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fork(2) writes:

If you studied computer science, you most likely encountered the Wagner-Fischer algorithm for edit distance in whatever course introduced 2D arrays. The edit distance between two strings of symbols is the minimum number of edits (insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to turn one string into the other. The algorithm builds a huge table with symbols of one string labeling the rows and symbols from the other labeling the columns. Each entry in the table is the the number of edits required to turn the string ending with the corresponding column into the string ending with the corresponding row.

For years people have been trying to improve on this basic algorithm. And failing. Now, Phys.org is reporting on a paper to appear at ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) next week which shows that Wagner-Fischer is as good as it's likely going to get. This sounds like an NP thing..and it is! If it were possible to solve the edit distance problem in less than quadratic time (i.e. faster than filling up the huge table), then it would be possible to solve the satisfiability problem in less than exponential time.

From Phys.org:

Theoretical computer science is particularly concerned with a class of problems known as NP-complete. Most researchers believe that NP-complete problems take exponential time to solve, but no one's been able to prove it. In their STOC paper, [Piotr] Indyk and his student Arturs Backurs demonstrate that if it's possible to solve the edit-distance problem in less-than-quadratic time, then it's possible to solve an NP-complete problem in less-than-exponential time. Most researchers in the computational-complexity community will take that as strong evidence that no subquadratic solution to the edit-distance problem exists.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Concealed handgun license holders in Texas can carry their weapons into public university buildings, classrooms and dorms starting Monday, a day that also marks 50 years after the mass shooting at the University of Texas' landmark clock tower.

The campus-carry law pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican legislative majority makes Texas one of a handful of states guaranteeing the right to carry concealed handguns on campus. 

Texas has allowed concealed handguns in public for 20 years. Gun rights advocates consider it an important protection, given the constitutional right to bear arms, as well as a key self-defense measure in cases of campus violence, such as the 1966 UT shootings and the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.

Opponents of the law fear it will chill free speech on campus and lead to more campus suicide. The former dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture left for a position at the University of Pennsylvania because of his opposition to allowing guns on campus.

Officials told the Austin American-Statesman it was a coincidence that the law took effect 50 years to the day after the UT shooting. Marine-trained sniper Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the 27-story clock tower in the heart of UT's flagship Austin campus, armed with rifles, pistols and a sawed-off shotgun on Aug. 1, 1966, killing 13 people and wounding more than 30 others before officers gunned him down.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/08/01/campus-carry-goes-into-effect-as-texas-remembers-ut-tower-shootings-50-years-later.html

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

3D printing has been used to build replicas of historical artefacts based on photographs and scans. Now, in honour of the 2016 Olympic Games, a team from 3D printing company Stratasys, 3DPTree in Atlanta and the Millennium Gate Museum in Atlanta have gone one step further -- recreating a statue that was destroyed over 1,500 years ago.

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia stood around 13 metres (43 feet) tall, towering over visitors to the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, Greece. It was constructed around 435 BC by the sculptor Phidias, and it would have made an imposing sight. Its core was wood, covered with ivory and gold, and it sat on a cedar wood throne decorated with ebony, ivory, gold and gems.

Now considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the statue stood (or sat) for over 850 years. In 420 AD, it was seized and taken to Constantinople, where it was added to the collection of imperial chamberlain Lausus. This was to be its final resting place. In 475, the Palace of Lausus and much of Constantinople was destroyed by fire, including the statue of Zeus.

No replica survived, only depictions on coins, and descriptions by historians and travellers. It was from these, and later statues that copied the style of the famous Zeus, that artists attempted to recreate the statue.

"The biggest challenge was the statue no longer existed. 3DPTree and museum curators teamed to conduct extensive research on how it would have looked, and later recreated it digitally," museum director Jeremy Kobus said in an email.

The resulting statue is printed in thermoplastics, rather than gold and ivory, and stands a fair bit smaller than the original at 1.8 metres (6 feet). It was constructed in pieces using the Stratasys Fortus 900mc 3D printer.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Router hardware has evolved and improved over the years, but its firmware remains stuck in the dark ages when it comes to security, network traffic visibility and control. Recognizing the inherent limitations in popular commercial routers, Untangle set about making a radical new OS for home routers based on its popular, broadly installed and easy-to-use NG Firewall product.

Untangle's NG Firewall will be available to flash onto various router models, beginning with the Asus AC3100 RT AC88U.

"The open source community has known for a long time what router manufacturers are loathe to admit: router firmware is lacking," said Dirk Morris, founder and chief product officer at Untangle. "Projects like DD-WRT have gained traction because of the limitations of the operating systems developed by hardware manufacturers. Firmware has failed to provide adequate security to the modern home, let alone network traffic visibility and shaping. Untangle handles these issues and more."

The biggest challenge facing home networks isn't necessarily even security: it's the lack of visibility into and control over the traffic. Unlike commercial firmware on today's home Wi-Fi routers, Untangle NG Firewall logs traffic for rich, robust reporting into every facet of what's happening online: sites the kids are visiting, neighbors jumping on the wireless network, and the newest IP-enabled gadget phoning home.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/08/05/new-home-router-os/

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fork(2) writes:

Space.com reports that Kepler apparently suffered a mysterious glitch last week but has recovered.

During a scheduled contact session on July 28, Kepler's handlers discovered that the observatory's photometer -- the camera-like tool it uses to detect alien planets -- had turned off. But the instrument powered back on again, and Kepler resumed "autonomous science operations" on Monday (Aug. 1), mission team members said.

"We will confirm that [normal] science operations have been resumed within a week," Kepler mission manager Charlie Sobeck, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, wrote in an update today (Aug. 5). "The team is currently investigating the cause; the spacecraft is otherwise operating normally."

The $600 [million USD] Kepler mission launched in March 2009, tasked with determining how common Earth-like planets are throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The spacecraft detects alien worlds by noting the tiny brightness dips they cause when crossing their host stars' faces from Kepler's perspective.

[...] Kepler's primary observing campaign came to a halt in May 2013, when the second of its four orientation-maintaining "reaction wheels" failed, robbing the telescope of its superprecise pointing ability. But Kepler's handlers soon figured out how to stabilize the observatory using sunlight pressure and the two remaining wheels, and, in May 2014, Kepler embarked on a new mission called K2.

The spacecraft is still hunting for exoplanets during K2, but on a more limited basis. It's also studying a wide variety of cosmic objects and phenomena, during a series of shifting 80-day "campaigns." Kepler is currently in the middle of K2's 10th campaign.

To date, Kepler has discovered more than 2,300 exoplanets -- about 70 percent of all known alien worlds -- along with several thousand other "candidates" that await confirmation by follow-up observations or analysis. One hundred twenty-eight of the confirmed alien planets have been spotted during the K2 mission, NASA officials said.

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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

The nice feller over at phoronix brings us this handy to have bit of info:

It turns out the RAID5 and RAID6 code for the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID support is faulty and users should not be making use of it if you care about your data.

There has been this mailing list thread since the end of July about Btrfs scrub recalculating the wrong parity in RAID5. The wrong parity and unrecoverable errors has been confirmed by multiple parties. The Btrfs RAID 5/6 code has been called as much as fatally flawed -- "more or less fatally flawed, and a full scrap and rewrite to an entirely different raid56 mode on-disk format may be necessary to fix it. And what's even clearer is that people /really/ shouldn't be using raid56 mode for anything but testing with throw-away data, at this point. Anything else is simply irresponsible."

Just as well I haven't gotten around to trying it then.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for xhedit

The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) must spend a majority of the four-year break between Olympics thinking up new, spectacularly petty demands to make of everyone when the next event rolls around. It's always been overbearing and thuggish, but it seems determined to top itself with each new iteration of its sports-related boondoggle.

In the run-up to this year's particularly dystopian Olympic games, being hosted in a city without clean water or a clean police force, the USOC has already demanded:

- That a company take down Olympic-related social media posts pertaining to the Olympic athlete the company is sponsoring

- That no non-official commercial entities are allowed to use certain hashtags in tweets

- That no "non-media" companies are allowed to refer to the Olympic games, outcomes of events, or even share/repost content posted by official Olympic media accounts

It's these last two that are being challenged -- not by a megacorporation unable to buy its way into the USOC's good graces, but a Minnesota-located franchise of the Zerorez carpet cleaning business.

A small business in Minnesota is suing over the US Olympic Committee's ban on tweeting about the Olympic games. The Committee announced last month that non-sponsors are banned from even using hashtags like #Rio2016 or #TeamUSA. Zerorez, a carpet cleaning business in Minnesota, will file suit in U.S. District Court on Thursday.

So why is this seemingly random floor cleaning business in Minnesota the one suing? They simply want to root for the home team.

"They're very engaged with social media," Aaron Hall, CEO of the JUX Law firm, told me over the phone. "They felt concerned about being censored on social media, especially at a time when we're going through a time of pain and negativity."

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160804/20130135162/minnesota-carpet-cleaning-business-sues-us-olympic-committee-over-ridiculous-social-media-rules.shtml

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Fnord666 writes:

http://www.recode.net/2016/8/4/12377596/beloved-silicon-valley-entrepreneur-blake-krikorian-has-died?utm_source=news

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fork(2) writes:

Gizmodo reports that the FBI has responded to an ACLU FOIA request by releasing 18 hours of surveillance video from the protests in Baltimore that followed the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. From the article:

According to the ACLU, the videos are all shot from traditional piloted aircraft. But as the ACLU points out drones can be seen in many of the videos. It's unclear if these drones were piloted by police, protesters, curious onlookers, or all of the above.

The videos, which all date from April 29, 2015 to May 3, 2015, switch from infrared (IR) to traditional camera mode and zoom in at various times -- though even at the maximum zoom it doesn't appear that any faces are clearly discernible. All 18 hours of raw video are available at the FBI's website. [The article contains the link.]

[...] After the protests occurred it was revealed in October 2015 that FBI planes using night vision and registered under fake businesses had been operating around the protest locations. This is the first time that footage from those planes has been released. As the ACLU notes, it's not clear what the FBI's records retention policy for videos like these might be and how they could be used for future investigations.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI has released more than 18 hours of video from surveillance cameras installed on FBI aircraft that flew over Baltimore in the days after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015. The videos, which were released to the ACLU before being posted online by the FBI this week, offer a rare and comprehensive view of the workings of a government surveillance operation. While the release of the footage addresses some questions, it leaves others unanswered.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/fbi-releases-secret-spy-plane-footage-freddie-gray-protests

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

It's long been suspected that "Portrait of a Woman," painted in oils between 1876 and 1880 by Edgar Degas, was painted over another painting. Now, researchers from the Australian Synchrotron have confirmed it -- and revealed the hidden painting in full colour.

Reusing canvases wasn't an uncommon practice for artists low on funds and reluctant to waste resources (and it still isn't), but it's only been in recent years that we've been able to see the artworks painted over. This is because technology has advanced to the point where X-raying an invaluable artwork isn't going to damage it.

Artists whose work has been confirmed to conceal earlier work include Pablo Picasso, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Vincent van Gogh -- but the X-ray could only reveal the hidden works in black and white.

Degas' hidden painting was confirmed using more conventional X-rays, then taken to the Australian Synchrotron, a type of particle accelerator, to reveal the colours of the painting. They used a technique called X-ray fluorescence elemental mapping, which uses X-rays to determine the different metals in the layers of paint.

This allowed the researchers to determine the colours of the paint based on their chemical makeup. The process took just 33 hours. If the team had attempted this scan 10 years ago, it would have taken 18 months.

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takyon writes:

Researchers suggest that a new form of light could be used in photonic circuits:

New research suggests that it is possible to create a new form of light by binding light to a single electron, combining the properties of both. [...] In normal materials, light interacts with a whole host of electrons present on the surface and within the material. But by using theoretical physics to model the behaviour of light and a recently-discovered class of materials known as topological insulators, Imperial researchers have found that it could interact with just one electron on the surface. This would create a coupling that merges some of the properties of the light and the electron. Normally, light travels in a straight line, but when bound to the electron it would instead follow its path, tracing the surface of the material.

In the study, published today in Nature Communications, Dr Vincenzo Giannini and colleagues modelled this interaction around a nanoparticle – a small sphere below 0.00000001 metres [10 nm] in diameter – made of a topological insulator. Their models showed that as well as the light taking the property of the electron and circulating the particle, the electron would also take on some of the properties of the light.

Normally, as electrons are travelling along materials, such as electrical circuits, they will stop when faced with a defect. However, Dr Giannini's team discovered that even if there were imperfections in the surface of the nanoparticle, the electron would still be able to travel onwards with the aid of the light. If this could be adapted into photonic circuits, they would be more robust and less vulnerable to disruption and physical imperfections.

Single-electron induced surface plasmons on a topological nanoparticle (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12375)

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We reported that Apple was planning to change its depiction of the pistol emoji (🔫), but things have taken a slightly different turn. Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

[...] The Emojipedia website argued that the symbol could still appear as a lifelike gun in messages sent to non-iOS users. Apple made the change in the wake of a series of shootings in the US.

However, Microsoft announced this week that its toy gun symbol would be redesigned as a more realistic-looking firearm. The emoji character system allows companies to use slightly different designs of the same basic objects, signs or expressions.

"The thing is, emojis already look different on different platforms and it does cause confusion," Jeremy Burge, editor of Emojipedia, told the BBC. "When we're dealing with guns and toys as a comparison, that's a whole new level of problems that we have there."

[...] "Apple has the most prominent emoji set that people use," said Mr Burge. "I think it has a high responsibility to be a bit cautious."

There was further criticism from web users, but a columnist in the Guardian praised the move as a statement on gun control.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

The FBI's director says the agency is collecting data that he will present next year in hopes of sparking a national conversation about law enforcement's increasing inability to access encrypted electronic devices.

Speaking on Friday at the American Bar Association conference in San Francisco, James Comey says the agency was unable to access 650 of 5,000 electronic devices investigators attempted to search over the last 10 months.

Comey says encryption technology makes it impossible in a growing number of cases to search electronic devices. He says it's up to U.S. citizens to decide whether to modify the technology.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fbi-chief-calls-national-talk-over-encryption-vs-safety-n624101

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Google has for the first time shared some of its data centre designs with the OpenCompute Project (OCP).

Google joined OCP back in March 2016 and, at the time, talked up its 48v racks and promised a new spec that would allow them to work with OCP servers in its own bit bars … and yours, should you choose to use OCP standards.

The Alphabet subsidiary has made good on that promise and shared a rack design in the hope they become part of the Open Rack 2.0 standard. Facebook's chipped in with some help, too.

Google says its efforts comprise a “48V power architecture with a modular, shallow-depth form factor that enables high-density deployment of OCP racks into data centers with limited space.”

The ads-and-search company says it has “extensively deployed these high-efficiency, high-availability systems since 2010.”

“We have seen significant reduction in losses and increased efficiency compared to 12V solutions,” writes technical program manager Debosmita Das and technical lead manager Mike Lau,” adding that “The improved SPUE [Server Power Usage Efficiency] with 48V has saved Google millions of dollars and kilowatt hours.”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Gartner defines Bimodal IT as: “the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed”.

I find myself more than a little bemused by the concept. First of all, why would I want to manage two separate modes of activity? That means that either I have to employ different people with specialisms in different approaches (expensive) or I have to take on people who are skilled in both areas (which by definition means they're not going to be best-of-breed in either).

Second, I have a strange liking for the concepts that Gartner mentions in Mode 1: safety and accuracy. I find it useful that my IT systems don't kill people; here in Jersey, for example, it's frowned upon if too many employees die in tragic business systems accidents. And in my experience, the CFO tends to be quite irritable if the month-end numbers don't add up. I also find security and integrity fairly useful too, along with availability – all things that can suffer in Gartner's so-called Mode 2 at the expense of agility and speed.

Although the term “bimodal IT” is relatively new, the concept isn't. Back in the 1990s I worked in an environment with two distinct approaches to IT: one slow, steady and methodical, and the other fast-moving and bleeding edge. Did the latter break more than the former? No, actually it didn't – but only because it was done by a small number of very technical people who could respond quickly to issues. Did it bring advantages? Yes: it was doing IP-based wide area stuff long before the other part of the IT world.

Would I go back to that setup tomorrow? Not on your nelly – it put a group of techies out on a limb, largely unsupportable by the other team and hence permanently lumbered with supporting bleeding-edge technology whenever it threw a tantrum and interfacing it tenuously into the core systems in the face of reluctant sighs from the core support group.

I had another of these “parallel” examples more recently, when a new senior techie decided that he would spin up cloud-based servers seemingly at random alongside the company's well-managed, well-documented and extremely stable infrastructure. He took exception, for some reason, when someone called him a “f**king cowboy”.

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