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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Ready to feel ancient? The original Doom is 25 years old -- and co-creator John Romero wants to make sure you know it. He's preparing an add-on for the 1993 game, Sigil, that serves as a "spiritual successor" to the classic shooter's fourth episode ("Thy Flesh Consumed") with nine single-player story levels as well as nine multiplayer deathmatch levels. The expansion will be free if you're just looking for some nostalgia-fueled demon slaying, but you can also spend a lot of money on it if you're determined to flaunt your fandom.

[...] Both the new levels and the physical copies are expected to arrive in mid-February.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/10/john-romero-doom-sigil-expansion/

bootsy writes:

According to Paul Thurrott, there will be 9 new single players levels and 9 new death match levels released for free but you will need the original DOS game in order to play them. It's planned for mid February so comfortably misses the 25 year anniversary.

"SIGIL is the spiritual successor to the fourth episode of DOOM, and picks up where the original left off."

I'm guessing you could get a legitimate copy from Good Old Games or fire up DOSBOX if you still have a version on floppy that will actually load.

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

takyon writes:

TIME Person of the Year 2018: The Guardians

Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi's killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country's Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, "I can't breathe," recorded on audio as the life was choked from him.

But the crime would not have remained atop the world news for two months if not for the epic themes that Khashoggi himself was ever alert to, and spent his life placing before the public. His death laid bare the true nature of a smiling prince, the utter absence of morality in the Saudi-U.S. alliance and—in the cascade of news feeds and alerts, posts and shares and links—the centrality of the question Khashoggi was killed over: Whom do you trust to tell the story?

[...] In the Philippines, a 55-year-old woman named Maria Ressa steers Rappler, an online news site she helped found, through a superstorm of the two most formidable forces in the information universe: social media and a populist President with authoritarian inclinations. Rappler has chronicled the violent drug war and extrajudicial killings of President Rodrigo Duterte that have left some 12,000 people dead, according to a January estimate from Human Rights Watch. The Duterte government refuses to accredit a Rappler journalist to cover it, and in November charged the site with tax fraud, allegations that could send Ressa to prison for up to 10 years.

In Annapolis, Md., staff of the Capital, a newspaper published by Capital Gazette Communications, which traces its history of telling readers about the events in Maryland to before the American Revolution, press on without the five colleagues gunned down in their newsroom on June 28. Still intact, indeed strengthened after the mass shooting, are the bonds of trust and community that for national news outlets have been eroded on strikingly partisan lines, never more than this year.

takyon writes:

Report: FBI opens criminal investigation into net neutrality comment fraud

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the use of stolen identities in public comments on the government's repeal of net neutrality rules, BuzzFeed News reported Saturday.

The investigation focuses on "whether crimes were committed when potentially millions of people's identities were posted to the FCC's website without their permission, falsely attributing to them opinions about net neutrality rules," the report said.

"Two organizations told BuzzFeed News, each on condition that they not be named, that the FBI delivered subpoenas to them related to the comments," BuzzFeed wrote.

The FBI subpoenas came a few days after similar subpoenas sent by NY AG Barbara Underwood in mid-October. Underwood "subpoenaed more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors, and Washington advocacy organizations," The New York Times reported in October.

Previously: John Oliver Leads Net Neutrality Defenders to Crash FCC Website. Again.
Bot Floods the FCC's Website with Anti-Net Neutrality Comments
FCC Officially Publishes Net Neutrality Repeal
U.S. Officially Repeals Net Neutrality Rules; FOIA Request Reveals Details of Bogus DDoS Attack
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Passes Blame Over Lying About Public Comment System Being DDoSed
99.7 Percent of Unique FCC Comments Favored Net Neutrality
Ajit Pai Admits Russia Interfered in Net Neutrality Process amid Lawsuit

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

China gene-editing scientist's project rejected for WHO database (original)

A Chinese branch of the World Health Organization has withdrawn an application to register He Jiankui's project in its clinical database. The move comes after China's government halted He's work, saying it would take a "zero tolerance attitude in dealing with dishonorable behavior" in research.

He has faced a global backlash after claiming to have produced the world's first gene-edited babies in a bid to make them HIV-resistant. The project drew international criticism for its lack of transparency, with health officials and other scientists concerned that it raises ethical questions that will taint other work in the field.

The application to enter the database of the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry was rejected because "the original applicants cannot provide the individual participants' data for reviewing," according to the registry's website.

[...] He's whereabouts are still unknown. Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily cited unnamed sources earlier this month that the researcher was put on house arrest by his university, Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, but representatives of the university and He's lab both declined to comment.

takyon: Several news organizations reported on Dec. 3 that He Jiankui was missing.

Previously: Chinese Scientist Claims to Have Created the First Genome-Edited Babies (Twins)
Furor Over Genome-Edited Babies Claim Continues (Updated)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which "arrived" at the asteroid Bennu on December 3 but has been slowly approaching it for weeks, has found evidence of Bennu's interaction with liquid water in the past:

In a conference today, scientists announced that OSIRIS-REx has found evidence of hydrated minerals on the surface of Bennu using its on-board spectrometers - tools used to determine the exact chemical composition of a specific spot.

That means "evidence of liquid water" in Bennu's past, according to Amy Simon, the scientist overseeing OSIRIS-REx's spectral analysis.

"To get hydrated minerals in the first place, to get clays, you have to have water interacting with regular minerals," says Simon. "This is a great surprise."

And they're abundant, too. There's "strong convincing, evidence that the surface is dominated by these hydrated minerals," according to Dante Lauretta, leader of OSIRIS-REx's sample return mission, leading the team to believe Bennu is "water rich".

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Form-fitting, nanoscale sensors now make sense

What if a sensor sensing a thing could be part of the thing itself? Rice University engineers believe they have a two-dimensional solution to do just that.

Rice engineers led by materials scientists Pulickel Ajayan and Jun Lou have developed a method to make atom-flat sensors that seamlessly integrate with devices to report on what they perceive.

Electronically active 2D materials have been the subject of much research since the introduction of graphene in 2004. Even though they are often touted for their strength, they’re difficult to move to where they’re needed without destroying them.

The Ajayan and Lou groups, along with the lab of Rice engineer Jacob Robinson, have a new way to keep the materials and their associated circuitry, including electrodes, intact as they’re moved to curved or other smooth surfaces.

The results of their work appear in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

The curious tale of ICANN, Verisign, claims of subterfuge, and the $135m .Web dot-word

An ugly struggle over the .Web top-level domain may soon spill into public view again, after one of the companies vying for control of the dot-word demanded an independent review of DNS overlord ICANN's handling of the saga.

More than two years ago, the internet infrastructure industry was agape when an unknown company paid $135m for the rights to sell .web internet addresses: the sum paid was three times the previous record paid for a new dot-word, and seven times the average auction price for a top-level domain.

All that money went directly into the coffers of ICANN, a financial sum that was more than double its annual budget. That was unusual since the vast majority of previous similar dot-word auctions had been decided in private between the bidders themselves with the proceeds split among them.

It soon emerged that the unknown winner – a company called Nu Dot Co – had been secretly funded by the owner of the dot-com registry, Verisign. But before that information emerged, many in the industry were astonished when Nu Dot Co refused to agree to a private auction and insisted all the money go to ICANN.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They're Not Keeping It Secret

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.

These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather Channel’s apps. The social network Foursquare remade itself as a location marketing company. Prominent investors in location start-ups include Goldman Sachs and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder.

Businesses say their interest is in the patterns, not the identities, that the data reveals about consumers. They note that the information apps collect is tied not to someone’s name or phone number but to a unique ID. But those with access to the raw data — including employees or clients — could still identify a person without consent. They could follow someone they knew, by pinpointing a phone that regularly spent time at that person’s home address. Or, working in reverse, they could attach a name to an anonymous dot, by seeing where the device spent nights and using public records to figure out who lived there.

Many location companies say that when phone users enable location services, their data is fair game. But, The Times found, the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading. An app may tell users that granting access to their location will help them get traffic information, but not mention that the data will be shared and sold. That disclosure is often buried in a vague privacy policy.

“Location information can reveal some of the most intimate details of a person’s life — whether you’ve visited a psychiatrist, whether you went to an A.A. meeting, who you might date,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who has proposed bills to limit the collection and sale of such data, which are largely unregulated in the United States.

“It’s not right to have consumers kept in the dark about how their data is sold and shared and then leave them unable to do anything about it,” he added.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Three Sentenced For Placing Advertising on Pirate Sites - TorrentFreak

While there are several business models that are able to keep pirate sites up and running, advertising is one of the most popular.

With huge amounts of traffic landing on both torrent and streaming platforms, even with low-quality adverts it’s possible for both site owners and advertising companies to generate decent profits.

Until now, pirate site operators have been the main targets for law enforcement agencies but a recently concluded case in Germany shows that the authorities are prepared to extend their reach when required.

According to Germany-based anti-piracy group GVU, the Leipzig District Court has now sentenced three employees of an Internet advertising agency to prison terms for aiding and abetting copyright infringement.

The investigation was led by the Integrated Investigation Unit Saxony (INES) at the Saxon Attorney General’s Office and supported by the GVU with analysis and insights.

“The defendants had brokered advertising space on well-known piracy portals such as kino.to or iload.to and displayed lucrative banner ads on a large scale,” GVU reveals.

“In this way, they achieved profits of more than 350,000 euros. They were aware that they were involved with structurally infringing sites, which apparently offered almost exclusively copyrighted files for download and streaming.”

The sentences for the trio were considerable, despite not being directly involved in the running of the sites. The manager of the agency received a sentence of one year and eight months, with two programmers each receiving one year and four months in prison. However, since the defendants confessed, all sentences were suspended.

“The verdict sets a significant precedent because up to now no advertising agency in Germany has ever been prosecuted for its support of illegal portal sites,” GVU concludes.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

AMSTERDAM, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Semiconductor industry bellwether ASML said on Monday a fire at one of its suppliers, electronic components maker Prodrive, would lead to some product delivery delays in early 2019.

The Dutch company, a key supplier to the world's largest computer chip makers, said in a statement it did not expect any change in 2018 deliveries, and it would take several weeks to assess the overall impact to its business.

[...]

ASML makes lithography systems, machines which can cost up to 100 million euros each and are used by Samsung, Intel, TSMC and others to help map out the circuitry of semiconductors.

https://www.reuters.com/article/asml-deliveries/update-1-asml-says-fire-at-supplier-prodrive-will-lead-to-delays-early-next-year-idUSL8N1Y817P

ASML is the only supplier of tech required for the next generation of microchips (see: 7 nm).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Topology Can Help Us Find Patterns in Weather

Topology––the study of shapes– seems to be all the rage. You could even say that data has shape, and shape matters. Shapes are comfortable and familiar concepts, so it is intriguing to see that many applications are being recast to use topology. For instance, looking for weather and climate patterns.

[...] Thanks to high-performance computing, weather predictions have become both more accurate and more precise (localized) in recent years. While this is true for most weather, it is far less the case for extreme weather events. It turns out that the extreme weather, such as thunderstorms, blizzards, heavy rains, dry spells, and hurricanes, are more challenging to forecast than more ordinary weather. The immediate and tangible benefits of better forecasting of extreme weather better are obvious. Additionally, there are longer-term trends to consider as well. In this vein, puzzling over the apparent supercharging of extreme weather events due to human activity is one of the youngest and most important branches of climate science.

[...] Researchers at the University of Liverpool, working with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, are exploring the use of topological data analysis for detecting and classifying patterns (shapes) in climate data.

[...] The researchers combined ideas from topological data analysis with machine learning for detecting, classifying and characterizing extreme weather events, such as certain atmospheric rivers. While these researchers were developing their techniques to analyze climate model output, it will have applicability to weather model output as well. They have successfully demonstrated this approach on the Cori supercomputer. Cori, one of the world's dozen most powerful supercomputers, with high performance Intel multicore processors, is operated by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

Researchers have published results showing that their accuracy (up to 90%) is higher than any prior published results for detection and classification of atmospheric rivers. They applied their algorithm to climate models, using data spanning nearly four decades of weather data, including four different spatial resolutions and two different temporal resolutions.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Every single day, rightsholders and their representatives scour the web for references to pirated content, which aren't hard to find. These links are then reported to various online services, such as Google, requesting their operators to remove the allegedly infringing content. This system works well in theory but it's being abused by scam-artists as well.

One of the most recent scams we've seen targets various popular game piracy sites[...] The notices in question are seemingly sent by prominent names in the gaming industry, such as Steam and Ubisoft. However, the sudden flurry of takedown requests appears to be initiated by scammers instead.

[...] The end result of these fraudulent notices is that thousands of URLs have been wiped from Google's search results by what appear to be scammers. In some cases, Google has rejected the requests, but many have been honored.

What certainly doesn't help is that the allegations are not incorrect per se. Pirated games often circumvent DRM. However, the scammy notices are sent out for a different purpose.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/scammers-hit-pirate-game-sites-with-irreversible-google-takedowns-181130/

Original Submission

stretch611 writes:

From Reuters:

Two major Dutch hospitals say they will stop importing human body parts from American firms, which they have been doing without any regulation for a decade. The hospitals told Reuters in recent weeks they made their decisions on ethical grounds. The move comes amid investigations by U.S. law enforcement into some so-called body brokers - companies that obtain the dead, often through donation, dissect them and sell the parts for profit.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that one broker under scrutiny by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation - Portland, Oregon-based MedCure - has used a Dutch hub to distribute tens of thousands of kilograms of human body parts across Europe since 2012. U.S. authorities suspect MedCure sold body parts tainted with disease to American and foreign customers, a concern triggered in part by such shipments to Canada and Hong Kong, according to people familiar with the investigation.

[...] One frozen head from Science Care [one of the largest body brokers in America] that passed through Dutch airport customs belonged to a 53-year-old who died in April 2017 after treatment to remove a brain tumor. Although the declared value of the head on the customs form was $25, the going rate for a human head in the U.S. market is currently around $500 [...] Even though the hospitals say they plan to stop using the U.S. suppliers, the business of sending body parts through the Netherlands continues.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1984:

Move over AlphaGo: AlphaZero taught itself to play three different games

Google's DeepMind—the group that brought you the champion game-playing AIs AlphaGo and AlphaGoZero—is back with a new, improved, and more-generalized version. Dubbed AlphaZero, this program taught itself to play three different board games (chess, Go, and shogi, a Japanese form of chess) in just three days, with no human intervention.

A paper describing the achievement was just published in Science. "Starting from totally random play, AlphaZero gradually learns what good play looks like and forms its own evaluations about the game," said Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. "In that sense, it is free from the constraints of the way humans think about the game."

[...] As [chess grand master Garry] Kasparov points out in an accompanying editorial in Science, these days your average smartphone chess playing app is far more powerful than Deep Blue. So AI researchers turned their attention in recent years to creating programs that can master the game of Go, a hugely popular board game in East Asia that dates back more than 2,500 years. It's a surprisingly complicated game, much more difficult than chess, despite only involving two players with a fairly simple set of ground rules. That makes it an ideal testing ground for AI.

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for takyon:

Supercomputers without waste heat

A collaboration at the University of Konstanz between the experimental physics group led by Professor Elke Scheer and the theoretical physics group led by Professor Wolfgang Belzig uses an approach based on dissipation-free charge transport in superconducting building blocks. Magnetic materials are often used for information storage. Magnetically encoded information can, in principle, also be transported without heat production by using the magnetic properties of electrons, the electron spin. Combining the lossless charge transport of superconductivity with the electronic transport of magnetic information -- i.e. "spintronics" -- paves the way for fundamentally novel functionalities for future energy-efficient information technologies.

The University of Konstanz researchers address a major challenge associated with this approach: the fact that in conventional superconductors the current is carried by pairs of electrons with opposite magnetic moments. These pairs are therefore nonmagnetic and cannot carry magnetic information. The magnetic state, by contrast, is formed by magnetic moments that are aligned in parallel to each other, thereby suppressing superconducting current.

"The combination of superconductivity, which operates without heat generation, with spintronics, transferring magnetic information, does not contradict any fundamental physical concepts, but just naïve assumptions about the nature of materials," Elke Scheer says. Recent findings suggest that by bringing superconductors into contact with special magnetic materials, electrons with parallel spins can be bound to pairs carrying the supercurrent over longer distances through magnets. This concept may enable novel electronic devices with revolutionary properties.

[...] "It is important to find materials that enable such aligned electron pairs. Ours is therefore not only a physics but also a materials science project," Elke Scheer remarks. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) provided the tailor-made samples consisting of aluminium and europiumsulfide. Aluminium is a very well investigated superconductor, enabling a quantitative comparison between theory and experiment. Europiumsulfide is a ferromagnetic insulator, an important material property for the realisation of the theoretical concept, which maintains its magnetic properties even in very thin layers of only a few nanometres in thickness as used here. Using a scanning tunnelling microscope developed at the University of Konstanz, spatially and energetically resolved measurements of the charge transport of the aluminium-europiumsulfide samples were performed at low temperatures. Contrary to commercial instruments, the scanning tunnelling microscope based at the Scheer lab has been optimized for ultimate energy resolution and for operation in varying magnetic fields.

Journal Reference:
S. Diesch, P. Machon, M. Wolz, C. Sürgers, D. Beckmann, W. Belzig, E. Scheer. Creation of equal-spin triplet superconductivity at the Al/EuS interface. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07597-w

Original Submission