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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Oculus has stepped back from enforcing its Oculus Rift headset-checking, DRM-like feature.

This controversial software was originally put in place to prevent HTC Vive owners who were using a homebrew application called Revive to access previously blocked-off Oculus Rift exclusive titles.

But, as we pointed out last month, that plan backfired, to say the least. Not only did Revive manage its way around the DRM, its creators also unintentionally allowed HTC Vive users to also bypass Oculus' game ownership check.

Not only were there Vive users on Oculus' gated lawn, they were stealing their apples, too.

Now, Oculus is lowering the fence and standing by its original position of siding with consumers, no matter which headset they purchase.

Original Submission

n1 writes:

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay $415 million and admit wrongdoing to settle charges that it misused customer cash to generate profits for the firm and failed to safeguard customer securities from the claims of its creditors.

An SEC investigation found that Merrill Lynch violated the SEC's Customer Protection Rule by misusing customer cash that rightfully should have been deposited in a reserve account. Merrill Lynch engaged in complex options trades that lacked economic substance and artificially reduced the required deposit of customer cash in the reserve account. The maneuver freed up billions of dollars per week from 2009 to 2012 that Merrill Lynch used to finance its own trading activities. Had Merrill Lynch failed in the midst of these trades, the firm's customers would have been exposed to a massive shortfall in the reserve account.

Source: The Securities and Exchange Commission

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"exec" writes:

Can a smartphone really cost the same as a cup of coffee? An Indian company is betting all its money on it.

After raising eyebrows around the world earlier this year, Indian smartphone company Ringing Bells has announced that it will begin shipping its suspiciously cheap Freedom 251 phone from June 30.

The announcement follows its earlier commitment of shipping the Freedom 251, a 4-inch entry level Android-powered smartphone priced at 251 rupees (roughly $3.70, £2.70, AU$5), by the end of June.

[...] Ringing Bells was caught disguising an Adcom Ikon 4s, which retails for around $60, as a Freedom 251 for marketing and media purposes back in February.

[...] Ringing Bells is still facing a loss of about 140 to 150 rupees per unit, and seeks help from government.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Just weeks before the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has suspended the authority of a revamped drug testing laboratory in Rio de Janeiro:

The lab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro said on Friday that it expected its operations would return to normal in July after a technical visit from WADA, ahead of the start of the games on Aug. 5. Still, the suspension adds to concerns about Rio's readiness to host the global sporting event as public services suffer amid a crisis in state finances. Technical errors leading to false positives were likely the cause of the suspension, a source familiar with the decision said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

"The suspension will only be lifted by WADA when the laboratory is operating optimally," Olivier Niggli, the incoming director general of the agency, said in a statement.

[...] WADA's decision is the latest black eye for the Rio anti-doping lab, after a lack of credentials forced testing for the 2014 World Cup to take place in Switzerland. With an eye on the Olympics, Brazil invested 188 million reais ($56 million) in new installations and equipment for the lab, which was recertified by WADA last year. The government also rushed through an executive order in March updating Brazil's doping laws to comply with international standards.

Also at The Atlantic and The New York Times .

In other doping news, the U.S. National Football League has announced that it will "interview" players named in an Al-Jazeera America documentary on performance-enhancing drug use... with the exception of the retired player Peyton Manning. The veracity of the Al-Jazeera report is disputed since it relies on recanted claims.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Data from the New Horizons mission revealed many previously unknown things about Pluto and hinted at others. One tantalizing tidbit was the prospect of an ammonia-rich ocean of water under the surface, a liquid sea beneath the frozen plains.

"Thanks to the incredible data returned by New Horizons, we were able to observe tectonic features on Pluto's surface, update our thermal evolution model with new data and infer that Pluto most likely has a subsurface ocean today," said Noah Hammond, a graduate student in Brown University's Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences who was lead author of a paper on the subject. The paper was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The team updated a thermal model of Pluto based on detailed data from the New Horizons probe. Those include tectonic features such as fault lines hundreds of kilometers long and mountains of water ice that indicate Pluto is slowly expanding over time. "What New Horizons showed was that there are extensional tectonic features, which indicate that Pluto underwent a period of global expansion," Hammond said. "A subsurface ocean that was slowly freezing over would cause this kind of expansion."

[...] To determine whether the ocean is still liquid or whether it has already frozen entirely, Hammond and his team ran a thermal evolution model using New Horizons data on Pluto's diameter and density. They found that, if the ocean under Pluto's surface had already frozen completely, it would have changed to a phase called ice II, which has a much more compressed structure than ordinary water ice, aka ice I. Basically, if there was no liquid water under Pluto's surface, it would show signs of contraction, rather than expansion.

This stage would only occur if Pluto's icy shell was more than 260 km (155 miles) thick. Evidence suggests that Pluto's shell is at least 300 km (186 miles) thick. So the case for liquid water on Pluto is strong.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following light-hearted story regarding the history of programming languages:

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML.

1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.

1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.

Read the rest of the article for coverage of people and languages up through the current time. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Smalltalk, Lisp, Perl, C, C++, and many others get similarly humorous treatment.

See The Register: Catch as catch can — A light-hearted look at exception handling

Original Submission

"exec" submitted:

CNET reports Google's five rules for AI safety — Google Research goes Asimov, spelling out concrete, real-world questions to ask in order to develop non-apocalyptic artificial intelligence:

Chris Olah at Google Research has, in a blog post on Tuesday, spelled out the five big questions about how to develop smarter, safer artificial intelligence.

The post came alongside a research paper Google released in collaboration with OpenAI, Stanford and Berkley called Concrete Problems in AI Safety. It's an attempt to move beyond abstract or hypothetical concerns around developing and using AI by providing researchers with specific questions to apply in real-world testing.

"These are all forward thinking, long-term research questions -- minor issues today, but important to address for future systems," said Olah in the blog post.

From the blog, the five rules are:

[Continues...]

n1 writes:

Scottish nationals have two supra-national citizenships. One is UK citizenship, the second is EU citizenship. In democratic referenda over the past two years, Scots have voted clearly to retain both citizenships.

Unfortunately it is not possible to respect both democratic decisions of the Scottish people, due to a vote by other nationalities. So where you have democratic decisions which cannot both be implemented, which does democracy demand should take precedence?

It is not a simple question. The vote to retain EU citizenship was more recent and carried a much larger majority than the earlier vote. In addition it was made crystal clear during the campaign that it may require the overturning of the earlier vote. So on these grounds I believe the most recent vote must, as an exercise in democracy, have precedence.

In these circumstances the announcement by the First Minister that she is initiating the procedure on a new referendum for Scottish independence from the UK, in order to retain Scottish membership of the EU, is a sensible step.

Source: Craig Murray

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports

Anticipating massive demonstrations in the streets during the Republican National Convention in mid-July, Cleveland police authorities are using emergency funds to stock up on the latest in crowd control equipment--armoring themselves as if they are going to war.

According to the Washington Post, Cleveland officials are using a $50 million "security grant" to beef up security around the convention, but are not tipping their hand on everything that they have purchased which is alarming some civil liberties groups concerned about the rights of protesters.

[...] Cleveland police are rumored to have obtained [LRADs] (Long Range Acoustical Device) normally used to keep pirates from boarding ships by emitting a non-lethal, but painful, beam of sound to drive people away, making it a popular tool for riot control.

Police have admitted that they have loaded up on riot gear--including full body armor--2,000 retractable steel batons, 10,000 sets of plastic handcuffs, 16 Pointer Illuminator Aiming Lasers, security cameras, and riot-control staple tear gas--while keeping funds in reserve for anticipated overtime pay for officers who will have their hands full.

[...] Said Joycelyn Rosnick of the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, [...] "We know that other cities have used these events to obtain equipment for large crowd control and surveillance that doesn't leave town when the event is over, potentially changing how the city will be policed."

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

From the Heinlein Prize Trust website:

Seattle -- Tuesday, June 21, 2016 -- The Heinlein Prize Trust announced today that it is awarding its prestigious Heinlein Prize to Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, for his vision and leadership in commercial space activities that have led to historic firsts and reusability in the commercial spaceflight industry.

The Heinlein Prize honors the memory of Robert A. Heinlein, a renowned American author. The purpose of the Heinlein Prize is to encourage and reward progress in commercial space activities that advances Robert and his wife Virginia's dream of humanity's future in space. In addition to the award, recipients receive a Lady Vivamus sword from Robert Heinlein's novel, Glory Road.

Space News continues:

Bezos is the third winner of the prize, first awarded in 2006 to Peter Diamandis for establishing the X Prize that stimulated the development of commercial suborbital reusable launch vehicles. The second winner, in 2011, was SpaceX founder Elon Musk for his development of the now-retired Falcon 1.

Musk, like Bezos, is also pursuing reusable launch vehicles, having successfully landed four Falcon 9 first stages on land or on ships for potential reuse. Bezos and Musk have in the past engaged in debates, primarily on Twitter, about the significance of their technical achievements.

The prize comes with a cash award that, while not specified in the announcement, was $250,000 when Musk won the prize in 2011. Any cash prize is likely to be a token award for Bezos, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine to be $62 billion.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Fiber has bought Webpass, an ISP that already runs a gigabit fiber network in some locations:

Alphabet-owned Google Fiber is present in five U.S. cities, but it has plans to be[sic] grow to more than 20 in the immediate future. San Francisco is one city that Google Fiber has earmarked, and this acquisition will help that expansion. Webpass has a strong presence in California, with its service running in San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley and San Diego. Beyond that, it is also in Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Chicago, and Boston.

In an email to existing customers announcing the deal — which is expected to close in the summer — Webpass said that "nothing will change in the foreseeable future regarding the day to day operation of our business, your service or pricing." Charles Barr, the President of Webpass, added more in a blog post.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In the 1950s, entomologists Edward F. Knipling and Raymond C. Bushland conducted research into the "sex life of the screwworm fly." A quarter of a million dollars in government money, spent on decades of studying the reproduction of an insect with a name that sounds silly.

But it wasn't silly, and Knipling and Bushland's work went on to save agriculture enormous amounts of money in the decades to come. This week, Knipling and Bushland have been posthumously awarded a Golden Goose, a prize that honours "scientists whose federally funded work may have been considered silly, odd, or obscure when first conducted but has resulted in significant benefits to society."

The screwworm fly can be a massive problem when raising livestock. The flies lay their eggs in flesh wounds in living animals. When the eggs hatch, the larvae feast on the living flesh of their host. This is known as flystrike, and can be fatal. Treating and preventing it costs vast sums of money.

This is where Knipling and Bushman enter. They discovered that female screwworm flies are monogamous, only mating with one male in their entire lives. Male screwworm flies, on the other hand, mate with many females. If they could somehow sterilise male screwworm flies, and release these sterile males in large numbers, perhaps they could eliminate the fly entirely by tricking the females into wasting their single mating on a sterile male.

[...] And, going forward, it could do even more. It's been identified as a potential solution for eradicating populations of malaria- and zika-carrying mosquitoes, as well as other crop-destroying pests.

A similar story is available at NPR.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

According to the Hollywood Reporter , on 16 June, the Shanghai Disneyland amusement park opened to the public. The 963-acre (390 hectare; 3.9 km²) development was built in the city's Pudong district. The project was the idea of Zhu Rongji, who had visited Disneyland in California in 1990 while he was mayor of Shanghai (Zhu later became vice-premier, then premier). It received the approval of the national government in 2009, after the Walt Disney Company agreed to make it "embody Chinese culture."

Disney agreed to take a minority 43 percent stake in the theme park itself, with the rest held by a consortium of Chinese state-controlled companies called the Shanghai Shendi Group. (Disney did retain operational control, however, owning 70 percent of the management company created with Shendi to run the resort.)

The city's subway system was extended to the park; the trains are decorated in a Disney theme.

Taiwanese tourists who made a banner that read "Participating in the Shanghai Disneyland Opening Ceremony" were "blocked" (Tor-friendly link) by guards, ostensibly because the word "Disneyland" violated copyright.

additional coverage:

• Rappler
• Shanghai Daily
• Orange County Register (editorial)
• Harbour Times
• CNN
• Barron's blog
• Movie News Guide
• Shanghaiist (Tor-friendly link)
• Inside the Magic (video; may require disabling of ad-blocker)
• afr.com
• South China Morning Post
• Orange County Register
• Theme Park Insider
• The Nation Bangkok
• Santa Fe New Mexican
• Plastics News (about plastic used in the park)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A sheriff's department in Utah has spent $10,000 on [a] black Labrador they say can sniff out porn and other illicit digital materials.

The deployment of the black Lab, dubbed URL but pronounced Earl, in Weber County comes just months after Utah became the first state in the US to declare pornography a full-fledged public health crisis.

Weber County's latest recruit has undergone nine months of intensive training on how to sniff out smut, or more specifically, digital devices such as flash drives, DVDs and memory cards that illegal material is typically stashed on.

Of course, such devices can also be used to store evidence of financial crime or terror-related materials, and the department will happily hoover those up. But, let's face it, it's porn that is the public health emergency.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Mozilla has announced the latest round of awards under its Open Source Support (MOSS) program.

The Firefox builder said that it will pay out a total of $385K to eight different projects covering areas including protecting privacy and anonymity and extending access for those with disabilities.

The "Mission Partner" awards are the second in an ongoing series of awards the Mozilla Foundation is giving out under its MOSS program. This round, Mozilla says, focused on funding outside projects whose aims align with the Mozilla manifesto.

Much of the prize money in this round will go to The Tor Project, which nabbed a $152,000 payout to fund an overhaul to its metrics tools. Mozilla said that the new system will improve the stability and performance of the Tor network.

Also getting a hefty award is the Tails anonymized OS. Mozilla is going to give the project a $77,000 payout to cover the costs of implementing a system to verify ISOs created from specific Tails OS builds.

Another $50,000 will be given to Caddy, a web server project designed to support secure connections through the Let's Encrypt project. That money will be put towards adding documentation and a new UI for the service.

Other winners in this round were the Mio I/O Rust library, the Godot game engine, and NVDA, a screen reading tool for the blind and visually impaired.

Original Submission