless tubes. With little wind resistance, they could make the 400-mile trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about a half-hour. Musk has said that while he does not plan to develop the hyperloop commercially, he wants to accelerate its development.

On Tuesday, his SpaceX rocket launching firm said global infrastructure firm AECOM would build a one-mile track at SpaceX headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport.

If all goes well, by summer's end, the track will host prototype capsules that emerge from a design competition this weekend at Texas A&M University. The prototype pods would be half the size of the system that Musk envisioned and would not carry people.

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takyon writes:

Facebook has resisted becoming a social media fossil, and is growing its revenues from mobile users and developing countries:

By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion [monthly active] users today and crushed the street's estimates in its Q4 2015 earnings with $5.841 billion in revenue and $0.79 earnings per share. That's up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Even with Q4 being the holidays, that 29.8% QoQ revenue growth is stunning, and it's up 51% vs Q4 last year.

Some more stats from Facebook: "19 million people connected via Internet.org." Mobile-only monthly active users have risen to 823 million from 526 million during Q4 2014. Average revenue per user (during the quarter) is $13.54 for US & Canada, $4.50 for Europe, $1.59 for Asia-Pacific, and $1.22 for the "rest of [the] world". Revenue from that last group of users has risen from $0.32 in Q1 2012.

Facebook's quarterly profit hit $1 billion for the first time. The company's momentum is "impossible to deny". So what will Facebook do next with its newfound cash? Add emoticon-based reactions to the "Like" button, of course.

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Phoenix666 writes:

It's a common assumption that being online means you'll have to part ways with your personal data and there's nothing you can do about it.

Not true, according to two communication professors. In their new book, Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest (MIT Press, 2015), they argue both that your privacy is being eroded through acts way, way more heinous than you might think, and that contrary to popular belief, there is something you can do about it.

Part philosophical treatise and part rousing how-to, Obfuscation reads at times as an urgent call to arms.

"We mean to start a revolution with this book," its authors declare. "Although its lexicon of methods can be, and has been, taken up by tyrants, authoritarians, and secret police, our revolution is especially suited for use by the small players, the humble, the stuck, those not in a position to decline or opt out or exert control."

Is obfuscation the best anti-tracking tactic?

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MrPlow submitted via IRC for Bytram:

Despite the nagging sense that your information is constantly collected, few people know exactly what gets scooped up or what happens to it.

Harvard's Data Privacy Lab and software maker ForgeRock are among the groups and companies hoping to change that. Today, on Data Privacy Day, which is devoted to your right to control your data, they seek to point a way out of a seemingly sinister forest.

[...] Data Privacy Lab director Latanya Sweeney [a former FTC CTO] said that right now the average person has no idea just how much personal data is bought and sold. That particularly applies to health care data, which gets anonymized -- supposedly -- and sold to a network that remains obscure.

[...] Sweeney and her research team want to reveal who is sharing your info. Their project, "All the Places Personal Data Goes," aims to illustrate the path your personal info takes from one place to another. On Tuesday, the Knight Foundation awarded the project $440,000 to expand its efforts.

This means Sweeney's group will continue using public-records requests and other methods to gather information on data buyers and sellers and make it available to journalists and others. The project will also soon host a data-visualization competition to bring the issue to life.

The Data Privacy Lab has already proved that some "anonymous" health care data can actually be pieced together to identify patients. In 2013, the lab published an unsettling discovery, which drew on hospital discharge records collected by Washington state that detailed everything from a patient's age and gender to diagnoses and treatments.

Sweeney's team then found news stories about car accidents and other emergencies and used them to put names to the records. After the team released its findings, Washington state changed its anonymization process.

Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/its-data-privacy-day-do-you-know-where-your-data-is/

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NotSanguine writes:

Jon Brodkin over at Ars Technica is reporting on the FCC's proposal (pdf) to require pay TV providers to make content available to third-party devices.

From the article:

The FCC is planning for a software-based, cardless replacement for CableCard. Without needing a physical card that plugs into a third-party set-top box, consumers would be able to get TV channels on tablets, smart TVs, or set-top boxes that they can buy from other companies instead of renting a box from a cable company.

"Consumers should be able to choose how they access the Multichannel Video Programming Distributor's (MVPDs)—cable, satellite, or telco companies—video services to which they subscribe," the FCC's summary of the proposal said. "For example, consumers should be able to have the choice of accessing programming through the MVPD-provided interface on a pay-TV set-top box or app, or through devices such as a tablet or smart TV using a competitive app or software. MVPDs and competitors should be able to differentiate themselves and compete based on the experience they offer users, including the quality of the user interface and additional features like suggested content, integration with home entertainment systems, caller ID and future innovations."

The proposal summary says the goal is to "unlock the set-top box."

Unsurprisingly, cable operators were nonplussed by the FCC's proposal. Previous coverage of this issue at Ars Technica details the cable industry's take on this:

[Continued.]

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

In an article titled Early antibiotic use 'may predispose children to weight gain and asthma', The Guardian reports on findings from a University of Helsinki study:

Intestinal microbiome is related to lifetime antibiotic use in Finnish pre-school children (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10410)

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Phoenix666 writes:

This post tries to prove that vulnerabilities can in fact be very subtle and that even people who master their toolkit and libraries can easily fall for them. It is based upon a vulnerability in ownCloud server fixed in June 2015.

cURL is probably known to most readers of this blog. If not: It is a library and command-line tool that can be used to send HTTP requests to other servers. It has an official PHP wrapper maintained by the PHP team.

Everybody who has used cURL before will probably agree: cURL is a mighty and complex utility, the PHP wrapper is no exception. Stating it is used to send HTTP requests is a bit of an understatement, it supports as well DICT, FILE, FTP, GOPHER, IMAP, LDAP, POP3, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMTP, TELNET and TFTP.

As with any mighty tool, there are a lot of possibilities to shoot yourself in your own foot.

Read on for examples...

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Phoenix666 writes:

An anchor chain on the 300-foot mega-yacht, the MV Tatoosh, owned by billionaire Paul Allen, has destroyed almost 14,000 sq.ft of reef in the West Bay replenishment zone, the Department of Environment confirmed following a survey of the area. DoE officials said more than 80% of the coral in the area has been damaged by the luxury boat's chain. Local divers conducted an in-water survey of the coral reef damage last week and the DoE expects to publish the detail findings next week.

Early findings already indicate extensive damage and investigations into the circumstances of the incident are ongoing, with the assistance of staff aboard the Microsoft billionaire's superyacht, which was anchored close to the Doc Poulson wreck and The Knife dive site, officials said.

"In addition to assessing the damage and determining the cause of this incident, we are also paying close attention to lessons learned so that we can more effectively prevent these accidents while still hosting visiting yachts," a spokesperson for the DoE said.

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Phoenix666 writes:

More than two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese. For many of them, the cure is diet: one in three are attempting to lose weight in this way at any given moment. Yet there is ample evidence that diets rarely lead to sustained weight loss. These are expensive failures. This inability to curb the extraordinary prevalence of obesity costs the United States more than $147 billion in healthcare, $4.3 billion in job absenteeism, and even more in lost productivity.

At the heart of this issue is a single unit of measurement—the calorie—and some seemingly straightforward arithmetic. "To lose weight, you must use up more calories than you take in," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dieters like Nash and Haelle could eat all their meals at McDonald's and still lose weight provided they burn enough calories, says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University. "Really, that's all it takes."

[...] After visiting over 40 US chain restaurants, including Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse and PF Chang's China Bistro, Susan Roberts of Tufts University's nutrition research center and colleagues discovered that a dish listed as having, say, 500 calories could contain 800 instead. The difference could easily have been caused, says Roberts, by local chefs heaping on extra french fries or pouring a dollop more sauce. It would be almost impossible for a calorie-counting dieter to accurately estimate their intake given this kind of variation.

[Continues.]

Submitted by MrPlow on IRC for AndyTheAbsurd:

China based technology company Bluboo will be launching world's first global triple SIM smartphone which will be powered by Android 5.1 OS. [...] The device is named 'XFire 2' and will be available for purchase worldwide. The device is rumored to sport a 5 inch display screen and is priced at just USD 70.

Source: http://www.smartcritique.com/bluboo-to-launch-worlds-first-global-triple-sim-phone/

takyon: Here's what else they're up to.

Also at International Business Times, Softpedia, and Mobipicker.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Evolve is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where a team of hunters chase down a monster. It was made by the hugely talented Left 4 Dead developers over six years before being released early in 2015, and I thought it was great. But publisher 2K, so convinced of the game's quality, put in place various DLC packages and pre-order bonuses to milk what it expected to be an enormous community. The perception took hold that Evolve was ripping off players—who had to buy the "core" game first—and it failed to sell in anything like the numbers expected. Now it's dead.

Rainbow Six: Siege walks a dangerously similar path.

Launched just before Christmas in the kind of primetime slot that with hindsight so often looks like a graveyard, Ubisoft anticipated that Siege would achieve lifetime sales of over seven million copies. For many reasons, however, Siege has thus far failed to make a commercial impact. The tragedy is that Siege offers something new and unique in the stalest of genres, the mainstream FPS. At one point it even looked like it might usurp the greats of the competitive shooter world. What's stopped it? Ubisoft.

Siege is riddled with evidence of top-down game design edicts. Prime among them is that the game is sold at a premium price (a rapidly-falling £50/$60), but at the same time includes a layer of microtransactions based around XP boosters—which will help players unlock stuff faster—as well as cosmetic weapon skins and a season pass for future DLC content. That might sound heinous, but it's to the credit of the development team at Ubisoft Montreal that it doesn't encroach too much on the core experience. These microtransactions, however, haven't had a good impact on the game's image, and much like Evolve, Ubisoft is in danger of losing players before they've even given the game a try.

Playing one-handed while typing in credit card numbers doesn't heighten the FPS experience?

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martyb writes:

New research suggests life on other planets may fail to progress rapidly enough to keep a planet habitable:

Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, say astrobiologists from The Australian National University (ANU).

In research aiming to understand how life might develop, the scientists realised new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

"The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and lead author on the paper, which is published in Astrobiology.

"Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive."

"Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable."

[Continues.]

caseih writes:

All the cool kids post code to Github these days, and many open source projects have adopted Github as their main tool for managing the development of their projects. Just recently it was announced that Python is moving their main repository to Github. For the last few hours (nearly 6 hours), Github has been struggling with a major network outage. This was also just noted by The Register. Hopefully Github's engineers will get to the bottom of it. At least with Git, even if Github is down, developers can still work with their code and commit changes to their local repositories and then push later when service is restored. This is but one example of the pitfalls of cloud hosting, though I daresay that Github's uptime is much better than most IT departments' own servers.

c0lo also reported GitHub having troubles as well as mentioning:

Last time similar things happened (Mar 2015), it was blamed on China.

[NOTE: The above was submitted shortly after 1:00 AM (UTC) on 2016-01-28.

GitHub has a status page which, as of this writing, is reporting: "Everything operating normally."

GitHub also posts a list of recent status messages. -Ed.]

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Pranksters are out in full force and are targeting iPhone and Mac users. Links are being sent to users that direct them to a prank site known as crashsafari.com, which then causes iPhones and iPads to reboot.

[...] The prank site contains code that causes a never-ending string of characters within the address bar. As the string continues to grow, the browser will struggle to load it, thus causing a memory issue.

[...] The prank site even affects Chrome users on Android, PCs, and Macs, as they will become very sluggish as Chrome attempts to load the code. Users will be forced to initiate a reboot in order to stop it.

Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/crash-safari-prank-news/

Original Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/25/sending-link-to-website-lets-you-crash-safari-and-anyones-iphone.

Original Submission

Submitted via IRC by MrPlow for The Mighty Buzzard:

Typeface company Font Brothers has filed a lawsuit against Hasbro claiming that My Little Pony uses one of its fonts without permission. According to the complaint, Harbro[sic] refuses to pay the required licenses while it continues to use the font in its My Little Pony merchandise and products.

Piracy comes in all shapes and sizes and even large multinationals can sometimes cross the line.

According to Font Brothers, American toy multinational Hasbro did so when it started to use the "Generation B" font for its My Little Pony products, without permission.

[...] While small differences can sometimes be tricky to prove that an unauthorized font is used, in this case it is also used on Hasbro's website. The stylesheet of the website specifically mentions the Generation B and a copy of the font stored and distributed through Hasbro's servers.

[...] Considering the scope of the alleged infringements, which affect pretty much the entire My Little Pony line, the potential damages run into the millions. In addition, Font Brothers demand the destruction of all products and material which utilize the infringing font.

Update: Hasbro quietly removed the font from their website, but Archive.org still has a copy.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/my-little-pony-sued-for-using-a-pirated-font-160125/

The full text of the complaint (pdf) is available.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for qkontinuum.

Microsoft is making the tools that its own researchers use to speed up advances in artificial intelligence available to a broader group of developers by releasing its Computational Network Toolkit on GitHub.

The researchers developed the open-source toolkit, dubbed CNTK, out of necessity. Xuedong Huang, Microsoft's chief speech scientist, said he and his team were anxious to make faster improvements to how well computers can understand speech, and the tools they had to work with were slowing them down.

So, a group of volunteers set out to solve this problem on their own, using a homegrown solution that stressed performance over all else.

The effort paid off.

In internal tests, Huang said CNTK has proved more efficient  than four other popular computational toolkits that developers use to create deep learning models for things like speech and image recognition, because it has better communication capabilities

"The CNTK toolkit is just insanely more efficient than anything we have ever seen," Huang said.

Source: http://blogs.microsoft.com/next/2016/01/25/microsoft-releases-cntk-its-open-source-deep-learning-toolkit-on-github/

Original Submission