Tag: science

Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment can run in Windows

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: “This is one of the coolest tickets I’ve seen on GitHub, ” writes Ubuntu developer Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, adding “this kind of surreal compatibility between platforms is now enabled…the fact that you can execute and use Linux window managers there, without virtual machines, is simply mind-blowing.” “The Windows 10 Anniversary Update coming in August includes an unusual feature aimed at developers: an Ubuntu sub-system that lets you run Linux software using a command-line interface, ” explains Liliputing.com “Preview versions have been available since April, and while Microsoft and Canonical worked together to bring support for the Bash terminal to Windows 10, it didn’t take long for some users to figure out that they could get some desktop Linux apps to run in Windows. Now it looks like you can even load Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment, making windows 10 look like Ubuntu. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment can run in Windows

George Takei Opposes Gay Sulu In ‘Star Trek Beyond’

HughPickens.com writes: Seth Abramovitch reports in the Hollywood Reporter that actor and LGBT activist George Takei says Paramount’s plans to have Sulu’s character in the upcoming ‘Star Trek Beyond’ the first LGBTQ lead character in Star Trek history is out of step with what creator Gene Roddenberry would have wanted. [Roddenberry] “was a strong supporter of LGBT equality, ” says Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Takei says he’d much prefer that Sulu stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character, ” says Takei. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.” The timeline logic of the new revelation is enough to befuddle even the most diehard of Trek enthusiasts, as the rebooted trilogy takes place before the action of the original series. In other words, assuming canon orthodoxy, this storyline suggest Sulu would have had to have first been gay and married, only to then go into the closet years later. Simon Pegg, who has co-written the latest Star Trek movie, as well as starring as Scotty, has responded to criticism by the actor George Takei at the film-makers’ decision to make the character he used to play openly gay. “He’s right, it is unfortunate, it’s unfortunate that the screen version of the most inclusive, tolerant universe in science fiction hasn’t featured an LGBT character until now. We could have introduced a new gay character, but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the ‘gay character, ‘ rather than simply for who they are, and isn’t that tokenism?” says Pegg. “Our Trek is an alternate timeline with alternate details. Whatever magic ingredient determines our sexuality was different for Sulu in our timeline. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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George Takei Opposes Gay Sulu In ‘Star Trek Beyond’

Researchers Discover Over 100 Tor Nodes Designed To Spy On Hidden Services

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Schneier on Security: Two researchers have discovered over 100 Tor nodes that are spying on hidden services. Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing reports: “These nodes — ordinary nodes, not exit nodes — sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over. The researchers used ‘honeypot’ .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions’ existence. They didn’t advertise the honions’ existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits. No one knows who is running the spying nodes: they could be run by criminals, governments, private suppliers of ‘infowar’ weapons to governments, independent researchers, or other scholars (though scholarly research would not normally include attempts to hack the servers once they were discovered).” The Tor project is aware of the attack and is working to redesign its system to try and block it. Security firm Bitdefender has issued an alert about a malicious app called EasyDoc that hands over control of Macs to criminals via Tor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Discover Over 100 Tor Nodes Designed To Spy On Hidden Services

Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Motherboard: An appeals court ruled Wednesday that sharing passwords can be a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a catch-all “hacking” law that has been widely used to prosecute behavior that bears no resemblance to hacking. Motherboard reports: “In this particular instance, the conviction of David Nosal, a former employee of Korn/Ferry International research firm, was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who said that Nosal’s use of a former coworker’s password to access one of the firm’s databases was an ‘unauthorized’ use of a computer system under the CFAA. In the majority opinion, Judge Margaret McKeown wrote that ‘Nosal and various amici spin hypotheticals about the dire consequences of criminalizing password sharing. But these warnings miss the mark in this case. This appeal is not about password sharing.’ She then went on to describe a thoroughly run-of-the-mill password sharing scenario — her argument focuses on the idea that Nosal wasn’t authorized by the company to access the database anymore, so he got a password from a friend — that happens millions of times daily in the United States, leaving little doubt about the thrust of the case. The argument McKeown made is that the employee who shared the password with Nosal ‘had no authority from Korn/Ferry to provide her password to former employees.’ At issue is language in the CFAA that makes it illegal to access a computer system ‘without authorization.’ McKeown said that ‘without authorization’ is ‘an unambiguous, non-technical term that, given its plain and ordinary meaning, means accessing a protected computer without permission.’ The question that legal scholars, groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and dissenting judge Stephen Reinhardt ask is an important one: Authorization from who?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Password Sharing Is a Federal Crime, Appeals Court Rules

This Is the Last Thing Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Saw Before It Died

Earlier this year, Japan launched a groundbreaking black-hole-monitoring satellite—only to lose control of it almost immediately under strange circumstances. Now, we finally can see what Hitomi did right before it died. Read more…

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This Is the Last Thing Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Saw Before It Died

TP-LINK Loses Control of Two Device Configuration Domains

Reader Orome1 writes: Security researcher Amitay Dan warns that tplinklogin.net, a domain through which TP-LINK router owners can configure their devices, is no longer owned by the company, and that this fact could be misused by malware peddlers. TP-LINK has confirmed that they no longer own the domain in question, and will not be trying to buy it from the unknown seller for now. Instead, they intend to change the domain in the manuals to a newer one that’s already in use.ComputerWorld has more details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TP-LINK Loses Control of Two Device Configuration Domains

MRI Software Bugs Could Upend Years Of Research

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register: A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” MRI-based science has been invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data. The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters. When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software. Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives. In this paper at PNAS, they write: “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40, 000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MRI Software Bugs Could Upend Years Of Research

Why World Hunger Is Going to Fall to Its Lowest Levels Ever This Decade

By 2026, there’s going to be a lot less hunger worldwide—and that’s something to celebrate. The reason is not that we’re growing more food, however. Food is just getting cheaper. Read more…

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Why World Hunger Is Going to Fall to Its Lowest Levels Ever This Decade

Regenerative tooth fillings could put an end to root canals

You really don’t want a root canal, and not just because it’s potentially painful. Emptying the tooth of the infected tissue at its heart potentially weakens it, since you can’t grow that organic material back or put toxic fillings in its place. Researchers may have a solution, though. They’ve crafted fillings that get the tooth’s own stem cells to regenerate and repair tissue. This doesn’t mean that your pearly whites would return to normal, but the substance could heal the tooth enough to spare you a root canal or prevent fillings from going south. You’re not going to have this option for a while, but it’s designed to be practical. You can cure the filling with light, so your dentist wouldn’t have to resort to exotic techniques to rescue your teeth. And importantly, it might be less expensive overall — you might not need a cap or crown to reduce the chances that the tooth will break after the surgery. Via: Popular Science , Gizmodo Source: University of Nottingham

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Regenerative tooth fillings could put an end to root canals

This ‘Hourglass’ Liquid Battery Runs on Gravity

Scientists at MIT have designed an ingenious new concept for a battery that operates on the same fundamental principal as an hourglass—it relies on gravity to generate energy. They described the device in a recent paper for Energy and Environmental Science . Read more…

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This ‘Hourglass’ Liquid Battery Runs on Gravity