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Submission + - New Study Claims That The "Black Death" Was Spread By Humans, Not Rats (bbc.com)

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study. The rodents and their fleas were thought to have spread a series of outbreaks in 14th-19th Century Europe. But a team from the universities of Oslo and Ferrara now says the first, the Black Death, can be "largely ascribed to human fleas and body lice". The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses records of its pattern and scale. The Black Death claimed an estimated 25 million lives, more than a third of Europe's population, between 1347 and 1351. "We have good mortality data from outbreaks in nine cities in Europe," Prof Nils Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, told BBC News. "So we could construct models of the disease dynamics [there]." He and his colleagues then simulated disease outbreaks in each of these cities, creating three models where the disease was spread by: 1) rats 2) airborne transmission 3) fleas and lice that live on humans and their clothes. In seven out of the nine cities studied, the "human parasite model" was a much better match for the pattern of the outbreak. It mirrored how quickly it spread and how many people it affected. "The conclusion was very clear," said Prof Stenseth. "The lice model fits best.It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats. It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person." Plague is still endemic in some countries of Asia, Africa and the Americas, where it persists in "reservoirs" of infected rodents. According to the World Health Organization, from 2010 to 2015 there were 3,248 cases reported worldwide, including 584 deaths. And, in 2001, a study that decoded the plague genome used a bacterium that had come from a vet in the US who had died in 1992 after a plague-infested cat sneezed on him as he had been trying to rescue it from underneath a house.

Submission + - "Quark Fusion" Produces Eight Times More Energy Than Nuclear Fusion (futurism.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: This new source of energy, according to researchers Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner, comes from the fusion of subatomic particles known as quarks. These particles are usually produced as a result of colliding atoms that move at high speeds within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where these component parts split from their parent atoms. It doesn’t stop there, however, as these disassociated quarks also tend to collide with one another and fuse into particles called baryon

Submission + - Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? (nautil.us) 1

Submitted by wjcofkc
wjcofkc writes: Caleb Scharf, astronomer and the director of the multidisciplinary Columbia Astrobiology Center at Columbia University presents an intriguing thought experiment.

"Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?"

Submission + - One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week (vice.com)

Submitted by SlaveToTheGrind
SlaveToTheGrind writes: Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency.

An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.

Submission + - Software Freedom Law Center At War Against Software Freedom Conservancy (sfconservancy.org)

Submitted by Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens writes: The Software Freedom Law Center, a Linux-Foundation supported organization, has asked USPTO to cancel the trademark of the name of the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization that assists and represents Free Software / Open Source developers.

What makes this bizzare is that SFLC started SFC, SFLC was SFC's law firm and filed for the very same trademark on their behalf, and both organizations were funded by Linux Foundation at the start.

There are a few other wild things that have happened related to this. Eben Moglen, president of SFLC and for decades the General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, is no longer associated with FSF. Linux Foundation has on its executive board a company that is being sued in Germany for violating the GPL, with the case presently under appeal, and the lawsuit is funded by SFC. And remember when Linux Foundation removed the community representative from its executive board, when Karen Sandler, executive director of SFC, said she'd run?

If you need a clue, the SFC are the good guys in this. There's a lot to look into.

Submission + - Hacktivist Jailed by Ortiz Excluded from Aaron Swartz Day by FreeChelsea Leader? (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Danngggg
Danngggg writes: As you may recall from Slashdot last year, alleged Anonymous hacktivist Martin Gottesfeld has been imprisoned without bail since federal agents arrested him on board a Disney Cruise ship in February of 2016 to face hacking charges brought by controversial former U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz. Though he’s the only activist after Aaron Swartz to face a felony CFAA indictment from Ortiz, apparently Aaron Swartz Day organizer and Chelsea Manning archivist Lisa Rein doesn’t want to include Gottesfeld in the festivities this year. So, he has taken to HuffPost to argue that his story should be told this November 4th and, perhaps with a sense of irony, to publish some potentially scandalous Signal messages allegedly sent by Rein to his wife revealing what seems to be disdain for hacking in general and Anonymous in particular. Indeed, Rein seems to borrow from the movie Mean Girls in her contemptuous rejection of Mrs. Gottesfeld’s appeals on behalf of her embattled husband. What does the Slashdot crowd have to say about whether Gottesfeld’s story belongs at Aaron Swartz Day as well as Rein’s alleged attitude towards his significant other?

“One might think that my voice would be welcomed at Aaron Swartz Day given all that the late Internet/freedom of information activist and I share in common. For starters, we were both indicted under the same controversial federal law, the CFAA, by the same Boston U.S. Attorney’s Office and indeed under the tenure of the same notorious U.S. Attorney, Carmen Ortiz.

Both of us have been persecuted for doing the moral thing; Aaron for trying to make taxpayer-funded research available to the general public and me for stopping the torture of an innocent child”

Submission + - Mysterious Void Discovered in Egypt's Great Pyramid (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by klgds
klgds writes: The cavity is the first major inner structure discovered in the pyramid since the 1800s.

Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza—one of the wonders of the ancient world, and a dazzling feat of architectural genius—contains a hidden void at least a hundred feet long, scientists announced on Tuesday.

The space’s dimensions resemble those of the pyramid’s Grand Gallery, the 153-foot-long, 26-foot-tall corridor that leads to the burial chamber of Khufu, the pharaoh for whom the pyramid was built.

Submission + - Hewlett-Packard historical archives destroyed in Santa Rosa fires (pressdemocrat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard historical archives destroyed in Santa Rosa fires
ROBERT DIGITALE

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT | October 29, 2017, 12:11AM
| Updated 5 hours ago.

When deadly flames incinerated hundreds of homes in Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove neighborhood earlier this month, they also destroyed irreplaceable papers and correspondence held nearby and once belonging to the founders of Silicon Valley’s first technology company, Hewlett-Packard.

The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash.

More than 100 boxes of the two men’s writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies. Keysight, the world’s largest electronics measurement company, traces its roots to HP and acquired the archives in 2014 when its business was split from Agilent Technologies — itself an HP spinoff.

Submission + - Woman says her identity was stolen 15 times after Equifax data breach (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Stories are starting to pour in about those impacted by last month’s massive Equifax data breach, which compromised the private information of more than 140 million people.

Katie Van Fleet of Seattle says she’s spent months trying to regain her stolen identity, and says it has been stolen more than a dozen times.

“I kept receiving letters from Kohl’s, from Macy’s, from Home Depot, from Old Navy saying ‘thank you for your application,'” she said to CNN affiliate KCPQ.

But she says she’s never applied for credit from any of those places. Instead, Van Fleet and her attorney Catherine Fleming say they believe her personal data was stolen during the massive Equifax security breach.

“It’s a product that they want to sell and that they need to profit off of,” said Fleming. “That’s what they care about.”

Fleming has filed a class-action lawsuit against Equifax, saying they were negligent in losing private information on more than 140 million Americans.

“Countless people, I mean, I’ve really, truly lost count, and the stories that like Katie’s, the stories I hear are heart-wrenching,” Fleming said.

Submission + - First Extrasolar Object Observed Racing Through Our Solar System (space.com) 1

Submitted by Enigma2175
Enigma2175 writes: For the first time, scientists have observed an object they believe came from outside our solar system. The object is in a hyperbolic orbit that will send it back into interstellar space. From Space.com:

The object, known as A/2017 U1, was detected last week by researchers using the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. "It's long been theorized that such objects exist — asteroids or comets moving around between the stars and occasionally passing through our solar system — but this is the first such detection," Chodas added. "So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it."

Submission + - SPAM: India announces plan to land on moon in 2018 3

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The spacecraft is the Chandrayaan 2 and it consists of an orbiter, lander and rover configuration ‘to perform mineralogical and elemental studies of the lunar surface,’ the ISRO said. ISRO Chairman AS Kiran Kumar told PTI that the space organization is already in the process of getting the spacecraft ready for an expected launch during the first quarter of next year.
Link to Original Source

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 + - Dutch Privacy Regulator Says Windows 10 Breaks the Law (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The lack of clear information about what Microsoft does with the data that Windows 10 collects prevents consumers from giving their informed consent, says the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA). As such, the regulator says that the operating system is breaking the law. To comply with the law, the DPA says that Microsoft needs to get valid user consent: this means the company must be clearer about what data is collected and how that data is processed. The regulator also complains that the Windows 10 Creators Update doesn't always respect previously chosen settings about data collection. In the Creators Update, Microsoft introduced new, clearer wording about the data collection—though this language still wasn't explicit about what was collected and why—and it forced everyone to re-assert their privacy choices through a new settings page. In some situations, though, that page defaulted to the standard Windows options rather than defaulting to the settings previously chosen. In the Creators Update, Microsoft also explicitly enumerated all the data collected in Windows 10's "Basic" telemetry setting. However, the company has not done so for the "Full" option, and the Full option remains the default.

The DPA's complaint doesn't call for Microsoft to offer a complete opt out of the telemetry and data collection, instead focusing on ensuring that Windows 10 users know what the operating system and Microsoft are doing with their data. The regulator says that Microsoft wants to "end all violations," but if the software company fails to do so, it faces sanctions.

Submission + - Recordings of the sounds heard in the Cuban US Embassy attacks released (apnews.com)

Submitted by chrissfoot
chrissfoot writes: The Associated Press has obtained a recording of what some U.S. Embassy workers heard in Havana in a series of unnerving incidents later deemed to be deliberate attacks. The recording, released Thursday by the AP, is the first disseminated publicly of the many taken in Cuba of mysterious sounds that led investigators initially to suspect a sonic weapon.

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