Humans are smart because we sleep weird

A new study claims to have learned one of the reasons that humans were able to rapidly evolve beyond rival primates, and it’s all down to our weird sleeping patterns. Researchers at Duke University, as reported by the New York Times, believe that our seven-hours-of-straight-shut-eye sleep cycle is something of an aberration. By comparison, chimpanzees enjoy 11.5 hours of rest, but our shorter run enabled us to get a much deeper, more dream-filled snooze. Humans, it seems, have above-average quantities of REM sleep, enabling us to slice valuable hours off the amount of time we’re laid up.

The study claims that one of the causes for this process was humans descent from the trees to laying on the floor. The contention being that you can relax a lot more if you’re not subconsciously worrying about rolling in the middle of the night and landing several feet further down. The team discovered this by watching apes sleep at the Indianapolis Zoo using night-vision cameras to track how much REM sleep orangutans got.

Instead of fussing over finding the strongest tree branch for the night, humans slept on the floor for far shorter, but higher-quality periods of time. This enabled them to have periods of extra time — several more hours each day — that could be dedicated to brain-developing activities. As the Times says, the study raises a few extra questions, since other mammals have higher periods of REM sleep than humans, like the platypus. Maybe it won’t be long before we’re all cowering at fear at a group of super-smart platypuses that have worked out that they should be beating us into second place.

Via: NYT

Source: Duke University, Evolutionary Anthropology

Budget bill heads to President Obama’s desk with CISA intact

Earlier today, the US House of Representatives passed a 2,000-page omnibus budget bill that contains the entirety of the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. Just moments ago, the Senate passed it too. Now the bill is on its way to President Barack Obama’s desk, where he has the option to veto it… except he almost certainly won’t. The gargantuan document lays out a $1.15 trillion spending plan that has received solid (if not unanimous) support from both sides of the aisle and should prevent a government shutdown like the one we saw in 2013. But at what cost?

In a nutshell, CISA was meant to allow companies to share information on cyber attacks — including data from private citizens — with other companies and the Department of Homeland Security. Once DHS had all the pertinent details, they could be passed along to the FBI and NSA for further investigation and, potentially, legal action. The thing is, critics saw the bill as way for government agencies to more easily keep tabs on Americans without their knowledge. CISA was derided by privacy advocates and tech titans alike, with companies like Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Google, Facebook and Symantec (to name just a few) issued statements against an earlier version of the bill.

By sticking CISA into such a huge omnibus bill, there’s basically no way it won’t become law. And if anything, the version of CISA that was quietly slipped into this budget plays with privacy even faster and looser than the original. For one, a previously held prohibition against sharing information with the NSA has been removed, meaning America’s best surveillance agency can receive pertinent data without it being handled by Homeland Security first. More importantly, the provision that required personal information to be scrubbed from cybersecurity reports also seems to have gone missing, leaving that task up to the discretion of which ever agency gets their hands on it. While the federal government has been trying to toughen its stance on cybersecurity in the wake of massive hacks on the Office of Personnel Management and Sony, we wound up with an even more effete version of a questionable plan that will soon become law.

Source: The Hill

Bernie Sanders’ campaign punished for accessing Clinton data

Bernie Sanders‘ National Data Director has been fired amid accusations from the Democratic National Committee that he viewed confidential voter information collected by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The DNC maintains a master list of likely Democratic voters and rents this out to campaigns, which then add their own, confidential data. Firewalls are in place to protect campaigns from viewing rival information, though the Sanders staff says a glitch on Wednesday allowed it to access Clinton’s data. Sanders Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver blamed the DNC’s software vendor, NGP VAN, for allowing the breach, The Washington Post reports.

Security of customers’ data is our top priority. On Wednesday, voter file users experienced a brief, isolated issue. (1/2)

— NGP VAN (@NGPVAN) December 18, 2015

The Sanders campaign held a live press conference about the breach on Friday morning. Weaver argued against the DNC’s decision to block its access to the master list, calling it “sabotage.” He said the campaign will be in federal court later on Friday if it isn’t re-granted access to the data. Weaver called for an independent audit of the DNC’s actions in this case.

“We are running a clean campaign,” Weaver said.

In a blog post, NGP VAN described the Wednesday incident as follows:

“On Wednesday morning, there was a release of VAN code. Unfortunately, it contained a bug. For a brief window, the voter data that is always searchable across campaigns in VoteBuilder included client scores it should not have, on a specific part of the VAN system. So for voters that a user already had access to, that user was able to search by and view (but not export or save or act on) some attributes that came from another campaign.”

NGP VAN determined that only the Sanders campaign had potentially accessed confidential data. The DNC suspended Sanders’ access to the master list, pending an investigation.

Sanders’ National Data Director Josh Uretsky took responsibility for accessing Clinton’s information and was promptly fired, though he says his intentions were exploratory, not predatory.

“We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening,” Uretsky told CNN on Friday. He continued, “We investigated it for a short period of time to see the scope of the Sanders campaign’s exposure and then the breach was shut down presumably by the vendor. We did not gain any material benefit.”

Uretsky said he was testing the breach, seeing how deep it went and if Sanders’ confidential data were similarly accessible by outside parties. He was about to call the DNC to tell them about the incident, but the DNC called him first, he said.

“This wasn’t the first time we identified a bad breach,” Uretsky told CNN. The Sanders campaign reported a similar breach in October.

Campaign Manager Weaver echoed that sentiment to The Washington Post, saying, “Sadly, the DNC is relying on an incompetent vendor who on more than one occasion has dropped the firewall between the various Democratic candidates’ data.”

DNC spokesman Luis Miranda responded with a statement to The Washington Post.

“The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it,” Miranda said. “We are working with our campaigns and the vendor to have full clarity on the extent of the breach, ensure that this isolated incident does not happen again, and to enable our campaigns to continue engaging voters on the issues that matter most to them and their families.”

[Image credit: Flickr/Phil Roeder]

Via: Reuters

Source: Washington Post

Target working on its own mobile payment system, report says

Initial reports are saying that Target is looking at developing its own mobile payment system similar to that of Android Pay and Samsung Pay. More and more companies are wanting to take tap into the success of these payment systems, with LG and JPMorgan Chase looking at making their own individual mobile payments systems as well.

The report from Reuters says:

“The fourth-largest U.S. retailer has not committed to launch the product, which would allow customers to pay for goods using an app on their mobile phones. The mobile wallet could launch as early as next year, but it is too early to predict, two of the sources said.”

Walmart recently launched its own mobile payment system, which could be encouraging Target to offer their own in order to stay competitive. There’s no telling how Target’s mobile payment system will work at this point, but there’ll no doubt be integration with the retailer’s Red credit and debit cards.

While the Reuters report says Target could launch its mobile wallet app as early as next year, the publication cites sources saying that it hasn’t been tested at any retail locations yet.

source: Reuters

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