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takyon writes:

Luxembourg expands its space resources vision

Étienne Schneider, deputy prime minister of Luxembourg, frequently tells the story of how he got interested in building a space resources industry in the country. His efforts to diversify the country's economy several years ago led to a meeting with Pete Worden, at the time the director of NASA's Ames Research Center and a proponent of many far-reaching space concepts. During an Oct. 22 panel discussion at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Washington, he recalled Worden advocating for commercial space: "Why shouldn't you go for space mining activities?"

"When he explained all this to me, I thought two things," Schneider said. "First of all, what did the guy smoke before coming into the office? And second, how do I get him out of here?"

He eventually bought into Worden's vision, starting a space resources initiative that attracted companies to the country while enacting a space resources law like that in the United States. By the beginning of 2019, though, it looked like it might all be a bad trip. The two major startups in that industry, Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, had been acquired by other companies with no interest in space resources. Worse, the Planetary Resources deal wiped out an investment of 12 million euros Luxembourg made in the startup.

Schneider is undaunted by those setbacks as he continues work to make Luxembourg a hotbed of entrepreneurial space, a scope that has expanded beyond, but has not abandoned, space resources. During the IAC, the country's year-old space agency signed an agreement with NASA to explore potential cooperation, building on an agreement Luxembourg signed with the U.S. Commerce Department in May. Just before the conference, Luxembourg announced it would partner with the European Space Agency on a space resources center in the country.

The article includes an interview with Schneider.

Previously: Luxembourg Announces Investment in Asteroid Mining

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canopic jug writes:

Web pioneer, standards activist, and co-founder of the Pirate Party of Norway, Håkon Wium Lie, writes that not only has the Norwegian public's access to its own written laws been re-confirmed but that his project has been credited for bringing the court around to that decision. Håkon has been leading the work to publish Norwegian law online since 1994 and the right to print the law goes back to the early 1800s and the Norwegian constitution. However, in 2018 he and his project were sued by a private foundation wishing to block that right.

We have fabulous news! The Norwegian government has announced an effort to give the public access to court decisions – and credited the rettspraksis.no project for being the inspiration!

As inspiration, Frølich refers to the rrettspraksis.no project ... which published court decisions freely on the web. Two of the volunteer behind the project, Håkon Wium Lie and Fredrik Ljone, were sued by Lovdata and finally lost in the Supreme Court.
—Their case was idealistic, and they tried to make it happen by themselves. They finally lost in the Supreme Court, but won my and many others' hearts. Their principles were clearly right, says Frølich.

This is a stunning development in a case that could easily have ended up with two people being sued and silenced by a mighty monopolist. Support from our fellow citizens, combined with our strong beliefs in public access to public information made us fight the lawsuit rather than back down. As a result, we liberated 166 years on Norwegian Supreme Court decisions. But the Supreme Court itself barred us from publishing decisions from 2003-2008. More on that below.

Earlier on SN:
Court Bites Håkon Wium Lie Over Public Domain Norwegian Court Decisions (2018)

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

FTC kicks feet through ash pile that once was Cambridge Analytica with belated verdict

The US Federal Trade Commission has issued what looks to be a largely symbolic ruling against the remnants of data-harvesting marketers Cambridge Analytica.

In a unanimous 5-0 ruling (PDF) issued on Friday, the trade body declared that the defunct British marketing intelligence operation ran afoul of laws against deceptive business practices and was in violation of the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework.

The findings stem from the FTC's July complaint filing against Cambridge Analytica, alleging that the political marketing company lied to Facebook users when it pitched its GSRApp as a "personality test" that would not collect or sell identifiable information.

In reality, Cambridge Analytica was found to have collected personal information on tens of millions of people and then used that data to train algorithms for specifically-targeted campaign ads. That, the FTC says, was definitely not legal.

[...] Not that any of this will mean much in the grand scheme of things. Cambridge Analytica was shut down as a going concern last year, and its CEO and App Developer settled their involvement back in July.

Still, the ruling makes it official record that Cambridge Analytica broke the law and was subject to legal action as a result.

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

WinRAR Nukes Pirate Keygen But is a "Good Guy" Towards Regular Users - TorrentFreak

Perhaps the most curious thing about this ubiquitous tool is that while WinRAR gives the impression of being free, technically it is paid software. Users get a 40-day period to trial the tool and then, if they like it, they can part with cash in order to obtain a license.

However, WinRAR never times out and relies completely on users’ inclination to pay for something that doesn’t need to be paid for to retain functionality. As a result, WinRAR has huge numbers of pirate users yet the company does pretty much nothing to stop them.

Those who do pay for a license get rid of a ‘nag’ screen and gain a couple of features that most people don’t need. But for pirates (and the tool is massively popular with pirates), an unlicensed WinRAR still does what it’s supposed to, i.e unpacking all those pesky compressed pirate releases.

Of course, there are people out there who would still rather not pay a penny to use a piece of software that is essentially free to use. So, in order to obtain a ‘license’ and get rid of the nag screen, they use a piece of software called a ‘keygen’ that generates one for them.

[...]“[I]n the field of private users we have always been the ‘good guys’ by not starting legal actions against every private user using it beyond the trial period, thus we also don’t understand the need of pirated license keys for WinRAR,” the company concludes.

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RandomFactor writes:

A data entry error in the Utah State Tax Commission office for Wasatch County caused the value of a home to be over-valued by close to ~$1 Billion dollars.

In May, an error was made which recorded a house built in 1978 as having a value of more than $987 million in the 2019 tax rolls.

In reality, the home should only have had a 2019 taxable value of $302,000.

Wasatch County Assessor Maureen 'Buff' Griffiths told officials last month a staff member may have dropped a phone on a keyboard. Griffiths said the 'horrific' and 'bizarre' mistake has resulted in a countywide overvaluation of more than $6 million

Wasatch county is sparsely populated with a population of 23,530 in its 1,206 square mile area (averaging 19 individuals per square mile). This single mistake flowed through the system causing the county office to significantly overestimate revenue and increase budgets upward, with the consequence that

the blunder has since produced revenue shortfalls in five taxing entities, with budgets already approved.

In Wasatch County's budget, the shortfall is more than $1 million. The Wasatch County Fire District will be short about $253,000, the Wasatch County Parks District will be short about $138,000, and Central Utah Water will be short about $217,000, according to a tax correction notice circulated by the county.

But the biggest blow is to Wasatch County School District, which is short about $4.4 million.

Perhaps unsurprisingly,

Taxpayers may now have to pay for the shortfall, with tax increases over the next three years

County Manager Mike Davis indicates that existing checks should have caught the error, but that in the future they would 'do a better job.'

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

Designers rendered images of flying car patents from the last century - Business Insider

"Blade Runner" predicted that in 2019 we'd zoom around Los Angeles in flying cars, but that hasn't quite worked out. Although this forecast hasn't manifested in actual vehicles beyond basic prototypes, there's been no shortage of optimistic inventors eager to throw together their own designs. 

Scottish leasing comparison startup LeaseFetcher charged creative studio NeoMam with the task of bringing patent sketches to life with realistic renderings. The patents span from nearly 100 years ago in 1921 to as recently as 2016.

Flying cars no longer seem like the clear vision of the future that they once were. Waymo, Uber,Tesla, and other companies have instead turned their efforts towards self-driving technology, but these renderings offer a look at how people in the past envisioned the future. Scroll to see drawings from patents, and how designers rendered them.

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RandomFactor writes:

CIMON 2 (Crew Interactive MObile companioN 2) is a free-floating spherical robot designed to recognize emotions of astronauts, that strongly resembles an oversized Tamagotchi.

"The overall goal is to really create a true companion. The relationship between an astronaut and CIMON is really important," Matthias Biniok, the lead architect for CIMON 2, said.

"It's trying to understand if the astronaut is sad, is he angry, joyful and so on."

CIMON 2 is a successor to CIMON, launched in 2018, however "CIMON 2 will be more sociable with crew members."

In times of conflict or disagreement among astronauts, one of CIMON's most important purposes would be to serve as "an objective outsider that you can talk to if you're alone, or could actually help let the group collaborate again," he said.

The betazoid beach ball was included in SpaceX's 19th resupply mission to the space station which launched on December 5th.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

'Randomizers' Are Breathing New Life Into Old Games

Like a longtime partner or a favorite pair of socks, there's comfort to be found in revisiting a familiar game from your youth. There's a sense of ease knowing what lies inside each treasure chest, which bush an enemy will spring from, or the secret tactic that vanquishes a foe with ease. That calming intimacy makes games like these an easy nostalgic choice when you just want to take a load off.

But what if you want to add some spice back to that familiar experience? After playing a classic game to the point of memorization, how do you recapture the sense of adventure and discovery you experienced the first time you played it? A small but growing community in the retro emulation scene is aiming to answer those questions with a class of mods and hacks called "randomizers."

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

H-1B visa: New registration system will start in March

A new electronic registration system intended to streamline the expensive and cumbersome H-1B application process will be in place for the upcoming application season, with an earlier deadline, the federal government said Friday afternoon.

Instead of submitting a detailed and labor-intensive initial H-1B application for each foreign worker a company wants to hire, employers will instead submit registration documents requiring only basic information about the company and worker, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration said.

The registration period, for H-1B applications subject to the annual 85,000 cap on new visas, will run from March 1 through March 20, the agency said.

If enough registrations come in to trigger the H-1B lottery, the registrations will be selected by lottery, according to the agency.

“Only those with selected registrations will be eligible to file H-1B cap-subject petitions,” the agency said.

Under the previous system, employers would mail in lengthy applications, which typically cost thousands of dollars in preparation costs and filing fees, during a five-day window starting April 1.

Now, employers will pay $10 for each registration, and only pay application fees if their registration is selected in the lottery and they become eligible to apply.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Jury sides with Elon Musk in "pedo guy" defamation case

A Los Angeles federal jury has found Elon Musk not liable for defamation in a lawsuit brought by British caver Vernon Unsworth. Musk dubbed Unsworth a "pedo guy" in a tweet last year, but argued in court that he meant this as a generic insult—not as an accusation that Unsworth was a pedophile.

"My faith in humanity is restored," Musk reportedly said on his way out of court.

Musk and Unsworth have been trading insults since last July, when Unsworth mocked a miniature submarine SpaceX engineers created to help rescue a dozen boys trapped in a cave in Thailand (it didn't arrive in time to be useful). In an interview with CNN, Unsworth said that Musk should "stick his submarine where it hurts."

Musk responded with a tweet labeling Unsworth a "pedo guy" and vowing to prove that the submarine would have been able to squeeze through the narrowest passages in the cave.

Musk's defamation win may reset legal landscape for social media

The victory by Tesla Inc's outspoken chief executive over a Twitter message describing a British cave explorer as "pedo guy" has raised the bar for what amounts to libel online, according to some legal experts.

Musk defended his comments as trivial taunts made on a social media platform that he argued everyone views as a world of unfiltered opinion, which is protected as free speech, rather than statements of fact.

"I think this verdict reflects that there is a feeling that internet tweets and chats are more like casual conversation whether you call it opinion or rhetoric or hyperbole and should not be punished in a lawsuit," said Chip Babcock, a lawyer who defends against defamation lawsuits.

Several other attorneys who specialize in defamation cases privately expressed surprise at the outcome of what they viewed as a strong case for the cave explorer, Vernon Unsworth. They attributed it to Musk's fame and the perceived youthfulness of the jury.

But they also agreed it would shift the legal landscape, undercutting the cases that would have seemed viable before the trial while defendants would use it to try to reduce possible settlement values.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

This Brainless, Single-Celled Blob Can Make Complex 'Decisions'

Tiny, brainless blobs might be able to make decisions: A single-celled organism can "change its mind" to avoid going near an irritating substance, according to new findings.

Over a century ago, American zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings conducted an experiment on a relatively large, trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism called Stentor roeselii. When Jennings released an irritating carmine powder around the organisms, he observed that they responded in a predictable pattern, he wrote in his findings, which he published in a text called "Behavior of the Lower Organisms" in 1906.

[...] In the decades that followed, however, other experiments failed to replicate these findings, and so they were discredited. But recently, a group of researchers at Harvard University decided to re-create the old experiment as a side project. "It was a completely off-the-books, skunkworks project," senior author Jeremy Gunawardena, a systems biologist at Harvard, said in a statement. "It wasn't anyone's day job."

[...] "They do the simple things first, but if you keep stimulating, they 'decide' to try something else," Gunawardena said. "S. roeselii has no brain, but there seems to be some mechanism that, in effect, lets it 'change its mind' once it feels like the irritation has gone on too long."

A Complex Hierarchy of Avoidance Behaviors in a Single-Cell Eukaryote (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.059) (DX)

Original Submission

barbara hudson writes:

The Atlantic reports aging causes men to lose Y chromosomes.

Researchers have found men who are missing the Y chromosome in as many as 87 percent of cells in their blood.

The Y chromosome is the smallest one, and errors make it more likely that it will fail to replicate during cell division. When this happens, future generations of those cells also no longer have a Y chromosome.

The ongoing loss of Y chromosomes correlates with increases in cancer.

In [samples of] blood, loss of the Y chromosome in some cells is the most commonly observed mosaicism, but there are countless other examples. In women, some blood cells lose one X chromosome. Other subsets of blood cells might gain a mutation in just one gene, lose only a small bit of a chromosome, or even gain an entire chromosome. (Red blood cells don't carry DNA at all, so this applies only to white blood cells.)

Perry and his colleagues also wanted to understand why the Y chromosome disappears in some men but not others. They looked into whether certain genetic variants on other chromosomes predisposed men one way or another, and they ended up finding 156 variants linked to Y-chromosome loss. Many are also near cancer-susceptibility genes, and having these same variants was correlated with higher risk of prostate and testicular cancer in men—as well as glioma, kidney, and other cancers in both men and women.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Mozilla's revenue in 2018 fell by nearly 20% compared to the year prior, and for the first time expenses outweighed income, the organization said in its annual financial report.

The nonprofit behind Firefox implied that the apparent downturn was misleading because of the comparison to record revenue of the year before. "2017 was an outlier, due in part to changes in the search revenue deal that was negotiated that year," Mozilla said in the "State of Mozilla 2018" report published on its website.

Mozilla also asserted that the revenue decline would not affect its work. "Despite the year-over-year change, Mozilla remains in a strong financial position with cash reserves to support continued innovation, partnerships and diversification of the Firefox product lines," the organization wrote.

Most of the $451 million in revenue the Mozilla Foundation recognized in 2018 came from royalty payments, with the bulk of that produced by deals struck for Firefox's default search spot. Mozilla Foundation is the nonprofit that in turn runs Mozilla Corp., the commercial organization that actually develops and maintains Firefox.

According to Mozilla's 2018 financial statement_[0] released Nov. 21, the $451 million in overall revenue was $111 million less than in 2017, a plummet of 19.8%. The statement marked the first time Mozilla reported a year-over-year revenue decline in the 14 years that Computerworld has tracked the organization's financial health.

Of total revenue, $430 million, or about 95%, came from royalty payments. As always with Mozilla's revenue, the greatest portion of what the organization categorized as royalties came from search contracts. In 2018, those search deals accounted for 91% of all royalty revenue, Mozilla said, representing about $391 million. That was a whopping $110 million less than in 2017, a 22% decline. As with revenue, the search deal total was the first-ever search revenue slump in Mozilla's history.

Mozilla did not explain the massive decline in search revenue, other than the brief reference to 2017's number and how it was an "outlier."

⁰Bogus link. 2018 audited financial statement (pdf).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

KringleCon returns by popular demand, with last year’s inaugural conference viewed more than 87,000 times on YouTube. As such, it’s believed to be one of the largest virtual cybersecurity conferences to date, and SANS hope to welcome even more attendees in 2019. It also has an overarching storyline: last year, an evil hacker locked Santa’s castle, trapping conference attendees inside the building. This year, the hacker is trying to hack KringleCon to stop the event taking place entirely.

You can watch last year’s KringleCon and all previous Holiday Hack Challenges here.

With well over 20,000 people expected to participate worldwide this year, KringleCon and the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge are prime examples of how cybersecurity education can be made fun, and can engage a whole new generation of cyber-professionals as well as advance the skills of established pros. Allowing participants to learn from experts as well as other community members, the Holiday Hack challenges slowly ramp up in difficulty, with hints, talks, and blogs provided that share tactics that people can directly apply in their jobs.

This year’s Holiday Hack Challenge will also include offensive and defensive machine-learning challenges, and SANS has included more defensive training opportunities to engage a broader audience in the infosec community.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 is 25% faster, comes with mandatory 5G

Today, Qualcomm detailed its new flagship SoC for 2020: the Snapdragon 865. This is going to be the chip that ships in every single high-end Android phone that comes out in 2020, and there's a lot to go over.

Details include speed increases, improvements in camera performance, some android specific enhancements, and 5G related hardware.

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