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Submission + - 300 Million Year Old Fossil Fish Likely Had Color Vision (nature.com)

Submitted by westlake
westlake writes: Nature is reporting the discovery of mineralized rods and cones in a 300 million year old fossil fish found in Kansas. The soft tissues of the eye and brain decay rapidly after death, within 64 days and 11 days, respectively, and are almost never preserved in the fossil record — making this is the first discovery of fossil rods and cones in general and the first evidence for color vision in a fossilized vertebrate eye.
Sony

Did North Korea Really Attack Sony? 282

Posted by samzenpus from the who's-to-blame dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Many security experts remain skeptical of North Korea's involvement in the recent Sony hacks. Schneier writes: "Clues in the hackers' attack code seem to point in all directions at once. The FBI points to reused code from previous attacks associated with North Korea, as well as similarities in the networks used to launch the attacks. Korean language in the code also suggests a Korean origin, though not necessarily a North Korean one, since North Koreans use a unique dialect. However you read it, this sort of evidence is circumstantial at best. It's easy to fake, and it's even easier to interpret it incorrectly. In general, it's a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the "evidence" to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.""

Submission + - Many DDR3 modules vulnerable to bit rot by a simple program (ycombinator.com)

Submitted by Pelam
Pelam writes: Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Intel report that a large percentage of tested regular DDR3 modules flip bits in adjacent rows when a voltage in a certain control line is forced to fluctuate. The program that triggers this is dead simple, just 2 memory reads with special relative offset and some cache control instructions in a tight loop. The researchers don't delve deeply into applications of this, but hint at possible security exploits. For example a rather theoretical attack on JVM sandbox using random bit flips has been demonstrated before.

Submission + - Oracle finally release Java MSI file. 1

Submitted by nosfucious
nosfucious writes: Oracle Corporation, one of the largest software companies and leading supplier of database and enterprise software quietly started shipping a MSI version of their Java Runtime (https://www.java.com/en/download/help/msi_install.xml). Java is the worlds leading software security vulnerability and keeping up with the frequent patches of nearly a job in itself. Added to this is the very corporate (read: Window on a large scale) unfriendly EXE packaging of the Java RTE. Sysadmins around the world should be rejoicing. However, nothing from Oracle is free. MSI versions of Java are only available to those with Java SE Advanced (and other similar products). Given that urgency and frequency of Java updates, what can be done to force Oracle release MSI versions publicly (and thereby reduce impact of their own bugs and improve Sysadmin sanity).
Math

Mathematicians Study Effects of Gerrymandering On 2012 Election 413

Posted by samzenpus from the fix-is-in dept.
HughPickens.com writes Gerrymandering is the practice of establishing a political advantage for a particular party by manipulating district boundaries to concentrate all your opponents' votes in a few districts while keeping your party's supporters as a majority in the remaining districts. For example, in North Carolina in 2012 Republicans ended up winning nine out of 13 congressional seats even though more North Carolinians voted for Democrats than Republicans statewide. Now Jessica Jones reports that researchers at Duke are studying the mathematical explanation for the discrepancy. Mathematicians Jonathan Mattingly and Christy Vaughn created a series of district maps using the same vote totals from 2012, but with different borders. Their work was governed by two principles of redistricting: a federal rule requires each district have roughly the same population and a state rule requires congressional districts to be compact. Using those principles as a guide, they created a mathematical algorithm to randomly redraw the boundaries of the state's 13 congressional districts. "We just used the actual vote counts from 2012 and just retabulated them under the different districtings," says Vaughn. "If someone voted for a particular candidate in the 2012 election and one of our redrawn maps assigned where they live to a new congressional district, we assumed that they would still vote for the same political party."

The results were startling. After re-running the election 100 times with a randomly drawn nonpartisan map each time, the average simulated election result was 7 or 8 U.S. House seats for the Democrats and 5 or 6 for Republicans. The maximum number of Republican seats that emerged from any of the simulations was eight. The actual outcome of the election — four Democratic representatives and nine Republicans – did not occur in any of the simulations. "If we really want our elections to reflect the will of the people, then I think we have to put in safeguards to protect our democracy so redistrictings don't end up so biased that they essentially fix the elections before they get started," says Mattingly. But North Carolina State Senator Bob Rucho is unimpressed. "I'm saying these maps aren't gerrymandered," says Rucho. "It was a matter of what the candidates actually was able to tell the voters and if the voters agreed with them. Why would you call that uncompetitive?"

Submission + - What do your donations to keep Wikipedia "online and ad-free" really pay for? (wikipediocracy.com)

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: As the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) prepares for its main annual fundraiser, many Wikipedia readers are presented with a banner inviting them to donate an amount equivalent to the "price of buying a programmer a coffee". It's to keep Wikipedia "online and ad-free", the site says. However, this masks the fact that the WMF’s revenue, assets and expenses have risen by about 1,000% in recent years. While the WMF got by on annual donations totaling $5 million in 2007, it now wants over $50 million a year, despite reporting net assets of $45 million last summer and having taken another $50+ million in donations since then. Most of this money is not spent on keeping Wikipedia "online and ad-free", but on a ballooning bureaucracy that sees a select group of Wikipedians transitioning from unpaid volunteer to paid tech staff positions, creating a two-tier society and causing outgoing Executive Director Sue Gardner to raise concerns over the potential for "log-rolling and self-dealing" last year. Meanwhile, the WMF’s software engineering work has been judged inept by the unpaid volunteer community. The VisualEditor (VE), a WYSIWIG editor touted as "epically important" by Jimmy Wales, was so buggy and caused so many errors (such as inserting chess pawn characters in Wikipedia articles) that volunteer administrators rebelled, going over the Foundation's heads to disable VE as the new default editor. Last month's new Media Viewer feature was equally controversial. The WMF had to create a new access right, "Superprotect", to prevent angry volunteer administrators from disabling it, bringing community relations between the WMF and the volunteer community to a new low. An open letter protesting the WMF’s actions acquired an unprecedented number of signatures. Flow, a planned Facebook-style revamping of Wikipedia discussion pages that has been in development for some time, is already mired in controversy, with volunteers complaining that the WMF is turning a deaf ear to their concerns. Donors should be aware that most of their money is not used to keep Wikipedia online and ad-free. It's not used to improve Wikipedia’s reliability either. Instead, it funds the further aggressive expansion of an organization that's at loggerheads with its volunteer community and criticized for having a "miserable cost/benefit ratio".

Comment My Wikipedia editing experience (Score 5, Insightful) 579

by Ellie K (#47782655) Attached to: Why Women Have No Time For Wikipedia

I am FeralOink on WP (shhhhhhhhhh ;o) I have Commons open on my adjacent browser tab right now!

I haven't been run off when editing articles about most topics of interest to me. This is even true for controversial articles e.g. Edward Snowden, AIG, Reptilians, Freedom Fries, cryptocurrency, Ambassador Chris Stevens, David E. Shaw, Codex Alimentarius, MongoDB and brassiere. Some articles are emotionally sensitive to other editors, e.g. Murray Rothbard, Ven currency, so I avoid them. It is easy to discern the situation. I have even made some horrific mistakes, deleting a huge chunk of Gen. Ghaddaffi's article was the worst, yet I was amazed that once I explained and apologized (I had also broken a genuine WP rule), the regulars on the article were very understanding. The only incidents of truly rude encounters and massive reverts of hours of my work has been for female-relevant articles. Both pertained to cunnilingus. I am still seething with irritation at the use of crappy references (Cengage Learning books instead of CDC or reputable websites), bare links, sloppy Google books citation without templates and bizarrely tangential content. Also... well, enough.

Wikipedia does omit a lot due to male PoV, even if unintentional. Here's an example. John Nash's sister wasn't mentioned at all in his bio, and his pre-university education was incorrectly modernized. Also, his wife is a graduate of MIT, a physics major in the class of 1956 or so. That's when Nash met her. His bio didn't mention that, but instead dwelt on her father "being of Argentine extraction"!

There are lots of little cliques that I sense, infer, and camaraderie. It would be great to be a part of that.

Comment I am editing Wikipedia right now! (Score 1) 2

by Ellie K (#47782461) Attached to: Why women have no time for Wikipedia
Hello Andreas! It is I, Ellie a.k.a. FeralOink on WP (shhhhhhhhhh ;O) I have Commons open on my adjacent browser tab right now!

I am well-received on most topics of interest to me. This is even true for controversial articles e.g. Edward Snowden, AIG, Reptilians, Freedom Fries, cryptocurrency, Ambassador Chris Stevens, David E. Shaw, Codex Alimentarius, MongoDB and brassiere. Some articles are emotionally sensitive to other editors, e.g. Murray Rothbard, Ven currency, so I avoid them. It is easy to discern the situation. I have even made some horrific mistakes, deleting a huge chunk of Gen. Ghaddaffi's article was the worst, yet I was amazed that once I explained and apologized (I had also broken a genuine WP rule), the regulars on the article were very understanding. The only incidents of truly rude encounters and massive reverts of hours of my work has been for female-relevant articles. Both pertained to cunnilingus. I am still seething with irritation at the use of crappy references (Cengage Learning books instead of CDC or reputable websites), bare links, sloppy Google books citation without templates and bizarrely tangential content. Also, well, enough.

Wikipedia does omit a lot due to male PoV, even if unintentional. Here's an example. John Nash's sister wasn't mentioned at all in his bio, and his pre-university education was incorrectly modernized. Also, his wife is a graduate of MIT, a physics major in the class of 1956 or so. That's when Nash met her. His bio didn't mention that, but instead dwelt on her father "being of Argentine extraction"!

There are lots of little cliques that I sense, infer, and camaraderie. It would be great to be a part of that.

Submission + - Cooling canals at Turkey Point nuclear power plant still too hot (miamiherald.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Florida Power & Light needs millions more gallons of freshwater to manage cooling canals that keep two nuclear reactors at Turkey Point from overheating, company officials said in an emergency request to the South Florida Water Management District.

The hot canals do not pose a safety risk, federal regulators have said, but they have forced the utility to dial back operations over the scorching summer.

So with the heat showing no sign of easing, could brownouts be far off?

“We have record electricity demand and what we’re doing is taking proactive action to make sure we can effectively manage the situation in an environmentally responsible way while maintaining reliability for our customers,” said FPL spokesman Michael Waldron.

To cool the canals, the Water Management District on Thursday authorized pumping up to 100 million gallons of water a day from a nearby canal system, but only if it doesn’t take too much water stored for Everglades restoration. The canals carry freshwater to Biscayne Bay and tamp down salinity, which can fuel algae blooms and harm marine life.

The 100 million gallons would be in addition to 14 million gallons a day from the Floridan aquifer that water managers approved in June, after high temperatures threatened to shut down the reactors.

Submission + - How to Survive H1B Displacement

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: So it looks like I'm going to be displaced by an H1B. I've been in IT / enterprise admin for some 20 years. I wont go into all of the details but its pretty clear that not only do I get the pleasure of losing my job, my employer is trying to trick me into training this guy before they sack me. The upside is that I caught on to whats happening and this person is actually not too bright. Today, he asked me to explain why when he opens an EBCDIC file with notepad.exe there are funny characters.

Anyway, I know I'm not the first and I won't be the last. I figure I have about 90 days since that persons hire date before they can pull my plug without getting sued. US labor law doesn't give much protection. Most likely there will be no package. So Slashdot -> what does one do when such a situation arises?

Submission + - Why women have no time for Wikipedia 2

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: Wikipedia is well known to have a very large gender imbalance, with survey-based estimates of women contributors ranging from 8.5% to around 16%. This is a more extreme gender imbalance than even that of Reddit, the most male-dominated major social media platform, and it has a palpable effect on Wikipedia content. Moreover, Wikipedia editor survey data indicate that only 1 in 50 respondents is a mother – a good proportion of female contributors are in fact minors, with women in their twenties less likely to contribute to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation efforts to address this "gender gap" have so far remained fruitless. Wikipedia’s demographic pattern stands in marked contrast to female-dominated social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, where women aged 18 to 34 are particularly strongly represented. It indicates that it isn’t lack of time or family commitments that keep women from contributing to Wikipedia – women simply find other sites more attractive. Wikipedia’s user interface and its culture of anonymity may be among the factors leading women to spend their online time elsewhere.
China

Chinese Hackers Infiltrate Firms Using Malware-Laden Handheld Scanners 93

Posted by timothy from the location-location-location dept.
wiredmikey (1824622) writes China-based threat actors are using sophisticated malware installed on handheld scanners to target shipping and logistics organizations from all over the world. According to security firm TrapX, the attack begins at a Chinese company that provides hardware and software for handheld scanners used by shipping and logistics firms worldwide to inventory the items they're handling. The Chinese manufacturer installs the malware on the Windows XP operating systems embedded in the devices.

Experts determined that the threat group targets servers storing corporate financial data, customer data and other sensitive information. A second payload downloaded by the malware then establishes a sophisticated C&C on the company's finance servers, enabling the attackers to exfiltrate the information they're after. The malware used by the Zombie Zero attackers is highly sophisticated and polymorphic, the researchers said. In one attack they observed, 16 of the 48 scanners used by the victim were infected, and the malware managed to penetrate the targeted organization's defenses and gain access to servers on the corporate network. Interestingly, the C&C is located at the Lanxiang Vocational School, an educational institution said to be involved in the Operation Aurora attacks against Google, and which is physically located only one block away from the scanner manufacturer, TrapX said.

Submission + - White House responds to petition to allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consu (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by devloop
devloop writes: White House posts an official response to this petition, already with nearly 140,000 votes in favor, to allow direct sales to consumers in all 50 states. "We believe in the goal of improving consumer choice for American families, including more vehicles that provide savings at the pump for consumers. However, we understand that pre-empting current state laws on direct-to-consumer auto sales would require an act of Congress."

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