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canopic jug writes:

There's been little to no coverage, but Kim Dotcom’s extradition appeal is concluding. Yet, although the case has been going since January 2012, it is still far from over. At the same time he is also petitioning the Appeals Court for a rehearing over the millions in assets seized from him in New Zealand by the U.S. government. Although the U.S. government is spending a lot of money to try to extradite him, it is essential to note that he never lived there, he never traveled there, and he had no company there. Additionally, competing companies providing the same services have been allowed to thrive and even essentially received endorsements, such as the one which gained a former high level member of the Bush administration as a director. So, like with the DeCSS case, it looks like there is something unmentioned which is at the heart of the drive for vigorous prosecution.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The New York Times reports that a Moroccan woman who took a piece of her dead husband's intestine on a flight to their home in Austria was carrying the sample because she suspected that he had been poisoned and she wanted European doctors to examine it.

The woman packed the four-inch piece in her checked baggage on a flight to the southern Austrian city of Graz, where she and her husband had been living for eight years. She acted on the advice of a doctor in Marrakesh who shared her suspicion that her husband had been poisoned at a meal the couple ate while visiting his relatives. The woman was travelling through Graz airport in the south of Austria but was reportedly stopped by officials after they observed her behaving suspiciously.

Officers determined that the woman had violated no Austrian laws by bringing the sample into the country. A Moroccan doctor extracted the piece of intestine and apparently helped pack it in formaldehyde and in thick plastic containers. Gerald Höfler, who leads the pathology institute in Graz where the intestine is being examined, described the packaging as very professional. "I would imagine that it was done by a pathologist," Höfler said. "It was absolutely secure, triple wrapped, according to European Union norms."

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Researchers led by NASA's former chief technologist are hoping to launch a satellite carrying water as the source of its fuel. The team from Cornell University, guided by Mason Peck, want their device to become the first shoebox-sized "CubeSat" to orbit the moon, while demonstrating the potential of water as a source of spacecraft fuel. It's a safe, stable substance that's relatively common even in space, but could also find greater use here on Earth as we search for alternatives to fossil fuels.

Water is a way around this issue because it is essentially an energy carrier rather than a fuel. The Cornell team isn't planning to use water itself as a propellant but to rather use electricity from solar panels to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and use them as the fuel. The two gasses, when recombined and ignited will burn or explode, giving out the energy that they took in during the splitting process. This combustion of gasses can be used to drive the satellite forward, gaining speed or altering its position in orbit of whichever desired planet or moon is the target.

Solar panels, with high reliability and no moving parts, are ideally suited to operate in zero gravity and in the extreme environments of space, producing current from sunlight and allowing the satellite to actively engage on its mission. Traditionally this energy is stored in batteries. But the Cornell scientists want to use it to create their fuel source by splitting the on-board water.

Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-09-space-rocket-fuel-power-revolution.html

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud," says the press release, though the press release does not state whether Adobe plans to move its services away from Amazon Web Services where they are currently hosted.

This security FAQ [PDF] states that "Creative Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), in the United States, EU, and Asia Pacific."

The press statement does refer to the Azure intelligence services, including machine learning, which Adobe and its customers can use for analytics. Adobe's design products are widely used in the marketing industry, where analytics is key to improve targeting and customer engagement, so there is obvious synergy here.

On Microsoft's side, the company says it will make "Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 Enterprise edition." Hmm. Adobe does not have a CRM solution, so this announcement is focused on building integration between Creative Cloud and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM. "The underlying data models will be extensible to enterprise customers, as well as third-party developers and partners," says Microsoft.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

The city of Moscow has announced it's going to start ditching Microsoft, following a call by president Vladimir Putin for Russia to be more self-reliant, and is starting with an untried-at-scale e-mail system.

The phase-out will start by replacing Microsoft Exchange servers and Outlook clients, on 6,000 of the city's computers, with an e-mail system from state-run carrier Rostelecom.

Windows and Office could be next on the list, and local reports suggest the shift could impact as many as 600,000 end users.

According to local business news outlet Vedomosti (in Russian here), the scale of the eventual rollout is because eventually schools, doctors, and housing and community service workers will be using the city-provided e-mail software.

The migration to email servers hosted at Rostelcom, using software from New Cloud Technologies in Russia, is expected to take two years.

Vedomosti says the city has budgeted RUB 43.6 million (about US$700,000) for the initial project, and that the new licenses will be around 30 per cent cheaper than Moscow's current Microsoft bill.

[...] Bloomberg [...] quotes communications minister Nikolay Nikiforov as saying "We want the money of taxpayers and state-run firms to be primarily spent on local software".

Moscow's CIO Artem Yermolaev said the city has already swapped out Cisco's surveillance camera software for local product.

In March, Oracle slagged off PostgreSQL in an attempt to fend off Russian moves towards the libre database.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram.

Following a story that we reported a few days ago which covered how the latest software update issued by HP for its printers prevented them from working with other cartridges, HP have responded and promise another update to re-enable other ink cartridges. But HP is still defending its practice of preventing the use of non-HP ink and is making no promises about refraining from future software updates that force customers to use only official ink cartridges.

"We updated a cartridge authentication procedure in select models of HP office inkjet printers to ensure the best consumer experience and protect them from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges that do not contain an original HP security chip and that infringe on our IP," the company said.

The recent firmware update for HP OfficeJet, OfficeJet Pro, and OfficeJet Pro X printers "included a dynamic security feature that prevented some untested third-party cartridges that use cloned security chips from working, even if they had previously functioned," HP said.

For customers who don't wish to be protected from the ability to buy less expensive ink cartridges, HP said it "will issue an optional firmware update that will remove the dynamic security feature. We expect the update to be ready within two weeks and will provide details here."

Source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/hp-to-issue-optional-firmware-update-allowing-3rd-party-ink/

While I'm sure that we recognise that HP cannot guarantee the operation of any printer not using their own cartridges, how often are similar techniques used to lock-out fair competition? What are your experiences and views?.

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takyon writes:

For the first time since President Obama took office in 2009, Congress has overridden his veto.

The U.S. Senate voted 97-1 to override President Obama's veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would allow victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia. The lone dissenting vote was Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who has "always had the president's back":

In a letter Monday to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.) and ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter warned that allowing the bill to become law risked "damaging our close and effective cooperation with other countries" and "could ultimately have a chilling effect on our own counter-terrorism efforts." Thornberry and Smith both circulated letters among members in the last few days, urging them to vote against overriding the veto. CIA Director John O. Brennan also warned of the 9/11 bill's "grave implications for the national security of the United States" in a statement Wednesday.

The House of Representatives voted 348-to-77:

Congress on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to override a veto by President Obama for the first time, passing into law a bill that would allow the families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the plot.

Democrats in large numbers joined with Republicans to deliver a remarkable rebuke to the president. The 97-to-1 vote in the Senate and the 348-to-77 vote in the House displayed the enduring power of the Sept. 11 families in Washington and the diminishing influence here of the Saudi government.

See also: The Risks of Suing the Saudis for 9/11 by the New York Times Editorial Board and this article in the Saudi Gazette.

Previously: President Obama to Veto Bill Allowing September 11 Victims to Sue Saudi Arabia

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Bloomberg News reports

Cracks are starting to show in China's labor market as struggling industrial firms leave millions of workers in flux.

While official jobless numbers haven't budged, the underemployment rate has jumped to more than 5 percent from near zero in 2010, according to Bai Peiwei, an economics professor at Xiamen University. Bai estimates the rate may be 10 percent in industries with excess capacity, such as unprofitable steel mills and coal mines that have slashed pay, reduced shifts, and required unpaid leave.

Many state-owned firms battling overcapacity favor putting workers in a holding pattern to avoid mass layoffs that risk fueling social unrest. While that helps airbrush the appearance of duress, it also slows the shift of workers to services jobs, where labor demand remains more solid in China's shifting economy.

[...] "Underemployment is especially rampant at state-owned companies", said Zeng Xiangquan, a professor of labor and human resources at Renmin University in Beijing. "The government tends to overprotect them." That keeps laid-off workers from getting retrained and hired into new jobs in more thriving sectors like services or high-end manufacturing, Zeng said.

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takyon writes:

Google Translate will be upgraded using a "Neural Machine Translation" technique, starting with Chinese-English translation today:

Google has been working on a machine learning translation technique for years, and today is its official debut. The Google Neural Machine Translation [GNMT] system, deployed today for Chinese-English queries, is a step up in complexity from existing methods. Here's how things have evolved (in a nutshell). [...] GNMT is the latest and by far the most effective to successfully leverage machine learning in translation. It looks at the sentence as a whole, while keeping in mind, so to speak, the smaller pieces like words and phrases. It's much like the way we look at an image as a whole while being aware of individual pieces — and that's not a coincidence. Neural networks have been trained to identify images and objects in ways imitative of human perception, and there's more than a passing resemblance between finding the gestalt of an image and that of a sentence.

Interestingly, there's little in there actually specific to language: The system doesn't know the difference between the future perfect and future continuous, and it doesn't break up words based on their etymologies. It's all math and stats, no humanity. Reducing translation to a mechanical task is admirable, but in a way chilling — though admittedly, in this case, little but a mechanical translation is called for, and artifice and interpretation are superfluous.

The code runs on Google's homegrown TPUs. The Google Research Blog says that the technique will be applied to other language pairs in the coming months.

Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation

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janrinok writes:

I found the following story which explains the nature of the DDoS threat facing us all. In the past, the main culprit of DDoS attacks were compromised computers which partially resulted in the multi-million dollar business of antivirus programs and similar software. Nowadays, the source is more likely to be a compromised CCTV camera, DVR, or some other device on the IoT.

Last week, the hosting provider OVH faced 1Tbps DDoS attack, likely the largest one ever seen.

The OVH founder and CTO Octave Klaba reported the 1Tbps DDoS attack on Twitter sharing an image that lists the multiple sources of the attack.

Klaba explained that the servers of its company were hit by multiple attacks exceeding 100 Gbps simultaneously concurring at 1 Tbps DDoS attack. One of the attacks documented by the OVH reached 93 MMps and 799 Gbps.

Now Klaba added further information on the powerful DDoS attacks, the CTO of the OVH claimed that the botnet used by attackers is powered by more than 150,000 Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including cameras and DVRs.

"This botnet with 145607 cameras/dvr (1-30Mbps per IP) is able to send >1.5Tbps DDoS. Type: tcp/ack, tcp/ack+psh, tcp/syn." — Octave Klaba / Oles (@olesovhcom) 23 settembre 2016

The bad news for the OVH company is that attacks are still ongoing and the size of the botnet is increasing.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story at CNET:

Apple plans to turn HealthKit app bundle into a full-fledged diagnostic tool that interprets fitness and health data in order to offer medical advice, Bloomberg reported Monday.

The tech giant has recruited a team of health care experts over the past few years who are busy beavering away to build an electronic record system that will be able to analyze data for both doctors and patients, the news service reported, citing "people familiar with team's plans."

Apple introduced HealthKit software in 2014 and, right from the start, made data gathered from wearables a central part of the accompanying Health app's job.

The article goes on to report that Apple is developing apps that take the gathered data, e.g. heart rate, and use it to perform analysis (time it takes to return to a resting heart rate after exercise — the quicker the recovery, the better health you are in). Apple bought Gliimpse, a startup health record data warehouse company, last August.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

ProPublica reports

The Education Department announced [September 22] [1] that it is stripping the powers of one of the nation's largest accreditors of for-profit schools.

The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS, has been under scrutiny for continuing to accredit colleges whose students had strikingly poor outcomes.

As ProPublica has reported, schools accredited by the agency on average have the lowest graduation rates in the country and their students have the lowest loan repayment rates.

Accreditors are supposed to ensure college quality, and their seal of approval gives schools access to billions of federal student aid dollars.

As we have also reported, two-thirds of ACICS commissioners--who make the ultimate decisions about accreditation for schools--were executives at for-profit colleges. Many of the commissioners worked at colleges that were under investigation.

[1] Content hidden behind scripts, and then the text is displayed as images.

Previous: Department of Education Recommends Termination of Accreditor
A Degree from a For-Profit College is the Same as No College when Seeking a Job

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

While waiting for ten minutes on "hold" to make an appointment with my local branch of Scotiabank, I had time read through the new "Digital Services Agreement. Most of the eighteen pages were unremarkable, but a couple of things stood out.

When you click "Accept", you are agreeing to not give your password to police if they ask!

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality and safekeeping of your Card, Card Number, Username, and Electronic Signature. ... These responsibilities include:

  - not voluntarily disclosing your Electronic Signature to anyone else at any time, including any family member, friend, law enforcement agency, or financial institution employee;

You're also agreeing to not use "public" wifi:

(These responsibilities include:) using your own private wireless data connection, and avoiding use of public Wi-Fi services, when you are using the Digital Services;

This of course is from a bank that still refuses to allow Uppercase letters or Special characters in a password.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new mitochondrial donation technique called spindle nuclear transfer has been successfully used in order to prevent a child from inheriting a mitochondrial disorder:

It's not the first time scientists have created babies that have DNA from three people - that breakthrough began in the late 1990s - but it is an entirely new and significant method. [...] The US team, who travelled to Mexico to carry out the procedure because there are no laws there that prohibit it, used a method that takes all the vital DNA from the mother's egg plus healthy mitochondria from a donor egg to create a healthy new egg that can be fertilised with the father's sperm.

[...] Some have questioned whether we are only now hearing the success story while failed attempts could have gone unreported. Prof Alison Murdoch, part of the team at Newcastle University that has been at the forefront of three person IVF work in the UK, said: "The translation of mitochondrial donation to a clinical procedure is not a race but a goal to be achieved with caution to ensure both safety and reproducibility." Critics say the work is irresponsible. Dr David King from the pro-choice group Human Genetics Alert, said: "It is outrageous that they simply ignored the cautious approach of US regulators and went to Mexico, because they think they know better. Since when is a simplistic "to save lives is the ethical thing to do" a balanced medical ethics approach, especially when no lives were being saved?" Dr Zhang and his team say they will answer these questions when they presents[sic] their findings at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in October.

Also at The New York Times and NPR.

First live birth using human oocytes reconstituted by spindle nuclear transfer for mitochondrial DNA mutation causing Leigh syndrome (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2016.08.004) (DX)

As far as I can tell, what you see in the above Fertility and Sterility paper is all that has been released.

Original Submission

FunkyLich writes:

I came across an article a few hours ago, http://www.networkworld.com/article/3121969/lan-wan/virtualizing-wan-capabilities.html

I was wondering how much of all that makes sense. It seems to put a lot of focus on the virtual buzz that exists today everywhere and it seems to be being pushed in networking as well. While I don't mind this being implemented by those who want to, I am a bit of a fanboy of the saying "Hardware is King". All this "IT as a service" doesn't seem to have much sense unless one defines what IT is. It may range from just a shared printer, to an entire rack full of servers and switches, to an entire floor full of them. Virtualised WANs and the notion of a 'WAN as a service' could be easy as a breeze to be managed, but how robust could they be? While performance needs at the network level always go up, how does this relate to virtualizing that in itself, transforming it into yet another layer down the stack? A layer which encapsulates all the other layers and which in turn may contain such a layer too. How deep would the nesting level go?

From the article:

Basically it is the promise of being able to draw a network in a CAD-like software, and push a "Run" button.

Then there is also:

What could be these shifting demands to change your mind often about the WAN infrastructure on which many other things depend on? The virtual network of the International Stock Exchange traffic, anyone?

Like someone else mentioned, would any Soylentils enjoy playing "The Sims: NOC Edition"?

Previously:
Software-Defined Networking is Dangerously Sniffable [
AT&T Open Sources SDN 8.5 Million Lines of Code - to be Managed by Linux Foundation [updated]

Original Submission