The ISS Is a Cesspool of Bacteria and Fungi, Study Finds (gizmodo.com) 151
NASA astronauts took swabs using sterile wipes at eight predefined locations on the ISS, on three different occasions during a 14 month period. The locations included both high and low traffic areas, including the viewing window, toilet, exercise platform, stowage rack, dining table, and sleeping quarters. NASA astronaut Terry Virts performed the first two sampling sessions on March 4, 2015 and then three months later on May 15, 2015. NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams took the third sample a year later on May 6, 2016. The samples were returned to Earth for analysis. The ISS may seem like a cold, sterile place in space, but the analysis showed it's a veritable cornucopia for microbes. The most prolific bacteria, according to culture results, were Staphylococcus (26 percent of total samples), Pantoea (23 percent), Bacillus (11 percent), Staphylococcus aureus (10 percent) and Pantoea conspicua and Pantoea gaviniae (both at 9 percent). The fungal population was primarily comprised of Rhodotorula mucilaginosa. The authors warn that some strains of bacteria could form damaging biological sheets known as biofilms: "[B]iofilm formation on the ISS could decrease infrastructure stability by causing mechanical blockages, reducing heat transfer efficiency, and inducing microbial influenced corrosion..."
London's BT Tower Broadcasted Windows 7 Error Message Over the Weekend (theregister.co.uk) 139
Internet RFC Series Turn 50 (circleid.com) 43
Former Senate Staffer Admits To Doxxing Five Senators On Wikipedia (theverge.com) 91
Cosko struck again a few days later, posting information about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Rand Paul -- who had called for an investigation -- on Wikipedia. He added comments calling himself a "golden god" who had a legal right to post the information, asking readers to "send us bitcoins." When a witness spotted him in Hassan's office the next day, Cosko responded with a threatening email titled "I own EVERYTHING." Cosko claimed he would release private emails, encrypted messages, and the health data and social security numbers for senators' children. "If you tell anyone I will leak it all," he wrote. Cosko was arrested soon after. Attorneys say Cosko could serve up to 57 months in prison, and he's required to give up all the equipment used in the crimes.
'SPURV' Project Brings Windowed Android Apps To Desktop Linux (androidpolice.com) 52
The most interesting part is 'SPURV HWComposer,' which renders Android applications in windows, alongside the windows from native Linux applications. This is what sets SPURV apart from (most) other methods of running Android on a computer. For this to work, the Linux desktop has to be using the Wayland display server (some Linux-based OSes use X11). Pre-built binaries for SPURV are not currently available -- you have to build it yourself from the source code. Still, it's an interesting proof-of-concept, and hopefully someone turns it into a full-featured product.
Elon Musk Continues To Amuse Himself On Twitter, Sharing Song, Duck Emoji (billboard.com) 101
"RIP Harambe" had more than 200,000 plays as of Sunday afternoon.
Some Twitter users left bemused replies, like "Dude, sober up by Thursday's contempt hearing." But the song appears to be part of a longer series of tweets. An anonymous reader writes: On Friday Musk had shared a blank tweet containing nothing but an emoji of a duck with his 25.5 million followers. It drew over 24,000 re-tweets, and 4,300 comments -- far more than the Harambe song (which drew only 14,000 retweets and 1,600 comments.) "Duck emoji FTW," Musk tweeted triumphantly on Sunday, following up on his earlier observation that "Duck emoji defeats Emo G Records. Crushing victory."
In its comments there was also a joke about X.com (the original online banking site Musk launched in 1999, which was eventually merged into PayPal). In 2017 Musk repurchased the domain because "it has great sentimental value" -- but replaced it with an entirely blank page with one lowercase x. In response to the duck emoji, someone tweeted that next Musk needed to update X.com.
Musk promptly replied by tweeting the URL x.com/x -- which (due to the site's error-handling) pulls up a web page with a single lowercase y.
Continuing Progress On Babbage Analytical Engine (plan28.org) 27
These decades, people don't think much of producing a new programming language to suit particular tasks — to "scratch an itch" in the vernacular. As with so many things, Babbage was a pioneer, according to the Plan 28 blog: :
There have already been significant finds. The Notations for Difference Engine 1, dating from 1834, thought to exist, had never come to light. These have now been found and represent a crucial piece in the puzzle of the developmental trajectory of the symbolic language Babbage developed as a design aid, to describe and specify his engine, and used extensively in the development of the Analytical Engine.
RockDoctor adds, "Anyone who has been tasked with taking over a project from someone else (retired, sacked, beheaded, whatever) will recognise this feeling..."
The survey so far has identified mis-titled drawings, single drawings that have two unrelated catalogue entries, and drawings known to exist from earlier scholarly work but not located.
"The hope of the project is to have a working machine in time for Babbages sesquicentenary in 2021."
When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk (ieee.org) 30
This short essay argues that Babbage's creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.
Wikimedia Foundation Joins the World Wide Web Consortium (wikimediafoundation.org) 26
The underlying technologies and standards of the web are a core part of the infrastructure that can facilitate knowledge equity, and so to achieve our vision, we need to participate and collaborate in designing the future of the web. As part of working groups, we will be collaborating directly with other major stakeholders on the web. Through attending meetings, providing feedback, helping with the drafting of standards, and performing some of the technical work necessary to put standards together (as well as participating in the decision-making process of their design), we're going to contribute to shaping a future of the web that helps everyone create and share free knowledge.
Improved Estimates of the Distance To the Large Magellanic Cloud 56
The Arxiv abstract: In the era of precision cosmology, it is essential to empirically determine the Hubble constant with an accuracy of one per cent or better. At present, the uncertainty on this constant is dominated by the uncertainty in the calibration of the Cepheid period — luminosity relationship (also known as Leavitt Law). The Large Magellanic Cloud has traditionally served as the best galaxy with which to calibrate Cepheid period-luminosity relations, and as a result has become the best anchor point for the cosmic distance scale. Eclipsing binary systems composed of late-type stars offer the most precise and accurate way to measure the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud. Currently the limit of the precision attainable with this technique is about two per cent, and is set by the precision of the existing calibrations of the surface brightness — colour relation. Here we report the calibration of the surface brightness-colour relation with a precision of 0.8 per cent. We use this calibration to determine the geometrical distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to 1 per cent based on 20 eclipsing binary systems. The final distane is 49.59 +/- 0.09 (statistical) +/- 0.54 (systematic) kiloparsecs.
In 2013 a team of researchers (including several of the current researchers) published a letter in Nature (2013) which estimated the distance with a precision of two per cent; Arxiv (2013).
Another team of researchers has also posted their recent research on Arxiv (2019) in which they provide a 1% foundation for the determination of the Hubble Constant.
All the links are to abstracts; the full letters to Nature are paywalled, but the Arxiv abstracts have links to PDFs which seem to be complete and accessible.
Pwn2Own Competitors Crack Tesla, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 10 (zdnet.com) 41
Not coincidentally, Team Fluoroacetate also won the three-day contest after earning 36 "Master of Pwn" points for successful exploits in Apple Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, VMware Workstation, and Windows 10... [R]esearchers also exploited vulnerabilities in Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, VMware Workstation, Oracle Virtualbox, and Windows 10.
Four Wikipedias To 'Black Out' Over EU Copyright Directive (wikimediafoundation.org) 49
These independent language communities decided to black out in the same way most decisions are made on Wikipedia -- through discussion and consensus, something summarized in a statement from the German Wikipedia volunteer community: "Each of these independent Wikipedia communities has been engaging in public online discussions as to their course of action, and voting on whether and how to protest. They have done this according to their own rules of governance."
'Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages' (huffpost.com) 103
"Sussman's main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn't work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will. He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there's little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman's arguments. So he usually gets his way."
NBC and Axios confirmed that they hired Sussman, and an Axios spokesperson told HuffPost that the site "hired him to correct factual inaccuracies." The spokesperson added "pretty sure lots of people do this," which may or may not be true.
Sussman's web site argues he's addressing "inaccurate or misleading information...potentially creating severe business problems for its subject," bragging in his FAQ that when he's finished, "the article looks exactly the same" to an outsider -- and that his success rate is 100%.
Musician Creates a Million-Hour Song Based On the Number Pi (vice.com) 65
"When users hit 'play' on the virtual tape deck, the algorithm actually 'performs' the piece," the report says. "This way, the 114-year song can fit in just one gigabyte of space, which is mostly comprised of the digits of Pi. The virtual tape deck was also a solution to a built-in quirk of browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox -- users must click on a webpage to trigger a sound." From start to finish, the song lasts 999,999 hours, "a limitation imposed by only considering the first one billion digits of Pi."
Physicists Reverse Time Using Quantum Computer (phys.org) 95
Quantum physicists from MIPT decided to check if time could spontaneously reverse itself at least for an individual particle and for a tiny fraction of a second. That is, instead of colliding billiard balls, they examined a solitary electron in empty interstellar space. "Suppose the electron is localized when we begin observing it. This means that we're pretty sure about its position in space. The laws of quantum mechanics prevent us from knowing it with absolute precision, but we can outline a small region where the electron is localized," says study co-author Andrey Lebedev from MIPT and ETH Zurich. The physicist explains that the evolution of the electron state is governed by Schrodinger's equation. Although it makes no distinction between the future and the past, the region of space containing the electron will spread out very quickly. That is, the system tends to become more chaotic. The uncertainty of the electron's position is growing. This is analogous to the increasing disorder in a large-scale system -- such as a billiard table -- due to the second law of thermodynamics.
"However, Schrodinger's equation is reversible," adds Valerii Vinokur, a co-author of the paper, from the Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. "Mathematically, it means that under a certain transformation called complex conjugation, the equation will describe a 'smeared' electron localizing back into a small region of space over the same time period." Although this phenomenon is not observed in nature, it could theoretically happen due to a random fluctuation in the cosmic microwave background permeating the universe. The team set out to calculate the probability to observe an electron "smeared out" over a fraction of a second spontaneously localizing into its recent past. It turned out that even across the entire lifetime of the universe -- 13.7 billion years -- observing 10 billion freshly localized electrons every second, the reverse evolution of the particle's state would only happen once. And even then, the electron would travel no more than a mere one ten-billionth of a second into the past. The researchers then attempted to reverse time in a four-stage experiment by observing the state of a quantum computer made of superconducting qubits, instead of an electron. The researchers "found that in 85 percent of the cases, the two-qubit quantum computer returned back into the initial state," reports Phys.Org. "When three qubits were involved, more errors happened, resulting in a roughly 50 percent success rate. According to the authors, these errors are due to imperfections in the actual quantum computer. As more sophisticated devices are designed, the error rate is expected to drop."
Alphabet's Security Start-Up Wants To Offer History Lessons (nytimes.com) 38
The hack on Google, called Operation Aurora, was historic for an unusual reason: It was the first time a Chinese government hacking victim confronted its attacker. Inside the company, Sergey Brin, one of Google's co-founders, made it his personal mission to make sure something like Aurora never happened again. Google, known for its motto "Don't Be Evil," had a new motto about its cybersecurity: "Never again." Google poached cyberexperts from the National Security Agency and Silicon Valley. It built a threat analysis group on a par with those at the top intelligence agencies and designed a new security infrastructure. It also created a new team, called Google Project Zero, to hunt for critical security flaws in technology outside Google. Chronicle was founded by Mike Wiacek, who started Google's threat analysis group after studying threats at the N.S.A., and Stephen Gillett, the former chief information officer at Starbucks and chief operating officer at Symantec.
Netflix Buys Rights To Stream Chinese Sci-Fi Blockbuster 'The Wandering Earth' (npr.org) 214
For China's film industry, the release marks a major milestone. "Filmmakers in China see science fiction as a holy grail," Raymond Zhou, an independent critic, told The New York Times. "It's like the coming-of-age of the industry." Two sci-fi movies, "The Wandering Earth" and "Crazy Alien," which is also inspired by Liu's work, topped this Chinese New Year movie season. Inkoo Kang wrote at Slate that the film "understands what American blockbusters are still loath to admit: Responding to climate change will pose infrastructural challenges on a massive order and require drastic measures on a planetary scale. Perhaps it takes a country like China, which is accustomed to a manic rate of construction and grandness of organizational possibility, to seriously consider how dramatically humanity will have to reimagine our ways of life to survive such a catastrophic force."
YouTube Is Heading For Its Cambridge Analytica Moment (cnbc.com) 100
[T]ech platforms that rely on user-generated content are protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which says platform providers cannot be held liable for material users post on them. It made sense at the time -- the internet was young, and forcing start-ups to monitor their comments sections (remember comments sections?) would have exploded their expenses and stopped growth before it started. Even now, when some of these companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, holding them liable for user-generated content would blow up these companies' business models. They'd disappear, reduce services or have to charge fees for them. Voters might not be happy if Facebook went out of business or they suddenly had to start paying $20 a month to use YouTube. Similarly, advertiser boycotts tend to be short-lived -- advertisers go where they get the best return on their investment, and as long as billions of people keep watching YouTube videos, they'll keep advertising on the platform. So the only way things will change is if users get turned off so badly that they tune out. Following Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, people deleted their accounts, Facebook's growth largely stalled in the U.S., and more young users have abandoned the platform. "YouTube has so far skated free of any similar scandals. But people are paying closer attention than ever before, and it's only a matter of time before the big scandal that actually starts driving users away," writes Rosoff.