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skullz writes:

With the release of Windows 10 there have been serious privacy concerns raised as to what data Windows is sending home to mommy and daddy. Much of this could be called benign data leakage for your average user (location information for a map, search information, etc) but it has been hinted that even disabling these features doesn't prevent data being sent from your computer. This is also true for Android, iOS devices, browsers, browser plugins, and software registration / update tools. Even a vanilla Linux or BSD install may be sending out information you aren't aware of. If you haven't checked, you don't know.

Firing up a packet monitor is fairly easy on the host OS and a decent firewall / gateway can dump all the packets from a local network. Assuming the majority of data you would be concerned about leaking out is encrypted, is there an easy way for an owner to decrypt it to see what is actually being sent out? Are there groups conducting this type of analysis and publishing their results with any level of detail?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Taiwanese Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in a lawsuit against an ex-R&D director who leaked trade secrets to Samsung:

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a former senior director at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC, 台積電) cannot work for rival company Samsung in any way before the end of this year, over concerns about revealing trade secrets to the competitor. Previously, in a lower court, a judgment was issued against TSMC, stating that forbidding Liang Mong-song (梁孟松) from holding offices in other companies violates his right to work. In a later appeal, Liang was banned from working for Samsung before the end of this year, which the Supreme Court yesterday let stand.

The Supreme Court explained that if he continued to work for Samsung during this time, the market competitiveness advantages of TSMC will severely be impaired, which will affect the semiconductor foundry industry in Taiwan. [...] TSMC stated that according to a comparison report conducted by specialists, the differences in nanometer technology between Samsung and TSMC have rapidly decreased over the years. The 16 nm and 14 nm FinFET products produced in massive quantities by both companies this year were very similar. "Simply by analyzing the structure, it is hard to differentiate which was made by Samsung or TSMC," the report said.

Legal experts point out that this final judgment is a first in the technology industry and in judicial circles. Taiwan courts have never restricted senior managers of enterprises from working for competitors, even after the end of their non-competition clause's expiry.

From The Register:

Among TSMC's accusations is that Liang gave Samsung its 28nm process tech at a time when TSMC was leading the semiconductor industry. Its claim is that the leaked secrets gave Samsung the advantage it needed to later leapfrog TSMC to the 16nm and 14nm process nodes.

Liang spent 17 years at TSMC, during which he reportedly earned a salary and bonuses of more than NT$36m ($1.1m/£704,000) per year, on average. When he left the company in 2009, he told TSMC that he planned to go into academia and soon took a job at Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University. But six months later he turned up at a different institution: Sungkyunkwan University, in South Korea. Sungkyunkwan is a private research university with campuses in Seoul and Suwon, and Samsung is its major backer. The move raised red flags within TSMC almost immediately, but it didn't file suit against Liang until 2011, by which time he had already officially accepted a job at Samsung proper. Still, in its complaint, the Taiwanese firm alleged Liang was "already leaking TSMC trade secrets to Samsung" by the time he joined Sungkyunkwan.

Liang has denied the charges, saying he would never do anything to harm TSMC. But he has admitted in court that he left the Taiwanese chipmaker because he was dissatisfied with a recent promotion, and he has reportedly since brought five more former TSMC execs over to Samsung.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A score of 103 out of 100 could be called kind of... Insane. This is exactly what the Tesla Model S P85D in 'Insane' mode received during testing by Consumer Reports (CR), a score so off-the-charts good that it actually broke the scale and forced CR to revise how they measure things. The official score with the new, updated methodology will be 100/100.

What made the Tesla break the ratings was the combination of supercar performance and extreme energy efficiency. These things haven't historically been found together, and so CR never had a car that go such high scores in both columns.

Impressive, but alas...traffic.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Amazon is laying off "dozens" of employees at Lab126, the hardware-development center in Silicon Valley responsible for products like the Fire Phone, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Sources at Amazon "familiar with the matter" told the WSJ that the company has scaled back or halted numerous development projects, including a large-screen tablet and a smart stylus.

The WSJ's sources claim that the layoffs form part of a broad reorganisation at Lab126, which began last year after disappointing sales of the Fire Phone. This resulted in Lab126 combining its tablet, e-reader, and phone projects. In October 2014, it emerged that Amazon was sitting on over $83 million (~£54 million) of unsold Fire phones, which the company swiftly tried to shift by offering a substantial price drop.

It's not yet clear whether Amazon will continue its in-house smartphone development. Some engineers at Lab126 told the WSJ that development would be shelved, while another claimed it had been shifted to Seattle under Steve Kessel, an executive who helped spearhead the company's hardware unit and oversaw digital media like e-books and music.

Has Amazon bitten off more than it can chew with mobile devices?

Original Submission

edIII writes:

Ever more the light seems to be shining in dark spots, and the cockroaches scatter. The Huffington Post reveals today that DuPont has knowingly been poisoning a small farm and community for decades, desperately trying to dump and hide the environmental, social, and medical fallout of their chemical C8. Despite their efforts, the scandal behind C8 cannot be so easily pushed down inside a landfill and forgotten like a painfully produced Atari video game. From the TFA:

That May, a group of DuPont executives gathered at the company's Wilmington headquarters to discuss the C8 issue. According to the minutes, attendees discussed recently adopted plans to cut C8 emissions at Washington Works, such as adding scrubbers to vents that spewed the chemical into the air. But they decided to scrap these initiatives. The additional expense was not "justified," the executives concluded, since it wouldn't substantially reduce the company's liability. "Liability was further defined as the incremental liability from this point on if we do nothing as we are already liable for the past 32 years of operation," the minutes read. "From a broader corporate viewpoint the costs are small."

One might think we would have learned our lessons from poisoning the world with lead, but clearly these executives never got the memo. Quite strange, given they're from the same company. I'm almost speechless at the scope of the harm and damage, knowingly and premeditatively, performed against all of humanity worldwide. The Chinese government announced today the arrests, and more than likely inevitable executions, of a score of executives and officials responsible for the Tianjin port explosions.

At what point does the harm that executives, in companies such as DuPont, meet thresholds high enough to discuss special prosecutions and the death penalty? When even China, who lacks a strong history of supporting human rights and consumer protections, recognizes that some executives and officials need to be "criminally detained" and ultimately dealt with, when can we in the so-called civilized Western societies perform the same? We've yet to even slow DuPont down.

[More after the Break]

Phoenix666 writes:

Most of the time, people don't actively track the way one thought flows into the next. But in psychiatry, much attention is paid to such intricacies of thinking. For instance, disorganized thought, evidenced by disjointed patterns in speech, is considered a hallmark characteristic of schizophrenia. Several studies of at-risk youths have found that doctors are able to guess with impressive accuracy—the best predictive models hover around 79 percent—whether a person will develop psychosis based on tracking that person's speech patterns in interviews.

A computer, it seems, can do better.

That's according to a study published Wednesday by researchers at Columbia University, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in the Nature Publishing Group journal Schizophrenia. They used an automated speech-analysis program to correctly differentiate—with 100-percent accuracy—between at-risk young people who developed psychosis over a two-and-a-half year period and those who did not. The computer model also outperformed other advanced screening technologies, like biomarkers from neuroimaging and EEG recordings of brain activity.

The article does not elaborate on how the transcripts are produced.

Automated analysis of free speech predicts psychosis onset in high-risk youths

WH_KuCCf0c0 writes:

The Citizen Lab describes an elaborate phishing campaign against targets in Iran's diaspora, and at least one Western activist. The ongoing attacks attempt to circumvent the extra protections conferred by two-factor authentication in Gmail, and rely heavily on phone-call based phishing and "real time" login attempts by the attackers. Most of the attacks begin with a phone call from a UK phone number, with attackers speaking in either English or Farsi.

The attacks point to extensive knowledge of the targets' activities, and share infrastructure and tactics with campaigns previously linked to Iranian threat actors. The researchers have documented a growing number of these attacks, and have received unconfirmed reports of targets and victims of highly similar attacks, including in Iran. The report includes extra detail to help potential targets recognize similar attacks. The report closes with some security suggestions, highlighting the importance of two-factor authentication.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Imagine if you could eliminate the tangle of wires that snake across a hospital patient's body so machines can monitor his or her vital signs. Sounds like a great idea. But wirelessly transmitting data from the patient to the machines cluttering hospital rooms creates the risk of electromagnetic interference. So one group of researchers in South Korea is proposing that some machines use Li-Fi instead.

The team used visible light communications, also known as Li-Fi, to transmit readings from an electroencephalograph (EEG) over a distance of about 50 centimeters. "It's a very much friendlier means of transmitting biomedical signals in a hospital," says Yeon Ho Chung, an engineer at Pukyong National University in Busan. The group described their work in the IEEE Sensors Journal.

Li-Fi would benefit places that experience a lot of interference from crowded wifi nodes as well, as long as there are no side effects.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A plan to use Wi-Fi airwaves for cellular service has sparked concerns about interference with existing Wi-Fi networks, causing a fight involving wireless carriers, cable companies, a Wi-Fi industry trade group, Microsoft, and network equipment makers.

Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US plan to boost coverage in their cellular networks by using unlicensed airwaves that also power Wi-Fi equipment. While cellular carriers generally rely upon airwaves to which they have exclusive licenses, a new system called LTE (Long-Term Evolution)-Unlicensed (LTE-U) would have the carriers sharing spectrum with Wi-Fi devices on the unlicensed 5GHz band.

Verizon has said it intends to deploy LTE-U in 5GHz in 2016. Before the interference controversy threatened to delay deployments, T-Mobile was expected to use the technology on its smartphones by the end of 2015. Wireless equipment makers like Qualcomm see an opportunity to sell more devices and are integrating LTE-U into their latest technology.

Is this a blessing for cell phone users, a curse for those who have to manage wifi networks, or a move that could backfire on telecommunication companies as cell service-over-wifi becomes ubiquitous and threatens their network advantage?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

UK politicians and have urged Twitter and Facebook to change the default behavior of autoplaying videos following the spread of footage showing the shooting of a WDBJ-TV reporter and cameraman:

MPs have called on Twitter and Facebook to take action after many users were confronted with autoplaying videos of the murder of a US TV news crew. The footage was suspected to have been posted by the murderer on Wednesday. Because the sites have set video to play automatically by default, many people saw the video without choosing to when it was shared into their feeds.

A parliamentary group said the firms should ensure that users are warned about graphic content before it plays. The chair of the cross-party Parliamentary Internet, Communications and Technology Forum (Pictfor) said that both social media sites should automatically sift for such content. "Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others have already worked together with government and regulators to prevent people being exposed to illegal, extremist content, using both automatic and manual techniques to identify footage. Social media, just like traditional media, should consider how shocking other content can be, and make sure consumers are warned appropriately," Matt Warman told the BBC.

The Conservative MP for Boston and Skegness added: "For victims, friends and families it's important to make sure that, in an online world without a watershed, users know what they're about to see and have a reasonable opportunity to stop it." He said that, while users can change their own settings to stop videos auto-playing, Facebook and Twitter "need to be aware that one size does not fit all". He said: "Many people who are ordinarily happy that videos play will have seen shocking footage by accident, without warning of its graphic nature."

Original Submission

zafiro17 writes:

The article comes out of the Australian press, but unless there's something truly unique about the Australian job market, it's almost certainly true elsewhere as well: a recent study shows more than half of young Australians are receiving college education to persue careers that will soon no longer exist. Thank robotics, industry consolidation, and the nature of the markets for the shrinking number of ways you will some day be able to earn a living.

There's a flip side to the debate, of course: there are certainly new things coming that haven't even been invented yet, that will provide job opportunities. But the trick is positioning yourself appropriately to take advantage of the new chances.

The not-for-profit group, which works with young Australians to create social change, says the national curriculum is stuck in the past and digital literacy, in particular, needs to be boosted. Foundation chief executive Jan Owen says young people are not prepared for a working life that could include five career changes and an average of 17 different jobs.

She says today's students will be affected by three key economic drivers: automation, globalisation and collaboration. "Many jobs and careers are disappearing because of automation," Ms Owen said. "The second driver is globalisation — a lot of different jobs that we're importing and exporting. And then thirdly collaboration which is all about this new sharing economy."

How does one future-proof his/her life and career?

zafiro17 writes:

FreeBSD hackers Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy surprised an audience of Bay Area FreeBSD Users in August 2015 by laying out their version for a new architecture, based vaguely on BSD but with a microkernel and an event-driven framework consisting of something like libdispatch and launchd. Those are big changes if you are familiar with what FreeBSD has looked like for all of its life.

The good news is, this doesn't mean the destruction of the FreeBSD we all know and love. In fact, Hubbard, who is also the CTO of ixSystems (developers of FreeNAS and PCBSD, both products derived from FreeBSD) aren't aiming to impact FreeBSD but rather change the fundamental architecture of ixSystems' own products.

The slide deck walks you through the proposed, new architecture. Better still, watch the talk yourself.

As a FreeBSD fan, I'm glad they're treating this as a separate product and not hacking up the FreeBSD source tree; that gives us time to see how this shakes out.

AnonTechie writes:

The advent of enzyme complex CRISPR/Cas9 has ushered in a new age of genetic manipulation—it could help us cure diseases or resuscitate extinct species. One of CRISPR’s big advantages is that it’s much easier to use than its predecessors. So easy, in fact, that amateur biohackers are using it in their experiments, according to a report from Nature News.

It’s natural to be nervous about this. CRISPR is a powerful tool that scientists don’t fully understand, and it can have unintended consequences even when used cautiously. Ever since April, when a team of Chinese researchers published their findings after using CRISPR to change the genes of human embryos, the discussion has reached a fever pitch. Experts have been discussing the issue of consent (embryos can’t consent to having their genes manipulated, and the effects could be passed down for generations), the consequences of introducing an unintended change, and the effects on the ecosystem should a genetically manipulated animal break free from the lab.

http://www.popsci.com/biohackers-are-now-using-crispr

Wikipedia: CRISPR and Cas9.

Article at Nature

Original Submission

An anonymous Coward writes:

The city of Waukesha, Wisconsin proposes taking water from Lake Michigan to deal with contamination in their local aquifer. The city is just outside the drainage basin from the lake and thus the Great Lakes Compact of 2008 comes into play, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/26/us/waukesha-plan-for-lake-michigan-water-raises-worries.html?_r=0

This might be a landmark case to test the Compact which requires approval of all eight governors of the surrounding states before large quantities of water can be taken outside the lake drainage area. Here is one article on the 2008 law: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/world/americas/24iht-24lakes.16429199.html.

From the bottom of the first article:

Original Submission

jan_jes writes:

Researchers developed a[sic] multipurpose, fish-shaped microrobots — called microfish — that swim around efficiently in liquids, are chemically powered by hydrogen peroxide, and magnetically controlled.

They used an innovative 3D printing technology to develop these microrobots.

These proof-of-concept synthetic microfish will inspire a new generation of “smart” microrobots that have diverse capabilities such as detoxification, sensing, and directed drug delivery.

The technique used to fabricate the microfish provides numerous improvements over other methods traditionally employed to create microrobots with various locomotion mechanisms, such as microjet engines, microdrillers, and microrockets.

http://www.rtoz.org/2015/08/27/3d-printed-microfish-capable-of-removing-and-sensing-toxins/