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realDonaldTrump writes:

This is the exact quote, folks. No games!

It's anything but a happy General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) day for several major U.S. news organizations as their websites are temporarily blocked in Europe as a new data privacy law goes into effect today.

Websites such as the LA Times, NY Daily News and Chicago Tribune are all temporarily blocked this morning, saying their content is unavailable in most European countries.

Anyone trying to access the sites, which also include those owned by Tronc and Lee Enterprises (examples include Orlando Sentinel [Tronc], Arizona Daily Sun and the St. Louis Dispatch [Lee Entperises]) see a message explaining that the website is working with European authorities on trying to get access back as quickly as possible.

Source: foxnews.com/tech/2018/05/25/various-us-news-websites-blocked-as-europe-s-gdpr-data-privacy-law-goes-into-effect.html

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

antiX Linux is a distro that was initially developed as a lighter version of MEPIS. While antiX has been in continuous development since 2007, MEPIS became unsupported after its chief developer Warren Woodford's circumstances required him to take a fulltime job in industry. As a tribute to MEPIS, anticapitalista and the antiX team developed a distro that has a more robust default install than antiX and they called it MX Linux.

Curmudgeonly, often-nitpicky blogger Dedoimedo AKA fiction author Igor Ljubuncic reports

I [previously] wrote an article on MX Tools, a unique and useful bunch of dedicated utilities packaged with the MX Linux distribution. This toolbox offered the ordinary (or new) MX Linux user a chance to perform some common configuration tasks with easy and elegance.

In general, MX-16 was a great player, and the recent MX-17 is even better--and at a first glance, so is the new version of MX Tools bundled with the system. Good stuff. So I set about testing, to see what has changed, and in what way this set of utilities has improved, if at all. But I'm positive.

[...] MX Tools turned out to be a predictable gem, just as I'd expected. Well, I'm cheating, because I wrote this article after some rather thorough testing. But then, if you look across the wider spectrum of Linux home distributions, there aren't that many unique players with distinctive features. Quite often, it's the rehash of old and familiar with some extra color, polish, and rebranding. MX Linux goes the extra mile (or kilometer, if you will) in making the newbie experience meaningfully different.

Future improvements could potentially include an interactive walkthrough--so users will be actively prompted and helped along in their tasks. Then of course, there's the matter of visual appearance, in the UI itself. But in general, MX Tools TNG is better than we had before. More elegant, more streamlined, better looking, and most importantly, more practical. This is a good and useful toolbox and it makes a solid distro even more appealing. Well worth testing.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Cosmic ravioli and spaetzle

The small inner moons of Saturn look like giant ravioli and spaetzle. Their spectacular shape has been revealed by the Cassini spacecraft. For the first time, researchers of the University of Bern show how these moons were formed. The peculiar shapes are a natural outcome of merging collisions among similar-sized little moons as computer simulations demonstrate.

[...] Based on the current orbit of the moons and their orbital environment, the researchers were able to estimate that the impact velocities were of the order of a few 10 m/s. Simulating collisions in this range for various impact angles, they obtained various stable shapes similar to ravioli and spaetzle, but only for low impact angles. "If the impact angle is bigger than ten degrees, the resulting shapes are not stable anymore," says Adrien Leleu. Any duck-shaped object like comet [67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko] would fall apart because of Saturn's tides. "That is why Saturn's small moons look very different to comets that often have bilobed shapes," explains Martin Jutzi.

Also at Scientific American.

The peculiar shapes of Saturn's small inner moons as evidence of mergers of similar-sized moonlets (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0471-7) (DX)

Related: Cassini Captures Best Ever Images of Saturn's Tiny Moon Pan
Cassini's Final Flyby of Atlas
Cassini Spacecraft Post-Mortem

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for guy_

Tencent chairman pledges to advance China chip industry after ZTE 'wake-up' call: reports

While the U.S. administration said on Friday it had reached a deal to put ZTE back in business after the company pays a $1.3 billion fine and makes management changes, the plan has run into resistance in Congress, indicating ZTE was still far from out of the woods. Also, ZTE is yet to confirm the deal.

"The recent ZTE incident made everyone more clearly realize that however advanced one may be in mobile payment, without the mobile, the chips and the operating system, you still cannot compete," Chinese media reports cited Tecent's Pony Ma as saying at a forum in Shenzhen on Saturday.

[...] Tencent is looking into ways it could help advance China's domestic chip industry, which could include leveraging its huge data demand to urge domestic chip suppliers to come up with better solutions, or using its WeChat platform to support application developments based on Chinese chips, Ma said.

"It would probably be better if we could get in to support semiconductor R&D, but that is perhaps admittedly not our strong suit and may need the help of others in the supply chain."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are looking to partner with NASA and ESA to help create settlements on the Moon. However, he implied that he would fund development of such a project himself if governments don't:

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture will work with NASA as well as the European Space Agency to create a settlement on the moon. And even if Blue Origin can't strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night.

[...] To facilitate a return to the moon, Blue Origin has a lunar lander on the drawing boards that's designed to be capable of delivery 5 tons of payload to the lunar surface. That's hefty enough to be used for transporting people — and with enough support, it could start flying by the mid-2020s. Blue Origin has proposed building its Blue Moon lander under the terms of a public-private partnership with NASA. "By the way, we'll do that, even if NASA doesn't do it," Bezos said. "We'll do it eventually. We could do it a lot faster if there were a partnership."

[...] It's important to point out that moon settlement isn't just a NASA thing. Bezos told me he loves the European Space Agency's approach, known as the Moon Village. "The Moon Village concept has a nice property in that everybody basically just says, look, everybody builds their own lunar outpost, but let's do it close to each other. That way, if you need a cup of sugar, you can go over to the European Union lunar outpost and say, 'I got my powdered eggs, what have you got?' ... Obviously I'm being silly with the eggs, but there will be real things, like, 'Do you have some oxygen?' "

canopic jug suggested the following story:

Jakob Nielsen and his group have long documented that advertising in online media carries a cost in terms of usability. A recent longitudinal study quantifies the effect.

Summary: Increased advertising caused a 2.8% drop in use of an Internet service. The full magnitude of the lost business was only clear after a full year.

We have long documented that advertising in online media carries a user-experience cost:

• Users find many online advertising techniques highly annoying — that attitude has remained constant since we first reported it in 2004.
• Because online ads are so irritating, users have evolved banner blindness as a defense mechanism to reduce this annoyance. (Also a finding that has remained true for decades, meaning that it's not likely to change anytime soon.)
• Even worse (from a web-design perspective), ads poison the well for honest designers seeking to boost the visual design of useful page elements: anything with an overly fancy look may be unjustly taken for an ad and also ignored by users.

[...] Reference

Jason Huang, David H. Reiley, and Nickolai M. Riabov (April 21, 2018): Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio. Available at https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf (warning: PDF file).

From: Annoying Online Ads Do Cost Business.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Elon Musk has floated the idea of creating Pravda, a web site that would allow users to rate/review the credibility of media organizations and journalists. Pravda Corp. was formed in Delaware and incorporated in California, according to an October 19, 2017 filing. Jared Birchall, a director at Musk's Boring Company, is President of Pravda Corp., and the addresses are identical:

Musk's idea quickly raised concerns that the reputation of news organizations and reporters could be determined by what could be an easy to manipulate online popular vote.

"Elon's next company: Rate My Professor but for Journalists. What a great idea that won't be gamed immediately in extremely predictable ways," Rene DiResta, who researches computation propaganda and is a policy lead at Data For Democracy, wrote on Twitter.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, told CNN such a service might might make sense if it employed a careful methodology and was overseen by an independent journalism foundation.

"It's not a crackpot idea," he said. "The question is why should Elon Musk be the one running it and how trustworthy would it be if he ran it."

Musk has been criticized a lot lately.

Also at The Verge, New Statesman, and The Washington Post.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Inquirer reports that Huawei has ended the support for bootloaders on its devices. This greatly reduces the utility and desireability of the phones for developers and others keen on customization. It's for our own good, apparently:

"In order to deliver the best user experience and prevent users from experiencing possible issues that could arise from ROM flashing, including system failure, stuttering, worsened battery performance, and the risk of data being compromised, Huawei will cease providing bootloader unlock codes for devices launched after May 25, 2018," the firm burbled.

See also Android Authority on Huawei will no longer allow bootloader unlocking (Update: Explanation from Huawei).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Antimicrobial resistance is on the rise worldwide. This is becoming a problem for infectious diseases like tuberculosis as there are only a few active substances available to combat such diseases. Pharmacists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have now found a way to increase the efficacy of a common tuberculosis agent while, at the same time, reducing resistance to it. The research group presents its latest developments in the international journal Molecules.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease transmitted by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis and it often affects the respiratory tract. TB is usually treated with antibiotics. "Increasingly, however, bacteria are developing a resistance to common antibiotics," says Professor Andreas Hilgeroth from the Institute of Pharmacy at MLU. If a patient does not respond to the standard treatment, stronger substances are required, which are sometimes accompanied by stronger side-effects. But bacteria can also become resistant to these stronger antibiotics. If a bacterial strain is resistant to several antibiotics, it is termed multi-resistant tuberculosis. In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 490,000 cases of multi-resistant TB.

To remedy this problem, the researchers from Halle pursued an alternative approach: Instead of developing a new active substance, they sought a way to improve the efficacy of the existing drugs. The tuberculosis bacteria defend themselves against the antibiotics by pumping the substances out of their cell interior before they can take effect. "If this pumping mechanism is blocked, or at least hindered, inside the bacteria, this could improve the efficacy of current drugs," Hilgeroth adds. The pharmacists developed a new chemical compound, combined it with conventional tuberculosis antibiotics and tested the effectiveness. They were able to demonstrate that the compound achieves very good results with the antibiotic isoniazid, and blocks the pumping mechanism in the bacteria. "This improves the effects of the isoniazid," concludes Hilgeroth.

Journal reference: Fabian Lentz, Norbert Reiling, Ana Martins, Joseph Molnár, Andreas Hilgeroth. Discovery of Novel Enhancers of Isoniazid Toxicity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Molecules, 2018; 23 (4): 825 DOI: 10.3390/molecules23040825

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports

As the official Grenfell Tower Inquiry opened, Panorama special Grenfell: Who Is To Blame, with reporting by Richard Bilton of the BBC, offers a devastating indictment of the corporate forces responsible for the June 14, 2017 inferno that claimed 72 lives.

Grenfell Tower was covered in flammable cladding and insulation materials that had never been tested together. Bilton's investigation draws out how companies were denying their responsibility for testing, jeopardising the safety of many thousands living in social and privately-owned housing tower blocks.

Bilton accuses manufacturer Celotex of having "knowingly misled buyers" about the safety and testing history of the insulation material. The formula for the Celotex product that received the safety certificate was different and safer than the product used at Grenfell Tower.

[...] Bilton's starting point is the 2014 refurbishment--which covered Grenfell Tower in highly flammable material--as he seeks to identify those responsible. Architect Andrzej Kuszell's design had created the gaps that allowed the fire to spread. Even given the relaxation of building regulations, says Bilton, it was Kuszell's job to make his plans safe and he failed.

Lead construction company Rydon was paid £8.7 million to refurbish Grenfell Tower between 2014 and 2016, winning the contract by undercutting rival bids. Central to this was cutting costs by using cheaper materials. They failed to fill the gaps at the side of the windows, allowing the fire to spread.

Bilton states that it was Rydon's suggestion to swap non-combustible materials for cheaper, flammable, substitutes. Fire expert Arnold Tarling, describing the fire as "totally avoidable", said the company had opted to use a "highly flammable material that is also highly toxic when burned". This was "utterly wicked", he said.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for guy_

[Greek] government promises action on collisions to avoid slaughter on busy shipping routes

In an office up a steep hill in a seaside suburb of Athens, a tiny blue light flickers from a computer terminal. Dr Alexandros Frantzis, Greece's foremost oceanographer, points it out. The light, he says, tracks marine traffic "in real time".

It is key to saving one of the world's most endangered whale populations. "It logs the position, course and speed of a vessel entering Greek waters," he says. "And that is vital to mapping shipping densities in areas populated by sperm whales."

[...] Like marine mammals in most places, the whales face a multitude of threats, from entanglement in fishing nets to ingestion of plastic waste.

In Greece there is the added risk of noise pollution from Nato warships conducting underwater sonar drills – exercises blamed for disorienting whales reliant on their own form of sonar to navigate and hunt. Seismic surveys, following the discovery of underwater hydrocarbons, also pose a threat.

But Frantzis says the biggest danger to local cetaceans is the chance of colliding with a ship. He singles out tankers, cargo vessels and cruise liners [in] the waters off the western Peloponnese, an area where whales swarm but one of the busiest routes for shipping.

Last month a nine-metre whale washed up on a beach in Santorini, the latest in a series of strandings. Frantzis now has a large white bone – one of its teeth – on his desk. For sperm whales, death by collision is by far the most painful, he claims, with propellers often leaving the animals torn and gashed.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/27/shipping-routes-move-save-whales-greek-seas-dying-agony

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

German researchers reckon they have devised a method to thwart the security mechanisms AMD's Epyc server chips use to automatically encrypt virtual machines in memory.

So much so, they said they can exfiltrate plaintext data from an encrypted guest via a hijacked hypervisor and simple HTTP requests to a web server running in a second guest on the same machine.

AMD's data-center processors, as well as its Ryzen Pro line, support what's called Secure Encrypted Virtualization. This decrypts and encrypts virtual machines on the fly while stored in RAM so that the host operating system, hypervisor, and any malware on the host computer, cannot snoop on protected VMs. Each virtual machine is assigned an address space ID which is linked to a cryptographic key to cipher and decipher data as it moves between memory and the CPU cores. The key never leaves the system-on-chip, and each VM gets its own key.

That means, in theory, not even a malicious or hijacked hypervisor, kernel, driver, or other privileged code, should be able to inspect the contents of a protected virtual machine, which is a good safety feature for multi-tenant cloud platforms. Now you can be sure that a BOFH isn't peeking into your guest instance. AMD marketed SEV as a feature to stop cloud and off-premises hosts from spying on sensitive virtual machines.

However, a technique dubbed SEVered [PDF] can, it is claimed, be used by a rogue host-level administrator, or malware within a hypervisor, or similar, to bypass SEV protections and copy information out of a customer or user's virtual machine.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for guy_

The Trump administration told lawmakers the U.S. government has reached a deal to put Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp back in business after it pays a significant fine and makes management changes, a senior congressional aide said on Friday.

U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to confirm the deal in a tweet late on Friday. “I closed it down then let it reopen with high level security guarantees, change of management and board, must purchase U.S. parts and pay a $1.3 Billion fine.”

The reported deal involving China’s second-largest telecommunications equipment maker ran into immediate resistance in Congress, where Democrats and Trump’s fellow Republicans accused him of bending to pressure from Beijing to ease up on a company that U.S. intelligence officials have suggested poses a significant risk to U.S. national security.

ZTE was banned in April from buying U.S. technology components for seven years for breaking an agreement reached after it violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea.. After ZTE makes a series of changes it would now be allowed to resume business with U.S. companies, including chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.

The deal, earlier communicated to officials on Capitol Hill by the Commerce Department, requires ZTE to pay a substantial fine, place U.S. compliance officers at the company and change its management team, the aide said.

The Commerce Department would then lift an order issued in April preventing ZTE from buying U.S. products. ZTE shut down most of its production after the ruling was announced.

Fox News said Trump told them on Thursday that he had negotiated the $1.3 billion fine with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a phone call.

ZTE, which is publicly traded but whose largest shareholder is a Chinese state-owned enterprise, agreed last year to pay a nearly $900 million penalty and open its books to a U.S. monitor. The penalty stemmed from for breaking an agreement after it was caught illegally shipping U.S. goods to Iran and North Korea, in an investigation dating to the Obama administration.

Source: http://www.oann.com/u-s-reached-deal-to-keep-chinese-telecom-zte-in-business-new-york-times/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

School Shooting Game Angers Steam Users, Developer 'Likely' Changing It

Earlier this week, a game called Active Shooter appeared on Steam. It'd be nothing more than another heap of hacked-together pre-purchased assets—or an "asset flip," as they're known on Steam—if not for its subject matter. It's about mass shootings.

The unreleased game's Steam store page describes it as a "dynamic S.W.A.T. simulator" in which you play as a shooter, a S.W.A.T. team member trying to neutralize them, or a civilian. Its trailer depicts a player running down school halls and through classrooms, indiscriminately murdering teachers until a S.W.A.T. team shows up.

Complaints about the game have been fierce, and yesterday the person behind the game said they'll probably remove the option to play as the mass shooter. Almost as soon as the game's store listing went up, Steam users took to the game's forums to voice their distaste.

The developer will send "press review" copies out on May 30.

The Hill mistakenly claimed that Active Shooter is "created by video game company Valve" (they have since corrected their article).

Recently, Valve made headlines when it demanded that developers remove "pornographic content" from visual novel games. Some developers/publishers have since received apologies and their games are under re-review.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for guy_

A former commander of the USS John S. McCain pleaded guilty Friday to dereliction of duty when the destroyer collided with a commercial tanker, killing 10 people and injuring five in the Straits of Singapore last August.

Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez, who has served in the Navy for more than 20 years, testified during a special court-martial at the Washington Navy Yard, Stars and Stripes reported.

“I am ultimately responsible and stand accountable,” Sanchez said. “I will forever question my decisions that contributed to this tragic event.”

Per disciplinary proceedings, Sanchez agreed to retire from service, forfeit $6,000 in wages, and was issued a letter of reprimand.

Sanchez claimed responsibility for the deadly collision. He said had failed to put a well-rested, well-trained crew in place to steer the destroyer into the Straits.

The former commander, who was immediately reassigned after the collision, initially faced negligent homicide charges, CBS News reported.

According to Sanchez, an 18-year-old undertrained helmsman had been navigating the destroyer, known as "Big Bad John," leading up to the collision.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/05/27/former-commander-uss-john-s-mccain-pleads-guilty-retires-after-deadly-collision.html

Original Submission