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charon writes:

Microsoft made a lot of changes in Windows 10 that helped it put the mistakes of Windows 8 in the rear view mirror. Not all of Microsoft's ideas are good, though. The company has shown a tendency to get a little too casual with how it promotes its services within Windows. You might even call these "ads." Microsoft would, of course, dispute that description. Some of these things that look very much like ads have started showing up in File Explorer. Specifically, Windows 10 has started nagging people to buy a subscription to OneDrive.

Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service is built into Windows 10 and tied to your Microsoft account. Everyone gets 5GB of space free, but you can pay to get as much as 1TB for a single user. That also includes an Office 365 subscription. Depending on your needs, that might be a good deal. That does not necessarily mean you want to be made aware of said deal while browsing your files.

The ad appears as a banner at the top of File Explorer, reminding you that OneDrive and Office 365 can be had for a mere $6.99 per month. You can take Microsoft up on the offer or dismiss it. It may just reappear at a later date, though. Some users reported seeing this a few months ago, but the incidence has ticked upward in the last week or so. This is not the first time Microsoft has crammed ads into the Windows UI — there are the lock screen ads disguised as backgrounds, notification ads for Edge, and a strange pop-up ad for Microsoft's personal shopping assistant in Chrome.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Reuters reports:

Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) pleaded guilty on Friday to fraud, obstruction of justice and falsifying statements as part of a $4.3 billion settlement reached with the U.S. Justice Department in January over the automaker's diesel emissions scandal.

It was the first time the company has pleaded guilty to criminal conduct in any court in the world.

[...] The September 2015 disclosure that VW intentionally cheated on emissions tests for at least six years led to the ouster of its chief executive, damaged the company's reputation around the world, and prompted massive bills.

In total, VW has agreed to spend up to $25 billion in the United States to address claims from owners, environmental regulators, states, and dealers, and offered to buy back about 500,000 polluting U.S. vehicles.

Volkswagen's general counsel Manfred Doess made the plea on its behalf after he said at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Detroit that he was authorized by the company's board of directors to enter a guilty plea.

[...] U.S. District Judge Sean Cox accepted the company's guilty plea to conspiracy to commit fraud, obstruction and entry of goods by false statement charges and set an April 21 sentencing date, where he must decide whether to approve the terms of the plea agreement.

Common Dreams reports:

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being. With a strong network of researchers, advocates, organizers, and students in state capitols across the country, we take on the special interests on issues, such as product safety, political corruption, prescription drugs, and voting rights, where these interests stand in the way of reform and progress.

Statement by Mike Litt, Consumer Program Advocate at U.S. PIRG Education Fund, on today's guilty plea by Volkswagen in its criminal court case for emission violations:

"18 months after news of Volkswagen's emission scandal broke, we're glad to see the company finally admit to criminal wrongdoing. This kind of company admission is a big deal.

Next, executives responsible for defrauding consumers and government regulators should pay with jail time. The VW scandal is one of the biggest corporate crimes in history. We need to make sure executives and their companies know that crime doesn't pay.

The story so far.

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Phoenix666 writes:

An adhesive that works under water and is modeled after those created by shellfish to stick to surfaces is stronger than many commercial glues created for the purpose.

"Our current adhesives are terrible at wet bonding, yet marine biology solved this problem eons ago," said Jonathan Wilker, a professor of chemistry and materials engineering at Purdue University. "Mussels, barnacles, and oysters attach to rocks with apparent ease. In order to develop new materials able to bind within harsh environments, we made a bio-mimetic polymer that is modeled after the adhesive proteins of mussels."

New findings showed that the bio-based glue performed better than 10 commercial adhesives when used to bond polished aluminum. When compared with the five strongest commercial glues included in the study, the new adhesive performed better when bonding wood, Teflon and polished aluminum. It was the only adhesive of those tested that worked with wood and far out-performed the other adhesives when used to join Teflon.

Findings are detailed in a research paper published online in February and in the March 1 print issue of the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Mussels extend hair-like fibers that attach to surfaces using plaques of adhesive. Proteins in the glue contain the amino acid DOPA, which harbors the chemistry needed to provide strength and adhesion. Purdue researchers have now inserted this chemistry of mussel proteins into a biomimetic polymer called poly(catechol-styrene), creating an adhesive by harnessing the chemistry of compounds called catechols, which are contained in DOPA.

Michael A. North et al. High Strength Underwater Bonding with Polymer Mimics of Mussel Adhesive Proteins, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b00270

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"exec" writes:

A 2015 Arkansas murder case that had raised privacy questions surrounding "always-on" electronic home devices took a step forward last week after Amazon agreed to release recordings from the murder defendant's Amazon Echo as possible evidence.

The Seattle-based e-commerce company had refused to comply with police warrants requesting the data in December and sought to quash a search warrant in February, court records showed. Although the company would not comment on this specific case, an Amazon spokeswoman told The Washington Post in December that it objected to "overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course."

That changed after the defendant, James Andrew Bates, agreed Friday to allow Amazon to release data from his Echo device to prosecutors. The company turned over the recordings later that day, according to court records.

"Because Mr. Bates is innocent of all charges in this matter, he has agreed to the release of any recordings on his Amazon Echo device to the prosecution," attorneys Kathleen Zellner and Douglas Johnson said in a statement to The Washington Post.

-- submitted from IRC

Previously: Police Seek Amazon Echo Data in Murder Case and Amazon Continues to Resist Requests for "Alexa" Audio Evidence in Arkansas Murder Case

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"exec" writes:

Physicists demonstrate the first single-atom magnetic storage.

Current commercial bits comprise around 1 million atoms. But in experiments physicists have radically shrunk the number of atoms needed to store 1 bit — moving from 12 atoms in 2012 to now just one. Natterer and his team used atoms of holmium, a rare-earth metal, sitting on a sheet of magnesium oxide, at a temperature below 5 kelvin.

Holmium is particularly suitable for single-atom storage because it has many unpaired electrons that create a strong magnetic field, and they sit in an orbit close to the atom's centre where they are shielded from the environment. This gives holmium both a large and stable field, says Natterer. But the shielding has a drawback: it makes the holmium notoriously difficult to interact with. And until now, many physicists doubted whether it was possible to reliably determine the atom's state.

To write the data onto a single holmium atom, the team used a pulse of electric current from the magnetized tip of scanning tunnelling microscope, which could flip the orientation of the atom's field between a 0 or 1. In tests the magnets proved stable, each retaining their data for several hours, with the team never seeing one flip unintentionally. They used the same microscope to read out the bit — with different flows of current revealing the atom's magnetic state.

-- submitted from IRC

[Ed's note: removed the reference/footnote that was mangling the year - FP]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/marines-syria-170309014847784.html

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Bruce Schneier has published an article on self-defense against doxing:

Doxing isn't new, but it has become more common. It's been perpetrated against corporations, law firms, individuals, the NSA and -- just this week -- the CIA. It's largely harassment and not whistleblowing, and it's not going to change anytime soon. The data in your computer and in the cloud are, and will continue to be, vulnerable to hacking and publishing online. Depending on your prominence and the details of this data, you may need some new strategies to secure your private life.

There are two basic ways hackers can get at your e-mail and private documents. One way is to guess your password. That's how hackers got their hands on personal photos of celebrities from iCloud in 2014.

How to protect yourself from this attack is pretty obvious. First, don't choose a guessable password. This is more than not using "password1" or "qwerty"; most easily memorizable passwords are guessable. My advice is to generate passwords you have to remember by using either the XKCD scheme or the Schneier scheme, and to use large random passwords stored in a password manager for everything else.

Second, turn on two-factor authentication where you can, like Google's 2-Step Verification. This adds another step besides just entering a password, such as having to type in a one-time code that's sent to your mobile phone. And third, don't reuse the same password on any sites you actually care about.

You're not done, though. Hackers have accessed accounts by exploiting the "secret question" feature and resetting the password. That was how Sarah Palin's e-mail account was hacked in 2008. The problem with secret questions is that they're not very secret and not very random. My advice is to refuse to use those features. Type randomness into your keyboard, or choose a really random answer and store it in your password manager.

Finally, you also have to stay alert to phishing attacks, where a hacker sends you an enticing e-mail with a link that sends you to a web page that looks almost like the expected page, but which actually isn't. This sort of thing can bypass two-factor authentication, and is almost certainly what tricked John Podesta and Colin Powell.

Most of it is old-hat or even second-nature for many Soylentils, but it's a readable article that could be shared with more non-technical friends and family members.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers at MIT have now devised tiny "microlenses" from complex liquid droplets comparable in size to the width of a human hair. They report the advance this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Each droplet consists of an emulsion, or combination of two liquids, one encapsulated in the other, similar to a bead of oil within a drop of water. Even in their simple form, these droplets can magnify and produce images of surrounding objects. But now the researchers can also reconfigure the properties of each droplet to adjust the way they filter and scatter light, similar to adjusting the focus on a microscope.

The scientists used a combination of chemistry and light to precisely shape the curvature of the interface between the internal bead and the surrounding droplet. This interface acts as a kind of internal lens, comparable to the compounded lens elements in microscopes.

"We have shown fluids are very versatile optically," says Mathias Kolle, the Brit and Alex d'Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "We can create complex geometries that form lenses, and these lenses can be tuned optically. When you have a tunable microlens, you can dream up all sorts of applications."

For instance, Kolle says, tunable microlenses might be used as liquid pixels in a three-dimensional display, directing light to precisely determined angles and projecting images that change depending on the angle from which they are observed. He also envisions pocket-sized microscopes that could take a sample of blood and pass it over an array of tiny droplets. The droplets would capture images from varying perspectives that could be used to recover a three-dimensional image of individual blood cells.

More information:
Sara Nagelberg et al. Reconfigurable and responsive droplet-based compound micro-lenses, Nature Communications (2017). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14673

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-scientists-microscopes-droplets.html

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Sounds plausible. Banks do use technology for their activities:

Technology is now at the "root" of all serious criminality, says Europe's police agency. The returns generated by document fraud, money laundering and online trade in illegal goods helps to pay for other damaging crimes, said Europol. The wider use of technology by criminal gangs poses the "greatest challenge" to police forces, it said in a study[PDF]. It revealed that Europol is currently tracking 5,000 separate international organised crime groups.

[...] The "comprehensive" study of organised crime in Europe found a wide range of crime groups ranging from loose networks of individual criminals up to large trans-national bodies that generate profits which rival those of legitimate multi-national corporations.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Since their discovery ten years ago, fast radio bursts have confounded astronomers. These intergalactic pulses of radio energy have defied explanation, but a new theory suggests a technological origin, whereby aliens use these beams to propel their ships through space. Extremely speculative stuff, to be sure, but it's an idea worth pursuing given just how weird these pulses are.

The idea that Fast Radio Bursts are produced by advanced alien civilizations in order to drive spacecraft through interstellar space sounds like something a UFO conspiracy site might cook up—but it's actually the serious suggestion of a new paper published by Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Of course, much more evidence is needed before we can attribute this unexplained phenomenon to artificial sources versus a natural astrophysical process.

With no good theory to go by, Loeb and Lingam wondered if extraterrestrials might be involved—and not without good reason. In a word, FRBs are weird. Like really weird.

http://gizmodo.com/wild-new-theory-suggests-radio-bursts-beyond-our-galaxy-1793130515

Additional coverage at ScienceBlog.com and Phys.org

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Journal Abstract: Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

Leashes Come Off Wall Street, Gun Sellers, Polluters and More

WASHINGTON — Giants in telecommunications, like Verizon and AT&T, will not have to take "reasonable measures" to ensure that their customers' Social Security numbers, web browsing history and other personal information are not stolen or accidentally released.

Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase will not be punished, at least for now, for not collecting extra money from customers to cover potential losses from certain kinds of high-risk trades that helped unleash the 2008 financial crisis.

And Social Security Administration data will no longer be used to try to block individuals with disabling mental health issues from buying handguns, nor will hunters be banned from using lead-based bullets, which can accidentally poison wildlife, on 150 million acres of federal lands.

These are just a few of the more than 90 regulations that federal agencies and the Republican-controlled Congress have delayed, suspended or reversed in the month and a half since President Trump took office, according to a tally by The New York Times.

The emerging effort — dozens more rules could be eliminated in the coming weeks — is one of the most significant shifts in regulatory policy in recent decades. It is the leading edge of what Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump's chief strategist, described late last month as "the deconstruction of the administrative state."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/politics/trump-deregulation-guns-wall-st-climate.html

In the submitter's opinion - some of these rollbacks are mistakes. Others, though, should never have been passed. For instance, the Social Security Administration being drafted into notifying law enforcement agencies of HIPAA protected information. The MPG requirements on American auto makers? The fuel efficient cars are available, but no one wants them. Left and right alike, buyers demand the gas guzzlers. Banking regulations, though, should stay in place. Trump should know that the bankers won't regulate themselves. FFS, he saw the same meltdown that we all saw in 2008!

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

BBC News reports that Indiegogo has blocked further donations to the crowd-funding campaign for the Spectrum ZX Vega+. The project, which according to the article is "backed by Sir Clive Sinclair," had received £513,000—more than its funding target—but shipments had not begun in spite of a promise to "ship after 20 Feb 2017."

The Spectrum ZX Vega+, backed by Sir Clive Sinclair, had achieved its original crowdfunding target. But then Indiegogo halted further fundraising because of delivery delays and a lack of communication to backers. The project's organisers had asked the BBC not to reveal the development.

The BBC understands no consoles have been delivered to backers, despite a pledge last month that they would "ship after 20 Feb 2017". And the company behind the project - Retro Computers Limited - suggested these details might put its team at risk.

"Following a credible threat of violence against personnel of Retro Computers Limited, including threats made as recently as last night, we asked [technology desk editor] Leo Kelion and the BBC to refrain from publishing a story we believe to be factually inaccurate and might put people at risk of physical harm, alarm and distress," Retro Computers Limited founder David Levy said in a statement on Wednesday. "Since December 2016 the BBC have formally been on notice that this is a police matter, and we ask that the BBC and Mr Kelion do not compromise the police investigation."

The BBC delayed publication of this report to give RCL managing director Suzanne Martin time to provide evidence of the threats, but she did not do so

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Data used for analysis covers the years from 1965 to 2000.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/3/e1601895.full

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Microsoft will close So.cl, its very low-key social network, on March 15.

Microsoft soft-launched So.cl to students only in May 2012 and billed it as an "experiment in social search" because posts always started with a Bing search. The service was made available to anyone in December 2012 and then ... crickets.

The service has scarcely been heard of since and if Microsoft has ever revealed user numbers, it appears to have done so in private. Statistics-selling service Statista doesn't include So.Cl on its list of the 22 most-used social networks, so it seems safe to assume that So.cl had fewer than 49 million users, the figure attached to messaging called Kakaotalk. Probably orders of magnitude fewer.

So.cl's death notice offers no explanation for its closure, but does say that running the network taught Microsoft "... invaluable lessons in what it takes to establish and maintain community as well as introduce novel new ways to make, share and collect digital stuff we love."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TAILS, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is a privacy-centric Linux distro based on Debian.

Softpedia reports

Tails 2.11 [will] be the last [version] to ship with the I2P anonymizing network software. I2P 0.9.25 is included in Tails 2.11, and it's already a very old version. The decision was made because the Tails team don't have the time to maintain I2P in their distribution.

[...] Two new features have been added in today's Tails 2.11 release, namely a notification to inform users that the upcoming Tails 3.0 Live CD won't start on a very old computer with a 32-bit processor, as well as another notification which will warn you that the I2P software will be removed in the next version, Tails 2.12.

Tails 2.11 also comes with the Tor Browser 6.5.1 anonymous web browser, and includes a bunch of security fixes for the infamous local root privilege escalation (CVE-2017-6074) by disabling the dccp module. Additionally, Linux kernel 4.8.15 was installed to prevent the GNOME desktop environment from freezing on Intel GM965/GL960 GPUs.

[It also] addresses an issue with the Tor Browser that did not display the offline warning when attempting to open the local documentation of Tails, as well as a rare problem that caused automatic upgrades to be applied incorrectly.

Previous: TAILS 3.0 Will Require a 64-Bit Processor

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

For the first time in more than six years, both chambers of Congress passed a bill that approves funding for NASA and gives the space agency new mandates [Ed: Link not AdBlock friendly].

The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 is a bill that the Senate and House collaborated on for months, and it appropriates $19.5 billion to the agency. (NASA received $19.3 billion in 2016, or 0.5% of the total federal budget.)

When the Senate brought the bill before the House of Representatives for a vote on March 7, "no members spoke against the bill" and it passed, according to Jeff Foust at Space News.

The document asks NASA to create a roadmap for getting humans "near or on the surface of Mars in the 2030s." It also calls on the space agency to continue developing the Space Launch System (SLS) — a behemoth rocket — and the Orion space capsule in order to eventually go to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

It also cancels a mission to capture an asteroid, and calls on the space agency to search for aliens.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission