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canopic jug writes:

Bows are more accurate, have greater range, and can fire more frequently than spears. They mostly replaced the spear. In many areas where thrown spears were used for a longer time, a lever known as an atlatl was use to add power to the throws. Some Canadian researchers reckon that if bow use, for example, was learned by children using child-sized bows and arrows, then spear use would be learned by children using child-sized spears and atlatls. Now they seem to have found archeological evidence of that in Par-Tee, Oregon, USA where they have uncovered small, child-sized whalebone atlatls.

The Par-Tee atlatls were made during what appear to have been the last few centuries of the widespread use of these weapons on the northern Oregon Coast; they were perhaps employed alongside the newly introduced bow and arrow. Their unusually high abundance at Par-Tee—they are more numerous here than at any other site on the west coast of North America—is difficult to explain. Most atlatls were probably made of wood, and therefore do not survive in most archaeological settings. Although the use of whalebone for atlatls at Par-Tee has facilitated their survival at this location, the reason for the repeated selection of bone for the crafting of these weapons is unknown. The choice to employ whalebone cannot be explained by differential access to this material alone, as bones from these animals could have been found whenever they washed ashore. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the use of whalebone improved the performance of atlatls compared to other types of locally available material. Perhaps this use of whalebone represents unique practices of marking status through the use of the body parts of truly powerful animals. Alternatively, this could have been a means of indicating close relations to, or high regard of, these animals among the inhabitants of Par-Tee, who appear to have sometimes hunted whales.

Source: Learning to use atlatls: equipment scaling and enskilment on the Oregon Coast.

Even just a few hundred years ago, archers had far more skill than the inept fumblings we are used to seeing. Archer Lars Andersen demonstrates archery on another level. (Direct link to Lars Anderson's YouTube page.) His major complaint is lack of strength, so the strength and skill training for that must have historically started in childhood. So why not similarly for spears?

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c0lo writes:

Picked via Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram, the story of a massive electronic vote miscount, luckily paper ballots were available

Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate's zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.

The worse news:

The machines that broke in Northampton County are called the ExpressVoteXL and are made by Election Systems & Software, a major manufacturer of election machines used across the country. The ExpressVoteXL is among their newest and most high-end machines, a luxury "one-stop" voting system that combines a 32-inch touch screen and a paper ballot printer.

The good news was that the chairwoman of the county Republicans realized the numbers made no sense and promptly initiated an investigation. When officials counted the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines, they realized Kassis had narrowly won.

How many trees still need to die until humans learn how to do voting properly?

_{Note: the original story ran on nytimes, but I respect their choice to not let me read their stories with 'Do not track' activated}

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

Feds prescribe $9m cash injection to counter 5G phobias

The federal government has gone on the offensive against a growing anti-5G movement in some communities, freeing-up a cash splash of $9 million over four years to get back on the community relations front foot with “additional scientific research and further public education”.

The move, announced on Monday, comes amid broader government and industry concern that US-style conspiracy theories – which cover topics ranging from public health immunisation, water fluoridation and the electromagnetic radiation – are quickly taking root in some communities.

The proliferation of community based opposition to the rollout of 5G, which is just starting to occur across Australia, is potentially a major headache for the government and telecommunications industry because of its potential disrupt infrastructure renewal and substantially increase costs.

While most anti-5G groups initially muster and organise their actions online, the political trench warfare typically starts at the local government level in the form concerned resident opposition to the construction and placement of new infrastructure.

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

Ads on Facebook are spreading misinformation about anti-HIV drugs

While many are focused on Facebook's unwillingness to curb false political ads, there appears to be another misinformation campaign going unchecked. The Guardian and GLAAD have noted that personal injury law firms continue to run Facebook ads making false claims about the risks of Truvada, a drug meant to reduce the likelihood of HIV transmission. Some float the specters of bone loss and kidney damage despite evidence that the risks of either are "not clinically significant," according to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

GLAAD said it contacted Facebook's public policy team and reached out to five fact-checking agencies, but the social network answered by pointing to a public ad policy page explaining why ads can be removed. In response, GLAAD posted an open letter asking Facebook to remove the ads, with support coming from 50 organizations, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Senator Elizabeth Warren. The advocacy group is buying ads on Facebook to promote the letter among the LGBTQ+ community.

We've asked Facebook for comment.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://tails.boum.org/news/celebrating_10_years/

In 2019, we are especially proud of celebrating with you the 10 years of Tails.

The first release of Tails, back then amnesia, was announced in 2009. Since then we released 98 versions of Tails, which were used more than 25 million times.

Tails is a Linux distribution. It has drawn upon several distributions that came before it including: Knoppix, ELE, Anonym.OS, Incognito, and Amnesia. It includes a full set of applications that are pre-configured to go through Tor.

Basically, if you want to use the internet and are looking for a distribution that leaves as little of a trace as possible of where you are going and where you came from, Tails would be an excellent choice. If you are looking for a recommendation, it was used by: Edward Snowden and journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Micah Lee for the discussion, preparation, and distribution of the leaked NSA documents.

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

Tech industry asks US court to reconsider net neutrality ruling

In petitions filed with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, internet trade group INCOMPAS and various advocacy groups asked the three-judge panel to rehear the case or the full appeals court to take up the issue.

[...] Members of the trade groups include Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet Inc.

Advocacy groups filing petitions include Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Centre for Democracy & Technology.

"The FCC abdicated its ability to regulate the behaviour of ISPs for the first time in its history. As a consequence, ISPs are permitted to block or throttle Internet access, demand pay-to-play ransom from Internet edge providers, or otherwise interfere with end users’ access to the Internet," the petition said.

FCC spokeswoman Tina Pelkey said the agency is confident the court's decision "will stand and that we will continue to have a free and open Internet moving forward."

The appeals court, in its October decision, also ruled the FCC erred when it declared that states cannot pass their own net neutrality laws and ordered the agency to review some key aspects of its 2017 repeal of rules set by the Obama administration, including public safety implications and how its decision will impact a government subsidy programme for low-income users.

The 2017 FCC 3-2 vote handed internet providers sweeping powers to recast how Americans use the internet, as long as they disclose changes. The new rules took effect in June 2018 but ISPs have yet to change how users access the internet.

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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

Recently Retired USAF General Makes Eyebrow-Raising Claims About Advanced Space Technology

Recently retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast gave a lecture last month that seems to further signal that the next major battlefield will be outer space. While military leadership rattling the space sabers is nothing new, Kwast's lecture included comments that heavily hint at the possibility that the United States military and its industry partners may have already developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever. Is this mere posturing or could we actually be on the verge of making science fiction a reality?

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

Valuable personal info leaks from Facebook – not Zuck selling it, someone stealing hard drive of staff data

Facebook has lost a copy of the personal details of more than 20,000 of its employees after a hard drive containing unencrypted payroll information was stolen from an employee's car.

The antisocial network said it is in the process of informing those who were exposed, though so far there is no indication of the purloined details being used for fraud, it is claimed.

"We worked with law enforcement as they investigated a recent car break-in and theft of an employee's bag containing company equipment with employee payroll information stored on it. We have seen no evidence of abuse and believe this was a smash and grab crime rather than an attempt to steal employee information," a Facebook spokesperson told The Register.

"Out of an abundance of caution, we have notified the current and former employees whose information we believe was stored on the equipment – people who were on our US payroll in 2018 – and are offering them free identity theft and credit monitoring services. This theft impacts current and former Facebook employees only and no Facebook user data was involved."

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upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

Max Q: Blue Origin launches a New Shepard and Rocket Lab officially opens U.S. launch site – TechCrunch

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space from TechCrunch. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox.

This is it – the very first edition of Max Q: TechCrunch’s space newsletter. Despite approaching the end of the year, it’s been a really busy week in the space industry, too. Between launches real and metaphorical, there’s plenty of activity to catch up on. And if you’ve got any space stuff you want to share for future newsletters, feel free to email me at darrell@techcrunch.com or let me know on Twitter @etherington.

Space enters a bit of a frenzy time at year’s end as a lot of other areas in tech are slowing down – especially over the past few years, as a number of companies push to re-ignite crewed spaceflight in the U.S. It’s common for many of these companies, and NASA itself, to set ambitious, optimistic timelines, and that often also means trying to fit in as much as possible before the year is out to make good on at least some of those promises.

Lots of interesting news in spaceflight.

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

In other words, what happens when a population suddenly stops taking fluoride in their drinking water, like Juneau's citizenry did?

Now, thanks to a recent study led by first author and public health researcher Jennifer Meyer from the University of Alaska Anchorage, we've got new insights into the subsequent effects.

In the study, Meyer assessed Medicaid dental claim billing records for two groups of children and adolescents aged 18 or under.

One of these groups represented what the researchers call "optimal" community water fluoridation (CWF) exposure: 853 non-adult patients on behalf of whom Medicaid dental claims were filed in 2003, years before the fluoride cessation began in 2007.

The other group was made up of 1,052 non-adult patients from families who similarly met Medicaid income requirements, and who made the same kind of dental claims almost a decade later, in 2012.

[...] "By taking the fluoride out of the water supply... the trade-off for that is children are going to experience one additional caries procedure per year, at a ballpark (cost) of US$300 more per child," Meyer explained to KTOO News.

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-happened-when-a-city-in-alaska-took-fluoride-out-of-its-drinking-water

Reference: Jennifer Meyer, Vasileios Margaritis & Aaron Mendelsohn, Consequences of community water fluoridation cessation for Medicaid-eligible children and adolescents in Juneau, Alaska, BMC Oral Health, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12903-018-0684-2

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

Feds Break Up Illegal Streaming Network That Dwarfs Netflix and Hulu Libraries

Two of the minds behind the nation's largest pirate streaming services, iStreamItAll and Jetflicks, have pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement charges, federal officials said Friday. Now we all can rest easier knowing there are a few less bad actors getting one over on multi-billion-dollar giants like Netflix and Disney.

A federal grand jury indicted the two men, Darryl Julius Polo, 36, and Luis Angel Villarino, 40, along with six other co-defendants back in August after feds busted their purported headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. In his plea agreement, Polo told DOJ officials that his illicit subscription-based service, iStreamItAll, offered more than 118,000 television episodes and 10,000 movies. Both men also admitted to working as computer programmers for Jetflicks, another Las Vegas-based streaming service that Villarino claimed hosted close to 200,000 pirated TV episodes.

All that adds up to more content than Hulu, Netflix, Vudu, and Amazon Prime combined, according to prosecutors. And all of it pirated from some of the world's most-frequented torrent sites, circumventing copyright owners' consent and cheating them out of what the DOJ estimates could amount to millions of dollars.

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

Lofty promises for autonomous cars unfulfilled

The first driverless cars were supposed to be deployed on the roads of American cities in 2019, but just a few days before the end of the year, the lofty promises of car manufacturers and Silicon Valley remain far from becoming reality.

Recent accidents, such as those involving Tesla cars equipped with Autopilot, a driver assistance software, have shown that "the technology is not ready," said Dan Albert, critic and author of the book "Are We There Yet?" on the history of the American automobile.

He questioned the optimistic sales pitch that autonomous cars would help reduce road deaths—40,000 every year in the United States, mostly due to human error—because these vehicles themselves have caused deaths.

As a result, self-driving maneuvers in the technology-laden vehicles are limited to parking, braking, starting or driving in a parking lot.

[...] "Automation may be used in areas such as closed campuses, where speeds are low and there is little or no interaction with other vehicles, pedestrians or cyclists or inclement weather," said Sam Abuelsamid, engineer and expert at Navigant Research.

The big problem is "perception": the software's ability to process data sent by the motion sensors to detect other vehicles, pedestrians, animals, cyclists or other objects, and then predict their likely actions and adapt accordingly, he said.

And that part is key, said Avideh Zakhor, engineering and computer science professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

"The perception part is not solved yet. The most advanced publicly available is 80-85 percent (reliable). That means that 15 percent of the time, it's going to hit objects and kill and destroy them," she said.

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

Google Maps has now photographed 10 million miles in Street View

If Google were to have a mascot, it might be the Street View car, with its towering camera rig and corporate logo exterior. There's good reason for that. In the 12 years since the search giant debuted Street View, which photographs the world at street level, the cars have been the company's ambassadors around the globe, prowling urban metropolises and rural countrysides.

On Friday, Google revealed how much work those cars and other devices have done to map the world: the company has captured more than 10 million miles of Street View imagery. The distance, Google said, would amount to circling the Earth more than 400 times.

The company also said Google Earth, the search giant's aerial mapping service, has a total of 36 million square miles of satellite imagery for people to browse. With that collection, Google has mapped out the parts of the world where 98% of people live.

The numbers mark the first time Google has released figures on how much of the world its services have charted, providing insight into the scope of Google Maps. With more than 1 billion monthly users, Maps is one of the company's most popular products. It's also a potent way for the search giant to deliver local advertising.

[...] Knowing the extent to which Google has photographed the physical world will be of little comfort to people who think the company already has too much data about us, our surroundings and our activity online.

Google, like its peers in Silicon Valley, is under pressure over its data collection practices. The company generates most of its nearly $140 billion in annual revenue from targeted ads, which are buttressed by user data. That includes ads on Google Maps, though the company doesn't break out those revenue figures. Google declined to comment on Maps ad revenue.

[...] [Ethan] Russell stressed that Google's mapping imagery is from public places you'd see while standing in the street or flying overhead. He said the company gets all of its satellite photographs from third-party providers.

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

Windows 10 App Starts Showing Ads, Microsoft Says You Can't Remove Them

Microsoft displaying banners in the official Mail app for Windows 10 is something that we’ve seen in the past, but this time the company has apparently returned with a more aggressive approach.

If the original ad only showed up for insiders as part of what Microsoft described as just a test, the new version is displayed in all instances of the Mail app.

These include not only insiders, but also non-insider devices such as production machines. I’m also seeing the ad on my device running the stable version of Windows 10 version 1909.

The banner shows up in the left sidebar and recommends users to “Get the free Outlook app on your phone.” The weird thing is that the ad is displayed even if the Outlook mobile app is installed on a device where the same email account is configured, as I also use Outlook for Android and Microsoft Launcher on my mobile phone.

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Fnord666 writes:

VISA Warns of Ongoing Cyber Attacks on Gas Pump PoS Systems

The point-of-sale (POS) systems of North American fuel dispenser merchants are under an increased and ongoing threat of being targeted by an attack coordinated by cybercrime groups according to a security alert published by VISA.

Three attacks that targeted organizations in this type of attack with the end goal of scraping payment card data were observed during the summer of 2019, according to the Visa Payment Fraud Disruption (PFD).

[...] PFD says that in the first incident it identified, unknown attackers were able to compromise their target using a phishing email that allowed them to infect one of the systems on the network with a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

This provided them with direct network access, making it possible to obtain credentials with enough permissions to move laterally throughout the network and compromise the company's POS system as "there was also a lack of network segmentation between the Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) and corporate network."

The last stage of the attack saw the actors deploying a RAM scraper that helped them collect and exfiltrate customer payment card data.

During the second and third incidents, PFD states that the threat actors used malicious tools and TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) attributable to the financially-motivated FIN8 cybercrime group.