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canopic jug writes:

Professor Eugene Spafford at Purdue University, the father of the field of Internet security, has some takes on this year's RSA conference:

I have now attended 13 of the last 18 RSA Conferences (see some of my comments for 2016, 2015, and 2014). Before there were RSA conferences, there were the Joint National Computer Security Conferences, and I went to those, too. I’ve been going to these conferences for about 30 years now.

[...] I am giving serious thought to this being my last RSA Conference — the expense is getting to be too great for value received. The years have accumulated and I find myself increasingly out of step here. I want to do what is right — safe, secure, ensuring privacy — but so much of this industry is built around the idea that “right” means creating a startup and retiring rich in 5 years after an M&A event. I don’t believe that having piles of money is how to measure what is right. I will never retire rich; actually, because I will never be rich, I probably can’t afford to retire! I am also saddened by the lack of even basic awareness of what so many people worked so hard to accomplish as foundations for others to build on. We have a rich history as a field, and a great deal of knowledge. It is sad to see that so much of it is forgotten and ignored.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Is This the End of Recycling?

For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

Most are choosing the latter. "We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can't afford it," said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin's residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn't want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there's not much she can do. "Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for," she said.

The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. "It almost feels illegal, to throw plastic bottles away," the town manager, Kyle O'Brien, told me.

Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill. The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Ajit Pai's rosy broadband deployment claim may be based on gigantic error

Ajit Pai's latest claim that his deregulatory policies have increased broadband deployment may be based in part on a gigantic error. Pai's claim was questionable from the beginning, as we detailed last month. The Federal Communications Commission data cited by Chairman Pai merely showed that deployment continued at about the same rate seen during the Obama administration. Despite that, Pai claimed that new broadband deployed in 2017 was made possible by the FCC "removing barriers to infrastructure investment."

But even the modest gains cited by Pai rely partly on the implausible claims of one ISP that apparently submitted false broadband coverage data to the FCC, advocacy group Free Press told the FCC in a filing this week. Further Reading Ajit Pai says broadband access is soaring—and that he's the one to thank

The FCC data is based on Form 477 filings made by ISPs from around the country. A new Form 477 filer called Barrier Communications Corporation, doing business as BarrierFree, suddenly "claimed deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless services (each at downstream/upstream speeds of 940mbps/880mbps) to census blocks containing nearly 62 million persons," Free Press Research Director Derek Turner wrote.

"This claimed level of deployment stood out to us for numerous reasons, including the impossibility of a new entrant going from serving zero census blocks as of June 30, 2017, to serving nearly 1.5 million blocks containing nearly 20 percent of the US population in just six months time," Turner wrote. "We further examined the underlying Form 477 data and discovered that BarrierFree appears to have simply submitted as its coverage area a list of every single census block in each of eight states in which it claimed service: CT, DC, MD, NJ, NY, PA, RI, and VA."

In reality, BarrierFree's website doesn't market any fiber-to-the-home service, and it advertises wireless home Internet speeds of up to just 25mbps, Free Press noted.

Related: Just How Rigged is America's Broadband World? A Deep Dive Into One US City Reveals All
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Proposes Raising Rural Broadband Speeds
Speedtest.net Report Concludes That Broadband Speeds in U.S. Are Improving
It's Now Clear None of the Supposed Benefits of Killing Net Neutrality Are Real
FCC Struggles to Convince Judge That Broadband Isn't "Telecommunications"
Democrats To Push To Reinstate Repealed 'Net Neutrality' Rules

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Tufts expelled a student for grade hacking. She claims innocence

As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it.

A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. “as soon as possible.” That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind.

Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students’ grades.

The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.

There’s just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she’s accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others.

[...] Tufts said she stole a librarian’s password to assign a mysteriously created user account, “Scott Shaw,” with a higher level of system and network access. Filler allegedly used it to look up faculty accounts and reset passwords by swapping out the email address to one she’s accused of controlling, or in some cases obtaining passwords and bypassing the school’s two-factor authentication system by exploiting a loophole that simply didn’t require a second security check, which the school has since fixed.

Tufts accused Filler of using this extensive system access to systematically log in as “Scott Shaw” to obtain answers for tests, taking the tests under her own account, said to be traced from either her computer — based off a unique identifier, known as a MAC address — and the network she allegedly used, either the campus’s wireless network or her off-campus residence. When her grades went up, sometimes other students’ grades went down, the school said.

In other cases, she’s alleged to have broken into the accounts of several assessors in order to alter existing grades or post entirely new ones.

The bulk of the evidence came from Tufts’ IT department, which said each incident was “well supported” from log files and database records. The evidence pointed to her computer over a period of several months, the department told the committee.

[...] A month later, the committee served a unanimous vote that Filler was the hacker and recommended her expulsion.

[...] Many accounts were breached as part of this apparent elaborate scheme to alter grades, but there is no evidence Tufts hired any forensics experts to investigate.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The paper, "Designing humans: A human rights approach," was published in Bioethics in 2018 and builds on Liao's previous writings, including The Right to Be Loved, a 2015 book in which he makes the case that children, as human beings, have the right to certain "fundamental conditions" necessary to pursue a good life (love is one such condition, according to Liao; so are food, water, and air).

In "Designing humans," Liao applies the same approach to gene editing and argues that part of the fundamental conditions necessary to have a good life are so-called "fundamental capacities," which might include but are not limited to: the capacity to act, to move, to reproduce, to think, to be motivated, to have emotions, to interact with others and the environment, and to be moral.

"The basic idea is that if we think about what human beings need in order to pursue a good life, maybe from there we can generate some principles that can guide us in reproductive genetic engineering," he says.

Liao introduces those principles with four "claims" on the ethics of genetic engineering:

Claim 1: It is not permissible to deliberately create an offspring that will not have all the fundamental capacities
Claim 2: If such an offspring has already been created, it is permissible to bring that offspring to term
Claim 3: It Is Not permissible to eliminate some fundamental capacity from an existing offspring
Claim 4: If it is possible to correct some lack of fundamental capacity—without undue burdens on parents or society—it may be impermissible not to do so

Liao's four claims neglect the question of superhuman augmentation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers in the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have developed a unique new device using the wonder material graphene that provides the first step toward ultrasensitive biosensors to detect diseases at the molecular level with near perfect efficiency.

The research is published in Nature Nanotechnology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature Publishing Group.

"In order to detect and treat many diseases we need to detect protein molecules at very small amounts and understand their structure," said Sang-Hyun Oh, University of Minnesota electrical and computer engineering professor and lead researcher on the study. "Currently, there are many technical challenges with that process. We hope that our device using graphene and a unique manufacturing process will provide the fundamental research that can help overcome those challenges."

[...] Significant attempts have been made to improve biosensors using graphene, but the challenge exists with its remarkable single atom thickness. This means it does not interact efficiently with light when shined through it. Light absorption and conversion to local electric fields is essential for detecting small amounts of molecules when diagnosing diseases. Previous research utilizing similar graphene nanostructures has only demonstrated a light absorption rate of less than 10 percent.

In this new study, University of Minnesota researchers combined graphene with nano-sized metal ribbons of gold. Using sticky tape and a high-tech nanofabrication technique developed at the University of Minnesota, called "template stripping," researchers were able to create an ultra-flat base layer surface for the graphene.

[...] "Our computer simulations showed that this novel approach would work, but we were still a little surprised when we achieved the 94 percent light absorption in real devices," said Oh, who holds the Sanford P. Bordeau Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. "Realizing an ideal from a computer simulation has so many challenges. Everything has to be so high quality and atomically flat. The fact that we could obtain such good agreement between theory and experiment was quite surprising and exciting."

In-Ho Lee, Daehan Yoo, Phaedon Avouris, Tony Low, Sang-Hyun Oh. Graphene acoustic plasmon resonator for ultrasensitive infrared spectroscopy. Nature Nanotechnology, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0363-8

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

New Google Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability Found Actively Exploited in the Wild

You must update your Google Chrome immediately to the latest version of the web browsing application.

Security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group discovered and reported a high severity vulnerability in Chrome late last month that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and take full control of the computers.

The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5786, affects the web browsing software for all major operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux.

Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says the issue is a use-after-free vulnerability in the FileReader component of the Chrome browser, which leads to remote code execution attacks.

What's more worrisome? Google warned that this zero-day RCE vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild by attackers to target Chrome users.

[...] The patch for the security vulnerability has already been rolled out to its users in a stable Chrome update 72.0.3626.121 for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, which users may have already receive or will soon receive in coming days.

So, make sure your system is running the updated version of the Chrome web browser.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Outbreaks of mosquito-borne illnesses like yellow fever, dengue, Zika and chikungunya are rising around the world. Climate change has created conditions favorable to mosquitoes' spread, but so have human travel and migration and accelerating urbanization, creating new mini-habitats for mosquitoes.

In today's Nature Microbiology, a large group of international collaborators combined these factors into prediction models that offer insight into the recent spread of two key disease-spreading mosquitoes -- Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. The models forecast that by 2050, 49 percent of the world's population will live in places where these species are established if greenhouse gas emissions continue at current rates.

"We find evidence that if no action is taken to reduce the current rate at which the climate is warming, pockets of habitat will open up across many urban areas with vast amounts of individuals susceptible to infection," says Moritz Kraemer, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital and the University of Oxford (UK).

[...] In the next 5 to 15 years, the models predict that spread of both species will be driven by human movement, rather than environmental changes. But thereafter, expansion will be driven by changes in climate, temperature and urbanization that create new mosquito habitats. And if climate change isn't curbed by 2050, the spread is predicted to be even greater.

"With this new work, we can start to anticipate how the transmission of diseases like dengue and Zika might be influenced by a variety of environmental changes," says Simon I. Hay, director of Geospatial Science at IHME and Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington. "Incorporating this information into future scenarios of risk can help policymakers predict health impacts and help guide strategies to limit the spread of these mosquito species, an essential step to reduce the disease burden."

Moritz U. G. Kraemer, et. al. Past and future spread of the arbovirus vectors Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Nature Microbiology, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41564-019-0376-y

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Democrats in the U.S. Congress plan to unveil legislation on Wednesday to reinstate “net neutrality” rules that were repealed by the Trump administration in December 2017, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

Pelosi told lawmakers in a letter that House Democrats, who won control of the chamber in the November 2018 elections, would work with their colleagues in the U.S. Senate to pass the “Save The Internet Act.”

The text of the proposed legislation has not been released.

The Federal Communications Commission repealed the rules that bar providers from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid “fast lanes.” The repeal was a win for providers like Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, but was opposed by internet companies like Facebook Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc.

The Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, voted in May 2018 to reinstate the net neutrality rules, but the House did not take up the issue before Congress adjourned last year.

A U.S. federal appeals court last month held lengthy oral arguments in a legal challenge to the FCC’s decision to repeal the net neutrality rules.

In its 2017 decision, the Republican-led FCC voted 3-2 along party lines to reverse the net neutrality rules. The agency gave providers sweeping power to recast how users access the internet but said they must disclose changes in users’ internet access.

A spokeswoman for FCC chairman Ajit Pai did not immediately comment on Monday.

Related:
FCC Struggles to Convince Judge That Broadband Isn't "Telecommunications"
It's Now Clear None of the Supposed Benefits of Killing Net Neutrality Are Real
FCC Chairman Pai Celebrates Congress Failing to Bring Back Net Neutrality

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information

It’s no secret that your personal data is routinely bought and sold by dozens, possibly hundreds, of companies. What’s less known is who those companies are, and what exactly they do.

Thanks to a new Vermont law requiring companies that buy and sell third-party personal data to register with the Secretary of State, we’ve been able to assemble a list of 121 data brokers operating in the U.S. It’s a rare, rough glimpse into a bustling economy that operates largely in the shadows, and often with few rules.

Even Vermont’s first-of-its-kind law, which went into effect last month, doesn’t require data brokers to disclose who’s in their databases, what data they collect, or who buys it. Nor does it require brokers to give consumers access to their own data or opt out of data collection. Brokers are, however required to provide some information about their opt-out systems under the law–assuming they provide one.

If you do want to keep your data out of the hands of these companies, you’ll often have to contact them one by one through whatever opt-out systems they provide; more on that below.

Related: A landmark Vermont law nudges over 120 data brokers out of the shadows

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple said Tuesday that one of its engineers contributed to a patent Qualcomm says the iPhone maker infringed on, a twist in the long-running legal dispute between the two companies. 

Apple said the concept behind the patent, which allows a smartphone to connect to the internet quickly once the device boots up, was proposed by Arjuna Siva, who worked for Apple before the 2011 release of the first iPhone that used a Qualcomm chip. Apple, which said Siva should be named on the patent, argued the point on the second day of a trial in a San Diego federal court.

Before Apple first released iPhones that use Qualcomm chips, the two companies worked together so Qualcomm could meet Apple's requirements for the components. To do that, the companies emailed back and forth and held calls together. The project was so secretive that the companies used code names for each other: Apple was "Maverick" and Qualcomm was "Eureka."

Apple says that while the two companies were in discussions, then-Apple engineer Arjuna Siva came up with the idea that Qualcomm would later patent. Siva, who now works at Google, will testify later in the trial.

"Does Qualcomm believe in giving credit where credit is due?" Apple's counsel, Joseph Mueller of Wilmer Hale, asked Monday. 

Phoenix666 writes:

The Moiré Patterns of Three Layers Change the Electronic Properties of Graphene:

Combining an atomically thin graphene and a boron nitride layer at a slightly rotated angle changes their electrical properties. Physicists at the University of Basel have now shown for the first time the combination with a third layer can result in new material properties also in a three-layer sandwich of carbon and boron nitride. This significantly increases the number of potential synthetic materials, report the researchers in the scientific journal Nano Letters.

Last year, researchers in the US caused a big stir when they showed that rotating two stacked graphene layers by a "magical" angle of 1.1 degrees turns graphene superconducting -- a striking example of how the combination of atomically thin materials can produce completely new electrical properties.

Lujun Wang, Simon Zihlmann, Ming-Hao Liu, Péter Makk, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Andreas Baumgartner, Christian Schönenberger. New Generation of Moiré Superlattices in Doubly Aligned hBN/Graphene/hBN Heterostructures. Nano Letters, 2019; DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b05061

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Denuvo-Free Devil May Cry 5 Reportedly Improves the Game's Performance by Up to 20FPS

It appears that Denuvo's anti-tamper tech has significant impact on Devil May Cry 5's performance, and a Denuvo-free .exe game file has now surfaced online.

The Devil May Cry 5 .exe file was actually released by Capcom following the game's release earlier today, but has now been pulled. However, the file can still be downloaded through the Steam console. Several users are reporting FPS improvements by up to 20FPS while using the Denuvo-free exe file.

Sound familiar? Devil May Cry 5 is the game AMD demoed running on a Radeon VII GPU at its CES 2019 keynote. I wonder if they were running it with DRM.

Average frame rates are only part of the story when it comes to a game's performance. Minimum frame rates, percentiles, etc. can measure frame stuttering. A significant boost in a game's performance can also increase minimum frame rates.

Related:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Denuvo Forgets to Secure Server, Leaks Years of Messages From Game Makers
More Powerful Denuvo DRM Cracked 10 Days After Release of PREY
'Rime' Creators Will Remove Anti-Tampering Code If It's Cracked
New "Out of Control" Denuvo Piracy Protection Cracked
Denuvo License Generator is Latest Circumvention Method
Voksi Releases Detailed Denuvo-Cracking Video Tutorial
DRM Software Company Takes Legal Action Against Cracker
Hitman 2's Denuvo Protection Cracked Three Days Before Launch
New 'Valeroa' Anti-Piracy System Cracked "In 20 Minutes"
Evidence Continues to Mount About How Bad Denuvo is for PC Gaming Performance

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

SFGate:

Zuckerberg doesn't typically work in a cordoned-off office like a traditional corporate executive. Instead, his regular desk is on the floor of Facebook's open-plan office, just like everyone — but executive-protection officers sit near his desk while he works, in case of security threats. Facebook's offices are built above an employee parking lot, but it's impossible to park directly beneath Zuckerberg's desk because of concerns about the risk of car bombs.

He also has access to a large glass-walled conference room in the middle of the space near his desk that features bullet-resistant windows and a panic button. There's also a persistent rumor among Facebook employees that he has a secret "panic chute" his team can evacuate him down to get him out of the office in a hurry. The truth of this matter remains murky: One source said they had been briefed about the existence of a top-secret exit route through the floor of the conference room into the parking garage, but others said they had no knowledge of it. Facebook declined to comment on this.

Does the escape route include a bridge over a piranha-filled pond?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Martin Shkreli continues to run business from prison, report says

Martin Shkreli reportedly runs his pharmaceutical company from prison on a contraband smartphone. Shkreli continues to run the remains of the drug company that once earned him the title of most hated man in America, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal. He was convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy in 2017. He has served 16 months of a seven-year sentence in federal prison.

Shkreli is reportedly running Phoenixus AG, formerly known as Turing Pharmaceuticals. In 2015, when Shkreli was the CEO, Turing raised the price of the lifesaving drug Daraprim used by AIDS patients from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. The price hike sparked a public outcry.

The Journal says that Shkreli anticipates the company will grow more successful while he's in prison. He believes the company, of which he owns 40%, could be worth $3.7 billion by the time he gets out of prison.

On one recent phone call, Shkreli fired Phoenixus CEO Kevin Mulleady, the Journal reported. Shkreli reportedly later changed his mind, agreeing to suspend Mulleady rather than fire him.

Cartoon villain performance art.

Previously: Martin Shkreli Points Fingers at Other Pharmaceutical Companies
Martin Shkreli Convicted of Securities Fraud Charges, Optimistic About Sentencing
Martin Shkreli Lists Unreleased Wu-Tang Clan Album on eBay
Martin Shkreli's $5 Million Bail Revoked for Facebook Post Seeking Hillary Clinton's Hair
Sobbing Martin Shkreli Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for Defrauding Investors

Related: Drug Firm Offers $1 Version of $750 Turing Pharmaceuticals Pill
Mylan Overcharged U.S. Government on EpiPens
EpiPen Maker is Facing Shareholder Backlash
FDA Has Named Names of Pharma Companies Blocking Cheaper Generics [Updated]
U.S. Hospitals Band Together to Form Civica Rx, a Non-Profit Pharmaceutical Company

Original Submission