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arulatas writes:

An interesting article about an invasive ant species:

One of the world's most invasive ant species had taken up residence in my house.

Argentine ants are unusual in another way, too. They don’t build one large nest with lots of tunnels and rooms. Instead, they live in constantly shifting networks of temporary, shallow nests that change from day to day. Their ability to move quickly in large groups is what helped them swarm on my cats’ food so fast—and it’s why they were able to pack up their eggs and flee the flood in my backyard like well-trained disaster workers. Even when they aren’t running away from human gardeners, they move their eggs between nests all the time. Queens and workers are used to transiting from nest to nest, rarely staying put for long.

Despite their name, Argentine ants have now lived in the United States for more than 120 ant generations, which are roughly a year long due to their short lifespans. It’s been a struggle. The environment in North America is dramatically different from the tropical ecosystems where the ants originally evolved. These ants had to become an urban species to survive, living almost exclusively in cities and agricultural areas where plumbing and irrigation provide the water they desperately need. Entirely thanks to humans, Argentine ants have now become the dominant ant species in California cities, driving out dozens of native species. Today they've actually invaded most major landmasses in the world, including North America, Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and quite a few islands.

These invaders have also developed social behavior that’s distinctly different from their native relatives back in South America. They've become adept at living in cities, creating nest networks that weave in and out of human houses and drinking from the water pipes that service their reluctant human neighbors. They've also become more peaceful, or at least less warlike. In their native ranges, Argentine ant colonies battle each other at the edges of their territories. In the rest of the world, this behavior is rare. Argentine ants abroad from different colonies treat each other like cousins, fighting very rarely. With city amenities available everywhere and no enemies at the gates, Argentine ants are currently thriving.

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takyon writes:

Western Digital has announced its intention to include 3D Resistive RAM (ReRAM) as storage class memory (SCM) in future SSDs and other products:

Without making any significant announcements this week, Western Digital indicated that it would use some of the things it has learnt while developing its BiCS 3D NAND to produce its ReRAM chips. The company claims that its ReRAM will feature a multi-layer cross-point implementation, something it originally revealed a while ago.

Perhaps, the most important announcement regarding the 3D ReRAM by Western Digital is the claim about scale and capital efficiency of the new memory. Essentially, this could mean that the company plans to use its manufacturing capacities as well as its infrastructure (testing, packaging, etc.) in Yokkaichi, Japan, to make 3D ReRAM. Remember that SCM is at this point more expensive than NAND, hence, it makes sense to continue using the current fabs and equipment to build both types of non-volatile memory so ensure that the SCM part of the business remains profitable.

One of WD's slides projects SCM as 50% the cost per gigabyte of DRAM in 2017, declining to 5% by 2023.

Samsung introduced its fourth generation of vertical NAND, with 64 layers:

With a per-die capacity of 512Gb (64GB), Samsung can now put 1TB of TLC flash in a single package. This means most product lines will be seeing an increase in capacity at the high end of the range. Their BGA SSD products will be offering 1TB capacity even in the 11.5mm by 13mm form factor. The 16TB PM1633a SAS SSD will be eclipsed by the new 32TB PM1643. Likely to be further out, the PM1725 PCIe add-in card SSD will be succeeded by the PM1735 with a PCIe 4 x8 host interface.

Complementing the NAND update will be a new non-standard oversized M.2 form factor 32mm wide and 114mm long, compared to the typical enterprise M.2 size of 22mm by 110mm. A little extra room can go a long way, and Samsung will be using it to produce 8TB drives. These will be enterprise SSDs and Samsung showed a diagram of these enabling 256TB of flash in a 1U server. Samsung will also be producing 4TB drives in standard M.2 sizing.

In what is likely a bid to steal some thunder from 3D XPoint memory before it can ship, Samsung announced Z-NAND memory technology and a Z-SSD product based around Z-NAND and a new SSD controller. They said nothing about the operating principles of Z-NAND, but they did talk about their plans for the Z-SSD products.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the first time ever, air traffic researchers can view and analyze archived flight data collected and merged from all air traffic facilities across the U.S., with fast update rates ranging from one second to 12 seconds for every flight's position. Previously, researchers only had access to national flight data that was similar to internet flight tracking, with one-minute flight updates and no information about flights on the ground at airports. Or, they had access to separate flight data sets from 77 different Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic facilities, which made research very challenging. NASA's newly improved tool, the Sherlock Air Traffic Management (ATM) Data Warehouse, merges all of the air traffic facility data to produce analysis-ready, end-to-end flight information at these improved resolutions for the entire U.S. airspace.

NASA is committed to transforming aviation by dramatically reducing its environmental impact and improving efficiency while maintaining safety in more crowded skies. ﾠSherlock will help air traffic management researchers quickly perform large-scale analyses of the U.S. air traffic system, to look for areas where ideas for improvement will have the most benefit in terms of environment, safety and efficiency.

For example, it allows researchers to use actual flight data to answer questions such as, "How much fuel could be saved if all flights into the San Francisco Airport used lower power for their final descent?" Or, "Would more accurate departure schedules reduce delays into busy Northeast airports, and at what rate?" Since new technologies are so costly to deploy in the complex U.S. airspace, finding the regions where they will help the most is very important, as is predicting the benefits to the flying public.

In development since 2009, Sherlock is a crucial piece of the air traffic management research infrastructure used by NASA and its partners. Sherlock includes a traditional database, a big data analytics system, web-based user interfaces and several tools for query and visualization. Located at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, the Sherlock ATM Data Warehouse team overcame challenges in correlating and rationalizing data from the 77 different FAA air traffic facilities, often with overlapping and conflicting positions, flight plans, as well as time and airspace references. The raw data include a variety of flight information from live streams of operational facilities, weather observations and forecasts, and other information collected from the FAA, such as traffic advisories and delay status.

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Sounds from your hard disk drive can even be used to steal a PC's data | PCWorld

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for crutchy

Researchers have found a way to steal a PC's data by using the mechanical noise coming from the hard disk drives inside.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3107209/security/sounds-from-your-hard-disk-drive-can-even-be-used-to-steal-a-pcs-data.html

New Air-Gap Jumper Covertly Transmits Data in Hard-Drive Sounds

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers have devised a new way to siphon data out of an infected computer even when it has been physically disconnected from the Internet to prevent the leakage of sensitive information it stores.

The method has been dubbed "DiskFiltration" by its creators because it uses acoustic signals emitted from the hard drive of the air-gapped computer being targeted. It works by manipulating the movements of the hard drive's actuator, which is the mechanical arm that accesses specific parts of a disk platter so heads attached to the actuator can read or write data. By using so-called seek operations that move the actuator in very specific ways, it can generate sounds that transfer passwords, cryptographic keys, and other sensitive data stored on the computer to a nearby microphone. The technique has a range of six feet and a speed of 180 bits per minute, fast enough to steal a 4,096-bit key in about 25 minutes.

[...] Besides working against air-gapped computers, the covert channel can also be used to steal data from Internet-connected machines whose network traffic is intensively monitored by intrusion prevention devices, data loss prevention systems, and similar security measures. The technique is documented in a technical paper titled DiskFiltration: Data Exfiltration from Speakerless Air-Gapped Computers via Covert Hard Drive Noise, which was published Thursday night. Guri and the other Ben-Gurion University researchers who devised the covert channel created the video demonstration below.

The techniques are effective, but their utility in real-world situations is limited. That's because the computers they target still must be infected by malware. If the computers aren't connected to the Internet, the compromise is likely to be extremely difficult and would require the help of a malicious insider, who very well may have easier ways to obtain data stored on the machine. Still, the air-gap jumpers could provide a crucial means to bypass otherwise insurmountable defenses when combined with other techniques in a targeted attack.

[...] The most effective way to prevent DiskFiltration-style data exfiltration is to replace hard drives with solid-state drives, since the latter aren't mechanical and generate virtually no noise. Using particularly quiet types of hard drives or installing special types of hard drive enclosures that muffle sound can also be an effective countermeasure. It may also be possible to jam hard-drive signals by generating static noise. Intrusion prevention systems may also be programmed to detect suspicious hard-drive seek patterns used to create the transmissions. Yet another solution is to isolate air-gapped computers from smart phones and other devices with a microphone.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A £1m British Army Watchkeeper drone had to be scrapped after crashing at an airfield in Wales when the ex-RAF officer piloting it disabled the unmanned aerial vehicle's anti-crash systems.

Although the official main cause of the accident was given as the automated Vehicle Management System Computer functioning “as designed but not as intended”, the drone's crew had agreed to select the Watchkeeper's Master Override function.

[...] During the flight the drone's crew were sat inside the Ground Control Station and using the Watchkeeper's on-board cameras and GPS systems to monitor where it was. Unlike other drones, such as the MQ-9 Reaper, the Watchkeeper cannot be flown manually, in the “stick and rudder” sense. Its crew must instead set waypoints on a computer screen for it to fly to.

“If the crew see cloud ahead and wish to avoid it, they must first approximate the position of the cloud, move the fly-to point and send the command to the UAV,” said the crash report. “This... can make it difficult for a UAV crew to always remain clear of inclement weather.”

The Service Inquiry into the accident found that the drone's civilian operators, experienced former military aviators who were carrying out a training flight designed to exercise the pilot and the surveillance systems operator, were worried about an incoming thunderstorm. Even as the training programme ended and the drone began flying back to base, the operators received indications that the Watchkeeper's flight instruments were occasionally malfunctioning – including its barometric pitot tube, which indicates height.

The Watchkeeper has four ways of determining altitude: barometric altitude, from the pitot tube; GPS altitude from its location unit; radar altitude, from the Watchkeeper system's ground radar unit; and its on-board laser altimeters, which are only used in landing. If the readings from these four sources disagree while the drone is landing, it is programmed to automatically abort the landing, but the operators can override this function.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A curious proof-of-work project built on cryptocurrency has emerged that offers a means to prove participation in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

University of Colorado assistant professor Eric Wustrow and University of Michigan phD student Benjamin VanderSloot create the platform that allows TLS web servers to be targeted.

Signatures are created when TLS connections are confirmed, gifting attackers another means to be paid for denial of service attacks.

The DDoSCoins could be traded in for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, the pair say.

"DDoSCoin allows miners to prove that they have contributed to a distributed denial of service attack against specific target servers," the researchers write in the paper DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with a Malicious Proof-of-Work [PDF].

[...] It is an interesting concept for the well-oiled DDoS machine that has become so commoditised that the bloke-in-the-pub can order cheap and very large anonymous attacks to any target of their choosing.

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takyon writes:

Microsoft has extended the duration and scope of support for Windows 7 and 8.1 operating systems running on Skylake chips:

Microsoft today repudiated an early retirement date for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 support, saying that it will patch those operating systems on PCs running Intel's Skylake silicon until 2020 and 2023, respectively.

The move was a complete rollback of a January [decree] that Microsoft called a "clarification" of its support policy. Under the January plan, Microsoft would have ended most support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on July 17, 2017, if the operating systems were powering machines equipped with Intel's now-current Skylake processor family. At the time, Microsoft attributed the decision to Windows 7's age and the hassle that Microsoft and OEMs would have to go through to ensure the 2009 operating system ran on Intel's latest architecture. In March, Microsoft retreated from the original mandate, saying then that it was extending the support drop-dead date by a year, to July 18, 2018. After that date, Microsoft said, it and its computer-making partners would not guarantee that they would revise device drivers to support Windows 7 and 8.1 on newer hardware.

[...] The one support rule that Microsoft did not reverse was its decision to support only Windows 10 on Intel's Skylake successor, an architecture dubbed "Kaby Lake;" and on AMD's next-generation "Bristol Ridge." That remained in place today.

Also at The Register and Windows.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

NPR reports:

On Wednesday morning, the United States Department of Justice announced the result of a yearlong investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, which found that BPD habitually violates the civil rights of its residents. These violations, the Justice Department found, have an outsized effect on the city's black population.

[...] The report's findings were far-reaching. Between 2010 and 2015, BPD recorded over 300,000 pedestrian stops (a number the DOJ believes vastly underrepresents actual stops.) Those stops often lacked reasonable suspicion, and were mostly confined to black neighborhoods — 44 percent occurred in two low-income black neighborhoods that make up 11 percent of Baltimore's population.

In the same time period, the report found that BPD made "warrantless arrests without probable cause," stopped black residents three times as often as white, and arrested black folks on drug charges at five times the rate of white folks, despite comparable levels of possession. They were also found to have used unreasonable force against juveniles and people who presented "little or no threat to officers or others."

According to the investigation, the BPD has also failed to respond adequately to reports of sexual assault, resulting "in part, from underlying gender bias." It reported BPD detectives asked questions like, "Why are you messing that guy's life up?" when interviewing women who reported sexual assault.

The World Socialist Web Site reports:

The report finds that despite making up 63 percent of the city's population, African-Americans account for over 83 percent of all criminal charges and are regularly over-represented in arrest reports in comparison to their percentage of the population.

The DoJ found that the percentage of people arrested in a five-year period on the petty and highly subjective charges of "failure to obey" or "disorderly conduct" was 91 and 84 percent African-American respectively. Even starker, African-Americans made up over 83 percent of the area's traffic stops, despite being less than 30 percent of the entire metropolitan region's total driving population.

[...] The DoJ found that over a five-year period, BPD officers made over 11,000 arrests that were subsequently thrown out at central booking for being groundless. [...] Investigators found "BPD uses overly aggressive tactics that unnecessarily escalate encounters, increase tensions, and lead to unnecessary force".

[...] Then there is the first African-American president, who has handed out military grade weaponry to local police departments across the country--at the same time his Justice Department has routinely rejected calls for killer cops to be prosecuted under federal civil rights laws and invariably opposed every attempt to bring police violence cases before the Supreme Court.

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Yog-Yogguth writes:

Science reports about a study of Greenland sharks Somniosus microcephalus using carbon dating of shark lenses where the oldest specimen was 392 plus or minus 120 years old i.e. between 272 and 512 years and older than any other known vertebrate. They are also the slowest to reach reproductive maturity at around 156 years old.

The sharks are usually between 2 and 5 meters long but can reach 6 or maybe 7 meters length and have been known to reach a high age ever since it was discovered they only grow 1 centimeter or less each year.

[Continues...]

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Television news has long used graphics at the bottom of their screens to identify the people and places in their stories – but with the 2016 presidential race, two networks lately have been injecting analysis into them during their news reporting.

It started in June when Donald Trump denied having said Japan should have nuclear weapons. CNN inserted this snarky line in their chyron:

TRUMP: I NEVER SAID JAPAN SHOULD HAVE NUKES (HE DID)

[...] While fact-checking may or may not be a legitimate new use of the chyron, what is noticeable is a distinct absence of chyron fact-checking for various claims made by Clinton.

For instance, Clinton recently told Fox News' Chris Wallace that FBI Director James Comey had called her answers about her private email use as secretary of state "truthful" – he did not make such a sweeping statement.

Source: FoxNews

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canopic jug writes:

Right before HTTP took off in the early 1990's, there was Gopher and for a while it, too, was growing exponentially. It was fast and hosted text, source code, graphics, and any number of other types of files, just not all mixed together in one and the same document. For a while it was winning out over HTTP and making grounds against FTP. But that changed eventually and the rest is history. The MinnPost goes a bit into the history of Gopher with the Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for crutchy, although as we have already reported not everyone agrees what actually happened.

Three days after millions of Australians headed to bed frustrated and angry, having unsuccessfully tried to complete the census online, we still don't know exactly what went wrong, or who to blame. Politicians have chosen to blame the only non-government entity involved - US-based tech giant IBM, which won the $9.6 million contract in 2014 to design, develop and implement the online census.

There are a few different theories as to who is behind the disruption on census night. Fairfax David Wroe explains the possibilities.

"The denial of service attacks were completely predictable and should have been repelled readily. They weren't because of failures in the system that had been put in place for ABS by IBM, and as I said there are issues for both IBM and ABS about that," Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told radio station 2GB on Thursday. "There is no doubt that there were serious failures in the systems preparation for an entirely predictable denial of service attack."

Meanwhile Senator Nick Xenophon has said taxpayers should ask IBM for their money back.

Even Treasurer Scott Morrison has raised the possibility of legal action.

"If there are issues relating to the service provider in this case, then you could expect us to pursue that to the nth degree," Mr Morrison told ABC radio on Friday morning.

Last night an IBM spokeswoman finally came out publicly to say the Australian Signals Directorate [ASD] confirmed no data was compromised and it "regret[s] the inconvenience that has occurred".

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/business/ibms-reputation-at-risk-in-wake-of-census-bungle-20160812-gqqxpa.html

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takyon writes:

Two Congressional reports have found that CENTCOM manipulated intelligence reports related to the Islamic State, including altering reports that questioned the effectiveness of airstrikes:

Senior officials at U.S. Central Command manipulated intelligence reports, press statements, and congressional testimony to present a more positive outlook on the war against the Islamic State, a House Republican task force concluded in a damning report released Thursday. The report, written by the members of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, confirmed more than a year of reporting by The Daily Beast about problems with CENTCOM analysis of the war against ISIS. House Democrats, who conducted their own separate investigation, reached a similar conclusion as their Republican colleagues, finding that CENTCOM "insufficiently accommodated dissenting views," Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement [link].

The altering of intelligence reports, which included information that made its way into briefings to President Obama, was systematic, lawmakers found. "There was a consistent trend that across four specific campaigns against [ISIS] in Iraq throughout 2014 and 2015, assessments approved by the J2 [CENTCOM's Joint Intelligence Center] or leadership were consistently more positive than those presented by the [intelligence community]," the report found.

Also at The Washington Post, Tampa Bay Times, and NYT.

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Celestial writes:

Vivaldi has released version 1.3 of the browser, with the addition of customizable themes and mouse gestures, the ability to disable WebRTC or just hide your IP address, and several fixes for the Linux platform.

The Vivaldi browser is keen on using mouse gestures, which are also user configurable. The new version supports more than 90 browser actions that are "either mapped to mouse gestures by default, or can be mapped to mouse gestures by you."

In addition:

Vivaldi [have] optimized the browser for Linux users by addressing Linux-specific issues. This includes a fix for Tab Hibernation -- works now -- and support for "some" proprietary media embedded in HTML5 content.

[Provided s]upport H.264, AAC and MP3 on OpenSUSE and Slackware if suitable libraries are available: Use libs from chromium-ffmpeg and AlienBob's Chromium packageSupport

You can find the full changelog here.

Have you replaced your browser with the new upstart Vivaldi? If so, what have your experiences been with the Vivaldi browser? Is it worth the current hype or is just another browser?

[Ed's Note: Submission substantially edited]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

While the bacteria E. coli is often considered a bad bug, researchers commonly use laboratory-adapted E. coli that lacks the features that can make humans sick, but can grow just as fast. That same quality allows it to transform into the tiniest of factories: when its chemical production properties are harnessed, E. coli has the potential to crank out biofuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful products.

Now, a team from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a way to make the production of certain biofuels in E. coli much more efficient. Fuzhong Zhang, assistant professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, along with researchers in his lab, have discovered a new method to cut out a major stumbling block to production process.

Their findings were recently published in the journal Metabolic Engineering.

"It's a critical step that we've figured out how to solve this problem," Zhang said.

Branched-chain fatty acids (BCFA) are important precursors to the production of freeze-resistant or improved cold-flow biofuels. However, making it in bacterial hosts is difficult. It's co-produced with different compounds called straight-chain fatty acids (SCFA), which have inferior fuel properties. Past attempts to engineer E. coli that churned out BCFA also made a large amount of SCFA, and made it difficult to isolate the BCFA for future use.

"From the process aspect, common bacteria produce mostly SCFA," Zhang said. "That is really not the best fuel to use. Previously, the best you could do was a 20 percent BCFA concentration. Then you needed to use some additional chemical processes to separate the BCFA from the SCFA and enrich it. It consumes so much energy that it's not cost-effective.

"Instead, our approach engineers this organism so it can produce something as close to 100 percent BCFA as possible," he said.

Original Submission