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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

[...] For conservation, each particle is bound to molecules of porphyrin, which will in turn bind to free iron ions in the wood, catching them before they can react to form damaging acid. That whole package is coated in a polymer that responds to changes in temperature; at around 22⁰C, the composite is a thick gel. With a slight dip in temperature, the polymer becomes a liquid, which soaks into the wood and carries the nanoparticles with it. Conservators can use magnetic fields to steer the composite to the right area of the wood and then draw it out again with the captured iron ions in tow. And when the whole process is done, they can heat the composite to a gel and peel it off the surface of the wood.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/how-magnetic-nanoparticles-will-help-preserve-a-500-year-old-shipwreck/

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Mass Shooting at Video Game Tournament in Jacksonville Leaves Multiple Dead:

Multiple people were killed in a mass shooting during a video game tournament at a shopping and dining complex in downtown Jacksonville, Florida, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said Sunday afternoon. Preliminary reports say four people were killed of the 11 people who were shot at the Jacksonville Landing, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the incident.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said on Twitter there were "multiple" fatalities and "many" transported to hospitals. One suspect was dead at the scene, the Sheriff's Office said, and it was not known if there was another suspect.

Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida is treating at least three patients that were involved in the gaming shooting incident, Hospital spokesman Pete Moberg tells CNN. All of the patients are in stable condition, Moberg says.

Live Updates: Shooting at Madden tournament in Jacksonville.

The shooting occurred at the Jacksonville Landing complex during a qualifying event for the Madden 19 Tournament at the GLHF Game Bar, according to the Twitter [feed] of CompLexity Gaming, one of the gaming teams.

Also at: NY Daily News and Fox News.

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captain normal writes:

Everyone knows that America's big cities and especially San Francisco live in their own financial bubbles.

Average rent in the City by the Bay is nearly four times greater than the US average, coming in at $3,750 a month for a one-bedroom apartment. The cost of living is 80 per cent higher than the rest of America. A typical cup of coffee costs a demented $6 – and some will charge a mind-boggling $20. The internet surge of the past few years has only deepened the problem: tech bros earning six-figure salaries have edged out working families, and homelessness, despite a slight retreat recently, remains high.

But among all the issues that have been rudely visited upon San Francisco, the one that has rich people most riled up is also the most human: shit. As in other people's shit. Dog shit, too, but mostly human shit.

Thanks to the impossible cost of living in the city and a repeated refusal by residents to cough up enough money to deal with the jump in homeless folk, more people that[sic] ever before are living on the streets with no where to go at night and – thanks to no one wanting to dirty up wonderfully clean and luxurious shopping centers and office buildings – no where to go (as in go) during the day. The result: shit. Tons of it.

"I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I've ever seen growing up here," said the city's new mayor London Breed recently. "That is a huge problem and we are not just talking about from dogs – we’re talking about from humans."

And so San Francisco has decided to deal with it in the only way it knows how: pay others to erase the problem from its sight. But before you wonder who on earth would accept a job cleaning up other people's excrement in one of the most expensive cities in the world, consider this: it pays well. Really well.

[...] All of which means that if you are lucky enough to grab a coveted spot on the Poop Patrol – it's a ten-person crew with its own minivan – you will earn a base salary of $71,760 a year. Add in benefits including health insurance, pension and so on and it brings the package to a rather enticing $184,678 a year.

Source: www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/25/san_francisco_clean_up/

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takyon writes:

Running Windows 95 in an "app" is a dumb stunt that makes a good point: Software piracy remains an important part of preserving our digital heritage.

A silly new app has been doing the rounds this week: Windows 95 as a standalone application. Running on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the Windows 95 "app" combines Electron (a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript and other Web technology) with an existing x86 emulator written in JavaScript. The emulator can run a bunch of operating systems: for the app, it's preloaded with Windows 95.

This is, of course, software piracy. The developer of the app has no rights to distribute Windows 95 like this, and I'm a little surprised that the app hasn't been yanked from GitHub yet. And for now, the app is just a toy; there's no real reason to run Windows 95 like this, other than the novelty factor of it actually working.

But Windows 95 (and software that runs on or requires Windows 95) was an important piece of computing history. I think a case could be made that it's Microsoft's most important Windows release of all time, and its influence continues to be felt today. Not only was it technically important as an essential stepping stone from the world of 16-bit DOS and Windows 3.x to 32-bit Windows NT, and not only did it introduce a user interface that's largely stayed with us for more than 20 years—Windows 95 was also a major consumer event as people lined up to buy the thing as soon as it was available. A full understanding of the computing landscape today can't really be had without running, using, and understanding Windows 95.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

CEO Elon Musk: Tesla will remain a public company

In a blog post published Friday evening, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he would change course from his sudden announcement three weeks ago and would actually keep Tesla as a publicly-traded company.

"It's apparent that most of Tesla's existing shareholders believe we are better off as a public company," he wrote. "Additionally, a number of institutional shareholders have explained that they have internal compliance issues that limit how much they can invest in a private company. There is also no proven path for most retail investors to own shares if we were private."

Musk noted that he had met with the Tesla board of directors on Thursday and "let them know that I believe the better path is for Tesla to remain public. The board indicated that they agree."

See also: Analysis: Why Elon Musk abandoned his plan to take Tesla private

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Lithium-oxygen batteries could store 10 times the energy of today's lithium-ion cells

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from our smartphones to our cars. But one of their most promising replacements is lithium-oxygen batteries, which in theory could store 10 times more power. The only problem: They fall apart after just a handful of charging cycles. Now, researchers have found that running them at high temperatures—along with a couple of other fixes—can push them to at least 150 cycles. Although they would be too hot to handle in phones, lithium-oxygen batteries the size of rail cars could one day underpin a green energy grid, storing excess wind and solar power and delivering it on demand.

"This is very encouraging," says Yang Shao-Horn, a chemical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. But she and others caution that the new batteries must prove themselves over many more cycles before they'll be considered for the mass market.

A high-energy-density lithium-oxygen battery based on a reversible four-electron conversion to lithium oxide (DOI: 10.1126/science.aas9343) (DX)

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Full contact information of everyone attending the BlackHat security conference this year has been exposed in clear text, a researcher has found. The data trove includes name, email, company, and phone number. The BlackHat 2018 conference badge came embedded with a near-field communication (NFC) tag that stored the contact details of the participant, for identification or for vendors to scan for marketing purposes.

A security expert that uses the online moniker NinjaStyle noticed that scanning his badge with an NFC chip reader he could see his real full name in clear text. However, his email address and other information were not available this way. [...] NinjaStyle started prodding the recommended card reader and decompiled its APK in search for potential API endpoints. He found out that BCard created a custom URL using the badge and event identification values of the badge owner, and he determined how the values were built.

"Though we can prove this in the code shown above, I simply guessed that those values corresponded to the eventID and badgeID parameters by sending the request in Firefox. To my surprise, I was able to pull my attendee data completely unauthenticated over this API," writes NinjaStyle in a blog post disclosing the glitch. These details are sufficient to carry out a brute-force attack that collects the contact details of all BlackHat attendees. The researcher used trial and error to discover that the range for the valid ID data was between 100000-999999, so he could start extracting the details. [...] The researcher was able to contact the BCard maker to disclose the security flaw, which was fixed in less than 24 hours by disabling the leaky API because it was a legacy system.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/legacy-system-exposes-contact-info-of-blackhat-2018-attendees/

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

Chicago Tribune:

Sen. John McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp with jut-jawed defiance and later turned his rebellious streak into a 35-year political career that took him to Congress and the Republican presidential nomination, died Saturday after battling brain cancer for more than a year. He was 81.

McCain, with his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, was a fearless and outspoken voice on policy and politics to the end, unswerving in his defense of democratic values and unflinching in his criticism of his fellow Republican, President Donald Trump. He was elected to the Senate from Arizona six times but twice thwarted in seeking the presidency.

An upstart presidential bid in 2000 didn't last long. Eight years later, he fought back from the brink of defeat to win the GOP nomination, only to be overpowered by Democrat Barack Obama. McCain chose a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate in that race, and turned Sarah Palin into a national political figure.

After losing to Obama in an electoral landslide, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign in which his reputation as a maverick had faded. In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, McCain energetically advanced his ideas and punched back hard at critics — Trump not least among them.

The scion of a decorated military family, McCain embraced his role as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, pushing for aggressive U.S. military intervention overseas and eager to contribute to "defeating the forces of radical Islam that want to destroy America."

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: "That I made a major contribution to the defense of the nation."

Also at The New York Timesand c|net.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

[...] The team used a mathematical model to simulate these epidemic patterns for each of the 20 most common types of enterovirus.

To build the model, they used Japanese enterovirus surveillance data. Japan keeps incredibly detailed information on enterovirus outbreaks, and the team used 14 years' worth of information to build the model (from 2000-2014).

They then tested the model, and found that it was able to predict subsequent outbreaks in 2015 and 2016 for most types of enterovirus.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180824090618.htm

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Current noise cancelling technology comes in the form of headphones and earbuds. To cancel noise, these headphones emit an anti-noise signal to contrast the external sounds. The time available for the headphones to produce this anti-noise signal is extremely short. This results in some noise getting through, which is why all these devices must cover the entire ear with noise-canceling material. However, wearing such ear-blocking devices for long periods of time is not comfortable, and can even be harmful.

"Our goal is to not block the ear canal," said Sheng Shen, lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). "We envision a behind-the-ear device that still achieves noise cancellation as good as the best headphones or earbuds available today."

The main idea behind this research involves combining wireless IoT networks with noise cancellation. A microphone is placed in the environment that senses sounds and sends them over wireless signals to an earpiece. Since wireless signals travel a million times faster than sound, the earphone can receive the sound information much faster than the actual sound itself.

Source: Method to cancel noise without ear-blocking headphones

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Paul Hansmeier, one of the lead attorneys behind the controversial law firm Prenda, has pleaded guilty to mail, wire fraud, and money laundering. The Pirate Bay provided important evidence in the case, where Hansmeier and his colleague were found creating and uploading porn movies to file-sharing sites to extract settlements from alleged pirates.

Over the past several years, so-called copyright trolls have been accused of various dubious schemes and actions, with one group as the frontrunner. The now-defunct Prenda Law grabbed dozens of headlines, mostly surrounding negative court rulings over identity theft, misrepresentation and even deception.

Most controversial was the shocking revelation that Prenda uploaded their own torrents to The Pirate Bay, creating a honeypot for the people they later sued over pirated downloads. The accusation was first published here on TorrentFreak. While some disregarded it as a wild conspiracy theory, the US Department of Justice took it rather seriously. These and other allegations ultimately resulted in a criminal indictment, which was filed in 2016. The US Government accused two of the leading Prenda lawyers of various crimes, including money laundering, perjury, mail and wire fraud. This week one of the defendants, Paul Hansmeier, pleaded guilty to two of the counts.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/prenda-lawyer-pleads-guilty-in-pirate-bay-honeypot-case-180818/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The entertainment industries are growing increasingly frustrated with major Internet platforms that, in their view, are not doing enough to tackle online piracy.

This was also the topic of a speech given by MPAA chief Charles Rivkin, during the TPI Aspen Forum yesterday.

[...] "I want to address one of the most vibrant and interconnected ecosystems in human history. That, of course, is the internet. And as we meet, the healthy and vibrant internet that we all want is in serious jeopardy," Rivkin says.

[...] While the complaints about Internet piracy are not new, the MPAA ties piracy in with more recent debates about fake news, election meddling, and hate speech. From Cambridge Analytica to Infowars.

Rivkin calls for a national conversation on how to return the Internet to a place of vibrant but civil discourse. A place where fake news, hate speech, and piracy are properly dealt with.

Eventually, this leads the MPAA's boss to Silicon Valley. Rivkin sees a major role for Internet platforms to do more to stop piracy and other types of abuse. If that doesn't happen voluntarily, the US Government could step in, he suggests

[...] The widespread problem of online piracy is a sign of worse to come, the MPAA chief suggests.

"Online piracy is also the proverbial canary in a coal mine. The same pervasive theft that my industry faces is part of a continuum of toxic developments that harm all of us in this ecosystem – consumers, creators, and commercial operators alike," he says.

In his speech, Rivkin refers to the "broken windows" theory to illustrate his point. This theory suggests that an atmosphere of lawlessness is created when small crimes are left unpunished. Seeing broken windows in the streets makes it more likely that others will start vandalizing as well.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-is-the-internets-canary-in-the-coal-mine-mpaa-chief-says-180821/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Jarkko Oikarinen wrote Internet Relay Chat (IRC) at the Department of Information Processing Science of the University of Oulu, in Finland, 30 years ago. Even today, people are still using IRC and it is an essential communication tool for many distributed teams.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Verizon tries to douse criticism, touts "priority access" for first responders -- Firefighters don't like their mobile hotspots slowed to a "dial-up modem from 1995."

Verizon officials were contrite and apologetic during a California State Assembly committee hearing that was convened Friday to examine mobile Internet throttling experienced by firefighters during recent blazes. "We all make mistakes from time to time, the true measure of leadership is how soon we admit it, own it," Rudy Reyes told the Select Committee on Natural Disaster, Response, Recovery, and Rebuilding after reading from a statement that the company released hours earlier.

In that statement, Verizon said it would be introducing a "new plan" with truly unlimited data and "priority access" for first responders nationwide. "As of yesterday, we removed all speed cap restrictions for first responders on the West Coast and in Hawaii to support current firefighting and Hurricane Lane efforts," the company said. "Further, in the event of another disaster, Verizon will lift restrictions on public safety customers, providing full network access."

The executives spoke shortly after hearing from Santa Clara County Fire Chief Tony Bowden who said that his agency had experienced similar throttling in December 2017. The Santa Clara department had tried to address it with the Verizon accounts manager at the time.

See also: Verizon stops throttling more firefighters, plans unlimited data "with no caps"
California State Assembly plans hearing on Verizon throttling of firefighters' data

Previously on SN: Verizon Throttled Fire Department's "Unlimited" Data During California Wildfire

Original Submission

takyon writes:

No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms

A large new global study published in the Lancet has confirmed previous research which has shown that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The researchers admit moderate drinking may protect against heart disease but found that the risk of cancer and other diseases outweighs these protections. A study author said its findings were the most significant to date because of the range of factors considered.

The Global Burden of Disease [open, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31310-2] [DX] study looked at levels of alcohol use and its health effects in 195 countries, including the UK, between 1990 and 2016.

Analysing data from 15 to 95-year-olds, the researchers compared people who did not drink at all with those who had one alcoholic drink a day. They found that out of 100,000 non-drinkers, 914 would develop an alcohol-related health problem such as cancer or suffer an injury. But an extra four people would be affected if they drank one alcoholic drink a day. For people who had two alcoholic drinks a day, 63 more developed a condition within a year and for those who consumed five drinks every day, there was an increase of 338 people, who developed a health problem.

One of the study authors, Prof Sonia Saxena, a researcher at Imperial College London and a practising GP, said: "One drink a day does represent a small increased risk, but adjust that to the UK population as a whole and it represents a far bigger number, and most people are not drinking just one drink a day."

Related: The Truth We Won't Admit: Drinking is Healthy
Study Shows 3 Drinks a Day May Cause Liver Cancer
Even Moderate Drinking Linked to a Decline in Brain Health
American Society of Clinical Oncology: Alcohol Use Increases Risk of Cancer

Original Submission