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Submission + - Fauci-funded virus research at Wuhan lab leave no trace of 'human manipulation' (nypost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FBI found it ‘alarming’ that Fauci-funded virus research at Wuhan lab would leave no trace of ‘human manipulation’

The FBI was tipped off in April 2020 to gain-of-function virus research in China, funded by the agency formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, that “would leave no signature of purposeful human manipulation,” emails from agents at the bureau show.

Submission + - Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger Speaks Out (city-journal.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

Larry Sanger remembers the promise of the web. He co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, with the hope that it could sustain a “free and open” Internet—a place where information, dissent, and creativity could thrive.

At Wikipedia, he proposed a system of rules that encouraged users to “avoid bias” and maintain a “neutral point of view.”

That Internet is gone.

Submission + - "David Bray is going on unhinged racist rants on LinkedIn" (campusreform.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “David Bray is going on unhinged racist rants on LinkedIn. Clearly suffering from mental illness and too unstable to be teaching classes.”

  Bray's outspoken LinkedIn posts garnered the attention of conservatives who agreed with him, as well as of campus progressives who saw his sentiments as problematic.

  One former administrator told Campus Reform that he believes that 'the university administration is persecuting Dr. Bray and altering its standard procedures.'

Submission + - The Windows Registry Adventure #1: Introduction and research results (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the 20-month period between May 2022 and December 2023, I thoroughly audited the Windows Registry in search of local privilege escalation bugs.

  The hive binary format is not very well suited for trivial bitflipping-style fuzzing, because it is structurally simple, and random mutations are much more likely to render (parts of) the hive unusable than to trigger any interesting memory safety violations.

  On the other hand, the registry has many properties that make it an attractive attack surface for further research, especially for manual review. It is 30+ years old, written in C, running in kernel space but highly accessible from user-mode, and it implements much more complex logic than I had previously imagined.

Submission + - Protecting Airport Data Privacy & Control from Cyber Threats

Submitted by SeanFaber
SeanFaber writes: This article on aviation cybersecurity strategies is highly informative and thought-provoking. It sheds light on the critical importance of protecting the aviation industry from cyber threats and offers valuable insights into effective security measures. The detailed analysis and expert recommendations make it a must-read for anyone interested in aviation security.

Submission + - Police responded to alarm around time of $30 million L.A. heist, but thieves... (latimes.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Police responded to alarm around time of $30 million Los Angeles heist, but thieves went undetected

The Los Angeles Police Department responded to three separate alarms at GardaWorld’s Sylmar cash storage facility on the day that thieves stole as much $30 million from its vault during the biggest heist in the city’s history.

Despite the officers’ presence at the property in the early hours of Easter Sunday — including around the time it is believed the sophisticated burglary was carried out — the criminals remained undetected, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation of the incident.

During at least one of the responses by a patrol car, GardaWorld was alerted, according to the officials, but the Montreal-based security services company did not register the intrusion.

The Times has previously reported that GardaWorld did not learn of the crime until opening the vault the following day, April 1. It wasn’t until then, officials said, that LAPD investigators were notified that a substantial amount of money had been taken.

Click to read more

Submission + - Police responded to alarm around time of $30 million L.A. heist, but thieves... (latimes.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Police responded to alarm around time of $30 million L.A. heist, but thieves were undetected

The Los Angeles Police Department responded to three separate alarms at GardaWorld’s Sylmar cash storage facility on the day that thieves stole as much $30 million from its vault during the biggest heist in the city’s history.

Despite the officers’ presence at the property in the early hours of Easter Sunday — including around the time it is believed the sophisticated burglary was carried out — the criminals remained undetected, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation of the incident.

During at least one of the responses by a patrol car, GardaWorld was alerted, according to the officials, but the Montreal-based security services company did not register the intrusion.

The Times has previously reported that GardaWorld did not learn of the crime until opening the vault the following day, April 1. It wasn’t until then, officials said, that LAPD investigators were notified that a substantial amount of money had been taken.

Click to read more

Submission + - Ocean Spray Emits More PFAS Than Industrial Polluters, Study Finds (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines. The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water. The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author. “There is evidence that the ocean can be an important source [of PFAS air emissions],” Cousins said. “It is definitely impacting the coastline.”

The Stockholm researchers several years ago found that PFAS from ocean waves crashing are released into the air around shorelines, then can travel thousands of kilometers through the atmosphere before the chemicals return to land. The new research looked at levels in the sea spray as waves crash by testing ocean samples between Southampton in the UK and Chile. The chemicals’ levels were higher in the northern hemisphere in general because it is more industrialized and there is not much mixing of water across the equator, Cousins said. It is unclear what the findings mean for human exposure. Inhalation of PFAS is an issue, but how much of the chemicals are breathed in, and air concentrations further from the waves, is still unknown.

Submission + - Dutch Privacy Watchdog Recommends Government Organizations Stop Using Facebook (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Dutch privacy watchdog AP on Friday said it was recommending that government organizations should stop using Facebook as long as it is unclear what happens with personal data of users of the government's Facebook pages. "People that visit a government's page need to be able to trust that their personal and sensitive data is in safe hands," AP chairman Aleid Wolfsen said in a statement. Junior minister for digitalization Alexandra van Huffelen said Facebook parent company Meta had to make clear before the summer how it could take away the government's concerns on the safety of data. "Otherwise we will be forced to stop using Facebook, in line with this advice," she said.

Submission + - A Chess Formula Is Taking Over the World (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard’s online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students’ headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash—and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world’s dominant social-media empire—was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system.

Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win. That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports—soccer, football, basketball—and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating. [...]

Elo ratings don’t inherently have anything to do with chess. They’re based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition—which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams—a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver’s 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system’s shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game. Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game.

Submission + - Propellantless propulsion drive just produced enough thrust to counter gravity (thedebrief.org)

Submitted by garyisabusyguy
garyisabusyguy writes: Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.

“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”

“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years until the next thing comes.”

Submission + - IMF sounds alarm on ballooning US national debt: 'Something will have to give

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

Under current policies, public debt in the U.S. is projected to nearly double by 2053. The IMF identified “large fiscal slippages” in the U.S. in 2023, with government spending surpassing revenue by 8.8% of GDP – a 4.1% increase from the previous year, despite strong economic growth.

If this trend continues, the Congressional Budget Office anticipates the national debt will grow to an astonishing $54 trillion in the next decade. Higher interest rates are also compounding the pain of higher debt.

Should that debt materialize, it could risk America’s economic standing in the world.

The IMF is talking down to Washington like we’re a Third World country because that’s the direction Washington is taking us.

Interest payments alone on the current debt is $1.6T/year.

Submission + - British Columbia bans autonomous cars

Submitted by Baloo Uriza
Baloo Uriza writes: In a rare display of sanity in the automotive space, British Columbia has banned autonomous cars from its highways, after years of watching autonomous cars hamper emergency response efforts in California and outright kill a pedestrian in Arizona. Let's hope this regulatory trend continues, and moves into the human space by pulling licenses of drivers with a known history of poor driving.

Submission + - FBI says Chinese hackers preparing to attack US infrastructure (reuters.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting "for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday.

An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at
Vanderbilt University.

China is developing the "ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing," Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. "Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic."

Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China's broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China's sovereignty claims and says only the island's people can decide their future.

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