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+ - SF evictions surging from crackdown on Airbnb rentals->

Submitted by JoeyRox
JoeyRox (2711699) writes "The city of San Francisco is aggressively enforcing its ban on short-term rentals. SF resident Jeffrey Katz recently came home to an eviction notice posted on his door that read "You are illegally using the premises as a tourist or transient unit". According to Edward Singer, an attorney with Zacks & Freedman who filed the notice against Katz, "Using an apartment for short-term rentals is a crime in San Francisco". Apparently Airbnb isn't being very helpful to residents facing eviction. "Unfortunately, we can't provide individual legal assistance or review lease agreements for our 500,000 hosts, but we do try to help inform people about these issues", according to David Hantman, Airbnb head of global public policy. SF and Airbnb are working on a framework which might make Airbnb rentals legal, an effort helped by Airbnb's decision last week to start collecting the city's 14% hotel tax by summer."
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+ - Nature Publishing Group Requires Authors to Waive "Moral Rights" to Works->

Submitted by cranky_chemist
cranky_chemist (1592441) writes "Megan O'Neil has published a story on the Chronicle of Higher Education's website noting some unusual language in the license agreement between authors and Nature Publishing Group.

"Faculty authors who contract to write for the publisher of Nature, Scientific American, and many other journals should know that they could be signing away more than just the economic rights to their work, according to the director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communication at Duke University.

Kevin Smith, the Duke official, said he stumbled across a clause in the Nature Publishing Group’s license agreement last week that states that authors waive or agree not to assert "any and all moral rights they may now or in the future hold" related to their work. In the context of scholarly publishing, "moral rights" include the right of the author always to have his or her name associated with the work and the right to have the integrity of the work protected such that it is not changed in a way that could result in reputational harm."

Nature Publishing Group claims the waivers are required to ensure the journal's ability to publish formal retractions and/or corrections.

However, the story further notes that Nature Publishing Group is requiring authors at institutions with open-access policies to sign waivers that exempt their work from such policies."
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+ - It's Time to Build a Real Jurassic Park->

Submitted by jonyen
jonyen (2633919) writes "Scientists now say they've got enough blood and bone to bring an Ice Age icon kicking and stomping into the modern age. All thanks to a remarkably well-preserved mammoth found in Siberia last summer. "The data we are about to receive will give us a high chance to clone the mammoth," Radik Khayrullin, of the Russian Association of Medical Anthropologists, told The Siberian Times. ...

But even where the necessary genetic material is available, there are still technical issues. Cloning a mammoth would be a more complex procedure than cloning Dolly the sheep. Scientists still need to fully map the genome of the woolly mammoth, a process that is currently around 70 percent complete, before they can determine whether de-extinction is feasible. The chances are good, however, as the revival of the once extinct gastric-brooding frog demonstrates.

But even if it's feasible to bring back extinct species like the mammoth — or even dinosaurs — in the future, would it be a good idea?"
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+ - Firefox 28 Arrives With VP9 Video Decoding, HTML5 Volume Controls

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, and volume controls for HTML5 video and audio. Firefox 28 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play."

+ - Consumerist releases bracket for 2014 worst company in America

Submitted by bi$hop
bi$hop (878253) writes "The Consumerist is proud to present the first round match-ups for this year’s Worst Company in America tournament!

There are several returning competitors, including previous champs EA and Comcast, three-time runner-up (and sort of winner from when it acquired Countrywide) Bank of America, the perennially hated Ticketmaster and PayPal (with their respective corporate counterparts LiveNation and eBay). There are also some new names on the list, like Koch Industries and lawsuit-happy seed company Monsanto. There’s also SeaWorld making a splash on WCIA 2014, presumably because people have been watching that Blackfish documentary.

Voting will begin tomorrow, March 19..."

+ - How Google's algorithm could fix the financial system

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Google's famous PageRank algorithm transformed the web by making it much easier to search. An algorithm, cleverly applied, transformed the world. Could that same algorithm, translated into the world of banking, do the same for our perpetually unstable financial system? Yes, according to recent research by some physicists and economists. The best way to eliminate the problem of "too big to fail," they suggest, isn't through complex regulations that banks will inevitably work around. Rather, it's to design the system to have automatic "radical transparency," so that financial institutions have natural incentives to act in ways that improve overall system stability, even as they go about seeking their own profits. http://tinyurl.com/p6zg34k"

+ - NASA radar system could help predict sinkholes->

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie (973519) writes "don't recall ever hearing about as many disastrous sinkholes as I have in the past couple of years — the most recent swallowing up a bunch of Chevrolet Corvettes in a museum in Kentucky. The trend no doubt hasn't been lost on the country's best and brightest scientists and NASA for example now says it has evidence that using one of its aircraft-deployed radar systems it can foresee sinkholes before they happen, decreasing danger to people and property."
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+ - The Death Cap Is Spreading Across the United States

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Discover News reports that although it's big, meaty, looks innocuous, and smells delicious, the death cap is now an invasive species on every continent except Antarctica and is spreading along the East and West Coasts and appears to be moving south into Mexico. "When someone eats Amanita phalloides, she typically won’t experience symptoms for at least six and sometimes as many as 24 hours.," says Cat Adams. "Eventually she’ll suffer from abdominal cramps, vomiting, and severely dehydrating diarrhea. This delay means her symptoms might not be associated with mushrooms, and she may be diagnosed with a more benign illness like stomach flu. To make matters worse, if the patient is somewhat hydrated, her symptoms may lessen and she will enter the so-called honeymoon phase." Without proper, prompt treatment, the victim can experience rapid organ failure, coma, and death. But good news is on the way. S. Todd Mitchell of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California has treated more than 60 patients with a drug derived from milk thistle. The patients who have started the drug on time (within 96 hours of ingesting the mushroom) and who have still had kidney function intact have all survived. “When administered intravenously, the compound sits on and blocks the receptors that bring amatoxin into the liver, thus corralling the amatoxins into the blood stream so the kidneys can expel them faster,” says Adams. "“As long as the drug is started within 96 hours or less following an ingestion of these deadly mushrooms, we’ve had 100% of patients make full and complete recovery." Still, Mitchell cautions against the “regular look” of deadly mushrooms. “They smell very good and when they’re cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they’ve ever eaten. Unfortunately, famous last words for some.”"

+ - How About A Spherical Solar Collector ?-> 5

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar (2968043) writes "German architect André Broessel claims to have invented a solar collector that is far more efficient than today's flat panels, even flat panels with tracking. He calls it the Betaray. The idea is that a fixed transparent sphere can concentrate any available sunlight, direct or diffuse, and coming from any direction, to its center. At that point a small high-efficiency collector, presumably one that loves high temperatures, harvests the energy.

Broesser's orb is a lot prettier to look at than existing solar collectors, but for me two questions arise. For one, wouldn't a hemisphere work just as well and be cheaper to manufacture, easier to keep cool and more easily mounted? And if so, why not arrays of multiple, much smaller hemispheres as an efficient collector design for all those suburban rooftops?"
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+ - How Online Clues Located North Korea's Missile-Launcher Factories-> 1

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett (1594911) writes "It all started with a parade through Pyongyang on April 15, 2012, held to commemorate the birthday of the country's founder, Kim Il Sung. At this parade, one thing had analysts buzzing: six mobile launchers carrying KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Bloggers in China quickly noted the similarities between the trucks and those used by the Chinese military, right down to the shape of the windows and the grille pattern. It's the stuff of spy thrillers. A few seconds of video, literature, a couple of memoirs and Google Earth helped locate a secret North Korean military plant — and using none of the classified tools of the intelligence trade."
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+ - Should developers fix bugs in their own time? 7

Submitted by Bizzeh
Bizzeh (851225) writes "Today my boss came to me with what he thought to be a valid point and analogy. If a builder builds a wall, and a week later, bricks begin to fall out of the bottom, but he continues to build the wall higher, he would have to replace those lower bricks he did not place correctly at his own expense and in his own time. When a software developer writes a piece of software, when bugs are discovered, they are paid to fix them by the company and on the companies time. I didn't know how to refute the analogy at the time, but it did make me think, why are bugs in software treated differently in this way?"

+ - How Snowden gained high-level access ..->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "In an interview on Tuesday with the Wall Street Journal, former NSA chief and Booz Allen Vice Chairman Mike McConnell explained how Edward Snowden gained access to all of the files that he’s been leaking. If McConnell is to be believed, Snowden was hired in the first place after using a trick he probably learned in high school: He “stole” an NSA admittance test with the answers, and used it to ace the test."
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+ - Target's data breach started with an HVAC account->

Submitted by Jim Hall
Jim Hall (2985) writes "Security blogger Krebs reports that Target's data breach started with a stolen HVAC account. Last week, Target said the initial intrusion into its systems was traced back to network credentials that were stolen from a third party vendor. Sources now claim that the vendor in question was a refrigeration, heating and air conditioning subcontractor that has worked at a number of locations at Target and other top retailers. Attackers stole network credentials from Fazio Mechanical Services, then used that to gain access to Target's network. It’s not immediately clear why Target would have given an HVAC company external network access, or why that access would not be cordoned off from Target’s payment system network."
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+ - Major Internet Censorship Bill Passes in Turkey -> 1

Submitted by maratumba
maratumba (1409075) writes "The Bill extends what are already hefty Internet curbs in place under a controversial 2007 law that Earned Turkey equal ranking with China as the world’s biggest web censor according to a Google Transparency report published in December.
The text notably permits a government agency, the Telecommunications Communications Presidency (TIB), to block Access to websites without court authorization if they are deemed to violate privacy or with content Seen as “insulting”.
Erdogan, Turkey’s all-powerful leader since 2003, is openly suspicious of the Internet, branding Twitter a “menace” for being Utilized in organisation of mass nationwide protests in June in which siX people died and thousands injured."
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There has been a little distress selling on the stock exchange. -- Thomas W. Lamont, October 29, 1929 (Black Tuesday)

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