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A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology suggests that humans can sense the Earth's magnetic field. "We have not as a species lost the magnetic sensory system that our ancestors [millions of years ago] had," said Prof Joseph Kirschvink, leader of the research from the California Institute of Technology. "We are part of Earth's magnetic biosphere." The Guardian reports: Writing in the journal eNeuro, Kirschvink and colleagues in the U.S. and Japan describe how they made their discovery after building a six-sided cage, the walls of which were made of aluminium to shield the setup from electromagnetic interference. These walls also contained coils through which currents were passed to produce magnetic fields of about the same strength as Earth's. Each participant was asked to enter the cage and sit still on a wooden chair in the dark, facing straight ahead towards the north. During the experiment, the team measured the participant's brain waves using an electroencephalogram (EEG).

In some experiments the applied magnetic fields were fixed in one direction, while in others they were rotated. In still others the machines were turned on but no magnetic field was produced -- meaning the participant was only exposed to Earth's natural magnetic field. The participant was unaware which experiment was under way. The results, gathered from 34 adult participants, revealed that certain scenarios triggered a drop in participants' alpha brain waves -- a change that is linked to the brain processing information. This occurred if the applied magnetic field was pointed north and then swept upwards or downwards, or directed down while pointing north and rotated anticlockwise. That is similar to a human in the northern hemisphere nodding their head, or turning their head to the right respectively. Kirschvink said the responses showed that the brain was clocking an unexpected change in the environment. "Crucially, he said, it means that humans must be ale to detect such changes -- although the strength of the response varied hugely among participants," reports The Guardian.

The authors say the new research suggests the human system can tell north from south via a mechanism involving special cells containing iron-based crystals. "These crystals are thought to rotate rather like the needle of a compass, opening or closing pores in the cells, thereby affecting signals being sent to the brain," the report adds.

Avast's PC Trends Report 2019 found [PDF] that users are making themselves vulnerable by not implementing security patches and keeping outdated versions of popular applications on their PCs. From a news report: The applications where updates are most frequently neglected include Adobe Shockwave (96%), VLC Media Player (94%) and Skype (94%). The report, which uses anonymized and aggregated data from 163 million devices across the globe, also found that Windows 10 is now installed on 40% of all PCs globally, which is fast approaching the 43% share held by Windows 7. However, 15% of all Windows 7 users and 9% of all Windows 10 users worldwide are running older and no longer supported versions of their product, for example, the Windows 7 Release to Manufacturing version from 2009 or the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update from early 2017.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this article from New York magazine: In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered... Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to "spoofed" websites.... [B]ots "faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers." Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites -- the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion...."

[N]ot even Facebook, the world's greatest data-gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80âpercent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its "Instant Articles," the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook's mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.
On Twitter the author also shared a Twitter thread by the Washington Post's director of advertising technology, who shares his own complaints about the ecosystem of online advertising. "The problem isn't just that the internet is full of fakery and bullshit and bad numbers and malfunctioning metrics and bullshitters and fraudsters. The problem is that all the fake shit is layered on top of other fake shit and it just COMPOUNDS itself... Like you get fake users, who get autoplay videos which no one is really watching....

"That's not even counting the entire ad campaigns that are fake where the product is just a bullshit excuse to collect data on you."