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Phoenix666 writes:

The rise in ransomware attacks on MongoDB installations prompted the database maker last week to issue advice on how to avoid being victimized.

As of Sunday, security researcher and Microsoft developer Niall Merrigan identified more than 27,000 MongoDB databases seized by ransomware. By Tuesday afternoon Pacific Time, an online spreadsheet maintained by Merrigan and fellow security researcher Victor Gevers listed 32,643 victims.

The attacks involve hackers who copy data from insecure databases, delete the original, and ask for a ransom of a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin to return the stolen data back to the owner.

MongoDB, like other NoSQL databases, has suffered from security shortcomings for years. Trustwave called out MongoDB in 2013. Security researcher John Matherly did so again in 2015.

Where MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other relational databases tend to default to local installation and some form of authorization, MongoDB databases are exposed to the internet by default, and don't require credentials immediately by default.

MongoDB's security checklist is here. The company has stated it is the user's responsibility to make these changes to the default configuration.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

The Pentagon could be poised for a rapid about-face under the Trump administration, with the Obama administration's push for social reform surrendering to what could be an old-school emphasis on combat readiness and the spirit of the United States military, experts told FoxNews.com.

Under President Obama, the military sought to integrate transgender persons into the ranks, allow women into special operations forces and purge the nomenclature of gender-specific words, adopting what some critics say was a "politically correct" liberal agenda. That's a contrast to the traditional U.S. military approach.

In addition, some Navy ships have been named for civil rights activists. And while the Obama administration has taken an inclusive approach on some issues, it has also worked to minimize expressions of Christianity in the ranks. For example, several officers have been disciplined for displaying Bibles or gospel verses in their quarters.

Veterans and military experts told FoxNews.com that, while some of Obama's civil rights advancements may be locked in, neither Trump nor his choice for secretary of defense, Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, are likely to make social experimentation a priority.

Source: Fox News

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

I am delighted to announce Remacs, a project to port Emacs to Rust!

Emacs, at its heart, is a lisp interpreter written in C. In Remacs, we're replacing this C code with Rust, and all the elisp you know and love will just work.

If you've ever fancied contributing to core Emacs, this is a great opportunity to learn the internals. There's tons of low hanging fruit, we have a list of good first bugs and even a walkthrough of writing your first elisp function using Rust.

Rust is perfect for this because we can port incrementally. If you want to replace the entire regular expression engine, you can do that. If you just want to replace this function here, you can do that and the C code won't even notice. You will have a full-blown Emacs every step of the way.

[...] Remacs is based on Emacs 25.2. We've got enough type definitions that you can write interesting built-in functions, but the project is still at a very early stage. Using these, we've got a few built-in elisp functions written entirely in Rust: some arithmetic, some type checks, and even some basic list functionality.

I'll stick to MrPlow for now, thanks. He's Rust enough for me until his code stops looking like a noob wrote it.

Source: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/01/11/announcing-remacs-porting-emacs-to-rust/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A day after the Justice Department reached a settlement with Volkswagen, another automaker has been accused of using software to cheat U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emissions testing:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today issued a notice of violation to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. and FCA US LLC (collectively FCA) for alleged violations of the Clean Air Act for installing and failing to disclose engine management software in light-duty model year 2014, 2015 and 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokees and Dodge Ram 1500 trucks with 3.0 liter diesel engines sold in the United States. The undisclosed software results in increased emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the vehicles. The allegations cover roughly 104,000 vehicles. EPA is working in coordination with the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which has also issued a notice of violation to FCA. EPA and CARB have both initiated investigations based on FCA's alleged actions.

"Failing to disclose software that affects emissions in a vehicle's engine is a serious violation of the law, which can result in harmful pollution in the air we breathe," said Cynthia Giles, Assistant Administrator for EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. "We continue to investigate the nature and impact of these devices. All automakers must play by the same rules, and we will continue to hold companies accountable that gain an unfair and illegal competitive advantage."

"Once again, a major automaker made the business decision to skirt the rules and got caught," said CARB Chair Mary D. Nichols. "CARB and U.S. EPA made a commitment to enhanced testing as the Volkswagen case developed, and this is a result of that collaboration."

Also at Reuters and Ars Technica.

[Continues...]

randomerr writes:

The People's Bank of China started spot checks on major Bitcoin exchanges starting a dip in the digital currency value for fears of a crackdown. China's central bank inspections of BTCC, Huobi, and OKCoin were conducted to find any potential regulatory breach. The news caused at least a 12 percent dip in the price of Bitcoin against the US dollar. Bitcoin was trading around $910 early-Wednesday and by late-Thursday.was down to $759.

In a separate announcement, its Shanghai unit said its officers visited BTCC to check on the exchange's operations and assess if it functioned within regulatory policies on financing, forex business, and anti-money laundering, among others.

Bitcoin's value last year climbed 125 percent, becoming the best-performing currency globally against other currencies issued by central banks.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Primates are talking, but are you listening?

For decades, scientists thought that most primates could not produce vowels, sounds fundamental to human speech. That's because nonhumans supposedly lacked the necessary vocal anatomy. But now, researchers report that Guinea baboons, monkeys that inhabit the forests and savanna of West Africa, make five vowellike sounds similar to those used by humans. The findings bolster a recent study showing that Japanese macaques are also anatomically capable of speech. Together, the work suggests that the basic elements of spoken language began to evolve much earlier than suspected, at least 25 million years ago.

"It perfectly complements our own results," says William Tecumseh Fitch, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna and the lead author of the macaque study. "But they're looking at what baboons actually do," not a simulation as in his team's research, he adds. The discovery "provides additional evidence that scientists have underestimated the flexibility of the primate vocal tract."

That error stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the monkey larynx, says Joel Fagot, a primatologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and an author of the new study. "It was thought that in order to pronounce vowels, you had to have a low larynx [voice box], as humans do," he says. Because monkey larynxes are set much higher than our own, scientists thought this anatomical difference explained why primates could not utter vowels, which are "critical for language," Fagot says. "You can't have language without them." Yet human babies with high larynxes can also pronounce vowels, a phenomenon that perplexed Fagot and his colleagues.

Also at Scientific American and NYT.

Evidence of a Vocalic Proto-System in the Baboon (Papio papio) Suggests Pre-Hominin Speech Precursors (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169321) (DX)

Previously: Why Can't Monkeys Talk Like Us? Their Vocal Tract Might Not Be the Problem.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Some of Intel's cheapest dual-core CPUs will now have four threads enabled rather than just two, in what may be a move to compete with AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs, which all have two threads per core:

The Pentium series traditionally consists of low-power, dual-core offerings with no [Hyper-Threading (HT)]. Pentiums serve as the low-end alternative to the i3 series, which features dual-core offerings with HT enabled. The addition of HT to the Pentium series expands its range, but there are still a few key differentiators compared to the i3 series.

[...] The HT-enabled Pentiums create a challenge to AMD's line of low-end processors, and of course, some will speculate that it appears that Intel is bolstering its low-end products in the face of AMD's pending Ryzen onslaught. In either case, the HT-powered Pentiums add a welcome new wrinkle to the low end. The processors are listed on Intel's ARK but are currently available only for preorder.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Amazon has announced that it will create 100,000 new full-time jobs in the U.S. over the next 18 months, mostly in warehouses (fulfillment centers) and call centers. Many of the jobs will be added in Texas, California, Florida, New Jersey, among other states:

Amazon has quickly ramped up its workforce over the last few years, as it pushes to open up more fulfillment centers to get packages out to its customers more quickly. In 2011, Amazon had 30,000 full-time employees in the U.S. At the end of last year, it employed 180,000 people. [...] Amazon has seen "tremendous" demand for their retail service as well as a fast-growing cloud business, says Edward Jones analyst Josh Olson on why Amazon is hungry for more workers. Amazon is increasingly emphasizing convenience of its retail service, such as Same-Day Delivery options, as its edge on pricing dulls with the introduction of state sales taxes.

President-elect Trump's incoming press secretary Sean Spicer helped his boss to take credit for the news:

"The president-elect met with heads of several of the tech companies and urged them to keep their jobs and production inside the United States," spokesman Sean Spicer said in his opening remarks in a press call on Thursday.

Also at CNN, and Amazon.

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

AI's have beaten the best human players in chess, go, and now poker.

In a landmark achievement for artificial intelligence, a poker bot developed by researchers in Canada and the Czech Republic has defeated several professional players in one-on-one games of no-limit Texas hold'em poker.

Perhaps most interestingly, the academics behind the work say their program overcame its human opponents by using an approximation approach that they compare to "gut feeling."

"If correct, this is indeed a significant advance in game-playing AI," says Michael Wellman, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in game theory and AI. "First, it achieves a major milestone (beating poker professionals) in a game of prominent interest. Second, it brings together several novel ideas, which together support an exciting approach for imperfect-information games."

Source: Poker Is the Latest Game to Fold Against Artificial Intelligence

Is there anything at which AI's won't soon be able to beat humans?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An optogenetics technique has been used to activate mouse neurons associated with predatory behavior:

With a flash of light, researchers have induced mice to pounce on anything in their line of sight. Researchers from Yale University and the University of São Paulo isolated the regions of the mouse brain that control both hunting and biting, and say they can activate the neurons involved on command. The research should help illuminate another small part of the neural pathways that connect the outside world to our internal computations.

In this case, the researchers were interested in the link between an outside stimulus — like seeing a delicious cricket — and an action, such as pouncing on said cricket. Their research [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.027] [DX], published Thursday in Cell, looks at the second part of that question. The researchers used a technique called optogenetics to empirically test the findings of a previous paper that described mouse brain regions involved in predatory behavior. They implanted genetic material from light-sensitive algae into neurons that control hunting and biting, and used flashes of laser light to stimulate them.

The results were convincing: When target regions were activated, the mice pounced without a second thought, following their predatory instincts. When the laser turned off, the mice returned to normal behavior. And the mice didn't limit their attacks to prey: When the kill switch was activated, they attacked sticks and bottle caps as well.

Also at NPR, Science Magazine, and The Guardian.

Original Submission

charon writes:

Geographers from Dartmouth College and the University of Sheffield provide new insight into the economic geography of commuter megaregions in the U.S., by using an empirical approach that combines visual interpretation with statistical analysis. The findings appear in PLOS One and shed light on an old geographic problem: how to divide space into coherent unit areas.

These emerging "megaregions" reflect the economic links woven by millions of commuters traveling to and from work each day. They map out complex networks in which economic systems, natural resources and infrastructure are linked. Understanding the way functional geographic connections cross over the existing borderlines of states and regions is vital for developing institutional forms that match the patterns of the contemporary world.

"We know just how interconnected people are across vast distances in the modern economy—that's one of the basic principles of globalization," says co-author Garrett Dash Nelson, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Geography and the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College. "But we still need bounded areal units for things like regional administration and transportation planning. Our paper offers a new way of thinking about how these economic flows and megaregional boundaries are related."

They also have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about their research on reddit.

An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions, PLOS ONE (2016). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166083

Also at National Geographic and The Daily Mail, among others.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Uh oh, a biotechnology company's shares are spiking! Illumina, a company that makes DNA sequencing machines, has announced the NovaSeq, a sequencer it expects to enable $100 genome sequencing (some day):

Illumina's CEO Francis deSouza showed off the machine, called the NovaSeq, onstage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in downtown San Francisco today, telling the crowd the machine's scanning speed could decipher an entire human genome in less than an hour. [...] Illumina's new machine is meant to be a lower-priced device and comes in two models — NovaSeq 5000 for $850,000 and the NovaSeq 6000 for $985,000.

Six customers have already come on board to test NovaSeq, including the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub (the life sciences arm started by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and biotech companies Regeneron and Human Longevity Inc. DeSouza also confirmed each company had put in a purchase order for the new machine.

Here's the company's press release, and some related information at Next Big Future.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX is seeking federal approval to construct two additional landing pads so that it can land three Falcon Heavy first stage boosters on the ground nearly simultaneously:

As part of the process to gain federal approval for the simultaneous landing of its Falcon Heavy rocket boosters in Florida, SpaceX has prepared an environmental assessment of the construction of two additional landing pads alongside its existing site. The report considers noise and other effects from landing up to three first stages at the same time. After undergoing a preliminary review by the US Air Force, the document has been released for public comment.

First reported by NASASpaceFlight.com, the document offers some interesting details about the proposed launch and landing of SpaceX's heavy lift rocket, which the company hopes to fly for the first time in the spring or early summer of 2017. After previously demonstrating the ability to land a single Falcon 9 booster, SpaceX also hopes to land the three first-stage boosters that will power the Falcon Heavy for potential re-use.

Improvements in the rockets' landing guidance system will allow the company to repurpose the space used by smaller contingency pads. If the additional landing pads aren't constructed, the company could try landing one or both of the remaining boosters on drone barges instead.

SpaceX's planned return-to-flight of the Falcon 9 has been delayed to Jan 14th due to weather. The company plans to launch 10 satellites for Iridium Communications.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

University of California, Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University researchers tested the DNA of fish ordered at 26 Los Angeles sushi restaurants from 2012 to 2015, and found that 47% of the sushi was mislabeled. Tuna and salmon were generally genuine, but halibut and red snapper were mislabeled in every single instance of 43 and 32 orders, respectively:

A one-year sampling of high-end grocery stores found similar mislabeling rates, suggesting the bait-and-switch may occur earlier in the supply chain than the point of sale to consumers. [...] Over the four-year study, only bluefin tuna was always exactly as advertised. While only one of 48 tuna samples was not tuna, different kinds of tuna occasionally swapped places, including two samples that turned out to be Atlantic bluefin tuna and southern bluefin tuna, species classified as endangered and critically endangered. Out of nine orders of yellowfin tuna, seven were a different kind of tuna, usually bigeye — a vulnerable and overexploited species, the researchers said. Salmon remained a largely safe bet, with only 6 of 47 orders going awry. However, all halibut and red snapper orders failed the DNA test, and in 9 out of 10 cases, diners ordering halibut were served flounder. About 4 in 10 halibut orders were species of flounder considered overfished or near threatened.

Although some short-term studies have suggested that fish fraud is declining due in part to stricter regulations, this study uncovered consistent mislabeling year over year, indicating seafood misidentification is not improving. While the current study took place in Los Angeles, previous studies detected similar problems nationwide, suggesting that the UCLA findings are widely applicable [...] The researchers used DNA barcoding, which uses a partial DNA sequence from a mitochondrial gene, to accurately identify the fish.

Also at CBS Los Angeles.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11022/scio-sensor-added-to-smartphone

I first saw Consumer Physics' SCiO handheld scanner a couple of years ago and was impressed by its ability to identify materials by scanning and analyzing their chemical composition. In the intervening years, Consumer Physics has partnered with Analog Devices to increase the sensor's accuracy and reduce its size, and at CES 2017, the company announced the first smartphone with an integrated SCiO sensor, making this technology even easier to carry and use.

[...] The SCiO sensor uses near-infrared spectroscopy to identify a material's molecular content. By illuminating an object with a broadband light source and using the spectrometer, a type of optical sensor, to break the reflected light into its constituent components, SCiO's signal processing algorithms compare the reflected light's wavelengths to the original emission to create a spectral fingerprint. This technique works because molecules will only absorb photons at certain energy levels, which means specific wavelengths will be missing or attenuated in the reflected light.

Original Submission