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Submission + - A ChillingEffects.org for Domain Names (indolering.com)

Submitted by fsterman
fsterman writes: Domain name seizures used to be a rare occurrence, but US law enforcement has become adept at exploiting a quirk in the Internet's governance structure that allows them to seize a wide range of domains without due process. The rate has been increasing exponentially, with a total of 87 in 2010 to 1,700 in mid-2013. A month ago, nearly 5,000 domains were seized by a corporation using civil proceedings. The types of attacks targeting DNS have been increasing as well, such as when a US embassy had GoDaddy shut down a political protest site.

Submission + - Girls 'better than boys at making computer games', study finds. 1

Submitted by Esteanil
Esteanil writes: Researchers in the University of Sussex's Informatics department asked pupils at a secondary school to design and program their own computer game using a new visual programming language.
The young people, aged 12-13, spent eight weeks developing their own 3D role-playing games. The girls in the classroom wrote more complex programs in their games than the boys and also learnt more about coding. The girls used seven different triggers – almost twice as many as the boys – and were much more successful at creating complex scripts with two or more parts and conditional clauses. Boys nearly always chose to trigger their scripts on when a character says something, which is the first and easiest trigger to learn.

Submission + - Europeans came from three ancestry groupings (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A recent study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Tübingen in Germany has found that present day Europeans are descendants of three different groups of people — A near east farmer group, an indigenous hunter gatherer group, and an ncient North Eurasian group from Siberia

"Nearly all Europeans have ancestry from all three ancestral groups," said Iosif Lazaridis, a research fellow in genetics in Reich's lab and first author of the paper. "Differences between them are due to the relative proportions of ancestry. Northern Europeans have more hunter-gatherer ancestry — up to about 50 percent in Lithuanians — and Southern Europeans have more farmer ancestry."

The most surprising part of the project, however, was the discovery of the Basal Eurasians

Before Australian Aborigines and New Guineans and South Indians and Native Americans and other indigenous hunter-gatherers split, they split from Basal Eurasians

The study also found that Mediterranean groups such as the Maltese, as well as Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated, while far northeastern Europeans such as Finns and the Saami, as well as some northern Russians, had more East Asian ancestry in the mix

Submission + - Study Finds Link Between Artificial Sweeteners and Glucose Intolerance

Submitted by onproton
onproton writes: The journal Nature released a study today that reveals a link between the consumption of artificial sweeteners and the development of glucose intolerance, a leading risk factor for the development of type 2 diabetes, citing a critical alteration of intestinal bacteria. Paradoxically, these non-caloric sweeteners, which can be up to 20,000 times sweeter than natural sugars, are often recommended to diabetes patients to control blood glucose levels. Sugar substitutes have come under additional fire lately from studies showing that eating artificially sweetened foods can lead to greater overall calorie consumption and even weight gain. While some, especially food industry officials, remain highly skeptical of such studies, more research still needs to be done to determine the actual risks these substances may pose to health.

Submission + - Snowden's Leaks Didn't Help Terrorists 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The Interecept reports that contrary to lurid claims made by U.S. officials, a new independent analysis of Edward Snowden’s revelations on NSA surveillance that examined the frequency of releases and updates of encryption software by jihadi groups has found no correlation in either measure to Snowden’s leaks about the NSA’s surveillance techniques. According to the report "well prior to Edward Snowden, online jihadists were already aware that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were attempting to monitor them (PDF).” In fact, concerns about terrorists' use of sophisticated encryption technology predates even 9/11.

Earlier this month former NSA head Michael Hayden stated, “The changed communications practices and patterns of terrorist groups following the Snowden revelations have impacted our ability to track and monitor these groups”, while Matthew Olsen of the National Counterterrorism Centre would add “Following the disclosure of the stolen NSA documents, terrorists are changing how they communicate to avoid surveillance.” Snowden’s critics have previously accused his actions of contributing from everything from the rise of ISIS to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. "This most recent study is the most comprehensive repudiation of these charges to date," says Murtaza Hussain. "Contrary to lurid claims to the contrary, the facts demonstrate that terrorist organizations have not benefited from the NSA revelations, nor have they substantially altered their behavior in response to them."

Submission + - Artificial sweeteners may contribute to diabetes (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When it comes to the sweet stuff, science often turns sour. Almost every study that has linked sugar to problems such as tooth decay, diabetes, obesity, or even childhood violence has come under heavy fire. Nonetheless, the World Health Organization released draft guidelines earlier this year that halved the recommended maximum sugar intake. Now, new research is suggesting that synthetic sweeteners like saccharin might not be a great alternative. They could have a negative effect on gut microbes and thus lead to a higher risk of diabetes, researchers say.

Comment Re:victory against science (Score 1) 510

by enrevanche (#45876559) Attached to: Anti-GMO Activists Win Victory On Hawaiian Island
I understand your problems with gluten (which I also have), however it is important to understand that the product you are recommending really has very little of its claimed ingredients. The 6X stuff is 1 part in a million, the 12X is 1 part in a trillion. If you take 1 gram of the liquid, you are only getting 1 microgram each of the 6X ingredients and one millionth of a microgram of the 12X ingredients. For almost all substances, these amounts are unlikely to have any substantial physiological effects, especially ones related to something as large as the gut. For something to be labled as gluten-free, it must have less that 20 parts per million and you will typically eat much more than a gram of something. The claim of homeopathy is that the carrier (water or sugar) contains "memory" of the original ingredient which is supposedly as powerful as the ingredient itself.

Submission + - Intel's Knights Landing - a 72 core, 3 teraflop beast (realworldtech.com)

Submitted by asliarun
asliarun writes: David Kanter of Realworldtech recently posted his take on Intel's upcoming Knights Landing chip. The technical specs are startling massive and shows Intel's new found focus on throughput processing (and possibly graphics). 72 Silvermont cores with beefy FP and vector units, mesh fabric with tile based architecture, DDR4 support with a 384bit memory controller, QPI connectivity instead of PCIe, and 16GB on-package eDRAM (yes, 16GB!). All this should ensure throughput of 3 teraflops/s double precision. Many of the architectural elements would also be the same as Intel's future CPU chips — so this is also a peek into Intel's vision of the future. Will Intel use this as a platform to compete with nVidia and AMD/ATI graphics? Or will this be another Larrabee? Or just an exotic HPC product like Knights Corner?

Submission + - Passwords Tried by Hackers - Case Study On Small WordPress Site (s-crib.com)

Submitted by SmartCrib
SmartCrib writes: The total number of passwords we logged was 11,312. This set contains 4,421 different passwords. We can split all passwords into several distinct groups:
  • number passwords – contain only digits;
  • names – first names;
  • popular passwords – passwords that rank high in known statistics;
  • keyboard friendly – characters are next to each other on keyboard;
  • website related – use the website name and/or usernames on the website; and
  • topical – e.g., StarTrek related, football related, and so on.

It seems to be a very bad idea to use password consisting of only digits. We have logged passwords of 1 digit to passwords of 12 digits. As such, even a long number does not help. 22% of all guesses used number passwords.

Passwords made form keys that are close to each other are not so often but I was still surprised by some of them. Here is again a small selection: q1q1q1, qwertuiop, ytngfh, k,jdm, qweasd123, 123asd, qazwsxedcrfv.

Submission + - Academics Against Mass Surveillance speak out

Submitted by Koen Lefever
Koen Lefever writes: Over 250 Academics Against Mass Surveillance demand American and European security agencies to stop large scale monitoring of the population: "The signatories of this declaration call upon nation states to take action. Intelligence agencies must be subjected to transparency and accountability. People must be free from blanket mass surveillance conducted by intelligence agencies from their own or foreign countries. States must effectively protect everyone's fundamental rights and freedoms, and particularly everyone's privacy. "

Submission + - Surround-Ultrasound Creates "Anti-Gravity" Forcefield (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Researchers at the University of Tokyo have published a paper and video describing a technique that is explicitly not an anti-gravity system, and doesn’t pretend to be, but looks very much like one. “The essence of levitation is the countervailing of gravity,” according to the provocative opening of a paper published Dec. 14 on the Cornell University science-publishing site arXiv.org that describes a way to not only raise an object into the air, but maneuver it in three dimensions using only standing waves of ultrasound. Since the mid-1970s, researchers have been able to levitate small objects using focused beams of high-frequency sound that bounce off a flat surface and create a wave of pressure that pushes the object into the air. But they couldn’t cause an object to float, and they couldn’t move it around in any direction other than up or down. The University of Tokyo team led by Yoichi Ochiai built a system that could raise small particles, water droplets and even “small creatures” off a flat surface and zoom them around within an open, cubical area about 21 inches on each side. The system uses four sets of phased arrays – speakers producing focused beams of sound at around 40kHz – to create waves of ultrasonic force on every side of the object rather than just one. The force produced by each of the four ultrasound sources can be changed – and the force on the object manipulated – using the same techniques utilized by older systems. Coordinating the frequencies and force of ultrasound arrays on four sides, however, creates a consistent focal point for the force from each. By keeping frequency changes in sync, the system creates a “bubble” within which the force from all four sources is consistent no matter where within the target area the focus is directed.

Submission + - The UK's Internet Porn Filter and Fighting Censorship Creep (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian takes the UK government's internet porn filter to task by pointing out how absurd the opt-out process is: 'Picture the scene. You're pottering about on the internet, perhaps idly looking up cake recipes, or videos of puppies learning to howl. Then the phone rings. It's your internet service provider. Actually, it's a nice lady in a telesales warehouse somewhere, employed on behalf of your service provider; let's call her Linda. Linda is calling because, thanks to David Cameron's "porn filter", you now have an "unavoidable choice", as one of 20 million British households with a broadband connection, over whether to opt in to view certain content. Linda wants to know – do you want to be able to see hardcore pornography? How about information on illegal drugs? Or gay sex, or abortion? Your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How about obscene and tasteless material? Would you like to see that? Speak up, Linda can't hear you.' The article also points out how the filter is being used as a tool for private industry to protect their profits. 'The category of "obscene content", for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years.'

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