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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 377 declined, 89 accepted (466 total, 19.10% accepted)

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Submission + - Cambodian village hit by HIV mass infection (asianscientist.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: More than 100 out of the 9,000 residents of a Cambodian village have tested positive for HIV. Patients ranging from 3 to 82 years old

First detected in late November after a 74 year old man tested positive for HIV, the unusually large number of cases in the Roka Commune of Battambang province has sparked panic among the community, causing more than 800 to come forward for testing. “It has been confirmed three times by different techniques. Around 90 [people] have tested positive,” Dr. Didier Fontenille, director of the Pasteur Institute in Cambodia

According to Reuters sources, a 55-year old man by the name of Yem Chrrin has been charged with murder and practicing medicine without a license. Facing death threats, he was taken into police custody over the weekend for questioning and his own protection

The mass infections come as a blow to Cambodia which recently announced intentions to have a zero percent infection rate by 2020. Since an outbreak which swept through the country in the 1990’s, Cambodia has managed to reduce the rate of HIV infection among people aged 15 to 49 from 0.6 percent in 2013 to 0.4 percent in 2014

Submission + - CHINESE LASER ZAPS SPACE, FOR WORLD PEACE (popsci.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A laser, using a sodium based gain medium, was fired 90 kilometers into the atmosphere from Mianyang, China. While it might look like a laser firing back at Imperial Star Destroyers, but it's actually for a peaceful purpose

The laser which was fired 90 kilometers into the atmosphere has an accuracy of within two picometers, and was used to support calibrating the International Thirty Meter Telescope, based in Mauna Kea, Hawaii

The $1 Billion International Thirty Meter Telescope observes the ultraviolet to mid-infrared wavelengths. With adaptive optics and high altitude location, the 30 meter wide optical lens is more than 100 times as sensitive as other existing optical telescopes, and is a highlight of international cooperation, with American, Canadian, Chinese, Indian and Japanese scientists all involved in its construction and operation

The Mianyang laser's critical support role is to provide an accurate reference point in the sky during the telescope's construction. This laser is certainly an example of Chinese contributions to space science that include space x-ray telescopes and lunar rovers. However, its accuracy and power could theoretically be also applied to military purposes, such as anti-satellite and missile defense purposes

Submission + - Guess what North Korea calls Obama ? (bbc.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: The saga behind the movie "The Interview" doesn't seem to be fizzle out soon

The latest salvo is from the North Korean regime, and their official description of Obama is something I wouldn't want to repeat here, suffice to say you can get it at the following two links:

http://www.komonews.com/news/n...

and

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Submission + - The Second Nuclear Age (sldinfo.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: SLD (Second Line of Defense) carries a very good article on what is needed to contemplate for the 2nd Nuclear Age by Paul Bracken of Yale University

There is a growing realization that we are entering a multipolar nuclear world. Despite U.S. appeals to other countries to give up nuclear arms, this isn’t happening. And there’s little sign that it will anytime soon

New missile and other weapons in Russia and China, continued nuclear programs in Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Israel, and India’s nuclear triad are hard to square with the conviction that the world is marching toward some kind of global disarmament regime

A forum has been set up to discuss this issue, and it is hosted at http://www.sldforum.com/


Submission + - New sophisticated malware from the makers of "Red October" (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A new and powerful malware is making the rounds

That malware is reportedly created by the same people behind "Red October" espionage malware. It infects Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry, jail-broken iPhones, desktop version of Windows, and even Blackberry

It was found independently by Kaspersky Labs and by Blue Coat, and has been given two names

"Cloud Atlas" and "Inception"

The following countries have been targeted by this powerful malware

Russia
Kazakhstan
India
Belarus
Czech Republic
Romania
Venezuela
Mozambique
Paraguay
Romania
Turkey

On mobile, the malware would come as a fake Whatsapp update, while on the desktop, it would infect users through a Visual Basic script that people could download from email attachments as part of received documents

The malware's origins seem to be heavily obfuscated. Its code contains "bread crumbs" that led the researchers to multiple countries and regions including China, South Korea, Russia, India, Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Middle East, UK and even the U.S. Whoever built it wanted to make it very difficult for others to pinpoint their location

Blue Coat warns users to be on the lookout for unauthorized WedDAV traffic or "regsvr32.exe" constantly running in the process list. Users should also watch out for emails containing RTF documents and MMS messages that tell you to update certain apps

Submission + - US rescue attempt failed. Hostages killed (bbc.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: US special forces, along with soldiers from Yemen, launched a hostage rescue mission in the southern Shabwa region today in an attempt to rescue two Caucasoid hostages that are being held by the Jihadists

There was a gun battle, people were killed, and the two hostages were shot by the Jihadists in cold blood, before the US forces could get to them

One of the hostages came from South Africa while the other was from the US of A

What I do not understand is, why, in this day and age, Westerners, especially those with white skin, still want to venture into places that they already know are hostile to them?

Submission + - Battery with a billion holes (phys.org)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A battery which is made up of tiny nanopores has been created by researchers from University of Maryland. Each of the nanopores holds electrolyte to carry the electrical charge between nanotube electrodes at either end, and acts as if a very tiny battery

According to Chanyuan Liu, a graduate student in materials science & engineering, says that it can be fully charged in 12 minutes, and it can be recharged thousands of time, and that the research team has already identified ways to increase the power of the batteries by ten times

The team consists of UMD chemists and materials scientists who collaborated on the project: Gary Rubloff , director of the Maryland NanoCenter and a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and in the Institute for Systems Research; Sang Bok Lee, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemisty and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and seven of their Ph.D. students (two now graduated)

Many millions of these nanopores can be crammed into one larger battery the size of a postage stamp. One of the reasons the researchers think this unit is so successful is because each nanopore is shaped just like the others, which allows them to pack the tiny thin batteries together efficiently. Coauthor Eleanor Gillette's modeling shows that the unique design of the nanopore battery is responsible for its success, and the space inside the holes is so small that the space they take up, all added together, would be no more than a grain of sand

The entire design of the battery involves each of its nanobattery components being composed of an anode, a cathode, and a liquid electrolyte confined within the nanopores of anodic aluminium oxide, which is an advanced ceramic material. Each nanoelectrode includes an outer ruthenium nanotube current collector and an inner nanotube of vanadium pentoxide storage material. These together form a symmetric full nanopore storage cell with anode and cathode separated by an electrolyte region. The vanadium pentoxide is treated with lithium at one end to serve as the anode, with pristine vanadium pentoxide at the other end serving as the cathode

Submission + - Support for IS is stronger in Europe and US than in Syria (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: This may be somewhat counter-intuitive, the fact is that the support for the Islamic State terrorist group amongst those who frequenting the Arabic social-media scene from Europe and the United States is stronger than those who are from Syria

Analysis of two million online posts found those originating in Europe were more favourable to Isis than those from frontline of conflict

Support for Islamic State (Isis) among Arabic-speaking social media users in Belgium, Britain, France and the US is greater than in the militant group’s heartlands of Syria and Iraq, a global analysis of over 2 million Arabic-language online posts has found

Italian academics found that in a three-and-a-half month period starting in July, content posted by Arabic-speaking Europeans on Twitter and Facebook was more favourable to Isis than content posted in those countries on the frontline of the conflict

In Syria, Isis appears to be dramatically losing the battle for hearts and minds with more than 92% of tweets, blogs and forum comments hostile to the militants who have rampaged through the east of the country and western Iraq, seizing large tracts of territory and declaring the establishment of a religious state

Outside Syria, on the other hand, the support for Isis rises significantly. Forty-seven per cent (47%) of studied tweets and posts from Qatar, 35% from Pakistan, 31% from Belgium and almost 24% of posts from UK and 21% from the US were classified as being supportive of the jihadist organisation compared with just under 20% in Jordan, Saudi Arabia (19.7%) and Iraq (19.8%)

If I were one of those who are living in the Western countries I would start to prepare for the worst

Submission + - iPhone 6 has reached its peak (digitimes.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Judging from Apple's order for chips that are used to build iPhone 6, the peak has been reached and it's starting to go downhill from now on

Apple has started scaling back on chip orders for its latest iPhone, according to sources at IC design houses

Orders for chips for the production of iPhone 6 devices will reduce to 44-46 million units in the first quarter of 2015 from more than 50 million units in fourth-quarter 2014, the sources estimated

In addition, analog IC firms in the supply chain for Apple's iPhone 6 disclosed that their unfilled orders-to-shipments ratio has slid to 1.1 from 1.3-1.4

Meanwhile, sources at downstream manufacturers also indicated that the visibility of orders for the iPhone 6 has reduced at a gradual pace. Shipments for Apple's latest iPhone devices might have already reached peak levels, the sources suggested

Submission + - Bitcoin is not anonymous after all (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Researchers from the University of Luxembourg have demonstrated that it is possible to figure out the IP address and therefore the identity of individuals who pay for transactions anonymously online using bitcoins

In an open-access paper entitled Deanonymisation of clients in Bitcoin P2P network — http://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10... — the researchers explain bitcoins do not protect the IP addresses of users, and these can be linked to the user's transactions in real time, even if the client uses different pseudonyms for each transaction

The researchers say a hacker could discover the identity of a bitcoin user by using several computers and spending just under €1,500 (£1,190, $1,871) on such a deanonymisation attack

There are several ways for a hacker to generate a malformed message and pretend it has been sent by a user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network, even if the message has been sent from one of Tor's exit nodes

For example, say there are 1,008 Tor exit nodes. The hacker just needs to establish 1,008 connections and send a few megabytes of data to all connections from the Tor exit nodes to Bitcoin servers

Once the attacker knows what all the servers are and the bitcoin users have been banned from accessing these servers using Tor, they will then have to access the servers the normal way

"It shows that the level of network anonymity provided by Bitcoin is quite low. Several features of the Bitcoin protocol makes the attack possible. In particular, we emphasise that the stable set of only eight entry nodes is too small, as the majority of these nodes' connections can be captured by an attacker"

Every time the user's client makes a connection to an entry node of the bitcoin server, its address (perhaps an IP address associated with a major internet service provider) will be advertised

Once the hacker knows this address, he can trick the bitcoin server into revealing the IP address of the user

"The crucial idea of our attack is to identify each client by an octet of outgoing connections it establishes. This octet of Bitcoin peers [entry nodes] serves as a unique identifier of a client for the whole duration of a user session and will differentiate even those users who share the same NAT IP address," the authors stress

"As soon as the attacker receives the transaction from just two to three entry nodes he can with very high probability link the transaction to a specific client"

Submission + - Open air laser communication at up to 2.5tb/s speed (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A proof of concept open-air data-transmission experiment using laser beam was run at Vienna, Austria just the other day

Researchers from the University of Vienna beamed a green laser mounted on a radar tower at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, which was aimed at a receiver at the University of Vienna 3 km (1.8 mi) away, with a twist

The latest twist is based on the Orbital Angular Momentum of light or OAM, which allows a beam of a particular color – or wavelength – to be twisted into a corkscrew shape to increase the number of potential communication channels available. So rather than one wavelength of light serving as a single channel, each of the theoretically infinite number of turns acts as a separate communication channel

The light beam was configured into 16 patterns corresponding to binary numbers. These were used to encode grey-scale images of Wolfgang-Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Erwin Schrödinger, which were the subjects of the transmission. At the receiver, a camera picked up the beam, which was fed into an artificial neural network to filter out atmospheric interference. In terms of individual photons of light, it means that instead of spinning like the Earth around its own axis, their energy traces out a spiral. It is the same sort of momentum that sees the Earth orbit the sun, but the photons are also moving forward at the speed of light. That corkscrew-like motion is useful because instead of just having two possible directions like polarisation (clockwise or anticlockwise), it can turn in either direction with a potentially infinite number of twists — much like a screw with multiple threads. This is why physicists have been investigating whether twisted light could help transmit information very quickly: each twist configuration could be its own channel, just like different colours of light inside an optical fiber

The team sees a number of applications for the technology, including satellite and other open air channels. In addition, the quantum nature of the light twists would make eavesdropping very difficult. Encryption keys, for example, could be sent securely because trying to read the beam in flight would alter its quantum state and destroy the data. "We have shown for the first time that information can be encoded onto twisted light and sent through a 3 km intra-city link with strong turbulences," says team member Mario Krenn. "The OAM of light is theoretically unbounded, meaning that one has, in theory, an unlimited amount of different distinguishable states in which light can be encoded. It is envisaged that this additional degree of freedom could significantly increase data-rates in classical communication”

BBC also carries the news @ http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Submission + - Islam inside the Western country (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Anjem Choudary, a British-born lawyer turned Islamic preacher, who lives in London and has for years been asserting his democratic right to call for an end to democracy

Anjem Choudary: I believe Islam is superior. And will not be surpassed. So I believe that the law of God is much superior to man-made law

Clarissa Ward: So, in that sense, you believe that Islam and democracy are mutually exclusive? That they can't exist side-by-side?

Anjem Choudary: Allah is the only one to legislate. So, obviously, in that sense it's completely, diametrically opposed. You cannot have man legislating and playing God in Parliament, and at the same time believe that Allah is the only legislator

one of Anjem's young followers, Abu Rumaysah

Abu Rumaysah: We want Islam. We want Islam to dominate the world

He is a convert from Hinduism but his new beliefs bar even the most basic human feelings towards his mother and other family members who didn't convert

Abu Rumaysah: I don't love them as non Muslims, but I desire for them to become Muslim and embrace Islam

Abu Rumaysah: It's not allowed for me to love non-Muslims. So that's something that is a matter of faith
Abu Rumaysah: Ultimately, I want to see every single woman in this country covered from head to toe. I want to the see the hand of the thief cut. I want to see adulterers stoned to death. I want to see Sharia law in Europe. And I want to see it in America as well


So ... if you guys in the West still think that you are safe, think again !!

Submission + - What kind of Internet we need in the future? (forumblog.org)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Internet

Most of us can't imagine what kind of life we will have in a world without Internet. In fact, Internet is so ubiquitous that many of us are taking Internet for granted. But imagine this, Internet is changing, and may morph into a thing that none of us may recognize

In 1913, the city of London had 65 utility companies with 49 standards. In 2014, the situation echoes that of digital infrastructure, where you have multiple networks, each with different standards

How long will Internet retain its roll of being the "Conduit for Information Flow"?

Today, most municipalities still retain some kind of control over the management of Internet services, but it may not be long before this too, disappears. For Example: TaKaDu, an Israel-based company that offers cloud-based water management to cities in Australia and Singapore, monitored remotely from the other side of the world. In the near future, authorities will be able to outsource a plethora of operations, from traffic control to waste-disposal, to the cheapest, most efficient operator – wherever they may be. At the same time, immersive technologies will reduce the need for individuals to relocate to cities in order to access top-tier healthcare services

Many people regard the internet as a global entity, something that exists outside of the boundaries of national ownership. Yet the fact remains that much of the system’s core infrastructure remains in the hands that pioneered it, and specifically in Western institutions. The protocol for the assignation of IP addresses and online namespaces is handled by ICANN, based in California; authority over the internet’s Domain Name System ultimately lies with the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The Internet Society, a non-profit organization that aims to shape the development of the net for the benefit of users worldwide, now has chapters in 90 different countries – but its headquarters are located in Reston, Virginia, in the US>br>
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s electronic surveillance revelations, the movement to oppose this US dominance is gaining momentum. The recent debates over the surveillance activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have cast a spotlight upon governmental use of the internet, particularly with regards to data-tracking. The real dangers, however, lie with the rapid centralization of the internet, which has led to the emergence of monolithic platforms such as those owned by the world’s most popular search engines and social networks. While these companies may have a broadly positive impact on the experience of using the internet, their data-gathering capabilities and increasing omnipresence makes them hard to control.

Crucial bodies like ICANN currently lack members from developing nations, depriving these countries of a voice in regulatory debates. As their access to computer resources improves, developing countries will find it easier to send representatives to organizations such as ICANN – yet true progress may rely upon the creation of new institutions altogether

For all the drastic change that the growth of the internet has already brought to our lives, the years ahead will require further adaptation on the part of governments and individuals alike – particularly as the Internet of Things becomes a widespread reality

Submission + - Google to lease and refurbish Naval Air Base for space exploration (go.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Google has signed a long-term lease for part of a historic Navy air base, where it plans to renovate three massive hangars and use them for projects involving aviation, space exploration and robotics. The giant Internet company will pay $1.16 billion in rent over 60 years for the property, which also includes a working air field, golf course and other buildings. The 1,000-acre site is part of the former Moffett Field Naval Air Station on the San Francisco Peninsula. Google plans to invest more than $200 million to refurbish the hangars and add other improvements, including a museum or educational facility that will showcase the history of Moffett and Silicon Valley, according to a NASA statement. The agency said a Google subsidiary called Planetary Ventures LLC will use the hangars for "research, development, assembly and testing in the areas of space exploration, aviation, rover/robotics and other emerging technologies"

NASA plans to continue operating its Ames Research Center on the former Navy site. Google will take over operations at the runways and hangars, including a massive structure that was built to house dirigible-style Navy airships in the 1930s. NASA said the deal will save it $6.3 million in annual maintenance and operation costs

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