Bacteria Are Already Making the Best HIV Treatment in Nature. Image: scimag.org After three decades in the HIV/AIDS research trenches, it sounds like a cruel tease. A long slow slog, littered with many millions of bodies, and there it is: the answer. But this is what researchers at the Salk Institute are currently chasing.
By “hacking” the extremely powerful and well-attuned immune responses offered by bacteria against viral infection, it may be possible to wield something like “cellular scissors” against HIV. The Salk group, led by biochemist Hsin-Kai (Ken) Liao, describes their most recent efforts in the current issue of Nature Communications. “To combat hostile viruses, bacteria and archaea [nonbacterial single-celled microbes] have evolved a unique antiviral defense system composed of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs), together with CRISPR-associated genes (Cas),” the paper explains.
To be sure, Liano and his group’s work is not alone. The effect is of “editing out” HIV from the human genome. O “fim do Brasil” ficou mais perto para quem acreditou na “Empiricus” The Closest Thing to a Map of the Dark Net: Pastebin. The vast majority of hidden service websites (that is, the ones you need Tor to get to) have to walk a fine line. They want to remain somewhat hidden, but not so hidden that no one can actually find them. Therefore, there is evidence of how to find deep web sites littered all over the public, or "clear" internet. Staffan Truvé, CEO of Recorded Future, a Sweden-based cyber threat research company, has tracked down where users talk about the dark web and direct each other to specific hidden sites in an attempt to visualize what it looks like.
In fact, the company is persistently monitoring many parts of the dark web. "Some people are over mystifying the dark web. "We capture everything that's posted on paste sites" Recorded Future scrapes everything posted on Pastebin and other "paste" sites, which are sites where plaintext can be posted anonymously. "If you're in this business to sell something, well, you need to advertise it somewhere," he said. "We just ignore that content," he said. Smart-Cities Look to Fix Japan's Broken-Up Grid with Microgrids. Grids make sense. They really do. The notion, popular enough among techno-libertarian types, that every single power-consuming unit (house, factory, bunker) might be better off generating its own power off-the-grid is mostly absurd.
Some things make sense (are more efficient) to do together, particularly when those things are more or less consumed in the same ways by basically everyone. Like electricity. But maybe there's something in between. Enter microgrids. As detailed on IEEE Spectrum's grid blog, post-Fukushima Japan has seen a boom in the development of relatively small-scale localized grids. Image: Toyota The result of a 2013 partnership between the car manufacturer's In emergency situations, supply electricity to the neighboring community area covering the Ohira village office, which A partnership between Honda and the Japanese homebuilder Japan has a partitioned grid. The Net Neutrality Fight Is Already Over and Regular People Won. The answer, in the short term, is "probably. " Many people around the United States are still stuck with the “choice” between a big cable company and a big phone company, both of which are champing at the bit to start some sort of metered system.
The prospect of a Comcast-Time Warner merger doesn’t make things look any better, from that standpoint. But market forces and consumer expectations of unfettered internet access appear to be pushing the industry in a net neutral direction. In the long term, it's looking more and more like fast lanes are a loser, big telecom's stranglehold on the industry is loosening, and consumers are simply unwilling to deal with their crap any longer. "All of these issues are symptoms of a not adequately competitive marketplace" For a good while there, it was looking like big telecom's monopolistic hold on infrastructure would make the net neutrality decision a defining moment for the future of the internet. The Army Just Open-Sourced Its Security Software How Elon Musk Is Like a 19th Century Railroad Baron. Elon Musk got on a podium somewhere But then, Musk went and said he’s going to put an array of low-orbiting satellites into space and start offering low-cost internet to everyone, with a $1 billion cash influx from Google.
Which kind of begs the question: What, exactly, is Elon Musk’s long-term plan for SpaceX? Here’s why: Musk, through SpaceX, is hellbent on creating reusable rockets, a feat that has never been matched before in spaceflight history. It’s something that no one else is seriously trying, except for Virgin Galactic. The difference here is that Virgin’s spaceplane can’t take a satellite, or much of anything besides two humans, to space. Musk’s rockets can take satellites and heavier cargo loads to space. And when he can do it for 100 times cheaper than anyone else, that makes him an incredibly powerful person. Rather than laugh, he finishes my sentence for me—we'll fly to the SpaceX colony, and eat SpaceX food.
You see where this is going. “Oh, definitely. With Microsoft's New Holographic Computer Goggles, You'll Never Unplug Again. Windows 10 event HoloLens What Microsoft's Alex Kipman, inventor of the Xbox Kinect, created is a computer that blends virtual and analogue worlds. Like augmented reality (AR), and the mysterious Magic Leap (which would project an AR directly onto users' eyes), HoloLens maps its holographic visuals onto everything from walls and desks to a room's empty space. The company claims it also tracks users hands with its camera, allowing them to manipulate virtual objects. To hear Microsoft tell it, untethered and free from wires, phones, or connection to a PC, users will be able to walk, run or sit, staring off into space checking email, reading, Skyping, or doing something as mundane as making dinner reservations.
Put more simply, you'll always be jacked in, or as much as possible anyway. If this vision of an always connected world isn't clear enough already, just watch the HoloLens videos. Microsoft sees users wearing it at work and home. Welcome To The Maker-Industrial Revolution. A Startup Offering Gigabit Fiber Is Expanding to a Second Comcast-Dominated City. Revealed plans "We want to blow this thing up, and we want disruptive services at disruptive pricing," Robert Wack, Westminster's city council president, told me. "We've got Comcast and its usual suite of services, Verizon DSL, with its patchy service areas, and dish and satellite services.
Nobody is happy with any of it, and none of it has the capacity we need to take this city into the future. " So, two and a half years ago, the town of 20,000 people—located about an hour north of Baltimore and an hour-and-a-half north of Washington, DC—began looking into building its own fiber network. But, instead of operating the network itself, the town is going to lease that network to Ting, which is owned by a company that made its name selling domain names in the late 1990s. they've recently been running around town trying to lock people into long term contracts The emergence of Ting and companies like it might suggest that Jasper's vision is coming closer to becoming a reality.
TALE OF FAIL: Microsoft offers blow-by-blow Azure outage account. Microsoft has published a full, frank, and ugly account of just what went wrong when Azure Storage entered Total Inability To Support Usual Performance – TITSUP - mode in November. The nub of the problem was that Azure's update procedures and code had “... a gap in the deployment tooling that relied on human decisions and protocol.” At the time of the incident, Microsoft said it was caused by “... an issue that resulted in storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop, which had gone undetected during fighting (testing).” Microsoft says its flighting process works like this: “There are two types of Azure Storage deployments: software deployments (i.e. publishing code) and configuration deployments (i.e. change settings).
Both software and configuration deployments require multiple stages of validation and are incrementally deployed to the Azure infrastructure in small batches. This progressive deployment approach is called ‘flighting.’ Microsoft's being very open about this issue. Cuba Is Getting the Internet. The reopening of diplomatic relations with Cuba means the people of the small Caribbean island are likely to finally get internet access that's on par with the rest of the world. Today, President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced that the two countries, which have had no formal relations since the early 1960s, will begin normalizing relations. Though the repeal of the United States' longstanding trade embargo will require Congressional action, Obama said he will use executive orders to ease restrictions on travel and banking.
The United States will also open an embassy in Havana. What's this all have to do with the internet there? Well, the submarine cable system that connects much of the world with fiber optics has basically bypassed Cuba. Instead, the country has been relying on extremely old and slow satellite technology to give its people (limited and censored) internet access. Obama specifically said he will allow American telecom companies to work with Cuba. 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World. After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands.
The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but... " It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed? " We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth. But police are not a permanent fixture in society. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. The decriminalization of almost every crime What is considered criminal is something too often debated only in critical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Community patrols. The Only Truly Intimate Online Experience Left. Bruce Schneier: Sony Hackers 'Completely Owned This Company'
The Sony hack is “every CEO’s worst nightmare” and the leaked data is probably going to send someone to jail, expert Bruce Schneier says. That, not any threat of violence, is the real power of this hack. The “Guardians of Peace,” as the group behind the attack has called itself, posted a new dump of emails today, this time from CEO Michael Lynton. The hackers also issued a warning implying that any theater screening the political comedy The Interview, which is about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, could be the target of a physical attack as well. “Soon all the world will see what an awful movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of fear,” a message posted on PasteBin alongside links to Lynton’s leaked emails said. “Remember the 11th of September 2001.” So who is behind this mess? And it’s a narrative that both sides are happy to embrace, Schneier speculated in an interview with me.
This is like Snowden, only with Sony. Debandada de jornalistas na lendária revista - Reproduzido do El País, 7/12/2014; título original “Debandada de jornalistas na lendária revista ‘The New Republic’”, intertítulo do OI | Observatório da Imprensa | Observatório da Imprensa - Você nunca mais. Billions of Nodes and Nerds: Making Us One With Everything. Keoni101/Flickr As if Big Data wasn’t big enough, the tech world has picked a new, even bigger buzzword to fuel wild fantasies. This time about connecting everything with everyone and everything else. The newest hype is called the “Internet of Things.”
Experts hatch plans to instrument the planet, Google recently sunk billions into buying Nest and Dropcam, and the lines between media companies, hardware manufacturers and software houses are becoming blurred beyond recognition as the cloud fills with more and more data in all kinds of formats. (See a sampling of expectations.) Perhaps the IoT will bring the great convergence we have been promised for so long — the day when every device and sensor is sending data to anything or any person who is listening. Hold that thought for a moment and ask yourself who can listen in the full sense of the word. Therein lies the biggest challenge the IoT poses: start making sense of data. Beyond systems we also need to prepare ourselves as humans.
Net Neutrality: Ford, UPS, Visa, and BofA Lobby FCC in Secret. The corporate battle lines over the new federal rules for the Internet have been well established. Vocal technology startups have been leading the charge for muscular regulations for broadband access, and Internet service providers including Comcast (CMCSA) and Verizon (VZ) have been arguing loudly for more flexibility. Blue chip companies without obvious tech interests have kept a lower profile.
But a corporate alliance with subtle interests in this fight has been quietly pushing the Federal Communications Commission for strict broadband rules. In a series of meetings this year attended by representatives from Ford Motor (F), Visa (V), United Parcel Service (UPS), and Bank of America (BAC), participants urged FCC commissioners to reclassify broadband service under Title II, according to documents filed with the FCC. That places some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies firmly on one side of the net neutrality debate, advocating for Internet access to be regulated like public utilities. An Art of Air and Fire: Brazil’s Renegade Balloonists—Vol. 2, No. 4—The Appendix. Imagine waking up early on Sunday morning to the sound of loud explosions. Growing up in São Paulo in the 1990s, these explosions were often my weekend alarm clock. But the rude awakening was not at all reason for distress—rather, it was reason for joy and excitement.
I would jump out of bed and run to the backyard, usually bumping into my older brothers, who were doing the same. The strange succession of bursts and explosions, we knew, could only mean one thing: balloons! Soon we would be sitting on the fence, in our pajamas, scanning the sky for huge balloons—preferably with grandpa’s old binoculars—for a closer inspection. The alarm clocks were easy to spot: balloons carrying enormous racks full of hundreds of fireworks of all sorts. They left huge trails of smoke in the sky, continuing their pyrotechnic displays sometimes for half an hour. Balloon with fireworks flying in São Paulo.
My favorites were the night balloons. Such celebrations have persisted in contemporary Brazil. In Bjørndalen, Norway, a Small Cabin Enjoys Some of the World's Fastest Internet. Mapping the internet | nicolasrapp.com. A Futurist on Why Lawyers Will Start Becoming Obsolete This Year | Underwire. Photo: Do-Ming Lum Karl Schroeder is one of the best of the current generation of hard science fiction writers. He’s also an accomplished futurist who works for the design firm Idea Couture. In his new novel Lockstep, he presents the idea of a civilization that uses synchronized cryonics to maintain a thriving interplanetary society without the need for faster-than-light travel. This far future civilization has also replaced their entire legal system with all-knowing AIs. But we won’t have to wait thousands of years for technology to start replacing lawyers. “We’re headed there in about six months in terms of contract law,” says Karl Schroeder in Episode 106 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
“So if I’m claiming in Lockstep that at some point legal apparatus might be replaced by computerized systems, I’m only barely avoiding being out of date.” Schroeder points to efforts like the Ethereum project, which uses block chains—the technology behind bitcoin—to create smart contracts. Surprise, surprise: my online metadata actually reveals where I’ve been.
Inside the Shadowy World of Data Brokers. When using open source makes you an enemy of the state | Technology. Amazon and Google Could Fix Everything Wrong With Game Consoles | Wired Business. NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls. Facebook’s DeepFace Project Nears Human Accuracy In Identifying Faces. Out in the Open: Raise Your Own Edible Insects With This Free Kit | Wired Enterprise. NSA Spinoff Sqrrl Is Commercializing Big Data Software. A 10-Point Plan to Keep the NSA Out of Our Data | Threat Level. Evgeny Morozov: Hackers, Makers, and the Next Industrial Revolution.