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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Exclusive: AT&T considers cellphone plans subsidized by ads:

(Reuters) - AT&T Inc T.N is considering offering wireless phone plans partially subsidized by advertising as soon as a year from now, Chief Executive John Stankey said in an interview on Tuesday.

[...] The consideration, which has not been previously disclosed, underscores AT&T's commitment to the advertising business as the U.S. phone carrier reviews its portfolio to identify assets to sell in order to reduce its debt load. AT&T is considering selling its advertising-technology unit Xandr, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

"I believe there's a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill," Stankey said.

Various companies including Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O, Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint's Boost Mobile have tested advertising supported phone services since the early 2000s but they have not caught on. AT&T is hoping that better advertising targeting could revive the idea.

The planned launch of an ad-supported version of AT&T's video-streaming service HBO Max next year will serve as a "foundational element" that will provide new advertising inventory, and would be key to new phone plans supported by ads, Stankey said without offering details.

[...] AT&T engineers are creating "unified customer identifiers," Stankey said. Such technology would allow marketers to identify users across multiple devices and serve them relevant advertising.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

YouTube Rippers 'Flvto' and '2Conv' Will Take Legal Battle to US Supreme Court * TorrentFreak:

In 2018, a group of prominent record labels sued two very popular YouTube rippers, FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com.

The labels, including Universal, Warner Bros, and Sony, accused the sites of copyright infringement and hoped to quickly shut them down.

That didn't go as expected. The owner of the sites, a Russian man named Tofig Kurbanov, lawyered up and fought back.

[...] A Virginia federal court ruled that the music companies lacked personal jurisdiction. The sites were operated from abroad and didn't 'purposefully' target or interact with US users, it concluded.

[...] The music companies disagreed and appealed the matter at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sent the case back to the district court a few months ago.

The appeals court found that there are more than sufficient facts to conclude that Kurbanov purposefully conducted business in the US, specifically, the state of Virginia. Kurbanov and his legal team disagreed but their request for a rehearing was denied.

Faced with this decision, which could potentially affect many other websites operated outside the United States, the owner of FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com has decided to petition the Supreme Court to take on the case.

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canopic jug writes:

David Rosenthal discusses the last 25 years of digital preservation efforts in regards to academic journals. It's a long-standing problem and discontinued journals continue to disappear from the Internet. Paper, microfilm, and microfiche are slow to degrade and are decentralized and distributed. Digital media are quick to disappear and the digital publications are usually only in a single physical place leading to single point of failure. It takes continuous, unbroken effort and money to keep digital publications accessible even if only one person or institution wishes to retain acccess. He goes into the last few decades of academic publishing and how we got here and then brings up 4 points abuot preservation, especially in regards to Open Access publishing.

Lesson 1: libraries won't pay enough to preserve even subscription content, let alone open-access content.

[...] Lesson 2: No-one, not even librarians, knows where most of the at-risk open-access journals are.

[...] Lesson 3: The production preservation pipeline must be completely automated.

[...] Lesson 4: Don't make the best be the enemy of the good. I.e. get as much as possible with the available funds, don't expect to get everything.

He posits that focus should be on the preservation of the individual articles, not the journals as units.

Previously:
(2020) Internet Archive Files Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Publisher Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
(2018) Vint Cerf: Internet is Losing its Memory
(2014) The Importance of Information Preservation

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hubie writes:

Homemade and small scale chocolate making has followed an arc similar to the beer industry where a "golden age" declines through consolidation to industrial dominance from which an "artisan" resurgence grows. In the early 20th century there were a relatively large number of chocolate makers where most of them were small-scale producers. As the century progressed, a number of factors drove the industry to consolidate where essentially all the small-scale makers were bought, or they went out of business. The global industry today is dominated by the "big five": Hershey's^®, Mars^®, Ferrero Rocher^®, Cadbury^®, and Nestlé^®. However, over the last 15 or so years, a number of small but dedicated "bean to bar" chocolate makers have been springing up.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Teen 'Blasts Away' Parts of Retina by Staring Into a Pet's Laser Pointer:

The device used was a laser pointer toy intended for exercising pets. While devices like this are often advertised as being low-power lasers, that's now[sic] always the case, and mounting evidence of retinal damage caused by such pointers suggests the risk is growing, researchers say, even though people might not be aware of it.

[...] Despite only looking at the laser directly for a matter of seconds, immediately afterwards he experienced a form of vision loss for several minutes, after describing the initial visual effect as a bright light.

Five months after the incident, the boy, experiencing ongoing blurred vision and partial vision loss in his right eye, went to see OSU ophthalmologist Frederick Davidorf.

At the time, the boy said he sometimes couldn't see individual letters when reading text with his right eye (with his left eye closed). At that point, tests revealed visual acuity was slightly diminished in his right eye, but presented as normal in his left eye.

On a subsequent visit six months later, his visual acuity was found to have improved to a normal level in both eyes, but that seemingly positive result didn't reflect the harm done inside the eye.

Using a high-resolution optical scanning system, Davidorf saw first-hand the damage done to the boy's retinas, where entire regions of light-sensitive photoreceptors cells (aka rods and cones) had been "blasted away" by the laser, as Davidorf puts it.

"There's just nothing left there," Davidorf says. "The affected areas are devoid of cones."

Journal Reference:
Vitellas, Carol BA; Doble, Nathan PhD; Wells-Gray, et al. Cone Photoreceptor Integrity assessed with Adaptive Optics Imaging after Laser-Pointer-Induced Retinal Injury Retinal Cases and Brief Reports, (DOI: 10.1097/ICB.0000000000001025)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Cheap, innovative venom treatments could save tens of thousands of snakebite victims:

[...] snakebites are finally getting the attention they've long needed. In 2017, the WHO officially recognized snakebites as a neglected tropical disease. That designation has led to an influx of funding for innovative research; the largest, more than $100 million, came in 2019 from the Wellcome Trust.

Effective snakebite treatments do exist, and those antivenoms are considered the "gold standard" of care. If a victim receives the right antivenom soon after a bite — within an hour or two — then the chances of survival are "very, very high," says Nicholas Casewell, a biomedical scientist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England.

But that "if" looms large, with big challenges remaining, including the difficulties of speedy access to care and the fact that most anti-venoms work against just a few of the hundreds of dangerous species of venomous snakes. Antivenoms are also "a technology that has seen limited innovation for 120 years," says Andreas Laustsen, a biotech researcher and entrepreneur at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby.

Now, researchers from disparate fields of science are coming together to reimagine the way snakebites are managed. Casewell, Laustsen and others are tweaking current treatments, repurposing pharmaceuticals and even engineering toxin-stopping nanoparticles. The work offers hope that people everywhere, even in remote areas, will eventually be able to safely coexist with snakes.

Venomous snakebites are painful and often deadly. This is an in-depth article that describes problems with accessibility, availability, cost, efficacy, side-effects, and more. For example, an antivenom for one species may not work at all on a different species -- and there are hundreds of them. Further, side effects from the wrong anti-venom are not insignificant. Well worth reading the entire article.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Wayback Machine and Cloudflare team up to archive more of the Web:

The Internet Archive and Cloudflare have teamed up to archive the content of websites that use Cloudflare's Always Online service, increasing the odds that users will be able to view a recent version of a website during outages. The partnership will increase the number of webpages scanned by the Internet Archive, making the organization's Wayback Machine more useful to Internet users in general.

"Websites that enable Cloudflare's Always Online service will now have their content automatically archived, and if by chance the original host is not available to Cloudflare, then the Internet Archive will step in to make sure the pages get through to users," said an announcement by Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

[...] The Internet Archive integration is available to Cloudflare's free users but will only back up the website every 30 days. Cloudflare's paying customers will get more frequent backups, every 15 days for Pro users and every five days for Business and Enterprise users.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Now everyone's a statistician. Here's what armchair COVID experts are getting wrong.:

If we don't analyze statistics for a living, it's easy to be taken in by misinformation about COVID-19 statistics on social media, especially if we don't have the right context.

For instance, we may cherry pick statistics supporting our viewpoint and ignore statistics showing we are wrong. We also still need to correctly interpret these statistics.

It's easy for us to share this misinformation. Many of these statistics are also interrelated, so misunderstandings can quickly multiply.

Here's how we can avoid five common errors, and impress friends and family by getting the statistics right.

1. It's the infection rate that's scary, not the death rate
2. Exponential growth and misleading graphs
3. Not all infections are cases
4. We can't compare deaths with cases from the same date
5. Yes, the data are messy, incomplete and may change

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

plug in, check out

Plugging in a strange USB drive – What could possibly go wrong?:

While wanting to return a found USB flash drive is commendable, you should avoid taking unnecessary risks, lest your device get infested and your data compromised.

External data storage devices have been around almost as long as computers have existed. Magnetic tape and floppy disks, which were once the dominant media, are now mostly fond memories, while optical discs are mostly used in gaming consoles. For the past 20 years, the dominant player on the external storage scene has been the USB flash drive. No wonder: over the years, their storage capacity has increased, and their prices have dropped.

However, even if the humble flash drive has withstood the test of time – at least for now – it has been associated with a number of risks. Especially, due to its small form factor, portability, and ease of access, it can be used to smuggle data out of companies or used to deliver a malware payload that could wreak havoc on systems.

Let's look at the proper cybersecurity practices you should use when handling strange flash drives lying around that you may have stumbled upon.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Scientists discover a new crustacean species in one of the hottest places on Earth:

[...] The lake in which this delicate crustacean was found is a temporary thing. Shallow pools of water are formed in parts of the desert by seasonal floods after spring rainfall. Annual precipitation in the region never exceeds more than 30 mm [~1.2 in] per year, and there are no bodies of water that are there year-round.

[...] Co-author Dr. Martin Schwentner, a crustacean specialist from the Natural History Museum of Vienna, explained that these species are designed for this.

"These Crustaceans are able to survive for decades in the dried-out sediment and will hatch in an upcoming wet season, when the aquatic habitat refills," he said in the press release. "They are perfectly adapted to live in desert environments. Their ability to survive even in the Lut desert highlights their resilience."

[...] Recently, that temperature has risen, with the most recent satellite temperature measurements clocking in at 80.8 degrees Celsius [~177 °F] on the surface.

[...] The air temperature in the region, while not as scorching as the ground itself, is also up there, reaching more than 50 degrees Celsius [122 °F] in the summer.

The larger female of the new species is around three centimetres [~1.2 in] long, while the male specimen is around 2.25 cm [~0.9 in]. Its lack of pigmentation makes it appear almost like a ghost.

Journal Reference:Martin Schwentner, Alexander V. Rudov & Hossein Rajaei. Some like it hot: Phallocryptus fahimii sp. n. (Crustacea: Anostraca: Thamnocephalidae) from the Lut desert, the hottest place on Earth, (2020) Zoology in the Middle East, DOI: 10.1080/09397140.2020.1805139

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

NASA finds evidence of "fresh ice" on Saturn's moon Enceladus:

By digging through detailed infrared images of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus — courtesy of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which met its demise back in 2017 after 13 years of Saturn exploration — NASA scientists say they've found "strong evidence" of fresh ice in the moon's northern hemisphere.

The ice, thought to have originated and resurfaced from Enceladus' interior, could be good news for the prospect of life on Enceladus, which is considered by many scientists to be one of the most promising places to look for life in the solar system.

The dataset, the most detailed global infrared views ever produced of the moon according to the agency, was created using data collected by Cassini's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). It includes scans of variable wavelengths, including visible light and infrared.

Also at NASA.

Photometrically-corrected global infrared mosaics of Enceladus: New implications for its spectral diversity and geological activity (DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2020.113848) (DX)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

World's smallest ultrasound detector is tinier than a blood cell:

Scientists in Germany have succeeded in developing the smallest ultrasound detector ever created, which is tinier than a blood cell and opens up new possibilities in what is known as super-resolution imaging. The researchers describe the results as "breathtaking," and hope the technology could allow for the study of biological tissue in unprecedented detail.

Developed by scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München (German Research Center for Environmental Health) and the Technical University of Munich, the new device represents something of a departure from the technology behind traditional ultrasound imaging, which usually relies on what are known as piezoelectric devices that take the pressure created by ultrasound waves and turn it into an electric voltage.

The image quality produced through this method is directly tied to the size of the piezoelectric detector, with the smaller the detector the higher the resolution, but this in turn compromises the sensitivity of the device. The authors of the new study detail a solution to this problem, by turning to a different type of imaging technology that relies on silicon photonics.

[...] The research was published in the journal Nature.

Journal Reference:
Rami Shnaiderman, Georg Wissmeyer, Okan Ülgen, et al. A submicrometre silicon-on-insulator resonator for ultrasound detection, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2685-y)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

NASA has figured out a new way to safely land on the Moon:

NASA has built a brand new system that could make landing on Moon and Mars a whole lot less risky — and it already has plans to test it out on an upcoming mission.

The agency's Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project aims to improve landing safety by combining a suite of laser sensors, a camera, a high-speed computer, and some sophisticated algorithms — all of which, it says, is capable of foregoing the need for a human pilot.

"What we're building is a complete descent and landing system that will work for future Artemis missions to the Moon and can be adapted for Mars," project manager Ron Sostaric said in a NASA statement. "Our job is to put the individual components together and make sure that it works as a functioning system."

The system could allow for landers to touch down on a much wider variety of sites, including near boulders or craters. It can also identify safe target areas that are only half the size of a football field.

To put that into perspective, the landing area for Apollo 11 in 1968 was about 11 by three miles.

YouTube video.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

'Irreplaceable' books by Galileo, Newton found under house in Romania:

Police in Romania have uncovered a trove of "irreplaceable" books including first editions of works by Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton that were stolen in a sophisticated 2017 heist from a warehouse in London, police and the European Union's judicial co-operation agency said on Friday.

The stash of some 200 rare and valuable books was discovered on Wednesday hidden in a concealed space under a house in rural Romania.

London's Met Police said in a statement that the recovered books have a combined value of more than £2.5 million ($3.2 million).

"These books are extremely valuable, but more importantly they are irreplaceable and are of great importance to international cultural heritage," Detective Inspector Andy Durham said in a statement.

The books were stolen in a raid on a warehouse in west London. Burglars cut holes in the roof and abseiled down into the building to avoid motion detectors, loaded the books into 16 large bags and clambered back up the ropes to make their getaway through the roof, police said.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Nvidia RTX 3080 cards are selling for thousands on eBay, and people are pissed:

The Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card was released at 9AM ET, and disappointment began only seconds later. All major online stores in the US are sold out, and there have been reports of brick-and-mortar stores each having as few as 10 units for sale. The end result: eBay scalpers are now trying to cash in, and very few people who want to enjoy the graphics card seem to have actually gotten their hands on a confirmed order.

The card is being listed on eBay for many hundreds of dollars — in some cases, even thousands of dollars — over its $699 sticker price. And PC gaming fans are mad, claiming that Nvidia held a sloppy launch just a day after US retailers similarly botched early preorders for Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5.

[Ed Note: The second link in the quoted material was copied from the source article as is]

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