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Submission + - FCC should prove DDoS attacks stopped net neutrality comments (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Michelle Davidson
Michelle Davidson writes: After John Oliver urged viewers of HBO's Last Week Tonight to fight again for net neutrality and post comments in support of it, people hit a wall — the FCC's site essentially crashed.

Originally, it was believed that the number of people trying to access the site caused the problem, but then the FCC released a statement saying "multiple" DDoS attacks — occurring at the same time Oliver sent viewers to the site — caused the site to crash.

“These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.”

The group Fight for the Future doesn't buy it, though, and wants proof. It says the FCC should release the logs.

"The FCC should immediately release its logs to an independent security analyst or major news outlet to verify exactly what happened last night. The public deserves to know, and the FCC has a responsibility to maintain a functioning website and ensure that every member of the public who wants to submit a comment about net neutrality has the ability to do so. Anything less is a subversion of our democracy."

No word yet from the FCC on whether it will release its logs, leading the interwebs to speculate about whether it was actually an attack to prevent commenting or if the FCC is ill-prepared to handle large amounts of traffic and blamed DDoS attacks to cover their inabilities. People are even questioning whether the FCC's tech team knows what a DDoS attack is.

Submission + - SPAM: Popular belief that saturated fat clogs up arteries is a myth, experts say

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The authors, led by Dr Aseem Malhotra, from Lister Hospital, Stevenage, wrote: “Despite popular belief among doctors and the public, the conceptual model of dietary saturated fat clogging a pipe is just plain wrong.”

Dr Malhotra and colleagues Professor Rita Redberg, from the University of California at San Francisco, and Pascal Meier from University Hospital Geneva in Switzerland and University College London, cited a “landmark” review of evidence that appeared to exonerate saturated fat.
They said relative levels of “good” cholesterol, or high density lipoprotein (HDL), were a better predictor of heart disease risk than levels of low density lipoprotein (LDL), also known as “bad” cholesterol.

High consumption of foods rich in saturated fat such as butter, cakes and fatty meat has been shown to increase blood levels of LDL.
The experts wrote: “It is time to shift the public health message in the prevention and treatment of coronary artery disease away from measuring serum lipids (blood fats) and reducing dietary saturated fat.

“Coronary artery disease is a chronic inflammatory disease and it can be reduced effectively by walking 22 minutes a day and eating real food.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - University DDoSed by Its Own IoT Devices (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An unnamed university has suffered a DDoS attack at the hand of its own IoT devices, according to a sneak preview of Verizon's upcoming yearly data breach report. The DDoS attack was caused by an unnamed IoT malware strain that connected to the university's smart devices, changed their default password, and then launched brute-force attacks to guess the admin credentials of nearby devices.

Investigators said that the hacked devices would then start an abnormally high level of DNS lookups that flooded the university's DNS server, which in turn resulted in the server dropping many DNS requests, including legitimate student traffic. The university's IT team said that many of these rogue DNS requests were related to seafood-related domains. The university said that over 5,000 smart devices had been taken over during this incident. Investigators regained access over hijacked devices after they took the university's network offline and used a script to capture the new admin password, and then rewrite it with their own.

Submission + - Banned chemicals persist in deep ocean & food chain (bbc.com)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Scientists were surprised by the relatively high concentrations of pollutants like PCBs and PBDEs in deep sea ecosystems.

The authors of the study say that the deep ocean can become a "sink" or repository for pollutants.

They argue that the chemicals accumulate through the food chain so that when they reach the deep ocean, concentrations are many times higher than in surface waters.

Submission + - California Fights Drought with 96 Million 'Shade Balls'

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Katie Rogers writes in the NY Times that the city of Los Angeles is releasing 96 million plastic "shade balls" into the 175-acre Los Angeles Reservoir to help block sunlight and UV rays that promote algae growth, which would help keep the city’s drinking water safe. Officials also say the balls will help slow the rate of evaporation, which drains the water supply of about 300 million gallons a year. The balls cost $0.36 each and are part of a $34.5 million initiative to protect the water supply. Shade balls are the brainchild of Brian White, a biologist with the utility who based the idea on “bird balls” that he observed in waterways near airport runways to prevent airfield bird strikes. The Los Angeles Reservoir, which holds 3.3 billion gallons, or enough water to supply the city for up to three weeks, joins three other reservoirs already covered in the shade balls. “In the midst of California’s historic drought, it takes bold ingenuity to maximize my goals for water conservation," says Mayor Eric Garcetti who was at the Los Angeles Reservoir to mark the addition of 20,000 of the small balls to the lake. "This effort by LADWP is emblematic of the kind of the creative thinking we need to meet those challenges."

Submission + - Pluto probe back to normal, cause of snafu found (planetary.org)

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: "Update:...NASA’s New Horizons mission is returning to normal science operations after a July 4 anomaly and remains on track for its July 14 flyby of Pluto. The investigation into the anomaly that caused New Horizons to enter "safe mode" on July 4 has concluded that no hardware or software fault occurred on the spacecraft. The underlying cause of the incident was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby. No similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter.

Submission + - Checking mammoth DNA against elephants hints at how they got hairy

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new study on mammoth DNA comparing the hairy animals to their cousins, the Asian and African elephants, has isolated what genes separate it from its warm-weather cousins. The study found that genes controlling skin and hair development, fat metabolism, insulin signaling, and skull shape, differed from today's contemporary elephant species. "They have this weird hump on their back, which is thought to be something like a camel hump — sort of a fat deposit that stored water and energy for the cold, dark winters," says Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.

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