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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) introduced legislation on Tuesday meant to halt the use of Department of Defense (DOD) computer networks by users for sharing or procuring pornographic images of children.

The End National Defense Network Abuse (END Network Abuse) was introduced in the wake of in[sic] an investigation called "Project Flicker" carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This investigation identified over 5,000 individuals, including many affiliated with DOD, who were subscribed to child porn websites.

The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service subsequently identified hundreds of DOD-affiliated individuals as suspects involved in accessing child pornography, several of whom used government devices to view and share the images.

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/451383-house-bill-aims-to-stop-use-of-pentagon-networks-for-sharing-child

Why does this require a new law?

Original Submission

upstart writes for SoyCow4463:

A new genetic algorithm for traffic control optimization

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney and DATA61 have recently developed a new method for optimizing the timing of signals in urban environments under severe traffic conditions. Their approach, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, entails the use of genetic algorithms (GAs), a popular computer science technique for solving optimization problems.

[...] "GAs are commonly used in optimization problems (e.g., finding the best phase duration that would minimise travel time in an intersection) by using bio-inspired functions such as individual mutation, crossover, and selection of best individuals to carry on the best genes of a population—in our case, best signal phases," [researcher Tuo] Mao said. "We thought that GAs would be a fantastic solution to solve this problem and decided to use them to generate the optimized traffic signal plans for the incident affected area."

The GA developed by Mao and his colleagues essentially explores all possible traffic signal control plans for a given intersection (e.g. the green time for "right turn" signals, "go straight' signals, etc.). Its key objective is to minimize the total travel time in an area affected by a road accident by identifying the best combination of signal phases across all intersections within that area.

"We first generate a large number of traffic control plans, including different phase durations evenly distributed in a large numerical space, which constitute the first generation of individuals from the entire population," Mao explained. "Then we apply selection, crossover and mutation in order to introduce more randomness in exploring the space of all possibilities, and select only the best candidates to carry on the optimization in a next generation."

Subsequently, the approach devised by Mao and his colleagues evolves the original population for a specific number of generations until the majority of individuals within that population are similar, and it has reached an optimal solution. The GA's final outcome is an optimized traffic signal control plan for all traffic lights in areas affected by road accidents.

[...] "Our method has three key advantages," Mao explained. Firstly, it considers non-recurrent traffic incidents, as we input the incident to the model actively after someone reported it, therefore the traffic signal control plan is aware of the incident and can respond faster. Secondly, it considers the rerouting behavior of drivers by applying a dynamic traffic assignment, which considers the road capacity drop caused by the traffic incidents. Finally, our method is efficient for exploring many possibilities of signal control plans."

The researchers evaluated their technique using a four-intersection network designed in AIMSUN, a renowned traffic modeling platform. They constructed three different scenarios in which the GA had to optimize traffic signal timings under both normal conditions and with severe traffic. In these tests, they observed that when traffic signal control plans can be adapted to a change of route by drivers after a traffic accident has occurred, congestion tends to dissipate faster.

Traffic signal control optimization under severe incident conditions using genetic algorithm (https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.05356)

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

No sooner had Facebook announced Libra cryptocurrency and the matching digital Calibra wallet that cybercriminals tried to get a head start on a new phishing theme.

Since the official news came out, cryptocurrency news sites have been busy explaining what Libra is and how it works, while fraudsters wasted no time registering domain names that impersonated the legitimate websites for both the coin and the Calibra wallet.

Around the date of the announcement, registration of domains referencing Libra increased manyfold: from about 20 and less a day before the news to over 110 on the day after, according to risk protection company Digital Shadows.

A similar situation was recorded for the Calibra wallet, slated for launch in 2020. There were barely new registrations the day prior to the announcement while the following day saw more than 65 registrations.

Not all of them are fraudulent, though, as many are part of cybersquatting attempts, where individuals rushed to purchase domains hoping that Facebook would offer to pay a better price at a later time.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/libra-cryptocurrency-scams-already-active-ahead-of-2020-launch/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2019/0703/China-is-ramping-up-its-media-abroad-and-not-just-in-Chinese

The campaign involves not just promoting pro-Beijing information, but discouraging negative reports. Censorship extends into social media, and is strengthened by Chinese platforms' suppression of content that authorities deem negative. For example, some U.S. citizens have recently had messages or entire accounts censored on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, owned by the firm Tencent.

"It's quite shocking to me that China's Great Firewall is coming to the U.S. in digital form," says George Shen, a technology consultant from Newton, Mass., who had his WeChat accounts banned last month. "It's a very stealthy, sophisticated censorship. ... They are filtering out your messages without even telling you," he says.

Bankrolled with billions of dollars of government funds, the strategy goes beyond establishing Chinese media entities abroad, to leasing or purchasing foreign news outlets and hiring foreign reporters. This tactic, known as "borrowing a boat to go out on the ocean" – or buying a boat, as the case may be – is aimed at offering a cloak of credibility.

Even as China expands its channels to American audiences, it is increasing restrictions on U.S. media in China. Last month, Chinese authorities blocked several more U.S. media outlets from the internet in China, including the websites of The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and NBC News.

Original Submission

Chocolate writes:

Have you ever lain awake in the early hours of the morning ticking away the seconds until you have to get up. Wondered if you should have taken a pill while knowing that if you do so you will probably snooze right through any alarm that does not involve water. If so there may be hope for you in the form of a podcast by what may be the world's most boring man. Five years and over 150 episodes of Sleep With Me ago Drew Ackerman recorded the first podcast designed to allow someone to fall asleep — as the recording can make someone feel like they are listening to a friend talk to them which can be very comforting. Ackerman's monologue is so boring that he has fallen asleep while editing his own podcasts. With millions of people around the world listening to him ramble on about nonsense, Ackerman is helping people with insomnia and anxiety find a deeper sleep without drugs.

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

Antique radio receivers retain a significant charm, and though they do not carry huge value today they were often extremely high quality items that would have represented a significant investment for their original owners. This guy acquired just such a radio, a Philco 37-11 made in 1937, and since it was it[sic] a bit of a state he set about giving it some updated electronics. Stripping away the original electronics, he gave it a modern amplifier with Bluetooth capabilities, and a Raspberry Pi.

One of the coolest applications for a Pi I've seen.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1944:

ICE Used Facial Recognition to Mine State Driver's License Databases

WASHINGTON — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have mined state driver's license databases using facial recognition technology, analyzing millions of motorists' photos without their knowledge.

In at least three states that offer driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, ICE officials have requested to comb through state repositories of license photos, according to newly released documents. At least two of those states, Utah and Vermont, complied, searching their photos for matches, those records show.

In the third state, Washington, agents authorized administrative subpoenas of the Department of Licensing to conduct a facial recognition scan of all photos of license applicants, though it was unclear whether the state carried out the searches. In Vermont, agents only had to file a paper request that was later approved by Department of Motor Vehicles employees.

The documents, obtained through public records requests by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology and first reported on by The Washington Post, mark the first known instance of ICE using facial recognition technology to scan state driver's license databases, including photos of legal residents and citizens.

Privacy experts like Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the center, which released the documents to The New York Times, said the records painted a new picture of a practice that should be shut down.

[...] He continued: "These states have never told undocumented people that when they apply for a driver's license they are also turning over their face to ICE. That is a huge bait and switch."

AnonTechie writes:

A math equation that predicts the end of humanity:

The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the "doomsday argument," a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years.

The doomsday argument doesn't tell what's going to kill us — it just gives the date (very, very approximately).

Yet, I [William Poundstone] now believe the doomsday prediction merits serious attention — I've written my latest book about it. Start with J. Richard Gott III. He's a Princeton astrophysicist, one of several scholars who independently formulated the doomsday argument in the last decades of the 20th century. (Others are physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Brandon Carter and philosopher John Leslie.) In 1969, Gott was a physics undergraduate fresh out of Harvard, spending the summer in Europe. At a visit to the Berlin Wall, he did a quick calculation and announced to a friend: The Berlin Wall will stand at least 2 and 2/3 more years but no more than 24 more years.

Demolition on the wall began 21 years later. This motivated Gott to write his method up. He published it in the journal Nature in 1993. There, Gott wrote of the future of humanity itself. He forecast a 95 percent chance that the human race would cease to exist within 12 to 18,000 years.

Not all Nature readers were convinced. "'There are lies, damn lies and statistics' is one of those colourful phrases that bedevil poor workaday statisticians," biostatistician Steven N. Goodman complained in a letter to Nature. "In my view, the statistical methodology of Gott ... breathes unfortunate new life into the saying."

martyb writes:

How to Enable DNS-Over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox:

The DNS-over-HTTPS [(Doh)] protocol works by taking a domain name that a user has typed in their browser and sending a query to a DNS server to learn the numerical IP address of the web server that hosts that specific site.

This is how normal DNS works, too. However, DoH takes the DNS query and sends it to a DoH-compatible DNS server (resolver) via an encrypted HTTPS connection on port 443, rather than plaintext on port 53.

This way, DoH hides DNS queries inside regular HTTPS traffic, so third-party observers won't be able to sniff traffic and tell what DNS queries users have run and infer what websites they are about to access.

Further, a secondary feature of DNS-over-HTTPS is that the protocol works at the app level. Apps can come with internally hardcoded lists of DoH-compatible DNS resolvers where they can send DoH queries.

This mode of operation bypasses the default DNS settings that exist at the OS level, which, in most cases are the ones set by local internet service providers (ISPs).

This also means that apps that support DoH can effectively bypass local ISPs traffic filters and access content that may be blocked by a local telco or local government -- and a reason why DoH is currently hailed as a boon for users' privacy and security.

[...] The below step-by-step guide will show Firefox users in the UK and Firefox users all over the world how to enable the feature right now, and not wait until Mozilla enables it later down the road -- if it will ever do. There are two methods of enabling DoH support in Firefox.

The fine article then presents step-by-step instructions on two methods to enable DoH in Firefox, as well as an explanation of what the various setting values mean.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dark Horse Comics, along with co-creaotrs[sic] Wendy and Richard Pini will return to the world of ElfQuest later this year with ElfQuest: Stargazer's Hunt. The story will be the first return to the universe of ElfQuest since the series ended in March 2018. ElfQuest: Stargazer's Hunt has story by ElfQuest co-creators Wendy and Richard Pini, and a script by Wendy Pini. Veteran ElfQuest alumnus Sonny Strait returns at full force as the artist (over layouts by Wendy) and colorist for the new series.

Fans of the series may be surprised to see the Pinis coming back to it; back in 2018, we asked the pair whether they might return do a "reunion tour" in the vein of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise XXV, and they shot down the notion at the time.

"No, you have met few couples who are more completely in sympathy and in-tune about having no more deadlines in their lives for the rest of their lives," Wendy Pini told ComicBook.com at the time. "I will jump in say, though, that if I knew I was going to be drawing these blankety-blank elves for 40 years, I would have designed them quite differently. They all would have been bald and naked."

https://comicbook.com/comics/2019/07/03/elfquest-stargazers-hunt-/

Previously: Elfquest Concludes 40-Year Run

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and are powered by supermassive black holes capturing matter and simultaneously accelerating particles away from them at near the speed of light. Many quasars, however, date back to the first 800 million years of the universe, long before stars were old enough to collapse, explode in a supernova, and form said supermassive black holes.

Researchers have now modeled the creation of these early black holes sans explosion.

...black holes in the very early universe could have formed by simply accumulating a gargantuan amount of gas into one gravitationally bound cloud. The researchers found that, in a few hundred million years, a sufficiently large such cloud could collapse under its own mass and create a small black hole — no supernova required.

These theoretical objects are known as direct collapse black holes (DCBHs). According to black hole expert Shantanu Basu, lead author of the new study and an astrophysicist at Western University in London, Ontario, one of the defining features of DCBHs is that they must have formed very, very quickly within a very brief time period in the early universe.

The process involves an interaction of two nearby galaxies, one over-actively forming new stars and the other highly gaseous but relatively inactive in star formation.

As new stars form in the busy galaxy, they blast out a constant stream of hot radiation that washes over the neighboring galaxy, preventing the gas there from coalescing into stars of its own. Within a few hundred million years, that starless gas cloud could accrete so much matter that it simply collapses under its own weight, forming a black hole without ever producing a star, Basu found.

According to Basu, black holes that formed at the beginning of that initial 150 Million year window would have grown rapidly, potentially increasing their mass by as much as a factor of 10,000.

Journal Referrence
Shantanu Basu and Arpan Das 2019 ApJL 879 L3 DOI:https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ab2646

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD's "7nm" Zen 2 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X and 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X CPUs have been reviewed:

The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar

From the conclusion page:

In the majority of controlled tests, AMD has done something they haven't been able to achieve in almost 15 years, since the tail-end of the Athlon 64's reign in 2005: that is to have a CPU microarchitecture with higher performance per clock than Intel's leading architecture. Zen 2 finally achieves this symbolic mark by a hair's margin, with the new core improving IPC by 10-13% when compared to Zen+.

Having said that, Intel still very much holds the single-threaded performance crown by a few percent. Intel's higher achieved frequencies as well as continued larger lead in memory sensitive workloads are still goals that AMD has to work towards to, and future Zen iterations will have to further improve in order to have a shot at the ST performance crown.

[...] In the majority of our system benchmarks, AMD more often than not is able to best Intel's Core i7-9700K and i9-9900K in terms of performance. It was particularly interesting to see the new 3rd gen Ryzens post larger improvements in the web tests, all thanks to Zen 2's improved and larger op cache.

In anything that is more than lightly multi-threaded, AMD is also able to take the performance crown among mainstream desktop processors, thanks to their inclusion of 12 cores in their top SKU Ryzen 3900X. For total MT throughput, Intel can still beat this with their massive X-series HEDT chips, but these server-derrived parts are in a completely different class in both features and price, and AMD has their own Threadripper parts to rival that. All of this means that for heavily threaded scenarios, the 3900X rules the roost among true desktop processors.

[...] Perhaps the best arguments for the 3700X and 3900X is their value as well as their power efficiency. At $329 the 3700X particularly seems exciting, and gamers will want to take note that it posts the same gaming performance as the $499 3900X. Considering that AMD is also shipping the CPU with the perfectly reasonable Wrath Spire cooler, this also adds on to the value that you get if you're budget conscious.

The 3900X essentially has no real competition when it comes to the multi-threaded performance that it's able to deliver. Here the chip not only bests Intel's mainstream desktop designs, but it's able to go toe-to-toe with the lowest rung of Intel's more specialized HEDT platforms. Even AMD's own Threadripper line-up is made irrelevant below 16 cores.

Also at Tom's Hardware, Guru3D, and Wccftech.

See also: AMD Zen 2 Microarchitecture Analysis: Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome

Previously: AMD and Intel at Computex 2019: First Ryzen 3000-Series CPUs and Navi GPU Announced
AMD Details Three Navi GPUs and First Mainstream 16-Core CPU

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Excel workbook protection and sheet protection are commonly used as if they provide file security. It turns out that these mechanisms do NOT provide file security, nor were they ever intended to do so. Section 18.2.29 of ECMA-376-1:2016, the latest version of the standard governing Office Open XML, says the following:

Applications might use workbook protection to prevent anyone from accidentally changing, moving, or deleting important data. This protection can be ignored by applications which choose not to support this optional protection mechanism.

The same section contains an additional note:

Worksheet or workbook element protection should not be confused with file security. It is not meant to make your workbook safe from unintentional modification, and cannot protect it from malicious modification.

Both sheet protection and workbook protection may be removed without the protection password in four basic steps:

1. Unzip the .xlsx or .xlsm file so that its contents may be modified in the following steps. Excel workbook files are actually ZIP files with a different file name extension.
2. Remove the <workbookProtection ... /> XML tag from the xl\workbook.xml file.
3. Remove the <sheetProtection ... /> XML tag from any .xml file in the xl\worksheets\ directory.
4. Zip the modified Excel workbook file contents, using the .xlsx or .xlsm filename extension for the resulting ZIP file.

I have published a detailed PDF guide for accomplishing these steps using only File Explorer and Notepad on Windows.

Is anyone else surprised by how easy it is to bypass these protections?

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

A new law in Mississippi(1) makes it illegal to refer to plant and cell-culture based patties as 'burgers'.

The law would also prohibit the use of "burger" or "dog" in relation to vat-grown, cell-based food, which is made of meat. The statute reserves these appelations for foodstuffs derived from "slaughtered livestock."

The law has naturally been challenged by parties such as the Good Food Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union among others. In a nutshell

The contention on the meat industry side is:

Mike McCormick, president of the Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation: "This bill will protect our cattle farmers from having to compete with products not harvested from an animal."

The contention on the other side is:

"There's nothing misleading about the name of a veggie burger, or vegan hot dog, or seitan bacon," Almy, a lawyer on the Missouri case, told me. "The packages clearly disclose that this is plant-based food that has the taste or texture of this familiar food."

A typical American would likely fall somewhere between these two views.

I fully understand (and at times enjoy) 'veggie burgers', however I had to look up 'seitan bacon' (FYI - a traditional Japanese wheat based food that is meat-like) and would not have known what it was at a glance (does super-seitan bacon go to 9000 calories?)

So where do patrons of Soylent Words-Related-to-Current-Happenings fall on this one?

(1) - Note TFA bounces between Missouri and Mississippi actions. There are similar labeling laws in both states. SB 627 in Missouri and SB 2922 in Mississippi.

Related: U.S. Cattlemen's Association Wants an Official Definition of "Meat"
Regulation Coming to Lab-Grown Meat

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Adding to the steaming pile of unsubstantiated hype over probiotics, the New York Times ran an uncritical article this week suggesting that a probiotic of heat-killed bacteria can treat obesity.

Of course, the data behind the story does not suggest that. In fact, the study is so small and the data so noisy and indirect, it's impossible to come to any conclusions about efficacy. There's also the nit-picky complaint that the study deals with dead bacteria, while probiotics are generally defined as being live bacteria. More importantly, the study was authored by researchers with a clear financial stake in the treatment succeeding. They hold a patent on the treatment and have started a company based on it—two details the New York Times seems to have forgotten to mention.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/the-new-york-times-suggests-a-probiotic-can-treat-obesity-the-data-doesnt/

Original Submission