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Submission + - 8.5 Ton Chinese Space Station 'Tiangong 1' Is Going To Crash To Earth (cnbc.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: China launched a space laboratory named Tiangong 1 into orbit in 2011. The space laboratory was supposed to become a symbol of China's ambitious bid to become a space superpower. After 2 years in space, Tiangong 1 started experiencing technical failure. Last year Chinese officials confirmed that the space laboratory had to be scrapped. The 8.5 ton heavy space laboratory has begun its descent towards Earth and is expected to crash back to Earth within the next few months. Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth's atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 Kilograms (220 Pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth's surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs.The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1's debris is considered unlikely

Submission + - Predatory Journals Hit By "Star Wars" Sting (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by intellitech
intellitech writes: From the article:

Inspired by previous publishing “stings”, I wanted to test whether ‘predatory‘ journals would publish an obviously absurd paper. So I created a spoof manuscript about “midi-chlorians” – the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars. I filled it with other references to the galaxy far, far away, and submitted it to nine journals under the names of Dr Lucas McGeorge and Dr Annette Kin.

Four journals fell for the sting. The American Journal of Medical and Biological Research (SciEP) accepted the paper, but asked for a $360 fee, which I didn’t pay. Amazingly, three other journals not only accepted but actually published the spoof. Here’s the paper from the International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access (MedCrave), Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (Austin) and American Research Journal of Biosciences (ARJ) I hadn’t expected this, as all those journals charge publication fees, but I never paid them a penny.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Are you MAD AS HELL and not going to take it anymore??

Submitted by TheRealHocusLocus
TheRealHocusLocus writes: This year marks the 40th anniversary of Howard Beal's rant in the 1976 movie 'Network', and I am staring at a laptop in the throes of a Windows 10 Update 'gasm'. Progress has rolled past 100% several times and started over. They decided people don't mind that. Some cutesy-pie message "close to goodness" flashes by that was probably 'tiger-team tested' by overpaid professionals. I am on call, supposed to be monitoring a sewer plant. Instead after several dismissals to the screens without a LATER, NOT NOW or I'LL LET YOU KNOW, I pushed the reschedule dialogue to the rear and left it waiting. But my application did not count as activity and I left for a few moments, so Windows decided to answer its own question and restart (breaking a persistent Internet connection). In addition to the flaky Bluetooth and countless options missing or rearranged beyond belief to accommodate stupidphones, I've had it.

Upon due consideration I now conclude I have been personally f*ck'd with. Driver availability, my apps and WINE permitting, this machine is getting Linux or pre-Windows-8.

We're not supposed to act this way, get angry. I'm sure there are no angry people North of Oregon, or it could never have come to this. And replacing signed components with other signed components could not possibly take this long, there must be eons of just-in-time crapulation going on behind that blue screen. I'm done with it. That's mine, now let's hear about the things that are pushing you over the edge this very minute. Phones, software, power windows, anything. Are you MAD AS HELL? Let's get a Real Beal rant rolling.

Submission + - South Korean Web Hosting Provider Pays $1 Million in Ransomware Demand (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nayana, a web hosting provider based in South Korea, announced it is in the process of paying a three-tier ransom demand of nearly $1 million worth of Bitcoin, following a ransomware infection that encrypted data on customer' servers. The ransomware infection appears has taken place on June 10, but Nayana admitted to the incident two days later, in a statement on its website.

Attackers asked for an initial ransom payment of 550 Bitcoin, which was worth nearly $1.62 million at the time of the request. After two days of negotiations, Nayana staff said they managed to reduce the ransom demand to 397.6 Bitcoin, or nearly $1 million. In a subsequent announcement, Nayana officials stated that they negotiated with the attackers to pay the ransom demand in three installments, due to the company's inability to produce such a large amount of cash in a short period of time.

On Saturday, June 17, the company said it already paid two of the three payment tranches. In subsequent announcements, Nayana updated clients on the server decryption process, saying the entire operation would take up to ten days due to the vast amount of encrypted data. The company said 153 Linux servers were affected, servers which stored the information of more than 3,400 customers.

Submission + - British PM seeks ban on encryption after terror attack (itwire.com)

Submitted by troublemaker_23
troublemaker_23 writes: British Prime Minister Theresa May has used Saturday's terrorist attack to again push for a ban on encryption. May said on Sunday that Britain must take a new approach to tackling terrorism, and that this included denying terrorists and their sympathisers access to digital tools that she claimed were being used for communication and planning attacks.

Submission + - No more FTP at Debian (debian.org)

Submitted by Gary Perkins
Gary Perkins writes: It looks like anonymous FTP is officially on its way out. While many public repositories have deprecated it in favor of HTTP, I was rather surprised to see Debian completely drop it on their public site.

Submission + - Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 stable release candidate announced (devuan.org)

Submitted by jaromil
jaromil writes: Devuan 1.0.0-RC is announced, following its beta 2 release last year. The Debian fork that spawned over systemd controversy is reaching stability and plans long term support. Devuan deploys an innovative continuous integration setup: with fallback on Debian packages, it overlays its own modifications and then uses the merged source repository to ship images for 11 ARM targets, a desktop and a minimal live, vagrant and qemu virtual machines and the classic installer isos. The release announcements contains several links to project that have already adopted this distribution as a base OS.

Submission + - Drupal Developers Threaten to Quit Drupal Unless Larry Garfield Reinstated (drupalconfessions.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot previously covered the story of Larry Garfield, a Drupal developer who was allegedly banned from the community for his BDSM/Gorean lifestyle, after he was outed by a colleague with a grudge. Now, dozens of core Drupal developers, committers, and funders have banded together in an open letter to Dries Buytaert, the CTO of Acquia, Drupal trademark owner, and Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) of the Drupal project. Among other things, they demand that Larry Garfield be reinstated, threatening to abandon the project if their demands are not met:

If you will not fight for us and restore our faith in the professionalism of the Drupal community, then a number of us will be permanently leaving the Drupal community, ceasing all contributions to the official, Drupal-branded branch of the codebase, and ceasing participation in all Drupal communities. This is not our first choice, but we cannot and will not participate in a community that encourages abusers to totally destroy people’s careers for personal or ideological reasons.

Submission + - The Kodi development team wants to be legitimate and bring DRM to the platform. (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by pecosdave
pecosdave writes: The XBMC/ Kodi development team has taken a lot of heat over the years, mostly due to third party developers introducing piracy plugins to the platform, then in many cases cheap Android computers are often sold with these plugins pre-installed with the Kodi or XBMC name attached to them. The Kodi team is not happy about this, and has taken the fight to the sellers. The Kodi team is now trying to work with rights holders to introduce DRM and legitimate plugins to the platform. Is this the first step towards creating a true one-stop do it yourself Linux entertainment system?

Submission + - Mozilla Thunderbird Finally Makes Its Way Back into Debian's Repos

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: A year ago, we told you that, after ten long years, the Debian Project finally found a way to switch their rebranded Iceweasel web browser back to Mozilla Firefox, both the ESR (Extended Support Release) and normal versions, but one question remained: what about the Mozilla Thunderbird email, news, and calendar client? Well, that question has an official answer today, as the Mozilla Thunderbird packages appear to have landed in the Debian repositories as a replacement for Icedove, the rebranded version that Debian Project was forced to use for more than ten years do to trademark issues. Make sure you read the entire article to find out what steps you need to take if you want to migrate from Icedove to Mozilla Thunderbird.

Submission + - Faulty phone battery may have caused fire that brought down EgyptAir flight MS80 (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by drunkdrone
drunkdrone writes: French authorities investigating the EgyptAir crash that killed 66 people last year believe that the plane may have been brought down by an overheating phone battery.

Investigators say the fire that broke out on the Airbus A320 in May 2016 started in the spot where the co-pilot had stowed his iPad and iPhone 6S, which he placed on top of the instrument panel in the plane's cockpit.

Submission + - Scientists scramble to protect research on climate change (cnn.com)

Submitted by ClickOnThis
ClickOnThis writes: Scientists are concerned that an incoming Trump administration would remove existing datasets on climate-change. They are scrambling to ensure that existing data is preserved. From the article:

Some scientists and academics are embarking on a frenzied mission to archive reams of scientific data on climate change, energized by a concern that a Trump administration could seek to wipe government websites of hard-earned research.

Environmentalists and researchers encountered a friendly White House over the last eight years that encouraged inquiry into global warming and signed historic agreements meant to lower global carbon emissions. But the surprise victory of Donald Trump last month has ignited a scramble among those minds who are alarmed by the President-elect's comments on climate change and a string of appointments who do not share the Obama administration's views or attention to this type of scientific research.

The chief concern: publicly available climate change data and research found on government websites would be wiped clean or made otherwise inaccessible to the public. Some worry the information could only be retrieved with a taxing Freedom of Information Act request.

Submission + - Do You Have a Living Doppelganger?

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelganger; somewhere out there there’s a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother’s eyes, your father’s nose and that annoying mole you’ve always meant to have removed. Now BBC reports that last year Teghan Lucas set out to test the hypothesis that everyone has a living double. Armed with a public collection of photographs of U.S. military personnel and the help of colleagues from the University of Adelaide, Lucas painstakingly analysed the faces of nearly four thousand individuals, measuring the distances between key features such as the eyes and ears. Next she calculated the probability that two peoples’ faces would match. What she found was good news for the criminal justice system, but likely to disappoint anyone pining for their long-lost double: the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that’s only a one in 135 chance that there’s a single pair of doppelgangers. Lucas says this study has provided much-needed evidence that facial anthropometric measurements are as accurate as fingerprints and DNA when it comes to identifying a criminal. “The use of video surveillance systems for security purposes is increasing and as a result, there are more and more instances of criminals leaving their ‘faces’ at a scene of a crime,” says Ms Lucas. “At the same time, criminals are getting smarter and are avoiding leaving DNA or fingerprint traces at a crime scene.”

But that's not the whole story. The study relied on exact measurements; if your doppelganger’s ears are 59 mm but yours are 60, your likeness wouldn’t count. “It depends whether we mean ‘lookalike to a human’ or ‘lookalike to facial recognition software’,” says David Aldous. If fine details aren’t important, suddenly the possibility of having a lookalike looks a lot more realistic. It depends on the way faces are stored in the brain: more like a map than an image. To ensure that friends and acquaintances can be recognized in any context, the brain employs an area known as the fusiform gyrus to tie all the pieces together. This holistic ‘sum of the parts’ perception is thought to make recognizing friends a lot more accurate than it would be if their features were assessed in isolation. Using this type of analysis, and judging by the number of celebrity look-alikes out there, unless you have particularly rare features, you may have literally thousands of doppelgangers. “I think most people have somebody who is a facial lookalike unless they have a truly exceptional and unusual face,” says Francois Brunelle has photographed more than 200 pairs of doppelgangers for his I'm Not a Look-Alike project. “I think in the digital age which we are entering, at some point we will know because there will be pictures of almost everyone online

Submission + - SPAM: Pale Moon Devs Ponder Dropping Current Codebase and Starting from Scratch

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The developers of the Palo Moon browser are thinking of scratching their current codebase due to the fact that i doesn't support many of today's current Web standards and because future Firefox plans will introduce incompatibilities within its codebase.

The team plans to build a new browser from scratch, which they'll use to replace Pale Moon when it reaches a stable version. As with the old Pale Moon, the browser will keep Firefox's pre-Australis interface and still support many features removed in Firefox, like Tab Groups and full themes.
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