SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Waterfox web browser sold to System1

It appears that the Waterfox web browser has been sold to System1 recently, the same company that bought the Startpage search engine some time ago. To be precise, Startpage was bought by Privacy One Group Ltd which System1 owns. System1 is an advertising company that tries to "make advertising better and safer, while respecting consumer privacy".

[...] Privacy expert Liz McIntyre, who was involved with Startpage prior to the ownership change, noticed in October 2019 that System1 was looking to hire a web browser developer. She decided to keep an eye on potential web browser sales as it was likely that System1 was interested in buying an established web browser with a user base instead of building one from scratch.

The job description provides insight on the potential target: It revealed that development would focus on the Mozilla platform and that a key goal was to keep a classic version of the browser up-to-date.

[...] There are not that many browsers that match the description which made the most popular ones, Waterfox and Pale Moon, the most likely target for a sale.

See also: Waterfox has joined System1

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Thank You!

On the occasion of the site's sixth anniversary, I thought it fitting to mention some of the many ways that fellow Soylentils contribute to our community. This also seems like a good opportunity to mention some of the site's history, relate some staffing changes, mention other contributions by the SoylentNews community, and to wrap things up with some site statistics.

Please accept our thanks:

These thanks go out to all of you: my fellow members of the SoylentNews community.

To the Anonymous Cowards who post comments to our site (be they inciteful or insightful). To our registered users who not only post comments, but are also the only members who can moderate comments. No matter how long you have been here; whether you have just arrived (Welcome!) or have been with us from the very start... Thank You!

Speaking of which, thanks go to our staff who bludgeoned and duct-taped an ancient unmaintained open-sourced version of the code underpinning slashdot into some sort of basic functionality, and who have since made it the site you are enjoying today. Thanks, too, to our behind-the-scenes staff members, who keep the underlying services we depend on, running 24/7. Other staff members are more visible, like the editorial team who spend several hours every single day processing the stories that get posted to the site.

And let's not forget the members of the community who purchase subscriptions and thereby fund the operations of this site. We do have real world expenses: paying for our servers, domain registrations, and paying a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) to do our taxes.

Read on past the fold for all the rest!

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Amazon wins court injunction on controversial JEDI contract:

[...] Amazon late last year filed suit against the Trump administration over the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud-computing contract. Amazon last month asked the court to grant a temporary injunction halting any JEDI work while the case is pending, and today Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith agreed. Although the existence of the injunction is public, documents relating to the matter are presently sealed.

The JEDI contract is a $10 billion agreement to build a cloud computing and storage platform for use by the entire Department of Defense. Several firms were in the running for the deal, including Oracle and IBM. in April, the DoD dropped the list of finalist candidates to two: Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure. AWS was widely expected to seal the deal, and so industry-watchers were surprised when in October Microsoft nabbed the contract instead.

Amazon filed suit a month later. The company argued that it didn't just lose the contract for ordinary reasons of cost or capability but was instead sabotaged for political reasons. Microsoft's win flowed from "improper pressure from President Donald J. Trump, who launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy—Jeffrey P. Bezos," the lawsuit argued. (Bezos is the founder of Amazon and CEO as well as owner of The Washington Post.)

Previously:

• Pentagon's $10BN Jedi Decision 'Risky for the Country and Democracy,' Says AWS CEO Jassy
• Pentagon Beams Down $10bn JEDI Contract to Microsoft: Windows Giant Beats Off Bezos
• Amazon, Microsoft Wage War Over the Pentagon's "War Cloud"

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Food and energy availability cause physical changes in acid-loving microorganisms that are used to study Earth's climate history, according to research from Dartmouth College.

The finding that factors other than temperature can influence the membranes of single-celled archaea adds to the complexity of paleoclimate studies which have traditionally used the microbe's fossilized remains to reconstruct past climate conditions.

Archaea are one of three major domains of life alongside bacteria and eukarya, the domain that includes animals and plants.

The research result, published in Environmental Microbiology, can help resolve disagreements in paleoclimate research and can support a more detailed understanding of the planet's climate systems.

"Biomarkers, like the fat molecules that make up the cell membranes in our own bodies, can be powerful recorders of the environment that can last for billions of years," said William Leavitt, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth. "The motivation of this research was to better explain how archaea respond to all major types of stress in their environment, and how they record that stress in fat molecules that last over geologic time."

[...] While most research on archaeal membranes has focused on species that live in lakes and oceans, the Dartmouth researchers studied thermoacidophiles—acid and heat-loving relatives that originally evolved in hot springs and thrive in some of Earth's most extreme environments. Instead of studying how the microbe reacted to temperature changes, the research team focused on the effects of varying food and energy availability.

[...] The research aims to help geologists and climatologists in their efforts to fine-tune records of past sea surface temperatures as they piece together portraits of Earth's past climate.

More information: Alice Zhou et al, Energy flux controls tetraether lipid cyclization in Sulfolobus acidocaldarius, Environmental Microbiology (2019). DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.14851

Journal information: Environmental Microbiology

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.itwire.com/open-source/linux-kernel-patch-maker-says-court-case-was-only-way-out.html

The head of security firm Open Source Security, Brad Spengler, says he had little option but to file a lawsuit against open source advocate Bruce Perens, who alleged back in 2017 that security patches issued for the Linux kernel by OSS violated the licence under which the kernel is distributed.

The case ended last week with Perens coming out on the right side of things; after some back and forth, a court doubled down on its earlier decision that OSS must pay Perens' legal costs as awarded in June 2018.

The remainder of the article is an interview with Brad Spengler about the case and the issue.

iTWire contacted Spengler soon after the case ended, as he had promised to speak at length about the issue once all legal issues were done and dusted. Queries submitted by iTWire along with Spengler's answers in full are given below:

Previously:
Court Orders Payment of $259,900.50 to Bruce Perens' Attorneys

Original Submission

martyb writes in with an IRC submission:

Automated system can rewrite outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles

A system created by MIT researchers could be used to automatically update factual inconsistencies in Wikipedia articles, reducing time and effort spent by human editors who now do the task manually.

Wikipedia comprises millions of articles that are in constant need of edits to reflect new information. That can involve article expansions, major rewrites, or more routine modifications such as updating numbers, dates, names, and locations. Currently, humans across the globe volunteer their time to make these edits.

In a paper being presented at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the researchers describe a text-generating system that pinpoints and replaces specific information in relevant Wikipedia sentences, while keeping the language similar to how humans write and edit.

The idea is that humans would type into an interface an unstructured sentence with updated information, without needing to worry about style or grammar. The system would then search Wikipedia, locate the appropriate page and outdated sentence, and rewrite it in a humanlike fashion. In the future, the researchers say, there's potential to build a fully automated system that identifies and uses the latest information from around the web to produce rewritten sentences in corresponding Wikipedia articles that reflect updated information.

"There are so many updates constantly needed to Wikipedia articles. It would be beneficial to automatically modify exact portions of the articles, with little to no human intervention," says Darsh Shah, a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and one of the lead authors. "Instead of hundreds of people working on modifying each Wikipedia article, then you'll only need a few, because the model is helping or doing it automatically. That offers dramatic improvements in efficiency."

Many other bots exist that make automatic Wikipedia edits. Typically, those work on mitigating vandalism or dropping some narrowly defined information into predefined templates, Shah says. The researchers' model, he says, solves a harder artificial intelligence problem: Given a new piece of unstructured information, the model automatically modifies the sentence in a humanlike fashion. "The other [bot] tasks are more rule-based, while this is a task requiring reasoning over contradictory parts in two sentences and generating a coherent piece of text," he says.

Original Submission

martyb writes in with an IRC submission:

Registrars raise alarm over proposal for big .com fee hikes:

Last week, ICANN announced that Verisign, the private company that administers the .com domain, will be allowed to raise prices by more than 70 percent over the next decade. Domain registrars—companies that help the public register domains and must pass along these escalating fees—aren't happy about it.

"ICANN and Verisign made these changes in secret, without consulting or incorporating feedback from the ICANN community or Internet users," registrar Namecheap wrote in a blog post. "Namecheap will continue to lead the fight against price increases that will harm our customers and the Internet as a whole."

On Sunday, my Ars Technica colleague Kate Cox got a notification from her registrar, Dynadot, warning that "price increases on the registry level unfortunately result in price increases at Dynadot."

To register a .com domain on behalf of a customer, a company like Namecheap or Dynadot must pay Verisign a $7.85 fee. Registrars typically add a few dollars on top of this fee, but fierce competition among registrars limits their ability to raise prices. But Verisign itself doesn't have competitors; if you want to register a .com address, you have to do business with Verisign.

To prevent Verisign from abusing this monopoly, ICANN caps the fees Verisign can charge.

The new contract allows Verisign to raise the current $7.85 price by 7 percent per year over the next four years—far faster than expected inflation over that period. Verisign would then be required to keep prices flat for two years before it could begin another four-year cycle of 7 percent annual price hikes. Add this all up, and the price of a domain registration could rise 70 percent to $13.49 by 2030. If inflation stays near the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target during that period, Verisign's inflation-adjusted revenue will rise by about $4 per domain, per year.

That would represent a massive windfall for Verisign because according to Namecheap, there are more than 140 million .com domain names registered. So Verisign would reap more than $500 million in additional revenue, each year, for running the .com registration database.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Preclinical Study Links Human Gene Variant to THC Reward:

A common variation in a human gene that affects the brain's reward processing circuit increases vulnerability to the rewarding effects of the main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis in adolescent females, but not males, according to preclinical research by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. As adolescence represents a highly sensitive period of brain development with the highest risk for initiating cannabis use, these findings in mice have important implications for understanding the influence of genetics on cannabis dependence in humans.

The brain's endocannabinoid system regulates activity of cannabinoids that are normally produced by the body to influence brain development and regulate mood, as well as those from external sources, such as the psychoactive ingredient THC, also known as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which is found in cannabis. An enzyme called fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH) breaks down a cannabinoid called anandamide that is naturally found in the brain and is most closely related to THC, helping to remove it from circulation.

In the study, published Feb. 12 in Science Advances, the investigators examined mice harboring a human gene variant that causes FAAH to degrade more easily, increasing overall anandamide levels in the brain. They discovered that the variant resulted in an overactive reward circuit in female—but not male adolescent mice—that resulted in higher preference for THC in females. Previous clinical studies linked this FAAH variant with increased risk for problem drug use, but no studies had specifically looked at the mechanistic effect on cannabis dependence.

"Our study shows that a variant in the FAAH gene, which is found in about one-third of people, increases vulnerability to THC in females and has large-scale impact on brain regions and pathways responsible for processing reward," said lead author Dr. Caitlin Burgdorf, a recent doctoral graduate from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. "Our findings suggest that genetics can be a contributing factor for increased susceptibility to cannabis dependence in select populations."

The team found that female mice with the FAAH variant showed an increased preference for the environment in which they'd been exposed to THC over a neutral environment when they were exposed to the substance during adolescence, and the effect persisted into adulthood. However, if female mice with this variant were exposed to THC for the first time in adulthood, there was no increased preference for THC. These findings in mice parallel observations in humans that a select population of females are more sensitive to the effects of cannabis and demonstrate a quicker progression to cannabis dependence. "Our findings suggest that we have discovered a genetic factor to potentially identify subjects at risk for cannabis dependence," said Dr. Burgdorf.

Journal Reference: Caitlin E. Burgdorf, Deqiang Jing, Ruirong Yang, et. al. Endocannabinoid genetic variation enhances vulnerability to THC reward in adolescent female mice. Science Advances, 2020; 6 (7): eaay1502 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay1502

Original Submission

Coward, Anonymous writes:

According to Bloomberg:

Boeing Co. told U.S regulators on Friday that it didn't see the need to undertake a potentially costly fix for a wiring issue on the company's grounded 737 Max, according to two people familiar with the briefing.

The planemaker found in an audit last year of the 737 Max that wires were bundled improperly in a way that could trigger a failure similar to what happened in two crashes of the plane in which a total of 346 people died.

U.S. law requires wiring that could cause a hazardous condition in a failure to be separated from other wires. [...]

The wiring issues have been found in more than a dozen locations on the 737 Max.

From The Seattle Times [May require that Ad-Blockers be switched off, or at least disable style sheets]:

During the original design and certification of Boeing's 737 MAX, company engineers didn't notice that the electrical wiring doesn't meet federal aviation regulations for safe wire separation. And the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) failed to detect Boeing's miss.

The wiring vulnerability creates the theoretical potential for an electrical short to move the jet's horizontal tail uncommanded by the pilot, which could be catastrophic. If that were to happen, it could lead to a flight control emergency similar to the one that brought down two MAX jets, causing 346 deaths and the grounding of the aircraft.

Because this danger is extremely remote, the FAA faces a dilemma over what to do about it. The issue has complicated the return of the MAX to service after a grounding that is edging close to one year. [...]

"There are 205 million flight hours in the 737 fleet with this wiring type," a Boeing official said. "There have been 16 failures in service, none of which were applicable to this scenario. We've had no hot shorts."

In addition, Boeing says pulling out and rerouting wires on the almost 800 MAXs already built would pose a potentially higher risk of causing an electrical short, because insulation could chafe or crack in the process of moving the wires.

However, an FAA safety engineer familiar with the issue, who asked not to be identified because he spoke without agency permission, said agency technical staff have been clear that the wiring doesn't comply with regulations and have told their Boeing counterparts it has to be fixed.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Flaws in the blockchain app some states plan to use in the 2020 election allow bad actors to alter or cancel someone’s vote or expose their private info.

Security researchers have found key flaws in a mobile voting app that some states plan to use in the 2020 election that can allow hackers to launch both client- and server-side attacks that can easily manipulate or even delete someone’s vote, as well as prevent a reliable audit from taking place after the fact, they said.

A team of researchers at MIT released a security audit of Voatz—a blockchain app that already was used in a limited way for absentee-ballot voting in the 2018 mid-term elections—that they said bolsters the case for why internet voting is a bad idea and voting transparency is the only way to ensure legitimacy.

West Virginia was the first state to use Voatz, developed by a Boston-based company of the same name, in the mid-term election, marking the inaugural use of internet voting in a high-stakes federal election. The app primarily collected votes from absentee ballots of military service personnel stationed overseas. Other counties in Utah and Colorado also used the app last year in a limited way for municipal elections.

However, despite the company’s claim that the app has a number of security features that make it safe for such an auspicious use—including immutability via its use of a permissioned blockchain, end-to-end voting encryption, voter anonymity, device compromise detection, and a voter-verified audit trail–the MIT team found that any attacker that controls the user’s device through some very rudimentary flaws can brush aside these protections.

“We find that an attacker with root privileges on the device can disable all of Voatz’s host-based protections, and therefore stealthily control the user’s vote, expose her private ballot, and exfiltrate the user’s PIN and other data used to authenticate the server,” MIT researchers Michael A. Specter, James Koppe and Daniel Weitzner wrote in their paper (PDF), “The Ballot is Busted Before the Blockchain: A Security Analysis of Voatz, the First Internet Voting Application Used in U.S.Federal Elections.”

[...] One voting district in Washington state—Mason County–already has pulled its plans to use Voatz in November, according to the New York Times, while West Virginia is moving ahead with its plans to expand Voatz used to disabled voters, the paper reported.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Fires contained in hard-hit Australia state, but now floods threaten:

All the blazes in Australia's hard-hit state of New South Wales have been brought under control, firefighters said on Thursday, signalling the end of a "black summer" that claimed 33 lives nationwide.

But heavy rains that helped extinguish the blazes that have raged along the east coast since September are causing flash floods in parts of the state, posing new problems for some residents.

"Not all fires are out, there's still some fire activity in the far south of the state but all fires are contained so we can really focus on helping people rebuild," the state's fire service deputy commissioner Rob Rogers said on Twitter.

[...] Bushfires scorched more than 10 million hectares in the country's east and south, killing at least 33 people and an estimated one billion animals, while destroying more than 2,500 homes.

[...] Days of recent rainfall have extinguished the largest fires and brought those that remain under control.

In the Australian Capital Territory around Canberra firefighters are still trying to bring one blaze under control, but it was not said to be threatening.

Attention has now turned to tackling flash flooding expected in the coming days following the heaviest rains in 30 years.

On Thursday dams near Sydney overflowed after days of torrential rain, a spectacular reversal from months of drought. The Nepean dam was just a third full less than a week ago, but on Thursday video footage showing water cascading over the dam wall. Hundreds of people have been rescued from floodwaters in recent days.

More Information:

Dams overflow as Australia braces for more floods:

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

A weekly financial newsletter included this link, https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/50-cognitive-biases-to-be-aware-of-so-you-can-be-the-very-best-version-of-you/. A cute graphical "flash card" version of the same list is available at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-cognitive-biases-in-the-modern-world/ Each "card" includes a short example that I found helpful in understanding the definitions.

Along with the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger Effect, the list had some eye openers for me. Here are the first ten. As a mental exercise, think about how many more you are aware of...before going to either of the links for a peek:

1. Fundamental Attribution Error: We judge others on their personality or fundamental character, but we judge ourselves on the situation.

Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot (1990)

martyb writes in with several IRC submissions:

Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot (1990):

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

[...] Voyager 1 was speeding out of the solar system — beyond Neptune and about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun — when mission managers commanded it to look back toward home for a final time. It snapped a series of 60 images that were used to create the first “family portrait” of our solar system.

The picture that would become known as the Pale Blue Dot shows Earth within a scattered ray of sunlight. Voyager 1 was so far away that — from its vantage point — Earth was just a point of light about a pixel in size.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Watch the winner of this year's 'Dance Your Ph.D.' contest:

[...] Dance Your Ph.D., hosted by Science and AAAS.[...] The contest challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through the most jargon-free medium available: interpretive dance. "Antonia Groneberg's choreography, inspired by zebrafish larvae, merged dance and science for an aesthetically stunning and intellectually profound masterwork of art," says Alexa Meade, one of the contest judges and an artist who uses mathematics and illusion in her work.

[...] Largely shot over one hot weekend at Champalimaud Research, the video incorporates colleagues, some of her dance students, children of the adult participants, and others on the Lisbon campus. (Groneberg says she went around asking, "Do you have toddlers I can borrow?")

[...] The judges—a panel of world-renowned artists and scientists—chose Groneberg's dance from 30 submissions based on both artistic and scientific merits. She takes home $1000 and a distinction shared by 11 past overall winners. "This year's Dance Your Ph.D. featured some of the best combinations of science and interpretive dance I have seen! The competition made complicated subject-matters accessible while maintaining the integrity of the material," Meade says.

This year's contest covered four broad categories: biology, chemistry, physics, and social science.

The winners were:

• Antonia Groneberg: Overall winner and social science category winner.
• Katharina Hanika: Biology category winner.
• Jackie Zorz: Chemistry category winner.
• Samuli Junttila: Physics category winner.

Which one did you like best?

Original Submission