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takyon writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/24/15867350/microsoft-windows-10-source-code-leak

A portion of Microsoft's Windows 10 source code has leaked online this week. Files related to Microsoft's USB, storage, and Wi-Fi drivers in Windows 10 were posted to Beta Archive this week. Beta Archive is an enthusiast site that tracks Windows releases, and asks members to donate money or contribute something Windows-related after accessing a private FTP full of archived Windows builds. The leaked code was published to Beta Archive's FTP, and is part of Microsoft's Shared Source Kit.

"Our review confirms that these files are actually a portion of the source code from the Shared Source Initiative and is used by OEMs and partners," reveals a Microsoft spokesperson in an email to The Verge. While The Register claims 32TB of data, including unreleased Windows builds, has been leaked, The Verge understands most of the collection has been available for months, or even years. The Register also claims the source code leak is bigger than the Windows 2000 leak from 2004, but The Verge understands this is inaccurate and that the Windows 10 source code leak is relatively minor.

[...] The source code leak comes just a day after two men were arrested in the UK as part of an investigation into unauthorized access to Microsoft's network. Detectives executed warrants to arrest a 22-year-old man from Lincolnshire, and a 25-year-old man from Bracknell. The Verge understands both men have been involved in collecting confidential Windows 10 builds, and that at least one is a donator to the Beta Archive site. A spokesperson for Thames Valley police refused to provide more information on the arrests to The Verge, and would not confirm the two identities of the individuals.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

M.C. Straver, the lead developer of the Pale Moon web browser, has created a fork of the Mozilla Code Repository as a starting point for further development.

The developers of Pale Moon, a browser based on Firefox code, had to find a way to deal with the changes that Mozilla planned to make to the core of the Firefox web browser in 2017.

Mozilla plans to cut the classic add-on system from Firefox when Firefox 57 hits for instance, and remove XUL and XPCOM components from the browser in the process.

The team decided that it would continue development of the classic Pale Moon browser; what this means for users is that Pale Moon will continue to work like before, but won't follow Mozilla down the path.

The decision was made to fork Mozilla's code repository, so that it could become a potential base for Pale Moon in the future. It is not a given at this point that Pale Moon will use UXP in the future.

I'm inclined to agree lately, fork a bunch of Mozilla.

Source: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/06/21/mozilla-fork-unified-xul-platform/

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Phoenix666 writes:

Battery flat on your radio? Don’t sweat it. Or maybe that’s exactly what you should do. Sweat alone has been used to power a radio for two days, demonstrating the capability of a new skin patch.

The patch is a flexible square just a couple of centimetres across that sticks to skin. It contains enzymes that replace the precious metals normally used in batteries and feed off sweat to provide power. Getting enough power out of a biofuel cell to make it useful has proved tricky, but the latest version can extract 10 times more than before.

“We’re now getting really impressive power levels. If you were out for a run, you would be able to power a mobile device,” says Joseph Wang at the University of California, San Diego, who was in the team that worked on the technology.

The creators hope the approach can be used to power wearable health sensors.

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takyon writes:

Artisanal coffee, anyone?

Cold brew was still a relatively niche market until 2015, when Starbucks introduced the drink in a number of stores; it is now available at every one of its more than 13,000 locations in the United States, 800 of which also offer nitro. It's a coffee with both mass-market appeal and indie credibility. Today, you can find cold brew at a coffee shop where everything is meticulously crafted by hand, and at a Dunkin' Donuts.

The drink's range is expanding even more rapidly when you count canned, bottled and packaged coffees, called "ready to drink" within the industry. You can get that New Orleans-style iced coffee in a school-lunch-size milk carton, or that nitro cold brew in what looks like a beer can. Ready-to-drink, which has long been available in Whole Foods and other upscale markets, is now appearing everywhere. As of last month, you could find bottles of Slingshot Coffee, made by a small-batch company in Raleigh, N.C., at nearly 250 Target stores in the South.

What is cold brew? Essentially, it is a preparation. You steep coffee grounds in room-temperature water (which isn't "cold," strictly speaking) for six to 20 hours (depending on the recipe) to make a concentrate that can be diluted with water and served over ice. By giving up heat, you have to add time.

Cold brew is more than a slowed-down version of hot coffee; it's a noticeably different product. Hot water will bring out the acids in coffee, a characteristic that professional tasters call "brightness." Cold water doesn't but still gets the full range of mouthfeel and sweetness. The absence of acidity in cold brew is even more pronounced when compared with the iced coffee from the dark ages (of a few years ago), when it was almost always made with hot coffee that was chilled in the refrigerator. When hot coffee cools, even more acids develop, many of them unpleasantly harsh.

Cold brew coffee, and nitro.

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Phoenix666 writes:

It's one of the most enduring mysteries of our time: what happened to pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 as she attempted to fly around the world?

Four border collies named Berkeley, Piper, Marcy, and Kayle may have answers. On Wednesday, National Geographic reported that an expedition organized by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) will set sail from Fiji on Saturday, June 24, with the specially trained forensic dogs from the Institute for Canine Forensics along for the ride.

The mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart may be as close as it’s ever been to being solved https://t.co/Kqa1bGdu1c

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) June 21, 2017

The group's Earhart Project has spent decades testing the hypothesis that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan landed safely on Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro, about 400 miles (640 kilometers) southeast of their intended landing spot, Howland Island. According to the project's website, the group believes Earhart and Noonan survived on the island for a time as castaways, catching and cooking small fish, seabirds, turtles and clams.

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McGruber writes:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that Albert DeMagnus, the 74-year old founder and CEO of Computer Management Services, Inc. was stabbed to death during a home invasion.

When Deputies responded to the home at approximately 2:30 a.m., they found DeMangus with a stab wound. He was taken to Piedmont Fayette Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The homeowner’s wife told authorities three men demanded cash and jewelry before taking the victim’s gray Lexus and leaving the scene. That’s when she called 911.

Deputies spotted the Lexus near the scene of the home invasion, Babb said. The stolen car crashed in the area of Jimmie Mayfield Boulevard and Bradley Drive and two men ran, he said. Deputies and Fayetteville police officers found located both men.

Jeffrey Lee Wallace, 22, of Atlanta, and Kavion Wyzeenski Tookes, 21, of Decatur, were both arrested and being held Friday night at the Fayette County jail.

One suspect remains at large.

DeMagnus' firm, Computer Management Services, Inc. (CMS) is an Information Technology (IT) augmentation firm that provides IT services to Fortune 500 Companies, the Federal Government, and State and Local Agencies.

ARTICLE: http://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/year-old-ceo-stabbed-death-during-home-invasion/LYI93lCxKasTsT1cncg3zL/

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Phoenix666 writes:

Manufacturers say they are making rapid progress in the development of Europe's new rocket - the Ariane 6.

The vehicle is due to enter service in 2020, gradually replacing the existing workhorse, the Ariane 5.

The prime contractor, the recently rebranded ArianeGroup, gave an update on the status of the programme here at this week's Paris Air Show.

"We're on track with our roadmap and Ariane 6 is progressing very well," CEO Alain Charmeau told BBC News.

"Perhaps the most spectacular highlight at the moment is the testing of our Vinci engine. It's a brand new engine that will be on our new, versatile upper-stage. And on Monday we had another successful test. We're now well above 100 hundred tests."

The Vinci can be stopped and restarted multiple times. It will permit the Ariane 6 to conduct a broader range of missions than its predecessor.

It can also bring the upper-stage out of orbit after it has dropped off the satellite payload. This is a nod to the tightening "clean space" requirements that demand rocket operators leave as little debris in space as possible.

Also mentioned were the A62 and A64 variants which feature a central, liquid-fueled (hydrogen and oxygen) core combined with either 2 or 4 solid-fueled boosters.

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takyon writes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Google plans to abandon its longstanding practice of scanning user email in its Gmail service to serve targeted advertising.

Google said it does not scan the email of paying corporate customers of its G Suite of services, but it made the policy change — announced in a company blog post on Friday — on its free consumer version to eliminate confusion and create one uniform policy toward Gmail.

As it builds its Google Cloud business for selling internet infrastructure and services to corporate customers, Google is trying to ease concerns that it will use data from corporate customers to help its mainstay advertising business.

Google said it plans to carry out the changes to the Gmail ad policy "later this year." It will continue to scan Gmail to screen for potential spam or phishing attacks as well as offering suggestions for automated replies to email.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Electric and hybrid electric vehicles are in the fast lane to wider adoption, according to a new study by University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers analyzed the present status of electric vehicles in the U.S., their life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, and progress toward lifting barriers to broader acceptance. The study is a literature and technical review that synthesizes and analyzes recent findings from many sources.

"We feel that within the next decade, electric vehicles are positioned to be more suitable for most drivers to use on a daily basis," said Brandon Schoettle, project manager at the U-M Transportation Research Institute. "That's due to recent improvements such as longer driving ranges, faster recharging times and lower vehicle prices."

[...] Schoettle and colleague Michael Sivak, a research professor at UMTRI, found that sales of plug-in electric vehicles in the U.S. have increased by more than 700 percent since 2011.

[...] Other key findings include:

• Availability: The number of individual electric vehicle models that consumers can choose from has increased rapidly, nearly doubling from 13 in model year 2016 to 23 in 2017. Recent price trends make plug-in hybrid vehicles more affordable and more similar in price to the average internal combustion engine vehicle.
• Charging infrastructure: The number of public charging stations has grown rapidly since 2010, with approximately 16,000 now available across the U.S., supplying approximately 35,000 individual connections (for comparison, there are roughly 112,000 gas stations).
• Driving range: The driving distance between charges of battery electric vehicles continues to improve. The range of all electric vehicles has increased to an average of 110 miles. Several studies the researchers cite estimate that a range of 120 miles can cover 99 percent of household vehicle trips.
• Fuel prices Compared to gasoline, electricity prices have been low and stable over the past decade or more, and they're projected to remain that way over the next several decades.

Getting Americans to give up their cars for public transportation may be a tough sell, but if the study is right getting them to switch to electric cars won't be.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Pacifica Radio's KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley, California, the first publicly-funded radio station in the USA (1949), will broadcast and stream George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on Tuesday, June 27 from 6AM until 9PM PT (but will not have any actual content until 12:01AM Tuesday.)

The classic cover-to-cover reading [recorded in 1975] is by [longtime KPFA morning host and] blacklisted writer Charles Morgan and legendary voiceover artist June Foray [Rocket J. Squirrel, Natasha Fatale, Nell Fenwick; Stan Freberg collaborator].

[...] KPFA is also heard on KPFB 89.3 FM in Berkeley, KFCF [...] 88.1 FM in Fresno, and 97.5 FM K248BR in Santa Cruz.

It will also be broadcast simultaneously on Pacifica stations WBAI in New York and WPFW in Washington DC (9AM ET to Midnight), KPFT in Houston, and KPFK in Los Angeles, as well as many Pacifica affiliates. (Another streaming link on that page.)

For those who are impatient or otherwise-occupied on that day, the 13 one-hour segments of the audiobook (not 10 installments, as some sources indicate) are available as CDs. Caveat: $18 each.

This is one of many offerings of the Pacifica Radio Archives, sometimes known as From the Vaults. The project is transferring decades of programming recorded on reel-to-reel tape to digital format before those available-nowhere-else recordings degrade to nothingness. The project is funded by sales of CDs of their efforts and a yearly 1-day network-wide drive.

A source says they also have this on 13 pages at Soundcloud (Javascript required). That source also notes that the "audiobook" undersells the dramatic audio presentation a bit.

Depending on how ridiculous the length of copyright is where you are, you may also be able to legally download the text of the novel, gratis.

The University of Adelaide has a very nice HTML presentation, chapter-by-chapter. (My favorite chapter is Part Two, Chapter IX, where Emmanuel Goldstein's "The Book" describes the purpose of perpetual war (Oligarchy; Fascism). Scroll down to "Chapter III" for the good stuff. This is in Part 8 of Pacifica's recordings.)

Project Gutenberg, Canada will give you the whole book in one gulp (HTML format; 597kB).

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In the wake of the attack on the FCC privacy rules, more than a dozen states have rushed to enact new privacy protections for consumers, requiring that ISPs are very clear about what data they're collecting and who they're selling it to. And in the wake of federal apathy to consumer complaints about some of the worst customer service in any industry, individual states have also started pushing back, as evidenced by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's lawsuit against Charter Communications for advertising speeds company execs knew they couldn't deliver.

Ironically, cable lobbyists (and the politicians, sock puppets, think tankers and policy wonks paid to love them) have quickly rushed to defend "states' rights!" when it comes to giant ISPs' ability to write protectionist state laws that hamper broadband competition. But now that several states are actually passing legislation that might help consumers, the broadband industry and current FCC have launched a concerted effort to keep states from meddling in their attempts to build utterly-unaccountable media, advertising, broadband and television conglomerates.

Case in point: the FCC is already making noise about their plans to somehow prevent states from passing consumer broadband privacy laws. And last week, cable industry lobbyists began petitioning the FCC in the hopes of making it much more difficult for states to investigate claims of substandard broadband service and speeds, allowing them to hide behind the "up to" marketing language most of us are familiar with[.]

[...] Again, deregulation can help competitive markets thrive. But the telecom sector, as we've long illustrated, is neither competitive nor that simple. In fact, earlier efforts to blindly deregulate an uncompetitive, utterly-dysfunctional, taxpayer-subsidized broadband industry is the precise reason most of you are currently stuck on hold with Comcast in the first place.

Source: TechDirt

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Phoenix666 writes:

Could an effort to gather genetic data from its population of one billion people help India take the lead in advanced healthcare?

India is the land of inventors and industry, spices and spirituality - and 1.3 billion human genomes. But although the subcontinent contributes around 20% of the world's population, the DNA sequences of its people make up around 0.2% of global genetic databases.

In a similar vein, 81% of the world's genomic information has been collected from people with European ancestry. Still, this is an improvement from a staggering 96% back in 2009.

At the same time, there's a growing interest in developing new, more effective therapies tailored to an individual's genetic makeup - an idea known as precision or personalised medicine.

Missing out on mapping worldwide genetic diversity is a big mistake, according to Sumit Jamuar, chief executive of Global Gene Corp.

It's a company aiming to democratise healthcare by capturing anonymised genetic data from populations around the world and share it with the global community of academic and pharmaceutical industry researchers. It will start by focusing on populations in South Asia.

Khan Noonien Singh's name was scrupulously scrubbed from the proposal.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

The inability to remember has long been considered a failure of the brain, but a new study has found that our brains are actively working to forget memories in order to retain the truly important information.

In fact, the study’s researchers believe the brain is not designed to keep memories intact, but its actual purpose is to only hold onto valuable information to optimize intelligent decision making overtime.

"It's important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that's going to help make decisions in the real world," says Blake Richards, author of the study and associate fellow in the Learning in Machines and Brains program.

The new University of Toronto paper was published Wednesday in the Neuron journal. Paul Frankland, a senior fellow at CIFAR's Child & Brain Development program, who was also involved in the study, says,"We find plenty of evidence from recent research that there are mechanisms that promote memory loss, and that these are distinct from those involved in storing information."

Source: RT

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Three popular Chinese online video services have been temporarily shut down. They will likely reappear with "beefed-up oversight":

Beijing has shut down online video services of three popular Chinese media sites in a swift action that unleashed financial shockwaves and posed a firm warning to the country's online video industry: clean up, or close down.

China's internet shares tumbled after news of the unusually harsh clamp down spread, with Weibo Corp's down 6.1 percent, while SINA Corp, which has a stake in Weibo, fell 4.8 percent. That amounted to a combined $1.3 billion knock to the market value of both companies.

The Twitter-like service Sina Weibo, popular online video site ACFUN and news portal iFeng.com will have to stop video streaming services that violate the country's regulations, the TV and film watchdog said on Thursday.

"This will provide a clean and clear Internet space for the wide number of online users," the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television said in a brief statement on its website.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Cosmetic procedures are of increasing interest to millennial men, a new industry report found.

Thirty one percent of men said they were extremely likely to consider a cosmetic procedure, either surgical or noninvasive, according to a survey conducted by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Among that 31 percent, 58 percent were from 25 to 34 years old and 34 percent were aged 18 to 24 years. Both age ranges are members of the millennial generation.

The top reason cited by respondents pursuing cosmetic procedures to appear younger was wanting to feel better about themselves, followed by the desire to appear less tired or stressed, and then to please their partners. In the 25- to 34-year-old range, 42 percent cited wanting to remain competitive in their career as a reason to go under the knife.

The most common procedures for men are rhinoplasty (nose jobs), otoplasty (pinning back the ears), and treatment for gynecomastia (a surgery that reduces male breast size), according to Clyde H. Ishii, a surgeon and president of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

Part of the reason young men are increasingly interested in cosmetic procedures derives from social media, said Dr. Fred G. Fedok, president of the academy that conducted the survey. "People are more aware of their looks from different angles," he said. A growing interest in health and self-care also plays a part. "It's sort of like exercise," Fedok said about cosmetic procedures.

Apparently man boobs have gone out of fashion.

Original Submission