Russian scientists will not participate in international conferences this year, and institutions will not emphasize publication in international journals that are indexed in databases that generate scientific metrics.

App Store might suggest you a useful app from time to time, but you can’t rely on that to discover new apps. Places like Reddit communities or Product Hunt could also be very broad for what you are looking for. So a team of engineers at Basedash, a startup that helps companies connect their databases […]Dockhunt is a new way to discover Mac apps by looking at other people’s docks by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Cybersecurity giant Imperva will acquire jSonar, a database security startup that recently landed $50 million from Goldman Sachs. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The acquisition of jSonar, which provides security and compliance to databases on-premise or in the cloud, will help…

Twenty-four professors from the Cyprus university of technology (Tepak) have been included in a database among the world’s leading researchers. The academics are included in recently updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators which include the world’s leading researchers, both throughout their academic careers and exclusively for the year...

App Store might suggest you a useful app from time to time, but you can’t rely on that to discover new apps. Places like Reddit communities or Product Hunt could also be very broad for what you are looking for. So a team of engineers at Basedash, a startup that helps companies connect their databases […]Dockhunt is a new way to discover Mac apps by looking at other people’s docks by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Hackers, particularly state-sponsored and organized cybercriminals, wreak havoc worldwide. However, their aliases, such as Fancy Bear and Refined Kitten, often undermine the seriousness of their actions, Wired argues. Microsoft's cybersecurity division recently revamped its naming taxonomy for the hundreds of hacker groups it tracks, adopting two-word names with a weather-based term to indicate the hackers' suspected country and affiliation. For instance, the Iranian group Phosphorous is now dubbed Mint Sandstorm, while Russia's Iridium (Sandworm) goes by Seashell Blizzard. Critics, like Rob Lee, founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Dragos, argue that the whimsical new names could hinder the perception of the profession and be counterproductive for cybersecurity analysis. Furthermore, the new naming scheme forces analysts and customers to revise their databases and products to align with Microsoft's terminology. The revised system also risks cementing educated guesses about hackers' national loyalties without clarity on the confidence of those assessments. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was writing a tiny website to display statistics of how much sponsored content a Youtube creator has over time when I noticed that I often write a small tool as a website that queries some data from a database and then displays it in a graph, a table, or similar. But if you want to use a

DALLAS (AP) — The gunman who took four people hostage at a Texas synagogue in a 10-hour standoff that ended in his death was checked against law enforcement databases before entering the U.S. but raised no red flags, the White House said.

Cory Doctorow just wrote a new thriller "about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works," according to his publisher. Doctorow calls Red Team Blues "a book about the financial rot at the center of Silicon Valley... a kind of anti-finance finance thriller." The publisher describes the book's hero as "a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. " He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He's as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he's a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike. He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He's not famous, except to the people who matter. He's made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he's been paid pretty well. It's been a good life. Now he's been roped into a job that's more dangerous than anything he's ever agreed to before — and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive. "I write when I'm anxious, and right now these are anxious times," Doctorow explained last month in Publisher's Weekly, describing what he'd learned about selling audiobooks without going through Amazon's service Audible. This time Cory got 4,080 backers to pledge $152,735 to fund an audiobook for Red Team Blues read by Wil Wheaton that his Kickstarter campaign stressed would be DRM-free. ("Every audiobook sold on Audible be wrapped in Amazon's Digital Rights Management technology, which is a felony for you to remove, even if the copyright holder asks you to. It's punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine!") Red Team Blues is the first book in a new trilogy, and Cory is now making in-person appearances to promote the book — starting today (and tomorrow) at the LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California. Tuesday he'll be in San Diego, and a week from Sunday he's appearing in San Francisco, before heading to Portland, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Gaithersburg Maryland. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The developers of Kodi, the widely used open-source media player app, have revealed a data breach of its user forum. What happened? The breach did not happen due to a vulnerability. Instead, an unknown attacker used the account of a legitimate but inactive member of the forum admin team to access the MyBB admin console on two occasions February 16 and 21, 2023. The attacker was able to create backups of databases, which they then … More →The post Kodi forum breach User data, encrypted passwords grabbed appeared first on Help Net Security.

(marketscreener.com) such as would not, if determined adversely to the Company, individually or in the aggregate, have a Material Adverse Effect; 10 The Company's information technology assets and equipment, computers, systems, networks, hardware, software, websites, applications, and databases are adequate for, and...https//www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/SENDAS-DISTRIBUIDORA-S-A-119962748/news/Sendas-Distribuidora-S-A-International-Underwriting-and-Placement-Facilitation-Agreement-Form-6-42450601/?utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=20221201

Eight Sleep is the first sleep fitness company — we design products at the forefront of sleep innovation. Our mission is to make people’s sleep count for more, using innovative technology, detailed design, and proven science and data to personalize and improve each night for everybody—changing the way people sleep forever and for better. Backed by leading Silicon Valley investors including Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, it was named by Fast Company in 2018 as one of the Most Innovative Companies in Consumer Electronics. We recently launched our latest temperature-regulated smart bed, the Pod Pro. It's an absolute game changer, improving people's health and happiness by changing the way they sleep. Early feedback is great, but we still have a long way to go toward achieving our mission. That is why Eight Sleep is looking for a talented Frontend Engineer to join our expanding Growth team, with responsibilities spanning the consumer website, marketing and analytics systems. If you are a growth-oriented engineer and enjoy finding creative ways to solve business problems using your unique skill set, this is the right opportunity for you. **How you'll contribute** - Work with an interdisciplinary team on complex business problems to drive growth - Analyze and understand user behavior in order to optimize key performance metrics and enable a more personalized experience across all marketing channels. - Help design and implement A/B tests to improve conversion, optimize site flow, and drive revenue - Integrate data from various back-end services and databases to help build a richer picture of user behavior and help us spot areas for improvement. - Collaborate with designers to develop polished, intuitive, and well optimized experiences. - Identify and implement tools and systems to help scale our growing business. **About you** - You have the desire to make a significant impact as part of a rapidly growing, dynamic startup. - You consider yourself to be a generalist engineer - willing to roll up your sleeves and use whatever language or framework will best help you get the job done. - You should feel just as comfortable diving into the backend when you are working on a feature as you do polishing the UI. - You often write small scripts that help automate parts of your work and are constantly finding new tools that make you more efficient. - You have a BA/BS in Computer Science, or commensurate experience from a coding bootcamp or similar. - You love thinking about things from the customer’s perspective and trying to understand what motivates and drives decision making. - You have side projects outside of work that you’re excited to tell us about. **What you'll need to succeed** - 2+ years of experience developing frontend applications in a production environment at a startup using modern JS frameworks such as React - 2+ years of experience using Typescript - Solid understanding of how web applications work including performance, security, session management, accessibility, and best development practices. - Familiarity with some of the following technologies React, Next.JS, AWS Lambdas + S3, Node.js, Typescript. - Experience with web analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics, Amplitude) and Search Engine Optimization - Knowledge of relational database systems, Object Oriented Programming and various scripting languages. - Intuitive understanding of how to manipulate, analyze and interpret highly complex data - Knowledge of design tools (Figma, Sketch, Photoshop and Shopify) is a plus. **Why you’ll love Eight Sleep** - We’re a tight-knit, passionate team that’s working to improve people’s lives by improving the way they sleep - Leadership is committed to employees’ wellness and career development - You’ll get a better night sleep every night; all full-time employees receive the Pod - Flexible, generous PTO - 100% employer contribution for medical/dental/vision insurance

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Microsoft (MSFT.O) on Thursday warned thousands of its cloud computing customers, including some of the world's largest companies, that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases, according to a copy of the email and a cyber security researcher.

Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors like Neo4j and TigerGraph had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store dat…

SALT LAKE CITY — Genetic tests have become increasingly popular in recent years, and a Utah bill would expand the use of DNA testing for investigations of violent crimes. SB156, better known as the “Sherry Black bill,” would create requirements for law enforcement for searching DNA testing databases based on voluntary genetic testing. The bill […]

A data warehouse is an input to the Feature Store. A data warehouse is a single columnar database, while a feature store is implemented as two databases.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A special Customs and Border Protection unit used sensitive government databases intended to track terrorists to investigate as many as 20 U.S.-based journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, according to a federal watchdog.

Business is booming these days for graph databases--maybe it took COVID to show us how connected everything is--and that’s good news for Franz, which

Efforts to diversity skin image databases include generating synthetic images of darker skin using AI. But trying to fix equity issues through fake images has potential issues.

Ongoing attack hitting unsecured data leaves the word "meow" as its calling card.

“24h Sunrise/Sunset” is an installation that displays a realtime sunset and sunrise somewhere happening in the world with the use of CCTV. Hardware Raspberry Pi 3B+, Arduino Nano Every , custom PCB, power supply’s, VFD displays, lasercut metal and LEDs. Software Python 3 & Firebase realtime databases Changelog of the installationv1. Release at St. Moritz with…

Datastax, the company best known for commercializing the open-source Apache Cassandra database, is moving beyond databases. As the company announced today, it has acquired Kesque, a cloud messaging service. The Kesque team built its service on top of the Apache Pulsar messaging and streaming projec…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the workspace app Notion. Bergen, a product manager living in Vancouver, uses it to plan trips abroad in meticulous detail, with notes and timelines. He uses it to curate lists of the movies and TV shows he's watched, and records what he thought of them. It's also a handy way to keep tabs on his 3D-printing projects, map snowboarding runs, and quickly update his cute list of the funny things his kid has said. It might sound strange, but Bergen is one of a growing number of people using Notion, software intended for work, to organize their personal lives. They're using it in a myriad of different ways, from tracking their meditation habits and weekly schedules to logging their water intake and sharing grocery lists. So why has a platform built to accommodate "better, faster work" struck such a chord when there are countless other planning apps out there? Part of the reason Notion has such a devoted fan base is its flexibility. At its heart, Notion is designed to combine the various programs a business might use for functions like HR, sales, and product planning in a single hub. It uses simple templates that let users add or remove features, and remote workers can easily collaborate on notes, databases, calendars, and project boards. This high level of customizability sets Notion apart from other work apps. It's also what's made it so popular among people looking to map out their free time. It started to gain traction around 2018 in YouTube's thriving productivity subculture, where videos of fans swapping time management tips and guides to organizing their lives regularly rack up millions of views. Since then, its following has snowballed. More than 275,000 people have joined a dedicated subreddit, tens of thousands of users share free page templates in private Facebook groups, and TikTok videos advising viewers on how to make their Notion pages look pretty have been watched hundreds of millions of times. "You don't have to change your habits to how rigid software is. The software will change how your mind works," says Akshay Kothari, Notion's cofounder and chief operating officer. "I think that's actually been a big reason why you see so much love in the community because people feel like the things they build are theirs." While platforms like Notion are great for people who enjoy feeling organized, spending too much time optimizing and organizing our lives can be counterproductive when we prioritize creating to-do lists over completing the actual tasks on them, says Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University. It's a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. Using Notion to track whether you're drinking enough water or going jogging, or using it to plan assignments, doesn't necessarily mean you're actually getting those things done. "In a way, Notion might help me to get structure, but it might not work to get me going," she says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

## What we're looking for Sutra is seeking a React Native developer who is truly a self-starter. You'll join the team and be a part of all major mobile architecture decisions. You're comfortable building new systems from the ground up during a period of hyper-growth. ## The Role - Help lead the design, architecture, and execution of our React Native stack - Advance our mobile architecture and stay one step ahead of growth - Take technical ownership of features and move the product forward - Partner closely with the product team to consistently move the needle - Present cross-team launches and updates at company-wide checkins ## The You - Ship. You like to get things done. - 3+ years experience as a problem solver - High level of expertise in React Native (React, Redux, Typescript) - Excellent communication skills - Proven record of shipping features on time - Organized, self-sufficient and a go-getter - Bonus experience in building and scaling NoSQL databases ## The Benefits - Weekly workouts with the team - Health/dental/vision coverage - Unlimited PTO / sick leave - Annual company retreat

The developers of Kodi, the widely used open-source media player app, have revealed a data breach of its user forum. What happened? The breach did not happen due to a vulnerability. Instead, an unknown attacker used the account of a legitimate but inactive member of the forum admin team to access the MyBB admin console on two occasions February 16 and 21, 2023. The attacker was able to create backups of databases, which they then … More →The post Kodi forum breach User data, encrypted passwords grabbed appeared first on Help Net Security.

## About Writesonic [Writesonic](http//writesonic.com/) is an **AI-powered creativity platform** that generates marketing content so good you can’t believe it wasn’t written by a human. With a few lines of text, Writesonic will generate ads, blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, and 40 other types of content. We are saving agencies, eCommerce brands, and marketing team's about 80% of the time and effort it would take them to do the job themselves. And we're decreasing their costs dramatically! Our customers love us, as evidenced by the 2000+ 5-star reviews on platforms like G2, TrustPilot, and Capterra. We are a seed-stage company, well funded by top investors like Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Broom Ventures, Amino Capital, etc., and are building a real business fueled by real revenue — not just venture capital. We're a small, creative, and hard-working team looking for people with a founder mindset to join us. ## About the role We are expanding the functionality of our application based on market requirements and customer feedback, and are also building integrations with platforms like Shopify, Wordpress, etc. So, we are looking for talented full stack engineers who can understand our domain, research the market, own the application and drive development from the ground up. This position says founding engineer. We really mean that. You'd build critical features from the ground up, and deliver 5x faster than you have at previous jobs. We're looking for someone who is serious about building, and who can wear many hats. Your day-to-day work will directly influence how customers and partners interact with our products. ## ?? **Who you are** - You have designed, built, and maintained production-grade web applications. People describe you as "extremely productive." - You have a strong grasp of engineering fundamentals. - You are excited about working on a small team and helping us set the long term vision for our engineering organization and product direction. - You have experience in areas such as databases, UX implementation, debugging, and full-stack performance measurement and optimization. - You're flexible, trustworthy, energetic, and a great communicator. - You care more about solving customers' problems and building a delightful experience than about using a particular technology to do it. - **Big bonus points** for AI, design and/or devops experience. ## ?? What you'll do - Take ownership of Writesonic's full-stack web platform, all the way to deploys, monitoring, debugging, and overall reliability. - Research the market and competition, and come up with new features or ways to improve the system. - Help design and implement core architecture. - Ship major features often, iterate on those features, and build out our core infrastructure. - Be exposed to every level of the company, working closely with the CEO to meet business goals and working off customer feedback. ### **Required Technical Skills and Qualifications** - **3+ years of experience in a software engineering role at a product-based company or startup.** - You have a strong background in computer science with a degree in CS or a related field from a reputed institute like IIT (Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai, Roorkee), IIIT (hyderabad or Delhi), BITS Pilani. - Experience with building, deploying, and scaling production-level web applications. - Experience with the microservices architecture. - Experience in developing REST APIs to serve web clients, preferably using Python based web frameworks like FastAPI, Flask etc. - Experience building modern frontends using ReactJs/VueJs or similar. - Experience putting high-fidelity custom UI/UX designs into code using HTML/CSS/JS. - Experience with SQL-based relational databases. - Experience building public facing websites that work elegantly across commonly used browsers ### **? Bonus Points** - Proven experience with design, architecture, and UI / UX principles. ## Technology **Frontend** - NextJs/React with Redux - TypeScript - TailwindCSS **Backend** - Python (FastAPI) - PostgreSQL - Kubernetes for deployment and orchestration

The developers of Kodi, the widely used open-source media player app, have revealed a data breach of its user forum. What happened? The breach did not happen due to a vulnerability. Instead, an unknown attacker used the account of a legitimate but inactive member of the forum admin team to access the MyBB admin console on two occasions February 16 and 21, 2023. The attacker was able to create backups of databases, which they then … More →The post Kodi forum breach User data, encrypted passwords grabbed appeared first on Help Net Security.

Researchers found 17 illicit marketplaces claiming to sell vaccine passports, and some appear to be valid entries in national databases

BOSTON (AP) — Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases for the Afghan people. The nobly stated goal Promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-ravaged land.

Many container customers building applications use common software packages (e.g. operating systems, databases, and application components) that are publicly distributed as container images on Docker Hub. Docker, Inc. has announced that the Hub service will begin limiting the rate at which images are pulled under their anonymous and free plans. These limits will progressively take […]

Actiondesk is a new spreadsheet solution for the software-as-a-service era. It connects with the databases, CRMs and SaaS tools that you already use so that you can build dashboards and generate reports without having to manually import data. The startup raised a $3.9 million seed round from Tiger …

A saga through BoltDB source code to understand how mmap works in databases

Databases have always been a complex part of the equation for developers requiring a delicate balance to manage inside the application, but Fauna wants to make adding a database a simple API call, and today it announced $27 million in new funding. The round, which is technically an extension of the…

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 spotted this story in today's New York Times. (Also re-published in the Seattle Times.) In early 2020 a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists "released critical data" on the speedy spread and lethality of the coronavirus, remembers Times, "cited in health warnings around the world... Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it... "What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science." It's not the only retraction. The Times also points out a paper published on March 9 of 2020 relying on patient samples from mid-December of 2019, which "added to evidence that the virus was spreading widely before the Chinese government took action." Two months later the journal that published an update that "said that the Wuhan samples were not collected in December after all, but weeks later, in January... After Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle tweeted about the discrepancy, the journal's editors posted a third version of the paper, adding yet another timeline. This revision says the samples were collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1." Beijing's stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found. Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found. This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus. The article notes an international team's discovery last month of genetic sequence data collected in January of 2020 at Wuhan market, "withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that global health officials called 'inexcusable.'" The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, a finding consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals... Soon after the group alerted Chinese researchers to their findings, the genetic sequences temporarily disappeared from a global database. "It's just pathetic that we're in this stage where we're having cloak-and-dagger conversations about deleted data," said Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney biologist who was part of the group that analyzed the sequences containing raccoon dog DNA. The Times cites retracted coronavirus papers flagged by Retraction Watch, which tracks withdrawn research. Amid tighting government censorship in 2020, Chinese researchers began asking journals to retract their work, the Times reports, and "a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad." Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government's demands. "Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests," he said... The journal retractions continued, and for unusual reasons. One group of authors noted that "our data is not perfect enough." Another warned that its paper "cannot be used as the basis for the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2." A third said its findings were "incomplete and not ready for publication." Several scientists promised in retraction notices to update their findings but never did. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers who discovered a massive flaw in the main databases stored in Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Azure cloud platform on Saturday urged all users to change their digital access keys, not just the 3,300 it notified this week.

App Store might suggest you a useful app from time to time, but you can’t rely on that to discover new apps. Places like Reddit communities or Product Hunt could also be very broad for what you are looking for. So a team of engineers at Basedash, a startup that helps companies connect their databases […]Dockhunt is a new way to discover Mac apps by looking at other people’s docks by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

In recent years, neural networks have shown impressive performance gains on long-standing AI problems, and in particular, answering queries from natural language text. These advances raise the question of whether they can be extended to a point where we can relax the fundamental assumption of database management, namely, that our data is represented as fields of a pre-defined schema. This paper presents a first step in answering that question. We describe NeuralDB, a database system with no pre-defined schema, in which updates and queries are given in natural language. We develop query processing techniques that build on the primitives offered by the state of the art Natural Language Processing methods. We begin by demonstrating that at the core, recent NLP transformers, powered by pre-trained language models, can answer select-project-join queries if they are given the exact set of relevant facts. However, they cannot scale to non-trivial databases and cannot perform aggregation queries. Based on these findings, we describe a NeuralDB architecture that runs multiple Neural SPJ operators in parallel, each with a set of database sentences that can produce one of the answers to the query. The result of these operators is fed to an aggregation operator if needed. We describe an algorithm that learns how to create the appropriate sets of facts to be fed into each of the Neural SPJ operators. Importantly, this algorithm can be trained by the Neural SPJ operator itself. We experimentally validate the accuracy of NeuralDB and its components, showing that we can answer queries over thousands of sentences with very high accuracy.

This blog takes a deep dive into the hows and whys of time series databases—and why Honeycomb couldn't be limited to a TSDB implementation.

Learn libraries and techniques to use Haskell for a variety of real world tasks, like connecting to databases, building web servers, and testing.

Companies producing software are becoming ever more reliant on open source databases to build their programs, but it’s complex working with all these different products. Instaclustr, a California startup, wanted to change that by offering popular open source databases delivered as a service. …

Key information systems will be lost even if a security deal is struck before 31 December, National Crime Agency says

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 spotted this story in today's New York Times. (Also re-published in the Seattle Times.) In early 2020 a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists "released critical data" on the speedy spread and lethality of the coronavirus, remembers Times, "cited in health warnings around the world... Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it... "What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science." It's not the only retraction. The Times also points out a paper published on March 9 of 2020 relying on patient samples from mid-December of 2019, which "added to evidence that the virus was spreading widely before the Chinese government took action." Two months later the journal that published an update that "said that the Wuhan samples were not collected in December after all, but weeks later, in January... After Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle tweeted about the discrepancy, the journal's editors posted a third version of the paper, adding yet another timeline. This revision says the samples were collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1." Beijing's stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found. Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found. This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus. The article notes an international team's discovery last month of genetic sequence data collected in January of 2020 at Wuhan market, "withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that global health officials called 'inexcusable.'" The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, a finding consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals... Soon after the group alerted Chinese researchers to their findings, the genetic sequences temporarily disappeared from a global database. "It's just pathetic that we're in this stage where we're having cloak-and-dagger conversations about deleted data," said Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney biologist who was part of the group that analyzed the sequences containing raccoon dog DNA. The Times cites retracted coronavirus papers flagged by Retraction Watch, which tracks withdrawn research. Amid tighting government censorship in 2020, Chinese researchers began asking journals to retract their work, the Times reports, and "a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad." Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government's demands. "Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests," he said... The journal retractions continued, and for unusual reasons. One group of authors noted that "our data is not perfect enough." Another warned that its paper "cannot be used as the basis for the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2." A third said its findings were "incomplete and not ready for publication." Several scientists promised in retraction notices to update their findings but never did. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The developers of Kodi, the widely used open-source media player app, have revealed a data breach of its user forum. What happened? The breach did not happen due to a vulnerability. Instead, an unknown attacker used the account of a legitimate but inactive member of the forum admin team to access the MyBB admin console on two occasions February 16 and 21, 2023. The attacker was able to create backups of databases, which they then … More →The post Kodi forum breach User data, encrypted passwords grabbed appeared first on Help Net Security.

In 2019, to meet GitHub's growth and availability challenges, we set a plan in motion to improve our tooling and ability to partition relational databases.