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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The German government has ordered intelligence agencies to investigate a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing Germany and weakening Chancellor Angela Merkel. These concerns started to grow after the crisis in the Ukraine, but this has recently come to a head with an active role played by the Russian government in exploiting the refugee issue. Germany is not alone as other countries have accused Russia of engaging in Cold War KGB-style propaganda campaigns meant to destabilize governments. However, there seems to be disagreement as to how influential this strategy is.

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martyb writes:

Bloomberg has a story about some of the pitfalls of IPO options for startup employees — Big IPO, Tiny Payout for Many Startup Workers:

Whatever happens with an IPO, executives tend to hang on to enough equity to guarantee huge payouts when they sell their shares. Most early investors get a chance to sell options on secondary markets before a company's IPO. Later investors increasingly demand preferential treatment, including agreements that if an IPO underperforms the terms of their investment, they'll be made whole with an equivalent amount of additional shares. Late-stage investors in both Box and Square had such so-called ratchet agreements in place, further devaluing locked-up employee equity. When those kinds of deals are in place, employees often find their payouts disappointing because they're so diluted, says Clara Sieg, a partner at Revolution Ventures.

[...] Ordinary employees are typically without meaningful financial protections or even a clear sense of what their equity stakes mean, says Chris Zaharias, who's worked at startups for about 20 years and as a volunteer teaches people about their equity rights. Options grants often don't come with information on strike prices (discounts on shares), preferential treatment, or even the total number of shares outstanding. "People on average overestimate what they are going to make by about 10X," he says.

One employee at Jawbone, a maker of fitness-tracking wristbands, says he's no longer sure of the value of his options given the company's recent round of layoffs and debt financing. It looks less likely Jawbone will be able to go public at or close to its $3.3 billion private valuation, he says, and it may opt to stay out of public markets entirely, rendering the options worthless.

Have any Soylentils had any experience with this? Was it worth it? How was the payout compared to forecasts? Are things less advantageous now than they used to be? If given the option (hah!), would you accept options in lieu of pay?

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Runaway1956 writes:

A dramatic video shown on Iranian state TV, purporting to show a Hezbollah sniper shoot six ISIS soldiers, has been exposed as footage from the first-person shooter video game Medal of Honor.

The video was shown on Iran's state TV as well as shared on its website and across other Iranian media outlets, according to France 24.

The men speaking Arabic in the video are portrayed as a team of crack Hezbollah snipers from Lebanon.

The footage generated a number of sensational headlines from national media including "Hezbollah sniper kills Daesh combattant", "Hezbollah sniper hunts down Daesh brutes", and "Six Daesh combatants are killed in 2 minutes by a Hezbollah sniper".

Press agency Mizan News went even further and alleged that the Hezbollah commandos were using "the Arash" – a 20-caliber anti-material rifle made in Iran.

If you've ever played Medal of Honor, you'll probably spot the giveaway signs pretty quickly. Watch out for the familiar symbols and see if you can pinpoint the exact clip that was altered.

https://www.rt.com/news/333174-isis-video-medal-of-honor/

Direct link to youtube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkQ-ij3LTTM

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

NASA's working on a telescope with an even wider eye than Hubble

NASA said Thursday that it's getting down to business building a new telescope that could get us a step closer to finding E.T. and perhaps reveal other mysteries of the universe along the way.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will have capabilities that make it similar to taking Hubble's telescope and putting a panoramic lens on it. It will carry a wide-field instrument allowing it to capture images with the same depth and quality as Hubble, but covering 100 times its field of view.

In addition to having such a wide view of parts of space, WFIRST will also sport a coronagraph that can block the glare from individual stars to better characterize not only planets orbiting those, but the atmospheres of planets as well.

"It will also develop technology that will pave the way for finding and characterizing Earth-like planets in the future," said Nikole Lewis of the Space Telescope Science Institute in a statement.

Appalbarry writes:

If you downloaded Mint Cinnamon today (for versions of "today" that include February 20th, 2016) you should immediately check the MD5 checksum. Blog Entry here.

From Clem:

We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn't impact many people, but if it impacts you, it's very important you read the information below.

Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.

As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition.

If you downloaded another release or another edition, this does not affect you. If you downloaded via torrents or via a direct HTTP link, this doesn't affect you either.

Finally, the situation happened today, so it should only impact people who downloaded this edition on February 20th.

Apparently the hacked ISOs are hosted on 5.104.175.212 and the backdoor connects to absentvodka.com. Both lead to Sofia, Bulgaria, and the name of 3 people over there.

The comment thread suggests that the ISOs are showing up in other places, and that the Mint site may still not be entirely secure.

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with this upbeat news about Virgin Galactic from ArsTechnica:

It's been 16 months since SpaceShipTwo crashed into the Mojave Desert and killed the vehicle's co-pilot Michael Alsbury. On Friday, Virgin Galactic sought to move on from that accident and put the company firmly back on a path toward delivering tourists to the edge of space by unveiling a new version of its spacecraft named VSS Unity.

"I'm really proud of the entire team," said George Whitesides, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, in an interview with Ars. "It's a bunch of folks who came to this company to open space up, and they're not going to be deterred by the accident. They've been working really hard for a year and a half to finish this vehicle."

The new spacecraft is in many ways the same as the original SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Enterprise, Whitesides said. It has the same basic airframe and propulsion systems. The biggest change is to the feather locking system, used to aid in the descent of the spacecraft. During the fatal flight on Oct. 31, 2014, Alsbury prematurely deployed the system while still making a powered ascent. Unity now includes a mechanical pin to prevent the feather lever from moving when the vehicle is flying in an unsafe flight regime.

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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with this Kanye West follow up from Arstechnica:

Kanye West is reportedly meeting with his legal team to discuss the possibility of suing file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay. West's new album The Life of Pablo has been "setting illegal download records" as would-be listeners flock to grab it from illicit file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay.

Back on February 14, The Life of Pablo was released exclusively on Tidal, a subscription-based music streaming service. The exclusive release had two effects: first, the Tidal app rocketed to the number-one spot on the iPhone App Store, and second, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to file-sharing websites to grab a free copy of the album.

West's new album also appeared briefly as a direct download from his website for $20, but the download link vanished soon after launch, possibly to drive more people toward a Tidal subscription. There are reports that some people paid their $20 for the direct download but were unable to download the album before it was pulled.

It's common for highly anticipated albums to shift thousands of illegal copies on sites like The Pirate Bay, but Pablo's restricted availability probably drove a far greater number of users to seek out a non-legit copy of the album than otherwise would. Within 24 hours of release, TorrentFreak was reporting an estimated 500,000 pirate downloads of the album; now, a few days later and with the album still exclusively available through Tidal, that number is likely far higher.

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frojack writes:

Another nail in the coffin of Medicine's own Zombie reveals

Still it persists, not only in the UK but also in the US. And a simple google search about health insurance payments for homeopathy will reveal that the homeopathy industry is very busy writing long winded explanations of how to con your insurance company into covering homeopathy.
(Key trick: have your homeopath recommend a Nurse Practitioner which have prescription authority in many states, and who will write you a prescription for homeopathy along with a statement of medical necessity).

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) have used UAH's Rocket-city Ozone (O3) Quality Evaluation in the Troposphere (RO3 QET) Lidar to measure ozone that was chemically produced by summertime lightning over the United States, research that could be important to air quality prediction and assessment once it is developed further.

"This is the first time in the United States that we have used high-resolution Lidar data to determine lightning's impact on tropospheric ozone," says Dr. Lihua "Lucy" Wang, a UAH Earth Systems Science Center (ESSC) research associate who was the lead author of a research paper on the team's findings.

The ESSC team used data from a Lidar facility on the top floor of The National Space Science Technology Center (NSSTC) in Cramer Research Hall, one of just five such atmospheric Lidar facilities in the U.S. and about 15 worldwide.

Lidar uses a laser beam to collect data, so it is effective only during clear conditions. Vaisala's U.S. National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) monitors total lightning activity across the continental United States, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The UAH team estimated lightning nitric oxide (NO) emissions based on NLDN observations, measured the resulting ozone created by the lightning downwind of the storms, where clear conditions allowed Lidar to function and quantified the ozone enhancements due to lightning.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The new test monitors the expression of three genes from a blood sample and can specifically detect an active infection. The test is 86% sensitive with a false negative rate of 1%.

http://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-02-blood-tuberculosis-diagnosis-treatment-countries.html

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/35608276/facebook-adds-new-suicide-prevention-tool-in-the-uk

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://m.phys.org/news/2016-02-scientists-sue-state-police-pro-prosecution.html

Three scientists who worked at the New York State Police crime lab have sued the agency, alleging administrators retaliated against them for finding flaws in processing DNA evidence and pushing for new testing that would identify past errors.

Shannon Morris, Melissa Lee and Kevin Rafferty are seeking unspecified damages in federal court. They cited blowback for supporting the computerized DNA analysis called TrueAllele that state police began implementing then rejected.

The three scientists said that had the system remained in place, it would have exonerated "a small percentage" of suspects who were convicted using evidence involving scenes with mixed genetic material.

"There are people that are very pro-prosecution. They were putting pressure on scientists to reach conclusions that were not scientifically valid," their lawyer, John Bailey, said Friday. "That's what my clients were objecting to."

Morris was the associate lab director until she was fired last year. Lee and Rafferty, both lab supervisors, still work there, but faced disciplinary proceedings and have been reassigned. All worked for the state police for nearly 20 years with otherwise unblemished records, Bailey said.

Their suit alleges that they're protected from retaliation as government employees for speaking out on matters of public importance.

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takyon writes:

Google is looking to service a billion or more potential new users:

To better serve its users in Southeast Asia, Google is creating its first engineering team dedicated to the region. To kick off the recruitment drive it's acquired Pie, a startup in Singapore that was developing a Slack-style service for workplace communications. Google says it's also on the lookout for new hires -- both graduates and experienced engineers -- to bulk up its team, and will be inviting its employees with "deep ties to Singapore" to consider relocating to the city. Students can also apply for a 12-week internship, although these will be taking place in Australia.

Why go to such lengths? Well, Google recognises that internet "first-timers" in Southeast Asia are often different to those in the US. Many use a low-cost smartphone as their primary computing device, for instance, rather than a laptop or PC. Internet connectivity can also be a problem, either because of its cost, speed or reliability. It makes sense, then, to build a team that's closer to these users and understands the cultural differences. A dedicated, local crew should be nimbler, reacting faster to the community and organically coming up with new, tailored ideas.

"That's why we're building a new engineering team in Singapore," Google's Caesar Sengupta said in a blog post. "To get closer to the next billion users coming online and to develop products that will work for them."

Also at TechCrunch.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

At least 220,000 people have fled Burundi since last year.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/12/17/un-calls-for-mission-to-investigate-burundi-violence.html

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

At a campaign event in South Carolina the day before the state's GOP primary, Donald Trump urged the crowd to boycott all Apple products because of CEO Tim Cook's refusal to help law enforcement decrypt the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters in the terrorist massacre at San Bernardino, CA last December. Trump added casually, "I just thought of that". But he later repeated the call for a boycott at another rally, and on Twitter:

The Washington Post's Brian Fung noted that even while Trump was calling for the boycott, he was tweeting from an iPhone. However, in a follow-up tweet Trump noted he had both Apple and Samsung phones; he evidently switched to the latter for subsequent tweets. Others have pointed out a row of iPads used for POS for merchandise at Trump campaign events.

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