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PastTense writes:

The study, published in the Lancet Public Health journal and believed to be the first to research the effects of low levels of lead exposure on the general public, also concludes there is no safe level of the toxic metal: people with the lowest detectable amounts were still affected.

Researchers at four North American universities, led by Bruce Lanphear, of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, studied the fate of 14,289 people whose blood had been tested in an official US survey between 1988 and 1994. Four fifths of them had harboured levels of the toxic metal below what has, hitherto, been thought safe.

The study found that deaths, especially from cardiovascular disease, increased markedly with exposure, even at the lowest levels. It concluded that lead kills 412,000 people a year – accounting for 18% of all US mortality, not much less than the 483,000 who perish as a result of smoking.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/17/lead-petrol-more-deadly-than-we-thought-brexit-bring-it-back

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

March 20^th, 2018, Daniel Stenberg notes twenty years of his flexible, multi-protocol, text-based utility, curl. It is a very common client-side file transfer utility. The associated development libraries, libcurl are a couple of years younger.

curl itself and components from libcurl are found nearly everywhere these days. Due to such widespread use, it is hard to be precise with usage numbers, but conservative estimates suggest billions of people every day are using it, though mostly under the hood several layers down inside devices they own. It is the Internet transfer utility of choice for thousands of software applications. It is found in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, settop boxes, and media players for starters.

A detailed, free-of-charge, ebook, Everything curl, covers basically everything there is to know about curl, libcurl, and the associated project.

Earlier on SN:

Reducing Year 2038 Problems in curl

cURL turns Seventeen Today

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google is reportedly acquiring Lytro, a company that made light field cameras and hoped to pivot to virtual reality video capture. Google appears to have gotten a good (or at least cheap) deal:

Multiple sources tell us that Google is acquiring Lytro, the imaging startup that began as a ground-breaking camera company for consumers before pivoting to use its depth-data, light-field technology in VR.

One source described the deal as an "asset sale" with Lytro going for no more than $40 million. Another source said the price was even lower: $25 million. A third source tells us that not all employees are coming over with the company's technology: some have already received severance and parted ways with the company, and others have simply left. Assets would presumably also include Lytro's 59 patents related to light-field and other digital imaging technology.

The sale would be far from a big win for Lytro and its backers. The startup has raised just over $200 million in funding and was valued at around $360 million after its last round in 2017, according to data from PitchBook.

Despite a lot of hype, Lytro had little success with its expensive, ergonomically challenged, and low resolution light field cameras for consumers.

Also at 9to5Google and Engadget.

Related: LinkedIn's Top 10 Silicon Valley Startups for 'Talent Brand' - Note: Both Lytro and Theranos are on the list.
A Pocket Camera with Many Eyes - Inside the Development of Light

Original Submission

takyon writes:

PlayStation 3 Phat owners have a month left to claim 'OtherOS' class action settlement

The settlement was reached in October 2016, and originally PS3 owners were told to expect up to $55. That's increased to $65 now, possibly because fewer claims than expected were submitted in the 18 months since.

This resolves, legally anyway, the removal of the so-called "OtherOS" feature from the PS3's operating system eight years ago. That feature allowed users to partition their PS3's hard drive and install Linux on it. You may remember that, before then, the console was pitched and even used as a computer, including by the Air Force (which created a supercomputer cluster out of more than 1,700 of the consoles) and in distributed computing applications such as Folding@home and SETI@home.

But in April 2010, Sony stripped out the OtherOS feature, citing security concerns, which pissed off a small but very vocal contingent of PS3 users. That led to the lawsuit, which alleged false advertising, breach of warranty and etc. Sony admits no wrongdoing, which is customary in civil settlements.

"Phat" refers to the original console, which weighed approximately 5 kg and measured 325 mm (W) × 98 mm (H) × 274 mm (D).

Make a claim here.

Also at BetaNews.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Anonymous coders can be identified using stylometry and machine learning techniques applied to executable binaries:

Source code stylometry – analyzing the syntax of source code for clues about the author – is an established technique used in digital forensics. As the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) puts it, "Stylometry research has proven that anonymous code contributors can be de-anonymized to reveal the original author, provided the author has published code before."

The technique can help identify virus makers as well as unmask the creators of anti-censorship tools and other outlawed programs. It has the potential to pierce the privacy that many programmers assume they have.

Source code is designed to be human-readable, but binaries – typically produced by compiling or assembling source code – have fewer characteristics that may suggest authorship. Toolchains can be instructed to strip out variable names, function names and other symbols and metadata – which may say something about the author – and alter the structure of code through optimization.

Nonetheless, the researchers – Aylin Caliskan, Fabian Yamaguchi, Edwin Dauber, Richard Harang, Konrad Rieck, Rachel Greenstadt and Arvind Narayanan – building on work described in a 2011 paper, demonstrate that binary files can be analyzed using machine-learning and stylometric techniques.

If you want to remain an anonymous coder, you'd better not contribute anything under your own name publicly:

When Coding Style Survives Compilation: De-anonymizing Programmers from Executable Binaries (arXiv:1512.08546 [cs.CR])

We evaluate our approach on data from the Google Code Jam, obtaining attribution accuracy of up to 96% with 100 and 83% with 600 candidate programmers. We present an executable binary authorship attribution approach, for the first time, that is robust to basic obfuscations, a range of compiler optimization settings, and binaries that have been stripped of their symbol tables. We perform programmer de-anonymization using both obfuscated binaries, and real-world code found "in the wild" in single-author GitHub repositories and the recently leaked Nulled.IO hacker forum. We show that programmers who would like to remain anonymous need to take extreme countermeasures to protect their privacy.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Stephen Hawking's ashes to be interred near Sir Isaac Newton's grave

The ashes of Professor Stephen Hawking will be interred next to the grave of Sir Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey, it has been revealed. The renowned theoretical physicist's final resting place will also be near that of Charles Darwin, who was buried there in 1882.

Stephen Hawking's Last Paper (Probably) Doesn't Prove We Live in a Multiverse

A few months before physicist Stephen Hawking died, he published a paper that several media outlets touted as a way to finally prove (or disprove) the existence of parallel worlds. But that claim may be a bit of cosmic inflation, said several physicists who were not involved in Hawking's research.

"The paper makes no statements about observational tests. It's not entirely uninteresting, but it's one of literally several thousand ideas for what might possibly have happened in the early universe" many of which include parallel worlds, said Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, who blogs at backreaction.blogspot.com.

Sabine Hossenfelder's blog post: Hawking's "Final Theory" is not groundbreaking

A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? (arXiv:1707.07702 [hep-th])

takyon writes:

Mars' oceans formed early, possibly aided by massive volcanic eruptions

A new scenario seeking to explain how Mars' putative oceans came and went over the last 4 billion years implies that the oceans formed several hundred million years earlier and were not as deep as once thought.

[...] The new model proposes that the oceans formed before or at the same time as Mars' largest volcanic feature, Tharsis, instead of after Tharsis formed 3.7 billion years ago. Because Tharsis was smaller at that time, it did not distort the planet as much as it did later, in particular the plains that cover most of the northern hemisphere and are the presumed ancient seabed. The absence of crustal deformation from Tharsis means the seas would have been shallower, holding about half the water of earlier estimates.

"The assumption was that Tharsis formed quickly and early, rather than gradually, and that the oceans came later," Manga said. "We're saying that the oceans predate and accompany the lava outpourings that made Tharsis."

It's likely, he added, that Tharsis spewed gases into the atmosphere that created a global warming or greenhouse effect that allowed liquid water to exist on the planet, and also that volcanic eruptions created channels that allowed underground water to reach the surface and fill the northern plains.

Timing of oceans on Mars from shoreline deformation (DOI: 10.1038/nature26144) (DX)

Related: Evidence of Giant Tsunami on Mars Suggests an Early Ocean
Evidence of Sea Floor Hydrothermal Deposits Found on Mars
Ceres May Have Had a Global Surface Ocean in the Past

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Japanese basket pattern inspires new material

Researchers have produced a metal with exotic electrical properties by mimicking a pattern from Japanese basket-weaving.

Kagome baskets are characterised by a symmetrical pattern of interlaced, corner-sharing triangles; the pattern has preoccupied physicists for decades.

Metals resembling a kagome pattern on the atomic scale should exhibit peculiar electrical characteristics.

The team behind the first kagome metal has published details in Nature.

Their product is an electrically conducting crystal, made from layers of iron and tin atoms, with each atomic layer arranged in the repeating pattern of a kagome lattice.

When they passed a current across the kagome layers within the crystal, they found that the triangular arrangement of atoms induced strange behaviour in that current.

Instead of flowing straight through, electrons instead veered, or bent back within the lattice.

Trihexagonal tiling.

Massive Dirac fermions in a ferromagnetic kagome metal (DOI: 10.1038/nature25987) (DX)

Original Submission

The suspect in a spate of bombings that terrorized residents of Austin, Texas, died after detonating an explosive inside his vehicle as a SWAT team approached to apprehend him on the side of a highway, officials said.

Early Wednesday, authorities tracked the suspect — a 24-year-old white man — to a hotel in Round Rock, a city in the Austin metropolitan area, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley told a news conference early Wednesday.

They tracked his vehicle until it pulled over on Interstate 35 and the suspect "detonated a bomb inside the vehicle, knocking one of our SWAT officers back and one of our officers fired on the vehicle as well," Manley said.

Austin serial bombings.

Also at CNN, BBC, and Bloomberg.

Previously: Two Injured in Fourth Package Bombing Incident this Month in Austin, Texas

takyon writes:

Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'

Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK - age-related macular degeneration.

Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but "I can now read the newspaper" with it, he says. He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.

[...] Doctors have devised a way of building a new retinal pigment epithelium and surgically implanting it into the eye. The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology [DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4114] [DX], starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body. They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place. The living patch is only one layer of cells thick - about 40 microns - and 6mm long and 4mm wide. It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.

Related: British Man Receives World's First Bionic Eye Implant for Macular Degeneration
Stem Cell Therapy for Macular Degeneration: Conflicting Reports

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Volcanic eruption influenced Iceland's conversion to Christianity

Memories of the largest lava flood in the history of Iceland, recorded in an apocalyptic medieval poem, were used to drive the island's conversion to Christianity, new research suggests.

A team of scientists and medieval historians, led by the University of Cambridge, has used information contained within ice cores and tree rings to accurately date a massive volcanic eruption, which took place soon after the island was first settled. Having dated the eruption, the researchers found that Iceland's most celebrated medieval poem, which describes the end of the pagan gods and the coming of a new, singular god, describes the eruption and uses memories of it to stimulate the Christianisation of Iceland. The results are reported in the journal Climatic Change.

[...] The Cambridge-led team pinpointed the date of the eruption using ice core records from Greenland that preserve the volcanic fallout from Eldgjá. Using the clues contained within the ice cores, the researchers found that the eruption began around the spring of 939 and continued at least through the autumn of 940. [...] Iceland's most celebrated medieval poem, Vǫluspá ('The prophecy of the seeress') does appear to give an impression of what the eruption was like. The poem, which can be dated as far back as 961, foretells the end of Iceland's pagan gods and the coming of a new, singular god: in other words, the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, which was formalised around the turn of the eleventh century.

The Eldgjá eruption: timing, long-range impacts and influence on the Christianisation of Iceland (open, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-018-2171-9) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Humanity Star to reach fiery doom earlier than expected

Rocket Lab's Humanity Star is expected to reach a fiery doom much earlier than expected.

The 8kg carbon fibre geodesic sphere with 65 reflective panels, which resembled a disco ball, was shot into orbit from the Mahia Peninsula on January 21 on board Rocket Lab's Electron rocket.

The launch also carried small satellites into the Earth's orbit for US companies Planet Labs and Spire Global.

It was expected the Humanity Star would be one of the brightest objects in the night sky for nine months, but satellite-tracking website Satview reported on Wednesday that it will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrate at 3am on Friday.

Satview.

Previously: Rocket Lab's Electron Rocket Launched "Humanity Star", a Temporary Source of Light Pollution

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

AMD confirmed all thirteen Ryzen and EPYC chip exploits unveiled by CTS-Labs, which will be patched within weeks.

AMD has responded to the reports last week of a range of security flaws affecting its Platform Security Processor (PSP) and chipset. The company acknowledges the bugs and says that, in coming weeks, it will have new firmware available to resolve the PSP bugs. These firmware fixes will also mitigate the chipset bugs.

Israeli firm CTS identified four separate flaw families, naming them Masterkey (affecting Ryzen and Epyc processors), Ryzenfall (affecting Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile), Fallout (hitting only Epyc), and Chimera (applying to Ryzen and Ryzen Pro systems using the Promonotory chipset).

[...] AMD's response today agrees that all four bug families are real and are found in the various components identified by CTS. The company says that it is developing firmware updates for the three PSP flaws. These fixes, to be made available in "coming weeks," will be installed through system firmware updates. The firmware updates will also mitigate, in some unspecified way, the Chimera issue, with AMD saying that it's working with ASMedia, the third-party hardware company that developed Promontory for AMD, to develop suitable protections. In its report, CTS wrote that, while one CTS attack vector was a firmware bug (and hence in principle correctable), the other was a hardware flaw. If true, there may be no effective way of solving it.

[...] The striking thing about the bugs was not their existence but rather the manner of their disclosure. CTS gave AMD only 24 hours notice before its public announcement that it had found the flaws. Prior to reporting the problems to AMD, CTS also shared the bugs, along with proofs of concept, with security firm Trail of Bits so that Trail of Bits could validate that the bugs were real and could be exploited the way that CTS described. While the computer security industry has no fixed, rigid procedure for disclosing bugs to vendors, a 90-day notice period is far more typical.

This short notice period led Linux creator Linus Torvalds to say that CTS' report "looks more like stock manipulation than a security advisory."

This perception wasn't helped when short-seller Viceroy Research (which claims to have no relationship with CTS) said that the flaws were "fatal" to AMD and, that its share price should drop to $0, and that the company should declare bankruptcy. Such a valuation is obviously absurd: the PSP is non-essential (some Ryzen firmware allows it to be disabled, albeit at the loss of some functionality), its flaws can be repaired with a firmware update, and the flaws can only be exploited by an attacker with superuser access to the system. To suggest that such bugs should not merely hurt AMD's share price, but drive the company out of business entirely, with nothing salvageable from the Zen architecture, AMD's x86 license, its long-term contracts with Microsoft and Sony, or its GPU architecture, plainly has no possible factual justification.

In addition, AMD wants an investigation of unusual stock trade activity due to the CTS-Labs' revelation of the thirteen Ryzen chip exploits.

[...] There's no evidence that of any of those holes has been used for malevolent purposes, and it would be extremely difficult to use any of them to attack computers, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said. AMD saw reports of unusual trading activity in its stock about a week ago when an Israeli company called CTS Labs went public with a report on the flaws and has reported it to the relevant authorities.

[...] "It's important to note that all the issues raised in the research require administrative access to the system, a type of access that effectively grants the user unrestricted access to the system," AMD's Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster said in the statement, referring to the recent report. "Any attacker gaining unauthorized administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research."

Previously: CTS-Labs Identifies Vulnerabilities in AMD Chips, Gives AMD Just 24 Hours' Notice

Original Submission

takyon writes:

U.S. bans transactions with Venezuela's digital currency

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order barring any U.S.-based financial transactions involving Venezuela's new petro cryptocurrency, as U.S. officials warned that it was a "scam" by President Nicolas Maduro's government to further undermine democracy in the OPEC country.

"The 'petro' is a desperate effort by a corrupt regime to defraud international investors," a senior U.S. administration official told reporters, strongly warning that any transactions in the petro digital currency would violate U.S. sanctions. "Investing in the 'petro' should be viewed as directly supporting this dictatorship and its attempts to undermine the democratic order in Venezuela," the official added.

Trump's order bars "all transactions related to, provision of financing for, and other dealings in, by a United States person or within the United States, any digital currency, digital coin, or digital token," issued by Venezuela's government since Jan. 9, the White House said in a statement.

Also at the New York Times.

Previously: Enter the "Petro": Venezuela to Launch Oil-Backed Cryptocurrency

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Xilinx Announces Project Everest: The 7nm FPGA SoC Hybrid

This week Xilinx is making public its latest internal project for the next era of specialized computing. The new product line, called Project Everest in the interim, is based around what Xilinx is calling an ACAP – an Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform. The idea here is that for both compute and acceleration, particularly in the data center, the hardware has to be as agile as the software. Project Everest will combine Xilinx's highest performing next-generation programmable logic along with application processors, real-time processors, programmable engines, RF, high-speed SerDes, programmable IO, HBM, and a custom network-on-chip. The idea is that space typically devoted to hard blocks in FPGAs (such as memory controllers) are now optimized on chip, leaving more programmable silicon for the compute and adaptability. Project Everest is one of the Three Big Trends as identified by Xilinx's new CEO, Victor Peng.

[...] Xilinx's ACAP portfolio will be initiated with TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process, with the first tapeouts due in late 2018. Xilinx states that Project Everest has been a monumental internal effort, taking 4-5 years and 1500 engineers already, with over $1b in R&D costs. The final big chips are expected to weigh in at 50 billion transistors, with a mix of monolithic and interposer designs based on configurations.

Today's announcement is more of a teaser than anything else – the diagram above is about the limit to which that Xilinx will talk about features and the product portfolio. The value of the ACAP, according to Xilinx, will be its feature set and millisecond-level configurability. For a server on the edge, for example, an ACAP can use both the programmable logic elements for millisecond bitstream reconfiguration of different processes along with the application processors for general logic or the programmable engines as ASIC-level acceleration. This can lead to, among other things, different AI acceleration techniques and 5G RF manageability by multiple containers/VMs on a single ACAP. The overriding idea is that the ACAP can apply dynamic optimization for workloads, with Xilinx citing a 10-100x speedup over CPUs and more use cases than GPUs or ASICs as a fundamental value to the new hardware, built through software and hardware programmability. Xilinx also stated that the RF will have four times the bandwidth of current 16nm radios, leveraging 16x16 800 MHz radios.

Also at The Register and The Next Platform.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

#DeleteFacebook trends in response to Cambridge Analytica

We all moved on from MySpace. We can move on from Facebook too." This was a typical message found on Twitter in the wake of accusations over Cambridge Analytica using personal data from 50 million Facebook users to influence the US presidential election in 2016. After reports of Cambridge Analytica using Facebook's user information came to light, people began to urge others to either #DeleteFacebook or #BoycottFacebook in response.

[...] A spokeswoman for Privacy International warned that privacy concerns extend beyond Facebook as "your data is being exploited all the time". A person on the technology subsection of Reddit agreed, saying removing Facebook "doesn't solve the long term problem [because] consent to data use is very weakly protected online right now". And one Twitter user seeking regulation of Facebook said having the ability to delete an account is "a privilege".

This is a campaign we can all get behind, regardless of your position on election interference and influences.

Previously: The Cambridge Analytica Files

Original Submission