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Submission + - WHO ready to resume its trials of hydroxychloroquine (politico.com)

Submitted by ilguido
ilguido writes: As Politico and others report, the World Health Organization will restart its trial of hydroxychloroquine after that the Lancet study that sparked the stoppage has drawn heavy criticism.
Meanwhile the Lancet has issued an “expression of concern” about the data and methodology of the study that suggested higher mortality rates for patients treated with hydroxychloroquine:
"we are issuing an Expression of Concern to alert readers to the fact that serious scientific questions have been brought to our attention".

Hydroxychloroquine made the headlines when U.S. President Trump publicly talked about its use against COVID-19.

Submission + - Urban foxes may be self-domesticating in our midst (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In a famous Siberian experiment carried out the 1950s, scientists turned foxes into tame, doglike canines by breeding only the least aggressive ones generation after generation. The creatures developed stubby snouts, floppy ears, and even began to bark.

Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own. When the animals moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, new research reveals, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication.

Most significantly, the urban foxes, like those in the Russian experiment, had noticeably shorter and wider muzzles, and smaller brains, than their rural fellows. And males and females had very similar skull shapes. All of these changes are typical of what Charles Darwin labeled domestication syndrome.

Comment MIPS vs 'Normal' (Score 2) 79

by G-Man (#58442434) Attached to: Science and Bicycling Meet In a New Helmet Design

It should be noted that MIPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-directional_Impact_Protection_System) was only introduced to bike helmets pretty recently. The vast majority of helmets out there - and the majority of helmets on sale today - don't have MIPS. It tends to only be in high-end helmets, or is an additional cost over the non-MIPS version of the same helmet.

Submission + - Apple,Youtube,Facebook,Spotify and Google Search purge Alex Jones (cnn.com) 4

Submitted by bongey
bongey writes: Alex Jones has been removed from Apple, Youtube and Spotify. Facebook deleted the majority of Jones pages.Search Google has effectively removed "alex jones" from its search. Searching for "alex jones" leads to no content produced by alex jones.

Submission + - Obama officials unmasked hundreds of Americans in intelligence intercepts (thehill.com)

Submitted by mi
mi writes: When American spies capture our communications with foreigners, the identities of Americans on the other side of the conversation are generally protected — if not by bona-fide laws, then certainly by rules and regulations. A transcript of the conversation should have their name replaced with labels like "US person 1". The citizen involved can only be "unmasked" with a good reason. In 2011 Obama relaxed these rules, making it much simpler even for officials without any intelligence role to obtain the identities.

Predictably, certain top officials of the Obama Administration abused their access to get this information:

“The [House Intelligence] committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” [Intelligence Chairman Devin] Nunes wrote. “Of those requests, only one offered a justification that was not boilerplate.”

Submission + - Smart Fish Tank Used to Hack North American Casino (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Some clever hackers found new ways to use the smart devices surrounding us, according to a report published last week by UK-based cyber-defense company Darktrace. The report, entitled the Darktrace Global Threat Report 2017, contains nine case studies from hacks investigated by Darktrace, among which two detail cyber-incidents caused by IoT devices. In one of these case studies, Darktrace says that an unknown hacker had managed to take over a smart fish tank the casino installed at its premises for the enjoyment of its guests.

In spite of the fact that the fish tank was installed on its own VPN, isolated from the rest of the casino's network, the hacker managed to break through to the mainframe and steal data from the organization. "The data was being transferred to a device in Finland," says Darktrace. "No other company device had communicated with this external location." "No other company device was sending a comparable amount of outbound data," experts added. Communications took place on a protocol normally associated with audio and video." In total, the hacker managed to steal over 10GB of data by siphoning it off via the IoT fish tank.

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