JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing, with the caption: "Enhance, zoom in... more... more... straight out of CSI." From the report: Last month a Japanese entertainer named Ena Matsuoka was attacked in front of her home in Tokyo. Her alleged attacker, an obsessed fan, was able to figure out where she lived by zooming in on a high resolution photo and identifying a bus stop reflected in her pupils. According to Asia One, the alleged attacker "even approximated the storey Matsuoka lived on based on the windows and the angle of the sunlight in her eyes."

Space scientists are abandoning the heavens to help you decide what to wear and watch and listen to. Whether it's stars or Stitch Fix, it's all about machine learning. Wired: Chris Moody knows a thing or two about the universe. As an astrophysicist, he built galaxy simulations, using supercomputers to model the way the universe expands and how galaxies crash into one another. One night, not long after he'd finished his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, he met up with a few other astrophysicists for beers. But that night, no one was talking about galaxies. Instead, they were talking about fashion. A couple of Moody's astrophysicist pals had recently left academia to work for Stitch Fix, the online personal styling company now valued at $2 billion. Moody gawked at them. "They were like, 'You don't think this is an interesting problem?'" he says. Indeed, he did not. But when his friends described the work they were doing -- sprinkling in phrases like "Bayesian models" and "Poincare space" -- predicting what clothes someone might like started to sound eerily like the work he'd done during his PhD. Quantifying style, he discovered, "turns out to have really close analogues to how general relativity works."

Four years later, Moody works for Stitch Fix too. He belongs to a growing group of astrophysicist deserters, who have stopped researching the cosmos to start building recommendation algorithms and data models for the tech industry. They make up the data science teams at companies like Netflix and Spotify and Google. And even at elite universities, fewer astrophysics PhDs go on to take postdoctoral fellowships or pursue competitive professorships. Now, more of them go straight to work in Silicon Valley. To understand what's driving astrophysicists into consumer product startups, consider the recent explosion of machine learning. Astrophysicists, who wrangle massive amounts of data collected from high-powered telescopes that survey the sky, have long used machine learning models, which "train" computers to perform tasks based on examples. Tell a computer what to recognize in one intergalactic snapshot and it can do the same for 30 million more and start to make predictions. But machine learning can also be used to make predictions about customers, and around 2012, corporations started to staff up with people who knew how to deploy it.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the past month or so, about 20 volunteer moderators out of about 600 have distanced themselves from Stack Exchange, the online network of Q&A communities, to protest corporate policy changes and the removal of a moderator, Monica Cellio, over alleged violations of as-yet unpublished Code of Conduct changes. Cellio on Friday posted her account of what happened, claiming that her moderator status had been revoked by a Stack Exchange employee on the assumption Cellio "will in the future violate a thoughtcrime-style provision of a Code of Conduct change that hasn't been made yet." Cellio raised concerns that the Q&A site's revised Code of Conduct would require people to use other people's preferred gender pronouns -- a phrase that advocacy group Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education (GLSEN) says should be simply "pronouns" to assert that their chosen pronouns are mandatory and not optional.

Caleb Maclennan, a Stack Exchange moderator who resigned in protest of Cellio's treatment, offered his own take on the dust-up. He suggests Stack Exchange intends to treat refusal to use a person's designated pronouns as a code of conduct violation. In a post on Monday evening, Cellio offered more details about what happened to complement Maclennan's account. "In January a mod asked a discussion question on the mod team: should we require that people use preferred pronouns?" she explains. "My answer said we must not call people what they don't want to be called, but there are multiple ways to avoid misgendering and we should not require a specific one. Under some pressure I said I don't use singular they or words like chairwoman but solve the problem other ways (with examples)." She said the moderator linked to her question and called her a bigot. Things went downhill from there. In response to an email from The Register, Stack Exchange director of community Sara Chipps said, "On Friday, we revoked privileges for one Stack Exchange moderator when they refused to abide by our Code of Conduct (CoC) after being asked to change their behavior multiple times. The disagreement stemmed from an interpretation of a certain policy, but our CoC is not up for debate."

"Have you ever wondered how -- or even why -- Microsoft is offering $650 to switch from iPhone to Samsung's latest phones?" asks tech columnist Chris Matyszczyk.

"A Microsoft store salesman enlightened me. It was spiritual, as much as factual." "This is a Microsoft store," I said. "Why are you pushing these?"

"Because three weeks ago, you couldn't do what you can do now," he said.

This was quite some drama. I hadn't heard that my life had changed just 21 days prior, but Oscar was ready to explain. "Now you can have a terabyte, which means this phone improves your mobility and can now replace your laptop. You can now run your business straight from this phone," he said... With a fervent -- and, I have to say, elegant -- enthusiasm, he talked me through my new possibilities. The ability to have everything from Outlook to Word to Excel to One Drive existing simultaneously on every gadget was, apparently, my new Nirvana. He took me over to a desktop and showed me how to dock my new Samsung phone and work simultaneously on the phone and the desktop.

He then led me to the Surface Pro 6. "This is the one I've got. And, look, you don't need a keyboard," he said, as he brought up the on-screen keyboard that really isn't very easy to type on. Oscar's congenital positivity was so alluring that I had to insert a pause and ask him what phone he had. He pulled out the same iPhone XR as mine, but sadly in a case. "I've been with Apple for a long time," he explained. "But I just need to pay my iPhone down a bit more and I'm going to switch to this Note..."

"Switching from iPhone to Samsung isn't easy, is it?" I muttered.

"It's all in your mind," he replied. "You need to have a growth mindset. That's what leaving your iPhone behind represents. Growth." I had to laugh. Not out of insult, but out of sheer admiration for his TED Talk attempt to inspire. He was appealing to my spirit, not my rational mind. He was right, of course. I have a growth bodyset, not a growth mindset....

[A]s I walked out many minutes later, I remembered there was a new iPhone coming out. Three new iPhones. Would any of them represent personal growth?

hcs_$reboot shared this report about Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, a new three-part documentary that debuted Friday on Netflix from Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim: The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist is asked what his worst fear is. It's not family tragedy or personal pain. "I don't want my brain to stop working," he responds... A portrait emerges of a visionary who gnaws on his eyeglasses' arms, downs Cokes and is relentlessly optimistic that technology can solve social ills. He is also someone who reads manically -- he'll scrutinize the Minnesota state budget for fun -- and who is a wicked opponent at cards...

While the series is largely sympathetic toward its subject, Guggenheim nevertheless presses Gates on everything from the federal antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s to his relationship with his mother. In a phone interview, Gates acknowledged that he balanced the camera's intrusion with the chance to tell the world -- and recruit help -- about his efforts to help the planet and the poor... Each episode in the series introduces three huge global issues the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has tackled recently -- safe sanitation technology, polio eradication and nuclear power -- and then switches back in time to see how Gates solved other complex issues in his life as a younger man. "The series doesn't do a traditional cradle-to-grave portrait of him. He wasn't interested in that. I wasn't interested in that," said the filmmaker. Instead, he wanted to find out the source of his relentless optimism and his push to do all these great things.... Gates himself said he appreciated Guggenheim serving as a reality check for many of the seemingly intractable public health issues that his foundation has tackled. "I'm not that objective. It was interesting, through Davis' eyes, to have him say, 'Are you sure?' Well, I'm not sure," said Gates. "So I thought that was good. It made me step back."
At one point, Gates admits to eating Tang straight out of the jar.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've spent much time thinking about the political divide in the United States, you've hopefully noted how bloody weird it is. Somehow, just about every topic that people want to argue about splits into two camps. If you visualize the vast array of topics you could have an opinion about as a switchboard full of toggles, it seems improbable that so many people in each camp should have nearly identical switchboards, but they do. This can even extend to factual issues, like science -- one camp typically does not accept that climate change is real and human-caused. How in the world do we end up with these opinion sets? And why does something like climate change start an inter-camp argument, while other things like the physics behind airplane design enjoy universal acceptance?

One obvious way to explain these opinions is to look for underlying principles that connect them. Maybe it's ideologically consistent to oppose both tax increases and extensive government oversight of pesticide products. But can you really draw a straight line from small-government philosophy to immigration attitudes? Or military funding? A new study by a Cornell team led by Michael Macy approaches these questions with inspiration from an experiment involving, of all things, downloading indie music. That study set up separate "worlds" in which participants checked out new music with the aid of information about which songs other people in their experimental world were choosing. It showed that the songs that were "hits" weren't always the same -- there was a significant role for chance, as a song that got trending early in the experiment had a leg up.

SpaceX launched its sub-scale Starship 'hopper' spacecraft on a brief unpiloted up-and-down test flight at the company's Boca Chica, Texas, test facility Tuesday, a dramatic demonstration of rocket technology intended to pave the way to a new, more powerful heavy lift booster and, eventually, crew-carrying interplanetary spacecraft. Spaceflight Now reports: Running a day late because of a last-second technical glitch, the squat Starhopper's powerful methane-fueled Raptor engine thundered to life at 6:02 p.m. EDT, pushing the stubby test vehicle straight up into a clear blue sky atop a jet of flame and a churning cloud of exhaust. The spacecraft, shaped a bit like R2-D2 from the "Star Wars" movies, appeared to reach its FAA-approved 492-foot (150 meter) altitude limit, moved sideways and slowly descended to touchdown on a nearby landing pad. The approximately one-minute flight was the rocket's second "untethered" test following a July jump to an altitude of about 65 feet.

The hardware SpaceX is testing is intended for a fully reusable two-stage vehicle featuring a powerful first stage, dubbed the Super Heavy Rocket, and the winged Starship. The hopper is a sub-scale version of the Starship's propulsion system, the first to utilize a SpaceX-designed Raptor engine burning cryogenic methane with liquid oxygen. SpaceX says the new booster-Starship system eventually will replace the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as the Cargo and Crew Dragon capsules used to deliver supplies and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. In other SpaceX news, the company's Dragon supply ship successfully departed the ISS and returned to Earth Tuesday to conclude its third round-trip flight to the orbiting research outpost, bringing home a spacesuit, mice and numerous experiments.

For years, Naval Research Laboratory meteorologist David Peterson has been obsessed with one of Earth's rarest atmospheric spectacles: thunderclouds formed by raging wildfires. Last week, he became one of the only people on Earth to fly straight through one. From a report: Peterson is the lead forecaster for Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ), a joint NASA and NOAA-led field campaign that's spending the summer intensively studying wildfire smoke from the ground, the air, and satellites. On August 8, he rode shotgun as NASA's DC-8 research aircraft passed directly through an anvil cloud as it was developing over the 45,000-acre Williams Flats fire currently burning in the Pacific Northwest.

Over the next few hours, the plane would conduct the most detailed reconnaissance ever from within a pyrotechnic weather system, making observations and collecting samples that will help researchers to better understand the nature of these dramatic events and how they can impact Earth's climate. "Just being there was the most amazing experience I've ever had while working in science," Peterson said. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs) only form when conditions are just right -- you need a special combination of atmospheric instability, moisture, and loads of wildfire heat to create an updraft.

A team of researchers has synthesized the first ring-shaped molecule of pure carbon -- a circle of 18 atoms. Nature reports: The chemists started with a triangular molecule of carbon and oxygen, which they manipulated with electric currents to create the carbon-18 ring. Initial studies of the properties of the molecule, called a cyclocarbon, suggest that it acts as a semiconductor, which could make similar straight carbon chains useful as molecular-scale electronic components.

Chemist Przemyslaw Gawel of the University of Oxford, UK, and his collaborators have now created and imaged the long-sought ring molecule carbon-18. Using standard 'wet' chemistry, his collaborator Lorel Scriven, an Oxford chemist, first synthesized molecules that included four-carbon squares coming off the ring with oxygen atoms attached to squares. The team then sent their samples to IBM laboratories in Zurich, Switzerland, where collaborators put the oxygen -- carbon molecules on a layer of sodium chloride, inside a high-vacuum chamber. They manipulated the rings one at a time with electric currents (using an atomic-force microscope that can also act as a scanning-transmission microscope), to remove the extraneous, oxygen-containing parts. After much trial-and-error, micrograph scans revealed the 18-carbon structure. "I never thought I would see this," says Scriven. Alternating bond types are interesting because they are supposed to give carbon chains and rings the properties of semiconductors. The results suggest that long, straight carbon chains might be semiconductors, too, Gawel says, which could make them useful as components of future molecular-sized transistors. The paper has been published in the journal Science.

Josh Tucker, writing for The Outline: Retired Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was a Marine platoon commander in Vietnam, a U.S. Senate candidate, and eventually, a National Rifle Association president. At the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, he helped manage a number of violent imperial operations, including the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Due to televised hearings in the Summer of 1987 where he gave horrifying testimony about the things that he and the United States government had allegedly done, he is probably best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Alternatively, you might instead recognize North as a minor character from Call of Duty: Black Ops II. In the game, he makes an appearance, service ribbons and all, to talk a retired Alex Mason -- the game's protagonist -- into joining a covert mission in Angola. The cameo was accompanied by North's role as an advisor and pitchman for the 2012 title. It was very bizarre, and, according to the developers, not at all political.

In an interview with Treyarch head Mark Lamia, Kotaku's Stephen Totilo asked if the studio had expected the controversy around using North as a consultant. "We're not trying to make a political statement with our game," Lamia responded. "We're trying to make a piece of art and entertainment." This answer would be farcical under any circumstances, but to be clear, Black Ops II was already a jingoistic first-person shooter in a series full of dubious storylines and straight-up propaganda. Its writer and director, Dave Anthony, would later go on to a fellowship at D.C.'s Atlantic Council, advising on "The Future of Unknown Conflict." Regardless, Lamia felt comfortable insisting on record that there was nothing political about getting the Iran-Contra fall guy to shill for its game. In the time since, this brazen corporate line has become the standard for blockbuster games, including the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. "Are games political?" continues to be exhaustingly rehashed, because game companies continue to sell an apolitical delusion.

Xiaomi has now been India's top smartphone seller for eight straight quarters, becoming a constant headache for Samsung in the world's second largest smartphone market as sales have slowed pretty much everywhere else in the world. From a report: The Chinese electronics giant shipped 10.4 million handsets in the quarter that ended in June, commanding 28.3% of the market, research firm IDC reported Tuesday. Its closest rival, Samsung -- which once held the top spot in India -- shipped 9.3 million handsets in the nation during the same period, settling for a 25.3% market share. Overall, 36.9 million handsets were shipped in India during the second quarter of this year, up 9.9% from the same period last year, IDC reported. This was the highest volume of handsets ever shipped in India for Q2, the research firm said. As smartphone shipments slow or decline in most of the world, India has emerged as an outlier that continues to show strong momentum as tens of millions of people purchase their first handset in the country each quarter.

In 2014 Esquire argued that great movies like The Matrix "predicted a revolution in film that never happened," adding "We are in many ways worse off now than we were 15 years ago as a culture. We seem to have run out of original ideas."

This week two film critics debated whether 1999 was in fact cinema's last great year. Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Notable films of 1999 are Fight Club, Magnolia, The Matrix, Eyes Wide Shut, Three Kings, The Sixth Sense, EXistenZ, Being John Malkovich, Man On The Moon, American Beauty, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Office Space, Boys Don't Cry, Election, Rushmore, Buena Vista Social Club, The Virgin Suicides, Sleepy Hollow, The Insider, Girl Interrupted, The Iron Giant and Toy Story 2.

According to Nicholas Barber, 1999 also was the beginning of the end for quality cinema:

"The release of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace proved that long-dormant series could be lucratively revived. Toy Story 2, the first ever Pixar sequel, proved that cartoon follow-ups needn't be straight-to-video cheapies, but major, money-spinning phenomena. The Matrix proved that digitally-enhanced superhero action could attract audiences of all ages. And The Blair Witch Project proved that found-footage horror in particular, and microbudget horror in general, could be a gold mine. As wonderful as those films may have been -- The Phantom Menace excepted, obviously -- they taught Hollywood some toxic lessons. Instead of continuing to bet on young mavericks, studio executives twigged that there was a fortune to be made from superhero blockbusters, Disney sequels, merchandise-friendly franchises and cheapo horror movies. And that's what we get in 2019, week after week."
He also writes that the boom in DVDs in 1999 had "encouraged studios to fund offbeat projects," ultimately concluding 1999 was "the year when everything began to go wrong." He argues that today it's a different technology driving innovation. "In the 21st Century, streaming platforms have made the small screen the home of fresh ideas, as well as for conversation-starting communal cultural experiences."

But film critic Hannah Woodhead counters with a line from the 1999 film Magnolia: "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

"Nostalgia is often the enemy of progress when it comes to pop culture. We have a tendency to look back fondly on what came before, ironing out the flaws in our memory until the past is something that seems truly great, and even aspirational."

International Business Machines (IBM) has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as "cool" and "trendy" as Amazon and Google, according to a deposition from a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit. From a report: The technology company is facing several lawsuits accusing it of firing older workers, including a class-action case in Manhattan and individual civil suits filed in California, Pennsylvania and Texas last year. "We have reinvented IBM in the past five years to target higher value opportunities for our clients," IBM said in a statement. "The company hires 50,000 employees each year." Big Blue has struggled with almost seven straight years of shrinking revenue. In the last decade, the company has fired thousands of people in the U.S., Canada and other high-wage jurisdictions in an effort to cut costs and retool its workforce after coming late to the cloud-computing and mobile-tech revolutions. The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 -- a 19% reduction since 2013.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Apple has long performed like clockwork, growing steadily and producing an ever-growing stream of profit. Not anymore. On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley behemoth said that its net income had fallen 13 percent and that its revenue rose 1 percent in the latest quarter, with iPhone sales continuing to decline and gains in the company's services and wearables business failing to make up the difference. The results showed persistent signs of weakness for one of the world's financial standouts. Apple built its enormous business on the iPhone, but sales of the device have slipped for three straight quarters in a saturated market for smartphones. Yet the results also suggested that the company could be starting to halt declines in those sales and other key areas, including revenue from the Chinese market. Over the previous two quarters, Apple's profits and revenue had fallen over all.

Apple said net income had dropped to $10.04 billion for its fiscal third quarter, from $11.5 billion a year earlier, with profit of $2.18 a share exceeding Wall Street estimates. Revenue rose to $53.8 billion from $53.3 billion a year earlier. In the latest quarter, revenue from iPhone sales fell nearly 12 percent, to $25.97 billion, from a year earlier. In the company's previous quarter, iPhone sales fell 17 percent. For the first time since 2013, iPhone sales did not account for at least half of Apple's revenue, said Yoram Wurmser, an analyst at the market-research firm eMarketer. Sales in China have declined nearly 25 percent over the previous two quarters, the report adds. "In the latest quarter, Apple's sales in the region fell 4.1 percent, while revenue specifically in mainland China grew."

Shortly after the 2019 Hyperloop Pod competition ended, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that next year's Hyperloop competition will be held in a six mile curved vacuum tunnel. Previously, the competition was held in a straight three-quarters of a mile test tunnel which is located at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Engadget reports: The Hyperloop competition is a student engineering challenge where teams are invited to design and build a prototype vehicle to travel in the potential Hyperloop network. The vehicles must be self-propelled and achieve maximum possible speeds without crashing. At this year's competition, in which a team from Technical University of Munich (TUM) reached a top speed of 288 miles per hour before damage occurred and an emergency stop had to be performed, Musk mentioned the possibility of expanding the competition to include tunneling as well.

"We'll consider a tunneling competition," Musk said at a Q&A about the competition, TechCrunch reports. "I think a tunneling thing would be pretty exciting. Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively -- it's harder than it seems."

Tinder has joined a growing backlash against app store taxes by bypassing Google Play in a move that could shake up the billion-dollar industry dominated by Google and Apple. From a report: The online dating site launched a new default payment process that skips Google Play and forces users to enter their credit card details straight into Tinder's app, according to new research by Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter. Once a user has entered their payment information, the app not only remembers it, but also removes the choice to swap back to Google Play for future purchases, he wrote. "This is a huge difference," Schachter said in an interview. "It's an incredibly high-margin business for Google bringing in billions of dollars," he said.

Apple and Google launched their app stores in 2008, and they soon grew into powerful marketplaces that matched the creations of millions of independent developers with billions of smartphone users. In exchange, the companies take as much as 30% of revenue. The app economy is expected to grow to $157 billion in 2022, according to App Annie projections. As the market expands, a growing revolt has been gaining steam over the past year. Spotify Technology filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission earlier this year, claiming the cut Apple takes amounts to a tax on competitors. Netflix has recently stopped letting Apple users subscribe via the App Store and Epic Games said last year it wouldn't distribute Fortnite, one of the world's most popular video games, through Google Play.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The official Skype Snap app for Linux has not been updated in nearly six months, and Microsoft is yet to say why. When introducing the cross-distro build in early 2018, the company said the Skype Snap app would give it the "... ability to push the latest features straight to our users, no matter which device or distribution they happen to use." Clearly, not. Because at the time of writing this post the Skype Snap app sits on version 8.34.0.78, which the Snapcraft store reports was 'last updated' in November 2018. However, the "regular" Linux version available to download from the Skype website is on version 8.47.0.73, released June 2019.

Some think automated radio emails are mucking up the spectrum reserved for amateur radio, while others say these new offerings provide a useful service. Wave723 writes: Like many amateur radio fans his age, Ron Kolarik, 71, still recalls the "pure magic" of his first ham experience nearly 60 years ago. Lately, though, encrypted messages have begun to infiltrate the amateur bands in ways that he says are antithetical to the spirit of this beloved hobby. So Kolarik filed a petition, RM-11831 [PDF], to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposing a rule change to "Reduce Interference and Add Transparency to Digital Data Communications." And as the proposal makes its way through the FCC's process, it has stirred up heated debate that goes straight to the heart of what ham radio is, and ought to be. The core questions: Should amateur radio -- and its precious spectrum -- be protected purely as a hobby, or is it a utility that delivers data traffic? Or is it both? And who gets to decide?

Since Kolarik filed his petition in late 2018, this debate has engulfed the ham world. Fierce defenders of both sides have filed passionate letters and comments to the FCC arguing their cases. On one side is Kolarik in Nebraska. In his view, it's all rather simple: "Transparency is a core part of ham radio," he says. "And yet, you can find tons of traffic from automatic[ally controlled digital] stations that are extremely difficult to identify, if you can identify them at all, and they cause interference." The automatically controlled digital stations (ACDS) Kolarik refers to can serve to power services like Winlink, a "global radio email" system. Overseen and operated by licensed volunteers around the globe, Winlink is funded and guided by the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc. (ARSFI). The service uses amateur and government radio frequencies around the globe to send email messages by radio. Users initiate the transmission through an Internet connection, or go Internet-free and use smart-network radio relays.

On Winlink's website, the service says it provides its licensed users the ability to send email with attachments, plus messages about their positions, and weather and information bulletins. Representatives of the service say it also allows users to participate in emergency and disaster relief communications. But Kolarik's petition argues two points: First, because such messages "are not readily and freely able to be decoded," the FCC should require all digital codes to use protocols that "can be monitored in entirety by third parties with freely available, open-source software." Secondly, he wants the rule change to reduce the interference that he says services like Winlink can create between amateur-to-amateur stations -- by relegating the often-unattended automatic stations to operate solely on narrower sub-bands. Loring Kutchins, the president of ARSFI, says he believes Kolarik's petition is "well intentioned in its basis. But the fundamental conflict is between people who believe amateur radio is about hobby, not about utility. But nowhere do the FCC rules use the word 'hobby.'"

"ProPublica recently reported that two U.S. firms, which professed to use their own data recovery methods to help ransomware victims regain access to infected files, instead paid the hackers. Now there's new evidence that a U.K. firm takes a similar approach."

An anonymous reader quotes their report: Fabian Wosar, a cyber security researcher, told ProPublica this month that, in a sting operation he conducted in April, Scotland-based Red Mosquito Data Recovery said it was "running tests" to unlock files while actually negotiating a ransom payment. Wosar, the head of research at anti-virus provider Emsisoft, said he posed as both hacker and victim so he could review the company's communications to both sides. Red Mosquito Data Recovery "made no effort to not pay the ransom" and instead went "straight to the ransomware author literally within minutes," Wosar said. "Behavior like this is what keeps ransomware running."

Since 2016, more than 4,000 ransomware attacks have taken place daily, or about 1.5 million per year, according to statistics posted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Law enforcement has failed to stem ransomware's spread, and culprits are rarely caught... But clients who don't want to give in to extortion are susceptible to firms that claim to have their own methods of decrypting files. Often, victims are willing to pay more than the ransom amount to regain access to their files if they believe the money is going to a data recovery firm rather than a hacker, Wosar said.
Red Mosquito charged their client four times the actual ransom amount, according to the report -- though after ProPublica followed up, the company "did not respond to emailed questions, and hung up when we called the number listed on its website."

The company then also "removed the statement from its website that it provides an alternative to paying hackers. It also changed 'honest, free advice' to 'simple free advice,' and the 'hundreds' of ransomware cases it has handled to 'many.'"

schwit1 quotes SFGate: Airlines are squeezing as many passengers as they can onto their jets, but one seat manufacturer believes its product can help carriers push capacity to the absolute limit. And it may help push down fares.

Say goodbye to whatever personal space you had left.

At this week's Paris Air Show, lots of curious convention-goers eagerly wanted to try out Avio Interior's "SkyRider" saddle-like airplane seat, but that's probably not the reception it would get if people found it installed on their next flight.

SkyRider passengers would lean on a bicycle-seat type cushion that sits higher than your traditional airline seat. Legs sort of hang off the saddle, as they would if you were riding a horse. The seat back sits straight up, forcing good posture. A knee cut-out provides another precious few inches of legroom.

You're neither sitting nor standing — you're sort of leaning.
Airplanes can install the seats in part of their planes as an alternative to more expensive seating options, the article points out. But it also notes that the company "is still looking for its first buyer...and has been for nearly 10 years."