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takyon writes:

WikiLeaks founder sought Russian visa in 2010, per AP report

The Associated Press has published a cache of 10 documents that it says are part of a leaked "larger trove of WikiLeaks emails, chat logs, financial records, secretly recorded footage, and other documents." AP reporter Raphael Satter declined to elaborate as to how much more material the AP had or why that material was not being released now.

Among those documents is a purported November 30, 2010 effort by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to seek a Russian visa via its London consulate. That's just a week before Assange surrendered to British authorities who sought him for questioning on behalf of Swedish prosecutors who wanted him on allegations of sexual misconduct. By June 2012, Assange had entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has remained since. Assange has denied any wrongdoing in the Swedish case.

[...] This cache adds intrigue to WikiLeaks' and Assange's ongoing saga. Numerous media outlets reported early last month that Assange's days in the embassy are numbered and that the Ecuadorian authorities could boot him soon. "The files provide both an intimate look at the radical transparency organization and an early hint of Assange's budding relationship with Moscow," Satter wrote.

[...] For its part, WikiLeaks responded shortly after the Associated Press story went live on Monday morning by suggesting that, at a minimum, the visa application document was false, tweeting at numerous media outlets:

Mr. Assange did not apply for such a visa at any time or author the document. The source is document fabricator & paid FBI informant Sigurdur Thordarson who was sentenced to prison for fabricating docs impersonating Assange, multiple frauds & pedophilllia. https://t.co/xzMfhctFx4

Related: Ecuador Reportedly Almost Ready to Hand Julian Assange Over to UK Authorities

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Pipe pressure before gas explosions was 12 times too high

The pressure in natural gas pipelines prior to a series of explosions and fires in Massachusetts last week was 12 times higher than it should have been, according to a letter from the state's U.S. senators to executives of the utility in charge of the pipelines.

Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey sent the letter Monday seeking answers about the explosions from the heads of Columbia Gas, the company that serves the communities of Lawrence, Andover and North Andover, and NiSource, the parent company of Columbia Gas.

"The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has reported that the pressure in the Columbia Gas system should have been around 0.5 pounds per square inch (PSI), but readings in the area reached at least 6 PSI — twelve times higher than the system was intended to hold," the letter said.

The pressure spike registered in a Columbia Gas control room in Ohio, the senators said in the letter, which requests a reply by Wednesday.

See also: Columbia Gas pledges $10M toward relief efforts in Lawrence, Andover, North Andover

Previously: 60-80 Homes Burn; Gas Line "Incident" in Northern Massachusetts

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Amazon plans to release at least 8 new Alexa-powered devices, including a microwave, an amplifier, and an in-car gadget

Amazon is doubling down on its Alexa-powered devices, with plans to release at least 8 new voice-controlled hardware devices before the end of the year, CNBC has learned.

The devices include, among others, a microwave oven, an amplifier, a receiver, a subwoofer, and an in-car gadget, people familiar with the matter said. All of the devices will be Alexa-enabled, meaning they can easily connect to the voice assistant. Some of the devices will also have Alexa built in.

Amazon is expected to reveal some of these devices at an event later this month, according to an internal document describing the plans.

The new devices reflect Amazon's ambition to make its Alexa voice technology ubiquitous by focusing on areas where people spend most of their time — at home and in the car. Alexa was initially considered a geeky experiment at Amazon. Now it is now one of the most popular voice assistants, leading the growth of the burgeoning smart speaker market, which is expected to be worth $30 billion by 2024, according to Global Market Insights.

Alexa-"powered" microwave ovens would be among the first consumer "AI" devices with the ability to harm small animals or babies.

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://yellowstoneinsider.com/2018/09/04/wolves-fewer-elk-yellowstone-aspen-comeback/

But with the reintroduction of wolves, the elk population has gone down significantly — from almost 20,000 in 1995 to around 7,500 in the latest estimates — and during that time scientists have documented a Yellowstone aspen comeback. That’s part of a larger picture of restoring balance to the ecosystem. The aspen already face a variety of challenges from insects and the like.

A 2010 study did not find any impact on aspen with the reintroduction of wolves, but a new study, published in the journal Ecosphere, did. Here’s a synopsis of the study from Oregon State:

This is the first large-scale study to show that aspen is recovering in areas around the park, as well as inside the park boundary, said Luke Painter, a wildlife ecologist at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. Wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995. The study shows their predation on elk is a major reason for new growth of aspen, a tree that plays an important ecological role in the American West.

Wolves are culling the elk herd, adding to the effects of bears, cougars, and hunters outside the park, which means less elk are browsing on aspen and other woody species. The presence of wolves has also resulted in most of the elk herd spending winter outside of the park, Painter said. Before wolf restoration, even when elk numbers were similarly low, most of the elk stayed in the park.

"What we're seeing in Yellowstone is the emergence of an ecosystem that is more normal for the region and one that will support greater biodiversity," Painter said. "Restoring aspen in northern Yellowstone has been a goal of the National Park Service for decades. Now they've begun to achieve that passively, by having the animals do it for them. It's a restoration success story."….

The study answers the question of whether the return of wolves to Yellowstone could have a cascading effect on ecosystems outside the park, Painter said, where there is much more human activity such as hunting, livestock grazing, and predator control. There has also been skepticism surrounding the extent and significance of aspen recovery, he said.

[Editor's Note: Related - there has been a lot of interest generated in this topic from this TED talk]

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

C.J. Collier posted to the gnupg-users' list about working through the steps to get GNU Privacy Guard approved for Washington State electronic notary public endorsements:

[...] This all seemed to me to be something that GnuPG is designed to do and does quite well. So I sent an email on Friday night to the sender of the letter requesting specific issues that my provider did not comply with. This morning I received a call from the DoL[*], and was able to successfully argue for GnuPG's qualification as an electronic records notary public technology provider for the State of Washington.

In short, GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts < http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=42.45.140> in the State of Washington!

[*] DoL: WA State Licensing (DOL) Official Site: Home

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

From Engadget:

It could soon prove expensive for media makers to chase online pirates in Canada. The country's Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that internet providers are entitled to "reasonable" compensation when asked to link pirates' IP addresses to customer details.

Voltage Pictures (the production firm behind The Hurt Locker) intended to sue roughly 55,000 customers of telecom giant Rogers for allegedly bootlegging movies, but balked when Rogers wanted to charge $100 per hour to comply with the requests for information. Rogers won the initial Federal Court case, but had to defend itself at the Supreme Court when Voltage appealed the case.

From TorrentFreak:

In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Rogers' favor this week. The Internet provider is entitled to recover costs to link IP-addressed to customer details. Exactly how much will be determined in a future Federal Court hearing.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

During a press conference at his company's Hawthorne, CA headquarters, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced the first planned private passenger to travel into deep space and around the Moon. Yusaku Maezawa, a billionaire fashion entrepreneur and art collector, paid an undisclosed amount to become one of the first people to fly on a SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), with a target date of 2023. If the launch happens, he won't be going alone. Maezawa (aka "MZ") plans to invite at least six to eight artists to accompany him on a journey around the Moon. The passengers chosen may be painters, sculptors, musicians, fashion designers, dancers, film directors, architects, etc. and are intended to represent the Earth and participate in an art exhibition after returning to Earth. Musk himself has also been invited. The project is called #dearMoon.

Yusaku Maezawa approached SpaceX and made a contribution that will pay for a "non-trivial" amount of the BFR's development costs. During the Q&A, Musk estimated that the entire development of BFR would cost around $5 billion, or no less than $2 billion and no more than $10 billion. Other potential sources of funding for BFR development include SpaceX's top priority, Crew Dragon flights to the International Space Station (ISS), as well as satellite launches and Starlink satellite broadband service.

Maezawa (along with a guest) was a previously announced anonymous customer for a Falcon Heavy ride around the Moon. SpaceX currently has no plans to human-rate the Falcon Heavy. The switch from Falcon Heavy to BFR will substantially increase the maximum number of passengers and comfort level attainable on a nearly week-long mission, since the Crew Dragon 2 has a pressurized volume of just 10 m³, about 1% of the volume of the BFS.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Open Insulin, 'DIY bio' and the future of pharma

The development, manufacture and sale of pharmaceutical drugs in the United States is a complex landscape involving intellectual property and strict federal regulations. But according to Colorado State University scientists, the status quo of the U.S. pharmaceutical market may soon be turned on its head. That's due in part to a growing community of do-it-yourself "biohackers" who are disrupting business-as-usual for pharmaceutical discovery, development and distribution. A Sept. 13 perspective piece in Trends in Biotechnology [DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2018.07.009] [DX] frames these emerging issues, and predicts how the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. regulatory environment, will need to change in response.

[...] The authors use the California-based Open Insulin Project as a case study of how the DIY bio movement might shape the future of medicine. Founded in 2015, the project's creators are trying to increase competition in the insulin market by developing and releasing an open-source protocol for manufacturing off-patent insulin.

Why does the Open Insulin Project exist in the first place? Insulin is 100 years old, but it remains prohibitively expensive for many patients, with some uninsured patients paying up to $400 a month for this life-saving medicine. People are angry, and in some cases, people are dying, from lack of access to affordable insulin.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

California Gov. Jerry Brown to launch satellite to track greenhouse gas emissions

California Gov. Jerry Brown started the week by signing a pair of actions to get his state to use nothing but electric power drawn from green sources like wind and solar by 2045. He ended the week Friday with a surprise: The state would launch its "own damn satellite" to track down greenhouse gas emitters who fuel global warming.

Brown announces California plan to launch satellite to track climate change

News of California's satellite was among an abundance of pomp and pageantry on Friday when some of the week's biggest names took the stage, including musician Dave Matthews, former Secretary of State John Kerry and chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

A security researcher has found a new way to crash and restart any iPhone — with just a few lines of code. Sabri Haddouche tweeted a proof-of-concept webpage with just 15 lines of code.

Sabri Haddouche tweeted a proof-of-concept webpage with just 15 lines of code which, if visited, will crash and restart an iPhone or iPad. Those on macOS may also see Safari freeze when opening the link.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/15/a-new-css-based-web-attack-will-crash-and-restart-your-iphone/

Original Submission

Fnord666 (from IRC) writes:

Uber glitch not paying drivers:

A glitch within the Uber driver payment system is forcing San Diego drivers off the road, and riders are paying for it with higher charges.

[...] Uber drivers earn a commission on each drive that they perform. At the end of the trip, that money is pooled and is available two ways for the driver. The most traditional is a weekly period paid into a bank account after the period ends. The other method is InstaPay, which drivers use to finance their Uber duties. Instapay allows drivers to "cash out" their earnings, and thus self-fund their Uber duties without having to access their traditional accounts.

The glitch within the system has halted payments being made to drivers, and unable to access their funds, drivers are not available to Uber. By mid-afternoon Friday, September 14, the glitch had pushed enough San Diego drivers off the platform that the entire region began to surge. Surge is higher pay for the drivers that continue to work, and, higher costs for passenger riders

The glitch in the payment system also means that trip and safety issues are unable to be reported, either by the passenger, or the driver.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Climate change is killing our planet. The excess production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are filling the atmosphere and warming the Earth faster than natural processes can effectively negate them. Since 1951, the surface temperature has risen by 0.8 degrees C, with no sign of slowing. So now it's time for humans to step in and rectify the problem they created -- by using technology to suck excess CO2 straight from the air.

Direct Air Capture (DAC), is one of a number of (still largely theoretical) methods of collecting and sequestering atmospheric carbon currently being looked at. Despite their varied methods, all of these techniques seek to accomplish the same goal: pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in a form that will not contribute to the effects of global warming.

[...] Unlike current flue gas capture systems, which can only effectively collect CO2 directly from a factory smokestack where the carbon dioxide is more concentrated, DACs can capture carbon at more diverse and distributed sources. And given that roughly half of annual CO2 emissions come from distributed sources (such as vehicle tailpipes), DACs could have a huge impact on climate change.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 2016, as the mosquito-borne Zika virus spread through the Americas and cases of infected women having brain-damaged babies mounted, investigators raced to develop a vaccine. Now, a $110 million vaccine trial is underway at 17 sites in nine countries, but it faces an unexpected, and ironic, challenge. Cases of Zika have plummeted to levels so low that most people vaccinated in the trial likely will never be exposed to the virus, which could make it impossible to tell whether the vaccine works.

"Right now, there are no infections, and certainly not enough to even think about an efficacy signal at this point," says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which launched the trial. Human trials of other Zika vaccine candidates at earlier stages are also in limbo, and last year one large vaccinemaker pulled the plug on development of its candidate. But NIAID and others are pressing ahead, saying a vaccine might someday be needed. To make up for the lack of new cases, other investigators are turning to an unusual, and ethically complex, strategy. Starting next year, Science has learned, they plan to test a vaccine by deliberately infecting people with Zika.

Launched in March 2017, NIAID's placebo-controlled vaccine trial includes two sites in Brazil, where Zika hit hardest and where the brain damage known as microcephaly first surfaced. From the beginning of the outbreak in 2015 until the start of this year, Brazil had about half of all 800,000 suspected and confirmed Zika cases in the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, D.C. But from January through June, Brazil's Ministry of Health reported fewer than 7000 probable cases, in a nation of 200 million people. "It's a good dilemma because we don't have Zika anymore," says Esper Kallás of the University of São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil, principal investigator for the local NIAID site. "But it's a dilemma. Everybody is concerned about it. It's a lot of investment."

[...] Given the drop in cases, a surer way to test any vaccine against Zika is to deliberately expose inoculated subjects to the virus. Researchers have used this strategy, known as a human challenge trial, for decades to test vaccines against diseases that either can be effectively treated or, like Zika, typically cause mild symptoms.

But in 2017, an ethics committee convened by NIAID and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, called it "premature" for Zika. They worried that people intentionally infected with the virus might transmit it to their sexual partners, primarily through infected semen. And they were confident that traditional field trials could test the efficacy of the leading vaccine candidates.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sarcopenia, a decline in skeletal muscle in older people, contributes to loss of independence.

[...] Sarcopenia can be considered for muscle what osteoporosis is to bone," Dr. John E. Morley, geriatrician at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, wrote in the journal Family Practice. He pointed out that up to 13 percent of people in their 60s and as many as half of those in their 80s have sarcopenia.

As Dr. Jeremy D. Walston, geriatrician at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, put it, "Sarcopenia is one of the most important causes of functional decline and loss of independence in older adults."

Yet few practicing physicians alert their older patients to this condition and tell them how to slow or reverse what is otherwise an inevitable decline that can seriously impair their physical and emotional well-being and ability to carry out the tasks of daily life. Sarcopenia is also associated with a number of chronic diseases, increasingly worse insulin resistance, fatigue, falls and, alas, death.

A decline in physical activity, common among older people, is only one reason sarcopenia happens. Other contributing factors include hormonal changes, chronic illness, body-wide inflammation and poor nutrition.

But — and this is a critically important "but" — no matter how old or out of shape you are, you can restore much of the strength you already lost. Dr. Moffat noted that research documenting the ability to reverse the losses of sarcopenia — even among nursing home residents in their 90s — has been in the medical literature for 30 years, and the time is long overdue to act on it.

DannyB writes:

Not Again: Galaxy Note 9 Reportedly Catches Fire

Two years after the infamous exploding issues suffered by the recalled Galaxy Note 7, there's now a report of a woman's Galaxy Note 9 catching fire.

The woman, Diane Chung, said that she had a Galaxy Note 9 in her purse recently and spontaneously caught fire, according to the New York Post, which obtained a copy of the lawsuit. The incident occurred on Sept. 3, when Chung was in an elevator.

She said in the court documents that the Galaxy Note 9 "became extremely hot" in her purse. She then heard "a whistling and screeching sound, and she noticed thick smoke," the lawsuit alleges, according to the Post.

After seeing the smoke, Chung said that she placed her bag on the floor in the elevator and tried to remove the phone. In doing so, she burned her fingers and was "extremely panicked," according to the lawsuit. A thick smoke was clouding her vision in the elevator.

Samsung says . . .

"Samsung takes customer safety very seriously and we stand behind the quality of the millions of Galaxy devices in use in the United States," said a Samsung spokesperson. "We have not received any reports of similar incidents involving a Galaxy Note9 device and we are investigating the matter."

Hopefully this is an isolated incident and not a trend.

Original Submission