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Comment Re:I told you this was coming... (Score 1) 110

by bubblegoose (#58774808) Attached to: Upgrade Your Memory With A Surgically Implanted Brain Chip

I hate to say I told you so, but....

So the question becomes, will people with these kinds of chips have to also have easily recognizable tatoos on their faces so that people around them will know that everything that people do and say around them may be essentially getting recorded for all time?

Yes, Mike Tyson is one of the fortunate few to have already gotten an implant.

Comment Pages go out unencrypted (Score 1) 45

by bubblegoose (#57752042) Attached to: Japan's Final Pager Provider To End Its Service In 2019

I work in Healthcare, and they still love pagers here. I've been trying to get our security team to push to eliminate them, as they sent out in the clear.

From this article, following the release of pager records for 9/11.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/e...
Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them.

But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space -- and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.

Submission + - Facebook Offers 500 Pages of Answers To Congress' Questions About Cambridge (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook pledged to continue refining its privacy practices and investigating its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica in nearly 500 pages of new information supplied to Congress and published Monday — though the social giant sidestepped some of lawmakers’ most critical queries. Much as it did during the hearing, Facebook told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee that it is reviewing all apps available on its platform that had access to large queries of data, a process that already has resulted in 200 suspensions.

Facebook did acknowledge that its consultants embedded in 2016 presidential campaigns, including President Trump's team, “did not identify any issues involving the improper use of Facebook data in the course of their interactions with Cambridge Analytica.” In another exchange, Facebook said it had provided “technical support and best practices guidance to advertisers, including Cambridge Analytica, on using Facebook’s advertising tools.” Facebook also pointed to new tools meant to address its privacy practices, including a feature called Clear History, which “will enable people to see the websites and apps that send us information when they use them, delete this information from their accounts, and turn off our ability to store it associated with their accounts going forward,” the company said.

Submission + - Experimental Spit Test Could Identify Men Most At Risk of Prostate Cancer (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A test developed by scientists in the U.K. and U.S. might someday be able to pinpoint the men most likely to get prostate cancer. A new study published Monday in Nature Genetics suggests the test can detect the one percent of men who are genetically most vulnerable to developing prostate cancer, a leading cause of cancer deaths among American men. The international research team used a new DNA analysis technique to peer into the genes of more than 70,000 people enrolled in previous studies. Some 45,000 of the subjects had already developed prostate cancer, while 25,000 hadn’t. So the researchers compared the two groups, singling out any inherited genetic variations that might have contributed to their cancer risk. According to the authors, they managed to find 63 new variants never before associated with prostate cancer.

These results were then integrated with nearly a hundred genetic variants linked to prostate cancer previously found among 60,000 people to create a total genetic risk score. And finally, the researchers devised a test that uses a person’s saliva to detect these more than 150 variants. In the U.S., people over the age of 50 are generally screened for prostate cancer via the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test. Those with a certain high level of PSA should be screened annually, while everyone else is advised to be screened every two years. But the saliva test could reveal especially high-risk people who need annual screening regardless of their PSA level, while ruling out low-risk people who don’t need annual screening based on their genetic risk and PSA scores. Those people would only need screenings every two, five, and maybe even 10 years.

Submission + - Sweden Tries To Halt Its March To Total Cashlessness (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A key committee of Swedish lawmakers wants to force the country’s biggest banks to handle cash in an effort to halt the nation’s march toward complete cashlessness. Parliament’s Riksbank committee, which is in the process of reviewing the central bank law, proposed making it mandatory for banks to offer cash withdrawals and handle daily receipts. The requirement would apply to banks that provide checking accounts and have more than 70 billion kronor ($8 billion) in deposits from the Swedish public, according to a report.

The lawmakers said there needs to be “reasonable access to those services in all of Sweden," and that 99 percent of Swedes should have a maximum distance of 25 kilometers (16 miles) to the nearest cash withdrawal. The requirement doesn’t state how banks should offer those services, and lenders can choose whether to use a third party, machines or over-the-counter services. The move is a response to Sweden’s rapid transformation as it becomes one of the most cashless societies in the world. That’s led to concerns that some people are finding it increasingly difficult to cope without access to mobile phones or bank cards. There are also fears around what would happen if the digital payments systems suddenly crashed.

Comment Re:Too much hype... (Score 1) 319

by bubblegoose (#56411403) Attached to: Your Future Home Might Be Powered By Car Batteries

"The potential is so huge." Tesla battery pack voltage potential is around 400 V, dangerous for human life, but not exactly "huge".

You need to understand the relationship between voltage and current. Nuclear submarines use a 250 V battery pack as an emergency power source. That is capable of powering an emergency motor to move the boat, keeping the lights and critical systems on, and restarting the reactor in an emergency. Compared to your car and typical house, I would consider it quite "huge".

Comment Saw this happen IRL once with a safe-cracker (Score 4, Interesting) 56

I had a job installing security systems many years ago. There was a grocery store in a slightly isolated area, it had an alarm hooked up with an outside siren and connected to the phone line. It was the 1980s, there were no cellular backups. The would be safe cracker pulled the outside siren off the wall with his vehicle and cut all of the phone lines, then he broke in and started working on the safe ignoring the inside siren. He had about $1000 worth of power tools in to the back office and started to drill the safe. He didn't count on the baker coming in early to get a start on the day. When the baker showed up, the robber bugged out the back door. He left behind all of his nice tools. He did cause the business some hardship, they couldn't access the contents of the safe for about 3 days until the locksmith could replace the parts he had ruined. Insurance paid to fix his safe and alarm system, after that they had their phone lines buried so they couldn't be cut as easily.

Comment Re:Huge Risk and Inconsistent Technology Assumptio (Score 2) 231

by PhilHibbs (#52867753) Attached to: Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds?

If there's life there, what are the chances that the microbes that we send there will be better at living on their world than the nativre stuff is? Sure, some of the native life might die out, like when an invasive slug or fish or plant drives out an indiginous one, but ALL life? No way. Grey squirrels may have driven out the red squirrels here in the UK, but they aren't threatening any other life. Most likely the Earth life will cause some damage, and then crash and die out, and the native life will be back to normal in a few hundred thousand years.

Comment Re:Why not? (Score 1) 231

by PhilHibbs (#52867735) Attached to: Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds?

I'm thinking, ff there's life there already, it's probably better suited to its environment than anything we could export there. And if it isn't, if it's so primitive and fragile that a few Earth bugs can wipe it out, well maybe that's tough. It played the game of life and it lost, like a quintillion species did on this planet. Now what would be a real shame is if Earth bugs wiped out the indigenous stuff, and then crashed and died out itself. But I guess there will always be something left behind that's still close enough to life to bootstrap itself.

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