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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Identifying perceived emotions from people's walking style

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Maryland at College Park has recently developed a new deep learning model that can identify people's emotions based on their walking styles. Their approach, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, works by extracting an individual's gait from an RGB video of him/her walking, then analyzing it and classifying it as one of four emotions: happy, sad, angry or neutral.

[...] The approach first extracts a person's walking gait from an RGB video of them walking, representing it as a series of 3-D poses. Subsequently, the researchers used a long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network and a random forest (RF) classifier to analyze these poses and identify the most prominent emotion felt by the person in the video, choosing between happiness, sadness, anger or neutral.

The LSTM is initially trained on a series of deep features, but these are later combined with affective features computed from the gaits using posture and movement cues. All of these features are ultimately classified using the RF classifier.

Randhavane and his colleagues carried out a series of preliminary tests on a dataset containing videos of people walking and found that their model could identify the perceived emotions of individuals with 80 percent accuracy. In addition, their approach led to an improvement of approximately 14 percent over other perceived emotion recognition methods that focus on people's walking style.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

The sinkhole that saved the internet

It was late afternoon on May 12, 2017. Two exhausted security researchers could barely unpack the events of what had just happened.

Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins, who were working from their homes in the U.K. for Los Angeles-based cybersecurity company Kryptos Logic, had just stopped a global cyberattack dead in its tracks. Hours earlier, WannaCry ransomware began to spread like wildfire, encrypting systems and crippling businesses and transport hubs across Europe. It was the first time in a decade a computer worm began attacking computers on a massive scale. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was one of the biggest organizations hit, forcing doctors to turn patients away and emergency rooms to close.

Hours after the disruption began to break on broadcast news networks, Hutchins — who at the time was only known by his online handle @MalwareTech — became an “accidental hero” for inadvertently stopping the cyberattack by registering a web domain found in the malware’s code.

The internet, still reeling from the damage, had gotten off lightly. The two researchers, at the time both in their early 20s, had saved the internet from a powerful nation-state attack launched by an enemy using hacking tools developed by the West.

But the attack was far from over.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Carny

How a Tax Loophole Is Helping Silicon Valley Workers Save Millions

When Kay Luo joined LinkedIn in 2006, she received a grant of shares with a value of 12 cents each. The company went public in 2011 at $45 a share. By the end of the first day of trading, the price had doubled, and she began the process of selling her stock.

"It was more money than I've ever known," said Ms. Luo, who is in her 40s and has retired from the tech industry. "I felt very unsophisticated to manage the wealth. I thought the right thing to do was hire a fancy accountant."

Her new accountant helped with common techniques to minimize her tax on the windfall, like trusts, gifts and philanthropy. But she said he missed what has become one of the great windfalls in Silicon Valley: a provision in the tax code that allows employees at small companies to receive tens of millions of dollars in stock gains tax-free.

Ms. Luo said she was shocked that her accountant had failed to tell her about this: "It was hundreds of thousands of dollars we overpaid," she said.

The tax code provision addresses what's called qualified small-business stock. It says that people who are invested in a company valued under $50 million are eligible to exclude from their taxes $10 million or 10 times their investment, whichever is higher. It can be used by employees at start-ups who are given stock as part of their compensation plans.

"This is just an incredible way to exclude a large amount of income," said Raymond L. Thornson, managing director at the accounting firm Andersen Tax in San Francisco. "What makes this unique is most of the opportunities to save on taxes are to give money away or deduct your mortgage."

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RandomFactor writes:

NASA has awarded Silicon Valley startup company Made in Space, $73.7 million to give it's "Archinaut One" in space assembly craft an in orbit test run in 2022.

In a statement Friday, NASA announced the award and stated

NASA has awarded [the] contract to Made In Space, Inc. of Mountain View, California, to demonstrate the ability of a small spacecraft, called Archinaut One, to manufacture and assemble spacecraft components in low-Earth orbit. The in-space robotic manufacturing and assembly technologies could be important for America's Moon to Mars exploration approach.

The contract is the start of the second phase of a partnership established through NASA's Tipping Point solicitation. The public-private partnership combines NASA resources with an industry contribution of at least 25% of the program costs, shepherding the development of critical space technologies while also saving the agency, and American taxpayers, money.

Archinaut One is expected to launch on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from New Zealand no earlier than 2022. Once it's positioned in low-Earth orbit, the spacecraft will 3D-print two beams that extend 32 feet (10 meters) out from each side of the spacecraft. As manufacturing progresses, each beam will unfurl two solar arrays that generate as much as five times more power than traditional solar panels on spacecraft of similar size.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Charter gets final approval to stay in NY despite breaking merger promise

Charter Communications has received final approval to stay in New York State despite violating merger commitments related to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable.

The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) had revoked its approval of the merger and ordered Charter to sell the former Time Warner Cable system in July 2018. Charter repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for broadband expansions that were required in exchange for merger approval, state officials said.

But Charter and state officials struck a deal in April, and yesterday the PSC approved the settlement.

"Under the terms of the agreement, Charter will expand its network to provide high-speed broadband service to 145,000 residences and businesses entirely in Upstate New York and will pay an additional $12 million to expand broadband service to additional premises," yesterday's PSC announcement said.

The 2016 merger approval required Charter to extend its high-speed broadband network to 145,000 unserved and underserved homes and businesses by 2020. Under the settlement, Charter now has until September 30, 2021 to complete the buildout.

"To date, Charter has passed approximately 65,000 of the required 145,000 addresses," the PSC said.

[...] Charter had claimed that it met its interim deadlines, but state officials found that Charter was counting locations that it was already required to serve as part of franchise agreements. The state hit Charter with a $2 million fine in June 2018 and a $1 million fine in June 2017.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for aristarchus

AMD Releases BIOS Fix To Motherboard Partners For Booting Newer Linux Distributions - Phoronix

AMD has just alerted us that they have released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners that takes care of the issue around booting newer Linux distributions on the new Zen 2 processors.

Earlier this week I mentioned AMD would be working on a BIOS fix to address the fundamental problem with booting newer systemd-using Linux distributions on their new Ryzen 3000 series processors. However, I hadn't expected the fix to make it to motherboard vendors in less than one week!

RdRand issue looks like will be fixable by a BIOS update.

— Michael Larabel (@michaellarabel) July 8, 2019

The problem is the RdRand issue colliding with systemd that is making use of the RdRand instruction directly and not jiving with the expected behavior. There's been a patch in systemd since May but that hasn't been found in a released version yet. But for newer Linux distributions like Ubuntu 19.04, Clear Linux, Fedora Workstation 31, Arch Linux / Manjaro, and others, it's meant not being able to boot the distribution due to all systemd services failing to start.

[...] I just received the following official statement from AMD:

AMD has identified the root cause and implemented a BIOS fix for an issue impacting the ability to run certain Linux distributions and Destiny 2 on Ryzen 3000 processors. We have distributed an updated BIOS to our motherboard partners, and we expect consumers to have access to the new BIOS over the coming days.

Hopefully it won't take too long for motherboard vendors to release new BIOS updates.

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shortscreen writes:

The Shift Project has released a report pointing the finger at online video as a significant, and growing, cause of greenhouse gas emissions.

From New Scientist:

The transmission and viewing of online videos generates 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or nearly 1 per cent of global emissions. On-demand video services such as Netflix account for a third of this, with online pornographic videos generating another third.

[...] The authors call for measures to limit the emissions from online videos, such as preventing them from autoplaying and not transmitting videos in high definition when it is unnecessary. For instance, some devices can now display higher resolutions than people can perceive. The report says regulation will be necessary.

No word on the carbon footprints of HTTPS, JavaScript, or advertising.

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RandomFactor writes:

Following a successful launch on a Proton rocket Saturday, a joint Russian and European all-sky-survey satellite is safely in space and heading towards its final destination.

The Spektrum-Röntgen-Gamma mission, also known as Spektr-RG, is a joint project between the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, and the German space agency, DLR. Spektr-RG launched to space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 8:31 a.m. EDT (1231 GMT, or 5:31 p.m. local time).

The satellite is heading for the L2 Lagrange point, a point in space where gravitational forces are balanced allowing for station keeping with minimal fuel expenditure.

The spacecraft is expected to detect 100,000 galaxy clusters, 3 million supermassive black holes, tens of thousands of star-forming galaxies, the presence of plasma (superheated gas) and many more types of objects, according to Roscosmos.

The observatory includes two X-ray mirror telescopes, called ART-XC and eROSITA. ART-XC (a Russian payload) will examine the higher energies of X-rays, up to 30 keV, while eROSITA (Extended Roentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) is optimized for an energy range of 0.5 to 10 keV.

Spektr-RG should be in place, calibrated, and beginning its survey in about three months.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

There's a multitrillion-dollar black hole growing at the heart of the world's financial markets. Negative-yielding debt -- bonds worth less, not more, if held to maturity -- is spreading to more corners of the bond universe, destroying potential returns for investors and turning the system as we know it on its head. Now that it looks like sub-zero bonds are here to stay, there's even more hand-wringing about the effects for mom-and-pop savers, pensioners, investors, buyout firms and governments.

[...] Negative-yielding debt topped $13 trillion in June, having doubled since December, and now makes up around 25% of global debt. In Germany, 85% of the government bond market is under water. That means investors effectively pay the German government 0.2% for the privilege of buying its benchmark bonds; the government keeps 2 euros for every 1,000 euros borrowed over a period of 10 years. The U.S. is one of the few outliers, with none of its $16 trillion debt pile yielding less than zero, but across the world, strategists are warning that the problem may get worse.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-13/the-black-hole-engulfing-the-world-s-bond-markets-quicktake?srnd=premium

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RandomFactor writes:

For the first time ever, Physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have captured an image of a type of strong quantum entanglement referred to as Bell entanglement.

This is what it looks like

The particular type of entanglement investigated in the experiment, Bell entanglement, is named after John Stewart Bell, the author of Bell's Theorem which rules out local hidden variables as a viable explanation of quantum mechanics.

Bell formalised the concept of quantum entanglement and was a notable critic of Einstein's principle of local realism – both the assumption that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, and the assumption that a particle must objectively have a pre-existing value in order to be measured.

The researchers results (full article) were published last week in the journal Science Advances.

The image we've managed to capture is an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature, seen for the very first time in the form of an image," said Dr Paul-Antoine Moreau of the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy, and lead author of the paper.

"It's an exciting result which could be used to advance the emerging field of quantum computing and lead to new types of imaging."

Scientists are certainly burning the Type Ia Supernova (*) at both ends lately - from imaging black holes to imaging quantum entanglement.

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AnonTechie writes:

How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China's Surveillance State:

AN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to "drive innovation" — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

[...] After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian's role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In response, a Semptian employee sent documents showing that the company — under the guise of iNext — has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which it says can "store and analyze unlimited data."

Aegis can provide "a full view to the virtual world," the company claims in the documents, allowing government spies to see "the connections of everyone," including "location information for everyone in the country."

The system can also "block certain information [on the] internet from being visited," censoring content that the government does not want citizens to see, the documents show.

[The Semptian video demonstration showing how the Aegis system tracks people's movements is embedded in the article]

[Related Cloud Platform by IBM - China]: SuperVessel

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takyon writes:

'A s--- show': uBiome just cut half its staff as the troubled poop-testing startup searches for a path forward after an FBI raid[*]

On a cloudy Wednesday morning in San Francisco, the moment uBiome's employees had been expecting for months finally arrived.

The beleaguered poop-testing startup began laying off about half its staff, as the company searches for a path forward after an FBI raid and the departures of its founders.

At uBiome's headquarters in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, people who'd just been let go began streaming out of a grey warehouse building around 9:30 a.m.

Some carried potted plants. One blasted the Phil Collins rock anthem "You'll be in my heart" out of iPhone speakers.

"It was a s--- show on Monday, it's a s--- show today," one said as she left, to no one in particular.

In all, uBiome cut 114 of the 229 people it employed, according to a person familiar with the situation — 42 from its US operations and 72 in Latin America.

See also: uBiome has stopped running its only lab test after the troubled poop-testing startup laid off half its workers[*]

[*] Free account signup may be required.

Also at: Yahoo!

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takyon writes:

After shocking leadership shakeup at NASA, new head of human exploration says moon 2024 is doable:

Less than 24 hours after being named head of human exploration at NASA, former astronaut Ken Bowersox said the agency is trying to speed up decision-making in its quest to reach the moon by 2024.

"The key is we need to fly when we're ready, but if we don't shoot for 2024 we have zero chance," Bowersox said Thursday at the American Astronautical Society's John Glenn Memorial Symposium. "Our attitude is to get as much of this going as we can — to move as fast as we can, as long as we can."

Bowersox' brief remarks in Cleveland follow the shocking announcement Wednesday night that Bill Gerstenmaier — a pillar in NASA's human exploration operations since 2005 — was out as the agency's associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

The announcement was made in a Wednesday email to NASA employees from Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "As you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars," he wrote. "In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes." He then named Bowersox — a 62-year-old veteran of five space shuttle flights — as Gerstenmaier's replacement.

The decision — which surprised many in the space community — comes as NASA continues a years-long struggle to keep its human exploration plans on track. Projects such as the Space Launch System rocket being built to launch humans to the moon and the commercial crew program, meant to alleviate the country's reliance on Russia for transportation to the International Space Station, are years behind schedule.

See also: To the Moon and beyond

Related: 2020s to Become the Decade of Lunar Re-Exploration
NASA Chief Says a Falcon Heavy Rocket Could Fly Humans to the Moon
Here's Why NASA's Audacious Return to the Moon Just Might Work
Lockheed Martin Proposes Streamlined Lunar Gateway for 2024 Manned Lunar Landing
Artemis: NASA to Receive $1.6 Billion for 2024 Manned Moon Landing
NASA Orders First Segment of Lunar Station for 2024 Artemis Moon Mission
Project Artemis: Return to the Moon to Cost Another $20-30 Billion

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takyon writes:

F.T.C. Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion

The Federal Trade Commission has approved a fine of roughly $5 billion against Facebook for mishandling users' personal information, according to three people briefed on the vote, in what would be a landmark settlement that signals a newly aggressive stance by regulators toward the country's most powerful technology companies.

The much-anticipated settlement still needs final approval in the coming weeks from the Justice Department, which rarely rejects settlements reached by the agency. It would be the biggest fine by far levied by the federal government against a technology company, easily eclipsing the $22 million imposed on Google in 2012. The size of the penalty underscored the rising frustration among Washington officials with how Silicon Valley giants collect, store and use people's information.

It would also represent one of the most aggressive regulatory actions by the Trump administration, and a sign of the government's willingness to punish one of the country's biggest and most powerful companies. President Trump has dialed back regulations in many industries, but the Facebook settlement sets a new bar for privacy enforcement by United States officials, who have brought few cases against large technology companies.

Also at Reuters, CNBC, The Verge, MarketWatch, and CNN.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

For the second year in a row the Australia MyGov portal has gone down at tax time denying Australians access to digital services as they prepare to pay their taxes and process government service requests such as Medicare. The MyGov page currently throws a message saying "myGov is currently unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience". This is the second year in a row that this key service provided by the newly renamed Services Australia has suffered a significant outage during a peak usage period. The Australian government has made several decisions that result in citizens who want to claim Australian government payments or use government services must do so through the MyGov portal, including submitting tax returns online. Due to this the uptake of these digital services has resulted in them being slashdotted. With the move to bring more services online and require new government service offerings to be available through this portal will the Australian government provide the resources required to provide a stable service.

That's it, I'm using the paper form this year for my tax. I don't need a MyGov account to request the paper form, do I?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/12/mygov-crashes-as-thousands-try-to-submit-tax-returns

As thousands of Australians try to submit their tax returns, the main online portal for federal government services has gone down.

In an outage that will also affect thousands of welfare recipients across the country, the MyGov site appeared to be unavailable on Friday morning, returning an error.

The Department of Human Services said via MyGov's Twitter account there were "technical difficulties" with the website.

"We are urgently investigating the issue and we're working hard to fix this as quickly as possible," it repeatedly said in replies to people reporting the error.

A department of human services spokeswoman said: "Some services, including myGov, are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness. The department is working on the issue and apologises for the inconvenience."

"We're continuing to monitor the performance of our services closely, and in the past hour have seen signs of significant improvement."

The spokeswoman later added that the department would conduct a "thorough investigation into how the outage occurred" after its services were fully up and running".

Also at:
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/mygov-website-down-preventing-australians-from-completing-tax-returns-20190712-p526kx.html
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mygov-the-site-responsible-for-your-centrelink-medicare-tax-and-super-info-is-down-2019-7

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