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Cybersecurity expert Joe Carrigan, co-host of 'Hacking Humans' podcast, offers tips for verifying information online

Before the November midterm elections, Russia activated an army of misinformation-laden social media bots aimed at convincing voters in closely contested House of Representatives and Senate races that the U.S. should not support efforts by Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion.

But the spread of so-called "fake news" via the internet is not confined to election time. An estimated 5 billion people around the globe get entertainment and information and connect with others online, and most of them use social media. By some estimates, 40% of internet users say that they have inadvertently shared misinformation online.

That statistic does not surprise Joe Carrigan, senior security engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. The co-host of a popular Cyberwire podcast called Hacking Humans, Carrigan is an expert on social engineering scams and the bots that perpetrate them.

[...]
The main takeaway, Carrigan says, is that social media platforms are not reliable sources of information.

"People should not get their news from social media—period," he says. "They should totally discount any news delivered by that method. It's a tough stance, but it's the only way to be sure. View any news content on social media with skepticism, and hesitate before you share it."

Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute

Why we need open-source science innovation — not patents and paywalls

As we prepare to invest money to prevent the next global pandemic and find solutions to many other problems, science funders have a large opportunity to move towards open science and more research collaboration by offering open-source endowed chairs.

In these research positions, professors agree to ensure all of their writing is distributed via open access — and they release all of their intellectual property in the public domain or under appropriate open-source licenses.

The global scholarly publishing market has grown steadily and is now worth over US$28 billion. Researchers estimate universities are also able to capture billions through patent licensing, although most technology transfer offices at universities actually lose money.

But many academics want to see their research fully accessible — free for everyone. My research with colleagues has found the majority of American and Canadian academics want to see universities establish open-source endowed chairs.

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There is a clear willingness of academics to leave behind antiquated IP models for the good of science and society. It is time to provide incentives to accelerate innovation using open science to hasten scientific progress while also making science more just and inclusive.

All research funders — governments, foundations, private companies, donors and universities — should start funding open-source endowed chairs to maximize the impact of their resources.

The Conversation

I refer to the following story submitted by "Danny B":
Facial Recognition Can Expose Political Orientation - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/03/09/0116220
I would hesitate to submit such stories because of the sheer number of hyperlinks. If the story was submitted by manually editing each of the hyperlinks, my hats off to him.

If the hyperlinks were copied automatically, I would like to learn to do this too, especially, if the submission used a short cut (or tool) to copy all links from the original web page. Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated and would encourage me to submit more stories ...

Dear Editors,
How do I submit this story ??

From the eat-shit-has-a-new-meaning dept.

In a randomized, controlled clinical trial starting this year, researchers will test out such a fecal formula for the treatment of obesity. They’ll also try to glean critical details about the human microbiome and its role in our health and metabolism. The trial, led by Elaine Yu, an assistant professor and clinical researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, will involve taking fecal samples from lean, healthy donors then freeze-drying the stool, putting a gram or two into capsules, and giving them to 20 obese patients.

Such poop-packed pills, which are designed to replace a person’s intestinal microbes with those from a donor via their feces, have proven effective at treating tenacious gut infections. This has led researchers to ponder whether the transplants could remedy other health problems, including obesity and metabolic disorders. A few animal studies and some anecdotal data in humans suggests the answer is yes—and Yu hopes to get a final answer with the upcoming trial.

A few years ago, researchers took the gut microbes from a set of twins—one lean, one obese—and transplanted them into two sets of microbe-free mice. Even though all the mice were on the same diet, the rodents that received the obese twin’s microbes became chubby. The mice that got the lean twin’s mix stayed slim, suggesting that the microbes were calling the shots when it came to the animals’ weight.

In line with those results, another study on lean and obese twins’ microbes suggested that obesity is linked to having altered mixes and lower diversity of gut microbes.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/freeze-dried-poop-pills-being-tested-for-obesity-treatment/

Law enforcement’s surveillance in America—and particularly its ever-increasing use of wiretaps—have been primarily driven for the last 25 years by drug cases. And as the chart above shows, that’s now truer than ever before.

Earlier this month the US court system released its annual report of every wiretap over the last year for which it granted law enforcement a warrant. And of those 3,554 wiretaps in 2014, fully 89 percent were for narcotics cases. That’s the highest percentage of wiretaps focused on drugs in the report’s history, and it continues a steady increase in the proportion of drug-focused spying. Twenty-five years ago, just 62 percent of wiretaps were for drug cases.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/drug-war-driving-us-domestic-spying/

From the Millennium Falcon to the USS Enterprise, science fiction has shown us a vast array of out-of-this-world spaceships that defy our rules of physics. We’ve rounded up some of your favorite intergalactic crafts from television, film and video games, along with real NASA spacecraft, to compare and speculate who has the fastest ship in the universe.

https://www.fatwallet.com/blog/fastest-ship-in-the-universe/

Our study finds that the current real-world deployment of Diffie-Hellman is less secure than previously believed. This page explains how to properly deploy Diffie-Hellman on your server.

When I tested https://soylentnews.org/ on their website, I got the following message:

Warning! This site uses a commonly-shared 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman group, and might be in range of being broken by a nation-state. It might be a good idea to generate a unique, 2048-bit group for the site.

I do not know enough about this to make a comment. Maybe, someone more experienced would find this interesting.

I was pleasantly surprised to receive feedback on why my submission was rejected. Thank you editors. You guys are swell.

What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates. In the late 1800s, Francis Galton—founder of the scientific study of intelligence and a cousin of Charles Darwin—analyzed the genealogical records of hundreds of scholars, artists, musicians, and other professionals and found that greatness tends to run in families. For example, he counted more than 20 eminent musicians in the Bach family. (Johann Sebastian was just the most famous.) Galton concluded that experts are “born.” Nearly half a century later, the behaviorist John Watson countered that experts are “made” when he famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents.”

The experts-are-made view has dominated the discussion in recent decades. To test this idea, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues recruited violinists from an elite Berlin music academy and asked them to estimate the amount of time per week they had devoted to deliberate practice for each year of their musical careers. Based on these findings, Ericsson and colleagues argued that prolonged effort, not innate talent, explained differences between experts and novices. These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” ( http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ ) in his book Outliers.

However, recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201516 ) to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.

In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/09/malcolm_gladwell_s_10_000_hour_rule_for_deliberate_practice_is_wrong_genes.single.html

[Related Abstract]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=(Macnamara+and+Hambrick)

Over the weekend, there's been a slew of images released showing celebrities in varying states of undress. Now, it appears that a flaw in iCloud could be responsible for the images making their way online.

On Monday, a Python script emerged on Github (which we’re not linking to as there is evidence a fix by Apple is not fully rolled out) that appears to have allowed malicious users to ‘brute force’ a target account’s password on Apple’s iCloud, thanks to a vulnerability in the Find my iPhone service. Brute force attacks are where a malicious user uses a script to repeatedly guess passwords to attempt to discover the correct one.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/09/01/this-could-be-the-apple-icloud-flaw-that-led-to-celebrity-photos-being-leaked/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/is-apples-icloud-safe-after-leak-of-jennifer-lawrence-and-other-celebrities-nude-photos-9703142.html