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Fnord666 writes:

On Friday, representatives of the notorious hacking entity known as Fancy Bear failed to appear in a federal court in Virginia to defend themselves against a civil lawsuit brought by Microsoft.

As the Daily Beast first reported on Friday, Microsoft has been waging a quiet battle in court against the threat group, which is believed to be affiliated with the GRU, Russia's foreign intelligence agency. For now, the company has managed to seize control of 70 domain names, but it's going after many more.

The idea of the lawsuit, which was filed in August 2016, is to use various federal laws—including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and American trademark law—as a way to seize command-and-control domain names used by the group, which goes by various monikers, including APT28 and Strontium. Many of the domain names used by Fancy Bear contain Microsoft trademarks, like microsoftinfo365.com and hundreds of others.

In June 2017, Microsoft asked the judge to issue a default judgement in its favor, since the individuals behind Fancy Bear have not made themselves known. According to the Daily Beast, Microsoft and its lawyers have made several attempts to serve the unknown "John Does" via e-mail. According to the Daily Beast, those e-mails have been opened dozens of times and were equipped with a tracking beacon. Microsoft's lawyers have also conveniently posted all the court documents on a public website, inviting the defendants to contact them via postal mail, e-mail, or even fax.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/microsoft-targets-fancy-bears-domains-in-trademark-lawsuit/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The price of Bitcoin surged late last week as it became clear that a proposal to expand the Bitcoin network's capacity had the support it needed to go into effect. Supporters of the proposal hope that it will put an end to a two-year-old feud that has been tearing the Bitcoin community apart.

The core dispute is over how to accommodate the payment network's growing popularity. A hard-coded limit in Bitcoin software—1 megabyte per blockchain block—prevents the network from processing more than about seven transactions per second. The network started to bump up against this limit last year, resulting in slow transactions and soaring transaction fees.

Some prominent figures in the Bitcoin community saw an easy fix: just increase that 1MB limit. But Bitcoin traditionalists argued that the limit was actually a feature, not a bug. Keeping blocks small ensures that anyone can afford the computing power required to participate in Bitcoin's consensus-based process for authenticating Bitcoin transactions, preventing a few big companies from gaining de facto control over the network.

This seemingly esoteric debate has nearly torn the Bitcoin community apart over the last two years. While Bitcoin insiders squabbled, competitors like Ethereum have soared in value and gained developer mindshare.

The new agreement aims to bridge the divide between the warring factions, bringing Bitcoin users faster processing times and lower transaction fees. The larger question is whether this deal will become the foundation for a new, more collaborative approach to expanding the Bitcoin network—or whether it will merely represent a temporary ceasefire in the Bitcoin community's increasingly bitter civil war.

Source: A new deal could end Bitcoin’s long-running civil war

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Fnord666 writes:

Kaspersky has finally launched its free antivirus software after a year-and-a-half of testing it in select regions. While the software was only available in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, China and in Nordic countries during its trial run, Kaspersky is releasing it worldwide. The free antivirus doesn't have VPN, Parental Controls and Online Payment Protection its paid counterpart offers, but it has all the essential features you need to protect your PC. It can scan files and emails, protect your PC while you use the web and quarantine malware that infects your system.

The company says the software isn't riddled with advertisements like other free antivirus offerings. Instead of trying to make ad money off your patronage, Kaspersky will use the data you contribute to improve machine learning across its products. The free antivirus will be available in the US, Canada and most Asia-Pacific countries over the next couple of days, if it isn't yet. After this initial release, the company will roll it out in other regions from September to November.

Source:

Kaspersky launches its free antivirus software worldwide

Original Submission

Legal Egal writes:

ACLU* national legal director David Cole warns that this new piece of legislation is a serious problem to free speech. He says that just discussing the boycott of Israel could land you in prison for 20 years and fined $1 million.

The right to boycott has a long history in the United States, from the American Revolution to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Montgomery bus boycott to the campaign for divestment from businesses serving apartheid South Africa. Nowadays we celebrate those efforts. But precisely because boycotts are such a powerful form of expression, governments have long sought to interfere with them — from King George III to the police in Alabama, and now to the U.S. Congress.

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, legislation introduced in the Senate by Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and in the House by Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.), would make it a crime to support or even furnish information about a boycott directed at Israel or its businesses called by the United Nations, the European Union or any other "international governmental organization." Violations would be punishable by civil and criminal penalties of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison. The American Civil Liberties Union, where we both work, takes no position for or against campaigns to boycott Israel or any other foreign country. But since our organization's founding in 1920, the ACLU has defended the right to collective action. This bill threatens that right.

As a European myself I find it very strange that such a law can ever be officially proposed. And in the US of all countries where the freedom of speech in codified in the constitution.

What do you make of it?

*American Civil Liberties Union

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Ryzen chip sales have boosted AMD's "Computing and Graphics" revenue significantly. AMD's CEO Lisa Su noted that game and content developers have optimized for the Ryzen architecture:

Ryzen was the star of AMD's second-quarter earnings call Tuesday: The processors helped boost earnings 19 percent compared to a year ago. Company executives also had two messages for gamers: one, that game developers had largely completed their code optimizations for Ryzen, and two, that miners who hoarded graphics cards wouldn't be around forever.

[...] Ryzen sales had a profound impact on second-quarter sales. AMD's Computing and Graphics segment revenue rose a whopping 59 percent year over year to $659 million. AMD's other segment, covering the enterprise and chips for game consoles, fell 5 percent to $563 million. Overall, AMD lost $16 million (or took in $19 million in profits, without charges) and reported $1.22 billion in revenue.

Ryzen 3 CPUs will begin shipping on July 27th, and AMD will launch new Vega GPUs at SIGGRAPH (July 30 - August 3).

AMD release. Also at AnandTech, Wccftech, and Barron's.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists can use the shavings of a polyvinyl chloride eraser used on old books to identify bookworm species, which types of animals were used to make parchment and leather bindings, and even isolate microbial and human DNA:

[Researchers found that the 12th-century copy of the Gospel of Luke had a cover that] was made of the skin of roe deer, a species common in the United Kingdom. But the strap was made from a larger deer species, either native red deer or fallow deer introduced from continental Europe, possibly by the Normans after their invasion in 1066. [postdoctoral fellow Sarah] Fiddyment speculates that the book may have captured a transitional moment when native roe deer were declining and landowners and monasteries stocked parks with bigger deer.

[...] Parchment eraser shavings also yield DNA that can trace specific breeds and their use over time. For example, in a 2014 study of DNA from two pieces of parchment from the 1600s and 1700s, [biochemist Matthew] Collins's team showed that a big shift occurred in the breed of sheep raised in the midlands of the United Kingdom, from a scrappier, black-faced, highland variety to a meatier, lowland breed.

[...] The York Gospels also offer a rare record of the people of the book: Almost 20% of the DNA [postdoc Matthew] Teasdale extracted from its eraser shavings came from humans or microbes shed by humans, he announced at the symposium. This is the only surviving Gospel book to contain the oaths taken by U.K. clergymen between the 14th and 16th centuries, and it's still used in ceremonies today. Pages containing oaths were read, kissed, and handled the most, and these pages were particularly rich in microbial DNA from humans, Teasdale reported.

For example, researchers identified DNA from bacteria known to live in human skin and noses, including an abundance of two genera—Propionibacterium, which causes acne, and Staphylococcus, which includes strains that cause staph. Thus the "crud" that mars the surface of many books and documents is a well-preserved bioarchive of bacteria that infected people who handled the books, [historian Peter] Stallybrass says.

takyon writes:

Ninety-nine percent of ailing NFL player brains sport hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease, autopsy study finds

The largest study of its kind has found damage in the vast majority of former football players' brains donated for research after they developed mental symptoms during life. Of 202 former players of the U.S. version of the game whose brains were examined, 87% showed the diagnostic signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with repetitive head trauma. Among former National Football League (NFL) players in the sample, that number jumped to 99%. The findings will likely ratchet up the pressure on leaders at all levels of football to protect their players. Still, the authors and other experts caution against overinterpreting the results, because the brains all came from symptomatic former players and not from those who remained free of mental problems.

"I think it is increasingly difficult to deny a link between CTE and repeated traumatic brain injury, be it through contact sports or other mechanisms," says Gil Rabinovici, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who was not affiliated with the study.

The researchers, led by Boston University (BU) neuropathologist Ann McKee, used brains from a bank maintained by the VA Boston Healthcare System, BU, and the Concussion Legacy Foundation. They were donated by families of former football players. The team defines CTE, a diagnosis made only at autopsy, as "progressive degeneration associated with repetitive head trauma." The designation remains controversial with some, who call it a muddy diagnosis that doesn't include an iron-clad clinical course and the kind of clear-cut pathology that defines classical neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease.

Clinicopathological Evaluation of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Players of American Football (open, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.8334) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Both Toshiba (or whomever ends up buying Toshiba's memory fabrication assets) and Western Digital (WD) have both recently announced plans to produce 3D QLC (four bits per cell) NAND:

Western Digital's SanDisk subsidiary and Toshiba have a long history of jointly developing and manufacturing NAND flash memory. While that relationship has been strained by Toshiba's recent financial troubles and attempts to sell of their share of the memory business, the companies are continuing to develop new flash memory technology and are still taking turns making new announcements. In recent months both companies have started sampling SSDs using their 64-layer BiCS3 TLC 3D NAND and have announced that their next generation BiCS4 3D NAND will be a 96-layer design.

Yesterday Western Digital made a small announcement about their other main strategy for increasing density: storing more bits per memory cell. Western Digital will introduce four bit per cell QLC parts built on their 64-layer BiCS3 process, with a capacity of 768Gb (96GB) per die. This is a substantial increase over the 512Gb BiCS3 TLC parts that will be hitting the market soon, and represents not only an increase in in bits stored per memory cell but an increase in the overall size of the memory array. These new 3D QLC NAND parts are clearly intended to offer the best price per GB that Western Digital can manage, but Western Digital claims performance will still be close to that of their 3D TLC NAND. Western Digital's announcement did not mention write endurance, but Toshiba's earlier announcement of 3D QLC NAND claimed endurance of 1000 program/erase cycles, far higher than industry expectations of 100-150 P/E cycles for 3D QLC and comparable to 3D TLC NAND.

Western Digital will showcase SSDs and removable flash media using QLC NAND at the Flash Memory Summit from August 8-10.

Will QLC NAND endurance become a bigger issue than it is with TLC? Will this be used primarily for high density cold storage like Facebook has asked for?

Previously: Toshiba Teasing QLC 3D NAND and TSV for More Layers
SK Hynix Developing 96 and 128-Layer TLC 3D NAND
Western Digital Announces 96-Layer 3D NAND, Including Both TLC and QLC
Toshiba's 3D QLC NAND Could Reach 1000 P/E Cycles
Toshiba Develops 512 GB and 1 TB Flash Chips Using TSV

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Statistician Valen Johnson and 71 other researchers have proposed a redefinition of statistical significance in order to cut down on irreproducible results, especially those in the biomedical sciences. They propose "to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance for claims of new discoveries from 0.05 to 0.005" in a preprint article that will be published in an upcoming issue of Nature Human Behavior:

A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists is renewing a controversial proposal to raise the standard for statistical significance in research studies. They want researchers to dump the long-standing use of a probability value (p-value) of less than 0.05 as the gold standard for significant results, and replace it with the much stiffer p-value threshold of 0.005.

Backers of the change, which has been floated before, say it could dramatically reduce the reporting of false-positive results—studies that claim to find an effect when there is none—and so make more studies reproducible. And they note that researchers in some fields, including genome analysis, have already made a similar switch with beneficial results.

"If we're going to be in a world where the research community expects some strict cutoff ... it's better that that threshold be .005 than .05. That's an improvement over the status quo," says behavioral economist Daniel Benjamin of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, first author on the new paper, which was posted 22 July as a preprint article [open, DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MKY9J] [DX] on PsyArXiv and is slated for an upcoming issue of Nature Human Behavior. "It seemed like this was something that was doable and easy, and had worked in other fields."

But other scientists reject the idea of any absolute threshold for significance. And some biomedical researchers worry the approach could needlessly drive up the costs of drug trials. "I can't be very enthusiastic about it," says biostatistician Stephen Senn of the Luxembourg Institute of Health in Strassen. "I don't think they've really worked out the practical implications of what they're talking about."

They have proposed a P-value of 0.005 because it corresponds to Bayes factors between approximately 14 and 26 in favor of H₁ (the alternative hypothesis), indicating "substantial" to "strong" evidence, and because it would reduce the false positive rate to levels they have judged to be reasonable "in many fields".

Is this good enough? Is it a good start?

OSF project page. If you have trouble downloading the PDF, use this link.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Language patterns could be predicted by simple laws of physics, a new study has found.

Dr James Burridge from the University of Portsmouth has published a theory using ideas from physics to predict where and how dialects occur.

He said: "If you want to know where you'll find dialects and why, a lot can be predicted from the physics of bubbles and our tendency to copy others around us.

"Copying causes large dialect regions where one way of speaking dominates. Where dialect regions meet, you get surface tension. Surface tension causes oil and water to separate out into layers, and also causes small bubbles in a bubble bath to merge into bigger ones.

"The bubbles in the bath are like groups of people - they merge into the bigger bubbles because they want to fit in with their neighbours.

"When people speak and listen to each other, they have a tendency to conform to the patterns of speech they hear others using, and therefore align their dialects. Since people typically remain geographically local in their everyday lives, they tend to align with those nearby."

Is proximity the determinant to dialect, or is identity?

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000 prompted students to reject computer science programs. Enrollments plummeted with the crash. But colleges are now scrambling to keep up with the major's year-after-year enrollment growth.

Take Stanford University. In the 2007-08 academic year, Stanford had 87 declared undergraduate computer science majors. That was near the trough of the great decline in computer science enrollments.

But since then, the number of declared majors at Stanford has grown in each year and by the 2016-17 academic year, Stanford counted 353 majors. This is now the school's top undergraduate major.

Stanford is not alone. Dartmouth College's computer science program has quadrupled, but that doesn't tell the entire story. Many students, who are pursuing a variety of undergraduate degrees, are making computer science part of their study. These students now consider data analytics and coding as fundamental parts of their field.

"I don't think anybody expected what we are seeing now," said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and chair of the department at Dartmouth.

By the time they graduate, 75 percent of Dartmouth's students have either taken an engineering or computer course, said Farid. An introductory computer science course teaches a student how to code in Python. Students also study data structures to learn how to represent and manipulate data, as well algorithmic analysis that teaches them how to assess whether one algorithm is better than the other in terms of runtime complexity.

"I can tell you that 50 percent of accepted students to Dartmouth have expressed some interest in computer science – that's insane," said Farid.

This increasing demand for computer science education is nationwide.

Source: http://insight.ieeeusa.org/insight/content/policy/775982

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

[...] some experts believe as much as 95% of passenger miles could be electric, autonomous by 2030, thanks to some basic economics. Because electric vehicles cost a whole lot less to drive and maintain—but more to buy—and because autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the cost of commercial driving, a combination of the two technologies will make autonomous Transportation as a Service exponentially more cost competitive than either owning a car, or hiring a car and driver. It's also exponentially more profitable for car companies, who have long feared the loss of maintenance and service profits associated with a transition to electric cars.

This question will come up more frequently as self-driving technology advances. Will perfection of that technology make a difference, though, in the face of social behaviors that have been deeply ingrained over the past century?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Humpback whales learn songs in segments – like the verses of a human song – and can remix them, a new study involving University of Queensland research has found.

The study featured data from Associate Professor Michael Noad of the UQ School of Veterinary Science's Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory (CEAL).

Research indicated that whale songs appeared to be learnt a similar way to how humans acquire language skills, or a bird learns its warble.

"All the males in a population sing the same complex song, but the pattern of song changes with time, sometimes quite rapidly, across the population," Dr Noad said.

"Learning new songs is a form of what's known as 'social learning', which is where individual animals learn behaviours from each other rather than having them passed on from one generation to another genetically.

"Although we know that whales change their songs over time, we don't know about how they learn the new songs.

"The rate of change though shows that they are constantly learning and updating their songs rapidly."

Yes, whales sing, but they only sing ska...

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

India is resisting the push towards driverless cars in order to protect jobs, its transport minister has said.

Nitin Gadkari said the government would "not allow any technology that takes away jobs".

He said India needed to recruit about 22,000 more commercial drivers and would be opening 100 training facilities to address the need.

India's road system and sometimes chaotic traffic makes it a difficult place to develop the technology.

The Hindustan Times reports Mr Gadkari as saying: "We won't allow driverless cars in India. I am very clear on this.

"In a country where you have unemployment, you can't have a technology that ends up taking people's jobs."

Wonder what Mr. Gadkari's position is on the technology that has outsourced jobs in America and Europe to India?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An "accessible luxury" brand is buying a "high fashion" shoe and accessories brand for £896 million as American mall traffic continues to decline and consumers have gravitated towards either extremely cheap or extremely expensive fashion products:

Many upscale retailers are grappling with plummeting sales and tepid profits. Mall traffic in North America has declined sharply, and deep discounting tactics have resulted in some luxury labels losing much of their luster with core customers.

Shoppers who have traditionally been loyal to the so-called middle market have gravitated toward brands at extremes of the style, and price, spectrum. That has benefited e-commerce giants like Amazon, fast-fashion brands like H&M and Zara, and luxury houses like Gucci.

And it has left companies like Michael Kors — once the runaway leader of the "accessible luxury market" — exposed.

[...] The shoemaker was founded in 1996 by Tamara Mellon, then accessories editor at British Vogue, and the Malaysian cobbler Jimmy Choo. It shot to fame thanks to a slew of celebrity patrons, including Diana, the Princess of Wales, and the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, who embraced its signature sky-high stilettos and the vampish aesthetic for which it became known.

After three cycles of private equity ownership, it became the first luxury footwear brand to list on a public market in 2014. Prices range from $425 for flat shoes to $1,795 for over-the-knee suede boots, while small clutch handbags start around $700, according to Jimmy Choo's website.

Press release.

Original Submission