Comment Bye-bye ransomware insurance (Score 1) 69
This will kill the ransomware insurance market for the affected sectors. That's probably intentional.
Comment Re:Hopefully (Score 2) 69
If you make it illegal to pay ransomware, what is the business model?
The business model becomes "wreck havoc on companies that are prohibited by law from paying up, to send a message to other countries to not pass such laws" followed by attacks on companies in those countries, accompanied by a "we've got a deal you can't refuse" ransom-payment offer.
Comment ~1 in 20 does not a "fingerprint" make (Score 2) 37
A person's actual fingerprints are either unique or very close to unique.
This is about 1 in 20, which is far from unique.
As others have pointed out, it's also easy to change.
Comment Trust and don't verify Re:peak hype (Score 1) 122
We are fully into "Trust, and don't even try to verify" territory at that point.
I've been trusting-and-not-verifying the output of my compilers for almost* my entire programming career.
Someday "AI" vibe-coding will get to that point. For some specific use cases, we may already be there.
* There were those times I suspected a compilier bug or was just curious how the complier implemented something, but both are very rare these days.
Comment But will it be real Coke? (Score 2) 1
Will it be "another product" or will it be "The Real Thing?"
The closest thing we have to "The Real Thing" these days is "Passover Coke" which is available only around Passover and only in certain stores. Look for the yellow cap and "cane sugar" in the ingredients list.
I'm not sure if "Passover Coke" is 100% identical to the pre-corn-syrup coke of the before-times, but it's close enough for me.
The biggest advantage of "Passover Coke" over "Mexican Coke" is the price: It costs the same as regular Coke in 2L plastic bottles. Mexican Coke comes in 0.5L glass bottles with a much-higher cost-per-half-liter.
Submission + - Engineers transform dental floss into needle-free vaccine (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: Flossing may be good for more than getting your dentist off your back—one day, it may also protect you from the flu. In an unorthodox approach to needle-free vaccines, researchers have developed a special kind of floss that can deliver proteins and inactive viruses to mice’s gumlines and trigger immune responses that protect against infectious disease, they report today in Nature Bioengineering.
For many years, scientists have tried to develop alternatives to delivering vaccines via syringes by turning to the moist areas in your mouth and nose where most viruses enter. But it’s tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules.
To test this idea, researchers at Texas Tech University had to do something no scientist had done before: Try to floss a mouse. It was a “quite difficult” two-person job: One scientist gently pulled the mouse’s jaw down with the metal ring from a keychain while the other administered the floss.
During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with a fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse’s gums. And even 2 months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.
Next, the engineers added an inactive flu virus—a common vaccine component—to the floss, which in theory could teach the mouse’s body to build up immunity to the flu. Over a 28-day period, the researchers flossed 50 mice with the coated floss every 2 weeks. Then, 4 weeks after the final dose, they infected those mice with the real flu virus. All the mice that were flossed three times survived, whereas all the unvaccinated mice died.
The flossed mice also had a more systemic immune response: Not only were flu antibodies present in their feces and saliva, but the mice had more T cells—the directors of the body’s immune response—in their lungs and spleens, as well as larger lymph nodes. What’s more, the team found flu antibodies in the mice’s bone marrow, signaling that their immune systems were “fully engaged” by the inactive flu virus. Overall, the immune response to the floss resembled the response to vaccines that are sprayed into the nose, such as FluMist.
To gauge whether the method could work in humans, the researchers asked 27 healthy volunteers to floss with dental picks coated with colored food dye. On average, roughly 60% of the dye was delivered to the participants’ gums. They then surveyed the participants on what they thought of the approach. Most said they were open to trying a floss-based vaccine and would prefer it to a shot.
For many years, scientists have tried to develop alternatives to delivering vaccines via syringes by turning to the moist areas in your mouth and nose where most viruses enter. But it’s tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules.
To test this idea, researchers at Texas Tech University had to do something no scientist had done before: Try to floss a mouse. It was a “quite difficult” two-person job: One scientist gently pulled the mouse’s jaw down with the metal ring from a keychain while the other administered the floss.
During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with a fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse’s gums. And even 2 months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.
Next, the engineers added an inactive flu virus—a common vaccine component—to the floss, which in theory could teach the mouse’s body to build up immunity to the flu. Over a 28-day period, the researchers flossed 50 mice with the coated floss every 2 weeks. Then, 4 weeks after the final dose, they infected those mice with the real flu virus. All the mice that were flossed three times survived, whereas all the unvaccinated mice died.
The flossed mice also had a more systemic immune response: Not only were flu antibodies present in their feces and saliva, but the mice had more T cells—the directors of the body’s immune response—in their lungs and spleens, as well as larger lymph nodes. What’s more, the team found flu antibodies in the mice’s bone marrow, signaling that their immune systems were “fully engaged” by the inactive flu virus. Overall, the immune response to the floss resembled the response to vaccines that are sprayed into the nose, such as FluMist.
To gauge whether the method could work in humans, the researchers asked 27 healthy volunteers to floss with dental picks coated with colored food dye. On average, roughly 60% of the dye was delivered to the participants’ gums. They then surveyed the participants on what they thought of the approach. Most said they were open to trying a floss-based vaccine and would prefer it to a shot.
Comment Reasonable lines Re:Pre-computer equivalent (Score 1) 121
I am reminded of the company in the World Trade Center that had off-site backups. Which they kept in the other tower.
Reasonable risk-managers only go so far. There's always the "big asteroid that goes undetected" that lands on your building during a big in-person meeting tha thas most of your company's key talent.
Comment Re:Backups often won't help (Score 5, Interesting) 121
A ransomeware group worth spit would have poisoned your backups so when you're having your genius moment to restore from snapshot or tape backup from last month guess what? It has ransomeware as well!
My recent backups might be infected, but my "day of compromise minus one" backups won't.
Even if my recent backups are infected, they are likely to not be ransomware-encrypted, which means they are still useful to me.
Comment Re:It's not the employee (Score 1) 121
there should be no operational way to "delete" or "modify" existing records.
Technically, this is very hard to do. It's much easier to set things up so there should be no operational way to "delete" or "modify" existing records without it being obvious that something out of the ordinary is going on
With the right level of access, there will be a way to copy everything from the existing media EXCEPT what you want deleted to new media. As long as this is easy to detect (say, CCTV recordings showing someone entered the server room, downed the server, removed the write-once media, used a magic box* to copy only what he wants to copy, then replacing the old media with the new media), that's going to be a deterrent to unauthorized record-deletion.
* how the magic box works is left as an exercise to the student, but for planning purposes, assume such a box exists until proven otherwise
Comment "will soon follow you" (Score 1) 15
Microsoft is stalking you. Again.
Comment Pre-computer equivalent (Score 1) 121
Imagine it's 1950s or earlier. You run a business that lives or dies by paper records, such as an insurance company, land office, or something similar.
Your office burns down, taking all the data with it. You don't have off-site backups (microfilm, carbon copies, or what-not). Thankfully the fire was after-hours and nobody was hurt.
Your business is probably toast, figuratively and literally. At best, you are insured and will be able to start over from scratch, but your existing customers might prefer to start over with a company that knew how to keep backups rather than continue working with you.
Comment Mentioned in /. comments in 2019 (Score 1) 1
Re:What do you mean by "possible?":
You mean the The MOnSter 6502?
The oldest monster6502.com entry in archive.org is from 2016.
Comment Modern-day Letter of Marque (Score 1) 57
If true, this is the modern-day version of a Letter of Marque, with the slight (cough cough) difference that the United States and China are neither technically at war (like N. and S. Korea) nor actually shooting at each other (like the various non-declared wars/hostilities the US has been involved in after WW2).
Comment Re:Easy fix ... (Score 3) 48
the green thing to do is build products on the continent they will be sold on.
If the raw materials are all on one continent, the end users are on another, and the finished product is less massive than the raw materials, it's going to require less shipping to build it where the raw materials are then ship it to the customer.
Also, what about things like coffee, that simply don't grow everywhere they are consumed?
Comment Problem as old as ships? (Score 0) 48
If I read this right, ancient seafaring peoples had the same problem, just on a much smaller scale.
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