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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Laptop infected with six of the most destructive viruses sells for $1.9 million. [ed: Australian Dollars]

You wouldn't ordinarily want to seek out a computer with viruses installed, but that's exactly what the winner of a US$1.345 million auction just did – picking up a laptop crammed with the deadliest malware of our time in return for their cash.

The buyer remains anonymous but we know much more about the laptop, which is actually part of an art project by Chinese digital artist Guo O Dong. The piece is called The Persistence of Chaos.

Dong worked with cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct to load up the laptop with its dangerous code, and it's apparently air gapped, which means it has security measures that prevent it from connecting to any other networks, to stop it from spreading its malware further.

[...] Persistence of Chaos includes ILOVEYOU from 2000, a particularly damaging worm that came attached to an email with an "ILOVEYOU" subject header. It deleted local files when run, and is thought to have caused billions of US dollars' worth of damage before being stopped.

Also at ABC.net.au and Digital Trends.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

From Slate

If we had a fair Supreme Court not driven by partisanship in its most political cases, Thursday’s blockbuster revelation in the census case would lead the court to unanimously rule in Department of Commerce v. New York to exclude the controversial citizenship question from the decennial survey. Those newly revealed documents show that the Trump administration’s purpose in putting the citizenship question on the upcoming census was not its stated one to help Hispanic voters under the Voting Rights Act, but rather to create policy that would be “a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.” It’s difficult to produce a greater smoking gun than explicitly saying you are hoping to help the GOP by increasing white voting power. But this revelation, coming from the hard drive of a deceased Republican political operative and made available to Common Cause by his estranged daughter, is ironically more likely to lead the Republican-appointed conservative justices on the Supreme Court to allow the administration to include the question that would help states dilute the power of Hispanic voters.

[...]And here is where Thursday’s revelations fit in. The New York Times reported that the hard drive of the late Republican redistricting guru Thomas B. Hofeller contained documents indicating that the real purpose of including the citizenship question was to allow Republicans to draw new congressional, state, and local legislative districts using equal numbers of eligible voters in each district, not equal numbers of persons, a standard that would greatly reduce the power of Hispanics and Democrats in places like Texas. According to the Times, files on Hofeller’s hard drives, subpoenaed in litigation concerning North Carolina redistricting, show that Hofeller “wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act—the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.”

[...]Thursday’s revelations should be damning. The ACLU is already seeking sanctions in the trial court in the census case for government officials lying about the real reason for including the citizenship question. But instead the revelations may help to prop up a case that should embarrass government lawyers to argue.

Yep.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers at Cardiff University have shown tiny light-emitting nanolasers less than a tenth of the size of the width of a human hair can be integrated into silicon chip design.

The photonic band-edge lasers can operate at superfast speeds and have the potential to help the global electronics industry deliver a range of new applications—from optical computing to remote sensing and heat seeking,

[...] "This is the first demonstration that shows how photonic band-edge lasers can be integrated directly on patterned silicon-on-insulator platforms," said Professor [Diana] Huffaker.

"Silicon is the most widely used material in semiconductor industries. However, it has been difficult to integrate compact light sources on this material. Our research breaks through this barrier by developing extremely small lasers integrated on silicon platforms, applicable to various silicon-based electronic, optoelectronic, and photonic platforms."

The paper, "Room‐Temperature InGaAs Nanowire Array Band‐Edge Lasers on Patterned Silicon‐on‐Insulator Platforms," has been published in Physica Status Solidi—RRL.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

[Ed. note: Wikipedia entry for those who may not be familiar with the company and which notes: "Checkers Drive-In Restaurants, Inc., is one of the largest chains of double drive-thru restaurants in the United States. The company operates Checkers and Rally's restaurants in 28 states and the District of Columbia. They specialize in hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, and milkshakes." --martyb]

On Wednesday, fast food chain Checkers reported that they had found malicious point-of-sale (POS) software in place on their systems that affected over 100 Checkers and Rally's restaurants and which left customer names, card numbers, verification codes and expiration date vulnerable.

The Full List of affected restaurants including the estimated exposure dates, is available in the data breach notification.

Exposure dates go back as far as December 2015 in one case (Los Angeles, CA), although the majority span late 2018 to current.

In the official statement Checkers says:

What We Are Doing?
As indicated above, after identifying the incident, we promptly launched an extensive investigation and took steps to contain the issue. We also are working with federal law enforcement authorities and coordinating with the payment card companies in their efforts to protect cardholders. We continue to take steps to enhance the security of Checkers and Rally's systems and prevent this type of issue from happening again.

What You Can Do
If you used a payment card at an affected restaurant during a relevant time period, please consider the following recommendations:

Review Your Account Statements. We encourage you to remain vigilant by reviewing your account statements. If you believe there is an unauthorized charge on your card, please contact your financial institution or card issuer immediately.
Order a Credit Report. You are entitled under U.S. law to one free credit report annually from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting agencies. To order your free credit report, visit www.annualcreditreport.com or call toll-free at 1-877-322-8228.
Review the Reference Guide and FAQs. The Reference Guide and FAQs provide additional recommendations on the protection of personal information.

What amounts to, in essence, "our bad, review your statements and check your credit reports" is likely to be considered a very weak response by customers affected. Also the date that the breach was discovered is not revealed ("recently became aware of") so the gap between discovery, completion of the investigation, and the date of breach notification is not known.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Gaming Disorder' Is a Now an Official Medical Condition, According to the WHO

Nearly anywhere you go, it's easy to find children and adults alike transfixed by their phones, and while texting and social media certainly claim a big part of that attention, increasingly it's gaming that's drawing us in.

At the World Health Organization's World Health Assembly on Saturday, member states officially recognized gaming addiction as a modern disease. Last year, the WHO voted to include gaming disorder as an official condition in the draft version of its latest International Classification of Diseases (ICD); the vote finalizes that decision. The WHO's ICD, currently in its 11th edition, serves as the international standard for diagnosing and treating health conditions.

According to Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesperson for the WHO, the move is "based on reviews of available evidence," and reflects general agreement among experts around the world that some people show a "pattern of gaming behavior characterized by impaired control," prioritizing gaming over other daily responsibilities, including attending school or work and keeping social appointments.

According to the WHO experts who analyzed studies on gaming behavior, people's use of gaming is different from their use of the internet, social media, online gambling and online shopping. There isn't sufficient data, they say, to indicate that people's reliance on those is a "behavioral addiction" the way gaming can be.

Previously: World Health Organization Will Recognize "Gaming Disorder"
World Health Organization Officially Lists "Gaming Disorder" in ICD
Why is There a 'Gaming Disorder' but No 'Smartphone Disorder?'

Related: Treatment Centers for Internet Addiction are Popping Up
Burnout is Now an Official Medical Diagnosis, Says the World Health Organization

Original Submission

takyon writes:

US Department of Energy is now referring to fossil fuels as "freedom gas"

Call it a rebranding of "energy dominance." In a press release published on Tuesday, two Department of Energy officials used the terms "freedom gas" and "molecules of US freedom" to replace your average, everyday term "natural gas."

The press release was fairly standard, announcing the expansion of a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at the Freeport facility on Quintana Island, Texas. It would have gone unnoticed had an E&E News reporter not noted the unique metonymy "molecules of US freedom."

DOE Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg is quoted as saying, "With the US in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of US freedom to be exported to the world."

Artist's depiction of this news.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When a person has a severely damaged cornea, a corneal transplant is required. However, there are 2,000 patients waiting for the cornea donation in the country as of 2018, and they wait for six or more years on average for the donation. For this reason, many scientists are attempting to develop an artificial cornea. The existing artificial cornea uses recombinant collagen or is made of chemical substances such as synthetic polymer. Therefore, it does not incorporate well with the eye, nor is it transparent after the cornea implant.

Professor Dong-Woo Cho of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Jinah Jang of Creative IT Convergence Engineering, and Ms. Hyeonji Kim at POSTECH, collaborating with Professor Hong Kyun Kim of Ophthalmology at Kyungpook National University School of Medicine, 3-D printed an artificial cornea using a bio-ink made of decellularized corneal stroma and stem cells. Because this cornea is made of corneal tissue-derived bio-ink, it is biocompatible, and 3-D cell printing technology recapitulates the corneal microenvironment, so its transparency is similar to the human cornea. This research is recently published on Biofabrication.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Strange Buzzing in 9-Year-Old Boy's Ear was Actually a Tick Embedded in His Eardrum:

Three days after a 9-year-old Connecticut boy started to hear a strange buzzing sound in his ear, his parents took him to a doctor at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital.

The boy reported that he had no pain in his ear, no hearing loss, and no ringing or signs of tinnitus. He said he'd been playing outdoors recently on school days.

Then the doctor, Erik Waldman, looked into the boy's ear and saw a true vision of horror—a brown arachnid burrowing into the epidermal layer of the eardrum and feasting on the child's blood.

The hospital captured an image of the tick lodged into the right tympanic membrane, which was published along with a case study on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

So, just pull the little bugger out and all is good, right? Not really. The eardrum is a thin membrane and just pulling out the tick would rupture the eardrum and could leave the child hearing impaired in that ear:

"The eardrum essentially acts as a part of a pretty complex lever mechanism to allow sound to travel from the outer ear into the inner ear and through the middle ear, where there are ossicles—small bones," Kasle told CNN. "You need that drum intact to get good sound."

Kasle was able to remove the tick's feeding structure with a fine hook tool. The boy's eardrum remained intact. Tests a month later revealed the child did not get rashes or fever from the tick.

That does it. From now on, I'm not going outside without a good pair of earplugs!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers with Guardicore Labs, who disclosed the campaign Wednesday, said that the Nansh0u​ campaign (named due to a text file string in the attacker’s servers being called Nansh0u) is “not another run-of-the-mill mining attack.”

The cryptomining malware, which targets an open source cryptocurrency called TurtleCoin, is being spread via a sophisticated campaign relying on techniques often utilized by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, such as using certificates and 20 different payload versions.

“Breached machines include over 50,000 servers belonging to companies in the healthcare, telecommunications, media and IT sectors,” researchers said in an analysis. “Once compromised, the targeted servers were infected with malicious payloads. These, in turn, dropped a crypto-miner and installed a sophisticated kernel-mode rootkit to prevent the malware from being terminated.”

The campaign has been ongoing since February, researchers said. In April, researchers noticed three similar attacks – all had source IP addresses originating in South Africa, shared the same attack process and used the same breach method.

“Looking for more attacks with a similar pattern, we found attacks dating back to February 26, with over seven hundred new victims per day,” said researchers. “During our investigation, we found 20 versions of malicious payloads, with new payloads created at least once a week and used immediately after their creation time.”

The campaign was rapidly infecting servers – in fact, within the  timeframe of April 13 to May 13, researchers observed the number of infections double to 47,985.

Victims were mostly located in China, the U.S. and India – however, attackers also reached victims in up to 90 countries, Guardicore researchers told Threatpost.

[...] Researchers pointed to weak authentication username and passwords on Windows MS-SQL servers as a main reason behind the attack – and urged system administrators to consider strong credentials.

“This campaign demonstrates once again that common passwords still comprise the weakest link in today’s attack flows,” they said. “Seeing tens of thousands of servers compromised by a simple brute-force attack, we highly recommend that organizations protect their assets with strong credentials as well as network segmentation solutions.”

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The latest expansion of optic fiber broadband creates conditions for parallel expansion of mobile broadband. A study argues that the negative effect is mainly due to mobile broadband. The argument is supported by the fact that the effect does not exist in the countryside, where mobile broadband has poor coverage.

"Of course, it's difficult to believe that the internet is negative for companies—and we don't think that is the case: The internet and broadband are probably good for companies. What we found is rather that the latest developments in technology have a negative side effect on productivity, and it's important to highlight this trend and investigate it further," says Martin Nordin, associate professor in labor market economics and one of the authors of the study.

"We saw that the negative effect first appeared in 2011. As this coincided with the start of the 4G network expansion, there is reason to believe that the effect is connected to mobile broadband. When an area gets optic fiber, it can be assumed that 4G transmission masts for mobile broadband are also set up," continues Martin Nordin.

The negative productivity effect is greater for companies whose employees mix private and job-related internet use. "If it's correct that the effect is due to mobile broadband, the effect is not only linked to what happens at work. Internet use outside work also has an effect," says Martin Nordin.

Psychologists have shown that new media habits in combination with smartphones mean a constant stimulation of our social reward system. It has been claimed that smartphones affect sleep patterns, depression, suicide risks among young people, performance at school and accident risks.

"Stating that smartphones have negative effects isn't controversial. Research shows that we are disturbed every 12 minutes by our smartphones, for example. What is new about our study is that we investigate if there could be negative effects on companies' finances," says Martin Nordin.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Apple's Privacy Schtick is Just an Act, say Folks Suing the iGiant: iTunes 'Purchase Histories Sold' to Highest Bidders:

Apple has been hit with a class-action complaint in the US accusing the iGiant of playing fast and loose with the privacy of its customers.

The lawsuit [PDF], filed this month in a northern California federal district court, claims the Cupertino music giant gathers data from iTunes – including people's music purchase history and personal information – then hands that info over to marketers in order to turn a quick buck.

"To supplement its revenues and enhance the formidability of its brand in the eyes of mobile application developers, Apple sells, rents, transmits, and/or otherwise discloses, to various third parties, information reflecting the music that its customers purchase from the iTunes Store application that comes pre-installed on their iPhones," the filing alleged.

"The data Apple discloses includes the full names and home addresses of its customers, together with the genres and, in some cases, the specific titles of the digitally-recorded music that its customers have purchased via the iTunes Store and then stored in their devices' Apple Music libraries."

[...] Additionally, the lawsuit alleges the Music APIs Apple includes in its developer kit can allow third-party devs to harvest similarly detailed logs of user activity for their own use, further violating the privacy of iTunes customers.

The end result, the complaint states, is that Cook and Co are complacent in the illegal harvesting and reselling of personal data, all while pitching iOS and iTunes as bastions of personal privacy and data security.

If you are not paying for it, you are the product. But, just because you are paying for it, does not prevent you from being the product, too.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Burnout is now an Official Medical Diagnosis, Says the World Health Organization:

If you feel chronically exhausted or frustrated with your work, keep making small mistakes or feel stuck in a cycle of unproductiveness, you may want to take a trip to your doctor. Even if it isn't burnout, it's worth getting checked out.

Why does burnout happen?

Burnout occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally and mentally depleted and unable to keep up with constant demands at work. As stress continues to mount, you may feel hopeless, disinterested and resentful when it comes to your work life.

According to the American Institute of Stress, Americans now work longer and harder than before: In one generation, the number of hours worked increased by 8% to an average of 47 hours per week.

Some other startling statistics from the Institute of Stress:

• 25% of workers have felt like screaming or shouting because of job stress
• Nearly 50% of workers say they need help learning how to manage stress
• More than a third of workers (35%) say they feel their jobs harm their physical or emotional health

And from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health:

• 40% of workers report their job as being very or extremely stressful
• 75% of employees believe on-the-job stress is much higher than it was a generation ago
• Workers associate job stress with health issues more than they associate financial or family problems with health issues

As for what to do about it? There are no hard-and-fast rules, but the suggestions basically amount to separating from activities that lead to "immediate reaction required". Only check your e-mail in the morning, at lunch, and at the end of the day. Log out of chat applications whenever possible. Reduce the amount of time spent on social media. Go for a walk without your cellphone or media device.

In a nutshell: take back control of your life.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Britain's got talent—but we're still wasting it. That's the main finding of a new report by researchers from Oxford University published today.

Children of similar cognitive ability have very different chances of educational success; it still depends on their parents' economic, socio-cultural and educational resources. This contradicts a commonly held view that these days that our education system has developed enough to give everyone a fighting chance.

The researchers, led by Dr. Erzsébet Bukodi from Oxford's Department of Social Policy and Intervention, looked at data from cohorts of children born in three decades: 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. They found significant evidence of a wastage of talent. Individuals with high levels of cognitive ability but who are disadvantaged in their social origins are persistently unable to translate their ability into educational attainment to the same extent as their more advantaged counterparts.

[...] "If we compare the educational attainment of children born in the 1990s to those in the late 1950s and early 1970s, we see that parent's economic resources have become a less important factor, but their socio-cultural and educational resources have grown in significance," says Dr. Bukodi. "That means that your parents' place in society and their own level of education still play a big part in how well you may do."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser

SpaceX satellites pose new headache for astronomers

It looked like a scene from a sci-fi blockbuster: an astronomer in the Netherlands captured footage of a train of brightly-lit SpaceX satellites ascending through the night sky this weekend, stunning space enthusiasts across the globe.

But the sight has also provoked an outcry among astronomers who say the constellation, which so far consists of 60 broadband-beaming satellites but could one day grow to as many as 12,000, may threaten our view of the cosmos and deal a blow to scientific discovery.

The launch was tracked around the world and it soon became clear that the satellites were visible to the naked eye: a new headache for researchers who already have to find workarounds to deal with objects cluttering their images of deep space.

"People were making extrapolations that if many of the satellites in these new mega-constellations had that kind of steady brightness, then in 20 years or less, for a good part the night anywhere in the world, the human eye would see more satellites than stars," Bill Keel, an astronomer at the University of Alabama, told AFP.

Noting that there are currently about 2,100 satellites aloft, the article continues:

If another 12,000 are added by SpaceX alone, "it will be hundreds above the horizon at any given time," Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told AFP, adding that the problem would be exacerbated at certain times of the year and certain points in the night.

"So, it'll certainly be dramatic in the night sky if you're far away from the city and you have a nice, dark area; and it'll definitely cause problems for some kinds of professional astronomical observation."

[...] If optical astronomers are concerned, then their radio astronomy colleagues, who rely on the electromagnetic waves emitted by celestial objects to examine phenomena such as the first image of the black hole discovered last month, are "in near despair," he added.

One of the most spectacular sights of my life was being out in the wilderness, far from local light pollution, and seeing the Milky Way shining so brightly that I could not make out any constellations for all the other stars that were now visible. I cannot imagine how concerned astronomers must be to face the prospect of taking long-duration "images' of faint astronomical bodies... and having a satellite fly past at a much brighter magnitude. What, if anything, can be done?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Exploding stars led to humans walking on two legs, radical study suggests

It was the evolutionary leap that defined the species: while other apes ambled around on all fours, the ancestors of humans rose up on two legs and, from that lofty position, went on to conquer the world.

The benefits of standing tall in the African savannah are broadly nailed down, but what prompted our distant forebears to walk upright is far from clear. Now, in a radical proposal, US scientists point to a cosmic intervention: protohumans had a helping hand from a flurry of exploding stars, they say.

According to the researchers, a series of stars in our corner of the Milky Way exploded in a cosmic riot that began about 7m years ago and continued for millions of years more. The supernovae blasted powerful cosmic rays in all directions. On Earth, the radiation arriving from the cataclysmic explosions peaked about 2.6m years ago.

The surge of radiation triggered a chain of events, the scientists argue. As cosmic rays battered the planet, they ionised the atmosphere and made it more conductive. This could have ramped up the frequency of lightning strikes, sending wildfires raging through African forests, and making way for grasslands, they write in the Journal of Geology. With fewer trees at hand in the aftermath, our ancient ancestors adapted, and those who walked upright thrived.

Also at University of Kansas and Discover Magazine.

From Cosmic Explosions to Terrestrial Fires? (DOI: 10.1086/703418) (DX)

Original Submission