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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Inside your gut, a quiet battle is raging among many bacteria competing for survival. A new study suggests how some gut bacteria might acquire a defensive arsenal against a type of toxic assault waged by their neighboring microbes.

Researchers at the University of Washington wanted to understand what forces drive the composition and ecology of the microbe collections that live in people's guts. The state of the human gut microbiome is critical to aspects of health and disease.

"Diet and immune response are not enough to explain the constituents of their gut microbiome," the project scientists said. The victors of struggles and hostilities among micro-organisms attempting to reside in the gut may contribute to the makeup of that microbial community.

[...] Bacteria have many ways of antagonizing their own or other species, these scientists noted. A group of prevalent gut bacteria, from the order Bacteroidales, have a secretion mechanism to inject toxic proteins into bacteria that crowd too close. At the same time, they keep themselves safe from their own or their kin cells' poisons by carrying specific immunity factors that neutralize the toxins.

In the current study, the researchers found that several of the Bacteroides species that populate the human gut have acquired sizable interbacterial defense gene clusters. These encode for large arrays of immunity determinants that neutralize the direct hit of toxins from their competitors. The clusters have features that suggest they are actively acquiring new immunity genes as new threats are encountered.

[...] Based on their observations, the scientists think these immunity genes have an adaptive role because they help these bacteria overcome toxic hits from their B. fragilis assailants. They see this shielding effect during growth in Petri dishes in their labs and when they introduced the bacteria carrying these genes into the guts of mice.

The researchers then asked if similar orphan immunity genes protect against other toxins produced in the gut, in addition to those delivered by B. fragilis. This led to the discovery of a second set of orphan immunity gene clusters that are widespread among Bacteroides species in the gut. These clusters contain genes predicted to guard against diverse toxins made by a range of different species, not just other Bacteroides. A second striking feature of this second kind of immunity gene cluster is that it shows signs of recent new gene acquisition.

The scientists concluded that obtaining and maintaining orphan immunity genes clusters is a common way for gut bacteria to try to fend off interbacterial assaults and sustain their species' or strain's presence in the human gut microbiome.

Journal Reference:

Benjamin D. Ross, Adrian J. Verster, Matthew C. Radey, Danica T. Schmidtke, Christopher E. Pope, Lucas R. Hoffman, Adeline M. Hajjar, S. Brook Peterson, Elhanan Borenstein, Joseph D. Mougous. Human gut bacteria contain acquired interbacterial defence systems^[$]. Nature, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1708-z

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute first in U.S. to use deep brain stimulation to fight opioid addiction

The West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute and WVU Medicine, today (Nov. 5) announced the launch of a first-in-the-U.S. clinical trial using deep brain stimulation for patients suffering from treatment-resistant opioid use disorder.

Funded through a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the clinical trial is led by principal investigator Ali Rezai, M.D., executive chair of the RNI, and a multidisciplinary team of neurosurgical, psychiatric, neuroscience, and other experts.

The team successfully implanted a Medtronic DBS device in the addiction and reward center of the brain. The trial's first participant is a 33-year-old man, who has struggled with substance use disorder, specifically excessive opioid and benzodiazepine use, for more than a decade with multiple overdoses and relapses.

[...] "Our team at the RNI is working hard to find solutions to help those affected by addiction," Dr. Rezai said. "Addiction is a brain disease involving the reward centers in the brain, and we need to explore new technologies, such as the use of DBS, to help those severely impacted by opioid use disorder."

Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple wants affordable housing in California—but laws stand in the way

Apple has pledged $2.5 billion to help address California's affordable-housing crisis, the company announced on Monday. In recent years, the San Francisco Bay Area has become the most expensive housing market in America. Los Angeles also suffers from housing costs far above the national average.

Apple's $2.5 billion package includes several different initiatives. Apple will offer a $1 billion line of credit to organizations building housing for low-income people.

[...] Apple's commitment follows on the heels of similar announcements by other technology giants:

• In January, Microsoft said it would provide $500 million in grants and loans to promote affordable housing in the Seattle area and aid the homeless.
• In June, Google announced a $1 billion initiative, including $750 million worth of Google-owned land, to support the development of at least 20,000 new housing units "at all income levels" in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• In October, Facebook unveiled its own initiative to offer $1 billion in grants and loans to support the construction of 20,000 housing units in the region.

Apple's initiative is larger than the other programs and appears to be more focused on low-income housing.

But there are some problems that can't be immediately solved with money:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Anyone running Chrome will want to update and restart their browser in order to make sure they have the latest build, as usual. Google has patched a bunch of flaws including a use-after-free() vulnerability (CVE-2019-13720) that was being actively exploited in the wild against victims. Make sure you're running version 78.0.3904.87 or higher for Windows, Mac, and Linux to be safe.

More technical details are here: essentially, a malicious JavaScript file on a webpage can exploit the vulnerability to potentially gain arbitrary code execution and install spyware and other horrible stuff on the computer. Kaspersky reckons the flaw was abused in an attempt to infect Chrome-using visitors of a Korean-language news website, in a campaign dubbed Operation WizardOpium.

We hope you've all patched your Windows systems for the BlueKeep RDP flaw, which can be exploited to achieve remote-code execution on vulnerable machines. It appears Monero-mining malware is spreading among un-patched boxes via the security flaw. Microsoft patched the bug way back in May.

Marcus Hutchins, with help from Kevin Beaumont, has detailed the spread of the BlueKeep-exploiting nasty here for Kryptos Logic.

All the more reason to ensure you're patched.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

These Machines Can Put You in Jail. Don't Trust Them.

A million Americans a year are arrested for drunken driving, and most stops begin the same way: flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror, then a battery of tests that might include standing on one foot or reciting the alphabet.

What matters most, though, happens next. By the side of the road or at the police station, the drivers blow into a miniature science lab that estimates the concentration of alcohol in their blood. If the level is 0.08 or higher, they are all but certain to be convicted of a crime.

But those tests — a bedrock of the criminal justice system — are often unreliable, a New York Times investigation found. The devices, found in virtually every police station in America, generate skewed results with alarming frequency, even though they are marketed as precise to the third decimal place.

Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have thrown out more than 30,000 breath tests in the past 12 months alone, largely because of human errors and lax governmental oversight. Across the country, thousands of other tests also have been invalidated in recent years.

The machines are sensitive scientific instruments, and in many cases they haven't been properly calibrated, yielding results that were at times 40 percent too high. Maintaining machines is up to police departments that sometimes have shoddy standards and lack expertise. In some cities, lab officials have used stale or home-brewed chemical solutions that warped results. In Massachusetts, officers used a machine with rats nesting inside.

[...] Technical experts have found serious programming mistakes in the machines' software. States have picked devices that their own experts didn't trust and have disabled safeguards meant to ensure the tests' accuracy.

[...] Yet the tests have become all but unavoidable. Every state punishes drivers who refuse to take one when ordered by a police officer.

I strongly suggest reading the entire article. Breath-taking and sobering is an understatement.

Also at CNET

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

When researchers reanalysed the gold-standard data set of the early universe, they concluded that the cosmos must be "closed," or curled up like a ball. Most others remain unconvinced.

A provocative paper published today in the journal Nature Astronomy argues that the universe may curve around and close in on itself like a sphere, rather than lying flat like a sheet of paper as the standard theory of cosmology predicts. The authors reanalysed a major cosmological data set and concluded that the data favours a closed universe with 99% certainty — even as other evidence suggests the universe is flat.

The data in question — the Planck space telescope's observations of ancient light called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — "clearly points towards a closed model," said Alessandro Melchiorri of Sapienza University of Rome. He co-authored the new paper with Eleonora di Valentino of the University of Manchester and Joseph Silk, principally of the University of Oxford. In their view, the discordance between the CMB data, which suggests the universe is closed, and other data pointing to flatness represents a "cosmological crisis" that calls for "drastic rethinking."

What Shape Is the Universe?

In your opinion, which shape is more likely ?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

— The United States House of Representatives passed a bill tonight that would put America's small business owners' personally identifiable information at unprecedented risk and cost them billions of dollars and millions of hours in paperwork. The Corporate Transparency Act of 2019 (H.R. 2513), which passed the House 249-173 attempts to shift a responsibility from big banks to America's smallest businesses, saddling them with an additional 131.7 million hours of paperwork at a cost of $5.7 billion over the first 10 years.

"The House today not only shouldered millions of small business owners with a tremendous compliance burden but put their personally identifiable information at serious risk," said NFIB President & CEO Juanita D. Duggan. "The reporting requirements and devastating financial penalties will affect only small businesses, from farmers to franchisees to the mom-and-pop retail shop down the street. It is a big-government solution in search of a small-business problem, and we will not cease our efforts to stand up for small businesses against this serious threat."

The Corporate Transparency Act of 2019 is legislation that would require only those small corporations and limited liability companies with 20 or fewer employees to complete and submit annual paperwork which includes the personally identifiable information of each business owner to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network upon the creation of the business and periodically for the life of the business. Failure to comply is a federal crime with civil penalties up to $10,000 and criminal penalties of up to three years in prison.

https://www.nfib.com/content/press-release/homepage/house-deals-blow-to-millions-of-small-businesses-by-passing-corporate-transparency-act/

While everyone is distracted by "impeachment", this is what the government is doing.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2513
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/proposed-corporate-transparency-act-2019-would-require-corporations-and-limited

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

System administrator and former ski instructor, Albert Valbuena, has posted a table with accompanying analysis comparing several of the BSDs against Illumos and Linux. Among the topics in the analysis are licensing, how licensing is abused by companies, benchmarking, and of course a comparison of how various features are or aren't implemented across the spectrum.

The writing of this piece comes from the annoyance I get from reading about the prominence of Linux (the kernel) in almost all the computing spaces. And since electronic devices are gaining relevance in our daily lives and society in general this question of prominence of not just Linux but 'X' gains importance too.

More specifically this writing comes after reading someone who has participated in relevant software which is in a gazillion people's pocket. In a very unfortunate reply to the question: 'What are the advantages Linux has over BSD now?' the individual in question (which I'd like to preserve his identity) replied something close to (I do paraphrase): Linux receives much more investment from companies and therefore more paid developers are in it, plus BSD's feature parity with that of Linux doesn't hold.

This is mainstream opinion. Linux is better than anything else and money is poured in constantly, more than in other platforms. And aside this is not true, this is not based in facts but on feelings. Most GNU/Linux distributions are very average on many aspects. The fact they run on many servers on this planet and many developers work on them, doesn't make them better than 'X'. They are popular but that's it.

The individual in question did not, because he could not, point to relevant feature differences bettween the two operating systems.

Now go back to the top of this article and start checking features in a specific OS and start comparing, from that fastly written, from the top of my head, chart. Have fun doing that.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_yellow

Amazon blames 'error' for blocking Nintendo resellers from listing products

Amazon Marketplace sellers who deal in new, used, and refurbished Nintendo products woke up to a peculiar notice yesterday: without warning, Amazon was telling third-party sellers that they could no longer list Nintendo products of any kind without seeking approval. The policy change appeared to affect both Nintendo games and Nintendo hardware like 3DS handhelds. At first blush, it looked like two companies had stuck a so-called brand gating deal, common in e-commerce and designed to restrict third-party sellers who may traffic in counterfeits.

After a day of silence, Amazon says the email notifying Nintendo resellers of the apparent policy change was a mistake. "Yesterday's email was sent in error and all impacted listings were reinstated within hours," a company spokesperson now tells The Verge. Despite Amazon's claim that all listings were reinstated, a forum thread filled with affected Amazon Marketplace sellers has been active for the last 24 hours. It's unclear how many sellers were affected, and whether Amazon has communicated the error to them.

Initially, the policy change looked quite similar to the type of brand gating deals Amazon has struck with Apple and other companies in the past. Those deals have had the effect of kicking off all but the largest third-party sellers from an e-commerce platform, ostensibly as a tool for counting down on counterfeit products. (Nike is another big-name Amazon partner in this regard.) But dozens of legitimate third-party Nintendo sellers were saying they were being cut off from the most lucrative US marketplace for selling online goods without any explanation and without any guidelines for how to proceed.

Amazon now says it has reinstated all Nintendo resellers' listings

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a recent development of the story about wood ants trapped in a post-Soviet nuclear weapon bunker in Poland, scientists, led by Prof. Wojciech Czechowski, with the decisive contribution of Dr. István Maák, both from the Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, deduced that the "colony" (in quotation marks because only workers were found), while lacking other food, had to survive on the corpses of imprisoned nestmates. By using an experimentally installed boardwalk, the ants were helped to get through the ventilation pipe that led out of the bunker and back to their maternal nest on the top.

The ants were discovered in 2013 thanks to a yearly campaign set to count hibernating bats in the same bunker. The scientific report was published in 2016 also in Journal of Hymenoptera Research. At that time, the scientists estimated the presence of at least several hundred thousand workers, arguably close to a million. The insects ended up in this situation as a result of large numbers of wood ants continuously falling down a ventilation pipe to never return to their nest on top of the bunker. Several years later, the "colony" still appeared to be thriving, despite being trapped in a confined space with no light, heat and obvious source of food.

In the newly published paper, the scientists sought out whether while lacking alternative food, the wood ants would consume the dead bodies of their conspecifics that were accumulating on the bunker floor. In nature, a similar behaviour occurs frequently during spring, when protein food is scarce. These are the so-called "ant wars", which serve to set the boundaries of the territories of neighbouring conspecific colonies of wood ants, while simultaneously providing food in the form of the fresh corpses of the numerous victims.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Google patched last month an Android bug that can let hackers spread malware to a nearby phone via a little-known Android OS feature called NFC beaming.

NFC beaming works via an internal Android OS service known as Android Beam. This service allows an Android device to send data such as images, files, videos, or even apps, to another nearby device using NFC (Near-Field Communication) radio waves, as an alternative to WiFi or Bluetooth.

Typically, apps (APK files) sent via NFC beaming are stored on disk and a notification is shown on screen. The notification asks the device owner if he wants to allow the NFC service to install an app from an unknown source.

But, in January this year, a security researcher named Y. Shafranovich discovered that apps sent via NFC beaming on Android 8 (Oreo) or later versions would not show this prompt. Instead, the notification would allow the user to install the app with one tap, without any security warning.

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/android-bug-lets-hackers-plant-malware-via-nfc-beaming/

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

University of Sussex researchers have developed an adhesive that releases in the presence of a magnetic field.

In a new research paper, published by the European Polymer Journal, [Dr. Barnaby Greenland, Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry, working in conjunction with Stanelco RF Technologies Ltd and Prof Wayne Hayes at the University of Reading] describe a new type of adhesive which contains tiny particles of metal. When passed through an alternating electromagnetic field, the glue melts and products simply fall apart.

The adhesive works with plastic, wood, glass and metal and in terms of strength, is comparable to those currently used in industry.

Dr. Greenland said: "In as little as 30 seconds, we can unstick items using a relatively weak magnetic field.

Relatively little residue remains making recycling easier and the magnetic field levels required are low and safe to be around.

In principle, the formula could be applied to any thermal adhesive making it an innovation which could be incorporated into industry relatively easily.

Dr. Greenland said: "In essence, we could have a big conveyor belt of products going through a magnetic field where they enter fully assembled, and come out the other end completely dismantled.

This technique eliminates the need for harsh chemicals that are generally required to disassemble adhesives currently.

Journal Reference
Sara Salimi et al. Composite polyurethane adhesives that debond-on-demand by hysteresis heating in an oscillating magnetic field^[$], European Polymer Journal (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.eurpolymj.2019.109264

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Police Scotland has unveiled a new aerial drone system to help in searches for missing and vulnerable people.

The remotely-piloted aircraft system (RPAS) can see things we can't to try to work out where people are.

It uses advanced cameras and neural computer networks to spot someone it is looking for - from "a speck" up to 150 metres away.

Its recognition software is compact enough to be run on a phone, with the technology learning as it goes.

"The drone itself has very special sensors on it," said Insp Nicholas Whyte, of Police Scotland's air support unit.

"There's a very highly-powered optical camera which can allow us to see things quite clearly from a good height. Also, there's a thermal imaging sensor which detects heat.

"We're there to find people. People who need our help or people who are lost."

The system is the result of a collaboration involving Police Scotland, the technology multinational Thales and the University of the West of Scotland (UWS).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD Custom Power Plan Boosts Turbo Speeds Of Ryzen 3000 CPUs By 250MHz, Up To 4.6GHz Now Possible On Ryzen 9 3900X!

Here is something you don't see every day: 1usmus, an AMD Ryzen developer and author of DRAM Calculator for Ryzen, has revealed a new power plan that nets an average increase of 200-250MHz on AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors (including the upcoming Threadripper 3000 series based on the sRTX4 socket). This is absolutely insane considering turbo clocks are usually pretty much fixed across processors and AMD users will suddenly be able to get much higher performance per dollar for parts that they have already purchased.

[...] [According] to 1usmus, the mod is currently working the best on dies with at least two CCDs (i.e. more than 8 cores) such as the Ryzen 3900 and 3950X while others will notice "positive gains". This means that you can expect even higher performance boosts on the upcoming Threadripper series which features even more than two CCDs.

The AMD developer states that he has sent an official recommendation to AMD and hopes it will be made part of the official stack soon enough. Considering AMD has always been very historically open to suggestions and improvements I won't be surprised to see this upgrade rolled out officially soon enough (maybe as a setting in the control panel?).

Here is the interesting part however, the processor actually increases in energy efficiency with this new power plan. 1usmus has achieved this by using an optimized load balancer approach. While AMD's official stack loads up bad cores (cores which may not boost as high), the custom stack loads up the best cores, allowing for higher boosts and an increased power efficiency curve. The stock AMD stack also uses multiple cores with an uneven distribution of load while as 1usmus' custom plan utilizes only two "good" cores.

1usmus Custom Power Plan for Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 Processors

Original Submission

soylent_yellow wrote in with a story which was the inspiration for:

Brian Krebs has an interesting story about NCR barring both Mint and QuickBooks last month during a period of high account takeover activity.

Banking industry giant NCR Corp. [NYSE: NCR] late last month took the unusual step of temporarily blocking third-party financial data aggregators Mint and QuickBooks Online from accessing Digital Insight, an online banking platform used by hundreds of financial institutions. That ban, which came in response to a series of bank account takeovers in which cybercriminals used aggregation sites to surveil and drain consumer accounts, has since been rescinded. But the incident raises fresh questions about the proper role of digital banking platforms in fighting password abuse.

[...] In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, NCR said that on Friday, Oct. 25, the company notified Digital Insight customers "that the aggregation capabilities of certain third-party product were being temporarily suspended."

"The notification was sent while we investigated a report involving a single user and a third-party product that aggregates bank data," reads their statement, which was sent to customers on Oct. 29. After confirming that the incident was contained, NCR restored connectivity that is used for account aggregation. "As we noted, the criminals are getting aggressive and creative in accessing tools to access online information, NCR continues to evaluate and proactively defend against these activities.""