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Submission + - Ancient Viruses Hacked Human Brains (hacked.com) 1

Submitted by giulioprisco
giulioprisco writes: A new study from Lund University in Sweden indicates that inherited viruses that are millions of years old play an important role in building up the complex networks that characterize the human brain. The Lund study shows that retroviruses seem to play a central role in the basic functions of the brain — over the course of evolution, the viruses took an increasingly firm hold on the steering wheel in our cellular machinery. In particular, the retroviruses seem to play an important role in the regulation of which genes are to be expressed, and when.

Submission + - The Next Decade in Storage

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Beyond “What’s coming in 2015” articles: Robin Harris, a.k.a. StorageMojo, predicts what storage will be like in 2025. And, he says, the next 10 years will be the most exciting and explosive in the history of data storage. For instance:

There are several forms of [Resistive RAM], but they all store data by changing the resistance of a memory site, instead of placing electrons in a quantum trap, as flash does. RRAM promises better scaling, fast byte-addressable writes, much greater power efficiency, and thousands of times flash’s endurance.

RRAM's properties should enable significant architectural leverage, even if it is more costly per bit than flash is today. For example, a fast and high endurance RRAM cache would simplify metadata management while reducing write latency.

...and plenty more, of course.

Submission + - Short-term exposure to diesel fumes causes changes in gene expression

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: The Vancouver Sun is reporting on experiments using human volunteers showing that just two hours of exposure to diesel exhaust fumes led to biological changes; some genes were switched on while others turned off. The air quality during the diesel fume exposures is said to be comparable to a Beijing highway or shipping ports in British Columbia. The next step is for researchers to study how changes in gene expression from air pollution affect the human body over the long term, since the study shows genes may be vulnerable to pollution without producing any obvious or immediate symptoms of ill health.

Submission + - Did dogs only arrive in North America thousands of years after humans?

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: It's long been believed that wherever humans went, dogs went with them. A Science World Report on the migration of dogs to North America reports that genetic analysis indicates that dogs may have first successfully migrated to the Americans only about 10,000 years ago, which is thousands of years after the first human migrants crossed a land bridge from Siberia to North America.

Submission + - Simulations may indicate that arrow of time goes in 2 directions

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Scientific American reports on the results of computer simulations that may indicate the creation of 2 universes at the big bang, with the arrow of time flowing in opposite directions in each. "They investigated the dynamic behavior of the system using a measure of its "complexity," which corresponds to the ratio of the distance between the system’s closest pair of particles and the distance between the most widely separated particle pair. The system’s complexity is at its lowest when all the particles come together in a densely packed cloud, a state of minimum size and maximum uniformity roughly analogous to the big bang. The team's analysis showed that essentially every configuration of particles, regardless of their number and scale, would evolve into this low-complexity state. The sheer force of gravity sets the stage for the system’s expansion and the origin of time’s arrow. From that low-complexity state, the system of particles then expands outward in both temporal directions, creating two distinct, symmetric and opposite arrows of time."

More here.

Submission + - Forget Stuxnet: Banking Trojans Attacking Power Plants (darkreading.com)

Submitted by PLAR
PLAR writes: Everyone's worried about the next Stuxnet sabotaging the power grid, but a security researcher says there's been a spike in traditional banking Trojan attacks against plant floor networks. The malware poses as legitimate ICS/SCADA software updates from Siemens, GE and Advantech. Kyle Wilhoit, the researcher who discovered the attacks, says the attackers appear to be after credentials and other financial information, so it looks like pure cybercrime, not nation-state activity.

Submission + - Linux Controlling a Gasoline Engine with Machine Learning

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a short (2 min) video of PREEMPT_RT Linux controlling a gasoline engine from one burn to the next using a Raspberry Pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's using an adaptive machine learning algorithm that can predict near chaotic combustion in real-time. A paper about the algorithm is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3567

Submission + - Google sees biggest search traffic drop since 2009 as Yahoo gains ground (mashable.com)

Submitted by helix2301
helix2301 writes: Google's grip on the Internet search market loosened in December, as the search engine saw its largest drop since 2009. That loss was Yahoo's gain, as the Marissa Mayer-helmed company added almost 2% from November to December to bring its market share back into double digits. Google's lead remains overwhelming, with just more than three-quarters of search, according to SatCounter Global Stats. Microsoft's Bing gained some momentum to take 12.5% of the market. Yahoo now has 10.4%. All other search engines combined to take 1.9%.

Submission + - Inside North Korea's Naenara Browser (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Up until a few weeks ago, the number of people outside of North Korea who gave much thought to the Internet infrastructure in that country was vanishingly small. But the speculation about the Sony hack has fixed that, and now a security researcher has taken a hard look at the national browser used in North Korea and found more than a little weirdness.

The Naenara browser is part of the Red Star operating system used in North Korea and it’s a derivative of an outdated version of Mozilla Firefox. The country is known to tightly control the communications and activities of its citizens and that extends online, as well. Robert Hansen, vice president of WhiteHat Labs at WhiteHat Security, and an accomplished security researcher, recently got a copy of Naenara and began looking at its behavior, and he immediately realized that every time the browser loads, its first move is to make a request to a non-routable IP address, http://10.76.1.11./ That address is not reachable from networks outside the DPRK.

“Here’s where things start to go off the rails: what this means is that all of the DPRK’s national network is non-routable IP space. You heard me; they’re treating their entire country like some small to medium business might treat their corporate office,” Hansen wrote in a blog post detailing his findings. “The entire country of North Korea is sitting on one class A network (16,777,216 addresses). I was always under the impression they were just pretending that they owned large blocks of public IP space from a networking perspective, blocking everything and selectively turning on outbound traffic via access control lists. Apparently not!”

Submission + - Windows 10's new Spartan browser will pack Cortana's smarts, report claims (pcworld.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: We've already heard that Microsoft plans to build Cortana into Windows 10. Now it appears the Windows maker has further plans for Cortana in its upcoming operating system refresh.

Cortana is slated to play a supporting role in Spartan, the rumored new web browser planned for Windows 10, according to The Verge. From the sounds of it, Cortana-Spartan integration won't be a voice-activated feature, unlike what Google has done with "OK Google" in Chrome on desktop PCs.

Instead, Cortana will play a more Google Now-like role, surfacing information about tracked flights, hotel bookings, package tracking, and other information as you ask for it. Say, for example, you wanted to see shipping progress on a package from Amazon. As you start typing the information into the Spartan address bar Cortana would fill in the package tracking details for you.

Why this matters: Although we're still in the rumor zone with Cortana-Spartan integration, adding smarts to Windows 10 and the web browser is an important move for Microsoft. Google's ability to surface flight tracking, shipping information, and other data for its users has helped attract and keep people in its Android-Chrome ecosystem. Microsoft's Cortana already offers some of this Google-like functionality on Windows Phone, but building Cortana into the desktop will give the service a much needed expansion.

Submission + - Microsoft Restricts Advanced Notification of Patch Tuesday Updates (securityweek.com) 1

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Microsoft has decided to ditch its tradition of publicly publishing information about upcoming patches the Thursday before Patch Tuesday. The decision represents a drastic change for the company's Advance Notification Service (ANS), which was created more than a decade ago to communicate information about security updates before they were released. However, Microsoft's "Premier customers" who still want to receive information about upcoming patches will be able to get the information through their Technical Account Manager support representatives, Microsoft said.

Submission + - Root command execution bug found across wireless router range (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A currently unpatched bug in ASUS wireless routers has been discovered whereby users inside a network can gain full administrative control, according to recent research conducted by security firm Accuvant. Although the flaw does not allow access to external hackers, anyone within the network can take administrative control and reroute users to malicious websites, as well as holding the ability to install malicious software. The vulnerability stems from a poorly coded service, infosvr, which is used by ASUS to facilitate router configuration by automatically monitoring the local area network (LAN) and identifying other connected routers. Infosvr runs with root privileges and contains an unauthenticated command execution vulnerability, in turn permitting anyone connected to the LAN to gain control by sending a user datagram protocol (UDP) package to the router.

Submission + - Sounds we don't hear any more

Submitted by J. L. Tympanum
J. L. Tympanum writes: Discussing music with my 24-year old son, the Typewriter Song https://archive.org/details/Ty... (Leroy Anderson) came up. Within 10 seconds he had it playing on his laptop, but he didn't really get the joke because he had never seen a typewriter nor heard the characteristics sounds — the clack of the keys, the end-of-line bell, the zip of the carriage return — that the typewriter makes. What other sounds do we not hear any more? More points for the longer they lasted (typewriters were around for over a century).

Submission + - Where in the World Are the Fossil Fuels That Cannot Be Burned to Restrain Global (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. cannot burn much of the coal, oil and gas located within their national territories if the world wants to restrain global warming. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis aimed at determining what it will take to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius this century—a goal adopted during ongoing negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"If we want to reach the two degree limit in the most cost-effective manner, over 80 percent of current coal, half of gas and one third of oil need to be classified as unburnable," said Christophe McGlade, a research associate at University College London's Institute for Sustainable Resources (ISR) and lead author of the report published in Nature on January 8, during a press conference. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Those global restrictions apply even if technologies that can capture carbon dioxide and dispose of it become widespread over the next decade. "Rapid development of [carbon capture and storage] only allows you to produce very slightly more."

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