Monthly Archives: July 2020

A star was born when Chief Meteorologist Jeff Lyons for 14 News in Evansville, Indiana brought Betty his cat on-air during a weather hit. USA TODAY

If the world of misinformation had its way, Dorothy would be adding parades of deadly tornadoes alongside lions, tigers and bears on Kansas'list of worst nightmares.

Despite fact-checkers efforts, Facebook users continue to misrepresent a photo illustration of a May 2016 tornado's evolution. The image, which MamouChoctow posted July 11, appears to depicta series of seven hurricanes simultaneously striking a Kansas horizon.

Intense Supercell with a Mass of Tornados North of Minneola Kansas. By @ Jason Weingart,Choctaw captioned the photo.

There were more tornadoes in Kansas between 1950 and August 2018 than in every other state besides Texas.(Photo: clintspencer / Getty Images)

Many Facebook users expressed awe at the photo and terror at the presumed destruction, while some commented that the scene was not as it seemed.

Like a menacing army of tornados marching on. Wow, what a photo! Nyla Slosson commented.

But Harris John quoted from the image's Wikipedia caption: This image is created from eight images shot in two sequences as a tornado formed north of Minneola, Kansas on May 24, 2016. This prolific supercell went on to produce at least 12 tornadoes and at times had two and even three tornadoes on the ground at once,

Choctaw has not yet responded to USA TODAYs request for comment.

Fact check: Hurricane Hanna did not collapse border wall in Texas

The supercellstruck north of Minneola, Kansas, on May 24, 2016, and was photographed by storm chaser Jason Weingart.

According to the National Weather Service, the supercell produced 12 to 15 tornadoes that afternoon and early evening. The tornadoesdid not strike simultaneously in a line as Choctow suggests.

Supercell tornadoes are the most common kind of tornado, which form from supercell thunderstorms. Scientists theorize that supercell tornadoes form when winds at different heights, speeds and directions form an updraft of rotating air.

Fact check: Viral photo shows Obama, Fauci visiting NIH lab in 2014, not a 'Wuhan lab' in 2015

Weignart has confirmed via phone call with USA TODAY and within the description on his website that the image captures one single tornado, not a mass of multiple tornadoes.

It is the evolution of one single tornado, Weingart told USA TODAY.

Evolution of the first of several tornadoes in Ford County, Ks on May 24, 2016, Weingart describes the photo on his website.

He told USA TODAY he created "Evolution of a Tornado" from a time-lapse he recorded.

Weingart sells the image online and has made it availableon Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. He also uploaded a video of the tornado to YouTube.

In 2017, Weingart submitted"Evolution of a Tornado" as an image series to the Wiki Science Competition and won.

"About a year later someone on Facebook downloaded and posted it as a 'mass of tornadoes'and it went viral," he said.

Fact check: Picture of a massive dust cloud is over Phoenix, not Puerto Rico

We rate the claim that a widely shared photo of a May 2016 stormdepicts a mass of tornadoes simultaneously striking FALSE because it is not supported by our research. The photographer Jason Weingart has confirmed in his online descriptions and directly to USA TODAY that he edited a time-lapse of a single tornado into one image to createa visual representation of thestorm's evolution.

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Autoplay

Show Thumbnails

Show Captions

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/29/fact-check-image-doesnt-show-mass-tornadoes-but-evolution-one/5531001002/

Read the original:

Fact check: Image doesn't show mass of tornadoes; it's an edited evolution of one tornado - USA TODAY

The hat and baseball are connected like Ben and Jerry. One without the other doesnt make sense. Nobody says, Hey, while youre at the grocery store can you pick me up some Bens?

Ben needs Jerry. Ballplayers need caps.

These days, wearing a baseball hat is common place. They are worn by most people and have become a part of everyday attire for quite a few baseball and non-baseball fans alike. But where did these hats come from and how did they evolve into the fashion statements that we adorn today?

The mid to late 19th century was a cornucopia of hats and hat styles. From deerstalkers (think Sherlock Holmes) to jockey caps, to pillbox caps (Civil War couture), to boaters and fedoras, the man or woman of the Industrial Revolution had plenty of head wear to choose from. And from these various styles developed the baseball hat that we know today.

The place was Hoboken, New Jersey. It was June 19, 1846. The first officially recorded baseball game was being played between the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and the New York Base Ball Club. The Knickerbockers lost 23 to 1. They also wore straw hats as they played, thusly triggering the love affair between baseball and hats, although their hats were probably better suited for a pleasant row around the pond.

Fourteen years later an amateur team named the Brooklyn Excelsiors donned the ancestor of the modern baseball cap. The Brooklyn-style hat had a rounded-top and a button at the peak. The Excelsiors were in the midst of a championship season in 1860 and that could be one reason the style caught on. Champions tend to set the trends. Who doesnt want to follow a winner?

In 1901, the charter member of the newly founded American League, the Detroit Tigers, wore a cap with something new on it. What was that newfangled thing? A logo. The dark blue cap had a running orange tiger stitched on the front. It seems so simple and standard now, but in 1901 it was revolutionary.

Baseball hats in the 1920s and 1930s, well, grew. The bill, or visor, became longer in an attempt to further shade the players eyes from the sun. The visor also became firmer, allowing for the wearer to shape the bill to their comfort level. Probably the most iconic hat from this era, and possibly of all baseball history (although, Boston Red Sox fans would surely disagree), is the New York Yankees cap.

As the 30s came to a close the idea of bigger is better continued to sink its claws into American society. The baseball hat wasnt exempt. Although the bill stayed the same length, the crown grew up. With the gain in altitude the front of the hat allowed for more advertising space. For the next sixty years, give or take a few, this hat style dominated the national game and worked its way into the closets of the American citizen.

Baseball hats have always been made of wool. You know the stuff, its itchy and hot. Then, in 2007, Major League Baseball decided, for the comfort of its players, to switch to a polyester blend. So long wool, hello breathability.

Who knows what the baseball hat will evolve into? Possibly, instead of stitched logos, they will become digital, with different images attainable on a single hat. Maybe the bill will get longer, perhaps long enough to match Scotty Smalls hat from the Sandlot. Whatever direction the baseball cap takes it is a part of the fabric of our society and has become not just a tool of functionality, but a statement of fashion.

Main ImageEmbed from Getty Images

Originally posted here:

Around the Horn In Six Hats (The Evolution of Baseball Caps) - Last Word on Baseball

The Pokmon franchise is going strong for nearly 25 years. That's a quarter century of new pocket monsters, adventures, and updates. The series is constantly evolving like its namesake creatures. That also includes adding newPokmon each generation.Occasionally, an entire new evolution will be added to an existingPokmon or evolutionary line, which is exciting for fans.

RELATED:10 Pokmon We Want To See In Detective Pikachu 2

Fans are always clamoring for a new form or version of their absolute favorites. With Dynamax, Gigantamax, regional variants, and Mega Evolutions in the games, fans have been able to see their favorites in all-new ways. Still, there are somePokmon that never get these updates, or some that could still use some more.

This Ghost/Grass anchor is known as the Sea CreeperPokmon. It was added in Generation VII, a perfect aquatic addition to the Alola region in the Sun and Moon games. It is a huge anchor held to a ship's steering wheel by seaweed. ThisPokmon not only has a neat design, but it's also the only one that can learn the move Anchor Shot.

Dhelmise absolutely deserves an evolution, as it cannot evolve into any otherPokmon. Speculating on what an evolution could look like for this cool creature, it could possibly evolve into a large ghost ship itself, or even a giant sail. Fans would love a new design.

Absol is one of the series' most popularPokmon. This Dark-typePokmon has been around since Generation III, where it captured hearts with its stand-out design. Although not one of the most powerfulPokmon, it is one of the most memorable. It's so popular, in fact, that itis one of the few to be given a Mega form.

RELATED: The 10 Most Powerful Pokmon Cards, Ranked

Somehow, it still doesn't have an evolution, though. Absol would be a prime candidate to get a newPokmon in its line, given its fan-favorite status. Simply imagine how cute an emo kitten would be as a predecessor, or to see it evolve into an even more ferocious feline.

The Fire-type anteaterPokmon from Generation V onward doesn't have an evolution. This is surprising, as it is has made cameos in the anime, manga, and many side games in the franchise. It's about time an evolution gets added to its line.

Fun fact: Heatmor is the only non-Bug typePokmon that can learn the move Bug Bite. This could be a clue as to what the anteater can evolve into: a Fire/BugPokmon. Not manyPokmon have the distinction of this specific, opposing dual typing, so it would make for a great final evolution for Heatmor.

Pinsir is one of the originalPokmon, with its origins going all the way back to good old Generation I. Beginning in Red and Blue, trainers could catch Pinsir in a couple of ways. Depending on the game, players could obtain Pinsir through trade, the Safari Zone, or Celadon City's Game Corner.

That made it exclusive and desirable. It also had a companion, as many do: Scyther, which got its own evolution in a later game. So why shouldn't Pinsir? It has a Mega Evolution form, but not a standard evolution. Maybe this will change in a later generation.

This cute giraffePokmon goes way back: first introduced in Generation II, Girafarig is Normal/Psychic and has no known evolutions. While not necessarily a fan favorite, it's about time such a sweetPokmon gets its dues.

RELATED:The 10 Biggest Problems With Pokmon Games (They Need To Fix)

Think of how adorable an evolution would be. It could grow into a tall, long-necked giraffe, much like Alolan Executor. Or, its design could be similar to the dinosaur-like Tropius from Generation III.

Stantler is another Generation IIPokmon with no evolutions. The Big HornPokmonis all kinds of classic: its design is a straightforward caribou while its type is simply Normal. Therefore, it provides a great foundationfor an evolutionary line, but it never got the distinction.

Fans would probably adore a pre-evolution that looks like Bambi. It would serve thePokmon well and make Stantler a desirable final evolution for players to reach. Maybe it will be chosen for a future evolution in another game, although it was introduced so long ago it's possible it will never get another form.

Maractus the flowering cactusPokmon has such a unique design that it's a shame it has no known evolutions. With the popularity of desert plants like succulents these days, which are all the rage with younger generations, it would be the cutest design to have a succulentPokmon evolve into Maractus.

On the other hand, Maractus could also evolve into a larger and even more powerfulPokmon, such as a large plant, like a Joshua Tree or Yucca. That would serve its unique design well and really add to thePokmon universe.

Klefki is the cute Steel/Fairy-typePokmon introduced in Generation VI. The Key RingPokmon has aone-of-a-kind look. But without any evolutions, it leaves so much to be desired. The possibilities are endless with this one! With the key motif, there are so many designs to play off of.

Here are a few to get the conversation started: it could evolve into a skeleton key, playing off its spooky look; it could evolve from a little lock with a heart-shaped key in honor of being Fairy; or it could start off as one of the keys on its keyring, similar to the evolutionary line of Dreepy.

Without contest, Druddigon is one of the coolestPokmon from Generation V. But in a huge surprise, it doesn't actually have any evolutionary forms. Typically, Dragon-typePokmon do have evolutions, as they usually appear later in the game and take quite a bit of leveling up to get to its final form.

Therefore, it would make sense for Druddigon to have one, if not two, forms to precede its final evolution. All the great Dragon types have them, as they are meant to be challenging to raise and train. Only a few generations old, there's a possibility Druddigon's line could expand.

If there is anyPokmon most famous for its evolutions, it has to be Eevee. Its name even sounds like evolution, which is most likely intentional. The foxPokmon is one of the most adorable and acclaimed designs, even getting its own feature in theLet's Goseries.

Without fail, fans clamor for a new Eevolution with every generation that's announced. Interestingly enough, it did not get a new elemental evolution in the latest generation, but there are still so many possibilities out there: Ghost, Poison, Flying, and Dragon, to name a few. Game Freak simply has to continue expanding this line, there's no doubt about it.

NEXT:10 Pokmon So Dangerous, Only Tiger King Would Want One As A Pet

Next The 100: 10 Questions About Clarke Griffin, Answered

See more here:

10 Awesome Pokmon That Really Need A New Evolution | ScreenRant - Screen Rant

Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda.

The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has hundreds of thousands of developers who use it, and in the last quarter alone, more than 20,000 developers built applications based on the service, according to the company. Cloudflare also uses Workers to power many of its own services, but the first iteration of the platform had quite a few limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to do away with most of those and turn it into a platform that can compete with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google.

The original motivation for us building Cloudflare Workers was not to sell it as a product because we were using it as our own internal platform to build applications, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me ahead of todays announcement. Today, Cloudflare Teams, which is our fastest-growing product line, is all running on top of Cloudflare Workers and its allowed us to innovate as fast as we have and stay nimble and stay agile and all those things that get harder as you become a larger and larger company.

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince (Image Credits: TechCrunch)

Prince noted that Cloudflare aims to expose to third-party developers all of the services it builds for its internal consumption. The fact that weve been able to roll out a whole Zscaler competitor in almost no time is because of the fact that we had this platform and we could build on it ourselves, he said.

The original Workers service will continue to operate (but under the Workers Bundled moniker) and essentially become Cloudflares serverless platform for basic workloads that only run for a very short time. Workers Unbound as the name implies is meant for more complex and longer-running processes.

When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, Prince argues that speed obviously remains an important feature and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold-start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price.

Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions, the company says in todays press release.

As it turned out, the fact that Workers was also an edge computing platform was basically a bonus, but not necessarily why developers adopted it.

Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. I think the thing were realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies not just the individual developer hacking away at home but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you cant use XYZ platform, then you dont use XYZ platform and thats the end of the story, Prince noted.

Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold-start times of the original Workers platform. But we wanted to be better, he said. We wanted to be the clearly fastest serverless platform forever and the only number that we know no one else can beat is zero unless they invent a time machine.

The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. Were excited to be the first cloud computing platform that [offers], for no additional costs, out of the box, zero millisecond cold-start times, which then also means less variability in the performance.

Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds.

Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.

Prince credits Cloudflares ability to roll out this platform, which is obviously heavy on compute resources and keep it affordable to the fact that it always thought of itself as a security platform first (the team has often said that the CDN functionality was more or less incidental). Because it performed deep packet inspection, for example, the companys servers always featured relatively high-powered CPUs. Our network has been optimized for CPU usage from the beginning and as a result, its actually made it much more natural for us to extend our network that way, he explained. To this day, the same machines that are running our firewall products are the same machines that are running our edge computing platform.

Looking ahead, Prince noted that while Workers and Workers Unbound feature a distributed key-value store, the team is looking at adding a more robust database infrastructure and distributed storage.

The team is also looking at how to decompose applications to put them closest to where they will be running. You could imagine that in the future, it might be that you write an application and we say, listen, the parts of the application that are sensitive to the user of the database might run in Portland, where you are but if the database is in Ashburn, Virginia, then the parts that are sensitive to latency in the database might run there, he said.

Go here to see the original:

Cloudflare launches Workers Unbound, the next evolution of its serverless platform - TechCrunch

SophosLabs has just published a new report on a ransomware strain known as ProLock, which is interesting not so much for its implementation as for its evolution.

Lets start at the very top of the ransomware dilemma.

Should you ever pay blackmail money to ransomware crooks?

As you can imagine, law enforcement and government bodies around the world reguarly say, No! Please dont, because its the regular payments that make the whole ransomware ecosystem work in the first place.

Sure, in the 1990s, before anyone figured out how to make any real money out of malware, there were plenty of deeply destructive computer viruses that circulated widely and did huge amounts of damage.

It was often hard to figure out why anyone would write and deliberately disseminate malware back then, because those who were caught very often ended up serving prison sentences.

There were lots of possible reasons, of course: because virus writers had some sort of axe to grind with the world; because they wanted to make some sort of social or political statement; or simply because they could, and wanted to show off to their buddies in the cyberunderground.

Money didnt really come into it at all back then, not least because there wasnt a reliable way to extort money online and remain anonymous.

But malware in general, and ransomware in particular, doesnt much follow that anger at the world path any more.

Its almost all about money now and as you are no doubt aware in the case of ransomware, the money demanded can be several million dollars per network attack.

So, if no one ever paid up, contemporary theory says that crooks would be much less inclined to bother attacking networks with ransomware in the first place.

Thats because most attacks require quite a lot of time and effort on the part of the crooks this isnt an after-hours hobby where hackers compare notes with underground chums, but a competitive cybercrime arena.

Ransomware gangs may take days or weeks to get their attack ready, for example by:

Our own threat response team has even dealt with a ransomware victim where the criminals appear to have dug around in the IT departments own email to find out what cyberinsurance arrangements the company had in place, and to gauge how high to pitch their ransom demand.

These crooks also downloaded personal contact data for key members in the IT team, and then placed a voice call (using a voice changer) to the IT manager to threaten him directly, reading out some of his personally identifiable information (PII) as proof that they had already exfiltrated corporate data.

Weve also seen ransomware attacks where the criminals have emailed staff across the company to warn them that their own PII would be exposed to the world if the company didnt pay up, urging the staff to contact their IT team to demand that payment be made basically, turning the organisation against itself.

As you can see, the reaction of the crooks to the ever-louder advice, Dont pay! has been to adjust their approach to make their demands more compelling, even against companies that feel sure theyd never pay up.

As a result, weve always taken a conciliatory approach that says, We urge you to avoid paying up if there is any way you can. But if its legal to pay in your country, and you end up doing so, were not going to judge you for it, because its not the future of our business thats looking into the barrel of a ransomware criminals gun.

After all, if you genuinely have been caught out with inadequate backup, if every single computer in your company is essentially frozen and useless, if your business is almost certain to go down the tubes if you dont pay up, and if paying up is likely to save the company

then it would be rather self-indulgent for anyone to insist, You still shouldnt pay up, even if it means that everyone loses their job.

But what if paying up wont work, no matter how stuck you are, and might even make your position worse?

Thats a problem that faced the ProLock ransomware gang earlier this year.

Last year, as far as we can tell, these crooks were behind ransomware called PwndLocker that fortunately for the rest of us could sometimes be decrypted without paying.

The crooks had apparently made a cryptographic blunder that sometimes allowed victims to recover the decryption key even after the encryption was finished.

Next came the ProLock ransomware strain, which ended up provoking a more-urgent-than-ever warning from the FBI that said:

The decryption key or decryptor provided by the attackers upon paying the ransom has not routinely executed correctly. The decryptor can potentially corrupt files that are larger than 64MB and may result in file integrity loss of approximately 1 byte per 1KB over 100MB. Added coding may be necessary for the decryptor to function.

Interestingly, ProLock doesnt actually scramble every byte of every file it attacks.

In the ProLock sample analysed by SophosLabs, the first 8KB (8192 bytes, or 0x2000 in hex) of every file are left untouched.

As a result, files of 8KB or below are unmodified, while files bigger than 8192 bytes are encrypted but with the first 8KB intact.

ProLock isnt the first ransomware to use this trick leaving the start of files alone and there are three likely reasons why ransomware crooks do it:

We checked our own home directory and found that about two-thirds of our files were smaller than 8KB, which led us to think that a ProLock attack might not be that bad after all

except that the one-third of files that would get scrambled included almost everything of real importance, including all audio and podcast files and every video file, as well as most images, PDFs, documents, databases and presentations.

Only in the case of our Naked Security article archive would we have been lucky enough to retain just over half of our files, for the simple reason that we save the originals as plain text files, half of which are just under 8KB. (If saved as DOC or DOCX files, they would all come out well over 8192 bytes.)

ProLock also has some other interesting tricks to learn about, including obscuring the ransomware executable itself by hiding it inside a BMP (bitmap image) file that displays as an almost-uniform and apparently uninteresting black rectangle if you open it for inspection.

In a real-life ProLock attack, however, a PowerShell script that does not itself contain any ransomware code is used to unravel the EXE from the innocent-looking BMP file in order to launch it.

ProLock also contains a list of more than 150 different software products that it tries to spot in memory and kill off automatically, including enterprise applications (which typically keep files such as databases locked open, with the result that ransomware cant get write access to those files), security software and backup tools.

For the full and fascinating details of the ProLock ransomware, please visit the SophosLabs report.

You will learn:

Continue reading here:

ProLock ransomware new report reveals the evolution of a threat - Naked Security

As the Design Museum opens its new show Electronic, we speak to curator Gemma Curtin and The Chemical Brothers collaborators Smith & Lyall about the genres wider impact on creativity and culture, and how the music industry could look post-pandemic

Its a surreal experience stepping foot inside the Design Museums new exhibition about electronic music in the midst of a pandemic. When I visit the show in late July, the UK is well into its fourth month of a nationwide lockdown, and its been what feels like an eternity since I interacted with real-life people outside of a Zoom call, let alone feel the crush of other human bodies in a crowded nightclub or music festival.

As I walk around the darkened exhibition space, Im bombarded with sensory experiences flashing strobe lights, a thumping soundtrack and electrifying footage from the bygone days of live shows all designed to transport you back to the dancefloor. But as I step inside the final exhibit, an immersive installation created by Adam Smith and Marcus Lyall, longtime collaborators of The Chemical Brothers, which recreates one of the bands live shows, the thing that instinctively hits me is just how familiar it smells.

When I catch up Smith and Lyall after the show and question them about the distinctive scent that I cant quite put my finger on, Im informed that its just the smell of the smoke machine. Its like freshly mown grass for ravers, isnt it?, says Lyall. In putting on Electronic, the Design Museum is attempting to recreate that intangible feeling of electronic music albeit in a different setting while also exploring the genres wider social and cultural influence.

See the rest here:

From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers: the evolution of electronic music - Creative Review

Fall Guys

If your idea of battle royale is focused on shrinking circles and assault rifles, perhaps adjust your thinking. Ive just spent the morning playing Fall Guys, and . But make no mistake: this game might represent the most important evolution of battle royale since Fortnite added building into the mix.

Heres the setup: youre a weird rubbery pill thing, and youre on a game show that looks more than a little like Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. You start out running down an obstacle course with 59 other weird rubbery pill things, and by the end of it only 45 of you will advance to the next round. The next round will be something else: maybe some other weird obstacle course, maybe a team game where you have to steal tails off each others butts, maybe something I havent seen yet, but more players will be eliminated. Fewer and fewer, until only 1 remains.

Its battle royale, right?

Whats most interesting to me is that Fall Guys actually sacrifices very little of what defines battle royale, despite the wacky, nonviolent setup. Its all here: the insane, moshpit of an early phase, the escalating tension, the thrill of watching yourself stand tall as others fall, what I only assume is the elation of final victory.

What this game might do better, though, is the key element of any battle royale. A battle royale has to be fun to lose, because thats what 59 out of 60 competitors are going to be doing every round. And damn, if this isnt fun to lose: its insane, bouncy weirdness, top and and down, and it doesnt really matter if youre come out on top so long as you get to go again.

Weve seen a lot of games try to mimic the essential structure of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds with wildly varying degrees of success. What Fall Guys does is different. It doesn't just add new abilities and items into the basic kill everyone until you or your team are the only ones left standing formula. By conceptualizing a battle royale without that basic verb kill, it turns it into something totally different that still keeps the essential building blocks of what made PUBG so successful.

Continue reading here:

Fall Guys Is The Evolution Battle Royale Has Been Waiting For - Forbes