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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The depths of the ocean have an otherworldly, alien quality to them, showcasing remarkable beauty like that seen in upside-down mirror pools and the terrifying visions of transparent Eldritch horrors.

The latest discovery, by a team of scientists and explorers currently charting the ocean's five deepest points, falls somewhere in between. 

Exploring the 4.5-mile-deep Java Trench in the Indian Ocean for the first time, Alan Jamieson, chief scientist of the Five Deeps Expedition, ran into this never-before-seen species of sea squirt, casually floating along the ocean floor. The jelly-like creature sailed along in front of the Five Deeps team's deep-sea submarine, in perfect view of the camera, displaying a blue and white balloon-like floater.

Jamieson describes it as a "stalked Ascidean," a type of sea squirt, albeit one we have never laid eyes on before.

"It is not often we see something that is so extraordinary that it leaves us speechless," Jamieson said in a statement. 

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An advance in the breakthrough cancer treatment known as CAR T-cell therapy appears to eliminate its severe side effects, making the treatment safer and potentially available in outpatient settings, a new USC study shows.

"This is a major improvement," said Si-Yi Chen of the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and senior author of the study appearing online April 22 in Nature Medicine. "We've made a new CAR molecule that's just as efficient at killing cancer cells, but it works more slowly and with less toxicity."

This improved version of CAR T therapy produced no serious side effects in 25 patients who had lymphoma that recurred after previous treatments. Although the study was designed to look at safety, not effectiveness, six out of 11 participants receiving a commonly used dose went into complete remission.

[...] Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration less than two years ago, CAR T is a literal lifesaver for some people with leukemia and lymphoma, bringing lasting remissions to those on the brink of death. The downside is that the treatment often causes severe side effects -- some of them life-threatening -- which must be managed by experienced specialists.

[...] "The improved CAR T cells proliferated and differentiated into memory cells in the patients, thus producing a potent and long-lasting anti-tumor effect without causing toxicities," Chen said. "Toxicities are currently the biggest barrier to the use of CAR T-cell therapy. My hope is that this safer version of CAR T cell therapy could someday be administered to patients in outpatient settings."

Journal Reference: Zhitao Ying, et. al. A safe and potent anti-CD19 CAR T cell therapy. Nature Medicine, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-019-0421-7

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Russian hackers are targeting European embassies, according to new report

Russian hackers recently attacked a number of embassies in Europe by emailing malicious attachments disguised as official State Department documents to officials, according to a new report from Check Point Research.

The hackers targeted European embassies in Nepal, Guyana, Kenya, Italy, Liberia, Bermuda, and Lebanon, among others. They typically emailed the officials Microsoft Excel sheets with malicious macros that appeared to have originated from the United States State Department. Once opened, the hackers were able to gain full control of the infected computer by weaponizing installed software called TeamViewer, a popular remote access service.

"It is hard to tell if there are geopolitical motives behind this campaign by looking solely at the list of countries it was targeting," the press release says, "since it was not after a specific region and the victims came from different places in the world."

Government finance officials were also subject to these attacks, and Check Point notes that these victims were of particular interest to the hackers. "They all appear to be handpicked government officials from several revenue authorities," the press release says.

[...] While Russian in origin, it's unlikely that these attacks were state-sponsored. One perpetrator was traced back [to] a hacking and carding forum and registered under the same username, "EvaPiks," on both. EvaPiks posted instructions for how to carry out this kind of cyberattack on forums and advised other users as well.

[Editor's Comment: "...attacked a number of embassies in Europe" is incorrect, but is quoted as written. With the exception of Italy, the hackers attacked the embassies of European countries which are located outside Europe.]

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://fossforce.com/2019/04/whats-wrong-with-the-music-modernization-act/

Pretty much everyone in the music industry agreed that the rate setting process for both mechanical and streaming royalties was antiquated. Having a central location for storing publishing and master ownership information for all recordings — as well as for obtaining digital mechanical licenses — would be ideal. There also needed to be payments to heritage artists whose music is broadcast on satellite services, and a clear system for paying producers and engineers for their share of the master recording income derived from performance.

The MMA promised all that and more. The changes it brought about, however, came with a price.

The Music Modernization Act: What Is It & Why Does It Matter?

The Music Modernization act, or "MMA" creates a formalized body, run by publishers, that administers the "mechanical licensing" of compositions streamed on services like Spotify and Apple Music (we call them DSPs). It changes the procedure by which millions of songs are made available for streaming on these services and limits the liability a service can incur if it adheres to the new process. It funds the creation of a comprehensive database with buy in from all the major publishers and digital service providers. This would be the first of its kind that has active participation from the major publishers, representing a vast majority of musical works. It also creates a new evidentiary standard by which the performance rights organizations ASCAP and BMI can argue better rates for the performance of musical works on DSPs.

[...] There will be meaningful criticism of this bill. But at the end of the day, this is a good thing for our business. A consensus amongst the music community and agreement with the DSPs. Two notions that, before this bill, lived in the realm of fantasy. And a real nuts and bolts solution to, what a year ago, seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle.

So how about it fellow Soylentils? What do you think about this proposal?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For two periods last year, those using preview builds of Windows 10 could access to a feature called Sets: a tabbed interface that was eventually to allow tabs to be put in the titlebar of just about any window. These tabs would allow both multiple copies of the same application to be combined—a tabbed Explorer or Command Prompt, say—and multiple disparate windows to be grouped—combining, say, a browser window containing research with the Word window. However, both times the feature was enabled only for a few weeks, so Microsoft could gather data, before disabling it. Sets aren't in the Windows 10 May 2019 update.

The Shell-provided tab experience is no more, but adding tabs is high on our to do list.

— Rich Turner (@richturn_ms) April 20, 2019

It seems now that Sets are unlikely to ever materialize. Rich Turner, who oversees Microsoft's revamping of the Windows command-line infrastructure and the Windows Subsystem for Linux tweeted that the interface "is no more." Having everything tabbed everywhere isn't going to happen. Adding tabs specifically for command-line windows is, however, "high on [Microsoft's] to do list."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Alphabet's Wing drones get FAA approval to make deliveries in the US

Wing, the Alphabet-owned startup, has become the first drone delivery company to gain the Federal Aviation Administration's approval to make commercial deliveries in the US. Bloomberg reports that the company was granted the regulator's blessing after fulfilling many of the safety requirements of a traditional airline.

Gaining the FAA's approval as an airline was necessary for the way Wing wants to operate its drone deliveries. Current FAA regulations prevent a drone from being flown outside of an operator's line of sight, while licenses for automated deliveries have previously only been granted for demonstrations where drone companies haven't been allowed to accept payment for their services. Gaining the FAA's approval as an airline meant creating safety manuals and training routines and implementing a safety hierarchy.

The approval means that Wing, which has the same parent company as Google, can start making deliveries in Virginia in the coming months, where it plans to deliver goods from local businesses to rural communities in Blacksburg and Christiansburg. Wing will be able to apply for the FAA's permission to expand to other regions in the future.

[...] For Wing, gaining the FAA's approval took months, but Bloomberg notes that the process is likely to be a lot quicker for future drone delivery companies now that the regulator has worked out which airline rules are appropriate for drone operators. These competitors could include Amazon's Prime Air, which has yet to launch a commercial drone delivery service, despite having performed its first public demonstration in the US back in 2017.

See also Wing becomes first certified Air Carrier for drones in the US

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas has forced out three senior researchers with ties to China. The move comes amid nationwide investigations by federal officials into whether researchers are pilfering intellectual property from US research institutions and running "shadow laboratories" abroad, according to a joint report by Science magazine and the Houston Chronicle.

The National Institutes of Health began sending letters to the elite cancer center last August regarding the conduct of five researchers there. The letters discussed "serious violations" of NIH policies, including leaking confidential NIH grant proposals under peer review to individuals in China, failing to disclose financial ties in China, and other conflicts of interest. MD Anderson moved to terminate three of those researchers, two of whom resigned during the termination process. The center cleared the fourth and is still investigation[sic] the fifth.

The move follows years of probing from the FBI, which first contacted MD Anderson back in 2015 with such concerns, according to MD Anderson President Dr. Peter Pisters. In December 2017, MD Anderson handed over hard drives containing employee emails to FBI investigators. That same year, a report by the US Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property used some rough calculations to estimate that IP theft by all parties cost the country upward of $225 billion, potentially as high as $600 billion, each year. The report called China the "world's principal IP infringer."

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/nih-fbi-accuse-scientists-in-us-of-sending-ip-to-china-running-shadow-labs/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

resubmitted for EarnestGoesToSpace

Bug in French government's WhatsApp replacement let anyone join Élysée chats

On April 17, the French government introduced an Android application meant to be used by government employees as an internal secure channel for communications. Called Tchap, it was touted as a replacement for WhatsApp and Telegram, providing (in theory) both group and private messaging channels to which only people with government email addresses could join.

Tchap is not intended to be a classified communications system—it runs on regular Android phones and uses the public Internet. But as the DINSIC, the French inter-ministry directorate for information systems that runs Tchap put it, Tchap "is an instant messenger allowing government employees to exchange real-time information on everyday professional issues, ensuring that the conversations remain hosted on the national territory." In other words, it's to keep official government business off of Facebook's and Telegram's servers outside France.

Based on the Riot.im chat application from the open source project Matrix, Tchap is officially still in "beta," according to DINSIC. And that beta test is getting off to a rough start. Within two days, French security researcher Baptiste Robert—who goes by the Twitter handle @fs0c131y (aka Elliot Alderson)—had tapped into Tchap and subsequently viewed all of the internal "public" discussion channels hosted by the service.

On the bright side, DINSIC responded quickly, and the agency is now embracing input from security researchers to help make the application more secure. But as with many "digital transformation" projects, this one was done with perhaps a bit too little prior planning for security.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Robot authors trying to compete with Orwell

A non-profit lab called Open AI has announced that they've trained a machine to read, write, translate, and summarize text unsupervised.

According to Open AI's blog post, the objective is for the machine to write human quality text, both fiction and non-fiction, and bring society:

• AI writing assistants
• More capable dialogue agents
• Unsupervised translation between languages
• Better speech recognition systems

Some negative things this reading/writing robot might be able to do:

• Generate misleading news articles
• Impersonate others online
• Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media
• Automate the production of spam/phishing content

The creators announced it's too soon to release the program and expressed that the major concern is misleading or false news stories that may be created by the robots. Open AI did, however, release a smaller version for people to experiment with.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

According to a [PDF] paper to be presented at the 2019 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 15-21 in Long beach, California, researchers have discovered a "simple, cost-effective, and accurate new method" of enabling self driving cars to recognize 3d objects in their path.

Currently bulky expensive lasers, scanners, and specialized GPS receivers are used in LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors and mounted on top of the vehicle. This causes increased drag as well as being unsightly and adding another ~$10,000 to the price tag. Until now, this has been the only viable option.

Cornell researchers have discovered that a simpler method, using two inexpensive cameras on either side of the windshield, can detect objects with nearly LiDAR's accuracy and at a fraction of the cost. The researchers found that analyzing the captured images from a bird's eye view rather than the more traditional frontal view more than tripled their accuracy, making stereo cameras a viable and low-cost alternative to LiDAR.

According to the paper, which goes into this in considerable depth, it is not the quality of images and data which causes the difference in accuracy, but the representation of the data. Adjusting this brings the object detection results using far less expensive camera data for 3D image-analysis up to nearly the same effectiveness as much more expensive LiDAR.

Kilian Weinberger, associate professor of computer science and senior author of the paper, notes that

stereo cameras could potentially be used as the primary way of identifying objects in lower-cost cars, or as a backup method in higher-end cars that are also equipped with LiDAR.

The paper concludes that future work may improve image-based 3D object detection using the denser data feed from cameras further, fully closing the gap with LiDAR.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A hotspot finder app exposed 2 million Wi-Fi network passwords – TechCrunch

A popular hotspot finder app for Android exposed the Wi-Fi network passwords for more than two million networks.

The app, downloaded by thousands of users [Ed: link appears to have been removed], allowed anyone to search for Wi-Fi networks in their nearby area. The app allows the user to upload Wi-Fi network passwords from their devices to its database for others to use.

That database of more than two million network passwords, however, was left exposed and unprotected, allowing anyone to access and download the contents in bulk.

Sanyam Jain, a security researcher and a member of the GDI Foundation, found the database and reported the findings to TechCrunch.

We spent more than two weeks trying to contact the developer, believed to be based in China, to no avail. Eventually we contacted the host, DigitalOcean, which took down the database within a day of reaching out.

“We notified the user and have taken the [server] hosting the exposed database offline,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Each record contained the Wi-Fi network name, its precise geolocation, its basic service set identifier (BSSID) and network password stored in plaintext.

[...] Tens of thousands of the exposed Wi-Fi passwords are for networks based in the U.S.

A family tracking app was leaking real-time location data

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

MIT scientists 'work out' synthetic hydrogels to make them stronger

Your muscles are soft, pliable, and can resist fatigue after thousands of repetitive movements. Researchers at MIT have found a way to make synthetic hydrogels act like muscles by putting them through a vigorous workout. After being mechanically trained in a water bath, the hydrogels became pliant, soft and resistant to breakdown. A paper with the study's findings was published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They used polyvinyl alcohol hydrogels, which are common in lab settings and used for medical implants and drug coatings. The trick was to create a material that was as strong as a muscle, but which also contained a high enough water content to be pliant enough for the human body.

[...] Before exercise, the nanofibers in the hydrogels were randomly oriented. During the training process, researchers began to realize that the nanofibers in the hydrogels were actually aligning and becoming stronger. Hydrogels became strong, soft, full of water and more resistant after 1,000 stretching rounds in the water bath. A trained hydrogel was found to be 4.3 times stronger than an untrained hydrogel. Researchers hope that one day the materials can be used in implants such as "heart valves, cartilage replacements, and spinal disks, as well as in engineering applications such as soft robots."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A brand new Huawei P30 Pro smartphone has been found to be sending queries and possibly data to Chinese government servers, without the user having signed up for any Huawei services, reported OCWorkbench.

The Facebook page ExploitWareLabs at 5:32 p.m. on Sunday uploaded a post which included a list of DNS (Domain Name System) queries being delivered behind the scenes from a new Huawei P30 Pro. A DNS query (also known as a DNS request) is a demand for information sent from a user's computer (DNS client) to a DNS server.

In layman's terms, it means the phone could potentially be automatically transferring user data back to cloud servers run by the Chinese government, unbeknownst to the device's owner.

The list of DNS addresses includes beian.gov.cn, which was registered by Alibaba Cloud and managed by China's Ministry of Public Security, according to Whois.com. Another frequently listed request was sent to china.com.cn, which was registered by EJEE Group and operated by China's state-run mouthpiece the China Internet Information Center, according to Whois.com.

According to ExploitWareLabs, all of these queries were sent to Chinese government-run servers despite the fact that the user had not configured the phone for any Huawei services, such as Huawei ID or any Hi services.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a time where the coral reefs are dying at an unprecedented rate Dr. Dave Vaughan, former Executive Director at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, accidentally found a way to increase the growth rates of corals by a factor of 25-40 . The technique called “microfragmenting” works by essentially cutting living corals into 1-5 smaller polyps using a specialized saw. This stimulates rapid healing and growth. The corals are then placed in a water tank where they will grow to full size over 4-12 months, after which the process can be repeated or divers can replant them at the reefs.

Dr. Dave Vaughan currently employs his technique with aim at restoring the Florida Reef Tract, which is the earth’s third largest coral reef and a vital ecosystem for underwater life. Furthermore, Dr. Dave Vaughan trains others in the technique, enabling them to set-up nurseries of their own from where they can help restore their local coral reefs.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

DNA from medieval Crusader skeletons suggests surprising diversity

European soldiers and civilians poured into the Levant in the 12th and 13th centuries, often killing or displacing local Muslim populations and establishing their own settlements in an effort to seize control of sites sacred to three major religious groups.

But in a new study, DNA from the skeletons of nine soldiers hints that the armies of the Crusades were more diverse and more closely linked with local people in Lebanon than historians previously assumed. The genetic evidence suggests that the Crusaders also recruited from among local populations, and European soldiers sometimes married local women and raised children, some of whom may have grown up to fight in later campaigns.

For centuries, the mingled, charred bones of at least 25 soldiers lay buried in two mass graves near the ruins of the Castle of St. Louis, a 12th- to 13th-century Crusader stronghold near Sidon, in south Lebanon. Several of the skeletons (all apparently male) bore the marks of violent death, and the artifacts mingled with the bones—buckles of medieval European design, along with a coin minted in Italy in 1245 to commemorate the Crusades—mark the pit's occupants as dead Crusader soldiers, burned and buried in the aftermath of a battle. From nine of them, geneticist Marc Haber and his colleagues at the Wellcome Sanger Institute obtained usable DNA sequences, which offer a rare look into the ranks of the soldiers who fought on one side of the 200-year series of wars.

The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2019. DOI: 10.1016/10.1016/j.ajhg.2019.03.015

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

JCPenney explains why it dropped Apple Pay – TechCrunch

JCPenney quietly ditched Apple Pay this month. The decision was announced in response to a customer complaint on Twitter, but without any context or further explanation at the time. JCPenney had first rolled out Apple Pay into testing in 2015, then expanded to all its U.S. stores the following year, and later to its mobile app.

The retailer now claims the move was necessitated by the April 13, 2019 deadline in the U.S. for supporting EMV contactless chip functionality.

As of this date, all terminals at U.S. merchants locations that accept contactless payments must actively support EMV contactless chip functionality, and the legacy MSD (magnetic stripe data) contactless technology must be retired.

JCPenney was not ready to comply, it seems, so it switched off all contactless payment options as a result. However, it hasn’t ruled out re-enabling them later on, it seems.

JCPenney made the decision to remove Apple Pay for our stores, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We will definitely forward your feedback regarding this for review.

— Ask JCPenney (@askjcp) April 20, 2019

Original Submission