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slinches writes:

Elio Motors has locked in the base price of $7300 for non-refundable reservation holders for their 84mpg 3-wheel "autocycle". Reservations can be made for as little as $100 or as much as $1000 with higher values getting priority delivery when they go into production. The price is above the $6800 target that had been quoted for the last few years, but those who are willing to make a binding commitment to purchase a vehicle can sign an additional online form to knock their price back down to $7000. The locked-in prices will be available until they reach a total of 65,000 reservations (~57,000 have been made to date).

The startup car company is attempting to disrupt the auto industry by producing an efficient, affordable vehicle similar to what VW did with the $1699 Beetle in 1968, but at an even more affordable price (the Beetle cost $11,768 in 2016 dollars)

The vehicle itself, while technically a motorcycle under federal law, is controlled like a car with a steering wheel and pedals. Most states have enacted legislation exempting such vehicles from the extra license endorsements or helmet requirements that motorcycles and trikes normally need. Standard features of the base model include an enclosed cabin with A/C, heat, cruise control and power windows & door lock.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), still reeling from the hack on its computer system that resulted in a bunch of leaked emails and the resignation of basically all of its top people, has now created a "cybersecurity advisory board" to improve its cybersecurity and to "prevent future attacks." .

"To prevent future attacks and ensure that the DNC's cybersecurity capabilities are best-in-class, I am creating a Cybersecurity Advisory Board composed of distinguished experts in the field," interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile wrote in a memo. "The Advisory Board will work closely with me and the entire DNC to ensure that the party is prepared for the grave threats it faces—today and in the future."

Sure. That sounds like a good idea. But, then there's this:

Members include Rand Beers, former Department of Homeland Security acting secretary; Nicole Wong, former deputy chief technology officer of the U.S. and a former technology lawyer for Google and Twitter; Aneesh Copra, co-founder of Hunch Analytics and former chief technology officer of the U.S.; and Michael Sussmann, a partner in privacy and data security at the law firm Perkins Coie and a former Justice Department cybercrime prosecutor.

[...] But none of them are actual cybersecurity experts. I have no problem with these people being on this advisory board, but it's insane to put together a cybersecurity advisory board that doesn't include at least a single (and probably more) actual technologist with experience in cybersecurity.

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160815/09190935246/democratic-national-committee-creates-cybersecurity-board-without-single-cybersecurity-expert.shtml

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MostCynical writes:

Airlander 10, the large, helium-filled plane/balloon/bum-shaped flying thing still hasn't left the ground since Hybrid Air Vehicles of the UK (HAV) bought it back from the US Military and reassembled it.

The cost of development was $USD 297 million when it was canned. HAV paid $301,000 for it (minus military hardware, software, and the helium)

The original version flew once, for 90 minutes, in August 2012. The makers are still claiming 90mph (148kph) maximum speed and up to five days aloft.

Sources:

• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3740746/Grounded-Maiden-flight-world-s-largest-aircraft-nicknamed-flying-bum-postponed-minute-technical-issues.html

• http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-37086999

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Air_Vehicles_HAV_304_Airlander_10

I still want a ride on it, if it ever flies.

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martyb writes:

Ars Technica has a story and a link to the trailer of an upcoming movie, Hidden Figures which is due in theaters on Friday, January 13, 2017.

This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.

Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson, now retired, was a mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. The movie is your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise, including college at the age of 15. She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.

[...] As anyone who has ever watched NASA TV during a Mars landing knows, a spaceship is only as good as its makers. There is intense drama going on behind the scenes during every flight and landing, and that's why Hidden Figures looks like such a great ride. The movie hits theaters on January 13, 2017.

I am struggling to fathom having to perform manual calculations of orbital trajectories all day — with nothing more than paper, pencil, and a slide rule — and knowing that if you make an error, there's a good chance something is going to go BOOM and probably take some lives with it. Gives fresh meaning to the term meeting a deadline.

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Some may have heard of scambaiting spammers to waste their time and resources. There are many sites like 419eater which concentrate on it. However, Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story which takes things a step further. A French security researcher says he managed to turn the tables on a cyber-scammer by sending him malware. Whether or not that is ethical is left as an exercise for the readership.

But Ivan Kwiatkowski played along with the scheme until he was asked to send credit card details. He instead sent an attachment containing ransomware.

[...] When Mr Kwiatkowski's parents stumbled across one such website, he decided to telephone the company and pretend he had been fooled.

The "assistant" on the telephone tried to bamboozle him with technical jargon and encouraged him to buy a "tech protection subscription" costing 300 euros (£260).

Mr Kwiatkowski told the assistant that he could not see his credit card details clearly and offered to send a photograph of the information.

But he instead sent a copy of Locky ransomware disguised as a compressed photograph, which the assistant said he had opened.

"He says nothing for a short while, and then... 'I tried opening your photo, nothing happens.' I do my best not to burst out laughing," Mr Kwiatkowski wrote in his blog.

[...] Mr Kwiatkowski said he could not be absolutely certain whether the ransomware had infected the scammer's computer, but there was a fair chance it had.

"He did not let on that something had happened to his computer, so my attempt is best represented as an unconfirmed kill," said Mr Kwiatkowski.

"But encrypting a whole file system does take some time."

He acknowledged that some people may have found his retaliation unethical, but said responses had been "mostly positive".

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956 from a VAI press release:

A collaborative study from research teams in Sweden, the US and Australia published in Translational Psychiatry shows that suicidal patients have a reduced activity of an enzyme that regulates inflammation and its byproducts.

It is known that people who have attempted suicide have ongoing inflammation in their blood and spinal fluid. Now, a collaborative study from research teams in Sweden, the US and Australia published in Translational Psychiatry shows that suicidal patients have a reduced activity of an enzyme that regulates inflammation and its byproducts.

[...] Currently, there are no biomarkers for psychiatric illness, namely biological factors that can be measured and provide information about the patient's psychiatric health. If a simple blood test can identify individuals at risk of taking their lives, that would be a huge step forward, said [Professor Sophie] Erhardt, a Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the Karolinska Institutet, who led the work along with [Professor Lena] Brundin.

The researchers analyzed certain metabolites, byproducts formed during infection and inflammation, in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid [CSF] from patients who tried to take their own lives. Previously it has been shown that such patients have ongoing inflammation in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid. This new work has succeeded in showing that patients who have attempted suicide have reduced activity of an enzyme called ACMSD, which regulates inflammation and its byproducts.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

Viral infections are more successful when the infection started in the morning, and disruptions to the circadian rhythm such as jet lag give viruses even better opportunities to propagate, according to a new study:

Viruses are more dangerous when they infect their victims in the morning, a University of Cambridge study suggests. The findings, published in PNAS [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601895113], showed viruses were 10 times more successful if the infection started in the morning. And the animal studies found that a disrupted body clock - caused by shift-work or jet lag - was always vulnerable to infection.

The researchers say the findings could lead to new ways of stopping pandemics. Viruses - unlike bacteria or parasites - are completely dependent on hijacking the machinery inside cells in order to replicate. But those cells change dramatically as part of a 24-hour pattern known as the body clock.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google Fiber has spent hundreds of millions dollars digging up streets and laying fiber-optic cables in a handful of cities to offer web connections roughly 30 times faster than the U.S. average but is now rethinking its high-speed internet business after initial rollouts have proved more expensive and time consuming than anticipated, a stark contrast to the fanfare that greeted its launch six years ago. The company is trying to cut costs and accelerate its expansion by leasing existing fiber or asking cities or power companies to build the networks instead of building its own. "If you're in the telecommunications industry for 150 years, there are no surprises here," said Jonathan Reichental. "But if you're a software company getting into the business for the first time, this is a completely new world."

Google Fiber last month bought Webpass Inc., a company that beams internet service from a fiber-connected antenna to another antenna mounted on an apartment building. Webpass Chief Executive Charles Barr, now an Alphabet employee, said wireless offers an opportunity to overcome the challenging economics of building fiber networks from scratch. "Everyone who has done fiber to the home has given up because it costs way too much money and takes way too much time." Some analysts have long suspected that Google Fiber's primary goal was to prod other broadband firms to increase their speeds. AT&T, Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable, which recently was acquired by Charter Communications Inc., have done so in some competing markets. Google Fiber insists that fiber to the home is a real business. "We continue to see Fiber as a huge market opportunity," Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat told investors last month. "We're being thoughtful and deliberate in our execution path."

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

20,000 [...] bees were found in the exhaust nozzle of an F-22 Raptor engine following flight operations at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, on June 11, 2016.

Rather than kill the bees--America is badly affected by hive collapse, the base decided to call on a beekeeper to take them away.

Andy Westrich, US Navy retiree, was the apiarist known to the on-base entomologist (the Air Force keeps insect experts on its bases, apparently). Westrich used vacuum hoses to trap the bees, and he calculated the swarm size from the weight of the captured bees--eight pounds, or in modern numbers, 3.6 kilos.

From the USAF release: "Westrich suspected that the swarm of bees were on their way to a new location to build a hive for their queen. [...] Westrich believes she landed on the F-22 to rest. Honey bees do not leave the queen, so they swarmed around the F-22 and eventually landed there."

wordlessTech has a good photo.

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takyon writes:

A new study has found that the FluMist nasal delivery system is just as reliable as other forms of a vaccine:

It came as a surprise this June when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended against using the nasal flu vaccine for the 2016-2017 flu season, citing a lack of evidence that it works. Now, findings from a Canadian study [DOI: 10.7326/M16-0513] appear at first blush to contradict the research that led the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP] to recommend against that live attenuated vaccine.

But things aren't so simple. In fact, the conflicting evidence about the live nasal flu vaccine offers an excellent case study on how complex the task of analyzing flu vaccine data and making recommendations really is. "Sometimes the public wants a very simple message, and unfortunately life's not like that," Mark Loeb, the new study's lead author and director of the division of infectious diseases at McMaster University in Ontario, tells Shots. "Things change as the evidence grows and we understand more. Unfortunately, that's how science and clinical medicine work. The challenge is to be able to help the public understand the shades of gray here."

[...] CDC data consistently showed the live nasal vaccine to be very effective in children until 2013, when the vaccine went from including three strains (trivalent) to including four strains (quadrivalent). And therein lies the rub: The new Canadian study used the trivalent vaccine, while ACIP analyzed data using the quadrivalent vaccine, and among U.S. children. "Many of us felt very strongly that the LAIV [live attenuated influenza vaccine] was a better vaccine than the inactivated for children, and the data supported that," says Pedro Piedra, a professor of virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the investigators involved in the nasal vaccine clinical trials in the late 1980s. "But something happened when it became a quadrivalent vaccine."

Previously: CDC Advisory Panel Recommends Against "FluMist" Nasal Spray Vaccine System

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martyb writes:

The game director for Final Fantasy XV claims that the master disc of the game has been written, but to ensure the highest possible quality, the game's release has been delayed until November 29th. As reported in Ars Technica :

Early Monday morning, FFXV Director Hajime Tabata took to YouTube to announce an official delay for the long-awaited RPG, now slated to launch on November 29 of this year (meaning, one day off from the joke date). Tabata-san explained that the game's "master disc" (typically called the "gold" copy) had been completed "the other day," but its content would not be "the highest possible quality" without a downloadable patch, which he said would be completed by September 30.

Then the director changed course and said that the game would eventually require another patch, as the day-one patch's content would still be "one step away from that truly ultimate quality we are striving for." Tabata-san insists that this delay means FFXV will not require any day-one patch downloads—a fact that he stated multiple times, almost as if to pour salt in the wound of No Man's Sky in light of its recent day-one patch brouhaha. The announcement also mentioned separate plans for paid DLC, which had already been reported days earlier in the form of a $25 "season pass."

I find it more than a little amusing that something which is called "Final Fantasy" has had so many releases. Any Soylentils looking forward to this release?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

From the ramparts of Delhi's 17th-century Red Fort, Modi vowed that his administration was on track to meet its pledge of providing power and toilets to every household across the world's second most populous nation.

Modi drew praise in his first August 15 speech in 2014 as he tackled often taboo issues such as sexual violence and a lack of toilets, promising to build one for every household within four years.

"Today I can say that in such short time, more than 20 million toilets have been built in India's villages and more than 70,000 are free of open defecation," Modi said to loud applause.

Open defecation has long been a major health and sanitation problem in India, where almost 594 million people—nearly half the population—defecate in the open, according to UNICEF.

Modi has stressed the need to clean up India since storming to power in 2014 and has repeatedly urged every household to have a toilet to end the spread of disease and illnesses such as diarrhea.

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butthurt writes:

Reuters and Yahoo Finance report that the Dow 30 NASDAQ and S&P 500 stock indexes all reached record high levels on Monday. According to Yahoo this last occurred in 1999.

Reuters cited as possible factors speculation that the central bank will not soon raise interest rates, rising oil prices due to speculation that oil producers may cut production, and a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued earlier in the month.

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takyon writes:

A group is claiming that they hacked the NSA and obtained advanced malware and hacking tools (such as Stuxnet):

A mysterious hacker or hackers going by the name "The Shadow Brokers" claims to have hacked a group linked to the NSA and dumped a bunch of its hacking tools. In a bizarre twist, the hackers are also asking for 1 million bitcoin (around $568 million) in an auction to release more files.

"Attention government sponsors of cyber warfare and those who profit from it!!!!" the hackers wrote in a manifesto posted on Pastebin, on GitHub, and on a dedicated Tumblr. "How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? [...] We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame."

The hackers referred to their victims as the Equation Group, a codename for a government hacking group widely believed to be the NSA.

Also at Computerworld:

The whole episode screams elaborate SCAM, but maybe it is legit as Twitter chatter by some security experts seem to lean toward believing it. On the flipside, it doesn't appear as if many trust it enough yet to have coughed up bitcoins. Other hackers are suggesting the auction is made up of really old vulnerabilities; this is partially based on the "free" files being offered by Shadow Broker as proof of hacking the Equation Group. Or it could be a mix, old and new, to keep everyone off-balance. Another oddity, pointed out in a Pwn All The Things tweet, is that the "free sample" file size is actually larger than the auction file size.

Yet security pro Matt Suiche dived into the free files offered by Shadow Broker, then took to Medium to say, "Most of the code appears to be batch scripts and poorly coded Python scripts. Nonetheless, this appears to be legitimate code." Suiche said the main targets in the dump he reviewed "appeared to be Fortigate, TopSec, Cisco and Juniper firewalls." He described some of the codenamed-exploits such as Eligible Bachelor, Extra Bacon and Banana Glee. The latter, he pointed out, is "particularly interesting because it allows references to the JETPLOW explanation from the 2014 NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) catalog."

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n1 writes:

Private law firms will be hired by police to pursue criminal suspects for profit, under a radical new scheme to target cyber criminals and fraudsters.

In a pilot project by the City of London police, the lead force on fraud in England and Wales, officers will pass details of suspects and cases to law firms, which will use civil courts to seize the money.

The force says the scheme is a way of more effectively tackling fraud – which is now the biggest type of crime, estimated to cost £193bn a year. It is overwhelming police and the criminal justice system.

Under the shakeup being piloted, a law firm will pursue the suspect in the civil courts before any conviction and possibly even without a criminal charge. The burden of proof is lower in civil courts, and they will only have to show that the suspect stole the money on the balance of probabilities.

[...] Katie Wheatley, joint head of criminal law at Bindmans, a London law firm, expressed unease over the proposals, which she said gave police "what they would regard as an easy deterrent, without having the inconvenience of proving an offence to a criminal standard".

[...] A working group to oversee the experiment has been set up by the City of London police, officers from the National Crime Agency, and Metropolitan police, and law and private investigation firms.

Source: The Guardian

takyon: The City of London is a small county within Greater London, run by the City of London Corporation. It is well known for being a centre of evil finance.

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