SoylentNews

canopic jug writes:

The US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits devices and software that can be used to circumvent digital restrictions, no matter how trivial the restrictions. A new slide deck from the US Department of Homeland Security (warning for PDF) states that the overall number of copyright-, patent-, trademark-related seizures increased by 8% last year. Though much of it was from traditional counterfeit goods, there were some hints at something more problematic regarding interpretation of the rules:

New data released by Homeland Security shows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized significantly more DMCA circumvention devices in 2017. The seizures, which includes mod chips for gaming consoles, increased 324% compared to the year before, although the actual number remains fairly low.

[...] What we did notice is that the International Intellectual Property [sic] Alliance (IIPA) recently framed streaming boxes as possible circumvention tools. The strong enforcement focus of rightsholders on these devices may have been communicated to border patrols as well.

Again, there is no word yet on what the border staff actually consider to be circumvention technologies.

From TorrentFreak : U.S. Border Seizures of DMCA Circumvention Devices Surges
and the Washington Examiner : US customs agencies seize $1.2B in counterfeit imports as illegal goods market continues to grow.

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takyon writes:

China unveils plans for x-ray satellite to probe most violent corners of the universe

China is raising the stakes in its bid to become a major player in space science. At a kick-off meeting in Beijing last week, China's National Space Science Center, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), began detailed design studies for a satellite that would round out an array of orbiting platforms for probing x-rays from the most violent corners of the cosmos.

The enhanced X-Ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP) mission would be China's most ambitious space science satellite yet—and its most expensive, with an estimated price tag of $473 million. To pull it off, China is assembling a collaboration involving more than 200 scientists so far from dozens of institutions in 20 countries. If the eXTP mission passes a final review next year, it would launch around 2025.

Chinese scientists "are becoming leaders in the field of x-ray astrophysics," says Andrea Santangelo, an astrophysicist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and eXTP's international coordinator. Last year, the National Space Science Center launched the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope, which is observing high-energy objects such as black holes and neutron stars. As early as 2021 it will be joined by the Einstein Probe, a wide-field x-ray sentinel for transient phenomena such as gamma ray bursts and the titanic collisions of neutron stars or black holes that generate gravitational waves. "For years we have used data from U.S. and European missions," says eXTP Project Manager Lu Fangjun, an astrophysicist at the CAS Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. Now, he says, "We want to contribute [observational data] to the international community."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

University Hospitals notifies 700 fertility patients of freezer "fluctuation" and potential damage to stored eggs and embryos

University Hospitals has notified about 700 fertility patients and their families that the frozen eggs and embryos they had stored at one of its hospitals may have been damaged over the weekend when the temperature rose in a storage tank.

The problem, in one of two large freezers preserving specimens at the UH Fertility Center housed at the Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood, was discovered on Sunday morning. It occurred some time after staff left the previous afternoon, according to Patti DePompei, president of UH Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital and MacDonald Women's Hospital.

The liquid nitrogen freezer held about 2,000 egg and embryo specimens, according to Dr. James Liu, chairman of the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UH Cleveland Medical Center. Some patients had more than one sample stored, and some of the samples were provided as long ago as the 1980's.

Also at Newsweek.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

A study shows that misinformation spreads faster and farther than correct information:

An analysis of news stories tweeted by three million people between 2006 and 2017 shows that fake news spreads significantly more than the truth on social media.

[...] Truthful tweets took six times as long as fake ones to spread across Twitter to 1,500 people – in large part because falsehoods in the sample were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, even after accounting for account age, activity level and their number of followers. The most viral fake news was political in nature.

The study was carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Social Machines.

From The Inquirer.net : False stories travel way faster than the truth, says study
and New Scientist : Fake news travels six times faster than the truth on Twitter
and The Economist : On Twitter, falsehood spreads faster than truth.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The out-of-control Chinese space station is now predicted to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere sometime around the beginning of April. Most of it will burn up on the way down, but it's possible some pieces of the 9-ton spacecraft could make it to the surface.

Tiangong means "Heavenly Palace" in English and Tiangong-1 was China's first space station, launched in 2011. The original plan for the craft's demise was a controlled re-entry that would allow it to burn up over an unpopulated section of the South Pacific, with any surviving fragments falling in the sea. 

But as early as March 2016, reports began to suggest that Tiangong-1 was malfunctioning and ground crews had lost control of the craft. In other words, there appears to be little chance of performing the maneuvers to steer it to a graceful breakup over the ocean. Instead, it's all up to chance.

According to a new projection from the European Space Agency on Tuesday, the space station is expected to make a likely uncontrolled re-entry roughly between March 29 and April 9. The ESA stresses that it won't be possible to make a precise prediction about exactly when or where Tiangong-1 will burn up and how much of it will get all the way through the atmosphere to the surface. 

That said, the Chinese space station is fairly easy to track and ESA says in an online FAQ that we should know about a day in advance of the craft's end which regions of the planet might be able to see it actually burning up in the sky. Predicting where any impact might occur is significantly more difficult, however. 

"Even 7 hours before the actual re-entry, the uncertainty on the break-up location is a full orbital revolution -- meaning plus or minus thousands of kilometers," writes ESA's Daniel Scuka.

Tiangong-1's orbit spans from 43 degrees north to 43 degrees south, or from the central United States down to the southern tip of Australia, according to Jay Melosh, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University. He explains that it could come down anywhere between the two points but is more likely to land at either extreme because the station spends more time there.

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canopic jug writes:

Clearly forged video footage was submitted as evidence recently regarding an international crime investigation. The forgery was detected because it not smoothly done. But that is changing. So while the countries involved might seem out of the way, recent news about algorithm-enhanced falsified video footage and the social and legal repercussions of realistic but completely fabricated videos make this kind of a warning shot for the admissibility of recordings in general.

Regarding the particular case in question and the forged video, YLE reports:

Aliganyira said that local police were using doctored footage which contained "insertions, removal of images, creating someone to look like [the victim] yet it wasn't him."

Earlier, The Daily Monitor had reported on the footage.

The Internal Security Organisation (ISO) on Tuesday said the footage that is currently in the hands of security and intelligence agencies on the death of the Finnish national who died at Pearl of Hotel on February 6, in Kampala was manipulated.

Already, realistic voice forgery can be done affordably. Soon video capabilities will be realistic enough to cause real difficulties. Then investigations will depend even more so on advanced forensics, if audio and video are even still admissible. Realistic forgeries also allow real snakes to stir up denials and long delays when real evidence is produced by asserting that it is "fake news".

Sources :
Fake video? New twist in case of Finnish businessman's death in Uganda. .
CCTV footage of Kampala hotel where Finnish businessman died was doctored, says ISO. Daily Monitor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Sun is the source of energy that sustains all life on Earth but much remains unknown about it. However, a group of researchers at Queen's [Ed: Queen's University Belfast] have now unlocked some mysteries in a research paper, which has been published in Nature Physics.

In 1942, Swedish physicist and engineer Hannes Alfvén predicted the existence of a new type of wave due to magnetism acting on a plasma, which led him to obtain the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970. Since his prediction, Alfvén waves have been associated with a variety of sources, including nuclear reactors, the gas cloud that envelops comets, laboratory experiments, medical MRI imaging and in the atmosphere of our nearest star -- the Sun.

Scientists have suggested for many years that these waves may play an important role in maintaining the Sun's extremely high temperatures but until now had not been able to prove it.

Dr David Jess from the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's University Belfast explains: "For a long time scientists across the globe have predicted that Alfvén waves travel upwards from the solar surface to break in the higher layers, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of heat. Over the last decade scientists have been able to prove that the waves exist but until now there was no direct evidence that they had the capability to convert their movement into heat.

looorg writes:

Google is selling the Pentagon some Machine Learning / AI training solution so their drones and sensors can pick out the good stuff from all the crap stuff being recorded by their massive surveillance apparatus on a daily basis. Most companies would probably be super pleased by selling something to a customer. Not the Google-employees. Apparently their solutions should only be used for "good", or not being evil or something and Pentagon is clearly "evil" in their eyes.

Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the technology giant when they learned of Google's involvement.

Google's pilot project with the Defense Department's Project Maven, an effort to identify objects in drone footage, has not been previously reported, but it was discussed widely within the company last week when information about the project was shared on an internal mailing list, according to sources who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.

Google's Eric Schmidt summed up the tech industry's concerns about collaborating with the Pentagon at a talk last fall. "There's a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly," he said. While Google says its involvement in Project Maven is not related to combat uses, the issue has still sparked concern among employees, sources said

Project Maven, a fast-moving Pentagon project also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT), was established in April 2017. Maven's stated mission is to "accelerate DoD's integration of big data and machine learning." In total, the Defense Department spent $7.4 billion on artificial intelligence-related areas in 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Are the employees at Google starting to become a problem for Google and their eventual bottom line with their political agendas? Are they getting in the way of doing actual work? When or if is there such a line?

https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533

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McGruber writes:

A "personal drone" that crashed and burst into flames was the cause of the Kendrick Fire, a 335 acre fire in the Coconino National Forest (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconino_National_Forest) in northern Arizona, USA. Coconino National Forest spokesman George Jozens said that about 30 firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service and Summit Fire and Medical worked to quell the fire.

Article: https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-breaking/2018/03/06/personal-drone-sparks-335-acre-wildfire-north-flagstaff/401493002/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves

What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?"
- @RichardDawkins - 6:15 AM - 3 Mar 2018

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/969939225180364805
https://archive.fo/kSmgi

"Lab-grown 'clean' meat could be on sale by end of 2018, says producer"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/clean-meat-lab-grown-available-restaurants-2018-global-warming-greenhouse-emissions-a8236676.html

"'Soylent' Dawkins? Atheist mulls 'taboo against cannibalism' ending as lab-grown meat improves"
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/mar/6/richard-dawkins-mulls-taboo-against-cannibalism-en/

and:

https://www.nationalreview.com/blog/corner/richard-dawkins-eating-human-meat-cannibalism-taboo/

Original Submission

Arik writes:

On April 9, 1972, Iraq and the Soviet Union signed an historic agreement. The USSR committed to arming the Arab republic with the latest weaponry. In return for sending Baghdad guns, tanks and jet fighters, Moscow got just one thing — influence ... in a region that held most of the world's accessible oil.

[...] In neighboring Iran, news of Iraq's alliance with the Soviets exploded like a bomb.[...] The administration of U.S. president Richard Nixon was all too eager to grant the shah's wish in exchange for Iran's help balancing a rising Soviet Union. Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger visited Tehran in May 1972 — and promptly offered the shah a "blank check." Any weapons the king wanted and could pay for, he would get — regardless of the Pentagon's own reservations and the State Department's stringent export policies.

[...] That's how, starting in the mid-1970s, Iran became the only country besides the United States to operate arguably the most powerful interceptor jet ever built — the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, a swing-wing carrier fighter packing a sophisticated radar and long-range AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles.[...]Today Iran's 40 or so surviving F-14s remain some of the best fighters in the Middle East. And since the U.S. Navy retired its last Tomcats in 2006, the ayatollah's Tomcats are the only active Tomcats left in the world.

[...] The F-14 was a product of failure. In the 1960s, the Pentagon hoped to replace thousands of fighters in the U.S. Air Force and Navy with a single design capable of ground attack and air-to-air combat. The result was the General Dynamics F-111 — a two-person, twin-engine marvel of high technology that, in time, became an excellent long-range bomber in Air Force service.

[...] But as a naval fighter, the F-111 was a disaster. [...]In 1968, the Defense Department halted work on the F-111B. Scrambling for a replacement, Grumman took the swing-wing concept, TF-30 engines, AWG-9 radar and long-range AIM-54 missile from the F-111B design and packed them into a smaller, lighter, simpler airframe.

[...] Voila — the F-14.

TFA goes on in some depth both about the historical importance of the F-14 as it flew nearly 50 years ago, as well as the challenges Iran has faced in creating an entirely new supply chain, and eventually new upgrades, to keep a fleet of dedicated interceptors from the last century in service.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

McAfee announced that it has acquired Canada-based virtual private network (VPN) company TunnelBear. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2011, Toronto-based TunnelBear has gained a solid reputation for its fun, cross-platform VPN app that uses quirky bear-burrowing animations to bring online privacy to the masses.

The company claims around 20 million people have used its service across mobile and desktop, while a few months back it branched out into password management with the launch of the standalone RememBear app.

[...] McAfee has said that it bought TunnelBear for its consumer-focused business, but TunnelBear has also branched out into the business realm, recently introducing a new VPN product for teams, so there is scope for McAfee to build on this foundation.

That TunnelBear has sold to a major brand such as McAfee won't be greeted warmly by many of the product's existing users. However, with significantly more resources now at its disposal, TunnelBear should be in a good position to absorb any losses that result from the transfer of ownership.

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/08/mcafee-acquires-vpn-company-tunnelbear/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Cisco released 22 security advisories yesterday, including two alerts for critical fixes, one of them for a hardcoded password that can give attackers full control over a vulnerable system.

The hardcoded password issue affects Cisco's Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP), a software application that can be used for the remote installation and maintenance of other Cisco voice and video products. Cisco PCP is often installed on Linux servers.

Cisco says that an attacker could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-0141) by connecting to the affected system via Secure Shell (SSH) using the hardcoded password.

The flaw can be exploited only by local attackers, and it also grants access to a low-privileged user account. In spite of this, Cisco has classified the issue as "critical."

Although this vulnerability has a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Base score of 5.9, which is normally assigned a Security Impact Rating (SIR) of Medium, there are extenuating circumstances that allow an attacker to elevate privileges to root. For these reasons, the SIR has been set to Critical.

The reasons are that an attacker can infect another device on the same network and use it as a proxy for his SSH connection to the vulnerable Cisco PCP instance, allowing for remote, over-the-Internet exploitation.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hardcoded-password-found-in-cisco-software/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

There are two kinds of horror stories about Airbnb. When the home-sharing platform first appeared, the initial cautionary tales tended to emphasize extreme guest (and occasionally host) misbehavior. But as the now decade-old service matured and the number of rental properties proliferated dramatically, a second genre emerged, one that focused on what the service was doing to the larger community: Airbnb was raising rents and taking housing off the rental market. It was supercharging gentrification while discriminating against guests and hosts of color. And as commercial operators took over, it was transforming from a way to help homeowners occasionally rent out an extra room into a purveyor of creepy, makeshift hotels.

Several studies have looked into these claims; some focused on just one issue at a time, or measured Airbnb-linked trends across wide swaths of the country. But a recent report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, zeroes in on New York City in an effort to answer the question of exactly what home sharing is doing to the city.

Source: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/03/what-airbnb-did-to-new-york-city/552749/

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Anonymous Braveheart writes:

The Free Software Foundation's annual conference is here again. Saturday & Sunday March 24-25th in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hundreds of people, similar mindset, different view points. This year the theme is embedded systems:

LibrePlanet's 10th anniversary theme is "Freedom. Embedded." Consider: embedded systems are everywhere, in cars, digital watches, traffic lights, and even within our bodies. Right now, proprietary software is everywhere, its sinister aspects embedded in software, digital devices, and our lives. We've come to expect that our phones monitor our activity and share that data with big companies, governments enforce digital restrictions management (DRM), and even our activity on social Websites is out of our control.

In a society reliant on embedded systems, how do we defend computer user freedom? How do we insist on copylefted code, protect ourselves against government and corporate surveillance, and move toward a freer world? For many people, digital freedom seems like a pipe dream. Can we change the narrative and make free software the norm, instead of walled gardens, denial of the right to repair, and DRM?

https://libreplanet.org/2018/

Original Submission