85613531
submission
derekmead writes:
Some Tor users are very unhappy with the way the project has been run in recent months, and are calling for a blackout on September 1st. They are asking users to not use Tor, for developers to stop working on Tor, and for those who run parts of the network's infrastructure to shut it down. The disgruntled users feel that Tor can no longer be fully trusted after a brief hiring of an ex-CIA official and the internal sexual misconduct investigation against activist Jacob Appelbaum.
83236601
submission
derekmead writes:
Since taking the bench in 2011—moving literally across the street from his law office into the district courthouse—Judge Rodney Gilstrap has become one of the most influential patent litigation judges in the country. In 2015, there were 5,819 new patent cases filed in the US; 1,686 of those ended up in front of Judge Gilstrap. That’s more than a quarter of all cases in the country; twice as many as the next most active patent judge.
This busy patent docket didn’t blossom overnight, and it’s not some strange coincidence. Due to some unique rules around intellectual property filings, patent holders can often file their lawsuits at any district court in the country, even if neither the plaintiff nor the defendant is based there. By introducing a list of standing court orders and local regulations, the Eastern District of Texas (and, in particular, Gilstrap’s division of Marshall) has become the court of choice for many plaintiffs, especially non-practicing entities, often referred to as patent trolls.
81089005
submission
derekmead writes:
Harvesting electrical power from vibrations or other mechanical stress is pretty easy.Turns out all it really takes is a bit of crystal or ceramic material and a couple of wires and, there you go, piezoelectricity. As stress is applied to the material, charge accumulates, which can then be shuttled away to do useful work. The classic example is an electric lighter, in which a spring-loaded hammer smacks a crystal, producing a spark.
Another example is the heart of a piezoelectric system described in a new paper in the Journal of Sound and Vibration courtesy of engineers at Ohio State's Laboratory of Sound and Vibration Research. The basic idea behind the energy harvesting platform: exploit the natural internal resonances of trees within tiny artificial forests capable of generating enough voltage to power sensors and structural monitoring systems.
81013521
submission
derekmead writes:
Differentiating wolf howls with human ears can prove tricky, so researchers have turned to computer algorithms to suss out if different wolf species howl differently. They think that understanding wolf howls could help improve wolf conservation and management programs.
In a study published in the journal Behavioural Processes, a group of international researchers describe using machine learning for the first time to analyse 2,000 wolf howls gathered from both wild and domesticated wolves and their subspecies from around the world.
80912171
submission
derekmead writes:
A team of National Health Institute researchers has for the first time uncovered the genetic roots of one of the strangest allergies: vibrations. The vibration allergy, which is just as it sounds, may be quite rare, but understanding it more completely may yield important insights into the fundamental malfunctioning of immune cells in the presence of allergens. The group's findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine .
In addition to being uncommon, the vibration allergy is not very dangerous. In most cases, the allergic response is limited to hives—the pale, prickly rash most often associated with allergic and autoimmune reactions. Other less common symptoms include headaches, blurry vision, fatigue, and flushing. The triggering vibrations are everyday things: jogging, jackhammering, riding a motorcycle, towel drying. Symptoms appear within a few minutes of exposure and are gone usually within an hour.
80053215
submission
derekmead writes:
In order to fight what it has called one of the largest child pornography sites on the dark web, the FBI hacked over a thousand computers, according to court documents reviewed by Motherboard and interviews with legal parties involved.
Just a month after launch, a bulletin board called Playpen had nearly 60,000 member accounts. By the following year, this number had ballooned to almost 215,000, with over 117,000 total posts, and an average of 11,000 unique visitors each week. Many of those posts, according to FBI testimony, contained some of the most extreme child abuse imagery one could imagine, and others included advice on how sexual abusers could avoid detection online.
But after Playpen was seized, it wasn't immediately closed down, unlike previous dark web sites that have been shuttered by law enforcement. Instead, the FBI ran Playpen from its own servers in Newington, Virginia, from February 20 to March 4, reads a complaint filed against a defendant in Utah. During this time, the FBI deployed what is known as a network investigative technique (NIT), the agency's term for a hacking tool.
78162871
submission
derekmead writes:
The Caprican-Haderach contest did not, in fact, take place in a distant land or on one of Frank Herbert’s planets in Dune, as the names of the actors might suggest. It was one scenario in a two-day war game organized by the Center for a New American Security, a national security think tank in Washington, DC.
The “Game of Drones” was designed to explore the different ways that drones could be used for tactical and strategic effect in a conflict.
The summit sought to address whether shooting down a drone might escalate tensions between countries or whether drones changed the character of a conflict by giving actors capabilities they didn’t have before. As more and more state and non-state actors acquire drones, the war game illustrated how drones could be used in .
77819573
submission
derekmead writes:
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to crack down on exorbitant prison phone rates, in a landmark victory for criminal justice reform advocates who have long criticized what they call abusive and predatory practices by phone companies.
The new FCC rules cap the cost of prison phone calls at 11 cents a minute for debit or prepaid calls in state and federal prisons, and reduce the cost of most inmate calls from $2.96 to $1.65 for a 15-minute in-state call, and from $3.15 to $1.65 for a 15-minute long distance call. The new policy also cracks down on excessive service fees and so-called “flat-rate calling,” in which inmates are charged a flat rate for a call up to 15 minutes regardless of the actual call duration.
77562069
submission
derekmead writes:
A coalition of 260 cybersecurity experts is taking advantage of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) public comment period to push for open source Wi-Fi router firmware.
The cybersecurity experts asked the FCC on Wednesday to require router makers to open-source their firmware, or the basic software that controls its core functionality, as a condition for it being licensed for use in the US. The request comes amid a wider debate on how the FCC should ensure that Wi-Fi routers’ wireless signals don’t “go outside stated regulatory rules” and cause harmful interference to other devices like cordless phones, radar, and satellite dishes.
77486011
submission
derekmead writes:
In this excerpt from the recently published The Red Web , Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan describe how the Kremlin has been trying to rewrite the rules for the internet to make it “secure” as it is understood by Russia’s secret services.
Vladimir Putin was certain that all things in the world—including the internet—existed with a hierarchical, vertical structure. He was also certain that the internet must have someone controlling it at the top. He viewed the United States with suspicion, thinking the Americans ruled the web and that it was a CIA project.
Putin wanted to end that supremacy.
Just as he attempted to change the rules inside Russia, so too did he attempt to change them for the world. The goal was to make other countries, especially the United States, accept Russia’s right to control the internet within its borders, to censor or suppress it completely if the information circulated online in any way threatened Putin’s hold on power.
77161747
submission
derekmead writes:
The Chernobyl disaster remains the worst nuclear accident in human history, with a death toll that is difficult to tally even decades later. Given the sobering reach of the resulting radiation contamination, you might expect the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone—the 4,200 square kilometers in the immediate vicinity of the explosion—to have suffered serious long-term ecological damage.
Surprisingly, though, a study published today in Current Biology shows that wildlife in the exclusion zone is actually more abundant than it was before the disaster. According to the authors, led by Portsmouth University professor of environmental science Jim Smith, the recovery is due to the removal of the single biggest pressure on wildlife—humans.
77000415
submission
derekmead writes:
When Congress passed the FAA Modernization Act in 2012, it gave the agency until September 30, 2015 to fully regulate commercial drones for use in the United States. Well, it's October 1, and we're left with a patchwork of regulatory band-aids, quasi-legal "guidelines," and a small drone rule that still hasn't gone into effect yet.
This news shouldn't surprise anyone. The agency has missed most every milestone—both internal and lawmaker mandated—that has been set for it. The last two years have been fraught with lawsuits, confusion on enforcement within its own local offices (some FAA agents have told pilots they can't post videos on YouTube, for example), and various conflicting guidelines as to who can fly a drone where, and for what purposes.
75533029
submission
derekmead writes:
Forty years ago today, NASA launched the Viking 1 spacecraft to Mars, where it would become the first probe to achieve a soft landing on the Martian surface. The touchdown was a major milestone in the exploration of Mars, providing the first images and data from the red planet, which had been obsessively studied from afar for centuries.
Moreover, on a geopolitical level, NASA’s success with Viking 1 was kind of like winning the Martian Triple Crown against the Soviet space program. Over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, the USSR desperately tried to get a jump on NASA with regards to Mars exploration, and launched well over a dozen flyby, orbiter, and landing attempts.
75095277
submission
derekmead writes:
The most controversial parts of SOPA, an anti-piracy bill defeated in 2012 after a massive public outcry, may end up becoming de facto law after all, depending on the outcome in an obscure case that is working its way through the legal system without anyone noticing.
Next week, the US Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit will hear oral arguments in ClearCorrect Operating, LLC v. International Trade Commission, a case that could give an obscure federal agency the power to force ISPs to block websites. In January, The Verge reported that this very legal strategy is already being considered by the Motion Picture Association of America, as evidenced by a leaked document from the WikiLeaks Sony dump.
74519061
submission
derekmead writes:
While the media might focus on prosthetics, the technology and techniques involved in limb salvage have advanced tremendously too, spurred in large part by America’s recent military conflicts.
Now, when a soldier or civilian faces a brutal limb injury, they have choices—save the limb, or amputate. Be a limb salvage patient, or an amputee. Reconstruct the limb you were born with, out of the pieces you have left over, or lose that limb altogether. And that choice is, increasingly, a really difficult one.
