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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Have a Vizio smart TV? You'll probably want to read this article over at net-security.org then:

Owners of Smart TVs manufactured by California-based consumer electronics company Vizio should be aware that their viewing habits are being tracked and that information sold to third parties ("partners").

And, what's more, with a recent change of the company's privacy policy, the company has started providing this data to companies that "may combine this information with other information about devices associated with that IP address."

"Beginning October 31, 2015, VIZIO will use Viewing Data together with your IP address and other Non-Personal Information in order to inform third party selection and delivery of targeted and re-targeted advertisements. These advertisements may be delivered to smartphones, tablets, PCs or other internet-connected devices that share an IP address or other identifier with your Smart TV," the privacy policy says.

Vizio's competitors Samsung and LG Electronics can also track users' viewing habits via their smart TV offerings, ProPublica's Julia Angwin pointed out, but the feature has to be explicitly turned on by the users.

Yep, glad I do all my TV watching on a computer monitor.

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HughPickens.com writes:

Alana Semuels writes in The Atlantic that Millennials want the chance to be alone in their own bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, but they also want to be social and never lonely.That's why real estate developer Troy Evans is starting construction on a new space in Syracuse called Commonspace that he envisions as a dorm for Millennials that will feature 21 microunits, each packed with a tiny kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and living space into 300-square-feet. The microunits surround shared common areas including a chef's kitchen, a game room, and a TV room. "We're trying to combine an affordable apartment with this community style of living, rather than living by yourself in a one-bedroom in the suburbs," says Evans. The apartments will be fully furnished to appeal to potential residents who don't own much (the units will have very limited storage space). The bedrooms are built into the big windows of the office building—one window per unit—and the rest of the apartment can be traversed in three big leaps. The units will cost between $700 and $900 a month. "If your normal rent is $1,500, we're coming in way under that," says John Talarico. "You can spend that money elsewhere, living, not just sustaining."

Co-living has also gained traction in a Brooklyn apartment building that creates a networking and social community for its residents and where prospective residents answer probing questions like "What are your passions?" and "Tell us your story (Excite us!)." If accepted, tenants live in what the company's promotional materials describe as a "highly curated community of like-minded individuals." Millennials are staying single longer than previous generations have, creating a glut of people still living on their own in apartments, rather than marrying and buying homes. But the generation is also notoriously social, having been raised on the Internet and the constant communication it provides. This is a generation that has grown accustomed to college campuses with climbing walls, infinity pools, and of course, their own bathrooms. Commonspace gives these Milliennials the benefits of living with roommates—they can save money and stay up late watching Gilmore Girls—with the privacy and style an entitled generation might expect. "It's the best of both worlds," says Michelle Kingman. "You have roommates, but they're not roommates."

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports:

Hoping to expand the pool of Let's Encrypt testers, TrueCrypt audit project co-founder Kenneth White has run up a set of scripts to automate the process of installing certificates under the Mozilla-backed open CA.

White, co-director of the Open Crypto Audit Project, has posted the work at Github, here. He explains that the project is quite simple, consisting of Python scripts to "stand up the official Let's Encrypt certificate management ACME client tool" in the target environments.

These include Debian, Amazon's Linux (for AWS), CentOS, RedHat, and FreeBSD.

[...]White says [...] the official client "can be fragile and error-prone on some systems".

Having had to batter his own head against the client, White [...] says he cleaned up the process in his scripts to make Let's Encrypt more accessible to other users.

He warns against running either the Let's Encrypt client or his scripts in production systems:

"LE is still in beta and has some rough edges", White notes, "including silently invoking sudo and installing quite a few development packages".

Previous: The "Let's Encrypt" Project Generates Root and Intermediate Certificates
Let's Encrypt Has Issued Its First Gratis SSL/TLS Certificate

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Phoenix666 writes:

Today in Tokyo, Toyota announced that it is investing US $1 billion over the next five years to establish a new R&D arm headquartered in Silicon Valley and focused on artificial intelligence and robotics. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) plans to hire hundreds of engineers to staff a main facility in Palo Alto, Calif., near Stanford University, and a second facility located near MIT in Cambridge, Mass.

Former DARPA program manager Dr. Gill Pratt, an executive technical advisor at Toyota, was named CEO of TRI, which will begin operations in January. Toyota president Akio Toyoda said in a press conference that the company pursues innovation and new technologies "to make life better for our customers and society as a whole," adding that he wanted to "work with Gill not just because he's an amazing researcher and engineer, but because I believe his goals and motivations are the same as ours."

West Coast Soylentils, time to burnish those resumes.

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HughPickens.com writes:

If there's one thing politicians of all stripes can agree on, it's this: The immigration system is broken. What's less obvious is the extent to which that's physically true. An online system that was supposed to automate the processing of green cards and other immigration benefits has struggled to function properly since at least 2009. Now Jerry Markon writes at the Washington Post that, the US government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated paper approach to managing immigration and a decade into the project, all that officials have to show for their effort is a single form that's now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper. The project called ELIS, run by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it's now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation's immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats. "You're going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we're still a paper-based agency,'' says Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. "It's a huge albatross around our necks.''

Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency. When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. "There was virtually no oversight back then,'' says a former federal official. "DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions." "The biggest problem is that the holes that were in the system that allowed the terrorists to come in—for 9/11, the Times Square bomber, all of those people—came through USCIS" and the flaws in the system remain, says a USCIS manager who departed within the past year and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation that could affect future employment. "They don't have any real-time validation of any of the documents" from banks and higher education schools. The long-delayed website has burned through more than a billion dollars, mainly from refugees, asylum seekers and other foreigners who fund the system through application fees. It now faces an influx of more than 5 million petitioners under Obama's executive actions on immigration—if ELIS ever becomes capable of handling the relevant forms.

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MikeRo writes:

Jim Balsillie of BlackBerry fame has come out against the TPP.

From the CBC article:

Jim Balsillie warns that provisions tucked into the Trans-Pacific Partnership could cost Canada hundreds of billions of dollars — and eventually make signing it the worst public policy decision in the country's history.

After poring over the treaty's final text, the businessman who helped build Research In Motion into a $20-billion global player said the deal contains "troubling" rules on intellectual property that threaten to make Canada a "permanent underclass" in the economy of selling ideas.

...

And unlike legislation passed in Parliament, he noted treaties like this one set rules that must be followed forever. This deal, he added, also features "iron-clad" dispute mechanisms.

"I'm worried and I don't know how we can get out of this," said Balsillie, who's also helping guide the creation of a lobby group that would press for the needs of Canada's innovation sector.

"I think our trade negotiators have profoundly failed Canadians and our future innovators. I really lament it."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

When a material, typically a liquid, is confined by surfaces that it doesn't like, the material can be expelled from the confining region in a process called "dewetting."

University of Pennsylvania researchers have now discovered a new facet of this "dewetting" process, showing it is easier to initiate than previously believed. Using computer modeling, they showed how variations in the density of water molecules that are confined between two hydrophobic surfaces, can speed along this process.

Better understanding of dewetting would be helpful in both controlling it and promoting it. On one hand, dewetting decreases the stability of thin films, such as the ones found in smartphone displays. On the other, dewetting is crucial to the function of the water-repelling superhydrophobic surfaces. Dewetting is also implicated in the initiation of boiling. The first places where bubbles appear in a boiling pot of water have to do with dewetting at certain surface sites.
...
Visualizing their simulations revealed a new phenomenon: In the initial stages of dewetting, stable bubbles of vapor to form near one surface, rather than span both surfaces.

"As these voids grow, it's possible for them to reach across the surface and make a tube," Patel said. "But, by that point, the vapor tube is already bigger than the critical size predicted by the previous theory and also requires less energy to form. As a result, it's easier to induce dewetting through this new pathway than by starting with a vapor tube and growing it."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Massachusetts-based startup called C2Sense, using research conducted at MIT, has created what they call "disruptive gas sensing technologies" that will be used to sniff out rotting food, Wired reports.

Early detection of spoilage is critical to keeping other foods in a container from going bad. Take fruit for instance: as a piece of fruit ripens, it releases a gas called ethylene, which accelerates the ripening of nearby fruits, prompting them to release even more ethylene, quickly spoiling, as the saying goes, the whole barrel.
...
Shnorr says his company hopes to make sensor chips cheap enough to be built into food packaging that could be scanned with smartphones, which would provide users with a "freshness reading."

Noses are passe.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Tufts researchers have pioneered a new way to study the properties of cells at unprecedented resolutions and speed, allowing them to examine more precisely, for example, the differences between cancer cells and healthy ones. The technique could lead to faster and more accurate diagnostic tests for a range of diseases or even offer insight into how we grow old.

Using a combination of existing spectroscopy technologies, Igor Sokolov, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering, and postdoctoral researcher Maxim Dokukin generated mechanical data from tissues and other kinds of "soft" biological materials at resolutions as much as 100 times better than current methods. The research was published this summer in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal put out by the group that produces the journal Nature. The work was funded mostly by the National Science Foundation.

Sokolov likens the advancement of the new technique to the difference between the optical microscope, invented in the 16th century, and the scanning electron microscope, developed in 1931. With an optical scope, you can see objects roughly the size of a large virus, about 200 to 300 nanometers. Scanning electron microscopes, by contrast, can image objects as small as 1 to 20 nanometers, about the size of the large molecules in DNA. But they aren't useful with organic materials, Sokolov says.

The device Sokolov's team has invented—which they call FT-nanoDMA, because it employs Fourier transform spectroscopy (FT) and dynamic mechanical spectroscopy (DMA) down to the nanoscale (nano)—can accurately gather information about soft materials down to 10-50 nanometers.

And it can do that quickly, taking less than one second per surface point to relay back properties of a 100-by-100-pixel area in just a few hours' time. That's compared with the 23 days the competing existing technologies require. The new technique can also do something that others cannot—study dynamic mechanical properties of individual cells. It's at this scale "where new things typically happen," says Sokolov.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Last year, Germany produced 161 billion kWh from renewable sources, or about 27% of electricity consumption. This year, thanks to rapid growth in solar and wind power, the country is on track to produce 193 billion kWh from renewable sources, or about 33% of total electricity consumption. That's grow of about 22% in just a year!

Though this is a preliminary estimate, on 31 October 2015 wind energy had already supplied 47% more electricity (63 billion kWh) that during the same time period in 2014.

        Though the late autumn weather tends to be unpredictable, Germany's solar sector has already provided as much electricity during that 10 month period (35 billion kWh) as the whole of 2014.

Energy independence has real geopolitical implications for Germany vis-a-vis Russia.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A new study out of Sweden says the tiny country is on course to become the world's first "cashless society," thanks in part to a mobile payment app called Swish.

The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm released a statement in October quoting researcher Niklas Arvidsson, who said cash is an important means of payment in many countries, "... but that no longer applies here in Sweden."

Arvidsson and his team of researchers said there are about 80 billion Swedish crowns in regular circulation, down from 106 billion six years ago. "And out of that amount, only somewhere between 40 and 60 percent is actually in regular circulation. ... Our use of cash is small, and it is decreasing rapidly."

Swish has more than 3.5 million users (of Sweden's total population of 9.5 million) and nearly 4.5 billion Swedish crowns were "Swished" in October.

Original Submission

jasassin writes:

Phoronix reports the systemd developers are having their first conference. Here is a direct link to the YouTube video channel.

Whether you love systemd or hate it, it looks like it's not going away. If you dislike it maybe one of these videos might change your mind.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A spate of shipwrecks recently found near a group of Greek islands has given researchers new insights into how trade routes and sailing technology evolved in the Eastern Mediterranean. And with more exploration planned, additional discoveries are still likely.

Over a stretch of two weeks in September, tips from local fishermen and sponge divers led a team of Greek and American archaeologists to the precise locations of 22 shipwrecks in a 17-square-mile area around the Fourni archipelago in the eastern Aegean.
...
The earliest wreck dates to the Archaic Period (700-480 B.C.), while the most recent is from the Late Medieval Period (16th century A.D.). Ships from the Classical Period (480-323 B.C.) and the Hellenistic Period (323-31 B.C.) were also found, though a majority—12 of the 22—sailed and sank at some point during the Late Roman Period (300-600 A.D.)

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Flashing lights pierced the black of night, and the big white letters made clear it was the police. The woman pulled over was a daycare worker in her 50s headed home after playing dominoes with friends. She felt she had nothing to hide, so when the Oklahoma City officer accused her of erratic driving, she did as directed.

She would later tell a judge she was splayed outside the patrol car for a pat-down, made to lift her shirt to prove she wasn't hiding anything, then to pull down her pants when the officer still wasn't convinced. He shined his flashlight between her legs, she said, then ordered her to sit in the squad car and face him as he towered above. His gun in sight, she said she pleaded "No, sir" as he unzipped his fly and exposed himself with a hurried directive.

"Come on," the woman, identified in police reports as J.L., said she was told before she began giving him oral sex. "I don't have all night."

The accusations are undoubtedly jolting, and yet they reflect a betrayal of the badge that has been repeated time and again across the country.
_________________

"It's happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country," said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them."

Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities — they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.

In interviews, lawyers and even police chiefs told the AP that some departments also stay quiet about improprieties to limit liability, allowing bad officers to quietly resign, keep their certification and sometimes jump to other jobs.
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[More After the Break]

Phoenix666 writes:

The cable box, a crucial part of home theaters for decades, might be on the way out. Casual TV watchers say it's easier to find something to watch through online services such as Netflix and Hulu than it is to flip through hundreds of channels in hopes of finding something interesting. Other viewers complain that the boxes are poorly programmed and difficult to use. Even Congress doesn't particularly like the cable box: Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently decried the high cost most customers pay to rent one from their provider.

Cable companies are of two minds about this trend. Some, such as Comcast, are trying to find ways to make cable boxes better. Instead of ugly units with clumsy remote controls, they're scrambling to produce sleeker boxes loaded with software that makes it easier to get straight to TV shows and movies.

Are the cable companies missing the forest for the trees?

Original Submission