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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/

Here are some of the works that will be entering the public domain in 2020. (To find more material from 1924, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)

[...] Unfortunately, the fact that works from 1924 are legally available does not mean they are actually available. After 95 years, many of these works are already lost or literally disintegrating (as with old films and recordings), evidence of what long copyright terms do to the conservation of cultural artifacts. In fact, one of the items we feature below, Clark Gable's debut in White Man, apparently no longer exists. For the works that have survived, however, their long-awaited entry into the public domain is still something to celebrate. (Under the 56-year copyright term that existed until 1978, we would really have something to celebrate – works from 1963 would be entering the public domain in 2020!)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Anonymous_Coward:

Wyze Exposes User Data via Unsecured ElasticSearch Cluster:

Smart home tech maker Wyze Labs confirmed that the user data of over 2.4 million of its users were exposed by an unsecured database connected to an Elasticsearch cluster for over three weeks, from December 4 to December 26.

The company discovered the incident after receiving an inquiry from an IPVM reporter via a "support ticket at 9:21 a.m. on December 26," immediately followed by IPVM publishing a piece "at 9:35 a.m" covering the exposed database discovered by security consulting firm Twelve Security.

However, as Dongsheng Song, Wyze's Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer said in a blog post, some of the reported information wasn't accurate.

"We do not send data to Alibaba Cloud. We don’t collect information about bone density and daily protein intake even from the products that are currently in beta testing," he said in response to Twelve Security's disclosure and IPVM's story. "We did not have a similar breach 6 months ago."

This one impacting @WyzeCam looks pretty serious. Original public disclosure (which looks like it may have been made prematurely) is here: https://t.co/2WKp7siSSihttps://t.co/cnfixxFuTP

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 27, 2019

[...] Regarding the impact of this security incident, Wyze advises its customers to be wary of future phishing attempts since one ore [sic] more third-parties could have their email addresses.

As a precautionary measure Wyze logged out all users by pushing a token refresh and "added another level of protection to our system databases (adjusted several permission rules and added a precaution to only allow certain whitelisted IPs access databases)."

As a direct result of these measures, all Wyze customers will have to log back in the next time they need to access their accounts and relink their Alexa, Google Assistant, or IFTTT integrations.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

University of Cambridge researchers are hoping to launch technology that blocks online "hate speech" similar to how an antivirus program stops malicious code.

Thanks to researchers at the University of Cambridge, the largest social media companies in the world may soon have the ability to preemptively quarantine content classified by an algorithm as "hate speech"." On October 14, 2019, researcher Stephanie Ullmann and professor Marcus Tomalin published a proposal in the Ethics and Information Technology journal promoting an invention that they claim could accomplish this goal without infringing on individual rights of free speech. Their proposal involves software that uses an algorithm to identify "hate speech" in much the same way an antivirus program detects malware. It would then be up to the viewer of such content to either leave it in quarantine or view it.

The basic premise is that online "hate speech" is as harmful in its way as other forms of harm (physical, emotional, financial...), and social media companies should intercept it before it can do that harm, rather than post-facto by review.

Tomalin's proposal would use a sophisticated algorithm which would evaluate not just the content itself, but also all content posted by the user to determine if a post might be classifiable as "hate speech". If not classified as potential "hate speech", the post occupies the social media feed like any regular post. If the algorithm flags it as possible "hate speech", it will then flag the post as potential hate speech, making it so that readers must opt-in to view the post. A graph from the proposal illustrates this process.

The alert to the reader will identify the type of "hate speech" potentially classified in the content as well as a "Hate O'Meter" to show how offensive the post is likely to be.

The goal of the researchers is to have a working prototype available in early 2020 and, assuming success and subsequent social media company adoptions, intercepting traffic in time for the 2020 elections.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Anonymous_Coward:

US Coast Guard discloses Ryuk ransomware infection at maritime facility:

An infection with the Ryuk ransomware took down a maritime facility for more than 30 hours; the US Coast Guard said in a security bulletin it published before Christmas.

The agency did not reveal the name or the location of the port authority; however, it described the incident as recent.

"Forensic analysis is currently ongoing but the virus, identified as 'Ryuk' ransomware," the US Coast Guard (USCG) said in a security bulletin meant to put other port authorities on alert about future attacks.

USCG officials said they believe the point of entry was a malicious email sent to one of the maritime facility's employees.

"Once the embedded malicious link in the email was clicked by an employee, the ransomware allowed for a threat actor to access significant enterprise Information Technology (IT) network files, and encrypt them, preventing the facility's access to critical files," the agency said.

The USCG security bulletin describes a nightmare scenario after this point, with the virus spreading through the facility's IT network, and even impacting "industrial control systems that monitor and control cargo transfer and encrypted files critical to process operations."

Coast Guard officials said the Ryuk infection caused "a disruption of the entire corporate IT network (beyond the footprint of the facility), disruption of camera and physical access control systems, and loss of critical process control monitoring systems."

The maritime facility -- believed to be a port authority -- was forced to shut down its entire operations for more than 30 hours, the Coast Guard said.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Polio eradication program faces hard choices as endgame strategy fails:

The "endgame" in the decades-long campaign to eradicate polio suffered major setbacks in 2019. While the effort lost ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which recorded 116 cases of wild polio—four times the number in 2018—an especially alarming situation developed in Africa. In 12 countries, 196 children were paralyzed not by the wild virus, but by a strain derived from a live vaccine that has regained its virulence and ability to spread. Fighting these flare-ups will mean difficult decisions in the coming year.

The culprit in Africa is vaccine-derived polio virus type 2, and the fear is that it will jump continents and reseed outbreaks across the globe. A brand new vaccine is now being rushed through development to quash type 2 outbreaks. Mass production has already begun, even though the vaccine is still in clinical trials; it could be rolled out for emergency use as early as mid-2020. At the same time, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is debating whether to combat the resurgent virus by re-enlisting a triple-whammy vaccine pulled from global use in 2016. That would be a controversial move, setting back the initiative several years, as well as a potential public relations disaster—an admission that the carefully crafted endgame strategy has failed.

"All options are on the table," says viro-logist Mark Pallansch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the five partner organizations in GPEI. "We are clearly in the most serious situation we have been in with the program," adds Roland Sutter, who recently stepped down as the director of polio research at the World Health Organization (WHO).

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Anonymous_Coward:

Over 100 Android Apps Used 'Soraka' Package to Perform Ad Fraud:

Researchers identified more than 100 apps that used a common code package named “Soraka” to perform ad fraud on users’ Android devices.

The White Ops Threat Intelligence team observed that many of the apps did not have a suspicious reputation at the time of discovery. For instance, the “Best Fortune Explorer” registered no red flags with anti-virus engines on VirusTotal when White Ops Threat Intelligence published its research. The app had already received 170,000 downloads by that time, and it was still available for download on Google’s Play Store.

Together, all of the 100+ malicious Android apps registered 4.6 million downloads.

In its analysis, the White Ops Threat Intelligence team found that the apps relied on a framework called AppsFlyer to watch for inorganic installations attributed to fraudsters’ promotional efforts. The apps displayed fraudulent ads only when where there was an inorganic installation. In those cases, the apps used their underlying Soraka code to determine what to run based upon several triggers.

According to the White Ops Threat Intelligence team, there’s a likely explanation for this use of AppsFlyer. As the researchers explain in a blog post:

The filtering is likely a mechanism to avoid detection from automated analysis and other services that would install the app ad-hoc and then, most likely, be considered as organic by AppsFlyer. This mechanism also allows fine-grain control of who (or what) receives the ad fraud, using the controls of ad serving platforms. The apps render out-of-context ads when the filter conditions are appropriate.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Super-precise new CRISPR tool could tackle a plethora of genetic diseases:

For all the ease with which the wildly popular CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tool alters genomes, it's still somewhat clunky and prone to errors and unintended effects. Now, a recently developed alternative offers greater control over genome edits — an advance that could be particularly important for developing gene therapies.

The alternative method, called prime editing, improves the chances that researchers will end up with only the edits they want, instead of a mix of changes that they can't predict. The tool, described in a study published on 21 October in Nature, also reduces the 'off-target' effects that are a key challenge for some applications of the standard CRISPR–Cas9 system. That could make prime-editing-based gene therapies safer for use in people.

The tool also seems capable of making a wider variety of edits, which might one day allow it to be used to treat the many genetic diseases that have so far stymied gene-editors. David Liu, a chemical biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lead study author, estimates that prime editing might help researchers tackle nearly 90% of the more than 75,000 disease-associated DNA variants listed in ClinVar, a public database developed by the US National Institutes of Health.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Injecting the flu vaccine into a tumor gets the immune system to attack it:

A number of years back, there was a great deal of excitement about using viruses to target cancer. A number of viruses explode the cells that they've infected in order to spread to new ones. Engineering those viruses so that they could only grow in cancer cells would seem to provide a way of selectively killing these cells. And some preliminary tests were promising, showing massive tumors nearly disappearing.

But the results were inconsistent, and there were complications. The immune system would respond to the virus, limiting our ability to use it more than once. And some of the tumor killing seemed to be the result of the immune system, rather than the virus.

Now, some researchers have focused on the immune response, inducing it at the site of the tumor. And they do so by remarkably simple method: injecting the tumor with the flu vaccine. As a bonus, the mice it was tested on were successfully immunized, too.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Microsoft takes court action against fourth nation-state cybercrime group.:

On December 27, a U.S. district court unsealed documents detailing work Microsoft has performed to disrupt cyberattacks from a threat group we call Thallium, which is believed to operate from North Korea. Our court case against Thallium, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, resulted in a court order enabling Microsoft to take control of 50 domains that the group uses to conduct its operations. With this action, the sites can no longer be used to execute attacks.

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) have been tracking and gathering information on Thallium, monitoring the group's activities to establish and operate a network of websites, domains and internet-connected computers. This network was used to target victims and then compromise their online accounts, infect their computers, compromise the security of their networks and steal sensitive information. Based on victim information, the targets included government employees, think tanks, university staff members, members of organizations focused on world peace and human rights, and individuals that work on nuclear proliferation issues. Most targets were based in the U.S., as well as Japan and South Korea.

Like many cybercriminals and threat actors, Thallium typically attempts to trick victims through a technique known as spear phishing. By gathering information about the targeted individuals from social media, public personnel directories from organizations the individual is involved with and other public sources, Thallium is able to craft a personalized spear-phishing email in a way that gives the email credibility to the target. As seen in the sample spear-phishing email below, the content is designed to appear legitimate, but closer review shows that Thallium has spoofed the sender by combining the letters "r" and "n" to appear as the first letter "m" in "microsoft.com."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Uber sues California to block gig-worker law going into effect this week:

Ride-hailing service Uber filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of California, alleging a landmark gig-worker law set to go into effect is unconstitutional. The lawsuit seeks to block AB 5, which has the potential to upend gig economy companies such as Uber and Lyft.

The complaint, which also lists Postmates as a plaintiff, argues that the law unfairly targets workers and companies in the on-demand economy, treating them differently than traditional employees and threatening their flexibility.

In September, California became the first state to pass a law aimed at protecting gig worker rights, which forces Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates and other gig economy companies reclassify their workers as employees. Using independent contractors allows the companies to shift many costs to the workers.

The lawsuit says the law arbitrarily exempts dozens of occupations, including direct salespeople, travel agents, grant writers, commercial fishermen and construction truck drivers, among others.

"There is no rhyme or reason to these nonsensical exemptions, and some are so ill-defined or entirely undefined that it is impossible to discern what they include or exclude," says the complaint (see below), which was filed in a Los Angeles federal court.

Postmates and Uber v State of California on Scribd

Original Submission

martyb writes:

CRISPR scientist who made gene-edited babies sentenced to 3 years in prison:

The scientist who claimed to have created the first gene-edited human babies was fined around $430,000 and sentenced to three years in prison by a Chinese court on Monday, according to Chinese state media. He Jiankui was reportedly convicted of conducting an "illegal medical practice."

A court in Shenzhen reportedly found He, along with two colleagues, violated Chinese regulations and ethics by editing twin embryos' DNA. Authorities also found his team fabricated regulatory paperwork, according to state news agency Xinhua. He and his colleagues reportedly pleaded guilty to the charges.

He was condemned by the scientific community for using the gene-editing technology CRISPR to alter the gene CCR5, which HIV utilizes when infecting humans.

Previously:
One of CRISPR's Inventors Calls for Controls on Gene-Editing Technology
Russian Biologist Plans to Pursue CRISPR-Edited Babies Targeting Same Gene (CCR5) as He Jiankui Did
China's CRISPR Babies Could Face Earlier Death
China Confirms That He Jiankui Illegally Edited Human Embryo Genomes
Chinese Scientist Who Allegedly Created the First Genome-Edited Babies is Reportedly Being Detained
Chinese Gene-Editing Scientist's Project Rejected for WHO Database (Plus: He Jiankui is Missing)
Furor Over Genome-Edited Babies Claim Continues (Updated)
Chinese Scientist Claims to Have Created the First Genome-Edited Babies (Twins)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Waiting for Betelgeuse: what's up with the tempestuous star?:

Have you noticed that Orion the Hunter—one of the most iconic and familiar of the wintertime constellations—is looking a little... different as of late? The culprit is its upper shoulder star Alpha Orionis, aka Betelgeuse, which is looking markedly faint, the faintest it has been for the 21st century.

When will this nearby supernova candidate pop, and what would look like if it did?

[...] Fortunately for us, we're safely out of the 50 light-year 'kill zone' for receiving any inbound lethal radiation from Betelgeuse: A supernova would simply be a scientifically interesting event, and put on a good show. Ancient supernovae may have had a hand in the evolution of life on Earth, and a recent study suggests that one might even have forced early humans to walk upright.

What would a supernova in Orion look like? Well, using the last supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud (also a Type IIb event) as a guide, we calculate that when it does blow, Betelgeuse would shine at magnitude -10. That's 16 times fainter than a full moon, but 100 times brighter than Venus, making it easily visible in the daytime sky. A Betelgeuse-gone-supernova would also easily cast noticeable nighttime shadows.

[...] For now though, we're in a wait-and-see-mode for any New Year's Eve fireworks from Betelgeuse. Such an occurrence would be bittersweet: We would be extraordinarily lucky to see Betelgeuse go supernova in our lifetime... but familiar Orion the Hunter would never look the same again.

Also at CNET

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Miami lawyer's pants caught on fire during an arson trial. He's about to be suspended

The Florida Supreme Court wants to suspend the Miami lawyer who drew worldwide notoriety after his pants burst into flames during an arson trial.

[...] In March 2017, Gutierrez was representing a Miami man accused of torching his own car for insurance money. In a story first reported by the Miami Herald, Gutierrez was arguing to jurors that the blaze might have been caused by spontaneous combustion when flames and smoke began billowing from his pants.

[...] Prosecutors launched a criminal investigation. In a memo on the case, Assistant State Attorney Michael Filteau said "it seems obvious" the fire was a "a stunt or demonstration ... meant to illustrate the feasibility of his spontaneous combustion theory of defense."

But under Florida law, prosecutors said they could not prove Gutierrez acted with "criminal intent" — such a demonstration, while misleading and unethical, could technically be legal.

The Florida Bar too launched a probe. The investigation found that Gutierrez, after the guilty verdict, filed a bogus insurance claim with GEICO, which had insured the car. For his handling of the case, a referee ruled that Gutierrez should be found guilty of ethical breaches involving dishonesty and sham claims. He pleaded guilty to the violations.

Stephen Gutierrez was suspended on November 14:

Administrative Order 2019-89 Order of Suspension of Attorney Stephen Gutierrez Florida Bar 117515

Previously: Lawyer's Pants Catch on Fire During Arson Trial

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

The spectacle of Earth suspended in space was so overwhelming for Edgar Mitchell that the Apollo 14 astronaut and sixth man on the moon wanted to grab politicians by the scruff of the neck and drag them into space to witness the view.

Such drastic measures may not be necessary, however. Scientists are about to welcome the first participants on an unprecedented clinical trial that aims to reproduce the intense emotional experience, known as the "Overview effect", from the comfort of a health spa.

If the trial goes well, what led Mitchell to develop "an instant global consciousness" and a profound connection to Earth and its people could be recreated with nothing more than a flotation tank, a half tonne of Epsom salts, and a waterproof virtual reality (VR) headset.

"There's a lot of division and polarisation and disconnection between people," said Steven Pratscher, a psychologist and principal investigator on the trial at the University of Missouri. "We'd like to see if we can recreate the Overview effect on Earth to have an impact on those issues."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/26/scientists-attempt-to-recreate-overview-effect-from-earth

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Micro-angelo? This 3D-printed 'David' is just one millimeter tall – TechCrunch:

3D printing has proven itself useful in so many industries that it’s no longer necessary to show off, but some people just can’t help themselves. Case in point: this millimeter-tall rendition of Michelangelo’s famous “David” printed with copper using a newly developed technique.

The aptly named “Tiny David” was created by Exaddon, a spin-off company from another spin-off company, Cytosurge, spun off from Swiss research university ETH Zurich. It’s only a fraction of a millimeter wide and weighs two micrograms.

It was created using Exaddon’s “CERES” 3D printer, which lays down a stream of ionized liquid copper at a rate of as little as femtoliters per second, forming a rigid structure with features as small as a micrometer across. The Tiny David took about 12 hours to print, though something a little simpler in structure could probably be done much quicker.

As it is, the level of detail is pretty amazing. Although, obviously, you can’t recreate every nuance of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, even small textures like the hair and muscle tone are reproduced quite well. No finishing buff or support struts required.

Original Submission