Showing posts with label Recent posts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recent posts. Show all posts
“The brief for this project was to design a beautiful addition to a heritage listed Bowral cottage - one which was private and allowed the existing cottage to appear unchanged from the street. The clients were passionate about restoration of the original parts of the building, and replacing the dysfunctional 1980's addition to the rear of the building. The additions were to maximise the solar-passive performance of the house, create a large entertainers kitchen in the heart of the home, allow for a new living and dining area, provide for a new sunken media room and guest accommodation. The client was keen to explore a contemporary approach to the new work, allowing for the new addition to juxtapose with the original weatherboard cottage. Most importantly, the house had to 'work well' from an environmental performance perspective. The new additions have been detailed to eliminate thermal bridging, create a well insulated and airtight envelope and to maximise passive solar heat gain and natural cross ventilation. The house has been designed to capture the sunlight in winter, and to exclude it from heating up the spaces in summer. A geo-thermal heat recovery system heats the pool, floor slab and domestic hot water and 35kW of solar panels provide more electricity than the occupants are likely to use (feeding the surplus back into the grid). A charging station in the garage powers an electric vehicle.” Product Description. Windows and doors- ThermalHEART range. ThermalHEART™ window and door systems are thermally broken to deliver improved energy efficiency for building. The thermal break in ThermalHEART™ windows and doors is created using a polyamide strip between the aluminium exterior and interior elements. The thermal break minimises the transfer of heat and cold through the aluminium window frame, giving the thermally broken aluminium window excellent insulation properties.
COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh (AP) — The Myanmar soldiers came in the morning, the young mother says. They set fire to the concrete-and-thatch homes, forcing the villagers to cluster together. When some of her neighbors tried to escape into the fields, they were shot. After that, she says, most people stopped running away.
"They drove us out of our houses, men and women in separate lines, ordering us to keep our hands folded on the back of our heads," says 20-year-old Mohsena Begum, her voice choking as she described what happened to the little village of Caira Fara, which had long been home to hundreds of members of Myanmar's minority Rohingya community. She said that when about 50 people had been gathered together, the soldiers, along with a group of local men, pulled four village leaders from the crowd and slit their throats.
Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation, the Rohingya have long faced persecution in Myanmar, where most are denied citizenship. The latest outbreak of violence was triggered by October attacks on guard posts near the Bangladesh border that killed nine police officers. While the attackers' identities and motives are unclear, the government launched a massive counter-insurgency sweep through Rohingya areas in western Rakhine state. Most Rohingya live in Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh.
The government, which has implied the attacks were carried out by Rohingya sympathizers, has acknowledged using helicopter gunships in support of ground troops in the sweep. While survivors and human rights groups have tracked waves of anti-Rohingya violence in recent weeks, the Myanmar government insists that stories like Begum's are exaggerations.
Myanmar's leader, the Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has accused the international community of stoking unrest.
"It doesn't help if everybody is just concentrating on the negative side of the situation, in spite of the fact that there were attacks on police outposts," she said in a recent interview on Singapore's Channel News Asia.
Suu Kyi, whose party took power in March after decades of military-backed rule, has been accused of not acting strongly enough to curb the violence against the more than 1 million Rohingya believed to be in the country. Although many have lived in Rakhine for generations, they are widely seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
"It helps if people recognize the difficulty and are more focused on resolving these difficulties rather than exaggerating them, so that everything seems worse than it really is," she said in the interview.
But Begum says she has no need to exaggerate what happened in Caira Fara.
She said that after the four leaders were killed, violence churned through the village in chaotic scenes of horror. Begum's husband, a poor, illiterate farm laborer, was beaten and then murdered by having his throat slit, along with an unknown number of other villagers, she said. Their bodies were eventually driven away in a truck.
She said attackers knocked her young son knocked from her grasp, then raped her.
Finally, when the soldiers weren't paying attention, she grabbed her son and ran into the nearby hills. After hiding for two days, her brother gave her enough money — about $38 — to pay smugglers to get her and her son into Bangladesh.
When Bangladeshi border guards stopped them, she began to weep.
"I told them I have no one to protect me there," she says, and told them: "'Look at my baby! He will die if I go back there.'" After that, they let her pass.
Much of Rakhine has been closed to outsiders, including journalists, since the violence began. However, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, leader of a commission formed to investigate the situation in Rakhine state, was allowed to visit in recent days. He is expected to hold a press conference Tuesday in Yangon, Myanmar's biggest city.
Along the banks of the Naf River, which marks the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar, it's not difficult to find people who can talk about what is happening.
Some 15,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh over past month, often brought in by smugglers, according to police and intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the government refuses to release numbers publicly. They have joined up to 500,000 undocumented Rohingya who have been living in Bangladesh after arriving from Myanmar in waves since the 1970s. Some 33,000 registered Rohingya refugees live the Cox's Bazar district. Bangladesh does not welcome Rohingya — its maritime patrols sometimes turn back refugee boats full of them — but it is seen as a haven compared to Myanmar.
The U.N. says up 30,000 Rohingya Muslims have abandoned their homes amid the recent violence. Satellite images analyzed by the rights group Human Rights Watch show 1,250 structures destroyed in November in Rohingya villages.
Osman Gani, a thin, fast-talking Arabic teacher, fled after his village, Gouzo Bil, was attacked Nov. 11.
"They came and killed mercilessly. They burned our homes," says Gani, standing near the Naf River over the weekend. "No one was there to save us."
He hid with his family for about a week near the village. But when searches intensified, and with soldiers targeting men, he was forced to leave Myanmar without his family.
"I had no other choice but to leave them behind. I came to the bank of the river and started swimming," he says. His family was able to join him in Bangladesh a few days later.
As he fled north, he used his mobile phone to film destruction in other Rohingya villages he passed through. In some, the blackened remains of what appear to be children can be seen amid the wreckage of homes. Gani's voice can be heard in some of the videos but The Associated Press could not confirm their authenticity.
"I have shot videos!" he says, holding out his mobile phone to a reporter. "Don't you see the charred bodies?"
While he was initially in hiding after the attack, Osmani said he also managed to slip back into his village and film what remained of his home.
As he walks through the village, a child can be heard talking to him.
"Where are you coming from?" the boy asks.
Gani doesn't answer, instead asking, "Where's my cow?"
Then he pans through the ashes and broken concrete. "This is my land, my home," he says. "This is Puitta's. This is Uncle Yunus."
 — The Myanmar soldiers came in the morning, the young mother says. They set fire to the concrete-and-th...){kind=link}
NEW YORK (AP) — Two state politicians sued on Monday to try to stop New York City from destroying personal records related to its immigrant-friendly municipal ID cards, a move the city is considering to prevent the data from becoming a deportation tool for a new Republican federal administration.
The lawsuit comes ahead of a Dec. 31 date for the city to decide whether to delete copies of the passports, birth certificates, educational records and other documents submitted by more than 900,000 IDNYC cardholders. The date was built into the program from its 2014 start, partly out of concern about the possible election of a Republican president such as President-elect Donald Trump, whose campaign promises included deporting millions of people in the U.S. illegally.
Republican state Assembly members Ron Castorina and Nicole Malliotakis, citing state public-records laws, say in their lawsuit that destroying government records "due to the results of a federal election is against the ideals of the United States and has no basis in law."
The lawmakers, both from Staten Island, argue that the information could help to trace cardholders if they commit crimes or obtain municipal IDs under fraudulent identities, perhaps for nefarious purposes.
"As elected officials, we have a duty to protect our constituents from unlawful government action that compromises their safety," Malliotakis said in a statement.
Castorina said he was appalled that the program's authors would "play politics" with the data.
Asked about the lawsuit on Monday, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio said city officials wouldn't "allow ourselves to be in a situation where those records would be turned over to the federal government."
"The reason people were willing to trust us is: We made very clear that there would never be a situation where it would lead to their deportation, and we're going to keep that pledge," he said.
Officials said no decision had been made on retaining the records, however.
Municipal ID programs began in 2007 in New Haven, Connecticut, and have expanded to about 10 cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. New York's program is the most ambitious.
Officials encouraged all New Yorkers to sign up, but the program was aimed at those without other forms of ID, including homeless people and, especially, the estimated 500,000 immigrants living illegally in the city. The ID would help them do such everyday things as cash checks or attend parent-teacher conferences at public schools, supporters said.
But with civil liberties advocates worried about authorities requesting the data, city law provided for destroying applicants' identity and residency information at the end of this year if administrators don't move to keep it.
"Protecting it from a possible Republican president" was among reasons for the provision, according to City Councilman Carlos Menchaca, a Democrat.
City officials say applicants' documents are carefully verified to guard against ID fraud, and the city notes IDNYC cards can't be used to get driver's licenses, board planes or cross borders.
"Claims that IDNYC is being used by those intending serious harm is reckless fearmongering," mayoral spokeswoman Rosemary Boeglin said.
Some immigrants have said they remain hopeful the city IDs won't backfire.
 — Two state politicians sued on Monday to try to stop New York City from destroying personal records related to its immig...){kind=link}
If you’ve ever watched ants, you’ve probably noticed
their tendency to “kiss,” quickly pressing their mouths together in
face-to-face encounters. That’s how they feed each other and their larvae. Now,
scientists report that the insects are sharing much more than food. They are
also communicating—talking via chemical cocktails designed to shape each other
and the colonies they live in.
The finding suggests that saliva exchange could play
yet-undiscovered roles in many other animals, from birds to humans, says Adria
LeBoeuf, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in
Switzerland, and the study’s lead author. “We’ve paid little attention to what
besides direct nutrition is being transmitted” in ants or other species, adds
Diana Wheeler, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in
Tucson, who was not involved with the work.
Social insects—like ants, bees, and wasps—have long
been known to pass food to one another through mouth-to-mouth exchange, a
behavior known as trophallaxis. They store liquid food in “social stomachs,” or
crops, from which they can regurgitate it later. It’s how nutrients are passed
from foraging ants to nurse ants, and from nurses to the larvae in a colony.
Other research has suggested that ants also use trophallaxis to spread the
colony’s odor, helping them identify their own nest mates.
To see whether trophallaxis plays a role in ant
communication, LeBoeuf and her colleagues collected the trophallactic fluid of
Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus).
Using a range of chemical and biological methods, the researchers discovered
that this social fluid contains a diverse array of chemicals, including
growth-, digestion-, and immune-related proteins; nest mate recognition cues;
and a juvenile hormone, important for regulating ant reproduction, development,
and behavior.
The discovery of the juvenile hormone was particularly
unexpected. “[It’s] a big upset,” says LeBoeuf, explaining that previously
scientists thought the hormone was simply present in the insect’s bloodstream.
Instead, it appears that the adults are passing it “in a private communication”
to the larvae. “It suggests they’re deciding what the larvae are going to be
when they grow up.”
The scientists tested that idea experimentally. They
gave groups of 25 to 30 worker ants five to 10 larvae to rear, providing the
workers with food that was either supplemented with the hormone or a solvent.
Larvae that received the hormone-laced food were twice as likely as the
controls to mature into adults, and they grew into majors, the bigger of two worker castes. That
means that nurse ants must be selectively feeding larvae the hormone, depending
on what type of adult workers the colony needs, LeBoeuf says. In essence, the
nurses are “deciding the long-term shape and fate of the colony.” Adds Wheeler,
“It’s a way to integrate the colony,” to ensure it functions as a single
entity.
The researchers also analyzed the socially exchanged
fluid of three other species: two other ants and the honey bee. They found
similar and additional proteins connected to growth,
development, and maturation, they report today
in eLife.
Scientists used to think the molecules in social
insects’ regurgitated food were simply “byproducts,” says Ofer Feinerman, a
biophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, who was
not involved in the study. The new work, he says, shows they instead play “an
active role in regulating the colony’s behavior, population structure, and
immune resistance.”
Ants, of course, aren’t the only animals exchanging
body fluids over a social network. “Sperm, breast milk, the saliva in a
kiss—there are so many social fluids that are so exciting and just waiting to
be explored,” LeBoeuf says. “Up to now, these have been private, privileged
forms of communication,” though she notes that semen is known to influence female physiology. Could
these fluids affect the receivers in other unexpected ways, influencing their
behaviors, relationships, and social standing? The ants’ answer is “Yes.”
Facebook on Monday denied that its network and Messenger app were being used to spread ransomware to its users, contradicting the claims of Check Pointresearchers Roman Ziakin and Dikla Barda.
The two researchers last week reported they had discovered a new method for delivering malicious code to machines, which they dubbed "ImageGate."
Threat actors had found a way to embed malicious code into an image, they said.
Due to a flaw in the social media infrastructure, infected images are downloaded to a user's machine, Ziakin and Barda explained. Clicking on the file causes the user's machine to become infected with a ransomware program known as "Locky," which encrypts all the files on the infected machine. The user then must pay a ransom to the purveyor of the malicious software in order to decrypt the files.
"In the past week, the entire security industry is closely following the massive spread of the Locky ransomware via social media, particularly in its Facebook-based campaign" the researchers wrote in an online post. "Check Point researchers strongly believe the new ImageGate technique reveals how this campaign was made possible, a question which has been unanswered until now."
Bad Chrome Extension
Facebook has disputed Check Point's findings.
"This analysis is incorrect," Facebook said in a statement provided to TechNewsWorld by spokesperson Jay Nancarrow.
"There is no connection to Locky or any other ransomware, and this is not appearing on Messenger or Facebook," the company maintained.
"We investigated these reports and discovered there were several bad Chrome extensions, which we have been blocking for nearly a week," Facebook noted. "We also reported the bad browser extensions to the appropriate parties."
Most social media sites, including Facebook, have protections in place to block spam and dangerous file types, said Marc Laliberte, an information security threat analyst with WatchGuard Technologies.
"This most recent attack bypassed Facebook's protections by using a specific type of image file that supports interactivity via embedded scripts, like JavaScript," he told TechNewsWorld. "Facebook has since added the image file type -- SVG -- used in this attack to their filter."
Cloak of Legitimacy
What makes this attack so devious is that it's cloaked in legitimacy.
"The JavaScript embedded in the image is not malicious," explained Alexander Vukcevic, virus labs director at Avira. "It leads you to a website that looks like YouTube."
At the website, you're told you need to download a browser extension to watch video at the site.
"The browser extension then downloads the ransomware," Vukcevic told TechNewsWorld.
Ransomware like Locky has become a big threat to consumers, observed Javvad Malik, a security advocate for Alien Vault.
"Most are not technically savvy to spot or defend against ransomware," he told TechNewsWorld. "While a lot of effort is put into educating consumers around the dangers of clicking on links in emails or opening attachments, there is an inherent level of trust that people put in social media platforms, which is being abused by this current threat."
Consumer Protection
While Ransomware is always a serious threat to consumers, this new twist on its distribution raises the bar even higher, WatchGuard's Laliberte noted.
"Consumers simply do not expect malware to be delivered via a Facebook message," he said. "Most people probably consider social media sites to be a safe space, so the lack of concern and vigilance makes it powerful as a potential infection channel for malware."
For consumers concerned about an ImagteGate attack, Check Point recommended not opening any files downloaded to a device after clicking any image. The same is true for image files with unusual extensions, such as SVG, JS or HTA.
Users also should keep their operating system and antivirus software up to date, Avira's Vukcevic added, "and make backups. Even if you're never infected with ransomware, you never know when something might go wrong with your machine."
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)