SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Environmental scientists are warning of a sixth mass extinction, pointing to a decline in vertebrate population sizes, even among species of least concern:

Many scientists say it's abundantly clear that Earth is entering its sixth mass-extinction event, meaning three-quarters of all species could disappear in the coming centuries. That's terrifying, especially since humans are contributing to this shift.

But that's not even the full picture of the "biological annihilation" people are inflicting on the natural world, according to a study published Monday [open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1704949114] [DX] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Gerardo Ceballos, an ecology professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his co-authors, including well-known Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, cite striking new evidence that populations of species we thought were common are suffering in unseen ways. "What is at stake is really the state of humanity," Ceballos told CNN.

The authors: Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo.

Also at The Guardian and DW.

Related: For the Second Time, We Are Witnessing a New Geological Epoch: The Anthropocene
Crystals Win in the Anthropocene: 208 Manmade Minerals Identified

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A Purdue researcher and a team of scientists working on a new insecticide argue that mosquitoes should not simply be made extinct due to their role in various ecosystems. Catherine Hill, a professor of entomology, and her team are developing an insecticide that will suppress mosquitoes' ability to transmit diseases without killing the insect or interfering with other life forms. The team is based in Discovery Park, a research park dedicated to using interdisciplinary teams to solve global problems. Hill's research was one of the winners of Discovery Park's Big Idea Challenge, a program that provides resources to interdisciplinary teams with innovative research.

"For the last 20 years I've been trying to figure out how to kill mosquitoes, and then I had this epiphany where, morally, I'm just not OK with it anymore," she said.

There has been a lack of research in preserving mosquitoes because researchers have looked mostly at ways to eradicate them. Therefore, Hill thinks it is essential to consider all the possible effects of wiping out an organism that has existed for thousands of years. She points out that mosquitoes have co-evolved with many species, so there are likely other organisms that depend on them as a food source.

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-mosquitoes.html

[Source]: Why mosquitoes should not be eliminated

I was reminded of:

Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference has never tried to fall asleep with a mosquito in the room. - Christine Todd Whitman

Should there be a "Save the Mosquito" movement?

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is displaying its historic New Shepard rocket and offering simulated space rides at the EAA AirVenture convention in Oshkosh. That's the same New Shepard that served as key for the company to beat SpaceX in the reusable rocket race. In November 2015, it flew over the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space before heading back down to become the first rocket to achieve a vertical landing. Blue Origin then used it for four more missions in 2016 to prove that it truly is reusable.

While seeing the rocket in person already sounds like a treat, the private space corp has another offering you might appreciate even more. It's also bringing a replica of its tourism-oriented crew capsule at the event and allowing visitors to climb in and use its reclining seats. Blue Origin's capsule has windows that take up one-third of its surface area, so astronauts can enjoy the views going up. Since it can't exactly fly people to space just yet, it's treating guests to a simulated flight experience using actual footage taken by New Shepard's on-board cameras.

Source: Engadget

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Here's a statement that would have been unimaginable in previous years: Ubuntu has arrived in the Windows Store. As promised back in May, you can now download a flavor of the popular Linux distribution to run inside Windows 10. It won't compare to a conventional Ubuntu installation, as it's sandboxed (it has limited interaction with Windows) and is focused on running command line utilities like bash or SSH. However, it also makes running a form of Linux relatively trivial. You don't have to dual boot, install a virtual machine or otherwise jump through any hoops beyond a download and ticking a checkbox.

Source: Engadget

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Today, implanted electrode devices for stimulating the brain are extremely crude devices with only a handful of electrodes that are used to mitigate the effects of Parkinson's, epilepsy, and other neurodegenerative conditions. The number of patients with these devices is merely tens of thousands because of the extreme invasiveness of the implantation process and the large size of the implanted device. The invention of a less invasive implant device with many more channels that can interact with the brain would result in revolutionary improvements to brain-machine interfaces, including direct interfaces to the auditory cortex and the visual cortex, expanding dramatically the ways in which artificial systems can support brain function.

Thanks to a new four-year $15.8M grant from the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Columbia Engineering Professor Ken Shepard, a pioneer in the development of electronics that interface with biological systems, is leading a team to do just that: invent an implanted brain-interface device that could transform the lives of people with neurodegenerative diseases or people who are hearing and visually impaired.

"This topic has drawn lots of interest from the private sector recently, including start-ups Neuralink and Kernel," says Shepard, who is the Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering, and professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering. "If we are successful, the tiny size and massive scale of this device could provide the opportunity for transformational interfaces to the brain, including direct interfaces to the visual cortex that would allow patients who have lost their sight to discriminate complex patterns at unprecedented resolutions. This is a highly ambitious project for Columbia, indeed for all of us, and we are very excited to address such a challenging issue."

Source: ScienceDaily

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The master decryption key for last year's Petya ransomware was made public last week and has since been confirmed to be genuine.

Petya ransomware first emerged in March 2016, distinguishing itself from similar malware by encrypting the Master Boot Record (MBR) instead of individual files. Soon after its initial appearance, Petya was paired with another ransomware, and the pair became available as a service a couple of months later.

The last known variant of the malware was spotted in December 2016 and was referred to as GoldenEye. Dubbed PetrWrap, a ransomware family observed in March this year was using Petya for its nefarious purposes, but wasn't created by Janus Cybercrime Solutions, the name Petya's author goes by.

[...] Kaspersky security researcher Anton Ivanov‏ has already confirmed that the key works for all Petya versions, including GoldenEye.

The release of the master decryption key is great news for those Petya victims who were unable to restore their files to date. Last year, security researchers managed to crack the first two versions of the ransomware, and the only variant not decrypted before was GoldenEye.

"Thanks to the currently published master key, all the people who have preserved the images of the disks encrypted by the relevant versions of Petya, may get a chance of getting their data back," Hasherezade explains.

The newly released master key, however, won't help users hit by NotPetya.

Key is for the original Petya not NotPetya.

Source: http://www.securityweek.com/original-petya-master-decryption-key-released

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Peter N. M. Hansteen walks through use of OpenBSD on a modern laptop in his latest blog post. While OpenBSD has a good reputation for servers and routers, many do not realize how well it works on laptops with supported hardware. He's been running it as the only OS on his laptops for well over a decade at this point and shares his experience with recent hardware. OpenBSD is clean, organized, and predictable. It does what you configure it to do, and only that, with no backtalk or second-guessing — like from other systems. Its documentation is second to none.

Original Submission

rigrig writes:

While looking at the delegation paths for various top-level domains, Matthew Bryant noticed that the domains of 4 out of 7 nameservers for the .io TLD were available for registration:

It appeared that Gandi's API was returning that multiple .io nameserver domains were available for purchase! This does not necessarily mean you can actually register these domain names however, since in the past I had seen multiple incidents where registries would state a domain name was available but wouldn't allow the actual registration to go through due to the domain name being "reserved".

But when he tried anyway, his order went through, and after the registration finished his server began to receive DNS queries for .io domains.

Given the fact that we were able to take over four of the seven authoritative nameservers for the .io TLD we would be able to poison/redirect the DNS for all .io domain names registered. Not only that, but since we have control over a majority of the nameservers it's actually more likely that clients will randomly select our hijacked nameservers over any of the legitimate nameservers even before employing tricks like long TTL responses, etc to further tilt the odds in our favor.

One mitigating factor that should be mentioned is that the .io TLD has DNSSEC enabled. This means that if your resolver supports it you should be defended from an attacker sending bad/forged DNS data in the way mentioned above. That being said, as mentioned in a previous post DNSSEC support is pretty abysmal and I rarely encounter any support for it unless I specifically set a resolver up that supports it myself.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

tl;dr:

This is a meta post concerning Soylentnews' background, finances, operations, staffing, story scheduling, and a conclusion. If this is not your cup-of-coffee++ (or tea, etc.), then please ignore this story — another will appear shortly.

takyon writes:

Facebook has cut the price of the Oculus Rift for the second time this year. It debuted at $800, was cut to $600 in March, and is now $400. Is there real trouble in the virtual reality market, or is it just a normal price correction now that early adopters have been served?

It means that the Rift now costs less than the package offered by its cheapest rival, Sony, whose PlayStation VR currently totals $460 including headset and controllers.

Even so, it's not clear that it will be enough to lure people into buying a Rift. A year ago, our own Rachel Metz predicted that the Rift would struggle against Sony's offering because the former requires a powerful (and expensive) gaming computer to run, while the latter needs just a $350 PlayStation 4 game console.

Jason Rubin, vice president for content at Oculus, tells Reuters that the reduction isn't a sign of weak product sales, but rather a decision to give the headset more mass market appeal now that more games are available. Don't believe it: this is the latest in a string of bad news for the firm, which has also shut down its nascent film studio, shuttered in-store demo stations of its hardware, and stumped up $250 million as part of a painful intellectual property lawsuit in the last six months.

Here's a February story about the Oculus demo stations at Best Buy stores being shut down.

Previously: Facebook/Oculus Ordered to pay $500 Million to ZeniMax
Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A compound called the Integrated Stress Response inhibitor (ISRIB) may restore memory by reversing the effects of traumatic brain injury (in mice):

Whether caused by a car accident that slams your head into the dashboard or repeated blows to your cranium from high-contact sports, traumatic brain injury can be permanent. There are no drugs to reverse the cognitive decline and memory loss, and any surgical interventions must be carried out within hours to be effective, according to the current medical wisdom. But a compound previously used to enhance memory in mice may offer hope: Rodents who took it up to a month after a concussion had memory capabilities similar to those that had never been injured.

The study "offers a glimmer of hope for our traumatic brain injury patients," says Cesario Borlongan, a neuroscientist who studies brain aging and repair at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Borlongan, who reviewed the new paper, notes that its findings are especially important in the clinic, where most rehabilitation focuses on improving motor—not cognitive—function.

[...] In 2013, the lab of Peter Walter, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), discovered a compound—called ISRIB—that blocked the stress response in human cells in a dish. Surprisingly, when tested in healthy mice, ISRIB boosted their memory. Wondering whether the drug could also reverse memory impairment, Walter teamed up with UCSF neuroscientist Susanna Rosi to study mouse models of traumatic brain injury. First, they showed that the stress response remains active in the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory, for at least 28 days in injured mice. And they wondered whether administering ISRIB would help.

Rosi and her team first used mechanical pistons to hit anesthetized mice in precise parts of their surgically exposed brains, resulting in contusive injuries, focused blows that can also result from car accidents or being hit with a heavy object. After 4 weeks of rest, Rosi trained the mice to swim through a water maze, where they used cues to remember the location of a hidden resting platform. Healthy mice got better with practice, but the injured ones didn't improve. However, when the injured mice were given ISRIB 3 days in a row, they were able to solve the maze just as quickly as healthy mice up to a week later [open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1707661114] [DX], the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Most animals have a circulatory system that pumps blood. Sea spiders have a digestive system that can move both food and blood:

Researchers discovered the remarkable physiological strategy after injecting dye into sea spiders—common inhabitants of the world's oceans named for their resemblance to land-based spiders—and watching the flow of blood. They noticed that the animals' hearts were beating weakly. But the digestive system—which is unusually extensive in sea spiders, running down each leg—was contracting in waves, moving food in the gut as well as blood in the surrounding hemocoel cavity, the spider equivalent of veins and arteries.

Respiratory gut peristalsis by sea spiders (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.062) (DX)

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

In a shift from a mere couple of years ago, when a majority of Republican-Americans thought that higher education was a good thing, the majority of them now believe the opposite.

A Pew Research Center survey published Monday revealed voters have grown apart in their support of secondary education since the 2016 presidential election season, when a majority of Democratic and Republican Americans agreed the nation’s universities serve as a benefit for the U.S. Whereas 54 percent of Republicans said "colleges and universities had a positive impact on the way things were going in the country" in 2015, the majority now believe the opposite, with 58 percent saying such institutions negatively impact the state of the union.

Get the full story here.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Avanti Markets, a company whose self-service payment kiosks sit beside shelves of snacks and drinks in thousands of corporate breakrooms across America, has suffered of breach of its internal networks in which hackers were able to push malicious software out to those payment devices, the company has acknowledged. The breach may have jeopardized customer credit card accounts as well as biometric data, Avanti warned.

According to Tukwila, Wash.-based Avanti's marketing literature, some 1.6 million customers use the company's break room self-checkout devices — which allow customers to pay for drinks, snacks and other food items with a credit card, fingerprint scan or cash.

Sometime in the last few hours, Avanti published a "notice of data breach" on its Web site.

"On July 4, 2017, we discovered a sophisticated malware attack which affected kiosks at some Avanti Markets. Based on our investigation thus far, and although we have not yet confirmed the root cause of the intrusion, it appears the attackers utilized the malware to gain unauthorized access to customer personal information from some kiosks. Because not all of our kiosks are configured or used the same way, personal information on some kiosks may have been adversely affected, while other kiosks may not have been affected."

Avanti said it appears the malware was designed to gather certain payment card information including the cardholder's first and last name, credit/debit card number and expiration date.

Breaches at point-of-sale vendors have become almost regular occurrences over the past few years, but this breach is especially notable as it may also have jeopardized customer biometric data. That's because the newer Avanti kiosk systems allow users to pay using a scan of their fingerprint.

"In addition, users of the Market Card option may have had their names and email addresses compromised, as well as their biometric information if they used the kiosk's biometric verification functionality," the company warned.

Source: Krebs On Security

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Fields v. Philadelphia has established the right to record police in the U.S. Third Circuit (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Virgin Islands):

The First Amendment protects our right to use electronic devices to record on-duty police officers, according to a new ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Fields v. Philadelphia. This right extends to anyone with a recording device, journalists and members of the public alike. And this right includes capture of photos, videos, and audio recordings.

EFF filed an amicus brief seeking this ruling. We argued that people routinely use their electronic devices to record and share images and audio, and that this often includes newsworthy recordings of on-duty police officers interacting with members of the public.

[...] The Third Circuit erred on the issue of "qualified immunity." This is a legal doctrine that protects government employees from paying money damages for violating the Constitution, if the specific right at issue was not clearly established at the time they violated it. In Fields, the Third Circuit unanimously held that going forward, the First Amendment protects the right to record the police. But the majority held that this right was not clearly established at the time the police officers in the case violated this right.

According to Slate, similar rulings have been issued in the First, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. The new decision addressed two cases in Philadelphia:

Friday's decision involved two instances in which the Philadelphia police retaliated against citizens attempting to film them. In the first incident, a legal observer named Amanda Geraci tried to film police arresting an anti-fracking protester when an officer pinned her against a pillar, preventing her from recording the arrest. In the second, a Temple University sophomore named Richard Fields tried to film police officers breaking up a house party when an officer asked him whether he "like[d] taking pictures of grown men" and demanded that he leave. When Fields refused, the officer arrested and detained him, confiscating his phone and looking through its photos and videos. The officer cited Fields for "Obstructing Highway and Other Public Passages," although the charges were dropped when the officer failed to appear at a court hearing. Geraci and Fields filed civil rights suits against the officers who interfered with their filming attempts.

Writing for the court, Judge Thomas Ambro agreed that both Geraci and Fields held a constitutional right to record the police—a right that officers violated in both instances. "The First Amendment protects the public's right of access to information about their officials' public activities," Ambro wrote. This access "is particularly important because it leads to citizen discourse" on public and political issues, the most highly valued First Amendment activity. Thus, the government is constitutionally barred from "limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw."

Anything you say or do may be uploaded to YouTube.

Previously: Right to Record Police Established in U.S. Fifth Circuit

Original Submission