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wirelessduck writes:

The Register reports: "Apple's bad hair day: Watch 'stripped' of health sensors":

Apple has ditched plans to make its new smart watch a health-monitoring device following problems with the technology and regulatory issues, according to reports.

Sources told The Wall Street Journal that some of the features were too complicated, while others would have prompted unwanted regulatory oversight. It said development of its health sensor technology has failed to meet standards, with inconsistency from sensor readings, arising from hairy arms or dry skin.

"Apple also experimented with ways to detect blood pressure or the amount of oxygen in the blood, but the results were inconsistent," said the paper.

Kromagv0 writes:

The Minnesota legislature has introduced an amendment to the MN Constitution to enshrine the protections afforded by the 4th amendment to electronic communication and data as well. It appears that this amendment has broad diverse support in the state house but leadership in the state senate is only lukewarm on it. In the senate Ron Latz (DFL) Chairman of the Judiciary Committee had blocked the amendment stating that he feels it is redundant. Additionally Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk (DFL) opposes the amendment because it is an amendment to the MN constitution. If passed, Minnesota would become only the second state to enact such a change — Missouri enacted its amendment last year with 75% of the popular vote.

prospectacle writes:

202,586 people applied to be part of a one-way mission to mars, from which 660 where shortlisted and now, after online interviews a hundred remain.

Further rounds of testing will include team work and training exercises at the replica mars outpost, to see who can function as part of a successful and resilient team.

All the candidates can be seen here.

If you're wondering how realistic and/or crazy this project is, a research team at MIT have made a fairly detailed and critical analysis of the Mars One foundation's plan.

kaszz writes:

Researchers at the University of Kansas and Harvard in USA are working to give men more choices for avoiding unwanted pregnancies. From the article:

"H2-gamendazole keeps sperm from maturing. The unfinished sperm fragments are then reabsorbed into the testis, never ending up in the semen. 'If there's no sperm, the egg's not going to get fertilized,' says Joseph Tash, a reproductive biologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

Almost two years ago, the FDA reviewed the compound, and now the agency wants Tash to investigate if the compound remains in the semen and whether that would harm a woman if it ends up in the vagina. Jay Bradner, working with other anti-cancer researchers at Harvard, discovered that the JQ1 molecule blocked a bromodomain in cancer cells, causing them to forget how to be cancer. One side effect is that JQ1 also obstructed a testicle-specific bromodomain called BRDT, making the sex cells that would otherwise produce sperm non-functional — mice treated with JQ1 can hump with abandon yet generate zero mouselings.

But it will be at least several years before the drug is available: Researchers are looking for a version of the molecule that works on the testicle protein only, to avoid any weird side effects."

c0lo writes:

The online analysis magazine Pieria runs an interesting piece on why the world's biggest military force keep losing wars. So far it identifies the following reasons, which I'll tersely enumerate and quotes snippets (just for teasing) and strongly recommend you read TFA in full (it makes a good read):

1. Too much logistics, not enough combat

   More than three-quarters of Americans in Iraq didn’t fight.
   ... Pecan pie, sweet ice tea, lobster and steak on Fridays, all shipped halfway around the globe. The logistical tail was wagging the combat dog.

2. Learn the Language

   Since the interpreter just made up what he thought his bosses wanted to hear, the Marines were operating with negative intelligence.
   ... The moral: don’t invade a country if you are too lazy to learn the language.

3. Fear of Casualties

   The American military is deeply committed to force protection, to not losing soldiers.
   ... Despite apparent American strength, its enemies know if they have a little patience and inflict a little pain, the Americans will probably leave.

4. War as Symbol

   Fifty thousand Americans died in Vietnam. So did more than 2 million Vietnamese. If war were a numbers game, America would have been victorious.
   ...Lyndon Johnson only went to war because he feared being accused of “losing” Vietnam by congressional Republicans.

5. War, What is it good For? Absolutely Nothing

   Angell observed that no German personally profited from the annexation of Alsace in 1870.
   ...If their primary interest was oil, American diplomats would have told Saddam to grant exclusive contracts to select oil companies and he would have gladly complied in order to avoid invasion. But Bush, Cheney et al weren’t really interested in Iraq’s oil but rather in an opportunity to demonstrate America’s awesome military power, in order to cow the rest of the Middle East and the world beyond. It didn’t work out as they had hoped.

dx3bydt3 writes:

Recent analysis of a nearby star system nicknamed “Scholz’s star", in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, indicates that it passed relatively close to our solar system 70,000 years ago.

According to an article at ScienceDaily:

A group of astronomers from the US, Europe, Chile and South Africa have determined that 70,000 years ago a recently discovered dim star is likely to have passed through the solar system's distant cloud of comets, the Oort Cloud. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close -- five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri."

The lead author of the paper, Eric Mamajek is from the University of Rochester where an additional article is available.

kaszz writes:

The population of Hillsboro, Oregon is becoming vocal about the state's enterprise zone program offering enormous tax concessions to companies setting up data centers in the region — even though the 5-year deals on offer only require data center operators to employ one person. That's exactly as many people as one DC plant, Infomart Portland, employs full-time, yet it gets more tax relief than highly-staffed enterprise zone neighbor Solarworld. The current influx of data centers to Hillsboro have only generated seven jobs to date. More installations are coming, and all Hillsboro residents are seeing is space taken up that might have gone to businesses that give something of benefit to the community.

Data centers seem to occupy your power supply capacity and leave you no job (income).

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In an interview with re/code, US President Barack Obama stressed the vulnerability of IT infrastructures within US corporations and government agencies and facilities, as a matter requiring urgent coordination within the US public and private sectors. This vulnerability was highlighted recently by the hacking of Sony's IT networks prior to the release of the film The Interview, allegedly by hackers working for the North Korean government:

Obama sidestepped a question about the alleged role of the US government in the Stuxnet attack on Iran, but made an interesting analogy:

martyb writes:

Seen on MIT Technology Review: The Face Detection Algorithm Set to Revolutionize Image Search.

From the article:

Back in 2001, two computer scientists, Paul Viola and Michael Jones, triggered a revolution in the field of computer face detection. ... [They] built an algorithm that looks first for vertical bright bands in an image that might be noses, it then looks for horizontal dark bands that might be eyes, it then looks for other general patterns associated with faces.

Detected by themselves, none of these features are strongly suggestive of a face. But when they are detected one after the other in a cascade, the result is a good indication of a face in the image. Hence the name of this process: a detector cascade. And since these tests are all simple to run, the resulting algorithm can work quickly in real-time.

Unfortunately, though that algorithm worked well with images of faces viewed from the front, it could not accurately recognize faces seen from other angles. This is where the new algorithm makes its mark. Researchers at Yahoo! Labs and Stanford University have:

[...] trained a deep convolutional neural network with a database of 200,000 images that included faces at various angles and orientations and a further 20 million images without faces. They then trained their neural net in batches of 128 images over 50,000 iterations.

The result is a single algorithm that can spot faces from a wide range of angles, even when partially occluded. And it can spot many faces in the same image with remarkable accuracy.

An abstract is available at arXiv.org along with a link to the full paper.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A major announcement on the FreeBSD mailing list landed earlier today:

Various security companies and blogs are already reporting duplicate keys spotted in the wild. So, patch your systems!.

[Updates: (1) This pertains to the '-current' branch which is not recommended for use on production systems. (2) The statement about "duplicate keys" was in the original submission, but lacks confirmation. If you can confirm/deny, please reply in the comments with a link to the source.]

Hugh Pickens writes:

The headaches of commercial air travel — security lines, delays, cancellations — are driving high net worth individuals to look for alternative options. Matt Krupnick reports at the New York Times that JetSmarter is one of a host of new ventures that are seeking to upend the private jet market by capitalizing on advancing technology and rising dissatisfaction with commercial airlines. To make travel easier, and to avoid the headache of commercial flying, JetSmarter allows passengers to fly on so-called empty legs, or private jets flying without passengers on their way to pick someone up.

JetSmarter, whose customers booked more than 1,300 flights last year, expects to book 10 times as many passengers in 2015, says its 26-year-old chief executive, Sergey Petrossov adding that while some might consider the $7,000 annual fee steep, it’s far more affordable than a private jet. A recent nonmember search of the JetSmarter app showed empty legs available, for example, between Miami and the Bahamas for $1,750 and from Chicago to Bedford, Mass., for $5,249. “For an LA to Vegas flight, sometimes we have deals for under $1000 for a four-passenger flight,” says Petrossov. But if you were chartering, say, an Airbus corporate jet for 30 hours of flying, it could be “in the millions of dollars.”

“Our business model is similar to Uber,” says Petrossov. Like Uber does with its drivers, JetSmarter forges partnerships with independent carriers, and displays their schedules and GPS locations on the app. JetSmarter users can request flights as few as six hours in advance, and from anywhere in the world. Like any good startup founder, Petrossov says he’s “trying to change the world in our little way” by “democratizing” private air travel. "Although let’s be honest," writes Jordyn Taylor. "JetSmarter’s taking something that was only available to the insanely ultra-rich, and making it more available to the not-QUITE-as-rich-but-still-insanely-rich."

darkfeline writes:

Ars Technica reports:

AT&T's gigabit fiber-to-the-home service has just arrived in Kansas City, and the price is the same as Google Fiber—if you let AT&T track your Web browsing history. AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history

Just as it did when launching its "GigaPower" service in Austin, Texas in late 2013, AT&T offers different prices based on how jealously users guard their privacy. AT&T's $70 per-month pricing for gigabit service is the same price as Google Fiber, but AT&T charges an additional $29 a month to customers who opt out of AT&T's "Internet Preferences" program.

AT&T says it tracks "the webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter... AT&T Internet Preferences works independently of your browser's privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track, and private browsing. If you opt-in to AT&T Internet Preferences, AT&T will still be able to collect and use your Web browsing information independent of those settings."

Reader "skicow" commented with an interesting observation:

They still track you, even if you opt-out:

AT&T may collect and use web browsing information for other purposes, as described in our Privacy Policy, even if you do not participate in the Internet Preferences program.

AnonTechie writes:

Software reverse engineering, the art of pulling programs apart to figure out how they work, is what makes it possible for sophisticated hackers to scour code for exploitable bugs. It’s also what allows those same hackers’ dangerous malware to be deconstructed and neutered. Now a new encryption trick could make both those tasks much, much harder.

At the SyScan conference next month in Singapore, security researcher Jacob Torrey plans to present a new scheme he calls Hardened Anti-Reverse Engineering System, or HARES. Torrey’s method encrypts software code such that it’s only decrypted by the computer’s processor at the last possible moment before the code is executed. This prevents reverse engineering tools from reading the decrypted code as it’s being run. The result is tough-to-crack protection from any hacker who would pirate the software, suss out security flaws that could compromise users, and even in some cases understand its basic functions.

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/crypto-trick-makes-software-nearly-impossible-reverse-engineer/

hash14 writes:

The OpenStreetMap project has announced on their blog today that the main website has been updated to provide functionality to find a route between two points. A quick test-drive shows that it's fast and easy to use, and while it is certainly not (yet!) up to feature parity with Google Maps and other available services, it's great to see the advances from the biggest community-driven competitor in the area of online mapping services.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Alan Feuer writes in the New York Times that it has been three years since Tinder landed in New York City bringing its addictive right swipes and rabid style of flirting to the city’s inherently frenetic technologized dating culture turning the search for love (or at least a nearby body) into a Ritalin-paced video game. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Tinder is a matchmaking service that enables people to connect with one another through no more than a brief swipe on their smartphones. You look at a photo, tagged only with a name, an age and, with a tap, perhaps a short introduction, and then you vote yes by swiping to the right, or no by swiping left. With about one million Tinder users in New York, the largest market in the country, the app plays off our desire for instant gratification while avoiding the embarrassment of rejection, in what the company calls the “double opt-in”: a match between two users will occur only if they each signal that they like the other’s profile. The matched pair can then chat through Tinder’s messaging service and, perhaps, meet. “When you have a population of young, relatively affluent transients, schooled in technology, uprooted from their networks and hoping to find each other, the chances are they’ll look for a solution on their phones,” says Benjamin Karney.

Social scientists say apps like Tinder are incredibly effective at identifying a local population of potential mates and at helping people contact one another (through instant-message systems), particularly in large, anonymous places like New York, where traditional modes of introduction — family connections or religious institutions — might not be available. Of course, having too many options online can make it more difficult for some to choose and commit to just one person to go out with on a Friday night says Paul Eastwick, "It's called the 'paradox of choice,' " There’s tons of research that suggests "if people know they have lots of options, they feel less dependent on and committed to their current option,” says Karney. “If you want to leave your lover, there aren’t just 50 ways these days, there are 150,000 ways.”