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takyon writes:

The UK's Video Standards Council Rating Board has refused to issue a UK Certificate of Classification (archive) for the JRPG game Omega Labyrinth Z, due to it "clearly [promoting] the sexualisation of children". The publisher's appeal of the decision was rejected. This is the first game to be banned in the UK since Manhunt 2, which was initially refused classification by the British Board of Film Classification, but eventually classified "18" after censorship, a second refusal, and an appeal.:

The game is explicit in its setting within a "school" environment and the majority of the characters are young girls - one child is referred to as being a "first year" student and is seen holding a teddy bear. The game clearly promotes the sexualisation of children via the sexual interaction between the game player and the female characters. The style of the game is such that it will attract an audience below the age of 18.

There is a serious danger that impressionable people, i.e. children and young people viewing the game would conclude that the sexual activity represented normal sexual behaviour. There is a constant theme of sexual innuendo and activity throughout the game that suggests behaviour likely to normalise sexual activity towards children. As a means of reward gained by successfully navigating the game, the player has the means to sexually stimulate the female characters by using either a hand held remote device or touch screen software.

The VSC Rating Board believes this content in a game, which would have strong appeal to non-adult players, is an issue which would be unacceptable to the majority of UK consumers and, more importantly, has the potential to be significantly harmful in terms of the social and moral development of younger people in particular.

Omega Labyrinth Z was released in Japan on July 6, 2017 for the PlayStation Vita and PS4 platforms, and will be released in North America and Europe in early 2018. The game was also refused classification in Australia and Germany, and will not be released in New Zealand or Ireland.

The UK's Digital Economy Act 2010 shifted responsibility for classifying most video games from the British Board of Film Classification to the Video Standards Council.

In unrelated news, Luigi may or may not have a penis.

Also at BBC, Gamasutra, and Kotaku.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Back in 43AD, after the Roman conquest of Britain, the Emperor Vespasian sent governor Quintus Petilius Cerialis to what's now Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cumbria to wrestle control of the north of England from a Celtic tribe called the Brigantes and put down a rebellion that had erupted after the breakdown of the marriage between Queen Cartimandua and her husband Venetius (she eloped with a 'common soldier'). These roads were an important part of connecting buildings and settlements to consolidate territory up north.

LiDAR mapping has helped to find four lost Roman roads so far, and there are hopes it will enable archaeologists to find many more - this 'light detection and ranging' laser mapping technology can be used to 'prove' the course a road took where before it was only suspected. LiDAR enables them to spot 'aggers' - Roman ramparts - running straight for a few kilometres, where a road must have been.

At present, about 75 per cent of England is mapped in this way, with limited knowledge of upland areas – the Environment Agency began LiDAR scanning 20 years ago as a means of tracking changing coastlines and performing flood modelling.

They have just announced plans to map the entire of England – which they say is the equivalent of about 32 million football pitches - by the end of 2020.

To create LiDAR maps, aircraft with laser scanners measure the distance between the plane and objects it encounters. Instead of radio or sound waves, as in the case of Radar or Sonar, LiDAR - wait for it - uses light waves and 'velocity of time' to calculate the time it takes to hit an object and be sent back, building up a detailed picture of what is out there.

[...] Beyond assessing flood risk, planning defences and understanding the natural landscape for varied purposes including those of archaeologists, the agency also hopes to fight "waste crime," which James Bevan, chief executive of the environment agency, has dubbed "the new narcotics".

Waste dumping reportedly costs £1 billion a year, with 1,000 sites discovered in 2015 - the process involves fraudsters dumping skip-loads of rubbish onto a piece of land and leaving it there to fester, while charging customers for the pleasure. LiDAR data enables authorities to discover sudden changes in the landscape quickly and crack down on the practice.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports

The March edition of Patch Tuesday lands just hours before researchers are expected to flaunt their latest and greatest exploits at the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking competition in Vancouver.

Hopefully nobody was planning to use any of the 75 CVE-listed vulnerabilities Microsoft addressed today, including several for the Edge and Internet Explorer browsers that would allow remote code execution.

The fixed bugs include nine remote code execution (RCE) flaws in the Chakra scripting engine in Edge. Microsoft says the scripting bugs (such as CVE-2018-0874[1]) would allow an infected webpage to run code with the logged-in user's clearance level.

The Edge scripting engine was also the subject of four memory corruption RCE flaws, as well as an information disclosure bug, CVE-2018-0839[1], that allows an attack page to view objects in memory.

Just two of the 75 Microsoft bugs squashed this month have been publicly disclosed. They include an elevation of privilege bug in Exchange (CVE-2018-0940[1]) exploited via email. Dustin Childs of the Zero Day Initiative said that the bug is perfectly set up to facilitate a spear phishing attack.

[1] All content at portal.msrc.microsoft.com is behind scripts. Attempts to have archive.is run the scripts results in a EULA page.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

An appeals court threw out part of a Federal Communications Commission regulation aimed at reducing automated telephone solicitations, weakening a 2015 effort to squelch the scourge of so-called robocalls.

The rule was aimed at calls generated by auto-dialing devices. But its language was too broad, and could be construed to prohibit calls from any smartphone, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in a unanimous opinion Friday.

[...] Unwanted calls, including robocalls, are the top consumer complaint to the FCC, with more than 200,000 such comments received annually, according to the agency. Some private analyses estimate that U.S. consumers received about 2.4 billion robocalls per month in 2016.

[...] Because under the FCC's rule "any uninvited call or message from the device is a statutory violation," regular smartphone users could face a $500 penalty for calls -- such as inviting a person to a party -- without first getting consent to contact them, the judges said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-16/u-s-robocall-limits-partly-tossed-out-by-federal-appeals-court

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Irish culture will soon be celebrated across the globe with parades, pub crawls and seas of green. But newly uncovered documents prove unlike previous belief, St. Patrick's Day celebrations did not start in Boston, rather at least 100 years earlier in St. Augustine, Florida.

The curious discovery comes from a rather unlikely source: gunpowder expenditures lists from St. Augustine for the years 1600-1601.While cannons and other artillery were often fired to help guide ships safely across St. Augustine's protective sandbar, they were also shot off during times of public celebrations and religious festivities.

A single entry from March 1600 states St. Augustine's residents gathered together and processed through the streets in honor of the feast day of San Patricio, or St. Patrick. As they made their way through the town, cannons fired from the wooden fort in celebration of the Irish saint.

"It was certainly a surprise," said historian J. Michael Francis, PhD, University of South Florida-St. Petersburg, who uncovered the document. "It did not register the first time I saw the name "San Patricio," the Spanish name for St. Patrick. After a few seconds it actually hit me that there was a St. Patrick's Day parade/procession in St. Augustine in 1601. Even more surprising was that the document identified St. Patrick as the patron saint of the city's maize fields."

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-truth-st-patrick-day-celebrations.html

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Teenagers are more likely to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit because they are less able to make mature decisions, new research shows.

Experts have called for major changes to the criminal justice system after finding innocent younger people are far more likely admit to offences, even when innocent, than adults.

Those who carried out the study say teenagers should not be allowed to make deals where they face a lesser charge in return for pleading guilty. The study suggests young people are more likely to be enticed by these deals, and take what they see as an advantageous offer even when they have done nothing wrong.

Most criminal convictions in the UK and the USA occur as the result of guilty pleas, rather than trial. This means the majority of convictions are the result of decisions made by people accused of crimes rather than jurors.

The research was carried out in the USA, where a system known as "plea bargaining" is utilised, but the academics say their discovery has implications for countries across the world that allow teenagers accused of crimes to receive a sentence or charge reduction by pleading guilty. Specifically, the researchers recommend restricting reductions that may entice innocent teenagers into pleading guilty and making it easier for teenagers to change pleas after they have been entered.

Other research has found adolescents are less able to perceive risk and resist the influence of peers because of developmental immaturity.

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-teenagers-guilty-crimes-didnt-commit.html

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The US Department of Defense is in the process of releasing all of its custom software under Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licenses with a deadline of June for getting under way. Most of the barriers so far have been legal and policy ones, not technical.

As part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the Defense Department has until June to start moving much of its custom-developed software source code to a central repository and begin managing and licensing it via open source methods.

The mandate might prove daunting for an organization in which open source practices are relatively scarce, especially considering that, until recently, there was no established open source playbook for the federal government. That's begun to change, however, with the Office of Management and Budget's code.gov, and its DoD corollary, code.mil, run by the Defense Digital Service (DDS).

The fact that such software is actually under public domain inside the US adds a small twist to the release process.

From Federal News Radio : Amid congressional mandate to open source DoD's software code, Code.mil serves as guidepost.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

AI researchers from 34 institutions have compiled 27 examples of ways in which digital evolution produces surprising and creative solutions. They also make the case that such surprise is the rule rather than the exception. These 27 are just a small subset of what are for now amusing anecdotes and for every story they received or heard, there are likely to be many others that have been already forgotten as researchers retire.

The process of evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution can provide examples of how their evolving algorithms and organisms have creatively subverted their expectations or intentions, exposed unrecognized bugs in their code, produced unexpectedly adaptations, or engaged in behaviors and outcomes uncannily convergent with ones found in nature. Such stories routinely reveal surprise and creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative.

[...] One obstacle to their dissemination is that such unexpected results often result from evolution thwarting a researcher's intentions: by exploiting a bug in the code, by optimizing an uninteresting feature, or by failing to answer the intended research question. That is, such behavior is often viewed as a frustrating distraction, rather than a phenomenon of scientific interest. Additionally, surprise is subjective and thus fits poorly with the objective language and narrative expected in scientific publications. As a result, most anecdotes have been spread only through word of mouth, providing laughs and discussion in research groups, at conferences, and as comic relief during talks. But such communications fail to inform the field as a whole in a lasting and stable way.

Limited to the lab, the examples given are currently either humorous or intriguing or both. Those outside of AI work and, maybe some inside it, forget the completely alien nature of the algorithms and their ability to deliver exactly what was asked of them. These examples help illustrate that nature.

From Arxiv.org : The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities

Original Submission

Appalbarry writes:

In a story that should interest anyone involved in on-line security the Canadian Press reports that:

The chief executive of a Vancouver-based company appeared in a Washington state court on Thursday in the first U.S. case in which a company has been targeted for providing criminal drug cartels with the technology to evade law enforcement, the U.S. Justice Department said.

Phantom Secure CEO Vincent Ramos was indicted, along with four of his associates, on charges related to providing criminal organizations with cellular phones and encrypted networks to coordinate the shipment of illegal drugs around the world.

"Phantom Secure allegedly provided a service designed to allow criminals the world over to evade law enforcement to traffic drugs and commit acts of violent crime without detection," said FBI Director Christopher Wray in a statement.

CNBC suggests that Phantom Secure was selling "hacked" BlackBerry and Samsung phones:

The people behind a company that hacked Samsung and BlackBerry phones to make them more secure, have been indicted for allegedly conspiring with drug cartels to help them evade law enforcement and sell narcotics.

Phantom Secure, a Canada-based firm, sold Samsung and BlackBerry devices that had been modified with a higher encryption. This made it difficult for the authorities to trace drug traffickers.

Phantom Secure's web site does say that:

We are a law-abiding company that is permitted to deliver encrypted communication services to our clients in order for them to protect their communications, without having the ability to decrypt their communications. Our service does not require personal information and has no back doors.

In providing such a service we do understand that there will be a very small number of people that may use our service to do activities we do not support. We do not condone the use of our service for any type of illegal activities and if known we will terminate the use of our service without notice. Considering this, requests for the contents of communications may arise from government agencies, which would require a valid search warrant from an agency with proper jurisdiction over Phantom Secure. However, our response to such requests will be the content and identity of our clients are not stored on our server and that the content is encrypted data, which is indecipherable.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Hagerty are running a nice story, on the ramp-to-ramp spiral jump, 50th anniversary. The stunt was developed as part of validating a detailed math model for car accident reconstruction--including early computer graphics. After touring for several years as part of an auto thrill show, the stunt was eventually featured in the James Bond movie, The Man With the Golden Gun. The article also details a couple of recent copies of this stunt.

Your submitter knows someone that insures a classic car with Hagerty, but has no other connection with this specialized insurance company.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New Report Reveals Google's Extensive Financial Support for European Academics and Think Tanks

Today, Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group focused on public accountability, released a new report revealing how Google has paid tens of millions of euros to European academic institutions over the past decade to develop an influential network of friendly European academics who write research papers supporting the tech giant's business interests.

Read the report here.

CfA Executive Director Daniel E. Stevens stated, "Google's lavish funding of academics and think tanks helps the company exert a subtle and hidden form of influence on European policymakers. As Europe looks to crack down on Google's excesses, regulators need to be aware that a good deal of the academic research defending the company is written by Google-funded institutions."

Spanning the length and breadth of Europe, Google-funded think thanks have published hundreds of papers on issues central to the company's business, from antitrust enforcement to regulation governing privacy, copyright, jobs, and the "right to be forgotten." Events organized by Google-funded institutions have attracted many of the European policymakers charged with creating and enforcing regulation affecting the company.

One of the donors to the Campaign for Accountability is Oracle.

Also at Politico.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hacker who gave up Wikileaks source dies

Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker best known for passing on information that led to the arrest of Chelsea Manning, has died aged 37. In online messaging conversations, Manning confided in him, describing confidential military material Manning had sent to Wikileaks.

[...] The cause of Lamo's death, confirmed to the BBC by the Sedgwick County coroner in Kansas, has not yet been made public.

[...] Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Friday described Lamo as a "petty conman and betrayer of basic human decency".

Adrian Lamo.

Related: Report: Iraq and Afghanistan WikiLeaks Disclosures Did Not Significantly Harm U.S. National Security

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Using AI to count craters on the moon at U of T's Centre for Planetary Sciences

A new technique developed by researchers at the University of Toronto is using the technology behind self-driving cars to measure the size and location of crater impacts on the moon.

"When it comes to counting craters on the moon, it's a pretty archaic method," says Mohamad Ali-Dib, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Planetary Sciences (CPS) at U of T Scarborough.

"Basically we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image. Here we've developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process that saves significant time and effort."

[...] In order to determine its accuracy, the researchers first trained the neural network on a large data set covering two-thirds of the moon, and then tested their trained network on the remaining third of the moon. It worked so well that it was able to identify twice as many craters as traditional manual counting. In fact, it was able to identify about 6,000 previously unidentified craters on the moon.

Also at New Scientist and Science News.

Lunar Crater Identification via Deep Learning (arXiv:1803.02192)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Guardian reports doctors from Quebec have published an open letter demanding better allocation of public funds.

"We, Quebec doctors, are asking that the salary increases granted to physicians be cancelled and that the resources of the system be better distributed for the good of healthcare workers," reads the open letter.

It was drafted late last month by Médecins québécois pour le régime public, a group of doctors and medical students who support public healthcare.

So far the letter has attracted some 800 signatures from people with a spine and media attention.

Additional coverage on The New York Times, BBC News and The Washington Post

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Code-repository GitHub has raised the alarm about a pending European copyright proposal could force it to implement automated filtering systems – referred to by detractors as "censorship machines" – that would hinder developers working with free and open source software.

The proposal, part of Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive from 2016, has been working its way through the legislative process.

In a blog post on Wednesday GitHub explained that the shakeup was designed to address the perception that there's a "value gap" between the money streaming-media platforms make from uploaded content and what content creators actually get paid.

"However, the way it's written captures many other types of content, including code," San Francisco-based GitHub said.

If passed, the rules would require code hosting platforms to take preemptive action to prevent copyrighted material from being shared without the appropriate license.

[...] Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament and a representative of the Pirate Party in Germany, argues that the proposed requirements would force GitHub to negotiate a license from every single developer and would "kill the platforms economy in Europe."

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/15/eu_copyright_proposal_could_limit_github_code/

Original Submission