itwbennett writes: Security researcher Chris Kubecka has identified (and reported to Boeing and the Department of Homeland Security back in August) a number of security vulnerabilities in Boeing's networks, email system, and website. "[T]he company's failure to remedy the security failures she reported demonstrate either an unwillingness or inability to take responsibility for their information security," writes JM Porup for CSO online. The vulnerabilities include a publicly exposed test developer network, a lack of encryption on the boeing.com website, failure to use DMARC for email security, and, perhaps most notably, an email server infected with malware. For its part, Boeing says that the vulnerabilities Kubecka reported are "common IT vulnerabilities — the type of cyber-hygiene issues thousands of companies confront every day" and that the company has "no indication of a compromise in any aviation system or product that Boeing produces." What Porup's reporting and Kubecka's research clearly shows, however, is how poor information security practices can become aviation security risks.

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Supreme Court rules in favour of Hindus in dispute with Muslims

UN draft report obtained by Al Jazeera says member states gave weapons to warring parties in Libya, violating sanctions.

"The hit programming language Python has climbed over once-dominant Java to become the second most popular language on Microsoft-owned open-source code-sharing site GitHub," reports ZDNet: Python now outranks Java based on the number of repository contributors, and by that metric Python is now second only to JavaScript, which has been in top spot since 2014, according to GitHub's 'State of the Octoverse' report for 2019... Another interesting aspect of GitHub's report is its ranking of fastest-growing languages. Google's Dart programming language and Flutter, for building UIs for iOS and Android apps, are getting major traction with developers on GitHub. Dart was the fastest-growing language between 2018 and 2019, with usage up a massive 532%. It was followed by the Mozilla-developed Rust, which grew a respectable 235%. Microsoft is experimenting with Rust in its Windows code base because it was designed to address memory-related security bugs -- the dominant flaw-type in Microsoft software over the past decade. Last year Kotlin, the Google-endorsed programming language for Android app development, was the fastest-growing language on GitHub. It's not a top-10 language yet, but it still grew 182% over the year. Microsoft-backed TypeScript, its superset of JavaScript, is also growing fast, up 161% over the past year as more developers use it to grapple with large-scale JavaScript apps. Other languages making up the top 10 fastest-growing category are HCL, PowerShell, Apex, Python, Assembly, and Go.

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Supporters cheer former Brazilian president, who vows to take on conservative leader Bolsonaro at next elections.

I'm also a proud boomer, and member of The Grateful Dead Party. Our anthem. Wave that flag, wave it high and wide!

Brilliant tweet. When journalists ask how Warren will pay for something she should say Mexico will pay for it.

As a newbie in town, I have basic questions like where to shop for groceries, ride the bike, look at the stars, which airport to fly out of -- really basic stuff. I usually post the question in the private Facebook group for the town. I keep an outline of some, not all of the questions and the best advice, on this.how. It's for things that aren't blog posts, stories I want to come back to, edit, refine, add to.

Long-time Slashdot reader taiwanjohn shared this article from Live Science: The mind-bending calculations required to predict how three heavenly bodies orbit each other have baffled physicists since the time of Sir Isaac Newton. Now artificial intelligence (A.I.) has shown that it can solve the problem in a fraction of the time required by previous approaches. Newton was the first to formulate the problem in the 17th century, but finding a simple way to solve it has proved incredibly difficult. The gravitational interactions between three celestial objects like planets, stars and moons result in a chaotic system -- one that is complex and highly sensitive to the starting positions of each body. Current approaches to solving these problems involve using software that can take weeks or even months to complete calculations. So researchers decided to see if a neural network -- a type of pattern recognizing A.I. that loosely mimics how the brain works -- could do better. The algorithm they built provided accurate solutions up to 100 million times faster than the most advanced software program, known as Brutus. That could prove invaluable to astronomers trying to understand things like the behavior of star clusters and the broader evolution of the universe, said Chris Foley, a biostatistician at the University of Cambridge and co-author of a paper to the arXiv database, which has yet to be peer-reviewed.

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At least seven more protesters reportedly killed, lifting number of casualties since October towards 300.

As tensions mount following death of student, police charge six legislators with obstructing local assembly.

Security forces and pro-Russian fighters started withdrawing from another front line in eastern Ukraine, raising hopes for new round of talks.

Israeli army, which celebrated soldiers helping cancer patients, regularly denies Gazans right to travel for treatment.

schwit1 tipped us off to an interesting new study. Newsweek reports: Babies of women who took acetaminophen -- a common painkiller marketed in the U.S. under the brand name Tylenol -- near the end of pregnancy had a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders or with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry. The study, conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, cross referenced blood samples taken from the mother after the baby's birth and samples taken from the babies' umbilical cords, which were used to assess how much acetaminophen the mother had ingested. A mother-to-be who takes Tylenol during their pregnancy is liable to have some of the medication reach a developing fetus, as the drug has been demonstrated to cross the placenta, according to United Press International (UPI). The children involved in the study were reexamined when they were around 10 years old. Researchers found that those children whose umbilical cords had contained higher levels of acetaminophen were significantly more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder or ADHD than the children who did not appear to have been exposed to acetaminophen in utero. According to UPI's analysis of the findings, "the odds of these developmental disorders were more than twice as high in children exposed to acetaminophen near the time of birth. The association was strongest between exposure to acetaminophen and ADHD in the child."

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Remember last month when "an international collaboration of researchers" suggested there was no reason to reduce consumption of red meat? Here's a response from Frank Hu, chairman of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: The recent guidelines published in the Annals of Internal Medicine should not change existing recommendations on healthy and balanced eating patterns for the prevention of chronic diseases. Guidance to reduce red and processed meats is based on a large body of evidence indicating that higher consumption of red meat -- especially processed red meat -- is associated with higher risk of Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancers, and premature death. While this guidance is supported by both national and international organizations, including the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and the World Health Organization, consumers should know that the new guidelines were released by a self-selected panel of 14 members. Furthermore, when my colleagues and I closely reviewed the studies informing the panel's decision, we saw that their findings contradicted their guidance. In short, the three meta-analyses of observational studies actually confirmed existing evidence on the potential for health benefits when cutting back on red and processed meats. However, because they based their analysis on a measure of three servings of red meat per week, the effects of an individual reducing consumption appeared small. But if you consider that about a third of U.S. adults eat one serving or more of red meat each day, the potential health benefits of reducing consumption become much greater... [N]utrition research is complex, and rarely do [its findings] reverse so abruptly. That's why it's so important to look beyond the headlines at the quality of the evidence behind the claims. Still, the publication of these new guidelines in such a prominent medical journal is unfortunate as it risks further harm to the credibility of nutrition science, eroding public trust in research as well as the recommendations they ultimately inform.

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