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janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

LEIPZIG, GERMANY – Researchers hunting cyber-espionage group Sednit (an APT also known as Sofacy, Fancy Bear and APT28) say they have discovered the first-ever instance of a rootkit targeting the Windows Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in successful attacks.

The discussion of Sednit was part of the 35C3 conference, and a session given by Frédéric Vachon, a malware researcher at ESET who published a technical write-up on his findings earlier this fall (PDF). During his session, Vachon said that finding a rootkit targeting a system's UEFI is significant, given that rootkit malware programs can survive on the motherboard’s flash memory, giving it both persistence and stealth.

"UEFI rootkits have been researched and discussed heavily in the past few years, but sparse evidence has been presented of real campaigns actively trying to compromise systems at this level," he said.

The rootkit is named LoJax. The name is a nod to the underlying code, which is a modified version of Absolute Software's LoJack recovery software for laptops. The purpose of the legitimate LoJack software is to help victims of a stolen laptop be able to access their PC without tipping off the bad guys who stole it. It hides on a system’s UEFI and stealthily beacons its whereabouts back to the owner for possible physical recovery of the laptop.

Each time the system restarts, the code executes on boot, before the OS loads and before the system's antivirus software is launched. That means that even if the device's hard drive is replaced, the LoJack software will still operate.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers analysing soil from Ireland long thought to have medicinal properties have discovered that it contains a previously unknown strain of bacteria which is effective against four of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA.

[...] They have named the new strain Streptomyces sp. myrophorea.

The soil they analysed originated from an area of Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, which is known as the Boho Highlands. It is an area of alkaline grassland and the soil is reputed to have healing properties.

The search for replacement antibiotics to combat multi-resistance has prompted researchers to explore new sources, including folk medicines: a field of study known as ethnopharmacology. They are also focusing on environments where well-known antibiotic producers like Streptomyces can be found.

One of the research team, Dr Gerry Quinn, a previous resident of Boho, County Fermanagh, had been aware of the healing traditions of the area for many years.

Traditionally a small amount of soil was wrapped up in cotton cloth and used to heal many ailments including toothache, throat and neck infections. Interestingly, this area was previously occupied by the Druids, around 1500 years ago, and Neolithic people 4000 years ago.

[...] The main findings of the research were that the newly-identified strain of Streptomyces:

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Let's do the time warp again. It's just a bend in the middle of your new apple device, a little legal shuffling and lawyers laughing all night. Let's do the bendgate again. This time it's the iPad Pro with new devices being shipped pre-bent to customers. Is this Apple subtly telling their customers to get bent? Will Apple ever learn? Will we get a Bendgate the third? Tune in six months from now to find out.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Alexa's advice to 'kill your foster parents' fuels concern over Amazon Echo

An Amazon customer got a grim message last year from Alexa, the virtual assistant in the company's smart speaker device: "Kill your foster parents."

The user who heard the message from his Echo device wrote a harsh review on Amazon's website, Reuters reported - calling Alexa's utterance "a whole new level of creepy".

An investigation found the bot had quoted from the social media site Reddit, known for harsh and sometimes abusive messages, people familiar with the investigation told Reuters.

The odd command is one of many hiccups that have happened as Amazon tries to train its machine to act something like a human, engaging in casual conversations in response to its owner's questions or comments.

The research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. But making sure she keeps it clean and inoffensive has been a challenge.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Pilot project demos credit cards with shifting CVV codes to stop fraud

US-based PNC Bank is in the middle of a pilot project that aims to test out credit cards with constantly changing card verification values (or CVVs) to reduce online credit card fraud. The dynamic CVV is displayed on the back of such a card in e-ink, and changes according to an algorithm supplied by Visa.

[...] A static CVV number can provide some protection from online fraud, but sometimes CVVs can be stolen in tandem with the card number. Worse, researchers have shown that Web bots making random guesses on legitimate websites can often come up with the appropriate CVV and expiration date to pair with a card number.

A dynamic CVV should—at least in theory—be far more difficult to guess and use. The idea of a dynamic CVV isn't new: the cards are being supplied by a company called Idemia, which announced its "Motion Code" dynamic CVV cards in 2016. Since then, Visa has detailed a specification for the dynamic CVV pairing, called dCVV2, and Visa is also a partner in getting this pilot project off the ground.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

It's that time of the year again, putting the important parts into review. Kicking it off Pornhub style. Billions of yearly visits with more breakdowns then you ever wanted to know or could shake a stick at on a per country level.

https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2018-year-in-review

It seems only a brave editor is willing to promote this story, but as I think I was the guy who submitted the 2017 equivalent, which was both amusing and informative, I have no problem picking out some highlights. Some redactions have been necessary to keep SN SFW, obviously -- FP.

All that high definition video means a lot of data gets pumped out by Pornhub’s servers every day. In 2018, we transferred [redacted] Petabytes of data, which equates to [redacted] per second. That’s more bandwidth than the entire internet consumed in [redacted]!

When they’re not busy watching videos, Pornhub’s users enjoy socializing, with nearly [redacted] private messages sent and [redacted] video comments left. The most often used words in Pornhub comments include lots of feel good terms such as [redacted]. More than [redacted] people took the time to vote for their favorite videos, which incidentally is more people than [redacted].

Every minute, [redacted] new visitors arrive at Pornhub, [redacted] videos are watched and [redacted] searches are performed. [redacted] of those video views are of [redacted], which is still Pornhub’s most watched video of all time at [redacted] views.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, while testing the "station keeping" functions of the glass knifefish, have created an augmented reality system that tricks the animal's electric sensing organs in real time. The fish keeps itself hidden by moving inside of its various holes/homes and the researchers wanted to understand what kind of autonomous sensing functions it used to keep itself safe.

Source: TechCrunch

To investigate, the researchers placed weakly electric fish inside an experimental tank with an artificial refuge enclosure, capable of automatically shuttling back and forth based on real time video tracking of the fish's movement. The team studied how the fish's behavior and movement in the refuge would be altered in two categories of experiments: "closed loop" experiments, whereby the fish's movement is synced to the shuttle motion of the refuge; and "open loop" experiments, whereby motion of the refuge is "replayed" to the fish as if from a tape recorder. Notably, the researchers observed that the fish swam the farthest to gain sensory information during closed loop experiments when the augmented reality system's positive "feedback gain" was turned up — or whenever the refuge position was made to mirror the movement of the fish.

[...] "It turns out the fish behave differently when the stimulus is controlled by the individual versus when the stimulus is played back to them," added Fortune. "This experiment demonstrates that the phenomenon that we are observing is due to feedback the fish receives from its own movement. Essentially, the animal seems to know that it is controlling the sensory world around it."

Source: NJIT

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren't yet

In some ways, hyper-local food is a counterculture movement, focused on growing herbs and vegetables in the same dense urban environments where they will be eaten. It trades the huge efficiencies of modern agriculture for large savings in transportation and storage costs. But is urban farming environmentally friendly?

According to researchers at Australia's University of New England, the answer is pretty complex. Within their somewhat limited group of gardeners, urban agriculture is far more productive for the amount of land used but isn't especially efficient with labor and materials use. But the materials issue could be solved, and the labor inefficiency may be a product of the fact that most urban farmers are hobbyists and are doing it for fun.

The researchers—Robert McDougalla, Paul Kristiansena, and Romina Rader—defined urban agriculture as taking place within a kilometer of a densely built environment. Working in the Sydney area, they were able to find 13 urban farmers who were willing to keep detailed logs of their activity for an entire year. Labor and materials costs were tracked, as was the value of the produce it helped create. The energetic costs of the materials and labor were also calculated in order to assess the sustainability of urban farming.

The plots cultivated by these farmers were quite small, with the median only a bit over 10 square meters. Yet they were extremely productive, with a mean of just under six kilograms of produce for each of those square meters. That's about twice as productive as a typical Australian vegetable farm, although the output range of the urban farms was huge—everything from slightly below large farm productivity to five times as productive.

For the vast majority of crops, however, the urban farms weren't especially effective. They required far more labor than traditional farms, and, as a result, the total value of the inputs into the crop exceeded the income from selling it. In other words, the urban farmers were losing money, at least by traditional accounting measures.

PNAS, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1809707115  (About DOIs).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Scientists Use Spinning Neutron Stars to Calibrate Atomic Clocks

The European Space Agency is synching up atomic clocks with distant, rapidly spinning neutron stars, called pulsars, according to a release.

The effort, led by a private company called GMV alongside the University of Manchester and the UK's NPL National Physical Laboratory, is used to advance the clocks used in the Galileo global satellite navigation system—like GPS, but for Europe. The pulsar-based "PulChron" system combines the long-term stability of pulsar measurements with the precision of vibrating atoms to create more accurate clocks.

[...] Though interesting on their own, scientists now use the regular spins of pulsars as tools, observing arrays of them to hunt for gravitational waves, for example. And their precise frequency makes them excellent time-keepers.

A clock, after all, is just something that ticks with well-understood intervals that can be used for measuring time. PulChron sources its measurements from five radio telescopes comprising the European Pulsar Timing Array, which observe 18 pulsars. Atomic clocks, meanwhile, come up with a characteristic frequency that makes up their "tick" by perfectly tuning a laser to excite an atom, then translating the laser's frequency into the usable interval.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage

911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink data center.

The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage beyond an issue with a “network element,” but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”

In a tweet, the telecoms giant said it was “working tirelessly” to get its affected systems back up and running.

CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Data center or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.

In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.

Several states sent emergency alerts to residents’ cell phones warning of the outage.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

New e-commerce restrictions in India just ruined Christmas for Amazon and Walmart

The Indian government is playing the role of festive party pooper for Walmart and Amazon after it announced new regulations that look set to impede the U.S. duo’s efforts to grow their businesses in India.

Online commerce in the country is tipped to surpass $100 billion per year by 2022, up from $35 billion today, as more Indians come online, according to a report co-authored by PwC. But 2019 could be a very different year after an update to the country’s policy for foreign direct investment (FDI) appeared to end the practice of discounts, exclusive sales and more.

The three main takeaways from the new policy, which will go live on February 1, are a ban on exclusive sales, the outlawing of retailers selling products on platforms they count as investors and restrictions on discounts and cash back.

Those first two clauses are pretty clear and will have a significant impact on Amazon — which has pumped some $5 billion into India — and Walmart, which forked out $16 billion to buy India-based Flipkart.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Tesla names Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson to board after SEC settlement

Tesla named Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson to its board on Friday, in compliance with an SEC settlement. The appointments add needed business and human resources expertise to the board — though add to questions about CEO Elon Musk's influence over the board.

Wilson-Thompson is the global head of human resources at Walgreens Boots Alliance and a former executive at Kellogg. Ellison is co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle, and recently disclosed a massive personal stake in Tesla.

[...] A Tesla spokesperson downplayed Ellison and Musk's personal relationship, saying the two had only socialized a handful of times and always in a group setting. The spokesperson said Musk and Ellison had not spoken for about a year leading up to Ellison's appointment to the board.

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Japan restarting commercial whaling, ignoring global moratorium

On Wednesday, Japan announced that it was pulling out of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a step that will allow it to restart commercial whaling in the spring. The move comes after a failed attempt to get the IWC to set legal quotas for legal hunting by its members. For whales, the news is good and bad: the move with shift Japan's hunting to its territorial waters, and away from the healthier populations in the Antarctic.

[...] Whaling ruling helps to clarify what counts as science researchAfter a hiatus, Japan restarted its whaling program, and began pressuring the IWC to set quotas for commercial whaling, something that was supported by Iceland and Norway, and was specified as a goal in the IWC's charter. But most other countries, noting that some populations of whales were only just beginning to rebound—there are under 500 right whales left in the North Atlantic, for example—rejected this proposal. Japan, suspecting that the IWC might never set quotas, has decided to withdraw from the organization instead.

Japan's announcement means that it will be free to restart commercial whaling in July. As part of the change, the country will no longer be sending ships to the Antarctic, a move Australian leaders say means these waters "will finally be true sanctuaries for all whales.” (The Australian government has otherwise condemned the move.) Instead, the whaling fleet will focus on Japanese territorial waters and economic zones. The country also says it will set limits on its hunts based on IWC estimates of populations. Currently, however, there's no indication of how Japan will track the number of kills and whether they'll report them to the IWC.

Others' takes:
BBC: Japan 'to leave whaling commission to resume hunting'
NatGeo: Japan will resume commercial whaling. Get the facts.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

UK Cops Have Decided Impolite Online Speech Is Worth A Visit From An Officer

In this case, it was Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan being visited by the Norwich Police Department on a Sunday morning. He was apparently reported by outspoken trans rights activist Adrian Harrop. Linehan had posted tweets criticizing Harrop's televised debate with a woman who had paid for a billboard depicting the dictionary's definition of the word "woman," which bothered Harrop so much he complained and got that taken down as well.

Harrop was the reason Linehan was talking to police officers about tweets that didn't even violate the Twitter Rules. He had merely suggested Harrop's steamrolling of the billboard buyer during a televised debate might have been "male privilege." Another tweet alleged Harrop had threatened women and doxxed them for not being friendly enough to his cause. This is the tweet Harrop admits bothered him so much he needed to call the police. This is the disturbing, but ultimately useless, outcome of Harrop's decision.

[...] You can't recognize free speech while still insisting everyone has to be nice to everyone else while online. You can hope that's what will happen, but you can't demand this of the general population. Unless you're in the UK, in which case you can, because you don't really recognize free speech and should probably remove that phrase from the government's collective vocabulary.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

For on-line news, what sites do you avoid and which ones do you seek out as being trustworthy?

Thanks to my position as an editor on SoylentNews, I've had the privilege of viewing story submissions which have referenced a veritable plethora of different sources. It has been a privilege to serve you these past few years. My goal has been to provide stories that cover a diversity of areas but always with an attempt to provide level-headed background. I strive to avoid shrill in-your-face!!!!elevnty! diatribes. To invoke a common mis-quotation "Just the facts, ma'am." Full confession: I'm not above posting an occasional funny or feel-good story, either.

Over time, I've come to learn that some sources are more reputable than others. News outlets are comprised of people who have their own biases; some try to remain objective whereas others use their position to push an agenda.

For example, I've learned here that RT is a mouthpiece for the Russian government (A modern-day Pravda, if you will).

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), on the other hand, is funded primarily through a television license costing £147 per year per household. But, it has received a funding boost from government to expand its global reach.

Fox News has had complaints about its content and has had its share of controversies. But even some commonly-held beliefs about Fox News have proved exaggerated and not fully supported by the facts.

ScienceDaily, phys.org, CNET, Quora, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), ESA (European Space Agency), Spaceflight Now, weather.gov, and Hurricane Prediction Center are just some of the sites that I have found especially helpful.

So, I turn to the SoylentNews community:

• What biases have you found with MSM (main-stream media)?
• what 'news' sites do YOU avoid? Why?
• where do YOU find trustworthy, unbiased, fact-supported news?

Bonus question: What would you think of a news story on SoylentNews whose only supporting link is CNN? Fox News? Breitbart?

Original Submission