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Submission + - Nearly half of corporate donations in 2024 are from crypto corps (citizen.org) 1

Submitted by drinkypoo
drinkypoo writes: Public Citizen reports that 48% of all corporate contributions in 2024 elections have come from cryptocurrency corporations, with over $119 million spent influencing federal elections. Only fossil fuel companies have spent more over the last ten years. The crypto sector's chosen SuperPACs won their preferred outcomes in 36 out of 42 primary races they invested in. Is this undue influence when only 7% of Americans have used cryptocurrency?

Submission + - Scientists discover 200 pits on the moon that are always 63F/17C in the shade. (livescience.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Lunar scientists think they've found the hottest places on the Moon, as well as some 200 Goldilocks zones that are always near the average temperature in San Francisco.

The moon has wild temperature fluctuations, with parts of the moon heating up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and dropping to minus 280 F (minus 173 C) at night. But the newly analyzed 200 shaded lunar pits are always always 63 F (17 C), meaning they're perfect for humans to shelter from the extreme temperatures. They could also shield astronauts from the dangers of the solar wind, micrometeorites and cosmic rays. Some of those pits may lead to similarly warm caves.

These partially-shaded pits and dark caves could be ideal for a lunar base, scientists say.

"Surviving the lunar night is incredibly difficult because it requires a lot of energy, but being in these pits and caves almost entirely removes that requirement," Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student in planetary science at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author on the NASA-funded research published online July 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, told Live Science.

Submission + - Proxy Service 911[.]re Closes After Disclosing Breach (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by tsu doh nimh
tsu doh nimh writes: 911[.]re, a proxy service that since 2015 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, announced this week that it is shutting down in the wake of a data breach that destroyed key components of its business operations, KrebsOnSecurity reports.

"On July 28th, a large number of users reported that they could not log in the system," the statement continues. "We found that the data on the server was maliciously damaged by the hacker, resulting in the loss of data and backups. Its [sic] confirmed that the recharge system was also hacked the same way. We were forced to make this difficult decision due to the loss of important data that made the service unrecoverable."

Operated largely out of China, 911 was an enormously popular service across many cybercrime forums, and it became something akin to critical infrastructure for this community after two of 911's longtime competitors — malware-based proxy services VIP72 and LuxSock — closed their doors in the past year.

911 wasn't the only major proxy provider disclosing a breach this week tied to unauthenticated APIs: On July 28, KrebsOnSecurity reported that internal APIs exposed to the web had leaked the customer database for Microleaves, a proxy service that rotates its customers' IP addresses every five to ten minutes. That investigation showed Microleaves — like 911 — had a long history of using pay-per-install schemes to spread its proxy software.

Submission + - Large Chunk of Space Debris Lands In Australia (newsweek.com)

Submitted by 192_kbps
192_kbps writes: A large piece of space debris, likely from a Space X Dragon, landed on a sheep farm in New South Wales, Australia. This is the largest piece of space junk to land in Australia since Skylab's 1979 re-entry.

Submission + - Australian teenager built spyware, netted over $300,000 (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'Jacob Wayne John Keen, now 24, was 15 years old and living in his mother’s rental when he allegedly created a sophisticated spyware tool known as a remote access trojan (RAT) that allowed users to remotely take control of their victims’ computers.

'Keen allegedly sold the tool for $35 on a hacking forum, making between $300,000 and $400,000 by selling it to more than 14,500 people in 128 countries.'

Perhaps sentencing him to work for the spy agencies — as in 'Catch me if you can' — would be the most appropriate sentence, though as with him, a period in prison does seem appropriate.

Submission + - Roboticists Discover Alternative Physics (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Energy, mass, velocity. These three variables make up Einstein's iconic equation E=MC2. But how did Einstein know about these concepts in the first place? A precursor step to understanding physics is identifying relevant variables. Without the concept of energy, mass, and velocity, not even Einstein could discover relativity. But can such variables be discovered automatically? Doing so could greatly accelerate scientific discovery. This is the question that researchers at Columbia Engineering posed to a new AI program. The program was designed to observe physical phenomena through a video camera, then try to search for the minimal set of fundamental variables that fully describe the observed dynamics. The study was published on July 25 in Nature Computational Science.

The researchers began by feeding the system raw video footage of phenomena for which they already knew the answer. For example, they fed a video of a swinging double pendulum known to have exactly four "state variables"—the angle and angular velocity of each of the two arms. After a few hours of analysis, the AI produced the answer: 4.7. The researchers then proceeded to visualize the actual variables that the program identified. Extracting the variables themselves was not easy, since the program cannot describe them in any intuitive way that would be understandable to humans. After some probing, it appeared that two of the variables the program chose loosely corresponded to the angles of the arms, but the other two remain a mystery. "We tried correlating the other variables with anything and everything we could think of: angular and linear velocities, kinetic and potential energy, and various combinations of known quantities," explained Boyuan Chen Ph.D., now an assistant professor at Duke University, who led the work. "But nothing seemed to match perfectly." The team was confident that the AI had found a valid set of four variables, since it was making good predictions, "but we don't yet understand the mathematical language it is speaking," he explained.

After validating a number of other physical systems with known solutions, the researchers fed videos of systems for which they did not know the explicit answer. The first videos featured an "air dancer" undulating in front of a local used car lot. After a few hours of analysis, the program returned eight variables. A video of a lava lamp also produced eight variables. They then fed a video clip of flames from a holiday fireplace loop, and the program returned 24 variables. A particularly interesting question was whether the set of variable was unique for every system, or whether a different set was produced each time the program was restarted.

Submission + - 'Orwellian' Facial Recognition Cameras In UK Stores Challenged By Rights Group (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Shoppers at a supermarket chain in southern England are being tracked by facial recognition cameras, prompting a legal complaint by a privacy rights group. Big Brother Watch said Southern Co-operative's use of biometric scans in 35 stores across Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Bristol, Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Southampton, and London was “Orwellian in the extreme” and urged Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to investigate whether it breaches data protection legislation.

The complaint claims the use of the biometric cameras “is infringing the data rights of a significant number of UK data subjects." It outlines how the facial recognition system, sold by surveillance company Facewatch, creates a biometric profile of every visitor to stores where the cameras are installed, enabling Southern Co-operative to create a "blacklist" of customers. If a customer on the list enters the store, staff are alerted. [...] "We take our responsibilities around the use of facial recognition extremely seriously and work hard to balance our customers' rights with the need to protect our colleagues and customers from unacceptable violence and abuse," Southern Co-operative said. It said it uses the facial recognition cameras only in stores where there is a high level of crime to protect staff from known offenders and does not store images of an individual unless they have been identified as an offender.

Comment Re:Check your arithmatic (Score 3, Informative) 214

by kevinatilusa (#47686269) Attached to: Figuring Out Where To Live Using Math

I'm not so sure about that. I lived in Midtown for 3 years without a car. Grocery store was 4 blocks away, plenty of restaurants within walking distance including a great pub right across the street from me. The Atlanta Symphony, High Museum of Art, Shakespeare Tavern, and Piedmont Park were all within easy walking distance, and if I was willing to walk a bit further Centennial Park and Downtown Atlanta were only about half an hour walk. If I wanted to go further afield, there were two Marta stations within 3 blocks of me.

Compared to other places I've lived (Southern California, New Jersey, Far suburbs of Chicago), Midtown Atlanta was by far the most walkable and livable without a car.

Comment Re:haha (Score 2) 119

by kevinatilusa (#42269229) Attached to: Facebook Changes Privacy Policies, Scraps User Voting

But any competent marketing department would get the hint when 589,141 out of 668,872 people disliked a proposed change.
You need to poll far less than 30% to get a statistically significant result representing the wishes of those 1,000,000,000 idiots.

"Statistically Significant" doesn't really make sense here...that sort of computation assumes that the people being surveyed are a representative sample of all users.

In this case we've got a pretty strong selection bias going on where people who are most upset about the new policy are the most likely to vote.

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