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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:110

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the TCO dept.

Apple's chance to grow as half a billion Windows 7 PCs hit EOL:

The company's enterprise credentials continue to extend. At a recent Apple-focused enterprise IT event, we encountered opinion and statistics to reinforce this point.

The point being that support for Apple technologies has become a human resources issue, and that people entering the workshop will choose to use that company's technologies if they can.

This is prompting some of the world's most influential enterprise firms to offer that choice to their employees.

Beyond HR considerations, IBM CIO Fletcher Previn points out multiple advantages Cupertino's computers offer, not least in terms of net promoter score, user experience and the actual costs of management, upgrade and support.

[...] The positive upswell in support for Apple's systems comes as around 417,000,000 Windows 7 devices (a big chunk of all Windows PCs currently in use worldwide) are about to experience Microsoft terminating support on January 14, 2020.

It's a relatively safe assumption to think that at least some tens of thousands of these PCs could now be replaced by an iPad, or even a Mac.

Why wouldn't some of these migrate to Apple's platforms, when Microsoft's fee-based extended support package costs up to $200 per device?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-to-update dept.

Mozilla Patches Firefox Zero-Day Exploited in Targeted Attacks:

Updates released by Mozilla on Wednesday for its Firefox browser address a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in targeted attacks.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-17026 and classified as having critical impact, has been described by Mozilla as an "IonMonkey type confusion with StoreElementHole and FallibleStoreElement." IonMonkey is the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler for Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.

"Incorrect alias information in IonMonkey JIT compiler for setting array elements could lead to a type confusion," Mozilla explained in its advisory.

Mozilla says it's aware of targeted attacks exploiting this zero-day, but no other information has been made available.

A Current Activity bulletin released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says the vulnerability could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system.

The flaw has been patched with the release of Firefox 72.0.1 and Firefox ESR 68.4.1, and users have been advised to update their installations.

Also at Ars Technica


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @06:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the think-of-the-children dept.

House lawmakers introduce bill to update children's online privacy law:

A pair of House lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday to update a decades-old law designed to protect children's online privacy. The bill comes amid growing concern that children are encountering increasingly sophisticated threats online.

The Preventing Real Online Threats Endangering Children Today Act (PDF), introduced by Republican Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan and Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, aims to strengthen the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) to address the ever-evolving digital landscape, the lawmakers said.

"Children today are more connected online and face dangers that we could not have imagined years ago," Walberg said in a statement. "While advancements in technology allows for many benefits, it also poses a risk for our kids."

The legislation would allow parents to force companies to delete any private information they've collected about their children. It would also raise the raise the age of parental consent protections from the current 13 years of age to 16.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @04:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the only-the-date dept.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 end of support: What will change on 14 January?:

It is remarkable that Windows 7 is reaching end of support on January 14 2020 while maintaining something approaching 27 per cent market share among Windows users, according to Statcounter.

This is down from 35 per cent in December 2018 but still substantial. Windows has a share among desktop users of around 77 per cent, so that is around 20 per cent of active desktop PCs.

"End of support" means no technical support, software updates or security fixes from Microsoft. Of these, the significant piece is the security fixes. Without regular patches, flaws that are discovered in the operating system will put users at greater risk from things like ransomware attacks, perhaps triggered by an email attachment or malicious web link.

Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 also go out of support on the same day. Although it is less likely that users will be browsing the web or clicking attachments on Server 2008, it is still risky if these servers are exposed to the internet – as appears to be the case with Travelex, currently suffering a ransomware attack – or if they are used for remote desktop services.

Another curious feature of this "end of support" is that Microsoft will still be providing security updates for both operating systems, for three further years. So the real end of support date is in 2023. That said, you can only get these "extended security updates", or ESU, in certain ways:

  • Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) users get free ESU until January, 2023
  • You can purchase Windows 7 ESU by subscription from Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers, which means most IT support companies signed up as authorised Microsoft suppliers.
  • Windows 7 ESU is free for a year to customers who subscribe to Windows E5 or Microsoft 365 E5. Details are here
  • Only Windows 7 Professional and Enterprise are covered by ESU.
  • Windows 7 embedded can be supported through an "Ecosystem Partner Offering" support contract.
  • The scenario for Windows Server 2008 ESU is similar to that for Windows 7.

[...] There is a degree of artificiality about this key "end of support" date and ways to keep old stuff patched, but the security risks are real.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @02:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-point dept.

Vermont bill would ban cell phone use by anyone younger than 21:

A bill has been introduced in Vermont's legislature that would prohibit anyone under 21 years old from using or possessing a cell phone. However, the bill appears to be more about gun rights than cell phones.

The bill, introduced Tuesday by Democratic Sen. John Rodgers, says those under the age of 21 "are not developmentally mature enough" to posses and use cell phones safely. The bill cites fatal car crash and bullying among teens as reasons for the proposed legislation.

"The use of cell phones while driving is one of the leading killers of teenagers in the United States," according to the bill (PDF). "Young people frequently use cell phones to bully and threaten other young people, activities that have been linked to many suicides."

The bill would make possession or use of a cell phone by anyone under 21 punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The bill says that if those under 21 "aren't mature enough" to possess guns, smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, then the same rule should apply to cell phone use. In recent years, the state has passed laws raising the minimum smoking age to 21 and prohibiting the sale of firearms to anyone under 21.

[...] "I have no delusions that it's going to pass. I wouldn't probably vote for it myself," he told the newspaper.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the whats-the-buzz? dept.

Mysterious drone swarms in 3 states prompt FAA, FBI investigation:

Federal agencies and local law enforcement in Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska met this week to investigate a mystery that's generated buzz in those states: swarms of drones.

Since mid-December, sheriff's departments in the border area of the three states have been flooded with at least 30 reports of nighttime drone sightings, sometimes groups of a dozen or more machines, and sometimes flying in formation. The FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and US Air Force have been called in and are reportedly investigating the drone swarms. As of now, no one seems to know who owns or has been operating them.

The Colorado Springs Gazette reported this week that the Air Force itself might be behind the drones, as part of a secretive counterdrone program designed in part to keep airborne cameras away from missile silos, a number of which are in the area of the sightings. The Gazette said the Air Force had neither confirmed nor denied this.

The Morgan County Sheriff's Office, which hosted a meeting Monday with dozens of law enforcement partners, said the Air Force had denied involvement. The Air Force didn't immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.

Several agencies at the meeting with the Morgan County Sheriff's Office, including the FAA, agreed to continue investigating the drone sightings.

"Multiple FAA divisions are working closely with federal, state and local stakeholders to try to determine whether the reported sightings in Colorado and Nebraska are drones and, if so, who is operating them and for what reason," the FAA said in a statement Monday.

The FAA also said it's contacted unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) test sites, drone companies and companies authorized to operate drones in the area, but hasn't been able to determine if any of these are responsible for the drone swarms.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @09:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the "who-wants-to-live-forever?" dept.

Biologists identify pathways that extend lifespan by 500%:

Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif., and Nanjing University in China, have identified synergistic cellular pathways for longevity that amplify lifespan fivefold in C. elegans, a nematode worm used as a model in aging research.

The increase in lifespan would be the equivalent of a human living for 400 or 500 years, according to one of the scientists.

The research draws on the discovery of two major pathways governing aging in C. elegans, which is a popular model in aging research because it shares many of its genes with humans and because its short lifespan of only three to four weeks allows scientists to quickly assess the effects of genetic and environmental interventions to extend healthy lifespan. Because these pathways are "conserved," meaning that they have been passed down to humans through evolution, they have been the subject of intensive research. A number of drugs that extend healthy lifespan by altering these pathways are now under development. The discovery of the synergistic effect opens the door to even more effective anti-aging therapies.

The new research uses a double mutant in which the insulin signaling (IIS) and TOR pathways have been genetically altered. Because alteration of the IIS pathways yields a 100 percent increase in lifespan and alteration of the TOR pathway yields a 30 percent increase, the double mutant would be expected to live 130 percent longer. But instead, its lifespan was amplified by 500 percent.

"Despite the discovery in C. elegans of cellular pathways that govern aging, it hasn't been clear how these pathways interact," said Hermann Haller, M.D., president of the MDI Biological Laboratory. "By helping to characterize these interactions, our scientists are paving the way for much-needed therapies to increase healthy lifespan for a rapidly aging population."

The elucidation of the cellular mechanisms controlling the synergistic response is the subject of a recent paper in the online journal Cell Reports entitled "Translational Regulation of Non-autonomous Mitochondrial Stress Response Promotes Longevity." The authors include Jarod A. Rollins, Ph.D., and Aric N. Rogers, Ph.D., of the MDI Biological Laboratory.

[...] The paper focuses on how longevity is regulated in the mitochondria, which are the organelles in the cell responsible for energy homeostasis. Over the last decade, accumulating evidence has suggested a causative link between mitochondrial dysregulation and aging. Rollins' future research will focus on the further elucidation of the role of mitochondria in aging, he said.

More information:

Jianfeng Lan et al. Translational Regulation of Non-autonomous Mitochondrial Stress Response Promotes Longevity, Cell Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.06.078

Journal information: Cell Reports


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @07:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the US-law-says-it-can-be dept.

Why is a 22GB database containing 56 million US folks' personal details sitting on the open internet using a Chinese IP address? Seriously, why?:

A database containing the personal details of 56.25m US residents – from names and home addresses to phone numbers and ages – has been found on the public internet, served from a computer with a Chinese IP address, bizarrely enough.

The information silo appears to belong to Florida-based CheckPeople.com, which is a typical people-finder website: for a fee, you can enter someone's name, and it will look up their current and past addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, names of relatives, and even criminal records in some cases, all presumably gathered from public records.

However, all of this information is not only sitting in one place for spammers, miscreants, and other netizens to download in bulk, but it's being served from an IP address associated with Alibaba's web hosting wing in Hangzhou, east China, for reasons unknown. It's a perfect illustration that not only is this sort of personal information in circulation, but it's also in the hands of foreign adversaries.

It just goes to show how haphazardly people's privacy is treated these days.

A white-hat hacker operating under the handle Lynx discovered the trove online, and tipped off The Register. He told us he found the 22GB database exposed on the internet, including metadata that links the collection to CheckPeople.com. We have withheld further details of the security blunder for privacy protection reasons.

The repository's contents are likely scraped from public records, though together provide rather detailed profiles on tens of millions of folks in America. Basically, CheckPeople.com has done the hard work of aggregating public personal records, and this exposed NoSQL database makes that info even easier to crawl and process.

"In and of itself, the data is harmless, it's public data, but bundled like this I think it could actually be worth a lot to some people," Lynx told El Reg this week. "That's what scares me, when people start combining these with other datasets."


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @04:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the buried-hole dept.

800,000 years ago a huge meteorite struck Earth. We might have just found its crater:

Scientists have known for over a century that a 1.2-mile-wide meteorite smashed into Earth about 790,000 years ago, scattering black, glassy blobs -- known as tektites -- across 20% of the Eastern Hemisphere. But they didn't know exactly where that behemoth landed.

A team of scientists now say they may have finally found the location of the long-sought crater. They believe it's in the southern part of south-east Asian nation of Laos, in an area known as the Bolaven plateau. The findings, earlier reported by CNN, were published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Dec. 30.

"We present stratigraphic, geochemical, geophysical, and geochronological evidence that the ∼15-km diameter crater lies buried beneath a large, young volcanic field in Southern Laos," the scientists wrote.

The researchers propose that the elusive crater may be buried in the 218-cubic-mile Bolaven plateau volcanic field, hidden beneath a lava bed. They estimate the crater to be about 8 miles (13 kilometers) wide and 11 miles (18 kilometers) long. The case isn't closed, however. The scientists' next step is to drill down to the strata beneath the lava and verify whether the crater is where they predict.


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday January 11 2020, @02:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the bite-my-shiny dept.

So it seems that AI is a big thing, especially predictions on how it will kill us all. But the Boston Review currently has a rather interesting article on the ethics of algorithms.

A great deal of recent public debate about artificial intelligence has been driven by apocalyptic visions of the future. Humanity, we are told, is engaged in an existential struggle against its own creation. Such worries are fueled in large part by tech industry leaders and futurists, who anticipate systems so sophisticated that they can perform general tasks and operate autonomously, without human control. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all publicly expressed their concerns about the advent of this kind of "strong" (or "general") AI—and the associated existential risk that it may pose for humanity. In Hawking's words, the development of strong AI "could spell the end of the human race."

These are legitimate long-term worries. But they are not all we have to worry about, and placing them center stage distracts from ethical questions that AI is raising here and now. Some contend that strong AI may be only decades away, but this focus obscures the reality that "weak" (or "narrow") AI is already reshaping existing social and political institutions. Algorithmic decision making and decision support systems are currently being deployed in many high-stakes domains, from criminal justice, law enforcement, and employment decisions to credit scoring, school assignment mechanisms, health care, and public benefits eligibility assessments. Never mind the far-off specter of doomsday; AI is already here, working behind the scenes of many of our social systems.

[...] For a concrete example, consider the machine learning systems used in predictive policing, whereby historical crime rate data is fed into algorithms in order to predict future geographic distributions of crime. The algorithms flag certain neighborhoods as prone to violent crime. On that basis, police departments make decisions about where to send their officers and how to allocate resources. While the concept of predictive policing is worrisome for a number of reasons, one common defense of the practice is that AI systems are uniquely "neutral" and "objective," compared to their human counterparts. On the face of it, it might seem preferable to take decision making power out of the hands of biased police departments and police officers. But what if the data itself is biased, so that even the "best" algorithm would yield biased results?

Long article, good read. Conclusion?

[...] Rather than rushing to quick, top-down solutions aimed at quality control, optimization, and neutrality, we must first clarify what particular kind of problem we are trying to solve in the first place. Until we do so, algorithmic decision making will continue to entrench social injustice, even as tech optimists herald it as the cure for the very ills it exacerbates.

The path to this conclusion is worth considering.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday January 10 2020, @11:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the Goal:-I-want-a-pony,-NOW! dept.

The human brain is organized into circuits that develop from childhood through adulthood to support executive function -- critical behaviors like self-control, decision making, and complex thought. These circuits are anchored by white matter pathways which coordinate the brain activity necessary for cognition. However, little research exists to explain how white matter matures to support activity that allows for improved executive function during adolescence -- a period of rapid brain development.

Researchers from the Lifespan Brain Institute of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia applied tools from network science to identify how anatomical connections in the brain develop to support neural activity underlying these key areas. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"By charting brain development across childhood and adolescence, we can better understand how the brain supports executive function and self-control in both healthy kids and those with different mental health experiences," said the study's senior author Theodore Satterthwaite, MD, an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Penn. "Since abnormalities in developing brain connectivity and deficits in executive function are often linked to the emergence of mental illness during youth, our findings may help identify biomarkers of brain development that predict cognitive and clinical outcomes later in life."

[...] "These results suggest that executive functions like impulse control -- which can be particularly challenging for children and adolescents -- rely in part on the prolonged development of structure-function coupling in complex brain areas like the prefrontal cortex," explained lead author Graham Baum, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, who was a Penn neuroscience PhD student during the time of the research. "This has important implications for understanding how brain circuits become specialized during development to support flexible and appropriate goal-oriented behavior."

Journal Reference:
Graham L. Baum, Zaixu Cui, David R. Roalf, Rastko Ciric, Richard F. Betzel, Bart Larsen, Matthew Cieslak, Philip A. Cook, Cedric H. Xia, Tyler M. Moore, Kosha Ruparel, Desmond J. Oathes, Aaron F. Alexander-Bloch, Russell T. Shinohara, Armin Raznahan, Raquel E. Gur, Ruben C. Gur, Danielle S. Bassett, Theodore D. Satterthwaite. Development of structure–function coupling in human brain networks during youth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019; 201912034 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1912034117


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday January 10 2020, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-Linux-owns-the-phones dept.

2019 Was the Year When Windows 10 Conquered the Desktop:

Windows 10, the operating system that Microsoft officially launched in mid-2015, became the number one desktop platform in 2020 after it managed to overtake its predecessor Windows 7.

[...] NetMarketShare [reports] Windows 10 started the year with 40.90% market share before dropping to 40.30% the next month. It reached a market share of 54.30% in November and ended 2020 with a personal record of 54.62%.

Windows 7, on the other hand, lost market share throughout the year, obviously because of the approaching end of support set for January 14. Windows 7 was running on 37.19% of the devices worldwide 12 months ago and then dropped gradually to a market share of 26.64% in December. With less than two weeks left until the end-of-life is reached, the market share of Windows 7 is very likely to continue going down, albeit not all devices will be upgraded before this milestone is reached.

Needless to say, the rest of the operating systems are far behind and pose no threat to the dominance of Windows 10. For example, Windows 8.1 is running on just 3.63% of the systems worldwide, while macOS 10.14 has a market share of 3.50%.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday January 10 2020, @08:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the sudden-outbreak-of-common-sense? dept.

Cogent cut off from ARIN Whois after scraping net engineers' contact details and sliding them to sales staff:

There are still corners of the internet that function like the old days, and US regional internet registry ARIN has just proved it – much to the joy of network engineers.

[...] "ARIN has repeatedly informed Cogent that their use of the ARIN Whois for solicitation is contrary to the terms of use and that they must stop," ARIN's CEO John Curran posted to a mailing list this week.

"Despite ARIN's multiple written demands to Cogent to cease these prohibited activities, ARIN has continued to receive complaints... For this reason, ARIN has suspended Cogent Communications' use of ARIN's Whois database effective today and continuing for a period of six months."

[...] So what's being going on? Well, according to the longer letter [PDF] sent to Cogent's CEO Dave Schaeffer from ARIN's Curran, the regional Internet registry (RIR) has received "numerous complaints of Cogent personnel repeatedly using the database to solicit customers" – largely emails and phone calls offering internet engineers bandwidth and similar services.

No one likes sales reps calling, especially engineers who go out of their way to make sure they are not easily contactable.

And that, [it] seems, was Cogent's downfall because – being engineers – many of them have set up specific emails just for ARIN correspondence and others never gave out their phone numbers except to ARIN because, well, they had to. So when the sales reps came calling the engineers knew straight away where they had culled their information.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday January 10 2020, @06:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-many-statements? dept.

The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code in its Git repository, up from 26.1 million a year ago, while systemd now has nearly 1.3 million lines of code, according to GitHub stats analysed by Michael Larabel at Phoronix.

There were nearly 75,000 code commits to the kernel during 2019 which is actually slightly down on 2018 (80,000 commits), and the lowest number since 2013. The top contributors by email domain were Intel and Red Hat (Google's general gmail.com aside) and the top contributing individuals were Linus Torvalds, with 3.19 per cent of the commits, followed by David Miller (Red Hat) and Chris Wilson (Intel). There were 4,189 different contributors overall.

Another point of interest is that systemd, a replacement for init that is the first process to run when Linux starts, is now approaching 1.3 million lines of code thanks to nearly 43,000 commits in 2019. Top contributor was not systemd founder Lennart Poettering (who was second), but Yu Watanabe with 26.94 per cent of the commits.

[...] Larabel has published statistics on coding activity for the Linux kernel here and for systemd here.®


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 10 2020, @04:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the watching-the-watchers-watch-the-watched dept.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/amazons-ring-fired-at-least-four-employees-for-snooping-on-user-videos/

Amazon's Ring line of consumer home surveillance products has drawn quite a bit of attention in recent weeks for how easily bad actors outside the company have been able to access users' accounts. But for Ring, as with many other firms, some of the greatest security risks may come from inside the company

In response to congressional questioning, Amazon this week admitted to four incidents in the past four years where employees accessed video data they were not supposed to.

[...]Ring fired all those employees following "swift action to investigate" and told Congress that following each incident, the company "has taken multiple actions to limit such data access to a smaller number of team members." Additionally, the company said, it "periodically reviews" employees' access to data "to verify they have a continuing need for access" in order to do their jobs.

[...]"publicly available" Ring video may include more information than the customers who generated it intend. Previous reports found footage online from tens of thousands of Ring cameras nationwide sharing extremely granular coordinates that allowed reporters and researchers to generate maps of their locations.

[...]Amazon was first called on to provide answers to Congress about Ring late last fall, following news that the company had developed close partnerships with more than 400 law enforcement agencies nationwide. (As of today, the list includes 770 agencies.)


Original Submission