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Submission + - Micromax Remotely Installing Unwanted Apps and Showing Ads

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Reports are coming in that users of certain devices by Indian phone manufacturer Micromax noticed apps being silently installed without their consent or permission. Uninstalling these apps won't help, as they will be automatically reinstalled. Alternatively, instead of downloading apps, the phone might litter the UI with stack of notifications which are advertisements for online stores and other apps. It turns out that the "System Update" application is responsible for all of this. When starting to tear down the application (which is actually called FWUpgrade.apk on the filesystem), the first thing you notice is that it’s a third-party application. A Chinese company named Adups developed it as a replacement for the stock Google OTA service. The article shows the potential abilities of this app and how Micromax customers can work around the disruptive behavior.

Submission + - Washington DC's Public Library Will Teach People How to Avoid the NSA

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Later this month, the Washington DC Public Library will teach residents how to use Tor as part of a 10 day series designed to shed light on government surveillance, transparency, and personal privacy.
The series is called "Orwellian America," and it's quite subversive, considering that it's being held by a publicly funded entity mere minutes from a Congress and administration that allowed the NSA’s surveillance programs to spin wildly out of control.

Submission + - Carnivorous pitcher plant "out-thinks" insects (discovery.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A carnivorous pitcher plant is changing its behavior in response to natural weather fluctuations, allowing it to give up its prey in order to capture more.

The pitcher plant, which has liquid-filled leaves shaped like funnels, has the ability to allow some of its prey, such as ants, to escape by “switching off” its trap."

The first ant reports back to the other ants that it found a large batch of sweet nectar, causing a large contingent of ants to descend upon it. If the trap captures the first ant, it won’t be able to capture many more ants later.

Submission + - Two genes associated with risk of PTSD identified

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Medicalxpress.com is reporting on a new UCLA discovery may shed light on why some people are more susceptible to PTSD than others. UCLA scientists have linked two gene variants to the debilitating mental disorder, suggesting that heredity influences a person's risk of developing PTSD. Published in the February 2015 edition of the Journal of Affective Disorders, the findings could provide a biological basis for diagnosing and treating PTSD more effectively in the future. "We found a significant association between variants of (the genes) COMT and TPH-2 with PTSD symptoms, suggesting that these genes contribute to the onset and persistence of the disorder," said Goenjian. "Our results indicate that people who carry these genetic variants may be at higher risk of developing PTSD."

Submission + - OpenBSD source tree moved to version 5.7-beta (zbsd.org)

Submitted by aojensen
aojensen writes: Theo de Raadt has moved the OpenBSD source tree to version 5.7-beta as shown in this recent mailing list entry from CVS. Highlights for this release includes nginx being purged from the base system, a new web server httpd from relayd replacing nginx, and rcctl, a new control utility for daemons and services similar to sysrc on FreeBSD.

Submission + - WSJ refused to publish Lawrence Krauss' response to "Science Proves Religion".

Submitted by Kubla Kahhhn!
Kubla Kahhhn! writes: Recently, the WSJ posted a controversial piece "Science Increasingly Makes a Case for God", written by non-scientist and darling of the apologist crowd, Eric Metaxas. Noted astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a simple and clear retort in a letter to the editor, which the WSJ declined to publish. Is it an example of the kind of "fair and balanced reporting" we can expect, now that Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch?

Submission + - 'Disco clam' lights up to scare predators away (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When predators get close, the bright, orange-lipped “disco clam” flashes them to scare them off. But it's not just the light that's important. Researchers have found that the clam has sulfur in its fleshy lips and tentacles and suspect that, like another clam species that drop tentacles laden with sulfuric acid to deter predators, the disco clam's sulfur also gets converted into a distasteful substance. The flashing may warn predators away, similar to the bright orange of a monarch butterfly warning birds of its toxic taste.

Submission + - Finnish Bank OP Under Persistent DDoS Attack

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Finnish bank OP Pohjola Group has been a target of a dedicated DDoS attack for days. The attack, which investigators said was launched from both Finland and abroad, began on New Year's Eve. OP was forced to open a helpline for customers unable to confirm payments or transfer money because of jammed systems. On Saturday the firm said it would compensate people for any losses or late payment fees incurred as a result of attack. On Sunday morning the bank tweeted that its services were operating normally and even customers based outside Finland were able to access their accounts — and that it was still monitoring traffic carefully to try and ward off any renewed strikes. However, on Sunday afternoon further denial of service attacks took place delaying payments and preventing access to banking services for OP customers. A formal police complaint has been filed and OP says that KRP is looking into the case.

Submission + - Indiana Court Rules Melted Down Hard Drive Not Destruction of Evidence (freezenet.ca) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Indiana court has ruled that a hard drive that was sent to recycling was not destruction of evidence. The ruling stems from a BitTorrent file-sharing case filed by Malibu Media where a defendant claimed that his hard drive had failed thanks to heavy use. Malibu claimed that the act was destruction of evidence and filed a motion demanding a default judgement. The court denied this motion suggesting that because the hard drive failed, there was no evidence to destroy in the first place.

Submission + - Experiments create matter from nothing using nutrinos

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: In experiments partially funded by the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, scientists have reported:

Ten trillion neutrinos pass through your hand every second, and fewer than one actually interacts with any of the atoms that make up your hand. When neutrinos do interact with another particle, it happens at very close distances and involves a high-momentum transfer.

A new paper published in Physical Review Letters shows that neutrinos sometimes can also interact with a nucleus but inflict no more than a "glancing blow" — resulting in a particle being created out of a vacuum.

Producing an entirely new particle — in this case a charged pion — requires much more energy than it would take to blast the nucleus apart — which is why the physicists are always surprised that the reaction happens as often as it does.

Submission + - Netflix Cracks Down on VPN and Proxy "Pirates" (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Due to complicated licensing agreements Netflix is only available in a few dozen countries, all of which have a different content library.

Some people bypass these content and access restrictions by using VPNs or other circumvention tools that change their geographical location. This makes it easy for people all around the world to pay for access to the U.S. version of Netflix, for example.

The movie studios are not happy with these deviant subscribers as it hurts their licensing agreements. Previously entertainment industry sources in Australia complained bitterly that tens of thousands of Netflix “VPN-pirates” were hurting their business.

Submission + - The next big step for Wikidata: forming a hub for researchers (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by The ed17
The ed17 writes: Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. ... This proposal is significant because no other open collaborative project ... can connect the free databases in the world across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. ...the project will be capable of providing a unique open service: for the first time, that will allow both citizens and professional scientists from any research or language community to integrate their databases into an open global structure, to publicly annotate, verify, criticise and improve the quality of available data, to define its limits, to contribute to the evolution of its ontology, and to make all this available to everyone, without any restrictions on use and reuse.

Submission + - South African Man 3d Prints a Working Lawn Mower in Just 9 Hours (3dprint.com)

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: Hans Fouche of South Africa has used his unique "Cheetah" 3d printer to created what is believed to be the first ever 3d printed lawn mower. The Cheetah is a super fast 3D printer that printed this entire lawn mower in just 9 hours. Fouche plans to begin selling these 3d printers sometime in the near future for a little over $10,000. Unlike most printers on the market today, the Cheetah prints using raw materials that costs just 1/10 that of normal printer filament.

Submission + - Scientific team sounds the alarm on sugar as a source of disease (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Is sugar making us sick? A team of scientists at the University of California in San Francisco believes so, and they're doing something about it. They launched an initiative to bring information on food and drink and added sugar to the public by reviewing more than 8,000 scientific papers that show a strong link between the consumption of added sugar and chronic diseases.

The common belief until now was that sugar just makes us fat, but it's become clear through research that it's making us sick. For example, there's the rise in fatty-liver disease, the emergence of Type 2 diabetes as an epidemic in children and the dramatic increase in metabolic

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