An anonymous reader writes: The European Parliament is debating the Trade Secrets Protection Act critics say threatens to turn whistleblowers into criminals. The bill is aimed to protect European companies from corporate spying by their rivals in other parts of the world. But critics fear that the legislation will make it possible for corporations to define any information they do not want released as a trade secret, and then prosecute journalists or whistleblowers who release it to the public. Campaigner Martin Pigeon, from Corporate Europe Observatory in Brussels says the Trade Secrets Protection Act would have potentially criminalized the release of the Panama Papers. On the flip side, supporters of the bill say there is nothing to worry about because it contains a defense for those who release information exposing criminal wrongdoing or who are acting in the public interest. The bill will still need to be passed into law by national parliaments across the 28 nations of the EU, assuming the bill is approved by the European Parliament.

Sho Chandra, reporting for Bloomberg: The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits unexpectedly declined last week to match a more than 42-year low, indicating employers are upbeat about an economy that bogged down in the first quarter. Jobless claims dropped by 13,000 to 253,000 in the week ended April 9, equaling the level in March that was the lowest since November 1973, a report from the Labor Department showed Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 270,000. Continuing claims also declined, to the lowest since mid-October. "Jobless claims are running really low and all other labor market data are telling us that the economy is creating a lot of jobs," said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. "This is further confirmation that the labor market is strong."

Reader JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Marco Marsala appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, the hosting provider has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Marsala wrote on a Centos help forum, "I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)." The terse "rm -rf" is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles, but not to this guy. Can this example finally serve as a textbook example of why you need to make offsite backups that are physically removed from the systems you're archiving?"Rm -rf" would mark the block as empty, and if the programmer hasn't written anything new, he should be able to recover nearly all of the data. Something about the story feels weird.

An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2002, a company called MaxMind had an idea: Gather up as many unique computer or smartphone IP addresses as they can, match them to a map, and sell that data to advertisers. The problem is that MaxMind's tech has made life miserable for a handful of homes across the US -- especially one otherwise unnoteworthy northern Kansas farm. The farm's 82-year-old owner, Joyce Taylor, and her tenants have been subject to numerous FBI visits, IRS collectors, ambulances, threats, and the release of private information online. They've found people rummaging in the farm's barn and one person even left a broken toilet for some reason. People would even post her details online and encourage others to get in on the harassment, she said. The local sheriff even had to put a sign on her driveway, telling trespassers to stay away and contact him first if there are any questions. What's her mistake? MaxMind thought that if its tech couldn't tell where, exactly, in the United States, an IP address was located, it would instead return a default set of coordinates very near the geographic center of the country -- coordinates that happen to coincide with Taylor's front yard. The abuse began in 2011. A quick online search for the farm's address brings up pages of forum posts reporting the "scam farm."

An anonymous reader writes: In what seems like an April Fools' Day prank story but is surprisingly real, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, says that he has convinced Hillary Clinton to declassify as many documents as possible related to Area 51 and UFOs. On the matter of alien visitation, Clinton has previously stated that "I think we may have been [visited already]. We don't know for sure." Meanwhile, Democratic rival Bernie Sanders has been dismissive of UFO talk. And on the other side of the isle, everyone surely already knows how likely Republican nominee Donald Trump feels about illegal aliens. "The U.S. government could do a much better job in answering the quite legitimate questions that people have about what's going on with unidentified aerial phenomena," said John Podesta, who was also a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

An anonymous reader writes with a report that: Tamar Barbi, a 10th grade student living in Hod Hasharon, Israel, discovered that the theorem she was using to solve one of the problems on her geometry homework didn't actually exist. With the help of her teacher and mathematicians, she wrote up a proof for the theorem, which helps provide new and more elegant proofs for many other mathematical theorems. Posters at Hacker News have some skeptical words about the theorem's novelty, but also about the phrasing of the news report, which seems to omit some crucial words.

HughPickens.com writes: Cyrus Farivar reports at ArsTechnica that Congressman David Jolly has introduced the "No Taxpayer Support for Apple Act," a bill that would forbid federal agencies from purchasing Apple products until the company cooperates with the federal court order to assist the unlocking of a seized iPhone 5C associated with the San Bernardino terrorist attack. "Taxpayers should not be subsidizing a company that refuses to cooperate in a terror investigation that left 14 Americans dead on American soil," said Jolly, who announced in 2015 that he's running for Senate, joining the crowded GOP primary field to replace Sen. Marco Rubio. "Following the horrific events of September 11, 2001, every citizen and every company was willing to do whatever it took to side with law enforcement and defeat terror. It's time Apple shows that same conviction to further protect our nation today." Jolly's bill echoes a call from Donald Trump last month to boycott Apple until it agrees to assist the FBI. Not to fear, GovTrack gives Jolly's bill a 1% chance of being enacted.

schwit1 writes: Here's a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail. Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues. So it's easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, the media was abuzz with the case of the Hollywood hospital that almost shut down its operations because of a ransomware infection, which it eventually paid. Something similar happened around the same time in a South Carolina school district when ransomware shut down an elementary school's servers. The school had to pay $8,500.

A senior geneticist and a bioethicist warned on Friday that they fear "rogue scientists" operating outside the bounds of law, and agreed with a US intelligence chief's assertion this week that gene editing technology could have huge, and potentially dangerous, consequences. Recent advances in genetics allow scientists to edit DNA quickly and accurately, making research into diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and cancer, easier than ever before. But researchers increasingly caution that they have to work with extreme care, for fear that gene editing could be deployed as bioterrorism or, in a more likely scenario, result in an accident that could make humans more susceptible to disease rather than less.

clovis writes: US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died in his sleep while on a hunting trip near Marfa, Texas. Justice Scalia was a Constitutional originalist and textualist. He did not believe the Constitution was a living document to be interpreted with the evolving standards of modern times.

I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.

Machines could put more than half the world's population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence's threat to the economy should not be understated. Vardi, a professor at Rice University and Guggenheim fellow, said that technology presents a more subtle threat than the masterless drones that some activists fear. He suggested AI could drive global unemployment to 50%, wiping out middle-class jobs and exacerbating inequality. "Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever, which is finding meaning in life after the end of 'in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread'," he said. "We need to rise to the occasion and meet this challenge."

A team from the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that augments regular GPS data with on-board inertial measurements from a sensor. Actually, that's been tried before, but in the past it's required large computers to combine the two data streams, rendering it ineffective for use in cars or mobile devices. Instead what the University of California team has done is create a set of new algorithms which, it claims, reduce the complexity of the calculation by several orders of magnitude. In turn, that allows GPS systems in a mobile device to calculate position with an accuracy of just an inch.

An anonymous reader writes: A new study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology by researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology and The University of Texas at Austin sheds more light on potentially harmful emissions from desktop FDM 3D printers. The researchers measured emissions of both ultrafine particles (UFPs) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from 5 commercially available polymer-extrusion 3D printers using up to 9 different filaments. [The researchers] found that the individual VOCs emitted in the largest quantities included caprolactam from nylon-based and imitation wood and brick filaments (ranging from ~2 to ~180 g/min), styrene from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and high-impact polystyrene (HIPS) filaments (ranging from ~10 to ~110 g/min), and lactide from polylactic acid (PLA) filaments (ranging from ~4 to ~5 g/min). Styrene is classified as a "possible human carcinogen" by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC classification group 2B). While caprolactam is classified as "probably not carcinogenic to humans," the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) maintains low acute, 8-hour, and chronic reference exposure levels (RELs) of only 50, 7, and 2.2 g per cubic meters, respectively, all of which would likely be exceeded with just one of the higher emitting printers operating in a small office.

An anonymous reader writes: According to game historian Jon Peterson, Gary Gygax's Chainmail fantasy wargame (which became the basis for Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and later Dungeons & Dragons) borrowed heavily from an earlier set of rules published by Leonard Patt, a long-forgotten member of the New England Wargamers Association. Among the appropriations were rules for heroes and wizards including the iconic fireball spell, which ended up in everything from Magic: the Gathering to World of Warcraft, as well as monster rules for dragons, orcs, ents, and other Tolkien creations. Gygax had something of a reputation for borrowing things without giving proper credit, and this latest revelation shows how the open and collaborative environment of early gaming was quickly exploited for commercial purposes.