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An Anonymous Coward writes:

On June 7, 2016, weather radar near Columbus, Indiana showed what looked like a pop-up thunderstorm, but is now being reported as a release of military chaff. The cloud was visible on radar for more than six hours, drifting ESE before finally dissipating south of Cincinnati.

The National Weather Service confirms with the military that countermeasures / chaff was released south of Indianapolis this evening, which caused the mysterious "blob" to show up. Weather service officials also said we should expect more "blobs" to show up on radar soon. The chaff release showed up on radar for nearly five hours.

takyon: "Chaff [...] is a radar countermeasure in which aircraft or other targets spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminium, metallized glass fibre or plastic, which either appears as a cluster of primary targets on radar screens or swamps the screen with multiple returns."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Over the weekend, Twitter and Pinterest accounts belonging to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were hacked by a group called the "OurMine Team," reportedly based in Saudi Arabia.

They were able to pull this off because Zuckerberg did exactly what online security experts have been encouraging people not to do for years: he used the same password for several different social media platforms.

It was a rather lame password, at that: "dadada."

Source: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/06/06/zuckerberg-gets-hacked-turns-really-lame-password/

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

Here's a story of the interestingly designed tanks that helped the Allies win on the D-day beaches of Dieppe. Tanks designed by an unconventional thinker (but who wants to think conventionally?). This is the story of 'Hobart's Funnies'. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160603-the-strange-tanks-that-helped-win-d-day

On 19 August 1942, Allied armies put their plan for an invasion of Occupied Europe to the ultimate test – by landing troops on the beaches and trying to capture a French port [Dieppe].

The landings were a disaster.

In less than 10 hours, more than 60% of the 6,000 British, Canadian and American troops who landed on the beach were either killed, wounded or captured. All of of the 28 tanks which came ashore alongside them – essential if the troops were going to be able break through the German strongpoints – were knocked out. Many were stranded, unable to move on the loose shingle, and picked off by anti-tank guns.

The failure of the Dieppe landings provided many lessons. Trying to capture a heavily defended port was likely to fail, commanders realised. Troops would have to land on sandy beaches, and their tanks would have to be able to make their way across these beaches and punch holes through the seawalls or other concrete obstacles the Germans had built up.

One man, it turned out, had a solution. And two years later, his fleet of highly specialised – and often bizarre-looking tanks – would be one of the major reasons why the D-Day landings were a success.

My personal favourite: the Sherman DD swimming tank. Or as the Americans discovered, the Sherman submarine.

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CoolHand writes:

From ScienceAlert.com:

A 25-year-old has just received a full heart transplant... but not before surviving for more than a year without a human heart inside his body.

Instead, Stan Larkin wore an 'artificial heart' in a backpack 24/7 for 555 days, which pumped blood around his body and kept him alive. The success of the procedure suggests that the device could be used to sustain other patients with total heart failure while they're waiting for a donor.

[...] At the time, no one knew how much he'd be able to do with it. The portable device comes in the form of a 6-kg (13.5 pound) backpack that's connected to the patient's vascular system, to keep oxygenated blood pumping around the body.

It's not the most versatile thing to have on you 24/7, and Stan reported not being able to hold his daughters or give them piggy back rides. But he did manage to continue playing basketball - a total surprise to his doctors.

"This wasn't made for pick-up basketball," said Haft. "Stan pushed the envelope with this technology ... He really thrived on the device."

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Original URL: http://www.itworld.com/article/3078572/security/human-error-biggest-risk-to-health-it.html

Human error biggest risk to health IT

In the race to digitize the healthcare industry, providers, insurers and others in the multi-layered ecosystem have failed to take some of the most basic steps to protect consumers' sensitive health information, a senior government official is warning.

Servio Medina, acting COO at the Defense Health Agency's policy branch, cautioned during a recent presentation that too many healthcare breaches are the product of basic mistakes, ignorance or employee negligence.

"These are things that could be prevented," Medina said. "Today's training and awareness efforts that we provide currently are simply not effective. They are not enough. We have to do something radically more and different."

Medina is arguing for a more concerted effort to address what he refers to as "the human element" of the healthcare data breach, citing a Defense Department memo (PDF) issued last September that called attention to the need to improve what it called the "cybersecurity culture" at the Pentagon.

"Nearly all past successful network penetrations can be traced to one or more human errors that allowed the adversary to gain access to and, in some cases, exploit mission-critical information," Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Martin Dempsey, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the memo. "Raising the level of individual human performance in cybersecurity provides tremendous leverage in defending the [DoD's networks]."

[...] This story, "Human error biggest risk to health IT" was originally published by CIO.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

China has been making significant progress in cleaning up its toilets, according to the National Tourism Administration, since the launch of a three-year "toilet revolution" which aims to build 33,000 restrooms and renovate 24,000 others by next year.

By the end of last year, 22,009 had been built or upgraded, 4 percent more than the target.

China will build or renovate 25,000 facilities this year, at a cost of more than 12.5 billion yuan (US$1.9 billion), the NTA said, and it will also work to improve toilets in rural areas.

Toilets in the countryside have earned a nasty reputation, with some little more than ramshackle shelters surrounded by cornstalks and others just open pits next to pigsties. The ongoing "toilet revolution" is set to change all that.

China's national standard requires "sanitary" toilets in rural homes to have walls, roofs, doors and windows and to be at least 2 square meters.

In the eastern province of Shandong, toilets in rural areas were often just roofless structures made of mud or rock.

"When children from the cities come to our village, they would rather hold it the whole time than use the pits," said Feng Jinghua, Party chief of Zhouzhuang Village in Qufu.

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2016-06/06/content_38610207.htm

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In an effort to achieve a larger degree of monetization, Reddit has announced it will be rolling out a system to automatically rewrite links to include an affiliate URL. Under this system, Reddit will get credit anytime someone links to a merchant that Reddit has partnered with. The post states the Reddit has partnered with about 5000 merchants, but Amazon is not one of them.

The post describes the process, "The redirect will be inserted by JavaScript when the user clicks the link. The link displayed on hover will match the original link. Clicking will forward users through a third-party service called Viglink which will be responsible for rewriting the URL to its final destination." To address privacy concerns of Reddit users, the post adds, "We've signed a contract with them that explicitly states they won't store user data or cookies during this process."

Right now the system is in a test phase, and only a limited number of users will be affected. They are planning a larger rollout in the near future out which will affect the entire site. The post also states that adblockers will not break the system, even if Viglink is a blocked domain. In response to comments, it is stated that the system was only tested with Adblock Plus, and it may not work with other adblockers.

Source: http://techraptor.net/content/reddit-introduces-affiliate-links

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hackers took over the National Football League's (USA) twitter account for about nine minutes on Tuesday, posting a tweet falsely announcing Commissioner Roger Goodell's death at age 57. The Twitter community seemed to take the development in stride, quickly running up the retweet count into the thousands before the original was deleted. But the hackers managed to post a couple snarky follow-ups before exiting.

The TechInsider piece reports receiving email from the hacker group Peggle Crew afterwards claiming responsibility (credit?) for the hack; the hacker revealed the 'lame' password used to protect the NFL account (see TFA).

As previously reported, the Twitter account of Laremy Tunsil was hacked several weeks ago, on the night of the NFL draft, with disastrous consequences for the highly touted college prospect. That hack was probably done by someone who knew Tunsil personally, though.

Also in the news of late is that Mark Zuckerberg of facebook fame recently had his twitter and pinterest accounts hacked. Thoughts are that he had reused his password on several accounts, one of which was revealed in a data dump of LinkedIn data. To borrow and slightly amend a lyric from The Police: "De do do do de dadada is all I want to say to you."

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

NASA seems hell bent to go to Mars, but can't afford to on its own.
Its international partners have no stomach for that — they would would rather return to our moon and build a base there for further exploration.

Doesn't going back to the moon make more sense? Build a base on the moon, and use its low gravity and possible water at the poles as propellant for further space exploration?

Why not the moon first?

http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/7/11868840/moon-return-journey-to-mars-nasa-congress-space-policy

Links:
From NASA itself, in 2008: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/series/moon/why_go_back.html
The all-knowing, ever-trustworthy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_the_Moon

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Amanda Kooser writes in Cnet that a life size bronze sculpture showing two young women standing together and taking a selfie with a smartphone in front of City Hall in Sugar Land, Texas has inflamed selfie-haters across the internet. A Twitter user calls it "proof our country has gone to hell." Other users call it "ridiculous" and say it makes them feel "sad" or "embarrassed for everyone." Twitter user “goo goo doll” shared a photo of the statue covered in strips of tape with words including "naive," "trashy," "shallow" and "rude" written on them.

But not everyone is upset, disappointed or angry about the sculpture. Some people are amused at the thought of future archaeologists discovering this sign of our times. Plenty of smartphone photographers are sharing fun pictures of themselves with the sculpture along with the #selfiestatue hashtag. The selfie sculpture is part of a 10-piece collection that was donated by a generous resident of the city. It's aimed to portray the ways in which people spend time in the square.

Is not the only artistic manifestation of its kind. According to the City of Sugar Land the inclusion of sculpture in the Town Square plaza aligns with the continued vision of the City and the Legacy Foundation's commitment to establish cultural arts amenities that "provide and/or support activities and facilities that enrich the artistic, cultural, educational, and historical character of Sugar Land."

Original Submission

el_oscuro writes:

According to Consumerist:

"The Copyright Office is untertaking a review of the DMCA to figure out what is and isn't working. One big aspect of that is the "notice and takedown" aspect of the law: when a site receives notice from a copyright holder that they're hosting infringing content, they're legally immune from being an infringing party if they pull it down. We see examples of this gone amok fairly regularly, but it's the way the internet world works right now.

But notice and takedown is prone to abuse. On the one hand, it doesn't stop media pirates from willfully uploading content they don't own again, or to other platforms. And on the other hand, it's an incredibly powerful tool that lets basically anyone request to have basically any content removed wholesale from the internet at any time, potentially without appeal."

"However, the proposal now before the Copyright Office is something even more stringent. It's called "Notice and Staydown," and would have the effect that it sounds like: not only would the site receiving the notice have to take the content down, but they would have to assure that the work never appears on the platform ever again — from any user, in any form."

"The DMCA has its problems, but Notice and Staydown would be an absolute disaster," the Archive post concludes. "Unfortunately, members of the general public were not invited to the Copyright Office proceedings last week. The many thousands of comments submitted by Internet users on this subject were not considered valuable input; rather, one panelist characterized them as a 'DDoS attack' on the Copyright Office website, showing how little the people who are seeking to regulate the web actually understand it."

Here is the referenced Internet archive story: Copyright Office's Proposed Notice and Staydown System Would Force the Internet Archive and Other Platforms to Censor the Web via Torrent Freak)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel's director of high performance computing has left the company after 27 years:

Reinders describes how he joined Intel in 1989 to work on a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor called iWarp, designed to be connected into a cluster. It was the early days of a search for higher computing performance via parallelism rather than faster clock rates.

According to Reinders, Intel's work on parallelism eased back when clock rates surged again with the 486 and Pentium processors, but that was only temporary. Reinders became a tireless champion for concurrency as well as for Intel's compilers, libraries and other software development tools.

Not everything went well. Intel's general-purpose GPU and accelerator project, codenamed Larrabee, never came to market. However parts of Larrabee were used in Intel's MIC (Many Integrated Core) concurrent processor, which became Xeon Phi, codenamed Knights Corner, fully released in 2012. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the world's fastest according to the Top 500 list, uses Xeon Phi accelerators.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

[linked study is currently unavailable. find DOI]

A new study suggests that "habitable zones" may not be habitable for long:

In research published in the journal Astrobiology, we argue that early extinction could be the cosmic default for life in the universe. This is because the earliest habitable conditions may be unstable. In our "Gaian Bottleneck" model, planets need to be inhabited in order to remain habitable. So even if the emergence of life is common, its persistence may be rare.

Mars, Venus and Earth were more similar to each other in their first billion years than they are today. Even if only one of the planets saw the emergence of life, this era coincided with heavy bombardment from asteroids, which could have spread life between the planets.

But about 1.5 billion years after formation, Venus started to experience runaway heating and Mars experienced runaway cooling. If Mars and Venus once harboured life, that life quickly went extinct. Even if wet rocky Earth-like planets are in the "Goldilocks Zone" of their host stars, it seems that runaway freezing or heating may be their default fate. Large impactors and huge variation in the amounts of water and greenhouse gases can induce positive feedbacks cycles that push planets away from habitable conditions.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new study has found that the plastic pollution dumped in the oceans has harmful effects in fish:

Scientists have demonstrated for the first time the devastating physiological and behavioral effects on fish exposed to the tiny bits of plastic pollution clogging the world's oceans. Lab experiments with European perch larvae showed exposure to microplastic particles at levels present in seas inhibited hatching of fertilized eggs, stunted larval growth, reduced activity levels, and made them more susceptible to predators, increasing mortality rates, researchers said on Thursday.

"For me, the key finding and biggest surprise in this study was the fact that larvae preferentially ate microplastic particles and literally stuffed themselves with the microbeads," ignoring their natural food source of zooplankton, said marine biologist Oona Lönnstedt of Uppsala University in Sweden.

There is increasing concern among scientists about the effect of pervasive plastic pollution on marine ecosystems. This study was the first to look at direct effects of microplastic particles on fish development, Lönnstedt said.

Also at PBS NewsHour and the Washington Post.

Ecologically relevant data are policy-relevant data (DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf8697)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A NASA grant will explore the possibility of flying small robotic craft onto asteroids in order to harvest them and manufacture rudimentary propulsion that would allow the rock to be steered to another location in the solar system:

A few decades from now, asteroids may be flying themselves to mining outposts in space, nobly sacrificing their abundant resources to help open the final frontier to humanity. That's the vision of California-based company Made In Space, which was recently awarded NASA funding to investigate how to turn asteroids into giant, autonomous spacecraft. The project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), is part of Made In Space's long-term plan to enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable.

[...] The converted asteroids wouldn't resemble the traditional idea of spacecraft, with rocket engines and complex electronic circuitry. Rather, everything would be mechanical and relatively primitive. For example, the computer would be analog, akin, perhaps, to the Antikythera mechanism invented by the ancient Greeks to chart the motion of heavenly bodies, Dunn said. And the propulsion system might be some sort of catapult that launches boulders or other material off the asteroid in a controlled way, thereby pushing the space rock in the opposite direction (as described by Newton's Third Law of Motion), he added. "At the end of the day, the thing that we want the asteroid to be is technology that has existed for a long time. The question is, 'Can we convert an asteroid into that technology at some point in the future?'" Dunn said. "We think the answer is yes."

Original Submission