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Comment Maybe lack of negative influence (Score 1) 111

Maybe instead of being a positive evolutionary pressure it is lack of a negative one. It would be reasonable to guess that people with the 3rd artery are more likely to die from a serious arm injury which would be evolutionary pressure to only have 2 arteries. With the advent of modern medicine (and decrease of hand combat using sharp weapons) the risk from having the 3rd artery decrease so it is making a comeback. It would be interesting to know how prevalent it was thousands of years ago.

Submission + - Trend Micro set up a fake tech company and honeypot to study cyber-criminals (zdnet.com)

Submitted by DesScorp
DesScorp writes: In an effort to better understand the latest threats to IT systems, antivirus and security company Trend Micro created a fake tech company, complete with AI-generated photos of fake employees, in order to build a honeypot environment that looked like an actual, working tech factory environment. :

Malicious hackers are targeting factories and industrial environments with a wide variety of malware and cyberattacks including ransomware, cryptocurrency miners – and in some cases they're actively looking to shut down or disrupt systems. All of these incidents were spotted by researchers at cybersecurity company Trend Micro who built a honeypot that mimicked the environment of a real factory. The fake factory featured some common cybersecurity vulnerabilities to make it appealing for hackers to discover and target. To help make the honeypot as convincing as possible, researchers linked the desktops, networks and servers to a false company they called MeTech and created a website detailing how the manufacturer served clients in high-tech sectors including defence and aerospace – popular targets for hacking. The website even featured images and bios of people who supposedly worked for the false brand, with headshots generated by artificial intelligence in an effort to make the honeypot look as much like a legitimate company as possible.

Trend Micro even leaked details of system vulnerabilities in things like VNC access to further lure criminals in. The fake company was attacked by everyone from ransomware actors to crytocurrency miners, to hackers that did "recon" to look for possible industrial espionage data.

Submission + - Sabre and Google sign 10 year tech partnership (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by boaworm
boaworm writes: Sabre Corp announced a 10 year partnership with tech giant Google. Sabre President and Chief Executive Officer, Sean Menke: "Today, we embark on a new transformational journey with Google. As our preferred cloud provider and broader strategic partner, Google Cloud will help to accelerate our digital transformation and ability to create a new marketplace and critical products and systems focused on our customer needs for decades to come.”

Google is sporadically partnering with major corporations in various areas, for example recently with the Mayo Clinic to drive healthcare innovation. Details on the full scope of the partnership will be announced at a later time.

Submission + - SPAM: OLAY Partners with Girls Who Code on #MakeSpaceForWomen Super Bowl Ad

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "When we #MakeSpaceForWomen we make space for everyone," explained skincare giant OLAY as it released a teaser for its upcoming Super Bowl LIV ad. "At this year’s big game, OLAY is partnering with Girls Who Code and five fearless women: Busy Philipps, Lilly Singh, Nicole Stott, Taraji P. Henson and Katie Couric to prove there’s enough space... in space... for women. With every mention of #MakeSpaceForWomen on twitter, OLAY will donate $1 (up to $500,000) to Girls Who Code [2018 revenue: $23M], an organization that teaches girls how to solve problems, build community and even make robots dance." Ironically, OLAY's #MakeSpaceForWomen campaign is launching as Girls Who Code faces some heat for not making space for boys. In its FAQs, Girls Who Code answers the questions of "Who is eligible to join a Club" ("All girls aged 11-18") and "Are boys eligible to join Girls Who Code Clubs?" ("Our programs are intended for students who identify as female regardless of gender assignment at birth or legal recognition."). And on the question of "Why can't it just be People Who Code?" at Google last year, Girls Who Code Founder and CEO Reshma Saujani quipped (YouTube), "We can talk about the boys when we're at 70%, and they're at 30%. And then I'll start Boys Who Code, right?"

Submission + - Google Scientists Unveil the Biggest, Most Detailed Map of the Fly Brain Yet (hhmi.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a darkened room in Ashburn, Virginia, rows of scientists sit at computer screens displaying vivid 3-D shapes. With a click of a mouse, they spin each shape to examine it from all sides. The scientists are working inside a concrete building at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus, just off a street called Helix Drive. But their minds are somewhere else entirely – inside the brain of a fly. Each shape on the scientists’ screens represents part of a fruit fly neuron. These researchers and others at Janelia are tackling a goal that once seemed out of reach: outlining each of the fly brain’s roughly 100,000 neurons and pinpointing the millions of places they connect. Such a wiring diagram, or connectome, reveals the complete circuitry of different brain areas and how they're linked. The work could help unlock networks involved in memory formation, for example, or neural pathways that underlie movements.

Gerry Rubin, vice president of HHMI and executive director of Janelia, has championed this project for more than a decade. It’s a necessary step in understanding how the brain works, he says. When the project began, Rubin estimated that with available methods, tracing the connections between every fly neuron by hand would take 250 people working for two decades – what he refers to as “a 5,000 person-year problem.” Now, a stream of advances in imaging technology and deep-learning algorithms have yanked the dream of a fly connectome out of the clouds and into the realm of probability. High-powered customized microscopes, a team of dedicated neural proofreaders and data analysts, and a partnership with Google have sped up the process by orders of magnitude. Today, a team of Janelia researchers reports hitting a critical milestone: they’ve traced the path of every neuron in a portion of the female fruit fly brain they’ve dubbed the “hemibrain.” The map encompasses 25,000 neurons – roughly a third of the fly brain, by volume – but its impact is outsized. It includes regions of keen interest to scientists — those that control functions like learning, memory, smell, and navigation. With more than 20 million neural connections pinpointed so far, it’s the biggest and most detailed map of the fly brain ever completed.

Submission + - Y2K20 Parking Meter Software Glitch Causes Global SNAFU (gothamist.com)

Submitted by grunby
grunby writes: The NYC Department of Transportation said in a statement that parking meters are not currently accepting credit card payments and pre-paid parking cards. "The outage was caused by a configuration error in the credit-card payment software used by Parkeon, a vendor for automated parking systems around the world," the DOT wrote. "The software in the model of Parkeon meter used in New York City had established an end date of January 1, 2020 – and had never been updated by the company. Cities worldwide using the same meters/software began seeing a series of cascading credit card rejections, starting in Australia, as the calendar reached that date."

NYC DOT crews are now in the field reconfiguring the software at individual meters—the NY Times notes that NYC has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces, so it may take a little while longer to fix.

Submission + - The Bacteria Lurking in American Showerheads (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by kevink707
kevink707 writes: We imagine water to be clean, and we imagine clean to mean lifeless, and yet all the water you have ever bathed in, swum through, or drunk has been full of life, from bacteria to tiny crustaceans. So, too, the pipes in which it travels. As water passes through pipes in general and showerheads in particular, a thick biofilm builds up. Biofilm is a fancy word that scientists use to avoid saying “gunk.” It is made by individuals of one or more species of bacteria working together to protect themselves from hostile conditions—including the flow of water, which constantly threatens to wash them away—via their own excretions.

Comment Long time to read it (Score 1) 175

by kevink707 (#56863114) Attached to: 128TB SD Cards Are Coming
Assuming I did my math correctly, 128 TB at 985 Mb/second is 1.5 days to read the entire card (and I'm guessing writing would be slower). That seems awfully slow (or at least should be by the time 128 TB becomes reality).

Submission + - Facebook Ordered To Explain Deleted Profile (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has been ordered by a UK high court judge to reveal who told it to delete the profile of a jazz musician and his band, six months after he died. The Times reports that the firm said it had acted on a request but had declined to reveal to the family who had instructed it. Mirza Krupalija's partner Azra Sabados says she is certain that it was not a family member or friend. She said losing his posts and messages felt like losing him "a second time." Mr Krupalija, who lived in Sarajevo, suffered a fatal heart attack just after his 57th birthday in 2016. Ms Sabados said she spent a year talking to Facebook before pursuing legal action.

Ms Sabados' lawyer Greg Callus from the law firm 5BR confirmed to the BBC that Facebook is now required to provide the details under what is legally known as a Norwich Pharmacal Order — where Facebook is innocent but may have information about a third party who could be involved in wrongdoing. The firm will have 21 days to respond.

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