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takyon writes:

An obligatory moment of bad press for Facebook and its censorship team comes to us from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Facebook says it made a mistake in disabling the accounts of an artist who posted images of tattoos that she created for breast cancer survivors following reconstruction. "A member of our team accidentally removed something you posted on Facebook. This was a mistake, and we sincerely apologize for they error," the social media site said in a message to Kerry Soraci. "We've since restored the content, and you should now be able to see it."

The note came after a story about Soraci's accounts was posted on stltoday.com Thursday afternoon, which launched other media inquiries into why Facebook took the action it did. "It is really annoying that we have to go through the media to get them to respond!" Sorachi told the Post-Dispatch Friday morning.

Facebook had disabled Soarci's page, Tattoos by Kerry Soraci, on Dec. 30, saying it did not meet the social media site's "community standards." "Your account has been disabled for not following the Facebook Community Standards, and we won't be able to reactivate it," Facebook's Steven Parker wrote in a response to Soraci. "We disable accounts that solicit others or feature content that is sexually suggestive/contains nudity."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Exposure to pet rats has led to an outbreak of Seoul virus in Illinois and Wisconsin:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed Friday that pet rats are the source of an outbreak of Seoul virus infections in Illinois and Wisconsin. The virus has been confirmed in eight patients in an ongoing investigation. The recent cases are "the first human cases we've seen in the United States associated with pet rats," said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, a veterinarian and deputy division director for CDC's division of high consequent pathogens and pathology. Several previous outbreaks reported in the US occurred in wild rats.

Also at CBC. Illinois Department of Public Health statement.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a Seoul Virus FAQ.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Following the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Qualcomm, Apple has also sued the company, seeking $1 billion in damages:

Apple is suing Qualcomm for roughly $1 billion, saying Qualcomm has been "charging royalties for technologies they have nothing to do with." The suit follows the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Qualcomm earlier this week over unfair patent licensing practices. [...] Apple says that Qualcomm has taken "radical steps," including "withholding nearly $1 billion in payments from Apple as retaliation for responding truthfully to law enforcement agencies investigating them." Apple added, "Despite being just one of over a dozen companies who contributed to basic cellular standards, Qualcomm insists on charging Apple at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined."

Also at Reuters, The Verge , and Ars Technica .

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Daphnis, Saturn's tiny "wavemaker moon" which was discovered in 2005, has been imaged in relatively high resolution by the Cassini spacecraft. The image shows dust being pulled out of a nearby ring and trailing the moon:

Daphnis (5 miles or 8 kilometers across) orbits within the 42-kilometer (26-mile) wide Keeler Gap. Cassini's viewing angle causes the gap to appear narrower than it actually is, due to foreshortening. The little moon's gravity raises waves in the edges of the gap in both the horizontal and vertical directions. Cassini was able to observe the vertical structures in 2009, around the time of Saturn's equinox (see PIA11654).

Like a couple of Saturn's other small ring moons, Atlas and Pan, Daphnis appears to have a narrow ridge around its equator and a fairly smooth mantle of material on its surface -- likely an accumulation of fine particles from the rings. A few craters are obvious at this resolution. An additional ridge can be seen further north that runs parallel to the equatorial band. Fine details in the rings are also on display in this image. In particular, a grainy texture is seen in several wide lanes which hints at structures where particles are clumping together. In comparison to the otherwise sharp edges of the Keeler Gap, the wave peak in the gap edge at left has a softened appearance. This is possibly due to the movement of fine ring particles being spread out into the gap following Daphnis' last close approach to that edge on a previous orbit.

Also at Ars Technica which includes some of the older images.

Original Submission

Trump Signs Executive Order That Could Effectively Gut Affordable Care Act's Individual Mandate

"exec" writes:

The Washington Post reports:

President Trump signed an executive order late Friday giving federal agencies broad powers to unwind regulations created under the Affordable Care Act, which might include enforcement of the penalty for people who fail to carry the health insurance that the law requires of most Americans.

The executive order, signed in the Oval Office as one of the new president's first actions, directs agencies to grant relief to all constituencies affected by the sprawling 2010 health-care law: consumers, insurers, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, states and others. It does not describe specific federal rules to be softened or lifted, but it appears to give room for agencies to eliminate an array of ACA taxes and requirements.

[...] Though the new administration's specific intentions are not yet clear, the order's breadth and early timing carry symbolic value for a president who made repealing the ACA — his predecessor's signature domestic achievement — a leading campaign promise.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-012

Where should NASA's Juno spacecraft aim its camera during its next close pass of Jupiter on Feb. 2? You can now play a part in the decision. For the first time, members of the public can vote to participate in selecting all pictures to be taken of Jupiter during a Juno flyby. Voting begins Thursday, Jan. 19 at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) and concludes on Jan. 23 at 9 a.m. PST (noon EST).

[...] NASA's JunoCam website can be visited at: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam

The voting page for this flyby is available at: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/voting/

[...] There will be a new voting page for each upcoming flyby of the mission. On each of the pages, several points of interest will be highlighted that are known to come within the JunoCam field of view during the next close approach. Each participant will get a limited number of votes per orbit to devote to the points of interest he or she wants imaged. After the flyby is complete, the raw images will be posted to the JunoCam website, where the public can perform its own processing.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Note: The story is dated September 2014, but I just stumbled upon it and think the subject matter is interesting enough that others in the community might find it both enlightening and entertaining. Also, the site had been under attack, per conversations with the author; if the link fails, then use this web archive link to 'On Testing'. --martyb]

Bill Sempf posted a humorous take On Testing which started with a tweet:

QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.

He continues:

This is 'edge case' testing; posting values to a system that really don't belong there. It came to mind because of a problem I had encountered in a system I was working on earlier.

[...] As it turns out, there are a lot of people who are all about this. The replies to my tweet over the last 24 hours covered a lot of ground, but by far were those that wanted to push the edge testing to the max - and I love it.

The posting gathers a quite remarkable set of tests submitted in response. The whole story is well worth reading, but among the notables there were:

Ah yes, the Edge Case Saloon. A fine establishment.

Orders a gimlet. Orders a gauntlet. Orders the 80s arcade game Gauntlet. Orders 4 beers. Orders 3 friends to come over for some fun.

Unhooks the tap and orders a beer. Breaks all the glassware and orders a beer. Sets the bar on fire and orders a beer.

Walks into the bar backwards. Runs into the bar. Sits at the bar overnight doing nothing to see what happens. Tries to sell a beer.

Quickly orders a second beer before the first is served.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

Several news sites are reporting that Donald Trump is looking to elevate Ajit Pai to head up the FCC:

Ajit Pai, a Republican Federal Communications Commission member and foe of net neutrality regulation, will be named to head the agency, according to a person familiar with the transition.

Pai has often dissented as FCC Democrats voted for tighter regulations, including the 2015 open internet, or net neutrality, decision that forbids internet service providers from unfairly blocking or slowing web traffic. The rule opposed by AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. is among those likely to be reversed by president Donald Trump's FCC, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts.

Additional information at Politico and Reuters.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

EAGLE, The Easily Applicable Graphical Layout Editor is an ECAD (electronic computer-aided design), proprietary software for creating printed circuit boards. Cadsoft, the company that created it, sold EAGLE to Autodesk in June.

Hackaday reports

Autodesk has announced that EAGLE is now only available for purchase as a subscription. [Previously], users purchased EAGLE once and [could use] the software indefinitely (often for years) before deciding to move to a new version with another one-time purchase. Now, they'll be paying Autodesk on a monthly or yearly basis.

Before Autodesk purchased EAGLE from Cadsoft, a Standard license would run you $69, paid once. [...] Standard will [now] cost $15/month or $100/year and gives similar functionality to the old Premium level, but with only 2 signal layers.

[...] The next level up was Premium, at $820, paid once. [...] If you [now] need more [than 2] layers or more than 160 [sq.cm] of board space, you'll need the new Premium level, at $65/month or $500/year.
New Subscription Pricing Table for Eagle

[...] The [freeware] version still exists, but, for anyone using Eagle for commercial purposes (from Tindie sellers to engineering firms), this is a big change. Even if you agree with the new pricing, a subscription model means you never actually own the software. This model will require licensing software that needs to phone home periodically and can be killed remotely. If you need to look back at a design a few years from now, you better hope that your subscription is valid, that Autodesk is still running the license server, and that you have an active internet connection.

The page has well over 100 comments, with many saying the equivalent of "Goodbye, EAGLE; Hello, KiCAD".
KiCAD is gratis and libre, cross-platform, has been adopted as a software development project by nerds at CERN, and has seen marked improvement in recent years.

Previous:
CERN is Getting Serious About Development of the KiCAD App for Designing Printed Circuits
Scripts Make the (Proprietary) Cadsoft EAGLE-to-(FOSS) KiCAD Transition Easier

Some time back, anubi and I conversed about how EAGLE has been DRM'd for quite a long while.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Human beings possess an innate fascination with sex, but nothing is more interesting to us than the idea of cosmic copulation. We're intellectually titillated by the idea that what goes up must get off — but how? There's surprisingly little information available on space sex, presumably because, according to NASA, it's never happened before.

Since the first space flight launched in 1961, about 558 people have traveled through space. And it's alleged — but not confirmed — that there has been at least one case of space sex: Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov is rumored to have had an affair with fellow cosmonaut Elena Kondakova during his 437 day stint aboard the Mir space station during the 90s. Also in the 90s, the first married couple — Americans Jan Davis and Mark Lee — embarked on a space mission together. However, the two reportedly worked separate shifts and have refused to answer questions about their relationship while in space.

With no firsthand accounts to turn to, humans are left to ponder: How exactly does sex in space work?

-- submitted from IRC

---

Original Submission

Ignacio Agulló writes:

Since the year 2011 I maintain the Calendar of ICT Holidays for the members of the Computer Engineers Association of Spain (Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, ATI) and for the professionals of the Information and Communication Technologies in general. The Calendar is published through the Google Calendar application in formats iCal and HTML, which means that is possible to subscribe from every kind of agenda and e-mail applications, and also view the calendar as a web page or insert it in one. The calendar is available in English, Spanish and Galician. The news is that this year the Calendar is doubly updated: in addition of towards the future, also towards the past. Now the Calendar holds also all the editions of the holidays previous to 2011. Now it's not only an announcement of what is to come, but also a register of the past.

• English: International ICT Holidays · iCal · HTML
• Spanish: Celebraciones TIC Internacionales · iCal · HTML
• Galician: Celebracións TIC Internacionais · iCal · HTML

Note: For 2017 three of the holidays aren't still announced and therefore the date could be modified. Subscribing to the Calendar allows to get the updates.

[Editor note: Author is a native Spanish speaker, I left his English as submitted.]

Original Submission

BK writes:

Bacon News: Woman Says Bacon Helped Her Celebrate 109 Years

A 109-year-old woman from southern Illinois has some advice for living a long life.

"I never smoked a cigarette in my life, I never drank liquor in my life, and I had one husband for 43 years," said Ruth Benjamin. "And I love bacon!

Some of our readers may not know that 'Bacon News' was once a contender here.

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

2016 was the warmest year since humans began keeping records, by a wide margin. Global average temperatures were extremely hot in the first few months of the year, pushed up by a large El Niño event. Global surface temperatures dropped in the second half of 2016, yet still show a continuation of global warming.

This is the third record-breaking year in a row.

butthurt adds:

Berkeley Earth's work has been published in Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601207) (DX)

Also at NASA (Javascript required) and the Washington Post.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports

On January 9, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous summary ruling reversing a decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and upholding qualified immunity for a police officer who shot and killed Samuel Pauly in an attempt to investigate a traffic incident near Santa Fe, New Mexico in October 2011.

Prior to the shooting, Samuel's brother Daniel was involved in a non-violent road-rage incident in which he stopped his car and confronted two women who he claimed had been tailgating him. Daniel subsequently drove home, where he lived with Samuel. Samuel was at home playing video games and had not been involved in the confrontation. Meanwhile, the occupants of the other vehicle called the police, who were able to locate the house where the brothers lived.

At that point, no crime had been committed and there was no legal justification to arrest anyone or to enter or search any house. While the frequency of "road-rage" incidents is not a healthy sign, they do constitute a fairly common occurrence in American social life.

According to Daniel, when two police officers arrived at the brothers' house they failed to identify themselves. Not realizing that it was the police, and believing that they were being burglarized, the brothers armed themselves with weapons. The brothers warned, "We have guns!" The encounter escalated and there was an exchange of gunfire in which no one was struck. Then a third officer arrived and, without warning, shot Samuel dead.

The phrase "qualified immunity" refers to a judge-made doctrine that has no basis in the text of the US Constitution, notwithstanding the claims by various Supreme Court justices to be handing down the Constitution's "original" meaning. In recent decades, this doctrine has quietly been built up to huge proportions within the judicial system, largely without significant media commentary or public discussion. It now plays an important role in blocking civil rights cases and encouraging the ongoing epidemic of police brutality.

According to this authoritarian and anti-democratic doctrine, a judge can unilaterally decide a case in favor of a police officer--even if the officer's conduct violated the Constitution--if the judge determines that the police officer acted "reasonably" in light of previous Supreme Court decisions. If qualified immunity is awarded to the police officer, the case can be thrown out of court, never going before a jury, and costs can be imposed against the victim or the victim's survivors.

[...] The Supreme Court held that the officer who killed Samuel "did not violate clearly established law" because "existing precedent" had not "placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate".

[...] In the written opinion, the justices went out of their way to complain that the lower courts were not granting qualified immunity to police officers often enough.

Clearly, having appointments made by Democrat presidents doesn't lessen Authoritarianism in the USA.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Researchers devised a browser fingerprinting technique that allows interested parties to "identify" users across different browsers on the same machine.

The group – Yinzhi Cao and Song Li from Lehigh University, and Erik Wijmans from Washington University in St. Louis – found that many novel OS and hardware level features, such as those from graphic cards, CPU, and installed writing scripts, can be used to accurately "fingerprint" users.

"Our evaluation shows that our approach can successfully identify 99.24% of users as opposed to 90.84% for state of the art on single-browser fingerprinting against the same dataset," they noted. They have proposed and successfully tested a number of cross-browser fingerprintable features, including screen resolution, the number of CPU virtual cores, list of fonts, installed writing scripts, and more.

They extract those features by asking browsers to perform tasks that rely on corresponding OS and hardware functionalities. They found these fingerprintable features to be highly reliable – the removal of a single feature has little impact on the fingerprinting results. Also, that software rendering can be definitely used for fingerprinting.

Currently, the only way to prevent the collection of most of these features is to use the Tor Browser.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/01/17/cross-browser-fingerprinting/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Pornhub is one of the pre-eminent porn sites on the web. Each year Pornhub releases a year in review post with anonymous details about the site's users. More and more Linux users are visiting Pornhub, Linux saw an impressive 14% increase in traffic share in 2016.

[...] While Windows continues to dominate when it comes to which operating system users count on to watch Pornhub (about 80% of desktop users), Mac OS and Linux are on the rise, with Mac OS up 8% in traffic share and Linux up an impressive 14%.

Moving onto mobile. The playing field is pretty even here, with Android and Apple iOS almost at par with one another. Android leading with 3% more users on Pornhub than Apple iOS (47% of Pornhub's mobile users). Android's mobile market share has increase by 5% over the last year.

Look, it wasn't all me. I swear.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3158159/linux/linux-use-on-pornhub-surged-14-in-2016.html

Original Submission