NASA Reports Massive Solar Flare; Massive Madness in Tow?

The sun is starting to wake up: After years of relative quiet, our sun has begun ejecting huge coronal flares. According to NASA, these solar flare-ups happen in cycles of five to 11 years, and when they occur, they bathe our planet in radiation. This active cycle began in 2011, and will continue through the next decade or so.

The most recent solar storm occurred just this past Thursday at 1:13 AM Easter Daylight Time, peaking about 45 minutes later. While the output from this storm was deemed mild, it is an established fact that solar flare-ups impact not only electronics, but also the behavior of human beings.

Just months ago, the Washington Times reported that solar storms like the one last Thursday interfere with human circadian rhythms, producing side effects that range form headaches and poor sleep to confused thinking and agitated moods. Could the coming years of increased solar activity translate to more human violence and socially disruptive behavior?

Source: Disinfo

It's Terrifying and Sickening that Microsoft Can Now Listen In on All My Skype Calls

There was a wildly terrifying story published late Friday on Slate that didn’t get much attention because of the time of the week it was released.

In it, the author – Ryan Gallagher – lays out how Microsoft (MSFT) seems to have made some subtle and (to most) imperceptible changes to the popular Skype calling service that allows it to eavesdrop on all of your calls going forward.  (Forbes contributor Anthony Wing Kosner flagged the service changes in an earlier  post published July 18.)

Although it’s not completely clear, some seem to think that Microsoft may have made the changes either from or in anticipation of pressure from various government entities.

Shocked?  I certainly was.

One of the reasons that Skype has grown so swiftly in the last 5 years was the belief by many users that the founders from Luxembourg had taken steps to make the service one of the most locked-down and encrypted services available to communicate with.

But in May 2011, Microsoft announced that it was spending $8.5 billion to buy Skype and that it would form a new division within the software giant.  From the start, observers wondered how Microsoft could justify paying so much for a service that most of its users pay nothing for but which still lets them talk for free to other Skype users.  Microsoft countered by saying that Skype was the world leaders in voice-over-IP communications and it wanted to own that brand and was sure that it could be sold alongside other popular Microsoft enterprise-focused software and services.

(Given that Microsoft just wrote down its last blockbuster multi-billion dollar acquisition by $6.2 billion after paying $6.3 billion for aQuantive in 2007, it’s hard not to be suspicious that they haven’t made the same mistake with Skype.  But, we’ll see….)

As Gallagher points out, “in June [2011], Microsoft was granted a patent for ‘legal intercept’ technology designed to be used with VOIP services like Skype to ‘silently copy communication transmitted via the communication session.’”

Gallagher tried several times last week to confirm that Microsoft had changed Skype’s policies and technologies to allow for accessing all communications.  He got no response, which strongly suggests that they are able to do this.  It’s also important to note that Skype/Microsoft denied the allegation that the change to its architecture this Spring had anything to do with surveillance, according to the Slate article.

Why is this so significant?

- Most Skype users are still under the legacy impression that Skype communications are private — more private than even their regular old phone conversations.

- If this has changed since the Microsoft acquisition, it hasn’t been overtly communicated to users.  It’s unclear why, but presumably Microsoft worries that Skype’s meteoric growth would be stunted if more people knew about this privacy adjustment made behind their backs.

- Since the Microsoft purchase, it has been heavily promoted to Facebook (FB) users as an additional communications tool within the Facebook platform.  Yet, new sign-ups to the Skype service are also likely not aware of the capability

It’s not bad enough the big web companies are trying to track every keystroke we make, website we visit, and image we hover over — with Facebook and any other cookie maker leader the charge.  They also want to nefariously go around Apple‘s (AAPL) stated privacy policies and track our geographic location — thanks Google (GOOG).  Now, they want to track our every utterance and text message via Skype.

I don’t know if it’s going to be Apple or some other smaller company trying to knock Skype off its leadership perch in VOIP calling, but it seems to me that there is a huge opportunity for big and small Web/mobile companies to champion true user privacy.  I’m willing to bet that a huge proportion of users would opt for it if truly given the choice in a clear and open manner, instead of having the choice hidden from their view.

This latest back-door changing of the rules by Microsoft is truly terrifying – and sickening.

Source: Forbes

Scientists Read Monkeys' Minds, See What They're Planning to Do Before They Do it

How To Construct a 'Circle-Out' Experiment (BYO Monkey) MORAN/PEARCE via WUSTL

Neurologists working with monkeys at Washington University in St. Louis to decode brain activity have stumbled upon a rather surprising result. While working to demonstrate that multiple parameters can be seen in the firing rate of a single neuron (and that certain parameters are embedded in neurons only if they are needed to solve the immediate task), they also found that they could read their monkeys’ minds.

This isn’t exactly ESP, but it is really interesting. The researchers came to find out that by analyzing the activity of large populations of neurons, they could discover what actions the monkeys were planning before they made a single motor movement. By monitoring neural activity, the researchers could essentially see what the monkey was thinking about doing next.

This discovery occurred largely because the two monkeys involved in the experiment had already demonstrated very different cognitive styles. One is a bit hyperactive, eager to begin and complete each task even before being given the signal to begin. The other is more methodical, waiting for the entire breadth of the task to be revealed before making a motion.

The tasks involved were so-called “center-out tasks” in which a monkey or some other subject must place a hand at the center of a field (a tabletop or some surface) and then move it from this center location to another location placed in the area around the center. To plan this movement, the brain needs to know simply where its hand is located (at the center), where the target locations is (somewhere on the surface away from center), and the velocity vector the hand will follow (what path the hand will take to move from starting place to target). These can all be measured in the neural activity of the brain.

When the path between center and target locations is unimpeded, this is relatively straightforward in terms of neural activity. But when the the researchers introduced obstacles that would pop up between the center and the target like whack-a-moles, the neural activity of the two monkeys began to show interesting differences.

The impatient monkey (known as subject H) couldn’t wait to reach for the target and planned to reach directly for it, so when the obstacle popped up his directional vector shortened and then rotated to find a way around the obstacle. Methodical monkey (subject G), however, would wait for the obstacle to present itself before moving, and only then begin to plan its directional vector to go around the obstacle and reach the target. In cases where the target was unimpeded, it paid to jump the gun. But when an obstacle was presented, Methodical Monkey reached the target faster.

In other words, the two monkeys showed completely different strategies for reaching the target--strategies that the researchers could see unfolding in the neural activities of their brains beforehand. They could see what the monkeys were planning before they did it--which is pretty amazing from a neuroscience standpoint.