Tag: more-at-boing

WinCo: worker-owned grocery chain that pays benefits, pensions, living wages — and has lower prices than WalMart

WinCo is a midwestern chain of worker-owned stores that consistently underprice WalMart, while still paying a living wage to their staff and decent prices to their suppliers.        

Read the article:
WinCo: worker-owned grocery chain that pays benefits, pensions, living wages — and has lower prices than WalMart

NSA firing 90% of its sysadmins to eliminate potential Snowdens

The NSA is to cut 90% of its 1, 000 sysadmins in a bid to reduce the risk of leaks. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a network administrator, charged with keeping the machines running on the network of vast data-centers used by the NSA to harvest, store and analyze unimaginably large quantities of data.        

View article:
NSA firing 90% of its sysadmins to eliminate potential Snowdens

First vatburger is ready to eat

After spending $250,000 worth of anonymously donated money, Mark Post from Maastricht University is ready to go public with his first vat-grown hamburger, which will be cooked and eaten at an event in London this week. Though they claim that it’s healthier than regular meat, one question not answered in the article is the Omega 3/6 balance — crappy, corn-fed, factory-farmed meet is full of Omega 6s and avoided by many eaters; the grass-fed, free-range stuff is higher in Omega 3s. Yet growing meat in the laboratory has proved difficult and devilishly expensive. Dr. Post, who knows as much about the subject as anybody, has repeatedly postponed the hamburger cook-off, which was originally expected to take place in November. His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue “tastes reasonably good.” For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper. But the meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin. And the burger was created at phenomenal cost — 250,000 euros, or about $325,000, provided by a donor who so far has remained anonymous. Large-scale manufacturing of cultured meat that could sit side-by-side with conventional meat in a supermarket and compete with it in price is at the very least a long way off.“This is still an early-stage technology,” said Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has long studied the development of what is also sometimes referred to as “shmeat.” “There’s still a huge number of things they need to learn.” There are also questions of safety — though Dr. Post and others say cultured meat should be as safe as, or safer than, conventional meat, and might even be made to be healthier — and of the consumer appeal of a product that may bear little resemblance to a thick, juicy steak. Engineering the $325,000 Burger [Henry Fountain/New York Times] ( via /. )        

See the article here:
First vatburger is ready to eat

Making brains transparent

Stanford University researchers developed a process to make a mouse brain totally transparent. The brain has to be, er, removed from the mouse first but it’s still an amazing process that enables scientists to see the entire brain in great detail, without chopping it up. Brilliant bioengineer, Karl Deisseroth, a pioneer in the field of optogenetics, postdoc Kwanghun Chung, and their colleagues have used the same technique, called CLARITY, to make fish and, yes, bits of human brains transparent as well. The process involves replacing the fatty molecules, called lipids, with a hydrogel. As a result, the brain can be studied with visible light and chemical markers with unprecedented clarity and resolution. Check out the stunning fly-through of the rodent’s brain above. ” Getting CLARITY: Hydrogel process developed at Stanford creates transparent brain ”        

Link:
Making brains transparent

World’s largest tunnel boring machine lands in Seattle

Known affectionately as Bertha, this tunnel boring machine has the widest diameter of any boring machine ever built; 57.5 feet. It’s being used to dig a highway tunnel under downtown Seattle and it just arrived there today after being shipped from Japan. I feel this warrants your attention for two reasons: 1) If you live near Seattle, you can actually go get a look at this massive beast before it starts chewing its way through the city. If you like looking at giant machines (or know someone who does) now’s your chance. She’s coming into the Port of Seattle, Terminal 46, as you read this and there will be ample opportunities to get a look as the pieces are assembled and moved into the nearby launch pit. The Washington State Department of Transportation has suggestions on places to go to get a good view . 2) If, for some reason, you were looking for a new way to lose massive amounts of time on YouTube, Bertha (and boring machines, in general) can help with that. Here’s a cutaway animation explaining how boring machines work . Here’s a video of Big Becky, another boring machine, breaking through to the other side of a tunnel at Niagara Falls, Canada . (In fact, boring machine breakthrough videos are, in and of themselves, a mesmerizing genre.) And in this video, you can watch the massively long line of support equipment go by in the wake of a boring machine .

Read More:
World’s largest tunnel boring machine lands in Seattle

DDoS storm breaks records at 300 Gbps

The Internet has been groaning under the weight of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Domain Name Service, apparently aimed at anti-spam vigilantes Spamhaus, in retaliation for their blacklisting of Dutch free speech hosting provider Cyberbunker. At 300 mbps, the DDoS is the worst in public Internet history. “These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.” The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks have reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second. “It is a real number,” Mr. Gilmore said. “It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.” Spamhaus, one of the most prominent groups tracking spammers on the Internet, uses volunteers to identify spammers and has been described as an online vigilante group. In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet’s core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS. As bad as this is, it could be a lot worse. An anonymous paper called Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices reports on a researcher’s project to scan every IPv4 address for publicly available machines that will accept a telnet connection and yield up a root login to a default password. The researcher reports that 1.2 million such devices are available online (s/he compromised many of these machines in order to run the census). These machines are things like printers and routers with badly secured firmware, visible on the public net. They are often running an old version of GNU/Linux and can be hijacked to form part of a staggeringly large botnet that would be virtually unkillable, since the owners of these devices are vanishingly unlikely to notice that they are silently running attackware, and the devices themselves are completely unregarded. Firm Is Accused of Sending Spam, and Fight Jams Internet [NYT/John Markoff & Nicole Perlroth] ( via Hacker News )

View post:
DDoS storm breaks records at 300 Gbps