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Phoenix666 writes:

The University of Iowa suspects at least 30 Chinese students of having used ringers to take their exams. The case offers a look inside a thriving underground economy of cheating services aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Chinese kids applying to and attending foreign colleges. ...The advertisements were tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the English language and an unfamiliar culture.

Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at U.S. colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.

For dozens of Chinese nationals at the University of Iowa, the offers proved irresistible. ...Reuters has identified companies in China that help students contrive their entire college application – embellishing or ghostwriting application essays, doctoring letters of recommendation from high school teachers, and even advising kids to obtain fake high school transcripts. Other providers continue the illicit assistance after admission, such as those that performed coursework for hire in Iowa City.

... The cheating services extend far beyond Iowa. At the University of Washington, the University of Alabama and Penn State University, for example, students received Chinese-language advertisements by email this semester from unnamed firms. The pitch: Students could raise their grade point averages and graduate early if they hired the outfits to take classes and do assignments for them. The ads, reviewed by Reuters, offered a money-back guarantee. Students who didn't get As would get refunds.

The article continues with a detailed analysis of one student's dealings with University of California, Davis.

Original Submission

Celestial writes:

Just when it looked like the Paramount Pictures and CBS Corp. lawsuit against Axanar Productions over the Star Trek: Axanar fan film was winding down after both J.J. Abrams and Justin Lin said last week that it would "go away," Axanar Productions has filed a countersuit against Paramount Pictures and CBS Corp.

The counterclaim was filed on Monday, and it runs twenty-eight pages in length.

A statement from Axanar explained why the counterclaim was necessary. "Yesterday, Axanar Productions, through its law firm Winston & Strawn, filed a response to the first amended complaint filed by CBS Studios and Paramount Pictures. The response includes a Counterclaim for Declaratory Relief that previews Axanar Productions' fair use defense, provides substantive background on how Alec Peters operated in good faith in his dealings with the Plaintiffs, and describes Alec's fruitless four year struggle with CBS to obtain fan film guidelines.

Axanar is looking for a recovery of attorneys' fees and cost, as well as "additional relief the court finds 'just, proper, and equitable.'"

In defending Axanar's use of the Star Trek playground, the defense provided Peters' history as a bona fide Star Trek fan dating back to the original airing of the show. They went all the way back to Peters' childhood, giving a story of Peters' watching the show as an eight-year-old boy. "Mr. Peters is a lifelong Star Trek fan. Starting with the very first Star Trek teaser appearing on NBC in the summer of 1966, Mr. Peters has seen every episode of Star Trek many times over. When Mr. Peters was just eight years old and NBC moved Star Trek to 10:00 p.m., his mother would put him to bed at 8:00 p.m., but would wake him up at 10:00 p.m. only so that he could watch Star Trek, before putting him back to bed again."

The counterclaim also mentioned the support of Abrams and Justin Lin, saying "even Plaintiffs' own producers and directors have recognized the importance of fans to Star Trek, and have publicly renounced and called for an end of the lawsuit against defendants."

The defendants gave their reason for the counterclaim as the "defendants are currently left with uncertainty as to how Axanar may proceed with its film to fulfill the wishes of thousands of fans who have contributed."

Had Paramount and CBS planned on dropping the suit, it will not be possible at this time due to the counterclaim being filed this week. The plaintiffs now have three weeks to answer this latest legal action, and then the defense will have three weeks to respond.

The full counterclaim can be found here.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The government is spending about three-fourths of its technology budget maintaining aging computer systems, including platforms more than 50 years old in vital areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. One still uses floppy disks. ...GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office) said it found problems across the government, not just in a few agencies. Among those highlighted in the report:

— The Defense Department's Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which is used to send and receive emergency action messages to U.S. nuclear forces. The system is running on a 1970s IBM computing platform, and still uses 8-inch floppy disks to store data. "Replacement parts for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete," GAO said. The Pentagon is initiating a full replacement and says the floppy disks should be gone by the end of next year. The entire upgrade will take longer.

— Treasury's individual and business master files, the authoritative data sources for taxpayer information. The systems are about 56 years old, and use an outdated computer language that is difficult to write and maintain. Treasury plans to replace the systems, but has no firm dates.

— Social Security systems that are used to determine eligibility and estimate benefits, about 31 years old. Some use a programming language called COBOL, dating to the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Most of the employees who developed these systems are ready to retire and the agency will lose their collective knowledge," the report said. "Training new employees to maintain the older systems takes a lot of time." Social Security has no plans to replace the entire system, but is eliminating and upgrading older and costlier components. It is also rehiring retirees who know the technology.

— Medicare's Appeals System, which is only 11 years old, but facing challenges keeping up with a growing number of appeals, as well as questions from congressional offices following up on constituent concerns. The report says the agency has general plans to keep updating the system, depending on the availability of funds.

— The Transportation Department's Hazardous Materials Information System, used to track incidents and keep information relied on by regulators. The system is about 41 years old, and some of its software is no longer supported by vendors, which can create security risks. The department plans to complete its modernization program in 2018.

COBOL...remember when people paid sick money to COBOL programmers to prepare for Y2K?

Original Submission

b0ru writes:

Currently, there are two competing theories for the formation of supermassive black holes; one theory posits that the seeds for these stellar bodies form from black holes with a mass of ten to one hundred times the mass of our Sun. They then grow via mergers with other black holes, and by consuming gas from their immediate surroundings. The problem with this theory is that it is necessary for these black holes to have grown unusually quickly to support our observations which estimate them to be approximately twelve billion years old.

A team of Italian astrophysicists using the Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes have presented a paper which supports another theory, where a gas cloud of one hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun collapses to form a black hole. This black hole would start large, and grow at the normal rate, which seems more realistic. Andrea Grazian, a co-author from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy states:

Of course, confirmation is required to assert this theory of formation to be correct. Further study, and new instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the massive E-ELT, will afford the observation of more distant black holes, and possibly lead to the discovery of more supermassive black hole seed candidates.

[Ed addition.] Ars Technica has very readable coverage which also points out why this research is important:

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology researchers have designed graphene transistors capable of harnessing rather than resisting quantum tunneling in order to operate at high frequencies using low power:

Building transistors that are capable of switching at low voltages (less than 0.5 volts) is one of the greatest challenges of modern electronics. Tunnel transistors are the most promising candidates to solve this problem. Unlike in conventional transistors, where electrons "jump" through the energy barrier, in tunnel transistors the electrons "filter" through the barrier due to the quantum tunneling effect. However, in most semiconductors the tunneling current is very small and this prevents transistors that are based on these materials from being used in real circuits.

The authors of the article, scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the Institute of Physics and Technology RAS, and Tohoku University (Japan), proposed a new design for a tunnel transistor based on bilayer graphene, and using modelling, they proved that this material is an ideal platform for low-voltage electronics.

[...] Under optimum conditions, a graphene transistor can change the current in a circuit ten thousand times with a gate voltage swing of only 150 millivolts. "This means that the transistor requires less energy for switching, chips will require less energy, less heat will be generated, less powerful cooling systems will be needed, and clock speeds can be increased without the worry that the excess heat will destroy the chip," says Svintsov.

Found at NextBigFuture.

Abrupt current switching in graphene bilayer tunnel transistors enabled by van Hove singularities (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep24654)

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists are studying how climate change will affect the speed of sound under water to help prepare the U.S. Navy for operating in progressively warmer oceans.

Light doesn't travel very far underwater so the navy uses sound to transmit messages. The speed of underwater sound depends on a combination of temperature, salinity and pressure. It's a complicated equation, but temperature is the biggest factor, says Glen Gawarkiewicz, an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Understanding sound speed is crucial for transmitting messages, detecting enemy submarines and avoiding marine animals. As climate change elevates temperatures, understanding underwater sound speed will become increasingly important.

"[We] haven't had to deal with this issue of climate change until the last 15 years, but the temperature changes are significant enough that it really is having an impact on how sound travels in the ocean," Gawarkiewicz said. He and his colleagues will present their research on the effect of climate change on sonar this week at the 171st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held May 23 - 27 in Salt Lake City.

What does this mean for Flipper?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New U.S. Geological Survey-led research suggests that even though amphibians are severely declining worldwide, there is no smoking gun -- and thus no simple solution -- to halting or reversing these declines.

"Implementing conservation plans at a local level will be key in stopping amphibian population losses, since global efforts to reduce or lessen threats have been elusive," said Evan Grant, a USGS research wildlife biologist who led the study published in Scientific Reports today. "This research changes the way we need to think about amphibian conservation by showing that local action needs to be part of the global response to amphibian declines, despite remaining questions in what is causing local extinctions."

The evidence shows that though every region in the United States suffered declines, threats differed among regions.

They include:

• Human influence from the Mississippi River east, including the metropolitan areas of the Northeast and the agricultural-dominated landscapes of the Midwest
• Disease, particularly a chytrid fungus in the Upper Midwest and New England
• Pesticide applications east of the Colorado River
• Climate changes across the Southern U.S. and the West Coast

Amphibian declines are a global phenomenon that this new research demonstrates has continued unabated in the United States since at least the 1960's, and which are occurring even in protected national parks and refuges. Scientists have broadly linked declines to environmental factors like climate, human influence such as land-use change, and contaminants and disease, but have not been able to use actual scientific data on a large scale to discern causes of the ongoing disappearance of amphibian populations.

They forgot the other threat, Doc Hopper's Frog Legs.

Original Submission

frojack writes:

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Mission (LRO) Mission reports

The swirls appear on the moon's surface in many places, (see image at link above) but there has been no real good explanation of how they got there. The are located in areas of residual crustal magnetism that can be remotely measured by various space craft over several lunar missions. They can be 10s of miles in size, or just a few oddly shaped bright streaks. They are currently suspected of being a sprinkling of less weathered lunar soil, but the method of distribution is far from nailed down. The three contending theories are:

The problem is that these local magnetic remnants in the lunar crust are measured to be far too weak to provide any direct deflection of solar particles which weather lunar soil.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Hill reports

A federal judge in Texas on [May 19] tore into Justice Department lawyers who argued the immigration case involving the Obama administration, ordering them to take ethics classes.

In a blistering court order, U.S. District Court [Judge] Andrew S. Hanen said he was "disappointed" about having to address the subject of lawyer behavior, calling it "at best, a distraction".

Hanen said any Department of Justice attorney who wants to argue in a state or federal court in any of the 26 states involved in the immigration case must take an annual three-hour ethics course for the next five years.

"Clearly, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about or adherence to the duties of professional responsibility in the halls of the Justice Department", Hanen wrote in his 28-page order,[PDF] which quoted the films "Bridge of Spies" and "Miracle on 34th Street".

The judge ordered Attorney General Loretta Lynch to provide a "comprehensive plan" within 60 days on how to "prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again".

The reprimand [...] came after the Obama administration granted 100,000 expanded work permits for undocumented immigrants despite Hanen issuing a ruling in February 2015 to temporarily block Obama's executive action. Hanen said he was misled by lawyers arguing the case as to when the Obama administration would implement the directive.

TechDirt goes into excrucitiating detail.

Original Submission

The Pirate Bay Sails Back to Its .org Domain

Phoenix666 writes:

Faced with a new ruling from a Swedish court that saw its Swedish ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se domains confiscated, torrent site The Pirate Bay is moving back to where it first started in 2003, ThePirateBay.org.

The site is currently redirecting all traffic from the above two domains back to its .org home. The Pirate Bay had originally moved to .se in 2012, before making moves to more obscure domains, such as .sx and .ac. It would eventually return to .se in 2015. The alternative domains the site was using have all been seized.

While the moves were meant as a way to avoid copyright lawsuit-related closures, the return back to .org could see potential legal action from the US, as the registry that manages the top level .org domains is based in Virginia.

Starbucks Wifi Landing Page Promotes The Pirate Bay

MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

When one logs into the "Free WiFi by Google" at Starbucks, at least here in the US, three of the day's top searches are listed on the landing page as well as how many times each has been searched-for so far that day.

This is how I usually find out that someone famous has died. The other day I thought Liverpool had been hit by a terrorist attack, but no, to my great dismay it had something to do with a soccer match.

This morning at 7:30 US Left Coast Time, the landing page informed me that 20,000 searches had been performed for "The Pirate Bay".

Curious, I did the search myself, only to find that The Man had seized their .se domain, but with the good news that their original .org domain is working just fine.

This leads me to advance the thesis that millions of people who had no clue how to download w4r3z have just been clued in by our Seattle friends.

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Phoenix666 writes:

US engineer Frances Arnold has won the Millennium Technology Prize for pioneering "directed evolution".

By driving a sped-up version of natural selection in the lab, the method has created new enzymes for industrial catalysts, household detergents, and even to make rocket fuel from sugar.

The €1m (£0.8m) prize is awarded biennially and Prof Arnold is the first female winner in its 12-year history.
...
Prof Arnold, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), spoke to the BBC before travelling to Helsinki for Tuesday's ceremony.

She said the "basic concept" of using evolution to create better enzymes emerged from her laboratory more than 20 years ago.

"Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time. And I figured out that this should be the algorithm for forward design, for making new biological code that is useful to humans," Prof Arnold said.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

EFF has a little progress report on the Canary Watch project, and has announced that it will no longer be accepting submissions to the warrant canary database. The article notes some of the issues involved with interpreting and maintaining warrant canaries, and notes a change in the law allowing web companies to report national security requests in ranges, such as "0-250":

We announced Canary Watch a year ago as a coalition project to list Warrant Canaries and monitor them for changes or removal. Canary Watch was a joint project, with EFF, Freedom of the Press Foundation, NYU Law, Calyx and the Berkman Center.

[...] [The] Canary Watch project has been a major success, and we've decided that it has achieved the goals we set out for it. As of today we will no longer accept submissions of new canaries or monitor the existing canaries for changes or take downs.

Transparency reports and warrant canaries have an important role to play in the fight against illegal and unconstitutional national security process, including National Security Letters and other secret court processes. We have not received any court orders or government requests to shut down the Canary Watch project. Rather, all of the members of the Canary Watch coalition have come to the agreement that the project has run its course and has come to a natural ending point.

Original Submission

Hairyfeet writes:

Among the new memory requirements for Windows 10 is this little tidbit, Intel's TPM module will be required for new OEM installs of Microsoft's flagship OS.

Where this leaves AMD and ARM isn't clear, but for those of us who don't want hardware DRM baked into our systems this is an unwelcome bit of news.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Microsoft Technet details the requirements for the TPM, what features require its use and different ways it can be implemented. It also gives the option of a firmware based implementation which can use the security feature, such as trust zone and IME.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Facebook banned libertarian Canadian commentator Lauren Southern for reporting a ban of the administrator of the Disdain for Plebs page.

Update: "Lauren Southern reports that Facebook has lifted her ban."

Source: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/05/21/facebook-bans-canadian-commentator-for-saying-it-targets-conservatives/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Humans have changed the world's oceans in ways that have been devastating to many marine species. But, according to new evidence, it appears that the change has so far been good for cephalopods, the group including octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. The study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 23 shows that cephalopods' numbers have increased significantly over the last six decades.

"The consistency was the biggest surprise," says Zoë Doubleday of Australia's Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide. "Cephalopods are notoriously variable, and population abundance can fluctuate wildly, both within and among species. The fact that we observed consistent, long-term increases in three diverse groups of cephalopods, which inhabit everything from rock pools to open oceans, is remarkable."

According to the researchers, there has been growing speculation that cephalopod populations were proliferating in response to a changing environment, based partly on trends in cephalopod fisheries. Cephalopods are known for rapid growth, short lifespans, and extra-sensitive physiologies, which may allow them to adapt more quickly than many other marine species.

Climate change taketh away, but it also giveth.

Original Submission