BREAKING NEWS: At least dozens of people have been seriously injured, a Globe staffer on the scene says.
— Boston.com News (@BostonDotCom) April 15, 2013
Two explosions along @bostonmarathon route. Multiple severe injuries. Terrible. Horrific. twitter.com/JackieBrunoNEC…
— Jackie Bruno (@JackieBrunoNECN) April 15, 2013
University of British Columbia researchers have discovered two new symbionts living in the gut of termites, and taken the unusual step of naming them after fictional monsters created by American horror author HP Lovecraft. The single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, help termites digest wood. The researchers decided to name them after monstrous cosmic entities featured in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe.
"When we first saw them under the microscope they had this unique motion, it looked almost like an octopus swimming," says UBC researcher Erick James, lead author of the paper describing the new protists, published in the online journal PLoS ONE.
The octopus-like movements and appearance of both protists reminded James of the horrid Cthulhu and Cthylla, and the little protists were baptized after the two monsters. Cthulhu is often depicted as a giant, octopus-like entity with wings. Cthylla is his daughter, and has a similar appearance.
Most of the larger protists living in termites have already been identified, but Cthulhu and Cthylla are very small -- they are in the range of 10 to 20 microns, while the bigger protists are around 50 to 150 microns -- and had passed unnoticed until now. But although tiny, the protists and their brethren have a big impact, much like their fictional namesakes.
"The huge diversity of microbial organisms is a completely untapped resource," says James. "Studying protists can tell us about the evolution of organisms. Some protists cause diseases, but others live in symbiotic relationships, like these flagellates in the intestines of termites."
Exxon Mobil was working to clean up thousands of barrels of oil in Mayflower, Arkansas, after a pipeline carrying heavy Canadian crude ruptured, a major spill likely to stoke debate over transporting Canada's oil to the United States.
Exxon shut the Pegasus pipeline, which can carry more than 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Pakota, Illinois, to Nederland, Texas, after the leak was discovered on Friday afternoon, the company said in a statement.
Exxon, hit with a $1.7 million fine by regulators this week over a 2011 spill in the Yellowstone River, said a few thousand barrels of oil had been observed.
A company spokesman confirmed the line was carrying Canadian Wabasca Heavy crude. That grade is a heavy bitumen crude diluted with lighter liquids to allow it to flow through pipelines, according to the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA), which referred to Wabasca as "oil sands" in a report.
The spill occurred as the U.S. State Department is considering the fate of the 800,000 bpd Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry crude from Canada's oil sands to the Gulf Coast. Environmentalists, concerned about the impact of developing the oil sands, have sought to block its approval.
Supporters say Keystone will help bring down the cost of fuel in the United States.
The Arkansas spill was the second incident this week where Canadian crude has spilled in the United States. On Wednesday, a train carrying Canadian crude derailed in Minnesota, spilling 15,000 gallons of oil.
Malala Yousafzai (1997-) is a 15-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head on the way home from school by the Taliban. Her only crime was criticising the Taliban’s strict rules against female education and standing up for her right to go to school.
Inspired by her activist father, Malala was involved in social justice from a young age. She first gained prominence at age 11, when she wrote a blog for the BBC for 10 weeks (under a pseudonym) detailing her life under Taliban rule. The blog was extremely popular and her real identity was later revealed when her father nominated her for an International Peace Prize. From there she started appearing on television, speaking against the Taliban’s ruling that banned girls from attending school. Her international status grew even more when she was featured in a New York Times documentary (which you can watch here). She continued to speak out against the Taliban and was nominated for the International Youth Peace Prize and won the inaugural Pakistan National Youth Peace Prize in 2011 (now named the National Malala Peace Prize).
On the 9th October 2012, on her way home from school, Malala was shot in the head and neck by a masked gunman (two other children, Kainat Riaz and Shazia Ramzan, were also injured). The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that Malala was “the symbol of the infidels and obscenity”. Straight after the incident Malala was taken to Peshawar Military hospital for an initial operation where part of her skull was removed to allow room for the swelling of her brain and was later flown to the United Kingdom for further treatment. She would receive two further surgeries to insert a titanium plate in her skull and attach a cochlear device in her left ear to restore her hearing. Malala was released from hospital this month and is currently staying in her temporary home with her family in Birmingham and is expected to make a full recovery.
Malala has recently been nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person in history to receive the honour, and I, along with the millions of people she has inspired, am hoping this remarkable young woman wins.
- - The Malala Fund was established to educate girls throughout the world.
- - The quotes in the comic were taken from her blog entries, the NYT documentary and this interview Malala did with CNN.
- - I illustrated the events of the shooting after reading a few sources: Daily Mail, The Guardian, CNN, ABC Australia and Wikipedia.
Playhaven fired a developer after he allegedly made sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers. Now Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, is getting rape and death threats via Twitter.
Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two allegedly began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:
Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon
— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013
One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The other developer, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was fired by PlayHaven for the incident (PlayHaven confirmed this today). He posted about what happened from his perspective on Hacker News and denied that any sexual comments were made about forking:
While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery, the highest form being implementation, and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo.” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.
Email delivery company SendGrid has fired developer evangelist Adria Richards (pictured above) after she outed a developer who was allegedly making sexual jokes during a conference, via Twitter.
The developer in question was fired by his employer, PlayHaven, after Richards posted his picture and a few details about what he said. VentureBeat broke the story last night.
The company made a statement on its Facebook account:
Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.
Please note that, though this is showing up on SendGrid’s Facebook account, I have not been able to confirm with the company that Richards has actually been fired. SendGrid is under DDOS attack right now, which means that some fairly sophisticated hackers are very focused on the company, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they have cracked into SendGrid’s social media accounts.
However, SendGrid has also confirmed the firing on Twitter:
Effective immediately, @adriarichards has been terminated from @sendgrid. For more details, please see ow.ly/jhW0y
Last night VentureBeat broke the story about a developer who was fired from his job at PlayHaven after being outted on Twitter for allegedly making sexual jokes during a conference. Today, the company where the person who outted him works is under a distributed denial of service attack.
After hearing several jokes about forking software repositories and “big dongles,” SendGrid’s developer evangelist Adria Richards tweeted a picture of the jokesters with the hashtag “pycon.” Conference organizers saw the tweet, ejected the developers, and in short order, PlayHaven fired one of the accused.
Today, SendGrid, the email delivery company where Richards works, is under a DDOS attack.
So are the idiots now DDoS’ing SendGrid because of #pycon? YOU ARE BREAKING THE INTERNET YOU FOOLS
— Tane Piper (@tanepiper) March 21, 2013
A DDOS attack basically shuts down a website or Internet service by flooding it with traffic. Communication requests from a distributed pool of computers — often in a botnet controlled by a hacker — occupy the site’s servers and make it impossible for the site to continue.
So SendGrid.com is currently inaccessible, and that’s not the only problem: At least some developers are cancelling their accounts with the service.
Canceled my accout with @sendgrid today. I cannot do business with someone who supports a woman who gets a father fired over a joke #freedom
— Pj(@pjmprometheus) March 21, 2013
SendGrid posted about the incident — apparently trying to calm the furor — but says that mail is still being sent. I’m trying to contact the company for more information and Adria Richards for her perspective on this entire situation.
We hear you, internet. We’re working to serve our customers at the moment. Further comments, once we’ve done our job of delivering email ^tf
— SendGrid (@SendGrid) March 21, 2013
Adria Richards’ personal site, But You’re A Girl, is also under DDOS attack but is currently being protected by CloudFlare. That’s something her company might want to consider as well.
Interestingly, PlayHaven.com, the company that fired the developer, is working just fine.
Wow. This week has been extremely challenging for all. We want to give you our perspective on this complicated situation, so here goes…
On Sunday at PyCon, Adria Richards felt comments made behind her during a conference session were inappropriate and of an offensive, sexual nature. We understand that Adria believed the conduct to be inappropriate and support her right to report the incident to PyCon personnel. To be clear, SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior, whenever and wherever it occurs.
What we do not support was how she reported the conduct. Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation. Even PyCon has since updated their Code of Conduct due to this situation. Needless to say, a heated public debate ensued. The discourse, productive at times, quickly spiraled into extreme vitriol.
A SendGrid developer evangelist’s responsibility is to build and strengthen our Developer Community across the globe. In light of the events over the last 48+ hours, it has become obvious that her actions have strongly divided the same community she was supposed to unite. As a result, she can no longer be effective in her role at SendGrid.
In the end, the consequences that resulted from how she reported the conduct put our business in danger. Our commitment to our 130 employees, their families, our community members and our more than 130,000 valued customers is our primary concern.
We will continue listening to the community, addressing this situation constructively, and serving our customers to the best of our ability. I welcome your feedback, and you can email me directly at ceo@sendgrid.com.
Transportation Security Administration inspectors forced a wounded Marine who lost both of his legs in an IED blast and who was in a wheelchair to remove his prosthetic legs at one point, and at another point to stand painfully on his legs while his wheelchair was examined, according to a complaint a congressman has registered with the TSA.
Rep. Duncan Hunter said in his letter Monday that the Marine, who is still on active duty and showed TSA agents his military identification, was still forced to undergo that scrutiny.
“A TSA office asked the Marine to stand and walk to an alternate area, despite the fact that he physically could not stand or walk on his own. With numerous TSA officers sitting and unwilling to assist, an officer then made him remove his legs, then put them back on, only to advance to a secondary screening location where he was asked again to stand, with extraordinary difficult, while his wheelchair was examined for explosives,” Mr. Hunter said.
He also said TSA officers initially directed the Marine to the wrong line, then made him move lines but made no effort to help him. The incident occurred at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport last week, as a group of Marines was returning to San Diego.
Mr. Hunter included two photos of the inspection in his letter that appear to show a TSA agent patting down the Marine’s arm and examining the prosthetic leg.
The congressman asked TSA to detail its procedures to inspecting wounded U.S. troops at airports, and to consider whether agents should show “situational awareness.”
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes unlocking cell phones, ripping DVDs, removing eBook DRM, and jailbreaking tablets illegal in the USA. However, there’s another surprise: simply watching a DVD on Linux is also illegal.
This is why Ubuntu and other Linux distributions don’t include out-of-the-box DVD support, forcing you to run a command that downloads and installs libdvdcss from elsewhere – not the Linux distribution’s software repositories, or they would get in trouble.
If you are an American who’s watched a DVD on Linux, there’s a good chance the DMCA makes you a criminal.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act came into effect in 1998 in the USA. It’s a copyright law that includes anti-circumvention measures. Essentially, it makes it illegal to circumvent “technological protection measures,” including cell phone locks and protections against installing unapproved software on tablets like Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface RT (jailbreaking).
Technological protection measures are also found on eBooks, so breaking the DRM on an eBook to read it on another eReader is technically a crime, as well. (Not all eBooks have to contain DRM, however. Our eBook has no DRM, although it’s published through Amazon.)
You can find more information about the DMCA and its anti-circumvention measures on the Chilling Effects website.
Playing a commercial video DVD is normally as simple as placing it in a DVD player or a computer’s DVD drive. If it’s a computer, the appropriate software starts up and starts playing it automatically. In an age of DRM-tainted eBooks and other types of files that may not play on all your hardware, DVDs are a convenient way to watch movies without any restrictions.
That’s what it feels like, at least. However, most commercial video DVDs are encrypted using the Content Scramble System (CSS). If you wanted to produce your own DVD player, you’d have to license CSS support from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA). As part of this licensing scheme, you would also have to implement other copy-protection features, such as the region code system that prevents DVDs purchased in one part of the world from being played on DVD players purchased elsewhere.
In 1999, there was no way to play DVDs on the Linux operating system. While DVD players built into computers came with licensed DVD-playing software for Windows, they didn’t function on Linux. A Norwegian programmer named Jon Lech Johansen created DeCSS by reverse-engineering a poorly-protected DVD player. DeCSS was capable of decoding the CSS encryption, allowing unlicensed software to access the data on a DVD video disc. Before DeCSS, Linux users had no ability to watch video DVDs on Linux.
In response, his home was raided by Norwegian police in 2000 and the DVD CCA attempted to prosecute him under the Norwegian criminal code. He was ultimately acquitted, but the court process took several years.
Modern Linux machines don’t use DeCSS. However, through examining the DeCSS code, people realized that CSS was vulnerable to a brute-force attack. CSS uses 40-bit encryption and doesn’t use every possible key, so it’s an extremely weak type of encryption. A modern computer can crack a DVD’s CSS encryption through brute force – that is, by trying every possible key and seeing which one works – in just a few seconds.
This is what libdvdcss does. With libdvdcss installed on Linux, after you insert a DVD into your computer’s DVD drive, your computer will brute-force its encryption in a few seconds. It may look like the DVD is just opening in VLC, but your computer is cracking the encryption key in the background to make it viewable.
If you don’t have libdvdcss installed, DVDs won’t play back at all.
Unlike DeCSS, there have been no legal challenges against libdvdcss in particular, although it appears to be illegal under the DMCA.
Court rulings in the US have affirmed that breaking CSS encryption is a violation of the DMCA. RealNetworks once produced RealDVD, an application that allowed users to copy their own DVDs and create digital copies – essentially ripping them, as people rip audio CDs.
The DVD CCA argued that, although Real had licensed CSS encryption support from them, this was a violation of their agreement and a violation of the DMCA. The courts ruled that Real had violated the DMCA’s anti-circumvention measures. Other DVD-ripping applications, such as the popular Handbrake, are also illegal under the DMCA, although they’re widely available on the Internet.
While the DMCA has an exemptions process – this is why it’s legal to jailbreak a phone (but not a tablet) – an exemption has never been granted for watching DVDs on Linux. The government continues to consider this illegal, just as it considers ripping DVDs to your computer illegal.
Update: As of January, it’s not legal to unlock your phone without the permission of the carrier that you bought it from, assuming they locked it in the first place. You can buy an unlocked phone, of course, but that will cost more.
It was once true that Linux users had to become criminals to watch commercial video DVDs (at least in the USA). However, there are now licensed DVD players available for Linux.
For example, Ubuntu’s Software Center offers the licensed Fluendo DVD Player. This DVD player will cost you $25, although you have probably already paid for licensed DVD-playback software that comes with your computer’s DVD drive in the first place. If you purchased the licensed Cyberlink DVD player, which was previously the only legal option for watching DVDs on Linux in the USA, you probably need to buy the Fluendo DVD Player to play DVDs on modern versions of Ubuntu.
In practice, most Linux users will Google up a solution to watching DVDs on Linux and install libdvdcss, which is free and allows them to watch DVDs in VLC and other media players they already use.
We’re not lawyers here, and it’s certainly unclear whether this would stand up in court, just as it’s unclear if the courts would uphold a prosecution against someone for unlocking a cell phone or jailbreaking an iPad. However, this is what the DMCA says.
Laws as bad as this one aren’t restricted to the USA alone – other countries may have similar laws. For example, Canada now has a law that makes “breaking a digital lock” illegal, which would also make this illegal in Canada.
