We’ve got the genome of the closest living relative to bilaterians.
Enlarge/ Some of the gutless worms (orange) cover a coral. (credit: Samuel Chow )
In the movies, regeneration is the stuff of superheroes like Deadpool, who regrew the lower half of his body through some seriously awkward transitional scenes. Here in reality, regeneration is run of the mill, with lizards and amphibians regrowing limbs and tails while various worms are able to regrow half their entire body. How they manage this has been the subject of extensive study, and we have a fair idea of some of the genes and processes involved. But it's fair to say we don't have a strong idea of how the whole process is coordinated and directed to form all of the needed tissues.
A step in that direction comes from a recent study that takes a strange angle on regeneration. To understand the process, the authors sequenced the genome of a worm that can regenerate into two full organisms after being cut in half. But the worm also happens to be part of a group that contains the closest living relatives of bilateral animals—those with a left and right side. As such, it could provide a fascinating perspective on our own evolution, but it's something the researchers choose to ignore in this paper.
Xena coelo what a?
Most of the animals we're familiar with are bilaterals, which have a left and right side. That includes some creatures (like sea urchins) where the two sides aren't all that obvious. These bilateral animals also start out early in their development as three layers of cells: an outer layer that forms the skin and neural tissue; a central one that forms internal structures like muscles and bone; and an inner layer that goes on to form the lining of the gut.
Texas-based Internet provider Grande Communications has no right to a safe harbor defense in its case against several RIAA backed record labels. The ruling from the Texan federal court puts the ISP at a severe disadvantage for the upcoming trial, where it’s accused of being liable for copyright infringements allegedly committed by its users.
Regular Internet providers are being put under increasing pressure for not doing enough to curb copyright infringement.
Music rights company BMG got the ball rolling a few years ago when it won its piracy liability lawsuit against Cox.
Following on the heels of this case, several major record labels including Capitol Records, Warner Bros, and Sony Music, filed a lawsuit in a Texas District Court. Helped by the RIAA, they sued ISP Grande Communications for allegedly turning a blind eye to its pirating subscribers.
The labels argued that the Internet provider knew that some of its subscribers were frequently distributing copyrighted material, but failed to take any meaningful action in response. For example, it didn’t have a proper policy in place to deal with persistent pirates.
In order to enjoy safe harbor protection, the DMCA requires ISPs to adopt and reasonably implement a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat copyright infringers. According to the labels, it is clear that Grande failed to do so.
Last year, the record labels moved for summary judgment on this safe harbor protection defense, ahead of the trial. This is a crucial issue, as the ISP can be held directly liable without a safe harbor defense.
A few days ago, Senior US District Court Judge David Ezra ruled on the request, siding with the record labels. The decision follows the report and recommendations from US Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin, but Judge Ezra conducted a fresh review of several contested issues.
According to Judge Ezra, it is clear that Grande Communications is not entitled to a safe harbor defense. The evidence, including comments from the ISP’s own employees, clearly shows that it hasn’t adopted and reasonably implemented a repeat infringer policy.
“In this case, the evidence is clear that from at least 2011 until 2016 Grande had no internal policy or procedures whatsoever to enforce their forward-facing statement that they would terminate customers for repeat infringements,” the order reads.
Grande terminated subscribers before October 2010 but stopped doing so for the six-and-a-half year period that followed. The ISP argued that it had a public-facing policy under which it could take action, but this wasn’t actively enforced, evidence shows.
“In internal emails, one Grande employee even stated that ‘we have users who are racking up DMCA take down requests and no process for remedy in place’,” the order reads.
“Moreover, to be eligible for the DMCA safe harbor, an ISP must ‘reasonably implement’ a termination policy, not just adopt one,” Judge Ezra adds.
Grande didn’t terminate any subscribers between October 2010 and May 2017. This, despite receiving over a million copyright infringement notices, and tracking over 9,000 customers in its DMCA “Excessive Violations Report.”
The court states that this “utter failure to terminate any customers at all over a six-and-a-half-year period,” shows that the ISP made every effort to “avoid reasonably implementing” a repeat infringer policy.
Terminations eventually started again in 2017, two months after this lawsuit was filed.
Utter failure
The record labels made several comparisons between Grande and the ISP Cox Communications, which also lost its safe harbor defense in a similar case. Grande contested that this argument doesn’t hold, as Cox actually failed to enforce its specific policy.
However, Judge Ezra counters that Cox at least had internal procedures that in theory could lead to the termination of a customer. Grande failed to implement a proper policy to begin with.
“Grande thus did even less than Cox to ‘reasonably implement’ the kind of policy required for the protections of DMCA’s safe harbor,” Judge Ezra writes.
“If lax enforcement and frequent circumvention of existent procedures disqualifies a defendant from the safe harbor’s protections, the complete nonexistence of such procedures surely must do likewise,” the order adds.
In its defense, the ISP also raised serious concerns about the reliability of Rightscorp’s piracy notices. Grande said that there are critical flaws in the Rightscorp system based. As such, terminating the Internet access of any subscriber based on this info may not have been right.
Judge Ezra waved away this argument as well, highlighting that there were hundreds of thousands of notices from other companies, which the company didn’t act on either.
“Even if the Court were to accept Grande’s arguments related to the Rightscorp notices, the summary judgment evidence shows that Grande failed to terminate a single customer despite the receipt of several hundred thousand other copyright infringement notices,” Judge Ezra writes.
The result is that the court has adopted the recommendations from the Magistrate Judge, granting summary judgment in favor of the record labels. As a result, Grande will go to trial without a safe harbor defense. This means that it can be held directly liable for the pirating activity of its users.
This is a major setback, and there is more bad news for the ISP.
Grande requested summary judgment in its favor on a variety of liability issues, including direct infringement, willfulness, damages, and ownership of copyright. These were all denied, as recommended, except for two limited issues regarding the alleged violation of reproduction or public performance rights.
The RIAA labels also submitted a cross-motion on these liability issues, requesting a ruling in their favor, but that was denied as well. This means that those matters will be decided at trial.
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A copy of Judge Ezra’s order adopting the report and recommendations is available here (pdf).
Mirai, the virulent Internet of Things malware that delivered record-setting denial-of-service attacks in 2016, has been updated to target a new crop of devices, including two found inside enterprise networks, where bandwidth is often plentiful, researchers said on Monday.
The malware infects webcams, routers, DVRs, and other Internet-connected devices, which typically ship with default credentials and run woefully outdated versions of Linux that are rarely, if ever, updated. The rapidly-spreading Mirai first made a name for itself in 2016, when it helped achieve record-setting DDoS attacks against KrebsOnSecurity and French Web host OVH.
A newly discovered variant contains a total of 27 exploits, 11 of which are new to Mirai, researchers with security firm Palo Alto Networks reported in a blog post Monday. Besides demonstrating an attempt to reinvigorate Mirai’s place among powerful botnets, the new exploits signal an attempt to penetrate an arena that's largely new to Mirai. One of the 11 new exploits targets the WePresent WiPG-1000 Wireless Presentation systems and another exploit targets LG Supersign TVs. Both of these devices are intended for use by businesses, which typically have networks that offer larger amounts of bandwidth than Mirai’s more traditional target of home consumers.
One of the more notable features of Google Project Zero's (GPZ) security research has been its 90-day disclosure policy. In general, vendors are given 90 days to address issues found by GPZ, after which the flaws will be publicly disclosed. But sometimes understanding a flaw and developing fixes for it takes longer than 90 days—sometimes, much longer, such as when a new class of vulnerability is found. That's what happened last year with the Spectre and Meltdown processor issues, and it has happened again with a new Windows issue.
Google researcher James Forshaw first grasped that there might be a problem a couple of years ago when he was investigating the exploitability of another Windows issue published three years ago. In so doing, he discovered the complicated way in which Windows performs permissions checks when opening files or other secured objects. A closer look at the involved parts showed that there were all the basic elements to create a significant elevation of privilege attack, enabling any user program to open any file on the system, regardless of whether the user should have permission to do so. The big question was, could these elements be assembled in just the right way to cause a problem, or would good fortune render the issue merely theoretical?
The basic rule is simple enough: when a request to open a file is being made from user mode, the system should check that the user running the application that's trying to open the file has permission to access the file. The system does this by examining the file's access control list (ACL) and comparing it to the user's user ID and group memberships. However, if the request is being made from kernel mode, the permissions checks should be skipped. That's because the kernel in general needs free and unfettered access to every file.
The first “truly wireless” earbuds started to hit the streets a few years ago. And they were expensive. Samsung’s Gear IconX earbuds sold for $200 at launch. Apple’s AirPods sold for $159 at launch… and they still do. Over…
The first “truly wireless” earbuds started to hit the streets a few years ago. And they were expensive. Samsung’s Gear IconX earbuds sold for $200 at launch. Apple’s AirPods sold for $159 at launch… and they still do. Over the past year or so, we’ve seen a number of cheaper options… but Chinese company Xiaomi […]
User uploads corrupted in server migration, and Myspace seemingly has no backups.
Enlarge/ Myspace's music player. (credit: Myspace)
Myspace has apparently lost most or all of the music files uploaded by its users before 2015, and it told users that the data was corrupted beyond repair during a server migration. Myspace apparently admitted the problem to concerned users seven or eight months ago, but so few people noticed that there wasn't any news coverage until the past 24 hours.
Myspace, the once-mighty social networking site, has existed since 2003 but has been fading into obscurity for the past decade. Many musicians used to rely on Myspace to spread their music, and over the years it hosted 53 million songs from 14.2 million artists.
Some of Myspace's loyal users noticed more than a year ago that they couldn't play music or download music files and asked Myspace for answers. Myspace initially told those users that it would recover the lost data, but months later it admitted that the files were gone forever.
Der Staat will dort 5G aufbauen, wo es sich für Konzerne nicht lohnt. Mit Steuergeldern sollen nach Ansicht der Fraktion die Linke die Funklöcher gestopft werden, mit denen die Mobilfunkbetreiber nicht genug Geld verdienen können. (Mobilfunk, Telekom)
Der Staat will dort 5G aufbauen, wo es sich für Konzerne nicht lohnt. Mit Steuergeldern sollen nach Ansicht der Fraktion die Linke die Funklöcher gestopft werden, mit denen die Mobilfunkbetreiber nicht genug Geld verdienen können. (Mobilfunk, Telekom)
Rakuten is holding a site-wide sale today, which means you can save 15 percent off the price of almost anything the retailer sells (for up to $60 in total savings). Just apply the coupon code SAVE15 at checkout. For example, you can pick up an Amazon F…
Rakuten is holding a site-wide sale today, which means you can save 15 percent off the price of almost anything the retailer sells (for up to $60 in total savings). Just apply the coupon code SAVE15 at checkout. For example, you can pick up an Amazon Fire 7 tablet for $40, a Lenovo 8″ Smart […]
“I don’t trust some computer to drive me around,” Trump reportedly said.
Enlarge/ President Donald Trump, as seen on January 27, 2017 in Arlington, Virginia. (credit: Pool Photo/Getty Images)
Donald Trump's choice to lead the Department of Transportation, Elaine Chao, has worked hard to avoid placing regulatory barriers in the way of self-driving cars. But Chao's boss is a driverless car skeptic, Axios reports.
One Axios source had a conversation with Trump in 2017 where he mentioned owning a Tesla with Autopilot technology. According to the source, Trump "was like, 'Yeah that's cool but I would never get in a self-driving car... I don't trust some computer to drive me around.'"
On another occasion, Trump reportedly said, "Can you imagine, you're sitting in the back seat and all of a sudden this car is zig-zagging around the corner and you can't stop the f---ing thing?"
In Kooperation mit einem Lieferdienst bringt Epson neue Tintenpatronen bis vor die Haustür, wenn eine Farbe ausgeht. Der Dienst erfordert kein Abo, umfasst aber ausschließlich die meist teureren Originalpatronen. (Epson, Drucker)
In Kooperation mit einem Lieferdienst bringt Epson neue Tintenpatronen bis vor die Haustür, wenn eine Farbe ausgeht. Der Dienst erfordert kein Abo, umfasst aber ausschließlich die meist teureren Originalpatronen. (Epson, Drucker)
Der Staat will dort 5G aufbauen, wo es sich für Konzerne nicht lohnt. Mit Steuergeldern sollen nach Ansicht der Fraktion die Linke die Funklöcher gestopft werden, mit denen die Mobilfunkbetreiber nicht genug Geld verdienen können. (
In Kooperation mit einem Lieferdienst bringt Epson neue Tintenpatronen bis vor die Haustür, wenn eine Farbe ausgeht. Der Dienst erfordert kein Abo, umfasst aber ausschließlich die meist teureren Originalpatronen. (
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