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Phoenix666 writes:

When Apple said it was going to allow ad blocking on the iPhone version of its web browser last September, it escalated a conflict that had been building in the digital economy for years.

Programs such as Adblock Plus, AdFender and Popup Blocker Pro have long claimed to protect consumers from intrusive web ads that slow down our browsers and hoover up personal data.

Around 200 million people globally are estimated to use such apps.

But for businesses that depend on web advertising, ad blockers could cost an estimated $21.8bn (£15bn) in lost revenue a year.

While some dispute this figure, most in the industry agree that ad blockers threaten publishers' ability to provide content free at the point of use.

Now publishers and advertisers are fighting back; the battle of the blockers is heating up.

The article surveys different aspects of the tension between companies and users, citing Ghostery and Brave and other measures. Much of it is not new to Soylentils, but it does illustrate a fun arena for hackers to be playing in right now.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Politicians are often criticized for not living up to their promises. For the Idaho Republican Party, however, doing so may end up leaving schools open to constitutional battles.

Last year, the state Republican party's central committee officially endorsed using the Bible in the state's public schools. Although the Bible has valid educational uses in a number of classes, the resolution included a huge laundry list of possible topics where it could apply, and those included a number of sciences, specifically astronomy, biology, and geology.

The language of the bill is here. It would be more fun if it was the Satanic Bible.

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on the interesting design of a new robotic hand which attempts to replicate the structure of a real human hand as closely as possible to produce an impressive level of dexterity and functionality:

Because of the inherent complexity of a real human hand, biomimetic anthropomorphic hands inevitably involve lots of compromises to get them to work properly while maintaining a human-ish form factor. Zhe Xu and Emanuel Todorov from the University of Washington, in Seattle, have gone crazy and built the most detailed and kinematically accurate biomimetic anthropomorphic robotic hand that we've ever seen, with the ultimate goal of replacing human hands completely.

The accompanying Vimeo video demonstrates the hand in action, where the authors further explain that the hand:

closely mimics its human counterpart with artificial joint capsules, crocheted ligaments and tendons, laser-cut extensor hood, and elastic pulley mechanisms.

Original Submission

FakeBeldin writes:

A news report from Ars Technica baffles the mind.

A security firm created a wireless burglar alarm. Wireless, you ask? Well, the keypad isn't wired to the other system components. The keypad just transmits its PINs wirelessly. Unencrypted. Without any replay-prevention.

Unsurprisingly, this is trivially broken. $250 / €225 gets you the setup to perform the obvious attack of recording one correct entry and then replaying that whenever you're entering.

What's most amazing about this to me is the lack of thought. A security system that utterly fails to think of the most obvious threat to it *should* be unheard of. Then again, I expect that reading the comments will make me weep for mankind.

Original Submission

Associated Press and AMD Announce VR Journalism Partnership

takyon writes:

What can stop the decline of journalism? Strapping it directly to your face!

Today, the Associated Press announced that it is also embracing the new medium, and that it has entered a partnership with AMD to use AMD hardware and the Liquid VR [Virtual reality] toolset to produce high quality VR news content. "AMD will provide substantial value to the Associated Press in the form of VR expertise with best in class development platforms and post production support to enhance the VR news experience," said Sasa Marinkovic, Global Head of VR Marketing, AMD.

Paul Cheung, Director of Interactive And Digital New Production, Associated Press, said that the AP has had a "rich history working with emerging technologies" throughout its 170 year history. In 1889, the Associated Press used a wireless telegraph to broadcast the results of the America's Cup yacht race. Cheung said this was the first test of broadcast news radio. Cheung said the AP was also the first news organization to publish a digital image (1980s), and the first to embrace digital cameras (partnership with Kodak in 1994).

[...] The Associated Press isn't the first news organization to embrace VR, but Cheung said the company has been experimenting with different types of VR experiences since August 2015. Cheung said that the company is looking at all sorts of different options, including 360-degree video, stereoscopic 360-degree content, and even 3D rendered environments, for different kinds of storytelling. The AP is launching a VR content channel today where you can find all of the company's future immersive news content. Examples of things you can expect to see include news stories, documentaries and special interest pieces.

360° Videos and Virtual Reality at the Associated Press.

[Continues.]

benoni writes:

A story from Rob Ramaker for Wageningen University (in Dutch) in Resource news bulletin:

"Economists should learn from ecology, climatology and other sciences studying complex systems; so they can better understand the formation of bubbles and crashes impacting the stability of the society."

This idea is published today in Science by a group of scientists, including Cars Hommes, Professor of Economic Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam and Marten Scheffer, Professor of Aquatic Ecology at Wageningen University.

More than seven years ago, the US bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and nearly took the global financial system down with the fall. Such impending crashes and bubbles are often not noticed in advance. Even though they cause enormous damage — the write off from the banking crisis in 2008 is estimated at 14 trillion US dollars — those losses are often paid for by the taxpayer. It's not surprising that policymakers and central bankers want better insights to understand how economic crises arise and how they can be prevented or attenuated.

Economists have to learn from other 'complex' sciences, says Cars Hommes. One of the lessons is the importance of network structures. Even if individual banks are stable, that does not automatically guarantee a safe position considering the banking system as a whole. In the 2008 crisis this financial network played a role. "With the collapse of Lehman Brothers a domino effect was put in motion," said Hommes, "and other banks and financial institutions were sucked into the crisis."

[Continues.]

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports

In early November, the "final text" of the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] was finally released. The [United States Trade Representative] even posted the thing to Medium, pretending that after years of secrecy it was now being transparent. As we've been told time and time again, the final document is not open to any changes. The only thing left to do was a "legal scrub" which is a final process in which the lawyers comb through the document word by word, basically to make sure there are no typos or out-and-out errors. The legal scrub is NOT when any substantial changes can be made.

...yet the eagle-eyed Jeremy Malcolm over at [the Electronic Freedom Frontier] has spotted an apparent change in the "legal scrub" of the Intellectual Property chapter that will massively expand criminal penalties for copyright infringing activities that have no impact on the actual market. Technically, the scrub just changed the word "paragraph" to "subparagraph" in the following sentence:

With regard to copyright and related rights piracy provided for under paragraph 1, a Party may limit application of this subparagraph to the cases in which there is an impact on the right holder's ability to exploit the work, performance or phonogram in the market.

[...] It's obviously a significant change that could end up criminalizing plenty of activity that is infringing, but which is totally not for profit and which may have plenty of legitimate uses. There's been a long push by the legacy copyright players to use the TPP to ratchet up criminal penalties, and many of the worst proposals were stripped from the agreement--but, with this "legal scrub", things have moved massively towards criminalization.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

In yet another laser beam incident, crew on a flight carrying Pope Francis reported a laser beam sighting to air traffic control in Mexico City:

Alitalia flight AZ4000 was travelling from Havana with the Pope on board, and was preparing to land when the laser was spotted.
No crew or passengers were injured by the beam, the airline added.

[...] "This is yet another incident that shows how serious and widespread the issue of laser attacks on aircraft is," said Jim McAuslan, General Secretary of the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), in response to the case involving the Pope's plane. "Modern lasers have the power to blind and the potential to dazzle and distract pilots during critical phases of flight," he told the BBC. "Shining a laser at an aircraft is illegal and dangerous and puts all those on board and on the ground nearby at completely unnecessary risk."

Aboard the plane headed from Rome to Mexico, the Pope said that contraception may be the "lesser evil" for women at risk of catching the Zika virus. In comments made on the ground, he chastised Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump for his plan to build a wall on the Mexican border.

In another story from the UK laser crime beat, Englishman Philip Houghton has been sentenced to 20 weeks in prison for admitting to shining a laser pen at a Humberside Police helicopter that was investigating a shooting.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

It passed without fanfare, but this very site recently passed an important milestone... SoylentNews celebrated its two-year anniversary!

On Wednesday February 12 2014, @07:28AM our very first article was posted: Welcome to SoylentNews! and then, on Monday 2014-02-17 at 02:06:00 UTC, we announced our presence to the world at large: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!

There were some who thought the site would fail right from the start. Yes, there have been some significant challenges along the way. Thankfully, the community has pulled together and given the support needed to keep this site running as a going concern.

The support has come in many forms. Of course, there is the financial side where people have subscribed or purchased SoylentNews swag. We are also grateful to those who submit stories, post comments, and perform moderations. Others post journal articles and comment on those. Still more are active on our IRC server. Then there's our very own Wiki. There are those, too, who mention our site to family and friends.

On an entirely different level we have the folks who maintain our servers, front ends, code base, site, mail, and the like. Others handle behind-the-scenes organization and communications tasks.

For those who joined us at the outset, you may recall that site crashes were a regular occurrence. Now, most of our downtime is due to either site upgrades or reboots of our systems by our hosting provider.

For those who may no be aware, this is all brought to you by volunteers who freely give of their free time and energy to make this all happen for you, our community.

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to say a big "Thank-You!" to all who have helped us get to where we are today. Some helped at the outset and moved on, others have been with us from the start, and still others have joined more recently. We would not be where we are today without ALL of you!

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

Derek Lowe brings us a paper on the problems in drug discovery

Here's a really interesting paper from consultants Jack Scannell and Jim Bosley in PLoS ONE, on the productivity crisis in drug discovery. Several things distinguish it: for one, it's not just another "whither the drug industry" think piece, of which we have plenty already. This one get[s] quantitative, attempting to figure out what the real problems are and to what degree each contribute.

As they finish up by saying, we have to realize what the "domains of validity" are for our models. Newtonian physics is a tremendously accurate model until you start looking at very small particles, or around very strong gravitational fields, or at things with speeds approaching that of light. Similarly, in drug discovery, we have areas that where our models (in vitro and in vivo) are fairly predictive and areas where they really aren't. We all know this, qualitatively, but it's time for everyone to understand just what a big deal it really is, and how hard it is to overcome. Thinking in these terms could make us value more the data that directly reflect on predictive value and model validity (read the paper for more on this).

Be sure to read the comments at the end of Dr Lowe's article.

For those who may not recognize the name, this is the Derek Lowe who is author of: Things I Won't Work With and Things I'm Glad I Don't Do. He has a gift for writing that conveys complicated concepts in a very readable and entertaining fashion.

Original Submission

arulatas writes:

Surprisingly the FCC has decided to continue on with its process to force cable providers to unlock the set-top box for cable access that consumers are already paying to view. Will this lead to better options and better pricing across the board as newer hardware is allowed to access the cable signals the way consumers want?

See: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/02/fcc-votes-to-unlock-the-cable-box-over-republican-opposition/

Prior coverage: FCC Says It Will "Unlock the Set-Top Box"

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Duke University has a report on MorphoSource, a database that allows you to download 3D scans of fossils:

Duke assistant professor Doug Boyer's office is more than 8,000 miles away from the vault at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the fossil remains of a newly discovered human ancestor, Homo naledi, rest under lock and key. But with a few clicks of his computer's mouse, he can have models of any one of hundreds of naledi bone fragments delivered to his desk in a matter of minutes.

Paleontologists like Boyer frequently travel halfway around the world to examine such unique and fragile specimens. That is, assuming their curators will even allow such access. But the Homo naledi specimens are a different story. They, and hundreds of other species, are now available in a free online database of digital scans that anyone can download and print in 3-D.

MorphoSource, which Boyer launched at Duke in 2013, is the largest and most open digital fossil repository of its kind.

What other fields would benefit from immediate access like this?

Original Submission

DECbot writes:

For those Linux folks out there, imagine merging LVM2, dm-raid, and your file system of choice into an all powerful, enterprise ready, check-summed, redundant, containerized, soft raid, disk pool, ram hungry, demi-god file system. The FreeBSD Handbook is a good start to grep the basic capabilities and function of ZFS[*].

The Ars reports:

ZFS was available as a technology preview in Ubuntu 15.10, but the install method was a bit more cumbersome than just apt-get install zfsutils-linux. I for one am excited to see ZFS coming to Linux as it is a phenomenal solution for building NAS devices and for making incremental backups of a file system. Now I just wish Ubuntu would do something about the systemD bug.

[*] According to Wikipedia:

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, efficient data compression, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs.

ZFS was originally implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is registered as a trademark of Oracle Corporation.

OpenZFS is an umbrella project aimed at bringing together individuals and companies that use the ZFS file system and work on its improvements.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

France may pass a "right to disconnect" law, allowing employees to ignore work emails when they are no longer on the job:

Liberty, equality, fraternity — and now, the "right to disconnect." Among a host of new reforms designed to loosen the more stringent regulations in the country's labor market, France's labor minister, Myriam El Khomri, is including a provision that would give employees the right to ignore professional emails and other messages when outside the office. It would essentially codify a division between work and home and, on a deeper level, between public and private life.

El Khomri apparently fleeced this idea from a report by Bruno Mettling, a director general in charge of human resources at Orange, the telecommunications giant. Mettling believes this policy would benefit employers as much as their employees, whom, he has said, are likely to suffer "psychosocial risks" from a ceaseless communication cycle. As reported in Le Monde, a recent study found than approximately 3.2 million French workers are at risk of "burning out," defined as a combination of physical exhaustion and emotional anxiety. Although France is already famous for its 35-hour workweek, many firms skirt the rules — often through employees who continue working remotely long after they leave for the day.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Someone is sick out in a very rural area and there are no good roads to get there. How do you get medical supplies to them in a timely fashion? Rwanda is giving a trial run to using drones instead of motorbikes:

The latest way that drones are helping to improve lives is by delivering needed medical supplies in Rwanda. The nation's government has started a drone delivery program that will get supplies like blood bags to people in rural areas.

Up until now, this aid was brought to people via motorbike, but unpaved and hard to navigate roads can make the journey difficult and long while people wait for necessary medical supplies on the other end. Drones can make these trips quickly and safely, getting people the supplies they need when they need them.

Rwanda is establishing what it's calling a Droneport, a centralized hub for the drones and supplies where deliveries will originate and then be distributed to rural areas for a pilot testing phase.

Maybe Amazon can get some delivery tips from Rwanda?

Original Submission