Month: March 2020

How alternative Egyptology and scientific archaeology were born on the Giza Plateau

The analog world still has plenty of wonders in this excerpt from The Analog Antiquarian.

  • A camel in front of the Great Pyramids of Giza near Cairo, Egypt in modern times. [credit: Visions of America / Getty Images ]

In the nineteenth century, a rift opened in the study of Egyptology. Early on, men like Giovanni Caviglia and Howard Vyse, full of metaphysical notions about Egyptian civilization that were drawn from the Bible and various mystical texts, could still have their work taken seriously by the international community of scholars. Later in the century, though, as men like Samuel Birch, Karl Richard Lepsius, and Auguste Mariette moved toward a more empirical understanding of ancient Egypt, that became less and less the case.

Thus began a conflict that remains with us to this day, between the “mainstream” or “respectable” branches of Egyptology and what a steadfastly neutral observer might refer to as “alternative Egyptology”; respectable Egyptologists, for their part, tend to prefer terms like “the pyramidiots.” Here's how the battle began.

The publisher

The founding text of this alternative Egyptology was published the very same year as On the Origin of Species. It was called The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built and Who Built It? by John Taylor. Even in 1859, most sober-minded Egyptologists thought they had already done a pretty good job of answering those questions. But Taylor, needless to say, begged to differ.

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High-stakes security setups are making remote work impossible

Some staffers at power grids, intelligence agencies, and more can’t work from home

High-stakes security setups are making remote work impossible

It's a rule of thumb in cybersecurity that the more sensitive your system, the less you want it to touch the internet. But as the US hunkers down to limit the spread of Covid-19, cybersecurity measures present a difficult technical challenge to working remotely for employees at critical infrastructure, intelligence agencies, and anywhere else with high-security networks. In some cases, working from home isn't an option at all.

Companies with especially sensitive data or operations often limit remote connections, segment networks to limit a hacker's access if they do get in, and sometimes even disconnect their most important machines from the internet altogether. Late last week, the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory to critical infrastructure companies to prepare for remote work scenarios as Covid-19 spreads. That means checking that their virtual private networks are patched, implementing multifactor authentication, and testing out remote access scenarios.

But cybersecurity consultants who actually work with those high-stakes clients—including electric utilities, oil and gas firms, and manufacturing companies—say that it's not always so simple. For many of their most critical customers, and even more so for intelligence agencies, remote work and security don't mix.

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‘Pirate’ iTunes Download Site and Three Others Targeted By the RIAA

The RIAA has obtained a DMCA subpoena against Cloudflare in an effort to unmask the operators of several ‘pirate’ music platforms including one offering iTunes content. The subpoena requires the CDN company to hand over names, addresses and account information of people allegedly behind infringement of tracks by Justin Timberlake, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Selena Gomez and more.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Despite the fact that most modern music is readily available for free on ad-supported platforms such as YouTube and Spotify, a thriving market for pirated content remains.

While streaming is convenient and mostly cheap, part of the lure of pirate sites is that music can be downloaded to users’ machines, to be played back whenever they like, with or without an Internet connection and associated costs.

The threat from unlicensed sources is actively countered by groups such as the RIAA, which is regularly seen targeting so-called YouTube-downloader sites via legal action and DMCA anti-circumvention notices. However, there are also efforts to identify the people behind these sites and the weapon of choice in that respect appears to be the DMCA subpoena.

The latest, filed by the RIAA at a district court in Columbia, targets a handful of unlicensed music platforms, all of which use or have used the services of Cloudflare. The theory is that the CDN company holds information on the operators of these sites so if the RIAA can gain access to that too, something can be done to disrupt their activities.

“We have learned that your service is hosting the below-referenced websites on its network,” the RIAA’s latest subpoena to Cloudflare reads.

“These websites are offering recording s which are owned by one or more of our member companies and have not been authorized for this kind os use, including without limitation that referenced at the URLs below. We have a good faith belief that this activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

The first unlicensed site targeted by the RIAA is iPlusFree.org, a music download site that appears to specialize in tracks culled from iTunes.

iPlusFree isn’t a particularly big platform when compared to some of the most popular YouTube-ripping sites and if anything its traffic has been reducing over the past several months. However, at least a quarter of the site’s traffic comes from the United States so the RIAA appears keen to unmask its operators for offering tracks by prominent artists without permission.

They include The Other Side (SZA & Justin Timberlake), Rare by Selena Gomez, and A Boogie wit da Hoodie by Artist 2.0.

The three other sites listed in the DMCA subpoena do not appear particularly popular in the United States. However, the RIAA will be concerned by their popularity in South America, Brazil in particular, where the trio are thriving.

From virtually no traffic at all six months ago, Asmelhores.net (Portuguese: ‘The Best’) is now enjoying more than 360,000 visits per month, with 97% of users hailing from Brazil.
Baixarcdscompletos.net (Portuguese: ‘Download Complete CDs’), the second most-trafficked site in the list with 340,000 visits per month, is also big in Brazil with a similar percentage of traffic.

With more than 218,000 visits per month according to SimilarWeb, Xandaodownload.net is also dominated by traffic from the same region. Unlike the others, however, the site also offers non-musical content including movies, TV shows, software and games.

This trio are accused of offering unlicensed copies of tracks from Red Hot Chili Peppers (Scar Tissue), Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana), Sexx Dreams (Lady Gaga), Daydream (Maria Carey), plus several others.

“As is stated in the attached subpoena, you are required to disclose to the RIAA information sufficient to identify the infringers,” the letter to Cloudflare reads. “This would include the individuals’ names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account history.”

The subpoena was signed off by a court clerk in the District of Columbia three days after it was filed, with two of those days covered by a weekend. It requires Cloudflare to hand over the personal details requested by the music industry group by 17:00 on March 13, 2020.

Whether Cloudflare holds any useful information will remain to be seen. All four sites are operational at the time of writing.

The RIAA’s subpoena to Cloudflare can be obtained here (pdf)

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

What Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks can teach us about peer review

Reducing the time it takes for peer review by 80 percent wouldn’t affect funding levels

John Cleese's famously silly walk from a 1970 episode of <em>Monty Python's Flying Circus</em>

Enlarge / John Cleese's famously silly walk from a 1970 episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus (credit: BBC)

One of the best-known sketches from Monty Python's Flying Circus features John Cleese as a bowler-hatted bureaucrat with the fictional Ministry of Silly Walks. It's a classic of physical comedy, right up there with the troupe's Dead Parrot sketch ("This parrot has ceased to be!") in terms of cultural significance.

A pair of scientists at Dartmouth University have performed a gait analysis of the various silly walks on display, publishing their findings in a new paper in the journal Gait and Posture. It's intended in part as a commemoration on the 50-year anniversary of the sketch, but also to draw attention to the need for a more streamlined peer review process for grants in the health sciences.

The two authors, Erin Butler and Nathaniel Dominy, are married, having met 12 years ago at Stanford. (Butler was a TA for a class where Dominy gave a lecture on the evolution of bipedalism.) Dominy is the Monty Python fan. "So, put together a Monty Python fan with a creative scientific mind and an expert in gait analysis, and this paper is what you get," Butler told Ars. Or, as they wrote in their paper, "It really is the silliness of the sketch that resonates with us, and extreme silliness seems more relevant now than ever before in this increasingly Pythonesque world."

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There’s Something Fishy Going on with Australia’s Piracy Numbers

The Australian Government recently reported that local piracy rates had been slashed in half over a period of 12 months. While this impressive drop was music to the ears of copyright holders, a closer inspection of the data shows that something is not quite right, or potentially, very wrong.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Australia’s latest online copyright infringement report, released by the Department of Communications in December, suggested that piracy is falling.

The data pointed out that there’s been a steady decrease in the number of people who consume music, movies, and TV shows illegally. This follows a trend that was revealed in earlier reports.

According to the Government, a mere 16% of the population can be classified as pirates. This is a drastic drop compared to last year when a similar study found that 32% obtained content illegally. In 2015, when the first survey was taken, the number was even higher at 43%.

Like many other news outlets, we reported the numbers as they were presented. However, something didn’t feel right. This prompted us to step back and take a closer look at the reported data to see how this unprecedented drop took place.

Specifically, we want to see where this drop comes from and how it can be so massive.

The bar chart below provides a good starting point. It shows what percentage of a particular category of digital content is consumed 100% legally, 100% illegally, or a mix of both. The chart also shows the same data for “any of the four” content categories.

As reported, the bar on the far right shows that, across all categories, only 16% of the respondents consumed content unlawfully in any of the four categories. That is exactly as reported, so that’s good news.

The problem is, however, that this percentage doesn’t make much sense when we look at the individual categories.

Based on the reported sample numbers, the 16% across all categories translates to 314 respondents. In other words, 314 people pirated something from any of the four categories which includes music, games, movies and TV.

However, when we look at the movies category on its own we see that 25% of the respondents consumed movies illegally. Based on the sample size for that category, that translates to 316 respondents.

How can it be that more people consume movies illegally than in the four categories combined, which also includes movies, and thus the same respondents?

Technically this can be chalked up as rounding variance. But even when that’s the case, it seems implausible that every person who pirated something also pirated movies.

That explanation is even more implausible when we look at the exact same data from the year before. That year 32% of the people consumed content from any of the four categories unlawfully (555 respondents). However, less than half of these were also movie pirates (240 respondents).

It seems very unlikely that when in 2018 less than 50% of the self-proclaimed pirates consumed illegal movies, this suddenly went up to 100% in 2019.

We shared our findings with the Australian Government’s Department of Communications and the Arts. Despite several back and forths, they were not able to explain these findings.

In previous years the report also included the raw numbers for all the categories, which could provide more insight. However, the most recent report no longer includes these and the Government informed us that it does not have permission to share the data.

And it doesn’t stop there. The further we delve into the numbers the weirder things get.

For example, there is a similar chart to the one shown earlier but in this instance detailing the consumption of “free” content (e.g. downloading from torrent sites).

As shown above, this indicates that 46% of all respondents who consumed free content in any of the four categories did so unlawfully.

This translates to roughly 678 respondents, which is much more than the number cited for all content consumers (paid and free), which presumably includes the same people.

There are many other examples to give but the above clearly illustrates that there’s something fishy with these numbers. According to the Government, the entire pirate population was slashed in half last year, but we doubt that this is really the case.

Drom: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also have an annual VPN review.

Watch Live: SpaceX attempts to launch the same Falcon 9 a fifth time [Updated]

Weather is good again on Wednesday.

The top of a rocket has a SpaceX logo.

Enlarge / This batch of Starlink missions will launch with a used rocket fairing. (credit: SpaceX)

7:15am ET Wednesday update: Weather is good. After an engine issue on Sunday, the Falcon 9 rocket is good. And the 60 Starlink satellites in the booster's payload fairing are good. All, therefore, remains set for a second attempt to launch the sixth Starlink mission at 8:16am ET Wednesday (12:16 UTC).

The webcast below should begin about 15 minutes before liftoff.

Starlink launch.

9:30am ET Sunday update: The flight computers stopped the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday morning at T-0. There was apparently a power issue with at least one of the rocket's nine engines that caused an automatic shutdown after ignition occurred. The company will not make a second attempt on Sunday.

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Sea turtles think plastic smells like food

New explanation for why sea predators are eating so much plastic

A turtle very interested in the smells that pipe has to offer.

A turtle very interested in the smells that pipe has to offer.

The push against single-use plastic has some emotive mascots, including the iconic turtle with a straw in its nose. The working hypothesis about why turtles are so attracted to plastic is that plastic drifting in the ocean can look a lot like jellyfish. But how does that explain turtles caught up in, and eating, other kinds of plastic, like that straw?

A paper published in Current Biology this week has an alternative explanation: it’s the smell of plastic, not the look, that attracts turtles. Rather, it's the smell of organisms that latch on to the plastic. The authors found that turtles were attracted to the smell of plastic coated in goopy ocean organisms just as much as they were attracted to the smell of food. That’s useful information for starting to figure out how to mitigate the effects of ocean plastic on predators like turtles.

Delicious stinky plastic

Plastic floating around in the ocean pretty quickly gets gooped up by all kinds of organisms that start to grow on them. This “biofouled” plastic has been found to emit dimethyl sulfide, an organic compound that plankton releases in larges quantities. Animals use this smell as a signal that food may be present, and seabird species that rely on this as a food cue have been shown to ingest more plastic than species that use the smell cue less.

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Review: The Hunt is every bit as bad and offensive as we suspected

But at least it’s an equal opportunity offender. And Betty Gilpin is terrific.

Betty Gilpin stars in The Hunt.

Twelve random "regular" people find themselves being hunted by vengeful wealthy sociopaths in The Hunt, starring GLOW's Betty Gilpin and Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Delayed since last fall in the wake of mass shootings, the film is being touted as a daring, politically incorrect edgy satire. It's not. It's just a predictably pointless, simplistic premise with all the subtle nuance of a cudgel to the side of the head, pretending that it has something relevant to say about "cancel culture" and our current hyper-polarized partisan divide.

Written by LOST's Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse, The Hunt is about 12 strangers who wake up in a clearing with no idea where they are or how they got there. They soon discover they are "prey" at an exclusive resort called The Manor, where the uber-wealthy come to hunt human beings—although Hilary Swank's high-end executive (who masterminded the whole thing) scoffs that they should hardly be considered "beings." But one of the targets, Gilpin's Crystal, fights back, and proves to be a formidable adversary.

As I pointed out when the first trailer dropped, it's not a particularly new idea, since Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" was first published in 1924 and has spawned countless film and television interpretations of the basic concept over the ensuing decades. The twist in this case is that the hunted are all red state "deplorables," and the hunters are "liberal elites"—albeit of the super-entitled uber-wealthy variety.

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