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ticho wrote in with news from infoq:

Apple has open-sourced its new lossless compression algorithm, LZFSE, introduced last year with iOS 9 and OS X 10.10. According to Apple, LZFE provides the same compression gain as ZLib level 5 while being 2x–3x faster and with higher energy efficiency.

LZFSE is based on Lempel-Ziv and uses Finite State Entropy coding, based on Jarek Duda's work on Asymmetric Numeral Systems (ANS) for entropy coding. Shortly, ANS aims to "end the trade-off between speed and rate" and can be used both for precise coding and very fast encoding, with support for data encryption. LZFSE is one of a growing number of compression libraries that use ANS in place of the more traditional Huffman and arithmetic coding.

Admittedly, LZFSE does not aim to be the best or fastest algorithm out there. [...] LZFSE is Apple's suggested option when compression and speed are more or less equally important and you want reduce energy consumption.

See GitHub for a reference implementation and a copy of the license.

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Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

A current employee granted access to his work account to some former employees. Since the former employees were setting up a competing business and using the account to download the employer's confidential information it wound up in court.

The case went to appeal on the question of whether access authorized by the account holder and not authorized by the computer's owner is a violation of the CFAA. One issue the appellate judges kicked around was whether a "yes" answer would criminalize some routine and harmless activities. There's even another upcoming case with a similar issue, involving a firm that provided a service involving logging in to people's Facebook accounts on their behalf. Facebook didn't like that. A "no" answer of course risks accidentally legalizing any intrusion that has an insider as part of the conspiracy.

A lawyer's analysis is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/06/password-sharing-case-divides-ninth-circuit-in-nosal-ii/

The case numbers are 14-10037 and 14-10275 if you want to look them up in PACER. No, I won't lend you my password :-)

Original Submission

Runaway1956 writes:

A woman named Lavish Reynolds has posted a dramatic Facebook Live video showing a bleeding man, Philando Castile, next to her in a car as a police officer who just shot him points a gun at him through a car window. Philando Castile, 32, died at the hospital a short time later, WCCO confirmed through his family. "Police shot him for no apparent reason, no reason at all," she says at one point.

The police shooting occurred in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Falcon Heights, which is located 10 minutes from Minneapolis/St. Paul, is the home of the Minnesota State Fair and dubs itself a "village within the city." A child (she was 4-years-old, said the St. Paul Pioneer Press) was in the car when the police officer, who has not been identified, shot Philando Castile. The child could be heard crying in the background as the emotional-sounding officer continues to point his gun through the car window as Castile bleeds through his white T-shirt and an upset Reynolds talks live on Facebook, imploring God to save him. Facebook Live allows people to stream live video directly from their cell phone onto their Facebook page.

In the video, Lavish Reynolds says to Philando Castile, "Stay with me... We got pulled over for a busted taillight in the back." She also said in the video that police asked Castile, the driver, for his license and registration and, as he reached for it, he told officers that he had a firearm and a concealed carry permit. The officer then shot him, she said (Castile had been stopped for traffic issues before; he was booked for driving after revocation in the past. However, a check with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's criminal record database showed only an entry for failing to provide proof of insurance; the Minneapolis Star-Tribune said his record consisted of "misdemeanors and petty misdemeanors" only.)

Philando Castile, 32, worked in a school cafeteria in St. Paul, the Star-Tribune said. A parent of a child in the school posted a tribute to him on Facebook, saying "This was a GOOD MAN" who pushed extra food on children and gave a borderline autistic child constant hugs.

There are a number of links with this story - I chose the first one with a working link to the video. (Working for me, anyway. [Javascript required, but see below. -Ed.])

[This seems to be a direct link to the 10m30s, 36MB video: http://videos.videopress.com/zis1YJRV/minnesota-video_dvd.mp4
The video is also available on YouTube. -Ed.]

Update #1: This revolution will not be televised – Facebook mysteriously vanishes Philando Castile death-by-cop video

Update #2: According to a story on Ars Technica , the Governor of Minnesota is asking for an independent federal investigation:

Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota on Thursday asked the Department of Justice to investigate the killing of a black motorist shot by a white police officer. Philando Castile's dying moments were live-streamed on Facebook, and the incident prompted a comment from President Barack Obama.

Dayton said he wanted an "immediate independent federal investigation into this matter." The governor suggested that racism was to blame for the killing of Castile, a 32-year-old school cafeteria manager, who was shot at least four times by a police officer after being pulled over for a broken taillight in Falcon Heights.

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takyon writes:

Researchers have found that states with legalized medical cannabis saw declines in Medicare prescriptions for drugs such as opioids and antidepressants:

Research published [DOI: 10.1377/hlthaff.2015.1661] Wednesday found that states that legalized medical marijuana — which is sometimes recommended for symptoms like chronic pain, anxiety or depression — saw declines in the number of Medicare prescriptions for drugs used to treat those conditions and a dip in spending by Medicare Part D, which covers the cost on prescription medications.

Because the prescriptions for drugs like opioid painkillers and antidepressants — and associated Medicare spending on those drugs — fell in states where marijuana could feasibly be used as a replacement, the researchers said it appears likely legalization led to a drop in prescriptions. That point, they said, is strengthened because prescriptions didn't drop for medicines such as blood-thinners, for which marijuana isn't an alternative.

The study, which appears in Health Affairs, examined data from Medicare Part D from 2010 to 2013. It is the first study to examine whether legalization of marijuana changes doctors' clinical practice and whether it could curb public health costs.

The findings add context to the debate as more lawmakers express interest in medical marijuana. This year, Ohio and Pennsylvania passed laws allowing the drug for therapeutic purposes, making it legal in 25 states, plus Washington, D.C. The approach could also come to a vote in Florida and Missouri this November. A federal agency is considering reclassifying medical marijuana under national drug policy to make it more readily available.

Medical marijuana saved Medicare about $165 million in 2013, the researchers concluded. They estimated that, if medical marijuana were available nationwide, Medicare Part D spending would have declined in the same year by about $470 million. That's about half a percent of the program's total expenditures.

Less prescription opioids? It seems a few pharmaceutical companies have a reason to fear legal cannabis (as long as they aren't in the business of selling it).

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butthurt writes:

CNET reports that Snapchat is introducing (in a phased roll-out) a feature called Memories, "a searchable and shareable archive of" one's photos that are stored on the company's servers.

Snapchat wants you to hold on to your photos and videos for a little while longer.

The new Memories feature is a searchable and shareable archive of snaps that you can access within the app. Memories backs up snaps to Snapchat's servers and automatically pulls together saved snaps into categories based on location. But you can also search on a keyword, such as food.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Writing in Science, Lizzie Wade says:

There's a big geopolitical imbalance in the new clean energy agreement reached this week by the presidents of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Although Canada already far exceeds the trilateral pledge to generate half of North America's electricity from non-carbon-based sources by 2025 and the United States has a clear path forward, Mexico faces major hurdles.

[...]

[...] new continent-wide commitment comes shortly after the Mexican government completed a controversial energy reform that opened up the nationalized oil industry to foreign investments. The reform will make regulating the energy sector more complex.

[...]

Hydropower now makes up 70% of renewable energy in Mexico, with wind at only 15%. But last year the government committed to tripling the country's wind energy capacity to 9.8 gigawatts by 2018. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico -- the thin strip of land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans -- is one of the windiest places in the world and already hosts about 1600 turbines, generating 90% of the country's output. The majority of future wind development is planned for this region, but several ambitious projects there have been delayed or canceled by conflicts with indigenous communities over land rights.

"The problem isn't that they don't want wind power. The problem is that they are not consulted," says [Gustavo] Alanis-Ortega, [president of the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights] whose organization has supported the communities' challenges. "They feel invaded, marginalized, and exploited. No one is taking them into account."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Al Gara, chief architect for exascale computing at Intel, gave a talk at the ISC16 supercomputing conference in which he made the case for 100 exaflops supercomputing in the next 15 years:

Dreaming is the foundation of the technology industry, and supercomputing has always been where the most REM action takes place among the best and brightest minds in computing, storage, and networking – as it should be. But to attain the 100 exaflops level of performance that is possible within the next fifteen years, the supercomputing sector is going to have to do a lot of hard engineering and borrow more than a few technologies from the hyperscalers who are also, in their own unique ways, pushing the scale envelope.

This, among other themes, was the focus of a recent talk by Al Gara, chief architect for exascale computing at Intel, at the ISC16 supercomputing conference in Germany. Gara, who was one of the architects of IBM's BlueGene family of massively parallel supercomputers before joining Intel, mapped out the scalability issues that the supercomputing industry faces as it tries to push performance ever higher. And the result of his detailed presentation was both optimistic in that he thought the industry, working collaboratively, could hit the 100 exaflops performance level by 2030 and somewhat pessimistic in that such a performance gain fifteen years from now – about 1,000X if you round generously – was nothing like the 50,000X we have seen in the past fifteen years.

Aspects discussed include bringing memory closer to processors using technologies like Hybrid Memory Cube and High Bandwidth Memory, the need for ever-cheaper fiber optics to make interconnects faster, and the need for even better transistors and concurrency. One amusing prediction: power consumption of a 100 exaflops supercomputer will rise up to 80 megawatts instead of being capped around 20 megawatts, but this could be mitigated if the price of a megawatt-year decreased from around $1,000,000 to $500,000. This would ensure that the energy needed to run the machine would cost no more than half the total budget for the 100 exaflops supercomputer. I guess we need to bet on small-scale nuclear fusion to help bring that cost down. Perhaps the use of ever-faster high-performance computing to conduct fusion efficiency simulations could create a feedback loop?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AnandTech interviewed Mark Re, SVP and Chief Technology Officer of Seagate, to talk about plans for upcoming hard disk drive (HDD) technologies.

Although shingled magnetic recording (SMR) lowers write speeds, a number of techniques help reduce the impact, such as banding together SMR tracks into certain zones with perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) zones covering the rest of the drive rather than shingling, or adding more SLC NAND and DRAM cache. Seagate will be expanding its use of SMR to increase density in client drives, not just "cold storage" drives, but will be using partial SMR/partial PMR and caching in order to mitigate write performance issues.

For the moment, Seagate won't be using helium outside of products for capacity-demanding datacenter customers (such as the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 10 TB HDD). The company can reduce fluid flow forces inside air-filled HDDs using purely mechanical solutions. On the other hand, Western Digital has introduced helium-filled drives aimed at consumers and has a marketing name for its technology (HelioSeal).

[Continues...]

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

We've seen government officials do some pretty questionable things to avoid turning over documents to FOIA requesters. The most common method is just to stick requesters with a bill they can't pay. Stonewalling is popular, too -- so much so that the federal government sends out "Still interested?" notices to people whose requests have been backburnered for years.

More rarely, officials will race requesters to the courthouse, hoping to secure a judgment in their favor stating that they've already fully complied with a FOIA request -- even when they've done nothing but withhold and redact. Stripped of all the legal wrangling, this is basically the government suing individuals for asking for documents, forcing taxpayers to go out-of-pocket if they hope to counter the officials' assertions.

But one thing we haven't seen is a government official securing a grand jury indictment against open records requesters... for making open records requests.

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160702/22172134883/judge-responds-to-open-records-request-having-requester-indicted-arrested.shtml

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fork(2) writes:

Engineers at MIT have developed an easily customizable vaccine that can be quickly manufactured and deployed in response to disease outbreaks, ScienceDaily reports.

The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. These molecules are then packaged into a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells, where it is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host.

In addition to targeting infectious diseases, the researchers are using this approach to create cancer vaccines that would teach the immune system to recognize and destroy tumors.

"This nanoformulation approach allows us to make vaccines against new diseases in only seven days, allowing the potential to deal with sudden outbreaks or make rapid modifications and improvements," says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

The paper describing the new vaccines will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of July 4, 2016. The project was led by Jasdave Chahal, a postdoc at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and Omar Khan, a postdoc at the Koch Institute.

Dendrimer-RNA nanoparticles generate protective immunity against lethal Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii challenges with a single dose (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1600299113)

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fliptop writes:

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled more than 500,000 hoverboards after many months of safety warnings and reports of fires:

The recall impacts the biggest hoverboard brands on the market, including Swagway (the Swagway X1 model), the Hovertrax from Razor, the Airwalk Self Balancing Electric Scooter, the iMoto, the Hype Roam, the Wheeli, 2Wheelz, Back to the Future, Mobile Tech, Hover Shark, NWS, X Glider and X Rider.

Additionally, retailer Overstock.com is recalling all hoverboards sold on its website, which amounts to 4,300 in all. Similarly, Boscov's, a retailer based in Reading, Pennsylvania, is recalling 1,300 Orbit hoverboards.

The hazard described by the CPSC specifically cites risks associated with lithium-ion battery packs used in the hoverboards that may "overheat, posing a risk of the products smoking, catching fire and/or exploding."

[...] Consumers in the U.S. unsure whether or not their hoverboard is part of the recall can call the CPSC consumer hotline at (800) 638-2772.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists have suggested that non-water based life could form on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon:

A team of researchers at Cornell University has built and run a simulation that showed prebiotic reactions could possibly occur on the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan, suggesting the possibility of life evolving in a place where it is too cold for water to be a factor. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes the simulation they created in response to the discovery (by the Huygens probe) that polymers such as polyimine might have already developed on the moon's surface.

[...] For life to come about in such places, researchers reason, there would likely need to be some sort of action going on—and that is why there has been so much focus on Titan; it is the only object in our solar system, besides Earth, that has both rainfall and erosion due to liquid movement. But the water it has is locked far underground and the moon is too cold to support an impact by water anyway. But, as the researchers with this new effort discovered after poring over data sent back by Huygens, the surface does have hydrogen cyanide in its sediment, brought down from the atmosphere by methane and ethane rain.

Polymorphism and electronic structure of polyimine and its potential significance for prebiotic chemistry on Titan (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606634113)

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

A little over a year ago Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean said, "In the fall of 2013 and early 2014 we started to notice a big, almost circular mass of water that just didn't cool off as much as it usually did, so by spring of 2014 it was warmer than we had ever seen it for that time of year."

Bond coined the term "The Blob" to refer to it.

Now new research indicates that the The Blob and El Niño together strongly depressed productivity off the West Coast, with The Blob creating most of the impact. From an article at phys.org:

The research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by scientists from NOAA Fisheries, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California, Santa Cruz is among the first to assess the marine effects of the 2015-2016 El Niño off the West Coast of the United States.

"Last year there was a lot of speculation about the consequences of 'The Blob' and El Niño battling it out off the U.S. West Coast," said lead author Michael Jacox, of UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center. "We found that off California El Niño turned out to be much weaker than expected, The Blob continued to be a dominant force, and the two of them together had strongly negative impacts on marine productivity."

"Now, both The Blob and El Niño are on their way out, but in their wake lies a heavily disrupted ecosystem," Jacox said.

[...] The research paper describes real-time monitoring of the California Current Ecosystem with the latest technology, including autonomous gliders that track undersea conditions along the West Coast. "This work reflects technological advances that now let us rapidly assess the effects of major climate disruptions and project their impacts on the ecosystem," Jacox said.

Not to be confused with the movie of the same name...

Original Submission

n1 writes:

Three former Barclays employees have been found guilty of rigging the Libor interest rate between 2005 and 2007.

[...] The Libor rate is used by banks to set prices of financial products. It stands for the London inter-bank offered rate, and underpins trillions of pounds worth of loans and financial contracts for households and companies across the world.

The jury was unable to reach a verdict, after nearly two weeks of deliberation, in relation to two other defendants, Ryan Reich, 34, and Stelios Contogoulas, 44.

[...] In May, it was revealed that a sixth employee of Barclays, Peter Johnson, had pleaded guilty to conspiring to manipulate the rate.

[...] Last year, Tom Hayes became the first individual to be convicted in the Libor fixing scandal, initially sentenced to 14 years in prison although that was later reduced to 11.

But in January five city brokers were cleared of helping Hayes to manipulate the Libor rate.

Source: BBC

Barclays declined to comment.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

NPR's All Things Considered aired a piece by Nell Greenfieldboyce today (July 5) about what comes next for NASA:

The exploration of our outer solar system is about to hit a real slump. NASA is celebrating Juno's arrival at Jupiter, but in less than two years, Juno will be gone -- it's slated to plunge into the gas giant and burn up. The Cassini spacecraft, now orbiting Saturn, will meet the same fate next year.

"It'll be the first time since the 1970s that there will be no NASA presence in the outer planets," says Casey Dreier, director of space policy at The Planetary Society. "For the first time in 40 years, the lights will go out in the outer solar system."

NASA does have some upcoming missions closer to home. In September, one mission will go off toward an asteroid, aiming to return a sample to Earth. And there are a couple of missions that will go back to Mars: a big rover in 2020, and a lander that was supposed to launch this year but got delayed until 2018.

"Basically we're suffering now from what were budget cuts to the planetary budget that started in 2013 with the sequester," says Jason Barnes of the University of Idaho, who chairs the division for planetary sciences of the American Astronomical Society.

NASA is now trying to whip up some new adventures, and Congress is getting involved here, too. Lawmakers recently ordered NASA to visit Europa, an icy moon that orbits Jupiter. It may have vast underground oceans, making it an intriguing place to look for life.

Last year's final appropriations act required NASA to launch a Europa mission no later than 2022, says Dreier, who notes that "people kind of jokingly refer to it as the only mission that would be illegal for NASA not to fly." And the law doesn't just say go to Europa. It says go there on a certain rocket -- one that Congress demanded that NASA build after the retirement of the space shuttles.

[...] There are other places in the outer solar system that NASA would like to visit, too, such as Saturn's moon Titan, which has lakes of liquid methane. And another moon, Enceladus, clearly has an underground store of water. "We see geysers coming out of the southern hemisphere," notes [Jim Green, the director of the planetary science division at NASA].

Original Submission