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aristarchus informs us of a link:

As reported by The Huffington Post:

New rules implemented on Twitter Monday have led to the suspensions of accounts belonging to prominent neo-Nazis, white nationalists and other far-right extremists.

[...] "You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people," states Twitter's rule for "violent extremist groups," which went into effect Monday.

"This includes, but is not limited to, threatening or promoting terrorism," the rule continues. "You also may not affiliate with organizations that – whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform – use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes."

[...] The "alt-right ― a loose association of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, assorted racists, fascists, and other far-right elements that has used Twitter for years to organize and recruit ― anticipated today's "purge," with many preparing to make the jump to Gab, a largely rules-free micro-blogging platform used primarily by white nationalists.

Related: Twitter: Our Blue Check Marks Aren't Just About "Verification"

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The story of net neutrality as an Obama-led takeover of the Internet has been a key Republican talking point for months, a talking point which has been refuted by internal FCC documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information Act request. These findings were made by the independent, nonpartisan FCC Office of Inspector General an Inspector General. However, the findings were not made public prior to Thursday’s vote.

[...] First, some background: The FCC is an independent regulatory agency that is supposed to remain “free from undue influence” by the executive branch—it is not beholden to the White House, only the laws that Congress makes and tells it to regulate. This means the president cannot direct it to implement policies. In November 2014, President Obama released a statement saying that he believed the FCC should create rules protecting net neutrality, but noted that “ultimately this decision is theirs alone.”

[...] Since 2014, Republicans have pointed to net neutrality as an idea primarily promoted by President Obama, and have made it another in a long line of regulations and laws that they have sought to repeal now that Donald Trump is president. Prior to this false narrative, though, net neutrality was a bipartisan issue; the first net neutrality rules were put in place under President George W. Bush, and many Republicans worked on the 2015 rules that were just dismantled.

What happened, then, is that Republicans sold the public a narrative that wasn’t true, then used that narrative to repeal the regulations that protect the internet.

Internal FCC Report Shows Republican Anti-Net Neutrality Narrative Is False

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple has been accused of slowing down old iPhones by tying performance to battery condition. This could cause some users to upgrade to a newer model rather than get the battery replaced:

Apple may be slowing down older iPhones in order to counteract problems with decreased battery capacity, according to Primate Labs founder John Poole. The news could add fuel to the conversation around planned obsolescence—the idea that tech companies purposely slow down older devices to encourage users to buy new models. Claims of planned obsolescence have hit almost all the big firms, and have reached the status of a major conspiracy theory in many tech circles.

In a recent blog post, Poole, whose company created the Geekbench benchmarking system, set out to detail the data behind a particular Reddit post claiming that Apple was slowing down iPhones with low-capacity batteries. The user was getting lower-than-expected scores on Geekbench, which improved after they replaced the battery in their iPhone 6S.

[...] Of course, part of the battery issues have to do with the changes that came with iOS 10.2.1, Poole wrote. Apple introduced the update to combat a bug causing the sudden shutdown of iPhone 6 and 6S models. "I believe (as do others) that Apple introduced a change to limit performance when battery condition decreases past a certain point," Poole wrote in the post.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

A series of documents released by the US Department of State have revealed how Sweden was pressed to take action against The Pirate Bay. According to US officials, this directly led to law enforcement's decision to shut down the torrent site more than ten years ago. Sweden, meanwhile, avoided a spot on the feared US Trade Representative's 301 Watch List.

[...] The trail starts with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005. This is roughly six months before the Pirate Bay raid, which eventually resulted in criminal convictions for four men connected to the site.

The Embassy writes that Hollywood's MPAA and the local Anti-Piracy Bureau (APB) met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with Swedish State Secretary of Justice at the time, Dan Eliasson. The Pirate Bay issue was at the top of the agenda during these meetings.

"The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world's largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy's follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns," the cable reads.

"Embassy understands that State and Commerce officials have also met with Swedish officials in Washington on the same concern," it adds, with the Embassy requesting further "guidance" from Washington.

Source : How The US Pushed Sweden to Take Down The Pirate Bay

c0lo writes:

Aviation Today reports that the Boeing 757 is vulnerable to remote, non-cooperative, penetration.

A team of government, industry and academic officials successfully demonstrated that a commercial aircraft could be remotely hacked in a non-laboratory setting last year, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said Wednesday at the 2017 CyberSat Summit in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

"We got the airplane on Sept. 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration," said Robert Hickey, aviation program manager within the Cyber Security Division of the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate.

"[Which] means I didn't have anybody touching the airplane, I didn't have an insider threat. I stood off using typical stuff that could get through security and we were able to establish a presence on the systems of the aircraft." Hickey said the details of the hack and the work his team are doing are classified, but said they accessed the aircraft's systems through radio frequency communications, adding that, based on the RF configuration of most aircraft, "you can come to grips pretty quickly where we went" on the aircraft.
...
[...]in March 2017, at a technical exchange meeting, he said seven airline pilot captains from American Airlines and Delta Air Lines in the room had no clue.

"All seven of them broke their jaw hitting the table when they said, 'You guys have known about this for years and haven't bothered to let us know because we depend on this stuff to be absolutely the bible,'" Hickey said.

Better late than never, hope is still alive, right?

takyon writes:

Stanford scientists have administered electric jolts to mice in response to a pattern of brain activity in the nucleus accumbens that occurs just before "impulsive behavior" (in this study, overeating). This reportedly disrupts the impulse and the impulsive behavior, but not normal behavior. The lead author of the study says the research could lead to a brain implant that could "predict and prevent a suicide attempt, a heroin injection, a burst of binge eating or alcohol intake, or a sudden bout of uncontrolled rage":

Just imagine if you could predict and prevent a burst of binge eating or alcohol intake, a heroin injection, a sudden bout of uncontrolled rage or a suicide attempt. The world would be a better place.

Long journeys start with first steps. In a study [open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1712214114] [DX] published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford researchers led by neurosurgeon Casey Halpern, MD, have identified, both in mice and in a human subject, a signature pattern of electrical activity in a small but important deep-brain region called the nucleus accumbens just a second or two before a burst of impulsive behavior.

The nucleus accumbens is the hub of the brain's reward circuitry, which evolution has engineered to reinforce survival-promoting actions by inducing pleasure in anticipation or performance of those actions. The researchers showed in mice that supplying a small electrical jolt to the nucleus accumbens as soon as the electrical signature manifested there stopped the mice from overindulging in fatty food — without messing up the rest of their natural activities.

"Impulses are normal and absolutely necessary for survival," Halpern said when I interviewed him for our news release on the new study. "They convert our feelings about what's rewarding into concrete action to obtain food, sex, sleep and defenses against rivals or predators."

Which dystopian novel do you want to compare it to?

Also at NPR.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

According to a new fossil analysis, previously described Australian fossils do contain evidence of 3.5-billion-year-old microbial life. However, the complexity of the fossilized microbes suggests that life arose much earlier, possibly as far back as 4 billion years ago:

In 1992, researchers discovered evidence of what was then potentially the earliest life on Earth: 3.5-billion-year-old microscopic squiggles encased in Australian rocks. Since then, however, scientists have debated whether these imprints truly represent ancient microorganisms, and even if they do, whether they're really that old. Now, a comprehensive analysis of these microfossils suggests that these formations do indeed represent ancient microbes, ones potentially so complex that life on our planet must have originated some 500 million years earlier.

The new work indicates these early microorganisms were surprisingly sophisticated, capable of photosynthesis and of using other chemical processes to get energy, says Birger Rasmussen, a geobiologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, who was not involved with the work. The study "will probably touch off a flurry of new research into these rocks as other researchers look for data that either support or disprove this new assertion," adds Alison Olcott Marshall, a geobiologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the effort.

[...] The analysis detected several distinct carbon ratios in the material [DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1718063115] [DX], Schopf, Valley, and colleagues report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Two types of microfossils had the same carbon ratio as modern bacteria that use light to make carbon compounds that fuel their activities—a primitive photosynthesis that did not involve oxygen. Two other types of microfossils had the same carbon ratios as microbes known as archaea that depend on methane as their energy source—and that played a pivotal role in the development of multicellular life. The ratio of a final type of microfossil indicated that this organism produced methane as part of its metabolism.

That there are so many different carbon ratios strengthens the case that these are real fossils, Schopf says. Any inorganic processes that could have created the squiggles would be expected to leave a uniform carbon ratio signature, he says. The fact that microbes were already so diverse at this point in Earth's history also suggests that life on our planet may date back to 4 billion years ago, he says. Other researchers have found signs of life dating back at least that far, but those findings are even more controversial than Schopf's.

Also at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Previously: Ancient Rocks Record First Evidence for Photosynthesis That Made Oxygen
3.7 Billion-Year-Old Fossil Found
Oldest Evidence of Life on Earth Found in 3.77-4.28 Billion Year Old Fossils
Earliest Known Evidence for Microbial Life on Land: 3.48 Billion Years Old

Original Submission

takyon writes:

We can make plants pass out—with the same drugs that mysteriously knock us out

Just like humans, plants can succumb to the effects of general anesthetic drugs [open, DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcx155], researchers report this week in the Annals of Botany. The finding is striking for a variety of reasons—there's the pesky fact that plants lack a central nervous system, for one thing. But, perhaps more noteworthy is that scientists still aren't sure how general anesthetics work on humans—let alone plants. Despite that, doctors have been using the drugs daily for more than a century to knock people out and avert pain during surgeries and other medical procedures. Yet the drugs' exact effects on our body's cells and electrical signals remain elusive.

The authors of the new study, led by Italian and German plant biologists, suggest that plants could help us—once and for all—figure out the drugs' mechanism of action. Moreover, the researchers are hopeful that after that's sorted out, plants could be a useful tool to study and develop new anesthetic drugs. "As plants in general, and the model plant [Arabidopsis] thaliana in particular, are suitable to experimental manipulation (they do not run away) and allow easy electrical recordings, we propose them as ideal model objects to study anaesthesia and to serve as a suitable test system for human anaesthesia," they conclude.

For the study, Stefano Mancuso of the University of Florence and František Baluška of the University of Bonn, along with colleagues, rounded up a variety of plants known for their movement. This includes the famous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipulaI) and the creeping herb Mimosa pudica (sometimes called a shy plant), whose leaves fold inward when touched. The researchers also gathered carnivorous sundew plants (Drosera capensis), which have vibrant, sticky tentacles that bend to ensnare prey. Last, the researchers looked at growing pea tendrils, which twirl around as they grow upward.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

wired runs this story on how 'email open' tracking is becoming more ubiquitous than someone would like

"I JUST CAME across this email," began the message, a long overdue reply. But I knew the sender was lying. He’d opened my email nearly six months ago. On a Mac. In Palo Alto. At night.
I knew this because I was running the email tracking service Streak, which notified me as soon as my message had been opened.
...
There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools.
The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts.
...
But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”
According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked.

Fnord666 writes:

The soaring price of bitcoin—the virtual currency is now worth more than $250 billion—has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks. But the real significance of bitcoin isn't just its rising value. It's the technological breakthrough that allowed the network to exist in the first place.

Bitcoin's still anonymous inventor, who went by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, figured out a completely new way for a decentralized network to reach a consensus about a shared transaction ledger. This innovation made possible the kind of fully decentralized electronic payment systems that cypherpunks had dreamed about for decades.

As part of our recent efforts to shed light on the mechanics of the popular cryptocurrency, today we'll provide in-depth explanation of how bitcoin works, starting with the basics: how do digital signatures make digital cash possible? How did Nakamoto's invention of the blockchain solve the double-spending problem that had limited earlier digital cash efforts?

We'll also explore more recent happenings like the block size debate that has divided the bitcoin community into two warring camps. And finally, we'll look at the future and talk about why bitcoin's design could make it a uniquely fertile platform for innovation in the coming years. As you're about to see, there's simply a lot to cover.

Source:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/how-bitcoin-works/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google's Project Tango is shutting down because ARCore is already here

Google said today that it'll be shutting down Project Tango next year, on March 1st. Project Tango was an early effort from Google to bring augmented reality to phones, but it never really panned out. The system was introduced in 2014 and made it into developer kits and even a couple consumer devices as recently as last year.

But those devices required special sensors. And in the meantime, Google (and competitors, like Apple) figured out ways to bring AR features to phones with just the hardware that's already on board. Google introduced a new augmented reality system, known as ARCore, in late August. It just brought that system to the Pixel and Pixel 2 in the form of some augmented reality stickers — immediately opening AR features to more people than Tango is likely to have reached in its lifetime.

ARCore Developer Preview 2.

Also at Ars Technica, TechCrunch.

Related: Google's Project Tango Coming to 12 More Countries
Google Tango Means You'll Never Get Lost in a Store Again
Google Announces "Lens" Augmented Reality Service
Google Partnering With HTC and Lenovo for Standalone VR Headsets
HTC Cancels U.S. Release of a Google Daydream VR Headset, Reveals Own Standalone Headset

Original Submission

Two Soylentils wrote in with newly-released research results about Earth's Van Allen belts that came from analyzing data gathered by CubeSats.

Van Allen Belt Electrons Measured Using CubeSat

takyon writes:

Students have used a CubeSat to help researchers investigate the origins of Earth's Van Allen belts:

A 60-year-old mystery regarding the source of some energetic and potentially damaging particles in Earth's radiation belts is now solved using data from a shoebox-sized satellite built and operated by CU Boulder students.

The results from the new study indicate energetic electrons in Earth's inner radiation belt—primarily near its inner edge—are created by cosmic rays born from explosions of supernovas, said the study's lead author, Professor Xinlin Li of CU Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). Earth's radiation belts, known as the Van Allen belts, are layers of energetic particles held in place by Earth's magnetic field.

The team showed, during a process called "cosmic ray albedo neutron decay" (CRAND), cosmic rays entering Earth's atmosphere collide with neutral atoms, creating a "splash," which produces charged particles, including electrons, that become trapped by Earth's magnetic fields. The findings have implications for understanding and better forecasting the arrival of energetic electrons in near-Earth space, which can damage satellites and threaten the health of space-walking astronauts, said Li.

Measurement of electrons from albedo neutron decay and neutron density in near-Earth space (DOI: 10.1038/nature24642) (DX)

Six-Decade-Old Space Mystery Solved With Shoebox-Sized Satellite Called a CubeSat

Fnord666 writes:

A 60-year-old mystery about the source of energetic, potentially damaging particles in Earth's radiation belts has been solved using data from a shoebox-sized satellite built and operated by students. The satellite is called a CubeSat.

Imagine a fully instrumented satellite the size of a half-gallon milk carton. Then imagine that milk carton whirling in space, catching never-before-seen glimpses of atmospheric and geospace processes.

CubeSats, named for the roughly 4-inch-cubed dimensions of their basic building elements, are stacked with smartphone-like electronics and tiny scientific instruments.

Built mainly by students and hitching rides into orbit on NASA and U.S. Department of Defense launch vehicles, the small, low-cost satellites have been making history.

Now, results from a new study using CubeSats indicate that energetic electrons in Earth's inner radiation belt -- primarily near its inner edge -- are created by cosmic rays born from supernova explosions, said scientist Xinlin Li of the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder).

[...] The CubeSat mission, called the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE), housed a small telescope to measure the flux of solar energetic protons and Earth's radiation belt electrons.

Launched in 2012 aboard an Atlas V rocket, CSSWE involved more than 65 students and was operated for more than two years from a ground station on the roof of a building on the CU-Boulder campus.

[...] "This is really a beautiful result and a big insight derived from a remarkably inexpensive student satellite, illustrating that good things can come in small packages," said Baker. "It's a major discovery of what has been there all along, a demonstration that Yogi Berra was correct when he remarked, 'You can observe a lot just by looking.'"

Xinlin Li, Richard Selesnick, Quintin Schiller, Kun Zhang, Hong Zhao, Daniel N. Baker, Michael A. Temerin. Measurement of electrons from albedo neutron decay and neutron density in near-Earth space. Nature, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nature24642

Source: https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=243964&WT

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

canopic jug writes:

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original Pirate Party, now living in Germany, has published four parts so far of series on analog equivalent privacy rights. He plans to have 21 parts in all. The series starts out early on with the point that there is no reason for the offline liberties of our parents to not be carried over into the same online liberties for our children and examines this point from different directions. So far he has posted in detail on the following topics over at Private Internet Access' blog:

• Our children should have the same rights as our parents
• The analog, anonymous letter
• Posting an Anonymous Public Message
• Our children have lost Privacy of Location

Rick will post more over the next few weeks. The current batch of adults and teenagers are likely the last generation to have any choice in the matter. Apathy and ignorance abound and deciding not to decide is still, sadly, a choice.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bright Areas on Ceres Suggest Geologic Activity

Since Dawn arrived in orbit at Ceres in March 2015, scientists have located more than 300 bright areas on Ceres. A new study in the journal Icarus, led by Nathan Stein, a doctoral researcher at Caltech in Pasadena, California, divides Ceres' features into four categories.

The first group of bright spots contains the most reflective material on Ceres, which is found on crater floors. The most iconic examples are in Occator Crater, which hosts two prominent bright areas. Cerealia Facula, in the center of the crater, consists of bright material covering a 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer-wide) pit, within which sits a small dome. East of the center is a collection of slightly less reflective and more diffuse features called Vinalia Faculae. All the bright material in Occator Crater is made of salt-rich material, which was likely once mixed in water. Although Cerealia Facula is the brightest area on all of Ceres, it would resemble dirty snow to the human eye.

More commonly, in the second category, bright material is found on the rims of craters, streaking down toward the floors. Impacting bodies likely exposed bright material that was already in the subsurface or had formed in a previous impact event.

Separately, in the third category, bright material can be found in the material ejected when craters were formed.

The mountain Ahuna Mons gets its own fourth category -- the one instance on Ceres where bright material is unaffiliated with any impact crater. This likely cryovolcano, a volcano formed by the gradual accumulation of thick, slowly flowing icy materials, has prominent bright streaks on its flanks.

Ceres and cryovolcanos.

The formation and evolution of bright spots on Ceres (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2017.10.014) (DX)

Previously: A Closer Look At Mystery Spots On Dwarf Planet Ceres
NASA's Dawn Orbiter Finds a Mountain on Ceres
Ceres's Cryovolcanoes Viscously Relax Into Nothingness
Organic Molecules Found on Ceres
Dawn Mission Extended at Ceres
Ceres May Have Had a Global Surface Ocean in the Past

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Report: At least 6 dead after Amtrak train derails from bridge onto Interstate 5 near Olympia

Several people were killed Monday morning when an Amtrak train derailed and fell off a bridge over Interstate 5 near Mounts Road between Lakewood and Olympia. The Associated Press, citing an unnamed U.S. official, reported that at least six people were killed in the crash. Gov. Jay Inslee has called a state of emergency in response to the derailment.

Pierce County Sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer told news media that there were fatalities on the train and that motorists had been injured, but not killed. A total of 77 people were sent to hospitals in Pierce and Thurston counties, according to CHI Franciscan Health, which operates numerous hospitals in Western Washington. Four of the injured are "level red" patients, with critical injuries. The injured are being taken to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, St. Claire Hospital in Lakewood, St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor and Tacoma General Hospital and Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia.

There were 78 passengers and five crew members on the train when it derailed, according to Amtrak.

The train was running on a new, faster service route using a new bypass. This was the first day that the new route was used.

Also at CNN. Amtrak statement about service disruption.

Original Submission