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(credit: Alpha six)

Cloud backup provider Backblaze has published the latest data it has accumulated about the reliability of the hard drives it uses. In the first quarter of the year, the company passed more than a billion hours of aggregate drive usage since it started tracking reliability in April 2013.

HGST's drives have long stood out as the most reliable, and that trend continues. Their failure rate is remarkably low; even after three years in service, the 3TB and 4TB units have annualized failure rates of just 0.81 percent and 1.03 percent, respectively. 2TB units, which last quarter were already on average more than 5 years old, have seen a small increase in failure rate—1.57 percent, compared to 1.15 percent a year ago—but still show extraordinary reliability considering their age.

After some bad experiences with certain models, and annualized failure rates in some cases approaching 30 percent, Seagate's performance is also solid. Backblaze's most common disk type is a 4TB Seagate unit, with nearly 35,000 of the drives in use, and those are demonstrating at a failure rate of 2.90 percent.

(credit: Alan Rockefeller)

Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in ‘magic’ mushrooms, may be an effective way to treat depression in patients that have seen no benefit from other, standard forms of treatment, early results suggest.

In a pilot study involving just 12 people with treatment-resistant depression, two doses of the mushroom compound cleared symptoms in eight participants—67 percent—after one week. After three months and no other doses, seven participants still reported reduced depressive symptoms, including five—42 percent—who reported complete remission of their depression.

But the finding, published Tuesday in the Lancet Psychiatry, is just a first step to assess safety of using the hallucinogenic drug. With such a small study, no controls, and non-randomized participants, it is not possible to determine if the promising efficacy results will stand.

(credit: Alan Rockefeller)

Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in ‘magic’ mushrooms, may be an effective way to treat depression in patients that have seen no benefit from other, standard forms of treatment, early results suggest.

In a pilot study involving just 12 people with treatment-resistant depression, two doses of the mushroom compound cleared symptoms in eight participants—67 percent—after one week. After three months and no other doses, seven participants still reported reduced depressive symptoms, including five—42 percent—who reported complete remission of their depression.

But the finding, published Tuesday in the Lancet Psychiatry, is just a first step to assess safety of using the hallucinogenic drug. With such a small study, no controls, and non-randomized participants, it is not possible to determine if the promising efficacy results will stand.

(credit: RunKeeper)

RunKeeper announced Tuesday that it had found a bug in its Android code that resulted in the leaking of users’ location data to an unnamed third-party advertising service. The blog post came four days after the Norwegian Consumer Council filed a complaint against the Boston company.

In the blog post, CEO Jason Jacobs wrote:

Like other Android apps, when the Runkeeper app is in the background, it can be awakened by the device when certain events occur (like when the device receives a Runkeeper push notification). When such events awakened the app, the bug inadvertently caused the app to send location data to the third-party service.

Today we are releasing a new version of our app that eliminates this bug and removes the third-party service involved. Although the bug affected only our Android app, we have decided to remove this service from our iOS product too out of an abundance of caution. The iOS release will be made available once approved by Apple.

…

We take our responsibility for the privacy of user data very seriously, and we are thankful to the Runkeeper user community for your continued trust and support.

In an e-mail sent to Ars, Jacobs declined further questions, noting the statement "will be our only comment at this time."

This should become a thing of the past. (credit: Microsoft)

Anyone who's installed Windows 7 any time in the last, oh, five years or so probably didn't enjoy the experience very much. Service Pack 1 for the operating system was released in 2011, meaning that a fresh install has five years of individual patches to download and install. Typically, this means multiple trips to Windows Update and multiple reboots in order to get the system fully up-to-date, and it is a process that is at best tedious, typically leading one to wonder why, at the very least, it cannot pull down all the updates at once and apply them with just a single reboot.

The answer to that particular question will, unfortunately, remain a mystery, but Microsoft did today announce a change that will greatly reduce the pain of this process. The company has published a "convenience rollup" for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (and Windows Server 2008 R2), which in a single package contains all the updates, both security and non-security, released since the Service Pack, up through April 2016. Installing the rollup will perform five years of patching in one shot.

In other words, it performs a very similar role to what Windows 7 Service Pack 2 would have done, if only Windows 7 Service Pack 2 were to exist. It's not quite the same as a Service Pack—it still requires Service Pack 1 to be installed, and the system will still report that it is running Service Pack 1—but for most intents and purposes, that won't matter. Microsoft will also support injecting this rollup into Windows 7 Service Pack 1 system images and install media.

Edward Screven, Oracle's chief architect, speaking at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in 2012. (credit: Oracle PR)

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle lawyers put two executives and a computer expert on the witness stand in federal court here today, pushing their case that Google violated copyright law when it used Java API packages in its Android operating system.

Following morning testimony by Oracle CEO Safra Catz, the ten-person jury heard from Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, who has worked at the company for 30 years. Screven was deeply involved in the company's decision to buy Sun Microsystems in 2009. He was worried that, given Sun's business problems, it wouldn't be able to invest and be a "good steward" of Java.

"Were you in favor of that decision because you thought Oracle could sue Google?" asked Oracle attorney Annette Hurst.

An example of Node.js code that launches a Web server and creates ASCII art from a JPEG image being executed from within COBOL code. Because we can. (credit: Bizău Ionică)

Last August, we told you about a project posted on GitHub by Romanian software developer Bizău Ionică that makes it possible for snips of legacy COBOL code to run within the JavaScript code of the popular Node.js interpreter. There's more than a little irony in this project. COBOL, the mother of all cross-platform programming languages, is still in use 62 years after it was first published, mostly in legacy applications that no one cares about or dares to retire. Grabbing snippets of code to run in Node.js—one of the most popular languages to develop networked software today—could be seen as a way to pull old code into the 21^st century.

Ionică has now completed the circle with a software bridge that can execute Node.js script from within COBOL programs. It’s called node.cobol, and it compiles with GNU COBOL, though it still requires Node.js be installed on the same machine the code runs on. This is really helpful if you want to, say, run a Web server from within COBOL code.

Would you really want to run a Web server within COBOL? I don't know. But now you can:

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(credit: anutkak43)

Some people never seem to learn. A recent investigation by security firm Compaas trawled Google Docs and Dropbox and found thousands of sensitive documents belonging to hospitals, schools, and corporations. In many cases, the spreadsheets caused the organizations to run afoul of consumer privacy laws.

"We found a couple hospitals that had breaches in HIPPA compliance," Compaas COO Doran David said. "There was patient information, what types of surgeries they had, social security numbers. Anything that you would think of that you would consider personal is the type of thing we've come across."

In most cases, the documents are uploaded by employees who don't understand the privacy implications of what they're doing. They simply know that Google Docs and similar services are a much easier way to exchange documents than official methods provided by their employer. In other cases, they use misconfigured third-party apps to swap documents with co-workers. The end result is documents that never should have been made public but can in fact be downloaded by anyone.