SoylentNews

exaeta writes:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/amp/story/2019/03/20/pacer-court-records-225821

But I'm here to tell you that PACER—Public Access to Court Electronic Records—is a judicially approved scam. The very name is misleading: Limiting the public's access by charging hefty fees, it has been a scam since it was launched and, barring significant structural changes, will be a scam forever.

Somewhat old but still relevant today.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An Australian scientist has proved that human bodies move around significantly for more than a year after death, in findings that could have implications for detectives and pathologists around the world.

After studying and photographing the movements of a corpse over 17-months, Alyson Wilson told AFP on Friday that she found humans don't exactly rest in peace.

In one case study, arms that began held close to the body ended up flung out to the side.

"We think the movements relate to the process of decomposition, as the body mummifies and the ligaments dry out," she said.

[...] Wilson and her colleagues were trying to improve a commonly used system for estimating the time of death using time-lapse cameras and in the process found that human bodies actually move around significantly.

Her findings were recently published in the journal Forensic Science International: Synergy.

A better understanding of these movements and the rate of decomposition could be used by police to estimate time of death more accurately.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for chopchop1

The problem of 42 — at least as it relates to whether the number could be considered the sum of three cubes — has finally been solved. The question of whether every number under 100 could be expressed in this fashion has been a long-standing puzzle in the world of mathematics. Now, two mathematicians, Andrew Sutherland of MIT and Andrew Booker of Bristol, have jointly proven that 42 is indeed the sum of three cubes.

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

In the equation x³+y³+z³ = k, let x = -80538738812075974, y = 80435758145817515, and z = 12602123297335631. Plug it all in, and you get (-80538738812075974)³ + 80435758145817515³ + 12602123297335631³ = 42.

Source: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/298112-life-the-universe-and-math-42-proven-to-be-the-sum-of-3-cubes

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Toyota is Trying to Figure Out How to Make a Car Run Forever:

Put together the best solar panels money can buy, super-efficient batteries and decades of car-making know-how and, theoretically, a vehicle might run forever.

That's the audacious motivation behind a project by Toyota Motor Corp., Sharp Corp. and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan, or NEDO, to test a Prius that could revolutionize transportation.

"The solar car's advantage is that — while it can't drive for a long range — it's really independent of charging facilities," said Koji Makino, a project manager at Toyota.

[...] But the current forecast is only partly sunny because there's still some work left to reach that level of efficiency.

"This is not a technology we are going to see widely used in the next decades," said Takeshi Miyao, an auto analyst at consultancy Carnorama. "It's going to take a long time."

[...] Toyota has been testing a new solar-powered Prius since July, though it acknowledges that cars running nonstop without connecting to a hose or plug are still far away. Even so, the Toyota City-based company said the research will pay off in other ways.

Indeed, there have been some breakthroughs, mainly due to advancements by Sharp. The prototype's solar panel converts sunlight at an efficiency level of more than 34%, compared with about 20% for current panels on the market.

[...] If the car is driven four days a week for a maximum of 50 kilometers a day, there's no need to plug into an outlet, NEDO's Yamazaki said.

Or only drive it on weekends.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Cubed Wombat Poop, why Your Left Scrotum Runs Hot, Among Ig Nobel Winners:

Prizes honor "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."

Over the years, curious intrepid scientists have gleaned insight into why the wombat's poo is cube-shaped, explored the magnetic properties of living and dead cockroaches, and determined that a man's left testicle really does run hotter than the right. These and other unusual research topics were honored tonight in a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater to announce the 2019 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes and honor "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The unapologetically campy award ceremony features mini-operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds, and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it is devoid of scientific merit.

The winners receive eternal Ig Nobel fame and a ten-trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. It's a long-running Ig Nobel gag. Zimbabwe stopped using its native currency in 2009 because of skyrocketing inflation and hyperinflation; at its nadir, the 100-trillion dollar bill was roughly the equivalent of 40 cents US. (Earlier this year the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe introduced the "zollar" as a potential replacement.) The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics was awarded to the then-head of the RBZ, Gideon Gono, "for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000)."

[...] If you happen to be in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area on Saturday afternoon, September 14, most of the new winners will give free public talks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lectures will also be webcast.

My personal favorite, in a just-how-do-you-stop-the-squirming kind of way was the Engineering Citation awarded to Iman Farahbakhsh "for inventing a diaper-changing machine for use on human infants."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/12/20862352/youtube-algorithm-recommendation-social-campaign-mozilla-firefox

Mozilla is trying to shame YouTube into doing more to fix its numerous recommendation algorithm issues, many of which can lead users down dangerous content spirals.

With a new social media campaign called #YouTubeRegrets, Mozilla is asking people to submit their own experiences of falling down the recommendation rabbit hole, and discuss how they got from point A to point B. Everything is done through a Google Doc, which includes a little more information about the project.

"Once, at 2 a.m., you searched YouTube for 'Did aliens build Stonehenge?' Ever since, your YouTube recommendations have been a mess: Roswell, wormholes, Illuminati," Mozilla writes. "YouTube's recommendation engine can lead users down bizarre rabbit holes — and they're not always harmless."

If, somehow, you find insufficient distraction on YouTube, check out this oldie-but-goodie 19 Wikipedia Pages That'll Send You Into A Week-Long Wikihole. It's exactly what's on the tin; highly recommended. Unless you have too much to do; in that case do NOT go there.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/million-year-old-rhino-tooth-provides-oldest-dna-data-180973117/

DNA sequencing has revolutionized the way researchers study evolution and animal taxonomy. But DNA has its limits—it's a fragile molecule that degrades over time. So far, the oldest DNA sequenced came from a 700,000-year-old horse frozen in permafrost. But a new technique based on the emerging field of proteomics has begun to unlock the deep past, and recently researchers extracted genetic information from the tooth enamel of a rhinoceros that lived 1.7 million years ago.

The new proteomics approach is essentially reverse engineering. Using a mass spectrometer, researchers look at preserved proteins and are able to determine the amino acids that make them up. Because researchers know what three-letter DNA sequence encodes each amino acid, they can then determine the DNA sequence for the protein.

"It's reading DNA when you don't have any DNA to read," Glendon Parker, a forensic scientist at the University of California, Davis, says in a press release. He and colleagues are developing proteomics techniques that can be used in criminology, evolutionary biology and anthropology. "Protein is much more stable than DNA, and protein detection technology is much better now."

The most stable protein that we know of is tooth enamel, which can remain intact in fossils for millions of years. Enrico Cappellini of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues focused on this protein in a new study in the journal Nature. The researchers took a miniscule amount of enamel from the tooth of a 1.77-million-year-old Eurasian rhinocerous species called Stephanorhinus, which was dug up in Dmanisi, Georgia. The DNA had long since degraded, but mass spectrometry allowed the team to retrieve genetic data from the enamel, the oldest ever to be recorded, according to another press release.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://9to5google.com/2019/09/11/google-scrapped-touchless-chrome-android-feature-phones/

For the past six months, we've been tracking Google's progress on introducing feature phones as a new form factor for both Android and the Chrome browser. Now it seems plans may have changed, as Google seems to be removing all of the code for Chrome's Android-based touchless mode.

Early this year, we discovered that Google was working on a version of Chrome that was designed to be used by feature phones without a touchscreen, a form factor that still sees significant usage in emerging markets. This "touchless" Chrome even included a bonus standalone version of the Dino Runner mini-game reworked for the new screen size.

This morning, reader Kawshik tipped us off to a new work-in-progress commit with the straightforward title, "Remove touchless* with the exception of Blink code." In the code change, we see Google removing all references to touchless Chrome and deleting the hundreds of files within the "touchless" folder.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

NY Payroll Company Vanishes With $35 Million

This communique came after employees at companies that depend on MyPayrollHR to receive direct deposits of their bi-weekly payroll payments discovered their bank accounts were instead debited for the amounts they would normally expect to accrue in a given pay period.

To make matters worse, many of those employees found their accounts had been dinged for two payroll periods — a month’s worth of wages —leaving their bank accounts dangerously in the red.

The remainder of this post is a deep-dive into what we know so far about what transpired, and how such an occurrence might be prevented in the future for other payroll processing firms.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/10/chrome_78_dnsoverhttps/

Only days after Mozilla said it plans to make DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) available by default gradually for Firefox users in the US, Google announced its intention to test DoH in Chrome 78, due for beta release in the next two weeks.

DoH wraps domain-name queries in a secure, encrypted HTTPS connection to a DNS server, rather than firing off requests using bog-standard plain-text insecure DNS, thereby keeping queries inaccessible to eavesdroppers. It's one of several emerging internet protocols intended to close security and privacy gaps in online communications.

Google's experiment will involve checking whether Chrome 78 users' DNS provider is among six services selected for their readiness to test DoH – Cleanbrowsing, Cloudflare, DNS.SB, Google, OpenDNS and Quad9. And if so, Chrome will switch from standard DNS to DoH using the same service provider, at least for those lucky few in the experimental group.

Google is thus avoiding one of the concerns raised by Mozilla's approach, forcing Firefox users to change their chosen DNS provider for Cloudflare. In so doing, Google ensures that malware screening and parental filtering capabilities offered by DNS providers will continue to function, if possible under DoH.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Reuters

Traders know that when President Donald Trump tweets he can rock financial markets, often in unpredictable ways, but analysts at JP Morgan (JPM.N) have now quantified the impact of his tweets, at least on the U.S. interest rates market.

Trump's tweets, which have in recent months veered toward market-sensitive topics such as trade and monetary policy, have increasingly moved U.S. rates markets, analyst Munier Salem said in a note on Friday.

In the report, which runs well over 4,000 words, J.P. Morgan analysts use machine learning techniques and their own volatility model to show how the president's 280-character missives served to raise investors' expectations for future moves in the U.S. rates market.
...
JP Morgan's newly built "Volfefe" index - a nod to "covfefe," the mysterious word coined by Trump in an unfinished 2017 tweet - analyzes a rolling sample of recent tweets to judge how much effect the president's remarks have had on volatility.

The index can explain a measurable fraction of moves in the market's forecast of likely movement in rates, particularly the shorter duration 2-year and 5-year rates, the analysts said.

Trump's most market-moving tweets dwell on trade, and, to a lesser extent, monetary policy, with the words "China," "billion," "products," "dollars," "tariffs" and "trade" making the top list, the JP Morgan analysis found.
...
Separately, analysts at Citigroup (C.N) found that a wide range of currency pairs logged higher-than-expected volatility within a one-hour window after a Trump tweet.

The U.S. dollar - whose recent strength against major currencies has drawn much of the president's ire - weakening against the euro and the Japanese yen is the most pronounced reaction to the president's tweets about the greenback, analysts at Citigroup said in a Friday note.

The index has a Wikipedia entry too.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

1B Mobile Users Vulnerable to Ongoing 'SimJacker' Surveillance Attack

More than one billion mobile users are at risk from a SIM card flaw being currently exploited by threat actors, researchers warn.

A vulnerability discovered in mobile SIM cards is being actively exploited to track phone owners’ locations, intercept calls and more – all merely by sending an SMS message to victims, researchers say.

Researchers on Thursday disclosed what they said is a widespread, ongoing exploit of a SIM card-based vulnerability, dubbed “SimJacker.” The glitch has been exploited for the past two years by “a specific private company that works with governments to monitor individuals,” and impacts several mobile operators – with the potential to impact over a billion mobile phone users globally, according to by researchers with AdaptiveMobile Security.

“Simjacker has been further exploited to perform many other types of attacks against individuals and mobile operators such as fraud, scam calls, information leakage, denial of service and espionage,” said researchers with AdaptiveMobile Security in a post breaking down the attack, released Thursday.

They said they “observed the hackers vary their attacks, testing many of these further exploits. In theory, all makes and models of mobile phone are open to attack as the vulnerability is linked to a technology embedded on SIM cards.”

The attack stems from a technology in SIM cards called S@T Browser (short for SIMalliance Toolbox Browser). This technology, which is typically used for browsing through the SIM card, can be used for an array of functions such as opening browsers on the phone as well as other functions like setting up calls, playing ring tones and more.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An investigation by China Labor Watch has found Foxconn's Apple 11 factory is "routinely" and "repeatedly" breaking Chinese labour laws which limit employment of temporary staff.

The exhaustive investigation saw several people working in the factory to uncover abuses, with one individual placed there for more than four years.

The report found a big increase in Foxconn's use of dispatch workers – short-term staff hired during peak season – since 2016. Some of these are university and secondary school students forced to work overtime or risk losing qualifications – as detailed in a previous report.

Dispatch workers are hired via third-party companies. These staffers are promised bonuses for signing up to make iPhones, but this money is often not paid, the report stated.

Chinese law restricts dispatch workers to 10 per cent of total staff and their overtime is meant to be limited to 36 hours a month. Both of these limits are being ignored by Foxconn, according to the report, with dispatch staff making up as much as 50 per cent of total staff at peak times. Dispatch workers are paid more than permanent staff but have far fewer rights and are dismissed when peak demand is over. Hiring temporary staff means Foxconn does not have to increase wages across the board in order to attract more staff.

Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, said: "Apple and Foxconn know that the issue with dispatch workers is in violation of labor laws, but because it is profitable to hire dispatch workers, they haven't addressed the issue. They have allowed these violations to continue over the years."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board to Sell for as low as $39

Most low cost (sub $100) single board computers are based on Arm processors because Intel processors are normally more expensive, but there are some exceptions with AAEON Up Board and Atomic Pi both powered by an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 processor and selling for $99 and $35 respectively.

The former follows Raspberry Pi form factor and is easy to use, but the latter requires some more work to wire power supply unless you buy an extra baseboard. There should however soon be a third option for low-cost Intel SBCs with Radxa Rock Pi X board powered by an Intel Atom x5-Z8300 Cherry Trail processor and is expected to sell for as little as $39.

Rock Pi X just showed up in Hackerboards database, and there will be two models, namely Rock Pi X model A and Rock Pi X model B with the following specifications:

• SoC – Intel Atom x5-Z8300 “Cherry Trail” quad-core processor @ 1.44 GHz / 1.84 GHz (Turbo) with Intel Gen8 HD graphics @ 500 MHz
• System Memory –  1 GB, 2 GB. or 4GB LPDDR3-1866
• Storage – MicroSD card socket, eMMC flash socket
• Video Output / Display I/F – HDMI 1.4 port up to 4K @ 30 Hz, eDP and MIPI DSI connectors
• Audio I/O – Via HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack
• Connectivity
  • Gigabit Ethernet
  • Model B only – 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2 Classic + LE
• USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 3x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x USB OTG Type-C port
• Camera I/F – MIPI CSI connector
• Expansion – 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header with GPIOs, 2x ADC, 2x PWM, 2x I2C
• Misc – RTC
• Power Supply
  • 5V-20V up to 3A/1A Via USB-C port with QC and PD fast charging support;
  • AXP288C PMIC
  • Model B only – optional PoE support via additional HAT
• Dimensions – 85 x 52 mm

[...] Apart from the Intel processor and the lack of an M.2 slot, the specifications are very similar to the company’s Arm-based Rock Pi 4 SBC with the differences between model A and model B being the addition of a wireless module and support for PoE for the latter.  If you’re worried about cooling, a variant of Rock Pi 4 heatsink ($7.99) will certainly be made.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Bigelow Aerospace Unveils B330 Inflatable Module Mock-Up

Hotel mogul Robert Bigelow wants to take his idea to build inflatable space habitats and run with it — apparently, all the way to the moon and Mars.

On Thursday, the billionaire publicly unveiled Bigelow Aerospace's latest model of an expandable space station prototype, called the "Bigelow Mars Transporter Testing Unit." The mock-up has the volume of four 40-foot-long cargo containers and was built in part for NASA astronauts and engineers to try it out.

Bigelow's immediate goal is to convince NASA — which is testing prototypes made by four other companies— to fund a space-worthy unit, called the B330 (so named because it would have 330 cubic meters of volume). The work is in support of the space agency's $20-30 billion moon-landing program, called Artemis.

The 330 cubic meters of pressurized volume of the B330 compares favorably to the 351.6 m³ of Skylab (the US' first space station) and the 931.57 m³ of the ISS (International Space Station).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402

Criminals used artificial intelligence-based software to impersonate a chief executive's voice and demand a fraudulent transfer of €220,000 ($243,000) in March in what cybercrime experts described as an unusual case of artificial intelligence being used in hacking.

The CEO of a U.K.-based energy firm thought he was speaking on the phone with his boss, the chief executive of the firm's German parent company, who asked him to send the funds to a Hungarian supplier. The caller said the request was urgent, directing the executive to pay within an hour, according to the company's insurance firm, Euler Hermes Group SA.

Euler Hermes declined to name the victim companies.

Law enforcement authorities and AI experts have predicted that criminals would use AI to automate cyberattacks. Whoever was behind this incident appears to have used AI-based software to successfully mimic the German executive's voice by phone. The U.K. CEO recognized his boss' slight German accent and the melody of his voice on the phone, said Rüdiger Kirsch, a fraud expert at Euler Hermes, a subsidiary of Munich-based financial services company Allianz SE.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/possible-interstellar-comet-headed-our-way/

First there was 'Oumuamua, discovered nearly two years ago. Now we might be in store for another interstellar flyby, this time by the recently discovered comet known for now by the provisional designation C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) — formerly gb00234. Gennady Borisov captured the object on August 30, 2019, at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory when it was about 3 astronomical units (a.u.) from the Sun. Unlike 'Oumuamua, which wasn't spotted until well after perihelion, the new comet is approaching the plane of the solar system and will reach perihelion on December 10, 2019.

[...] If this result holds up, astronomers have an unprecedented opportunity to study a potentially interstellar object in great detail over a long span of time. Based on the comet's current magnitude (~18) and distance from the Sun (2.7 a.u.), it appears to be a fairly large object — perhaps 10 km or more across, depending on the reflectivity of its surface.

[...] For predicted positions and current orbital element, check out the Minor Planet Center's latest circular MPEC 2019-R106.

From the link at the Minor Planet Center:

Based on the available observations, the orbit solution for this object has converged to the hyperbolic elements shown below, which would indicate an interstellar origin. A number of other orbit computers have reached similar conclusions, initially D. Farnocchia (JPL), W. Gray, and D. Tholen (UoH). Further observations are clearly very desirable, as all currently-available observations have been obtained at small solar elongations and low elevations. Absent an unexpected fading or disintegration, this object should be observable for at least a year.

In other words, further observations are needed to better determine its exact path as it approaches the Sun.

Original Submission