93161683
submission
brennz writes:
"Freedom is not free unless corporations who exert a large influence in our lives believe in our well-being. I am a statistics professor and understand that there needs to be reasonable standards to control a large social network and make sure everyone is able to enjoy it freely. Invariably people disagree (we all see this), but some principles, such as simply showing probability and statistics with the sole hope of educating others, should be acceptable and in the middle of the distribution. I am for a higher standard, and a higher purpose. There is great care that I have taken to make sure that people treat one other well, admit faults, and present math and probability education to a wide audience. On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning. A number of us were stunned and unsure, but clearly we know at this point it wasn’t an accident. Here are some examples commented from best-selling author Nassim Taleb, and they have been retweeted by government officials, and the NYT and WSJ journalists" — Salil Mehta
93056657
submission
schwit1 writes:
The Google Lunar X-Prize has announced that it has extended its contest deadline from the end of 2017 to the end of March 2018 for the finalists to complete their lunar rover mission and win the grand prize of $30 million.
They also announced several additional consolation prizes that all of the remaining five contestants can win should they achieve lunar orbit ($1.75 million) or successfully achieve a soft landing ($3 million), even if they are not the first to do it.
At least one team, Moon Express, will be helped enormously by the extra three months. This gives Rocket Lab just a little extra time to test its rocket before launching Moon Express’s rover to the Moon.
93017701
submission
Joe_Dragon writes:
Easylist, the popular adblock filter list used by millions of subscribers, appears to be under attack. Github, where the project is maintained, has recently received a DMCA notice requiring a domain URL to be removed from the list. That domain appears to be owned by US-based anti-adblocking company Admiral.
The default business model on the Internet is “free” for consumers. Users largely expect websites to load without paying a dime but of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. To this end, millions of websites are funded by advertising revenue.
Sensible sites ensure that any advertising displayed is unobtrusive to the visitor but lots seem to think that bombarding users with endless ads, popups, and other hindrances is the best way to do business. As a result, ad blockers are now deployed by millions of people online.
In order to function, ad-blocking tools – such as uBlock Origin or Adblock – utilize lists of advertising domains compiled by third parties. One of the most popular is Easylist, which is distributed by authors fanboy, MonztA, Famlam, and Khrinunder, under dual Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and GNU General Public Licenses.
With the freedom afforded by those licenses, copyright tends not to figure high on the agenda for Easylist. However, a legal problem that has just raised its head is causing serious concern among those in the ad-blocking community.
Two days ago a somewhat unusual commit appeared in the Easylist repo on Github. As shown in the image below, a domain URL previously added to Easylist had been removed following a DMCA takedown notice filed with Github.
Domain text taken down by DMCA?
The DMCA notice in question has not yet been published but it’s clear that it targets the domain ‘functionalclam.com’. A user called ‘ameshkov’ helpfully points out a post by a new Github user called ‘DMCAHelper’ which coincided with the start of the takedown process more than three weeks ago.
A domain in a list circumvents copyright controls?
Aside from the curious claims of a URL “circumventing copyright access controls” (domains themselves cannot be copyrighted), the big questions are (i) who filed the complaint and (ii) who operates Functionalclam.com? The domain WHOIS is hidden but according to a helpful sleuth on Github, it’s operated by anti ad-blocking company Admiral.
Ad-blocking means money down the drain.
If that is indeed the case, we have the intriguing prospect of a startup attempting to protect its business model by using a novel interpretation of copyright law to have a domain name removed from a list. How this will pan out is unclear but a notice recently published on Functionalclam.com suggests the route the company wishes to take.
“This domain is used by digital publishers to control access to copyrighted content in accordance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and understand how visitors are accessing their copyrighted content,” the notice begins.
Combined with the comments by DMCAHelper on Github, this statement suggests that the complainants believe that interference with the ad display process (ads themselves could be the “copyrighted content” in question) represents a breach of section 1201 of the DMCA.
If it does, that could have huge consequences for online advertising but we will need to see the original DMCA notice to have a clearer idea of what this is all about. Thus far, Github hasn’t published it but already interest is growing. A representative from the EFF has already contacted the Easylist team, so this battle could heat up pretty quickly.
93000481
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Easylist, the popular AdBlock filter list has been the target of a DMCA takedown notice. Two days ago, a commit appeared in the Easylist repo on Github, removing the domain "functionalclam.com" from Easylist, following a DMCA takedown notice filed with Github.
That domain appears to be owned by US-based anti-adblocking company Admiral who claims that publishers have lost $13.4 Billion so far this year, due to AdBlock.
According to a comment on the EasyList repo, functionalclam.com is not actually an ad server but is part of Admiral's "copyright access control platform" that they provide to publishers. Admiral claims that blocking functionalclam.com amounts to "circumventing a publisher’s copyright access control technology" in violation of the DMCA.
91932199
submission
randomErr writes:
Guido Vranken recently published 4 security vulnerabilities in OpenVPN on his personal blog. Most of these are known issues that have not been addressed or patches have not been fully implemented in the production code .Here is some of what he found:
- CVE-2017-7521 — Remote server crashes/double-free/memory leaks in certificate processing
- CVE-2017-7520 — Remote (including MITM) client crash, data leak
- No CVE yet — Remote (including MITM) client stack buffer corruption
- CVE-2017-7508 — Remote server crash (forced assertion failure)
91311055
submission
ClarkMills writes:
Rocket Lab: We have lift-off! History made as Electron launches successfully from Mahia.
90883361
submission
vasanth writes:
India(ISRO) successfully launched the South Asia Satellite, intended to serve “economic and developmental priorities” of South Asian nations, using its heavy rocket Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F09) on Friday.
Data from the satellite will be shared with Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It was also offered to Pakistan, which turned it down. India is also working with Afghanistan but a deal has still not be ironed out. At least one transponder of this satellite will be available to the participating countries. The satellite is dedicated to the South Asian countries as 'gift' from India.
90866501
submission
angry tapir writes:
A startup called SiFive is the first business dedicated to the open source RISC-V architecture, which was created by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. The company has created two new chip designs based on RISC-V that can be licensed.
90856413
submission
Baron_Yam writes:
From the CBC article: This emerging type of piracy often involves a simple box running an Android operating system that's loaded with special software.
Waterloo, Ont., tech company Sandvine offers insight into the device's appeal. The broadband equipment company monitored the home internet traffic of tens of thousands of Canadian households over the course of a month. It found that more than seven per cent of them were using software called Kodi enhanced with add-ons or apps to stream content without paying for it.
90814031
submission
vasanth writes:
A communication satellite developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), will bring India closer to its neighbours Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. The satellite, which weighs 2,230 kg would boost services such as telecommunication, direct-to-home, telemedicine, tele-education and other supporting systems in these countries.
The communications satellite will be India's gift to neighbors. The South Asia satellite has 12 Ku band transponders, which India's neighbours can utilise. Each country will get access to at least one transponder.
90781451
submission
prisoninmate writes:
Linux kernel 4.11 has been in development for the past two months, since very early March, when the first Release Candidate arrived for public testing. Eight RCs later, we're now able to download and compile the final release of Linux 4.11 on our favorite GNU/Linux distributions and enjoy its new features. Prominent ones include scalable swapping for SSDs, a brand new perf ftrace tool, support for OPAL drives, support for the SMC-R (Shared Memory Communications-RDMA) protocol, journalling support for MD RAID5, all new statx() system call to replace stat(2), and persistent scrollback buffers for VGA consoles. The Linux 4.11 kernel also introduces initial support for Intel Gemini Lake chips, which is an Atom-based, low-cost computer processor family developed using Intel's 14-nanometer technology, and better power management for AMD Radeon GPUs when the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver is used.
90775393
submission
loneship writes:
As of Monday, May 1, 2017, the Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) will abandon the rule of two people in the cockpit. An internal audit showed that this precautionary measure, taken in 2015 after the Germanwings crash, did not improve safety, according to the company officials.
90547347
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
From the school of expected things following its decision to drop Unity, Ubuntu will use Wayland by default for user sessions in Ubuntu 17.10 onwards. Mir had been Canonical’s home-spun alternative to Wayland but was recently put out to pasture.
90251709
submission
schwit1 writes:
The IBM 1460, which went on sale in 1963, was an upgrade of the 1401. Twice as fast, with a 6-microsecond cycle time, it came with a high-speed 1403 Model 3 line printer.
The 1403 printer was incredibly fast. It had five identical sets of 48 embossed metal characters like the kind you’d find on a typewriter, all connected together on a horizontal chain loop that revolved at 5.2 meters per second behind the face of a continuous ream of paper. Between the paper and the character chain was a strip of ink tape, again just like a typewriter’s. But rather than pressing the character to the paper through the ink tape, the 1403 did it backward, pressing the paper against the high-speed character chain through the ink tape with the aid of tiny hammers.
Over the years, IBM came out with eight models of the 1403. Some versions had 132 hammers, one for each printable column, and each was individually actuated with an electromagnet. When a character on the character chain aligned with a column that was supposed to contain that character, the electromagnetic hammer for that column would actuate, pounding the paper through the ink tape and into the character in 11 microseconds.
With all 132 hammers actuating and the chain blasting along, the 1403 was stupendously noisy, ... The Model 3, which replaced the character chain with slugs sliding in a track driven by gears, took just 55 milliseconds to print a single line. When printing a subset of characters, its speed rose from 1,100 lines per minute to 1,400 lines per minute.
90246805
submission
lhunath writes:
Scientists at the University of Gent exposed the TSLP protein's function in triggering allergic reactions such as asthma and eczema.
The team then developed a protein-based inhibitor used to capture TSLP and prevent its bioactivity as it associates with its natural receptors. Using this method, allergic reactions can be inhibited before they are triggered.
