Slashdot Mirror

Hugh Pickens writes writes "If robots are ever really going to carry the equipment of US soldiers and Marines, they're going to have to act more like pack animals. Now Terri Moon Cronk reports that DARPA's semiautonomous Legged Squad Support System — also known as the LS3 — will carry 400 pounds of warfighter equipment and walk 20 miles at a time also acting as an auxiliary power source for troops to recharge batteries for radios and handheld devices while on patrol. 'It's about solving a real military problem: the incredible load of equipment our soldiers and Marines carry in Afghanistan today,' says Army Lt. Col. Joseph K. Hitt, program manager in DARPA's tactical technology office. The robot's sensors allow it to navigate around obstacles at night, maneuver in urban settings, respond to voice commands, and gauge distances and directions. The LS3 can also distinguish different forms of vegetation when walking through fields and around bushes and avoid logs and rocks with intelligent foot placement on rough terrain (video). The robot's squad leader can issue 10 basic commands to tell the robot to do such things as stop, sit, follow him tightly, follow him on the corridor, and go to specific coordinates. Darpa figures that it's illogical to make a soldier hand over her rucksack to a robotic beast of burden if she's then got to be preoccupied with 'joysticks and computer screens' to guide it forward. 'That adds to the cognitive burden of the soldier,' Hitt explains. 'We need to make sure that the robot also is smart, like a trained animal.'"

jfruh writes "You may remember the tale of the blogger who found that an infographic he'd put on his site was the front end of an SEO spam job. Well, he's since followed the money to figure out just who's behind this maneuver: the for-profit college industry. He discovered that the contact info of someone who expresses interest in online degree programs can be worth up to $250 to an industry with a particularly sleazy reputation."

Hugh Pickens writes "Will Oremus writes that when something momentous is unfolding—the Arab Spring, Hurricane Sandy, Friday's horrific elementary school shooting in Connecticut—Twitter is the world's fastest, most comprehensive, and least reliable source of breaking news and in ongoing events like natural disasters, the results of Twitter misinformation can be potentially deadly. During Sandy, for instance, some tweets helped emergency responders figure out where to direct resources. Others provoked needless panic, such as one claiming that the Coney Island hospital was on fire, and a few were downright dangerous, such as the one claiming that people should stop using 911 because the lines were jammed. Now a research team at Yahoo has analyzed tweets from Chile's 2010 earthquake and looked at the potential of machine-learning algorithms to automatically assess the credibility of information tweeted during a disaster. A machine-learning classifier developed by the researchers uses 16 features to assess the credibility of newsworthy tweets and identified the features that make information more credible: credible tweets tend to be longer and include URLs; credible tweeters have higher follower counts; credible tweets are negative rather than positive in tone; and credible tweets do not include question marks, exclamation marks, or first- or third-person pronouns. Researchers at India's Institute of Information Technology also found that credible tweets are less likely to contain swear words (PDF) and significantly more likely to contain frowny emoticons than smiley faces. The bottom line is that an algorithm has the potential to work much faster than a human, and as it improves, it could evolve into an invaluable 'first opinion' for flagging news items on Twitter that might not be true writes Oremus. 'Even that wouldn't fully prevent Twitter lies from spreading or misleading people. But it might at least make their purveyors a little less comfortable and a little less smug.'"

First time accepted submitter veganboyjosh writes "I got an instant message from an uncle the other day, asking me what was in the link I sent him. I hadn't sent him a link so I figured that his account had been hacked and he'd received a malicious link from some bot address with my name in the 'From' box. This was confirmed when he told me the address the link had come from. When I tried explaining what the link was, that his account had been hacked, and that he should change the password to his @aol.com email account, his response was 'No, I think your account was hacked, since the email came from you.' I went over it again, with a real-life analog of someone calling him on the phone and pretending to be me, but I'm not sure if that sunk in or not. This uncle is far from tech savvy. He's in his 60s, and uses Facebook several times a week. He knows I'm online much more and kind of know my way around. After his initial response, I didn't have it in me to get into the whole 'Never click a link from an unfamiliar email address' bit; to him, this wasn't an unfamiliar email address, it was mine. How do I explain this to him, and what else should I feel responsible for telling him?"

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are apparently sharing a secret blacklist of domain names such that any mention of these domains will cause a message to be bounced back to the sender as spam. I found out about this because — surprise! — some of my new proxy site domains ended up on the blacklist. Hotmail and Yahoo are stonewalling, but here's what I've dug up so far — and why you should care." Read on for much more on how Bennett figured out what's going on, and why it's a hard problem to solve.

On December 7th I sent out a normal batch of emails to the Circumventor mailing list, where I send out new proxy sites for getting around Internet filters. I registered seven new domains and sent each domain to one seventh of the list; the list contains about 420,000 addresses, so each one went to about 60,000 people. (Each new site is only sent to a random subset of the list, so that a blocking company can't just subscribe one address to the list and block all new sites as soon as they're mailed out.)

The list is also comprised of 100%-verified-opt-in addresses, meaning that a new subscriber has to reply to a confirmation message in order to be added to the list. That's considered the gold standard for responsible mailing, but major email providers keep finding new ways to block the emails as "spam," which sometimes provide interesting insights into how the filters work behind the scenes.

After the last mailing, for example, all of my newly registered domains got disabled by the registrar because two of the domains had been incorrectly blacklisted by the Spamhaus Domain Block List. It took two days to discover the problem and then several hours to trace the problem to Spamhaus, although once I found Spamhaus's automated form I was able to get the domains un-blacklisted immediately. So the registrar re-enabled the domains a few hours later, although the traffic to the domains never returned to its previous levels. Spamhaus, meanwhile, continues to claim the DBL is a "zero false-positive" list, and has yet to acknowledge the error or contact me to help get to the bottom of how it happened. Well, they know how to reach me.

At least this time around, my domains didn't get disabled. Instead, the messages rolled out for a few hours with no problem (replies from users indicated that at least some hotmail.com and yahoo.com users were receiving them), until bounces abruptly started coming in from hotmail.com and yahoo.com addresses saying:

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mta5.am0.yahoodns.net.:
>>> DATA
<<< 550 Message Contains SPAM Content
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable

After pummeling my address with bounce messages (to the point where my own Gmail account started bouncing because it was getting hammered with so many bounce messages from Hotmail and Yahoo), when the dust finally settled, I tried reproducing the error by sending test messages from my server's IP address to a test Hotmail account. It turns out that out of the seven different URLs that I had been mailing to our users, four of the domains in those URLs would generate a "550 Message Contains SPAM Content" error when sent from my IP to a Hotmail address, and the other three did not. The message didn't have to contain the banned domain in the From: address; the message would get blocked if it even mentioned the domain anywhere in the message body. (This only happened when sending from my own IP address at peacefire.org. It didn't happen if I tried sending a message from my Gmail account to a Hotmail address, even if the message contained one of the four banned domain names, so the issue probably won't reproduce if you try sending a test message yourself.)

But interestingly, Yahoo Mail started bouncing my messages at about the same time — out of the seven domain names, the same four domain names were being bounced by Yahoo Mail as by Hotmail, also with the error "550 Message Contains SPAM Content." That's far too unlikely to be a coincidence, so it looks as if Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are using a common secret blacklist of domain names that cause a message to be blocked as spam. (As it happens, the other three domains were also being bounced by Yahoo Mail with the error "Message Contains SUSPECT Content" — as opposed to "SPAM Content" — while those three domains were not blocked by Hotmail at all. That of course is aggravating, but the real clue lies in the fact that both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were giving "SPAM Content" errors to the exact same subset of domains.)

I don't want to publish the list of all seven domain names here, so as not to make it too easy for censorware companies to block them all, but one of the four blacklisted domains was 'golflanding.com.' (All of the new domains I register are nonsensical two-word combinations, since those are the only .com domains that are likely to be (1) still available and (2) easy to remember.) As soon as it seemed like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were working off of a common blacklist, I checked to see if Spamhaus had screwed up again and listed our domains, but none of the seven domains were on Spamhaus's lists.

I looked up golflanding.com on the blacklistalert.org service, which checks against all major spam blacklists, but no hits were listed there either (except for on some defunct services which haven't been updated in years).

So if Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are both using the domain blacklist, perhaps it's a list compiled by one company and then licensed to the other, or perhaps it's a third-party list not widely known to the public. (Hotmail uses their own SmartScreen filter, but I've found nothing online about Yahoo using it as well.) It's conceivable that one or more of the domains might have gotten blacklisted as a result of Hotmail or Yahoo users clicking their "This is spam" button. However, Hotmail allows newsletter publishers to view data about what percent of their messages to Hotmail users are being flagged by users as "spam," and when I looked up the stats for our IP, they showed a "complaint rate" of less than 0.1% (usually the rest of people hitting 'Junk Mail' to unsubscribe from the list). Assuming that the complaint rates are similar for Yahoo Mail, it's unlikely that the domains got blacklisted as a result of user complaints, unless the blacklist trigger has a ridiculously low complaint threshold.

Neither the Hotmail postmaster site nor the Yahoo postmaster site mention anything about a list of domain names that could cause a message to be blocked for mentioning the domains in the message body. Yahoo Mail does provide a support form for newsletter publishers to send inquiries about why their mail is being blocked; I submitted that on Saturday and started a thread with email "support," although so far their response has just been to copy and paste articles from the Postmaster site, with tips like "Send email only to those that want it." Each time, I reply saying, No, this is not the problem, the problem is that the domains in the messages are getting incorrectly blacklisted, and each time, support cheerfully sends me another article. If I'm not literally talking to a bot, I might as well be.

I opened a similar ticket with Hotmail, and they sent me a form letter saying that the emails were being blocked because of SmartScreen, and that as a matter of policy, they would refuse to fix any errors being made by the SmartScreen filter. Waiting to see if I get a reply from a human next.

So why should you care? Well, for one thing, if you care about users in China and Iran being able to receive proxies to get around their Internet blockers, right now Hotmail and Yahoo are thwarting these proxies more effectively than those countries' own censors are. Yes, these are real people who really do write back to me after a mailing goes out, telling me about how they were able to use the proxies to receive banned political information, and sometimes how long the proxy lasted before the censors blocked it. This week, they had to do without.

But more importantly, this is an example of a general problem: That there are certain types of issues, like blocking of legitimate mail by spam filters, where the "free market" does not deliver the best experience to consumers, and the costs get passed on to everybody. Sometimes the problems could be solved with some effort, but the effort does not get made, because people believe that the free market will solve the problem, or that it already has.

In theory, if consumers have enough information about different companies and their services, the companies can compete to provide the best product to users. The problem is that if one type of information is systematically hidden from users — in this case, the fact that their mail provider is blocking mails from reaching them — then the "theory" falls apart. Since spam getting into your inbox is a visible problem, but missed email messages are an invisible problem, Hotmail's incentive is not to give the user the best experience, but rather to err on the side of blocking legitimate messages — even if the user might prefer to get slightly more spam, than to miss one important email that they were waiting for.

This means we're not just talking about a few messages getting caught in filters, which could happen even in an efficient marketplace. We're talking about a permanent equilibrium where the user gets a sub-par experience by default — a trade-off that causes them to miss more messages than they want to — and senders have to pay the cost of overcoming the marketplace inefficiencies. (Which means if the sender is a business you buy from or a charity you support, the costs get passed on to you.)

Pretty much the entire financial cost of sending email, is attributable to the failure of the "free market" to motivate email providers to deliver non-spam emails into their user's inboxes. If a company or organization uses an email list hosting company like AWeber or Constant Contact to email their users, they pay a fee of about $1 per month for every 100 users on their list (which would run me about $4,000 per month). That fee doesn't go towards bandwidth — even a 1-million-subscriber list, emailed once a month, would use less than 3 GB per month of bandwidth, which is what GeoCities was was giving away for free 10 years ago. What you're paying for is the fact that AWeber and Constant Contact have friends in the right places at Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail, so if your mails are getting blocked, they know the people to call to fix the problem. If you run your own list instead of paying a hosting fee to AWeber or Constant Contact, you'll end up paying other costs indirectly, through loss of income when your messages don't reach recipients, or in time and money spent trying to fix the issue. (I have to take this option anyway, since I send different URLs to different random subsets of my list, which is not supported by AWeber or Constant Contact.)

On the other hand, if the market actually "worked" — if email providers did reliably deliver non-spam messages to their users — a company or charity could run their own list for virtually zero cost, and would be able to keep all of that money. (I incur no up-front fees for running my own list; all of the costs are the time spent trying to get Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail to stop blocking it.) So every time you donate to a charity or buy from an online retailer, a little bit of that money goes towards the cost of that organization having to fight past marketplace failures in order to get their email to you.

I don't think there's an easy algorithmic solution, like crowdsourcing Facebook complaints or using random-sample voting on Digg. Generally, I just think we need more awareness of the fact that, under certain conditions (including those surrounding email deliverability), the "free market" is virtually guaranteed to arrive at a non-optimal solution. One manifestation of that awareness would be if Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail created public points of contact where legitimate email publishers could find out why their emails were blocked, and had real humans responding to the messages and fixing the problems. By default, the imperfect information in the marketplace leads toward an equilibrium that errs on the side of blocking too much legitimate email, so anything that pushes the equilibrium back towards more legitimate messages getting delivered will improve the experience for users and lower costs for senders.

Besides, there's a more basic ethical issue here. If you're Hotmail and you tell your users that you're providing them with "email accounts," then those users expect those accounts to work — including having the ability to receive mails from mailing lists that they've signed up for. Helping legitimate emails get through to users is not just a matter of addressing a marketplace inefficiency, it's a matter of honesty.

Larry Lessig's book "Code is Law" describes how default choices built into the architecture of the Internet and other environments — the "code" — can steer our behavior in ways that we might not choose otherwise. I'm making essentially the same point in saying that some problems are not fixed by market forces, because people are not aware of the problem at all. I think the evidence and the reasoning are straightforward in this case, but it's hard to convince people who have adopted it as an axiom that whatever the free market arrives at, must be the solution. My favorite single sentence in Lessig's book was, "Put your Ayn Rand away." I could imagine the years of pushing against dogmatic fanaticism that led him to write that sentence, and I knew how he felt.

Census numbers show that 176,632 people in England and Wales ask themselves, "What would Yoda do?" Although the number of people who list their religion as "Jedi" has dropped by more than 50% in the past 10 years, It remains the most popular "alternative" faith in England. From the article: "The new figures reveal that the lightsabre-wielding disciples are only behind Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in the popularity stakes, excluding non-religious people and people who did not answer."

Hugh Pickens writes writes "AP reports that if disaster strikes a US nuclear power plant, the utility industry wants the ability to fly in heavy-duty equipment from regional hubs to stricken reactors to avert a meltdown providing another layer of defense in case a Fukushima-style disaster destroys a nuclear plant's multiple backup systems. 'It became very clear in Japan that utilities became quickly overwhelmed,' says Joe Pollock, vice president for nuclear operations at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group that is spearheading the effort. US nuclear plants already have backup safety systems and are supposed to withstand the worst possible disasters in their regions, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. But planners can be wrong. The industry plan, called FLEX, is the nuclear industry's method for meeting new US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules that will force 65 plants in the US to get extra emergency equipment on site and store it protectively. The FLEX program is supposed to help nuclear plants handle the biggest disasters. Under the plan, plant operators can summon help from the regional centers in Memphis and Phoenix. In addition to having several duplicate sets of plant emergency gear, industry officials say the centers will likely have heavier equipment that could include an emergency generator large enough to power a plant's emergency cooling systems, equipment to treat cooling water and extra radiation protection gear for workers. Federal regulators must still decide whether to approve the plans submitted by individual plants. 'They need to show us not just that they have the pump, but that they've done all the appropriate designing and engineering so that they have a hookup for that pump,' says NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said. 'They're not going to be trying to figure out, "Where are we going to plug this thing in?"'"

Press2ToContinue writes "Dubbed the Python Challenge, the month-long contest will award $1,000 for the longest python and $1,500 for the most pythons caught between Jan. 12 and Feb. 10 in any of four hunting areas north of Everglades National Park and at the Big Cypress National Preserve. Pythons have been spreading through the Everglades for years, posing a threat to the sensitive ecosystem by preying on native species. Some estimates put their number in the tens of thousands. Last year, 272 pythons were removed from the wild, state figures show."

TrueSatan writes "Bloomberg reports that Apple and Google have partnered to make a bid of more than $500 million for the Kodak patent portfolio. The bid relates to Kodak's 1,100 imaging patents. 'Kodak obtained commitments for $830 million exit financing last month, contingent on its sale of the digital imaging patents for at least $500 million.' This is likely to be an opening bid, with the final figure being far larger. By comparison, a group including Apple, Microsoft, and RIM bought Nortel's 6000+ patents for $4.5 billion last year. 'Google lost the auction for those patents after making an initial offer of $900 million.'"

Barence writes "Great Big War Game, a popular iOS and Android app, made only £52 in its first week on Windows RT. In an angry blog post titled 'Windows RT — Born to fail,' UK-based developer Rubicon blamed Microsoft for the paltry sum and said it won't be bringing any more of its titles to the fledgling platform. It seems Microsoft refused to promote the app as it would only run on Windows RT devices. However, Microsoft quickly got in touch with Rubicon, and the post was deleted and replaced with an apologetic response saying, 'Microsoft have graciously decided work with us to iron out the problems and get us past this incident.' Rubicon will be hoping that £52 figure improves quickly, as it spent £10,000 porting the game to Windows RT."

First time accepted submitter its a trappist! writes "When I started my career back in the early 1990s, everyone had a 'business phone' phone on their desk. The phone was how your co-workers, customers, friends and family got in touch with you during the business day. It had a few features that everyone used — basic calling, transfer, hold, mute, three-way calling (if you could figure it out). This was before personal mobile phones or corporate IM, so the phone was basically the one and only means of real-time communication in the office. Flash forward 20 years. Today I have a smart phone, corporate IM, several flavors of personal IM, the Skype client and several flavors of collaboration software including Google Apps/Docs, GoToMeeting. My wife and daughter call me or text me on the cell phone. My co-workers who are too lazy or passive aggressive to wander into my office use IM. My brother in Iraq uses Skype. I use GoToMeeting and its built-in VoIP with customers. The big black phone sits there gathering dust. I use it for conference calls a few times each month. I'm sure that there are sales people out there who would rather give up a body part than their trusty office phone, but do any of the rest of us need them? Around here, the younger engineers frequently unplug them and stick them in a cabinet to free up desk space. Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"

Dainsanefh tips a CNET report about a number of law enforcement groups who have put forth a proposal to the U.S. Senate to require wireless providers to keep logs of subscriber text messages for a minimum of two years. "As the popularity of text messages has exploded in recent years, so has their use in criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. They have been introduced as evidence in armed robbery, cocaine distribution, and wire fraud prosecutions. In one 2009 case in Michigan, wireless provider SkyTel turned over the contents of 626,638 SMS messages, a figure described by a federal judge as 'staggering.' Chuck DeWitt, a spokesman for the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, which represents the 63 largest U.S. police forces including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago, said 'all such records should be retained for two years.' Some providers, like Verizon, retain the contents of SMS messages for a brief period of time, while others like T-Mobile do not store them at all. Along with the police association, other law enforcement groups making the request to the Senate include the National District Attorneys' Association, the National Sheriffs' Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies, DeWitt said."

lkcl writes about his effort to go further than others have, and actually have a processor designed for Free Software manufactured: "A new processor is being put together — one that is FSF Endorseable, contains no proprietary hardware engines, yet an 800MHz 8-core version would, at 38 GFLOPS, be powerful enough on raw GFLOPS performance figures to take on the 3ghz AMD Phenom II x4 940, the 3GHz Intel i7 920 and other respectable mid-range 100 Watt CPUs. The difference is: power consumption in 40nm for an 8-core version would be under 3 watts. The core design has been proven in 65nm, and is based on a hybrid approach, with its general-purpose instruction set being designed from the ground up to help accelerate 3D Graphics and Video Encode and Decode, an 8-core 800mhz version would be capable of 1080p30 H.264 decode, and have peak 3D rates of 320 million triangles/sec and a peak fill rate of 1600 million pixels/sec. The unusual step in the processor world is being taken to solicit input from the Free Software Community at large before going ahead with putting the chip together. So have at it: if given carte blanche, what interfaces and what features would you like an FSF-Endorseable mass-volume processor to have? (Please don't say 'DRM' or 'built-in spyware')." There's some discussion on arm-netbook. This is the guy behind the first EOMA-68 card (currently nearing production). As a heads ups, we'll be interviewing him in a live style similarly to Woz (although intentionally this time) next Tuesday.

MrSeb writes "In its continuing mission to build a 'Wiki Weapon,' Defense Distributed has 3D printed the lower receiver of an AR-15 and tested it to failure. The printed part only survives the firing of six shots, but for a first attempt that's quite impressive. And hey, it's a plastic gun. Slashdot first covered 3D-printed guns back in July. The Defense Distributed group sprung up soon after, with the purpose of creating an open-source gun — a Wiki Weapon — that can be downloaded from the internet and printed out. The Defense Distributed manifesto mainly quotes a bunch of historical figures who supported the right to bear arms. DefDist (its nickname) is seeking a gun manufacturing license from the ATF, but so far the feds haven't responded. Unperturbed, DefDist started down the road by renting an advanced 3D printing machine from Stratasys — but when the company found out what its machine was being used for, it was repossessed. DefDist has now obtained a 3D printer from Objet, which seemingly has a more libertarian mindset. The group then downloaded HaveBlue's original AR-15 lower receiver from Thingiverse, printed it out on the Objet printer using ABS-like Digital Material, screwed it into an AR-57 upper receiver, loaded up some FN 5.7x28mm ammo, and headed to the range. The DefDist team will now make various modifications to HaveBlue's design, such as making it more rugged and improving the trigger guard, and then upload the new design to Thingiverse." Sensible ammo choice; 5.7x28mm produces less recoil than the AR-15's conventional 5.56mm. I wonder how many of the upper's components, too, can one day be readily replaced with home-printable parts — for AR-15 style rifles, the upper assembly is where the gun's barrel lives, while the lower assembly (the part printed and tested here) is the legally controlled part of the firearm.

Hugh Pickens writes writes "BBC reports that scientists have developed a technique that can make bread stay mold-free for 60 days that could also be used with a wide range of foods including fresh turkey and many fruits and vegetables. At its laboratory on the campus of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Don Stull of Microzap showed off the long, metallic microwave device that resembles an industrial production line. Originally designed to kill bacteria such as MRSA and salmonella, the researchers discovered it could kill the mold spores in bread in around 10 seconds. 'We treated a slice of bread in the device, we then checked the mold that was in that bread over time against a control,' says Stull. 'And at 60 days it had the same mold content as it had when it came out of the oven.' Food waste is a massive problem in most developed countries. In the US, figures released this year suggest that the average American family throws away 40% of the food they purchase — which adds up to $165 Billion annually. There is some concern that consumers might not take to bread that lasts for so long and Stull acknowledges it might be difficult to convince some people of the benefits. 'We'll have to get some consumer acceptance of that. Most people do it by feel and if you still have that quality feel they probably will accept it.'"

another random user writes with news that Facebook and Zynga have altered their business arrangement to become less closely intertwined. Zynga.com will no longer be promoted on the social networking site, and Zynga won't have to show ads for Facebook. "Zynga is the developer behind Farmville, a game once mostly played on Facebook, which at its peak attracted 82 million players a month. Zynga now has its own games platform, but players will no longer be able to share their progress on Facebook. Zynga's share price fell by 13% in after-hours trading following the news. It is the latest blow for the company, which last month announced job cuts and studio closures. ... Facebook said the move would bring its relationship with Zynga in line with other games studios. ... Recent figures suggest 80% of Zynga's revenue comes from Facebook users."

Nerval's Lobster writes "While Microsoft claims it's sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the month since launch—a more rapid pace than Windows 7—new data from research firm The NPD Group suggests that isn't helping sales of actual Windows devices, which, in its estimation, are down 21 percent from last year. Desktops dropped 9 percent year-over-year, while notebooks fell 24 percent. 'After just four weeks on the market, it's still early to place blame on Windows 8 for the ongoing weakness in the PC market,' Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at The NPD Group, wrote in a Nov. 29 statement attached to the data. 'We still have the whole holiday selling season ahead of us, but clearly Windows 8 did not prove to be the impetus for a sales turnaround some had hoped for.'" That seems to match the public grumbling of Acer and Asus about early sales. And though these figures exclude Surface sales, the newly announced prices on for new Windows 8 Pro-equipped Surface tablets might not endear them to anyone. Have you (or has your business?) moved to Windows 8?

garymortimer writes "Earlier this month, Iran's news agency provided visual evidence that its government had figured out to make a fancy new drone that could take off and land vertically. What they didn't tell us is that they used Photoshop to make it stop taking off from the roof of Japan's Chiba University, which built the aircraft and never had anything to do with Iran's alleged version of it."

theodp writes "A little birdie told me which Windows 8 machines would sell out fast. 'Cheep' ones! While no official sales figures have emerged, anecdotal evidence suggests that cheap Windows 8 laptops were a big hit with Black Friday shoppers, leaving some Walmart and Best Buy bargain hunters disappointed at missing out on the sub-$250 deals. So, was the Doctor-Desktop-and-Mister-Metro dual nature of Windows 8 and lack of a touchscreen no big deal to these bargain basement 'Laptop Hunters', or did they not realize what they were buying? Or, as a GeekWire commenter suggests, perhaps they were really just looking to score an ultra-cheap Linux laptop!"

An anonymous reader writes "Vaccines, contrary to opinions from the anti-science crowd, are some of the most effective tools in modern medicine. For some diseases, a single shot is all it takes for lifetime immunity. Others, though, require booster shots, to remind your immune system exactly what it should prepare to fight. Failure to get these shots threatens an individual's health, and the herd immunity concept as well. Scientists are now looking into 'self-boosting' vaccines in order to fix that problem. Some viruses are capable of remaining in the body for a person's entire lifetime. If researchers can figure out a way to safely harness these, it may be possible to add genes that would create proteins to train the immune system against not just one, but multiple other viruses (abstract). This is a difficult problem to solve; changing the way we do vaccinations will itself have consequences for herd immunity. It also hinges on finding a virus that can survive the immune system without having uncomfortable flare-ups from time to time."