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Submission + - File-Sharing Site Was Actually an Anti-Piracy Honeypot (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The administrator of file-sharing site UploaderTalk shocked and enraged his userbase a few days ago when he revealed that the site was nothing more than a honeypot set up by a company called Nuke Piracy. The main purpose of the site had been to gather data on its users. The administrator said, 'I collected info on file hosts, web hosts, websites. I suckered shitloads of you. I built a history, got the trust of some very important people in the warez scene collecting information and data all the time.' Nobody knows what Nuke Piracy is going to do with the data, but it seems reasonable to expect lawsuits and the further investigation of any services the users discussed. His very public betrayal is likely meant to sow discord and distrust among the groups responsible for distributing pirated files.

Submission + - University in Malaysia gives Kim Jong-un an honorary doctorate in economics (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by arobatino
arobatino writes: From the article:

If the North Korean state news agency has it right, the particular doctorate is perhaps as much of a surprise for those outside the isolated nation as the honor itself. Dr. Kim, it says, is now a doctor of economics. The news report does not mention that he oversees one of the world’s poorest and most dysfunctional economies.

Comment Re:Because it's overblown (Score 1) 610

We need to get more organized and make specific proposals detailing what laws we would change and why it's so important to do so.

For starters, make it illegal for the NSA to deliberately weaken cryptography standards. Large, powerful countries such as Russia and China (with nuclear arsenals that could wipe out most of our population) continue to be a much greater potential threat to the average American than terrorists, despite the end of the Cold War, and the fact that the latter make a lot of noise. The US is still the most technologically advanced country, and when communication isn't secure, by osmosis most technology flows from us to them, making us less secure. Most media-obsessed Americans don't realize that (since unlike Al Qaeda, Russia and China don't normally threaten to blow us up), but the NSA should, and weakening standards so they can hoover up more data increases their own power, so guess what their priorities are.

Submission + - Olfactory test in diagnosing the Alzheimer's disease (ufl.edu)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Most Alzheimer's patients has their sense of smell affected, with the left nostril significantly more impaired than the right.

The experiment involved capping one nostril and measuring the distance at which the patient could detect about a tablespoon of peanut butter. In some Alzheimer's patients, the left nostril was impaired so thoroughly that, on average, it had 10 centimeters less range than the right, in terms of odor detection.

Of the 24 patients tested who had mild cognitive impairment, which sometimes signals Alzheimer’s disease and sometimes turns out to be something else, about 10 patients showed a left nostril impairment and 14 patients did not

Peanut butter was used because it's a so-called " pure odorant "

Generally our sense of smell actually incorporates two distinct sensations: the olfactory sense, or smell, as well as a trigeminal sense, which is like a more physical burning or stinging sort of sense. Peanut butter has no trigeminal element; it's only olfactory, which makes it ideal for testing, as the link to Alzheimer's is specifically dealing with the olfactory sense

This test could be used by clinics that don’t have access to the personnel or equipment to run other, more elaborate tests required for a specific diagnosis, which can lead to targeted treatment.

The peanut butter test would be a useful tool to add to a full suite of clinical tests for neurological function in patients with memory disorders.

Comment Re:I think they were just bored (Score 1) 225

The article and the abstract didn't specify the probability of winning the $20 (the full paper is paywalled). In any case, the article said that old people were more likely to play it safe when gambling on earnings, so I'd guess that the probability was higher than 25% and they chose the $5 anyway, not the $20.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 113

by arobatino (#44993445) Attached to: 3mm Inexpensive Chip Revolutionizes Electron Accelerators

Wikipedia agrees that the distinction is usually made on source as opposed to energy, and points out that how it's done depends on the field of study (for example, in astronomy it's made based on energy since the source may be uncertain). Personally I think it should always be done based on energy alone and that these different fields should standardize on that.

Submission + - 'Dramatic' Drop In Global HIV Infections (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The number of HIV infections and Aids-related deaths has fallen dramatically, according to a UN report. Death rates fell from 2.3 million during its peak in 2005 to 1.6 million last year, says UNAIDS. The number of new HIV infections fell by a third since 2001 to 2.3 million. Among children, the drop was even steeper. In 2001 there were more than half a million new infections. By 2012 the figure had halved to just over a quarter of a million. The authors put the fall in deaths and infection rates in children down to better access to antiretroviral drugs which help suppress the virus. Without treatment, people with HIV can go on to develop Aids which makes simple infections deadly. By the end of 2012 almost 10m people in low and middle income countries, including South Africa, Uganda and India, were accessing antiretroviral therapy, according to the report. The improved access is being attributed to drugs being more affordable and available in communities, as well as more people coming forward for help. According to UNAIDS, the world is "closing in" on its Millennium Development Goals to stop and reverse the Aids epidemic by 2015.

Submission + - Nirvanix Shuts Down Cloud Storage Service, After $70M in Funding

Submitted by cagraham
cagraham writes: Cloud storage provider Nirvanix, whose clients include IBM, Symantec, Fox Network, and National Geographic, has told its customers they're shutting down. They reportedly called large customers last week, telling them to move their data off Nirvanix's servers by the end of the month, with no further explanation. They've now extended that deadline to Oct. 15, but have yet to issue an official statement explaining what went wrong. Even their partner company Aorta Cloud doesn't seem to know what happened. This comes after they raised over $70M in funding since their 2007 launch, $25M of which came in May.

Submission + - Rare Abraham Lincoln Photo Discovered (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by starr802
starr802 writes: Researcher Christopher Oakley has concluded that President Lincoln is actually in a different location than historians thought in a famous image from Gettysburg in 1863. Aided by improved technology, Oakley says Lincoln is a few yards to the right of where he was believed to be, standing in front of the speakers' stand.

Submission + - NSA review panel ignores surveillance issue (theguardian.com)

Submitted by return 42
return 42 writes: The Guardian reports that surveillance reform was not addressed during the first meeting of the much-touted NSA review panel. 'A review panel created by President Obama to guide reforms to US government surveillance did not discuss any changes to the National Security Agency's controversial activities at its first meeting, according to two participants.'

'My fear is it's a simulacrum of meaningful reform,' said Sascha Meinrath, a vice president of the New America Foundation, an influential Washington think tank, and the director of the Open Technology Institute, who also attended. 'Its function is to bleed off pressure, without getting to the meaningful reform.'

Submission + - Our (3d) Universe originated from a 4D black hole? (nature.com)

Submitted by TaleSlinger
TaleSlinger writes: From Nature:

Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole.

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.

The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.

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