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tonyPick writes:

The RISC-V project ran the first RISC-V workshop last week, and the content from the workshop is being brought online.

Currently the slide packs are available, with videos to follow. From the blog posting

The RISC-V Project aims to develop an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) under a BSD License; from the project homepage:

The motivation for the project is summarised in The Case for RISC-V (PDF Download) .

carguy writes:

Video of a Q&A session with Noam Chomsky yesterday, sponsored by the MIT Faculty Forum:     http://slice.mit.edu/2015/01/14/faculty-forum-online-noam-chomsky/

The questions cover a wide range from activism to some fine points of linguistics to nuclear nonproliferation - something for everyone and surprisingly positive overall. I spotted at least one small factual error, fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

ah.clem writes:

Tumblr has long promoted itself as a hub for artists and creative entrepreneurs. Now, Tumblr wants to put those people to work.

To that end, the company unveiled a new initiative, in which it plans to hand-pick some of its most popular artists and creative users and pair them up with brands who want to advertise across the popular blogging platform.

Sell out here.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Stomp on the gas in a new Ford Mustang or F-150 and you’ll hear a meaty, throaty rumble—the same style of roar that Americans have associated with auto power and performance for decades. Now Drew Harwell reports at the Washington Post that the auto industry’s dirty little secret is that the engine growl in some of America’s best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit of lip-syncing, boosted through special pipes or digitally faked altogether. "Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks," writes Harwell. "Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away." For example Ford sound engineers and developers worked on an “Active Noise Control” system on the 2015 Mustang EcoBoost that amplifies the engine’s purr through the car speakers. Afterwards, the automaker surveyed members of Mustang fan clubs on which processed “sound concepts” they most enjoyed.

Among purists, the trickery has inspired an identity crisis and cut to the heart of American auto legend. The “aural experience” of a car, they argue, is an intangible that’s just as priceless as what’s revving under the hood. “For a car guy, it’s literally music to hear that thing rumble,” says Mike Rhynard, “It’s a mind-trick. It’s something it’s not. And no one wants to be deceived.” Other drivers ask if it really matters if the sound is fake? A driver who didn’t know the difference might enjoy the thrum and thunder of it nonetheless. Is taking the best part of an eight-cylinder rev and cloaking a better engine with it really, for car makers, so wrong? "It may be a necessary evil in the eyes of Ford," says Andrew Hard, "but it’s sad to think that an iconic muscle car like the Mustang, a car famous for its bellowing, guttural soundtrack, has to fake its engine noise in 2015. Welcome to the future."

"gewg_" writes:

Valve's changelog for the Steam client dated January 19 includes the fix for the Linux-related screwup.

Silviu Stahie notes at Softpedia

it might have deserved more than just an entry in a changelog, but we'll have to settle with just that.

"Fixed a rare bug where Steam could delete user files when failing to start"

Related:
rm -rf / Considered Harmful, to Steam Users

tonyPick writes:

The Washington Post contains an article on a recent survey by Oklahoma State University where over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA,”

The article discusses the wider issue of scientific ignorance driving policy decisions, and there is some further comment at io9. A summary of the full survey results is available (PDF).

AnonTechie writes:

This may be of interest to some readers of SN:

For decades, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) kept a record of all of its investigations into extraterrestrial activity in one extensive report called Project Blue Book ( http://www.archives.gov/foia/ufos.html ). Up until last week Project Blue Book's massive catalog of over 10,000 UFO and extraterrestrial reports from the 1940s to the 1970s had only been accessible by visiting the National Archives in Washington. Now the archives are available online. ( http://projectbluebook.theblackvault.com )

"gewg_" writes us about an El Reg report:

Forget the critics' opinion, audience figures, or box office take. What really sets a film apart is the number of times it's later referenced in other moving pictures.

That's according to a Northwestern University team led by Luis Amaral, which set out to determine what criterion best predicted a work's inclusion in the US Library of Congress's National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

After conducting a "a big data study of 15,425 US-produced films listed in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)", which applied both subjective metrics--"(critical reviews, awards, public opinion) and objective (citations, box office sales)"--the conclusion was that these weren't as accurate in predicting Film Registry glory as how many nods a work received in subsequent flicks.

[The study put] Star Wars and Psycho into second and third spots in the significance league table. [...] the fourth and fifth most significant silver screen outings were Casablanca and Gone With the Wind.

Amaral's ultimate aim is to develop a method for determining "the most significant scientific papers".

He explained: "More than 1 million scientific papers are published each year worldwide. It can be difficult to distinguish a good scientific paper from an average one, much like the movies. My next goal is to develop a good measure of scientific citations to get inside what is going on in the scientific literature."

Readers can judge for themselves the significance of the Northwestern University study--dubbed Cross-evaluation of metrics to estimate the significance of creative works--when it appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

mendax writes:

Ars Technica is reporting that Google's wrath at Microsoft about its security problems is extending to Apple. Google has identified and is now releasing details on three zero-day exploits in MacOS X here, here, and here.

At first glance, none of them appear to be highly critical, since all three appear to require the attacker to already have some access to a targeted machine. What's more, the first vulnerability, the one involving the "networkd 'effective_audit_token' XPC," may already have been mitigated in OS X Yosemite, but if so the Google advisory doesn't make this explicit....

The security flaws were privately reported to Apple on October 20, October 21, and October 23, 2014. All three advisories appear to have been published after the expiration of the 90-day grace period that Project Zero gives to developers before making reports public.

As a heavy MacOS X user and one who is pretty savvy about such things, I know that Macs are not invulnerable, but two of these I find worrisome. Google might also feel the same way given that they are a Mac shop, eschewing MS Windows because of its well-known security problems.

tonyPick writes:

The MIT Technology Review has an article on the problems faced by Hawaii in rolling out the large scale energy storage required to back solar power generation.

The article looks at the problems experienced by the current power storage solution, and the proposals to deploy large scale Lithium Ion batteries in the next generation of solar plants.

frojack writes:

ABC News (the Australian one, not the US one) is reporting on a rare catch.

"It has 300 teeth over 25 rows, so once you're in that mouth, you're not coming out... I don't think you would want to show it to little children before they went to bed" said the fishermen skipper David Guillot who caught it. It "scared the living bejeezus out of all on board."

This isn't a huge shark, just over 1.7 metres (6 1/2 feet) long. This particular specimen was caught at 700 metres deep; even though this species has been found as deep as 1,500 metres, it generally lives in waters shallower than 1,200 metres. None of the fishermen had ever seen one of these before and it was able to twist its body, and strike like a snake when handled by fishermen after being brought on board the trawler.

Interview with the Skipper here.

prospectacle writes:

Physicists, philosophers, professors, authors, cognitive scientists, and many others have weighed in on edge.org's annual question 2015: What do you think about machines that think? See all 186 responses here

Also, what do you think?

My 2¢: There's been a lot of focus on potential disasters that are almost certainly not going to happen. E.g. a robot uprising, or mass poverty through unemployment. Most manufacturers of artificial intelligence won't program their machines to seek self preservation at the expense of their human masters. It wouldn't sell. Secondly, if robots can one day produce almost everything we need, including more robots, with almost no human labour required, then robot-powered factories will become like libraries: relatively cheap to maintain, plentiful, and a public one will be set up in every town or suburb, for public use. If you think the big corporations wouldn't allow it, why do they allow public libraries?

slash2phar writes:

Researchers from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. The information is sent via the referrer header, which contains the URL of the page requesting a third party resource.

In one example, a URL at doubleclick.net is requested by your browser. Appended to the end of this URL is your age, smoking status, preganacy status, parental status, zip code, state and annual income. This URL is requested by your browser after you fill out the required information on healthcare.gov and click the button to view health insurance plans that you are eligible for.

jas writes:

Last January, the FCC’s Net Neutrality directives were struck down in the US Court of Appeals, a ruling that was expected—the FCC in 2002 reclassified ISPs as “information services”, which prevents the agency from exerting much control over the infrastructure that powers these networks. FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler indicated that the agency will hold a vote on February 26 which is likely to return ISPs to being “telecommunication services” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This will provide the FCC the legal authority to open access to utility poles to any interested company to build Internet infrastructure, as well as prevent ISPs from throttling speeds from any remote servers, or prioritizing speeds from others in exchange for payment.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-fccs-possible-reclassification-of-isps-signals-hope-for-net-neutrality/

AnonTechie writes with a story from the Electronic Frontier Foundation which provides some background on the asset forfeiture story we ran last week:

“You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the f*** it's gonna take you.”

This oft-cited wisdom comes from Detective Lester Freamon, a character in the classic HBO series The Wire, which tracked how an elite task force of (fictional) Baltimore cops used electronic surveillance to bring down criminal networks. But, the sentiment is ironic to a fault: if you keep following the money, it might take you right back to the police.

Asset forfeiture has long been a topic of controversy in law enforcement. Cops and prosecutors have had the power to seize property and cash from suspects before anyone has actually been convicted of a crime (usually narcotics-related). Then these law enforcement agencies have plugged a portion of that money (and money derived from auctioning of property) into their own budgets, allowing them to spend in ways that possibly would not have passed scrutiny during the formal appropriations process.

Critics note that asset forfeiture creates a perverse incentive for policing priorities: the more assets cops seize, the more money they get to spend. Satirist John Oliver characterized the practice as akin to “legalized robbery by law enforcement” in a must-watch segment on his show Last Week Tonight. News organizations, including New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Free Beacon have recently outlined abuses of the system.

[...]

The Washington Post has released its giant cache of Equitable Sharing Agreements from thousands of local law enforcement agencies around the country. We urge you to dig in, find your local cops, identify out how they’ve spend this money, and let the world know what you find.