Tag: science

TripAdvisor Fined In Italy For Fake Reviews

mpicpp writes with news that TripAdvisor, a travel website filled with user-generated reviews, has been hit with a €500, 000 ($611, 000) fine for “misleading customers” by failing to cull fake reviews from their list. “The regulator complained that people reading TripAdvisor Italy were unable to distinguish between genuine and fake reviews posted on the site. It said both were presented by TripAdvisor as ‘authentic and genuine in nature.’ Demanding payment of the fine within 30 days, the ICA also accused the travel company of failing to provide proper checks to weed out bogus postings.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TripAdvisor Fined In Italy For Fake Reviews

Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Zanadou writes On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided but despite the rise of various TPB clones and rumors of reincarnations, thepiratebay.se domain remained inaccessible, until today. This morning the Pirate Bay’s nameservers were updated to ones controlled by their domain name registrar binero.se . A few minutes later came another big change when The Pirate Bay’s main domain started pointing to a new IP-address (178.175.135.122) that is connected to a server hosted in Moldova. So far there is not much to see, just a background video of a waving pirate flag (taken from Isohunt.to) and a counter displaying the time elapsed since the December 9 raid. However, the “AES string” looks promising. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pirate Bay Domain Back Online

Satellite Captures Glowing Plants From Space

sciencehabit writes About 1% of the light that strikes plants is re-emitted as a faint, fluorescent glow—a measure of photosynthetic activity. Today, scientists released a map of this glow as measured by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a NASA satellite launched in July with the goal of mapping the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The map reveals that tropical rainforests near the equator are actively sucking up carbon, while the Corn Belt in the eastern United States, near the end of its growing season, is also a sink. Higher resolution fluorescence mapping could one day be used to help assess crop yields and how they respond to drought and heat in a changing climate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Satellite Captures Glowing Plants From Space

The Pirate Bay Responds To Raid

An anonymous reader writes The Pirate Bay’s crew have remained awfully quiet on the recent raid in public, but today Mr 10100100000 breaks the silence in order to get a message out to the world. In a nutshell, he says that they couldn’t care less, are going to remain on hiatus, and a comeback is possible. In recent days mirrors of The Pirate Bay appeared online and many of these have now started to add new content as well. According to TPB this is a positive development, but people should be wary of scams. Mr 10100100000 says that they would open source the engine of the site, if the code “wouldn’t be so s****y”. In any case, they recommend people keeping the Kopimi spirit alive, as TPB is much more than some hardware stored in a dusty datacenter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Pirate Bay Responds To Raid

IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects the Pirate Bay

An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content. This is much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay; it has a functioning search engine, all the old listings, and working magnet links. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects the Pirate Bay

Loggers didn’t cut down world’s oldest tree—but the real story is better

According to an article in World News Daily Report , loggers in the Amazon have accidentally cut down a 5, 800-year-old Samauma tree, the oldest in the world. Except there is no such tree. This “news” article with 143, 000 Facebook shares is a wholesale fabrication. Read more…

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Loggers didn’t cut down world’s oldest tree—but the real story is better

AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers

MojoKid writes: AMD just dropped its new Catalyst Omega driver package that is the culmination of six months of development work. AMD Catalyst Omega reportedly brings over 20 new features and a wealth of bug fixes to the table, along with performance increases both on AMD Radeon GPUs and integrated AMD APUs. Some of the new functionality includes Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. VSR is “game- and engine-agnostic” and renders content at up to 4K resolution, then displays it at a resolution that your monitor actually supports. AMD says VSR allows for increased image quality, similar in concept to Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Another added perk of VSR is the ability to see more content on the screen at once. To take advantage of VSR, you’ll need a Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, or R9 285 discrete graphics card. Both single- and multi-GPU configurations are currently supported. VSR is essentially AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. In addition, AMD is claiming performance enhancements in a number of top titles with these these new drivers. Reportedly, as little as 6 percent improvement in performance in FIFA Online to as much as a 29 percent increase in Batman: Arkham Origins can be gained when using an AMD 7000-Series APU, for example. On discrete GPUs, an AMD Radeon R9 290X’s performance increases ranged from 8 percent in Grid 2 to roughly 16 percent in Bioshock Infinity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers

Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records of Americans

cold fjord writes: The Weekly Standard reports, “This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to ‘advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.’ … Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015.” Among the many agencies that will be sharing records besides Health and Human Services are: Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison, Department of Labor, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records of Americans

This Artificial Skin Can Feel Pressure, Heat and Dampness

Skin is complicated. Our body’s largest organ senses touch—but also temperature, pain, wetness, itching, and more. A new, stretchy artificial skin can pick up many of the sensations from the real thing, and it could someday cover a lifelike prosthetic hand. Read more…

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This Artificial Skin Can Feel Pressure, Heat and Dampness

Linux 3.18 Released, Lockup Bug Still Present

jones_supa writes As anticipated, Linus Torvalds officially released Linux 3.18. The new version is now out there, though that nasty lockup issue has still yet to be resolved. Dave Jones is nearing the end of bisecting the issue, but since it also affects Linux 3.17 and not too many people seem to get hit by the lockups, Linus Torvalds decided to go ahead and do the 3.18 release on schedule. Linus was also concerned that dragging out the 3.18 release would then complicate the Linux 3.19 merge window due to the holidays later this month. Now the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window is open for two weeks of exciting changes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 3.18 Released, Lockup Bug Still Present