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takyon writes:

Statement from the Press Secretary Regarding Executive Grants of Clemency

Anthony Levandowski – President Trump granted a full pardon to Anthony Levandowski. This pardon is strongly supported by James Ramsey, Peter Thiel, Miles Ehrlich, Amy Craig, Michael Ovitz, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Ken Goldberg, Mike Jensen, Nate Schimmel, Trae Stephens, Blake Masters, and James Proud, among others. Mr. Levandowski is an American entrepreneur who led Google's efforts to create self-driving technology. Mr. Levandowski pled guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation. Notably, his sentencing judge called him a "brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs." Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.

Wikipedia entry on pardon within the United States.

See also: Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski among list of last-minute Trump pardons
Trump's last-minute pardons include Bannon, Lil Wayne and scores of others
Trump Reportedly Abandoned Pardons For Snowden And Assange
Trump declines to pardon Assange, Snowden, or 'Joe Exotic' – here's the 143 people he chose

Previously: Text Messages Between Uber's Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski Released
The Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Uber Shutting Down Self-Driving Truck Division
Ex-Uber Engineer Levandowski Pleads Guilty To Trade Secrets Theft
Uber Accuses Levandowski of Fraud, Refuses to Pay $179M Google Judgment
Ex-Googler Levandowski Gets 18 Months in Prison for Trade-Secret Theft

Original Submission   Alternate Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Elephants look tiny from space, but scientists figured out how to count them:

A team led by researchers with the University of Oxford and the University of Bath in the UK developed a method for counting African elephants using imagery from Maxar satellites, opening up a new way to monitor vulnerable and endangered animals.

[...] "For the first time, scientists have successfully used satellite cameras coupled with deep learning to count animals in complex geographical landscapes," said the University of Bath in a statement Tuesday.

The satellite images could offer an effective alternative to surveillance done by humans in aircraft, which can be an expensive and challenging way of counting elephants.

The space method has "comparable accuracy to human detection capabilities," according to a Maxar statement. Satellites can also easily cover a tremendous amount of ground.

[...] There are an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 African elephants left in the wild and they are listed as "vulnerable" on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The population is under pressure from habitat loss and poaching.

Journal Reference:
Isla Duporge, Olga Isupova, Steven Reece, et al. ZSL Publications [open], Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation (DOI: 10.1002/rse2.195)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Ernie Smith, an editor at Tedium, has explored the historical events which led to the Linksys WRT54G router becoming so popular. It rose to fame because of an undocumented feature which, once discovered, led to great interest in the wider ICT [*] community.

Mikas caught something interesting, but something that shouldn’t have been there. This was an oversight on the part of Cisco, which got an unhappy surprise about a popular product sold by its recent acquisition just months after its release. Essentially, what happened was that one of their suppliers apparently got a hold of Linux-based firmware, used it in the chips supplied to the company by Broadcom, and failed to inform Linksys, which then sold the software off to Cisco.

In a 2005 column for Linux Insider, Heather J. Meeker, a lawyer focused on issues of intellectual property and open-source software, wrote that this would have been a tall order for Cisco to figure out on its own:

The first takeaway from this case is the difficulty of doing enough diligence on software development in an age of vertical disintegration. Cisco knew nothing about the problem, despite presumably having done intellectual property diligence on Linksys before it bought the company. But to confound matters, Linksys probably knew nothing of the problem either, because Linksys has been buying the culprit chipsets from Broadcom, and Broadcom also presumably did not know, because it in turn outsourced the development of the firmware for the chipset to an overseas developer.

To discover the problem, Cisco would have had to do diligence through three levels of product integration, which anyone in the mergers and acquisitions trade can tell you is just about impossible. This was not sloppiness or carelessness—it was opaqueness.

Bruce Perens, a venture capitalist, open-source advocate, and former project leader for the Debian Linux distribution, told LinuxDevices that Cisco wasn’t to blame for what happened, but still faced compliance issues with the open-source license.

canopic jug writes:

The company Exotrail is testing a Hall Effect propulsion unit in a CubeSat and has completed some initial in-orbit tests successfully. Normally that kind of thruster is enormous and requires very large amounts of electricity. This one is about 2 liters in volume and uses only about 50 watts of power. More tests are planned in orbit. Exotrail's customers include the European Space Agency, the French space agency CNES, and AAC Clyde Space. Not much information beyond the press release is available.

Covered at:

• The first CubeSat with a Hall-effect thruster has gone to space
• Space Mobility On-Orbit Demo Success By Exotrail
• Exotrail Completes In-Orbit Demonstration Mission
• Space Mobility On-Orbit Demo Success By Exotrail
• Exotrail demonstrates miniature Hall-effect thruster in orbit

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Brave Becomes First Browser To Add Native Support For The Ipfs Protocol | Zdnet:

With the release of Brave 1.19 today, Brave has become the first major browser maker to support IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol meant for accessing decentralized or censored content.

[...] Released in 2015, IPFS stands for InterPlanetary File System. It is a classic peer-to-peer protocol similar to BitTorrent and designed to work as a decentralized storage system.

IPFS allows users to host content distributed across hundreds or thousands of systems, which can be public IPFS gateways or private IPFS nodes. Users who want to access any of this content must enter an URL in the form of ipfs://{content_hash_ID}.

Under normal circumstances, users would download this content from the nearest nodes or gateways rather than a central server. However, this only works if users have installed an IPFS desktop app or a browser extension.

Brave says that with version 1.19, users will be able to access URLs that start with ipfs://, directly from the browser, with no extension needed, and that Brave will natively support ipfs:// links going forward.

Since some major websites like Wikipedia have IPFS versions, users in oppressive countries can now use Brave's new IPFS support to go around national firewalls and access content that might be blocked inside their country for political reasons and is available via IPFS.

In addition, Brave also says that its users can also install their own IPFS node with one click with version 1.19 and help contribute to hosting some of the content they download to view.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA for torrent tracker source code

Dear GitHub Inc.:

[...] We are writing to notify you of, and request your assistance in addressing, the extensive copyright infringement of motion pictures and television programs that is occurring by virtue of the operation and further development of the Bittorrent website Nyaa.si’s “nyaa” repository (the “Project”), which is hosted on and available for download from your repository GitHub.com (the “Repository”) found at https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/ (the “URL”). Specifically, at the URL, the Repository hosts and offers for download the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows).

[...] Exhibit A, moreover, merely provides concrete examples of what is obvious from even a cursory review of the Project. The Project blatantly infringes the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights and countless other copyrights. Indeed, copyright infringement is so prevalent within the Project that infringement plainly is its predominant use and purpose.

[...] For your convenience, we have included links to the infringing files below:
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/utils/api_info.py
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/utils/api_uploader_v2.py
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/static/search-sukebei.xml
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/api_handler.py
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/.docker/nyaa-config-partial.py
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/torrents.py
https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/templates/home.html
[...]

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Monarch butterfly population moves closer to extinction:

The number of western monarch butterflies wintering along the California coast has plummeted precipitously to a record low, putting the orange-and-black insects closer to extinction, researchers announced Tuesday.

An annual winter count by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California's Marin County to San Diego County in the south in the 1980s.

[...]

Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in western states because of destruction to their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.

[...]

Monarch butterflies lack state and federal legal protection to keep their habitat from being destroyed or degraded. In December, federal officials declared the monarch butterfly "a candidate" for threatened or endangered status but said no action would be taken for several years because of the many other species awaiting that designation.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

As Ajit Pai exits FCC, Charter admits defeat on petition to impose data caps:

Charter Communications has withdrawn a petition seeking government permission to impose data caps on broadband users this year.

Unlike other ISPs, Charter is subject to the prohibition on data caps and overage fees until May 2023 because of seven-year conditions applied to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. In June 2020, Charter petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to let the condition expire two years early, on May 18, 2021.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sought public comment on the petition but never took final action, even though he had opposed the merger conditions when they were imposed by the Obama-era FCC. With Pai leaving the FCC upon President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration tomorrow, Charter submitted a brief filing stating that it "respectfully withdraws its petition."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

The Climate Events of 2020 Show How Excess Heat is Expressed on Earth:

By most accounts, 2020 has been a rough year for the planet. It was the warmest year on record, just barely exceeding the record set in 2016 by less than a tenth of a degree according to NASA's analysis. Massive wildfires scorched Australia, Siberia, and the United States' west coast – and many of the fires were still burning during the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record.

"This year has been a very striking example of what it's like to live under some of the most severe effects of climate change that we've been predicting," said Lesley Ott, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

[...] Human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for warming our planet, adding excess heat to the Earth. Climate events like droughts, hurricanes, and fires are all different ways that we see heat expressed in Earth's system.

[...] Burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas releases greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide – into the atmosphere, where they act like an insulating blanket and trap heat near Earth's surface.

"The natural processes Earth has for absorbing carbon dioxide released by human activities – plants and the ocean – just aren't enough to keep up with how much carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere," said Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.

Carbon dioxide levels have increased by nearly 50% since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. The amount of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled. As a result, during this period, Earth has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (just over 1 degree Celsius).

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for raxas:

Windows 10 bug corrupts your hard drive on seeing this file's icon:

An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command.

In multiple tests by BleepingComputer, this one-liner can be delivered hidden inside a Windows shortcut file, a ZIP archive, batch files, or various other vectors to trigger hard drive errors that corrupt the filesystem index instantly.

In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed.

When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records.

The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version.

What's worse is, the vulnerability can be triggered by standard and low privileged user accounts on Windows 10 systems.

[...] "Microsoft has a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and we will provide updates for impacted devices as soon as possible," a Microsoft spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Census Bureau director to resign amid criticism over data:

Facing criticism that he was acceding to President Donald Trump's demand to produce citizenship information at the expense of data quality, U.S. Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham said Monday that he planned to resign with the change in presidential administrations.

Dillingham said in a statement that he would resign on Wednesday, the day Trump leaves the White House and President-elect Joseph Biden takes office. Dillingham's term was supposed to be finished at the end of the year.

The Census Bureau director's departure comes as the statistical agency is crunching the numbers for the 2020 census, which will be used to determine how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets, as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending each year.

In his statement, Dillingham said he had been considering retiring earlier, but he had been persuaded at the time to stick around.

"But I must do now what I think is best," said Dillingham, 68. "Let me make it clear that under other circumstances I would be honored to serve President-Elect Biden just as I served the past five presidents."

[...] During Dillingham's tenure, the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census questionnaire and named a handful of political appointees that statisticians and Democratic lawmakers worried would politicize the once-a-decade head count of every U.S. resident. The president also issued two directives that advocacy groups said were part of efforts to suppress the participation of minorities and immigrants in the 2020 census.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

To Celebrate Wikipedia’s 20th Birthday, Try Editing It:

At a Monday press conference commemorating Wikipedia’s 20th birthday, Jimmy Wales joked, “We were never as bad as they thought we were, and we’re not as good as they think we are.” Then again, the recent spike in praise for Wikipedia is enough to make any internet encyclopedia editor blush. The Economist is celebrating the occasion with threearticlesarguing that the site is the rare early internet project that exceeded expectations, characterizing it as “the dream that worked.” In recent years, journalists have also described Wikipedia as the “last best place on the internet,” a “ray of light,” “the internet’s good grown-up,” and the “good cop” in the fight against internet misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories. As Katherine Maher, CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation observed at the press conference, perhaps Wikipedia’s core values are back in fashion.

[...] Each month the Wikipedia service is accessed by 1.5 billion unique devices from around the world. During that same period, a small minority of those users—some 280,000 editors—take the time to contribute to Wikipedia. According to Kevin Li, one of Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators and a junior at Stanford, the website’s biggest challenge is a declining supply of edit hours to continue the time-consuming work of maintaining an encyclopedia with such a massive readership. Essentially, Wikipedia needs more volunteers to help keep the archive up to date.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Expired Domain Allowed Researcher to Hijack Country's TLD:

A researcher claimed last week that he managed to take control of the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Democratic Republic of Congo after an important domain name was left to expire.

Before the holidays, Fredrik Almroth, founder and researcher at web security company Detectify, decided to analyze the name server (NS) records used by all TLDs. These NS records specify the servers for a DNS zone.

He noticed that a domain named scpt-network.com, which had been listed as a name server for .cd, the TLD for Congo, had been left to expire. Almroth realized that the domain could be highly valuable to a bad actor so he quickly acquired it himself to prevent abuse.

The remaining name servers managing the .cd TLD belonged to South African Internet eXchange (SAIX), which kept the TLD operational. However, gaining control over the scpt-network.com domain could have still allowed a malicious actor to hijack half of the DNS traffic for .cd websites.

Almroth believes the impact could have been significant considering that the African country has a population of approximately 90 million people, as well as the fact that many international organizations have a .cd website.

Also at Detectify Labs

Original Submission

hemocyanin writes:

The NY Times, in a Jan 17, 2020, article outlines new details in an anti-trust suit brought by ten states: Behind a Secret Deal between Google and Facebook. These apparently come from an unredacted version of the lawsuit filed in October 2020: Redacted Version. (I did not find an unredacted version)

From TFA:

"This idea that the major tech platforms are robustly competing against each other is very much overstated," said Sally Hubbard, a former assistant attorney general in New York's antitrust bureau who now works at Open Markets Institute, a think tank. "In many ways, they reinforce each other's monopoly power."

Some of the details outlined in the article:

c0lo writes:

Scientists shed light on how and why some people report "hearing the dead"

Spiritualist mediums might be more prone to immersive mental activities and unusual auditory experiences early in life, according to new research.

This might explain why some people and not others eventually adopt spiritualist beliefs and engage in the practice of 'hearing the dead', the study led by Durham University found.

The researchers conducted a survey of 65 clairaudient spiritualist mediums from the Spiritualists' National Union and 143 members of the general population in the largest scientific study into the experiences of clairaudient mediums.

They found that these spiritualists have a proclivity for absorption – a trait linked to immersion in mental or imaginative activities or experience of altered states of consciousness.

They found that 44.6 per cent of spiritualist participants reported hearing the voices of the deceased on a daily basis, with 33.8 per cent reporting an experience of clairaudience within the last day.

A large majority (79 per cent) said that experiences of auditory spiritual communication were part of their everyday lives, taking place both when they were alone and when they were working as a medium or attending a spiritualist church.