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Comment Re:legitimate threshold choice (Score 3, Interesting) 46

by RussH (#60679180) Attached to: UK Contact Tracing App Failed To Flag People Exposed To COVID-19

Totally agree, this seems to be the truth, see some more technical details here https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/... (also linked in the BBC Article).

Unfortunately though, this reasonable change doesn't fit the 'government is incompetent' narrative that's being pushed. (They may be, but this decision is not the evidence you're looking for)

Submission + - WHO Lauds Lockdown-Ignoring Sweden As a 'Model' For Countries Going Forward (nypost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The World Health Organization lauded Sweden as a “model” for battling the coronavirus as countries lift lockdowns — after the nation controversially refused restrictions. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, said Wednesday there are “lessons to be learned” from the Scandinavian nation, which has largely relied on citizens to self-regulate. “I think there’s a perception out that Sweden has not put in control measures and just has allowed the disease to spread,” Ryan told reporters. “Nothing can be further from the truth.”

Ryan noted that instead of lockdowns, the country has “put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting people in long-term care facilities.” “What it has done differently is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of its citizens to implement self-distancing and self-regulate,” Ryan said. “In that sense, they have implemented public policy through that partnership with the population.” He said the country also ramped up testing and had adequate capacity in hospitals to handle any outbreaks. “I think if we are to reach a new normal, Sweden represents a model if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns,” Ryan said.

Submission + - ICANN finally halts $1.1bn sale of .org registry, claims it's 'the right thing' (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Charlotte Web
Charlotte Web writes: ICANN has halted the proposed $1.1bn sale of the .org registry to an unknown private equity firm, claiming this was “the right thing to do.”

The DNS overseer has been under growing pressure to use its authority to refuse the planned transfer of the top-level domain from the Internet Society to Ethos Capital, most recently from the California Attorney General who said the deal “puts profits above the public interest.”

ICANN ultimately bowed to the US state's top lawyer when it concluded today it “finds the public interest is better served in withholding consent.”

Submission + - FDA Authorizes NASA-Developed Ventilator For Use In COVID-19 Treatment (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for emergency use as outlined in the agency’s COVID-19 guidelines a new ventilator designed by engineers working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The ventilator, which has an acronym because this is NASA we’re talking about, is called “VITAL” (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), and its design is being offered for free, licensed use for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. The JPL-developed emergency use ventilator is an intubation ventilator, meaning that a patient has to be sedated, with a breathing tube inserted all the way down their airway to assist their breathing. It’s reserved for COVID-19 patients exhibiting the most serious symptoms, and even then is really designed for use only to free up availability of existing, fully approved ventilator hardware in the case of extreme shortages.

What makes VITAL most interesting is that it is made of “far fewer” parts than existing traditional ventilators, according to NASA, and it also can be assembled much more quickly, and maintained with less expertise and effort over time. The design provides for use for between three or four months, however, rather than years for traditional hardware, and is meant specifically for COVID-19 patient use, hence its simpler design versus models that are made to serve in a number of different medical situations. NASA’s JPL is seeking commercial manufacturing partners for the hardware now that it has its authorization, however, in order to get it built in large numbers for distribution to hospitals in need.

Submission + - Intel unveils Comet Lake CPUs and pricing (pcgamer.com) 1

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: Intel released more information about their next generation CPUs code named Comet Lake. Overall, CPUs will get more cores and threads and slight speed boosts. Price wise, Intel is cutting prices to be more competitive with AMDâ(TM)s Rzyen processors. Some of the downsides include requiring new socket (thus new MBs), LGA 1200 and lack of PCIE 4.0 compatibility. No specific benchmarks were released however Intel claims to have the fastest gaming CPUs.

Submission + - Is Space-Time Quantized or analog? (space.com)

Submitted by sixoh1
sixoh1 writes: What are the implications if "space-time" (as conceived of in the Einstein Theory of General Relativity) is quantized like all other aspects of matter and energy?

In order for the math of general relativity to work, this fabric of space-time has to be absolutely smooth at the tiniest of scales. No matter how far you zoom in, space-time will always be as wrinkle-free as a recently ironed shirt. No holes, no tears, no tangles. Just pure, clean smoothness. Without this smoothness, the mathematics of gravity simply break down. But general relativity isn't the only thing telling us about space-time. We also have quantum mechanics (and its successor, quantum field theory). In the quantum world, everything microscopic is ruled by random chance and probabilities. Particles can appear and disappear at a moment's notice (and usually even less time than that). Fields can wiggle and vibrate with a will all their own. And nothing can ever be known for certain.

That's exactly what a team of astronomers did, submitting their results for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also posting their work to the online preprint site arXiv. And in a perfect coincidence, they searched for the frothiness of space-time using espresso. No, not the drink. ESPRESSO, the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, an instrument based at the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. As its name suggests, ESPRESSO was not designed to search for space-time frothiness, but it turned out to be the best tool for the job. And the astronomers pointed it at a perfect source: a run-of-the-mill gas cloud sitting over 18 billion light-years away. What makes this particular gas cloud especially useful is two facts. One, there is a bright source sitting just behind it, illuminating it. And two, there's iron in the cloud, which absorbs the background light at a very specific wavelength.

Submission + - Plants Can Turn Caterpillars Into Cannibals To Avoid Getting Eaten (nationalgeographic.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new study published in the Nature Ecology and Evolution journal found that when some plants are under attack from hungry herbivores, they emit defenses that make themselves incredibly foul-tasting to caterpillars, which spurs the caterpillars to eat each other. “Plants can defend themselves so much that they food-stress the herbivore, and then the herbivores determine that rather than have plants on their menu, they should have caterpillars at the top of their menu,” said John Orrock, the author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Orrock and his research team sprayed tomato plants with methyl jasmonate—a substance plants produce in response to environmental stresses—to trigger the plants’ defense mechanisms. This chemical allowed the plant to change its chemistry, which made it less appetizing to the beet armyworm caterpillars that were placed on a treated plant. This phenomenon has been documented in a variety of plants, and research has suggested that plants can sense when surrounding plants are under attack, which can spur the production of methyl jasmonate in entire communities of plants.

Submission + - SPAM: We Need to Reboot the Culture of View Source

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Back in ye olde days of the information superhighway," begins Clive Thompson in It's Time to Make Code More Tinker-Friendly "curious newbies had an easy way to see how websites worked: View Source." But no more. "Websites have evolved into complex, full-featured apps," laments Thompson. "Click View Source on Google.com and behold the slurry of incomprehensible Javascript. This increasingly worries old-guard coders. If the web no longer has a simple on-ramp, it could easily discourage curious amateurs." What the world needs now, Thompson argues, are "new tools that let everyone see, understand, and remix today’s web. We need, in other words, to reboot the culture of View Source." Thompson cites Fog Creek Software's Glitch, Chris Coyier's CodePen, and Google's TensorFlow Playground as examples of efforts that embrace the spirit of View Source and help people recombine code in useful ways. Any other suggestions?

Submission + - Amazon Prime Will Soon Be More Popular Than Cable TV (recode.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Someday soon, more U.S. households will be subscribers of Amazon Prime than cable or satellite TV, according to recent estimates of Amazon’s popular shipping and entertainment service. According to estimates from Morningstar, nearly 79 million U.S. households now have an Amazon Prime membership*, up from around 66 million at the end of last year. That compares to a projected 90 million U.S. households that will pay for cable or satellite TV this year, according to S&P Global. According to these estimates, more U.S. households may have an Amazon Prime subscription than a pay TV subscription as soon as next year. The implication here is not that Amazon’s Prime Video service is more popular than TV; the main reason most people subscribe to Amazon Prime is still the fast delivery of products.

Submission + - Dark Web Hosting Service Hacked, Some Data Stolen (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Deep Hosting — a Dark Web hosting service — admitted on Sunday to suffering a major security incident during which "some sites have been exported." According to a wiki page published by the Deep Hosting team, the hack took place after the hacker registered a shared hosting account on their service, and used it to upload two shells on their servers, one written in PHP and one in Perl. A Deep Hosting investigation into the events that preceded the hack showed that the attacker was not able to execute the Perl shell, but the PHP version worked just fine, allowing him to dump SQL DBs from sites hosted on Deep Hosting, many of which were dark web marketplaces and carder forums. While proving his claims to a reporter, the hacker, named Dhostpwned, accidentally wiped the MBR of a server hosting a Dark Web drugs marketplace.

Submission + - Intel annouces the new Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (intel.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel announced the new server CPU product line, the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor. Key new features include AVX512, Intel Mesh Technology, and security enhancements.

Submission + - NATO Providing Cybersecurity Equipment to Ukraine (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Ukraine is an area of great geopolitical significance — a sort of buffer zone between NATO and Russia — that both sides seek to influence. Crimea aside, neither side wishes to be too overt with military intervention, and the result is tailor-made for modern cyber warfare. NATO's official policy towards Ukraine is to bolster its independence.

As a result, NATO is providing Ukraine with cybersecurity equipment for some government institutions and authorities, which NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg says will enable Ukraine to "investigate who is behind certain cyber-attacks, because the response to them is extremely important."

In December 2014, NATO established a Trust Fund designed "to provide Ukraine with the necessary support to develop its strictly defensive, CSIRT-type technical capabilities, including laboratories to investigate cyber security incidents."

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