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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] The possibility of "financial and reputational" damage if staff lost or misused the devices prompted the decision, reported The Register.

Instead, IBM staff who need to move data around will be encouraged to do so via an internal network.

[...] Some IBM departments had been banned from using removable portable media for some time, said Ms Naidoo, but now the decree was being implemented worldwide. IBM staff are expected to stop using removable devices by the end of May.

[...] Security expert Kevin Beaumont said: "It is a brave move by IBM, as USB devices do present a real risk - often it is very easy to extract data from a company via these devices, and introduce malicious software."

[...] Sumir Karayi, chief executive of security company 1E, said IBM's ban was an "overreaction" by security staff who had not realised the many different ways data flowed in and out of an organisation.

[...] On 25 May, the GDPR rules are enacted, which impose heavy fines on organisations that do not do enough to protect sensitive information.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Somewhere, government-linked hackers might be panicking. A digital vigilante has struck back against what researchers believe is a cyberespionage group connected to a nation state. The hacker has allegedly stolen, rather ironically, a cache of data that the government-linked hackers lifted from their own victims across the Middle East.

The news provides a rare instance of someone targeting a so-called advanced persistent threat, or APT, as well as an opportunity for a behind-the-scenes look at a government hacking campaign.

"10 minutes of effort; intel on Iranian APTs," the anonymous hacker told Motherboard in an online chat, saying which nation they believe may be linked to the hacking group. Some cybersecurity experts tentatively agreed. But Kaspersky, which originally reported on the hacking group it dubbed "ZooPark" earlier this month, told Motherboard it could not currently link the outfit to a known actor.

Source: Vigilante Hacks Government-Linked Cyberespionage Group

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

For many years, Windows Notepad only supported text documents containing Windows End of Line (EOL) characters - Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF). This means that Notepad was unable to correctly display the contents of text files created in Unix, Linux and macOS.

[...] Starting with the current Windows 10 Insider build, Notepad will support Unix/Linux line endings (LF), Macintosh line endings (CR), and Windows Line endings (CRLF) as usual. New files created within Notepad will use Windows line ending (CRLF) by default, but it will now be possible to view, edit, and print existing files, correctly maintaining the file's current line ending format.

It's about damned time.

Source: Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] Play time is in short supply for children these days and the lifelong consequences for developing children can be more serious than many people realize.

An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children's play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control.

[...] Gray describes this kind of unstructured, freely-chosen play as a testing ground for life. It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults. Gray's article is meant to serve as a wake-up call regarding the effects of lost play, and he believes that lack of childhood free play time is a huge loss that must be addressed for the sake of our children and society.

Parents who hover over and intrude on their children's play are a big part of the problem, according to Gray. "It is hard to find groups of children outdoors at all, and, if you do find them, they are likely to be wearing uniforms and following the directions of coaches while their parents dutifully watch and cheer." He cites a study which assessed the way 6- to 8-year-olds spent their time in 1981 and again in 1997.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Imagine winning the lottery and having an ATM spit huge amounts of cash at you. That's exactly what some cyber criminals are after. They're targeting ATMs and launching "jackpotting" attacks, forcing them to dispense bills like a winning slot machine. Already this year, the U.S. Secret service has warned financial institutions of such attacks.

Security researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated such an attack and amazed attendees at Black Hat when he made two unpatched ATMs spit out cash on stage. For the most part, however, jackpotting was little more than a hypothetical until recently.

Now, with confirmed strains of malware like Ploutus.D being used in ATM jackpotting attacks on U.S. soil, jackpotting can be added to the growing list of popular ATM attack types, including skimming, shimming and network-based attacks. Here we examine various ATM attack techniques and offer security recommendations to protect against them.

Source: ATM attacks: How hackers are going for gold

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Thousands of attendees of the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff, Wales were mistakenly identified as potential criminals by facial recognition technology used by local law enforcement.

According to the Guardian, the South Wales police scanned the crowd of more than 170,000 people who traveled to the nation’s capital for the soccer match between Real Madrid and Juventus. The cameras identified 2,470 people as criminals.

Having that many potential lawbreakers in attendance might make sense if the event was, say, a convict convention, but seems pretty high for a soccer match. As it turned out, the cameras were a little overly-aggressive in trying to spot some bad guys. Of the potential criminals identified, 2,297 were wrongly labeled by the facial recognition software. That’s a 92 percent false positive rate.

Source: Facial Recognition Used by Wales Police Has 90 Percent False Positive Rate

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The surprising failure last month of a large clinical trial of a promising cancer immunotherapy drug from the biotech company Incyte has quickly reverberated across the pharmaceutical industry. Three companies have canceled, suspended, or downsized 12 other phase III trials of the compound, epacadostat, or two similar drugs, together slated to enroll more than 5000 patients with a variety of advanced cancers.

The companies say they aren't dropping the potential drugs, designed to unleash the immune system on cancer cells by blocking an enzyme called indoleamine (2,3)-dioxygenase (IDO). But the retrenching suggests that the frenzy to combine novel drugs with the wildly successful immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors is outpacing the science. The IDO strategy, says neuroimmunologist Michael Platten of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, "has been moved to randomized clinical trials too fast, and now we realize [the enzyme is] still a black box."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Right now, about one in five new homes in California comes with solar panels already installed. In two years, it will be all of them.

On Wednesday, California Energy Commission's vote was unanimous: California will soon become the first state to require solar panels on all new homes and on residential buildings smaller than four stories.

The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2020, specifies the minimum size of the system would be based on the size of the building and can vary between 2 and 7 kilowatts of output per dwelling.

California mandates solar panels on all new homes by 2020

Also at https://www.nytimes.com

An editorial in the Los Angeles Times expresses support for the measure.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

For the first time since humans have been monitoring, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have exceeded 410 parts per million averaged across an entire month, a threshold that pushes the planet ever closer to warming beyond levels that scientists and the international community have deemed ‘‘safe.’’

The reading from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii finds that concentrations of the climate-warming gas averaged above 410 parts per million throughout April. The first time readings crossed 410 at all occurred on April 18, 2017, or just about a year ago.

Earth’s atmosphere just crossed another troubling climate change threshold

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

"A Thai Airways passenger said he was charged a $94 fee at the airport for a name change because the online booking system would not let him type his full name.

The passenger, whose name was not shared, said when he went to purchase his ticket on the Thai Airways website, his full last name would not fit in the name field. The name field only allows 25 characters for surname. The passenger tried shortening his name on the website and was finally able to buy tickets for himself and his family, the Bangkok Post reported."

Traveler charged extra booking fee for having a long last name

I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly.

Original Submission

Over the last several months, I’ve witnessed many controversial discussions among my friends, in my San Francisco community, and on online forums about James Demore’s memorandum. People of both genders are wrestling with the fact that fewer women go into computer science and trying to find explanations that balance their experience, empathy, and ethical aspirations. I’ve heard lots of good-intentioned people consider discouraging theories of biological superiority because they can’t find any other compelling explanation (like this post on HackerNews, for example). As a woman who studied computer science, worked at some of the top tech firms, and has founded a software startup, I’d like to share my take on why fewer women go into CS and my opinion on how to address the issue.

[...] I graduated from Stanford with a BS in Mathematical & Computational Sciences in 2015, interned at Apple as a software engineer, and worked as an Associate Product Manager at Google 2015-2017. In October, I founded a video editing website called Kapwing and am working on the startup full-time. Although I’m only 25, I’ve already seen many of my female friends choose majors/careers outside of STEM and have been inside of many predominately-male classes, organizations, and teams.

This article is one person’s humble perspective, and I do not speak for every woman in tech. But hopefully having the view of someone who has “been there” can help people trying to understand why there are fewer women in tech.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Barely a week has passed from the last attempt to hide a backdoor in a code library, and we have a new case today. This time around, the backdoor was found in a Python module, and not an npm (JavaScript) package.

The module's name is SSH Decorator (ssh-decorate), developed by Israeli developer Uri Goren, a library for handling SSH connections from Python code.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/backdoored-python-library-caught-stealing-ssh-credentials/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

CRISPR's MAGESTIC Evolution Makes Gene Editing More Precise

Scientists at the Joint Institute of Metrology and Biology (JIMB)—a collaboration between Stanford University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—have now developed a CRISPR-Cas9–based platform that can make precise, single-nucleotide changes in target DNA at the genome-wide level. The new technology has been dubbed MAGESTIC because it is a "multiplexed, accurate genome-editing" tool that uses "short, trackable, integrated cellular" barcodes. Tests using the MAGESTIC platform to carry out high-throughput, precise gene editing and evaluation in the yeast model Saccharomyces cerevisiae demonstrated fivefold increases in editing efficiency and as well as sevenfold increases in cell survival.

[...] One of the major differentiators of the MAGESTIC platform is that it actively recruits the donor DNA to the double-stranded breaks caused by Cas9 scissors using array-synthesized guide RNA/donor DNA (guide-donor) oligonucleotides. This enables a more than fivefold increase in precision editing efficiency, the authors state. Another of the major features that sets MAGESTIC apart from other multiplexed CRISPR editing approaches is that it uses genome-integrated barcodes that are tagged onto the end of the guide-donor sequence. Using traditional approaches, the barcodes are embedded in the plasmids, which are then inherited by daughter cells and multiply. However, the plasmid barcode system is not completely accurate, and so can give false measures of cell number. Instead, the MAGESTIC platform integrates the barcodes directly into the yeast cell chromosomes, which is a far more stable, easily tracked system, the researchers claim. "...we introduce stable, genome-integrated barcodes instead of plasmid barcodes, thereby enabling marker-free variant tracking and one-to-one correspondence of barcode counts to stain abundance."

Multiplexed precision genome editing with trackable genomic barcodes in yeast (DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4137) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Three years of planning delays soured Apple on the plan.  

Apple is giving up on plans to build a data center in Ireland after waiting three years for final approval that never came, according to Reuters.

The center, which was expected to cost 850 million euros ($1 billion), was announced in 2015 and was supposed to be built in the town of Athenry on Ireland's west coast. Apple chose the location because of its proximity to renewable energy sources, something the company takes very seriously. In April, Apple announced that 100 percent of its facilities run on clean energy.

Planning appeals by two people caused the delays, although Ireland's High Court ruled in October that the data center could go ahead. The individuals then took their case to the country's Supreme Court, but Apple decided to call time on the project ahead of the hearing, which was set for Thursday.

"Despite our best efforts, delays in the approval process have forced us to make other plans and we will not be able to move forward with the data center," Apple said in a statement to Reuters.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In an unexpected finding, chemist Sankaran "Thai" Thayumanavan and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst show for the first time how movement of a single chemical bond can compromise a membrane made up of more than 500 chemical bonds. Their system uses light as a switch to create a reversible, on-demand molecular control mechanism.

Thayumanavan explains, "There are many applications that one can imagine developing from these fundamental findings, especially ones that need controlled release. For example, we have shown that two compounds that would readily react with each other can be in the same solution but are separated by a very thin membrane made of a few nanometers and therefore do not react with each other."

"But upon exposure to light, the membrane gets compromised to allow the two components to react with each other," he adds. "The interesting thing is that the membrane is not permanently compromised upon exposure to light, but only when the light is on."

His postdoctoral associate Mijanur Rahaman Molla and doctoral student Poornima Rangadurai conducted most of the experimental work. The UMass Amherst group also collaborated with theoretical chemists Lucas Antony and Juan de Pablo at the University of Chicago, who modeled the system in order to more deeply understand it, Thayumanavan notes. Details are online now in Nature Chemistry.

Such reversible molecular controls that respond only when there is a source of energy are quite rare in artificial systems, he says. Usually in artificial, human-made systems, "materials are in an equilibrium state, so if you have a particle that responds to pH change and you put it into an environment that triggers a change, it stays changed. You can't put the genie back into the bottle."

Mijanur Rahaman Molla, Poornima Rangadurai, Lucas Antony, Subramani Swaminathan, Juan J. de Pablo, S. Thayumanavan. Dynamic actuation of glassy polymersomes through isomerization of a single azobenzene unit at the block copolymer interface. Nature Chemistry, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41557-018-0027-6

Original Submission