SoylentNews

cafebabe writes:

Published in 1965, the title of this book hasn't aged well but fits into a formerly popular meme. This fictional book is set in a future where one conglomerate, The Joymaker Corporation, runs a network of speech recognition cell phones, rapid delivery services, job boards, restaurants, healthcare and other services. Indeed, it is fairly much an amalgamation of all of the biggest contemporary tech and Internet companies plus many of the foreseeable innovations expected within the next five years or so.

The protagonist, Charles Forrester, is transported from the present to this future in a manner very much like Buck Rogers: frozen for 500 years and then revived. (This plot point is largely irrelevant with the exception that few of us may have to be frozen or wait that long to see it happen.) Forrester struggles in a world of unknown unknowns where apartments are rented by the day and collaborative multicast media makes shared nicknames ubiquitous. He can ask his Joymaker anything but he just doesn't know what to ask.

The service industry is largely filled with life-like androids which all interface with The Joymaker Corporation. If you so desire, you can do your banking via your waitress or do your job hunting via your nurse. Indeed, when a fad or emergency occurs, androids may be deployed with incorrect uniforms. "We are all alike, Man Forrester," says one waitress from the very middle of the uncanny valley. In some regards, the outright psychopathy of Westworld is a welcome alternative to this economically-efficient dystopia which covers the economics of cryogenics, employment, psychological suitability thereof, leisure, success, destitution and alienation.

[Continues...]

MrPlow writes:

[Update. It appears the original submission was skewing the facts. From the What You Should Know about EEOC and Shelton D. v. U.S. Postal Service (Gadsden Flag case) on the EEOC (US Equal Employment Opportunity Commision) web site:

What You Should Know about EEOC and Shelton D. v. U.S. Postal Service (Gadsden Flag case)

• This decision addressed only the procedural issue of whether the Complainant's allegations of discrimination should be dismissed or investigated. This decision was not on the merits, did not determine that the Gadsden Flag was racist or discriminatory, and did not ban it.
• Given the procedural nature of this appeal and the fact that no investigative record or evidence had been developed yet, it would have been premature and inappropriate for EEOC to determine, one way or the other, the merits of the U.S. Postal Service's argument that the Gadsden Flag and its slogan do not have any racial connotations whatsoever.
• EEOC's decision simply ordered the agency - the U.S. Postal Service - to investigate the allegations. EEOC's decision made no factual or legal determination on whether discrimination actually occurred.

The original story follows. --martyb]

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has determined in a preliminary ruling that wearing clothing featuring the Gadsden Flag constitutes legally actionable racial harassment in the workplace. In short, wearing the Gadsden flag while at work can earn you the title of "racist", earn you harassment charges, and cost you your job. The ideological witch hunt started back in 2014 when a black employee at a privately owned company filed a complaint with the EEOC when he saw a co-worker wearing a hat featuring the Gadsden flag and the words "Don't tread on me." The EEOC has decided to side with the over-sensitive employee, despite already admitting that the flag originated in a non-racial context and has been adopted by multiple non-racial political groups, countless companies and more, since it was created.

The ruling is a preliminary ruling and has not yet been made "official" but the preliminary ruling says that you can be charged with "racial harassment." They have not indicated when an "official" ruling will be made and it is ongoing.

Source: American Military News

Better Source: Washington Post

Facts: EEOC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

QuadRooter Android vulnerabilities affect devices that are built on the Qualcomm chipset, a supplier of 80% of the chipsets in the Android ecosystem. If any one of the four vulnerabilities is exploited, an attacker can trigger privilege escalations and gain root access to a device, enabling them to change or remove system-level files, delete or add apps, and access the device's screen, camera or microphone.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/08/08/quadrooter-android-vulnerabilities/

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Disney Enterprises, Inc. has come up with the stealthiest way yet to track visitors to amusement parks—but Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has no plans to use the new technique.

US Patent 9,393,697, titled "System and method using foot recognition to create a customized guest experience," sets forth a system which would use unobtrusive cameras, machine vision, and a database to bring about "a customized guest experience at an amusement park." The inventors note that "some people have sensitivity to using personal biometrics, such as iris or facial scans, for identification purposes," that a clear view of the face is required by those techniques, and that they can be confounded by dark glasses or other headwear. Instead, they propose that guests may be identified by the appearance of their feet. A guest's feet would be photographed at an "acquisition station" and machine vision techniques would be used to create a "foot model" that would be added to a database along with other information about the guest, such as a name or a favourite food. Later, the guest's feet would be photographed again at the same place, or elsewhere in the park. Images could be captured by the park's employees, robots, or stationary cameras. The guest's feet could be identified by comparing the later images to the foot model. The park operator could then "provide interactions that are personalized to that guest."

A Disney spokesperson said the company has no plans to deploy the system in its parks. Currently it tracks visitors by means of MagicBands, bracelets bearing RFID chips.

coverage:

• Los Angeles Times
• Network World
• Newser
• Orlando Sentinel
• PCMag

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The quartet of Matt Molinyawe, Abdul-aziz Hariri, Jasiel Spelman, and Jason Smith of Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative vulnerability clearing house detailed and demonstrated the devastating white hat hacks during their presentations at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

They walked delegates through the exploitation steps of the eight successful Pwn2Own hacks pulled off at the Pwn2Own competition in March, recapping the steps and the 21 vulnerabilities which lead to digital goring of Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Apple OS X, and Adobe Flash.

"The winning submissions to Pwn2Own 2016 provided unprecedented insight into the state-of-the-art techniques in software exploitation" the quartet says in a 65-page technical paper [PDF] published after the talk.

"Every successful submission provided remote code execution as the super user (SYSTEM/root) via the browser or a default browser plug-in … attained through the exploitation of the Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X kernel."

[...] "Application sandboxing is a step in the right direction, but the kernel attack surface remains expansive and exposed," they say. "Each of the winning entries was able to avoid the sandboxing mitigations by leveraging vulnerabilities in the underlying OSs."

Mitigations that isolate access to kernel APIs from sandboxed processes will add hurdles to frustrate future attempts to pop god-mode shells, they say.

Presentation slides are also available as a PDF. ®

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Buried below the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, there's an abandoned U.S. Army base. Camp Century had trucks, tunnels, even a nuclear reactor. Advertised as a research station, it was also a test site for deploying nuclear missiles.

The camp was abandoned almost 50 years ago, completely buried below the surface. But serious pollutants were left behind. Now a team of scientists says that as climate warming melts the ice sheet, those pollutants could spread.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century in 1959, an Army film touted it as an engineering marvel — a cavernous home dug into the ice sheet, big enough for up to 200 people. Some sections were more than 100 feet deep. "On the top of the world," the film's narrator intoned, "below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried. Today on the island of Greenland, as part of man's continuing efforts to master the secrets of survival in the Arctic, the United States Army has established an unprecedented nuclear powered Arctic research center."

[...] The climate computer models say the camp could be uncovered by the end of this century.

Now, that's a worst-case scenario, based on an assumption that the world's governments won't do much to further reduce greenhouse gases that cause warming. But other things are happening that could spread that waste sooner.

Source: NPR

Original Submission

So after an extended period of inactivity, I've finally decided to jump back into working on SoylentNews and rehash (the code that powers the site). As such, I've decided to scratch some long-standing itches. The first (and easiest) to deploy was HSTS to SoylentNews. What is HSTS you may ask?

HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security and is a special HTTP header that signifies that a site should only be connected to over HTTPS and causes the browser to automatically load encrypted versions of a website should it see a regular URL. We've forbid non-SSL connections to SN for over a year, but without HSTS in place, a man-in-the-middle downgrade attack was possible by intercepting the initial insecure page load.

One of the big views I have towards SoylentNews is we should be representative of "best practices" on the internet. To that end, we deployed IPv6 publicly last year, and went HTTPS-by-default not long after that. Deploying HSTS continues this trend, and I'm working towards implementing other good ideas that rarely seem to see the light of day.

Check past the break for more technical details.

[Continues...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Link: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/doe-certain-wipp-to-open-in-december/article_e0557c93-1fa2-5552-8721-d1bd0b071b82.html

After a truck fire and a leaking drum of radioactive waste shut down the nation's only underground nuclear waste facility near Carlsbad in February 2014, the Department of Energy said that by March 2016, it could cleanup and safely reopen the critical site.

The agency knew it had only a 1 percent chance of meeting that deadline, according to an audit released this week by the Government Accountability Office, an investigating arm of Congress.

In 2015, the agency admitted it couldn't safely reopen the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, even for limited operations, until at least December 2016 — and at a higher cost. Now auditors say even the revised cost estimate was flawed. The agency "did not follow all best practices for cost and schedule estimates," federal auditors found, including having an independent analyst review them.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Cmn32480_phone

The torrenting community has been tumultuous these past few weeks. First, Kickass Torrents was seized by the government after the owner's arrest. Now, one of the largest search engines has vanished.

According to TorrentFreak, Torrentz.eu unexpectedly shut down on Friday, disabling its search functionality. The domain is still active, but currently, the site just features the search bar with a message in the past tense: "Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines."

Source: Gizmodo

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC is to spy on internet users in their homes by deploying a new generation of Wi-Fi detection vans to identify those illicitly watching its programmes online.

The corporation has been given legal dispensation to use the new technology, which is typically only available to crime-fighting agencies, to enforce the new requirement that people watching BBC programmes via the iPlayer must have a TV licence.

Researchers at University College London disclosed that they had used a laptop running freely available software to identify Skype internet phone calls passing over encrypted Wi-Fi, without needing to crack the network password. They actually don't need to decrypt traffic, because they can already see the packets. They have control over the iPlayer, so they could ensure that it sends packets at a specific size, and match them up.

Source: The Telegraph [paywall]
Also covered by The Register.

n1: The existing TV detector van 'technology' has been in use in the UK since the 1950's, there has never been an explanation as to how they work. I am unaware of any occasions where evidence obtained by one was used to prosecute anyone.

A leaked internal document from the BBC gives a detailed breakdown of the state of licence fee payments and the number of people who evade the charge – but fails to make any mention of the detector vans.

While documenting the number of officers to collect the £145.50 fee increased to 334 this summer, an 18 page memo from the TV Licensing's Executive Management Forum obtained by the Radio Times makes no mention of the vans finding those who don't pay.

Source: The Telegraph (2013)

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Ballot Access News reports:

On August 5, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer, a Bush Jr. appointee, ruled against Gary Johnson and Jill Stein in their debates lawsuit. The case had been filed on September 28, 2015, and is Johnson v Commission on Presidential Debates, U.S. District Court, D.C., 1:15cv-1580.

[...] The 27-page decision[Redirects to a PDF] [...] says, "Because Plaintiffs have no standing and because antitrust laws govern commercial markets and not political activity, those claims fail as a matter of well-established law."

[...] Footnote three, based on the judge's own research (or the research of her clerks), has factual errors. The judge relied on election returns published by the FEC, but the FEC returns do not say which candidates were [...] in states with a majority of electoral college votes, and the opinion's list of candidates is erroneous.

[...] Another factual error in the decision is on page 21. The decision says Ralph Forbes, an independent candidate for U.S. Senate, lost a case over debates in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998. Actually Forbes was a candidate for U.S. House.

In the comments, Richard Winger notes a similar case.

the lawsuit Level the Playing Field v FEC is still pending, before another judge, in the same court

The presidential debates were previously moderated by the League of Women Voters (1976, 1980, 1984). The Democrats and Republicans screwed things up in 1988. The Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporation controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, has run each of the presidential debates held since 1988.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has described India as one of the company's fastest growing markets and has proposed to the government a program to offer refurbished phones in the country as a way to get around the high prices of its devices in a price-sensitive market.

Cook is also said to have discussed with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May the "possibilities of manufacturing and retailing in India," a move that would help the company avoid the high import duties on smartphones and other products that the authorities have imposed to encourage local manufacture.

However, data from Strategy Analytics suggests that until these plans are put into action the company may continue to see a middling performance in the country. Shipments of the Apple iOS on smartphones fell to 800,000 in the second quarter from 1.2 million in the same quarter last year, according to the research firm.

The market share of iOS on smartphones also dropped to 2.4 percent from 4.5 percent a year ago. In contrast, Android saw its share soar to over 97 percent from 90 percent in the same quarter last year. Android smartphone shipments grew to 29.8 million in the second quarter from 23.2 million in the same quarter last year, though these come from a large number of vendors including from Indian brands.

Android looks unbeatable right now because of its deep portfolio of hardware partners, extensive distribution channels, and a wide range of low-cost apps like Gmail, said Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics, in a statement.

Total smartphone shipments in India grew 19 percent annually to 30.7 million in the second quarter of this year from 25.8 million units in the second quarter of 2015.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

If you studied computer science, you most likely encountered the Wagner-Fischer algorithm for edit distance in whatever course introduced 2D arrays. The edit distance between two strings of symbols is the minimum number of edits (insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to turn one string into the other. The algorithm builds a huge table with symbols of one string labeling the rows and symbols from the other labeling the columns. Each entry in the table is the the number of edits required to turn the string ending with the corresponding column into the string ending with the corresponding row.

For years people have been trying to improve on this basic algorithm. And failing. Now, Phys.org is reporting on a paper to appear at ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) next week which shows that Wagner-Fischer is as good as it's likely going to get. This sounds like an NP thing..and it is! If it were possible to solve the edit distance problem in less than quadratic time (i.e. faster than filling up the huge table), then it would be possible to solve the satisfiability problem in less than exponential time.

From Phys.org:

Theoretical computer science is particularly concerned with a class of problems known as NP-complete. Most researchers believe that NP-complete problems take exponential time to solve, but no one's been able to prove it. In their STOC paper, [Piotr] Indyk and his student Arturs Backurs demonstrate that if it's possible to solve the edit-distance problem in less-than-quadratic time, then it's possible to solve an NP-complete problem in less-than-exponential time. Most researchers in the computational-complexity community will take that as strong evidence that no subquadratic solution to the edit-distance problem exists.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Concealed handgun license holders in Texas can carry their weapons into public university buildings, classrooms and dorms starting Monday, a day that also marks 50 years after the mass shooting at the University of Texas' landmark clock tower.

The campus-carry law pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican legislative majority makes Texas one of a handful of states guaranteeing the right to carry concealed handguns on campus. 

Texas has allowed concealed handguns in public for 20 years. Gun rights advocates consider it an important protection, given the constitutional right to bear arms, as well as a key self-defense measure in cases of campus violence, such as the 1966 UT shootings and the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.

Opponents of the law fear it will chill free speech on campus and lead to more campus suicide. The former dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture left for a position at the University of Pennsylvania because of his opposition to allowing guns on campus.

Officials told the Austin American-Statesman it was a coincidence that the law took effect 50 years to the day after the UT shooting. Marine-trained sniper Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the 27-story clock tower in the heart of UT's flagship Austin campus, armed with rifles, pistols and a sawed-off shotgun on Aug. 1, 1966, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others before officers gunned him down.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/01/campus-carry-goes-into-effect-as-texas-remembers-ut-tower-shootings-50-years-later.html

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

3D printing has been used to build replicas of historical artefacts based on photographs and scans. Now, in honour of the 2016 Olympic Games, a team from 3D printing company Stratasys, 3DPTree in Atlanta and the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta have gone one step further -- recreating a statue that was destroyed over 1,500 years ago.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia stood around 13 metres (43 feet) tall, towering over visitors to the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece. It was constructed around 435 BC by the sculptor Phidias, and it would have made an imposing sight. Its core was wood, covered with ivory and gold, and it sat on a cedar wood throne decorated with ebony, ivory, gold and gems.

Now considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the statue stood (or sat) for over 850 years. In 420 AD, it was seized and taken to Constantinople, where it was added to the collection of imperial chamberlain Lausus. This was to be its final resting place. In 475, the Palace of Lausus and much of Constantinople was destroyed by fire, including the statue of Zeus.

No replica survived, only depictions on coins, and descriptions by historians and travellers. It was from these, and later statues that copied the style of the famous Zeus, that artists attempted to recreate the statue.

"The biggest challenge was the statue no longer existed. 3DPTree and museum curators teamed to conduct extensive research on how it would have looked, and later recreated it digitally," museum director Jeremy Kobus said in an email.

The resulting statue is printed in thermoplastics, rather than gold and ivory, and stands a fair bit smaller than the original at 1.8 metres (6 feet). It was constructed in pieces using the Stratasys Fortus 900mc 3D printer.

Original Submission