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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports

On June 27, 2016, Jack and Peter DeCoster, former owners of a Quality Egg Co. (not kidding), were ordered to begin serving time in jail.

The pair previously had been sentenced to three months each in jail for their role in a salmonella poisoning outbreak in 2010. The culprits admitted to knowingly shipping eggs with false processing and expiration dates to fool state regulators and retail customers about their age, and to bribing a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector at least twice to approve sales of poor-quality eggs.

In sentencing the egg operators, U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett said, "Given the defendants' careless oversight and repeated violations of safety standards, there is an increased likelihood that these offenses, or offenses like these, could happen again. The punishment will also serve to effectively deter against the marketing of unsafe foods and widespread harm to public health by similarly situated corporate officials and other executives in the industry." A "litany of shameful conduct" occurred under the DeCosters' watch, Judge Bennett told NBC News.

The Supreme Court refused¹ to hear an appeal.

[...] for consumers and honest egg producers, the sentences are both long overdue, and far too weak given Quality Egg's history, which includes at least 10 deaths and 500 people made ill from salmonella-infected eggs produced by the DeCoster-owned egg operations.

takyon writes:

Brown dwarfs may be as common as stars in the Milky Way galaxy, according to the astronomers behind a survey of a "nearby" star cluster:

It seems that for every star that ignites, there may be a failed star. A recent study by international researchers, including scientists at York University, found that the Milky Way may be home to 100 billion brown dwarfs — which matches the projected head count of 100 billion stars in our galaxy.

[...] The researchers performed an extensive survey of RCW 38, an ultra-dense star-forming cluster around 5,500 light-years away. Most stars that form in the region live fast, gain mass, and die young in a supernova explosion. But within the cluster, the researchers found the same ratio of brown dwarfs as in five other surveyed clusters going back to 2006, many without the same extreme conditions as RCW 38. In other words, there seems to be a fairly uniform distribution of brown dwarfs across the galaxy, regardless of environment.

"We've found a lot of brown dwarfs in these clusters. And whatever the cluster type, the brown dwarfs are really common," Alex Scholz, an astronomer at University of St. Andrews, said in a press release. "Brown dwarfs form alongside stars in clusters, so our work suggests there are a huge number of brown dwarfs out there."

Many nearby objects are brown dwarfs. Luhman 16, the third closest system to our own solar system, is comprised of two brown dwarfs about 6.6 light years away, yet was only discovered in 2013.

Also at the Royal Astronomical Society and Space.com.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Officials at the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, South Carolina say that a prisoner escaped by using wire cutters flown in by a drone:

A fugitive South Carolina inmate recaptured in Texas this week had chopped his way through a prison fence using wire cutters apparently dropped by a drone, prison officials said Friday. Jimmy Causey, 46, fled the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville, S.C., on the evening of July 4th after leaving a paper mache doll in his bed to fool guards into thinking he was asleep. He was not discovered missing until Wednesday afternoon.

[...] The director said he and other officials have sought federal help for years to combat the use of drones to drop contraband into prison. "It's a simple fix," Stirling said. "Allow us to block the signal. Allow us to stop them to have unfettered access ... They are physically incarcerated, but they are not virtually incarcerated." "As long as they have access to cellphones, this is just going to keep on happening and happening and happening," he said, The Post and Courier reported.

Also at LA Times and The Washington Post.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google's Waymo is dropping most of its patent claims against Uber, narrowing the case's focus to one patent and the many trade secrets allegedly stolen:

Waymo, Alphabet Inc.'s self-driving car division, dropped three of four patent-infringement claims in its lawsuit against Uber Technologies Inc. over the startup's autonomous vehicle program.

Waymo's decision to include patent claims in its complaint against Uber was a surprise move for Google parent Alphabet, which normally prides itself on limiting patent fights. The bulk of Waymo's case is not over patents, but trade secrets.

Waymo alleges that Uber stole trade secrets from Waymo when Anthony Levandowski, who worked for Waymo, downloaded 14,000 files to his personal computer and then joined Uber to lead the startup's driverless car program. Uber fired Levandowski in late May. The executive has invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination and has refused to testify in the case, hindering Uber's ability to defend itself against Waymo's claims.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco has asked Waymo to narrow its more than 100 trade secrets claims to fewer than 10 to put in front of a jury. In a June 7 hearing, he also said, "I want to reiterate to the plaintiff here that you should think a lot about just dropping the patent part of this case."

Also at Business Insider and Recode. Vanity Fair reports on a legal filing in the case that includes emails sent by Uber's former CEO Travis Kalanick. They depict him desperately seeking a partnership with Google and reacting to talk about Google launching an autonomous ride-hailing service.

Previously:
Google Spin-Off Waymo Accuses Uber of Stealing Self-Driving Tech
Uber Could Face Injunction Stopping It From Testing Driverless Cars
Lyft and Waymo (Google) Team Up for Autonomous Cars
Uber Fires Former Google Engineer Anthony Levandowski

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

In the world of financial technology, where startups are the focus of M&A chatter, a $10 billion combination of two back-office processors whose roots date to the 1970s might seem unusual.

But Vantiv Inc's (VNTV.N) plan to acquire Worldpay Group PLC (WPG.L) shows that the sheer size of some legacy players - and the inertia of their customers - makes them more interested in buying one another than newer rivals, bankers and analysts said. The two companies facilitate payments by linking stores to customers' bank and credit-card accounts.

"It's a pretty sticky product," said Thad Peterson, an analyst at Aite Group. "Once merchants find a processor that works for them, they are unlikely to change. Merchants aren't in the business of payments, they are in the business of selling stuff."

Vantiv started as a project inside of Cincinnati-based regional lender Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB.O) during the Nixon era. Worldpay, headquartered in London, was launched by a British lender in 1989 and absorbed into Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L).

Both companies were spun out of their banks after the financial crisis and thrived on their own continents. Now they are poised to become the singular middleman for more sales globally than any other wholly-owned merchant payments processor based on the $1.3 trillion worth of transactions they handled in 2016, according to data from The Nilson Report.

Source: Reuters

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A new study has contradicted a finding of CRISPR-Cas9 off-target activity, instead finding that "unexpected mutations" were due to two closely related mice:

In May, a study claimed that the revolutionary CRISPR gene editing technique can cause thousands of unwanted and potentially dangerous mutations. The authors called for regulators to reassess the safety of the technique. But doubts were raised about these claims from the very beginning, not least because it was a tiny study involving just three mice. Some critics have called for the paper to be withdrawn. Now a paper posted online on 5 July has proposed a simple and more plausible explanation for the controversial results. If it's right, the authors of the original study were wrong.

[...] When Stephen Tsang of Columbia University Medical Center and colleagues compared the entire genomes of two CRISPR-edited mice with a third one, they found thousands of shared mutations in the two edited mice. Tsang and co attributed to these mutations to CRISPR, and issued a widely-covered press release that suggested CRISPR is far riskier than dozens of other studies had suggested.

[...] But there is a much simpler explanation, says the latest study: the two CRISPR-edited mice just happened to be more closely related and thus shared more mutations. [...] "I agree the two mice are indeed more likely to be closely related," says geneticist Gaetan Burgio of the Australian National University, one of the many critics of the original paper. He says its publication in a prominent journal was a failure of peer review.

"Unexpected mutations after CRISPR-Cas9 editing in vivo" are most likely pre-existing sequence variants and not nuclease-induced mutations (open, DOI: 10.1101/159707) (DX)

The disputed press release from May, and the study it was based on:

Unexpected mutations after CRISPR–Cas9 editing in vivo (DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4293) (DX)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Tim Berners-Lee approved Web DRM yesterday, but W3C member organizations have two weeks to appeal. This was the controversial Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) standard for the WWW known as Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). The last opportunity to stop EME is an appeal by the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). An appeal would then trigger a vote from the whole Committee to make a final decision to ratify or reject EME. As an added difficulty Tim Berners-Lee heads the Advisory Committee.

Also at Techdirt and EFF. W3C's "Disposition of Comments for Encrypted Media Extensions and Director's decision".

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

WikiLeaks has today published the 15th batch of its ongoing Vault 7 leak, this time detailing two alleged CIA implants that allowed the agency to intercept and exfiltrate SSH (Secure Shell) credentials from targeted Windows and Linux operating systems using different attack vectors.

Secure Shell or SSH is a cryptographic network protocol used for remote login to machines and servers securely over an unsecured network.

Dubbed BothanSpy — implant for Microsoft Windows Xshell client, and Gyrfalcon — targets the OpenSSH client on various distributions of Linux OS, including CentOS, Debian, RHEL (Red Hat), openSUSE and Ubuntu.

Both implants steal user credentials for all active SSH sessions and then sends them to a CIA-controlled server.

BothanSpy is installed as a Shellterm 3.x extension on the target machine and only works if Xshell is running on it with active sessions.

[...] Gyrfalcon targets Linux systems (32 or 64-bit kernel) using a CIA-developed JQC/KitV rootkit for persistent access.

Source: The Hacker News

The latest addition to WikiLeaks' Vault 7 cache of CIA tools and documents gives details of tools used by the agency to attack Windows and Linux computers. The BothanSpy and Gyrfalcon projects can be used to intercept and exfiltrate SSH (Secure Shell) credentials.

BothanSpy is used to target Windows, while Gyrfalcon is used for Linux machines, with both working in different ways. A number of popular distros can be hit by Gyrfalcon, including CentOS, Debian, RedHat, openSUSE and Ubuntu, and both tools function as implants that steal credentials before transmitting them to a CIA server.

The leaked documentation for the tools was updated as recently as March 2015, and the file relating to BothanSpy reveals that XShell needs to be installed as it itself installs as a Shellterm extension. There are smatterings of humor throughout the file, with a warning that: "It does not destroy the Death Star, nor does it detect traps laid by The Emperor to destroy Rebel fleets." There is also the introductory quip: "Many Bothan spies will die to bring you this information, remember their sacrifice."

Source: BetaNews

Original Submission

mcgrew writes:

Biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov was joking, of course, when he came up with the substance (it came up in his orals for his doctorate, and it terrified him), but some theoretical physicists have suggested that something similar to Asimov's fictional chemical actually exists at the quantum level.

Phys Org reports that "Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory, in which the future influences the past."

(Phys.org)—Although there are many counterintuitive ideas in quantum theory, the idea that influences can travel backwards in time (from the future to the past) is generally not one of them. However, recently some physicists have been looking into this idea, called "retrocausality," because it can potentially resolve some long-standing puzzles in quantum physics. In particular, if retrocausality is allowed, then the famous Bell tests can be interpreted as evidence for retrocausality and not for action-at-a-distance—a result that Einstein and others skeptical of that "spooky" property may have appreciated.

It's a long and informative article that I found fascinating.

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump sent in a link which became this story:

In advance of their upcoming special Amelia Earhart - The Lost Evidence which airs Sunday, July 9, HISTORY is running a story suggesting Amelia Earhart might not have crashed in the Pacific Ocean:

Buried in the National Archives for nearly 80 years, a newly rediscovered photo may hold the key to solving one of history’s all-time greatest mysteries.

On July 2, 1937, near the end of her pioneering flight around the world, Amelia Earhart vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Most experts, including the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, believe Earhart likely ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. But no trace of the aviator, navigator Fred Noonan or her twin-engine Lockheed Electra airplane were ever found, confounding historians and fueling conspiracy theories ever since. Now, new evidence has surfaced in U.S. government archives suggesting Earhart might not have crashed into the Pacific at all, but crash-landed in the Marshall Islands, was captured by the Japanese military and died while being held prisoner on the island of Saipan.

[...] retired federal agent Les Kinney scoured the National Archives for records that may have been overlooked in the search for the lost aviator. Among thousands of documents he uncovered was a photograph stamped with official Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) markings reading “Marshall Islands, Jaluit Atoll, Jaluit Island, Jaluit Harbor.” In the photo, a ship can be seen towing a barge with an airplane on the back; on a nearby dock are several people.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Straight from the horse's mouth:

The first Chinese Forest City by Stefano Boeri Architetti is turning into reality. A city where offices, houses, hotels, hospitals and schools are entirely covered by plants and trees.

Once completed, the new city will host 30,000 people, absorb almost 10,000 tons of CO2 and 57 tons of pollutants per year and produce approximately 900 tons of oxygen.

Liuzhou Forest City will be built in the north of Liuzhou, in the mountain area of Guangxi, in the southern part of China; in an area that covers 175 hectares along the Liujiang river.
...
Liuzhou Forest City will have all the characteristics of an energy self-sufficient urban establishment: geothermal energy for interior air-conditioning and solar panels over the roofs for collecting renewable energy.

The great innovation of Stefano Boeri Architetti’s project is the presence of plants and trees over every building, of all sizes and functions.

Liuzhou Forest City will host in total 40,000 trees and almost 1 million plants of over 100 species.

Unlike the characters from a previous story, Stefano Boeri is an architect known to deliver (green urbanism): one of his recent projects (completed) is Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) - a pair of residential towers in the Porta Nuova district of Milan, Italy, between Via Gaetano de Castillia and Via Federico Confalonieri near Milano Porta Garibaldi railway station - inaugurated in October 2014.

Under construction, another "Vertical Forest" pair of towers, in Nanjing, with the inauguration date expected in 2018.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

OMG! Ubuntu! reports

The arrival of the Linux Kernel 4.12 at the weekend brought a boat load of big changes (including two I/O schedulers) but do you know how big it is?

Well, it's easy to see in this chart shared by kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman which details exactly how big the release is. graphic

"Linux 4.12 is big, really big, like bigger than you thought big", [Greg] says in an update on his Google+ profile.

It took 63 days to create Linux 4.12, during which a total of 14,570 commits were made across 59,806 files.

With 24,170,860 [...] lines of code in the Linux kernel 4.12, that works out at a boggling 795.58 lines of code added per hour.

Linus Torvalds commented on the size of the latest stable release in his mailing list post to announce the release, saying:

"As mentioned over the various rc announcements, 4.12 is one of the bigger releases historically, and I think only 4.9 ends up having had more commits [...] 4.12 is just plain big."

Original Submission

Justin Case writes:

The decision... gave Facebook a win in a lawsuit that accused the company of improperly tracking users' Internet usage... even after they had logged out of their Facebook accounts.

Facebook had promised that logging out would delete the cookies, the lawsuit charged.

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ruled that plaintiffs in the lawsuit "have not established that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy".

Additionally, the decision said the plaintiffs failed to establish a "realistic economic harm or loss".

Darn it! As a member of the injured class, I was looking forward to winning a coupon for 1 month of free facebook use.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

If I mistakenly write "NBC Nitely News," you can probably still tell what program I'm talking about. Nielsen's automated system can't, however, and a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal details how networks are taking advantage of that fact to disguise airings that underperform with viewers.

It's described as a common practice in the world of TV ratings, where programs with higher ratings can charge advertisers more to run commercials. When an episode performs poorly with viewers, the networks often intentionally misspell the show title in their report to Nielsen, according to the Journal. This fools the system into separating that airing out as a different show and keeping it from affecting the correctly-spelled show's average overall rating.

The report says the practice was initially used sparingly -- for instance, when a broadcast would go up against a major sporting event. But it has now grown fairly common, with NBC misspelling the title of "NBC Nightly News" 14 times since the current TV season began last fall. At one point, that reportedly included an entire week of broadcasts.

[...] Such a practice might be largely for the sake of marketing, with networks typically looking to boast publicly about show performance however possible. Still, it seems odd that Nielsen would allow them to do so with any sort of regularity, given that it ultimately calls the accuracy of its numbers into question.

Source: CNet

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

OneDrive users around the world have been upset to discover that with its latest update, Microsoft's cloud file syncing and storage system no longer works with anything other than disks formatted with the NTFS file system. Both older file systems, such as FAT32 and exFAT, and newer ones, such as ReFS, will now provoke an error message when OneDrive starts up.

To continue to use the software, files will have to be stored on an NTFS volume. While FAT disks can be converted, ReFS volumes must be reformatted and wiped. This has left various OneDrive users unhappy. While NTFS is the default file system in Windows, people using SD cards to extend the storage on small laptops and tablets will typically use exFAT. Similarly, people using Storage Spaces to manage large, redundant storage volumes will often use ReFS. The new policy doesn't change anything for most Windows users, but those at the margins will feel hard done by.

In a rather odd statement made to OnMSFT, Microsoft said that it "discovered a warning message that should have existed was missing when a user attempted to store their OneDrive folder on a non-NTFS filesystem—which was immediately remedied." The company's position, apparently, is that OneDrive should always have warned about these usage scenarios and that it's only a bug or an oversight that allowed non-NTFS volumes to work.

Source: Ars Technica

Original Submission