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Phoenix666 wrote in with an update on MIT's Cheetah robot:

MIT's biomimetic robotics lab, which last year [editor's note: it was two years ago per above linked MIT announcement] developed a free-running untethered cheetah robot capable of bounding along at 10mph, has now created a new version—Cheetah 2—that can autonomously jump over hurdles.

These aren't just token hurdles, either: the current version of the robot can clear obstacles that are up to 45 centimetres (18 inches) tall while maintaining a steady speed of 5mph (8kph). The 45 centimetre height is about half as tall as the robot itself.

While untethered jumping is already quite an achievement for a biomimetic robot, the way in which Cheetah 2 does it is even more impressive. There isn't a human pushing a "jump" button; Cheetah 2 is autonomous. Using on-board LIDAR, the robot can detect obstacles, estimate the distance to the object, determine the hurdle's height, and then adjust its stride so that it's perfectly placed to jump over.

All of the path-finding, vision, and physics modelling software are running on the robot. So in theory, it could just run around on its own, jumping over hurdles (until its battery pack ran out of juice anyway).

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The Associated Press reports:

Congress has sent legislation to the president reviving and remaking a disputed post-9/11 surveillance program two days after letting it temporarily expire.

The vote in the Senate Tuesday was 67-32. The House already has passed the bill, and President Barack Obama plans to sign it quickly.

The legislation will phase out, over six months, the once-secret National Security Agency bulk phone records collection program made public two years ago by agency contractor Edward Snowden.

It will be replaced by a program that keeps the records with phone companies but allows the government to search them with a warrant.

Senate Republican leaders opposed the House bill but were forced to accept it unchanged after senators rejected last-ditch attempts to amend it.

The story is being covered live by The Guardian.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most voluble defenders of the NSA in the past two years, has offered a more measured endorsement of Tuesday’s vote. She says she voted for the bill because it was “the best opportunity to quickly get [surveillance] programs back up and running.”

She emphasizes that the bill will allow “this and two other important counterterrorism programs to continue,” an allusion to Section 215 and the “lone-wolf” and “roving wiretap” provisions of the Patriot Act.

“I believe these programs are necessary to protect American lives and prevent terrorist attacks in our country,” she said in a statement.

Deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, which did not back the USA Freedom Act, has nonetheless described the bill as “a milestone”.

“This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check,” Jaffer said in a statement.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The use of information technology to transform impoverished communities in developing countries has inspired philanthropic projects around the world, now collectively referred by the ungainly appellation ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). A former Microsoft researcher who spent years trying to implement dozens of what he now calls "geek intervention" projects in Bangalore, India, as founder and head of a research lab there, cautions that making these projects work is a lot harder than its backers think. Kentaro Toyama has just published the book Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology recounting his experiences, and gave a remarkably pithy interview to MIT Technology Review discussing his findings. On developing world medical clinics:

If you go to a typical rural clinic, it's not the kind of place that anybody from the United States would think of as a decent place to get health care. Bringing along a laptop, connecting it to wireless, and providing Internet so you can do telemedicine is just an incredibly thin cover. It's a thin, superficial change.

I'm pleased to announce that we've upgraded the site to rehash 15.05.1, and site performance is now as good or better then when we were on slashcode. Major thanks to Paul for fixing the internal caching issues. Here's a brief changelog.

Rehash 15.05.1 - Release Notes

• Fixed internal cache breakage due to rows from the database no longer being returned by id - paulej72
• Located and fixed issues related to getSkin() not returning the mainpage nexus - paulej72
• Debugged SQL queries to locate deadlocks in MySQL cluster - NCommander

The primary cause of the slowdown was due to the fact that rehash did large JOIN operations on text columns in MySQL. This is bad practice in general due to performance reasons, but it causes a drastic slowdown with MySQL cluster, which prevents the query optimizer from doing what's known as a "pushdown", and allowing the query to execute on the NDB nodes. This caused article load to be O(n*m), where n was the number of articles in the database and m was the number of articles with the neverdisplay attribute set. The revised queries now load at O(1). Instead it had to do multiple pulls from the database and assemble the query data on the frontend, a process that took 4-5 seconds per problematic query. The problem was compounded that there are limited number of httpd daemons at any given moment, and any database pull that hit a problematic query (which were in index.pl and article.pl) would cause resource exhaustion.

Fortunately, our load balancer and varnish cache have a fairly high timeout waiting for httpd to come available, preventing the site from soyling itself under high load, or when we do an apache restart, which prevented SN from going down. Thank you for everyone's patience with this matter :).

~ NCommander

n1 writes:

Ars Technica reports:

Macs older than a year are vulnerable to exploits that remotely overwrite the firmware that boots up the machine, a feat that allows attackers to control vulnerable devices from the very first instruction.

The attack, according to a blog post published Friday by well-known OS X security researcher Pedro Vilaca, affects Macs shipped prior to the middle of 2014 that are allowed to go into sleep mode. He found a way to reflash a Mac's BIOS using functionality contained in userland, which is the part of an operating system where installed applications and drivers are executed. By exploiting vulnerabilities such as those regularly found in Safari and other Web browsers, attackers can install malicious firmware that survives hard drive reformatting and reinstallation of the operating system.

[Editor's Comment: The Ars Technica headline has been changed on their site to remove the word 'remote'. They note that "the hack involves use of a local exploit."]

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Chemical leak at Apple's NC Data Center

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Around 2:00 PM EDT on Monday, Apple's Maiden, NC, data center suffered a chlorine leak that injured five people. It remains unclear whether the injured were Apple data center employees or construction workers.

Last week, a fire broke out among the solar panels atop the Mesa, AZ, sapphire manufacturing facility that Apple recently bought from GT Advanced. No injuries were reported.

The two events do not seem to be linked, except that Apple is having a bad run of luck with site safety.

Chlorine Gas Leak at Apple Data Center Puts 5 in Hospital

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Emergency crews received a call [June 1] about 2pm local time from the Apple facility on Startown Road, in Maiden, North Carolina. Local news helicopters captured footage of people being given medical attention and oxygen masks outside the facility.

The Catawba emergency services said initially two unknown chemicals were involved in the alert, later stating that it was a chlorine gas leak.

[...] It is speculated that the chlorine was a key component in the facility's water-cleaning facility, perhaps for its water-cooled components.

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wantkitteh writes:

BBC News reports:

Russian warplanes have made several close passes in recent days over a US destroyer sailing in the Black Sea, the Pentagon said. Russian state media reported that the USS Ross was acting "aggressively". The US Department of Defense, however, said the ship was "well within international waters at all times, performing routine operations". The US Navy released video on Monday of a Russian plane passing as close as 500 metres to the USS Ross.

A Pentagon spokesman went on to assert that the Russian Su-24 planes were not armed and that the USS Ross made no changes to it's course in response to the passes. Russian warplanes have been exercising pretty hard lately with airborne intercepts by NATO forces increasing dramatically over recent months. In a previous story, also from BBC News, defence correspondent Jonathan Beale stated that the Royal Air Force is intercepting Russian planes approaching UK airspace with their transponders disabled on a monthly basis. Although no rules have been broken regarding sovereignty of international airspace or territorial waters, tensions have obviously increased, as have submarine patrols and exercises by both Russia and NATO.

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Two members of our community have submitted information on the Intel purchase of Altera:

Intel To Buy Altera For 16.7 billion USD

kaszz writes:

Intel bought chipmaker Altera for 16.7 billion US$. This follows another huge purchase in the semiconductor industry last week, when Avago snapped up Broadcom for $37 billion US$. This has been a record year for consolidation within the industry, as companies struggle to deal with slowing growth and stagnating stock prices. Altera had already rejected an offer from Intel, but shareholders pressured them to reconsider. "Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability. Altera has a huge FPGA business.

Perhaps this will impact Altera FPGA Linux support?

Intel Acquires Altera for $16.7 Billion

takyon writes:

Intel Corporation has announced that it is buying Altera Corporation for $16.7 billion in cash. The deal will allow Intel to access potentially valuable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) revenue streams and integrate FPGAs into Xeon chips to try and maintain its dominance in datacenters. Altera has already been using Intel's 14nm process to make its Stratix FPGAs.

The Platform has more in-depth analysis of the deal:

The first hedge that Intel is making with the Altera acquisition is that a certain portion of the compute environment that it more or less owns in the datacenter will shift from CPUs to FPGAs.

In the conference call announcing the deal for Altera, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that up to a third of cloud service providers – what we here at The Platform call hyperscalers – could be using hybrid CPU-FPGA server nodes for their workloads by 2020. (This is an Intel estimate.) Intel's plan is to get a Xeon processor and an Altera FPGA on the same chip package by the end of 2016 – Data Center Group general manager Diane Bryant showed off a prototype of such a device in early 2014 – and ramp its production through 2017, with a follow-on product that actually puts the CPU and the FPGA circuits on the same die in monolithic fashion "shortly after that."

Intel plans to create a hybrid Atom-FPGA product aimed at the so-called Internet of Things telemetry market, and this will be a monolithic design as well, according to Krzanich; the company is right now examining whether it needs an interim Atom and FPGA product that shares a single package but are not etched on a single die.

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tt0049065 writes:

Earlier this month, Brett Wentworth took Level 3 Communications Inc. into territory that most rivals have been reluctant to enter. The director of global security at the largest carrier of Internet traffic cut off data from reaching a group of servers in China that his company believed was involved in an active hacking attack.

The Broomfield, Colo., company handles roughly 40% of internet traffic and is taking an aggressive—and some say risky approach—to battling criminal activity. Risky because hackers often hijack legitimate machines to do their dirty work, raising the risk of collateral damage by sidelining a business using the same group of servers. Such tactics also run against a widely held belief that large carriers should be facilitating traffic, not halting it.

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AnonTechie writes:

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. – William Bruce Cameron

Australian universities have been in the media in recent weeks for the dubious treatment of overseas students and the problem of plagiarism. But they are in serious trouble for another reason: their reliance on "bibliometrics" for major decision making.

Two international companies, Thomson Reuters and Elsevier, rate the apparent prestige of the journals in which academics' publications appear, and the frequency with which other authors refer to them, i.e. their citations. Two of the key summary results are the Hirsch index (or h-index), which reflects citations, and journal impact factor (JIF), claimed to reflect the importance of journals.

Ratings such as these dominate decisions on academic promotions, tenure, grant funding and the status of departments and universities. They have been universally adopted by universities in Australia because of perceived benefits of speed, cost-effectiveness and alleged objectivity. They underpin the government's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).

This is of immediate national interest because of the links between these metrics, academic rankings and government funding of science and the universities. Also the potential harm to careers and the very way research is carried out.

Internationally, opposition has taken the form of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) [PDF]. Institutions are urged to acknowledge that the scientific content of a paper is more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.

Content rather than metrics is what ought to count.

http://theconversation.com/our-obsession-with-metrics-is-corrupting-science-39378

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takyon writes:

It's the site that Soylentils love to hate, and it is now making end-to-end PGP-encrypted email a little easier:

Facebook announced that its users can now add their PGP public keys to their profiles, which should make discovery of people who use PGP much easier. Emailing them will still depend on using your own PGP client, such as GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) or Whiteout. That also means that there's no way for Facebook to intercept those messages in an unencrypted form.

Facebook will also start encrypting the notifications it sends to users via email. Facebook itself will be able to see these messages because it is the one encrypting them "end to end" (from Facebook to the user). The main purpose of this wouldn't be to protect the notifications from Facebook itself, but to protect users against phishing emails (where sites impersonate Facebook).

Despite still being one of the companies that collects the most data about us, Facebook has taken some positive steps to increase the security and privacy (from other entities) of its users lately. It has enabled HTTPS on its site with HSTS protection, it has provided a Tor onion site^[1] for its service for those who want to have anonymous profiles on Facebook, and it has enabled STARTTLS encryption for emails going from its own datacenters to other email companies.

[1] Note that researchers recently used Facebook's hidden service to test an attack on Tor users.

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AnonTechie wrote in with an article on the 'hackberry':

Open Source and 3d printing have both long held promise of helping humanity as a whole. Here, they both come together to begin bringing some of that promise to fruition with an awesome looking Open Source 3d printed bionic hand.

From a designboom.com article:

3D printing is a technology that is constantly improving, but as time goes on, the groundbreaking advances fall to a level which allow for the adoption of it accessible to the masses. For one Japanese company called exiii, the 3D printing landscape has helped them to create an electric hand called 'hackberry'. The name represents a vision to 'hack' at problems, and to grow branches that reach out to users. Not only is it more functional than prosthetic hands from a ten years ago, but is also obtainable at just a fraction of the price.

There is also a nice article (but with similar pictures) at gizmodo.com.

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Hugh Pickens writes:

Cindy Cohn writes at EFF that when a criminal started lacing Tylenol capsules with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly sprang into action to ensure consumer safety. It increased its internal production controls, recalled the capsules, offered an exchange for tablets, and within two months started using triple-seal tamper-resistant packaging. Congress ultimately passed an anti-tampering law but the focus of the response from both the private and the public sector was on ensuring that consumers remained safe and secure, rather than on catching the perpetrator. Indeed, the person who did the tampering was never caught.

According to Cohn the story of the Tylenol murders comes to mind as Congress considers the latest cybersecurity and data breach bills. To folks who understand computer security and networks, it's plain that the key problem are our vulnerable infrastructure and weak computer security, much like the vulnerabilities in Johnson & Johnson's supply chain in the 1980s. As then, the failure to secure our networks, the services we rely upon, and our individual computers makes it easy for bad actors to step in and "poison" our information. The way forward is clear: We need better incentives for companies who store our data to keep it secure. "Yet none of the proposals now in Congress are aimed at actually increasing the safety of our data. Instead, the focus is on "information sharing," a euphemism for more surveillance of users and networks," writes Cohn. "These bills are not only wrongheaded, they seem to be a cynical ploy to use the very real problems of cybersecurity to advance a surveillance agenda, rather than to actually take steps to make people safer." Congress could step in and encourage real security for users—by creating incentives for greater security, a greater downside for companies that fail to do so and by rewarding those companies who make the effort to develop stronger security. "It's as if the answer for Americans after the Tylenol incident was not to put on tamper-evident seals, or increase the security of the supply chain, but only to require Tylenol to "share" its customer lists with the government and with the folks over at Bayer aspirin," concludes Cohn. "We wouldn't have stood for such a wrongheaded response in 1982, and we shouldn't do so now."

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ghost writes:

If you read SoylentNews, Ars Technica, Reddit, or anywhere other than the other site, you've probably heard about SourceForge hijacking accounts and monetizing open source software with crapware installers. It seems the other site is intent on burying that information. Perhaps they don't consider it newsworthy?

For those still using SourceForge, there are many superior alternatives.

Update: 06/02 03:27 GMT by mrcoolbp : Slashdot ran the story this morning.

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RobotMonster writes:

Phys.org has a report on "an untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades".

A demo sparking interest at the ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle was all about an origami robot that was worked on by researchers. More specifically, the team members are from the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT and the department of informatics, Technische Universitat in Germany. "An untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades" was the name of the paper, co-authored by Shuhei Miyashita, Steven Guitron, Marvin Ludersdorfer, Cynthia R. Sung and Daniela Rus. They focused on an origami robot that does just what the paper's title suggests. A video showing the robot in action showcases each move.

One can watch the robot walking on a trajectory, walking on human skin, delivering a block; swimming (the robot has a boat-shaped body so that it can float on water with roll and pitch stability); carrying a load (0.3 g robot); climbing a slope; and digging through a stack. It also shows how a polystyrene model robot dissolves in acetone.

The video is quite impressive!