In case you thought we’d figured out life in the oceans even a little bit, a new study published in Nature Communications sets the record straight. For the first time, scientists have found experimental evidence of underwater pollination. There are bees in the sea—or at least creatures that perform the same kind of… Read more…
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We Just Found Out There Are ‘Bees’ in the Sea
We’ve all stolen things from work—pencils, pens, maybe a notebook—but this Foxconn employee went a little too far. According to AsiaOne , a former senior manager at the world’s largest electronics maker and assembler was charged with stealing and selling 5, 700 iPhones for a value of about $1.56 million. Read more…
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Foxconn Employee Steals 5,700 iPhones Before Getting Caught
Enlarge / Courtroom 1 in the René Davidson Courthouse, part of the Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland, California. (credit: Cyrus Farivar) OAKLAND, Calif.—Most pieces of software don’t have the power to get someone arrested—but Tyler Technologies’ Odyssey Case Manager does. This is the case management software that runs on the computers of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of court clerks and judges in county courthouses across the US. (Federal courts use an entirely different system.) Typically, when a judge makes a ruling—for example, issuing or rescinding a warrant—those words said by a judge in court are entered into Odyssey. That information is then relied upon by law enforcement officers to coordinate arrests and releases and to issue court summons. (Most other courts, even if they don’t use Odyssey, use a similar software system from another vendor.) But, just across the bay from San Francisco, Alameda County’s deputy public defender, Jeff Chorney, says that since the county switched from a decades-old computer system to Odyssey in August, dozens of defendants have been wrongly arrested or jailed. Others have even been forced to register as sex offenders unnecessarily. “I understand that with every piece of technology, bugs have to be worked out,” he said, practically exasperated. “But we’re not talking about whether people are getting their paychecks on time. We’re talking about people being locked in cages, that’s what jail is. It’s taking a person and locking them in a cage.” Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Lawyers: New court software is so awful it’s getting people wrongly arrested
Ransomware, malware that enables attackers to disable systems or encrypt your data until you pay them , is on the rise. If you’ve become the victim of an attack, these four decryption tools might save the day. Read more…
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Avast’s Four Free Ransomware Decryption Tools Decrypt Locked Files
Nestle and its scientists have discovered how to “structure sugar differently” to reduce the amount of sugar in some of its products by 40%. What’s more is that it can be done reportedly without compromising the taste. The Guardian reports: The new process is said to make sugar dissolve faster so that even when less is used, the tongue perceives an identical level of sweetness. It plans to patent the process, discovered by its scientists, which it says will enable it to significantly decrease the total sugar in its confectionery products. A four-finger milk chocolate Kit Kat currently contains 23.8g of sugar, a plain (milk chocolate) Yorkie contains 26.9g and a medium peppermint Aero has 24.9g of sugar. If the amount of sugar in each of these products was cut by 40% the new amounts would be 14.3g, 16.1g and 14.9g respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nestle Discovers ‘Breakthrough’ Method To Cut Sugar In Chocolate By 40% Without Affecting Taste
Using Japanese sharpening stones of various grits and considerable prices, Junskitchen set out to try and make an edge of a $1 kitchen knife. The results are impressive—but how long will they last? [1,000 and 6,000] grits would be enough for a normal household knife. I used grits 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 8,000, and 12,000 in this video. The higher the number, the finer the sanding and the sharper the knife will be.
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Man attempts to sharpen a dollar-store kitchen knife
Enlarge / Avalanche once hosted ransomware that spoofed messages from law enforcement. Now, a team of 40 law enforcement agencies has shut it down. (credit: Symantec) A botnet that has served up phishing attacks and at least 17 different malware families to victims for much of this decade has been taken down in a coordinated effort by an international group of law enforcement agencies and security firms. Law enforcement officials seized command and control servers and took control of more than 800,000 Internet domains used by the botnet, dubbed “Avalanche,” which has been in operation in some form since at least late 2009. “The operation involves arrests and searches in five countries,” representatives of the FBI and US Department of Justice said in a joint statement issued today. “More than 50 Avalanche servers worldwide were taken offline.” The domains seized have been “sinkholed” to terminate the operation of the botnet, which is estimated to have spanned over hundreds of thousands of compromised computers around the world. The Justice Department’s Office for the Western Federal District of Pennsylvania and the FBI’s Pittsburgh office led the US portion of the takedown. “The monetary losses associated with malware attacks conducted over the Avalanche network are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, although exact calculations are difficult due to the high number of malware families present on the network,” the FBI and DOJ said in their joint statement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Legal raids in five countries seize botnet servers, sinkhole 800,000+ domains
Cruises are like floating piles of shit and piss that you pay to ride for a week. But sometimes cruises need to release a bit of that shit and piss so that the ship doesn’t sink. Dumping of bilge water is tightly regulated when cruises are near populated areas. But Princess Cruises, owned by Carnival Corp, just spent… Read more…
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Carnival Cruises to Pay $40 Million Fine for Secretly Dumping Shit Water Since 2005
Australian high school students have done “a little Breaking Bad ” by synthesizing and effectively open-sourcing the drug famously hiked 5, 000 percent in price by “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli . The drug they recreated, Daraprim, is used to treat infection caused by malaria and HIV and without it, many patients would die. “Working on a real-world problem definitely made us more enthusiastic, ” said 17-year-old Sydney Grammar student Austin Zhang. “The background to this [drug] made it seem more important.” Daraprim is a relatively simple compound and typically costs $12.99 AUD ($10) for fifty tablets in Australia. However, Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, has the exclusive rights to distribute the specific Daraprim formulation (it’s known as Pyrimethamine elsewhere), even though the drug was developed in 1953, and is long out of patent. To get a new version approved, a company would have to compare it Turing’s FDA-approved product with their permission, which isn’t likely — the company limits sales to doctors and pharmacies, making it difficult to reverse-engineer. Pharma companies would therefore need to go through an onerous approval process that probably wouldn’t be worth it, considering that less than 10, 000 Daraprim prescriptions are written in the US per year. (The US uses a ” closed distribution ” system which differs from most other countries.) @nedavanovac lol how is that showing anyone up? almost any drug can be made at small scale for a low price. glad it makes u feel good tho. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) December 1, 2016 Though the open source Daraprim literally debunks Shkreli’s premise that the drug is ” underpriced ” (supply and demand aside), it probably won’t directly help anyone. Shkreli himself dismissed the work with a tweet, saying, “how is that showing anyone up? Almost any drug can be made at small scale for a low price. Glad it makes u feel good tho [sic].” However, that doesn’t mean that the exercise was useless. In fact, the students didn’t just follow a recipe, they actually reverse-engineered the drug, checking their progress using spectral analysis on each new compound. They also posted the work on Github , letting experts from the Open Source Malaria Consortium (OSM) (endorsed by Bill Gates ) provide some help. For instance, the process used to manufacture Daraprim would be dangerous for students to replicate in a small high school lab. “They had to change things as some reagents were nasty and dangerous so some invention was needed on their part, ” said Todd. After achieving a “beautiful” spectrograph, they finished with 3.7 grams of pure pyrimethamine, worth about $110, 000 on the US market, and presented the results at a prestigious symposium. The OSM also posted a guide for making the drug that could help anyone else who wanted to try. That’s quite an accomplishment for 16- and 17-year-old students, even if they can’t actually sell it. And they sort of proved that as tempting as it is to hate Shkreli, he’s merely profiting from a US system that’s much friendlier to pharmaceutical companies than other countries. Via: The Guardian Source: Open Source Malaria
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High school students open-source Shkreli’s pricey HIV drug