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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Researchers find way to kill pathogen resistant to antibiotics

This bacterium is one of many that have evolved a system that allows them to acquire difficult-to-access iron from the human body. Iron is essential for bacterial growth and survival, but in humans, most of it is held up within the 'haem' complex of haemoglobin. To get hold of it, P. aeruginosa and other bacteria secrete a protein, called HasA, which latches onto haem in the blood. This complex is recognized by a membrane receptor on the bacterium called HasR, permitting haem entry into the bacterial cell, while HasA is recycled to pick up more haem.

Bioinorganic chemist Osami Shoji of Nagoya University and collaborators have found a way to hijack this 'haem acquisition system' for drug delivery. They developed a powder formed of HasA and the pigment gallium phthalocyanine (GaPc), which, when applied to a culture of P. aeruginosa, was consumed by the bacteria.

"When the pigment is exposed to near-infrared light, harmful reactive oxygen species are generated inside the bacterial cells," explains Shoji. When tested, over 99.99% of the bacteria were killed following treatment with one micromolar of HasA with GaPc and ten minutes of irradiation. The strategy also worked on other bacteria with the HasR receptor on their membranes, but not on ones without it.

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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ham radio, especially the HF bands, can be intimidating for aspiring operators, many being put off by the cost of equipment. The transceiver itself is only part of the equation and proper test and measurement equipment can easily add hundreds of dollars to the bill. However, such equipment goes a long way to ease the frustrations of setting up a usable station. Fortunately [Ashhar Farhan, VU2ESE] has been at it again, and recently released the Antuino, an affordable, hackable test instrument for ham radio and general lab for use.

As you can probably guess from the name, it is primarily intended for testing antennas, and uses an Arduino Nano as a controller. It has quite a list of measurement functions including SWR, field strength, cable loss, RF cable velocity, modulation, and frequency response plotting. It also provides a signal source for testing. Its frequency range includes the HF and VHF bands, and it can even work in the UHF bands (435Mhz) if you are willing to sacrifice some sensitivity. The software is open source and available with the schematics on Github.

Most of the active ham radio operators today are of the grey haired, retired variety. If the hobby is to stand any chance of outliving them, it needs to find a way to be attractive to the younger generations who grew up with the internet. The availability of affordable and hackable equipment can go long way to making this happen, and [Ashhar Farhan] has been one of the biggest contributors in this regard. His $129 μBITX HF SSB/CW transceiver kit is by far the best value for money general coverage HF radio available.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A call-center scammer has lost his appeal to overturn a $9m fine – after a court pointed out the crook had specifically waived the right to appeal when he pleaded guilty.

Viraj Patel was part of a large India-based criminal enterprise that conned tens of thousands of Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars: the swindlers would cold-call citizens and pose as US government officials demanding payment for unpaid taxes.

The unlucky victims were threatened with fines, arrests, or deportation if they didn't cough up: one 85-year-old woman ended up paying the fraudsters $12,300 after she was threatened with a stretch behind bars for phony tax violations. More than 60 suspect con men were charged [PDF] with conspiracy to commit identity theft, false impersonation of an officer of the United States, wire fraud, and money laundering.

In 2018, Patel, then a 33-year-old loser living in California, reached a deal with prosecutors: in exchange for pleading guilty and avoiding a lengthy trial, he would spend up to 165 months, or about 14 years, in the clink followed by three years of supervised release, plus receive a court order kicking him out of America when his punishment is over – and, to top it all off, an $8.97m fine.

He admitted his crimes, specifically, one count of money laundering – since he is based the US, his job in the caper was to launder roughly $4m to $9m of victims' cash – and was sentenced.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Greek archaeologists uncover riches overlooked by robbers

Archaeologists in northern Greece have explored more than 200 new graves in a vast ancient cemetery that was plundered in antiquity but still retained rich finds, including a gold mask and bronze helmets.

In a statement Friday, the Culture Ministry said the most impressive finds came from the graves of warriors who died in the 6th century B.C. and were members of a powerful military aristocracy.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

SFO: The typo that almost crashed a plane

In 2017, a commercial airliner lined up for takeoff at San Francisco International Airport on runway 01 Left, the main departure route.

The pilot accidentally punched 10 Left — a much longer SFO runway — into the cockpit computer, causing the plane to incorrectly calculate the appropriate thrust and wing flap settings.

The pilot’s simple reversing of the number caused the plane to nearly run out of runway, lifting off with only 400 feet left of asphalt, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report obtained by The Chronicle through the Freedom of Information Act.

It wasn’t the only such close call at SFO. The March 2018 FAA safety report found 25 cases from 2014 to 2017 in which airplanes from several carriers took off with less than 1,000 feet of runway remaining. The FAA believes some of those cases probably were a result of “transposition error” and said no other major airport in the United States has had a similar problem.

Aviation experts say airliners need to lift off the ground with enough runway left to abort a takeoff — 400 feet isn’t nearly enough and 1,000 feet is too close.

“Wow, that is practically the end of the runway!” retired pilot Ross Aimer, an aviation consultant familiar with SFO, said of the 2017 incident. “They were lucky they didn’t take out some of the instrument landing equipment erected at the end of that runway.”

The runway 01 error revelations are the latest issue at the airport involving its runways, taxiways and tarmac. The airport closed its busiest runway, 28L, on Sept. 7 for 20 days of repairs, leading to more than 1,000 flight delays and hundreds of cancellations. The closure was not related to the runway number issue but resulted from deteriorating concrete.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

About one in three diabetic patients develops diabetic retinopathy (DR), which can impair vision and lead to blindness. A new study in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, provides clear evidence that high glucose increases the levels of enzymatic precursor -- lysyl oxidase propeptide (LOX-PP) -- that promotes cell death, which was verified in an animal model of diabetes. These findings may help develop novel DR treatments by targeting LOX-PP or its metabolites.

'We found that hyperglycemic and diabetic conditions increased LOX-PP levels," explained lead investigator Sayon Roy, PhD, of the Departments of Medicine and Ophthalmology at Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA. "LOX-PP may induce cell death by compromising a cell survival pathway, and in retinas of diabetic rats, increased LOX-PP contributed to retinal vascular cell death associated with DR. Administration of recombinant LOX-PP alone was sufficient to induce cell death. This report shows novel functionality of LOX-PP in mediating cell death under high glucose condition in retinal endothelial cells as well as in diabetic animals."

Studies in pancreatic and breast cancer cells suggest that LOX-PP overexpression may trigger cell death. The researchers therefore studied the role of LOX-PP in the retinal tissue. The retinal blood vessels of normal and diabetic rats and normal rats administered artificially synthesized LOX-PP (recombinant LOX-PP, rLOX-PP) directly into the eye, were examined. Changes associated with DR such as swelling, blood vessel leakage, blockage or thickening of vascular walls, and histologic indicators such as acellular capillaries (AC) and pericyte loss (PL) were studied.

More AC and PL were observed in the retinas of diabetic rats compared to controls. In non-diabetic rats, injection of rLOX-PP directly into the eye also increased the number of ACs and PLs compared to rats receiving a control injection.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Researchers alter mouse gut microbiomes by feeding good bacteria their preferred fibers

The research aims to develop ways to identify compounds that can enhance the representation of health-promoting members of the gut microbial community. The goal is to identify sustainable, affordable dietary fiber sources for incorporation into next-generation, more nutritious food products.

"Fiber is understood to be beneficial. But fiber is actually a very complicated mixture of many different components," says senior author Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "Moreover, fibers from different plant sources that are processed in different ways during food manufacturing have different constituents. Unfortunately, we lack detailed knowledge of these differences and their biological significance. We do know that modern Western diets have low levels of fiber; this lack of fiber has been linked to loss of important members of the gut community and deleterious health effects."

[...] "We had suspected there might be competition going on among the different strains and that some would be stronger competitors than others," Patnode says. Proteomics analyses and genetic screens confirmed that there was a hierarchy of fiber consumption among the species present in this model bacterial community.

Gordon explains that "it's important to understand how the presence of a particular organism affects the dining behavior of other organisms -- in this case, with regard to different fibers. If we are going to develop microbiota-directed foods aimed at providing benefits to human health, it's important to find ways to determine which food staples will be the best source of nutrients and how the microbiota will respond."

Michael L. Patnode, et. al. Interspecies Competition Impacts Targeted Manipulation of Human Gut Bacteria by Fiber-Derived Glycans. Cell, 2019; 179 (1): 59 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.08.011

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/760317486/the-mysterious-death-of-the-hacker-who-turned-in-chelsea-manning

Morrow witnessed the exact moment when the hacker community turned on Lamo. It happened, in a stark way, at a Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York. Hacker meetups were usually a great opportunity to party, meet new people and start new projects, but from the outset it was clear that post-Manning, this HOPE meeting would be different.

"The first day at the conference there were a lot of people yelling out 'snitch' and at least one occasion that I recall somebody spitting in his direction," Morrow recalls. "It was a rather divisive time back then. Something like this had never happened to the community. Up until that point, Adrian had been an inspiration, but that all turned. In their minds, or in the culture, the worst thing you could be was a snitch and I think that probably confused a lot of people. There was a bit of a mob mentality, people were just so taken aback that this happened."

[...] After the conference, there was no ambiguity about how the hacker community felt about Lamo.

"People hated him," said another of his friends, Andrew Blake. "He couldn't log on to any sort of interest platform under his actual name without instantly getting some sort of hate directed toward him. Even when Adrian would do something with the absolute best of intentions, as soon as anyone realized that it was Adrian Lamo who did it, they didn't want anything to do with it."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Alcohol-producing gut bacteria could cause liver damage even in people who don't drink

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the build-up of fat in the liver due to factors other than alcohol. It affects about a quarter of the adult population globally, but its cause remains unknown. Now, researchers have linked NAFLD to gut bacteria that produce a large amount of alcohol in the body, finding these bacteria in over 60% of non-alcoholic fatty liver patients. Their findings, publishing September 19 in the journal Cell Metabolism, could help develop a screening method for early diagnosis and treatment of non-alcoholic fatty liver.

"We were surprised that bacteria can produce so much alcohol," says lead author Jing Yuan at Capital Institute of Pediatrics. "When the body is overloaded and can't break down the alcohol produced by these bacteria, you can develop fatty liver disease even if you don't drink."

Yuan and her team discovered the link between gut bacteria and NAFLD when they encountered a patient with severe liver damage and a rare condition called auto-brewery syndrome (ABS). Patients with ABS would become drunk after eating alcohol-free and high-sugar food. The condition has been associated with yeast infection, which can produce alcohol in the gut and lead to intoxication.

"We initially thought it was because of the yeast, but the test result for this patient was negative," Yuan says. "Anti-yeast medicine also didn't work, so we suspected [his disease] might be caused by something else."

By analyzing the patient's feces, the team found he had several strains of the bacteria Klebsiella pneumonia in his gut that produced high levels of alcohol. K. pneumonia is a common type of commensal gut bacteria. Yet, the strains isolated from the patient's gut can generate about four to six times more alcohol than strains found in healthy people.

Moreover, the team sampled the gut microbiota from 43 NAFLD patients and 48 healthy people. They found about 60% of NAFLD patients had high- and medium-alcohol-producing K. pneumonia in their gut, while only 6% of healthy controls carry these strains.

Jing Yuan, et. al. Fatty Liver Disease Caused by High-Alcohol-Producing Klebsiella pneumoniae. Cell Metabolism, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2019.08.018

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

TFlower Ransomware - The Latest Attack Targeting Businesses

The latest ransomware targeting corporate environments is called TFlower and is being installed on networks after attackers hack into exposed Remote Desktop services.

With the huge payments being earned by ransomware developers as they target businesses and government agencies, it is not surprising to see new ransomware being developed to take advantage of this surge in high ransoms.

Such is the case with the TFlower ransomware, which was discovered in the wild in early August. At the time it was just thought to be another generic ransomware, but sources who have performed incident response involving this ransomware have told BleepingComputer that its activity is beginning to pick up.

TFlower is being installed in a corporate network through exposed Remote Desktop services that are being hacked by attackers.

Once the attackers gain access to the machine, they will infect the local machine or may attempt to traverse the network through tools such as PowerShell Empire, PSExec, etc.

When executed, the ransomware will display a console that shows the activity being performed by the ransomware while it is encrypting a computer.

[...] When done encrypting a computer, it will send another status update to the C2 in the form of:

https://www.domain.com/wp-includes/wp-merge.php?name=[computer_name]&state=success%20[encrypted_file_count],%20retry%20[retried_file_count]

Victims will now find a ransom notes named !_Notice_!.txt placed throughout the computer and on the Windows Desktop. This ransom note will instruct victims to contact the flower.harris@protonmail.com or flower.harris@tutanota.com email addresses for payment instructions.

It is not known how much the ransom amounts are at this time.

TFlower is still being researched, so it is not known at this time if there are any weaknesses in the encryption that could allow a user to get their files back for free.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

The document showed that the state authorized Coalfire's team to "perform lock-picking activities to attempt to gain access to locked areas." But the document also stated the testers should "talk your way into areas" and allowed for "limited physical bypass."

The rules of engagement also dictated that the state authorities said they would not notify law enforcement of the penetration test.

[...] At 12:30am on the morning of September 11, penetration testers Justin Wynn and Gary Demercurio were caught with lock picks inside the Dallas County courthouse by Dallas County Sherriff's Department officers. They presented documents showing they had authorization from the state; the officers contacted state officials on the document, who verified that the test was authorized. But they arrested Wynn and Demurcurio anyway and charged them with burglary.

Wynn and Demurcurio are free on bail and have waived an initial hearing. They still face charges, despite state officials' apology to county officials.

Related: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/09/17/0641246

Coalfire's Comments:https://www.coalfire.com/News-and-Events/Press-Releases/Coalfire-Comments-on-Pen-Tests-for-Iowa-Judicial

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/iowa-officials-claim-confusion-over-scope-led-to-arrest-of-pen-testers/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

Investigating the self-attention mechanism behind BERT-based architectures

BERT, a transformer-based model characterized by a unique self-attention mechanism, has so far proved to be a valid alternative to recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in tackling natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite their advantages, so far, very few researchers have studied these BERT-based architectures in depth, or tried to understand the reasons behind the effectiveness of their self-attention mechanism.

Aware of this gap in the literature, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell's Text Machine Lab for Natural Language Processing have recently carried out a study investigating the interpretation of self-attention, the most vital component of BERT models. The lead investigator and senior author for this study were Olga Kovaleva and Anna Rumshisky, respectively. Their paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the EMNLP 2019 conference, suggests that a limited amount of attention patterns are repeated across different BERT sub-components, hinting to their over-parameterization.

"BERT is a recent model that made a breakthrough in the NLP community, taking over the leaderboards across multiple tasks. Inspired by this recent trend, we were curious to investigate how and why it works," the team of researchers told TechXplore via email. "We hoped to find a correlation between self-attention, the BERT's main underlying mechanism, and linguistically interpretable relations within the given input text."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20869271/impossible-burger-foods-gelsons-markets-southern-california-meat-free-plant-based

The Impossible Burger, a meat-free burger that's previously only been available in restaurants, will be available to buy in grocery stores for the first time this week. Starting tomorrow, September 20th, you'll be able to buy the plant-based burger in 27 Gelson's Markets stores in Southern California. Impossible Foods says it will bring the burger to more grocery stores — including some on the East Coast — later this month, and it plans to reach every region of the US by the middle of next year.

The launch brings Impossible Foods into even closer competition with Beyond Meat, which already sells its own meat-free burger in grocery stores in addition to restaurants. When it announced its latest burger back in June, Beyond Meat said that it was available to purchase in stores, including Whole Foods, Kroger, Safeway, Publix, Wegmans, Target, and Sprouts. Compared to this list of chains, Impossible Foods is lagging behind in selling its burgers directly to home cooks.

It's a 12 oz slab of fake ground beef, not yet shaped into patties.

Original Submission

Freeman submitted a story which became the inspiration for:

AT&T Explores Parting Ways With DirecTV:

Telecom giant considers fate of DirecTV satellite unit as cord-cutting saps subscriber base

AT&T Inc. is exploring parting with its DirecTV unit, people familiar with the matter said, a sharp reversal from Chief Executive Randall Stephenson's strategy to make the $49 billion bet on the satellite provider a key piece of the phone giant's future.

The telecom giant has considered various options, including a spinoff of DirecTV into a separate public company and a combination of DirecTV's assets with Dish Network Corp., its satellite-TV rival, the people said.

AT&T may ultimately decide to keep DirecTV in the fold. Despite the satellite service's struggles, as consumers drop their TV connections, it still contributes a sizable volume of cash flow and customer accounts to its parent.

AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion. The company's shrinking satellite business is under a microscope after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T last week and released a report pushing for strategic changes. Elliott has told investors that AT&T should unload DirecTV, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.

Related: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/09/18/1656205

Like Blockbuster, DirecTV, Dish, etc. are extremely slow to catch onto the whole Netflix/Amazon Prime Ad-Free, pick-what-I-want-to-watch model.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/amd-exec-tsmc-has-capacity-to-meet-epyc-rome-demand

AMD executive Scott Aylor said the chipmaker is "very well positioned" to meet demand for its second-generation EPYC Rome processors through the production capacity of semiconductor foundry TSMC.

Aylor, corporate vice president and general manager of data center of AMD's Datacenter Solutions Group, made the comments in a Tuesday briefing about the chipmaker's progress with EPYC Rome in response to concerns that its CPU supply won't be able to keep up with demand.

"We will be able to meet the needs of a fantastic level of interest," he said. "[TSMC has] full commitment to ramp the volumes needed on the market."

Aylor said his comments, which were made during a presentation for journalists, were not in response to a Tuesday story by Digitimes stating that TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, has pushed back the lead time for products made using the foundry's 7-nanometer node — which includes EPYC Rome — has been pushed back from two months to nearly six months.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-epyc-7h12-dell-emc-supermicro-atos-tsmc-server-launch,40427.html

AMD held its European launch in Rome, Italy of its new EPYC processors. Along with announcing that the company's EPYC Rome data center processors have now attained 100 world records (and counting), the company also announced a slew of new OEM servers.

AMD also unveiled its EPYC 7H12, a 64-core 128-thread that boasts a beastly 280W thermal design power (TDP) envelope, which allows the processor to reach a 2.6 GHz base and 3.3 GHz max boost frequency, marking the highest performance of its Rome product stack.

AMD designed the new chip, which requires watercooling to extract the ultimate performance, for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. ATOS unveiled its new Bullsequana XH2000, a hybrid supercomputer designed for exascale-class supercomputers that supports the new 7H12 chips.

The system supports the EPYC 7H12, cooling it's[sic] 32 1U blades (per rack) with an advanced water cooling solution, and said that it provides up to 4.2 TFLOPS of performance per chip, making the 7H12 up to 11% faster than the current top-of-the-stack EPYC 7742 processor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[In Australia,] State's upper house drags feet in passing law legalising abortion despite an overwhelming 75-percent support by voters.

The Reproductive Health Care Act 2019, which seeks to bring the state in line with the rest of Australia, would allow abortion up to 22 weeks. It was passed by the state lower house in August, with 59 votes in favour and 31 against.  The bill's backers say the change will protect women and reduce some of the stigma associated with the procedure, but the legislation has attracted intense debate and national attention.

Barnaby Joyce, a former deputy prime minister, claimed the bill ignored the rights of unborn children and, at an anti-abortion rights rally over the weekend, former prime minister Tony Abbott alleged the move to decriminalise would enable "infanticide on demand".

Terminations have existed in a legal grey area - allowed for health or economic reasons, but still carrying a risk of prosecution. "We need to take abortion out of the Crimes Act and give women autonomy over their decisions," Family Planning NSW Medical Director Dr Deborah Bateson told Al Jazeera.

A survey released this month by Pro-Choice NSW showed that more than 77 percent of the state's residents support decriminalisation.

Original Submission