Month: March 2016

(credit: flickr user: 0Four)

Approaches from a number of behavioral sciences can be used to understand human honesty. They’re not bothered with making particular judgements about whether a behavior is good or bad, but rather these approaches focus on understanding why people behave honestly or dishonestly in different situations.

Two economists at the University of Nottingham, Simon Gächter and Jonathan Schulz, have published an intriguing suggestion about the roots of dishonesty: they suggest that a corrupt social environment, rife with political corruption and tax evasion, can trickle down to the individual level and make people in such a country more likely to be dishonest in some contexts. Based on data gathering and behavioral experiments done in 23 countries, they found that people in more corrupt countries were more likely to cheat during an experiment.

The question was why—do national tendencies push the population toward more or less honesty, or do individuals drive the national tendency?

Rice paddies near Bandung, Indonesia. (credit: Onny Carr)

The rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been unrelenting over the past century. But that isn’t the only greenhouse gas humans are adding to the atmosphere, and other have different stories to tell. Methane levels, for example, actually flattened out in the late 1990s, holding pretty steady until continuing an upward climb in 2006. Why, you ask? Well, you aren’t the only one.

(credit: Ed Dlugokencky, NOAA/ESRL)

Methane is a little harder to get a handle on than CO₂, partly because human emissions from things like livestock, rice growing, and landfills are a little harder to track. It's also partly because the natural terms in the global equation are large and erratic. In wetlands, where water-logged, oxygen-poor sediments host methane-exhaling microbes, the amount of methane released varies strongly between wet or dry years. And then there’s the long-term warming of the Arctic, where thawing permafrost can constitute an additional methane source to account for.

Researchers try to determine trends in methane contributions in several ways. You can do your best to monitor individual processes and add up all your estimates. Or, flipping that around, you can interrogate atmospheric measurements to figure out which processes could be responsible for changes. As it happens, methane molecules come with labels that make that easier—different types of methane sources impart different isotopic fingerprints on the carbon in CH₄.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the trapped Michelle with just the right combination of incredibly suspicious, scared, and dangerous. (credit: 10 Cloverfield Lane)

Full of great acting, chills, and dark humor, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a fun confection of an action thriller—but it has nothing to do with the giant monster rampage movie Cloverfield. If you think that's a spoiler, then you've been suckered by a shamefully misleading marketing campaign.

10 Cloverfield Lane producer JJ Abrams has teased this flick by calling it a "blood relative" of Cloverfield. Ad campaigns have suggested it's a sequel or maybe set in the same universe. And if you really squint or bend your mind into pretzels, 10 Cloverfield Lane could be connected to Cloverfield. I mean, it's set on the same planet. It's a scary movie with speculative elements. But by that logic, Fringe is a Cloverfield TV series and Godzilla is a Cloverfield sequel.

The fact is, if this movie had been called 10 Cowabunga Lane, nobody would have wondered, "Wait, is this related to Cloverfield?" And while some will undoubtedly find a way to argue that 10 Cloverfield Lane could in fact be a sequel... c'mon. Occam's Razor, people. This is a movie that got shaped by an ad campaign. Even Abrams has admitted that the Cloverfield tie-in idea struck them about halfway through pre-production on a movie that was supposed to be called The Cellar.

A video posted online is responsible for charges being leveled Wednesday against two Baltimore school cops, one of whom is seen in the brief clip smacking a student in the face and then kicking him in the back.

The video, recorded March 1 by a fellow student at REACH Partnership School, shows an officer yelling at the 16-year-old student to "go the fuck home" and "get the fuck out of here."

Anthony Spence, 44, is accused of second-degree assault and misconduct in office. Another cop, Saverna Bias, 53, is charged with second-degree child abuse. The video shows a second cop, allegedly Bias, standing idly by during the brief beating. The pair have been placed on leave and were released on $50,000 bond Wednesday. Spence's attorney said his client was under the impression that the boy was trespassing before the altercation occurred. The boy, however, was a student at the school in the Clifton Park neighborhood.

A botched security fix released for the Java software framework 30 months ago has left millions of users vulnerable to attacks that Oracle had claimed were no longer possible, a security researcher said.

The bypass code, which was released Thursday by Polish security firm Security Explorations, contains only minor changes to the original proof-of-concept, according to an e-mail posted to the Full Disclosure security list. Security Explorations released the original exploit in October 2013 following the release of a patch from Oracle. Thursday's bypass changes only four characters from the 2013 code and uses a custom server to work. The bypass means that millions of Java users have remained vulnerable to the flaw, categorized as CVE-2013-5838, despite assurances from Oracle that the attacks were no longer possible.

"We implemented a Proof of Concept code that illustrates the impact of the broken fix described above," Security Explorations researchers wrote in a report. "It has been successfully tested in the environment of Java SE Update 97, Java SE 8 Update 74, and Java SE 9 Early Access Build 108. In all cases, a complete Java security sandbox escape could be achieved."

This has been a big week and a big year for small autonomous vehicle startups. This morning, General Motors announced that it had purchased Cruise Automation, a Silicon Valley-based autonomous vehicle startup of 40 people that already has a permit from the California DMV to test its systems on public roads in that state. And on Wednesday, Toyota hired all 16 employees of Jaybridge Robotics, a Massachusetts-based self-driving car company.

In GM’s case, Re/code reports that anonymous sources say the American automaker spent more than $1 billion to acquire Cruise, which will remain in Silicon Valley while it works under GM’s umbrella. Cruise had previously raised $18.8 million in funding, and it recently released a $10,000 after-market system that would make an Audi A4 or S4 self-driving.

GM is hardly being under-the-radar about its self-driving car ambitions. Earlier this year, the automaker pledged $500 million to Lyft to partner with the ride-sharing company in autonomous taxi research. A few weeks later, it also bought the defunct ride-sharing service Sidecar.

Not the message you want from your Web security firm.

A Web security company's systems are offline this morning after an apparent intrusion into the company's network. The servers and routers of Staminus Communications—a Newport Beach, California-based hosting and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection company—went offline at 8am Eastern Time on Thursday in what a representative described in a Twitter post as "a rare event [that] cascaded across multiple routers in a system wide event, making our backbone unavailable."

That "rare event" appears to have been intentional. A data dump of information on Staminus' systems includes customer names and e-mail addresses, database table structures, routing tables, and more. The data was posted to the Internet this morning, and a Staminus customer who wishes to remain anonymous confirmed his data was part of the dump. The authors of the dump claim to have gained control of Staminus' routers and reset them to factory settings.

The dump, in a hacker "e-zine" format, begins with a note from the attacker. Sarcastically titled "TIPS WHEN RUNNING A SECURITY COMPANY," this details the security holes found during the breach:

(credit: Michael Saechang)

If the federal government enacted just three gun-control laws—requiring universal background checks for firearms, background checks for ammunition, and firearm identification—gun deaths could fall by as much as 90 percent according to a new study.

The study, published in the The Lancet, tried to tease apart the independent effects that 25 state gun control laws implemented in various states in 2009 had on firearm related deaths (including homicides and suicides) between 2008 and 2010. The analysis, led by researchers at Boston University, also took into account factors related to gun deaths such as unemployment rates and levels of gun ownership.

However, some skeptics of the study wonder if the limited data of just a few years and correlations are enough to draw definitive links. The authors themselves admit that impacts of gun legislation could take several years to unfold in the statistics. And various other factors influencing gun death rates—such as suicide prevention efforts, law enforcement implementation, and demographics—may also skew the analysis.