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Outgoing Missouri Governor Signs "Revenge Porn" Law Criminalizing What He Is Accused of Doing

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Before leaving the Missouri governor's office, Eric Greitens (R) signed a bill into law would make it a felony to threaten to send out nonconsensual, private sexual images to coerce someone. Greitens resigned after an investigation found that he took an explicit photo of a woman and threatened her with its release before forcing her to performing oral sex.

The Missouri state legislature released a special investigative report in April on the 2015 incident, in which Greitens was said to have blindfolded a woman who worked as his hairdresser, ripped her shirt, pulled her pants down, blindfolded her, slapped her in the face and called her "a whore", sexually assaulted her, and threatened her with the release of nude photo.

[...] Greitens was also facing felony charges of computer data tampering but St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced a deal to dismiss that charge on [May 30]. He was accused of using his veterans charity's donor list for this 2016 gubernatorial campaign. He was indicted on felony invasion of privacy for his alleged actions in the 2015 incident the report described, but the charge was dropped

Previously...

jmorris writes:

From LiveScience.com: A Major Physics Experiment Just Detected A Particle That Shouldn't Exist

Physics just can't seem to stop churning out experiments with odd results. Will this one be the ONE that finally upsets the Standard Model?

Scientists have produced the firmest evidence yet of so-called sterile neutrinos, mysterious particles that pass through matter without interacting with it at all.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don't exist at all.

That means there's something strange happening in the universe that is making humanity's most cutting-edge physics experiments contradict one another.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Some of the recent additions to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) web standard are so powerful that a security researcher has abused them to deanonymize visitors to a demo site and reveal their Facebook usernames, avatars, and if they liked a particular web page of Facebook.

Information leaked via this attack could aid some advertisers link IP addresses or advertising profiles to real-life persons, posing a serious threat to a user's online privacy.

The leak isn't specific to Facebook but affects all sites which allow their content to be embedded on other web pages via iframes.

The actual vulnerability resides in the browser implementation of a CSS feature named "mix-blend-mode," added in 2016 in the CSS3 web standard.

The mix-blend-mode feature allows web developers to stack web components on top of each other and add effects for controlling to[sic] the way they interact. As the feature's name hints, these effects are inspired by the blend modes found in photo editing software like Photoshop, Gimp, Paint.net, and others. Example blend modes are Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Multiply, Inverse, and others.

The CSS3 mix-blend-mode feature supports 16 blend modes and is fully supported in Chrome (since v49) and Firefox (since v59), and partially supported in Safari (since v11 on macOs and v10.3 on iOS).

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/css-is-so-overpowered-it-can-deanonymize-facebook-users/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

Most women with the most common form of early-stage breast cancer can safely skip chemotherapy without hurting their chances of beating the disease, doctors are reporting from a landmark study that used genetic testing to gauge each patient's risk.

Cancer care has been evolving away from chemotherapy - older drugs with harsh side effects - in favor of gene-targeting therapies, hormone blockers and immune system treatments. When chemo is used now, it's sometimes for shorter periods or lower doses than it once was. The breast cancer study focused on cases where chemo's value increasingly is in doubt: women with early-stage disease that has not spread to lymph nodes, is hormone-positive (meaning its growth is fueled by estrogen or progesterone) and is not the type that the drug Herceptin targets.

Source: http://abc7ny.com/health/study-finds-that-many-breast-cancer-patients-can-skip-chemo-/3557439/

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Yammer, the Facebook clone for enterprises, now demands users to provide their date of birth to be able to access the network. The fallacy with this is that while saying "Verify your age to continue" it says "Enter your birthday to verify that you meet the age requirement to use Yammer." which doesn't make sense for a social network designed for work environments where it is a given that users will be of adult age.

Microsoft have stated (Microsoft account required) that this is due to the pending merge of Yammer with Microsoft 365, however it also states that if the organization using Yammer does not have any users under the age of 16 then this verification step of sending each user's date of birth to Microsoft is not required. This is being seen as another step by Microsoft towards killing Yammer in favor of "Microsoft Teams" which so far has very little traction in the social networking space. This may be one of the final nails in the coffin for the ailing social network for corporations.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA CubeSats Steer Toward Mars

NASA has achieved a first for the class of tiny spacecraft known as CubeSats, which are opening new access to space. Over the past week, two CubeSats called MarCO-A and MarCO-B have been firing their propulsion systems to guide themselves toward Mars. This process, called a trajectory correction maneuver, allows a spacecraft to refine its path to Mars following launch. Both CubeSats successfully completed this maneuver; NASA's InSight spacecraft just completed the same process on May 22.

The pair of CubeSats that make up the Mars Cube One (MarCO) mission both launched on May 5, along with the InSight lander, which is headed toward a Nov. 26 touchdown on the Red Planet. They were designed to trail InSight on the way to Mars, aiming to relay back data about InSight as it enters the planet's atmosphere and attempts to land. The MarCOs were never intended to collect any science data; instead, they are a test of miniaturized communication and navigation technology that can blaze a path for future CubeSats sent to other planets.

[...] While MarCO-A corrected its course to Mars relatively smoothly, MarCO-B faced some unexpected challenges. Its maneuver was smaller due to a leaky thruster valve that engineers have been monitoring for the past several weeks. The leak creates small trajectory changes on its own. Engineers have factored in these nudges so that MarCO-B can still perform a trajectory correction maneuver. It will take several more weeks of tracking to refine these nudges so that MarCO-B can follow InSight on its cruise through space.

Previously: NASA Launches InSight Mission to Study the Interior of Mars
CubeSats -- En Route to Mars with InSight -- Snap Another "Pale Blue Dot" Image

Original Submission

takyon writes:

[Update 20180604 @ 14:00 UTC: Acquisition confirmed. Microsoft is paying $7.5 billion in stock. Coverage at Microsoft, Security Week, The Register, and The Verge. Also, see the Microsoft blog post. --martyb]

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub

Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire GitHub, and that the company chose Microsoft partly because of CEO Satya Nadella. Business Insider first reported that Microsoft had been in talks with GitHub recently.

Time to move off GitHub?

Previously: Microsoft Holds Acquisition Talks with Github

An AC also submitted Bloomberg's article.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/06/02/us/golden-state-killer-unsealed-warrants/index.html

When the suspected Golden State Killer drove into a Hobby Lobby parking lot in April, investigators were waiting nearby. As he walked into the craft store, it gave them a perfect chance to collect a secret DNA sample.

Police swabbed the driver's side handle of [the suspect's] car, according to arrest and search warrants released Friday.

Authorities sent it for testing and matched it to semen recovered at some of the Golden State Killer's crime scenes, the arrest warrant said.

[...] The stop at the Hobby Lobby was just one of several ways investigators used to zero in on a suspect. Earlier this year, police tracked him down by comparing genetic profiles from genealogy websites to crime scene DNA, according to investigators.

On April 23, a day before his arrest, police say they collected multiple samples from a trash can outside DeAngelo's home in Citrus Heights, a town 16 miles northeast of Sacramento. They had watched the home for three days, the warrant said.

Previously: DNA From Genealogy Site Led to Capture of Golden State Killer Suspect
GEDmatch: "What If It Was Called Police Genealogy?"

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung Unveils 32 GB DDR4-2666 SO-DIMMs

Samsung on Wednesday introduced its first consumer products based on its 16 Gb DDR4 memory chips demonstrated earlier this year. The new SO-DIMMs are aimed at high-performance notebooks that benefit from both speed and capacity of memory modules.

Samsung's new 32 GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs based on 16 Gb DDR4 memory ICs (integrated circuits) are rated for a 2666 MT/s data transfer rate at 1.2 V. Because the 16 Gb memory chips are made using Samsung's 10 nm-class process technology, the new module is claimed to be 39% more energy efficient than the company's previous-gen 16 GB SO-DIMM based on 20 nm-class ICs. According to Samsung, a laptop equipped with 64 GB of new memory consumes 4.578 W in active mode, whereas a notebook outfitted with 64 GB of previous-gen DDR4 consumes 7.456 W in active mode.

Insert obligatory ECC comment here.

Samsung press release. Also at Tom's Hardware and DigiTimes.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

Researchers have devised a magnetic control system to make tiny DNA-based robots move on demand -- and much faster than recently possible.

In the journal Nature Communications, Carlos Castro and Ratnasingham Sooryakumar and their colleagues from The Ohio State University report that the control system reduced the response time of prototype nano-robot components from several minutes to less than a second.

[...] "Real-time manipulation methods like our magnetic approach enable the possibility for scientists to interact with DNA nano-devices, and in turn interact with molecules and molecular systems that could be coupled to those nano-devices in real-time with direct visual feedback."

In earlier work, Castro's team used a technique called DNA origami to fold individual strands of DNA to form simple microscopic tools like rotors and hinges. They even built a "Trojan horse" out of DNA for delivering drugs to cancer cells. For this new study, the researchers joined with Ratnasingham Sooryakumar, professor of physics. He previously developed microscopic magnetic "tweezers" for moving biological cells in biomedical applications such as gene therapy. The tweezers were actually made of groups of magnetic particles that moved in sync to nudge the cells where people wanted them to go.

Those magnetic particles, while invisible to the naked eye, were still many times bigger than one of Castro's nano-machines, Sooryakumar explained.

"We had discovered a way to harness the power of magnetic forces to probe the microscopic world -- a hidden world of astounding complexity," he said. "But we wanted to transition from the micro-world to the nano-world. This led to the collaboration with Dr. Castro. The challenges were to shrink the functionality of our particles a thousand-fold, couple them to precise locations on the moving parts of the machines and incorporate fluorescent molecules as beacons to monitor the machines as they moved."

Source: https://news.osu.edu/news/2018/06/01/dna-robots/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Holy grail of cancer research': doctors positive about early detection blood test

A blood test for 10 different types of cancers could one day help doctors screen for the disease before patients show symptoms, researchers at the world's largest gathering of oncologists have said.

The test, called a liquid biopsy, screens for cancer by detecting tiny bits of DNA released by cancer cells into blood. The test had particularly good results for ovarian and pancreatic cancers, though the number of cancers detected was small.

Researchers hope the test will become part of a "universal screening" tool that doctors can use to detect cancer in patients.

"This is potentially the holy grail of cancer research, to find cancers that are currently hard to cure at an earlier stage when they are easier to cure," said Dr Eric Klein, lead author of the research from Cleveland Clinic's Taussig Cancer Institute. "We hope this test could save many lives."

Also at CNN.

Development of a comprehensive cell-free DNA (cfDNA) assay for early detection of multiple tumor types: The Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas (CCGA) study. (abstract only)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

The Michael Jackson Estate is suing the Walt Disney Company and ABC for using dozens of its copyrighted works without permission. According to Disney, no harm has been done, since including these works in "The Last Days of Michael Jackson" documentary is "fair use." The Estate clearly disagrees and notes that Disney's argument would make even the founders of Napster pause.

According to the claim, Disney and ABC’s broadcast used at least thirty different copyrighted works owned by the Estate, without permission. In fact, Michael Jackson’s heirs specifically urged the media titans not to use its intellectual property without a license.

Since Disney is known to be an avid protector of its own rights, the Estate calls out the company’s double standard. “Apparently, Disney’s passion for the copyright laws disappears when it doesn’t involve its own intellectual property and it sees an opportunity to profit off of someone else’s intellectual property without permission or payment,” the complaint reads.

The complaint stresses that Disney is known for its strict copyright enforcement actions and a narrow view of copyright law’s “fair use” doctrine. “For example, just a few years ago, [Disney] sent DMCA takedown notices to Twitter, Facebook, and other websites and webhosts, when consumers posted pictures of new Star Wars toys that the consumers had legally purchased.

“Apparently, Disney claimed that simple amateur photographs of Star Wars characters in toy form infringed Disney’s copyrights in the characters and were not a fair use,” the state writes.

However, when the Estate urged Disney not to use any of its copyrighted works without permission, Disney’s attorney used fair use as a defense. The company argued that it could legally use Jackson’s copyrighted material since the broadcast was labeled as a documentary. This is “absurd” and “dead wrong” according to Jackson’s heirs, who see it as a blatant form of infringement which even the founders of Napster would recognize.

[...] A copy of the Michael Jackson Estate’s complaint against The Walt Disney Company and ABC is available here (PDF).

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/michael-jackson-estate-turns-the-fair-use-table-on-disney-180531/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A team of researchers from MIT and Harvard University has come up with a way to get 3-D printers to print objects using data sets rather than geometric representations. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their new technique and some of the ways they believe it could be used.

[...] To print an object on conventional 3-D printers, calculations are made regarding a digital description of an object, converting the numeric description to geometric shapes that can be used to print an object. The new technique, on the other hand, converts data that describes the digitized image to voxels (3-D pixels). That allows the printer to print voxels instead of shapes, with incredible precision—currently at a resolution of 2.3 million voxels per cubic centimeter.

In practice, this means taking data from a source such as an MRI machine, converting it, and then printing it in incredible detail. Additionally, like pixels, each individual voxel contains a color code that can be used to recreate the actual color of the real object—by mixing the familiar magenta, cyan, yellow and black, and of course white and clear. The result is an object that looks very much like the original object, say a human heart, or an ancient artifact. The researchers note that their technique can also be used to create new objects from scratch on a 3-D modeling computer and then print them. To demonstrate, they designed some interesting objects such as a very intricate mask with subtle color changes, and 3-D printed it—and in so doing, gave birth to an entirely new art form.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Last month, the NFL announced a new policy for its players during the national anthem: Players are permitted to stay in the locker room during the anthem, but if they go out onto the field during it, they must stand. If any of the players takes a knee, the team will be fined.

Soon afterwards, a Wall Street Journal report confirmed what most have long suspected: That President Donald Trump's public outrage about NFL players protesting police brutality and systemic racism during the national anthem at football games heavily influenced NFL owners to change the rule, and discouraged them from signing players who would protest.

It's all terrible news for those in favor of free speech and peaceful protest, and for those against white nationalism and police brutality.

However, Mark Geragos, the lawyer representing Kaepernick in his collusion lawsuit against the NFL, [...] believes [...] that Trump's direct influence over NFL owners on this issue violates federal law. U.S. Code 227 [which] says that members of Congress or the executive branch cannot "wrongfully influence a private entity's employment decision ... solely on the basis of partisan political affiliation".

A few revelations from the last couple of weeks strongly support Geragos' case here, and it's important to remember that Geragos knows much more about the case than we do--he has taken the depositions of more than a dozen NFL owners, while the public only knows about the depositions that have leaked.

[...] Of course, influencing the private hiring decisions of a company isn't the only part of U.S. Code [227] that needs to be proved; it would also have to be shown that Trump did it for partisan political purposes.

That sounds trickier to prove, but in this case, that's not necessarily true. First of all, Trump's comments were made at a political rally supporting an Alabama Republican candidate for US Senate--an expressly partisan environment. And according to the WSJ, Trump told Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in private conversations that the issue was a "winning" one for him.

Previous: NFL: New National Anthem Rule; NY Jets CEO: Break the Rule and I'll Pay the Fine

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

Although ARM-based PCs are now available, apps that utilize native 64-bit architectures on Microsoft's Windows 10 on ARM have been relegated to legacy support for 32-bit apps. Microsoft introduced the proper frameworks for 64-bit apps at its recent BUILD conference, allowing developers to port their apps and begin native app integration. After a small wait, apps are starting to appear; VLC -- the swiss army knife of multimedia players -- is one of the first to launch a dedicated ARM64 app.

Unlike traditional Intel and AMD processors, ARM's architecture has largely been synonymous with mobile devices and tablets, which are often powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors. Microsoft's more recent developments have paved the way for proper ARM architecture within PCs, and promise a whole host of benefits including better affordability, permanent online connection and improved battery preservation.

With a popular free app like VLC making the first move, it's highly probable that other app developers will be encouraged to follow in its footsteps. You can download VLC as you normally would -- via the official website -- just ensure you select the ARM 64 version from the drop down menu.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/01/vlc-one-of-first-arm64-windows-apps/

Original Submission