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Phoenix666 writes:

If one is going to get into the asteroid mining business, one needs to prove that you can do something with what's brought back. That seems to be the thinking behind Planetary Resources' presentation today at CES in Las Vegas, where the asteroid mining company unveiled the first object 3D printed using extraterrestrial materials.

Made in collaboration with 3D Systems, the nickel-iron sculpture represents a stylized, geometric spacecraft, such as might be used for asteroid mining or prospecting. Planetary Resources says it is representative of what could be printed in a weightless environment.

The sculpture was created using a fragment of a prehistoric meteorite that was pulverized and fed into a 3D Systems ProX DMP 320 3D metal printer. The powder consisting of nickel-iron with traces of cobalt similar to refinery-grade steel was spread out by the printer in thin layers and a laser beam guided by a 3D file fused the powder layer by layer into solid metal. When completed, the excess powder was removed to reveal the finished product.

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Phoenix666 writes:

When people are doing a physical task, it's easy to assess how hard they are working. You can see the physical movement, the sweat. You also see the result of their work: the brick wall rising, the hole in the ground getting bigger. Recognising and rewarding hard work is a pretty fundamental human instinct, it is one of the reasons we find endurance sports so fascinating. This instinctive appreciation of physical hard work is a problem when it comes to managing creative-technical employees. Effective knowledge workers often don't look like they are working very hard.

[...] I would submit that the appearance of hard work is often an indication of failure. Software development often isn't done well in a pressurised, interrupt driven, environment. It's often not a good idea to work long hours. Sometimes the best way of solving a difficult problem is to stop thinking about it, go for a walk, or even better, get a good night's sleep and let your subconscious solve it. One of my favourite books is A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy, one of the leading British mathematicians of the 20th century. In it he describes his daily routine: four hours work in the morning followed by an afternoon of watching cricket. He says that it's pointless and unproductive to do hard mental work for more than four hours a day.

To managers I would say, judge people by results, by working software, not by how hard they appear to be working. Counter intuitively, it may be better not to sit with your developers, you may get a better idea of their output unaffected by conventional/intuitive indicators. Remote working is especially beneficial; you will have to measure your employees by their output, rather than the lazier option of watching them sitting at their desks 8 hours a day thumping away at an IDE, or 'helpfully' crowding around each other's desks offering 'useful' suggestions.

Apparently from: Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy? which was originally published back in December of 2013. The entire article is well worth a read.

It does raise an interesting point of how to communicate to others, such as managers, how non-active periods may well be the most productive part of one's day. Have you run into this problem? How did you deal with it?

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"exec" writes:

An Anonymous Coward submitted (via exec on IRC):

Many of you have heard of the huge PowerBall jackpot that is still up for grabs.

For the optimists, ABC News reports Latest: No Powerball Winner, Jackpot May Reach $1.3 Billion:

No ticket matched all six Powerball numbers following Saturday night's drawing for a record jackpot of nearly $950 million, lottery officials said, boosting the expected payout for the next drawing to a whopping $1.3 billion.

The winning numbers — disclosed live on television and online — were 16-19-32-34-57 and the Powerball number 13. All six numbers must be correct to win, although the first five can be in any order. The odds to win the largest lottery prize in U.S. history were one in 292.2 million.

Officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game, said they expected about 75 percent of the possible number combinations would have been bought for Saturday night's drawing.

Since Nov. 4, the Powerball jackpot has grown from its $40 million starting point as no one has won the jackpot. Such a huge jackpot was just what officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game, hoped for last fall when they changed the odds of matching all the Powerball numbers, from about one in 175 million to one in 292.2 million. By making it harder to win a jackpot, the tougher odds made the ever-larger prizes inevitable.

CNN's Money offers a less exuberant assessment: Powerball's big bait and switch:

[Continues...]

CoolHand writes:

http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/medicine-health/using-skin-to-save-the-heart.html

Following a heart attack or other heart trauma, the heart is unable to replace its dead cells. Patients are often left with little option other than heart transplants, which are rarely available, or more recently cell therapies that transplant heart cells into the patient's heart.

In far too many cases, however, the transplanted heart cells do not engraft well, resulting in poor recovery.

[...] Under the direction of Senior Lecturer Yoshinori Yoshida, Funakoshi took induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that were reprogrammed from skin cells and made them into heart cells. Heart cells differentiated from iPS cells effectively go through all stages of development.

"Heart cells at different stages could behave very differently," said Fukakoshi. He therefore prepared heart cells of different maturation and transplanted them into damaged hearts of living mice. Hearts that received cells differentiated for 20 days showed much better engraftment than those that received cells differentiated for more or less, suggesting there exists an optimal maturation stage for cell therapies. However, Funakoshi cautions which day for human patients cannot be determined from this study. "We need to test animals bigger than mice," he said.

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takyon writes:

Top law enforcement officials and Silicon Valley leaders, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, met on Friday to discuss topics related to support for terrorism on social media, as well as encryption:

Media were not invited to the Silicon Valley meeting. NPR talked with spokespeople from several companies who were attending, and got a copy of the email invite. It's a powerhouse list: White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

Apple CEO Tim Cook was there. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo were among the other companies that confirmed attendance.

The word "encryption" is mentioned in the invite. But companies who'd be very relevant to that conversation, like Cisco, were not invited. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said encryption was likely to come up at the meeting, but he described it as a "thornier" issue.

[...] A spokesperson from one company at the meeting, who didn't want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issues involved, said it's almost as if the administration wants a Madison Avenue ad campaign, only coming from tech geeks. Another criticized the event as a "bait and switch." Companies were told, more or less: "Hey, the government wants to brainstorm with the very best engineers about how technology can help fight terrorism," the second source said. It was similar in tone to the White House's call for tech support after the massive failure of Healthcare.gov.

But as the planning for Friday's meeting evolved, so did the tone. And in the 11th hour, companies fought to bring their lawyers, because it's clearly not just a technical conversation.

[More After the Break]

xpda writes:

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.

On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information. Or, as is popular worldwide with these malware "exploit kits," lock up their hard drives in exchange for Bitcoin ransom. The exploit used was a version of hackenfreude.

Forbes has recently taken some flack from Soylent News readers for its heavy-handed approach to ad blockers.

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Phoenix666 writes:

One of the holiday's hottest presents is now considered contraband at many U.S. colleges.

More than 30 universities have banned or restricted hoverboards on their campuses in recent weeks, saying the two-wheeled, motorized scooters are unsafe. Beyond the risk of falls and collisions, colleges are citing warnings from federal authorities that some of the self-balancing gadgets have caught on fire.

"It's clear that these things are potentially dangerous," said Len Dolan, managing director of fire safety at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. The public school of 14,000 students issued a campus-wide ban effective on Monday, telling students in an email that any hoverboards found on campus would be confiscated.

"These things are just catching fire without warning, and we don't want that in any of our dorms," Dolan said.

Outright bans also have been issued at schools such as American University and George Washington University, both in Washington, D.C. Other schools said they will forbid the scooters in dorm rooms or campus buildings, a policy adopted at colleges including Louisiana State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Arkansas.

Other electronic devices that have caught fire and not been banned include laptops, e-cigarettes, and iPhones...

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requerdanos writes:

Although many U.S. presidential candidates are discussing "aliens," the Daily Mail has a story about a candidate talking about aliens from potentially much farther away. According to the Daily Mail, Hillary Clinton has made a campaign promise to 'get to the bottom' of Area 51 if she should be elected President of the United States of America. Specifically, Clinton said that she would reveal the UFO truth:

"one way or another. Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51."

"I think we may have been [visited already]. We don't know for sure."

The Daily Mail story is based on the report of an interview with the candidate published in the Conway Daily Sun newspaper of Conway, New Hampshire.

Do the contributors here think that extraterrestrials are a promising and important campaign topic? Or is there skepticism?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Remember when the FBI announced they were investigating the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team following an "attack" on the internal networks of the Houston Astros? Now a former St. Louis director has pleaded guilty to five counts related to multiple breaches:

A former St. Louis Cardinals director for baseball development, Chris Correa, pleaded guilty to five counts of unauthorized access to protected information on the Houston Astros, including scouting and injury reports, trade discussions and draft rankings.

According to the Department of Justice, Correa, 35, admitted that from March 2013 through at least March 2014, when he was in charge of scouting for the Cardinals, he illicitly accessed the Astros' online database, called Ground Control, as well as email accounts of people in the Astros organization to obtain proprietary data.

Each count carries a maximum possible sentence of five years in federal prison and a possible $250,000 fine.

A Justice Department statement said:

"In one instance, Correa was able to obtain an Astros employee's password because that employee has previously been employed by the Cardinals. When he left the Cardinals organization, the employee had to turn over his Cardinals-owned laptop to Correa along with the laptop's password. Having that information, Correa was able to access the now-Astros employee's Ground Control and e-mail accounts using a variation of the password he used while with the Cardinals."

[...] "Unauthorized computer intrusion is not to be taken lightly," U.S. attorney Kenneth Magidson said in the DOJ statement. "Whether it's preserving the sanctity of America's pastime or protecting trade secrets, those that unlawfully gain proprietary information by accessing computers without authorization must be held accountable for their illegal actions."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Highsnobiety reports Ehang 184: Human-Sized Drone

At Las Vegas' Consumer Electronics Show 2016, Guangzhou-based company Ehang unveiled the world's first self-flying aircraft prototype--or rather, a passenger drone. The Ehang 184 adopts similarities of a quadcopter drone, but this design has a small cockpit that can carry a single passenger.

After setting off on over 100 test flights, the pilotless vehicle has been designed to fly quite low, at altitudes of between 300 [and] 500 meters--with Ehang claiming it can reach up to 3500 meters. With a maximum speed of 63mph, the self-flying creation lets [each user] choose [his] route and destination via tablet.

Once [...] the take off [and] landing options [are specified and the vehicle is airborne], the [passenger] cannot issue any further directions--meaning the rest is left up to the drone's control base. It does seem a little scary giving up total control, but Ehang promise their device is quite safe, reassuring us that if one of its four rotors fail, there are three remaining rotors.

This much needed safety precaution will allow the aircraft to descend into a bumpy emergency landing. While there are flight restrictions in the UK/US that could limit the use of passenger drones, Ehang are working hard to get the prototype ready for the skies for when that might be a reality.

EV World's coverage has 2 nice photos including one of the thing all folded up.

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/new-https-bicycle-attack-reveals-details-about-passwords-gps-coordinates-498488.shtml

Mr. Vranken's HTTPS Bicycle Attack is completely undetectable and can also be used retroactively on HTTPS traffic logged many years before.

For an HTTPS Bicycle Attack to be successful, a few prerequisites need to be satisfied. First the HTTPS traffic must use a stream-based cipher, and then the attacker must know the length of the rest of the data before being able to extract details about specific parts of the HTTPS packets.

When all of these conditions are met, carrying out an HTTPS Bicycle Attack is easy. From an attacker's point of view, all he needs to do is to capture HTTPS packets from a user authentication operation.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/new-sloth-attack-can-reduce-the-security-of-tls-and-ssh-protocols-498575.shtml

Named SLOTH, or Security Losses from Obsolete and Truncated Transcript Hashes, this attack's name is a slap in the face for all the infosec dum-dums that have allowed all these years the weaker MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms to underpin some of the world's top security protocols.

In their research paper, the two researchers, Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent, present a new transcript collision attack that targeted the parts of the aforementioned security protocols where MD5 was used.

In their tests, the two were able to slice down a server's security signature from 128-bit to 64-bit. All of this was done in three hours on a 48-core workstation, but on a second try, after optimizing their calculations, the researchers managed to cut down the time to one hour.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

Rebecca Rosen has an interesting essay at The Atlantic on economist John Maynard Keynes' prediction in 1930 that with increased productivity, over the next 100 years the economy would become so productive that people would barely need to work at all. For a while, it looked like Keynes was right: In 1930 the average workweek was 47 hours. By 1970 it had fallen to slightly less than 39. But then something changed. Instead of continuing to decline, the duration of the workweek stayed put; it's hovered just below 40 hours for nearly five decades. According to Rosen there would be no mystery in this if Keynes had been wrong about the economy's increasing productivity, which he thought would lead to a standard of living "between four and eight times as high as it is today." Keynes got that right: Technology has made the economy massively more productive.

Now a new paper by Benjamin Friedman says that "the U.S. economy is right on track to reach Keynes's eight-fold multiple" by 2029—100 years after the last data Keynes would have had. But according to Friedman, the key reason that Keynes prediction failed to come true is that Keynes failed to allow for the changing distribution of wealth. With widening inequality, median income (and therefore the income of most families) has risen, and is now rising, much more slowly than Keynes anticipated. The failure of the workweek to shrink as he predicted follows. Although Keynes's eight-fold figure holds up for the economy in aggregate, it's not at all the case for the median American worker. For them, output by 2029 is likely to be around 3.5 times what it was when Keynes was writing—a bit below his four- to-eight-fold predicted range. "What Keynes foretold was a very optimistic version of what economists call technological unemployment—the idea that less labor will be necessary because machines can do so much," writes Rosen. "The prosperity Keynes predicted is here. After all, the economy as a whole has grown even more brilliantly than he expected. But for most Americans, that prosperity is nowhere to be seen—and, as a result, neither are those shorter workweeks."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A meteorite older than the Earth that researchers discovered embedded in the crust of a dried lake in southern Australia could help us understand more about the origins of the solar system.

The 1.7-kilogram meteorite was found by a team of geologists and researchers from Perth's Curtin University, after a painstaking search that was conducted just hours before heavy rainfall which would have destroyed all visible traces of the meteorite's landing.

Five remote cameras located around the dried bed of Lake Eyre, which are designed to detect falling meteorites, spotted the object as it came down to Earth, ABC reported.

Space agencies around the world have been launching expensive missions to land probes on asteroids to gather information about the early solar system, so potentially getting the same class of info from the meteorite is a key find.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

If you're using a PC running Windows 7 or 8, you may be getting a little sick of endless popup screens telling you to upgrade to version 10. And you may be worried about inadvertently installing the upgrade as part of a security update.

Microsoft will start pushing out a Windows 10 upgrade as a recommended, virtually mandatory, update very soon (it's right now only an optional download). Some people are tempted to turn off Windows Update completely to avoid getting the new operating system – don't. It'll leave your computer vulnerable to attack as you'll no longer get security patches.

It's actually rather easy to turn off the Windows 10 upgrade function without losing vital regular software updates. Microsoft even has an official document [*] explaining how to do it.

[...] Make sure you follow all the steps, but essentially you have to:

        1. Open the Registry Editor (search for regedit in the Start Menu and run it).
        2. Set [DWORD value] DisableOSUpgrade to 1 in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
        3. Set [DWORD value] ReservationsAllowed to 0 in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade

Or, the obligatory recommendation to run FOSS instead.

[*] Javascript required.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A new construction worker has been lending high-efficiency help to job sites, laying bricks at almost three times the speed of a human worker. SAM (short for Semi-Automated Mason) is a robotic bricklayer that handles the repetitive tasks of basic brick laying, MIT Technology Review reports. While SAM handles picking up bricks, applying mortar and placing them at designated locations, its human partner handles worksite setup, laying bricks in specific areas (e.g. corners) and improving the aesthetic quality of the masonry.

Despite its role in completing repetitive tasks, SAM can adapt to real jobsite conditions, including differentiating between theoretical drawings and the conditions of the actual building site. It is also capable of minor detailing, such as emblazoning a logo by following a pixel map of the image, and adding texture to the wall face by bumping bricks by half an inch.

The next robot like this should use the acronym LUDD.

Original Submission