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"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Adobe has reversed itself on a curious decision that would have denied refunds to customers in Venezuela whose accounts are being canceled through no fault of their own.

Adobe announced Monday that it is deactivating all user accounts in Venezuela in order to comply with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump. Adobe interpreted the executive order much more broadly than other companies, claiming that it was "unable to issue refunds" because the order required cessation of all business activity.

[...] Adobe reversed the no-refund part of its decision in an update to the support document yesterday. "If you purchased directly from Adobe, we will refund you by the end of the month for any paid, but unused services. We are working with our partners on the same," Adobe said in the update.

Adobe also reversed itself on one other portion of the mass account deletion. Adobe originally said it would have to stop providing both fee-based and free services to people in Venezuela. But now, Adobe says its free Behance social media platform will continue to be available in Venezuela after the cutoff date for other services.

"In order to remain compliant, Adobe will be deactivating all accounts in Venezuela, with the exception of Behance, on October 29, 2019," Adobe said.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

New compiler makes quantum computers two times faster

A new paper from researchers at the University of Chicago introduces a technique for compiling highly optimized quantum instructions that can be executed on near-term hardware. This technique is particularly well suited to a new class of variational quantum algorithms, which are promising candidates for demonstrating useful quantum speedups. The new work was enabled by uniting ideas across the stack, spanning quantum algorithms, machine learning, compilers, and device physics. The interdisciplinary research was carried out by members of the EPiQC (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computation) collaboration, an NSF Expedition in Computing.

[...] To match the constraints of current and near-term quantum computers, a new paradigm for variational quantum algorithms has recently emerged. These algorithms tackle similar computational challenges as the originally envisioned quantum algorithms, but build resilience to noise by leaving certain internal program parameters unspecified. Instead, these internal parameters are learned by variation over repeated trials, guided by an optimizer. With a robust optimizer, a variational algorithm can tolerate moderate levels of noise.

While the noise resilience of variational algorithms is appealing, it poses a challenge for compilation, the process of translating a mathematical algorithm into the physical instructions ultimately executed by hardware.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-arsonists-snack-foods.html

"Also, someone looking to start a fire who is carrying a can of petrol stands out. No one's going to look twice at someone with a bag of crisps, and the evidence destroys itself. This is especially helpful if someone is trying to make a deliberate fire look accidental. Criminals have presumably worked this out and told each other."

"Crisps encourage fire—they feed it—because they are hugely calorific and fatty. As the video shows, a packet of crisps—either the potato ones or the puffy, maize or corn-based ones—can set a car seat on fire within 200 seconds. Plenty of time for someone to get away."

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jmichaelhudsondotnet writes:

https://public-interest-tech.com/

Mr. Schneier and friends have created a new website to promote a change to the socio-economic technical milieu we are currently facing.

He suggests we need to have "public interest technologists" to help the situation.

He writes:

"We need technologists who work in the public interest. We need public-interest technologists.

Defining this term is difficult. One Ford Foundation blog post described public-interest technologists as "technology practitioners who focus on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest.""

Is he right? How can this be implemented without becoming as riddled with government agents, spies and mafias as the key positions of our corporations and institutions are right now?

Full disclosure: this writer has been a public interest technologist for a while now and I have actually alluded to the need for something like what is being suggested on multiple occasions, 'a different kind of organization' is the way I put it, way back a few months ago.

Discuss.

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upstart wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for Bytram.

Crowdsourcing consumer loans can bolster business growth and reduce crime

"It originally developed with households that are seeking unsecured loans being financed by other households. That's all it is: crowdsourcing consumer loans," said William Bazley, assistant professor of finance at the University of Kansas.

In his new article, "The Real and Social Effects of Online Lending," Bazley examines the fledgling industry, analyzing data that reveals why this modern method of borrowing is proliferating. He recently won the award for Best Paper on FinTech at the Northern Finance Association conference in Vancouver.

"When traditional credit becomes scarce, such as when banks merge or there's a natural disaster, having access to these markets and loan products moderates some of the decline in new business establishments," Bazley said.

He explains how these loans temper the effects of traditional credit scarcity by supporting small business growth. There are also social welfare implications. When conventional credit markets have frictions—something that prevents a trade from being executed smoothly—economic vitality suffers, and crime increases.

"In communities that can borrow in online peer-to-peer lending markets, the drop in economic growth is less severe. And the jump in crime is also moderated," Bazley said.

The first peer-to-peer lending in the U.S. appeared in 2006. The industry soared when banks refused to issue loans during the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Currently, Lending Club and Prosper are the two most successful of these companies.

As of 2016, they've originated about $100 billion in personal loans. According to a Price Waterhouse Coopers study, it's expected by 2025 these markets will generate about $150 billion in volume per year.

[...]More information:
The Real and Social Effects of Online Lending: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/113ef3_2b246ea4acdc4ad5abc71e5a90c76716.pdf

Original Submission

upstart wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1337.

Toyota's e-Palette will transport athletes during the 2020 Olympics

As part of its big robot push for upcoming the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, Toyota says it will have 20 of its e-Palette electric vehicles on-site to transport athletes.

Each of the vehicles will travel through the athletes' village at a leisurely 12 miles per hour along a designated loop. As an SAE Level 4-capable autonomous vehicle, the e-Palette will be able to navigate the area all on its own. However, a safety attendant will be onboard each vehicle to ensure nothing goes wrong. Those capabilities put the e-Palette in about the same ballpark as Waymo's current fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Toyota adds that it consulted with athletes to adapt the vehicle to their needs. It can transport up to four passengers in wheelchairs at the same time, and includes an electric ramp to facilitate easy and quick boarding. The automaker also made the interior elements of the Tokyo 2020 Version contrast to help colorblind individuals.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A recent analysis reveals that treatment of male breast cancer has evolved over the years. In addition, certain patient-, tumor-, and treatment-related factors are linked with better survival. The findings are published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

Male breast cancer (MBC) comprises one percent of all breast cancer cases, yet no prospective randomized clinical trials specifically focused on MBC have been successfully completed. Some studies suggest that the incidence of MBC may be rising, however, and there is an increasing appreciation that the tumor biology of MBC differs from that of female breast cancer.

To examine how MBC has been treated in the United States in recent years, and to identify factors associated with patient prognosis, a team led by Kathryn Ruddy, MD, MPH, and Siddhartha Yadav, MBBS, at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, analyzed information from the National Cancer Database on men diagnosed with stage I-III breast cancer between 2004 and 2014.

[...] Factors associated with worse overall survival were older age, black race, multiple comorbidities, high tumor grade and stage, and undergoing total mastectomy. Residing in higher income areas; having tumors that express the progesterone receptor; and receiving chemotherapy, radiation, and anti-estrogen therapy were associated with better overall survival.

Journal Reference:

“Male breast cancer in the United States: Treatment patterns and prognostic factors in the twenty-first century.” Siddhartha Yadav, Dhauna Karam, Irbaz Bin Riaz, Hao Xie, Urshila Durani, Narjust Duma, Karthik V. Giridhar, Tina J. Hieken, Judy C. Boughey, Robert W. Mutter, John R. Hawse, Rafael E. Jimenez, Fergus J. Couch, Roberto A. Leon Ferre, and Kathryn J. Ruddy. CANCER; (DOI: 10.1002/cncr.32472).

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Watch Out, MIT’s New AI Model Knows What You’re Doing Behind That Wall:

For better or worse, AI can now figure out what you're doing even without "seeing" you. The MIT Computer Science & AI Lab (CSAIL) has unveiled a neural network model that can detect human actions through walls or in extremely dark places.

Although automating the process of action recognition from visual data has been a computer vision research focus for some time, previous camera-based approaches — much like human eyes — could only sense visible light and were largely limited by occlusions. The MIT CSAIL researchers overcame those challenges by using radio signals in the WiFi frequencies, which can penetrate occlusions.

Their "RF-Action" AI model is an end-to-end deep neural network that recognizes human actions from wireless signals. The model uses radio frequency (RF) signals as input, generates 3D human "skeletons" as an intermediate representation, and can track and recognize actions and interactions of multiple people. The skeleton step enables the model to learn not only from RF-based datasets, but also from existing vision-based datasets.

Researchers say RF-Action is the first model to use radio signals for skeleton-based action recognition. "There are lots of potential applications regarding human behavior understanding and smart homes. For example, monitoring the elderly's abnormal behaviors such as falling down at home, monitoring whether patients take their medicine appropriately, or remote control of smart home devices by actions," says the paper's co-first author Tianhong Li.

Using RF in the "WiFi" bands. 25 hours of data was all it took (or all they collected) to train and test the AI. This article was unclear if the WiFi RF used was active, or passive although earlier reporting specifically mentioned passive.

MIT CSAIL RF Action site has a link to the paper:

Making the Invisible Visible: Action Recognition Through Walls and Occlusions
Tianhong Li*, Lijie Fan*, Mingmin Zhao, Yingcheng Liu, Dina Katabi
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019
[PDF] [arXiv] [BibTeX]

This looks like an update of the story we first published in 2015, but now including AI.

Previously:

• X-Ray Vision? Technology Making It a (Sort-of) Reality for $300
• See Through Walls by Passive Radiation From Wi-Fi

Original Submission

Wall Street company Clear offers a fast way around the long TSA lines at a number of large USA airports. Here's an article about it, https://www.fastcompany.com/90245393/clear-new-york-startup-speed-through-lines-at-airport-or-stadium

What's the pitch? You can sign up right at the airport in five minutes for $179 a year. If you are about to miss your flight because the TSA lines are an hour long, this might look like a trip saver. Of course there is a catch, they use biometric data: fingerprints, irises, faces... and a promise that your data is safe with them.

Clear's only domestic competition at airports is the Transportation Security Administration's service TSA PreCheck, which has more members (7 million), and is much cheaper ($85 for five years) and more widely available (200-plus airports). Another program, Global Entry, is run by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service to expedite passage of international travelers entering the United States. PreCheck and Global Entry both collect fingerprints from participating travelers but unlike Clear do not capture iris or facial scans. All three of the services—PreCheck, Global Entry, and Clear—worked with the Department of Homeland Security to develop tools that could predict the threat level of individual travelers, the "known traveler" model.

Clear is currently experimenting with an adaptation of this model that could be deployed at a vast number of non-airport venues. "In travel, prescreening programs like PreCheck and Global Entry create known travelers," Clear said in a statement to Fast Company. "As a qualified anti-terrorism technology, Clear believes creating known fan programs can continue to make experiences safer and easier." A former Clear executive put it this way: "If you wanted to do predictive analytics to show who at a stadium is more likely to bring a gun in, they have the ability to do that."

Here's the company pitch if anyone is interested : https://www.clearme.com/how-it-works/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Review of 737 Max Certification Finds Fault With Boeing and F.A.A.

A breakdown in the nation's regulatory system and poor communication from Boeing compromised the safety of the 737 Max jet before it crashed twice in five months and killed 346 people, according to a damning report released Friday.

Boeing did not adequately explain to federal regulators how a crucial new system on the plane worked, the report says. That system was found to have played a role in the accidents in Indonesia last October and Ethiopia in March.

[...] "This report confirms our very worst fears about a broken system," Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview. "To put the fox in charge of the henhouse never made any sense, and now we see the deeply tragic consequences."

Hours after the report was released, Boeing's board stripped the company's chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, of his chairman title. The move was the most direct response yet from a board that has resisted shaking up the management team before the Max is flying again, even as pressure mounted inside Boeing to hold someone accountable. The Max has been grounded for more than seven months.

[...] Friday's report, which was put together by representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA and nine international regulators, provided the first official detailed account of how federal regulators certified the Max. Lawmakers and federal investigators are still conducting their own inquiries into the design and approval of the jet.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Stadia (Google's next gen gaming console) will use AI to achieve negative latency in games

Speaking with Alex Wiltshire in Edge magazine #338, Google's top streaming engineer claims the company is verging on gaming superiority with its cloud streaming service, Stadia, thanks to the advancements it's making in modelling and machine learning. It's even eyeing up the gaming performance crown in just a couple of years.

"Ultimately, we think in a year or two we'll have games that are running faster and feel more responsive in the cloud than they do locally," Bakar says to Edge, "regardless of how powerful the local machine is."

This would be achieved using Google's homegrown streaming tech, which it's been teasing ever since Stadia was first announced late last year with Project Stream. The company believes its tech is capable of overcoming the hurdles presented by over-the-web gaming, despite its extensive web of datacentres sitting potentially hundreds of miles away from a user.

Specifically Bakar notes Google's "negative latency" will act as a workaround for any potential lag between player and server. This term describes a buffer of predicted latency, inherent to a Stadia players setup or connection, in which the Stadia system will run lag mitigation. This can include increasing fps rapidly to reduce latency between player input and display, or even predicting user inputs.

Yes, you heard that correctly. Stadia might start predicting what action, button, or movement you're likely to do next and render it ready for you – which sounds rather frightening.

With enough latency, the game will play itself and the console will just stream the game-play movie. I have the feeling a Netflix subscription will be cheaper.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

New Tools & IP Accelerate Development of 5nm Arm 'Hercules' SoCs

Arm, Synopsys, and Samsung Foundry have developed a set of optimized tools and IP that will enable chip designers to build next-generation SoCs based on Arm’s Hercules processor cores on Samsung’s 5LPE (5 nm, Low Power Early) node faster. The three companies expect the tools and IP to be used by designers of SoCs for a wide variety of applications.

The set of Synopsys tools are certified by Samsung Foundry for its 5LPE manufacturing technology, and now includes the Fusion Design Platform as well as QuickStart Implementation Kit that are enabled to optimize power, performance, and area for 5LPE designs. Meanwhile, Arm will provide Artisan Physical IP and POP IP tailored for Samsung’s 5LPE process. The IP packages will enable Arm’s partners to quickly develop 5LPE-optimized SoCs based on the Arm Hercules general-purpose CPU cores.

[...] Considering that Arm’s Hercules are the company’s next-generation advanced CPU cores and 5LPE is a leading-edge process technology, Samsung expects the new tools and IP to be used for SoCs aimed at HPC, automotive, 5G, and AI applications.

Samsung expected to tape out the first 5LPE chips in the second half of 2019 and plans to start volume production using the node in the first half of 2020.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

American intelligence follows British lead in warning of serious VPN vulnerabilities

The US National Security Agency (NSA) is warning admins to patch a set of months-old security bugs that have recently come under active attack.

The NSA's bulletin, issued earlier this week, says that state-sponsored hacking groups are now actively targeting the remote takeover and connection hijacking flaws in VPNs that were first publicized in April of this year.

"These vulnerabilities allow for remote arbitrary file downloads and remote code execution on Pulse Connect Secure and Pulse Policy Secure gateways. Other vulnerabilities in the series allow for interception or hijacking of encrypted traffic sessions," the NSA warned.

"Exploit code is freely available online via the Metasploit framework, as well as GitHub. Malicious cyber actors are actively using this exploit code."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Get the popcorn.

New blockchain-based music streaming service Audius is a copyright nightmare

New startup Audius says its blockchain-based music streaming service is the solution that finally pays attention to indie artists' needs. It's also full of pirated material.

Audius' website says "music platforms were at their best when they listened to what artists and fans wanted - not corporations or major labels" and that uploaded tracks can "never be censored or removed." TechCrunch called Audius' blockchain move its "secret sauce," while Yahoo finance said it is "adequately addressing the most pressing needs within the industry." But one of the most pressing problems in music right now is copyright. Audius contains infringing material — such as an unlicensed version of Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea's "Problem" — that, if its promotional materials are right, the company cannot remove.

[...] "They say 'We don't have the ability to deplatform you or censor you.' What I hear when I read that is, 'It's going to be real difficult for us to take down anything that you put up,'" says Kevin Casini, a professor of entertainment law at the Quinnipiac School of Law in Connecticut. "They're trying to speak as if they're talking to people who are afraid of this bogeyman intermediary. And they're also saying, 'Hey, this is a new spot where you can, at least for a brief amount of time, upload something, and we're not going to look at it and see what it is.' It seems that they know this is something that is going to happen quickly for them, and they're signaling and advertising to the people that actually know what they're saying, which is: 'You can come here and do it.'"

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers from the Photonics Research Group, an imec research group at Ghent university and MIT announced that they have integrated single photon emitters in 2-D layered materials with a silicon nitride photonic chip. Even for moderate quantum yields, dielectric cavities could be designed such that the single photon extraction into the guided mode can reach unity. The results published in Nature Communications, provide a crucial step in fundamental quantum photonics and 2-D materials research.

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) enable the miniaturization of complex quantum optical circuits connecting large numbers of photonic devices with optimized insertion losses and phase stability. A central building block for such an integrated quantum circuit is a single photon emitter (SPE), and a variety of material systems have been investigated to create such on-chip SPEs. 2-D-based SPEs have some extraction efficiencies without the need of any additional processing, allowing efficient single photon transfer between the host and the underlying PIC. Third, 2-D materials grown with high wafer-scale uniformity are becoming more readily available.

[...] "These results provide a crucial step in scaling up quantum photonic devices using 2-D-based integrated single photon sources," stated Frédéric Peyskens, first author of the paper.

More information: Frédéric Peyskens et al. Integration of single photon emitters in 2-D layered materials with a silicon nitride photonic chip, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12421-0

Original Submission