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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

The ACLU Is Suing For Info On The FBI's Encryption Breaking Capabilities:

The American Civil Liberties Union announced on Tuesday that it plans to sue for information related to the FBI's shadowy and relatively new ability to break into encrypted devices at will.

The lawsuit will reportedly seek to target information related to the FBI's Electronic Device Analysis Unit (EDAU) and its apparent acquisition of software that would allow the government to unlock and decrypt information that is otherwise securely stored on cell phones.

[...] The problem, however, is that the FBI's refusal to acknowledge whether the records exist or not is particularly implausible in light of how much information on the agency's attempts to access encrypted devices is already publicly available. The ACLU has now appealed to a federal court in an attempt to compel the DOJ and FBI to turn over all relevant documents on the EDAU and its technological capabilities. In the blog post, the ACLU wrote that the FBI's chilling refusal to provide information isn't just shutting the door on the investigation — "they've shut the door, closed the windows, drawn the shades, and refused to acknowledge whether the house that we're looking at even exists."

Original Submission

[2020-12-25 22:18:22 UTC -- Corrected typo (with thanks to maxwell demon) --martyb]
[2020-12-25 21:32:03 UTC -- Updated with staff info and reformatted the story. --martyb]

martyb writes:

First, on behalf of the staff at SoylentNews, please accept our best wishes for a happy (and safe and healthy) holiday!

Next, here are a few quick items of note that bear calling to your attention.

Please join me in welcoming requerdanos to the editorial staff at SoylentNews! He has already jumped in with both feet and had stories appear on the main page. Welcome aboard requerdanos!

Of note, as well, takyon has not only posted 1364 stories to the site, and he has submitted just shy of 6,100 stories (as I write this it stands at 6,097 submissions... there's more(!) how about posting over 20,000 comments! Thank you SO much!

I always feel reluctant to mention anyone specifically as running this site is a team effort. I sense there are some staff who prefer to work in the background and shun the limelight. We appreciate their efforts nonetheless! Recall the early days when site crashes were a request frequent occurrence. We've come a long way from then and I count it a privilege to have worked with such knowledgeable folk who have been so generous with their time and energy!

Lastly a huge thank-you to those who responded so generously to our end-of-the-year fundraiser! As of this writing, we have had 21 subscriptions totaling $567.40 since our request went out a couple weeks ago.

In this second half of the year (July 1 through December 31) we have raised $1908.15 from 85 subscriptions towards our $3,500.00 goal. THANK-YOU!

We realize it's been a tough year for everyone; take care of your friends, family, and community first. But, if you do have the means, we'd really appreciate your subscribing and helping us to keep things going for you and our community! Please see this comment to our previous story for step-by-step instructions on how to subscribe.

Why subscribe? Why not? Besides, you'll get all the benefits listed on the "SoylentNews - Why Subscribe?".

NB: If you'd prefer, you can subscribe anonymously. There's an option to make a gift subscription, as well. For any questions or difficulty, please reach out on IRC, send an email to admin@soylentnews.org, or just post a comment to this story.

Thank you!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Police Seize VPN Service Beloved by Cyber-criminals:

A virtual private network (VPN) used by some of the world's leading cyber-criminals has been shut down in an international law enforcement action led by German police.

The Safe-Inet service was deactivated yesterday as part of Operation Nova, a coordinated effort that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation and European law enforcement agencies acting through Europol.

Servers used by the service were taken down, and its infrastructure was seized in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Visitors to the Safe-Inet webpage are now greeted by a domain seizure notice.

Safe-Inet was active for eleven years prior to yesterday's action, describing itself as an international team of "experienced technical specialists who understand how important anonymity on the network is for our clients."

[...] "This VPN service was sold at a high price to the criminal underworld as one of the best tools available to avoid law enforcement interception, offering up to 5 layers of anonymous VPN connections," said a spokesperson for Europol.

Original Submission

Tesla Allowed to Clear Part of Forest Near Berlin for New Factory, Reports Say

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Tesla Allowed to Clear Part of Forest Near Berlin for New Factory, Reports Say:

The Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court has ruled that Tesla can clear a part of a forest near Berlin to build a new manufacturing site there, Reuters reported. The ruling prohibited clear-cutting the forest in peripheral areas of the site, but stressed that the same ban for the rest of the area "could not be justified".

The court turned down a complaint from the Gruene Liga Brandenburg group, stating that local authorities didn't violate laws when they allowed work on the factory to start.

Hibernating Lizards are Blocking Tesla's Plan for a Berlin Gigafactory

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Hibernating lizards are blocking Tesla's plan for a Berlin Gigafactory:

Tesla has run into yet another snag while it tries to construct its Gigafactory near Berlin, Germany.

On Friday, a German court rule that Tesla cannot raze as much of the nearby forest as it'd planned to, according to Business Insider. The reason? The forest is home to a protected species of sand lizard that's already hunkered down for its winter hibernation. In the face of yet another ecological delay, it seems increasingly likely that Tesla will have to revisit its planned completion date of July 2021.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Google told scientists to use 'a positive tone' in AI research, documents show:

Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists' papers by launching a "sensitive topics" review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work.

Google's new review procedure asks that researchers consult legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy.

"Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues," one of the pages for research staff stated. Reuters could not determine the date of the post, though three current employees said the policy began in June.

Google declined to comment for this story.

Original Submission

TommyJ writes:

Over the next three years, ten new satellites the size of a shoebox are to be built after a signing between the European Space Agency and AAC Clyde Space UK. The satellites will be built in Glasgow, and the initiative comes as part of a new innovative constellation service.

The satellites will be manufactured as part of a three-year project labeled 'xSPANCION', which will focus on the production of a satellite constellation with the aim of providing businesses with services such as Earth Observation, remote sensing, and satellite-based communications.

Here it is

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Stop the spread: no more plosive consonants (watch it)

Picked from abc.net.au

In the joke clip, Mr Prowse suggests the sounds produced by the letters P, T and C will be phased out and replaced with the sounds produced by N, F and L.

"Consonants project the virus for much greater distances than vowels, and certain consonants — the so-called plosive sounds — are worst of all," he says in the video, which was posted online earlier this month.

[...] Speaking conventionally to ABC Radio Adelaide this morning, Mr Prowse said the public response to the video was completely unexpected.

[...] "It happened all around the world, largely due to a rapper called Zuby, who re-posted it to [a] third-of-a-million followers."

Despite the video being marked as a joke on his YouTube page, some viewers were fooled into taking it seriously.

"Quite a lot of them [are] in America and a lot of them didn't actually realise it was a joke," he said.

Other similar jokes in French and German and some more details here.

No news on the classical Greek; aristarchus could not be contacted

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Video game revenues in 2020 set to top sports, movie industries:

Global video game revenue is up 20 percent in 2020, and will finish the year at an eye-watering $180 billion according to data from IDC. That figure beats the pre-coronavirus $100 billion that movies brought in in 2019, and the $75 billion brought in by the major sports leagues around the world.

And unlike sports and movies, which were both hit hard this year by the shuttering of stadiums and theaters, video games have only seen their popularity increase as people have looked for new ways to pass the time.

[...] Indeed, in an interview with MarketWatch, IDC’s Lewis Ward said that he doesn’t see a slowdown in video game sales coming any time soon.

Specifically mentioned game systems with higher demand are the Nintendo Switch, the Xbox Series X, and the Playstation 5.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

After spending years working behind the scenes to persuade regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington DC, 30 states, and at least a dozen other countries, Oracle's efforts to rein in Google's search-and-advertising business are paying off:

With great fanfare last week, 44 attorneys general hit Google with two antitrust complaints, following a landmark lawsuit the Justice Department and 11 states lodged against the Alphabet Inc. unit in October.

[...] Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle’s “black box” presentation showing how Google tracks users’ personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle’s top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the software company’s antitrust campaign against Google.

Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users’ location details — even when the phones aren’t in use — and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign.

[...] The onslaught of antitrust challenges is hardly just Oracle’s doing. Government officials, academics, lawmakers and public-interest groups have agreed for some time that U.S. technology giants have gotten so big that they are squeezing out competition and dragging down economic growth. Oracle acted on those concerns early, even if largely out of self-interest.

Original story reported by Bloomberg and appeared on MSN.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

DeepMind's New AI Masters Games Without Even Being Taught the Rules: (Javascript required)

The folks at DeepMind are pushing their methods one step further toward the dream of a machine that learns on its own, the way a child does.

The London-based company, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is officially publishing the research today, in Nature, although it tipped its hand back in November with a preprint in ArXiv. Only now, though, are the implications becoming clear: DeepMind is already looking into real-world applications.

DeepMind won fame in 2016 for AlphaGo, a reinforcement-learning system that beat the game of Go after training on millions of master-level games. In 2018 the company followed up with AlphaZero, which trained itself to beat Go, Chess and Shogi, all without recourse to master games or advice. Now comes MuZero, which doesn't even need to be shown the rules of the game.

The new system tries first one action, then another, learning what the rules allow, at the same time noticing the rewards that are proffered—in chess, by delivering checkmate; in Pac-Man, by swallowing a yellow dot. It then alters its methods until it hits on a way to win such rewards more readily—that is, it improves its play. Such learning by observation is ideal for any AI that faces problems that can't be specified easily. In the messy real world—apart from the abstract purity of games—such problems abound.

So, how far do you think this approach can advance ?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Sex at Christmas tends to be off menu until fireworks at new year – study:

Researchers have long noticed differences in birthrates at various times of the year, but whether this was the result of seasonal fluctuations in fertility or sexual activity was unclear. To investigate, Laura Symul at Stanford University in California and her colleagues turned to data from the Clue women's health app, which included anonymous sexual activity logs from more than 500,000 women in the UK, France, Brazil, and the US. "It's self-reported, but it is still the largest dataset of real-time reports of women's sexual activities," Symul said.

The research showed that holidays – including bank holidays and Valentine's Day – were always associated with a peak in sexual activity. "There was also a very strong difference between weekend and weekdays – people have more sex on weekends," said Micaela Martinez at Columbia University in New York, who was also involved in the research. "It suggests that having leisure time with your intimate partner facilitates sex."

However, the records indicated that the three days running up to Christmas represented a no-go zone for many women. In the case of younger or child-free women, this could be due to them spending Christmas with their parents, rather than romantic partners, Symul said.

MostCynical writes:

Boating Magazine has a story about the new Volvo Penta self-docking boat.

While autopilot has been available in boats for ages, Volvo's new docking system moves beyond that. It's a big step toward true self-driving boats. While cars can be expected to primarily move forward down a road, autonomy in boats is more complex because they have to be able to move in multiple directions. What's more, for a boat, the road is moving. The yacht uses the joystick-controlled Volvo Penta Inboard Performance System (IPS), which was first sold in 2006. The company later introduced the Dynamic Positioning System, which uses individual drives to automatically preserve a boat's heading and position, even during strong winds or tides. The self-docking yacht incorporates both of these systems into an onboard electronic vessel control system, which maneuvers the steering according to the boat's actual position.

When the boat arrives in a predefined "catch zone," it alerts the captain that it's ready to activate the self-docking function. Once initiated, the boat relies on GPS to move close to the berth, and waits for the captain to enable the final stage[.]

The system uses GPS and local sensors on both the boat and the berth to identify the docking location. After making the system available for retrofit on IPS-enabled vessels, Volvo intends to develop a fully-automated boat.

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hendrikboom writes:

Veracode has compared programming languages for incidence of vulnerabilities by collecting statistics on 130,000 applications they have scanned.

Programming language security: These are the worst bugs for each top language

C++ and PHP have far more high-severity security flaws than programming languages like JavaScript and Python.

Let the language wars resume.

-- hendrik

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

YouTube's Copyright Filter Is Crushing Video Critique:

In July, Harry "hbomberguy" Brewis shared a video on his popular YouTube channel called "RWBY Is Disappointing, And Here's Why." The two-and-half-hour video — a sharp, detailed critique of the cartoon RWBY — was the result of a lot of work by Brewis and his producer, Kat Lo. It also took an extra week and a half of editing and $1,000 in legal fees just to get and keep the video up on YouTube. All because of YouTube's copyright filter. And thanks to a new proposed law by Sen. Thom Tillis, Brewis' experience could become virtually everyone's.

YouTube's copyright filter is a labyrinthine nightmare called Content ID. Content ID works by scanning all the videos on YouTube and comparing them to a database of material submitted by copyright holders—often music labels and movie and TV studios—which have been given the ability to add things to the database by YouTube. Once Content ID matches a few seconds of an uploaded video to something in the database — regardless of context — a number of automatic penalties can be imposed. According to Google, most of the time the rights-holder chooses to just take the money generated by ads placed by Google on the video. If the original creator didn't want any ads put on their video, too bad. But in other cases, the rights-holder can make something much worse happen: They can make sure no one sees the video at all.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Let's Encrypt comes up with workaround for abandonware Android devices:

Things were touch-and-go for a while, but it looks like Let's Encrypt's transition to a standalone certificate authority (CA) isn't going to break a ton of old Android phones. This was a serious concern earlier due to an expiring root certificate, but Let's Encrypt has come up with a workaround.

[...] Yesterday, Let's Encrypt announced it had found a solution that will let those old Android phones keep ticking, and the solution is to just... keep using the expired certificate from IdenTrust? Let's Encrypt says "IdenTrust has agreed to issue a 3-year cross-sign for our ISRG Root X1 from their DST Root CA X3. The new cross-sign will be somewhat novel because it extends beyond the expiration of DST Root CA X3. This solution works because Android intentionally does not enforce the expiration dates of certificates used as trust anchors. ISRG and IdenTrust reached out to our auditors and root programs to review this plan and ensure there weren't any compliance concerns."