Snapchat Ads Are Heading Your Way This Weekend


snapchat-ads

WIRED



It’s happened to Twitter. And Tumblr. And Instagram. And now, Snapchat’s day has finally come.


Beginning this weekend, the ephemeral messaging app will start rolling out paid advertisements for the first time. The startup announced the news on its blog Friday afternoon, admitting that the introduction of advertisements on the app was bound to “feel a little weird at first.” But the post attempts to assure users that they’re not obligated to actually interact with the ads—at all. Instead, they’ll show up in users’ “Recent Updates” feeds, where they can decide to watch the ads or not. After 24 hours, they’ll disappear completely.


“We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication—things like Snaps or Chats,” the post reads. “That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.”


The move has been rumored for some time, as Snapchat has faced pressure to prove that it’s actually worth that $10 billion valuation. And the company admitted as much in the post. “We need to make money,” the blog reads. “Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters.”


Snapchat is undoubtedly aware of the risks. Users of any social media platform have historically revolted the minute branded content starts appearing where their friends’ photos used to be. And yet, despite it, many of these brands survive because even though users don’t like the ads, per se, they don’t hate them enough to ditch the app that all their friends are using. Even Facebook, which has all but buried posts from normal people under heaps of branded content, still boasts one billion users and counting.


Snapchat has clearly decided that it’s now big enough to risk pissing some people off. It’s even more daring, considering the startup is still recovering from the so-called “Snappening,” in which hundreds of thousands of users photos were leaked after a third-party app that apps onto Snapchat to save photos was hacked. The company’s leaders are either very sure of their users’ allegiance or very naive to their mistrust.


Still, even if users stick with Snapchat, that’s no guarantee they’ll actually look at the ads the company serves them. After all, we all know what TV watchers did when given the option to watch commercials or fast forward through them with a DVR. Snapchat ads could meet the same fate, and if they do, advertisers will likely press the company to make the ads more visible.


In the meantime, though, Snapchat promises its ads will be unintrusive, optional, and most importantly, untargeted. Time will tell if that’s a promise Snapchat can actually keep.



Gadget Lab Podcast: Did You Hear That Apple Had an Event This Week?


The iPad Air 2 is demonstrated at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand.

The iPad Air 2 is demonstrated at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP



New Apple hardware was released this week. Maybe you heard about it. The hosts, joined this week by Gadget Labber Tim Moynihan, sat down to record the show just a couple of hours after the big announcements from Cupertino. Up for debate: the iPad’s importance, both as a consumer product and as a cultural force, now that the design is pretty much baked and we’re only seeing small improvements to its functionality. Also, the trio discusses iPad etiquette (Mat takes pictures with his), and Apple’s newfound sense of humor that came across in Thursday’s presentation. It’s not all Apple this week, though. Other topics: new Nexus hardware, the Whisper location-tracking controversy, the mysteries of Minecraft , and the awesomeness of Carcassonne . Lastly, you’ve heard the one about trying to get a Nobel Prize through airport security—but wait until you hear Tim’s tale of trying to explain to TSA agents why he’s carrying an Internet of Things hub that looks like a bowling pin with a creepy smiley face on it.


Programming notes: A few F-bombs get dropped in this one near the end, so wake the kids. Also, the WIRED offices are currently undergoing some light construction (we’re remodeling). So during the podcast, you’ll hear background banging noises, some concrete polishing, and the occasional barking dog.


Listen to this week’s episode or subscribe in iTunes.


Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds (Mat Honan is @mat, Michael Calore is @snackfight, and Tim Moynihan is @aperobot) or to the main hotline at @GadgetLab.



Game|Life Podcast: Software Sales Slump and Bayonetta Makes a Comeback


Bayonetta 2.

Bayonetta 2. Nintendo



The NPD Group has released (some tiny amount of) data on the game industry’s September sales, and it’s not all good news, as we discuss on this week’s Game|Life podcast.


While hardware sales are up considerably over last year (thanks to the availability of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), sales of new physical software took a big 35 percent hit versus last year. While NPD did point out that September 2013 was boosted considerably by the release of Grand Theft Auto V, this past month saw the release of Destiny.


I’ve been playing some Bayonetta 2 and have some brief thoughts on the range of review scores that we’ve seen (coupled with a memory about the last time I actually got annoyed at someone else’s game review, 10 years ago), a few early thoughts on Fantasy Life, the new Level-5 RPG for 3DS that Nintendo is about to publish here in the U.S., and Bo talks more about Shadow of Mordor.


Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.



Game|Life Audio Podcast


[dewplayer: "http://ift.tt/11Fyr45"​]



​​



Cops Need a Warrant to Grab Your Cell Tower Data, Florida Court Rules


The top of a cell phone tower.

The top of a cell phone tower. Getty Images



Americans may have a Florida drug dealer to thank for expanding our right to privacy.


Police departments around the country have been collecting phone metadata from telecoms and using a sophisticated spy tool to track people through their mobile phones—often without obtaining a warrant. But a new ruling out of Florida has curbed the activity in that state, on constitutional grounds. It raises hope among civil liberties advocates that other jurisdictions around the country may follow suit.


The Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday that obtaining cell phone location data to track a person’s location or movement in real time constitutes a Fourth Amendment search and therefore requires a court-ordered warrant.


The case specifically involves cell tower data for a convicted drug dealer that police obtained from a telecom without a warrant. But the way the ruling is written (.pdf), it would also cover the use of so-called “stingrays”—sophisticated technology law enforcement agencies use to locate and track people in the field without assistance from telecoms. Agencies around the country, including in Florida, have been using the technology to track suspects—sometimes without obtaining a court order, other times deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of the devices to track suspects, telling judges the information came from “confidential” sources rather than disclose their use of stingrays. The new ruling would require them to obtain a warrant or stop using the devices.


The American Civil Liberties Union calls the Florida ruling “a resounding defense” of the public’s right to privacy.


“Following people’s movements by secretly turning their cell phones into tracking devices can reveal extremely sensitive details of our lives, like where we go to the doctor or psychiatrist, where we spend the night, and who our friends are,” said Nate Freed Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Police are now on notice that they need to get a warrant from a judge before tracking cell phones, whether using information from the service provider or their own ‘Stingray’ cell phone tracking equipment.”


The ruling constitutes the first time that a state court has reached this finding under the Fourth Amendment. It comes at a timely moment when federal courts of appeal in other jurisdictions are in the midst of taking up the question of cell tower data, Wessler told WIRED. Even if other jurisdictions rule differently, the Florida case makes it more likely that the issue will one day get to the U.S. Supreme Court. If it does, civil liberties advocates hope that the federal court would rule as it did on the use of GPS tracking devices used by police, determining that it constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. Though the court in that case fell short of ruling that the use of GPS devices requires a warrant, law enforcement agencies around the country have changed their practices as a result of the ruling.


The American Civil Liberties Union calls the Florida ruling “a resounding defense” of the public’s right to privacy.


Stingrays are equally as invasive as GPS trackers, if not more so since GPS trackers are generally used on vehicles traveling public roads. Stingrays, however, can track the mobile phone wherever it goes—inside an apartment building and even down to the exact apartment where a person resides.


The stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick any nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. When mobile phones connect to the stingray, the device can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the phone’s location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can triangulate the phone’s location with greater precision than they can using data obtained from a fixed tower location and from telecoms.


The Justice Department has long asserted that law enforcement agencies don’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because they don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages. Instead, authorities say, they operate like pen-register and trap-and-trace systems, collecting the equivalent of header information. A pen register system records the phone numbers that a person dials, while a trap-and-trace system records the phone numbers of incoming calls to that phone.


The ACLU and others argue, however, that stingrays are more invasive than a trap-and-trace and should require a warrant. By not seeking a warrant to use them, police in Florida have been able to not only conceal from judges and defendant’s their use of the devices but also prevent the public from learning how the secretive technology is employed.


With regard to the Florida drug case—involving cell tower data obtained from a telecom—the ruling is significant for another reason in that the court rejected arguments that a user has no expectation of privacy in data collected by a telecom.


The government argued in the case that they had a right to obtain the data without a warrant because it carried no special protection under the so-called third-party doctrine. Under this argument the government asserts that information a person provides to a third-party—in this case the telecom—carries no expectation of privacy. When a mobile user’s phone pings nearby cell towers, the user is willingly providing the cell tower, and telecom, with their location information, the government argued.


But the judges rejected this argument out of hand.


“Simply because the cell phone user knows or should know that his cell phone gives off signals that enable the service provider to detect its location for call routing purposes, and which enable cell phone applications to operate for navigation, weather reporting, and other purposes, does not mean that the user is consenting to use of that location information by third parties for any other unrelated purposes,” the judges wrote. “While a person may voluntarily convey personal information to a business or other entity for personal purposes, such disclosure cannot reasonably be considered to be disclosure for all purposes to third parties not involved in that transaction.”


The drug dealer in question, essentially, did not consent to give his location to police just by possessing and using a cell phone.



Silicon Valley Wins! Obama Picks Ex-Google Lawyer to Head Patent Office


Michelle Lee, deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), speaks during a Bloomberg West Television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Friday, June 27, 2014.

Michelle Lee, deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), speaks during a Bloomberg West Television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Friday, June 27, 2014. David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Images



Silicon Valley just won a major victory in the war over patents.


On Thursday, the White House announced that it has nominated former Google patent lawyer Michelle Lee as the next director of the USPTO. Lee, who holds a master’s degree from MIT in electrical engineering and computer science and a JD from Stanford Law School, has served as acting director of the office since she was appointed deputy director last year. If approved by the Senate, Lee will be the first woman to officially hold the USPTO’s top position, according to The Hill.


The nomination could signal the end of a nearly two year political struggle between the technology and pharmaceutical sectors over the directorship of the USPTO. The technology industry, plagued by “patent trolls”—companies that acquire patents for the sole purpose of suing others—has been fighting to reform the patent system for years. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, has generally sought to preserve the status quo.


This push and pull has helped keep the USPTO director role empty since the resignation of former IBM lawyer David Kappos in February 2013, the Washington Post reports. Although Lee has been running the office, the Obama administration previously floated Phil Johnson, a former executive at Johnson & Johnson, for the role. That plan was scrapped thanks to outcry from the technology industry.


Last May, the patent reform movement was struck a major blow when Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, yanked the reform bill Innovation Act, which had already passed in the House, off the Senate Judiciary Committee. Observers such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation blamed the pharmaceutical industry for blocking the legislation. But things have been looking up since then. The Supreme Court ruled that ideas can’t be patented, only implementations of those ideas.


While it’s good news that someone who understands the problems with the modern patent system will be likely be head of the USPTO, it’s hard not to worry that Lee is too close to the technology industry, and Google in particular. But Lee is uniquely suited for the role of director, thanks to her background in both law and engineering, and in both industry and the public sector. She spent five years as a patent attorney for the Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West, and then nine years as Google’s deputy general counsel from 2003 to 2012. After that she served as head of the USPTO’s Menlo Park office from November 2012 until her appointment as deputy director of the agency in December 2013.


Both Democrats and Republicans have praised Lee, and many expect that he appointment will be swiftly approved. But nothing in Washington is a sure bet—particularly when it comes to patents.



Kickstarter Freezes Anonabox Privacy Router Project for Misleading Funders


anonabox-ft


All August Germar asked for was $7,500 to fund his privacy-focused router project. But as the attention and controversy around his Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign snowballed over the last five days, he found himself at one point with 82 times that amount—and now with nothing.


On Friday afternoon Kickstarter suspended the crowdfunding campaign for Anonabox, an initiative to sell a tiny, $45 router that would run all the user’s online traffic over the anonymity network Tor. The idea tapped into an explosive demand for simple privacy technology, and earned more than 10 times its modest goal in hours. But as funders shoveled more than half a million dollars into the project, they also began to pick apart Anonabox’s claims of creating custom hardware, as well as the promised security of its software. Soon, many were calling for the project to be cancelled, and asked others to report its shortfalls to Kickstarter staff, who now say they’ll return all the investors’ funds.


In an email to the project’s investors, Kickstarter told backers only that “a review of the project uncovered evidence that it broke Kickstarter’s rules.” Those rules, the email continued, prohibit “offering purchased items and claiming to have made them yourself,” “presenting someone else’s work as your own” and “misrepresenting or failing to disclose relevant facts about the project or its creator.”


The backlash against Anonabox began Tuesday evening, as users pointed out that the router’s hardware, which Anonabox creator Germar had claimed was custom-designed, could be found for sale from Chinese suppliers on sites like the business e-commerce platform Alibaba. In fact, Germar soon clarified to WIRED that the Anonabox prototype was built from an off-the-shelf case and a nearly stock board tweaked to add more flash memory storage, both sourced from the Chinese manufacturer Gainstrong. That was a reversal of some claims he had made to WIRED before our initial story on Anonabox, which we corrected Wednesday; Germar had said, for instance, that the case was created with a custom injection mould that Anonabox had paid to have its supplier create.


Others soon followed up with critiques of Anonabox’s software: the router’s default settings left its wireless network open and included a hardcoded root password that would leave users vulnerable to spying or compromise by hackers, the said. Those security shortcomings, the project’s critics argued, were especially egregious considering that Anonabox’s founders had said they intended the device to be used by journalists protecting sources and political dissidents in repressive regimes.


Over the last two days, Anonabox’s total funding had already dropped by more than $25,000 as disillusioned backers pulled their pledges. Following the project’s suspension, Germar didn’t immediately respond to an email from WIRED, and a Kickstarter spokesperson declined to comment.


As the controversy around Anonabox grew, Germar told WIRED earlier in the week that he had never intended the project to be aimed at normal, non-expert users, so much as developers who would contribute feedback and continue to improve the router. But Kickstarter users who poured money into the project instead read Germar’s claims as promising an easy, secure device that was ready for the consumer market. “I had thought this would be like push-starting a car,” Germar said on Wednesday. “Instead, it’s been like being handcuffed to a rocket.”


Kickstarter backers on the suspended Anonabox funding page mostly applauded the site’s decision to refund their money. “Kickstarter thanks for protecting us! Good call,” wrote one user. “Thanks everyone for exposing this!” added another.


But some users were dismayed to see that the project was cancelled and wrote that they would be willing to fund a similar attempt to create a hardware-based Tor device if it were restarted elsewhere. “Regardless of [Kickstarter] rules being broken (and the apparently ‘drama’ surrounding it), I’d still like to get my hands on one,” wrote one backer. “So where?”


“We need someone to step forward for this project, and 9,000 of us proved it,” commented another supporter. “Wherever August starts this up again, I will learn where and join again.”



A Silver Lining in the JP Morgan Breach?


lockdown_660

CJ Schmit/Flickr



The JPMorgan Chase data breach rocked headlines early this month as the latest in a series of breaches hitting nearly a dozen financial companies in 2014 alone. The news also follows similar breach disclosures from Target, Home Depot, Albertsons and others.


The massive security breach compromised 76 million households and seven million small business accounts. As a result, the bank will no doubt spend millions of dollars over the next few months repairing the extensive damage and working to restore its reputation.


The Bad News: An Inherent Flaw in Information Security Architectures


As if the sheer reach of the JPMorgan Chase breach itself isn’t bad enough, it spotlights an inherent flaw with most modern information security architectures. Specifically, state-of-the-art “prevention” technologies are not 100 percent foolproof for detecting and blocking persistent attackers.


Several industry analyst firms — like Gartner, for example — recognize that decades of information security prevention systems have failed to produce an architecture that can stop committed attackers, and in response, they’re making a dramatic shift in their recommendations to security practitioners.


The Good News: Early Breach Detection


The good news — and yes, there is good news — is that JPMorgan Chase was able to identify the network breach and remove the offending malware before any highly-compromising confidential data was stolen and before irreparable harm was done to customer accounts.


According to a filing made by JPMorgan Chase with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, only names, addresses and emails were exfiltrated in the breach. There was no theft of money, account information like credit card numbers, passwords or social security numbers stolen.


Considering many of the other recent breaches in which highly confidential customer information was stolen, this is a success. While a network breach is never good, JPMorgan Chase was able to stop the data exfiltration before it reached a scale that would have caused irreparable harm to customer accounts and corporate brand equity.


Taking Down the Bad Guys


Organizations have a lot to learn from JPMorgan Chase on how it caught the attackers before they were able to cause significant damage. There are also several noteworthy lessons learned in understanding why the financial institution’s experience was so different from Target’s disastrous breach, which resulted in the loss of 40 million customer credit cards.


There are a handful of large and highly profitable organizations — like JPMorgan Chase — that have vast resources dedicated to information security. With billions of dollars of annual IT budgets, these elite organizations can afford to buy the latest and greatest network logging and security analytics products, and hire large groups of security analysts to filter through and triage the hundreds and thousands of false positive alerts that are generated daily by these products. Wading through all of these alerts takes a considerable amount of time and can consume a team of analysts full-time.


Target’s much smaller security team, on the other hand, wasn’t able to keep up with the high volume of alerts being generated by its security infrastructure, which involved many of the exact same technologies used by JPMorgan Chase. It’s well-documented that Target had deployed many state-of-art security products in its network that produced numerous alerts that a breach was occurring — very similar to the situation at JPMorgan Chase. The problem is that those alerts were buried within thousands of other simultaneous “false positive” alerts, making it extremely difficult for Target’s much smaller security staff to react and take action. Mainstream security products, including intrusion detection systems (IDS), sandboxing and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, are all known to create very high ratios of false positives — sometimes on the order of thousands per day.


The poor signal-to-noise ratio of these products is due to two factors. First, they only see attempts of malware to enter the network through links within web pages and files within emails — not actual compromises where users take action to initiate an actual breach (clicking on links and downloading files). Also, these products typically employ “correlation” algorithms that send alerts when they see behavior remotely resembling typical attack patterns without known certainty that it’s an actual attack. As a result, these systems produce an extremely high ratio of insignificant alerts relative to actual, true breaches of network hosts (i.e. poor signal-to-noise ratio). For these reasons, a large percentage of IDS, SIEM and related products deployed today can not be utilized to take action, and instead are used primarily to meet compliance regulations and for “CYA” purposes.


The Silver Lining


The contrasting experiences of the JPMorgan Chase and Target data breaches illustrate the critical need for technology architecture to evolve within the information security industry in order to stay ahead of the bad guys.


Security vendors and practitioners need to develop better products and processes that automate ongoing analytical tasks, similar to the actions taken by JPMorgan Chase’s security analysts. Products need to more accurately identify known breaches and eliminate the huge volume of noise produced by traditional security defense infrastructure. Organizations also need to eliminate the information overload that typically paralyzes lesser staffed security teams, and replace it with actionable information that they can use to remediate known attacks, reduce dwell time and minimize data loss exposure.


There’s a long way to go to ensure that the vast majority of enterprise security practitioners avoid catastrophic data breaches and drive outcomes similar to JPMorgan Chase. Until new approaches and techniques come to market, an increasing number of organizations will continue to experience damaging breaches.


The silver lining of the JPMorgan Chase attack is that it gives the industry hope that proactive measures can stop an attacker before a breach drives catastrophic results. Now, it’s up to organizations to make those proactive measures work for them.


Gonen Fink is CEO of LightCyber.



The iPad Air 2 Finally Lets You Easily Switch Between Carriers


Apple Inc. Announces The New iPad Air 2 And iPad Mini 3

Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images



Whether using a smartphone or tablet, wireless users have typically been tethered to a single carrier, constrained by their mobile device’s cellular band limitations and its SIM. No longer—well, at least with the iPad Air 2. While Apple didn’t highlight it in its Thursday keynote, the iPad Air 2 has a new SIM that could change the way you think of cellular network access.


The company details its new SIM, dubbed the “Apple SIM,” in its iPad Air 2 wireless section, saying “[it] gives you the flexibility to choose from a variety of short-term plans from select carriers in the U.S. and UK.” This allows you to choose the plan that works best for you, whenever you need it, without ever needing to enter a carrier retail store.


Unlike phones, which require ubiquitous cellular connectivity, the need for tablet cellular access comes and goes. For much of the year, you may use it only at home, or at the office, where Wi-Fi is fine. But you may take it on vacation, or business trips, too—places where a cellular connection becomes convenient.


Say you’re jet-setting around the country. You’ve got an AT&T iPad with AT&T cellular access, but you’re traveling to places where T-Mobile or Sprint have better coverage. It’s a bummer to be stuck with cellular access you can’t even use. With the Apple SIM, you can choose short term packages that fit your needs. If for one trip, you’re headed to Sprint territory, you can opt for that package. If T-Mobile has a short-term deal you want to take advantage of, you’re free to do that, too. You can even find plans from local carriers once you arrive at your destination. You don’t have to think about it beforehand.


Apple is able to do this because the iPad supports 20 different LTE bands (different carriers offer coverage on different bands) as well as both GSM and CDMA. This means one iPad could theoretically work on any network in the U.S. (and abroad). Often devices are either GSM or CDMA only, which limits the carriers it can operate on.


For now, Apple SIM works with AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the U.S., and EE in the UK (the iPad Air 2 also works on Verizon, but will need a Verizon SIM). Hopefully the number of participating carriers will eventually grow. In the meantime, just having this degree of carrier freedom in a mobile device is amazing.



Here’s How You Build a Beer Pipeline Across a Medieval City


Bruges Belgium

Bruges Belgium Getty Images



Bruges-based De Halve Maan brewery is building an underground pipeline to move beer from its brewery in the city center to its bottling facility a few miles away. It makes a lot of sense practically speaking, but let’s be honest: Most people are probably concerned with how they can sneakily drill into the ground and siphon off some brew for themselves. But before their plans can go horribly awry, De Halve Maan has to build the thing. And it’s going to be a lot harder than digging a trench, laying some pipe, and turning on the spigot. That’s because this is no ordinary construction area: Bruges’ entire city center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it’s covered in medieval architecture.


De Halve Maan has been brewing in Bruges since the 1850s, and in 2010 opened a new bottling facility just outside the city center to accommodate growth. That created a logistical problem: To move four million liters of beer from the old site to the new each year, De Halve Maan used trucks, which burned fuel and clogged Bruges’ small, cobblestone streets.


Two years ago, the brewery started looking for a new way to make the trip, and someone suggested a pipeline under the city. It “seemed to be a kind of joke” at first, says owner and Managing Director Xavier Vanneste. But upon considering the idea more seriously, “we realized it was not so crazy after all.”


De Halve Maan brewing vats.

De Halve Maan brewing vats. De Halve Maan



This isn’t the world’s first beer pipeline: According to City Labs, Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing Company uses underground tubes to move beer across the street, from its brewery to its pub. But there’s a difference between tunneling under a Cleveland street and digging up a medieval city.


Vanneste and his team started by looking at the oil and gas industries, where pipelines are commonplace, to see if it was technically feasible. They discussed the idea with beer experts, to make sure shipping their good stuff underground wouldn’t ruin the flavor. (The only consideration is that too much pressure can affect flavor, so they won’t be pumping too fast.) Then, they turned to the local authorities, to start the process. That’s where things started to get tricky: Bruges has its heritage site status thanks medieval buildings that testify “to significant stages in the commercial and cultural development of medieval Europe.” And what does UNESCO list as one of the biggest threats to preservation? New construction.


Bruges, a few miles inland from the English Channel in northwest Belgium, has been inhabited since at least the Iron Age. The city was founded by Vikings in the ninth century, and really got going between 1200 and 1400, when it was “the economic capital of Europe north of the Alps,” according to UNESCO. In the following centuries, it was home to some of the great painters of the Flemish Primitive movement. It’s where the first books were printed in English and French. Many of the buildings constructed during its “golden age,” from the late 14th to early 16th century, still stand today, and the city is lauded for its influence on the development of architecture. Colin Farrell filmed In Bruges in Bruges. (It also has great beers and waffles to offer for those less intrigued by history.)


A resting horse feeds in the medieval old town of Bruges Belgium.

A resting horse feeds in the medieval old town of Bruges Belgium. Getty Images



All of that makes it a tricky place to dig up the ground to lay a beer pipeline. Town officials liked the idea, says Vanneste, but were quite “difficult on the idea of breaking up all the roads,” the risk of damaging historic sites, and increasing congestion with construction. They did approve the pipeline, which is expected to cut heavy truck use by 85 percent, in September. “It is a win-win situation for everyone,” says Franky Dumon, the alderman for spatial planning who approved the project on behalf of the city council. It helped that De Halve Maan has pledged to cover all associated costs, though Vanneste would not provide an estimated budget.


The pipeline will likely consist of four polyurethane tubes, each about four inches in diameter, since the brewery will be moving different types of beer, and sometimes water. Between batches of beer, it will wash out the pipes with a “clean-in-place” process that disinfects and sterilizes everything when necessary.)



Scientific breakthrough will help design antibiotics of the future

Researchers at the University of Bristol focused on the role of enzymes in the bacteria, which split the structure of the antibiotic and stop it working, making the bacteria resistant.



The new findings, published in Chemical Communications, show that it's possible to test how enzymes react to certain antibiotics.


It's hoped this insight will help scientists to develop new antibiotics with a much lower risk of resistance, and to choose the best medicines for specific outbreaks.


Using a Nobel Prize-winning technique called QM/MM -- quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics simulations - the Bristol research team were able to gain a molecular-level insight into how enzymes called 'beta-lactamases' react to antibiotics.


Researchers specifically want to understand the growing resistance to carbapenems, which are known as the 'last resort' antibiotics for many bacterial infections and super bugs such as E. coli.


Resistance to carbapenems makes some bacterial infections untreatable, resulting in minor infections becoming very dangerous and potentially deadly.


The QM/MM simulations revealed that the most important step in the whole process is when the enzyme 'spits out' the broken down antibiotic. If this happens quickly, then the enzyme is able to go on chewing up antibiotics and the bacterium is resistant. If it happens slowly, then the enzyme gets 'clogged up' and can't break down any more antibiotics, so the bacterium is more likely to die.


The rate of this 'spitting out' depends on the height of the energy barrier for the reaction -- if the barrier is high, it happens slowly; if it's low, it happens much more quickly.


Professor Adrian Mulholland, from Bristol University's School of Chemistry, said: "We've shown that we can use computer simulations to identify which enzymes break down and spit out carbapenems quickly and those that do it only slowly.


"This means that these simulations can be used in future to test enzymes and predict and understand resistance. We hope that this will identify how they act against different drugs - a useful tool in developing new antibiotics and helping to choose which drugs might be best for treating a particular outbreak."




Story Source:


The above story is based on materials provided by University of Bristol . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.



Cystic Fibrosis lung infection: Scientists open black box on bacterial growth

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have shown for the first time how bacteria can grow directly in the lungs of Cystic fibrosis patients, giving them the opportunity to get tremendous insights into bacteria behavior and growth in chronic infections.



The study also discovered the bacterial growth in chronic lung infections among cystic fibrosis (CF) patients was halted or slowed down by the immune cells. The researchers discovered the immune cells consumed all the oxygen and helped "suffocate" the bacteria, forcing the bacteria to switch to a much slower growth.


The findings have recently been published in the journal Infection and Immunity, ASM, USA.


Professor Thomas Bjarnsholt and Ph.D. student Kasper Nørskov Kragh from the Department of International Health, Immunology and Microbiology were able to measure the growth of bacteria directly in transplanted infected tissue without disturbing the bacterial cells, giving them the opportunity to get tremendous insights into bacteria behavior and growth in chronic infections.


"The "suffocating" mechanism of the immune cells is the first time a bacteriostatic effect of immune cells has been described. The immune cells have up until now thought to only kill bacteria not halt their growth. In addition this helps us explain why the intensive and combinatory drug treatment approach developed and used in the CF clinic at Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen is as successful as it is," says Professor Bjarnsholt.


Better treatment


The growth of bacteria in chronic infection is poorly understood and up until now it has been impossible to open up the black box. This is all the more paradoxical as the effect of antibiotics are very closely connected to the rate of growth of the target bacteria. Most types of antibiotic are ineffective against dormant bacterial cells yet this study finally opens up the black box and helps pinpoint the best treatment of chronic lung infection among cystic fibrosis patients. Being able to understand bacterial growth will in the future enable clinicians to improve treatment with known antibiotics, combinations or give raise to new targets in antibiotic development.


"When we applied this to measure growth for bacteria living in biofilm in explanted lunge tissue, we saw a diverse pattern of growth throughout our tissue sample. This puzzled us, and so we investigated possible correlations, and found that high local concentrations of immune cells restricted the growth of the bacteria. Furthermore in vitro experiments supported this mechanism of how the immune cells can remove oxygen and in this way vigorously restrict the bacterial growth," adds Kasper Nørskov Kragh.


On the right track


The main goal of the project was to improve the understanding of the bacterial behavior in chronic infections including CF, and how the bacteria and immune defense compete with each other.


"We show that it is possible to study the bacteria not only in shake flasks in the laboratory but directly in the very complex environment in an infection. This is a major improvement for chronic infections in general. On top of this, the new mechanism of the white blood cells is very important to understand chronic infections. It is fair to say that we are on the right track to understand chronic infections like cystic fibrosis and piece by piece we will solve the puzzle," concludes Professor Bjarnsholt.




Story Source:


The above story is based on materials provided by University of Copenhagen – The Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.



Absurd Creature of the Week: The Wasp That Lays Eggs Inside Caterpillars and Turns Them Into Slaves


jj

I want you to call the last person you complained to about your “crappy” day and apologize for wasting their time. Go on. I’ll wait. GIF: Nurie Mohamed/WIRED. Source: National Geographic



We’re all at the mercy of parasites. You, me, your dog or cat or even pet rabbit—if you’re one of those people. But rather mercifully, parasites like the tapeworms that invade our guts don’t typically kill their hosts, on account of that meaning the end of their food and shelter. One group of parasites known as parasitoids, though, shows no such mercy. They invade their hosts, use them, and unceremoniously dispatch them when they’ve had their fill.



Few parasitoids are more bizarre or disturbing than the wasps of the genus Glyptapanteles, whose females inject their eggs into living caterpillars. There, the larvae mature, feeding on the caterpillar’s fluids before gnawing through its skin en masse and emerging into the light of day. Despite the trauma, not only does the caterpillar survive—initially at least—but the larvae mind-control it, turning their host into a bodyguard that protects them as they spin their cocoons and finish maturing. The caterpillar eventually starves to death, but only after the tiny wasps emerge from their cocoons and fly away.


Because he has awesome ideas and not because he’s some kind of sadist, ecologist Arne Janssen of the University of Amsterdam brought this remarkable lifecycle into the lab a few years back to study it. What he and his colleagues confirmed for the first time is that not only do Glyptapanteles larvae actively manipulate the behavior of their hosts, but by transforming caterpillars into bodyguards, they greatly boost their chances of survival compared to their unprotected comrades.


jj

A caterpillar stands guard over the Glyptapanteles wasps that erupted from its body. That’s a bit like you—OK there’s really nothing in the world to compare this to. Ton Rulkens/Flickr



It goes a little something like this. A female Glyptapanteles wasp pounces on a caterpillar, drilling into its flesh with what is known as an ovipositor (literally, “egg placer”), and pumps up to 80 eggs into its body cavity, according to Janssen. When the eggs hatch into larvae, they begin feeding on the caterpillar’s bodily juices, taking care to avoid attacking vital organs—somewhat of a rarity for parasitoids.


“Most parasitoids eat the host completely empty,” said Janssen. “The Glyptapanteles don’t do that. We don’t know exactly why, but one of the reasons may be that if you kill the host it cannot defend you afterwards.”


Inside the caterpillar, the larvae will go through several stages, or molts, to shed their exoskeletons as they expand. During all of this, the caterpillar, which grows more and more bloated as the larvae mature, isn’t yet showing any signs of being manipulated. Incredibly, you can’t even tell it’s behaving any differently, even as it swells to the point where it looks like it’s going to burst, like a can of soda in a freezer … that’s filled with parasitic larvae instead of soda, I guess.


Inevitably, though, the larvae must make their exit. All 80 at once. Over the course of an hour. They release chemicals that paralyze the caterpillar, then each individual begins gnawing its way out. It’s a horrific happening, as you can see in the amazing National Geographic video below, yet keep in mind that the caterpillar survives this incredible trauma.


How? Well, it’s thought that the larvae time their final molt to coincide with the exit, so as they squeeze through the caterpillar’s skin, the exoskeleton they leave behind blocks the exit hole. Thus they perform their own slapdash surgery on their gravely wounded host.


If You’ll Be My Bodyguard, I Can Be Your Long-Lost Pal


As the larvae congregate in a mass and begin spinning their cocoons, the caterpillar snaps out of it and helps them, using its own silk to construct a protective covering. And you can imagine it has somewhat conflicted feelings about all of this, much like Kevin Costner’s emotional struggles in The Bodyguard.


Once everyone is done spinning, the caterpillar switches into defense mode, lashing out at not only predatory insects, but other wasps known as hyperparasitoids. The Glyptapanteles pupae (the final stage before they complete their development), you see, don’t have it so easy. In a nice little bit of poetic justice, these hyperparasitoids will inject their own eggs into Glyptapanteles.



Absurd Creature of the Week: The Wasp That Lays Eggs Inside Caterpillars and Turns Them Into Slaves


jj

I want you to call the last person you complained to about your “crappy” day and apologize for wasting their time. Go on. I’ll wait. GIF: Nurie Mohamed/WIRED. Source: National Geographic



We’re all at the mercy of parasites. You, me, your dog or cat or even pet rabbit—if you’re one of those people. But rather mercifully, parasites like the tapeworms that invade our guts don’t typically kill their hosts, on account of that meaning the end of their food and shelter. One group of parasites known as parasitoids, though, shows no such mercy. They invade their hosts, use them, and unceremoniously dispatch them when they’ve had their fill.



Few parasitoids are more bizarre or disturbing than the wasps of the genus Glyptapanteles, whose females inject their eggs into living caterpillars. There, the larvae mature, feeding on the caterpillar’s fluids before gnawing through its skin en masse and emerging into the light of day. Despite the trauma, not only does the caterpillar survive—initially at least—but the larvae mind-control it, turning their host into a bodyguard that protects them as they spin their cocoons and finish maturing. The caterpillar eventually starves to death, but only after the tiny wasps emerge from their cocoons and fly away.


Because he has awesome ideas and not because he’s some kind of sadist, ecologist Arne Janssen of the University of Amsterdam brought this remarkable lifecycle into the lab a few years back to study it. What he and his colleagues confirmed for the first time is that not only do Glyptapanteles larvae actively manipulate the behavior of their hosts, but by transforming caterpillars into bodyguards, they greatly boost their chances of survival compared to their unprotected comrades.


jj

A caterpillar stands guard over the Glyptapanteles wasps that erupted from its body. That’s a bit like you—OK there’s really nothing in the world to compare this to. Ton Rulkens/Flickr



It goes a little something like this. A female Glyptapanteles wasp pounces on a caterpillar, drilling into its flesh with what is known as an ovipositor (literally, “egg placer”), and pumps up to 80 eggs into its body cavity, according to Janssen. When the eggs hatch into larvae, they begin feeding on the caterpillar’s bodily juices, taking care to avoid attacking vital organs—somewhat of a rarity for parasitoids.


“Most parasitoids eat the host completely empty,” said Janssen. “The Glyptapanteles don’t do that. We don’t know exactly why, but one of the reasons may be that if you kill the host it cannot defend you afterwards.”


Inside the caterpillar, the larvae will go through several stages, or molts, to shed their exoskeletons as they expand. During all of this, the caterpillar, which grows more and more bloated as the larvae mature, isn’t yet showing any signs of being manipulated. Incredibly, you can’t even tell it’s behaving any differently, even as it swells to the point where it looks like it’s going to burst, like a can of soda in a freezer … that’s filled with parasitic larvae instead of soda, I guess.


Inevitably, though, the larvae must make their exit. All 80 at once. Over the course of an hour. They release chemicals that paralyze the caterpillar, then each individual begins gnawing its way out. It’s a horrific happening, as you can see in the amazing National Geographic video below, yet keep in mind that the caterpillar survives this incredible trauma.


How? Well, it’s thought that the larvae time their final molt to coincide with the exit, so as they squeeze through the caterpillar’s skin, the exoskeleton they leave behind blocks the exit hole. Thus they perform their own slapdash surgery on their gravely wounded host.


If You’ll Be My Bodyguard, I Can Be Your Long-Lost Pal


As the larvae congregate in a mass and begin spinning their cocoons, the caterpillar snaps out of it and helps them, using its own silk to construct a protective covering. And you can imagine it has somewhat conflicted feelings about all of this, much like Kevin Costner’s emotional struggles in The Bodyguard.


Once everyone is done spinning, the caterpillar switches into defense mode, lashing out at not only predatory insects, but other wasps known as hyperparasitoids. The Glyptapanteles pupae (the final stage before they complete their development), you see, don’t have it so easy. In a nice little bit of poetic justice, these hyperparasitoids will inject their own eggs into Glyptapanteles.



Apple Can’t Say What the iPad Is for, But That’s the Whole Point


Apple CEO Tim Cook display the new iPad Air 2 at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand.

Apple CEO Tim Cook display the new iPad Air 2 at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP



At first, a lot of people didn’t get the iPad. “It’s just a really big iPhone,” the voices said when the Apple tablet made its debut. Some even called it a really big iPod Touch.


“The unanswered question is whether we really need a ‘third device’—something to fill the gap between smartphone and laptop,” PCWorld wrote after seeing Steve Jobs unveil the device in January 2010.


But since then, Apple has sold 225 million iPads—not bad for a device that skeptics weren’t sure anyone had a need for in the first place. Over the past several months, however, iPad sales have declined, and that original question as resurfaced: what is the iPad really for? And if Apple doesn’t have a good answer, how can it hope to turn that sales dip around?


If Apple’s live press event on Thursday was meant to assert the iPad’s definitive reason for being, it failed. Work! Education! Photos! Content! Apple executives name-dropped all these things, and more. But the main thing the audience was meant to remember was that the new iPad Air 2 is not just thin, but really, really, really thin. Thin for what, Apple doesn’t really say. “It is incredibly beautiful to hold all day long,” Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller gushed, as if hold-ability was its own justification.


The iPad becomes just one more way to slot into what you’re doing, or want to do, in your Apple-defined universe.


Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, discuss the features of the new Apple iPad Air 2 during an event at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, discuss the features of the new Apple iPad Air 2 during an event at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Marcio Jose Sanchez



Well, maybe it is. One of Apple’s greatest marketing successes is in convincing the world that it doesn’t do anything except by design. If Apple really wanted to pin down the iPad’s purpose—to erase its ambiguity—Apple could do that. By allowing the iPad to hover in a haze of possibility, perhaps Apple is playing to its longer game, a strategy that defines the Apple brand not as a collection of individual devices but the devices as an assortment of gateways to a single Apple world.


The crux of Apple’s broader vision was presented by Apple’s top software exec, Craig Federighi, before the new iPad was announced. Apple’s embrace “Continuity”—the seamless integration of apps and data across all Apple devices—was first made plain when the Mac’s new Yosemite operating system was revealed in June, and was driven home by Federighi’s demo Thursday.


Calls that come in on the iPhone can be answered on the Mac. A Keynote presentation on the iPad can incorporate lists of photos favorited on the iPhone, then be viewed via Apple TV while the slides are controlled by the Apple Watch. “Your devices are aware of each other and allow you to work at any moment with the device that’s right for that time,” Federighi said.


Apple ensures its future by sealing up the cracks through which the temptation to buy a non-Apple device might otherwise flow.


The iPad Air 2 is demonstrated at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand.

The iPad Air 2 is demonstrated at Apple headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2014 in Cupertino, Calif. Apple unveiled the thinner iPad with a faster processor and a better camera as it tries to drive excitement for tablets amid slowing demand. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP



By that logic of Continuity, the importance of any individual device is subordinated to the individual task, which might be best performed using a combination of devices. And these configurations, these workflows, become as myriad as the tasks to be performed. The iPad becomes just one more way to slot into what you’re doing, or want to do, in your Apple-defined universe. Its purpose doesn’t have to be defined ahead of time; its usefulness is just contingent on whatever makes sense at the moment.


Whether this is a good strategy for goosing iPad sales growth is difficult to say, but Continuity points to a more long-term vision in which individual device sales aren’t as important as keeping users locked into the Apple ecosystem. Apple may have the hardware game locked down, but as long as so many digital lives are dependent on a GMail-centered suite of Google services, the danger of fleeing to Android is ever-clear and present. More than selling an extra million iPads, Apple ensures its future by sealing up the cracks through which the temptation to buy a non-Apple device might otherwise flow.


If Apple can secure as much loyalty to its software as it has to its hardware, it doesn’t have to say what the iPad is for, because its purpose becomes self-evident: it’s another useful window into your Apple world. It’s just another screen, and that’s all it needs to be.