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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

So a professional critic is the last person you’d expect to use copyright to try to squelch someone else’s fair use rights. But that’s exactly what happened last month, when James Grubb, a journalist from VentureBeat, used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to censor a critic just for highlighting a few paragraphs of his work on Twitter.

On May 2, VentureBeat’s gaming section published Grubb’s review of a forthcoming video game, Red Dead Redemption II. His opinions on the game weren’t shared by everyone, which is no surprise. Another video game critic, Jake Magee, took a shot at Grubb on Twitter, suggesting he only liked games that contained “progressive political posturing.” Alongside that criticism, Magee posted screenshots from Grubb’s review—his goal was to show his followers the text that, as he saw it, supported his point.

That was apparently too much for Grubb, who promptly sent a DMCA notice to Twitter over the matter. Twitter soon slapped black boxes over the images that Magee had posted. It wasn't until several days later that the boxes were removed and the post was restored.

What justified this copyright takedown, in Grubbs’ view? First, Grubb said that Magee posted his entire article in a screenshot, a post which, in his view, “crosses the line of acceptable fair use.” Grubb also suggested that he wouldn’t have taken legal action if Magee had simply included a link to his article.

[...] Journalists and critics should know the basics of fair use. It’s a right that their work relies on. At the very least, before a professional critic uses the DMCA to have another critic’s material removed, a double-take is needed on fair use.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Plants use many of the same methods as animals to camouflage themselves, a new study shows.

Research on plant camouflage is limited compared to the wealth of knowledge about how animals conceal themselves.

But a review by scientists from the University of Exeter and the Kunming Institute of Botany (Chinese Academy of Sciences) found plants use a host of techniques long known to be used by animals.

These include blending with the background, "disruptive colouration" (using high-contrast markings to break up the perceived shape of an object) and "masquerade" (looking like an unimportant object predators might ignore, such as a stone).

"It is clear that plants do more than entice pollinators and photosynthesise with their colours -- they hide in plain sight from enemies too," said Professor Martin Stevens, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"From 'decoration', where they accumulate things like dust or sand on their surface, to disruptive coloration, they use many of the same methods as animals to camouflage themselves.

"We now need to discover just how important a role camouflage has in the ecology and evolution of plants."

[...] "Animal camouflage has provided scientists with arguably the best examples of evolution in action," said Professor Stevens. "It has been widely studied since the first pioneers of evolutionary biology, but relatively little research has been done into plant camouflage.

"Plants give us a fascinating parallel way of understanding how evolution works."

The paper, published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, is entitled: "Plant camouflage: ecology, evolution, and implications."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

You might say we're all living inside a ruinous waking nightmare that spawned from the dream of Web 2.0.

Don't get me wrong: It was a beautiful dream.

Web 2.0. We are all of us producers. With our blogs and our comments and our tweets and our YouTube channels we will democratise content and the algorithms -- those glorious algorithms -- will aid in the process. We will upvote and favourite and like and the wheat will be separated from the chaff.

Magic.

I think we can all agree that Web 2.0 didn't quite work as advertised.

It gave us Minecraft. It gave us Wikipedia, collaborative spaces, online tools. But it also gave us Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, Gamergate, incels, toxic communities, Logan Paul wandering into a suicide forest. It gave us Twitter bullying, Kelly Marie Tran harassment campaigns on Instagram.

It gave us terrible, opportunistic video games about school shootings.

Wednesday, after yanking Active Shooter, a video game where you play as a high school shooter, from its Steam store, Valve made an announcement. In a blog titled "Who gets to be on the Steam Store" Valve discussed the steps it's taking to prevent a video game like Active Shooter from making it to the Steam store in the future.

Its solution is about as Web 2.0 as it gets.

"[W]e've decided," wrote Valve, "that the right approach is to allow everything onto the Steam Store, except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling."

"Taking this approach allows us to focus less on trying to police what should be on Steam, and more on building those tools to give people control over what kinds of content they see."

In 2018, at this current moment, it seems like a decision out of time. An old-fashioned solution to a problem that literally every single platform on the internet is currently trying to solve. We live in a world where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are in the process of trying to actively take responsibility for the content produced and posted on their platforms.

Meanwhile, Valve is busy trying to abdicate that responsibility.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for boru

Caffeine is the most widely consumed stimulant to counter the effects of sleep loss on neurobehavioral performance. However, to be safe and most effective, it must be consumed at the right time and in the right amount. This study proposed an automated optimization algorithm to identify safe and effective caffeine-dosing strategies that maximize alertness under any sleep-loss condition.

"We found that by using our algorithm, which determines when and how much caffeine a subject should consume, we can improve alertness by up to 64 percent, while consuming the same total amount of caffeine," said principal investigator and senior author Jaques Reifman, PhD. "Alternatively, a subject can reduce caffeine consumption by up to 65 percent and still achieve equivalent improvements in alertness."

[...] The algorithm was assessed by computing and comparing dosing strategies for four previously published experimental studies of sleep loss. For each study, two dosing strategies were computed -- one which enhanced the predicted PVT performance using the same total amount of caffeine as in the original studies, and another which achieved an equivalent level of performance as in the original studies using a lower amount of caffeine.

Source: New algorithm determines ideal caffeine dosage and timing for alertness

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Until now, electric cars could be broken down nicely -- at the high end there is Tesla S & X, and then there is everything else (possibly including Tesla 3). A few possible competitors either quit early (Fisker) or haven't made it to production yet (Lucid, Faraday Future). This split covered price, luxury and range. Now there is a serious competitor from Jaguar and Motor Trend tested the I-Pace in Europe. While they report trouble finding charging points (it's a new car after all), they generally seemed to be impressed.

As BEV platforms go, the I-Pace’s skateboard layout is conventional. There’s a motor at each end, one driving the front wheels, the other the rear, and in between is a liquid-cooled 90-kW-hr battery pack with 432 lithium-ion cells that also provides structural integrity for the chassis. The Jaguar-developed motors are synchronous permanent magnet units with concentric transmissions that align the motors with the axles. Total output is 394 hp and 512 lb-ft.

[...] Much of Germany’s autobahn is subject to speed limits, so we spend a lot of time at 75–80 mph. There’s not much wind today, but the higher speed boosts consumption to 43 kW-hr per 100 miles. On one derestricted stretch I wind the I-Pace up near its 124-mph Vmax. It gets there easily, but I burn 6 miles of range in the process (and yes, a gasoline version would also burn fuel with such a surge). Feeling guilty at the extravagance, I back off and settle down to 75–80 mph again.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at Imperva on Tuesday found that the subdomain names of Auth0 are susceptible to security issues, allowing attackers to launch phishing attacks, harvest user credentials, or even possibly launching cryptomining attacks. 

Auth0 after this article was originally published reached out to deny and call into question Imperva’s blog post, citing “factual inaccuracies” within the blog.

Imperva took down the blog for two hours, before re-posting the blog, unchanged, onto its website. The company gave no further explanation to Threatpost about why it took down the blog then put it back online, despite multiple emails and phone calls.

“There are thousands of ways to perpetrate the same kind of phishing attempt on any company, aside from Auth0,” Joan Pepin, the CISO and vice president of operations at Auth0, told Threatpost in an email.

“While Imperva recognizes Auth0 as a leader in the security space and singled us out for the purposes of this blog post, social engineering like this can be executed in countless ways, especially when someone chooses to take advantage of our platform’s extensibility and flexibility,” Pepin told Threatpost. “Our documentation provides specific guidelines that were not followed in this case, such as using a custom domain, that would eliminate the risk altogether.”

Researcher Daniel Svartman said Imperva was thinking of using Auth0 as one of its product’s authentication mechanisms, so he was conducting some research on the service. During this process, he found potential security problems with the service’s subdomain registrations.

“Essentially, an attacker could spoof a legitimate website using the subdomain name from a different region,” Imperva researchers said in a post on Tuesday. “The attack would be very difficult to identify and could result in visitors to the site not realizing it is fake and handing over sensitive information.”

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

US hits China's ZTE with $1 billion penalty in deal to end crippling sanctions, Commerce Secretary Ross says

[...] "We are literally embedding a compliance department of our choosing into the company to monitor it going forward. They will pay for those people, but the people will report to the new chairman," Ross said in a "Squawk Box" interview.

ZTE's latest brush with U.S. regulators came after the company's business dealings with Iran and North Korea violated U.S. trade agreements. ZTE paid $1.19 billion in fines for those violations, but the dispute didn't end there. The Commerce Department then alleged that ZTE misled regulators and failed to discipline the employees responsible for the sanction breach.

The settlement deal includes $400 million in escrow to cover any future violations as well as requiring ZTE to change its board of directors and executive team in 30 days.

[...] In response to the announced deal, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Thursday in a statement, "When it comes to China, despite [Trump's] tough talk, this deal with ZTE proves the president just shoots blanks."

Also at ZTE will pay $1 billion fine to beat US export ban

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

bzipitidoo writes:

New research led by scientists at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol found that people who spend more time in education are more likely to develop near-sightedness. Specifically, researchers found that for every year a person spends in education — where they are likely to spend more time reading and typing on computers — there is a rise in myopic refractive error of 0.27 diopters, a diopter being a standard measure of the optical power of a lens. An estimated 68,000 participants were examined using the "Mendelian randomization" (MR), approach which is often used to examine causal effect of a disease in observational studies.

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/1199570-study-suggests-education-causes-short-sightedness

https://www.salon.com/2018/06/07/theres-a-scientific-reason-nerds-have-bad-eyesight/

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

More mystery objects detected near Milky Way's supermassive black hole

Astronomers have discovered several bizarre objects at the Galactic Center that are concealing their true identity behind a smoke screen of dust; they look like gas clouds, but behave like stars.

[...] "These compact dusty stellar objects move extremely fast and close to our Galaxy's supermassive black hole. It is fascinating to watch them move from year to year," said [Anna] Ciurlo. "How did they get there? And what will they become? They must have an interesting story to tell."

[...] GCOI [UCLA's Galactic Center Orbits Initiative] thinks that these G-objects are the result of stellar mergers—where two stars orbiting each other, known as binaries, crash into each other due to the gravitational influence of the giant black hole. Over a long period of time, the black hole's gravity alters the binary stars' orbits until the duo collides. The combined object that results from this violent merger could explain where the excess energy came from.

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-food-allergies-children-autism-spectrum.html

A new study from the University of Iowa finds that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are more than twice as likely to suffer from a food allergy than children who do not have ASD.

Wei Bao, assistant professor of epidemiology at the UI College of Public Health and the study's corresponding author, says the finding adds to a growing body of research that suggests immunological dysfunction as a possible risk factor for the development of ASD.

"It is possible that the immunologic disruptions may have processes beginning early in life, which then influence brain development and social functioning, leading to the development of ASD," says Bao.

[...] The study found that 11.25 percent of children reportedly diagnosed with ASD have a food allergy, significantly higher than the 4.25 percent of children who are not diagnosed with ASD and have a food allergy.

Bao says his study could not determine the causality of this relationship given its observational nature. But previous studies have suggested possible links—increased production of antibodies, immune system overreactions causing impaired brain function, neurodevelopmental abnormalities, and alterations in the gut biome. He says those connections warrant further investigation. [emphasis Gaaark's]

"We don't know which comes first, food allergy or ASD," says Bao

#Personal Observations:
Gaaark's personal observation of his son and his self is that at the very least, foods that cause allergic 'reactions' DO INDEED intensify autistic behaviours.
When we fed our son products with gluten (Kraft macaroni and cheese was his favourite), he was much more self involved and much less externally observant. He also regurgitated the macaroni (we think THIS behaviour was linked to the dairy in the cheese) hours afterwards and would often laugh oddly while staring into space (his doctor said this was due to the 'bugs' in his stomach turning the gluten into an opioid: he was 'high').

Off the gluten and dairy, he is much more observant of external things, enjoys and gives hugs and is much more 'normal'.
*End Personal Observation

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Since 2013, Chinese machines have occupied the number one slot in rankings of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Now America is back on top again. Engineers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee have just unveiled Summit, a supercomputer with enough processing power to surpass the current record holder, China's Sunway TaihuLight.

The new machine is capable, at peak performance, of 200 petaflops—200 million billion calculations a second. To put that in context, everyone on earth would have to do a calculation every second of every day for 305 days to crunch what the new machine can do in the blink of an eye. Summit is 60 percent faster than the TaihuLight and almost eight times as fast as a machine called Titan, which is also housed at Oak Ridge and held the US supercomputing speed record until Summit's arrival.

[...] Jack Wells of Oak Ridge says the experience of building Summit, which fills an area the size of two tennis courts and carries 4,000 gallons of water a minute through its cooling system to carry away about 13 megawatts of heat, will help inform work on exascale machines, which will require even more impressive infrastructure. Things like Summit's advanced memory management and the novel, high-bandwidth linkages that connect its chips will be essential for handling the vast amounts of data exascale machines will generate. Scientists at the national lab say they've already leveraged Summit's AI smarts to conduct what is effectively an exascale comparative genomics calculation. Thanks to these and other advances, Summit will help us reach even more impressive peaks of computing power.

The world's most powerful supercomputer

Also Covered by

Move Over, China: U.S. Is Again Home to World's Speediest Supercomputer (The New York Times)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Launches America's New Top Supercomputer for Science

The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Is an Absolute Beast (GIZMODO)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

More than 115,000 websites—many run by major universities, government organizations, and media companies—remained wide open to hacker takeovers because they hadn’t installed critical patches released 10 weeks ago, security researcher Troy Mursch said Monday. A separate researcher reported on Tuesday that many of the sites were already compromised and were being used to surreptitiously mine cryptocurrencies or push malware on unsuspecting visitors.

Infected pages included those belonging to the University of Southern California, Computer World’s Brazil site, and the Arkansas Judiciary’s Courts and Community Initiative, which were causing visitors’ computers to run resource-intensive code that mines cryptocurrency, Jérôme Segura, lead malware intelligence analyst at antivirus provider Malwarebytes, told Ars.

Segura said a Harvard University page that earlier was also infected with mining malware had since been defaced, presumably by a different party. Meanwhile, a Western Michigan University page that earlier was infected with code that pushed a malicious browser extension was later repaired. Segura reported his findings Tuesday and has indexed more than 900 infected sites here.

The lack of patching and the site takeovers that makes possible come after Drupal maintainers released an update in March that allowed hackers to remotely execute code of their choice. The severity of the vulnerability patched, combined with the ease in exploiting it, quickly earned the flaw the nickname Drupalgeddon2, a throwback to a similar 2014 Drupal vulnerability that came under mass exploit within hours of a patch being released. Drupal maintainers patched a separate code-execution vulnerability in April. The March and April vulnerability disclosures came with proof-of-concept exploits that provided a blueprint for malicious hackers to use. Almost immediately after the release of the April patch, the underlying vulnerability came under attack, but it so far has proven harder to successfully exploit.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Review of a couple of recent publications, in The Boston Review

People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.

We'll get to the quantum mechanics in a bit.

The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker's What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the "new" quantum physics up through the present day.

So, verifiable, experimental, experienced proof?

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Marion Nestle, PhD, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita reports via Food Politics

The FDA has concluded its "consultation process" on Golden Rice. This, you may recall, is rice bioengineered to contain genes for beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A.

The FDA's letter to IRRI concluding the consultation [PDF] includes this statement:

Although GR2E ["Golden"] rice is not intended for human or animal food uses in the United States, when present, it would be a producer's or distributer's [sic] responsibility to ensure that labeling of human and animal foods marketed in the United States, meets applicable legal requirements. Although the concentration of ß-carotene in GR2E rice is too low to warrant a nutrient content claim, the ß-carotene in GR2E rice results in grain that is yellow-golden in color.

The FDA's analysis of the science [PDF] concludes that this rice Is unlikely to be toxic or allergenic. It also concludes that although the rice contains higher amounts of ß-carotene than non-modified rice, people in the U.S. are unlikely to eat much of it and in any case the amounts would decline due to storage, processing, and cooking.

In any case, the amounts are not high enough to merit a nutrient-content claim.

This rice has long been promoted as a means to solve problems of vitamin A deficiency in the developing world. Will it? We are still waiting to find out.

NotSanguine writes:

The U.S. Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) released a new Vital Signs report on Thursday, 7 June, 2018.

In the press release about the new report, the CDC states that:

Suicide rates have been rising in nearly every state, according to the latest Vital Signs report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2016, nearly 45,000 Americans age 10 or older died by suicide. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death and is one of just three leading causes that are on the rise.
[...]
Researchers found that more than half of people who died by suicide did not have a known diagnosed mental health condition at the time of death. Relationship problems or loss, substance misuse; physical health problems; and job, money, legal or housing stress often contributed to risk for suicide. Firearms were the most common method of suicide used by those with and without a known diagnosed mental health condition.

Are any Soylentils contemplating suicide? Do you know anyone who has attempted or succeeded in taking their own life? Why do you think suicide rates are on the rise?

Original Submission