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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:47 | Votes:100

posted by chromas on Sunday July 21 2019, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-else's-computer dept.

https://www.wired.com/story/magecart-amazon-cloud-hacks/

You may not recognize the name Magecart, but you've seen its impact. A set of sophisticated hacking groups, Magecart has been behind some of the bigger hacks of the past few years, from British Airways to Ticketmaster, all with the singular goal of stealing credit card numbers. Think of them as the ATM skimmers of the web. And thanks to poor security hygiene, they've managed to hit 17,000 domains in the past few months alone.

A new report from threat detection firm RiskIQ details how Magecart hackers have found a way to scan Amazon S3 buckets—cloud repositories that hold data and other backend necessities for sites and companies—for any that are misconfigured to allow anyone with an Amazon Web Services account to not just read their contents but write to them, implementing whatever changes they want. Like, say, inserting code that steals credit card numbers from ecommerce sites.


Original Submission

posted by FatPhil on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-behind-you dept.

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Panic-stricken headlines claiming Earth will be slammed by an asteroid on September 9 this year should be ignored, the European Space Agency (ESA) assures us.

The supposedly planet-threatening 100-foot-(30-metre)-diameter space rock, dubbed 2006 QV89, was discovered in August 2006. Following observations over ten days, astronomers predicted it had a 1-in-7,000 chance of crashing into our home world 13 years later in September 2019.

With that date looming, experts at ESA and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) decided to take another look at 2006 QV89 this month, and used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a ground-based observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile, to peer through space at the hurtling rock.

And guess what: they couldn’t find the bloody thing. Tracking asteroids is surprisingly tricky, you know, especially when they’re newly discovered and their orbit paths are not yet confirmed, as is the case of QV89. It's hard to pinpoint where they are in the vast obsidian void, especially more than a decade after they are first seen. Still, as we'll explain in a minute, the boffins persisted in their search because 2006 QV89 is a fairly worrying size.

[...] Since near-Earth asteroid QV89 was observed for just ten days 13 years ago – the same year Twitter was created and no-one outside Apple had yet heard of the iPhone – you can forgive the astronomers for being unable to find the thing in their telescopes this month. However, they didn't give up: by simulating the orbital mechanics of 2006 QV89, they identified the area of space the asteroid would have to travel through if it was to have a serious chance of hitting Earth. And nothing at all was seen in that region: so, no asteroid in that area means no real chance of it hitting our planet. Fingers crossed. [...]


Original Submission

posted by FatPhil on Sunday July 21 2019, @08:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the throw-the-facebook-at-them dept.

FTC 'Failed Miserably' in Punishing Facebook With $5 Billion Fine, Democrats Say

The Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating Facebook in the wake of its massive Cambridge Analytica scandal, has voted to approve levying a massive $5 billion fine against the social media giant, according to reporting in both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. It's the single largest fine against a tech company by the FTC to date, but its inadequacy to curtail future breaches of this sort already has progressive lawmakers furious

Facebook was aware of a fine of this magnitude potentially coming down the pike for some time, and braced for a hit between $3 billion and $5 billion. The approval vote—which reportedly split down party lines, with three Republicans voting in favor and two Democrats against—was on the higher end of the expected spectrum.

This is expected to cap the agency's investigation into the data-mining scandal that compromised up to 87 million Facebook users' personal data. The data was originally harvested using a seemingly benign quiz app on the platform but was later potentially used by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, for the unrelated purpose of political ad targeting.

Both the FTC and Facebook declined to comment. [...]


Original Submission

posted by FatPhil on Sunday July 21 2019, @06:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the Big-Brother-Is-Listening dept.

Google has confirmed that audit snippets are sent to humans to listen to which includes background noises following an investigation about Dutch audio data that had been leaked.

Google said this work helps with developing voice recognition and other technology in its Google Assistant artificial intelligence system, which is used in its Google Home smart speakers and Android smartphones.

[...] Approximately 0.2 per cent of all audio snippets are reviewed by "language experts". Google's response to the leak of private user data is to review their safeguards to prevent future misconduct.

We just learned that one of these reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data. [...]

Belgium's VRT NWS also report: Google employees are eavesdropping, even in your living room, VRT NWS has discovered.

Google employees are systematically listening to audio files recorded by Google Home smart speakers and the Google Assistant smartphone app. Throughout the world – so also in Belgium and the Netherlands – people at Google listen to these audio files to improve Google's search engine. VRT NWS was able to listen to more than a thousand recordings. Most of these recordings were made consciously, but Google also listens to conversations that should never have been recorded, some of which contain sensitive information.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-that-COPPA-cobana dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering an update to the laws governing children's privacy online, known as the COPPA Rule (or, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act). The rule first went into effect in 2000 and was amended in 2013 to address changes in how children use mobile devices and social networking sites. Now the FTC believes it may be due for more revisions. The organization is seeking input and comments on possible updates, some of which are specifically focused on how to address sites that aren't necessarily aimed at children, but have large numbers of child users.

In other words, sites like YouTube.

The FTC's announcement comes only weeks after U.S. consumer advocacy groups and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) sent complaint letters to the FTC, urging the regulators to investigate YouTube for potential COPPA violations.

The advocacy groups allege that YouTube is hiding behind its terms of service, which claim YouTube is "not intended for children under 13" — a statement that's clearly no longer true. Today, the platform is filled with videos designed for viewing by kids.

[...] "In light of rapid technological changes that impact the online children's marketplace, we must ensure COPPA remains effective," said FTC Chairman Joe Simons, in a published statement. "We're committed to strong COPPA enforcement, as well as industry outreach and a COPPA business hotline to foster a high level of COPPA compliance. But we also need to regularly revisit and, if warranted, update the Rule," he added.

[...] The FTC says it will hold a public workshop on October 7, 2019 to examine the COPPA Rule.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/the-ftc-looks-to-change-childrens-privacy-law-following-complaints-about-youtube/


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 21 2019, @02:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the per-ardua-ad-astra dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Virgin Orbit, the small satellite launch company backed by billionaire Richard Branson, has signed an initial agreement to develop small satellite launch capabilities for the U.K.’s Royal Air Force (RAF). The deal, which is part of the RAF's Artemis project, will see Virgin Orbit aim to launch hardware provided by Guildford, U.K.-based Surrey Satellites in a demo mission.

This is in keeping with Virgin Orbit's stated hope to bring spacecraft launch capabilities to the U.K. The closest the U.K. has come is when it launched a British satellite aboard a British rocket in 1971 — but that took off from a launchpad in Australia. Virgin Orbit announced a deal to build a new Spaceport in Cornwall, from which its modified 747 launch aircraft will take off, with a target open date of early next decade.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/19/virgin-orbit-signs-agreement-to-launch-small-satellites-for-the-uks-royal-air-force/


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-what-we-knee'd dept.

The group describes the technology in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing. An energy harvester is attached to the wearer's knee and can generate 1.6 microwatts of power while the wearer walks without any increase in effort. The energy is enough to power small electronics like health monitoring equipment and GPS devices.

"Self-powered GPS devices will attract the attention of climbers and mountaineers," said author Wei-Hsin Liao, professor in the department of mechanical and automation engineering.

The researchers used a special smart macrofiber material, which generates energy from any sort of bending it experiences, to create a slider-crank mechanism -- similar to what drives a motor. The authors chose to attach the device to the knee due to the knee joint's large range of motion, compared to most other human joints. "These harvesters can harvest energy directly from large deformations," Liao said.

Due to the continuous back-and-forth the material will encounter when the wearer walks, every time the knee flexes, the device bends and generates electricity. This means the harvester can "capture biomechanical energy through the natural motion of the human knee," according to Liao. Previous wearable energy harvesters took advantage of the vibration caused in the device as a result of motion, which comes with drawbacks regarding efficiency.

"The frequency of human walking is quite slow, which significantly decreases the energy-harvesting capability," Liao said. Because the group's device uses a different method, it bypasses this limitation.

The prototype weighs only 307 grams (0.68 pounds) and was tested on human subjects walking at speeds from 2 to 6.5 kilometers per hour (about 1 to 4 miles per hour). The researchers compared the wearers' breathing patterns with and without the device and determined that the energy required to walk was unchanged, meaning that the device is generating power at no cost to the human.

[...] The article, "Macro fiber composite-based energy harvester for human knee," is authored by Fei Gao, Gaoyu Liu, Brendon Lik Hang Chung, Hugo H. Chan and Wei-Hsin Liao. The article appeared in Applied Physics Letters on July 16, 2019 (DOI: 10.1063/1.5098962) and can be accessed at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5098962.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Sunday July 21 2019, @10:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the ever-wonder-why-health-care-is-so-expensive dept.

Ever since her 14-year marriage imploded in financial chaos and a protective order, Amy Lankford had kept a wary eye on her ex, David Williams.

Williams, then 51, with the beefy body of a former wrestler gone slightly to seed, was always working the angles, looking for shortcuts to success and mostly stumbling. During their marriage, Lankford had been forced to work overtime as a physical therapist when his personal training business couldn't pay his share of the bills.

So, when Williams gave their three kids iPad Minis for Christmas in 2013, she was immediately suspicious. Where did he get that kind of money? Then one day on her son's iPad, she noticed numbers next to the green iMessage icon indicating that new text messages were waiting. She clicked.

What she saw next made her heart pound. Somehow the iPad had become linked to her ex-husband's personal Apple device and the messages were for him.

Most of the texts were from people setting up workouts through his personal training business, Get Fit With Dave, which he ran out of his home in Mansfield, Texas, a suburb of Fort Worth. But, oddly, they were also providing their birthdates and the group number of their health insurance plans. The people had health benefits administered by industry giants, including Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare. They were pleased to hear their health plans would now pay for their fitness workouts.

Lankford's mind raced as she scrolled through the messages. It appeared her ex-husband was getting insurance companies to pay for his personal training services. But how could that be possible? Insurance companies pay for care that's medically necessary, not sessions of dumbbell curls and lunges.

Insurance companies also only pay for care provided by licensed medical providers, like doctors or nurses. Williams called himself "Dr. Dave" because he had a Ph.D. in kinesiology. But he didn't have a medical license. He wasn't qualified to bill insurance companies. But, Lankford could see, he was doing it anyway.

As Lankford would learn, "Dr. Dave" had wrongfully obtained, with breathtaking ease, federal identification numbers that allowed him to fraudulently bill insurers as a physician for services to about 1,000 people. Then he battered the system with the bluntest of ploys: submit a deluge of out-of-network claims, confident that insurers would blindly approve a healthy percentage of them. Then, if the insurers did object, he gambled that they had scant appetite for a fight.

By the time the authorities stopped Williams, three years had passed since Lankford had discovered the text messages. In total, records show, he ran the scheme for more than four years, fraudulently billing several of the nation's top insurance companies — United, Aetna and Cigna — for $25 million and reaping about $4 million in cash.

Read the rest at ProPublica.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Sunday July 21 2019, @07:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the fried-rice dept.

Chinese space station Tiangong-2 has officially ended its mission, and the orbital research facility's entire existence. The platform de-orbited and burned up as planned at just after 9 AM ET on Friday, coming down over the South Pacific Ocean, as confirmed by the official Chinese space agency.

The station weighed around nine U.S. tons at the time it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, but even so it was small enough that it almost entirely burned up in the process.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/19/chinas-tiangong-2-space-station-is-officially-no-more/


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 21 2019, @05:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-have-felt-this-pain dept.

I've had some occasions of late to peer through the looking glass into a world that I hadn't seen much of previously. Specifically, I'm talking about the world of so-called "cloud" stuff, where you basically pay someone else to build and run stuff for you, instead of doing it yourself.

I'll skip the analysis of build vs. buy and just jump straight to the point where you've chosen "buy". Then you've had a whole bunch of fun outages caused by something going wrong with their services. Finally, you reach the point of a sit-down talk with the vendor to figure things out. Maybe they send some sales people too, or perhaps it's just engineers. You talk for a while, and before long, you realize what happened.

[...] This becomes obvious when talking about some problem you experienced at the hands of their system. The whole time, their dashboard stayed green because from their point of view, they had tremendous availability. We're talking 99.999% here! Totally legit!

Meanwhile, you were having a really bad day. Nothing was working. Your business was in shambles. Your customers were at your throat yelling for action, and all you could do is point at the vendor. What happened?

Well, this is the point where you find out that their "99.999%" availability is for their entire system. They see that, and they're good. It's not a problem! Everything is fine.

This also completely misses the fact that for you, everything was failing. It doesn't matter though, since your worst day still won't move the needle on their fail-o-meter. They won't see you. They won't have any idea anything even happened until you complain weeks later. You are the bug on the windscreen of the locomotive. The train has no idea you were ever there.

The problem is that they weren't monitoring from the customer's perspective. Had they done that, it would have been clear that oodles of requests from some subset of customers were failing. They would have also realized that certain customers had all of their requests failing. For those customers, there were no nines to be had that day.

Seriously, if you have a multi-tenant system, you owe it to your customers to monitor it from their point of view. Otherwise, how can you possibly know when you've done something that'll leave them in the cold?


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 21 2019, @02:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-percentage-of-people-are-right-handed? dept.

The experts assume that one reason for this preference is that emotions are primarily processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is linked to the left side of the body. The team led by lead author Julian Packheiser reports in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews on 26 June 2019.

International researchers have been investigating since 1960 whether and why people have a preferred side when cradling a baby. Some studies have demonstrated a preference, others have not. "In order to explain the effect, we looked for all of the studies we could find on this topic," says Julian Packheiser. The Bochum-based researchers included 40 studies in their analysis.

They ultimately found that between 66 and 72 per cent of all people hold an infant with their left arm. For right-handed people, the figure is even higher at 74 per cent, while it is only 61 per cent for left-handed people. The ratio is similar for men and women: 64 per cent of all men and 73 per cent of all women hold a baby with their left arm. "There may, of course, be links between gender and handedness," explains Packheiser. After all, men are 23 per cent more likely to be left-handed than women. "Unfortunately, this link has not been considered in any study," says the researcher.

Julian Packheiser, Judith Schmitz, Gesa Berretz, Marietta Papadatou-Pastou, Sebastian Ocklenburg. Handedness and sex effects on lateral biases in human cradling: Three meta-analyses. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2019; 104: 30 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.06.035


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 21 2019, @12:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the drawbacks-of-being-a-public-company dept.

The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, announces that it is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Netflix, Inc. ("Netflix" or "the Company") (NASDAQ: NFLX) for violations of §§10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The investigation focuses on whether the Company issued false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose information pertinent to investors. Netflix announced its second quarter 2019 earnings on July 17, 2019. During the Company's earnings call, as well as in its shareholder letter, it was revealed that Netflix gained only 2.7 million new subscribers against a forecast of 5 million new subscribers. Based on this startling news, shares of Netflix dropped by more than 13% over the next two days.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190719005440/en/


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday July 20 2019, @10:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-off-my-lawn dept.

Before being colonised by the Vikings, Iceland was lush with forests but the fearsome warriors razed everything to the ground and the nation is now struggling to reforest the island.

The country is considered the least forested in Europe; indeed, forests in Iceland are so rare, or their trees so young, that people often joke that those lost in the woods only need to stand up to find their way.

However, it wasn't always that way.

When seafaring Vikings set off from Norway and conquered the uninhabited North Atlantic island at the end of the ninth century, forests, made up mostly of birch trees, covered more than a quarter of the island.

Within a century, the settlers had cut down 97 percent of the original forests to serve as building material for houses and to make way for grazing pastures.

The forests' recovery has been made all the more difficult by the active volcanoes, which periodically cover the soil with lava and ashes.

According to a report published in 2015 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), forests now only cover 0.5 percent of the island's surface.

The lack of trees means there isn't any vegetation to protect the soil from eroding and to store water, leading to extensive desertification despite the country's far northern location.

[...]Reforestation efforts since the 1950s and especially the 1990s have helped the rocky landscape regain some of the greenery and efforts are ongoing.

In Hafnarsandur, a 6,000-hectare (14,800-acre) area of basalt and black sand in Iceland's southwest, authorities have tasked the Icelandic Forest Service with turning the lunar landscape into a forest.

"This is one of the worst examples of soil erosion in Iceland on low land," said Hreinn Oskarsson, the service's head of strategy.

Armed with a red "potti-putki", a Finnish designed tube-shaped tool, Oskarsson is planting lodgepole pines and Sitka spruces, two species of North American conifer trees, in an attempt to protect the nearby town of Thorlakshofn from recurring dust storms.

"We are planning an afforestation project to stabilise the soil," Oskarsson added.

[...]At the foot of Mount Esja, which overlooks the capital Reykjavik, is Mogilsa, where the Icelandic Forest Service's research division is located.

Next to the station is a 50 year-old planted forest where imported trees grow together with Iceland's only domestic tree, the birch.

Despite the birch being native to the soil, afforestation efforts often focus on other species of trees. The problem with birches, according to Adalsteinn Sigurgeirsson, deputy director of the forest service, is that they aren't a "productive species".

"So if you are going to meet other objectives, like fast sequestering of carbon or producing timber... we need more variety than just monocultures of one native species," he said.

[...]Dozens of nursery gardens have been set up throughout the country to facilitate the afforestation efforts.

[...]Since 2015, between three and four million trees have been planted in Iceland, the equivalent of about 1,000 hectares. That, however, is only a drop in the ocean compared to the six to seven million hectares planted in China over the same period.

See also: Forest Succession


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday July 20 2019, @07:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the nothing-is-safe dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Have your tax returns, Nest videos, and medical info been made public?

When we use browsers to make medical appointments, share tax returns with accountants, or access corporate intranets, we usually trust that the pages we access will remain private. DataSpii, a newly documented privacy issue in which millions of people's browsing histories have been collected and exposed, shows just how much about us is revealed when that assumption is turned on its head.

DataSpii begins with browser extensions—available mostly for Chrome but in more limited cases for Firefox as well—that, by Google's account, had as many as 4.1 million users. These extensions collected the URLs, webpage titles, and in some cases the embedded hyperlinks of every page that the browser user visited. Most of these collected Web histories were then published by a fee-based service called Nacho Analytics, which markets itself as "God mode for the Internet" and uses the tag line "See Anyone's Analytics Account."

[...] According to the researcher who discovered and extensively documented the problem, this non-stop flow of sensitive data over the past seven months has resulted in the publication of links to:

  • Home and business surveillance videos hosted on Nest and other security services
  • Tax returns, billing invoices, business documents, and presentation slides posted to, or hosted on, Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit.com, and other online services
  • Vehicle identification numbers of recently bought automobiles, along with the names and addresses of the buyers
  • Patient names, the doctors they visited, and other details listed by DrChrono, a patient care cloud platform that contracts with medical services
  • Travel itineraries hosted on Priceline, Booking.com, and airline websites
  • Facebook Messenger attachments and Facebook photos, even when the photos were set to be private.

Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday July 20 2019, @05:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-surprise-here dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

There's a big problem with Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency

Since Libra's unveiling, the project has gotten a chilly reception from some policymakers. On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell signaled skepticism about Facebook's plans for Libra.

"I don't think that the project can go forward ... without there being broad satisfaction with the way the company has addressed money laundering, all of those things," Powell said in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. He added that the project raised "serious concerns" for regulators.

According to The New York Times, even some of Facebook's official partners are lukewarm on the project. Partners are slated to contribute $10 million each to help fund the launch of the network. But the Times' Nathanial Popper reported in late June that "no money has changed hands so far," and he noted that some of the companies who agreed to lend their names to the project avoided making strong public statements in support of it.

That reflects significant uncertainty about how Libra will actually work—and if it's even possible to launch a network like this within the bounds of the law. Facebook is trying to build a payment system that combines the best characteristics of blockchain and conventional networks. But the result may wind up just being a contradictory mess that leaves almost everyone dissatisfied.

Libra Cryptocurrency

See Also Facebook is backpedaling from its ambitious vision for Libra


Original Submission