Amazon’s Cloud Crash Debacle
April 22nd, 2011Via: CRN:
A cloud outage and disruption that rocked Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other services continued to wreak havoc Friday morning, more than 24 hours after the Amazon cloud outage was first noticed.
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Amazon Web Service EC2 experienced outages and interruptions in its North Virginia region starting early Thursday morning. The outages caused some major Web sites that are Amazon EC2 cloud customers to experience hiccups or to be knocked off line. Some major Amazon customers like Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and Reddit took the biggest hit, while a host of other sites also struggled to maintain service due to the outage.
Three-Parent IVF Babies
April 22nd, 2011Via: New Scientist:
A review of technologies that create three-parent embryos to avoid mitochondrial disease has found no evidence that the methods are unsafe, calling for further research. Medical charities have followed up the report with a call to the UK’s health secretary to prepare to regulate the technology in clinics.
Kickstarter for ‘The Last Cause’
April 22nd, 2011You might think that I have something to do with this project, but I don’t. However, I want to see it and I kicked in some money.
Hmm. On the other hand, who needs Sci-Fi when people can use the Interwebs to crowdfund their film projects?!
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
April 22nd, 2011Eileen sent $80 and AS sent $20. Thank you.
Both Apple and Google Receive Smartphone Users’ Locations
April 22nd, 2011Via: Wall Street Journal:
Apple Inc.’s iPhones and Google Inc.’s Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google, respectively, according to data and documents analyzed by The Wall Street Journal—intensifying concerns over privacy and the widening trade in personal data.
Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s locations via their cellphones. These databases could help them tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services—expected to rise to $8.3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Gartner Inc.
China: Thousands of Truck Drivers Riot in Shanghai Over Fuel Prices
April 21st, 2011ZeroHedge is right:
China is now between a rock and a hard place: will it continue happily importing Bernanke’s inflation exports or finally retaliate. Unfortunately for its economy, the appropriately called “nuclear option” of revaluation, will leave it export economy flailing. So the real question: is China ready to migrate from an export-led to a consumer-led model. Alas, the answer is a resounding no.
Via: Reuters:
A two-day strike over rising fuel prices turned violent in Shanghai on Thursday as thousands of truck drivers clashed with police, drivers said, in the latest example of simmering discontent over inflation.
About 2,000 truck drivers battled baton-wielding police at an intersection near Waigaoqiao port, Shanghai’s biggest, two drivers who were at the protest told Reuters.
Research Credit: klaos
China Halts Fuel Exports to Ensure Domestic Supply
April 21st, 2011Some context is necessary on this story.
China is a huge net oil importer. This is from the U.S. Department of Energy:
China’s net oil imports reached about 4.3 million bbl/d in 2009, making it the second-largest net oil importer in the world behind the United States and for the first time surpassing Japan’s imports.
Conversely, China, “Only exports limited amounts of gasoline and high-sulfur diesel to Vietnam and Indonesia.”
In other words, the geopolitical foreshadowing of this is far more significant than any immediate shortages that may result.
Via: Bloomberg:
China Petrochemical Corp., Asia’s biggest oil refiner, halted fuel exports to ensure domestic supply as high crude costs and retail price caps cause private refiners to cut back on production.
Sinopec Group, as the company is known, “stopped exporting to other regions apart from sustaining the basic resource needs of Hong Kong and Macau,” it said in its online newsletter today. The Beijing-based company will run its refineries at full capacity and cut petrochemical production to boost output of gasoline and diesel for domestic use, it said.
Pesticide Exposure in Pregnancy Linked to Lower IQ in Kids
April 21st, 2011Via: U.S. News and World Report:
Three new studies draw a link between prebirth exposure to a class of pesticides widely used on food crops and lower intelligence scores in children.
The effect is especially noticeable in kids from a California farming region where they and their mothers were also potentially exposed to pesticides through their use on local crops.
The pesticides in question are known as organophosphates, which kill insects by disrupting their brains and nervous systems. First developed in a more potent form as nerve poisons during World War II, they can disrupt people’s nervous systems as well, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The research doesn’t prove that organophosphate exposure is bad for the developing brains of infants and children. That may be impossible to confirm because ethical constraints prevent scientists from randomly assigning kids to be exposed to pesticides to see what happens.
Still, “there’s a body of evidence that’s beginning to build” in support of a link, said Brenda Eskenazi, co-author of one of the studies and director of the Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health at the University of California, Berkeley.
Although organophosphates are no longer used in bug-killing products designed for the home, they remain common in agriculture, the researchers noted.
Two of the studies, conducted by researchers at Mt. Sinai Medical Center and Columbia University, examined kids in New York City, while Eskenazi’s study looked at 329 kids and their mothers in the Salinas Valley area of central California. All of the studies found links between exposure to the pesticides in pregnant mothers and lower IQ scores in their kids by age 7.
In the Salinas Valley study, researchers looked at signs of pesticide exposure in urine taken from the mothers during pregnancy and later from their children.
The researchers found that every 10-fold increase in organophosphates detected during a mother’s pregnancy corresponded to a 5.5-point drop in overall IQ scores in her children by age 7.
In fact, the 20 percent of the children whose mothers appeared to have been exposed to the least pesticides had about a 7-point higher IQ level, on average, than those in the 20 percent born to mothers with the highest exposure, the researchers reported.
The difference is equivalent to about six months of brain development in a typical child, Eskenazi said. And the differences remained even when the researchers adjusted their statistics so they wouldn’t be thrown off by factors such as the education levels of the mothers and exposure to other toxins such as lead, she noted.
Eskenazi pointed out that the association was “substantial” in terms of whole populations, and might result in more children in need of special education and other services.
Research Credit: minerva
U.S. DOLLAR INDEX: INTRADAY DOWNSIDE BREACH 74.170
April 21st, 201174.101.
iPhone Keeps Secret Record of Everywhere You Go
April 20th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised.
The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner’s movements using a simple program.
For some phones, there could be almost a year’s worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple’s iOS 4 update to the phone’s operating system, released in June 2010.
“Apple has made it possible for almost anybody – a jealous spouse, a private detective – with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you’ve been,” said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.
Only the iPhone records the user’s location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. “Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google’s] Android phones and couldn’t find any,” said Warden. “We haven’t come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this.”
