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charon writes:

Researchers have uncovered a rash of ongoing attacks designed to damage routers and other Internet-connected appliances so badly that they become effectively inoperable.

PDoS attack bots (short for "permanent denial-of-service") scan the Internet for Linux-based routers, bridges, or similar Internet-connected devices that require only factory-default passwords to grant remote administrator access. Once the bots find a vulnerable target, they run a series of highly debilitating commands that wipe all the files stored on the device, corrupt the device's storage, and sever its Internet connection. Given the cost and time required to repair the damage, the device is effectively destroyed, or bricked, from the perspective of the typical consumer.

Over a four-day span last month, researchers from security firm Radware detected roughly 2,250 PDoS attempts on devices they made available in a specially constructed honeypot. The attacks came from two separate botnets—dubbed BrickerBot.1 and BrickerBot.2—with nodes for the first located all around the world. BrickerBot.1 eventually went silent, but even now the more destructive BrickerBot.2 attempts a log-on to one of the Radware-operated honeypot devices roughly once every two hours. The bots brick real-world devices that have the telnet protocol enabled and are protected by default passwords, with no clear sign to the owner of what happened or why.

See also this related blog post inspired by this article.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.satnews.com/story.php?number=1047896505

The US Air Force is open to buying rides on previously flown SpaceX rockets to put military satellites into orbit, a move expected to cut launch costs for the Pentagon, the head of the Air Force Space Command said on Thursday. [...] "I would be comfortable if we were to fly on a reused booster," General John "Jay" Raymond told reporters at the USSpace Symposium in Colorado Springs. "They've proven they can do it. ... It's going to get us to lower cost."

SpaceX has so far won three launch contracts to fly military and national security satellites - business previously awarded exclusively to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. All those flights will take place on new Falcon 9 rockets.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Google has discriminated against its female employees, according to the US Department of Labor (DoL), which said it had evidence of "systemic compensation disparities".

As part of an ongoing DoL investigation, the government has collected information that suggests the internet search giant is violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women, agency officials said.

"We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce," Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday.

Reached for comment Friday afternoon, Janet Herold, regional solicitor for the DoL, said: "The investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters."

Herold added: "The government's analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry."

Google strongly denied the accusations of inequities, claiming it did not have a gender pay gap.

Source: The Guardian

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The MathJax CDN hosted at cdn.mathjax.org will be shutting down on April 30, 2017.

Background

Our CDN has been an important part of MathJax's history. When MathJax made its first public release in 2010, hosting a library like MathJax was a complex challenge. The CDN launched a year later and helped resolve this difficulty, enabling MathJax to quickly become the gold standard for rendering mathematics on the web.

Over the past 6 years, the CDN has grown steadily each year. From 22 Million monthly users and 1.3TB traffic in late 2011 to 179 Million monthly users and 70TB traffic last month. We switched CDN providers several times to improve performance and reduce costs. In the last three years we could keep up with this growth thanks to support from Google (providing free storage on Google Cloud Storage) which we combined with CloudFlare.

Recently, CloudFlare informed us that we need to upgrade our CloudFlare plan at a significantly increased rate. We greatly appreciate how CloudFlare has worked with us to find a suitable solution. Unfortunately, we do not see an affordable way to keep the CDN.

The MathJax Consortium and its team have come to the decision that our resources are best spent by focusing them on development and so we will retire our self-hosted CDN service on April 30, 2017.

We are proud of what the MathJax CDN has accomplished for mathematics on the web and we are grateful for everyone who has made use of it. We hope we can help everyone migrate to a new setup quickly and efficiently over the coming weeks.

They anticipate there will be no loss to the community and outline several alternatives.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Silicon Valley is starting to realize that the huge talent pool of nontraditional candidates may be the answer to its pipeline problem.

The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees.

IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on "new-collar jobs." The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. "We consider them based on their skills," he says, and don't take into account their educational background. This includes applicants who didn't get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. "We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps," says Ladah.

For IT roles, educational pedigree often doesn't make a huge difference. For instance, many gaming aficionados have built their own systems. With this technical grounding, they would likely have the aptitude to be a server technician or a network technician. These roles require specific technical knowledge, not necessarily an academic curriculum vitae. "We're looking for people who have a real passion for technology," says Ladah. He goes on to say that currently about 10% to 15% of IBM's new hires don't have traditional four-year degrees.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3069259/why-more-tech-companies-are-hiring-people-without-degrees

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

egp writes:

The story that describes the creation of this crowd art is almost better than the art itself.
http://sudoscript.com/reddit-place/

Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

From a single blank canvas, a couple simple rules and no plan, came this:

https://i.redd.it/5p68ukzkwdpy.gif [Ed. Note: This is a time lapse gif of the art created on r/place].

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Restorative, sedative-free slumber can ward off mental and physical ailments.

http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/05/deep-sleep-aging/

As we grow old, our nights are frequently plagued by bouts of wakefulness, bathroom trips and other nuisances as we lose our ability to generate the deep, restorative slumber we enjoyed in youth.

But does that mean older people just need less sleep?

Not according to UC Berkeley researchers, who argue in an article published April 5 in the journal Neuron that the unmet sleep needs of the elderly elevate their risk of memory loss and a wide range of mental and physical disorders.

"Nearly every disease killing us in later life has a causal link to lack of sleep," said the article's senior author, Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience. "We've done a good job of extending life span, but a poor job of extending our health span. We now see sleep, and improving sleep, as a new pathway for helping remedy that."

-- submitted from IRC

Bryce A. Mander, Joseph R. Winer, Matthew P. Walker. Sleep and Human Aging. Neuron DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.004

[Ed note. (martyb)] I've certainly noticed that I do not sleep as soundly as I used to — I rarely sleep through an entire night. On the other hand, there is a body of evidence for divided/segmented sleep. How has your sleeping fared as you have gotten older?

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

MOSCOW — If Russia once maintained at least a semblance of distance from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, it rushed to his defense after the American missile strike ordered by President Trump on Thursday. The attack cemented Moscow more closely than ever to the notorious Syrian autocrat.

Even as the United States condemned Mr. Assad for gassing his own citizens and held Russia partly responsible, given its 2013 promise to rid Syria of chemical weapons, the Kremlin kept denying that Syria had any such capability.

By championing Mr. Assad and condemning American "aggression," President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seemed to be burying the idea that he could somehow cooperate with the Trump administration to end the conflict on his terms.

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Attributed to Abraham Maslow.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/world/europe/us-attack-on-syria-cements-kremlins-embrace-of-assad.html?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Seasonality of auricular amputations in rabbits:

Abstract

This retrospective observational analysis hypothesizes that an increase occurs in online reports and images of auricular amputations of confectionary rabbits during the spring. Using the online search engine Google, online content and visual portrayals of confectionary rabbit auricular amputations from 2012 to 2017 were identified and trended against seasonal variations. To determine incidence, commercial availability of chocolate rabbits in retail facilities were assayed. A statistically significant increase in mention of rabbit auricular amputations occurred during the spring. Mapping techniques showed the annual peak incidence for 2012 to 2017 to be near Easter for each year studied. Human adults and children appear to be wholly responsible for the reports of rabbit auricular amputations. Reconstructive techniques are dependent on the percentage of auricular defect. Laryngoscope, 127:773–775, 2017

This report, available in full at the link provided above, is well worth a read.

Has RFC 1149 — A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers — finally met its match?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scott Gottlieb, President Trump's nominee to run the FDA, is a proponent of adaptive clinical trials, which would allow adjustments of trials as they are ongoing:

In 2006, Scott Gottlieb, then a deputy commissioner at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stood before an audience of clinicians and researchers to sing the praises of a new approach to drug trials. Instead of locking in a study's design from the start, researchers could build in options that would allow them to adjust along the way, based on the data they had collected. They could make the trial larger or smaller, for instance, add or remove arms, or change how incoming patients get assigned to them. Gottlieb predicted such adaptive trial designs, the topic of the conference he attended that distant summer in Washington, D.C., would "tell us more about safety and benefits of drugs, in potentially shorter time frames."

This week, as President Donald Trump's nominee to head FDA, Gottlieb sat before Republican lawmakers hungry for promises of "shorter time frames" for drug and device approvals, and again expressed his zeal—repeatedly—for adaptive trial designs. If confirmed to be FDA's head, as expected, Gottlieb suggested he'd promote wider use of the approach.

But for all their promise, many adaptive trial features still aren't commonplace. And Gottlieb will face a number of obstacles to encouraging their wider use, experts tell ScienceInsider.

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Michael Larabel over at Phoronix brings us news of a stealth Social Justice coup over at FreeDesktop.org:

X.Org, GStreamer, Wayland, LibreOffice, Mesa, VA-API, Harfbuzz, and SPICE are among the many projects hosted by FreeDesktop.org that now appear to be on a contributor covenant / code of conduct.

The Contributor Covenant for those unfamiliar with it is trying to promote a code of conduct for open-source projects that is trying to promote diversity and equality of contributors to libre software projects. From the covenant's website, "Part of this problem [of "free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations"] lies with the very structure of some projects: the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualized or culturally insensitive names."

The covenant states in part that those contributing should use welcoming and inclusive language, be respectful to others, showing empathy towards others, avoid insulting comments, and avoid inappropriate conduct. For the most part, it's basically common sense.

Now it seems this Contributor Covenant is being forced onto all FreeDesktop.org-hosted projects.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2017/04/07/smart-cephalopods-adapt-editing-genes-sacrifice-ability-evolve

Octopus, squid and cuttlefish are famous for engaging in complex behavior, from unlocking and escaping from an aquarium tank to instantaneous skin camouflage to hide from predators. A new study suggests their evolutionary path to neural sophistication includes a novel mechanism: Prolific RNA editing at the expense of evolution in their genomic DNA.

Liscovitch-Brauer, et al. (2017) Trade-off between transcriptome plasticity and genome evolution in cephalopods. Cell DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2017.03.025.

[Ed. Note: The wikipedia page on RNA editing is unclear unless you have some experience with biology. The New York Times does a better job of explaining what it is for the layman.]

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

University of Southampton (via Science Daily) (archived copy that may be more readable) reports on work published in Nature Communications (open access; doi:10.1038/ncomms14845). Scientists combined previously published data regarding atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past ~420 million years with an estimate of solar irradiance based on previous work. One of the authors told the University of Southampton:

additional coverage:
Climate Central

related story:
Scott Wagner Explains Climate Change: 'We're Moving Closer to the Sun'

related comment:
Re:Not entirely wrong by Anonymous Coward

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Lasers can be combined by harnessing the properties of an ultra-pure diamond crystal:

In a world-leading study researchers at Macquarie University have proven a method for multiplying laser power using diamond, demonstrating that a laser similar to the Star Wars 'superlaser' may no longer remain in science fiction. [...] The key to the high-powered beam is placing an ultra-pure diamond crystal at the point of convergence, and the beam-combining is achieved in diamond by harnessing a co-operative effect of the crystal that causes intense light beams to transfer their power into a selected direction while avoiding the beam distortion problems of single laser technologies.

"This discovery is technologically important as laser researchers are struggling with increasing power beyond a certain level due to the large challenges in handling the large heat build-up, and combining beams from multiple lasers is one of the most promising ways to substantially raise the power barrier," said lead experimentalist Dr Aaron McKay.

Diamond beam combining is a novel alternative to other concepts being currently trialed elsewhere in the world, and in this study, beam combining in diamond has the unique advantage that the process also changes the colour of the laser beam.

I prefer my lasers to operate at exawatt power levels.

Diamond-based concept for combining beams at very high average powers (DOI: 10.1002/lpor.201600130) (DX)

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Starting shortly before midnight Friday, emergency sirens all over the Dallas, Texas started blaring even though there was no emergency:

Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas' Office of Emergency Management, said that all 156 of the city's sirens were activated more than a dozen times.

Officials don't know who was responsible for the hacking, but Vaz said "with a good deal of confidence that this was someone outside our system" and in the Dallas area.

Deactivating the emergency alert system was the only way to stop the sirens:

The system remained shut down Saturday while crews safeguarded it from another hack. The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday — in time for thunderstorms that are expected to begin rolling through the area early next week.

[...] Dallas officials said they have begun working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to add an alert system that would send messages to all cellphones in the area when there is an emergency.

Original Submission