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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The 3GPP has told the industry to get cracking on standardising the air interface for 5G.

The standards body wants the “5G New Radio” (NR) to be frozen by June 2018, which should help vendors have devices ready for the planned 2020 date for 5G standards to be ready to fly.

Behind the radio, there will be two architectures: one, called standalone, will be all-5G with a new control plane; the other, non-standalone, will graft the new air interfaces onto the LTE control plane.

The air interfaces will have to support both sub-6 GHz frequency, and the emerging bands above 6 GHz.

The standardisation effort will target “enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), and “ultra-reliable and low latency communications” (URLCC) applications. The latter, Vulture South believes, is a cumbersome way of describing the much-touted Internet of Things.

By September 2016, the 3GPP work plan stipulates that the requirements for the radio interfaces be completed. Layer 1 and Layer 2 specs would then be completed by December 2017, with an initial focus on licensed bands.

The 3GPP announcement stresses that both radio and protocol design be forward compatible, “as this will be key for phasing-in the necessary features, enabling all identified usecases, in subsequent releases of the 5G specification”. ®

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takyon writes:

Google's Madrid, Spain offices have been raided as part of a broad European campaign against the company's alleged tax avoidance:

Google's Madrid offices are its latest to be raided as the search giant faces a series of tax probes across the European Union. The raid was approved by a court in Madrid, Reuters reported, following a request by the Spanish tax authorities. Reuters cited a spokeswoman giving the company's rote statement on such matters, saying that Google had complied with all regulations and legislation regarding financial matters in every territory in which it operated, and it was also working with the Spanish tax authorities to answer its questions.

The Spanish raid follows similar action in France, where Google was alleged to have underpaid tax by £1.2bn. Meanwhile the UK earlier this year made a £130m settlement with Google, averaging a mere £13m a year in tax paid for the duration of a dispute over accounts for revenues booked in the UK.

Back in the States, Senator Elizabeth Warren has been railing against Silicon Valley companies:

Potential vice-president and Wall Street critic Elizabeth Warren has accused tech giants Apple, Amazon and Google of undermining competition and using their political clout to kill off efforts to place limits on them. Giving the keynote [PDF] at a one-day conference titled "America's Monopoly Problem," the senator warned: "Today, in America, competition is dying." She cited a number of industries including Wall Street, the airline industry, cable companies, healthcare and livestock and pointed out that there are fewer companies in each, leading to less competition and record profits at the cost of consumer choice.

It was the tech industry, however, that bore the brunt of her criticism. "The second reason the decline in competition should cause concern is that big guys can lock out smaller guys and newer guys," she said. "Take a look at the technology sector – specifically, the battle between large platforms and small tech companies." She names names: "Google, Apple, and Amazon in many cases compete with those same small companies, so that the platform can become a tool to snuff out competition."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story on CNet::

If you're sick of having your view of Adele obscured by a thousand iPhones trying to film her, things are looking up. Apple was awarded a US patent this week for a system that can force your iPhone into disabling video-recording functions at concert venues.

The system uses infrared signals to send messages to your phone to tell it to shut down video recording. Apple's patent illustration shows a phone at a concert with the words "recording disabled" on screen.

[...] It's not known whether Apple plans to put the patent into use, and the company did not respond to a request for comment.

Too bad there are no other phones with video cameras and there is no way to construct an IR filter to fit over the camera lens.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36687631

A US woman has been sentenced after she sent Stephen Hawking multiple threatening emails and stalked him near where he was attending a conference in Spain:

A US woman has been given a suspended four-month jail sentence in Spain for threatening to kill British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

The 37-year-old has also been banned from approaching to within 500m of the scientist or communicating with him on social media for eight months.

The woman was arrested in a hotel in Tenerife, close to where Prof Hawking was attending a conference.

She had stalked him on social media before following him to the island.

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fork(2) writes:

Money, politics, and science... This time there's a happy ending. In 2015, Nature outlined a long-running Italian saga about murky "medicine" (in this case stem-cell therapy) which involved politicians and the judiciary, questionable science, good science, and a long, hard fight for evidence to prevail. One of the heroes in the story is Elena Cattaneo, a neuroscientist at University of Milan. (Cattaneo and her colleague, Gilberto Corbellini, published an article in Nature in 2014 sharing their experiences in this battle against pseudoscience. Also, see the article in Wikipedia.)

In 2013, Elena Cattaneo was appointed Senator for life by the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano. The Wikipedia article about her gives a nice/quick synopsis of the situation.

Last Wednesday (June 22), Nature reported that:

It isn't a scam, as neuroscientist Elena Cattaneo had first assumed. A total stranger really has left the prominent Italian, who is also a senator and a relentless campaigner against the misuse of science, his entire fortune to distribute for research. The sum is likely to be upwards of 1.5 million Euro (US$1.7 million).

The short, handwritten will of Franco Fiorini, an accountant from the small town of Molinella near Bologna, was officially made public on 21 June.

"I'll never know for sure why he decided to do this," says Cattaneo, who adds that she has wept with regret that she cannot thank Fiorini. "But it gives a hopeful message that there are some people like Franco who are able to work out on their own the importance of science and research for Italy's future."

She intends to make the money available for fellowships for young scientists in Italy, where funds for research are notoriously scarce.

[...] Many anonymous donors give significant amounts of money to medical-research foundations, notes Tullio Pozzan, director of the CNR Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Padua. "But giving money to an individual -- someone you only know through the press -- is unusual," he says. "It shows the importance of publicizing research in the press."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Security researchers are warning about the continuing spread of Hummer, a powerful trojan that roots Android handsets, downloads pornographic applications, and displays pop-up ads at random intervals.

Hummer first came up on the logs of Cheetah Mobile's security team in August 2014, but spent eight months in obscurity before starting to blow up. By March of this year, 1.4 million handsets were infected on a given day and many users were powerless to get rid of it.

"If the virus developer were able to make $0.50 USD (the average cost of getting a new installation) every time the virus installed an application on a smartphone, the group behind this trojan family would be able to make over $500,000 USD daily," the company said in a blog post.

The problem lies in the rooting capabilities of the malware. With the most recent iterations of the Hummer code, there are 18 separate software tools for rooting a handset once the code has been downloaded. Once rooted, even a factory reset may not fully wipe up after a Hummer infection.

Indian users are the hardest hit by the malware, with Indonesia second and China third. The bulk of infections are found among Asian users, although Hummer has popped up in most locations around the world in smaller numbers.

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fork(2) writes:

The OCX program is the Air Force's "Operational Control Segment," a next-generation ground system to control GPS satellites. Yesterday (Jun 30), SpaceNews reported that the OCX program is in trouble financially..to the point that it will trip the Nunn-McCurdy trigger.

From the SpaceNews article:

Nunn-McCurdy certification is a cost-control measure triggered by overruns. A "critical" breach occurs when the per-unit cost increases 25 percent or more over the current baseline or 50 percent over the original baseline. Under critical breaches, a program is presumed to be cancelled unless the Secretary of Defense certifies the program.

Unless the Secretary of Defense determines otherwise, this sets the stage for cancellation of the OCX program.

[...]the program has faced continuing technical difficulties and the delays have been a sore point for Air Force leaders, who say that because of the lag they will be unable to immediately leverage the full capabilities of the GPS 3 satellites, which include better accuracy and higher-power signals. The delay has also frustrated lawmakers, chiefly Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

At the same time, the program has been described by Air Force leaders as the most troubled development effort in the Defense Department.

[...] The full OCX program, which encompassed three blocks, and includes further modernization, is not expected to be completed sooner than 2021. Block 0 includes launch and on-oribt check out capabilities. Block 1 provides command and control of the GPS 3 and earlier generation satellites and Block 2 provide operational control of the new international civil signal aboard the GPS 3 satellites.

"Factors that led to the critical Nunn-McCurdy breach include inadequate systems engineering at program inception, Block 0 software with high defect rates and Block 1 designs requiring significant rework. Additionally, the complexity of cybersecurity requirements on OCX and impact of those requirements on the development caused multiple delays," the Air Force said in a June 30 release. "The corrective actions to resolve these problems took much longer than anticipated to implement."

As a result of the problems, the Air Force said in a June 30 press release that Raytheon has received none of the potential $43.9 million incentive fee payments. Remaining incentives fees are being restructures,[sic] the service said.

For months, Air Force leaders have stressed they are preparing contingency plans.

In February, the Air Force awarded Lockheed Martin a $96 million contract modification to adapt the existing ground system to serve as a stopgap measure if necessary. The first GPS 3 satellite is expected to launch as early as next year.

In May, the Air Force posted a request for information to the Federal Business Opportunities web site looking for prime contractors who could handle another capability: the tasking and monitoring of the GPS satellites' M-code, a military GPS signal that is more powerful and harder to jam.

The Air Force said June 30 is it[sic] preparing "additional mitigation options."

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fork(2) writes:

In early June The Guardian reported that:

The British Olympian Greg Rutherford has frozen a sample of his sperm before attending the Olympic Games in Rio because of his concerns over the Zika virus.

Rutherford's partner, Susie Verrill, said the couple, who have a son called Milo, decided to freeze his sperm because they wanted to have more children in the future and were worried about the risks of the disease. [...]

Now, in a first-of-its-kind study, a University of Miami researcher and others have created a mathematical model in an attempt to determine how much of a role sexual transmission plays on the spread and control of Zika.

Science Daily reports:

By itself, Shigui Ruan's model is not intended to measure the rates of Zika transmission but to delineate the virus's possible pathways and to help determine which of those transmission routes -- either mosquito-borne or sexual transmission--is most important in investigating the spread and control of the virus.

[...] To build his model, he and his team combined the two modes of transmission into a set of equations, and then calibrated their model to Zika epidemic rates -- obtained through the Pan American Health Organization -- in Brazil, Colombia, and El Salvador. Using factors such as the biting and mortality rates of the Aedes aegypti and how partners protect themselves during a sexual encounter, the researchers then produced what is called a "basic reproduction number," essentially the number of infections resulting from one initial infection in a population.

The team found that the average number of new infections that can be traced directly back to a single case of Zika comes out to 2, and that sexual transmission accounts for only 3 percent of new cases.

Their results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Their model can help determine where to target management effort. Consequently, from this model, it appears that mosquito control should remain the most important mitigation activity for control of Zika.

Prevention and Control of Zika as a Mosquito-Borne and Sexually Transmitted Disease: A Mathematical Modeling Analysis (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep28070)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Government officials haven't stopped complaining about how the rise of encryption is becoming an ever-growing problem that's threatening to make life harder for investigators trying to catch criminals and terrorists.

But the little official data that's publicly available keeps countering that narrative. Once again, for the second straight year, the number of times that state or federal wiretaps encountered encryption decreased, though cops and feds couldn't break encryption in more cases (11) than ever, according an annual government report called Wiretap Report.

takyon: Link to the report and a Counterpoint at The Register.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Reuters reports that Airbus and Safran "pledged on Thursday to make Europe competitive in the face of U.S. low-cost rival SpaceX as they completed a deal to merge their space launcher activities."

Under the final deal, French engine maker Safran will pay Airbus Group 750 million euros ($832 million) to ensure an equal 50/50 ownership split in the new venture -- slightly less than a previously expected figure of 800 million..

"They needed to complete this deal so that they are ready to design an entire launcher for civil customers rather than government requirements, forcing the agencies to accept what they have done for their customers rather than work with what governments want," an analyst said, asking not to be named.

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slash2phar writes:

A federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled that the user of any computer that connects to the Internet should not have an expectation of privacy because computer security is ineffectual at stopping hackers.

"Hacking is much more prevalent now than it was even nine years ago, and the rise of computer hacking via the Internet has changed the public's reasonable expectations of privacy," the judge wrote. "Now, it seems unreasonable to think that a computer connected to the Web is immune from invasion. Indeed, the opposite holds true: In today's digital world, it appears to be a virtual certainty that computers accessing the Internet can—and eventually will—be hacked."

The judge argued that the FBI did not even need the original warrant to use the NIT [Network Investigative technique/Toolkit] against visitors to PlayPen, a hidden service on the Tor network that acted as a hub for child exploitation.

http://www.eweek.com/security/home-computers-connected-to-the-internet-arent-private-court-rules.html

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dr. Lowe breaks these types of questions into "Matter for Experts", "Just Plain Facts", "Flat-Out Unknowable", and "Matters of Opinion" and the relative value of expertise for each.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/30/expertology

Background on "Right To Try" laws:
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/06/10/right_to_try_here_we_go

[Ed. note (martyb): This is the same Dr. Derek Lowe who authored the hilariously-written and highly-informative blogs: Things I Won't Work With and Things I'm Glad I Don't Do.]

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mhajicek writes:

Two bloggers have made a stunning claim that has spread like wildfire on the Internet: They say the Northern Hemisphere jet stream, the high-altitude river of winds that separates cold air from warm air, has done something new and outrageous. They say it has crossed the equator, joining the jet stream in the Southern Hemisphere. One said this signifies that the jet stream is ‘wrecked‘, the other said it means we have a “global climate emergency.”

But these shrill claims have no validity — air flow between the hemispheres occurs routinely. The claims are unsupported and unscientific, and they demonstrate the danger of wild assertions made by non-experts reaching and misleading the masses.

Source: The Washington Post

Related: Gigantic Gravity Waves to Mix Summer With Winter? Wrecked Jet Stream Now Runs From Pole-to-Pole

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Thexalon writes:

Yep, it’s not just you: Google Calendar appears to be down and has been since [Thursday, June 30 at] 9:47AM ET, according to Google’s App Status Dashboard.

Try going to Google Calendar now and you’ll likely be greeted with a blank page, or a server error page that tells you in a handful of languages that your meetings today are screwed and you should just go outside and escape this internet world.

[...] Update 2: As of 2:36PM ET, Google says the service should be back fully. Carry on!

Source: The Next Web

The issues were spilling over to Hangouts, where some users were having issues joining conference calls through Calendar invites.

It's unclear how widespread this outage was, but from the complaints on Twitter, it was affecting users worldwide.

Source: Mashable

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The structure of 100-million-year old wings found fossilized in amber in Myanmar is closing the gap between dinosaurs and birds. A study of the wings published in Nature Communications on Tuesday points to the fossil most likely belonging to a type of avian dinosaur that became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, more than 65 million years ago.

More impressively, the wings revealed that the plumage of those prehistoric feathered animals was very similar to modern birds. Prior to this study, most of the information scientists had about feathered dinosaurs came from imprints in fossils or individual feathers in amber.

These wings are the first to be found relatively intact and have helped to close gaps in the fossil record.

Original Submission