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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for tortured_old_man

Private property, not productivity, precipitated Neolithic agricultural revolution

Humankind first started farming in Mesopotamia about 11,500 years ago. Subsequently, the practices of cultivating crops and raising livestock emerged independently at perhaps a dozen other places around the world, in what archaeologists call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It's one of the most thoroughly-studied episodes in prehistory—but a new paper in the Journal of Political Economy shows that most explanations for it don't agree with the evidence, and offers a new interpretation.

With farming came a vast expansion of the realm over which private property governed access to valued goods, replacing the forager social norms around sharing food upon acquisition. A common explanation is that farming increased labor productivity, which then encouraged the adoption of private property by providing incentives for the long-term investments required in a farming economy.

"But it's not what the data are telling us", says Santa Fe Institute economist Samuel Bowles, a co-author of the paper. "It is very unlikely that the number of calories acquired from a day's work at the advent of farming made it a better option than hunting and gathering and it could well have been quite a bit worse."

[...] Bowles and co-author Jung-Kyoo Choi, an economist at Kyungpook National University in South Korea, use both evolutionary game theory and archaeological evidence to propose a new interpretation of the Neolithic. Based on their model, a system of mutually recognized private property rights was both a precondition for farming and also a means of limiting costly conflicts among members of a population. While rare among foragers, private property did exist among a few groups of sedentary hunter-gatherers. Among them, farming could have benefited the first adopters because it would have been easier to establish the private possession of cultivated crops and domesticated animals than for the diffuse wild resources on which hunter-gatherers relied.

"It is a lot easier to define and defend property rights in a domesticated cow than in a wild kudu," says Choi. "Farming initially succeeded because it facilitated a broader application of private property rights, not because it lightened the toil of making a living."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Could you taste the difference between cod and other whitefish, such as haddock or hake, if you didn't know what you were eating? The answer may have implications for supporting local fisheries and food sustainability in New England, says UMass Amherst environmental conservation graduate student Amanda Davis.

A research fellow at the UMass Amherst-based Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, Davis is exploring the reactions of UMass Amherst students and staff, born between 1980 and 2000, in a scientific sensory evaluation of five different whitefish sourced straight from the Boston Fish Pier: cod, dogfish, haddock, hake and pollock.

The study, funded by a seed grant from the UMass Amherst Institute for Social Science Research, is designed to explore "name bias" in seafood choices. Davis will present results in January at the winter science meeting of the American Fisheries Society's Southern New England Chapter in Cambridge.

The whitefish study grew out of Davis's interest in promoting local, sustainable seafood in New England. She is director of Our Wicked Fish, a newly founded, Deerfield-based nonprofit that strives to revitalize New England's fishing industry by educating consumers and connecting them with local seafood options.

It might come as a surprise, Davis notes, that despite the storied tradition of New England's fisheries—Cape Cod was named after the once-abundant fish, after all—most seafood offered in the Northeast U.S. today is imported. "We want to change that," Davis says. "How can we get consumers interested in eating whitefish other than cod? Hake, pollock and haddock taste as good and are not as expensive."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Fake Russian Tor browser purloins $40,000 in Bitcoin from dark web shoppers

Researchers from cybersecurity firm ESET have uncovered a malicious version of the Tor browser – the program used to access the dark web – and it's been stealing user's Bitcoin.

According to ESET, the bad actors were able to steal more than $40,000 worth of Bitcoin. But how?

The scammers have been using a trojanized version of an official Tor browser package. The bad browser redirects users to two websites which claim the user's version of Tor is out of date. Researchers say this happens even if the browser is the most up-to-date version.

When a user clicks on the "update" link on the nefarious page, they are redirected to another website where they are told they can download an update.

ESET says these websites and the malicious Tor browser was promoted in 2017 and early 2018 – during the infamous cryptocurrency bull run – on various Russian forums. The fake browser claimed to be the official Russian language version of Tor.

The scammers also used Pastebin accounts to promote their fake Tor websites, and encourage users to download the software to evade government surveillance. The associated Pastebin accounts have been viewed more than 500,000 times.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When scientists and engineers discover new ways to optimize existing materials, it paves the way for innovations that make everything from our phones and computers to our medical equipment smaller, faster, and more efficient.

According to research published today by Nature Journal NPG Asia Materials, a group of researchers -- led by Edwin Fohtung, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute -- have found a new way to optimize nickel by unlocking properties that could enable numerous applications, from biosensors to quantum computing.

They demonstrated that when nickel is made into extremely small, single-crystal nanowires and subjected to mechanical energy, a huge magnetic field is produced, a phenomenon known as giant magnetostriction.

Inversely, if a magnetic field is applied to the material, then the atoms within will change shape. This displacement could be exploited to harvest energy. That characteristic, Fohtung said, is useful for data storage and data harvesting, even biosensors. Though nickel is a common material, its promise in these areas wasn't previously known.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Pixel 4's 'Face Unlock' works even if you're asleep or dead -- and that's a problem

Google's new Pixel 4 smartphone doesn't have a fingerprint sensor. Instead it relies on "Face Unlock," a proprietary facial scanning system similar to the one found in Apple's Face ID. Early reports show a system that works well, perhaps too well, in fact, according to some security experts.

To unlock a Pixel, the operator must hold it up to their face while onboard cameras and sensors go to work scanning their mug for defining characteristics — the distance between your eyes, for example. Once the device is confident it's you, it unlocks and allows you to access the operating system.

With Google's system, according to the BBC, the Pixel's Face Unlock function works even if a user's eyes are closed, a clear and security risk for anyone with a Pixel 4. Using default settings, users who are asleep, or even dead, could unknowingly unlock their phone for others.

According to Google representatives, "Pixel 4 Face Unlock meets the security requirements as a strong biometric." True, but this in and of itself might not be enough. At its launch, Pixel product manager Sherry Lin said, "There are actually only two face [authorization] solutions that meet the bar for being super-secure. So, you know, for payments, that level — it's ours and Apple's."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Researchers find fake WordPress plugins that secretly mine cryptocurrency

Researchers have discovered several malicious WordPress plugins that are being used to surreptitiously mine cryptocurrency by running Linux binary code.

According to the researchers at website security company Sucuri, the plugins are also being used to maintain access to compromised servers. It seems their use has increased in recent months.

Essentially, the components are clones of the legitimate software, which have been altered for illicit purposes, making them relatively easy for hackers to create. Although the plugins' code differs in terms of names, they do have several things in common: they have a similar structure and header comments from the popular backup/restore plugin UpdraftPlus.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956_

Google is in serious trouble, warns top anti-trust lawyer

Seth Bloom, former general counsel to the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and former attorney at the Justice Department Antitrust Division, said Google is "in serious trouble" regarding anti-trust scrutiny from many different places.

Bloom said that the Justice Department took over the FTC investigation of Google, which is rare and a sign of the seriousness of the investigation. Plus, 48 states are investigating Google, and there is scrutiny from both Democrats and Republicans. "It's unique to have such scrutiny from both sides," said Bloom.

His remarks were made during a panel discussion organized by the Save Journalism Project -- founded by laid-off reporters. The activist organization blames Google and Facebook for decimating ad revenues for independent newspapers and magazines, resulting in huge numbers of layoffs and endangering a free press.

"Monopolies are not illegal under our antitrust laws, but exclusionary conduct is illegal," he said. US investigators are likely to follow European anti-trust investigations, which resulted in several massive fines totaling more than $9 billion.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC. for SoyCow1984.

$35B face data lawsuit against Facebook will proceed – TechCrunch

Facebook just lost a battle in its war to stop a $35 billion class action lawsuit regarding alleged misuse of facial recognition data in Illinois. Today it was denied its request for an en banc hearing before the full slate of ninth circuit judges that could have halted the case. Now the case will go to trial unless the Supreme Court intercedes.

The suit alleges that Illinois citizens didn’t consent to having their uploaded photos scanned with facial recognition and weren’t informed of how long the data would be saved when the mapping started in 2011. Facebook could face $1000 to $5000 in penalties per user for 7 million people, which could sum to a maximum of $35 billion.

A three-judge panel of ninth circuit judges rejected Facebook’s motion to dismiss the case and its appeal of the class certification of the plaintiffs back in August. One of those judges said that it “seems likely” that the Facebook facial recognition data could be used to identify them in surveillance footage or even unlock a biometrically secured cell phone. Facebook had originally built the feature to power photo tag suggestions, asking users if it’s them or a particular friend in an untagged photo.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Talking at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona, Alex Cho, president of HP's Personal Systems Business, claimed Intel's supply worries were across a portfolio of products, "not just specific CPUs".

[...] At the same event in the Catalonian capital, Gianfranco Lanci, chief operating officer at Lenovo, branded the lack of chips as a "concern" and a "limitation", saying the global PC market shipments could have grown at 7 to 8 per cent in Q3 if availability had improved, rather than the 4 per cent recorded.

[...] Steve Brazier, CEO at Canalys, said the "short answer is that we don't know [what is causing Intel's shortages]. And they are not telling anybody, so nobody completely knows why. All we can do is speculate that they made a serious software design flaw."

He added: "The interesting thing is the PC vendors do not know, they have no better information than we have. There is no sign of a short-term fix."

Of course, this has played into the hands of Intel nemesis AMD, which Brazier claimed was "now equal or ahead in performance – and it's cheaper". The Register is awaiting CPU market share figures from the analyst.

[...] We are also told that organisations, including financial institutions and cloud providers, are replacing current Intel chips with ones that have Meltdown and Spectre fixes built in.

An Intel spokesperson sent us a lengthy statement: "We continue working to improve the supply-demand balance for our PC customers. We invested an added $1bn in capital to achieve more capacity and flexible supply. As a result, we increased our 14nm capacity by 25 per cent while also ramping 10nm production.

"We've improved our supply every quarter. However, in the first half of 2019 we saw PC customer demand that exceeded our expectations and surpassed third-party forecasts. We are actively working to address the supply-demand challenge, and we expect supply in the second half will be up compared to the first half. We continue to prioritise available output toward the newest generation Intel Core products that support our customers' high-growth segments, and we plan to further increase our output capacity in 2020." ®

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1984.

Wing's delivery drones take flight for the first time in Virginia

Wing's drone delivery service is now live in Virginia. The Alphabet subsidiary is now delivering snacks and health care products to residents of Christiansburg, Virginia, after receiving approval from the government and teaming up with major players like FedEx and Walgreens. Wing says it's the first commercial drone delivery service in the US.

Earlier this year, Wing became one of the first drone operators to be certified as a commercial air carrier by the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing it to deliver goods to people who may live miles away and not in the drone operator's line of sight.

[...] The company says it hopes to replace deliveries that are typically made by car or truck in order to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. It also bills itself as a delivery service for people with limited mobility options. Wing promises deliveries within "minutes" of the orders being placed to customers who live in Christiansburg's "designated delivery zones." And there are no extra fees for the deliveries, a spokesperson said. (If you live in Christiansburg and are interested in opting in, click here to sign up for the waitlist.)

Also at: CNBC and DigitalTrends.

Original Submission

There have been many reports of AirBNB hosts spying on their guests with hidden cameras. This level of perversion has been one upped on a beach in Australia with a custom made device with a camera in a water bottle:

Tourist Michelle Montcourt, from Mexico, said she found the camera while sunbathing at Brighton-Le-Sands Beach in Sydney's south.

St George Police confirmed the bottle was handed into police on Friday and an investigation was underway.

"As the investigation is in its early stages, no further information is available," a spokesman for St George Police said.

She said a man who appeared to be aged in his 30s placed the device, disguised as a San Benedetto water bottle, in the sand behind her. He then ran off when she went to throw the bottle in the bin and noticed the camera.

[...] "I was in Brighton-Le-Sands tanning and noticed a man walk by and place what seemed to be a bottle of water directly behind me," she said.

"I saw it and thought to myself 'I can't believe he left his rubbish on the beach', so I picked it up to throw it away and noticed there was a hidden camera inside.

"He left running when I saw the camera inside the water bottle."

This purpose-made spy cam bottle is an extension of the devices now being used across the globe to discretely record people. Where will it end?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Update (2019/10/19 21:02:00 UTC): Both sodium and fluorine have rebooted. Next up will be beryllium rebooting 1d12h from now. That leaves rebooting of helium 18h later and 3h after that will have boron being rebooted. Again, any impact visible to the community should be minimal. See TMB's note, below. --martyb]

We have just learned that Linode, the provider of SoylentNews' server infrastructure, is planning a number of reboots.

[TMB Note]: This shouldn't mean any downtime for anything user-facing except IRC. There will be a few minutes where the comment counts won't update on the front page but those aren't realtime anyway and a few minutes where subscription updates will be delayed until the server that processes them comes back up.

Recently, we identified a commit to the upstream Linux kernel[1] as the cause of an increase in emergency maintenance on our platform. After implementing, testing, deploying, and gaining confidence in a fix, we are now ready to roll this update out to the remainder of our fleet. We're confident this will resolve the bug and ultimately lessen the amount of unplanned maintenance for your Linodes as a result of this specific issue.

To complete this, we will be performing maintenance on a subset of Linode's host machines. This maintenance will update the underlying infrastructure that Linodes reside on and will not affect the data stored within them.

If you are on an affected host, your maintenance window will be communicated to you via a Support ticket within the next few days. You can prepare your Linode for this maintenance by following our Reboot Survival Guide[2].

During the actual maintenance window, your Linode will be cleanly shut down and will be unavailable while we perform the updates. A two-hour window is allocated, however the actual downtime should be much less. After the maintenance has concluded, each Linode will be returned to its last state (running or powered off).

This status page will be updated once maintenance is complete.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/8/905
[2] https://linode.com/docs/uptime/reboot-survival-guide/

The first server reboot is currently scheduled for Friday, 2019-10-18 at 05:00:00 UTC.

Read on after the fold for more details on the scheduled maintenance dates and times.

Chocolate writes:

When is a shoe not a shoe? When it contains a spring, apparently, according to commentators who are taking offense at shoes worn by marathon winner Eliud Kipchoge being discussed as being potentially performance enhancing to the point that it gives the wearer an unfair advantage. Many sports have limits on what modifications are acceptable to equipment in a competition to ensure the event is fair for all competitors.

Some people believe that the shoe construction[*] provides a clear mechanical advantage which should be disallowed in competition. With people like Lance Armstrong being caught out, is it any wonder more focus will be on other sports in the future?

[*] Tweet by Darren Rovell:

"When a shoe company puts multiple carbon plates in a shoe with cushion between the plates, it is no longer a shoe. It's a spring and a clear mechanical advantage." — Runner @ryanhall3 on Eliud Kipchoge's unreleased Nikes for his sub 2 marathon.

Picture of the shoe with cross-section from the tweet showing the "Zoom Air Bags" and the "Carbon Fiber Plates".

[Editor's Comment: This was not an attempt at setting a record. It would never be recognised as a record - this was known before he even started running - because he had a vehicle pacing him showing a laser plot on the ground before him indicating where he had to be to get under 2 hours, he used 35 other pacemakres who took it in turns to run sections of the route with him, they acknowledged the controversy over the shoes which were worn by Kipchoge and each of the pacemakers, and there were no other competitors. Any of those things would negate a claim that this was a record. The shoes have not, however, been ruled illegal by the sport's governing body. He did the marathon under 2 hours to show that it was possible, not to claim any record. The whole thing was organised under the banner 'There are no limits' and was intended to spur non-athletes into taking up some form of exercise. Nevertheless, nobody else has run the marathon in under 2 hours, with or without similar shoes, and everyone is eligible to go for the record if they wish to do so.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Arctic's Freezer 50 TR Air Cooler w/ RGB for AMD's Threadripper Launched

The manufacturer does not disclose the cooler's rated TDP, but says that it can cool down Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX as well as CPUs 'of 32 cores and beyond'. So as we've seen with some other air coolers of this size (which can handle upwards of 340W) it's a reasonable bet that the 50 TR can dissipate at least 250 W of heat, leaving some additional headroom for overclocking and/or future processors with a higher TDP.

The back of the box says "It is an extremely powerful cooling solution for AMD sTR4 Threadripper® CPU, capable of efficiently and quietly cooling even 32- and 64-core CPUs with a TDP up to 250 W." sTR4 = Socket TR4.

Other leaks suggest that 24-core and 32-core Threadripper models will launch in November, alongside the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, while 48-core and 64-core models will launch in January 2020. Some features, including 8-channel memory support, may require new motherboards.

Here's a speculated lineup of a 24-core 3960X, 32-core 3970X, 48-core 3980X, and 64-core 3990X alongside older models.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Last Monday's blockade of Barcelona's airport by Catalonian indepedence protestors, which delayed over 100 flights, had a technological twist as the Guardian reports:

Tellingly, the airport occupation – with its echoes of the enduring protests in Hong Kong – was not called by the two biggest traditional pro-independence civil society groups, the Catalan National Assembly and Òmnium Cultural. It was the brainchild of a secretive new group called Tsunami Democràtic that is using apps and social media to control and co-ordinate the protests.

TechCrunch has a more in-depth article about the Tsuami Democràtic app and infrastructure. Users need to activate the app with QR codes—displayed at special events—to receive notifications of upcoming protests. The app seems to have taken a lot of inspiration from the Hong Kong protest movement, with a crowd-sourced map dynamically mapping road blocks and police presence in the area.

The group behind the app is described as a "technical elite" of unknown number or identity. Protests are organised (and canceled) by the app administrators with users signing up to attend. It's not clear who is behind, or financially backing the app; Catalonian tech expats, wealthy backers, or independence groups like CDR (Comitès de Defensa de la República) who have organised similar protests in the past.

This isn't the first technological solution for communicating out of sight of the Spanish state, perceived as increasingly authoritarian by some in the independence movement. Whatsapp was used during the 2017 referendum attempt, and Telegram's Messenger has seen a recent surge in Spanish downloads. On Friday, Spain's high court has ordered the Civil Guard to close down Tsunami Democratic's website and social media accounts. As TechCrunch notes:

"For Tsunami Democràtic and Catalonia's independence movement generally this week's protests look to be just the start of a dug-in, tech-fuelled guerrilla campaign of civil disobedience"

The app is currently only available on Android. There is no iOS version as the "politics of the App Store is very restrictive".

Original Submission