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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Single malt Scotch whisky exported to the United States is to face a tariff of 25% from 18 October.

The new duty is part of a raft of measures being imposed by the US in retaliation against EU subsidies given to aircraft maker Airbus.

Scotch exports to the US last year were worth $1.3bn (£1bn), with single malts accounting for a large share of that.

The US was given the go-ahead to impose tariffs on $7.5bn (£6.1bn) of goods it imports from the EU following a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling on Wednesday.

It is the latest chapter in a 15-year battle between the US and the EU over illegal subsidies for planemakers Airbus and rival Boeing.

The ruling by the WTO will mean tariffs on EU goods ranging from aircraft to agricultural products.

Brussels has threatened to retaliate similarly against US goods.

[...] The US had sought to impose tariffs on about $11bn in goods. Though the WTO cut that figure to $7.5bn, Wednesday's decision still marks the largest penalty of its kind in the organisation's history.

The WTO's dispute settlement body must formally adopt the ruling but is not expected to overturn the decision.

"Whisky" or "Whiskey"? From Wikipedia: Names and Spellings:

The spelling whiskey is common in Ireland and the United States, while whisky is used in all other whisky-producing countries.[5] In the US, the usage has not always been consistent. [...]Since the 1960s, American writers have increasingly used whiskey as the accepted spelling for aged grain spirits made in the US and whisky for aged grain spirits made outside the US.[7] However, some prominent American brands, such as George Dickel, Maker's Mark, and Old Forester (all made by different companies), use the whisky spelling on their labels, and the Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits, the legal regulations for spirit in the US, also use the whisky spelling throughout.[8]

Whisky made in Scotland is known as Scotch whisky, or simply as "Scotch" (especially in North America).

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The skies were clear, the winds were low, and the lasers aligned. In April, instruments aboard NASA's Operation IceBridge airborne campaign and the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 succeeded in measuring the same Arctic sea ice at the same time, a tricky feat given the shifting sea ice. Scientists have now analyzed airborne and spaceborne height measurements, and found that the two datasets match almost exactly, demonstrating how precisely ICESat-2 can measure the heights of the sea ice's bumpy, cracked surface.

[...] The Operation IceBridge team has been flying campaigns over Greenland and Antarctica for a decade, and once ICESat-2 was in orbit they adjusted several missions to fly along the same path as the satellite. When they flew over ice sheets it was relatively straightforward, since the masses of ice don't gain or lose much height over a day or two, or even a week or two.

Sea ice, however, is pushed around by winds and ocean currents. If IceBridge flew along an ICESat-2 orbit track an hour after the satellite passed, it could be measuring completely different ice. So IceBridge mission scientist John Sonntag had to calculate where and when ICESat-2 was going to be over a specific spot in the Arctic ocean, and how to navigate the plane to be there at the exact same time - preferably with low winds, and definitely with no clouds to block ICESat-2's view.

[...] When Kwok and his colleagues used computer programs to line up the two datasets, they saw the same ridges, bumpy surface, and open water in both elevation profiles. With four flights worth of data comparisons, over more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers), the two sets of height measurements closely match each other: Researchers would call an exact match 1.0, and these were correlated to more than 0.95.

Sea ice height profiles from ICESat-2 can tell scientists whether the ice is a newly formed, smooth surface or an older, rougher section. The key measurement from ICESat-2, however, is how high the ice surface is above the open water, called freeboard. If scientists know that number, they can calculate the thickness - which isn't directly measured from satellite data. When Kwok and his colleagues compared freeboard measurements from ICESat-2 and Operation IceBridge's Airborne Topographic Mapper instrument for the April flights, they were within 0.8 to 1.6 inches (2 to 4 centimeters) of each other.

For more information, visit: nasa.gov/icesat-2 or icesat-2.gsfc.nasa.gov

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RandomFactor writes:

Researchers in Oxfordshire are working to 'virtually unroll' several scrolls from the library of Herculaneum.

The scrolls were buried by Mt. Vesuvius which erupted in 79AD and are far to fragile to unroll physically (it has been tried with a few scrolls from this library with "largely disastrous results")

Unlike other ancient scrolls, these have resisted previous efforts to scan and read them due to their use of carbon based ink.

Unlike metal-based inks, such as the iron gall used to write medieval documents, carbon ink has a density similar to that of the carbonized papyrus on which it sits. Therefore, it appears invisible in X-ray scans.

The scrolls will be scanned at the U.K.'s Diamond Light Source synchrotron science facility at photon energies of 53-150keV.

The researchers believe that the tomography will "capture subtle, non-density-based evidence of ink, even when it is invisible to the naked eye in the scan data."

The machine-learning tool we are developing will amplify that ink signal by training a computer algorithm to recognize it pixel-by-pixel from photographs of opened fragments that show exactly where the ink is, voxel-by-voxel, in the corresponding tomographic data of the fragments. The tool can then be deployed on data from the still-rolled scrolls, identify the hidden ink, and make it more prominently visible to any reader.

The opened fragments that will be used to train the tool are the remains from scrolls sacrificed in earlier physical attempts at unrolling.

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takyon writes:

Software fix planned to restore DSCOVR

A space weather and Earth observation satellite that has been offline for more than three months could be restored to normal operations with new software, but that fix is not expected to be completed until early next year.

In a Sept. 30 statement, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that it has been working with NASA and an unnamed company on a "software fix" to restore the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, which went into a "safehold" June 27.

Those efforts, the agency said, are making progress, but it doesn't expect DSCOVR to resume operations soon. "Engineers report that intermediate test results of the software fix have been positive and they expect it to be incorporated during the first quarter of calendar year 2020," NOAA said in its statement.

Deep Space Climate Observatory.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9088

2,000 "Schrodinger's Cats" break record for large-scale quantum superposition

The world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be in two places at once or entangled with each other across vast distances, sounds spooky to us living in the macroscopic world of classical physics. But where exactly the boundary between the two lies is still a mystery. Now physicists have blurred the line more than ever before, with a new experiment showing that massive molecules containing up to 2,000 atoms can exist in two places simultaneously.

The discovery was made using an advanced version of an experiment that's been conducted countless times over the last 200 years – the double slit experiment. It was through this experiment that scientists came to understand the duality of light as both particles and waves.

The experiment sounds fairly simple. Light is beamed towards a surface that has two slits cut into it, and another surface behind it that the light ends up projected onto. If light was made up of only conventional particles, then the pattern on the rear surface would just appear in the shape and size of the slits. But waves of light bounce off each other like ripples in water, creating a kind of tiger-stripe pattern on the surface.

But the strangest thing is that even when the experiment is done with individual photons (or particles of light), the same striped pattern appears. Somehow, these photons don't seem to be taking just one path as they might be expected to, but are traversing all of them at once and interfering with themselves.

This phenomenon is known as quantum superposition, and it's most famously illustrated by Schrödinger's Cat. In this thought experiment, a cat hidden in a box is neither alive nor dead, but exists as both at the same time. When the box is opened, this superposition collapses into one state or the other.

By the same token, it's been said that if detectors were set up at the slits, so they were measuring which path the light was taking, the striped patterns would disappear. The fuzziness of the outcome clears up as soon as it's measured.

But superposition only seems to apply in the quantum realm – as objects get bigger, it gets harder for this phenomenon to occur, and by the time you get up to the macroscopic scale it seems to disappear entirely. Even Schrödinger's Cat needs a quantum link – the story often goes that there's a radioactive atom in the box too, and the cat's survival hinges on whether the atom decays or not.

The research was published in the journal Nature Physics.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A variety of two-dimensional materials that have promising properties for optical, electronic, or optoelectronic applications have been held back by the fact that they quickly degrade when exposed to oxygen and water vapor. The protective coatings developed thus far have proven to be expensive and toxic, and cannot be taken off.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has developed an ultrathin coating that is inexpensive, simple to apply, and can be removed by applying certain acids.

The new coating could open up a wide variety of potential applications for these "fascinating" 2-D materials, the researchers say. Their findings are reported this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT graduate student Cong Su; professors Ju Li, Jing Kong, Mircea Dinca, and Juejun Hu; and 13 others at MIT and in Australia, China, Denmark, Japan, and the U.K.

Research on 2-D materials, which form thin sheets just one or a few atoms thick, is "a very active field," Li says. Because of their unusual electronic and black phosphorus and a whole category of materials known as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), corrode when exposed to humid air or to various chemicals. Many of them degrade significantly in just hours, precluding their usefulness for real-world applications.

"It's a key issue" for the development of such materials, Li says. "If you cannot stabilize them in air, their processability and usefulness is limited." One reason silicon has become such a ubiquitous material for electronic devices, he says, is because it naturally forms a protective layer of silicon dioxide on its surface when exposed to air, preventing further degradation of the surface. But that's more difficult with these atomically thin materials, whose total thickness could be even less than the silicon dioxide protective layer.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://gizmodo.com/nearly-25-percent-of-your-cable-bill-is-bullshit-fees-1838787373

A cable bill survey of 2,057 U.S. adults in 2018 by Consumer Reports found that a staggering 85 percent have encountered surprise or hidden fees—especially non-government imposed fees and those different from fees outlined by the company for the service—in recent years. In examining consumer-submitted bills, Consumer Reports found that these hidden costs tack on 24 percent of the service's base price to consumers' monthly bills.

In examining almost 800 bills for cable services, Consumer Reports found that those fees can be for anything from set-top box rentals to broadcast and regional sports fees. Consumer Reports said that based on its nationally representative survey results, it estimates cable companies may be pulling in roughly $28 billion annually from these charges. These charges result in about $450 per consumer annually in additional costs on average, the report said.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The End Of Guinea Worm Was Just Around the Corner. Not Anymore

Next year was supposed to be the end of the line for Guinea worm.

The epic, decades-long campaign against the parasite — which humans and animals can contract from drinking water and which, about a year later, emerges as a worm up to 3 feet long from painful lesions on the feet or legs — has been one of the big success stories in modern global health. In the 1980s, more than 3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia contracted Guinea worm annually. Last year, that number was down to 28.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 95 this week and whose nonprofit Carter Center has led much of the Guinea worm eradication effort, has said that he would "like for the last Guinea worm to die before I do."

But that goal moved further out of reach this week, when the World Health Organization quietly revealed that it has moved its expected Guinea worm eradication date, which had been 2020, ahead a decade, to 2030. The change was first reported in Nature.

Over the past few years, the eradication effort has faced a series of setbacks. Last year, South Sudan, one of the countries hit hardest by the parasite, declared victory over it. But only a few months later a new outbreak surfaced there.

In 2013, researchers began to notice that in Chad, Guinea worm was proliferating among dogs — including some cases in which a single dog could carry more than 60 worms. The number of known infected dogs in Chad is rising, from a few hundred cases at first to as many as 2,000 this year. The parasite also seems to be spreading among baboons in Ethiopia.

[...] "We redefined eradication as elimination of transmission in animals as well as in humans," Breman says. "We're not exactly sure when the last dog or other animal will give up their worms. So that means there will be this delay."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9088

Cyber Threats to Medical Imaging Systems and How to Address Them

Healthcare continues to see staggering growth in breaches to patient health information. In the first half of 2019 alone, 32 million health records were breached, compared to 15 million records in the entire year of 2018. However, this trend of growing cyber breaches in healthcare is likely to persist due to the following characteristics of the healthcare industry:

[...] Medical imaging is a critical aspect in the delivery of patient care. Imaging records are now digitized and often stored on picture archiving communication systems (PACS), which enables the sharing of medical images to facilitate the delivery of care. However, cybersecurity measures to protect patient health information are often not implemented.

A recent report by ProPublica showed that medical imaging data of over 5 million patients in the United States are publicly available on the internet. As a result of 187 misconfigured servers, medical imaging data, often containing identifiable patient information that should be protected, is "sitting unprotected on the internet and available to anyone with basic computer expertise." Researchers discovered over 13.7 million medical tests, including 400,000 with downloadable images. These imaging records were stored on servers, including systems used for archiving medical images, without a robust solution in place to monitor for unauthorized changes or to ensure the servers were securely configured and in compliance with regulatory standards. These medical images include MRI, X-Rays and accompanying identifiable patient data that could be used for blackmail.

Due to the vulnerabilities in picture archiving communication systems (PACS), Tripwire partnered with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), a part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), along with other technology collaborators, to develop cybersecurity guidance for securing PACS. According to the NCCOE, "compromises on PACS could result in significant data loss, could serve as an avenue to cause disruption through a hospital's system, or should the information be altered or misdirected, could impede timely diagnosis and treatment."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Recently published climate research led by Sanjiv Kumar, a professor in Auburn University's School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, has already provided the basis of a pioneering new outlook product that is capable of forecasting drought.

Kumar and his team published their findings in the May issue of the Journal of Climate.

In August, the Massachusetts-based Climate Impact Company introduced an innovative new forecasting product developed based on that research. An article and accompanying chart on the company's website now exhibits the most likely dry or drought-prone areas in North America for meteorological autumn, or September, October and November. The article cites the soil reemergence process as its source, breaking down the science behind it.

"It is striking to see the speed at which basic climate science research can deliver a practical solution nationally and internationally—in this case, less than four months," said Kumar, who leads Auburn University's Climate, Water and Society, or CWS, Lab in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. "This development highlights the way in which basic climate research can fuel practical solutions world-wide."

[...] School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences Dean Janaki Alavalapati said the rapid development of a forecast product based on Kumar's research affirms that the findings will significantly affect climate science in the years to come.

"The findings that Dr. Kumar and his team have made in this research represent a major breakthrough in terms of the role of the land in climate predictability science," Alavalapati said. "This could result in substantially improved predictability of drought, which could positively impact the lives of people affected by drought each year and affect the decisions of natural resource managers and policymakers."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Oceanography satellite ends 11-year mission – Spaceflight Now

A joint U.S.-European satellite mission that measured rising sea levels for 11 years is ending due to the deteriorating condition of the spacecraft’s power system, officials said Friday.

The Jason 2 satellite was designed to operate for three to five years, but it outlived its design life and continued collecting precise sea level measurements through the launch of a replacement spacecraft — Jason 3 — in January 2016.

During its 11-year mission, Jason 2 charted nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) of global sea level rise, an observation scientists attribute to a rise in average global temperatures.

“Today we celebrate the end of this resoundingly successful international mission,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the NASA science mission directorate. "Jason-2/OSTM has provided unique insight into ocean currents and sea level rise with tangible benefits to marine forecasting, meteorology and our understanding of climate change.”

Ground teams noticed signs of aging from the Jason 2 satellite in 2017, and officials ordered controllers at NOAA’s satellite operations center in Maryland to command the spacecraft to move out of its original 830-mile-high (1,336-kilometer) science orbit to a slightly lower altitude away from other operational missions.

Jason 2 also depleted excess propellant reserves in 2017, but the satellite continued collecting scientific data. The lower orbit meant Jason 2’s measurements of the same location on the ocean were less frequent, but the resolution of the data improved, allowing scientists to conduct marine gravity studies and map seafloor topography, officials said.

[...] Issues with Jason 2’s power system in recent weeks prompted mission managers to “passivate” the spacecraft and end the mission in order reduce the risk of the satellite becoming a source of space junk. Jason 2 ended scientific observations Oct. 1, and the satellite will be decommissioned Oct. 10, officials said in a statement.

“With the recent degradation of the spacecraft’s power system, mission partners decided to end the mission to decrease risks to other satellites and future altimetry missions, and to comply with French space law,” the mission partners said in a statement.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9088

Discovery of Geost Botnet Made Possible by Attacker OpSec Fails

A series of operational security (OpSec) failures on the part of attackers enabled researchers to discover the Geost botnet.

In mid-2018, Virus Bulletin researchers Sebastian Garcia, María José Erquiaga and Anna Shirokova discovered Geost, one of the largest Android banking botnets known today, while analyzing another malware family called HtBot. The researchers found that HtBot converted victims into unwilling proxies that received traffic from the malware’s network and then sent it to the web. While analyzing that traffic, they observed someone logging into the command-and-control (C&C) panel of what was then a previously undocumented botnet.

[...] Garcia, Erquiaga and Shirokova learned all of this and more because several OpSec failures made it possible for the researchers to access a chat log of an underground team hired by Geost’s controllers. This log provided insight into the creation of Geost, the development of new features and the use of victims’ stolen data. In so doing, the log also revealed just how spectacularly the Geost botmasters had failed to secure their creation.

As the researchers explained in a blog post:

Maintaining a good OpSec is difficult both for security analysts and attackers trying to hide. The discovery of the Geost botnet was possible because of several OpSec mistakes, including the use of the HtBot illegal proxy network, not encrypting their command-and-control servers, re-using security services, trusting other attackers with less OpSec ,and [sic] not encrypting their chat sessions.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Dutch Govt Explains the Risks Behind DNS-Over-HTTPS Move

The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) explains how DNS-monitoring will get more difficult as modern encrypted DNS transport protocols are getting more popular in a fact sheet published this week.

The fact sheet's audience is represented by system or network admins and security officers who want to move to DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) DNS encryptions protocols that offer increased security and confidentiality.

Both DoH and DoT are designed to allow DNS resolution over encrypted HTTPS connections instead of using the currently common plain text DNS lookups.

Google and Mozilla are both running DoH trials for their browsers, with Chrome to upgrade to a provider's DoH server if it present on a pre-defined whitelist or to a shortlist of fallback providers (i.e., Cleanbrowsing, Cloudflare, DNS.SB, Google, OpenDNS, Quad9) if not.

By only upgrading the DNS resolution to DoH if the users' current DNS provider is supported, Google believes that the users' DNS resolution experience will stay the same.

Mozilla's DoH experiments have already been met with criticism from network admins and Linux distro maintainers after the decision to enable DoH by default and using Cloudflare's DoH server rather than a user's existing DNS provider.

Senior scalability engineer Kristian Köhntopp said that Mozilla is "about to break DNS" seeing that Cloudflare will be used for DNS resolution over the default server assigned by system administrators, leading to leaking visited website addresses inside corporate environments to Cloudflare.

Peter Hessler, an OpenBSD developer, tweeted at the time that OpenBSD disabled DoH in their Firefox package in the current releases and will also disabled it in future ones since "sending all DNS traffic to Cloudflare by default is not a good idea."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Rights groups, tech companies, academics and journalists opposed the law, which they say threatens free speech.

A "fake news" law, decried by academics, activists and tech giants, has gone into effect in Singapore, despite warnings that the measures could be used to stifle dissent and free speech in the South East Asian island country.

The law, which was passed by Singapore's parliament in May but took effect on Wednesday, gives government ministers powers to order social media companies to put warnings next to posts authorities deem to be false, order some content to be removed and in some cases block websites deemed to be propagating false information contrary to "public interest".

In April, shortly before the bill passed, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, said the legislation was an "essential part" of fighting fake news and hate speech. 

[...] Over 170 academics signed a letter saying the legislation had been fast-tracked without proper input from "key civil society actors."

The law is "likely to have a chilling effect on freedom of expression and academic freedom in Singapore", they said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The FBI is easing up a bit on its hardline stance against paying ransomware demands.

The Bureau has posted an updated version of the guidance it offers for companies on how to handle ransomware demands with a section discussing the option of paying the hackers to get data decrypted.

In short, the FBI still says that companies should not cave to hacker demands and pay to have their data unlocked, but the bureau acknowledges that paying is an option.

"Paying ransoms emboldens criminals to target other organizations and provides an alluring and lucrative enterprise to other criminals," the FBI's guidance reads.

"However, the FBI understands that when businesses are faced with an inability to function, executives will evaluate all options to protect their shareholders, employees, and customers."

[...] In other words; it's not advisable to pay ransomware demands, but you won't get in any trouble if you do.

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