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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

[...] When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says "This is what I do." The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function. So when we have a new cognitive function, like literacy, it doesn't have a preset network. Rather, it makes new connections among older networks, and that whole collection of networks becomes a circuit. It's a connected scaffolding of parts.

The beauty of the circuit for functions like literacy is its plasticity. You can have one for each different language, like English or Chinese or Hebrew. And then something miraculous happens: the circuit builds upon itself. The first circuits are very basic — for decoding letters as we're learning to read — but everything we read builds upon itself.

So what's changing now with technology? How is that affecting our circuits?

The fact that a circuit is plastic is both its beautiful strength and its Achilles' heel. Reading reflects our medium. And to the extent that a digital medium is going to require us to process large amounts of information very quickly, it will diminish from the time we have for slower processing work.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/27/17787916/reader-come-home-maryanne-wolf-neuroscience-brain-changes

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

Electrons whizzing around each other and humans crammed together at a political rally don't seem to have much in common, but researchers at Cornell are connecting the dots.

They've developed a highly accurate mathematical approach to predict the behavior of crowds of living creatures, using Nobel Prize-winning methods originally developed to study large collections of quantum mechanically interacting electrons. The implications for the study of human behavior are profound, according to the researchers.

For example, by using publicly available video data of crowds in public spaces, their approach could predict how people would distribute themselves under extreme crowding. By measuring density fluctuations using a smartphone app, the approach could describe the current behavioral state or mood of a crowd, providing an early warning system for crowds shifting toward dangerous behavior.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Australian filmmaker James Ricketson found guilty of espionage in Cambodia

Australian filmmaker James Ricketson has been sentenced to six years in a Cambodian prison, after being found guilty of spying for an unnamed country. The 69-year-old filmmaker was arrested in Cambodia in June 2017 after flying a drone over a rally organized by the Cambodia National Rescue Party, an opposition group that was later dissolved by the government.

A statement released by Ricketson's family Friday said they were "absolutely devastated" by the verdict and sentence. "We are in utter shock at this outcome and that James, an innocent Australian, has been sentenced so harshly. Our family lives this tragedy daily," his family said.

Ricketson's lawyer Sam Onn Kong told CNN that Ricketson would seek a royal pardon, which could take up to a month to be decided. Meanwhile his family urged the Australian government to intervene, saying that Ricketson's health had suffered during the 15 months he's spent in Prey Sar prison, in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.

Also at Time and Reuters.

Original Submission

European Commission to Recommend Abolition of Daylight Saving Time

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-to-stop-changing-the-clocks-juncker-pledges/a-45300586

Speaking to German public broadcaster ZDF, Juncker said that he would push for the changing clocks to be abolished and that the Commission "will decide on it today."

[...] Those who are looking forward to future undisturbed sleep will have to wait a while longer. The European Commission, the EU's top executive body, will need to agree on the measure and put forward a draft law on abolishing daylight saving time. The EU Parliament and the bloc's currently 28-member states would also then need to approve the measure.

The Commission is set to release the official results of the online poll, which experienced several technical problems due to the high level of interest when it was first launched online.

Clock Changes: EU Backs Ending Daylight Saving Time

MrPlow writes in with a story submitted (via IRC) for AndyTheAbsurd.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45366390

martyb writes:

Waters off New England in Midst of Record Year for Warmth:

The waters off of New England are already warming faster than most of the world's oceans, and they are nearing the end of one of the hottest summers in their history.

That is the takeaway from an analysis of summer sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine by a marine scientist with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. The average sea surface temperature in the gulf was nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average during one 10-day stretch in August, said the scientist, Andy Pershing, who released the work Thursday.

Aug. 8 was the second warmest day in recorded history in the gulf, and there were other sustained stretches this summer that were a few degrees higher than the average from 1982 to 2011, Pershing said. He characterized this year as "especially warm" even for a body of water that he and other scientists previously identified as warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean.

[...] The Gulf of Maine is a body of water that resembles a dent in the coastal Northeast, and it touches Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Atlantic Canada. It's the nerve center of the U.S. lobster fishing industry, an important feeding ground for rare North Atlantic right whales and a piece of ocean that has attracted much attention in recent years because of its rapid warming.

[...] The warming of the gulf is happening at a time when the center of the U.S. lobster population appears to be tracking northward. America's lobster catch is still high, but rising temperatures threaten to "continue to disrupt the marine ecosystem in this region," said John Bruno, a marine ecologist with the University of North Carolina who was not involved in Pershing's work.

The warming waters are causing a migration of lobsters northward which is having repercussions in Maine's $400+million lobster fisheries. This story in Bloomberg, Maine's Lobster Tide Might Be Ebbing explores what may lie ahead:

aristarchus writes:

At the The Verge:

Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong's The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 that has since gone out of print. It is a thorough and important look at the intractable problem of online harassment.

After a year on The Verge's staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York Times Editorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah's old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

An invention born in a dusty basement two decades ago called the Sapphire clock may be the key to future technology innovation in Australia starting with the defence systems:

A CLOCK that will protect Australia is about to be integrated into our defence systems to pinpoint any threats targeting our nation.

In fact, the clock is the best in the world because of its ability to hold time better than anything else. [*]

Basically, the Sapphire Clock keeps time within one second over 40 million years.

The reason that's important is because its precision accuracy enhances our current defence radar system, allowing even more detailed information to be received about missiles, planes and ships that could be a threat to Australia.

University of Adelaide's Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing director Professor Andre Luiten said the technology that could save Australia came about in a "dusty basement" 20 years ago.

[...] The Sapphire Clock was designed to work alongside Australia's current linchpin for defence, the Jindalee Over-The-Horizon Radar Network (JORN) system, to emit signals that are 1000 times purer than current methods, which means even smaller objects can be seen at even greater distances.

[*] Maybe they are not aware of atomic clocks, some of which are accurate to 1 second in billions of years?

See also: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/ipas/research/nls/pmg-research/SapphireClock/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Court Rules on Merits of IP Address Identification in Open WiFi Case:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was presented with a case about open WiFi and the responsibility of the owner of the network when someone commits copyright infringement on the IP address. Thomas Gonzalez was sued by the makers of the Adam Sandler movie, The Cobbler. He had won his initial day in court, but the copyright owners appealed the decision. In the new ruling (pdf), Judge Margaret McKeown had this to say, "In this copyright action, we consider whether a bare allegation that a defendant is the registered subscriber of an Internet Protocol ('IP') address associated with infringing activity is sufficient to state a claim for direct or contributory infringement." She then states, "We conclude that it is not."

From the ruling:

The district court properly dismissed Cobbler Nevada's claims. The direct infringement claim fails because Gonzales's status as the registered subscriber of an infringing IP address, standing alone, does not create a reasonable inference that he is also the infringer. Because multiple devices and individuals may be able to connect via an IP address, simply identifying the IP subscriber solves only part of the puzzle. A plaintiff must allege something more to create a reasonable inference that a subscriber is also an infringer. Nor can Cobbler Nevada succeed on a contributory infringement theory because, without allegations of intentional encouragement or inducement of infringement, an individual's failure to take affirmative steps to police his internet connection is insufficient to state a claim.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

The fight to secure net neutrality protections for Californians keeps showing how far ISPs and their surrogates will go to make a buck off of ending the free and open Internet. The latest maneuver is a flood of deceptive robocalls targeting seniors and stating that net neutrality will raise their cell phone bills by $30 a month and slow down the Internet. It's not just a lie, it's proof that you've successfully put them on the defensive by contacting your representatives about net neutrality.

The robocalls don't mention net neutrality by name. Instead, they simply assert that S.B. 822 will raise their bills and slow down their Internet. If ISPs decided to make this true by coordinating to raise prices in reaction to net neutrality legislation it would probably be illegal under federal antitrust law. There is no evidence that says net neutrality harms ISPs to the point where they must raise prices to make money. In fact, the evidence says the exact opposite.

[...] This year, the two major wireless and wireline providers (Verizon and AT&T) that are leading the effort to oppose California passing net neutrality legislation are expected to receive an additional $7 billion in cash in hand from Congress' tax cuts. (Verizon - $4 billion, AT&T - $3 billion). That's after having their 2017 net income receive a one-time jump of approximately $38.7 billion ($20 billion to AT&T, $18.7 billion to Verizon) in deductions from those tax cuts. Yet these high profits augmented by tax policy changes give them no pause in deploying their surrogates to falsely state that they must raise everyone's bills simply because they do not like consumer protection.

A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

As the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) secured domain querying draft creeps towards standardisation, Mozilla has run a test to see if applying encryption brings too heavy a performance penalty.

One somewhat-surprising outcome: for some queries, performance improved using DoH.

As Mozilla discusses here, run-of-the-mill DNS requests over DoH take a small performance hit.

However, the test team believes a six millisecond slowdown is acceptable, given that users get better security and privacy out of DoH.

The experiment found that from the billion DNS requests it gathered, “the slowest DNS transactions performed much better with the new DoH based system than the traditional one – sometimes hundreds of milliseconds better.”

[...] According to this paper, presented at Usenix earlier this month, interference with DNS is depressingly common.

That paper discovered 8.5 per cent of the networks the authors tested were intercepting DNS requests, and found a large number of networks using deprecated DNS software. Mozilla's Patrick McManus (one of DoH's two authors) hypothesised two possible reasons for the speed-up.

[...] Another Mozilla developer, Daniel Stenberg, posted a list of DoH endpoints here. There are now three “big names” in the list, with PowerDNS launching its server last week.

Original Submission

A bot called Arthur has collected the following story from the RSS feeds:

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018 and requires that companies obtain explicit permission from individuals to utilize their data. Since the GDPR became enforceable, the number of third-party cookies found on news websites in Europe declined by 22%, according to a study by Reuters Institute.

Between April and July, Reuters researchers analyzed about 1 million content requests from more than 200 news publishers in the EU. They found that the number of third-party cookies used per webpage declined from about 80 in April to about 60 in July.

[Ed note: I use the "Cookies Exterminator" add-on for Pale Moon that, except for my white-listed web sites, removes all cookies after something like a 15-second delay. How do you keep your cookies under control? --martyb]

Original Submission

MrPlow writes in with a story submitted (via IRC) for AndyTheAbsurd

SELFIES. Whether you love them or you hate them, they're constantly flooding our social media feeds.

For women it's often about being seen as sexy or looking glamorous. But why?

Well, researchers have figured it out. And the reason is not what you might think.

University of New South Wales researcher Khandis Blake says the next time you see a woman adjusting her bikini provocatively with her phone at the ready, don't think of her as vacuous or a victim.

"Think of her as a strategic player in a complex social and evolutionary game," says Dr Blake said [sic].

The study revealed women tend to sexualise themselves in environments with greater economic inequality, rather than where they might be oppressed because of their gender.

Analysing tens of thousands of social media posts across 113 countries, they tracked photos where people had taken selfies and then noted that they were tagged sexy, hot or similar.

[...] "That income inequality is a big predictor of sexy selfies suggests that sexy selfies are a marker of social climbing among women that tracks economic incentives in the local environment," Dr Blake says.

"Rightly or wrongly, in today's environment, looking sexy can generate large returns, economically, socially, and personally."

Source: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/the-science-behind-hot-selfies-revealed-in-new-study/news-story/1505f4fcdc3007f4a71bd6b2a79b9bad

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google's in-house security key is now available to anyone who wants one

Google's Titan Security Key is finally available to anyone who wants one. The two-factor token went live today in the Google store, with a full kit available for $50, shipping immediately. The kits include a USB key, a Bluetooth key, and various connectors. The key has been available to Google Cloud customers since July, when the project was first publicly announced.

Built to the FIDO standard, the Titan keys work as a second factor for a number of services, including Facebook, Dropbox, and Github. But not surprisingly, they're built particularly for Google account logins, particularly the Advanced Protection Program announced in October. Because the keys verify themselves with a complex handshake rather than a static code, they're far more resistant to phishing attacks than a conventional confirmation code. The key was initially designed for internal Google use, and has been in active use within the company for more than eight months.

Also at TechCrunch, CNBC, and BGR.

Previously: Google Defeats Employee Phishing With Physical Security Keys

Related: No Key, No Login: G Suite Admins Can Now Make FIDO Security Keys Mandatory

Original Submission

All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us writes:

Covered by Ars Technica, a replica of a Bugatti Chiron that is made almost entirely of... Lego.

For those willing to spend a little more, the LEGO Technic line has bigger replicas you can build, like the yet-to-be-completed LMP2 car still in its box here in my office. (I may have a LEGO problem.) But none of them compare to LEGO's latest creation: a full-size, drivable Bugatti Chiron.

[...] "This life-size model is a first of its kind in so many ways and with it, we wanted to push the boundaries of our own imagination," said Lena Dixen, senior VP of product and marketing at LEGO. "Our Technic designers and the engineers from the Kladno factory in the Czech Republic, the place which also builds the impressive models for LEGO Stores and LEGOLAND parks, have done an amazing job both at recreating the Chiron's iconic shapes and making it possible to drive this model."

The Chiron uses 339 different Technic elements, many of which are used as load-bearing components. It even has working headlights—featuring the first use of some new types of transparent Techic bricks. The car weighs 3,306lbs (1,500kg), and even the powertrain is made from Lego: 2,304 of the little electric motors to be precise.

According to the article it goes a little slower than the real thing at top speed (12.5 mph versus 261 mph). But what's a little slowness when you've got a Lego Bugatti?

A friend and I used to spend our summers creating a 40-tile spaceport "city" and then having adventures. What's the largest Lego creation you've ever tried to make?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmp9v/life-on-the-internet-is-hard-when-your-last-name-is-butts

[A writer for SB Nation, Natalie] Weiner's Twitter thread is a who's who of people with birth names that throw algorithmic obscenity filters through a loop, but the problem is hardly new. These sorts of false positives have been an issue for spam filters pretty much since the beginning of the internet and were so widespread that computer scientists have even christened the issue. They call it the "Scunthrope problem."

[...] According to coverage in RISKS Digest, rather than fixing the problem, AOL "announced that the town will henceforth be known as Sconthorpe" in its systems. As Rob Kling, then a member of the Association of Computing Machinery's committee on computers and public policy, noted in the RISKS forum, "I can imagine there might even be some people with the last name of Scunthorpe. The willingness of AOL to excise identities in the name of 'decency' raises big issues of genuine decency in my view."

In retrospect, Kling's critique was remarkably prescient.

Here is the twitter thread.

Original Submission