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canopic jug writes:

The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.

Edit: Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Friday, March 04, 2016 Swati Khandelwal

Article in Full w/ Screenshots:

https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/subgraph-secure-operating-system.html
https://archive.is/ZNTFH

"Subgraph OS[1] is a feather weighted Linux flavor that aims to combat hacking attacks easier, even on fairly low-powered computers and laptops.

Subgraph OS comes with all the privacy and security options auto-configured, eliminating the user's manual configuration."

"Subgraph OS offers more than just kernel security. The Linux-based operating system comes with a slew of security and privacy features that its developers believe will be more accessible to non-technical users.

[Continued...]

morpheus writes:

European Space Agency (ESA) and Roskosmos (Russian state corporation) launched a joint Mars mission today on a Proton rocket from Baikonur. The mission includes an orbiter and a landing module, named Schiaparelli. One of the goals of the mission is testing the Mars amosphere. The spacecraft is supposed to arrive at the Red Planet this October. See detailed mission description here.

The Orbiter and Schiaparelli were launched together on 14 March 2016 on a Proton rocket and will fly to Mars in a composite configuration. By taking advantage of the positioning of Earth and Mars the cruise phase can be limited to about 7 months, with the pair arriving at Mars in October.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Gaetan Dugas, a Quebec-born flight attendant at Air Canada, was labeled as AIDS Patient Zero in a 1984. A scientific study, published in Science , says this is not so:

A new genetic study of HIV isolated from blood samples taken in the late 1970s clarifies where and when the epidemic began in the United States—and it does not involve a man infamously labeled as "Patient Zero." Researchers lead by evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey from the University of Arizona in Tucson obtained eight blood samples taken from gay and bisexual men in 1978 and 1979 for hepatitis B studies. They isolated HIV from the blood and resurrected nearly complete viral genomes. They did the same with a 1983 blood sample from Patient Zero, a Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas whom journalist Randy Shilts made famous in his best-selling 1987 book about the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Using a technique known as the molecular clock that allows researchers to create a family tree of different genetic isolates and place them in time, Worobey explained in a presentation at an HIV/AIDS meeting in Boston last week that the virus likely came to New York City in 1970 and was linked to viral isolates then circulating in Haiti and other Caribbean countries.

Dugas's isolate fell in about the middle of the tree they created of early U.S. isolates, and clearly showed that he was not Patient Zero—the first person to introduce the virus—in the United States.

[Continues.]

devlux writes:

Hello fellow soylentils.

I have a project that I have put an enormous amount of effort into and would like to release it as a browser plugin because I feel that it might be useful. However today I heard about a somewhat similar product that ended up abusing user trust in order to steal funds.

Browser plugins are sort of a bad joke when it comes to code security. In truth they are nothing more than a zip file and anyone can download the plugin and read the source directly assuming too much obfuscation was not used. That said, there is no real "peer review". You're limited to either your own ability to read the code, or in the case of web store distributed plugins, then perhaps a cursory glance by whomever is in control of the webstore.

This product is intended to be something that people can entrust small amounts of funds and do tipping and other micropayment type of transactions. Really just a handy thing to have. Imagine a portable tipbot and you're on the right track.

I'm moderately confident in my skills as a programmer after two decades of doing this for a living and I'm completely comfortable with leaving the code out in the open for review. However it is not based on any open source product and I'd rather not see derivatives out in the open because a lot of what goes on under the hood was a significant effort to get right. I have seen many similar projects try but fail. In this particular case, the revenue model expects that the author (me) gets a small fee for each transaction. Unfortunately, this means that someone could easily just grab the code, change a few lines of code and release a competing product.

[Continues.]

frojack writes:

WorldTechToday and a bunch of other news sites are reporting:

It appears that the dramatic increase over the last several years of ADHD diagnosis may have been triggered by parents pushing children with birthdays close to the statutory cutoff dates for compulsory enrollment into school settings one year "early". Often parents do this because they believe their child is special, and more mature than other children.

The clear indication is that ADHD socially determined syndrome, triggered by schools, and teacher complaints more than any medical diagnosis.

Ed Note: The original article has no links to supporting information. The only thing that I found that was close was this article in Psychiatry Advisor, and it seems to fit the bill pretty well.

Original Submission

bitstream writes:

The GNU free software project has released the neural network computation package "Gneural Network". The GNU project has been impressed by the work of Google, IBM, AlphaGo and Watson on the field of artificial intelligence. But considers the fact that only companies and labs have access to this technology can represent a threat: "First of all, we cannot know how money driven companies are going to use this novel technology. Second, this monopoly slows down Progress and Technology." This is reason, the author, Jean Michel Sellier, decided to create this software and release it with a GPL license.

The current release 0.0.1, is a very simple feedforward network which can learn very simple tasks such as curve fitting, but the development team have plans for more advanced features very soon. They already work on a implementation of a network of LSTM (long short term memory) neurons for recurrent networks and deep learning and there's plans for Learning reinforcement techniques.

Original Submission

gringer writes:

[Ed note: We are experimenting with something new with this story on SoylentNews. The submitter has agreed to answer some of your questions. Please submit one question per comment. The most highly-rated comments will be given to the submitter. We'll post another story later with the replies.

Previous stories on MinION:

The MinION - Genome Sequencing in a Handheld Device
A MARC in the Silicon: Sequencing E. coli with the MinION]

I was invited to be a speaker at the TEDxWellington 2016 conference on 6th March. The theme of the conference was trust. Along with all other speakers and crew, I was trusted not to tell anyone about my role in it until I had finished speaking. Attendees were transported from a meeting place at the National War Memorial to the venue in buses that had been blacked out The conference was the first public event that was held inside Peter Jackson's private cinema at Park Road Post Production in Miramar, Wellington, New Zealand.

Due to an enclosed fabric tunnel, the cinema inside the venue was the first thing that attendees saw after getting into the buses. Only a few people knew the speaker lineup, and speakers for the second and third sessions were distributed throughout the audience, so that attendees couldn't tell who else would be talking.

The talks, prior to post-production and editing are available on a live stream feed. My talk was about DNA sequencing using the Oxford Nanopore MinION and starts at timecode 01:29:00 on the recorded video. A video of my presentation will be edited and uploaded to the TEDx YouTube channel in a few weeks.

Here's a brief point summary of my talk:

[Continues.]

n1 writes:

Bloomberg reports:

Social Finance Inc., a rapidly growing online lender, is hoping to stoke investor demand for the debt it originates by starting a hedge fund that will buy its own loans -- and potentially those of its competitors.

In recent weeks, the company established the SoFi Credit Opportunities Fund and raised $15 million from investors, according to a regulatory filing and a company spokeswoman. It's seeking to attract more money from wealthy individuals, funds of hedge funds and other institutional investors that may not want to buy whole loans directly from the company or securities backed by the debt.

SoFi, as the lender is known, and its competitors rode a wave of investor demand over the past few years that fueled a boom in originations. Concerns about the economy and consumer debt have caused some of that enthusiasm to cool. As a result, online lenders are trying to meet their growth ambitions by pursuing new strategies to entice investors.

The hedge fund will initially buy SoFi loans and could eventually put half of its capital into debt from other online lenders, according to Debra Jack, the spokeswoman.

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

As reported by CBC News:

Canadian scientists have developed a way to grow swatches of living heart tissue — containing muscle and "blood vessels" — that beat rhythmically like a real heart.

University of Toronto Prof. Milica Radisic and her team hope to use the technology to grow various kinds of "mini organs" that function the way tissues do inside the human body. That would allow them to be used for drug testing or even for growing replacement tissues to treat people who have suffered a heart attack, for example.

Scientists have previously grown individual tissues in petri dishes in order to test whether different chemical compounds could potentially function as drugs.

But very few compounds that work in those conditions actually develop into marketable drugs, said Christopher Moraes, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at McGill University in Montreal. "We think this is because all of our discoveries are made in artificial conditions."

[...] Moraes was not involved in the new study, but his research, like Radisic's, focuses on how to grow cells in conditions that more closely mimic the human body.

Radisic and her team tried to create a more suitable environment by growing heart cells in a 3D scaffold or "chip" instead of a flat petri dish. The scaffold is made of a stretchy, biodegradable polymer using techniques similar to those used to fashion computer chips.

Boyang Zhang, a PhD student in Radisic's lab, said he was impressed when he first saw heart cells beating rhythmically together on their scaffold in the lab.

Also reported by RT.

Biodegradable scaffold with built-in vasculature for organ-on-a-chip engineering and direct surgical anastomosis (DOI: 10.1038/nmat4570)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward or two writes:

From the Tor Project blog:

Tor Browser 5.5.3 is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

This release features important security updates to Firefox.

This release bumps the versions of several of our external components: Firefox to 38.7.0esr, OpenSSL to 1.0.1s, NoScript to 2.9.0.4 and HTTPS-Everywhere to 5.1.4.

Additionally, we fixed long-standing bugs in our Tor circuit display and window resizing code, and improved the usability of our font fingerprinting defense further.

Softpedia reports:

The open-source Tails amnesic incognito live system reached a new milestone on March 8, 2016, stable version 2.2, which adds several new features and improvements, along with security patches and software updates.

The final Tails 2.2 release is not so much different from the RC (Release Candidate) build, and if you're reading our website on a daily basis, you should know already what new features and changes it brings.

However, for those that are not in the loop, we would like to inform them that new features in Tails 2.2 include support for viewing DRM-protected DVD-Video discs, as well as Onion Circuits for displaying a list of the current Tor circuits and connections.

Of course, Onion Circuits replaces the unmaintained Vidalia cross-platform GUI for controlling the Tor anonymity network, and there's also a new system status icon to inform users if Tails is connected to Tor or not (see the attached screenshot for details).

The official announcement for Tails 2.2 can be found here.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

As reported by Windows Central:

Microsoft has entered yet another patent license agreement with a third-party company. This time, it's with Japan-based Rakuten, and it will cover both company consumer electronic products, including any Linux and Android-based devices.

From the Microsoft press release:

"This agreement gives us the freedom to bring our customers new and exciting products, while jointly recognizing the value of patented innovation," said Akio Sugihara, managing executive officer and director of Rakuten.

The terms of the agreement are confidential.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports:

Gordon "Greed is Good" Gekko remains an enduring symbol of Wall Street greed, corporate lawlessness and 1980s excess. That's why it's pretty surprising that the guy on whom the Wall Street character was based--former corporate raider Asher Edelman--says Bernie Sanders is the strongest presidential candidate. Appearing on CNBC's "Fast Money" this morning, Edelman responded immediately when asked who he thought the best candidate for the economy would be.

"Bernie Sanders", Edelman said, without missing a beat. "No question."

Asked to elaborate, Edelman stated his case.

"Well, I think it's quite simple", he began. "If you look at something called 'velocity of money'--you guys know what that is, I presume--that means how much gets spent and turns around. When you have the top one percent getting money, they spend five, 10 percent of what they earn. When you have the lower end of the economy getting money, they spend 100, or 110 percent of what they earn. As you've had a transfer of wealth to the top, and a transfer of income to the top, you have a shrinking consumer base, basically, and you have a shrinking velocity of money. Bernie is the only person out there who I think is talking at all about both fiscal stimulation and banking rules that will get the banks to begin to generate lending again as opposed to speculation. So from an economic point of view, it's straightforward."
Video

Original Submission

Burz writes:

Invisible Things Labs has released Qubes OS 3.1. Some of the features recently introduced into this secure concept, single-user desktop OS are Salt management, the Odyssey abstraction layer, and UEFI boot support. The 3.x series also lays the groundwork for distributed verifiable builds, Whonix VMs for Tor isolation, split-GPG key management, USB sandboxing, and a host of others.

Qubes has recently gained a following among privacy advocates, notable among them journalist J.M. Porup, Micah Lee at The Intercept and Edward Snowden.

Embodying a shift away from complex kernel-based security -- and towards bare metal hypervisors and IOMMUs for strict isolation of hardware components -- Qubes seals off the usual channels for 'VM breakout' and DMA attacks. It isolates NICs and USB hardware within unprivileged VMs which are themselves a re-working of the usual concept, each booting from read-only OS 'templates' which can be shared. Graphics are also virtualized behind a simple, hardened interface. Some of the more interesting attacks mitigated by Qubes are Evil Maid, BadBIOS, BadUSB and Mousejack.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

The South African Center for High Performance Computing's (SA-CHPC) Ninth Annual National Meeting was held Nov. 30 - Dec. 4, 2015, at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) International Convention Center in Pretoria, SA. The award-winning venue was the perfect location to host what has become a popular industry, regional and educational showcase.

With the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) being built in the great Karoo region, implications for SA and the HPC industry have captured the attention of a broad range of stakeholders. SKA will be the world's biggest radio telescope, and the most ambitious technology project ever funded. With an expected 50-year lifespan, SKA Phase One construction is scheduled to begin in 2018, and early science and data generation will follow by 2020.

With only a few years in which to prepare for SKA, it's not surprising that the CHPC conference has begun to feature in-depth data science and network infrastructure content, in addition to the meeting's traditional HPC tutorials, workshops, plenaries, and student programs. Once again, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) HPC and Industry Forums were co-located with the CHPC meeting. An increased number of conference attendees from data science and high-speed network occupations added diversity in terms of gender, discipline and nationalities represented. All things considered, the annual CHPC meeting provides a wealth of learning opportunities, and brings professional networking to an emerging region of the HPC world.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/2016/03/01/south-africa-maps-hpc-future/

Original Submission