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hoeferbe writes:

IBM and Red Hat announced today that they have closed the transaction under which IBM acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $34 billion.

The acquisition redefines the cloud market for business. Red Hat's open hybrid cloud technologies are now paired with the unmatched scale and depth of IBM's innovation and industry expertise, and sales leadership in more than 175 countries. Together, IBM and Red Hat will accelerate innovation by offering a next-generation hybrid multicloud platform. Based on open source technologies, such as Linux and Kubernetes, the platform will allow businesses to securely deploy, run and manage data and applications on-premises and on private and multiple public clouds.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Microsoft middlemen rebel against removal of free software licences

More than 2,500 resellers and integrators have signed a petition opposing Microsoft's intention to remove free software licences granted to members of the channel to run their business.

The changes are described here:

Effective July 1, 2020, we will retire the internal use rights (IUR) association with the product licenses partners receive in the Microsoft Action Pack and included with a competency. Product license use rights will be updated to be used for business development scenarios such as demonstration purposes, solution/services development purposes, and internal training.

Beginning October 1, 2019, the product licenses included with competencies will be specific to the competency you attain. Please review the benefits you will receive with your competency in Partner Center at time of purchase. Additional licenses can be purchased through commercial licensing to run your business.

[...] The barriers to entry are low and companies who sign up can qualify for a range of competencies, starting with an "Action Pack" subscription that comes with a wide range of benefits, such as five Office 365 seats, five Dynamics 365 licences, 2-core SQL Server, ten Windows 10 Enterprise packages, $100 per month Azure credit and so on. The Action Pack costs around £350 per year but represents excellent value if you would otherwise have to purchase the licences. The same is true of the higher levels, Silver and Gold competencies, which command a higher fee but provide a wider range of benefits.

Resellers are not allowed to resell these specific licences, but critically, they do allow use for "internal business purposes". Smaller Microsoft channel firms have been able to operate their businesses, in large part, using these subsidised licences.

That offer is now ending. "We will retire product licenses for internal use purposes on July 1 2020," stated the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) guide.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Years late to the SMB1-killing party, Samba finally dumps the unsafe file-sharing protocol version by default:

Samba says its next release will switch off previously on-by-default support for the aging and easily subverted SMB1 protocol. It can be reenabled for those truly desperate to use the godforsaken deprecated protocol version.

The open-source SMB toolkit's developers say the Samba 4.11 build, currently in preview, will by default set SMB2_02 as the earliest supported version of the Windows file-sharing protocol.

"This means clients without support for SMB2 or SMB3 are no longer able to connect to smbd (by default)," the 4.11 release notes read.

"It also means client tools like smbclient and others, as well as applications making use of libsmbclient are no longer able to connect to servers without SMB2 or SMB3 support (by default)."

Admins will still have the option to allow SMB1 on their servers if they so choose, but support will be turned off by default.

The move by Samba to drop SMB1 can be seen as long overdue, given that Microsoft has been moving to get rid of the file-server protocol version from its operating systems for several years now, even before it was revealed to be one of the NSA's favorite weak points to exploit.

Do any Soylentils have any systems that will be affected by this? How hard is it for you to upgrade?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Researcher Ben Perez has written that it is time to stop using RSA[*] encryption. He goes into some of the problems with the algorithm and its supporting code bases, how bad they are, some of the mitigations, and then explains his conclusion. Curve25519 is being recommended instead.

RSA was an important milestone in the development of secure communications, but the last two decades of cryptographic research have rendered it obsolete. Elliptic curve algorithms for both key exchange and digital signatures were standardized back in 2005 and have since been integrated into intuitive and misuse-resistant libraries like libsodium. The fact that RSA is still in widespread use today indicates both a failure on the part of cryptographers for not adequately articulating the risks inherent in RSA, and also on the part of developers for overestimating their ability to deploy it successfully.

The security community needs to start thinking about this as a herd-immunity problem—while some of us might be able to navigate the extraordinarily dangerous process of setting up or implementing RSA, the exceptions signal to developers that it is in some way still advisable to use RSA. Despite the many caveats and warnings on StackExchange and Github READMEs, very few people believe that they are the ones who will mess up RSA, and so they proceed with reckless abandon. Ultimately, users will pay for this. This is why we all need to agree that it is flat out unacceptable to use RSA in 2019. No exceptions.

[*] RSA:

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

(Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is one of the first public-key cryptosystems and is widely used for secure data transmission. In such a cryptosystem, the encryption key is public and it is different from the decryption key which is kept secret (private). In RSA, this asymmetry is based on the practical difficulty of the factorization of the product of two large prime numbers, the "factoring problem". The acronym RSA is made of the initial letters of the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described the algorithm in 1977.

However, many systems and hardware tokens are still hardcoded for RSA. So upgrading is not as easy a task as it could be.

Where have you been able to migrate from RSA? Where have there been obstacles?

Earlier on SN:
Mathematicians Seal Backdoor to Breaking RSA Encryption (2018)
Upgrade Your SSH Keys (2016)
512-bit RSA Keys Cracked in Four Hours for only $75 (2015)
NSA and RSA - Claims of More Evidence (2014)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Ross Perot, Billionaire Former Presidential Candidate, has Died at age 89:

Billionaire, philanthropist and former presidential candidate Ross Perot has died, CBS News has confirmed. He was 89.

Perot died in Texas, the state where he was born, surrounded by family.

[...] In 1992, Perot made a name for himself when he became the most successful non-major party presidential candidate in 80 years, amassing 19 percent of the popular vote, running against President George H.W. Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

As a boy in Texarkana, Texas, Perot delivered newspapers from the back of a pony. He earned his billions in a more modern way, however — by building Electronic Data Systems Corp., which helped other companies manage their computer networks.

Yet the most famous event in his career didn't involve sales and earnings; he financed a private commando raid in 1979 to free two EDS employees who were being held in a prison in Iran. The tale was turned into a book and a movie.

Perot first became known to Americans outside of business circles by claiming that the U.S. government left behind hundreds of American soldiers who were missing or imprisoned at the end of the Vietnam War. Perot fanned the issue at home and discussed it privately with Vietnamese officials in the 1980s, angering the Reagan administration, which was formally negotiating with Vietnam's government.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

This brain region may be why some robots send chills down your spine

A new analysis of brain scans may explain why hyperrealistic androids and animated characters can be creepy.

By measuring people's neural activity as they viewed pictures of humans and robots, researchers identified a region of the brain that seems to underlie the "uncanny valley" effect — the unsettling sensation sometimes caused by robots or animations that look almost, but not quite, human (SN Online: 11/22/13). Better understanding the neural circuitry that causes this feeling may help designers create less unnerving androids.

In research described online July 1 in the Journal of Neuroscience, neuroscientist Fabian Grabenhorst and colleagues took functional MRI scans of 21 volunteers during two activities. In each activity, participants viewed pictures of humans, humanoid robots of varying realism and — to simulate the appearance of hyperrealistic robots — "artificial humans," pictures of people whose features were slightly distorted through plastic surgery and photo editing.

[...] Brain scans revealed that activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or VMPFC — a region involved in making value judgments — mirrored participants' uncanny valley reactions. VMPFC activity was typically higher in response to more humanlike pictures, but dipped in response to artificial humans. That drop was most pronounced in people with the strongest dislike for artificial humans. Those findings suggest that this region of the brain underpins the uncanny valley sensation, the researchers say.

[...] If the VMPFC is responsible for generating the uncanny valley heebie-jeebies, that may be good news for android designers and animators. Social experiences can change how VMPFC reacts to certain situations, says Grabenhorst, of the University of Cambridge. So positive interactions with an initially creepy robot or avatar may make it less bothersome.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

After a week in the Bahamas with our wonderful partners at the CAPE ELEUTHERA INSTITUTE, this weekend we managed to achieve history—tagging an animal from a submersible (submarine) for the first time—EVER.

Our objective was the deep-sea shark, the bluntnose sixgill. This ancient species predates most dinosaurs, and is a dominant predator of the deep sea ecosystem. The lead scientist on the mission, FSU MARINE LAB'S DR. DEAN GRUBBS, has been the first to put a satellite tag on one of these elusive sharks, but until now had only been able to do so by bringing them up to the surface.

Because bluntnose sixgills are a deep sea species, it's hard on them physiologically to be tagged in this way. In their typical life cycle, they won't experience daylight, and very rarely will they feel the low pressure, warmer temperatures of surface waters. Typically, the data obtained after surface tagging of a six gill is believed to be skewed, as the shark does not return to its natural behaviors for some time after the tagging.

[...] This is historic for a variety of reasons. Now that we've proven this method can work for the sixgill, we can unlock the world of leviathan deep-sea dwellers and gain important insights into their movement and behavior.

Source: http://www.oceanx.org/shark-deep-sea-shark-tagging-submersible-first-ever/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Way back in December 2018, we reported that Google was building a creepy profile of everything people purchase by scanning their emails in Gmail. In that report, we covered ways to delete this purchase history which included deleting the order data directly from your Gmail inbox. Now a new report is claiming that deleting emails doesn't work and there's actually no way to delete this Google purchase history.

The report from CNBC's Todd Haselton says that he deleted 10 years worth of emails from his Gmail inbox in order to clear his Google purchase history. However, three weeks after deleting all the email, his purchase history is still there. He adds that he can't delete anything from this list of purchases and he can't stop Google adding his recent purchases to this list.

Google says that unlinking your subscriptions and changing the activity settings for other Google services can reduce the purchase history data that's collected. However, it doesn't provide any specific examples of which subscription settings or activity settings to change in order to stop this purchase data being collected.

Additionally, since Google's recommendation of deleting purchase receipts from your Gmail inbox doesn't appear to work, these other recommendations may also do little to prevent purchase data from being collected.

Source: https://reclaimthenet.org/google-gmail-purchase-history-cannot-be-deleted/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Researchers crack open Facebook campaign that pushed malware for years

Researchers have exposed a network of Facebook accounts that used Libya-themed news and topics to push malware to tens of thousands of people over a five-year span.

Links to the Windows and Android-based malware first came to researchers' attention when the researchers found them included in Facebook postings impersonating Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of Libya's National Army. The fake account, which was created in early April and had more than 11,000 followers, purported to publish documents showing countries such as Qatar and Turkey conspiring against Libya and photos of a captured pilot that tried to bomb the capital city of Tripoli. Other posts promised to offer mobile applications that Libyan citizens could use to join the country's armed forces.

According to a post published on Monday by security firm Check Point, most of the links instead went to VBScripts, Windows Script Files and Android apps known to be malicious. The wares included variants of open source remote-administration tools with names including Houdina, Remcos, and SpyNote. The tools were mostly stored on file-hosting services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.

The postings by the fake Haftar were riddled with typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. The spelling mistakes in particular gave Check Point researchers a high degree of confidence that the content was generated by an Arabic speaker, since translation engines that would have converted the text from another language would have been unlikely to introduce the errors.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

THE CALIFORNIA COAST GREW AND PROSPERED during a remarkable moment in history when the sea was at its tamest. But the mighty Pacific, unbeknownst to all, was nearing its final years of a calm but unusual cycle that had lulled dreaming settlers into a false sense of endless summer.

Elsewhere, Miami has been drowning, Louisiana shrinking, North Carolina's beaches disappearing like a time lapse with no ending. While other regions grappled with destructive waves and rising seas, the West Coast for decades was spared by a rare confluence of favorable winds and cooler water. This "sea level rise suppression," as scientists call it, went largely undetected. Blinded from the consequences of a warming planet, Californians kept building right to the water's edge.

But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Speculating about the next years, Fred Lambert writes that once there are good all-electric options across the car market internal combustion engines will be as good as dead.

Before 2025, there's going to be a point where there's not going to be a single car buyer in their right mind who's going to want to buy a new gasoline car. Not a single one. Because they're going to look at the market, they're going to look at what's out there, and all the different electric car models that are out there now. By that point, by 2025, there's going to be dozens and dozens of more EV models than what's available today. And attractive ones!

It's going to be hard for someone to justify buying a gas-powered car at that point, because they're going to think about the resale value of it.

I think the resale value of gasoline cars is going to drop massively in the next five years, and predicted value is going to drop even more drastically. Buying a gasoline car right now is a bad choice. Buying a gasoline car within the next five years is going to be just a financial suicide for most people.

Earlier on SN:
Every Electric Vehicle on Sale in the US for 2019 and Its Range (2019)
Australian Plan to Ban Petrol and Diesel Cars (2019)
Have We Reached Peak Car? (2018)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

These fungi drug cicadas with psilocybin or amphetamine to make them mate nonstop

A cicada-infecting fungus produces drugs that make the insects literally mate their butts off.

Massospora fungi make either a drug found in hallucinogenic mushrooms or an amphetamine found in khat leaves, plant pathologist Matthew Kasson of West Virginia University in Morgantown reported June 22 at the ASM Microbe 2019 meeting.

The fungi may use psilocybin, which causes people to hallucinate, or the amphetamine cathinone to suppress cicadas' appetites and keep the insects moving and mating even after they lose big chunks of their bodies. The finding marks the first time that researchers have discovered a fungus, other than mushrooms, producing psilocybin, and the first organism outside of plants to make an amphetamine.

Massospora fungi are transmitted sexually from cicada to cicada. Huge plugs of fungi form on the insects' abdomens, and during mating, parts of the abdomens may break away, Kasson said.

Psilocybin and cathinone.

Psychoactive plant- and mushroom-associated alkaloids from two behavior modifying cicada pathogens (DOI: 10.1016/j.funeco.2019.06.002) (DX)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Supercomputer Shows 'Chameleon Theory' Could Change how We Think About Gravity:

Supercomputer simulations of galaxies have shown that Einstein's theory of General Relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form.

Physicists at Durham University, UK, simulated the cosmos using an alternative model for gravity -- f(R)-gravity, a so called Chameleon Theory.

The resulting images produced by the simulation show that galaxies like our Milky Way could still form in the universe even with different laws of gravity.

The findings show the viability of Chameleon Theory -- so called because it changes behaviour according to the environment -- as an alternative to General Relativity in explaining the formation of structures in the universe.

[...] General Relativity was developed by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s to explain the gravitational effect of large objects in space, for example to explain the orbit of Mercury in the solar system.

[...] Scientists already know from theoretical calculations that Chameleon Theory can reproduce the success of General Relativity in the solar system.

[...] The Durham researchers expect their findings can be tested through observations using the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, based in Australia and South Africa, which is due to begin observations in 2020.

SKA will be the world's largest radio telescope and aims to challenge Einstein's theory of General Relativity, look at how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang, and help scientists to understand the nature or dark energy.

Journal Reference:
Christian Arnold, Matteo Leo, Baojiu Li. Realistic simulations of galaxy formation in f(R) modified gravity. Nature Astronomy, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0823-y

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

How seafood shells could help solve the plastic waste problem

Crustaceans' hardy shells contain chitin, a material that, along with its derivative chitosan, offers many of plastic's desirable properties and takes only weeks or months to biodegrade, rather than centuries.

The challenge is getting enough pure chitin and chitosan from the shells to make bio-based "plastic" in cost-effective ways. "There's no blueprint or operating manual for what we're doing," says John Keyes, CEO of Mari Signum, a start-up company based just outside of Richmond, Va., that is devising ways to make environmentally friendly chitin. But a flurry of advances in green chemistry is providing some guideposts.

[...] Entrepreneurs are trying to launch new chitin products. Cruz Foam, a company in Santa Cruz, Calif., set out to produce surfboards from chitin, though the company has since pivoted to focus on the much larger market of packaging foam. Polystyrene foam, a common component in both surfboards and food packaging, takes a minimum of 500 years to biodegrade. Company cofounder Marco Rolandi is convinced that his Cruz Foam will biodegrade readily, based on his at-home test. "I put Cruz Foam in my backyard compost and a month later there were worms growing on it," he says. Eco-friendly surfboards and wound dressings are valuable, but they are niche products — small potatoes that won't make a dent in the massive amounts of fossil fuel–based plastics. Scientists have proposed large-scale production of chitin or chitosan in the past. But the chemistry for isolating the materials from shell waste has some big drawbacks, so the work didn't get far.

[...] Approaches that reduce or eliminate corrosive reagents, recycle water and keep the polymers strong are in demand, says Pierre-Olivier Morisset of Merinov, a research center in Gaspé, Canada, that helps marine-product companies manage waste and commercialize innovations. "We're looking for technologies that can produce hundreds of kilograms" of chitin or chitosan with long polymer chains, Morisset says.

Advances in Functional Chitin Materials: A Review (DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b06372) (DX)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Already about half the cars being sold in Norway are electric. The country is so well-stocked with charging stations that it is promoting tourism opportunities to electric vehicle owners (archive). The Norwegian Automotive Association even has an electric vehicle tourist guide for the country. Some toll roads and the ubiquitous ferries there give discounts to electric cars. Depending on the region, parking may even be free of charge.

From Wired:

Norway's forward-thinking approach to transportation has become not just a point of pride for the country but a bona fide means of attracting tourism. The Norwegian government even maintains a website dedicated to encouraging EV aficionados to visit. That's not crazy: Ecotourism and sustainable travel of this type have grown significantly in recent years. So just like you might go to Botswana for an ethical safari, or to British Columbia for the legal weed and immense preserves of old growth redwoods, you can head to Norway to immerse yourself in a unique landscape and culture, and simultaneously experience what the world can be like when people work together to solve big problems.

Original Submission