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Australian Birds of Prey Are Deliberately Setting Forests On Fire

An anonymous reader writes: If you’ve been counting the ways the Australian environment is trying to kill you, you can now add “arson” to the list. According to a six-year study published in The Journal of Ethnobiology, observers have confirmed what Aboriginal rangers have been observing for years: birds of prey routinely carry burning or smouldering sticks into dry grassy areas to scare small mammals into fleeing so they can be pack-hunted more effectively. This has implications for environmental management, since the best firebreak will not protect your controlled burn from a “firehawk” determined to breach it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Australian Birds of Prey Are Deliberately Setting Forests On Fire

We All Nearly Missed the Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded

schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert: She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a “peculiar large mass” floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand. The Kiwi passenger emailed photos of the strange ocean slick to scientists, who realised what it was — a raft of floating rock spewed from an underwater volcano, produced in the largest eruption of its kind ever recorded. “We knew it was a large-scale eruption, approximately equivalent to the biggest eruption we’ve seen on land in the 20th Century, ” says volcanologist Rebecca Carey from the University of Tasmania, who’s co-led the first close-up investigation of the historic 2012 eruption. The incident, produced by a submarine volcano called the Havre Seamount, initially went unnoticed by scientists, but the floating rock platform it generated was harder to miss. Back in 2012, the raft — composed of pumice rock — covered some 400 square kilometres (154 square miles) of the south-west Pacific Ocean, but months later satellites recorded it dispersing over an area twice the size of New Zealand itself… for a sense of scale, think roughly 1.5 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens — or 10 times the size of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland. When an underwater robot first sent back detailed maps, one volcanologist remembers that “I thought the vehicle’s sonar was acting up… We saw all these bumps on the seafloor… It turned out that each bump was a giant block of pumice, some of them the size of a van.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We All Nearly Missed the Largest Underwater Volcano Eruption Ever Recorded

Self-destructing thumb drives with smoke loads, glowing elements, tiny explosives

MG’s Mr Self Destruct project takes the USB Killer to new levels, combining a $1.50 system-on-a-chip with a variety of payloads: smoke bombs, “sound grenades,” and little explosives, cleverly choreographed with keystroke emulation, allowing the poisoned drive to first cause the connected computer to foreground a browser and load a web-page that plays an appropriate animation (a jack-in-the-box that plays “Pop Goes the Weasel” with the drive’s explosive detonating for the climax). (more…)

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Self-destructing thumb drives with smoke loads, glowing elements, tiny explosives

EU standardizes edible insect rules

Alternative protein advocates in Europe have been stymied by the hodgepodge of national rules regarding insect consumption, but now the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will approve applications for edible bugs that will then be legal to serve to Europeans throughout the EU. (more…)

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EU standardizes edible insect rules

US regulators charge three bitcoin operators with fraud

Today the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that it has filed a federal civil enforcement action against three virtual currency operators. The details of one case remain sealed, but the other two companies facing charges are CabbageTech and Entrepreneurs Headquarters Ltd . The charges include fraud, misrepresentation, misappropriation and more, and are the first enforcement actions since the CFTC allowed trading bitcoin futures. Bitcoin has been on a rollercoaster recently. Its value has been in a freefall; two days ago, it tumbled below $10, 000, losing half of its peak value in less than one month . According to Coinbase , it’s risen a bit as of this writing. Bitcoin’s value is currently in the mid-$11, 000s. There are also fears that bitcoin and other cryptocurrency could threaten the security of the global economy; as a result, the US isn’t the only country taking action. China is moving toward an “orderly exit” from bitcoin mining because of its use of resources, as well as its affect on investors. Back in December, South Korea (which is the third largest market for cryptocurrency, after the US and Japan) banned all anonymous cryptocurrency accounts and enacted new regulations for monitoring exchanges. In a joint statement, the CTFC Enforcement Director and the Securities and Exchange Commision Enforcement Co-Directors made clear that the US government will be keeping a close eye on cryptocurrency action. “When market participants engage in fraud under the guise of offering digital instruments – whether characterized as virtual currencies, coins, tokens, or the like – the SEC and the CFTC will look beyond form, examine the substance of the activity and prosecute violations of the federal securities and commodities laws, ” they said in a joint statement. Via: Reuters Source: CFTC (1) , CFTC (2)

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US regulators charge three bitcoin operators with fraud

Tesla Is Last In the Driverless Vehicle Race, Report Says

Navigant Research has compiled a new report on 19 companies working on automated driving systems, and surprisingly, Tesla came in last place. U.S. News & World Report: Navigant ranked the 19 major companies developing AV technology based on 10 criteria, including vision, market strategy, partnerships, production strategy, technology, product quality and staying power. According to the report, General Motors Co. and Waymo, the auto unit of Alphabet, are the top two AV investment opportunities in the market today. Tesla and Apple are the two biggest laggards in the AV race, according to Navigant’s rankings. Investors are acutely aware of Tesla’s production and distribution disadvantages compared to legacy automakers like GM, but Navigant is also highly critical of Tesla’s technology. “The autopilot system on current products has stagnated and, in many respects, regressed since it was first launched in late 2015, ” Navigant says in the report, according to Ars Technica. “More than one year after launching V2, Autopilot still lacks some of the functionality of the original, and there are many anecdotal reports from owners of unpredictable behavior.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Tesla Is Last In the Driverless Vehicle Race, Report Says

Intel’s new cameras add human-like 3D vision to any machine

Intel has released two ready-to-use RealSense depth cameras, the D415 and the D435, that can add 3D capabilities to any device or machine. They both come in a USB-powered form factor and are capable of processing depth in real time, thanks to the chipmaker’s new RealSense vision processor D4. The models work indoors and outdoors in any lighting environment, so they can be used for almost any machine that needs a depth camera. Those include drones meant to soar the skies and robots with AR/VR features. Intel says the cameras’ target audiences aren’t just developers and manufacturers, but also makers and educators, since they’re easy to use and will work as soon as you plug them in. Also, it comes with Intel’s RealSense SDK 2.0, which is now a cross-platform, open source SDK. Intel RealSense VP Sagi Ben Moshe said in a statement: “Many of today’s machines and devices use 2D image recognition-based computer vision, but with Intel RealSense’s best-in-class depth technology, we are redefining future technologies to ‘see’ like a human, so devices and machines can truly enrich people’s lives. With its compact, ready-to-use form, the Intel RealSense D400 Depth Camera series not only makes it easy for developers to build 3D depth sensing into any design, but they are also ready to be embedded into high-volume products.” The D415 and the D435 are now available for pre-order for $149 and $145, respectively. D415 has a narrow field of view and a rolling shutter that scans its environment from one side to the other to take an image. It works best when dealing with small objects and anything that needs precise measurements. D435, on the other hand, has a wider field of view and has a global shutter that takes images all at once. That makes it ideal for capturing depth perception of objects in motion and for covering big areas, since it minimizes blind spots. Source: Intel

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Intel’s new cameras add human-like 3D vision to any machine

How to Make an Inexpensive DIY Sandblaster

Watching rust get blasted off of metal is always satisfying. It must be even more satisfying to do it, particularly when you’re using a self-made sandblaster. DIY’er Adam Fleisch figured out how to make one for under six bucks, using an airgun and a soda bottle, and the darn thing actually works:

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How to Make an Inexpensive DIY Sandblaster

Lebanese hackers stole a ton of data then left it on an open server

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and mobile security company Lookout released a report today detailing a major hacking campaign — dubbed Dark Caracal — that’s believed to have originated from Lebanon’s General Directorate of General Security (GDGS), one of the country’s intelligence agencies. The companies found information gathered from thousands of victims from over 20 countries through espionage efforts extending back to 2012. Targets included military personnel, journalists, activists, financial institutions and manufacturing companies and some of the stolen data included documents, call records, texts, contact information and photos. Michael Flossman, a Lookout security researcher, told the Associated Press , “It was everything. Literally everything.” The hackers used malicious apps that resembled legitimate communication platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to steal the trove of data, loading up the fake versions with malware that allowed them to tap into users’ conversations. “One of the interesting things about this ongoing attack is that it doesn’t require a sophisticated or expensive exploit, ” EFF Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin said in a statement . “Instead, all Dark Caracal needed was application permissions that users themselves granted when they downloaded the apps, not realizing that they contained malware.” However, the hackers’ storage of the stolen info also wasn’t terribly sophisticated, as it was all left exposed online on an unprotected server. “It’s almost like thieves robbed the bank and forgot to lock the door where they stashed the money, ” Mike Murray, Lookout’s head of intelligence, told the AP . The EFF and Lookout were able to link the data to a WiFi network coinciding with the location of Lebanon’s GDGS. “Based on the available evidence, it is likely that the GDGS is associated with or directly supporting the actors behind Dark Caracal, ” noted the report. EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin said that pinpointing the campaign to such a precise location was remarkable, telling the AP , “We were able to take advantage of extraordinarily poor operational security.” Via: Associated Press Source: Lookout

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Lebanese hackers stole a ton of data then left it on an open server