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GM pleads guilty but no criminal charges for employees in ignition switch recall

mattTheOne writes:

No GM employees going to jail for failure to fix an engineering problem:

General Motors will pay $900 million to settle criminal charges related to its flawed ignition switch that has been tied to at least 124 deaths. Problems with the ignition switch could shut off the car while it was being driven, disabling the airbag, power steering and power brakes -- and putting drivers and passengers at risk. GM had already admitted that its employees were aware of the problem nearly a decade before it started to recall millions of the cars early last year. That delay is the basis behind the criminal charges.

Sounds like the FORD Pinto...

Volkswagen Busted for Cheating on Emission Benchmarks

Nox Night writes:

Is it time for a DriverGater movement? Cheating on gaming benchmarks has been the raison d'être of the GamerGater movement. All of the major graphics chip manufacturers have been caught cheating on performance benchmarks by including code in the driver to detect benchmark runs and take visual shortcuts that produce better numbers but worse quality.

Now Volkswagen has been caught using the same tactics - to detect when their vehicles are being benchmarked for emissions and to release less nitrogen oxide pollution but operate less efficiently, giving false results.

The recall covers roughly 482,000 diesel passenger cars sold in the United States since 2009. Affected diesel models include the 2009-15 Volkswagen Jetta, 2009-15 Beetle, 2009-15 Golf, 2014-15 Passat and 2009-15 Audi A3.

Friday's notice of violation was the Obama administration's "opening salvo" in the Volkswagen case, said Thomas Reynolds, an E.P.A. spokesman. The Justice Department's investigation could ultimately result in fines or penalties for the company. Under the terms of the Clean Air Act, the Justice Department could impose fines of as much as $37,500 for each recalled vehicle, for a possible total penalty of as much as $18 billion.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A 24-year-old mother is in custody Saturday after her two young children were found barefoot, dirty and living in a wooden shipping crate in an underground cave on the eastern edge of Kansas City, Missouri.
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Mugrauer told investigators that her children had been living in the cave for several days and acknowledged leaving them there alone, the probable cause statement says. She was taken into custody Friday afternoon and has not yet appeared in court.
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The extensive network of caves is the product of massive limestone mining in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Years after the mining operations ceased, companies started finding ways to use the millions of square feet of abandoned underground space. The caves house hundreds of businesses, many of which specialize in storage or warehousing because they are protected from extreme weather and have year-round temperatures of around 70 degrees.
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Many of the caves feature paved roads, utilities and developed business space, while others, such as the one where the children were found, consist of dirt floors and uncontrolled entrances.

Dirty and alone sounds bad, though many people do that with kids that old. Caves that are "protected from extreme weather and have year-round temperatures of around 70 degrees" sound like a good choice for a city that's in the middle of Tornado Alley.

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martyb writes:

MIT Technology Review has a story about an artificial intelligence machine called Giraffe that was developed by Matthew Lai and which plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move. Still more impressive is that it teaches itself:

... he used a bootstrapping technique in which Giraffe played against itself with the goal of improving its prediction of its own evaluation of a future position. That works because there are fixed reference points that ultimately determine the value of a position—whether the game is later won, lost or drawn.

In this way, the computer learns which positions are strong and which are weak.

But all this would be academic if its chess playing skills could not be assessed. This is covered, as well:

Having trained Giraffe, the final step is to test it and here the results make for interesting reading. Lai tested his machine on a standard database called the Strategic Test Suite, which consists of 1,500 positions that are chosen to test an engine’s ability to recognize different strategic ideas. “For example, one theme tests the understanding of control of open files, another tests the understanding of how bishop and knight’s values change relative to each other in different situations, and yet another tests the understanding of center control,” he says.

The results of this test are scored out of 15,000.

Lai uses this to test the machine at various stages during its training. As the bootstrapping process begins, Giraffe quickly reaches a score of 6,000 and eventually peaks at 9,700 after only 72 hours.

[...] "Giraffe is able to play at the level of an FIDE International Master on a modern mainstream PC,” says Lai.

ArXiv has both an abstract and a full report (pdf).

How about a nice game of chess?

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fritsd writes:

Project Gutenberg, the repository for public domain books, has recently reached a new milestone of 50,000 books!

The latest addition is a bit self-referential: John Gutenberg, by Franz von Dingelstedt is a translation of a biography of Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398--1468), the inventor of the printing press.

It is very impressive to see the results of the 15 years of work by the PGDP project and its several international sister sites. Every single page of these 50,000 books has been scanned, OCRed, and then reviewed by at least 5 people.

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SubiculumHammer wrote in with a snippet from Bruce Schneier's blog:

Using the watch's built-in motion sensors, more specifically data from the accelerometer and gyroscope, researchers were able to create a 3D map of the user's hand movements while typing on a keyboard

The researchers then created two algorithms: one detected when the hand dipped (to create a heat map of keystrokes) and the second used the data from the first to detect duration of pauses to guess how many keystrokes were performed by the other hand. Combining this information with a simple dictionary lookup allowed the researchers to reproduce what was typed on the keyboard.

The blog references this report at SoftPedia:

Romit Roy Choudhury, Associate Professor at ECE Illinois, together with a group of students, worked on a project called Motion Leaks (MoLe), funded by the National Science Foundation, set to be presented during this week at the MobiCon 2015 conference in Paris.

Their research consisted of a homegrown app which they installed on a Samsung Gear Live smartwatch.

martyb writes:

BloombergBusiness is reporting that Bitcoin Is Officially a Commodity, According to U.S. Regulator:

Virtual money is officially a commodity, just like crude oil or wheat.

So says the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which on Thursday announced it had filed and settled charges against a Bitcoin exchange for facilitating the trading of option contracts on its platform.

"In this order, the CFTC for the first time finds that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are properly defined as commodities," according to the press release.

While market participants have long discussed whether Bitcoin could be defined as a commodity, and the CFTC has long pondered whether the cryptocurrency falls under its jurisdiction, the implications of this move are potentially numerous.

By this action, the CFTC asserts its authority to provide oversight of the trading of cryptocurrency futures and options, which will now be subject to the agency's regulations. In the event of wrongdoing, such as futures manipulation, the CFTC will be able to bring charges against bad actors.

Also covered by The Register.

This is not so much a change of official position as it is an assertion by the CFTC that it is able to regulate this market. The bitcoin market has been basically going sideways this year. Does this decision affect your [planned] use of bitcoin in any way?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Members of the Russian military have been receiving well-crafted phishing emails since mid-summer from attackers that use Chinese-language tools and Chinese command-and-control installations, according to a report released Wednesday.

The campaign also targets Russian telecom firms and, as collateral damage, has hit Russian-speaking financial analysts who cover the telecom space for global financial firms, according to Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security vendor Proofpoint, Inc.

In the past, the same group of attackers has been reportedly targeting military installations in Central Asia.

"Actor attribution is always tricky, but there is significant use of Chinese-language build tools and command-and-control goes back to host sites in Chinese-influenced areas," said Kevin Epstein, the company's vice president of the threat operations center.

Occam's Razon would mean that the Chinese are the most likely actors, he said, but there's always the possibility that some other group entirely is deliberately trying to cast blame on the Chinese.

In addition, the attack could be government sponsored, or it could be a financially-motivated group planning to sell the military intelligence it gathers.

"There is a world market for classified data of [sic] any time," said Epstein. "There are documented cases in the past where private hackers hacked into various institutions and then sold the data to nation states. The lines are increasingly blurred in the world of cybersecurity."

The attack starts with a well-written Russian-language email that seems to come from someone else in the targeted military division or an analyst section from the same group of the military, he said.

It comes with an attached document, a Microsoft Word file with a published article about the history of military testing in Russia.

"It's a decoy document," said Epstein. "You double-click on it, you open it, you read it, you think, 'Ah, that was kind of interesting.' Then you close it and you don't think about it again. But when it closes, it activates a macro, and the macro triggers a secondary file to take action, which is to download a third file, which is the nasty stuff."

That's when the malware takes over the computer and everything the user has access to, the attackers now have access to.

"Any anti-virus program wouldn't see a virus in the document because there's no virus in the document," he said. "And the trigger on closing is a common anti-sandboxing technique because most sandboxes check for triggering when documents are opened, not when they are closed."

According to Epstein, Russian-language speakers on his staff say that the email is very convincing, and if they didn't know to watch out for it -- or hadn't had enough coffee -- they might well have clicked on it.

"This looks like something a colleague might well send you as a reference, and there is nothing there to trigger suspicion," he said.

This story, "Russian military attacked, possibly by Chinese cyber group" was originally published by CSO.

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martyb writes:

CNET is reporting Beautiful new photos of Pluto show terrain, atmosphere.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has long since passed by Pluto, and is currently 4.96 billion kilometers (4.59 light hours) from Earth. But things are not over with yet. It is still sending back data and images from its flyby. On Earth we have the hydrological cycle in Greenland and the South Pole where water evaporates, falls as snow, builds up glaciers, which then flow out to restart the cycle. It appears that something very similar is happening on Pluto, but because of the incredibly frigid temperatures, this process is occurring with frozen Nitrogen.

NASA has stunning pictures and more complete descriptions.

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SanityCheck writes:

I read about a man being caught on camera deliberately scratching an Aston Martin a while back. While it was amusing that the man was caught in such a detail on the camera, the act of vandalism I brushed off as a "rich man's problem." That was until today, when I notice someone quite deliberately scratched up my 2010 Nissan Sentra. Accepting that I have very horrible neighbors and will move when I can, does anyone have any ideas for a good DIY security system that can produce results similar to the ones in the Aston Martin incident?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The BBC has admitted that the Micro:bit, the computer it plans to give to up to one million children, is not going to arrive on time due to quality problems.

The Micro:bit was announced in March as a "get kids coding" initiative. Delivery was anticipated to occur in September, so that every 11 or 12 year-old in the UK could be given the computer to spur them into digital classroom action .

By July the corporation revealed the device's spec and a revised "late October" release schedule.

Yesterday, the Beeb admitted that things are off the rails and that delivery can be expected "after Christmas".

An issue with the device's power supply is the reason for the delay. Which is fair enough as it's all very well to teach kids to hack, but not if they learn what it's like to cop a jolt from the device's batteries along the way.

The Micro:bit is a conscious revival of the BBC's efforts in the 1980s when it created the BBC Micro and promoted it, and the idea of programming, through radio and television programs. ®

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MrNemesis writes:

Winners of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, celebrating unusual scientific research, have been announced. Some highlights of prizes awarded to thought-provoking research this year include:

Inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg
Bangkok Metropolitan Police offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes
Trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed, during the years from 1697 through 1727, to father 888 children

Although perhaps the most deserved win goes to a pair of Smiths for...

...Justin Schmidt painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith, for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Three students in Britain have won an award for their idea of a condom which would change colour in the presence of disease-causing micro-organisms such as syphilis, herpes virus, HPV, or chlamydia — STIs or Sexually Transmitted Infections. Antibodies in the rubber would link to the organisms' surfaces, leading to the appearance of a distinct colour which would indicate what pathogen was present.

http://techxplore.com/news/2015-06-uk-youths-color-changing-condom-stis.html

Here is an idea: condoms that change color when they come in contact with STIs. That is the idea from three students in the UK attending the Isaac Newton Academy in Ilford. They developed their idea into a contest entry and they won in the "Healthcare Category" in the Teen Tech Awards. Their concept is called "S.T.EYE."

Daily Mail and other sites this week reported that the material turns green if in the presence of chlamydia. Yellow indicates herpes. Purple indicates HPV (human papillomavirus) and blue, syphilis.

The three inventors are 13-to-14 year olds. Daanyaal Ali, Chirag Shah, and Muaz Nawaz hoped their invention can help the future of the next generation. Their prize includes cash and a trip to Buckingham Palace.

In a report from BBC Newsbeat, Daanyaal said that "Once the [bodily] fluids come into contact with the latex, if the person does have some sort of STI, it will cause a reaction through antibodies and antigens hanging on to each other, which triggers an antibody reaction causing a color change."

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McGruber writes:

An unexpected outbreak of common sense in US higher education: Utica College, a small, private university in upstate NY, announced it is cutting its annual tuition by 42 percent. (Could that be a Douglas Adams influence?)

According to College President Todd Hutton, the change will reduce the sticker shock that many parents and students have when seeing the tuition price. Hutton says there are fewer than a dozen students who pay the full price.

Right now, 61 percent of the tuition revenue coming from freshman is grants and subsidies directly from the college's pockets. Under the new tuition rate this number, called the "discount rate," would go down to 29 percent.

Essentially, Utica College would spend less of its own money to pay the tuition of students who can't afford the full price. It expects to make up the lost revenue through increased enrollment, which would come as a result of the college appearing to be more affordable.

Even though some of it sounds like a shell game, students will all make out better in the end, Hutton said. The least a student will save is $1,000. The most is more than $5,000, Hutton said.

While the college's net revenue per student will decrease, the colllege anticipates offsetting that loss with a higher number of students enrolled. The lower tuition will have a cascading effect since more prospective students will consider the college and end up enrolling in it.

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jbernardo writes:

Microsoft has built a Linux distro, and is using it for their Azure data centres:

"It is a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux"

Apparently, the existing SDN (Software Defined Network) implementations didn't fit on Microsoft's plans for the ACS (Azure Cloud Switch), so they decided to roll their own infrastructure. No explanation why they settled on Linux, though — could it be that there is no windows variant that would fit the bill?

In other news, Lucifer has been heard complaining of the sudden cold.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Aboard an enclosed recumbent bicycle in Nevada today, Canadian Todd Reichart has claimed the world record for human powered speed. The annual World Human Powered Speed Challenge draws cyclists from around the world seeking to push the limits of pedal-powered motion, but it was the 33-year-old who left the competition in his wake to clock a top speed of 85.71 mph (137.9 km/h).
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The pilot sits in the recumbent position, with their legs out in front of them, in an enclosed capsule crafted with aerodynamics as a driving principle. Using a camera mounted to the top of the vehicle and a video monitor to see ahead, Eta was expected to offer around a one percent improvement on performance compared to its predecessor, according to the team's computer simulations.

Pretty cool, but their human-powered ornithopter is possibly cooler.

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