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Microsoft is launching the first decentralized infrastructure implementation by a major tech company that is built directly on the bitcoin blockchain. From a report: The open source project, called Ion, deals with the underlying mechanics of how networks talk to each other. For example, if you log onto Airbnb using Facebook, a protocol deals with the software that sends the personal information from your social profile to that external service provider. In this case, Ion handles the decentralized identifiers, which control the ability to prove you own the keys to this data. Christopher Allen, a crypto veteran and the co-founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working group for decentralized identity (DID) solutions, told CoinDesk that Microsoft's move could impact the entire tech industry. "A lot of enterprise infrastructures use Microsoft products," Allen said. "So if they integrate this into any of their infrastructure products, they'll have access to DID." Indeed, Yorke Rhodes, a program manager on Microsoft's blockchain engineering team, told CoinDesk that Microsoft's team has been working for a year on a key signing and validation software that relies on public networks, like bitcoin or ethereum, yet can handle far greater throughput than the underlying blockchain itself.

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The European Commission fines five banks a total of €1.07bn for forming cartels to rig currency trading.

Astronauts and Jeff Bezos-types hoping to set up shop on the Moon might have another challenge to worry about: moonquakes caused by tectonic activity.

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After a mural appeared at Marble Arch the artist may have been at the Extinction Rebellion protest.

"Star Wars" actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in the original trilogy, died on Tuesday, his family said today. He was 74. He died at his North Texas home surrounded by his family. From a report: He was discovered by producer Charles H. Schneer while working as a hospital attendant in London, and cast in Ray Harryhausen's "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger." The next year, he was cast as Chewbacca, the 200-year-old Wookiee. Mayhew went on to appear in "The Empire Strikes Back," "Return of the Jedi," "Revenge of the Sith," "The Force Awakens" and "The Star Wars Holiday Special." He was active on the "Star Wars" convention circuit and wrote two books, "Growing Up Giant" and "My Favorite Giant." His height was not due to gigantism, but he measured 7 feet 3 inches at his highest. George Lucas originally had his eye on bodybuilder David Prowse, but Prowse decided to play Darth Vader instead and Lucas went with the even taller Mayhew.

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"Nihilism is best done by professionals."

Julian Assange has been sentenced to just under a year in a UK prison on Wednesday after he was found guilty of violating his bail conditions when he entered Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden in 2012. From a report: "You had a choice and the course of action you chose was to commit an offense," Judge Deborah Taylor said. "You've not surrendered willingly ... you would not have come voluntarily before the court," she added, before handing down an "imprisonment of 50 weeks." Assange was wanted in Sweden for questioning over sexual assault and rape allegations. He faces a separate hearing on possible extradition to the United States over a computer hacking conspiracy charge on Thursday. Charges relating to his bail were formally laid at Westminster Magistrates' Court on April 11, hours after the 47-year-old's nearly seven-year sanctuary within Ecuador's central London embassy came to an abrupt and dramatic end.

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Nelson was captured by a militia who believed the vulture was transmitting military secrets.

Julian Assange has been arrested by police in London after almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy. The WikiLeaks founder was dragged out of the embassy at approximately 10:35 am local time, 5:35 am ET. Assange was formally charged by the U.S. Department of Defense this morning with, “conspiracy to commit…

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An anonymous reader writes: "A bad diet kills more people globally than tobacco," reports Bloomberg, citing a new study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published Wednesday in Lancet. The study argues that poor diets led to 11 million deaths in 2017 -- and that more than half of them were caused by just three main dietary factors: low consumption of whole grains, low consumption of fruits, and high intake of sodium. In fact, bad diets are responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other cause, the researchers concluded. "We found that improvement of diet could potentially prevent one in every five deaths globally."

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Game of Thrones, space travel, the life span of a hamster. They've all got nothing on Brexit.

Ryanair's attempt to tease British Airways over its flight plan mistake backfires.

Opera singer Anna Patalong had chosen to wear a yellow dress, featuring a blue sash with yellow stars.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was caught eating a chocolate bar during a vote in parliament.

Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker updated reporters at a press conference which had some lighter moments.

Bands from around the world are celebrating 50 years of heavy metal at the inaugural World Metal Congress in London.

Scientists have announced the observation of “CP violation in a D⁰ meson” at CERN, a discovery that will appear in physics textbooks for years to come. You’re probably wondering what exactly it means.

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Trailblazing mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck from the University of Texas at Austin has been awarded the 2019 Abel Prize—regarded as one of the highest accolades in mathematics. She is now the first woman to receive the illustrious award.

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Despite gruesome lyrics, death metal does not desensitise fans to images of violence, a study shows.

jbmartin6 shares a report from Scientific American: In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a group of scientists has theorized that sound waves possess mass, meaning sounds would be directly affected by gravity. They suggest phonons, particle-like collective excitations responsible for transporting sound waves across a medium, might exhibit a tiny amount of mass in a gravitational field. "You would expect classical physics results like this one to have been known for a long time by now," says Angelo Esposito from Columbia University, the lead author on the paper. "It's something we stumbled upon almost by chance." Esposito and his colleagues built on a previous paper published last year, in which Alberto Nicolis of Columbia and Riccardo Penco from Carnegie Mellon University first suggested phonons could have mass in a superfluid. The latest study, however, shows this effect should hold true for other materials, too, including regular liquids and solids, and even air itself. And although the amount of mass carried by the phonons is expected to be tiny -- comparable with a hydrogen atom, about 10^-24 grams -- it may actually be measurable. Except, if you were to measure it, you would find something deeply counterintuitive: The mass of the phonons would be negative, meaning they would fall "up." Over time their trajectory would gradually move away from a gravitational source such as Earth. "If their gravitational mass was positive, they would fall downward," Penco says. "Because their gravitational mass is negative, phonons fall upwards." And the amount they would "fall" is equally small, varying depending on the medium the phonon is traveling through. In water, where sound moves at 1.5 kilometers per second, the negative mass of the phonon would cause it to drift at about 1 degree per second. But this corresponds to a change of 1 degree over 15 kilometers, which would be exceedingly difficult to measure.

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My name is Charles, and I can’t Magic Eye.

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Hugo the African grey was found by a firefighter on the runway at Dublin Airport last weekend.

If, after meal prepping a big batch of chicken breasts or pork shoulder, your first instinct is to grab a couple of forks for shredding, listen up: I have a super-smart technique that's about to save you a lot of time (and effort). The key to the quickest shredded meat? Your trusty ol' electric mixer. It's not just for baking.

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The UK and US governments announce a £25m project to improve the sensitivity of the LIGO facilities.

What exactly happened during the 19 hour-siege in which 21 people were killed at a luxury complex?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: One of the great security fears about containers is that an attacker could infect a container with a malicious program, which could escape and attack the host system. Well, we now have a security hole that could be used by such an attack: RunC container breakout, CVE-2019-5736. RunC is the underlying container runtime for Docker, Kubernetes, and other container-dependent programs. It's an open-source command-line tool for spawning and running containers. Docker originally created it. Today, it's an Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification. It's widely used. Chance are, if you're using containers, you're running them on runC. According to Aleksa Sarai, a SUSE container senior software engineer and a runC maintainer, security researchers Adam Iwaniuk and Borys Popawski discovered a vulnerability, which "allows a malicious container to (with minimal user interaction) overwrite the host runc binary and thus gain root-level code execution on the host. The level of user interaction is being able to run any command (it doesn't matter if the command is not attacker-controlled) as root." To do this, an attacker has to place a malicious container within your system. But, this is not that difficult. Lazy sysadmins often use the first container that comes to hand without checking to see if the software within that container is what it purports to be. Red Hat technical product manager for containers, Scott McCarty, warned: "The disclosure of a security flaw (CVE-2019-5736) in runc and docker illustrates a bad scenario for many IT administrators, managers, and CxOs. Containers represent a move back toward shared systems where applications from many different users all run on the same Linux host. Exploiting this vulnerability means that malicious code could potentially break containment, impacting not just a single container, but the entire container host, ultimately compromising the hundreds-to-thousands of other containers running on it. While there are very few incidents that could qualify as a doomsday scenario for enterprise IT, a cascading set of exploits affecting a wide range of interconnected production systems qualifies...and that's exactly what this vulnerability represents."

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Porters and stouts go well with more than just dessert. Read More

Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A new kind of magnet, theorized for decades, may now have been experimentally proven to exist. And it could eventually lead to better data storage devices. In a normal magnet, the magnetic moments of individual grains align with each other to generate a magnetic field. In contrast, in the new "singlet-based" magnet, magnetic moments are temporary in nature, popping in and out of existence. Although a singlet-based magnet's field is unstable, the fact that such magnets can more easily transition between magnetic and non-magnetic states can make them well-suited for data storage application. Specifically, they could operate more quickly and with less power than conventional devices, says Andrew Wray, a materials physicist at New York University who led the research. Now, Wray and his colleagues have discovered the first example of a singlet-based magnet that is robust -- one made from uranium antimonide (USb2). "It ends up taking very little energy to create spin excitons for uranium antimonide," Wray says. "This is essential for the singlet-based magnet, because if it took a lot of energy, then there wouldn't be enough spin excitons to condense, stabilize one another, and give you a magnet." The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Mixing drinks may not actually make your hangover worse. So here's some tips to help you the morning after the night before.