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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2105986-what-you-eat-when-youre-sick-may-determine-if-youll-get-better/

Does that mean the Atkins followers have a higher risk of brain damage from flu? Or there's still enough glucose around?

Journal reference: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.07.026

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Plaintext passwords, usernames, e-mail addresses, and a wealth of other personal information has been published for more than 2.2 million people who created accounts with ClixSense, a site that claims to pay users for viewing ads and completing online surveys. The people who dumped it say they're selling data for another 4.4 million accounts.

Troy Hunt, operator of the breach notification service Have I Been Pwned?, said he reviewed the file and concluded it almost certainly contains data taken from ClixSense. Besides unhashed passwords and e-mail addresses, the dump includes users' dates of birth, sex, first and last names, home addresses, IP addresses, account balances, and payment histories.

A post advertising the leaked data said it was only a sample of personal information taken from a compromised database of more than 6.6 million ClixSense user accounts. The post said that the larger, unpublished data set also includes e-mails and was being sold for an undisclosed price. While the message posted over the weekend to PasteBin.com has since been removed, the two sample database files remained active at the time this post was being prepared. The Pastebin post, which was published on Saturday and taken down a day or two later, read in part:

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The International Standards Organisation this week signed off ISO 38504, new "Guidance for principles-based standards in the governance of information technology."

[...] the opposite of principles-based governance is rules-based governance. In the latter, organisations look at the rules under which they must or choose to operate and methodically demonstrate that they comply with each and every instruction. Rules-based governance is usually applied by strongly-regulated organisations or IT shops that like to nail down every last byte and manage change assiduously.

By contrast, as the ISO 38504 summary explains, "A principles-based approach to standardization is aimed at providing non-prescriptive guidance". Principles-based guidelines are considered helpful because "it can identify the outcomes of applying the principles without specifying explicit methodologies, structures, processes and techniques needed to achieve the outcomes."

The new standard is therefore a standard explaining the best way not to obey every last instruction in standards, but still emerge with processes that help IT to remain well-governed.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

BBC reports:

An autistic man suspected of hacking into US government computer systems is to be extradited from Britain to face trial, a court has ruled. Lauri Love, 31, who has Asperger's Syndrome, is accused of hacking into the FBI, the US central bank and the country's missile defence agency. Mr Love, from Stradishall, Suffolk, has previously said he feared he would die in a US prison if he was extradited.

Also at Ars Technica , The Guardian , and Reuters . Here is the judgment against Love (PDF).

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Some of New England's leading breweries will compete Oct. 1 to see who can turn the questionable water of Boston's Charles River into the tastiest suds.

Six area breweries have signed on for the first ever "Brew the Charles" challenge, a highlight of HUBweek, a weeklong Boston-area festival celebrating innovation in art, science and technology.

Nadav Efraty, CEO of Desalitech, a Massachusetts water treatment company that's sponsoring the competition, hopes it helps spotlight the importance of water conservation and water-saving technologies.

"We're having fun here, but at the end of the day, we want to educate the public and decisionmakers," he said. "We're all efficient with our energy because we know it has environmental and financial costs. We need to think exactly the same way about water."

The river, which winds through 23 Massachusetts communities before ending in Boston Harbor, has come a long way since it gained notoriety in "Dirty Water," the Standells' 1960s hit and one of Boston's adopted theme songs.

After kayaking on the Charles two weeks ago, I can't recommend anyone drink this beer.

Original Submission

What's Popular in Virtual Reality's 3-D World? Netflix and TV.

Phoenix666 writes:

Companies such as Samsung and Facebook's Oculus promote their virtual-reality headsets by highlighting awe-inspiring 3-D experiences for gaming and virtual travel. But one of the most popular activities among early adopters of the technology is less novel: watching 2-D movies and TV.

"It's been a surprise on the VR circuit because much of the work is driven by people coming from the gaming world, who are fairly dogmatic about what VR means," says Anjney Midha, founder of the San Francisco venture capital fund KPCB Edge. Figuring out what people want to do with headsets is crucial if companies such as Facebook are to make the devices widely popular.

Midha says consumer interest in a new way to view 2-D content shouldn't be surprising given the popularity of watching movies and TV on mobile devices with small screens. A 2-D video viewed using a VR headset can fill your visual field as if you were watching on a giant home cinema screen, even if you're in fact in a cramped dorm room or the middle seat on a budget flight. Virtual-reality apps from Netflix and Hulu even surround their 2-D content with a virtual theater, room, or beach scene to enhance the experience. Flat content is less likely to make you uncomfortable or nauseous, as 3-D content can.

People use the headsets in 3D reality to enter a 3D virtual reality where they can experience a 2D representation of 3D reality.

VR Arrives at Tokyo Game Show, Counted On to Revive Industry

Phoenix666 writes:

Virtual reality has arrived for real at the Tokyo Game Show, one of the world's biggest exhibitions for the latest in fun and games.

That's evident everywhere. Players at the booths are donning chunky headgear covering their eyes and ears, immersed in their own worlds, shooting imaginary monsters or dancing with virtual partners, at Makuhari Messe hall in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba.

The show, which gave a preview to reporters Thursday ahead of its opening to the public over the weekend, features 614 companies demonstrating more than 1,500 game software titles.

It's still anyone's guess how VR will play out as a business in years ahead. But most everyone agrees that's the way of the future. And Yasuo Takahashi, director at Sony Interactive Entertainment, the game division of Japanese electronics and entertainment giant Sony Corp., believes 2016 will mark VR's debut year, helping revive an industry that has languished with the advent of smart phones.

Is the video game industry in need of reviving?

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports

The Obama administration, the Democratic Party, and their allies in the corporate-controlled media have hailed the Census Bureau report released [September 13], claiming it demonstrates that the US economy has "turned the corner" and that the supposed "economic recovery" is now providing big dividends for working people and even for the poor.

[...] A careful examination of the figures presented in the Current Population Survey (CPS), the formal name of the study, suggests that the hosannas by Obama and the media are premature. The statistical data is not fabricated, but it has been packaged in the light most favorable to the Democrats in the final two months of a hotly contested presidential election.

[...] Many workers who were limited to part-time work in 2014, or were unemployed entirely, went back to work or worked longer hours in 2015. This does not mean they got a raise. A minimum-wage worker who went from 15 hours of work a week in 2014 to 30 hours of work a week in 2015 would see a doubling in his or her income, a 100 percent increase, entirely from longer hours, even as their pay remained abysmally low.

[...] Most new jobs taken by previously unemployed workers were in the low-pay service sectors, like healthcare, restaurants and bars, nursing homes, retail outlets, etc.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

PayPal has been annoying some of its customers for years.

Instead of making it easy for folks to pay online using their credit cards, the digital payments company directs them to buy stuff with their PayPal balances and checking accounts. The end result has been both profitable for PayPal (because it avoids credit card networks' higher fees) and a pain for shoppers looking to rack up points or frequent flyer miles.

PayPal is finally changing that, thanks to new deals with Visa and Mastercard it signed earlier this year. On Thursday, PayPal took the chance to tout those agreements, saying its US customers will be able set a default way to pay -- whether credit card, debit card or bank account -- starting this month. The change will be implemented globally beginning early next year.

"We want to make it easy for anyone to pay however they want, wherever they want," Joanna Lambert, a PayPal executive focused on consumer products, said in an interview.

This change is another way PayPal is hoping to make its app and website far more intimate pieces of people's financial lives. Right now, PayPal is something its average customer uses only twice a month; it wants that to increase to twice a week. The Visa and Mastercard agreements could help do that by encouraging more people to use PayPal more often and inviting back many customers who were turned off by its current system.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The mystery of why so many plants on New Zealand's otherwise bleak subantarctic islands have very large deeply coloured flowers and giant leaves has been solved by new University of Otago research.

These insect-pollinated "megaherbs" stand out like sore thumbs amongst the islands' other flora which are small, wind-pollinated plants that mainly reproduce by self-pollination or asexual reproduction.

Department of Botany researchers thermally imaged six species of Campbell Island megaherbs – whose mainland relatives are small and pale flowered – and discovered that their flowers and leaves heat up rapidly to make the most of rare moments of sunshine and calm weather.

The researchers found that leaf and flower temperatures of all six species were considerably higher than simultaneously measured surrounding temperatures, with the greatest heating seen in Campbell Island daisies.

The plants are structured to create mini greenhouse effects to attract pollinators.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In August 2010 I took my first solar machine - the Sun-Cutter - to the Egyptian desert in a suitcase. This was a solar-powered, semi-automated low-tech laser cutter, that used the power of the sun to drive it and directly harnessed its rays through a glass ball lens to 'laser' cut 2D components using a cam-guided system. The Sun-Cutter produced components in thin plywood with an aesthetic quality that was a curious hybrid of machine-made and "nature craft" due to the crudeness of its mechanism and cutting beam optics, alongside variations in solar intensity due to weather fluctuations.

In the deserts of the world two elements dominate - sun and sand. The former offers a vast energy source of huge potential, the latter an almost unlimited supply of silica in the form of quartz. The experience of working in the desert with the Sun-Cutter led me directly to the idea of a new machine that could bring together these two elements. Silica sand when heated to melting point and allowed to cool solidifies as glass. This process of converting a powdery substance via a heating process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or SLS (selective laser sintering). These 3D printers use laser technology to create very precise 3D objects from a variety of powdered plastics, resins and metals - the objects being the exact physical counterparts of the computer-drawn 3D designs inputted by the designer. By using the sun's rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world.

My first manually-operated solar-sintering machine was tested in February 2011 in the Moroccan desert with encouraging results that led to the development of the current larger and fully-automated computer driven version - the Solar-Sinter. The Solar-Sinter was completed in mid-May and later that month I took this experimental machine to the Sahara desert near Siwa, Egypt, for a two week testing period. The machine and the results of these first experiments presented here represent the initial significant steps towards what I envisage as a new solar-powered production tool of great potential.

Flash Video [Requires ecmascript].

[Ed Note: This story is about a project that occurred in 2011, but still represents an interesting technique to craft something of substance from readily available supplies: sunlight and sand. There is a video on YouTube: Solar Sinter. --martyb]

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports

A new report by the Huffington Post [September 15] reveals Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Peter Thiel he would nominate the PayPal co-founder and one-man anti-free speech crusader to the Supreme Court if elected president.

Thiel--who bankrolled a devastating blow to First Amendment rights earlier this year when he secretly paid $10 million in legal expenses to support Hulk Hogan's defamation lawsuit against Gawker Media--is apparently just the type of freedom-loving, Bill of Rights-protecting intellectual Trump hopes to stack on the Supreme Court.

A source close to Thiel told Huffington Post the GOP candidate "deeply loves Peter Thiel", which isn't terribly surprising considering Thiel served as a delegate for Trump, spoke at the candidate's convention, and pretty much became a walking how-to guide for Trump's promise to "open up libel laws". According to the source, Trump has "made it clear he will nominate" Thiel.

"It's not clear whether Trump has indeed offered to nominate Thiel--only that Thiel has said Trump would nominate him and that Trump's team has discussed Thiel as a possible nominee", the Huffington Post article reads. "Both sources requested anonymity, given that Trump and Thiel have each demonstrated a willingness to seek revenge against parties they feel have wronged them."

Both Thiel's spokesperson and Trump's press secretary denied Trump's indication, and Thiel--who sits on Facebook's board and serves as the chairman of the software company Palantir--told the Huffington Post he's not interested in the job.

We've previously referenced Thiel in contexts from "Mean People" to vampirism.

See also:
Trump camp denies report that he would consider Peter Thiel for Supreme Court
Peter Thiel denies he's talking to Donald Trump about Supreme Court job.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has warned that the nation's attempts at imposing a "Google Tax" are already being circumvented, and suggested big accountancy firms have found a way around efforts to stymie multinational tax avoidance.

Australia's Google Tax, formally known as the Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law (MAAL), is modelled on the UK's and imposes penalties on companies that move money offshore for the sole purpose of legally-but-cynically avoiding tax.

[...] Indeed the Office says it's just found a new [technique] it considers "artificial and contrived," as it "involves interposing an entity described as a partnership between the foreign entity originally making supplies to Australian customers, and the Australian customers."

"The partnership has one resident corporate partner with a minority interest in the partnership, therefore purporting to characterise the partnership as an 'Australian entity' for the purposes of the MAAL." But nothing changes in the business' actual operations, and the ATO says: "The arrangements have little, if any, commercial basis."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Tesla just won a bid to supply grid-scale power in Southern California to help prevent electricity shortages following the biggest natural gas leak in U.S. history. The Powerpacks, worth tens of millions of dollars, will be operational in record time—by the end of this year.

Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries. Tesla's contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed.

"The storage is being procured in a record time frame," months instead of years, said Yayoi Sekine, a battery analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "It highlights the maturity of advanced technologies like energy storage to be contracted as a reliable resource in an emergency situation."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Security researcher Sergei Skorobogatov has bypassed the iPhone 5c's firmware using NAND mirroring. The achievement comes too late for the FBI to save some money:

The FBI told Congress it couldn't hack the San Bernardino shooter's phone without Apple's aid, but a researcher has proved that claim was inaccurate. "The process does not require any expensive and sophisticated equipment," wrote University of Cambridge researcher Sergei Skorobogatov. "All needed parts are low cost and were obtained from local electronics distributors."

Security firm Trail of Bits argued earlier this year that it would be possible to replace the iPhone firmware with a chip that doesn't block multiple password attempts. You could then try every single one until you're in, a process that would take less than a day with a four-digit code, and a few weeks with a six-digit one.

[...] "Despite government comments about feasibility of the NAND mirroring for iPhone 5c it was now proved to be fully working," the paper says. That again lends credence to FBI critics who said that the FBI was only pushing for Apple's assistance to create a precedent in court. A magistrate judge ruled against Apple, so law enforcement could use that decision to make other companies cooperate in encryption cases.

Update: The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, have sued the FBI for information about how the agency accessed the locked iPhone 5c.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The study shows that as mated pairs of great tits settle down to breed in the spring, they establish their homes in locations close to their winter flockmates. They also arrange their territory boundaries so that their most-preferred winter 'friends' are their neighbours.

The findings give new insights into the social behaviour of birds and demonstrate how social interactions can shape other aspects of wild animals' lives, such as the environmental conditions they will experience based on their choice of home location.

The research is published in the journal Ecology Letters.

Lead author Dr Josh Firth, of the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology, said: 'The great tits we study are a good general model for many other bird species. They form large flocks in the winter, when they're searching for food, and then each pair chooses a single set breeding site where they will be located throughout the spring as they build a nest and raise their chicks.

'We show that they appear to choose their spring breeding sites to stay close to their winter flockmates. Not only do they nest closest to the birds they held the strongest winter social bonds with, they also appear to arrange their territories so that they share home boundaries with those birds.'

Dr Firth added: 'As well as telling us about the birds' social behaviour, this also has interesting implications for other aspects of biology. For instance, where an animal's "home" is determines the environmental factors they experience, such as weather conditions. Therefore, as they appear to base their location choices around their social bonds, this indicates that their previous social associations can underpin the environment and conditions they will be subjected to in future.'

Original Submission