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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again.

"If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn't have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6," Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.

IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially ran out of new addresses based on IPv4.

For security, public key cryptography is another thing Cerf would like to have added, had it been feasible.

Trouble is, neither idea is likely to have made it into the final result at the time. "I doubt I could have gotten away with either one," said Cerf, who won a Turing Award in 2004 and is now vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. "So today we have to retrofit."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37460682

On Saturday, Snap released some limited information about how the glasses will work. Footage will be recorded in a new, circular format which can be viewed in any orientation, the company said. The battery on the device will last around a day. A light on the front of the device will indicate to people nearby when the glasses are recording.

Prior to confirmation from Snap about the product, news website Business Insider published a promotional video it found on YouTube showing the product. The video has since been taken down. Spectacles will remind many of Google Glass, an ill-fated attempt by the search giant to create smart glasses.

Additional reporting: http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-glasses-2016-9

Also from the same submitter:

http://www.pcmag.com/news/348126/register-to-vote-now-via-snapchat US Snapchat users who are eligible to vote may now register using the app.

"Our country's democracy thrives on participation. But you can't participate unless you register to vote," a Snapchat spokesman told Mashable. "We hope this effort amplifies our community's voice come November."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story. Some goods which are dangerous to transport by air are legally described as Dangerous Goods or Dangerous Air Cargo. There are specific regulations covering the movement of these items and special procedures must be followed :

Amazon has been fined £65,000 after being found guilty of attempting to ship dangerous goods by air.

The online giant tried to transport lithium-ion batteries and flammable aerosols between 2014 and 2015. It was found guilty at Southwark Crown Court [London, UK] of causing dangerous goods to be delivered for carriage in an aircraft in breach of air navigation rules.

An Amazon spokesman said: "The safety of the public, our customers, employees and partners is an absolute priority."

The prosecution had been brought by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) under the Air Navigation (Dangerous Goods) Regulations 2002. The items were destined for flights in and outside the UK in four shipments between January 2014 and June 2015. They were only discovered when the cargoes were screened by Royal Mail before departure, and seized before they could reach the aircraft.

The court heard that Amazon had tried to ship a lithium-ion battery to Jersey on a day before 7 January 2014, and a flammable gas aerosol to Romania on a similar date.

Another shipment, destined for Ireland on a day before 17 July 2014, contained another aerosol, while Amazon illegally tried to send two more lithium-ion batteries to Northern Ireland between 12 May and 3 June 2015.

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takyon writes:

Chelsea Manning will spend at least seven days in solitary confinement for attempting suicide in July:

A military prison disciplinary board has sentenced US whistleblower Chelsea Manning to fourteen days in solitary confinement, her lawyer has said. She will spend seven days in solitary confinement for charges relating to her attempt to kill herself in July. She ended a hunger strike last week, after the military agreed to provide her with gender dysmorphia treatment. The army private, born as Bradley Manning, is serving a 35-year sentence for espionage.

Last July, the former intelligence officer attempted to take her own life, after what lawyers said was the Army's refusal to provide appropriate health care. She was found guilty on Thursday by prison officials in Leavenworth, Kansas, of "Conduct Which Threatens" for her suicide attempt. She also was convicted of having "prohibited property" - the book "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy," by Gabriella Coleman.

Earlier this month, it was announced that the US Army will grant Chelsea Manning's request for gender transition surgery.

The President of the United States and others believe that constraints must be placed on the practice of solitary confinement. Studies have found that solitary confinement leads to increased risks of self-harm.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Rats in tiny trousers, pseudoscientific bullshit, the personalities of rocks, and Volkswagen's, shall we say, "creative" approach to emissions testing were among the research topics honored by the 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes. The winners were announced last night at a live webcast ceremony held at Harvard University.

For those unfamiliar with the Ig Nobel Prizes, it's an annual celebration of silly science. Or a silly celebration of seemingly dubious science, courtesy of the satirical journal Annals of Improbable Research. The main objective is to honor research that first makes you laugh, and then makes you think. It's all in good fun, and the honorees frequently travel to the ceremony on their own dime to accept their awards.

Some of the honorees were:

Literature Prize: Fredrik Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.

Perception Prize: Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.

VW won the Chemistry category for "electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested".

Who would you have chosen to win an Ig Nobel Prize this year?

Whoever writes:

The 2016 Ig Nobel prizes were awarded yesterday, Thursday, September 22. Notable amongst the winners was VolksWagen, who won the Chemistry prize for "solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested." No one from VW attended the ceremony to collect the prize. Other notable winners included a team who won the Peace Prize for their groundbreaking work analyzing the detection of "Pseudo-Profound Bullshit."

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takyon writes:

Over a year after releasing a neglected Wi-Fi router, Google is preparing to release a brand new router called Google Wi-Fi:

OnHub-schmonhub: two sources are now telling us that Google will introduce an own-brand Wi-Fi router called Google Wifi, and that the device will cost $129. A source that has proved reliable in the past has told us that the device will be launched alongside Google's Pixel phones, Google Home, and the 4K 'Chromecast Ultra' on October 4th.

Chromecast Ultra could be a good device for installing Kodi on, although it will cost more than previous generations ($69 vs. $35). The device will reportedly have support for high dynamic range (HDR) video.

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takyon writes:

The singing of midshipman fish is linked to the melatonin cycle:

The researchers found the singing was controlled by a hormone that helps humans to sleep - melatonin. And looking more closely at how melatonin acts on receptors in different parts of the fish's brain could help explain why it is such a powerful "chemical clock" with a role in the timing of sleep-wake cycles, reproduction and birdsong. Prof Andrew Bass, who led the research, said his curiosity about midshipman fish had been piqued by a paper written in 1924 by an academic called Charles Greene, which described how the male fish would hum at night.

[...] To find out if the humming was controlled by an internal clock, or circadian rhythm, the team first kept a group of midshipman fish in constant light. This almost completely suppressed their humming. "But when [we gave the fish] a melatonin substitute," said Prof Bass, "they continued to hum, though at random times of day without a rhythm. "Melatonin essentially acted as a 'go' signal for the midshipman's nocturnal calling."

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NotSanguine writes:

The New York Times has an article asking readers to select (from their list) what questions they'd like to ask the 2016 presidential candidates.

It's clear that both candidates haven't given specific answers to questions about issues which directly affect us. What questions would Soylentils ask the candidates (your choices, not mine as in the NYT article) to identify their positions on issues which matter to you?

Some of the questions I'd like to see answered are:
How would you work with a Congress which isn't aligned with the goals of your administration to actually get something accomplished?
Does money equal speech? If so/not so, why and how?
How will you rein in our intelligence agencies that are unconstitutionally spying on U.S. citizens?
What specific steps would you take (if any) to combat anthropogenic climate change?
Would you allow non-American foods to be cooked in the White House kitchen? If not, what steps will you take to reduce the obesity problem that will inevitably ensue?

What about the rest of you? What questions would you like to see answered by the candidates?

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

National Whistleblower reports

House Intel Claim that Snowden Had Whistleblower Protection Is False and Misleading

In a brief 3-page report[PDF] dated September 15, 2016, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that Edward Snowden "was not a whistleblower" because there were "laws and regulations in effect at the time" that "afforded him protection" and he failed to exercise those whistleblower rights.  The Committee report specifically cited the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA) that does permit employees, like Snowden, to make disclosures of wrongdoing to Congress if certain other conditions are met.

However, the House Intel Committee failed to state the obvious. That the IC WPA contains no whistleblower protections whatsoever if an employee were to exercise the right to disclose information about agency wrongdoing to Congress.

To make matters worse, the House Intel Committee report made the unsupportable claim that the IC WPA "affords" national security whistleblowers "with critical protections". Indeed, it is well known that claim is not true. As a result, the House Intel Committee's claim of whistleblower protection for national security employees, like Snowden, is knowingly false and entirely misleading.

U.S. News & World Report says

Snowden-Slamming Lawmakers Accused of Embarrassing Errors in Report

A three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist says the House Intelligence Committee made surprisingly erroneous claims in the three-page executive summary of a report that denounces exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The summary asserts that Snowden caused "tremendous damage to national security" and is "a serial exaggerator and fabricator." The full and unreleased report, 36 pages, was unanimously adopted last week after two years of work, says a committee release.

Barton Gellman, the former Washington Post journalist who first reported some of the most explosive 2013 Snowden revelations about mass surveillance, says two details in the committee summary are demonstrably false and others arguably so.

"A close review of Snowden's official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying", the committee summary says before detailing alleged lies.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt says

House Intelligence Committee's List Of 'Snowden's Lies' Almost Entirely False

So, last week, I wrote up a long analysis of the House Intelligence Committee's ridiculous smear campaign against Ed Snowden, highlighting a bunch of misleading to false statements that the report made in trying to undermine Snowden's credibility as he seeks a pardon from President Obama. The Committee insisted that it had spent two years working on the report, but it seems like maybe they just needed all that time because they couldn't find any actual dirt on Snowden.

[...] Barton Gellman, one of the four reporters who Snowden originally gave his documents to, and who has done some amazing reporting on the Snowden leaks (not to mention, who is writing a book about Snowden) has responded to the report as well, and highlights just how incredibly dishonest the report is.

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butthurt writes:

A post on AT&T's corporate blog announced its Project AirGig, which would entail the use of power lines to carry millimetre-wave signals between stations that provide Internet access.

AT&T* unveiled today Project AirGig, a transformative technology from AT&T Labs that could one day deliver low-cost, multi-gigabit wireless internet speeds using power lines. We're deep in the experimentation phase. This technology will be easier to deploy than fiber, can run over license-free spectrum and can deliver ultra-fast wireless connectivity to any home or handheld wireless device. We designed Project AirGig literally from the ground up to be both practical and transformational. Our initial and ongoing testing at AT&T outdoor facilities has been positive. We expect to kick off our first field trials in 2017.

"Project AirGig has tremendous potential to transform internet access globally – well beyond our current broadband footprint and not just in the United States," said John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president, Technology and Operations, AT&T. "The results we've seen from our outdoor labs testing have been encouraging, especially as you think about where we're heading in a 5G world. To that end, we're looking at the right global location to trial this new technology next year."

PC Magazine
Engadget
Computer World

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Phoenix666 writes:

A recent quantum mechanical study of graphene by a research team at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea, has elucidated the intercalation mechanism and pathways for graphene decoupling from the copper substrate.

The graphene films, grown on the copper (Cu) substrates must be detached clean without leaving residue behind, as residual metallic impurities can significantly alter electronic and electrochemical properties of graphene.
...
The difference between the armchair graphene nanoribbon (GNR) and zigzag GNR on the Cu(111) substrate, is distinguished by the presence of an edge state in the zigzag GNR edges, which has been attributed to the hybridization between the out-of-plane carbon π orbitals and the metal d orbitals. This edge state, however, is absent in the armchair GNR edge atoms. Such an observation has not been reported for H-terminated GNR on Cu(111).

Vibrational stretching mode calculations showed that the GNR edges influenced the molecular adsorption of oxygen at the bare and GNR/Cu sites, confirming the role of GNR edges in weakening the pre-elongated O-O bond at the GNR/Cu interface. The research team also explained that the GNR edges facilitated the stabilization of water molecules (regardless of surface oxygenation), which would otherwise be unstable on the bare Cu surface.

Precise control of graphene and carbon nanotube formation has been an ongoing challenge for their widespread adoption into production products.

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hubie writes:

A functioning society requires various public services, such as hospitals, schools, landfills, etc., but deciding where to build them can be a complicated and contentious issue. The cost to build them are typically shared across society in the form of taxes, and deciding where they go involves various optimizations and tradeoffs to maximize their impact on society while minimizing the cost to society. Optimizing this kind of decision making is an active research topic in the field of algorithmic and network game theory.

A very common approach is to address the issue from a centralized, top-down perspective whereby a city planner considers the network of society as a whole, and inputs the pros and cons into a global optimization algorithm to find a minimum cost solution. This approach is known to not provide the most optimal solution. Another approach is to let individual agents make decisions in best response to the choices of their neighbors. For instance, if a region can access a hospital in a neighboring region, then they would have little motivation to want to have a hospital built in their region; however if none of their neighbors have a hospital, then they would be more likely to be willing to have one built in their region. Although this sounds more appealing than the top-down approach, this approach is also known to not be very socially efficient.

Yi-Fan Sun and Hai-Jun Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have published an open access paper in Nature's Scientific Reports that considers a cooperative decision process where global decisions are made via local consensus.

Briefly speaking, the basic rules are that agents in need of service recommend their network neighbors of highest local impact (to be precisely defined later) as candidate service providers, and an agent may be chosen as a service provider only if all its non-server neighbors are happy with this appointment. This distributed selection mechanism does not require the global structural information of the system but only involves local-scale information exchange. Yet very encouragingly we find that it leads to socially efficient solutions with tax level approaching the lowest possible value.

[Continues...]

"exec" writes:

Get ready to endlessly debate the value of "native 4K" on consoles

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/microsoft-and-sonys-emerging-4k-pixel-pissing-contest/

Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro (launching in November) and Microsoft's Xbox One Scorpio (launching late next year) are giving the pixel-counters out there a new, 4K-sized battlefield to fight over. Now, Microsoft is drawing a line in the sand in that developing battle, with Microsoft Studios Publishing General Manager Shannon Loftis telling USA Today that "any games we're making that we're launching in the Scorpio time frame, we're making sure they can natively render at 4K."

The word "natively" is important there, because there has been a lot of wiggle room when it comes to talking about what constitutes a truly "4K" game these days. For instance, according to developers Ars has talked to, many if not most games designed for the PS4 Pro will be rendered with an internal framebuffer that's larger than that for a 1080p game, but significantly smaller than the full 3840×2160 pixels on a 4K screen (the exact resolution for any PS4 Pro game will depend largely on how the developer prioritizes the frame rate and the level of detail in the scene). While the PS4 Pro can and does output a full 4K signal, it seems that only games with exceedingly simple graphics will be able to render at that resolution natively.

-- submitted from IRC

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Twitter is reportedly in conversation with a number of tech companies for a potential sale. According to CNBC, the social company is in talks with the likes of Google and cloud computing company...

The suiters [sic] courting Twitter are said to be interested in the data the company generates from its 313 million active users. However, sources say that, while conversations are ongoing and picking up steam, there's no assurance that a deal will be inked. As a result, Twitter's stocks have soared as high as 23 percent based on the news. Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports that the company has just lost two key staffers, including head of TV Andrew Adashek.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13028616/twitter-sale-talks-google-salesforce

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

Agrochemical giants Syngenta and Bayer discovered in their own tests that their pesticides caused severe harm to bees, according to unpublished documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the environmental group Greenpeace.

The companies conducted the trials on products that used the controversial pesticides known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, which have long been linked to rapid bee decline. Neonics are also the world's most commonly used pesticide.

According to their own studies, Syngenta's thiamethoxam and Bayer's clothianidin were found to cause severe harm at high levels of use, although the effect was lessened when used under 50 parts per billion (ppb) and 40ppb respectively, the Guardian reports.

However, as Greenpeace notes, the research "assumes a very narrow definition of harm to bee health and ignores wild bees which evidence suggests are more likely to be harmed by neonicotinoids".

That means the findings may "substantially underestimate" the impact of neonics, Greenpeace said.

[...] the studies are not realistic. The bees were not exposed to the neonics that we know are in planting dust, water drunk by bees, and wildflowers wherever neonics are used as seed treatments. This secret evidence highlights the profound weakness of regulatory tests.

Our previous discussions about neonicotinoids.

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