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takyon writes:

The days of killer USB Type-C cables may soon be over:

The USB Promoter Group announced a new cryptographic authentication protocol for USB Type-C devices that should put an end to faulty as well as malicious Type-C chargers and devices.

The USB Type-C standard was designed for both charging and data transfers as a convenience feature to allow people to carry fewer cables with them and to help device manufacturers cut costs. However, once the two were combined, the risk that people would become infected by plugging their laptops and smartphones with strange USB Type-C chargers or devices also increased. The USB devices could have embedded malware, which could infect host devices. The chargers could also be uncertified and use lower quality standards, which could risk damaging the host notebooks or smartphones.

The new authentication protocol for USB Type-C aims to fix both problems by allowing users to set policies that would restrict their devices to using only USB chargers that are compliant with the standard or automatically block them until their authenticity has been confirmed. The verification will be done right when the cable is connected, before any power or data is transmitted to the host device.

Previously:

One Manufacturer's "Fundamentally Dangerous" USB Type-C Cable Fries Hardware
Amazon Bans Non-Compliant USB Type-C Cables

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Last month, the story of a 25-year-old man who's living inside a plywood box parked in his friend's living room became the latest installment in San Francisco's crazy housing market.

In a city where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is currently $3,590, Peter Berkowitz's tale of paying only $400 a month in rent and squeezing into some 32-square-feet of space became the stuff of legend. 

"It fits all my needs where I have a private, sound-proof place where I can keep my belongings," Berkowitz said in an interview with SFGate. "I'm saving thousands of dollars a year. It's a solution that works for me. I don't want to spend so much money on rent."

After media outlets across the country covered the story and the London Guardian ran an editorial by Berkowitz, he began hearing from people who wanted to live in similar humble, inexpensive accommodations. Berkowitz announced in a story on Hoodline this week that he would begin selling custom pods.

Those plans were quickly stopped by the San Francisco's chief housing inspector Rosemary Bosque who told Hoodline that "pods are illegal and a violation of housing, building, and fire safety codes."

"He would have to completely open it up or look at something different, such as a bed with a frame, with curtains, something that was open to the room," Bosque said in the Hoodline interview. "This would be the case for anywhere in the country with respect to building and inhabitability codes."

Thinking outside the box is verboten (forbidden).

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Start-up Carbon began shipping its industrial-grade 3D printer with the expectation that big-name companies will soon be using it to replace traditional forms of manufacturing.

Last year, the Silicon Valley company emerged from quiet mode to announce its technology: a machine that can create objects 25 to 100 times faster than other 3D printers.

Carbon is not selling its M1 3D printer outright, but instead is offering it through a subscription price of $40,000 per year, which includes a service and maintenance plan.

Similar to existing stereolithography (SLA) rapid prototyping processes, the Carbon M1 3D printer uses an ultraviolet light projector under a light-sensitive resin pool to harden the liquid and then pulls the object from the pool.

The three-year-old company based in Redwood City, Calif. said its Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) printing process can create objects in minutes compared to the hours a typical 3D printer requires.

Kirk Phelps, Carbon's vice president of product management, said the M1 can print production-ready parts that can achieve price parity with traditional manufacturing methods with runs of up to 45,000 units.

Source: Computerworld

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Washington Post reports that the FBI did not require the services of Israeli firm Cellebrite to hack a San Bernardino terrorist's iPhone. Instead, it paid a one-time fee to a group of hackers and security researchers, at least one of whom the paper labels a "gray hat". It's also reported that the U.S. government has not decided whether or not to disclose to Apple the previously unknown vulnerability (or vulnerabilities) used to unlock the iPhone (specifically an iPhone 5C running iOS 9):

The FBI cracked a San Bernardino terrorist's phone with the help of professional hackers who discovered and brought to the bureau at least one previously unknown software flaw, according to people familiar with the matter. The new information was then used to create a piece of hardware that helped the FBI to crack the iPhone's four-digit personal identification number without triggering a security feature that would have erased all the data, the individuals said.

The researchers, who typically keep a low profile, specialize in hunting for vulnerabilities in software and then in some cases selling them to the U.S. government. They were paid a one-time flat fee for the solution.

[...] The bureau in this case did not need the services of the Israeli firm Cellebrite, as some earlier reports had suggested, people familiar with the matter said. The U.S. government now has to weigh whether to disclose the flaws to Apple, a decision that probably will be made by a White House-led group.

FBI Director James Comey told students at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law that "Apple is not a demon," and "I hope people don't perceive the FBI as a demon." What a saint.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

A company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah's lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a "formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin's most natural state."

Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

Source: The Intercept

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Verizon has announced that it will spend $300 million to replace copper cables with fiber optics in Boston, as well as expand Internet access and install "smart city" sensors:

Verizon and the city of Boston today announced a $300 million fiber optic cable replacement of copper cable throughout the city over the next six years. The project will increase Internet speeds and help Boston, which has 650,000 residents, expand broadband as part of its priority to ensure every resident has Internet access, Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement on Tuesday. Business, schools, hospitals and libraries will also be connected.

Smart city elements will be added as well, including a trial project to reduce traffic congestion along Massachusetts Avenue. The city and Verizon will partner to experiment with sensors and advanced traffic signal technology to increase safety, measure bike traffic and improve public transit vehicle flow. Future smart city apps could include sensors for environmental conditions, energy efficiency and city lighting management. Verizon will also attach wireless equipment to city street lights and utility poles to boost wireless service for residents.

Related: Largest Labor Action in 5 Years Slated for Wednesday, April 13 Against Verizon

Original Submission

oaklandwatch writes:

GitHub and Amazon Web Services have joined a new open source collaboration to speed up cancer research. "We cannot be competitors any more in cancer research because people die," said Jenny Zhang, a technician at the Seattle center working with AWS to create a portal to help doctors, researchers, and scientists pool information to recognize important patterns. "Cancer will be solved on the computer," says the center's director, in a GitHub blog post calling for Open Source volunteers in everything from CSS and D3 to robust implementations of new computational biology algorithms. One technology site describes the initiative's inspiring message as "Computers and programmers can cure cancer because the key to the cure lies in deciphering big data."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Using your skin as a touchscreen has been brought a step closer after UK scientists successfully created tactile sensations on the palm using ultrasound sent through the hand.

The University of Sussex-led study — funded by the Nokia Research Centre and the European Research Council — is the first to find a way for users to feel what they are doing when interacting with displays projected on their hand.

This solves one of the biggest challenges for technology companies who see the human body, particularly the hand, as the ideal display extension for the next generation of smartwatches and other smart devices.

Current ideas rely on vibrations or pins, which both need contact with the palm to work, interrupting the display.

However, this new innovation, called SkinHaptics, sends sensations to the palm from the other side of the hand, leaving the palm free to display the screen.

These devices will be a hacker's dream.

Original Submission

devlux writes:

According to techspot a Texas company has turned a real working glock into a nintendo duck hunt gun.
http://www.techspot.com/news/64405-texan-manufacturer-turns-working-glock-nintendo-duck-hunt.html

As I read this article and remembered my many wasted hours in front of the NES, I was disappointed to find that this was not in fact a new NES lightzapper in the shape of a Glock. It's a Glock painted to look like the NES peripheral. Took awhile to get that far and the title is ambiguous. Frankly it's pretty cool looking though and well worth the read.

I wonder if guns like this would be a good way to condition kids to respect firearms from an early age and teach them responsible gun ownership instead of the culture of fear they all grow up in now.

Wikipedia helpfully explains that the Glock pistol:

... sometimes referred to by the manufacturer as a Glock "Safe Action" Pistol or colloquially as a Glock, is a series of polymer-framed, short recoil-operated, locked-breech semi-automatic pistols designed and produced by Glock Ges.m.b.H., located in Deutsch-Wagram, Austria. It entered Austrian military and police service by 1982 after it was the top performer on an exhaustive series of reliability and safety tests.

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

A common urban myth is that many fathers are cuckolded into raising children that genetically are not their own, a fear fueled by the paternity tests that have become a standard staple of gossip magazines, talk shows, and TV series. Now Carl Zimmer reports at the NYT that our obsession with cuckolded fathers is seriously overblown as a number of recent genetic studies have challenged the notion that mistaken paternity is commonplace.

It wasn’t until DNA sequencing emerged in the 1990s that paternity tests earned the legal system’s confidence. Labs were able to compare DNA markers in children to those of their purported fathers to see if they matched. As the lab tests piled up, researchers collated the results and came to a startling conclusion: Ten percent to 30 percent of the tested men were not the biological fathers of their children. There's only one problem with these previous studies: the results didn’t come from a random sample of people. The people who ordered the tests already had reason to doubt paternity.

In a 2013 study, Dr. Maarten H.D. Larmuseau used Belgium’s detailed birth records to reconstruct large family genealogies reaching back four centuries. Then the scientists tracked down living male descendants and asked to sequence their Y chromosomes. Y chromosomes are passed down in almost identical form from fathers to sons. Men who are related to the same male ancestor should also share his Y chromosome, providing that some unknown father didn’t introduce his own Y somewhere along the way. Comparing the chromosomes of living related men, Larmuseau came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent.

Similar studies have generally produced the same low results in such countries as Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as agricultural villages in Mali. "The observed low EPP [(extra-pair paternity)] rates challenge the idea that women routinely ‘shop around’ for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations," concludes Larmuseau . "The (potential) genetic benefits of extrapair children are unlikely to be offset by the (potential) costs of being caught, particularly in such a long-lived species as humans with heavy offspring dependence and massive parental investment."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Mozilla has sent mixed signals about the future of the Firefox Web browser:

The head of Mozilla's Firefox browser is looking to the future. And, for the moment at least, it seems to lie in rival Chrome. Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser.

"Let's jump right in and say yes, the rumors are true, we're working on browser prototypes that look and feel almost nothing like the current Firefox," Mayo wrote in a blog post. "The premise for these experiments couldn't be simpler: what we need a browser to do for us – both on PCs and mobile devices – has changed a lot since Firefox 1.0, and we're long overdue for some fresh approaches."

The biggest surprise, however, was that the project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology – Gecko – but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.

However, Mayo updated his post to say that "I should have been clearer that Project Tofino is wholly focused on UX explorations and not the technology platform. We are working with the Platform team on technology platform futures too, and we're excited about the Gecko and Servo-based futures being discussed!" Mozilla's CTO also reaffirmed the company's commitment to the Gecko rendering engine:

Just two days after Mayo broke ranks, Mozilla's CTO jumped up and announced another new project – this one called Positron (geddit?) – which will take the Electron API and "wrap it around Gecko." Or, in other words, make it possible to take Mayo's new, better browser and pull it off Chromium and back into the safe hands of Gecko. And so the status quo seeks to reassert itself.

Also at CNET.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Facebook has showed off a 360-degree video camera at its F8 conference, but it won't be for sale:

At its F8 conference, Facebook announced the Surround 360 camera, a professional-grade device built to show what one can do with 360-degree video capture. On stage at F8, Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox explained that creating 360-degree video is, well, difficult. Even once you capture the images, which requires special multi-lens equipment, you have to stitch them together while preserving the fidelity of the images, which is not always so simple. That's not even taking into account the PC hardware you need to handle all the processes.

The Surround 360 will not solve these challenges, because Facebook didn't create the device to sell it; instead, it's a reference design other developers can use to build their own products. Facebook is open sourcing the software and hardware, and the code will be available on Github later this summer.

Cox noted that creating such a camera was a challenge, and the team working on it went through a number of prototypes and much trial and error. For example, he noted, when they used a plastic chassis, they found that the hot sun (not to mention the heat produced by the cameras themselves) warped the case and therefore distorted the images somewhat. The final iteration, though, is one the team is proud of. It can shoot for two hours and produce fully synced, 3D (360-degree) video at 60fps with an astonishing resolution of 8K per eye. Cox said that very little post production will be required.

At Facebook.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

A new study from the University of Florida, It's not me, it really is you offers an interesting perspective as to what makes or breaks relationships.

Attractive and smart but unlucky in love? New research suggests you might not have luck to blame but rather your own negative traits.

Researchers found that when evaluating potential mates, people give more weight to negative qualities than to positive ones. That is, even if someone has a number of positive qualities, one or two negative qualities can be enough for others to avoid pursuing romantic relationships with them.

[...] Using information from six independent studies, the researchers determined the top deal breakers for people who were making decisions about potential partners. Using those deal breakers, they were able to determine what effect age and gender have on determining which qualities are seen as deal breakers for different people.

The deal breakers are, in no particular order:

• unattractiveness
• unhealthy lifestyle
• undesirable personality traits
• differing religious beliefs
• limited social status
• differing mating strategies
• differing relationship goals

They also found that the effect of deal breakers is stronger for women and people in committed relationships. Does this explain the proverbial mom's basement dweller cliché?

An abstract is available; the full paper, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, is paywalled.

Original Submission

turgid writes:

The BBC and the Guardian both carry stories about an unmanned interstellar spacecraft designed to reach the Alpha Centauri system "within a generation" (30 or so years).

The spacecraft would be miniaturised to the size of an average silicon chip, and be propelled by a solar sail which would receive a boost from a powerful laser on the Earth.

Milner's Breakthrough Foundation is running a project, backed by Hawking, to research the technologies needed for such a mission, which they think will soon be feasible.

takyon: The campaign is called Breakthrough Starshot. Breakthrough Initiatives also announced the release of initial observational datasets from the Breakthrough Listen 10-year SETI effort.

Original Submission

fatuous looser writes:

Prosecutors love to root around in e-mail troves---like rabbits in a carrot patch. Some magistrates just say no.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article70921962.html

... a low-level court official in Kansas City, Kan., made one thing clear in recently rejecting a warrant request from the U.S. Attorney: investigators can't go rooting freely in the email accounts of criminal suspects.

U.S. Magistrate Judge David Waxse argued — in an expansive, signal-sending decision — that looking through an email account can intrude on someone's privacy more than a search of their home.

He compared access to your email to a cavity search. Browsing through your account, he noted, might be the best way yet to learn about your religion, your politics, finances, health, your sex life.

"A person's email account," he wrote in a sternly argued opinion in late March, "may reveal their 'privacies of life.' "

For that reason, he sided with a growing number of magistrates who man a largely overlooked front line of the court system. They've increasingly rejected warrants sought to track the electronic trails that criminal suspects — like the rest of us — leave in our increasingly digital world.

[...] Many analysts believe prosecutors took comfort in the techie work-around [of the FBI vs Apple] because it avoided a courtroom showdown. Had the judiciary let Apple off the hook in the San Bernardino case, that precedent might have blocked thousands of other warrants to come.

That's why, they say, prosecutors rarely appeal when magistrates deny their digital searches. They fear a "no" that could shut off a powerful investigative tool in cases across the board.

Original Submission