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Submission + - The people GoFundMe leaves behind (theoutline.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: President Donald Trump’s proposed budget seeks to slash $54 billion from social services including programs like Medicaid and Meals on Wheels. As these resources dry up, crowdfunding websites will further entrench themselves as extra-governmental welfare providers in order to fill the gap. For a lucky few, these sites are a lifeline. For most people, they are worthless. ...

Crowdfunding’s fatal flaw is that not every campaign ends up getting the money it needs. A recent study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine found that more than 90 percent of GoFundMe campaigns never meet their goal. For every crowdfunding success story, there are hundreds of failures.

“As many happy stories as there are in charitable crowdfunding, there are a lot of really worthy causes when you browse these platforms that nobody has given a cent to,” Rob Gleasure, professor at the business school of the National University of Ireland, Cork told The Outline. “People haven’t come across them.”

Submission + - Leaked recording: Inside Apple's global war on leakers (theoutline.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products.

The briefing, titled “Stopping Leakers — Keeping Confidential at Apple,” was led by Director of Global Security David Rice, Director of Worldwide Investigations Lee Freedman, and Jenny Hubbert, who works on the Global Security communications and training team.

According to the hour-long presentation, Apple’s Global Security team employs an undisclosed number of investigators around the world to prevent information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and the press, as well as hunt down the source when leaks do occur. Some of these investigators have previously worked at U.S. intelligence agencies like the National Security Administration (NSA), law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, and in the U.S. military.

Submission + - How Sony, Microsoft, and Other Gadget Makers Violate Federal Warranty Law (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: There are big “no trespassing” signs affixed to most of our electronics.

If you own a gaming console, laptop, or computer, it’s likely you’ve seen one of these warnings in the form of a sticker placed over a screw or a seam: “Warranty void if removed.”

In addition, big manufacturers such as Sony, Microsoft, and Apple explicitly note or imply in their official agreements that their year-long manufacturer warranties—which entitle you to a replacement or repair if your device is defective—are void if consumers attempt to repair their gadgets or take them to a third party repair professional.
What almost no one knows is that these stickers and clauses are illegal under a federal law passed in 1975 called the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

To be clear, federal law says you can open your electronics without voiding the warranty, regardless of what the language of that warranty says.

Submission + - Why New Antibiotics Never Come to Market (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: “We’ve discovered six antibiotics in the recent past,” Fenical said. “Of those, three to four have serious potential as far as we know, including anthramycin. But we have no way to develop them. There are no companies in the United States that care. They’re happy to sell existing antibiotics, but they’re not interested in researching and developing new ones.”

Submission + - How DMCA Rulemaking Has a Chilling Effect on Security Research (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: Jay Radcliffe is a security researcher with diabetes. In 2011, he gave a talk at Black Hat, showing how his personal insulin pump could be hacked—with potentially deadly consequences.

As a result of his 2011 presentation, he worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the Food and Drug Administration to address security vulnerabilities in insulin pumps.

“The specific technical details of that research have never been published in order to protect patients using those devices,” he wrote in his testimony to the Librarian of Congress and the US Copyright Office.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress puts a whole bunch of people through a twisted bureaucratic process called DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) rulemaking. Technically speaking, DMCA rulemaking doesn’t make things illegal or legal per se, but many people—like Jay Radcliffe—look to the rulemaking for a green light to do their work.

Submission + - Somebody Just Claimed a $1 Million Bounty for Hacking the iPhone (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million bounty set by the new startup Zerodium, according to its founder Chaouki Bekrar, a notorious merchant of unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities.

The challenge consisted of finding a way to remotely jailbreak a new iPhone or iPad running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system iOS (in this case iOS 9.1 and 9.2b), allowing the attacker to install any app he or she wants app with full privileges. The initial exploit, according to the terms of the challenge, had to come through Safari, Chrome, or a text or multimedia message.

This essentially meant that a participant needed to find a series, or a chain, of unknown zero-day bugs.

Submission + - Why Aren't There Better Cybersecurity Regulations for Medical Devices? (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: There is a growing body of research that shows just how defenseless many critical medical devices are to cyberattack. Research over the last couple of years has revealed that hundreds of medical devices use hard-coded passwords. Other devices use default admin passwords, then warn hospitals in the documentation not to change them.

A big part of the problem is there are no regulations requiring medical devices to meet minimum cybersecurity standards before going to market. The FDA has issued formal guidelines, but these guidelines "do not establish legally enforceable responsibilities."

"In theory you could sell a bunch of medical devices without ever having gone through a security review," the well-known independent medical device security researcher Billy Rios told Motherboard.

Submission + - How a Frozen Neutrino Observatory Grapples with Staggering Amounts of Data (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: "If the filtered data from the Pole amounts to ~36TB/year [this number was so incredible we had to double check it was not a typo -Ed.], the processed data amounts to near 100TB/year." Gonzalo Merino, the IceCube computing facilities manager at UW-Madison, wrote in an unencrypted email.

This data gets stored at UW-Madison, Merino wrote, and "all the data taken since the start of the detector construction is kept on disk so that it can be all analyzed in one go."

In total, the IceCube project is storing around 3.5 petabytes (that's around 3.5 million gigabytes, give or take) in the UW-Madison data center as of this writing.

Submission + - The Backbone of the Internet Could Detect Earthquakes, But No One's Using It (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: “Right now the current system of cables on the seafloor is deaf, dumb, and blind,” said Rhett Butler, the director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii. “Although they carry trillions of bits of information and basically run the global economy at this point, they don't know anything about the environment they're in. They don't measure anything at all and that seems crazy.”

According to Butler, AT&T and other telecom companies have paid lip service to the idea of integrating sensors into the cables, but he has watched proposal after proposal for smarter cables fall through for a variety of reasons.

“[The telecom companies] narrowly focus on making [the cables] as fast as possible, as reliable as possible. They don't really go beyond thinking about the narrow purpose,” he said. “Yet in a certain sense mankind has given the nod to lay cables across the open sea floor without any restrictions, so it seems to me to be a little reasonable [for the telecom companies to have] a little obligation on their part to help people out.”

Submission + - Meet MUMPS, the Programming Language for Healthcare (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: An ICU patient is monitored and assessed according to 12 different variables. These include such measurements as body temperature, heart rate, blood oxygenation, blood pH, and others. Together, they're used to formulate a quantitative answer to the question, "How bad is it, doc?" Many of these physiological signs are measured in real-time via electrodes and like a billion different varieties of catheter. Add to it barrages of lab tests done multiple times per day per patient and the need for 20 or so clinicians (per patient) to have access to all of this data, and the result is very a deep data problem.

Multiply that data problem by hundreds of thousands of patients.

This is the fundamental problem that the programming language MUMPS (sometimes called just "M"), or the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, aims to solve. To its proponents, MUMPS allows for a one of a kind synthesis of programming and database management, while to to its detractors, it's a bizarre anachronism with little connection to the evolution and innovation taking place elsewhere in programming. Probably to most people that do things with computers, MUMPS/M is poorly understood, at best, and more likely to be completely unknown.

Submission + - The Cure Culture: Our Obsession With Cures That Are 'Just Around the Corner' (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: There is no cure for cystic fibrosis. There is no cure for cancer. There is no cure for diabetes. There is no cure for HIV. There is no cure for Tay-sachs or Huntington's disease or ALS.

"The idea of a cure is simpler, it's more appealing as a fantasy."

And yet, scientists, the media, and the foundations that fund research consistently promise patients and their families that cures for very serious, lifelong diseases are imminent, or at least "around the corner." For cystic fibrosis, that cure has been pitched as being gene therapy, in which a faulty gene is replaced with a functioning one.

Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? What is a cure? What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? What does it mean to be cured of a disease that has already, soon after you're born or diagnosed, wreaked havoc on your body? And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?

Submission + - How Television Beat the Internet

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Wolff writes in the NYT that online-media revolutionaries once figured they could eat TV’s lunch by stealing TV’s business model with free content supported by advertising but online media is now drowning in free and internet traffic has glutted the ad market, forcing down rates. Digital publishers, from The Guardian to BuzzFeed, can stay ahead only by chasing more traffic — not loyal readers, but millions of passing eyeballs, so fleeting that advertisers naturally pay less and less for them. Meanwhile, the television industry has been steadily weaning itself off advertising — like an addict in recovery, starting a new life built on fees from cable providers and all those monthly credit-card debits from consumers. Today, half of broadcast and cable’s income is non-advertising based. And since adult household members pay the cable bills, TV content has to be grown-up content: “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “The Good Wife.”

So how did this tired, postwar technology seize back the crown? Television, not digital media, is mastering the model of the future: Make ’em pay. And the corollary: Make a product that they’ll pay for. BuzzFeed has only its traffic to sell — and can only sell it once. Television shows can be sold again and again, with streaming now a third leg to broadcast and cable, offering a vast new market for licensing and syndication. Television is colonizing the Internet and people still spend more time watching television than they do on the Internet and more time on the Internet watching television. "The fundamental recipe for media success, in other words, is the same as it used to be," concludes Wolff, "a premium product that people pay attention to and pay money for. Credit cards, not eyeballs."

Submission + - The Underfunded, Disorganized Plan to Save Earth from the Next Giant Asteroid (vice.com)

Submitted by citadrianne
citadrianne writes: Until a few decades ago, the powers that be didn’t take the threat of asteroids very seriously. This changed on March 23, 1989, when an asteroid 300 meters in diameter called 1989FC passed within half a million miles of Earth. As the New York Times put it, "In cosmic terms, it was a close call."

After this arguably close brush with total annihilation, Congress asked NASA to prepare a report on the threat posed by asteroids. The 1992 document, "The Spaceguard Survey: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth-Object Detection Workshop," was, suffice it to say, rather bleak.

If a large NEO were to hit Earth, the report said, its denizens could look forward to acid rain, firestorms, and an impact winter induced by dust being thrown miles into the stratosphere. ...

After reports from the National Research Council made it clear that meeting the discovery requirement outlined in the Congressional mandate was impossible given the lack of program funding, NEOO got a tenfold budget increase from 2009 to 2014. Yet it still faces a number of difficulties. A program audit released last September described the NEOO program as a one-man operation that is poorly integrated and lacking in objectives and oversight.

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