Trans-Fats: “Consumption of industrial trans-fats was associated with a 34 percent increase in all causes of mortality”
August 12th, 2015Via: Independent:
The latest findings, published in the British Medical Journal, appear to confirm the growing realisation that the prevailing health advice for the past half century to cut down on foods that are rich in saturated fats such as butter and cheese may have been misguided.
The study, carried out in Canada by Russell de Souza of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and colleagues found no association between saturated fats and ill health, but did find a link with the consumption of foods containing trans-fats, such as margarine.
The scientists found that the consumption of industrial trans-fats was associated with a 34 per cent increase in all causes of mortality, a 28 per cent increase in death from coronary heart disease and a 21 per cent increase in the risk of being diagnosed with heart disease.
The Teflon Toxin
August 12th, 2015Via: First Look:
Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.
This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.
The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay
August 11th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
Can the site’s dwindling ranks of volunteer editors protect its articles from the influence of money?
Google Creates New Company Called Alphabet, Restructures Stock
August 11th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
Google Inc. is reorganizing into a holding company that gives its main Web operations greater independence while offering investors more visibility into ambitious plans to expand new businesses, including health and Internet access.
Alphabet Inc. will be name of the new conglomerate. Google Inc., along with YouTube, Android mobile software and other Web-based products, will be a key part of that. Alphabet will also include Calico, Google Ventures, Google Capital, Google X and other subsidiaries, the Web company said in a blog post Monday. The goal isn’t to make Alphabet a consumer brand, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page said.
Yuan Devaluation
August 11th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
China devalued the yuan by the most in two decades, a move that rippled through global markets as policy makers stepped up efforts to support exporters and boost the role of market pricing in Asia’s largest economy.
The central bank cut its daily reference rate by 1.9 percent, triggering the yuan’s biggest one-day drop since China unified official and market exchange rates in January 1994. The People’s Bank of China called the change a one-time adjustment and said it will strengthen the market’s ability to determine the daily fixing.
Web’s Random Numbers Are Too Weak, Researchers Warn
August 9th, 2015Low entropy.
Via: BBC:
The data scrambling systems used by millions of web servers could be much weaker than they ought to be, say researchers.
A study found shortcomings in the generation of the random numbers used to scramble or encrypt data.
The hard-to-guess numbers are vital to many security measures that prevent data theft.
But the sources of data that some computers call on to generate these numbers often run dry.
This, they warned, could mean random numbers are more susceptible to well-known attacks that leave personal data vulnerable.
“This seemed like just an interesting problem when we got started but as we went on it got scary,” said security analyst Bruce Potter who, along with researcher Sasha Moore, carried out the study that was presented at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas.
Brazil: Radio Journalist Critical of Government Killed During Live Broadcast
August 9th, 2015Via: Fox Latino:
A well-known radio journalist in Brazil who repeatedly denounced political corruption was gunned down Thursday in the middle of one of his broadcasts.
Gleydson Carvalho was a dogged journalist who had received death threats on Facebook.
Carvalho, police said, was in the middle of his broadcast in Camocim, in the state of Ceará, when two men showed up at the building to buy advertising space, according to the show’s technical operator, Ricardo Farias.
The ad inquiry, police say, was a ruse. Once the men were allowed into the building, one of them forced his way into the Carvalho’s booth and ambushed him.
Secret Sanctions Revealed Against University Hosting $1.25 Billion Bio Lab
August 8th, 2015Via: USA Today:
Kansas State University — where a controversial $1.25 billion biosecurity lab facility is under construction — secretly faced federal sanctions last year after repeatedly violating safety regulations during its research with bioterror pathogens, records obtained by USA TODAY show.
Kansas State’s “history of non-compliance” during four consecutive inspections over two years shows a “systemic problem” and has “raised serious concerns” about the university’s ability to put safeguards in place to ensure safety and containment of dangerous pathogens, according to a March 2014 letter to the university from federal lab regulators.
University officials said Tuesday they were surprised by the letter’s harsh tone and language because nearly all of the violations involved administrative paperwork issues that posed no safety or security threat. Yet in the letter, regulators threatened to suspend or revoke the university’s permits to do research with bioterror pathogens if it didn’t agree to enter a federal performance improvement program.
The regulatory action against Kansas State is of particular importance because the university’s campus in Manhattan is the site of the federal government’s new National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), which held a groundbreaking ceremony in May. Construction of the 570,000-square-foot facility has faced years of delays and controversy because of concerns about whether research on some of the world’s most dangerous agricultural diseases can be done safely in farm country and near herds of livestock.
Although the NBAF will be an independently run Department of Homeland Security facility when it opens around 2022, the university has publicized on its website that Kansas State’s labs already are being used to “jump-start” research that “will eventually transition” to the new federal facility. Transition research underway includes studies of Rift Valley fever, a mosquito-borne disease that can cause abortions in livestock and fatal infections in people; Japanese encephalitis, another mosquito-borne disease that can cause reproductive problems in pigs and serious and sometimes fatal brain infections in people; and Classical swine fever, a potentially deadly pig disease.
Windows 10 Is Possibly the Worst Spyware Ever Made
August 8th, 2015Via: Network World:
The usual bumps of an OS launch are understandable and forgivable, but some of the terms of the end user service agreement for Windows 10 put the NSA to shame.
Microsoft is already getting heat after it was found that Windows 10 was being auto-downloaded to user PCs without warning, and more seriously, that it was using the Internet connections of Windows 10 users to deliver Windows 10 and updates to others.
But there are worse offenders. Microsoft’s service agreement is a monstrous 12,000 words in length, about the size of a novella. And who reads those, right? Well, here’s one excerpt from Microsoft’s terms of use that you might want to read:
We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.
EFF, where are you?
The good news is you can opt out of that feature, but the bad news is it defaults to on. You have to go to the Settings and then open the Privacy applet, where you are greeted with 13 different screens to weed through. Most of the offenders are on the General tab, but you really should go through all tabs, such as what types of data each app on your system can access.
Related: Tweaks to Windows 10 Settings for Privacy (Get comfortable, this is going to take awhile…)
The No Download List
August 8th, 2015Via: The Register:
Software export controls are being applied to blacklisted people as well as countries: and these controls apply to routine security packages such as freebie antivirus scanning software, as well as more sensitive technologies, El Reg has concluded.
We’ve come to this way of thinking after investigating why Reg reader Hasan Ali was blocked from downloading Sophos AV for Mac. A screenshot of the “computer says no” message can be seen below.
Ali brought the issue to our attention, complaining that Sophos had applied an “anti-Muslim name filter” that places hurdles in the way of his attempts to download the security software firm’s freebie Mac malware detection tool.
In response, Sophos said the filter was based on the International Denied Persons List and its use was routine procedure that it needed to follow in order to comply with various international export laws.
