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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion and incitement to racism.

Most of the raids concerned politically motivated right-wing incitement, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office, whose officers conducted home searches and interrogations. But the raids also targeted two people accused of left-wing extremist content, as well as one person accused of making threats or harassment based on someone's sexual orientation.

"The still high incidence of punishable hate posting shows a need for police action," Holger Münch, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, said in a statement. "Our free society must not allow a climate of fear, threat, criminal violence and violence either on the street or on the internet."

The raids come as Germans are debating the draft of a new social media law aimed at cracking down on hate speech, a measure that an array of experts said was unconstitutional at a parliamentary hearing on Monday.

The measure, championed by Justice Minister Heiko Maas for passage this month, would fine Facebook, Twitter and other outlets up to $53 million (50 million euros) if they failed to remove hate speech and other forms of illegal content.

The left ladies and gentlemen.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-accused-of-hateful-postings-over-social-media.html

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Anonymous Coward writes:

Roy Schestowitz at Techrights has summarized the situation at the European Patent Office (EPO) with a Primer on the Crises and Scandals. Spying on staff, filtering staff web access, and union busting are just a sample of the shenanigans by top EPO management. And of course one chronic tale of woe includes the continued attempts by a few within the organization to introduce software patents into Europe. Software patents are a solid threat to all who use software for personal or, especially, business ends. As they fade from North America, vigilance is needed in Europe.

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[Update #2 @ 2300 UTC: Corrected name of landing barge; Successful deployment of 10 @IridiumComm NEXT satellites to low-Earth orbit confirmed. .]

[Update #1 @ 2045 UTC: Launch was successful, first stage safely landed on the barge Of Course I Still Love You Just Read the Instructions, and the second stage is in a coasting orbit before commencing satellite deployment.]

martyb writes:

Just three months ago — March 30, 2017 — SpaceX celebrated achieving the World's First Reflight of an Orbital Class Rocket. Just this past Friday, SpaceX repeated with a successful launch and recovery of its previously-flown, Falcon-9 first stage booster rocket with its BulgariaSat 1 mission. If you missed the launch, it is available on YouTube.

SpaceX is, however, not one to rest on its laurels and has scheduled a launch for today with an instantaneous launch window exactly two hours from now at 2025 UTC... and it will sport an upgraded set of grid fins which help steer the rocket during its re-entry.

According to Ars Technica:

During prior missions these grid fins, manufactured from aluminum with added thermal protection, have caught fire due to atmospheric heating. To address this problem the company has forged new grid fins from titanium. "Flying with larger & significantly upgraded hypersonic grid fins," Musk tweeted. "Single piece cast & cut titanium. Can take reentry heat with no shielding." The new fins are a bit heavier, but are designed for multiple re-uses as SpaceX seeks to more toward rapid reuse of its first stage booster.

Ars has a photo of grid fins (not extended) on a used Falcon 9 rocket which show the effects of atmospheric heating. Compare that picture to those on an unlaunched rocket.

Today's launch details:

June 25 - Falcon 9 • Iridium Next 11-20
Launch time: 2025 GMT (4:25 p.m. EDT; 1:25 p.m. PDT)
Launch site: SLC-4E, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch 10 satellites for the Iridium next mobile communications fleet. Delayed from October, December and April. Moved forward from June 29.

Today's launch can be viewed on SpaceX's webcast.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The European Space Agency has just given the green light to the LISA mission to detect gravitational waves.

This will see lasers bounced between three identical satellites separated by 2.5 million km.

By looking for tiny perturbations in these light beams, the trio hope to catch the warping of space-time that is generated by cataclysmic events such as the merger of gargantuan black holes.

Ground-based laboratories in the US have recently begun detecting gravitational waves from coalescing objects that are 20-30 times the mass of our Sun.

But by sending an observatory into space, scientists would expect to discover sources that are millions of times bigger still, and to sense their activity all the way out to the edge of the observable Universe.

It should immeasurably advance our understanding of gravity and how it works; and perhaps even highlight some chinks in Einstein's so-far flawless equations.

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twistedcubic writes:

Lenovo connoisseur David Hill recently blogged about the upcoming release of the much anticipated retro Thinkpad (Retro ThinkPad: It's Alive). Details are scant, but he hints at a "keyboard to die for" which sounds promising, and notes that it definitely won't cost $5000 (whew!).

I'm sure many people have seen the recent leaks related to the Retro ThinkPad initiative I started nearly 2 years ago. There's talk about display aspect ratio, resolution, keyboard, pricing and much more. Adding fuel to the rumor fire, the Lenovo commercial segment executive leader, Christian Teismann, even gave it a brief mention at the recent Lenovo Transform event in New York City. (Read the original blog that got the ball rolling here.) The social media response to the concept was staggering.

[...] At this point, it seems like the cat's out of the bag. There are certain things I can now confirm. Yes, Lenovo will be making a special edition ThinkPad as part of the 25th anniversary celebration. It's aimed at enthusiasts and superfans that were kind enough to share their thoughts about what the laptop might be. As with any new product we develop, there are always technical and cost limitations but I think where we landed is quite impressive. The product will embody many of the things people asked for.

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takyon writes:

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/cramer-bitcoin-ethereum-craze-boosts-nvidia-and-amd-but-it-shouldnt-be.html

There are many reasons for investors to buy chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, but the recent rush for an indirect way to play skyrocketing cryptocurrencies bitcoin and ethereum should not be one of them, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Friday. "One of the reasons why AMD and Nvidia have been going up is their chips are used for mining, for cryptocurrency mining," Cramer told "Squawk on the Street." But he warned, "Do not play it for this is what I'm saying. But it is being played for that." [...] Cramer cited a recent note from RBC Capital Markets, which said the growing cryptocurrency mining market has contributed $100 million worth of GPU sales for Nvidia in the past 11 days alone. "AMD chips are the best ones for the ethereum platform," he added.

mrpg writes:

Nature reports:

One of the world's largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgement on 21 June against websites that provide illicit access to tens of millions of research papers and books. A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) project and related sites.

Judge Robert Sweet had ruled in October 2015 that the sites violate US copyright. The court issued a preliminary injunction against the sites' operators, who nevertheless continued to provide unauthorized free access to paywalled content. Alexandra Elbakyan, a former neuroscientist who started Sci-Hub in 2011, operates the site out of Russia, using varying domain names and IP addresses.

In May, Elsevier gave the court a list of 100 articles illicitly made available by Sci-Hub and LibGen, and asked for a permanent injunction and damages totalling $15 million. The Dutch publishing giant holds the copyrights for the largest share of the roughly 28 million papers downloaded from Sci-Hub over 6 months in 2016, followed by Springer Nature and Wiley-Blackwell. (Nature is published by Springer Nature, and Nature's news and comment team is editorially independent of the publisher.) According to a recent analysis, almost 50% of articles requested from Sci-Hub are published by these three companies¹.

Previously: Elsevier Wants $15 Million Piracy Damages from Sci-Hub and Libgen

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takyon writes:

The European Space Agency has approved PLATO, an exoplanet observing mission:

A mission to discover and characterise Earth-sized planets and super-Earths orbiting Sun-like stars in the habitable zone of the solar system – scientifically led by the University of Warwick - has been given the go-ahead today by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) will be launched into the 'L2' virtual point in space - 1.5 million km beyond Earth, as seen from the Sun – and will monitor thousands of bright stars over a large area of the sky.

PLATO will use 26 telescopes mounted on a single spacecraft to observe from 300,000 to one million stars. The launch date has been moved from 2024 to 2026.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will launch in March 2018. ESA's CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite (CHEOPS) is expected to launch in late 2018. These missions will help to find exoplanets suitable for study by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2019+.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Commuting is tough enough on a normal workday without the added hassle of a flooded tunnel on your way to or from work. With that in mind, how do subway systems around the world deal with this natural threat?

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has a solution in the form of a giant inflatable plug that will seal off subway tunnels and stop water from flowing throughout the subway system into stations and other subway lines.

"The tunnel plug is an innovative and groundbreaking technology that can protect subway tunnels from flooding," said John Fortune, Program Manager in S&T's Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA).

Dubbed the Resilient Tunnel Plug (RTP), S&T, in conjunction with ILC Dover, the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and West Virginia University, demonstrated the inflatable device at a recent event held in Frederica, Delaware. The uninflated plug integrates seamlessly into a subway tunnel without impeding the flow of normal train traffic, but can be quickly inflated to stop water from rushing through the tunnel and remain inflated to withstand the incredible pressure of restrained floodwaters.

The image of the plug in TFA looks like the plug uses a lot of duct tape.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is best known for its numerous geysers ejecting plumes of water and ice. These eruptive fountains perplex researchers searching for signs of microbial life beyond Earth. A dedicated spacecraft designed to study the plume-like features spewing from Enceladus could definitely tell us whether or not they contain alien microorganisms.

"We need a spacecraft to travel to Enceladus, fly through a geyser plume, and analyze the water that is immediately accessible," Geoffrey Marcy, a retired professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, told Astrowatch.net.

Marcy is a renowned exoplanet researcher who discovered many extrasolar worlds. He was one of the co-investigators of NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission that detected more than 4,000 exoworlds.
...
"The remarkable aspect of the search for microbes in the water spurting from geysers is that the spacecraft only needs to fly through the plume, well above the surface of Enceladus. No lander is needed—just a succession of flybys through the plumes as it orbits Enceladus," Marcy said.

He noted that such spacecraft should be fitted with a mass spectrometer to detect organic compounds that could be signs of microbial life. The spectrometer will look for amino acids and the structure of any organic molecules, especially fatty acids such as those composing cell membranes. It could also measure the relative amounts of isotopes of carbon (12 and 14) to detect non-natural anomalies due to biological processes.

Moreover, the mission to Enceladus would measure the properties of the water such as pH, oxidation and temperature, therefore assessing its suitability for organic life.

Marcy believes assembling "a brilliant team of billionaires" is the key to making such a mission possible. Lucky for him the monolith said nothing about Enceladus.

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takyon writes:

Facebook has changed its mission statement as Mark Zuckerberg has indicated a new focus on "groups":

"We used to have a sense that if we could just do those things, then that would make a lot of the things in the world better by themselves," Zuckerberg told CNN Tech. "But now we realize that we need to do more too. It's important to give people a voice, to get a diversity of opinions out there, but on top of that, you also need to do this work of building common ground so that way we can all move forward together."

The company even has a new mission statement: "To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." This marks the first time the company has overhauled its mission, which had previously been "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

CNNMoney also dishes the doubt:

Zuckerberg has denied that filter bubbles are widespread. He also believes memberships in groups will expose people to more opinions, not fewer, by helping "people meet new people and get new perspectives and broaden their horizons."

[...] The move to a more groups-based experience for Facebook users could mean people get fewer articles from their news feed, where many publishers post directly. They might see less news overall, including fake news, or a more curated selection of stories from their groups. Facebook has not said how or if its tools for fighting fake news carry over to stories posted in groups.

The focus on groups as a positive tool with the power to change the world overlooks how people use them for negative causes. Hate groups like white power organizations use Facebook groups openly, and will continue to exist in the future. Zuckerberg has said he values free speech on the platform and Facebook only interferes if something goes "way over the line," like bullying or the threat of real world violence. Facebook often relies on regular people flagging objectionable content, but that's less likely to happen in closed Facebook groups.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A blog has a walkthrough of using ZFS encryption on Linux:

In order to have a simple way to play with the new features of ZFS, it makes sense to have a safe "sandbox". You can pick an old computer, but in my case I decide to use a VM. It is tempting to use docker, but it won't work because we need a special kernel module to be able to use the zfs tools.

For the setup, I've decide to use VirtualBox and Archlinux, since those are a few tools that I'm more familiar with. And modifying the zfs-dkms package to build from the branch that hosts the encryption PR is really simple.

[...] Finally we are able to enjoy encryption in zfs natively in linux. This is a feature that was long due. The good thing is that this new implementation improved a few of the problems that the original one had, especially around key management. It is not binary compatible, which is fine in most cases and still not ready to be used in production, but so far I really like what I see.

If you want to follow progress, you can watch the current PR in the official git repo of the project. If everything keeps going ok, I would hope this feature to land in version 0.7.1

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takyon writes:

The Hill reports:

The British parliament was hit by a cyber attack Friday night that left members and staffers unable to access emails as hackers attempted to exploit weak passwords and gain access to accounts.

Multiple news agencies reported Saturday that the U.K. parliament was hit by a “sustained and determined” effort by hackers, a report which was confirmed on Twitter by multiple members of parliament.

“Sorry no parliamentary email access today - we’re under cyber attack from Kim Jong Un, Putin or a kid in his mom’s basement or something...” Henry Smith, a Conservative member, tweeted.

The New York Times notes:

Last week, there were reports in The Times of London that the passwords of British cabinet ministers, ambassadors and senior police officers were being sold online after Russian hacking groups gained access.

According to The Times, the stolen data revealed the private login details of 1,000 British members of Parliament and parliamentary staff, 7,000 police employees and more than 1,000 Foreign Office officials.

[...] In a statement, the spokeswoman [for the National Cyber Security Center] said that “the Houses of Parliament have discovered unauthorized attempts to access parliamentary user accounts. We are continuing to investigate this incident and take further measures to secure the computer network, liaising with the National Cyber Security Center.”

To protect member and staff accounts and “secure our network,” the statement added, “we have temporarily restricted remote access to the network. As a result, some members of Parliament and staff cannot access their email accounts outside of Westminster.”

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takyon writes:

SeaWorld is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over statements made about the Blackfish documentary:

For a while after the 2013 release of the documentary "Blackfish," which excoriated SeaWorld over its treatment of killer whales, the theme park company refused to talk about the film or discounted the idea that it had any impact.

It wasn't until August 2014 that the company admitted that the negative attention had hurt attendance and earnings.

And now federal authorities are asking questions. In a filing [PDF] with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission late Friday afternoon, SeaWorld Entertainment said it had received a subpoena this month "in connection with an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice concerning disclosures and public statements made by the company and certain executives and/or individuals on or before August 2014, including those regarding the impact of the 'Blackfish' documentary, and trading in the company's securities."

Also at Reuters, CNN, and The Street.

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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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