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HughPickens.com writes:

Stephanie Strom writes in The New York Times that all of Perdue's chickens - 676 million last year - will soon bask in sunlight and have more space in barns as part of an ambitious overhaul of the company's animal welfare practices. The commitment will hold Perdue to standards similar to those in Europe, which the American poultry industry has long dismissed as antiquated, inefficient and costly. Perdue may also tinker with breeding to decrease the speed at which birds grow or to reduce their breast size, steps that could decrease the number and severity of leg injuries, an issue that has brought unwanted attention to the company.

"We are going to go beyond what a chicken needs and give chickens what they want," says Jim Perdue, whose grandfather founded the business in 1920. The chicken industry has long argued that such standards would raise costs to producers but Perdue, which had $6 billion in sales last year and increased production more than 9 percent, is betting such concerns are overblown based on its experience so far. Over the last decade or so, Perdue has done more than any other major American poultry producer to eliminate antibiotics of all kinds from its procedures. While Tyson Foods, the country's largest poultry producer, asked its farmers to adopt what are known as the five freedoms of animal welfare — including freedom from discomfort and freedom from fear and distress — Perdue is going further by insisting that its farmers enforce them. "We want to be held accountable," says Perdue. "If we mess up, we have to be prepared to say we messed up."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story about Medicos (physicians or doctors):

Medicos are so adept at mitigating security controls that their bypassing exploits have become official policy, a university-backed study has revealed.

The work finds that nurses, doctors, and other medical workers will so often bypass information security controls in a bid to administer rapid health care that the shortcuts are taught to other staff.

It is built on face to face and phone interviews with hundreds of medical workers, chief technology officers, and 19 security boffins by an academic team of Sean Smith and Vijay Kothari of Dartmouth College, Ross Koppela of the University of Pennsylvania, and Jim Blythe of the University of Southern California.

"We find, in fact, that workarounds to cyber security are the norm, rather than the exception," the team writes in the paper Workarounds to Computer Access in Healthcare Organisations: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient? [pdf].

"They not only go unpunished, they go unnoticed in most settings — and often are taught as correct practice.

[...] These workarounds which keep machines logged in have resulted in at least one instance with the issuance of the wrong medication when a doctor did not realise the wrong patient records were open.

"The problem is the … chief information, technology, and medical informatics officers … did not sufficiently consider the actual clinical workflow," the team says.

The team says healthcare workers are some of the most creative in bypassing controls given their critical mission of healthcare delivery.

Original Submission

Afir writes:

I am the user of StartCom's (https://startssl.com) free SSL certificate service. This is the content of the email they send me a couple of days ago:

[Ed. Note: Could not independently verify the e-mail; found substantially the same announcement on StartCom's web site; that copy appears here. It seems that English is not their native language, so I would ask we keep the discussion to the technology.]

Eilat, Israel - 6th June. 2016.

StartCom, a leading global Certificate Authority (CA) and provider of trusted identity and authentication services, is pleased to announces a new service – StartEncrypt, an automatic SSL certificate issuance and installation software for your web server.

StartEncrypt is based on the StartAPI system which allows to obtain and install SSL server certificates into your web server for free and automatically; no previous knowledge is required, everything is done with just one click.

StartEncrypt supports Windows and Linux server for most popular web server software, and has many advantages such as:
(1) Obtaining AND installation of the SSL certificates automatically;
(2) Support for Extended Validated (Green Bar) and Organization validated certificates;
(3) Supported validation periods up to 39 months, more than 1180 days;
(4) Support for multiple hostname with up to 120 domains including wildcard support;
(5) All levels support free issuance of certificates, just make sure your StartSSL account is verified as Class 3 or Class 4 identity.

StartEncrypt together with StartSSL will allow you to secure your websites without any prior knowledge including extended and organization validations which provide the confidence your online customer needs in order to increase to online revenue. Let's Start to Encrypt now.

We recently covered 800-Pound Comodo Tries to Trademark Upstart Rival's "Let's Encrypt" Name and have had many stories on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts with Let's Encrypt.

[Disclaimer: SoylentNews is exploring the use of a cert from Let'sEncrypt on our development/test site.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The US Customs and Border Protection agency has submitted a request to the Office of Management and Budget, asking for permission to collect travelers social media account names as they enter the country.

The CBP, which is part of the US Department of Homeland Security, proposes that the request "Please enter information associated with your online presence — Provider/Platform — Social media identifier" be added to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) and to the CBP Form I-94W (Nonimmigrant Visa Waiver Arrival/Departure).

“It will be an optional data field to request social media identifiers to be used for vetting purposes, as well as applicant contact information,” the CBP noted.

“Collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide DHS greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.”

The public and affected agencies are asked to comment on the request within 60 days of its publication (i.e until August 22, 2016), but haven’t offered an online form for comments to be submitted. Instead, the commenters are asked to write them down and send them via snail mail to this address.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/06/27/us-customs-social-media-account-names/

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Open4D writes:

The Guardian claims that a Secretive Alphabet division aims to fix public transit in US by shifting control to Google

Exclusive: Documents reveal Sidewalk Labs is offering cloud software Flow to Columbus, Ohio, to upgrade bus and parking services – and bring them under Google's management

Sidewalk is initially offering its cloud software, called Flow, to Columbus, Ohio, the winner of a recent $50m Smart City Challenge organized by the US Department of Transportation.

Using public records laws, the Guardian obtained dozens of emails and documents submitted to Challenge cities by Sidewalk Labs, detailing many technologies and proposals that have not previously been made public.

The emails and documents show that Flow applies Google's expertise in mapping, machine learning and big data to thorny urban problems such as public parking. Numerous studies have found that 30% of traffic in cities is due to drivers seeking parking.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

While Congress seems somewhat hostile towards a mission to "redirect" an astroid (or at least a part of one), they do seem willing to fund some of the stuff that such a mission would help develop and prove. In April, Marcia S. Smith, writing at spacepolicyonline.com, said, "Space technology is level-funded at $686.5 million (compared to FY2016) and the committee specifies that $130 million of that is for the RESTORE-L satellite servicing technology development program that was shifted into space technology from space operations last year. Aeronautics would receive $601 million, $39 million less than FY201".

So, just what is the RESTORE-L program?

From nasa.gov we learn:

In May, NASA officially moved forward with plans to execute the ambitious, technology-rich Restore-L mission, an endeavor to launch a robotic spacecraft in 2020 to refuel a live satellite. The mission -- the first of its kind in low-Earth orbit -- will demonstrate that a carefully curated suite of satellite-servicing technologies are fully operational. The current candidate client for this venture is Landsat 7, a government-owned satellite in low-Earth orbit.

Beyond refueling, the Restore-L mission also carries another, weighty objective: to test other crosscutting technologies that have applications for several critical upcoming NASA missions. As the Restore-L servicer rendezvous with, grasps, refuels, and relocates a client spacecraft, NASA will be checking important items off of its technology checklist that puts humans closer to Mars exploration.

Restore-L technologies include an autonomous relative navigation system with supporting avionics, and dexterous robotic arms and software. The suite is completed by a tool drive that supports a collection of sophisticated robotic tools for robotic spacecraft refueling, and a propellant transfer system that delivers measured amounts of fuel at the proper temperature, rate, and pressure.

"Restore-L effectively breaks the paradigm of one-and-done spacecraft. It introduces new ways to robotically manage, upgrade and prolong the lifespans of our costly orbiting national assets. By doing so, Restore-L opens up expanded options for more resilient, efficient and cost-effective operations in space," says Frank Cepollina, leader of five crewed servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope. Cepollina now serves as the associate director of the Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO), the team that first conceived of the Restore-L concept and developed its technology portfolio.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Wheeeee! You're riding a flying unicorn down a magic rainbow while kittens and cupcakes rain from the sky. It's all so real.

Then, suddenly, everything goes black as you mindlessly take the final step in your living room to pull the cable from your virtual reality headset.

Bummer.

There's a virtual elephant in the living room, and here it is: High-quality virtual reality is going to be literally held back by the need to tether to a console.

Last week's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles offered new ideas (and old) to solve the catastrophic VR tethering problem.

The world of VR has been teasing fans for decades. In recent years, the busting out of real VR has always been a year or two away, they told us.

Finally, I'm happy to announce that VR is really here this year. In fact, many E3 attendees told me the show represents a turning point for VR -- that this is the event that makes it real at long last (rather than virtually real, I guess).

[Continues...]

[Ed. Note: The first link seems to have been pulled from the web after this story was accepted. We apologize that we have been unable to find a link to replace it.]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story about the progress of the Rust programming language and its growing usage:

"The Results are in! Thank you to all 3103 of you who responded to our first Rust community survey. We were overwhelmed by your responses, and as we read your comments we were struck by the amount of time and thought you put into them. It's feedback like this that will help us focus our energy and make sure Rust continues to grow the best way. A big reason for having the survey was to make the results available publically so that we can talk about it and learn from it together. In this blog post, we'll take a first look at the survey responses, including themes in the comments, demographics, and quantitative feedback.

Do You Use Rust?

We wanted to make sure the survey was open to both users of Rust as well as people who didn't use Rust. Rust users help us get a sense of how the current language and tools are working and where we need to improve. Rust non-users give us another perspective, and help shed light on the kinds of things that get in the way of someone using Rust. I'm happy to report that more than a third of the responses were from people not using Rust. This gave us a lot of great feedback on those roadblocks, which we'll talk about in this (and upcoming) blog posts.

But first, let's look into the feedback from Rust users.

Rust Users

How long have you been using Rust?

Almost 2000 people responded saying they were Rust users. Of these, almost 24% were new users. This is encouraging to see. We're still growing, and we're seeing more people playing with Rust now that could become long-term users. Equally encouraging is seeing that once someone has become a Rust user, they tend to stick around and continue using it. One might expect a sharp drop-off if users became quickly disenchanted and moved onto other technologies. Instead, we see the opposite. Users that come in and stay past their initial experiences tend to stay long-term, with a fairly even spread between 3 months to 12 months (when we first went 1.0).

There is much more to be found in the full story for Rust aficionados.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

VANCOUVER -- Mounties in charge of an undercover sting on a British Columbia couple accused of being terrorist sympathizers can't be faulted for bringing in a "closer" to wrap up the controversial operation, says a Crown lawyer.

Peter Eccles told B.C. Supreme Court on Monday that police couldn't draw out their investigation indefinitely and needed to determine whether John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were serious about following through with any of their various proposals for jihad, or holy war.

"So long as (the closer) doesn't induce, incite or entrap, you can't fault the police for wanting to shut this thing down," Eccles said.

"(The police) can't walk away. Not from these two. Not with what they know. So they have to find some way to arrest or walk."

Nuttall and Korody were found guilty of planting what they believed were pressure-cooker bombs at the B.C. legislature on July 1, 2013, with the intention to commit mass murder during Canada Day festivities. Their verdicts were put on hold while lawyers argue in a second hearing whether police manipulated the couple.

[...] "This was an innovative and effective undercover investigation in which the RCMP provided two suspects the opportunity to execute their jihad, to be the terrorists they wanted to be, while protecting the public by ensuring their plan did not succeed."

Eccles contradicted a defence argument that Nuttall's actions were motivated by fear of his new friend, an undercover officer Nuttall believed was a member of the radical Islamic group al-Qaida.

"You don't call up the devil and complain when he won't behave," he said.

Source: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/undercover-terrorism-sting-was-only-means-to-investigate-b-c-couple-lawyer-1.2944386

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

      Want to teach or learn about speech processing? Need resources? The Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen might be helpful:

The Speech Recognition Virtual Kitchen aims to extend the model of lab-internal knowledge transfer to community-wide dissemination through the use of virtual machines, with the primary goal of cultivating student interest in speech recognition via immediate, straightforward access to the tools and techniques used by advanced researchers. Speech recognition draws from many disciplines (e.g., phonetics, linguistics, computer science, electrical engineering, physics), each with myriad idiosyncratic computational methods and practices, making it difficult to establish an initial educational code base (or improve upon the state of the art). The kitchen environment addresses this difficulty through the use of virtual machines that provide a consistent, end-to-end environment for experimentation, without the need to install other software or data, and cope with their incompatibilities and peculiarities.

The Kitchen is flexible and can be used in many ways:

• Download and run one of their virtual machines directly on your computer using VirtualBox or VMWare
• Run one the Speech Kitchen's open-sourced images on Amazon EC2.
• Check out the repository on GitHub, and build a VM for yourself from scratch using Vagrant (or Docker).

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

      In a recent article by Marcia S. Smith at spacepolicyonline we learn that:

NASA is denying all travel for NASA employees and contractors to the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) conference to be held in Istanbul, Turkey beginning just five weeks from now. The reason: security. COSPAR President Lennard Fisk worries not only about the impact on COSPAR, but the messages NASA is sending about its commitment to leadership in space science and its resolve to not let terrorism be rewarded by changing what we do.

      COSPAR is the Committee on Space Research. On even-numbered years (2016, 2014...) COSPAR holds a Scientific Assembly, the 41st of which will be in Istanbul this year.

      In a statement provided to SpacePolicyOnline.com, COSPAR President Len Fisk expressed his deep concerns:

NASA has cancelled all travel of NASA civil servants and contractors to the COSPAR-2016 meeting to be held in Istanbul on 30 July - 7 August. And by doing so it demonstrated that it has no intention of exerting strategic leadership in the world, and that terrorism should be rewarded. The leaders of all the major space programs will gather in Istanbul to discuss among other topics, the future of human space exploration, but NASA will be absent. The major scientists of the world will gather in Istanbul, to share the results of their research, to plan future projects, to promote international cooperation in space science, but NASA civil servants and NASA sponsored contractors will be absent. And for what reason: a misguided assumption that Istanbul is more dangerous than Paris, or Brussels, or Orlando, Florida, or for that matter Israel and Jordan where NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently visited. Terrorism is rewarded if it causes us to cease to pursue that which is important, or for that matter our daily lives. [From Marcia S. Smith's article]

      The US State Department currently has a travel warning for Turkey.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Yesterday (June 25) Marcia S. Smith wrote at spacepolicyonline that:

China successfully conducted the first launch of its new mid-sized Long March 7 rocket from the new Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island today [June 25]. One of the payloads is a scale model of a new crew spacecraft which is expected to return to Earth tomorrow. This is the beginning of a busy period for China that includes the launch of a new small space station and a crew later this year, plus the inaugural launch of its largest rocket, Long March 5.

The Long March 7 lifted off from Wenchang at 12:00 GMT (8:00 am Eastern Daylight Time; 8:00 pm local time at the launch site).

Wenchang is China's fourth space launch site. Located on Hainan Island, it has the advantages of being closest to the equator, which is beneficial for satellites travelling to geostationary orbit, and debris from the launch falls into the ocean instead of on land. The other three sites are inland: Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert; Xichang, near Chengdu; and Taiyuan, south of Beijing. China plans to use Wenchang for launches of the Long March 7 and the new Long March 5, expected to makes its debut this year, too.

In addition to the scale model crew spacecraft, the payload contained four small spacecraft identified as Aolong 1, Aoxiang Zhixing, Tiange feixingqi 1 and 2. They are attached to the Long March 7's third stage, YZ-1A, which has another experiment, In-Orbit Refueling Experiment Device, attached to it.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A European team of astronomers have used the new GRAVITY instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope to obtain exciting observations of the centre of the Milky Way by combining light from all four of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes for the first time. These results provide a taste of the groundbreaking science that GRAVITY will produce as it probes the extremely strong gravitational fields close to the central supermassive black hole and tests Einstein's general relativity.

In short, there's a 15 solar-mass star in an elliptical orbit around the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in Sagittarius A* that, in 2018, will approach to within 17 light-hours (3 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto) and will be traveling at 2.5% of the speed of light.

Source: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1622/

This is an amazing instrument; see the Animation of the path of a light ray through GRAVITY. For more information on the instrument, see GRAVITY — The second generation VLTI instrument for precision narrow-angle astrometry and interferometric imaging.

This is an ambitious project, its Science Objectives are:

GRAVITY will carry out the ultimate empirical test to show whether or not the Galactic Centre harbours a black hole (BH) of four million solar masses and will finally decide if the near-infrared flares from Sgr A* originate from individual hot spots close to the last stable orbit, from statistical fluctuations in the inner accretion zone or from a jet. If the current hot-spot interpretation of the near-infrared (NIR) flares is correct, GRAVITY has the potential to directly determine the spacetime metric around this BH. GRAVITY may even be able to test the theory of general relativity in the presently unexplored strong field limit. GRAVITY will also be able to unambiguously detect intermediate mass BHs, if they exist. It will dynamically measure the masses of supermassive BHs (SMBHs) in many active galactic nuclei, and probe the physics of their mass accretion, outflow and jets with unprecedented resolution. Furthermore, GRAVITY will explore young stellar objects, their circumstellar discs and jets, and measure the properties of binary stars and exoplanet systems. In short, GRAVITY will enable dynamical measurements in an unexplored regime.

[Update] Also covered at Ars Technica .

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

"Bottoms up, from the distant past. Thanks to a new method of analyzing the chemicals in liquids absorbed by clay containers, researchers have uncorked the oldest solid evidence of grape-based wine making in Europe, and possibly the world, at a site in northern Greece."

Science News reports of an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science (DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2016.03.003) about a new two-step analytical protocol that has permitted the reliable structural identification of red wine thanks to the presence of dark grape (tartaric, malic, syringic acids) and fermentation markers (succinic and pyruvic acids) in two pieces of a smashed jar and in an intact jug discovered in 2010 in the ruins of a house destroyed by fire around 6,300 years ago at the ancient farming village of Dikili Tash.

After successfully testing the new technique on replicas of clay vessels filled with wine, then emptied, the scientists identified chemical markers of grape juice and fermentation in clay powder scraped off the inner surfaces of the Dikili Tash finds. None of the vessels contained visible stains or residue, researchers report online May 24 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Remains of crushed grapes found near the ancient jar shards and jug had already indicated that Dikili Tash farmers made wine or grape juice, say chemist Nicolas Garnier of Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and archaeobotanist Soultana Maria Valamoti of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

Previous reports of ancient wine have largely relied on chemical markers of grapes but not the fermentation necessary to turn them into wine, leaving open the possibility that containers held grape juice. The "juice versus wine" conundrum applies to roughly 7,400-year-old jars from Iran (SN: 12/11/04, p. 371), Garnier says.

Now we know...

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

El Reg reports:

The Department of Defence has tipped A$12 million (£6.1 million, US$9.1 million) into an information security facility to attract new blood by housing signals spooks alongside Australian National University academics.

The "unusual" pairing is hoped to attract skilled students into the information security field and the country's spy agency the Australian Signals Directorate.

It will house 70 students along with academics and signals staff to research high-performance computing, information security, and data analytics.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission