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takyon writes:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control announced on Monday that they are investigating a multi-state salmonella outbreak linked to alfalfa sprouts produced by Sweetwater Farms LLC. However, foodborne illness outbreaks linked to sprouts (such as alfalfa, mung bean, red clover or radish) are common:

For something many deem a "health food," sprouts regularly appear on official outbreak lists. Since 1998 there have been at least 49 foodborne outbreaks, including 24 multi-state outbreaks and 1,737 illnesses tied to sprouts, according to a tally kept by Colorado State University.

Sandwich chain Jimmy John's experienced multiple outbreaks linked to sprouts in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012. Sprouts are still on the menu, but place your order online, and a less than appetizing warning pops up: "The consumption of raw sprouts may result in an increased risk of foodborne illness and poses a health risk to everyone. Click 'Yes' if you understand the potential risks, or 'Cancel' if you'd like to continue without adding sprouts."

Jimmy John's may feel comfortable behind their warning label, but offering sprouts is a risk that Kroger and Wal-Mart no longer take — both grocery retailers have deemed sprouts too dangerous to sell. In announcing its decision in 2012, Kroger said it was based on a "thorough, science-based" review.

Sprout seeds need warmth and humidity to grow — which also happen to be ideal conditions for pathogens to flourish. Because of the number of outbreaks associated with sprouts, the FDA developed special requirements (pdf) for sprout growers within the Food Modernization and Safety Act that is just going into effect. A few years ago, the agency also helped launch the Sprout Safety Alliance, with the Institute for Food Safety and Health at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Sprouting at Wikipedia.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), has been blocked from reading printouts of EFF blog posts sent by a supporter, supposedly on "copyright" (among other) grounds:

EFF was dismayed to learn last week that the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Fort Leavenworth has refused to provide inmate Chelsea Manning with printouts of EFF blog posts and other materials related to prisoner censorship. Worse yet, it appears that the reason is ostensibly to protect EFF's copyrights.

Manning is serving a 35-year sentence for her role in the release of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. A volunteer from her support network attempted to send her a series of articles EFF wrote last year about our work defending the rights of inmates to maintain an online presence. This included articles about severe punishments leveled at inmates with Facebook profiles and our views on how prison telecommunications systems should be regulated. Also attached were relevant public records from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, EFF's comments to the Federal Communications Commission, and articles from Buzzfeed and the Harvard Business Review.

Manning was only allowed to have the Bureau of Prisons documents—an agency handbook and slide show on Facebook takedowns—but everything else was withheld. Instead, Manning received a notification that said the mail was rejected because it contained "printed Internet materials, including email, of a volume exceeding five pages per day or the distribution of which may violate U.S. copyright laws."

[...] EFF quickly sent USDB a letter explaining that all EFF content is available for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution license[*] that allows for the material to be freely shared and remixed. The Creative Commons license is indicated, and the full policy linked, at the bottom of every page of our website. As the copyright holder, we asked the prison to provide Manning with the documents immediately and not to block any further EFF material from the facility. We further pointed out that our comments to the FCC were also public records, not simply information printed out from the Internet.

[*] Creative Commons Attribution license

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Register reports

[Google] said that it has signed on to be the ISP for a handful of apartments and condos where fiber lines have already been laid. The move will likely limit the reach of Fiber service in San Francisco early on.

Google said (alternate Javascript-free link) the Fiber service will also be running to some affordable housing projects where the service will be offered free of charge.

Despite being a major tech hub, San Francisco itself presents a challenge for companies who would run fiber lines in the hilly terrain, unique architecture, and densely-packed clusters of houses and apartments in many of the city's neighborhoods, where ripping up copper wiring and installing new lines can be a painful and costly endeavor.

[...] [Area residents] can check if their apartment or condo is wired for Fiber on Google's website, and property owners can check for the specifications needed to run the service.

This use-what's-already-there approach is what Google announced some days ago for Huntsville, Alabama in contrast to the difficulties and public relations headache they have experienced with excavation in Austin, Texas.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Electronics maker Sharp has accepted a $6.25 billion (700 billion Japanese yen) takeover bid from Foxconn, although the deal is now on hold. The $6.25 billion figure includes liabilities:

Ailing electronics maker Sharp has accepted a takeover bid from Foxconn, the company that assembles iPhones. After the deal was announced, Sharp's stock fell more than 14 percent. And Foxconn now says it will postpone finalizing the sale due to late-arriving information.

Thursday night local time, Foxconn issued a statement in Taiwan saying that it will now delay signing the deal, because of a document that Sharp shared with it on Wednesday, according to Focus Taiwan News, which adds that the sale was previously planned to be finalized by the end of this month.

[...] The Japan Times says the proposed deal would mean the loss of one of the country's crown jewels, calling it "the largest-ever acquisition of a Japanese electronics maker by a foreign company."

[cont..]

Apple Asks Court to Vacate Order to Unlock iPhone

mendax writes:

The New York Times is reporting that:

Apple on Thursday filed its formal opposition to the federal court order requiring it to help law enforcement officials break into an iPhone, setting the stage for more legal wrangling in a case that has pitted the world's most valuable company against the United States government.

No surprise there. But what's interesting about its filing is the reasoning used:

Apple added that the order had broad implications that would "inflict significant harm — to civil liberties, society and national security — and would preempt decisions that should be left to the will of the people through laws passed by Congress and signed by the president." The company said the court order not only was at odds with existing law, but also violated the company's First and Fifth Amendment rights. [emphasis added]

National security? I wonder what their argument is...

Here is Apple's Motion to Vacate (pdf) (alt source (pdf)).

[Continues.]

HughPickens.com writes:

Kevin Quealy writes in The New York Times that the two remaining mainstream candidates for the GOP Presidential nomination — Marco Rubio and John Kasich — are living out an issue studied for decades in game theory. Game theorists might call the GOP predicament an anti-coordination game or a volunteer's dilemma but most of us might call it by a more familiar name: chicken. Although Rubio is the obvious establishment favorite, the two are splitting some votes. so to have his best chance against Trump and Cruz, Rubio needs Kasich to drop out. The longer both candidates remain in the race, the worse it is for both of them.

Kasich's first option is to stay in the race but he could go further, by committing to stay in no matter what. In a classic game of chicken between two drivers rushing headlong toward each other, this strategy is like removing your steering wheel, leaving you no choice but to drive straight toward your opponent. Kasich could hope for another robotic debate performance from Rubio or even an implosion from the Trump or Cruz campaigns.

Kasich's second strategy would be to cut a deal with Rubio (pdf) — offer to drop out, for example — in exchange for the second spot on a Rubio ticket or a cabinet post.

Kasich's third strategy would be to threaten to support a different candidate, like Trump or Cruz. If the threat had the potential to damage Rubio enough, it could be a useful bargaining chip. "Being crazy is a strategy, but only if your opponent actually believes it," says Richard Thaler.

Part of the problem is that this is a game that's played just once. "The chance to be your party's nominee for president comes along only every four or eight years, even for the very luckiest candidates," says Quealy. "If the candidates lived in a universe in which they could run for president hundreds of times, they might agree that, on average, their shared interests were better served by cooperating." But this is not an iterated dilemma. It's a one-time-only dilemma with a tremendous payoff for the winner. Ultimately, both Kasich and Rubio risk an outcome neither wants. But as Daniel Diermeier, the dean of the public policy school at the University of Chicago, notes, "A very important lesson of game theory is that sometimes the world is a grim place."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

President Obama has nominated a new Librarian of Congress:

President Obama has nominated Carla D. Hayden as the next librarian of Congress. If confirmed, she would be the first woman and first African-American ever to lead the world's largest library. Hayden is currently CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

In a White House statement, Obama says he and the first lady have known Hayden since she was at the Chicago Public Library, where she was deputy commissioner and chief librarian from 1991-1993. "Dr. Hayden has devoted her career to modernizing libraries so that everyone can participate in today's digital culture," Obama says. "She has the proven experience, dedication, and deep knowledge of our nation's libraries to serve our country well and that's why I look forward to working with her in the months ahead. If confirmed, Dr. Hayden would be the first woman and the first African American to hold the position — both of which are long overdue."

In a video on the White House website, Hayden talks about keeping the Enoch Pratt Library open during the recent unrest in Baltimore. "It was very evident that people needed, not only information, but a safe place and a trusted place to go," Hayden says. "We became a site for people to actually get food, to get supplies. We opened up our meeting room. It became that community meeting place. People were so relieved to have a safe place to be."

Hayden would replace James H. Billington, who served as the nation's librarian for 28 years. During his tenure, the Government Accountability Office issued a report criticizing library leadership for numerous IT infrastructure problems.

Previously:
What Do We Want From the Next Librarian of Congress?
Why Silicon Valley Cares So Much About Who Will Lead the Library of Congress

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly recently interviewed CIA Director John Brennan. Here are some highlights:

On the FBI/Apple dispute over the San Bernardino iPhone:

BRENNAN: What would people say if a bank had a safe-deposit box, or a storage company had a storage bin, that individuals could use and access and store things, but the government was not going to be able to have any access to those environments? And so criminals, terrorists, whatever, could use it. So what is it about electronic communications that makes it unique in terms of it not being allowed to be accessed by the government when, again, the law, the courts, say that the government should have access to it? So these are things that need to be worked through.

[...] On whether the CIA is arming and training opposition forces in Syria:

BRENNAN: I'm not going to talk about anything that the CIA might be doing in that area. But the U.S. government has made it very clear that it supports the opposition, moderate opposition inside of Syria. ... There are a lot of various means of providing support to the opposition. And given that the opposition is a patchwork of moderates, as well as extremists, as well as terrorists, there is a need to make sure that any type of support that comes from the outside, whether it be from the United States or other countries, is going to support those moderate elements within the opposition, and not the extremists and terrorists.

On Russian President Vladimir Putin's ambitions:

BRENNAN: I think he has found that he's in a bit of a quandary now inside of Ukraine, in terms of realizing his objectives. Now in Syria, he's had a relationship with the — Russia has had a relationship with the government in Damascus for the past 50 years, has invested a lot of money, and a lot of military support. ... Mr. Putin is very assertive, very aggressive. He pursues Moscow's agenda in a variety of means. He does it with his intelligence and security services when he wants to hide his hands, but also, he's doing it rather overtly right now, obviously, with the introduction of thousands of Russian military personnel and sophisticated weaponry inside of Syria.

Related:
C.I.A. Admits Penetrating Senate Intelligence Computers
CIA Chief: Terrorists Harder to Find, Because of Leaks, Reforms
Two Alleged Teen Hackers Cuffed: CIA Director Brennan Email Hacker, and French XMPP Server Operator

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A new enhancement has arrived for select users of Microsoft's free Windows 10 operating system. While the screen is locked, an offer for the popular game Rise of the Tomb Raider is displayed.

The free game posters may, for now, be disabled in the lock screen settings by turning off both Windows Spotlight and the option to "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen."

• Beta News
• PC World
• Apple Insider

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung has announced a 256 GB memory part based on the UFS 2.0 mobile standard, and it can reach faster sequential read speeds than commonplace SATA 3.0 (600 MB/s) SSDs:

Samsung announced the industry's first 256GB embedded memory based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard, which is meant to replace the eMMC standard. Samsung says that its new UFS 2.0 drive is faster even than some SATA-based SSDs for PCs.

[...] The new embedded storage module is based on Samsung's own V-NAND technology and comes with a "specially-designed high-performance controller." The latest UFS 2.0 memory supports up to 45,000 and 40,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reading and writing, respectively. That is twice as fast as the previous UFS generation that supported 19,000 and 14,000 IOPS for random read and write workloads.

Samsung's 256GB module achieves up to 850MB/s sequential read speed, which is twice as fast as many SATA SSDs. It also supports up to 256MB/s sequential write speed, which Samsung says is three times faster than what high-performance microSD cards can currently achieve.

[...] The new storage chip should be available in products by the end of the year.

UFS 2.0 parts could potentially reach even higher speeds:

While the new NAND definitely is part of the speed improvement, it couldn't have been achieved without an increase of the interface bandwidth. The new memory today is the first announced UFS 2.0 solution based on a 2-lane interface. The UFS 2.0 standard defines a lane running at up to HS Gear 3 at up to 600MB/s, so doubling up of the lanes gives a theoretical maximum of 1.2GB/s. It'll definitely be interesting to see what devices adopt this storage solution in the near future.

[Note: A comment on the AnandTech story claims "That's not true.Hynix announced half a year ago a HS G3x2 lane solution. And Toshiba must have announced their first one maybe a year before that." -Ed.]

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A team of quantum physicists at Aalto University led by Dr. Sorin Paraoanu managed to tame a so-called "dark state," created in a superconducting qubit. A superconducting qubit is an artificial atom fabricated on a silicon chip as an electrical circuit made of capacitors and tunnel junctions.

This technology is one of the most promising for the realization of quantum computers.

In the experiment, the circuit was operated in a regime where it no longer absorbs or emits electromagnetic waves of certain frequency, as if it would be hiding under an invisibility cloak -- hence the term "dark state." Then, by using a sequence of carefully-crafted microwave pulses, the team employed the dark state to realize a transfer of population from the ground energy level to the second energy level, without populating the first energy level. The amount of energy transferred in this process corresponds to a single microwave photon with about the same frequency as those in mobile phones or microwave ovens. This is verified by quantum tomography -- a technique of reconstructing the wave function (in general the density matrix) by applying rotations in an abstract qubit space followed by measurements.

[...] Besides the relevance for quantum computing, the result also has deep conceptual implications. Much of our understanding of the reality is based on the so-called continuity principle: the idea that influences propagate from here to there by going through all the places in-between. Real objects don't just appear somewhere from nothing. But the experiment seems to defy this. Like in a great show of magic, quantum physics allows things to materialize here and there, apparently out of nowhere.

Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a three-level superconducting circuit (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10628)

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Register reports

Residents of Austin, TX may be regretting the decision to bring Google Fiber to the city. The Austin American Statesman says that last year, 254 complaints were filed with the city over problems related to construction of the network.

The complaints include reports of landscape and property damage caused by crews tasked with laying cable for the Fiber network.

One such incident was an October flood which, residents say, was caused when contractors laying fiber cables blocked off storm drains. The resulting flood is said to have caused an estimated $760,000 in damages.

The Statesman report notes that other homeowners have complained of trespassing and blocked driveways.

[...] Not every city should expect to see construction to the extent of Austin, as some of the host cities (Provo and Huntsville, for example) are selling or leasing their existing (or planned) municipal fiber networks to Google.

In our previous coverage of Austin's upgrade, we linked to KXAN TV's report of messiness already associated with construction.
Google Fiber Signups in Austin to Begin in December

Google Fiber is a popular topic here — specifically how it is evoking competition from fat, lazy incumbent providers.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

On Friday, January 8, several high-level officials from the Obama administration—including the attorney general, the White House chief of staff, and the directors of the FBI and the NSA—met at a federal office in San Jose with senior executives from Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Apple (including CEO Tim Cook himself). On the agenda for the discussion, according to a one-page memo widely leaked to the press, was this question: "How can we make it harder for terrorists to [use] the Internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?"

For the previous month, since the ISIS-inspired shootings in San Bernardino, California, President Obama, as well as some of the candidates vying to succeed him, had been calling on Silicon Valley to join the government in this fight. As Hillary Clinton put it in a campaign speech, "We need to put 'the great disrupters' at work disrupting ISIS." In one of the Republican presidential debates, Donald Trump said he would ask "our brilliant people from Silicon Valley" to keep ISIS from using the Internet—a notion that reflected a misunderstanding of how the Internet works but also a widespread desperation for Silicon Valley to do something.

But what do Obama, Clinton, Trump, and the other politicians have in mind? How would the executives respond, and how should they respond? Many tech entrepreneurs—­libertarian in leanings and especially leery of open collusion with Washington since Edward Snowden's revelations—question whether government has any business putting private industry to work on such a venture, which could rub up against the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. And if some coöperative strategy could be mounted, quite apart from any philosophical considerations, would it have much effect ?

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600760/what-role-should-silicon-valley-play-in-fighting-terrorism/ (Javascript required.)

What do Soylentils think? Would you cooperate with the government and the TLAs?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Humans and dogs developed a special bond that goes back thousands of years. A critical part of this relationship is the high degree of shared inter-species communication. Dogs are one of the only known species who actively seek out eye contact with humans, and dogs are very good at interpreting emotion from visual cues. In a recent paper (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0907) published in Biology Papers , Smith et al., demonstrate that horses can also interpret human facial expressions. Their paper shows horses react differently to different facial expressions, and they also share the trait with humans and dogs of exhibiting left gaze bias, which is thought to be indicative of interpreting emotional state.

Paper abstract:

Whether non-human animals can recognize human signals, including emotions, has both scientific and applied importance, and is particularly relevant for domesticated species. This study presents the first evidence of horses' abilities to spontaneously discriminate between positive (happy) and negative (angry) human facial expressions in photographs. Our results showed that the angry faces induced responses indicative of a functional understanding of the stimuli: horses displayed a left-gaze bias (a lateralization generally associated with stimuli perceived as negative) and a quicker increase in heart rate (HR) towards these photographs. Such lateralized responses towards human emotion have previously only been documented in dogs, and effects of facial expressions on HR have not been shown in any heterospecific studies. Alongside the insights that these findings provide into interspecific communication, they raise interesting questions about the generality and adaptiveness of emotional expression and perception across species.

Original Submission

mendax writes:

The New York Times has an interesting article about what could perhaps be thought of as the earliest caffeinated energy drink: coffee. It poses a question with its headline: "I Don't Drink Coffee. Should I Start?"

From the article:

As someone who doesn't drink coffee, I'm sometimes forced to ponder whether I've escaped an unhealthy addiction or if I've just been asleep my whole life.

Counting yourself out from the 64 percent of Americans who drink at least one cup a day can invite bewildered responses from dedicated coffee drinkers. To them, the benefits are clear, the drawbacks minimal.

Being in the minority, it's easy to wonder: Have I been making a mistake? Should I and other coffee abstainers start now?

My take: I think coffee wakes people up because it tastes so filthy that it shocks the drinker's system into alertness, but there's nothing wrong with it. Furthermore, the digital revolution was fueled by coffee.

Original Submission