Daily Archives: January 20, 2019

Europe’s controversial ‘link tax’ sent back after member states rebel – The Verge

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Copyright activists just scored a major victory in the ongoing fight over the European Union’s new copyright rules. An upcoming summit to advance the EU’s copyright directive has been canceled, as member states objected to the incoming rules as too restrictive to online creators.

The EU’s forthcoming copyright rules had drawn attention from activists for two measures, designated as Article 11 and Article 13, that would give publishers rights over snippets of news content shared online (the so-called “link tax”) and increase platform liability for user content. Concerns about those two articles led to the intial proposal being voted down by the European parliament in July, but a version with new safeguards was approved the following September. Until recently, experts expected the resulting proposal to be approved by plenary vote in the coming months.

After today, the directive’s future is much less certain. Member states were gathered to approve a new version of the directive drafted by Romania — but eleven countries reportedly opposed the text, many of them citing familiar concerns over the two controversial articles. Crucially, Italy’s new populist government takes a far more skeptical view of the strict copyright proposals. Member states have until the end of February to approve a new version of the text, although it’s unclear what compromise might be reached.

Whatever rules the European Union adopts will have a profound impact on companies doing business online. In particular, Article 13 could greatly expand the legal risks of hosting user content, putting services like Facebook and YouTube in a difficult position. As Cory Doctorow described it to The Verge, “this is just ContentID on steroids, for everything.”

More broadly, Article 13 would expand platform’s liability for user-uploaded content. “If you’re a platform, then you are liable for the material which appears on your platform,” said professor Martin Kretschmer, who teaches intellectual property law at the University of Glasgow. “That’s the council position as of May, and that has huge problems.”

“Changing the copyright regime without really understanding where the problem is is foolish,” he continued.

Still, today’s vote suggests the ongoing activism against the proposals is having an effect. “Public attention to the copyright reform is having an effect,” wrote Pirate Party representative Julia Reda in a blog post. “Keeping up the pressure in the coming weeks will be more important than ever to make sure that the most dangerous elements of the new copyright proposal will be rejected.”

Source: Europe’s controversial ‘link tax’ sent back after member states rebel – The Verge

Incredible to see common sense seemingly prevailing over the interests of big money makers

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine?

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[…] today most of us have indoor jobs, and when we do go outside, we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen also blocks our skin from making vitamin D, but that’s OK, says the American Academy of Dermatology, which takes a zero-tolerance stance on sun exposure: “You need to protect your skin from the sun every day, even when it’s cloudy,” it advises on its website. Better to slather on sunblock, we’ve all been told, and compensate with vitamin D pills.

Yet vitamin D supplementation has failed spectacularly in clinical trials. Five years ago, researchers were already warning that it showed zero benefit, and the evidence has only grown stronger. In November, one of the largest and most rigorous trials of the vitamin ever conducted—in which 25,871 participants received high doses for five years—found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.

How did we get it so wrong? How could people with low vitamin D levels clearly suffer higher rates of so many diseases and yet not be helped by supplementation?

As it turns out, a rogue band of researchers has had an explanation all along. And if they’re right, it means that once again we have been epically misled.

These rebels argue that what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. That was just a marker. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above.

Source: Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? | Outside Online

Twins get some ‘mystifying’ results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test

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Last spring, Marketplace host Charlsie Agro and her twin sister, Carly, bought home kits from AncestryDNA, MyHeritage, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Living DNA, and mailed samples of their DNA to each company for analysis.

Despite having virtually identical DNA, the twins did not receive matching results from any of the companies.

In most cases, the results from the same company traced each sister’s ancestry to the same parts of the world — albeit by varying percentages.

But the results from California-based 23andMe seemed to suggest each twin had unique twists in their ancestry composition.

According to 23andMe’s findings, Charlsie has nearly 10 per cent less “broadly European” ancestry than Carly. She also has French and German ancestry (2.6 per cent) that her sister doesn’t share.

The identical twins also apparently have different degrees of Eastern European heritage — 28 per cent for Charlsie compared to 24.7 per cent for Carly. And while Carly’s Eastern European ancestry was linked to Poland, the country was listed as “not detected” in Charlsie’s results.

“The fact that they present different results for you and your sister, I find very mystifying,” said Dr. Mark Gerstein, a computational biologist at Yale University.

[…]

AncestryDNA found the twins have predominantly Eastern European ancestry (38 per cent for Carly and 39 per cent for Charlsie).

But the results from MyHeritage trace the majority of their ancestry to the Balkans (60.6 per cent for Carly and 60.7 per cent for Charlsie).

One of the more surprising findings was in Living DNA’s results, which pointed to a small percentage of ancestry from England for Carly, but Scotland and Ireland for Charlsie.

Another twist came courtesy of FamilyTreeDNA, which assigned 13-14 per cent of the twins’ ancestry to the Middle East — significantly more than the other four companies, two of which found no trace at all.

Paul Maier, chief geneticist at FamilyTreeDNA, acknowledges that identifying genetic distinctions in people from different places is a challenge.

“Finding the boundaries is itself kind of a frontiering science, so I would say that makes it kind of a science and an art,” Maier said in a phone interview.

Source: Twins get some ‘mystifying’ results when they put 5 DNA ancestry kits to the test | CBC News

DNS flag day – 1/2/19

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The current DNS is unnecessarily slow and suffers from inability to deploy new features. To remediate these problems, vendors of DNS software and also big public DNS providers are going to remove certain workarounds on February 1st, 2019.

This change affects only sites which operate software which is not following published standards.

[…]

On or around Feb 1st, 2019, major open source resolver vendors will release updates that implement stricter EDNS handling. Specifically, the following versions introduce this change:

  • BIND 9.13.3 (development) and 9.14.0 (production)
  • Knot Resolver already implemented stricter EDNS handling in all current versions
  • PowerDNS Recursor 4.2.0
  • Unbound 1.9.0

Also public DNS providers listed below will disable workarounds.

[…]

Minimal working setup which will allow your domain to survive 2019 DNS flag day must not have timeout result in any of plain DNS and EDNS version 0 tests implemented in ednscomp tool. Please note that this minimal setup is still not standards compliant and will cause other issues sooner or later. For this reason we strongly recommend you to get full EDNS compliance (all tests ok) instead of doing just minimal cleanup otherwise you will have to face new issues later on.

[…]

Firewalls must not drop DNS packets with EDNS extensions, including unknown extensions. Modern DNS software may deploy new extensions (e.g. DNS cookies to protect from DoS attacks). Firewalls which drop DNS packets with such extensions are making the situation worse for everyone, including worsening DoS attacks and inducing higher latency for DNS traffic.

DNS software developers

The main change is that DNS software from vendors named above will interpret timeouts as sign of a network or server problem. Starting February 1st, 2019 there will be no attempt to disable EDNS as reaction to a DNS query timeout.

This effectively means that all DNS servers which do not respond at all to EDNS queries are going to be treated as dead.

Source: DNS flag day