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Science

Scientists Discover First Warm-Blooded Fish 33

sciencehabit writes: The opah lives in the dark, chilly depths of the world's oceans, using heated blood to keep warm. It's the first fish found to be fully warm-blooded. Certain sharks and tuna can warm regions of their body such as swimming muscles and the brain but must return to the surface to protect vital organs from the effects of the cold. The opah on the other hand, generates heat from its pectoral muscles, and conserves that warmth thanks to body fat and the special structure of its gills. “It’s a remarkable adaptation for a fish,” says Diego Bernal, a fish physiologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
Security

Mobile Spy Software Maker MSpy Hacked, Customer Data Leaked 79

pdclarry writes: mSpy sells a software-as-a-service package that claims to allow you to spy on iPhones. It is used by ~2 million people to spy on their children, partners, Exes, etc. The information gleaned is stored on mSpy's servers. Brian Krebs reports that mSpy has been hacked and their entire database of several hundred GB of their customer's data has been posted on the Dark Web. The trove includes Apple IDs and passwords, as well as the complete contents of phones that have mSpy installed. So much for keeping your children safe.
Government

Drone Flying Near White House Causes Lockdown 95

stowie writes: The White House was placed on lockdown this afternoon after a man allegedly tried to fly a drone near the building, authorities said. The Secret Service detained and is questioning an individual in connection with a drone flying in Lafayette Park, according to a senior official. President Barack Obama is not currently in the White House and is at Camp David. It's the second drone incident at the White House in 2015. Also covered by CNN.
Censorship

Douglas Williams Pleads Guilty To Training Customers To Beat Polygraph 246

For quite a while, we've been following the case of Douglas Gene Williams, accused of and indicted for teaching people to pass polygraph tests that they might otherwise have been unable to, and for the claims he made in advertising this training -- and specifically for showing his techniques to some undercover Federal agents. Now, reports Ars Technica, Williams has pleaded guilty to five charges of obstruction of justice and mail fraud. From the article: Williams isn't the first person prosecuted for these type of allegations. An Indiana man was accused of offering similar services and was sentenced in 2013 to eight months in prison. The judge presiding over the case said the case blended a "gray area" of First Amendment speech and the unlawful act of instructing people to lie on polygraph tests issued by the federal government. Williams' site, Polygraph.com, is now defunct.
Encryption

Online Voting Should Be Verifiable -- But It's a Hard Problem 258

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a pithy overview at The Conversation of recent uses of (and nagging difficulties with) online voting and asks Regular 'internet voting too risky' arguments don't take some approaches into account like verifiability of votes by voters, observers, and international media. Could we have end-to-end verifiable online voting systems in the future? What are the difficulties? Where is it being done already? From the linked article (which provides at least some answers to those questions), one interesting idea:Another challenge to designing verifiability in online voting is the possibility of malware infection of voters' computers. By some estimates between 30%-40% of all home computers are infected. It’s quite possible that determined attackers could produce and distribute malware specifically designed to thwart or alter the outcome of a national election – for example undetectably changing the way a user votes and then covering its tracks by faking how the vote appears to have been cast to the voter. Whatever verifability mechanisms there are could also be thwarted by the malware.

One way to try to prevent this kind of attack is to make voters use several computers during the voting process. Although this is hardly convenient, the idea is to make it more difficult for an attacker to launch a co-ordinated attack across several computers at once.
The Almighty Buck

28-Year-Old Businessman Accused of Stealing $1 Billion From Moldova 133

An anonymous reader writes: You could be excused for not knowing much about Moldova — the small, Eastern European country has a population of around 3 million and occupies about 13,000 square miles of territory. Its GDP is just over $6 billion — which makes accusations that 28-year-old Ilan Shor stole close to a billion dollars from the country's banks quite interesting. A recent report (PDF) says Shor led a group that bought controlling stakes in three Moldovan banks and then passed transactions between them to increase their liquidity. The banks then issued massive loans to companies owned or related to Shor. $767 million disappeared from the banks, and the country's central bank thinks that total will rise to $1 billion. It was forced to bail out the banks to keep the economy from crashing. Widespread corruption led to many records of Shor's actions being "lost" or outright deleted. He's now charged and placed under house arrest while the investigation continues.

Comment Re:Hate for Uber (Score 1) 132

Except for the whole "We want to use robot cars" thing. Uber wants to dump the Uber drivers, kids. They want self-driving cars, and all the profits for the executives. They aren't out to make you money. They want all the money. And yes, that means two million cab drivers, poor laborers in a crappy job, out of work forever.

Same thing in the trucking industry. They want the drivers gone. And not because of human error- the error is caused by pressure by the owners to increase profits, which dials down to making drivers work too many hours. The drivers are fine. They are being wrecked by greedy owners, who now jui-jitsu their nasty little secret into blaming drivers and virtously switching to robot trucks. Millions more out of work.

Earth

Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach New Monthly Record 372

mrflash818 writes: For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of carbon dioxide gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015, according to NOAA's latest results. “It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012. In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone."

Comment Re: trickle down economics (Score 1) 227

Schools should not be funded with property taxes. That system was designed to keep the money in their own neighborhood, and jack the poorer who don't get to live there.

Poorer districts take EVERYone, including the hot messes, while the uber-schools firstly are located in districts without a lot of poor people and the mess that goes with it. So it costs more to educate EVERYone, instead of the select who live in a special neighborhood. The rich are not heroes. They made this system with the purpose of keeping out the poor - and so made inevitable the tsunami of the poor we see today. Concentrate the bad in hot zones, eliminate the jobs, shut down the factories, refuse to lend money to buy homes, and gosh, fifty years later the country is exploding with the stupid and the angry. Who knew?

Comment Re:trickle down economics (Score 1) 227

The rich possess an all-consuming rage that people are paid too much for labor, hence their fierce concentration on destroying the teachers' unions. It's nearly impossible to discuss education in the US without talk of the bad, paid-too-much teachers, which must be replaced with corporate employees half the price who quietly have to get food stamps to survive.

The teachers in the poorly-performing schools are big damned heroes. They face the fallout of our rage against the poor and dark and any employee who uses collective bargaining to be paid enough to buy a home. They go to school and face the mess that suburban white flight caused, while being condemnded as lazy idiots who can't teach. The students are n-generation washouts, and will only get worse, because that's how America's race dynamics and school funding works. We're unique among nations in our two-level school system, and that's because slavery never really ended. We made this mess, not the teachers.

Comment Re:trickle down economics (Score 1) 227

As with many things, the solution is obvious. As you say, fund all students equally, from general revenue, ideally Federal as the Constitution requires schools, instead of local property tax revenue. Schools would be flatly equal (other than the usual overclass bunching up in their own enclaves to keep out the poor and dark), rather than the ton spent on the students in the rich areas from local levies and the federal and state underfunding the poor schools, which of course leads to the "failure" of the average test scores we see (richer areas have high scores, poor dead flat ruined, and the "average" drops).

Schools work fine. We just concentrate wealth on some schools and let everyone else go to hell, in the name of freedom. Whose freedom is the question.

This is the fallout of slavery, and lately of quietly letting the country fill up with illegal immigrants to keep wages down. In essence, we've been screwed for over 300 years because businessmen wanted to pay zero to almost zero wages and keep the profits.

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