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takyon writes:

NSA deletes hundreds of millions of call records over privacy violations

The NSA unfortunately has a long history of violating privacy rules, although this time the agency might not be entirely to blame. The NSA is deleting hundreds of millions of call and text message data records (collected since 2015) after learning of "technical irregularities" that led to receiving records it wasn't supposed to obtain under the USA Freedom Act. General counsel Glenn Gerstell told the New York Times in an interview that "one or more" unnamed telecoms had responded to data requests for targets by sending logs that included not just the relevant data, but records for people who hadn't been in contact with the targets. As it was "infeasible" to comb through all the data and find just the authorized data, the NSA decided to wipe everything.

[...] The companies involved have "addressed" the cause of the problem for data going forward, the NSA said.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

It's Official: Astronomers Caught The First-Ever Direct Picture of a Planet Being Born

For the very first time, astronomers have captured an image of a baby planet as it carves a path through the disc of dust that surrounds its star, an orange dwarf 113.4 parsecs (370 light-years) away from Earth.

[...] PDS 70 has a few features that made it a good candidate for this sort of search. Its protoplanetary disc is large, spanning a radius of around 130 astronomical units (the distance between Earth and the Sun; the Kuiper belt only goes up to about 50 au).

[...] Using its coronagraph and polarisation filters, the [Very Large Telescope] team discovered a very large planet orbiting in the gap in PDS 70's protoplanetary disc - which means it's probably still in the process of accumulating material. Further analysis of the planet, described in a second paper, was conducted based on its spectrum. Its mass is several times that of Jupiter, and its orbit is around 22 AU, just a little bit farther than Uranus's orbit around the Sun. It takes about 120 Earth years to complete one orbit around its star, and its surface temperature is around 1,200 Kelvin.

PDS 70. Also at ESO and Syfy Wire.

Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70

Orbital and atmospheric characterization of the planet within the gap of the PDS 70 transition disk

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Judge slams Tacoma for not releasing stingray records

A judge in Washington state has excoriated the Tacoma Police Department for withholding public records pertaining to its use of cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays. Back in 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state sued the TPD on behalf of four community leaders, arguing that the department has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of stingrays, which included asking for a blank form authorizing its use.

"The [Public Records Act] establishes a positive duty to disclose public records unless they fall within specific exemptions," Judge G. Helen Whitener wrote in her Monday opinion. "This mandates that the City, upon receiving a request for documents, must first do an adequate search and then must produce the documents requested if there is not an exemption. The PRA does not require the City to analyze the reasons why the document is requested or to determine the relevance of the documents requested even if they are blank forms. The blank form taken in context of the other forms may have meaning to the requestor, and it is not for the City to analyze its relevance. To adopt the City's interpretation of the PRA would defeat the broad mandate of the PRA to allow access to public records not covered by and exemption."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Goats display audience-dependent human-directed gazing behaviour in a problem-solving task

Goats might not seem like the most cuddly animals, but researchers have found evidence that goats are as clever as dogs, and just as capable of building emotional relationships with humans as all the other domesticated animals we've let into our hearts and homes. The 2016 study showed that goats stare intensely at their owner when they're struggling to complete a task - a trait that's also observed in domesticated dogs, but not wolves.

[...] "From our earlier research, we already know that goats are smarter than their reputation suggests," said one of the researchers Alan McElligott. "But these results show how they can communicate and interact with their human handlers even though they were not domesticated as pets or working animals."

Not only does that suggest goats have the potential to be awesome and loving sidekicks, just like dogs, it also indicates that living alongside humans for tens of thousands of years - regardless of whether they're companion animals or not - might have a bigger impact on species than we expected.

Goats display audience-dependent human-directed gazing behaviour in a problem-solving task (open, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0283) (DX)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

SUSE Linux Sold for $2.5 Billion

British software company Micro Focus International has agreed to sell SUSE Linux and its associated software business to Swedish private equity group EQT Partners for $2.535 billion.

Also at The Register, Linux Journal, MarketWatch, and Reuters.

Previously: SuSE Linux has a New Owner
HPE Wraps Up $8.8bn Micro Focus Software Dump Spin-Off

Related: SUSE Pledges Endless Love for btrfs; Says Red Hat's Dumping Irrelevant

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Illinois prosecutors have charged a 13-year-old student with felony eavesdropping for recording his conversation with two school administrators. Should he be found guilty and sentenced, a conviction could land him a minimum of one year in prison. According to TechDirt:

The [Illinois] law forbids recordings without all parties' consent. It would seem that the school officials' refusal to discuss anything further once they were informed they were being recorded should have been enough. The conversation was ended, along with the recording. If they were concerned they said something they shouldn't have during the previous ten minutes, maybe should have restrained themselves during the argument, rather than ruin a 13-year-old's life with a bad law Illinois legislators refuse to rewrite. Given how often this law is used to protect the powerful, it's hardly surprising legislators haven't expressed a serious interest in fixing it.

Everyone from the administrators to the prosecutors and those in between had a lot of discretion available to stop the chain of events, but all chose not to stop it.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

This is a followup to: SoylentNews Site Certificates Expiring... We ARE Working on It, But... [Updated]
and: Site Services Restored

Certs (Not Just a Breath Mint):

Thanks to the efforts of The Mighty Buzzard and NCommander we now have valid certs, issued by LetsEncrypt installed on all of our servers. Except that the IRC server needs to be bounced to make its cert active on the backup daemon, all should now be in effect. As in our original story, you can check our certificate status with these links:

https://crt.sh/?q=soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25soylentnews.org
https://crt.sh/?q=sylnt.us
https://crt.sh/?q=%%25sylnt.us

Developers:

The past few days have brought into focus a situation that has been building for several months: We really only have a single person who is working on developing features for the site, The Mighty Buzzard. As with any large and on-going undertaking, this burden is taking its toll. I try to help out as I can, but as I am the primary QA/Test guy who is much better at the user-facing things than what all happens "under the covers", my abilities and assistance are limited. If you have any spare time and would like to lend a hand (and every bit helps), please reply in the comments or contact The Might Buzzard directly on IRC.

Community:

I recall in the early days of this site when things would fall over several times a day. That has largely become a thing of the past... to the point where it is unusual for any issues to appear on the site and the support services we maintain (email, wiki, IRC, etc.) The baseline code on which this site was founded (open-sourced, out-of-date, back-level, and non-functional) was not promising, but the staff managed to bludgeon it into shape and we now have a solid foundation. That it continues to run as smoothly as it has is a testament to our SysOps folk who toil largely in the background and just keep things working... as well as the continued care-and-feeding that TMB so generously provides. To all of you, please accept my heartfelt thanks and appreciation!

Some numbers: we are approaching the 23,000th story posted; have recently passed 700,000 comments submitted; have had over 3,300 journal articles posted; and are on the cusp of having our 120th Poll!

Though all numbers are approximate and unofficial, it appears we surpassed our funding goal for the first half of the year ($3,000) with a net subscription tally of just over $3,250! I'll leave it to our treasurer to collate and post the official numbers. I'll leave the "Funding Goal" side bar as is for a week or so to commemorate this accomplishment. Do note that subscriptions are still being accepted and will count towards the second half of the year's funding needs.

Folding@Home: Not all of you may be aware, but our soylentnews team for Folding@Home is currently at 240th place... in the world! It started with a single story posted to this site. Just over four years ago, we were at 230,319th place! If you have any spare computes you would like to contribute, especially GPU-based, we'd love to have you sign up! Just reply in the comments and I'm sure someone will get back to you.

Whenever I write one of these stories, I always fear I'll have omitted someone or something important. Please accept my humble apologies if I have done so as there is no intent to slight any contributor.

To the community, I offer my thanks for your contributions to the site as well as your patience and understanding during the challenges of the past few days. Contributions are not just financial (though we wouldn't be here without them -- Thank You!), but also submitting stories and comments, and moderating comments, too! The community continues to impress me with your wide-ranging knowledge and expertise; I have learned much from the exchanges in the story comments!

Lastly, please keep janrinok (our Editor-in-Chief) in your thoughts and wishes while he undergoes a medical procedure and attendant recovery period. Best of luck JR!

--martyb

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Two lawyers are still fighting to keep Buck Rogers from entering the public domain, something which should have begun 70 years after the author's death. Philip Nowlan, the stories' author, died in 1940 and so his works should have joined the public domain starting 2010. Part of the strategy from the copyright trolls has been to drag out the process with multiple lawsuits.

Back in October 2015 we brought you the story of the Buck Rogers Copyright Trolls, two lawyers who were fighting to keep Buck Rogers from entering the public domain using the discredited Sherlock Holmes system of licensing. Two and a half years later, Louise Geer and Dan Herman are still at it, using every trick in the book to keep a beloved tale out of the public domain, where it firmly belongs. Along the way the pair have stiffed multiple law firms, and currently are abusing a Bankruptcy Court in Pennsylvania in a Hail Mary effort to...well, it's not exactly clear what they're trying to do.

From Boing Boing : The continuing saga of Buck Rogers and the Copyright Trolls

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

High Country News reports:

[...] Scotts got permission from the USDA to plant larger fields for seed production. Farmers sowed 80 acres of bentgrass in Canyon County, Idaho, and 420 acres in Jefferson County, Oregon, north of Bend. The Oregon Department of Agriculture picked the site - an irrigated island in the sagebrush sea - to keep the plant far from the Willamette Valley. There, on the western side of the mountains, farmers grow forage and turf grass for a $1 billion-a-year seed industry.

Then two windstorms swept through the eastern Oregon fields in August of 2013, scattering flea-sized seeds well beyond the designated control area. Roundup-resistant pollen fertilized conventional bentgrass plants as far as 13 miles away.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

ZDNet Exclusive: Leaked data reveals many police departments are unable to respond in an active shooter situation.

A data breach at a federally funded active shooter training center has exposed the personal data of thousands of US law enforcement officials, ZDNet has learned.

The cache of data contained identifiable information on local and state police officers, and federal agents, who sought out or underwent active shooter response training in the past few years. The backend database powers the website of Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training -- known as ALERRT -- at Texas State University.

The database dates back to April 2017 and was uploaded a year later to a web server, believed to be owned by the organization, with no password protection.

ZDNet obtained a copy of the database, which was first found by a New Zealand-based data breach hunter, who goes by the pseudonym Flash Gordon.

Working with federal agencies like the FBI, the Texas-based organization provides training to law enforcement and civilians around the US in an effort to prevent or disrupt active shooter incidents. Since its inception in 2002, ALERRT has received tens of millions of dollars in funding from the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and several state governments.

[...] The database contained thousands of personal data records, including law enforcement officer's work contact information, with many of the records listing personal email addresses, work addresses, and cell numbers.

[...] tables included requests made by law enforcement reaching out to the organization for help through its web form. In doing so, many officials volunteered highly sensitive information about deficiencies in their jurisdiction, revealing their department's lack of training or capabilities.

[...] One police department openly admitted that it "doesn't have a full-time SWAT team," and is unable to respond to an active shooter situation. An ALERRT staffer responded, saying that the organization "couldn't facilitate his request at this time."

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-massive-cache-of-law-enforcement-personnel-data-has-leaked/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world-class service.

Maps needs fixing.

Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so it's re-building the maps part of Maps.

It's doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 beta and will cover Northern California by fall.

Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually, and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they're viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.

This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it's been four years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data-gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Dave Lindorff reports via CounterPunch

Over a generation ago, engineer Bill Smith, working at Motorola, developed a management system called Six-Sigma, designed to help companies avoid quality problems in their products and business processes. His system caught morphed[sic] into a general theory of management, and became a catch-word and marketing goldmine at business schools as well as requirement for promotion at large corporations.

In 1995, Jack Welsh, CEO of GE, made Six-Sigma central to his company's whole management approach. If you wanted to be promoted at that leading Fortune 100 industrial firm, you needed to be certified in Six-Sigma. Other companies followed suit and today most large US corporations and many abroad, as well as some public organizations (including the US military), claim to adhere to the model, and to promote management personnel based upon their having achieved so-called "black belt" or "green belt" status in understanding its precepts.

Indeed, GE's success in growing rapidly and achieving record profits year after year made Welsh and Six-Sigma (a trademarked term owned by Motorola) a leading model for top-level managers everywhere.

Jump forward, though, and GE is now being called an epic management disaster by analysts. The company, with Welsh at the helm, famously expanded into banking and financial services, got caught with its corporate pants down in the Fiscal Crisis and Great Recession that hit in 2007, and is now going through a wrenching divestment and break-up process that has seen its stock price fall from a high of $87 a share in August of 2000, when everything seemed to be humming along nicely, to today's low of $12.88, a level that valued the company at 50% of what it had been worth just a year ago.

canopic jug writes:

In an interview, anthropologist David Graeber answers questions about the modern workplace and the purposeless jobs that fill it.

Not since Dilbert has truth been spoken to power in soulless work settings. But the cartoon character's successor may be David Graeber. In 2013 he achieved viral fame with cubicle zombies everywhere after he published a short essay on the prevalence of work that had no social or economic reason to exist, which he called "bullshit jobs". The wide attention seemed to confirm his thesis.

Mr Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, has expanded on the ideas in a recent book. He responded to five questions from The Economist's Open Future initiative. He rails against "feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies." As he puts it: "People want to feel they are transforming the world around them in a way that makes some kind a positive difference."

[...] One thing it shows is that the whole "lean and mean" ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It's not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies.

From The Economist : Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Security firm FireEye has detected that malware authors have deployed the PROPagate code injection technique for the first time inside a live malware distribution campaign.

PROPagate is a relatively new code injection technique discovered last November. Back then, a security researcher found that an attacker could abuse the SetWindowSubclass API, a function of the Windows operating system that manages GUIs, to load and execute malicious code inside the processes of legitimate apps.

Source: PROPagate Code Injection Technique Detected in the Wild for the First Time

FireEye: RIG Exploit Kit Delivering Monero Miner Via PROPagate Injection Technique

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study

Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.

As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, "You have absolutely no idea what is out there!" The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.

I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.

With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.

See also: Released FAA recording reveals pilot report of a UFO over Long Island
I-Team Exclusive: Nevada senator fought to save secret UFO program

Related: Pentagon's UFO Investigation Program Revealed
UFO Existence 'Proven Beyond Reasonable Doubt': Former Head Of Pentagon Program
Newly-Released Video Shows 2015 U.S. Navy Sighting of UFO

Original Submission