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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

This Bot Turns Reddit Comments Into Ace Attorney Debates:

Drama is no stranger to Reddit, as many of you all might know. And while more than a few have snickered or giggled at Reddit arguments that have exploded or taken strange twists and turns, there's now a new way to check out what's happening in the comments.

Micah Price, a software engineer from Cape Town, South Africa, on Sunday unveiled a genius bot that turns Reddit arguments into scenes from Ace Attorney, the Capcom series in which attorney Phoenix Wright fights to get his clients off the hook using his investigative and courtroom skills, Mashable reported. The video arguments come with the dramatic music and the famous "Objection!" catchphrase. The results are entertaining, hilarious, and honestly sometimes don't make sense. There are, of course, some that do elicit an appalled, "Oh God," when you see what people are arguing about.

In an interview with Mashable, Price said that he got the idea from other meme-based videos of the game on YouTube.

"The dramatic music is great," Price told the outlet, "especially for the melodramatic debates on Reddit."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Chinese scientists develop gene therapy which could delay ageing:

BEIJING (Reuters) - Scientists in Beijing have developed a new gene therapy which can reverse some of the effects of ageing in mice and extend their lifespans, findings which may one day contribute to similar treatment for humans.

The method, detailed in a paper in the Science Translational Medicine journal earlier this month, involves inactivating a gene called kat7 which the scientists found to be a key contributor to cellular ageing.

The specific therapy they used and the results were a world first, said co-supervisor of the project Professor Qu Jing, 40, a specialist in ageing and regenerative medicine from the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

"These mice show after 6-8 months overall improved appearance and grip strength and most importantly they have extended lifespan for about 25%," Qu said.

[...] Qu said she hopes to be able to test the method on primates next, but it would require a lot of funding and much more research first.

"In the end, we hope that we can find a way to delay ageing even by a very minor percentage...in the future."

Journal Reference:
Wei Wang, Yuxuan Zheng, Shuhui Sun, et al. A genome-wide CRISPR-based screen identifies KAT7 as a driver of cellular senescence [$], Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abd2655)

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MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for TheMightyBuzzard.

The Origin Of Cut, Copy, And Paste:

I'm always fascinated that someone designed just about everything you use, no matter how trivial it is. The keyboard you type on, the light switch you turn on, even the faucet handle. They don't just spontaneously grow on trees, so some human being had to build it and probably had at least a hazy design in mind when they started it.

Some things are so ubiquitous that it is hard to remember that someone had to dream them up to begin with. A friend of mine asked me the other day why we use Control+X and Control+V to manipulate the clipboard almost universally. Control+C for copy makes sense, of course, but it is still odd that it is virtually universal in an industry where everyone likes to reinvent the wheel. I wasn't sure of the answer but figured it had to do with some of the user interface standards from IBM or Sun. Turns out, it is much older than that.

[NB: This story is much more than a dry history of physically cutting and pasting together documents.--martyb]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AI-Powered Text From This Program Could Fool the Government:

Idaho proposed changing its Medicaid program. The state needed approval from the federal government, which solicited public feedback via Medicaid.gov.

Roughly 1,000 comments arrived. But half came not from concerned citizens or even internet trolls. They were generated by artificial intelligence. And a study found that people could not distinguish the real comments from the fake ones.

The project was the work of Max Weiss, a tech-savvy medical student at Harvard, but it received little attention at the time. Now, with AI language systems advancing rapidly, some say the government, and internet companies, need to rethink how they solicit and screen feedback to guard against deepfake text manipulation and other AI-powered interference.

"The ease with which a bot can generate and submit relevant text that impersonates human speech on government websites is surprising and really important to know," says Latanya Sweeney, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School who advised Weiss on how to run the experiment ethically.

Sweeney says the problems extend well beyond government services, but it is imperative that public agencies find a solution. "AI can drown speech from real humans," she says. "Government websites have to change."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

FAA approves first commercial drone flights with no on-site pilots:

Farms and other agricultural operations in certain rural areas in the US can now use robotic drones to take images of or gather data on their crops. The FAA has approved Massachusetts-based American Robotics' request to be able to deploy automated drones without human pilots and spotters on site. As The Wall Street Journal notes, commercial drone flights typically require the physical presence of licensed pilots making them a costly undertaking. AR's machine eliminates the need for on-site personnel, though each automated flight will still need to be overseen by a remote human pilot.

According to the relevant documents (via The Verge) the FAA has uploaded on its website, the pilot "who is not co-located with the aircraft" will have to conduct pre-flight safety checks to ensure the drone is in working condition. American Robotics' drones are 20—pound machines powered by its Scout System technology, which uses predetermined paths. Scout also has a Detect-and-Avoid feature that allows the unmanned aircraft system to maintain a safe distance from other aircraft, birds and obstacles. When it's not in the air, the UAS can stay inside a weatherproof base station for charging, data processing/analysis and data transmission

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:

Now-dead radio telescope finds bizarre venomous-spider star:

Astronomers have discovered black widows and redbacks in space. While these cosmic objects don't kill and eat their mates, the stars share their eight-legged counterparts' violent behavior toward companions.

In addition to the run-of-the-mill spider stars, the researchers also discovered a bizarre black widow-redback crossbreed. The scientists used the now-destroyed Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico to discover the weirdo stars.

[...] In a new paper, researchers identify three new black widows and a redback in the Milky Way. They also found a spider star that defies categorization, almost like a crossbreed of the two species.

When a spider star has reduced its companion to significantly less than a tenth the mass of the sun (usually 0.02 to 0.03 times the sun's mass), that star is called a black widow. Redbacks have heftier companions that boast more than a tenth of the sun's mass. These binary companions of redbacks pass between the spider star and Earth periodically, creating temporary eclipses. The shriveled companions of black widows don't typically pull off that trick.

[...] The seeming crossbreed star is difficult to categorize. For now, researchers have labeled it a redback because its companion sometimes eclipses its ticking light. And that companion has a mass at least 0.055 times the mass of the sun (possibly larger), which would be quite heavy for a black widow, though quite light for a redback. For now, the exact mechanisms of that system are still a mystery.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Hitting the Books: Smaller cameras and projectors helped the Allies win WWII:

Modern cameras exist in high definition ubiquity — they're in our laptops and phones; strapped onto our helmets and dangling from our drones — heck, you'd be hard pressed to find someone on the street without a video capture-capable device in their pocket these days. In the early era of cinema, however, cameras and projectors were anything but that. Bulky, temperamental and prone to catching fire, early motion picture technology would require decades of innovation to migrate from their gilded movie palaces to American living rooms and classrooms — even the front lines. In Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture, Haidee Wasson explores this technological evolution and, in the excerpt below, examines the symbiotic (and quite lucrative) relationship between camera makers and the US Department of Defense during the second World War.

Excerpted from Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture by Haidee Wasson, published by the University of California Press. © 2020 by the Regents of the University of California.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Warped Egg Yolks Are Helping Scientists Understand How to Prevent Brain Injuries:

Every day you walk around with your brain gently bobbing about inside your skull. Much like a soft egg yolk floating in a cloud of clear egg whites.

All it takes is a sudden jolt or strike, and your brain is thrust aside with startling velocity. Whether it bumps against the skull or goes for a spin, the damage can be dire, as we know from people who have experienced a traumatic brain injury.

But precisely what happens to the brain in that moment of impact? How does it move?

Research investigating the biomechanics of brain injuries typically involves crash test dummies headed for an accident, athletes wearing mouthguards or helmets equipped with motion sensors, or models simulating the human brain.

Now, scientists have thrown eggs into the mix.

[...] Brain injuries sure are complicated, and many unfortunately go undetected. At least, with this clever experiment, we can see the brute impact for ourselves.

The study was published in Physics of Fluids.

Journal Reference:
Rungun Nathan. How to deform an egg yolk? On the study of soft matter deformation in a liquid environment, Physics of Fluids (DOI: 5.0035314)

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takyon writes:

SpaceX acquires former oil rigs to serve as floating Starship spaceports

SpaceX has acquired two former oil drilling rigs to serve as these floating spaceports. Named Phobos and Deimos, after the two moons of Mars, they are currently undergoing modifications to support Starship launch operations.

SpaceX has long been hinting at future floating launch and landing sites for their Starship launch system. The super heavy lift launch vehicle will have a large blast danger area and pose noise concerns if launched frequently near populated areas. Therefore, sea launch platforms will play a key role in the launch cadence SpaceX plans to reach with Starship, including on-orbit refueling flights for deep space missions and transportation from one place to another on Earth.

Job postings by SpaceX have indicated that work on offshore launch platforms has begun in Brownsville, Texas, near their Starship manufacturing and launch facilities in Boca Chica.

SpaceX purchased the rigs from the bankrupt owner for $3.5 million each. They may have cost around $500 million each to build.

See also: SpaceX's second Super Heavy booster enters production in South Texas

Previously: SpaceX Wants to Build Floating Spaceports for Daily Starship Launches

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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

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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)

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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