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n1 writes:

Australian Financial Review reports:

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks offered a [US$100,000] bounty for copies of a Pacific trade pact that is a central plank of President Barack Obama's diplomatic pivot to Asia on Tuesday.

WikiLeaks, which has published leaked chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiating text before, started a drive to crowdsource money for the reward, just as U.S. unions launched a new push to make the text public.

"The transparency clock has run out on the TPP. No more secrecy. No more excuses. Let's open the TPP once and for all," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement.

AnonTechie writes:

A record-breaking attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean using a solar-powered plane has been aborted. Poor weather conditions are forcing the Solar Impulse craft to head to Japan to land. The pilot was 36 hours into what was expected to be a six-day journey from China to Hawaii.

The team will now wait in Japan for clearer skies before attempting to continue. Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg, who is flying solo, tweeted that he was disappointed but looking forward to the next attempt.

fliptop writes:

The Consumerist reports:

While one might think the notion of a chicken with more than two wings and two legs is a bit farcical, a rumor of such genetically modified birds has been circulating in China, leading KFC's parent company to file lawsuits against three Chinese businesses for allegedly concocting and publicizing fabricated stories about the chain's products on social media.

KFC alleges in the lawsuits that the companies spread rumors on microblogs and through photos and articles online that purposely misled consumers about the quality of its food.

...

According to the WSJ, Yum [Brands (parent company of KFC)] is seeking about $245,000 in compensation from Ying Chen An Zhi Chenggong Culture Communications Ltd., Wei Lu Kuang Technology and Ling Dian Technology.

Also on FoxNews, USNews and ABC News.

No word on lawsuits stemming from a SN AC comment that KFC's chickens have three breasts.

n1 writes:

Aviation Week reports:

As senior Pentagon editor, there are perks to being a scribe. May 26, I had the opportunity to witness aviation history with a small group of reporters invited to the USS Wasp amphibious ship to witness a few hours of the first-ever F-35B Operational Test (OT-1) trials off the coast of North Carolina. I'm posting some of the many videos I collected to give our readers a sense of what we saw on the boat.

During OT-1, actual Marines -- not test overseers -- are operating the six F-35Bs that embarked May 18 for the tests; this includes pilots and maintainers. During DT (developmental testing), we got to see firsthand the first vertical landing and short takeoff at sea, but in OT-1, the Marines are demonstrating a cadence to operations to gain confidence the single-engine, stealthy fighters can assimilate into an air wing onboard the amphibious ship, which will include other platforms: the MV-22, CH-53E/K, AH-W/Z and unmanned air systems among them. This is all leading up to the operational debut of the F-35B, slated in July.

The article contains an 8 minute video of the F-35B with an accompanying written overview of what is occurring at various points during the video.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Dennis Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a lobbyist trading on contacts he gained in office, his leadership coincided with Congress's abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and now Hastert stands accused of improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet. If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.

Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn’t charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him.” It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. “In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers,” says Greenwald. “What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that.”

takyon writes:

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aarhus University have found that 74 small exoplanets orbit their stars in circular rather than eccentric patterns, suggesting that orbital regularity is common. The results could enhance the odds of finding Earth-sized exoplanets hospitable to life:

These 74 exoplanets, which orbit 28 stars, are about the size of Earth, and their circular trajectories stand in stark contrast to those of more massive exoplanets, some of which come extremely close to their stars before hurtling far out in highly eccentric, elongated orbits.

"Twenty years ago, we only knew about our solar system, and everything was circular and so everyone expected circular orbits everywhere," says Vincent Van Eylen, a visiting graduate student in MIT's Department of Physics. "Then we started finding giant exoplanets, and we found suddenly a whole range of eccentricities, so there was an open question about whether this would also hold for smaller planets. We find that for small planets, circular is probably the norm."

Ultimately, Van Eylen says that's good news in the search for life elsewhere. Among other requirements, for a planet to be habitable, it would have to be about the size of Earth — small and compact enough to be made of rock, not gas. If a small planet also maintained a circular orbit, it would be even more hospitable to life, as it would support a stable climate year-round. (In contrast, a planet with a more eccentric orbit might experience dramatic swings in climate as it orbited close in, then far out from its star.)

The team chose 28 stars with multiplanet systems that have been previously observed by the Kepler space observatory, and for which mass and radius had been determined using asteroseismology. Every one of the 74 known exoplanets orbiting those 28 stars were found to maintain circular orbits.

takyon writes:

A top secret report to the British prime minister has recommended that a new international treaty be negotiated to force the cooperation of the big US internet companies in sharing customers' personal data, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners said the decision to classify the report, written by the former diplomat Sir Nigel Sheinwald, as top secret was designed to bury it and said its key recommendation for an international treaty could provide a legal, front-door alternative to the government's renewed "snooper's charter" surveillance proposals.

It is believed the former British ambassador to Washington concluded that such a treaty could overcome US laws that prevent web giants based there, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo, from sharing their customers' private data with British police and security services. It would also mean not having to revive the powers – which require British phone companies to share data from the US giants passing over their networks – from the 2012 communications data bill that would enforce their compliance.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group said: "The Sheinwald report should be published. Any attempt to hide it can only be interpreted as an attempt to close down debate about whether the snooper's charter is really needed. A new international treaty is the right approach to cross-border requests for data by law enforcement agencies. This approach undermines Theresa May's claim that there is a need for a new snooper's charter when there is a simple, transparent and workable solution."

But the Cabinet Office defended its decision to keep the report secret [sic]. It said Shinewald "reports on progress to the prime minister but... is not undertaking a public review". The Guardian understands the report has been classified as top secret by the Cabinet Office because it goes into the detail of each company's operations. Shinewald was appointed by Cameron in September 2014 as his special envoy on intelligence and law enforcement data sharing.

takyon writes:

Computex 2015 has seen the enthusiastic promotion of Internet of Things devices, including a "smart diaper" seen on the show floor and a "smart vase" monitoring air quality featured in Intel's keynote.

The 6th generation of Intel Core processors, the 14nm "Tock" Skylake, was shown off in a 10mm thick all-in-one design with 4K resolution, but no new details about the CPUs were given. Sales of another form factor, the 2-in-1, were said to have increased 75% year-on-year, and they are expected to be more affordable this year. Intel also plans to increase the performance of its Atom-based Compute Sticks and release a more powerful Core M version this year.

Intel's Broadwell Xeon server chips will be featuring Iris Pro graphics. For example, the Xeon E3-1200v4 includes Iris Pro P6300, resulting in a chip suitable for video transcription. More details are at The Platform. Two socketed 65W Broadwell desktop processors with Iris Pro 6200 graphics have been announced. Both chips have 128 MB of on-die eDRAM acting as L4 cache. Other Broadwell desktop and laptop chips have been announced, and should be available within the next two months (followed by the first Skylake mobile chips in September).

Intel wants to bring wireless power and connectivity to Skylake laptops and tablets. Some Skylake devices will use WiGig (802.11ad) for data transfer, WiDi for display transfer, and Rezence magnetic resonance wireless charging. The extent to which PC vendors will commit to these cable-cutting wireless standards across Skylake devices remains to be seen. Intel also formally announced the merger of the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) and the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP).

Intel has deprecated the current Mini DisplayPort connector for Thunderbolt and adopted USB Type-C as the Thunderbolt 3 connector. Intel intended for the Thunderbolt interface to be used over USB ports in the first place back in 2011, but was blocked by the USB consortium at the time. Now that USB Type-C supports "USB Alternate Mode" functionality, the time has come for Intel to ditch MiniDP, the connector for 100 million Thunderbolt devices (many, but peanuts compared to USB). It has doubled the maximum bandwidth of Thunderbolt 3 to 40 Gbps, four times that of USB 3.1. Power consumption is halved, and the connector can drive two external 4K displays simultaneously or a single 5K display, at 60 Hz.

AMD has announced a launch date for graphics cards employing high-bandwidth memory (HBM): June 16th at E3. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti GPU was unveiled and reviewed the day before Computex. AMD's Carrizo APUs for laptops have been launched, at least on paper. AMD is explicitly targeting the $400-700 laptop segment with 15 W Carrizo chips. AMD has demoed FreeSync-over-HDMI, although hardware support remains scarce.

Broadcom and Qualcomm have unveiled 802.11ac MU-MIMO "Wave 2" products with 4x4 antenna configurations. Eight-antenna access points are capable of reaching an aggregate capacity of 6.77 Gbps. Broadcom also announced a 1 Watt gigabit Ethernet chip supporting the Energy Efficient Ethernet standard 802.3az, targeting European Code of Conduct energy efficiency requirements.

Hugh Pickens writes:

The Guardian reports that Vortex Bladeless has developed a new bladeless wind turbine that promises to be more efficient, less visually intrusive, and safer for birdlife than conventional turbines. Using the principle of natural frequency and vorticity, the turbine oscillates in swirling air caused by the wind bypassing the mast, and then builds exponentially as it reaches the structure's natural resonance. It's a powerful effect that famously caused the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940, footage of which inspired David Yáñez to try to build a structure to harness this energy rather than prevent it. The turbine "floats" on magnets, which as well as significantly amplifying the oscillation, also eliminates any friction and the need for expensive lubricating oils or mechanical parts. "Wind turbines now are too noisy for people's backyard," says David Suriol. "We want to bring wind power generation to people's houses like solar power."

On the minus side the oscillating turbine design will sweep a smaller area and have a lower conversion efficiency. "The best wind turbine will collect around 50% of energy from the wind," says Suriol. "We are close to 40% with bladeless turbines in our wind tunnel laboratory." To offset this disadvantage, "you can put four, five or six 4kW turbines in the space of one conventional turbine, which need 5 meter diameter space around them," he says. In fact, wind tunnel tests have shown they perform even better placed closer together as they benefit from the vortices each of them creates.

AnonTechie writes:

Your average scripter likely isn't writing a whole lot of proofs or going through the rigors of formal program verification, generally. Which is fine because your average scripter also isn't writing software for jet airliners or nuclear power plants or robotic surgeons. But somebody is—and the odds are pretty good that your life has been in their hands very recently. How do you know they're not a complete hack ?

Well, you don't really. Which prompts the question: How is this sort of code tested? It was a short blog post written by Gene Spafford, a professor of computer science at Purdue University, that inspired this particular asking of the question.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-is-critical-life-or-death-software-tested

[Related]: They Write the Right Stuff by Charles Fishman at Fast Company

An Anonymous Coward writes:

My organization recently deployed about 60 servers running Oracle Linux. I have worn a few different hats (SW Engineer, Systems Administration, Help Desk) over about 12 years of computing experience, and I have only ever had to use tech support for an Linux OS related problem once, and it was related to converting Red Hat classic subscriptions to the new subscription manager. I have developed software using C, C++, and Python. I have also resolved problems with open source software by downloading the source, fixing bugs, recompiling, and finally submitting the fix upstream.

Other than having someone to yell at, is there any benefit to paying for support? Would be better to just set aside some cash to pay a consultant if there is something I can't figure out myself?

AnonTechie writes:

Sentient claims to have assembled machine-learning muscle to rival Google by rounding up idle computers.

Recent improvements in speech and image recognition have come as companies such as Google build bigger, more powerful systems of computers to run machine-learning software. Now a relative minnow, a private company called Sentient with only about 70 employees, says it can cheaply assemble even larger computing systems to power artificial-intelligence software.

The company's approach may not be suited to all types of machine learning, a technology that has uses as varied as facial recognition and financial trading. Sentient has not published details, but says it has shown that it can put together enough computing power to produce significant results in some cases.

Sentient's power comes from linking up hundreds of thousands of computers over the Internet to work together as if they were a single machine. The company won't say exactly where all the machines it taps into are. But many are idle inside data centers, the warehouse-like facilities that power Internet services such as websites and mobile apps, says Babak Hodjat, cofounder and chief scientist at Sentient. The company pays a data-center operator to make use of its spare machines.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537831/ai-supercomputer-built-by-tapping-data-warehouses-for-their-idle-computing-power/

n1 writes:

Business Insider reports:

With a perfect ACT score and 13 Advanced Placement courses under his belt, Michael Wang applied to seven Ivy League universities and Stanford in 2013.

As an Asian-American, Wang suspected his race might work against him. But but he was still shocked when he was rejected by Stanford and every Ivy League school except for the University of Pennsylvania.

Wang says he worked incredibly hard and excelled in every area possible. But it still wasn't good enough.

"There was nothing humanly possible I could do," Wang told us, explaining that he felt utterly demoralized after his rejections.

After Wang was rejected from most of the Ivies, he says he filed a complaint with the US Department of Education alleging Yale, Stanford, and Princeton discriminated against him because he was Asian-American.

[...] Wang isn't alone in his belief that the Ivies discriminate against Asians. A coalition of Asian-American groups filed a lawsuit against Harvard University last month alleging the school and other Ivy League institutions use racial quotas to admit students to the detriment of more qualified Asian-American applicants. The more than 60 Asian groups are coming together to fight what they say are unfair admission practices.

[...] He also stressed that he was not just academically driven, but also a well-rounded applicant who maximized his extracurricular activities. He competed in national speech and debate competitions and math competitions. He also plays the piano and performed in the choir that sang at President Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration.

A story from a few days ago:

Phoenix666 writes:

A controversial proposed judicial rule change allowing judges to issue warrants to conduct "remote access" against a target computer regardless of its location has been approved by a United States Courts committee, according to the Department of Justice.

Federal agents have been known to use such tactics in past and ongoing cases: a Colorado federal magistrate judge approved sending malware to a suspect's known e-mail address in 2012. But similar techniques have been rejected by other judges on Fourth Amendment grounds. If this rule revision were to be approved, it would standardize and expand federal agents' ability to surveil a suspect and to exfiltrate data from a target computer regardless of where it is. (Both the United States Army and the Drug Enforcement Administration are known to have purchased such exploits, most likely zero-days.)

This should become even more significant as the Internet of Things moves forward.

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).