SoylentNews

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Overcharged by a tech company? New service could help get your money back:

When a major company overbills you, doesn't honor a sales promise or wrongly damages your credit, it can be difficult and discouraging to seek out ways to make a consumer claim. The online platform FairShake -- formerly known as Radvocate -- relaunched on Tuesday with a rebuilt product that aims to help people take on big companies such as Verizon, Wells Fargo and Equinox and win compensation.

FairShake automates the claims process of legal research, document creation and delivery to help customers negotiate a resolution to their claim against a company. Any disputes that aren't resolved in negotiation can be escalated to the private consumer arbitration court system, and the platform will automate the process of filing with the American Arbitration Association.

Around 80 million people per year in the US have some sort of unresolved dispute with a company, mostly in big industries like telecom, banking and online services, Max Kornblith, co-founder of FairShake, told CNET. As such, FairShake has expanded from focusing on the telecom industry to others including financial services, home security, fitness and ride-hailing services.

[...] FairShake takes a 20% commission of any refunds or other cash payments that customers receive in their disputes, and 10% of any adjustments to their debt or account balances, along with a $20 minimum for any successfully resolved claim. If you don't get paid, FairShake doesn't either, Kornblith said. The company also offers discounted or free help to low-income customers, he added.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Have I Been Pwned No Longer For Sale:

After announcing last year that he was looking to sell Have I Been Pwned (HIPB), Troy Hunt said this week that the popular service has been pulled off the market and will instead continue to be run independently.

HIBP offers a free service for consumers to check if their usernames and passwords have been compromised in a data breach. Since it was founded seven years ago, the platform has skyrocketed to offer commercial services for companies (including its Pwned Passwords tool and more) and to include more large-scale breaches (including the massive 2019 Collection #1 data dump, totaling 773 million unique addresses and 87GB in size).

These increased capabilities are part of the reason why Hunt said in June 2019 he was listing the service for sale – In a posting at the time, he said the sheer amount of breached data that needed to be loaded into database has increased beyond the capability of one person.

However after a strenuous M&A process resulting in an "infeasible" deal with an exclusive bidder, Hunt said that he will instead continue to run the service independently. "After 11 months of a very intensive process, culminating in many months of exclusivity with a party I believed would ultimately be the purchaser of the service, unexpected changes to their business model made the deal infeasible," Hunt said in a Monday post. "It wasn't something I could have seen coming nor was it anything to do with HIBP itself, but it introduced a range of new and insurmountable barriers."

Original Submission

[Editor's note: We have been unable to corroborate this story from GHacks. A search on Google has found there are other reports of this, but they all refer to a forum that no longer corroborates this report. It seems there was — something — but that it is not now visible on their site. See, too, the "Previously" section at the bottom which suggests this story may be in error. Can any Soylentil shed some light on this? --martyb]

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

SETI@Home's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence comes to an end - gHacks Tech News:

SETI@Home will go into hibernation on March 31, 2020. The distributed computing project was launched in 1999 to analyze data provided by the radio telescope Arecibo in Puerto Rico. Later on, data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Parkes Observatory in Australia were added.

SETI@Home -- SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- broke down the signals into packets which it then distributed to connected computer systems. These computer systems, often operated by volunteers from around the world, would then be used to analyze the data and transfer results back to the project.

[...] The project maintainers at UC Berkeley provide two reasons for the decision:

1. The project is "at a point of diminishing returns" as it has "analyzed all the data" that is needed "for now".
2. Managing the distributed processing of data is a lot of work and time is required to complete the "back-end analysis of the results" that have been obtained already.

Hibernation means that the project is not disappearing from the face of the earth. The project website and forums remain open and the distributed computing resources of SETI@Home may be used by other scientific research projects to focus on areas such as "cosmology or pulsar research". Seti@Home may start distributing work again if that happens and the project team will make an announcement if a new research project has been found.

Previously:
New Technologies, Strategies Expanding Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Is Aging a Disease?

Whether ageing can be cured or not, there are arguments for thinking about it like a disease. But there are major pitfalls, too.

The first depiction of humanity's obsession with curing death is The Epic of Gilgamesh—which, dating back to at least 1800 B.C., is also one of the first recorded works of literature, period. Centuries later, the ancient Roman playwright Terentius declared, "Old age itself is a sickness," and Cicero argued "we must struggle against [old age], as against a disease." In 450 B.C., Herodotus wrote about the fountain of youth, a restorative spring that reverses aging and inspired explorers such as Ponce de León. But what once was a mythical holy grail is now seemingly within tantalizing reach. As humans' understanding and knowledge of science and technology have increased, so too have our life spans.

[...] Maybe the ancients weren't wrong, and aging can be not only delayed but cured like a disease. Over the years, the movement to classify aging as a disease has gained momentum not only from longevity enthusiasts but also from scientists. In 1954, Robert M. Perlman published a paper in the Journal of American Geriatrics Society called "The Aging Syndrome" in which he called aging a "disease complex." Since then, others have jumped on board, including gerontologists frustrated by a lack of funding to study the aging process itself.

[...] However, labeling aging itself as a disease is both misleading and detrimental. Pathologizing a universal process makes it seem toxic. In our youth-obsessed society, ageism already runs rampant in Hollywood, the job market, and even presidential races. And calling aging a disease doesn't address critical questions about why we age in the first place. Instead of calling aging a disease, scientists should aim to identify and treat the underlying processes that cause aging and age-related cellular deterioration.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow2851:

Apple's $500 million iPhone settlement, briefly explained:

Apple has agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its phone batteries — and you might get a (small) cut of that.

According to Reuters, Apple will pay qualified iPhone owners $25 per phone, although this amount could be adjusted depending on how many claims are filed. (Think of that Equifax settlement that was supposed to give us $125 each, except so many people submitted a claim that it was significantly reduced). Nevertheless, the minimum amount that Apple must pay out will be at least $310 million.

The settlement will cover models 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, and SE devices that installed the software updates before December 21, 2017. If that's you, don't spend that $25 yet — the settlement still has to be approved by a federal judge.

The settlement puts a punctuation mark on what became known as "Batterygate." In 2016, iPhone 6s owners began complaining that their phones suddenly shut down despite having plenty of battery life remaining. Apple eventually responded by admitting that a "very small number" of the iPhone 6s had an issue with their batteries and offering free battery replacements to those models. Then, owners of other iPhone models claimed that their devices were having similar shutdown issues and that the problem was more widespread than Apple would admit. Apple responded with a software update that reduced the number of shutdowns significantly.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Linus Pauling was a fearsomely great scientist who is remembered by the general public for his advocacy of megadoses of Vitamin C, a favorite topic of his later in life. Infectious disease, cancer: Pauling advised gram amounts of ascorbic acid and had a lot of theorizing to offer about why that was beneficial. So while his scientific legacy is (among other things) his work on chemical bonding, on genetically-based disease and the concept of molecular biology in general, and plenty of lesser-known deeds such as encouraging the earliest NMR studies of organic compounds, his legacy in the wider world involves increased vitamin sales and the association of Vitamin C in particular with the treatment of disease.

Unfortunately, Pauling's ideas about how Vitamin C would prevent and treat disease were wrong. Instead of having an antioxidant effect (which is one of the things he proposed and what most people associate with it), at very high doses ascorbic acid has a pro-oxidant mechanism of action (see below). This is almost entirely seen with i.v. dosing, and it's worth noting that Pauling's 1976 paper on prolongation of life in terminal cancer patients via ascorbate supplementation used a combination of oral and i.v. routes. Attempts to follow up on this observation (mostly with oral dosing) did not reproduce the effect, and it's become clear that if you're going to see anything, it's via intravenous administration, and at even higher doses than Pauling thought.

Here's a new paper from a team in Italy that suggests that these effects have to do with immuno-oncology, and that the combination of i.v. ascorbate and immunomodulators might be quite useful. Vitamin C only showed effects in mouse tumor models when the animals had a fully competent immune system. Narrowing down, its beneficial effects appear to depend on T-cell pathways: antibodies to CD4 or CD8, for example, took things back to baseline tumor development. But on the other hand, the combination of Vitamin C with anti-PD1 and/or anti-CTLA-4 antibodies was noticeably more effective. This appears to be independent of the pro-oxidative damage mechanism mentioned above, as well as of the reported effects of high-dose ascorbate on iron metabolism.

The big question is, does this apply to humans?

-- submitted from IRC

[Ed Note: This is from "In The Pipeline", described as "Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry." - Fnord666]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Stealing advanced nations' Mac malware isn't hard. Here's how one hacker did it:

Malware developers are always trying to outdo each other with creations that are stealthier and more advanced than their competitors'. At the RSA Security conference this week, a former hacker for the National Security Agency demonstrated an approach that's often more effective: stealing and then repurposing a rival's code.

Patrick Wardle, who is now a security researcher at the macOS and iOS enterprise management firm Jamf, showed how reusing old Mac malware can be a smarter and less resource-intensive approach for deploying ransomware, remote access spy tools, and other types of malicious code. Where the approach really pays dividends, he said, is with the repurposing of advanced code written by government-sponsored hackers.

"There are incredibly well-funded, well-resourced, very motivated hacker groups in three-letter agencies that are creating amazing malware that's fully featured and also fully tested," Wardle said during a talk titled "Repurposed Malware: A Dark Side of Recycling."

"The idea is: why not let these groups in these agencies create malware and if you're a hacker just repurpose it for your own mission?" he said.

To prove the point, Wardle described how he altered four pieces of Mac malware that have been used in in-the-wild attacks over the past several years.

The repurposing caused the malware to report to command servers belonging to Wardle rather than the servers designated by the developers. From there, Wardle had full control over the recycled malware. The feat allowed him to use well-developed and fully featured applications to install his own malicious payloads, obtain screenshots and other sensitive data from compromised Macs, and carry out other nefarious actions written into the malware.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

They are there and they are gone: ICARUS chases a fourth neutrino:

It is well-established that the three known neutrino types – electron, muon and tau – oscillate, or change, into one another. To study these oscillations and how they happen, scientists need neutrinos to interact with something. For ICARUS, that substance is liquid argon.

In the ICARUS experiment, a muon-type neutrino beam will interact with liquid argon and should, in theory, produce mostly charged particles called muons. (An electron-type neutrino beam should produce mostly electrons.) But given results from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector and MiniBooNE, this is only part of the story, and ICARUS intends to fill the gaps.

"What if the neutrinos are oscillating into a neutrino that does not interact at all, not even a little bit like other neutrinos do?" [Robert] Wilson [deputy spokesperson of ICARUS and professor of physics at Colorado State University] said. "This is not a natural extension of neutrino theory, but it could explain the LSND[*] and MiniBooNE results."

Such a fourth type of neutrino, unlike the others, would not change into a complementary charged particle upon interaction in a detector. In fact, it wouldn't interact at all. By quantum mechanics, however, this so-called sterile neutrino could still oscillate between neutrino types and alter the oscillation pattern that ICARUS will observe.

Discovery of a sterile neutrino would upend the Standard Model of subatomic particles and affect our understanding of how the universe has evolved.

[...] It will take approximately eight weeks to fill ICARUS with liquid argon. Once the detector is filled, scientists will check its stability and the argon's purity. Then, they will turn on power for the first time since ICARUS made its way to Fermilab across the Atlantic Ocean. They expect to see first particle tracks later this year.

[*] LSND: Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275:

How a Hacker's Mom Broke Into a South Dakota Prison:

John Strand breaks into things for a living. As a penetration tester, he gets hired by organizations to attack their defenses, helping reveal weaknesses before actual bad guys find them. Normally, Strand embarks on these missions himself, or deploys one of his experienced colleagues at Black Hills Information Security. But in July 2014, prepping for a pen test of a South Dakota correctional facility, he took a decidedly different tack. He sent his mom.

[...] "She approached me one day, and said 'You know, I want to break in somewhere," says Strand, who is sharing the experience this week at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco. "And it's my mom, so what am I supposed to say?"

That's not as easy a call as it might sound. Penetration testers always say that you can get amazingly far with just a clipboard and some confidence, but a novice run at a state correctional facility is just plain daunting. And while pen testers are contractually permitted to break into a client's systems, if they're caught tensions can escalate quickly.

[...] Rita Strand's mission would also be complicated by her lack of technical expertise. A professional pen tester would be able to assess an organization's digital security in real time and plant back doors tailored to what they found on the specific network. Rita had the health inspector guise down cold, but she was no hacker.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Cells can both survive and multiply under more stress than previously thought, shows research from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences.

This was found by inhibiting the essential gene DNA polymerase alpha, or POLA1, which initiates DNA replication during cell division.

The discovery gives researchers new insights into DNA replication and may potentially be used for a new type of cancer treatment. Research Leader and Associate Professor Luis Toledo of the Center for Chromosome Stability at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine states as follows:

'If we are visionaries, I would say that we might be at the birth of a whole new set of molecules that could be used in fighting cancer', adding:

'Basically, if we turn the finding on its head, this novel strategy aims at exploiting an in-built weakness in cancer cells and make them crash while they divide.'

[...] 'All cells can be sensitive to POLA1 inhibitors, including cancer cells, and we might speculate that the strategy could be especially useful against very aggressive forms of cancer that proliferate at a high pace'.

The next step of the research group is to find more molecules that biologically inhibits the POLA1 gene and which, in combination with other substances, may be used in the treatment of cancer patients.

Journal Reference:

1. Amaia Ercilla, Jan Benada, Sampath Amitash, Gijs Zonderland, Giorgio Baldi, Kumar Somyajit, Fena Ochs, Vincenzo Costanzo, Jiri Lukas, Luis Toledo. Physiological Tolerance to ssDNA Enables Strand Uncoupling during DNA Replication. Cell Reports, 2020; 30 (7): 2416 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.01.067

   ---

   Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow2736:

This Program Will Make You Invisible (to Your Webcam):

Have you ever fantasized about pulling a vanishing act? One minute you're there, the next you're not. It's a fantasy that comes on especially strong, for me, when I'm stuck in a remote meeting. I'm sitting on my webcam, waiting for everyone to say their piece, and wishing I could just remove myself from the picture. Now, there's a program that will let you do just that.

It's called Disappearing People and it's the work of Google web engineer Jason Mayes. "This code attempts to learn over time the makeup of the background of a video such that I can attempt to remove any humans from the scene," Mayes wrote on his GitHub. "This is all happening in real time, in the browser, using TensorFlow."

[...] It's not perfect. When playing with it, I'd often see the bricked outline of my body moving across my room. It didn't remove me from the picture so much as cover me over with glitchy looking copies of my room. But it happens in real time, and that's still impressive.

Go here if you'd like to try removing yourself from the equation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Take heart, all ye parents weary of reminding your kids not to pick their noses and burp loudly. Fifteenth-century moms and dads faced the same battles to keep their tykes well-mannered.  

Just take a look at the 500-year-old Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke, which taught proper etiquette to children of families aspiring to life among English royals or nobles. It's been digitized for the first time by a new British Library site. 

The Little Children's Little Book manuscript, from around 1480, is written in Middle English, so there are lots of thines, thous and thys. But screens, cars and vaccines aside, kids will be kids. They dug out their boogers then and they dig out their boogers now. 

"Pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys," reads one rule. (Don't pick your ears or nose.) "Spette not ovyr thy tabylle," reads another. (Don't spit over your table.) "Bulle not as a bene were in thi throote." (Don't burp as if you had a bean in your throat.)

This kind of a behavioral guide, known as a courtesy book, was common in parts of Europe between the 13th and 18th centuries. The author of The Lytille Childrenes Lytil Boke links manners not only to social rank but to religion, saying courtesy comes straight from heaven.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Every year, little black-and-white birds called pied flycatchers make the lengthy trek from sub-saharan Africa to northern Europe to feast on caterpillars, claim a nest, and have babies. This typically goes off without a hitch, and the birds return to Africa a few months later, offspring in tow. But recently, some flycatchers have arrived to find their nesting sites occupied by haughty, territorial great tits. And those birds don't just chase flycatchers away—they brutally attack them, kill them, and eat their brains.

Source: https://www.popsci.com/great-tits-murder-climate-change/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Until the 1980s, big companies in America tended to take a paternalistic attitude toward their workforce. Many corporate CEOs took pride in taking care of everyone who worked at their corporate campuses. Business leaders loved to tell stories about someone working their way up from the mailroom to a C-suite office.

But this began to change in the 1980s. Wall Street investors demanded that companies focus more on maximizing returns for shareholders. An emerging corporate orthodoxy held that a company should focus on its "core competence"—the one or two functions that truly sets it apart from other companies—while contracting out other functions to third parties.

Often, companies found they could save money this way. Big companies often pay above the market rate for routine services like cleaning offices, answering phones, staffing a cafeteria, or working on an assembly line. Putting these services out for competitive bid helped the companies get these functions completed at rock-bottom rates, while avoiding the hassle of managing employees. It also saved them from having to pay the same generous benefits they offered to higher-skilled employees.

Of course, the very things that made the new arrangement attractive for big companies made it lousy for the affected workers. Not only were companies trying to spend less money on these services, but now there were companies in the middle taking a cut. Once a job got contracted out, it was much less likely to become a first step up the corporate ladder. It's hard to work your way up from the mailroom if the mailroom is run by a separate contracting firm.

[...] The existence of such a two-tier workplace is especially ironic in Silicon Valley, a region that takes pride in its egalitarian ethos. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a remarkably candid assessment of the situation in 2012, in a statement quoted by author Chrystia Freeland.

"Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out," Schmidt said. "We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person. Which I find sort of offensive, but it is the way it’s done."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

A dam right across the North Sea: A defense against climate change, but primarily a warning:
[Ed Note: English version of the story follows the Dutch version - Fnord666]

A 475-km-long dam between the north of Scotland and the west of Norway and another one of 160 km between the west point of France and the southwest of England could protect more than 25 million Europeans against the consequences of an expected sea level rise of several metres over the next few centuries. The costs, 250-500 billion euros, are "merely" 0.1% of the gross national product, annualy over 20 years, of all the countries that would be protected by such a dam. That's what Dr Sjoerd Groeskamp, oceanographer at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, calculated together with his Swedish colleague Joakim Kjellson at GEOMAR in Kiel, Germany, published this month in the scientific journal the Bulletin of the American Meterological Society. 'Besides being a possible solution, the design of such an extreme dam is mainly a warning', says Groeskamp. 'It reveals the immensity of the problem hanging over our heads.'

[...] The authors acknowledge that the consequences of this dam for North Sea wildlife would be considerable. 'The tide would disappear in a large part of the North Sea, and with it the transport of silt and nutrients. The sea would eventually even become a freshwater lake. That will drastically change the ecosystem and therefore have an impact on the fishing industry as well', Groeskamp elaborates.

[...] Ultimately, the description of this extreme dam is more of a warning than a solution, Groeskamp states. 'The costs and the consequences of such a dam are huge indeed. However, we have calculated that the cost of doing nothing against sea level rise will ultimately be many times higher. This dam makes it almost tangible what the consequences of the sea level rise will be; a sea level rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 according to the bleakest scenarios. This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now. If we do nothing, then this extreme dam might just be the only solution.'

Sjoerd Groeskamp, Joakim Kjellsson. NEED The Northern European Enclosure Dam for if climate change mitigation fails. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2020; DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0145.1

Original Submission