Tag: polls

New Russian Laboratory To Study Mammoth Cloning

An anonymous reader writes: While plans to clone a woolly mammoth are not new, a lab used in a joint effort by Russia and South Korea is. The new facility is devoted to studying extinct animal DNA in the hope of creating clones from the remains of animals found in the permafrost. IBtimes reports: “The Sakha facility has the world’s largest collection of frozen ancient animal carcasses and remains, with more than 2, 000 samples in its possession, including some that are tens of thousands years old, such as a mammoth discovered on the island of Maly Lyakhovsky; experts believe it may be more than 28, 000 years old.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Russian Laboratory To Study Mammoth Cloning

Oakland Changes License Plate Reader Policy After Filling 80GB Hard Drive

An anonymous reader writes: License plate scanners are a contentious subject, generating lots of debate over what information the government should have, how long they should have it, and what they should do with it. However, it seems policy changes are driven more by practical matters than privacy concerns. Earlier this year, Ars Technica reported that the Oakland Police Department retained millions of records going back to 2010. Now, the department has implemented a six-month retention window, with older data being thrown out. Why the change? They filled up the 80GB hard drive on the Windows XP desktop that hosted the data, and it kept crashing. Why not just buy a cheap drive with an order of magnitude more storage space? Sgt. Dave Burke said, “We don’t just buy stuff from Amazon as you suggested. You have to go to a source, i.e., HP or any reputable source where the city has a contract. And there’s a purchase order that has to be submitted, and there has to be money in the budget. Whatever we put on the system, has to be certified. You don’t just put anything. I think in the beginning of the program, a desktop was appropriate, but now you start increasing the volume of the camera and vehicles, you have to change, otherwise you’re going to drown in the amount of data that’s being stored.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Oakland Changes License Plate Reader Policy After Filling 80GB Hard Drive

Chinese Scientists Discover Structural Basis of Pre-mRNA Splicing

hackingbear writes: On August 21st, the research team led by Prof. Yigong Shi from School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University in China published two side-by-side research articles in Science, reporting the long-sought-after structure of a yeast spliceosome at 3.6 angstrom resolution determined by single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), and the molecular mechanism of pre-messenger RNA splicing. Until now, decades of genetic and biochemical experiments have identified almost all proteins in spliceosome and uncovered some functions. Yet, the structure remained a mystery for a long time. The works, primarily performed by Dr. Chuangye Yan, and Ph.D students Jing Hang and Ruixue Wan under Prof. Yigong Shi’s supervision, settled this Holy Grail question and established the structural basis for the related area. This work was supported by funds from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chinese Scientists Discover Structural Basis of Pre-mRNA Splicing

Lightning Wipes Storage Disks At Google Data Center

An anonymous reader writes: Lightning struck a Google data center in Belgium four times in rapid succession last week, permanently erasing a small amount of users’ data from the cloud. The affected disks were part of Google Computer Engine (GCE), a utility that lets people run virtual computers in the cloud on Google’s servers. Despite the uncontrollable nature of the incident, Google has accepted full responsibility for the blackout and promises to upgrade its data center storage hardware, increasing its resilience against power outages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Lightning Wipes Storage Disks At Google Data Center

Bruce Schneier On Cisco ROMMON Firmware Exploit: "This Is Serious"

When Bruce Schneier says of a security problem “This is serious, ” it makes sense to pay attention to it. And that’s how he refers to a recently disclosed Cisco vulnerability alert about “an evolution in attacks against Cisco IOS Classic platforms. Cisco has observed a limited number of cases where attackers, after gaining administrative or physical access to a Cisco IOS device, replaced the Cisco IOS ROMMON (IOS bootstrap) with a malicious ROMMON image.” Schneier links to Ars Technica’s short description of the attack, whicih notes The significance of the advisory isn’t that the initial firmware can be replaced. As indicated, that’s a standard feature not only with Cisco gear but just about any computing device. What’s important is that attackers are somehow managing to obtain the administrative credentials required to make unauthorized changes that take control of the networking gear. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bruce Schneier On Cisco ROMMON Firmware Exploit: "This Is Serious"

DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity

Vigile writes: The future of graphics APIs lies in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, both built to target GPU hardware at a lower level than previously available. The advantages are better performance, better efficiency on all hardware and more control for the developer that is willing to put in the time and effort to understand the hardware in question. Until today we have only heard or seen theoretical “peak” performance claims of DX12 compared to DX11. PC Perspective just posted an article that uses a pre-beta version of Ashes of the Singularity, an upcoming RTS utilizing the Oxide Games Nitrous engine, to evaluate and compare DX12’s performance claims and gains against DX11. In the story we find five different processor platforms tested with two different GPUs and two different resolutions. Results are interesting and show that DX12 levels the playing field for AMD, with its R9 390X gaining enough ground in DX12 to overcome a significant performance deficit that exists using DX11 to the GTX 980. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DirectX 12 Performance Tested In Ashes of the Singularity

Ask Slashdot: How To "Prove" a Work Is Public Domain?

New submitter eporue writes: YouTube claims that I haven’t been able to prove that I have commercial rights to this video of Superman. They are asking me to submit documentation saying “We need to verify that you are authorized to commercially use all of the visual and audio elements in your video. Please confirm your material is in the public domain.” I submitted a link to the Wikipedia page of the Superman cartoons from the 40s where it explains that the copyright expired, and to the Archive page from where I got it. And still is not enough to “prove” that I have the commercial rights. So, how do you “prove” public domain status ? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ask Slashdot: How To "Prove" a Work Is Public Domain?

Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox

An anonymous reader writes: Firefox’s privacy mode stops your computer from keeping track of where you’ve browsed, but it doesn’t do anything about external tracking. A new feature just rolled out to the Developer Edition and the Aurora channel now actively tries to block online services from tracking you. “Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you’re sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide.” The feature uses a blocklist maintained by Disconnect.me to stop you from navigating to sites known to log your personal data. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox

CNN and CBC Sued For Pirating YouTube Video

vivaoporto sends word that in a rare case of an individual taking on large corporations for copyright infrigement, a New York man has sued news networks CNN and CBC after they took a video of his from YouTube and broadcast it on the air without licensing it. His video shows a winter storm in Buffalo generating huge amounts of lake effect snow. The man, Alfonzo Cutaia, decided to enable monetization on his video, selecting the “Standard YouTube License, ” “a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of [the video]. All other rights are reserved to the copyright owner and standard copyright laws and exceptions apply.” Cutaia says the CBC used his video with their logo on it. The CBC confirmed this, and said they received a 10-day license from CNN, who had no legal right to do so. His lawsuit now accuses them both of “intentional and willful” copyright infringement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CNN and CBC Sued For Pirating YouTube Video

Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries

ckwu writes: The designs of pacemakers, watches, and other wearable gadgets have to be tailored around existing battery shapes, such as cylinders, coin cells, and rectangles. But a team of researchers hopes their fully printable, flexible lithium-ion batteries will one day free designers from these constraints. Battery shapes are now limited because of the need to contain liquid electrolytes. Two years ago, the researchers designed a printable, solid-state electrolyte composed of alumina nanoparticles and lithium combined with polymer that can be cured by ultraviolet light. In this latest work, they used a stencil printing technique to print full battery cells with the electrolyte and other printable materials for the electrodes. They printed batteries on paper and the curved surface of a glass mug. These printed Li-ion batteries can power small LEDs but still need a lot of improvements because they don’t last long before needing recharging. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Printing Flexible Lithium-Ion Batteries