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Books

Kobo Customers Losing Books From Their Libraries After Software Upgrade (teleread.com) 81

Posted by msmash from the one-second-it's-here,-at-other-it-isn't dept.
Reader Robotech_Master writes: After a recent Kobo software upgrade, a number of Kobo customers have reported losing e-books from their libraries -- notably, e-books that had been transferred to Kobo from their Sony Reader libraries when Sony left the consumer e-book business. One customer reported missing 460 e-books, and the only way to get them back in her library would be to search and re-add them one at a time! Customers who downloaded their e-books and illegally broke the DRM don't have this problem, of course.From the report: A Kobo representative actually chimed in on the thread, telling MobileRead users that they were following the thread and trying to fix the glitches that had been caused by the recent software changes and restore customers' e-books. It's good that they're paying attention, and that's definitely better than my first go-round with Barnes and Noble support over my own missing e-book. Hopefully they'll get it sorted out soon. That being said, this drives home yet again the point that publisher-imposed DRM has made and is making continued maintenance of e-book libraries from commercial providers a big old mess. About the only way you can be sure you can retain the e-books you pay for is to outright break the law and crack the DRM in order to be able to back them up against your company going out of business and losing the purchases you paid for.
Privacy

IoT Devices Are Secretly Phoning Home (thenewstack.io) 196

Posted by BeauHD from the fear-the-internet dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A popular internet-enabled security camera "secretly and constantly connects into a vast peer-to-peer network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware," according to security blogger Brian Krebs. While the device is not necessarily sharing video from your camera, it is punching through firewalls to connect with other devices. Even if the user discovers it, it's still extremely hard to turn off. Krebs notes that the same behavior has been detected in DVRs and smart plugs -- they're secretly connecting to the same IP address in China, apparently without any mention of this in the product's packaging. One security researcher told Krebs the behavior is an "insanely bad idea," and that it opens an attack vector into home networks.
China

Chinese ISPs Caught Injecting Ads And Malware In Their Network Traffic (thehackernews.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the Great-Firewall-of-China dept.
Chinese Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been caught red-handed for injecting advertisements as well as malware through their network traffic. Three Israeli researchers uncovered that the major Chinese-based ISPs named China Telecom and China Unicom, two of Asia's largest network operators, have been engaged in an illegal practice of content injection in network traffic. Chinese ISPs had set up many proxy servers to pollute the client's network traffic not only with insignificant advertisements but also malware links, in some cases, inside the websites they visit. If an Internet user tries to access a domain that resides under these Chinese ISPs, the forged packet redirects the user's browser to parse the rogue network routes. As a result, the client's legitimate traffic will be redirected to malicious sites/ads, benefiting the ISPs.
Earth

Giant Methane Leak in California Won't Be Capped For Months 292

Posted by timothy from the send-your-kids-to-the-school-of-mines dept.
Motherboard takes a look at the ongoing leak from a deep well in Southern California, and the engineering challenges that mean it won't be stopped for a while. From Motherboard's report: An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company. ... Part of the problem in stopping the leak lies in the base of the well, which sits 8,000 feet underground. Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva. Workers have been "unable to establish a stable enough column of fluid to keep the force of gas coming up from the reservoir." The company is now constructing a relief well that will connect to the leaking well, and hopefully provide a way to reduce pressure so the leak can be plugged. As the article notes, methane is an especially noxious gas in a figurative as well as literal sense; while it spends less time in the atmosphere than does CO2, it is more effective at trapping heat.
Math

Statisticians Uncover the Mathematics of a Serial Killer 164

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the something-about-murders-and-statistics dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Andrei Chikatilo, 'The Butcher of Rostov,' was one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history committing at least 52 murders between 1978 and 1990 before he was caught, tried, and executed. The pattern of his murders, though, was irregular with long periods of no activity, interrupted by several murders within a short period of time. Hoping to gain insight into serial killings to prevent similar murders, Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at UCLA built a mathematical model of the time pattern of the activity of Chikatilo and found the distribution of the intervals between murders follows a power law with the exponent of 1.4. The basis of their analysis is the hypothesis that 'similar to epileptic seizures, the psychotic affects, causing a serial killer to commit murder, arise from simultaneous firing of large number of neurons in the brain.' In modeling the behavior the authors didn't find that 'the killer commits murder right at the moment when neural excitation reaches a certain threshold. He needs time to plan and prepare his crime' so they built delay into their model. The killings eventually have a sedative effect, pushing the neuronal activity below the 'killing threshold' – which is why there are large intervals of time between groups of murders. 'There is at least qualitative agreement between theory and observation [PDF],' conclude the authors. 'Stats can't tell you who the perp is, but they're getting better and better at figuring out where and when the next crime might happen,' writes criminal lawyer Nathaniel Burney adding that 'catching a serial killer by focusing resources based on when and where he's likely to strike next is a hell of a lot better than relying on the junk science of behavioral profiling.'"
ISS

How 3D Printing Could Help Keep the ISS In Orbit 200

Posted by timothy from the extension-by-extrusion dept.
Despite all the best intentions and meticulous overengineering, some of the equipment on spacecraft like the ISS inevitably breaks. An anonymous reader poses the question "Why carry out a very expensive launch into space to resupply the ISS, when astronauts could just manufacture replacement parts themselves?" Startup Made in Space is working on a space-oriented 3D printing system to make it easy to transmit the information needed to pop out complex shapes (as might be in delicate mechanical systems), but the founders are also talking about using 3D printers to jump-start construction if humans extend their presence from the Earth to other planets (or revisit the moon).

Comment Re:A question about flash and SSDs (Score 5, Informative) 133

by Xygon (#38294180) Attached to: Intel and Micron Unveil 128Gb NAND Chip
Speaking as someone in the NAND industry...

NAND does not have its own reliability controls on-die. Items such as wear-leveling, file management, and ECC mechanisms need to be handled somewhere. So the options are in software, which would then need to be validated and designed for each NAND manufacturer, die, and process; and would consume CPU and batter power from the tablet OS, or it can be done via a separate off-die controller.

And as to the choice of eMMC, it's a cost/performance/reliability trade-off. eMMC is relatively inexpensive (very small die), and includes all of the aforementioned reliability mechanisms at a low-power, and low-cost method, in an I/O language supported by most mobile architectures (SD/MMC). However, it severely lacks in relative performance to an SSD. The other option is an optimized SSD controller, which may cost many times more, but has much higher performance. The problem is how to include a $100 SSD in a $100-200 tablet BOM... impossible.

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