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takyon writes:

Third time's the charm:

A California technology billionaire said on Thursday that his longtime and perhaps quixotic effort to partition the Golden State into multiple new states could soon be put before voters.

Venture capitalist Tim Draper said he had gathered about 600,000 signatures on a petition to put his proposal to divide California on the November ballot, more than the 366,000 needed to qualify. It is his third attempt to get voters to weigh in on his call to break up the most populous U.S. state.

Draper, who in 2014 and 2016 failed in his efforts to win approval for a ballot initiative to divide the state into six parts, said in a news release Thursday that he planned to file the signatures with election officials next week.

[...] To go into effect, California would first have to certify the signatures that Draper has gathered, and then voters in November would need to pass the measure. After that, the U.S. Congress would have to approve it.

Also at The Mercury News and SFGate.

Related:
Secessionists Formally Launch Quest for California's Independence
California Secession Leader has Russian Ties
Calexit: the "Bad Boys of Brexit" Throw Their Weight Behind Move to Split State

Original Submission

Russian Regulator Asks Courts To Disconnect Telegram

Arthur T Knackerbracket reported the following story on the 9 April:

Russian telecoms and mass communications regulator Roskomnadzor has filed a lawsuit it hopes will see secure messaging app Telegram turfed out of the country.

Moscow’s been unhappy with Telegram for some time, dating back to a mid-2017 dispute over the company’s non-compliance with requests to register as a telecoms service provider. The service and the Kremlin have also tangled over access to encryption keys.

The latter dispute is at the root of this latest episode, which has seen Roskomnadzor seek to have Telegram booted out of Russia for non-compliance.

Telegram has previously asserted it doesn’t have any keys to hand over, so can’t comply with Russian orders to do so.

Russia Will Block Telegram Messaging App Due to Encryption

takyon writes:

Russia to block Telegram app over encryption

A court in Moscow has approved a request from the Russian media regulator to block the Telegram messaging app immediately. The media regulator sought to block the app because the firm had refused to hand over encryption keys used to scramble messages.

Security officials say they need to monitor potential terrorists. But the company said the way the service was built meant it had no access to customers' encryption keys. Telegram had missed a deadline of 4 April to hand over the keys.

Russia's main security agency, the FSB, has said Telegram is the messenger of choice for "international terrorist organisations in Russia". A suicide bomber who killed 15 people on a subway train in St Petersburg last April used the app to communicate with accomplices, the FSB said last year. The app is also widely used by the Russian authorities, Reuters news agency reports.

The best endorsement.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

Update: President Trump has pardoned I. Lewis Libby Jr., former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. He is better known as "Scooter Libby":

"I don't know Mr. Libby," Trump said in a statement, "but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly. Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life."

Previously:

President Trump plans to pardon I. Lewis Libby Jr., who as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney was convicted of perjury in connection with the leak of a C.I.A. officer's identity, a person familiar with the decision said on Thursday.

Mr. Libby's case has long been a cause for conservatives who maintained that he was a victim of a special prosecutor run amok, an argument that may have resonated with the president. Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that the special counsel investigation into possible cooperation between his campaign and Russia in 2016 has gone too far and amounts to an unfair "witch hunt."

Mr. Libby, who goes by Scooter, was convicted of four felonies in 2007 for perjury before a grand jury, lying to F.B.I. investigators and obstruction of justice during an investigation into the disclosure of the work of Valerie Plame Wilson, a C.I.A. officer. President George W. Bush commuted Mr. Libby's 30-month prison sentence but refused to grant him a full pardon despite the strenuous requests of Mr. Cheney, a decision that soured the relationship between the two men.

takyon writes:

Despite cries of "responsible encryption", numerous law enforcement agencies are cracking into iPhones using a box called "GrayKey". Even the latest iPhones may be affected:

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently said that law enforcement agencies are "increasingly unable to access" evidence stored on encrypted devices. Wray is not telling the whole truth.

Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials. Many of the documents were obtained by Motherboard using public records requests.

[...] "It demonstrates that even state and local police do have access to this data in many situations," Matthew Green, an assistant professor and cryptographer at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, told Motherboard in a Twitter message. "This seems to contradict what the FBI is saying about their inability to access these phones."

As part of the investigation, Motherboard found:

• Regional police forces, such as the Maryland State Police and Indiana State Police, are procuring a technology called 'GrayKey' which can break into iPhones, including the iPhone X running the latest operating system iOS 11.
• Local police forces, including Miami-Dade County Police, have also indicated that they may have bought the equipment.
• Other forces, including the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, have seemingly not bought GrayKey, but have received quotations from the company selling the technology, called Grayshift.
• Emails show the Secret Service is planning to buy at least half a dozen GrayKey boxes to unlock iPhones.
• The State Department has already bought the technology, and the Drug Enforcement Administration is interested in doing so.

See also: FBI Refuses to Say Whether It Bought iPhone Unlocking Tech 'GrayKey'

Also at Engadget and AppleInsider.

Related: U.S. Legislators Trying to Weaken Encryption Yet Again

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Backpage's CEO Carl Ferrer took a plea deal one day before the site got shut down:

The CEO and co-founder of the classified ad website Backpage.com cut a plea deal with state and federal prosecutors, admitting that he knew that the site had become a massive online marketplace for prostitution. Carl Ferrer, 57, agreed to plead guilty to charges in state courts in Texas and California and federal charges in Arizona in a bid to resolve an array of criminal investigations he was facing over his role in the site. The plea deal appears to limit Ferrer's total potential prison time to no more than five years.

"I have long been aware that the vast majority of these advertisements are, in fact, advertisements for prostitution services (which are not protected by the First Amendment and which are illegal in 49 states and much of Nevada)," Ferrer acknowledged in a written statement that was part of the plea bargain.

During a lengthy Senate investigation, Ferrer and other Backpage officials insisted they were policing the website aggressively to remove such advertising. However, Ferrer admitted in the plea deal that those efforts were just window dressing. "I worked with my co-conspirators to create 'moderation' processes through which Backpage would remove terms and pictures that were particularly indicative of prostitution and then publish a revised version of the ad," he said in the plea document. "It was merely intended to create a veneer of deniability for Backpage."

The Washington Post reports that Ferrer agreed to testify against co-founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin.

The organizers of the Women's March have tweeted their opposition to the Backpage shutdown. Some conservatives are not amused, but sex workers have been critical of the shutdown and the passage of the SESTA law:

"Girls are going back to the streets and they are going to die in the streets, and nobody cares," said Calida, a mother of two, who said she used to do street work and fears she will have to start again to make ends meet. "Everybody is terrified."

MostCynical writes:

The Guardian reports that an "Australian bill to create back door into encrypted apps [is] in 'advanced stages.'" The Australian government is pushing ahead with controversial legislation it says will create "back doors" into encrypted communication services – but still can't say when it will introduce the bill.

After originally aiming to have the legislation before parliament in the first quarter of this year, the government has delayed its introduction. A spokesman for the acting attorney general, Marise Payne, would only say it was in "the advanced stages of development".

[...] "If it is to proceed, Labor calls on the government to release an exposure draft of this legislation, to allow for proper consultation. This is important given the complexities around this novel area of lawmaking."

Greens senator Jordon Steele-John said the whole concept was laughable. "Once the government has a back door into encrypted devices and platforms, everybody has a back door into encrypted devices and platforms," he said.

"That has been proven over and over again. Once it is created, somebody gets in. I wouldn't trust a government that can't keep Medicare information protected to be inserting a back door into a tin shed.

"So I certainly wouldn't be trusting them to do something as serious as this."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/13/australian-bill-to-create-back-door-into-encrypted-apps-in-advanced-stages

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

While most of the newspapers were distracting the public with the antics of Mark Zuckerberg, a European Union High Court raised 11 important questions regarding privacy (warning for PDF) that will affect large data-gathering operations like Facebook. The 11 questions have been passed upwards to the most senior EU court and are based on a current case started by Max Schrems.

The Irish High Court referral, published on Thursday and due to be submitted to the ECJ by the end of April, stems from a case brought by an Austrian privacy activist against the methods used by Facebook to store user data on U.S. servers following revelations in 2013 of mass U.S. surveillance practices.

[...] The High Court's five-page referral asks the Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) if the Privacy Shield - under which companies certify they comply with EU privacy law when transferring data to the United States - does in fact mean that the United States "ensures an adequate level of protection".

Opponents can still appeal the court's referral any time until the end of the month. The proposed Privacy Shield legislation is the EU's follow up framework to cover transfers of personal data to outside the EU. It is being written as a replacement for the now invalidated International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. The Safe Harbour agreement was brought down, after an earlier two-year lawsuit (Case C-362/14) by Max Schrems, because of its inadequate protections in light of the Snowden revelations.

From Reuters : EU's top court asked to probe Facebook U.S. data transfers
The Irish Times : High Court sets out 11 questions for ECJ on EU-US data transfers
Ars Technica : Facebook data transfers to be examined by EU court, Irish judge rules

See also an intial analysis, http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/sh2/PA-ref.pdf

Earlier on SN:
Austria Resident Max Schrems is Organizing a Privacy-Oriented Class-Action Suit Against Facebook
On its Way: A Google-Free, NSA-Free IT Infrastructure for Europe

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Tyler of tjll.net writes in his blog:

After my Asus N66U kicked the bucket, I considered a few options: another all-in-one router, upgrade to something like an EdgeRouter, or brew something custom. When I read the Ars Technica article espousing the virtues of building your own router, that pretty much settled it: DIY it is.

I've got somewhat of a psychological complex when it comes to rolling my own over-engineered solutions, but I did set some general goals: the end result should be cheap, low-power, well-supported by Linux, and extensible. Incidentally, ARM boards fit many of these requirements, and some like the Raspberry Pi have stirred up so much community activity that there's great support for the ARM platform, even though it may feel foreign from x86.

takyon writes:

Rocket Lab is about to win the small satellite launch space race

Life is pretty good for Rocket Lab and its founder Peter Beck right now. With two test flights of its Electron rocket completed in the last 10.5 months, the company says it will move into commercial operations later this month. The 14-day launch window for the "It's Business Time" mission, carrying two private payloads, opens on April 20.

In an interview, Beck said Rocket Lab hopes to fly eight missions in 2018 and reach a monthly launch cadence by the end of the year. The company's initial test flight in May 2017 failed to reach orbit, but a second flight in January of this year was almost entirely successful. Rocket Lab will become the first of a number of small-satellite launch companies to begin serving customers.

Previously: Rocket Lab Makes Suborbital Launch From New Zealand
Rocket Lab's Second "Electron" Rocket Launch Succeeds, Reaches Orbit

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Threatened: A Green-Haired Turtle That Can Breathe Through Its Genitals

In the debate over saving endangered species, it may be that some should get priority just because of how weird they are. Take the green-haired turtle. It breathes through its genitals. Not all the time — but after a long time underwater, an alternative way to get oxygen really helps.

The turtle is thirtieth on a new list of reptiles in trouble put out by the Zoological Society of London. The Edge of Existence program at the society looks at the evolutionary trees of animals that are endangered to determine which are most evolutionary distinctive. Previously, they put out lists for mammals and amphibians. The new list ranks reptiles on a combination of how distinctive and how endangered they are.

Rikki Gumbs and other researchers at the society who worked on the new list wrote a paper explaining how they arrive at the rankings, which was published in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday [open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194680] [DX].

Mr. Gumbs, who is pursuing a Ph.D. jointly at Imperial College London and the zoological society, said that evolutionary distinctiveness is not exactly the same as weirdness, but not far off. It is a measure of "how alone you are on the tree of life," he said. Those species do "tend to be weird and wonderful in the way they live."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX has raised $507 million, bringing the company's valuation to about $25 billion. That makes SpaceX the third most valuable venture-backed startup behind Uber and Airbnb, and also raises Elon Musk's worth by $1.4 billion to about $21.3 billion. SpaceX will launch NASA's TESS spacecraft on Monday, and plans to launch Bangabandhu-1 on May 5 using the Block 5 version of Falcon 9.

While SpaceX is planning to launch a record 30 missions in 2018, and possibly 50 missions in upcoming years, SpaceX expects the bulk of its future revenue to come from its upcoming Starlink satellite internet service. Internal documents show an estimate of $30 billion in revenue from Starlink and $5 billion from launches by 2025.

SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell has said that the company's BFR could be used for 100-person city-to-city flights within a decade:

A lot can (and probably will) change in a decade. But the idea is that a very large rocket, capable of carrying about 100 people, could fly like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on Earth much faster than a plane — halfway across the globe in about 30 to 40 minutes, Shotwell said, landing on a pad five to 10 kilometers outside of a city center. Shotwell estimated the ticket cost would be somewhere between economy and business class on a plane — so, likely in the thousands of dollars for transoceanic travel. "But you do it in an hour."

"I'm personally invested in this one," she said, "because I travel a lot, and I do not love to travel. And I would love to get to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner."

How could travel by rocket cost so little? Shotwell said the efficiency would come from being fast enough to be able to operate a route a dozen or so times a day, whereas a long-haul airplane often only does one flight per day.

She also said that the company could enable a manned mission to Mars within a decade. Boeing's CEO is also "hopeful" that humans will set foot on Mars within a decade.

Finally, Elon Musk has showed off an image of the main body tool/manufacturing mold for the BFR. BFR has a height of 106 meters and diameter of 9 meters, compared to a height of 70 meters and diameter of 3.7 meters for Falcon 9.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

It Built an Empire of GIFs, Buzzy News and Jokes. China Isn't Amused.

A Chinese start-up that appears to have mastered the art of keeping people glued to their smartphones also has a knack for something else: drawing the ire of China's censors. The country's top media regulator on Tuesday ordered the company, Bytedance, to shut down its app for sharing jokes and silly videos. Vulgar content on the Neihan Duanzi app had "caused strong dislike among internet users," a brief notice from the State Administration of Radio and Television said. The company was told to clean up its other platforms, too.

The shutdown was only the latest blow for Bytedance, one of the world's most successful technology start-ups. Just a day earlier, its flagship app, a popular news aggregator called Jinri Toutiao, was pulled from app stores for unspecified reasons. And last week, Huoshan, the company's platform for sharing slice-of-life video clips, vanished from app stores after China's official television broadcaster rapped it for glorifying underage pregnancy.

In a statement posted Wednesday morning, Zhang Yiming, Bytedance's founder and chief executive, said he had spent the previous, sleepless night in deep reflection, gnawed by "a guilty conscience." "Content had appeared that did not accord with core socialist values and was not a good guide for public opinion," Mr. Zhang wrote. "Over the past few years, we put more effort and resources toward expanding the business, and did not take enough measures to supervise our platform." He added that Bytedance would expand its team for monitoring content to 10,000 people from 6,000 currently.

The company's travails show how the government in Beijing has broadened its restrictions on what people see and say on the internet. Regulators are increasingly suppressing content that they deem pornographic or in poor taste, and not merely material that touches on politically sensitive topics such as regime change or personal freedoms. The authorities are also scrambling to keep up as a new wave of Chinese apps, many of them built around short, spontaneously recorded video clips or live streams, helps people communicate and express themselves in new and hard-to-supervise ways.

See also: Car Horns Honk, and China's Internet Censors Swoop In
A Saucy App Knows China's Taste in News. The Censors Are Worried.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Study: Vaccine Suppresses Peanut Allergies in Mice

Just three monthly doses of a nasal vaccine protected the mice from allergic reactions upon exposure to peanut, according to research from the Mary H. Weiser Food Allergy Center at the University of Michigan.

U-M researchers have spent nearly two decades developing a vaccine agent and have recently translated this work to the development of a vaccine to treat food allergies. In the new study, immunizing peanut allergic mice can redirect how immune cells responded to peanuts in allergic mice.

The new approach activates a different type of immune response that prevents allergic symptoms.

"We're changing the way the immune cells respond upon exposure to allergens," says lead author Jessica O'Konek, Ph.D., a research investigator at the food allergy center. "Importantly, we can do this after allergy is established, which provides for potential therapy of allergies in humans."

"By redirecting the immune responses, our vaccine not only suppresses the response but prevents the activation of cells that would initiate allergic reactions."

Nanoemulsion adjuvant–driven redirection of T_H2 immunity inhibits allergic reactions in murine models of peanut allergy (DOI: 10.1016/j.jaci.2018.01.042) (DX)

Related: Peanut Allergy Cured in Majority of Children in Immunotherapy Trial
Animal Study Shows How To Retrain The Immune System To Ease Food Allergies

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Phoronix reports

For fans of the FreeCAD open-source 3D CAD modeling software, a new major release is now available--the first update in almost two years.

FreeCAD 0.17 is now available to succeed FreeCAD 0.16 from April of 2016. While it may not be nearly as well off as AutoCAD or other alternatives, FreeCAD does continue getting better while being free and open-source software.

FreeCAD 0.17 overhauls its PartDesign Workbench, a new add-on manager to make installing new modules/macros easier, Sketcher improvements, new documentation, navigation improvements, and various Workbench improvements are among the changes making up this release.

Those wishing to learn more about FreeCAD 0.17 can check-out the lengthy release notes or head straight over to GitHub to download. Those upgrading to v0.17 are advised to backup their FreeCAD files as there could be issues in the upgrade path.

GitHub notes

This release of FreeCAD is dedicated to our friend Roland Frank who left us in 2017. He was an active and well-appreciated member of the FreeCAD forum, and his video tutorials on the Learn FreeCAD and BPLFRE Youtube channels helped many people get started with FreeCAD.

This is the official 0.17 release of FreeCAD for Windows and Mac OS platforms. Linux users are advised to get FreeCAD from their distribution's repository, or from our PPA if using Ubuntu.

The AppImage should work on most modern 64 bit Linux distributions. Download the file and make it executable. It's self contained and should be portable.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA announces James Webb Space Telescope Independent Review Board members

NASA recently announced the formation of an external Independent Review Board for the space agency's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The board will study a variety of factors impacting the mission's success and reinforce NASA's strategy for completing the observatory's final integration and testing phase, launch phase and commissioning.

"We are exploring every aspect of Webb's final testing and integration to ensure a successful mission, delivering on its scientific promise," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in a NASA news release. "This board's input will provide a higher level of confidence in the estimated time needed to successfully complete the highly complex tasks ahead before NASA defines a specific launch time frame."

According to NASA, the board includes individuals with expertise and experience in program management, schedule and cost management, systems engineering and the integration and testing of large and complex space systems, science instrumentation, unique flight hardware and missions with science objectives similar to Webb.

[...] According to NASA, the members of the Independent Review Board are:

DeathMonkey writes:

Twin Galaxies, the long-running video game high score tracker recognized by Guinness World Records, has banned Billy Mitchell and removed all of his past scores from its listings after determining that two million-plus-point Donkey Kong performances he submitted were actually created with an emulator and not on original arcade hardware as he consistently claimed. The move means that the organization now recognizes Steve Wiebe as the first player to achieve a million-point game in Donkey Kong, a question central to the 2007 cult classic documentary The King of Kong.

Nearly two months ago, Mitchell's scores were also removed from the leaderboards at Donkey Kong Forum. Forum moderator Jeremy "Xelnia" Young cited frame-by-frame analysis of the board transitions in Mitchell's Donkey Kong tapes, which showed visual artifacts suggesting they were generated by early versions of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) and not original Donkey Kong arcade hardware.

[...] The ban has no effect on the current world record in Donkey Kong, which currently sits at the 1.247 million points [score] set by Robbie Lakeman in February.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/premiere-game-scoreboard-bans-billy-mitchell-in-donkey-kong-cheating-scandal/

Original Submission