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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Just how this came to be is a narrative that remains murky and – ironically – far from fixed. It's a story that offers insights into the sometimes unexpected pace of technological change, and one that's peopled by unsung inventors and obsessive tinkerers. It taps a fervent debate that most of us are oblivious to.

The earliest typewriters were cumbersome, moody machines but there was nevertheless an order to their keys that any English-speaking user could readily glean: they were arranged alphabetically. So why change this logical layout? Legend has it that Qwerty – known for the jabberwocky-style word formed by the first six letters of its top row – was dreamt up with the express purpose of slowing typists down. One character even lectures another about it in a Paulo Coelho novel.

In fact, the Qwerty layout was concocted to prevent keys from jamming – or at least, that's what most experts have tended to believe. The letters on a typewriter are affixed to metal arms, which are activated by the keys; on early models, if a lever was activated before its neighbour had fully come back down to rest, they would jam, forcing the typist to stop. Enter Christopher Sholes. Born in small-town Pennsylvania in 1819, Sholes was many things, including newspaper editor and Wisconsin state senator. He was also one of a team of inventors credited with building the first commercially viable typewriter. Having already tried to build machines for typesetting and printing numbers, Sholes' adventures in type began in 1867, when he read an article in Scientific American describing the Pterotype, a prototype typewriter invented by one John Pratt. The article sounded the death knoll for that "laborious and unsatisfactory" instrument, the pen, soon to be set down in favour of "playing on the literary piano".

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takyon writes:

Facebook has detailed its plan to deal with fake news appearing on the platform. It involves labeling false information with a link to a fact-checking site, as well as warning users when they attempt to repost these flagged items and giving them a worse position in the news feed:

Facebook has struggled for months over whether it should crack down on false news stories and hoaxes that are being spread on its site. Now, it has finally come to a decision. The social network is going to partner with the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which includes groups such as Snopes and the Associated Press, to evaluate articles flagged by Facebook users. If those articles do not pass the smell test for the fact-checkers, Facebook will label that evaluation whenever they are posted or shared, along with a link to the organization that debunked the story. Many of the organizations said that they're not getting paid for this.

"We have a responsibility to reduce the spread of fake news on our platform," Adam Mosseri, Facebook vice president of product development, told The Washington Post. Mosseri said the social network still wants to be a place where people with all kinds of opinions can express themselves but has no interest in being the arbiter of what's true and what's not for its 1 billion users.

The new system will work like this: If a story on Facebook is patently false — saying that a celebrity is dead when they are still alive, for example — then users will see a notice that the story has been disputed or debunked. People who try to share stories that have been found false will also see an alert before they post. Flagged stories will appear lower in the news feed than unflagged stories. Users will also be able to report potentially false stories to Facebook or send messages directly to the person posting a questionable article.

The Pew Research Center also released a survey about fake news, finding that a majority of Americans believe that fake news has caused confusion about the basic facts of current events.

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Fnord666 writes:

Brian Krebs has posted an interesting article discussing IP cameras from Sony and other white labeled IP cameras that researchers recently found vulnerable to attacks that could see them being added to the Mirai arsenal.

New research published this week could provide plenty of fresh fodder for Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves poorly-secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices for use in powerful online attacks. Researchers in Austria have unearthed a pair of backdoor accounts in more than 80 different IP camera models made by Sony Corp. Separately, Israeli security experts have discovered trivially exploitable weaknesses in nearly a half-million white-labeled IP camera models that are not currently sought out by Mirai.

In a blog post published today, Austrian security firm SEC Consult said it found two apparent backdoor accounts in Sony IPELA Engine IP Cameras — devices mainly used by enterprises and authorities. According to SEC Consult, the two previously undocumented user accounts — named "primana" and "debug" — could be used by remote attackers to commandeer the Web server built into these devices, and then to enable "telnet" on them.

[...] "We believe that this backdoor was introduced by Sony developers on purpose (maybe as a way to debug the device during development or factory functional testing) and not an 'unauthorized third party' like in other cases (e.g. the Juniper ScreenOS Backdoor, CVE-2015-7755)," SEC Consult wrote.

It's unclear precisely how many Sony IP cameras may be vulnerable, but a scan of the Web using Censys.io indicates there are at least 4,250 that are currently reachable over the Internet.

[Editor note: I have been getting occasional 502 errors from krebsonsecurity.com pages yesterday and today.]

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FakeBeldin writes:

Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who is known to be suffering from epilepsy, reported on twitter that someone tweeted him a seizure-inducing image. This is not the first time it happened, but this attempt was (apparently) successful in triggering a seizure.

This might be the first physical attack on a person perpetrated via the internet. A sad point in history, in my view.

Links: coverage from Ars Technica, Eichenwald's Twitter feed. I'm not linking to the offending image - you're big enough to find it on your own and apparently it is quite horrible even for people who do not suffer from epilepsy.

Eichenwald has tweeted that he is involving law enforcement.

Any ideas on how hard it would be to filter out seizure-inducing media (make it click-to-view/play)?

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Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, inventor of life-saving maneuver, has passed away at the age of 96. The NY Times has the following:

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Fnord666 writes:

The latest issue of Wired has an interesting article about a 29 year old mathematician who is using crowd sourced machine learning to manage hedge funds.

Richard Craib is a 29-year-old South African who runs a hedge fund in San Francisco. Or rather, he doesn't run it. He leaves that to an artificially intelligent system built by several thousand data scientists whose names he doesn't know.

Under the banner of a startup called Numerai, Craib and his team have built technology that masks the fund's trading data before sharing it with a vast community of anonymous data scientists. Using a method similar to homomorphic encryption, this tech works to ensure that the scientists can't see the details of the company's proprietary trades, but also organizes the data so that these scientists can build machine learning models that analyze it and, in theory, learn better ways of trading financial securities.

"We give away all our data," says Craib, who studied mathematics at Cornell University in New York before going to work for an asset management firm in South Africa. "But we convert it into this abstract form where people can build machine learning models for the data without really knowing what they're doing."

He doesn't know these data scientists because he recruits them online and pays them for their trouble in a digital currency that can preserve anonymity. "Anyone can submit predictions back to us," he says. "If they work, we pay them in bitcoin."

So, to sum up: They aren't privy to his data. He isn't privy to them. And because they work from encrypted data, they can't use their machine learning models on other data—and neither can he. But Craib believes the blind can lead the blind to a better hedge fund.

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Fnord666 writes:

Wired has a recent article about author Octavia Butler and how her work presaged the "Make America Great" again campaign.

Octavia Butler, who died in 2006, was the author of such visionary science fiction novels as Kindred, The Parable of the Sower, and Dawn. Gerry Canavan, who just published a book-length study of Butler, describes her as one of the greatest writers of her era.

"I think you'd put her up there with Philip K. Dick and Le Guin and Delany and these other people who really made an impact on the way that science fiction circulates," Canavan says in Episode 234 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "Especially that mode of literary science fiction that's somewhere in the middle between genre fiction and prize-winning novels, she has to be top two, top three in that list."

Butler made headlines this year when fans noted that her 1998 novel The Parable of the Talents features a fascist politician who rises to power by promising to "make America great again." The comparisons to Donald Trump are obvious, but Canavan says the character was actually inspired by Ronald Reagan.

[...] Butler had a singularly dark imagination, and often had to do multiple rewrites in order to tell her stories in a way that readers would find palatable. But Canavan says that in the current political climate, Butler's dim view of humanity is starting to seem ever more relevant.

"She often thought about how easy it would be for everything to just kind of go back to the way it was," he says. "That the things that seemed like they were permanent progress were really just a kind of epiphenomenon of the wealth of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, and that when that fell apart, all the bad days would come back again."

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Fnord666 writes:

Brian Krebs has a post on KrebsOnSecurity where he discusses a recent law enforcement crackdown on individuals using "booter" services to knock web sites offline.

Federal investigators in the United States and Europe last week arrested nearly three-dozen people suspected of patronizing so-called "booter" services that can be hired to knock targeted Web sites offline. The global crackdown is part of an effort by authorities to weaken demand for these services by impressing upon customers that hiring someone to launch cyberattacks on your behalf can land you in jail.

On Dec. 9, 2016, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Sean Sharma, a 26-year-old student at the University of California accused of using a booter service to knock a San Francisco chat service company's Web site offline.

Sharma was one of almost three dozen others across 13 countries who were arrested on suspicion of paying for cyberattacks. As part of a coordinated law enforcement effort dubbed "Operation Tarpit," investigators here and abroad also executed more than 100 so-called "knock-and-talk" interviews with booter buyers who were quizzed about their involvement but not formally charged with crimes.

[...] Stresser and booter services leverage commercial hosting services and security weaknesses in Internet-connected devices to hurl huge volleys of junk traffic at targeted Web sites. These attacks, known as "distributed denial-of-service" (DDoS) assaults, are digital sieges aimed at causing a site to crash or at least to remain unreachable by legitimate Web visitors.

"DDoS tools are among the many specialized cyber crime services available for hire that may be used by professional criminals and novices alike," said Steve Kelly, FBI unit chief of the International Cyber Crime Coordination Cell, a task force created earlier this year by the FBI whose stated mission is to 'defeat the most significant cyber criminals and enablers of the cyber underground.' "While the FBI is working with our international partners to apprehend and prosecute sophisticated cyber criminals, we also want to deter the young from starting down this path."

According to Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, the operation involved arrests and interviews of suspected DDoS-for-hire customers in Australia, Belgium, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Europol said investigators are only warning one-time users, but aggressively pursuing repeat offenders who frequented the booter services.

"This successful operation marks the kick-off of a prevention campaign in all participating countries in order to raise awareness of the risk of young adults getting involved in cybercrime," reads a statement released Monday by Europol. "Many do it for fun without realizing the consequences of their actions – but the penalties can be severe and have a negative impact on their future prospects."

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takyon writes:

Yay, crab:

Fresh Oregon Dungeness crab will hit stores just in time for the holidays. Commercial crabbing will open on the southern Oregon coast – from Cape Blanco to the California border – on Dec. 18, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife announced. The season had been delayed past its traditional Dec. 1 opening because of high levels of domoic acid.

"We have consistently taken a very precautionary approach when opening our crab fisheries," Caren Braby, ODFW marine resources program manager said. "Recent test results have consistently shown low biotoxin results on the southern end of the state and decreasing levels in ports north of this area indicating they are of excellent quality, safe for consumption and ready for harvest."

[...] Shellfish toxins such as domoic acid are produced by algae and originate in the ocean. Domoic acid or amnesic shellfish toxin poisoning can cause dizziness, headaches, vomiting and diarrhea. More severe cases can result in memory loss and death.

Domoic acid.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Does eating good-tasting food make you gain weight? Despite the common perception that good-tasting food is unhealthy and causes obesity, new research from the Monell Center using a mouse model suggests that desirable taste in and of itself does not lead to weight gain.

"Most people think that good-tasting food causes obesity, but that is not the case. Good taste determines what we choose to eat, but not how much we eat over the long-term," said study senior author Michael Tordoff, PhD, a physiological psychologist at Monell.

Researchers who study obesity have long known that laboratory rodents fed a variety of tasty human foods, such as chocolate chip cookies, potato chips and sweetened condensed milk, avidly overeat the good-tasting foods and become obese.

These studies have provided support for the common belief that tasty food promotes overeating and ensuing weight gain. However, because no study had separated the positive sensory qualities of the appetizing foods from their high sugar and fat content, it was impossible to know if the taste was actually driving the overeating.

The French live by the theory of eating smaller portions of richer, better-tasting food.

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Fnord666 writes:

Online retailer Overstock.com has become the first publicly traded company to issue stock over the internet, distributing more than 126,000 company shares via technology based on the bitcoin blockchain.

Through a subsidiary called tØ, the Salt Lake City-based Overstock has spent the past two years building the technology that facilitates this new way of trading financial securities. The online retailer and its free-thinking CEO, Patrick Byrne, view the blockchain as a way of significantly streamlining not only stock exchanges like the NASDAQ, but all sorts of other capital markets.

The blockchain is an online ledger controlled not by any one company or government agency, but by a global network of computers. With bitcoin, this ledger tracks the exchange of money, but it can also track anything else that holds value, including stocks, bonds, and other financial securities. The idea is that this technology can more accurately and inexpensively oversee financial trades while eliminating many of the middlemen and loopholes that characterize today's markets.

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mrpg writes:

Yahoo has said data from more than one billion accounts may have been hacked.

But should you be worried - and what can you do to protect yourself in the future?

[...] Security expert and writer Brian Krebs said in a blog, "For years I have been urging friends and family to migrate off of Yahoo email, mainly because the company appeared to fall far behind its peers in blocking spam and other email-based attacks."

Yahoo has reassured its users: "We continuously enhance our safeguards and systems that detect and prevent unauthorised access to user account."

Some may not think of themselves as Yahoo users but the firm provides some BT and Sky customers' email accounts [in the UK].

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The rapidly expanding wearable device market raises serious privacy concerns, as some device makers collect a massive amount of personal data and share it with other companies, according to a new study.

Existing health privacy laws don't generally apply to wearable makers, the study says. While consumers are embracing fitness trackers, smart watches, and smart clothing, a "weak and fragmented" health privacy regulatory system in the U.S. fails to give consumers the privacy protections they may expect, said the study, released Thursday by the Center for Digital Democracy and the School of Communication at American University.

"Many of these devices are already being integrated into a growing Big Data digital health and marketing ecosystem, which is focused on gathering and monetizing personal and health data in order to influence consumer behavior," the study says.

As consumers buy more smart wearables and the devices' functionality becomes increasingly sophisticated, "the extent and nature of data collection will be unprecedented," the study adds.

"Americans now face a growing loss of their most sensitive information, as their health data are collected and analyzed on a continuous basis, combined with information about their finances, ethnicity, location, and online and off-line behaviors," said Jeff Chester, CDD's executive director and co-author of the report. "Policy makers must act decisively to protect consumers in today's big data era."

In the U.S., privacy law is piecemeal, with separate laws for different types of information, such as financial, student, or health data, the study notes. U.S. privacy laws governing health information are "limited and fragmented, with significant gaps in coverage," the study says. "The degree to which users of wearable devices will be able to make informed privacy decisions ... will ultimately depend on the effectiveness of government and self-regulatory policies."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In January, scientists said they discovered an exploding star ending in a super-luminous supernova that was almost inconceivably bright -- more so than the output of the entire Milky Way. Now, new research shows the distant flare may have actually been the result of a rare cosmic collision.

Even when news about the exploding star was announced, it didn't quite seem like your run-of-the-mill supernova explosion of a star at the end of its life.

"The explosion's mechanism and power source remain shrouded in mystery because all known theories meet serious challenges in explaining the immense amount of energy ASASSN-15lh has radiated," astronomer Subo Dong said in a statement at the time.

A study based on new data and observations of ASASSN-15lh attempts to solve the mystery by re-classifying it as what's called a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). That's the scientific way of saying that the powerful gravitational forces of a rotating black hole jarred and pulled at a star that passed too close, stretching it like spaghetti until it was ripped to pieces in a series of fantastic explosions.

At first, astronomers thought it was a super-supernova. Now they think the blast was caused by a crazy cosmic collision.
[...]
"We observed the source for 10 months following the event and have concluded that the explanation is unlikely to lie with an extraordinarily bright supernova," Giorgos Leloudas, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, said in a news release Monday. "Our results indicate that the event was probably caused by a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole as it destroyed a low-mass star."

The research will be published in a paper (PDF) in the debut issue of Nature Astronomy in January.

-- submitted from IRC

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The NY Times covers in a very in-depth article Google's contribution to the recent revolution in deep learning through its application in Google Translation. A great read that covers the journey from new theories to practice in less than 10 years. This piece is surprising very technical as it tries to explains the history, the people and the technology behind the recent AI revolution. Take the time to read the full story here.

It is, in fact, three overlapping stories that converge in Google Translate's successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas. The technical story is about one team on one product at one company, and the process by which they refined, tested and introduced a brand-new version of an old product in only about a quarter of the time anyone, themselves included, might reasonably have expected. The institutional story is about the employees of a small but influential artificial-intelligence group within that company, and the process by which their intuitive faith in some old, unproven and broadly unpalatable notions about computing upended every other company within a large radius. The story of ideas is about the cognitive scientists, psychologists and wayward engineers who long toiled in obscurity, and the process by which their ostensibly irrational convictions ultimately inspired a paradigm shift in our understanding not only of technology but also, in theory, of consciousness itself.

Original Submission