Mattalyst

Hottt.

Kim Goes to Jail: Anti-gay Kentucky clerk Kim Davis is now the subject of an erotic lesbian novel (For more info, visit Towleroad; For a related video, click here http://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/128660958746/kim-davis-speaks-after-being-released-from-jail)

"When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall."

It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

Hahahah, $60k wouldn't even cover the hardware you'd need to contemplate cracking Tor definitively.

mspohr writes: It looks like Russia's effort to crack Tor was harder than they anticipated. The company that won the contract is now trying to get out of it. Bloomberg reports: "The Kremlin was willing to pay 3.9 million rubles ($59,000) to anyone able to crack Tor, a popular tool for communicating anonymously over the Internet. Now the company that won the government contract expects to spend more than twice that amount to abandon the project. The Central Research Institute of Economics, Informatics, and Control Systems—a Moscow arm of Rostec, a state-run maker of helicopters, weapons, and other military and industrial equipment—agreed to pay 10 million rubles ($150,000) to hire a law firm tasked with negotiating a way out of the deal, according to a database of state-purchase disclosures. Lawyers from Pleshakov, Ushkalov and Partners will work with Russian officials on putting an end to the Tor research project, along with several classified contracts, the government documents say."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump finally responded to Boing Boing's uncovering of a 1920s-era story reporting the apparent arrest of his father at a Ku Klux Klan Rally in Queens. As one might expect from The Donald, he confirmed it, denied it, and got angry with "that little website."

But it wasn't our reporter, Matt Blum, who wrote that Fred Trump shared lawyers with men charged with attacking cops at the Klan "parade"—it was an unbylined Times writer with no idea of the then-young Fred Trump's future significance as a real estate mogul. And it's present-day Times journalist, Jason Horowitz, to whom Trump stumbled through his excuses.

"Mr. Trump’s barrage of answers – his sudden denial of a fact he had moments before confirmed; his repeatedly noting that no charges were filed against his father in connection with the incident he had just repeatedly denied; and his denigration of the news organization that brought the incident to light as a “little website” – shows his pasta-against-the-wall approach to beating down inconvenient story lines," writes Horowitz.

Q. Have you seen this story about police arresting a Fred Trump who lived at that Devonshire address in 1927 after a Ku Klux Klan rally turned violent?

A. Totally false. We lived on Wareham. The Devonshire — I know there is a road Devonshire but I don’t think my father ever lived on Devonshire.

Q. The Census shows that he lived there with your mother there. But regardless, you never heard about that story?

A. It never happened. And by the way, I saw that it was one little website that said it. It never happened. And they said there were no charges, no nothing. It’s unfair to mention it, to be honest, because there were no charges. They said there were charges against other people, but there were absolutely no charges, totally false.

Somebody showed me that website — it was a little website and somebody did that. By the way, did you notice that there were no charges? Well, if there are no charges that means it shouldn’t be mentioned.

Because my father, there were no charges against him, I don’t know about the other people involved. But there were zero charges against him. So assuming it was him — I don’t even think it was him, I never even heard about it. So it’s really not fair to mention. It never happened.

Trump—who recently described Mexican immigrants as rapists and has a history of dubious comments about minorities—inherited his father's fortune. But he also worked alongside and was mentored by him as a young man. A 1979 article, published by Village Voice, reported on a civil rights lawsuit that alleged the Trumps refused to rent to black home-seekers. It also quotes a rental agent who said Fred Trump instructed him not to rent to blacks, and to encourage existing black tenants to leave. The case was settled in a 1975 consent degree described as "one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated," but the Justice Department subsequently complained that continuing "racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents has occurred with such frequency that it has created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity."

Trump is currently the runaway leader among Republican voters, enjoying more than 30 percent support in some polls.

oldmanyellsatcloud:

amx004qubeley:

ninastestanin:

christmas-type-furret:

This is literally the most bomb-ass D&D story I’ve ever read in my life oh my god.

Holy shit ._.

NO!!!!

I’m glad I’m not the only person who likes to break their own characters in tabletop games.

via http://www.tumblr.com/likes

dustrial-inc:

Collide - Ctrl Alt Design

dustrial-inc:

NITZER EBB

sapphzeal:

OMG THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for asking me to do this,this is like idk the first time in forever that someone has went up to my ask box and said something(usually i ask for requests because im running out of ideas) Thank you scientist grandpa :) (sorry for the repost someone ask for a trigger warning in the tag and the picture disappeared so im just gonna leave it in the description im so sorry for the reposts im just getting frustrated at this point)

thvndermag:

Jason Martin

http://www.lissongallery.com/artists/jason-martin

Pretty much, yeah.

The US government wants to break encryption, and it wants America's biggest companies to do it without ruining the tech industry's dominance worldwide.

Consumers want to be able to communicate privately, and tech companies like Google and Apple say turning on encryption allows them to do that in a secure way.

Law enforcement can’t intercept or otherwise acquire criminal evidence from encrypted devices or messages, which is a problem for the NSA and FBI. But building "backdoors" into otherwise secure products makes them inherently insecure.

The overall move to more encryption has come as consumers demand privacy from government spying and as major online services (Ashley Madison), companies (Sony), and even the government itself (Office of Personnel Management) have suffered massive data breaches in recent months. Finding middle ground has been impossible, and the government's top officials seem to think that Silicon Valley's intractability has come from a lack of trying or a lack of understanding.

The security-minded say this is nonsense, and that any legislation breaking encryption is based on two pieces of blind faith coming from the administration: First, the request assumes that American tech companies dominance will never be challenged. Second, it assumes that computer scientists will be able to invent a method of encryption everyone has said is impossible.

"The answer to a technical consensus seems to be 'nerd harder and you'll find a way'"

"The unanimous conclusion—the scientific consensus—in industry, in academia, and even among government experts is that there is a significant security risk associated with facilitating government access via a backdoor," Jonathan Mayer, a computer scientist and lawyer at Stanford who is considered one of the nation's top security experts, said at an encryption policy event in Washington DC Monday.

“We know how to build one of these things that minimizes security and privacy problems. But the least bad is still really really bad,” Mayer added.

At the event, two of the government's top attorneys lamented Mayer's comments, which have been echoed repeatedly over the last few months. But lack of effort simply isn't the problem here.

"The answer to a technical consensus [that breaking encryption is a bad option] seems to be 'nerd harder and you'll find a way,'" Julian Sanchez, a fellow at the Cato Institute and founder of Just Security said. "That seems like an incredibly faith-based initiative. 'They say they can't do it, but let's pass the legislation to find out, and I bet they'll figure out the solution after we've mandated it.' That seems like a bad idea to me."

In leaked emails published by the Washington Post, Robert Litt, the top attorney for the US intelligence community, noted that a terrorist attack in which the perpetrators used encryption could be used as leverage to push through anti-crypto legislation.

Litt didn't discuss that email Monday but repeatedly said tech companies need to make a "good faith effort" to try to design a new encryption paradigm in which the United States can have access to encrypted communications with a warrant.

Litt shrugged off Mayer's suggestion that such a paradigm would be bad for overall security, bad for consumers, bad for companies (whose users might migrate elsewhere) and bad for human rights around the world (many activists rely on encryption to circumvent authoritarian governments).

"Our tech products are better than anyone else's. If we can devise a regime where it's known what can and can't be intercepted, am I going to buy some Romanian open-source software [that pledges no backdoors]?" Litt asked.

Wendy Seltzer, who sits on the board of directors at the Tor Project, noted that lots of people do indeed use more secure alternatives to popular messaging products.

"You can use Riseup, you can use PGP encryption, you can use lots of alternate services [to Gmail]," she said. "There are plenty of people using those alternate services—as long as open-source software is produced inside and outside the US, it's going to be hard to create a global backdoor."

"When you mention alternative email services, which, frankly, I've never heard of, how is their user base compared to Yahoo or Hotmail?" Litt responded, adding that people would be willing to deal with a decreased amount of security in exchange for the ability to use the “best” product.

"If the criminals who trust Google get caught and the ones who use Tor don’t, they'll change"

The fact is, services designed to be secure make up just a fraction of the overall market share for their particular products. Security experts will tell you that their small market share is precisely why it's so important that Apple, Google, and Facebook are all putting more encryption into their products—and they're doing this in part because secure-minded upstarts are gaining in popularity.

DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that bills itself as a surveillance-free Google alternative, performs about 8.2 million searches per day, up from just 1.5 million per day before Edward Snowden's original surveillance revelations in May of 2013.

"If the criminals who trust Google get caught and the ones who use Tor don’t, they'll change,” Sanchez said. “You're talking about making a very burdensome security complex regulatory apparatus with ever-diminishing benefits."

Someone, somewhere is always going to offer encryption services with no backdoors. It's more or less up to the federal government whether the companies offering those services will be America’s tech giants.

By undermining consumer security, the US intelligence complex is doing all it can to ensure that the next major tech companies come from abroad—maybe the next big open-source, backdoorless encryption software will even be made by some Romanian company you've never heard of.

\m/

xyrm:

escaped medical leech

The Secret Cemetery of American Soldiers Convicted of Terrible Crimes

Nine of the world's biggest banks on Tuesday threw their weight behind blockchain, the technology that powers bitcoin.

Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, State Street, Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS have all formed a partnership to draw up industry standards and protocols for using the blockchain in banking.

The partnership is being led by R3, a startup with offices in New York and London headed by David Rutter, the former CEO of ICAP Electronic Broking and a 32-year veteran of Wall Street.

Rutter told Business Insider that the plan is to build the "fabric" of blockchain technology for banking, as well as develop commercial applications for banks and financial firms.

He told Business Insider that other banks have already signed up to the partnership, but the timing of the release means they could not be named. The Financial Times reports that Goldman Sachs are also involved in the partnership.

The blockchain is the software that both powers and regulates cryptocurrency bitcoin. In its most basic form, it records ownership of bitcoin — money — and transactions — one person paying another.

Transactions are signed off by the parties involved using the software, then added to the blockchain, a long string of code that records all activity.

Once other transactions are added on in front of an exchange, the transaction is stuck there forever and can't be changed, in the same way you can't change a brick once it's been built into a wall.

The software cuts out the need for a "trusted middleman" to sit in between parties in a transaction as it acts as that middleman. This makes transactions quicker, cheaper, and easier when compared to the current systems banks use. 

Banks are therefore keen to see if it can be adapted for use with traditional currency, rather than just bitcoin.

The blockchain uses open ledger technology, meaning all of these transactions are free for anyone to look at and not stashed in some private data centre in Canary Wharf. Anyone can theoretically check to see if someone's using stolen bitcoin and this adds a level of transparency to the system.

Top banks including Barclays, Citi, Santander, and UBS have all expressed interest in the blockchain but this is the first time the banks have worked together on a project.

Rutter says he began approaching banks around 15 months ago after visiting around 30 blockchain and bitcoin companies he was considering investing in.

He says: "The lightbulb went off that distributed ledger technology could be to finance what the internet was to media."

Rutter says R3 has drawn up a "wish list" of what its banking partners want to use blockchain technology for, which covers "everything from issuance, to clearing and settlement and smart contracts, where the code is the contract and it saves on back office costs."

Barclays' Derek White recently told Business Insider that the bank has identified 45 potential uses for blockchain technology, while Santander told Business insider it is looking at 25 uses.

He says: "I think broadly speaking we'll be able to demonstrate within 1 to 2 years that the technology is fit for purpose. How long it will take to roll that out and integrate into existing systems is not something I know enough about to comment on.

"Our goal is to have some real examples of how this could work within the next year — so really fast."

As part of the partnership, banks are investing in R3. Rutter said: "I can’t reveal that but it’s been reported that it’s several million. From my prospective of having the banks involved, the human element is more valuable."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Animated map shows where all the world's McDonald's are

Who?

So on the one hand, I'm gonna miss some of their IP: I think I've played all the MGS games at this point (including the NES and PSP ones).

On the other hand, I'm kind of looking forward to a return to the days when hardcore gaming was a niche market populated by auteur developers who cared more about making something interesting than they did about shipping units. You know, the 70s-90s.

The loss of Hideo Kojima may have been the beginning of the end for Konami as we know it, as rumors surface that AAA games will no longer be coming from the publisher, including Metal Gear titles.

View Article

Wowwww.

Read: What You Need to Know About Europe's Migrant Crisis

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are streaming from Syria and other war-torn parts of the Middle East toward the relative safety of Europe right now. The refugee crisis has inspired a lot of support and goodwill from people around the world, but it's also sparked a shitstorm of racist, nativistic responses from anti-refugee citizens and leaders across Europe.

Hungary's far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, has already said that the flood of Muslim refugees is a threat to Europe's "Christian roots" and he is building a gigantic wall along the Serbian border to keep them out.

Now, the mayor of a Hungarian town called Asotthalom has taken Orban's example to the next logical levelhe's filmed an action-packed propaganda video to flaunt his town's might and warn potential immigrants to not even think about putting their malnourished, dirty fucking shrapnel-studded feet into it. The video looks like a scene from the new Transporter reboot, complete with a knock-off Steve Jablonsky score.

"If you are an illegal immigrant and you want to get to Germany," Asotthalom Mayor Laszlo Toroczkai says, after a few clips of speeding cop cars and swole, threatening dudes on horses, "Hungary is a bad choice. Asotthalom is the worst."

Toroczkai may be a pretty outspoken opponent of illegal border crossings, but the New York Times is quick to remind everyone that he once had his ass kicked by Serbian nationalists after getting caught sneaking into the country in 2008. If only there'd been a scary YouTube video to dissuade him back then.

A judge ruled that there was not enough evidence that the practice was a public nuisance

I can't fucking believe this is still an issue.

Donald J. Trump repeated a debunked claim that vaccines are linked with autism, and health experts worried it might discourage parents from getting them.

"On Monday, Ardbeg, a whisky distillery on the Scottish island of Islay, announced findings from an experiment it had sent to the International Space Station. Whisky aged in a weightless environment accentuated Ardbeg’s smokiness and revealed other flavors and aroms, said Bill Lumsden, Ardbeg’s director of distilling and whisky creation."

Holy shit. Hacker wasps...

A braconid wasp attacking a gypsy-moth caterpillar ( USDA / Wikimedia )

This is a story about viruses that became domesticated by parasitic wasps, which use them as biological weapons for corrupting the bodies of caterpillars, which in turn can steal the viral genes and incorporate them into their own genomes, where they protect the caterpillars from yet more viruses. Evolution, you have outdone yourself with this one.

The wasps in question are called braconids. There are more than 17,000 known species, and they're all parasites. The females lay their eggs in the bodies of still-living caterpillars, which their grubs then devour alive.

As early as 1967, scientists realised that the wasps were also injecting the caterpillars with some kind of small particle, alongside their eggs. It took almost a decade to realise that those particles were viruses, which have since become known as bracoviruses. Each species of braconid wasp has its own specific bracovirus, but they all do the same thing: They suppress the caterpillar’s immune system and tweak its metabolism to favour the growing wasp. Without these viral allies, the wasp grubs would be killed by their host bodies.

So, the viruses are essential for the wasps—but the reverse is also true. Unlike most other kinds of virus, these bracoviruses cannot make copies of themselves. They are only manufactured in the ovaries of the wasps, and once they get into the caterpillars, their life cycle ends. Some might say they’re not true viruses are all. They're almost like secretions of the wasp’s body.

The bracoviruses can't independently reproduce because they lack genes for making the protein coats that give them form and structure. Those coat genes didn't vanish. In 2009, Anne Bezier and Jean-Michel Drezen from Francois Rabelais University showed that they exist within the wasp genomes. The bracoviruses aren’t just allies for the wasps: They are part of the wasps.

Based on the diversity of these viral genes within different species of braconid wasps, Bezier and Drezen estimated that they must have entered the wasp genome around 100 million years ago, before the braconid dynasty expanded into its current lush state. Back then, an ancient virus infected an ancient wasp, inserted its genes among those of its host, and created a partnership that has been dooming caterpillars ever since.

More recently, Gaelen Burke and Michael Strand from University of Georgia showed that the wasp genomes contain two separate clusters of viral genes. The first is a replication set, which the wasps use to turn their ovaries into virus-making factories. The second is a virulence set, which attacks the caterpillars. But when the wasps build the viruses, they fill them only with the virulence genes, not the replication ones. That’s why the resulting particles can attack caterpillars, but can’t reproduce or spread to new hosts. They are fully domesticated.

The caterpillars aren't just helpless victims in this drama. Sometimes, they successfully fight off the wasp-and-virus tag team. Other times, the wasps screw up, by attacking caterpillars of the wrong species, against whom their particular viruses are useless. Either way, caterpillars occasionally survive their encounters with braconids, but still end up with swarms of bracoviruses in their bodies. What happens then? Since those viruses were originally part of one insect genome (the wasp’s), could they find their way into another (the caterpillar’s)?

The answer is yes. Last year, Sean Schneider and James Thomas from the University of Washington found evidence of bracovirus genes in the genomes of the silk moth and the monarch butterfly. The duo described the wasps as “accidental genetic engineers,” implanting the genomes of their caterpillar victims with their own (viral) DNA. In other words, one insect was genetically modifying another with viral genes, via a sting.

“What’s kind of funny is that such a species as iconic as the monarch has been genetically modified by the parasitic wasp virus and can thus be considered as a natural GMO,” says Drezen, in an email. He, together with Salvador Herrero from the University of Valencia, has now found similar genes in a wider range of butterfly and moth species, including important pests like the beet armyworm and fall armyworm. And they’ve found that these sequences may not just be passive hitchhikers.

Herrero is an expert on baculoviruses, a group of viruses that infect and kill insects, and are often used in biological control. While looking for moth genes that resist these infections, he found a few that had no counterparts in related species. Instead, their closest matches were the bracovirus genes in braconid wasps. It looked as if these viral genes, which had hopped from wasp to moth, were now protecting their new hosts from baculoviruses.  

By coincidence, Drezen had discovered the same thing on his own, and found himself sitting next to Herrero at a conference dinner. They talked, realized that they were working on the same problem, and teamed up. Together, they showed that one of the viral genes in the beet armyworm prevents baculoviruses from reproducing in insect cells. Another stops baculoviruses from entering the cells in the first place, blocking infections entirely.

Herrero speculates that the wasps might have originally used these genes to stop baculoviruses from prematurely killing their hosts before their grubs could develop. When the genes made their way into the caterpillars, they played exactly the same role, but on behalf of a different owner. Where they once preserved the caterpillar’s life so the wasp could later kill it, now they just preserve its life, full-stop.

Michael Strand says that the team haven’t conclusively shown that the viral genes play an active role in the moths; the data, he says, are “suggestive” but not conclusive. Herrero acknowledges this, and is trying to get more unambiguous proof. He plans to disable the transferred viral genes by editing them, to see if their caterpillar owners more readily suffer from baculovirus infections. In other words, he plans to genetically modify the moths to show that the wasps have been doing so all along.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/parasitic-wasps-genetically-engineer-caterpillars-domesticated-viruses/405874/

h8trffc17:

The Garden of Words, by Makoto Shinkai

Presumably their universe falls to chaos and is reborn once every 2 hours in a grim mythic cycle.

GUI, Peter Quinn