Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Fish-inspired filter removes 99% of microplastics from washing machine wastewate (techxplore.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Some fish feed by means of filtration; these include, for example, mackerel, sardines, and anchovies. They swim through the water with their mouths open and sift out the plankton with their gill arch system. "We took a closer look at the construction of this system and used it as the model for developing a filter that can be used in washing machines," says Blanke, who is a member of the transdisciplinary research areas Life & Health and Sustainable Futures at the University of Bonn.

During their evolution, these fish have developed a technique similar to cross-flow filtration. Their gill arch system is shaped like a funnel that is widest at the fish's mouth and tapers towards their gullet. The walls of the funnel are shaped by the branchial arches. These feature comb-like structures, the arches, which are themselves covered in small teeth. This creates a kind of mesh that is stretched by the branchial arches.

The filter element in the center imitates the gill arch system of the fish. The filter housing enables periodic cleaning and installation in washing machines.

"During food intake, the water flows through the permeable funnel wall, is filtered, and the particle-free water is then released back into the environment via the gills," explains Blanke. "However, the plankton is too big for this; it is held back by the natural sieve structure. Thanks to the funnel shape, it then rolls toward the gullet, where it is collected until the fish swallows, which empties and cleans the system."

This principle prevents the filter from being blocked—instead of hitting the filter head-on, the fibers roll along it toward the gullet. The process is also highly effective, as it removes almost all of the plankton from the water. Both are aspects that a microplastic filter must also be able to deliver. The researchers thus replicated the gill arch system. In doing so, they varied both the mesh size of the sieve structure and the opening angle of the funnel.

"We have thus found a combination of parameters that enable our filter to separate more than 99% of the microplastics out of the water but not become blocked," says Hamann. To achieve this, the team used not only experiments but also computer simulations. The filter modeled on nature does not contain any elaborate mechanics and should thus be very inexpensive to manufacture.

The microplastics that it filters out of the washing water collect in the filter outlet and are then suctioned away several times a minute. According to the researcher, who has now moved to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, they could then, for example, be pressed in the machine to remove the remaining water. The plastic pellet created in this manner could then be removed every few dozen washes and disposed of with general waste.

Submission + - Mozilla is shutting down Pocket (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: In a surprising move that will frustrate longtime fans, Mozilla has announced it will shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025. The once-popular âoeread-it-laterâ service, which helped users save and organize web content for later reading, will no longer function as normal after that date. While existing users can continue saving and reading articles until July, the service will switch to export-only mode afterward, with all user data permanently deleted on October 8.

Submission + - California Poice Officer Caught Using DMCA to Stop Activists (bbc.com) 1

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: A US police officer played a Taylor Swift song on his phone in a bid to prevent activists who were filming him uploading the video to YouTube.

The video platform regularly removes videos that break music copyright rules.

However, the officer's efforts were in vain as the clip of the encounter in Oakland, California promptly went viral.

Submission + - SPAM: Pentagon Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard. Senator Wyden's office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.

Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time, but believes it would meaningfully inform the debate around how the DoD is interpreting the law and its purchases of data. "I write to urge you to release to the public information about the Department of Defense's (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans," the letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, reads.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Firefox 88 Enables JavaScript Embedded in PDFs by Default 2

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: Firefox has long had a built-in PDF viewer, allowing users to view PDF files in the browser without having to install a third-party application. In addition to the other weird things PDF files can contain, one of them is JavaScript. Putatively offered as a way to create self-validating forms, this scripting capability has been abused over the decades in just about every way you can imagine. Firefox's built-in viewer, although it has apparently had the ability to execute embedded JS for some time, never turned that feature on, making it a safe(r) way to open PDFs... Until now. The newly released Firefox version 88 has flipped that switch, and will now blithely execute JavaScript embedded in PDFs. Firefox's main preferences dialog offers no control for turning this "feature" off.

To turn off JavaScript execution in PDFs:
  • Enter about:config in the address bar; click "I'll be careful."
  • In the search box near the top, enter pdfjs.enableScripting.
  • Change the setting to False.
  • Close the page.

And before the peanut gallery lunges for their keyboards to smugly honk, "Why are you concerned about JS in PDFs when you're already running JS in HTML Web pages?" Uh, no, I'm not doing that, either.

Submission + - SPAM: Nuclear Should Be Considered Part of Clean Energy Standard, White House Says

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More details have emerged about the climate and energy priorities of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, and they include support for nuclear power and carbon capture with sequestration (CCS). In a press conference yesterday with reporters, White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy said the administration would seek to implement a clean energy standard that would encourage utilities to use greener power sources. She added that both nuclear and CCS would be included in the administration’s desired portfolio. The clean energy standard adds a climate dimension to the Biden administration’s recently announced infrastructure plan, seeking to put the US on a path to eliminating carbon pollution.

“We think a CES is appropriate and advisable, and we think the industry itself sees it as one of the most flexible and most effective tools,” McCarthy told reporters. “The CES is going to be fairly robust and it is going to be inclusive." McCarthy did not provide details about how far a CES would go in supporting nuclear power. It’s possible that the policy may only cover plants that are currently operating, but it may also extend to include new plants. The former is more likely than the latter, though, given the challenges and costs involved in building new nuclear capacity.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Sir David Attenborough Delivers Stark Warning In BBC Doc 'Extinction: The Facts' (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At 94 years old and with over 60 years of wildlife documentary-making under his belt, Sir David Attenborough is well-placed to share his thoughts about the future of our planet. And on Sunday, in the new BBC documentary Extinction: The Facts, the legendary presenter had a warning for all humans about the creatures we share the Earth with. "Over the course of my life, I've encountered some of the world's most remarkable species of animals," Attenborough says at the start of the hour-long film. "Only now do I realize just how lucky I've been. Many of these wonders seem set to disappear forever. We're facing a crisis, and one that has consequences for us all. It threatens our ability to feed ourselves, to control our climate — it even puts us at greater risk of pandemic diseases such as COVID-19."

With the help of a number of academics and experts, Attenborough goes on to explain that extinction is now happening much faster than it used to — with 570 plant species and 700 animal species disappearing since the year 1500. "Studies suggest that extinction is now happening a hundred times faster than the natural evolutionary rate," Attenborough says. "And it's accelerating." A follow-up to Attenborough's 2019 explainer documentary, Climate Change: The Facts, Extinction: The Facts delves into some of the main causes of extinction and disastrous biodiversity loss today, including habitat destruction (either caused by land use or human-induced climate change or both), unsustainable agricultural and fishing practices, and poaching. The documentary examines a number of species across the world that are at risk, from the two remaining northern white rhinos in Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy to the 25 percent of assessed plant species currently at risk of disappearing forever.

Submission + - China Is What Orwell Feared: Using AI to enhance government totalitarian control (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Xi Jinping is exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.

Xi’s pronouncements on AI have a sinister edge. Artificial intelligence has applications in nearly every human domain, from the instant translation of spoken language to early viral-outbreak detection. But Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance. He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.

China’s government has a history of using major historical events to introduce and embed surveillance measures. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet. During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent.

Xi Jinping endorsed this explanation for the Soviet collapse in a 2013 address to party cadres. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked his audience. “An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce!” The party leadership is determined to avoid the Soviet mistake. A leaked internal party directive from 2013 describes “the very real threat of Western anti-China forces and their attempt at carrying out westernization” within China. The directive describes the party as being in the midst of an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival. According to the directive, the ideas that threaten China with “major disorder” include concepts such as “separation of powers,” “independent judiciaries,” “universal human rights,” “Western freedom,” “civil society,” “economic liberalism,” “total privatization,” “freedom of the press,” and “free flow of information on the internet.” To allow the Chinese people to contemplate these concepts would “dismantle [our] party’s social foundation” and jeopardize the party’s aim to build a modern, socialist future.

Related: China’s Plans to Win Control of the Global Order.

Submission + - Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Back in the day, leprosy patients were stigmatized and shunned, quarantined from society in Leper Colonies. Those days may be long gone, but are our mapping, GPS, and social media technologies in effect helping to create modern-day 'Leper Colonies'? The recently-shuttered GhettoTracker.com (born again as Good Part of Town) generated cries of racism by inviting users to rate neighborhoods based on 'which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe'. Calling enough already with the avoid-the-ghetto apps, The Atlantic Cities' Emily Badger writes, "this idea toes a touchy line between a utilitarian application of open data and a sly wink toward people who just want to steer clear of 'those kinds of neighborhoods.'" The USPTO has already awarded avoid-crime-ridden-neighborhoods-like-the-plague patents to tech giants Microsoft, IBM, and Google. So, when it comes to navigational apps, where's the line between utility and racism? 'As mobile devices get smarter and more ubiquitous,' writes Svati Kirsten Narula, 'it is tempting to let technology make more and more decisions for us. But doing so will require us to sacrifice one of our favorite assumptions: that these tools are inherently logical and neutral...the motivations driving the algorithms may not match the motivations of those algorithms' users.' Indeed, the Google patent for Storing and Providing Routes proposes to 'remove streets from recommended directions if uploaded route information indicates that travelers seem to avoid the street.' Even faster routes that 'traverse one or more high crime areas,' Google reasons, 'may be less appealing to most travelers'.

Feed Techdirt: Comcast NBC Universal Already Moving Past Six Strikes; Trying New Malware Popups (google.com) 1

From feed by feedfeeder
The "six strikes" Copyright Alert System (CAS) is barely under way and already Comcast/NBC Universal are looking to go beyond it with malware-like popups that show up as you download a piece of content, pushing you to buy it (well, "license" it) via an authorized source. Variety has the details at the link above, though late in the article it seems to suggest that this is all really coming from the NBC Universal side, not the Comcast side, which shouldn't come as a huge surprise:

While Comcast knows the solution is feasible, the companys engineers havent formally begun work on it. The project is being worked on in tandem with engineers at NBC Universal, the content side of the conglomerate.
That certainly sounds like something cooked up on the NBC Universal side of things. The offering here sounds ridiculous and intrusive:

As sources described the new system, a consumer illegally downloading a film or movie from a peer-to-peer system like Bittorrent would be quickly pushed a pop-up message with links to purchase or rent the same content, whether the title in question exists on the VOD library of a participating distributors own broadband network or on a third-party seller like Amazon.
This highlights a few key points:
  • For all the fuss about the six strikes system and how important it was, it sure sounds like yet another expensive disaster in a long line of expensive disasters by the legacy entertainment industry in its quixotic quest to stamp out infringement. They still don't get that this isn't an education problem, nor is it an enforcement problem. It's a service problem. And being creepy and spying on what people are surfing on isn't going to make people feel particularly warm and fuzzy about moving on to buy something.
  • Popups are a bad idea. As in really, really bad. First off, it just pisses people off to get any sort of popup. Second, the only way to do this is by effectively spying on all trafffic -- i.e., some sort of deep packet inspection/malware-like setup monitoring everything you do. Anyone who doesn't think that doesn't open up opportunities for abuse and security vulnerabilities hasn't been paying much attention.
  • As many people warned, you knew that the legacy entertainment industry would never believe that the six strikes program was "enough." They have huge staffs of "anti-piracy" people who need to stay employed, so you had to know they were cooking up more. But, no matter what plan is agreed to, there's always going to be mission creep as they try to get more and more and more.
  • Any system that involves spying on the activities of users is going to be a non-starter. Creeping the hell out of people isn't a way of encouraging them to buy. It's a way of encouraging them to want nothing to do with you.
  • My favorite part: the system would include affiliate links within the alerts in an attempt to drive extra revenue and to encourage other ISPs and sites to participate. I guess it's better than pressuring companies with a stick, but the affiliate link carrot just feels sleazy.
In the end, as we've been saying all along, the way to deal with infringement is by offering users a good reason to buy. That means providing them with more value -- whether it's direct value from purchasing authorized versions or something like a connection (e.g., so that people want to support the content creator directly). Anything that involves trying to pressure people just turns people off. It's the difference between setting up a store so that it's friendly and inviting, and filling a store with pushy salespeople who keep scolding you. One system attracts customers, the other attracts disdain. Why the legacy guys always go with the "disdain" path is beyond me.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story



Slashdot Top Deals

Evolution is a million line computer program falling into place by accident.

Close