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charon writes:

Scientists can model friction pretty well—after all, it plays a role in everything from manufacturing to biomechanics—but the model used, known as the "rate-and-state friction model" (or "RSF" for short), is not based on a fundamental understanding of friction. Instead, the RSF model is based on experiments and observations. The model has a good track record of fitting data already measured, but the best, most trustworthy models are those based on fundamental physics that not only are a great match to experimental results and observations, but that can actually predict friction without needing any information or measurements ahead of time.

In research just published in the American Physical Society's journal Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania provide new insight into friction at the nanoscale. Their work will help establish a better physical basis for models of the static friction that develops between the surfaces of rocks, like what we see prior to earthquakes, and of other materials.

Imagine two jagged edges trying to slide past one another, as in the case of tectonic plates. At some point, the kinetic friction (the friction between two moving surfaces) becomes so strong that they stop moving. In rocks and many other materials, this leads to something called frictional aging. Frictional aging means that the static friction (the force required to get two stationary surfaces moving) changes with time: it increases dramatically at first, and then continues to grow more slowly.

Kaiwen Tian et al. Load and Time Dependence of Interfacial Chemical Bond-Induced Friction at the Nanoscale Physical Review Letters 118. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.076103

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HMD is relaunching the iconic Nokia 3310 phone:

Nokia has sold 126 million of its original 3310 phone since it was first introduced back in September, 2000. It was a time before the iPhone, and Nokia ruled with popular handsets that let you play simple games like Snake. Now the 3310 is making a nostalgic return in the form of a more modern variant, thanks to Nokia-branded phone maker HMD. Like its predecessor, it will still be called the Nokia 3310, but this time it's running Nokia's Series 30+ software, with a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 2-megapixel camera, and even a microSD slot.

The original Nokia 3310's battery had a 900 or 1000 mAh capacity depending on the model. This one has a 1200 mAh battery, but supposedly allows 22 hours of talk time, ten times that of the original. The new version weighs 79.6 grams, versus 133 grams for the original.

The price for this throwback? 49 euros.

Here's a lot of pictures of the device.

Original Submission

charon writes:

In 2012 the Oxford research team started a trial in Kenya where hand pumps in 60 villages were fitted with data transmitters. The idea was they would monitor the motion of the pump and the amount of water extracted on an hourly basis - if the pump wasn't working, a message was sent to a repair company and workers were dispatched to fix the problem.

Now the scientists have found another way to interpret the data from the accelerometers fitted to the pump handles. They discovered that when the water is being drawn from a deep aquifer, it produces different vibrations than when the liquid comes from a shallow one.

"It's quite a simple and elegant solution to estimating groundwater and how it varies over time," co-author Dr Rob Hope from Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment told BBC News.

Farah E. Colchester et al, Accidental infrastructure for groundwater monitoring in Africa. Environmental Modelling & Software. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364815216308325

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Think YOUR job is difficult? Hey, there's a guy in Hollywood who has to hand the right envelope to the right person at the right time.

Oh, wait. That sounds really easy—yet it got screwed up.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are about to announce best picture, the culmination of entertainment's biggest awards show. Beatty opens a red envelope and looks at the card inside, giving a double-take. He looks inside the envelope to see if there's anything else there.

BEATTY: "The Academy Award..."

He pauses, looks at the envelope again.

BEATTY: "For best picture..."

He pauses again and looks offstage, then hands the envelope to Dunaway, who gives it a quick glance.

DUNAWAY: "La La Land."

The audience applauds, as the cast, crew, and producers of "La La Land" take the stage to accept what many had anticipated, the coveted honor of best picture. Producers Jason Horowitz and Marc Platt give speeches, but something seems amiss as Platt speaks. There's commotion among the people standing behind him as a man wearing headphones appears and checks red envelopes being held by producers.

[...] HOROWITZ: "There's a mistake. 'Moonlight', you guys won best picture. This is not a joke."

PLATT: "This is not a joke. I'm afraid they read the wrong thing."

[...] [Oscars host Jimmy] KIMMEL: "Guys. This is very unfortunate what happened. Personally, I blame Steve Harvey for this."

[...] KIMMEL: "Warren, what did you do?"

BEATTY: "I want to tell you what happened. I opened the envelope and it said 'Emma Stone, La La Land'. That's why I took such a long look at Faye and you. I wasn't trying to be funny."

takyon: 89th Academy Awards

Original Submission

charon writes:

Even tiny brains can learn strange and tricky stuff, especially by watching tiny experts.

Buff-tailed bumblebees got several chances to watch a trained bee roll a ball to a goal. These observers then quickly mastered the unusual task themselves when given a chance, researchers report in the Feb. 24 Science. And most of the newcomers even improved on the goal-sinking by taking a shortcut demo-bees hadn't used, says behavioral ecologist Olli Loukola at Queen Mary University of London.

Learning abilities of animals without big vertebrate brains often get severely underestimated, Loukola says. "The idea that small brains constrain insects is kind of wrong, or old-fashioned."

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/score-bumblebees-football-insect-social-learning

Original Submission

charon writes:

Anil Dash's article discusses how the internet has enabled and encouraged the formation of what he calls "Fake Markets." These Fake Markets have the appearance of a more ordinary free market, but the choices allowed therein are either illusory or can be arbitrarily shuffled or removed without knowledge of any of the parties to the transaction. He traces the changes in business plans of companies such as Uber, Google, and eBay to show how they have evolved from creating new markets to strangling them.

But unlike competitive sellers on eBay, Uber drivers can't set their prices. In fact, prices can be (and regularly have been) changed unilaterally by Uber. And passengers can't make informed choices about selecting a driver: The algorithm by which a passenger and driver are matched is opaque—to both the passenger and driver. In fact, as Data & Society's research has shown, Uber has at times deliberately misrepresented the market of available cars by showing "ghost" cars to users in the Uber app.

It seems this "market" has some awfully weird traits.

1. Consumers can't trust the information they're being provided to make a purchasing decision.
2. A single opaque algorithm defines which buyers are matched with which sellers.
3. Sellers have no control over their own pricing or profit margins.
4. Regulators see the genuine short-term consumer benefit but don't realize the long-term harms that can arise.

This is, by any reasonable definition, no market at all. One might even call Uber a "Fake Market". Yet, by carefully describing drivers in their system as "entrepreneurs" and appropriating the language of true markets, Uber has been welcomed by communities and policymakers as if they were creating a new marketplace. That has serious implications for policy, regulation and even civil rights. For example, we can sincerely laud Uber for making it easier for African American passengers to reliably hail a car when they need a ride, but if persistent patterns of bias from drivers arise again in the Uber era, we'll have a harder time regulating those abuses because Uber doesn't usually follow the same policies as licensed taxis.

Original Submission

Continuation of: Site Update 2/27

So, the recent site update got a lot of news, and comments. Predictably, there was a lot of comments split on the fence both ways. I've been out sick and haven't been actively involved in SN in a few days, but I did review the updated changes on dev before they went out. I'm still not up to responding to you guys personally, and TMB/Paul have had things covered, so I'm just going to write a blanket story. So, let's open this and say THIS ISN'T THE FINAL SET OF HOW THINGS WILL BE. I'm leaving my comments above the fold to make it clear what's going on. I'd put that in a blink tag on if that was still in the HTML standard.

The changes to commenting were primarily driven on technical grounds. To do D1.5, the site had to load a mass load of comments and do server side processing to thread them. To give you an example, on a cold page load, before we apply caching a few points in the site would take over a minute to load, render and thread. The only thing that prevented the site from becoming unusable in 503s is that the frontend has a lot of caching. Even with that, we can't cache every single bit of the site at once. In a "cold cache" scenario such as after a varnish or DB update, the site would be borderline unusable until those caches could be loaded. So let me make this clear that this change wasn't a change for changes sake. There was (and is) a need to revamp the commenting.

We noted that this change was coming in other meta stories, and even had a landing article on dev for people coming to check it out. No one did. How we use commenting on dev and how we use it on production are two different things; you can't realistically test these things in real world conditions without updating production.

As TMB stated, we couldn't get the same behavior without making the site cry in the corner, and this was fairly extensively tested on dev before it went live. For older users to the site, you may remember this is not the first time we've changed comments, and rather predictably, the roll out of Improved Commenting actually was fairly buggy. This is a more drastic update.

Right now, we're going to keep improving and changing things to address as many things as possible. To that extent, there will be a daily article for at least this week if not longer to allow for feedback as we work to make things better. If, at the end of all the tweaking, we can't satisfy the vast majority of folks, a revert remains as an available option. We've built this entire site on listening to the community, and taking their feedback into account. That isn't going to change now. I'm hoping we've earned enough trust from you guys collectively to be allowed to at least experiment for a bit.

I'm going to leave the rest of the article for the dev crew to use. Due to personal real life issues, I'm likely not going to be around much, so if you don't see me, that's why. I have full faith in the staff in helping manage and keep things going.

~ NCommander

Hi! I'm martyb (aka Bytram) your friendly neighborhood QA/test guy chiming in with my 2¢ on the upgrade/rollout.

Firstly, I apologize that you are seeing ANY issues with the site upgrade. I took this update very seriously and was, unfortunately, only able to perform about half of the testing that I wanted to see done before we went live. That said, there are some issues that were reported that I had not foreseen, so this has been a learning experience for me, too.

Secondly, I'd like to point out what you are NOT seeing -- the many MANY changes that TMB and PJ made as a result of feedback arising from testing. That said, comments are THE thing that makes this site. It's not the timeliness or fine writing of the stories — as I see it, this site is all about providing a venue for discussion.

Look past the fold for the rest of my comments.

Fnord666 writes:

The Federal Communications Commission plans to halt implementation of a privacy rule that requires ISPs to protect the security of its customers' personal information.

The data security rule is part of a broader privacy rulemaking implemented under former Chairman Tom Wheeler but opposed by the FCC's new Republican majority. The privacy order's data security obligations are scheduled to take effect on March 2, but Chairman Ajit Pai wants to prevent that from happening.

The data security rule requires ISPs and phone companies to take "reasonable" steps to protect customers' information—such as Social Security numbers, financial and health information, and Web browsing data—from theft and data breaches.

"Chairman Pai is seeking to act on a request to stay this rule before it takes effect on March 2," an FCC spokesperson said in a statement to Ars.

The rule would be blocked even if a majority of commissioners supported keeping them in place, because the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau can make the decision on its own.

Source: ArsTechnica

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Add this to the long list of problems caused by buzzing drones: Frightening 1,500 elk into stampeding at a time of year when too much stress can be deadly for the animals.

This winter already is one for the books in western Wyoming. More than twice as much snowfall than usual has fallen in many areas, and more than 3 feet has accumulated at the National Elk Refuge in the scenic valley of Jackson Hole.

Typically the National Elk Refuge provides a winter haven for elk. But on Monday, David A. Smart, 45, of Washington, D.C., got a $280 ticket for allegedly launching a drone from a highway pullout and flying it over hundreds of elk resting there.

The device caused the elk to stampede half a mile through the snow. Smart was trying to film the animals and afterward was apologetic, refuge deputy manager Cris Dippel said Friday.

Nonetheless, wildlife managers take animal harassment seriously. The federal crime of which Smart was accused, disturbing wildlife, is punishable by an up to $5,000 fine.

Source: Popular Mechanics

Original Submission

charon writes:

The proof is in the packaging. Making all cigarette packets look the same reduces the positive feelings smokers associate with specific brands and encourages quitting, Australian research shows.

The findings come ahead of the UK and Ireland introducing plain tobacco packaging in May.

Australia was the first nation to introduce such legislation in December 2012. Since then, all cigarettes have been sold in plain olive packets with standard fonts and graphic health warnings.

The primary goal was to make cigarettes less appealing so that people would not take up smoking in the first place. But an added bonus has been the number of existing smokers who have ditched the habit.

Between 2010 and 2013, the proportion of daily smokers in Australia dropped from 15.1 to 12.8 per cent – a record decline. The number of calls to quit helplines also increased by 78 per cent after the policy change.

Hugh Webb, et al. Smoke signals: The decline of brand identity predicts reduced smoking behaviour following the introduction of plain packaging, Addictive Behaviors Reports, DOI: 10.1016/j.abrep.2017.02.003

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Vancouver man was denied entry into the United States after a US Customs and Border Patrol officer read his profiles on the gay hookup app Scruff and the website BBRT.

[...] André, a 30-year-old Vancouver set decorator who declined to give his full name for fear of retaliation from US Customs, describes the experience as "humiliating."[He] says he was planning to visit his boyfriend, who was working in New Orleans. But when he was going through Customs preclearance at Vancouver airport last October, he was selected for secondary inspection, where an officer took his phone, computer and other possessions, and demanded the passwords for his devices.

"I didn't know what to do. I was scared, so I gave them the password and then I sat there for at least an hour or two. I missed my flight," André says. "He came back and just started grilling me. 'Is this your email?' and it was an email attached to a Craigslist account for sex ads. He asked me, 'Is this your account on Scruff? Is this you on BBRT?' I was like, 'Yes, this is me.'"

[...] "I could tell just by his nature that he had no intentions of letting me through. They were just going to keep asking me questions looking for something," he says. "So I asked for the interrogation to stop. I asked if I go back to Canada am I barred for life? He said no, so I accepted that offer."

A month later, André attempted to fly to New Orleans again. This time, he brought what he thought was ample proof that he was not a sex worker: letters from his employer, pay stubs, bank statements, a lease agreement and phone contracts to prove he intended to return to Canada.

When he went through secondary inspection at Vancouver airport, US Customs officers didn't even need to ask for his passwords — they were saved in their own system. But André had wiped his phone of sex apps, browser history and messages, thinking that would dispel any suggestion he was looking for sex work. Instead, the border officers took that as suspicious.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

Another privilege-escalation vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2005 and affects major distro of the Linux operating system, including Redhat, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Over a decade old Linux Kernel bug (CVE-2017-6074) has been discovered by security researcher Andrey Konovalov in the DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) implementation using Syzkaller, a kernel fuzzing tool released by Google.

The vulnerability is a use-after-free flaw in the way the Linux kernel's "DCCP protocol implementation freed SKB (socket buffer) resources for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST packet when the IPV6_RECVPKTINFO option is set on the socket."

The DCCP double-free vulnerability could allow a local unprivileged user to alter the Linux kernel memory, enabling them to cause a denial of service (system crash) or escalate privileges to gain administrative access on a system.

"An attacker can control what object that would be and overwrite its content with arbitrary data by using some of the kernel heap spraying techniques. If the overwritten object has any triggerable function pointers, an attacker gets to execute arbitrary code within the kernel," full disclosure mailing list about the vulnerability reads.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Jeff Regan was born with underdeveloped optic nerves and had spent most of his life in a blur. Then four years ago, he donned an unwieldy headset made by a Toronto company called eSight. Suddenly, Regan could read a newspaper while eating breakfast and make out the faces of his co-workers from across the room. He's been able to attend plays and watch what's happening on stage, without having to guess why people around him were laughing. "These glasses have made my life so much better," said Regan, 48, a Canadian engineer who lives in London, Ontario.

The headsets from eSight transmit images from a forward-facing camera to small internal screens — one for each eye — in a way that beams the video into the wearer's peripheral vision. That turns out to be all that some people with limited vision, even legal blindness, need to see things they never could before. That's because many visual impairments degrade central vision while leaving peripheral vision largely intact.

Although eSight's glasses won't help people with total blindness, they could still be a huge deal for the millions of peoples whose vision is so impaired that it can't be corrected with ordinary lenses.

Source: Popular Mechanics

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

A mid-2016 security incident led to Apple purging its data centers of servers built by Supermicro, including returning recently purchased systems, according to a report by The Information. Malware-infected firmware was reportedly detected in an internal development environment for Apple's App Store, as well as some production servers handling queries through Apple's Siri service.

An Apple spokesperson denied there was a security incident. However, Supermicro's senior vice-president of technology, Tau Leng, told The Information that Apple had ended its relationship with Supermicro because of the compromised systems in the App Store development environment. Leng also confirmed Apple returned equipment that it had recently purchased. An anonymous source was cited as the source of the information regarding infected Siri servers.

[...] A source familiar with the case at Apple told Ars that the compromised firmware affected servers in Apple's design lab, and not active Siri servers. The firmware, according to the source, was downloaded directly from Supermicro's support site—and that firmware is still hosted there.

Source: ArsTechnica

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Thursday's watershed attack on the widely used SHA1 hashing function has claimed its first casualty: the version control system used by the WebKit browser engine, which became completely corrupted after someone uploaded two proof-of-concept PDF files that have identical message digests.

The bug resides in Apache SVN, an open source version control system that WebKit and other large software development organizations use to keep track of code submitted by individual members. Often abbreviated as SVN, Subversion uses SHA1 to track and merge duplicate files. Somehow, SVN systems can experience a severe glitch when they encounter the two PDF files published Thursday, proving that real-world collisions on SHA1 are now practical.

On Friday morning, the researchers updated their informational website to add the frequently asked question "Is SVN affected?" The answer:

"Yes - please exercise care, as SHA-1 colliding files are currently breaking SVN repositories. Subversion servers use SHA-1 for deduplication and repositories become corrupted when two colliding files are committed to the repository. This has been discovered in WebKit's Subversion repository and independently confirmed by us. Due to the corruption the Subversion server will not accept further commits."

Source: ArsTechnica

Original Submission