An anonymous reader writes: A weird bug of unknown origins has been hitting Windows 7 computers this week, according to multiple reports online. Windows 7 users have been reporting that they are receiving a popup message that reads "You don't have permission to shut down this computer" every time they attempt to shut down or reboot their systems... Windows 7 reached official end of life (EOL) on January 14, 2020 and is not scheduled to receive new fixes. Last month, Microsoft made an exception to this rule when it provided a fix for a bug that broke wallpaper display for Windows 7 users. Seeing that rebooting or shutting down your computer is a more important OS feature than wallpaper support, Microsoft will most likely need to make a another exception and deliver a second post-EOL update pretty soon.

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Medium's technology blog OneZero reports that many websites today use a service that collects all of your mouse movements, enabling "replays" of every move. "What surprised me was that the software even recorded when I shook my mouse around while deciding what to click on. It felt like observing digital body language." Session replay services have been around for over a decade and are widely used. One service, called FullStory, lists popular sites like Zillow, TeeSpring, and Jane as clients on its website. Another, called LogRocket, boasts Airbnb, Reddit, and CarFax, and a third called Inspectlet lists Shopify, ABC, and eBay among its users. They bill themselves as tools for designing sites that are easy to use and increase desired user behavior, such as buying an item. If many users add items to their cart, but then abandon the purchase at a certain rough part of the checkout process, for instance, the service helps site owners figure out how to change the site's design to nudge users over the checkout line... FullStory even has a feature that tracks what it calls "rage clicks." This is when a user gets frustrated with a site and starts angrily clicking over and over. In a semi-related story, a reporter for The Markup also recently discovered Amazon had apparently collected 90,000 rows of timestamped data about every tap they'd made on their Kindle.

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"Scientists have cultivated plants from date palm seeds that languished in ancient ruins and caves for 2,000 years," writes ScienceAlert. schwit1 shared their report: This remarkable feat confirms the long-term viability of the kernels once ensconced in succulent Judean dates, a fruit cultivar lost for centuries. The results make it an excellent candidate for studying the longevity of plant seeds. From those date palm saplings, the researchers have begun to unlock the secrets of the highly sophisticated cultivation practices that produced the dates praised by Herodotus, Galen, and Pliny the Elder. First, they collected fragments of the seed shells still clinging to the roots of the plants. These were perfect for radiocarbon dating -- which confirmed the seeds date back to between 1,800 and 2,400 years ago. Then, the researchers could conduct genetic analyses of the plants themselves, comparing them to a genetic database of current data palms. This showed exchanges of genetic material from eastern date palms from the Middle East, and western date palms from North Africa. Indeed, the researchers found that the ancient seeds were up to 30 percent larger than date seeds today, which probably meant the fruit was larger, too. And, of course, there's the seemingly miraculous germination after so many centuries. As anyone who buys seeds for their garden knows, seeds deteriorate; the longer you have a packet of seeds sitting in storage, the fewer will germinate when you finally plant them. If scientists can discover how the date seeds retained their viability for so long, that could have important implications for agriculture.

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In recent months, researchers have caught ransomware "intentionally tampering with industrial control systems that dams, electric grids, and gas refineries rely on to keep equipment running safely," reports Ars Technica. According to researchers at the security firm Drago, the ransomware tries to kill 64 different processes, the names of which are all hard-coded within the malware. Long-time Slashdot reader Garabito shared Ars Technica's report: It remains unclear precisely what effect the killing of those processes would have on the safety of operations inside infected facilities... Monday's report described Ekans' ICS targeting as minimal and crude because the malware simply kills various processes created by widely used ICS programs. That's a key differentiator from ICS-targeting malware discovered over the past few years with the ability to do much more serious damage. One example is Industroyer, the sophisticated malware that caused a power outage in Ukraine in December 2016 in a deliberate and well-executed attempt to leave households without electricity in one of the country's coldest months... Another reason Dragos considers Ekans to be a "relatively primitive attack" is that the ransomware has no mechanism to spread. That makes Ekans much less of a threat than ransomware such as Ryuk, which quietly collects credentials for months on infected systems so it can eventually proliferate widely through almost all parts of a targeted network.

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Doc asked in passing what it means when a section of the outline has chevrons in place of the wedges. In this screen shot the red arrow points to a comment. It means the text is commented. You toggle the feature with Cmd-\. Like everything in an outline, it's hierarchic, so when you comment a headline, it and all its subs are commented. Okay so now what does it mean to be commented? It depends on who processes the outline. The idea originated in programming, when you want to explain a bit of code, you'd tell the code interpreter the writing by "commenting it out." Comments are like speaker notes for code. That was the long answer. The short one is that, for what you're doing now, it probably doesn't matter if some text is commented or not. It'll happen if you press Cmd-\ by accident.

In 2017 Elementary OS built a pay-what-you-want app store -- funded with $10,000 raised on IndieGogo. Now they're trying to raise another $10,000 for a one-week, in-person sprint in Denver, Colorado, Forbes reports, to upgrade the store while bringing an even grander concept to reality: That concept comprises 4 main goals: - Enable open source developers to monetize their apps on every other Linux distribution - Empower developers to ship apps with cutting-edge technologies - Improve privacy, security, and stability - Streamline the payments process On the technical side of things, the team plans to rebuild AppCenter's backend from the ground up to enable newer technologies developers are asking for, and they're rallying behind the Flatpak packaging format to get it done. They've already been collaborating with the FlatHub team, and plan to bring in developers from Endless and GNOME to ensure that "our solution can be reused and improved by other Flatpak stores and the greater open source desktop ecosystem." For a donation of $10, "you'll have your name immortalized in the AppCenter code on GitHub," explains a promotional video. (There's already 70 backers who have claimed this perk.) In fact, "Less than 8 hours ago we launched #AppCenterForEveryone, and we're 50% funded," announced an update Friday on Twitter. The campaign's web page shared this note of appreciation. "With your support, we'll be able to accelerate the timeline on adopting cutting edge technology and making an even more competitive Open Source operating system and a compelling foundation for all Flatpak stores."

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"Scientists have announced a breakthrough that could be key to the creation of a powerful new kind of particle collider," reports the Fermilab/SLAC magazine Symmetry. Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: As reported in the journal Nature, the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, has for the first time demonstrated the successful taming of a beam of particles called muons through a process called transverse ionization cooling, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles... Muons — which are heavy relatives of electrons — are interesting to accelerator scientists for a number of reasons. For one, they are more massive than the particles they have traditionally used in colliders. The more massive the particles you collide, the higher the energies you can reach with your collisions, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles... Scientists have thus far stuck to colliding particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, positrons and ions. One reason for this is the difficulty of producing a sufficient amount of muons and funneling them into an organized beam for an accelerator to propel and collide... MICE scientists passed a beam of muons through an absorber, slowing down their momentum perpendicular to the beam direction and focusing them into a tight beam. They then used radio-frequency cavities to speed up the momentum of the beam in the forward direction. They repeated this until they were left with a focused, well-behaved beam of muons traveling the right way. The scientists undertook the difficult task of measuring each particle one-by-one to evaluate their efforts. They found that they had achieved what they set out to do, bringing scientists a step closer to potentially making a muon collider a reality.

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I turned off the Likes feature on Scripting News. Most people are reading the stuff through email and RSS. Likes predates the email distribution. The server is a bit of a hog. But the most important thing was that it wasn't being used. If it had gained traction I would have been ready to do the work to get it smoothed out. The code is still there, the server is still running, so I could turn it back on any time.

BTW, LO2 is just another name for Little Outliner. There was a previous version that was quite different. So when the second version was on the way, I called it LO2. Also because typing Little Outliner was a lot more work than LO2. Sorry for the confusion.

Fixed a bunch of bugs in LO2 over the last few days. Still have a lot more to work on. It's great having people use it. It was hard to focus on it when I wasn't getting any feedback. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for me to have a connection with smart enthusiastic users.

popcornfan679 shares a report from Buzzfeed: Clearview has been touting a "rapid international expansion" to prospective clients using a map that highlights how it either has expanded, or plans to expand, to at least 22 more countries, some of which have committed human rights abuses. The document, part of a presentation given to the North Miami Beach Police Department in November 2019, includes the United Arab Emirates, a country historically hostile to political dissidents, and Qatar and Singapore, the penal codes of which criminalize homosexuality... Albert Fox Cahn, a fellow at New York University and the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told BuzzFeed News that he was disturbed by the possibility that Clearview may be taking its technology abroad. "It's deeply alarming that they would sell this technology in countries with such a terrible human rights track record, enabling potentially authoritarian behavior by other nations," he said. Clearview's CEO wouldn't confirm to Buzzfeed whether they were already working in those countries, or hoped to expand into them later, but he did claim that "Many countries from around the world have expressed interest in Clearview." But Buzzfeed has also accused Clearview of misrepresenting its work with law enforcement, for example "by falsely claiming a role in the arrest of a terrorism suspect... [I]n at least two cases, BuzzFeed News found that the company suggested it was working with a police department simply because it had submitted a lead to a tip line."

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The Saudi-based group OurMine took over Facebook's Twitter account on Friday, then pointed Facebook's 13.4 million followers to their own web site, reports NBC News: "Well even Facebook is hackable but at least their security is better than Twitter," the hackers tweeted just before 7 p.m. They said businesses interested in improving online security should visit OurMine's website. The tweet was quickly taken down. Facebook later tweeted that it had regained control of the account. OurMine said in an email that the tweet was up for about 15 minutes... While OurMine is usually described as a group of hackers, it said its security services are "for profit." Its social media takeovers have received widespread attention... "We have no bad intentions and only care about the security and privacy of your accounts and network," it said on its website. OurMine is the same group that took over the Twitter accounts of several American football teams in January, posting "We are here to show people that everything is hackable,"

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The four killed by suspected electrocution include a pregnant female, a conservation group says.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a system that transforms "waste CO2" into gray blocks of concrete. In March, the researchers will relocate to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, part of the Dry Fork power plant near the town of Gillette. During a three-month demonstration, the UCLA team plans to siphon half a ton of CO2 per day from the plant's flue gas and produce 10 tons of concrete daily. Carbon Upcycling UCLA is one of 10 teams competing in the final round of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize. The global competition aims to develop breakthrough technologies for converting carbon emissions into valuable products. The UCLA initiative began about six years ago, as researchers contemplated the chemistry of Hadrian's Wall -- the nearly 1,900-year-old Roman structure in northern England. Masons built the wall by mixing calcium oxide with water, then letting it absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The resulting reactions produced calcium carbonate, or limestone. But that cementation process can take years or decades to complete, an unimaginably long wait by today's standards. "We wanted to know, 'How do you make these reactions go faster?'" Gaurav Sant, a civil engineering professor who leads the team, recalled. The answer was portlandite, or calcium hydroxide. The compound is combined with aggregates and other ingredients to create the initial building element. That element then goes into a reactor, where it comes in contact with the flue gas coming directly out of a power plant's smokestack. The resulting carbonation reaction forms a solid building component akin to concrete. The UCLA system is unique among green concrete technologies because it doesn't require the expensive step of capturing and purifying CO2 emissions from power plants. Sant said his team's approach is the only one so far that directly uses the flue gas stream. The group has formed a company, CO2Concrete, to commercialize their technology with construction companies and other industrial partners.

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A zoologist explains why footage showing the two animals working together, might be more common than you think.