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mhajicek writes:

A court case with far-ranging consequences concluded Tuesday in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Ray Rosas is a free man tonight after a jury of his peers found him not guilty of shooting three Corpus Christi police officers on February 19, 2015. On that day, early in the morning, CCPD executed a no-knock search warrant, forcing entry into the home without first knocking and announcing they were the police.

A flash bang grenade was fired into Rosas' bedroom, reportedly stunning the 47-year-old, who then opened fire on the intruders. Three officers were wounded; officers Steven Ruebelmann, Steven Brown, and Andrew Jordan. Police were looking for drugs and Rosas' nephew, who they suspected to be a dealer. However, the unnamed nephew was not home at the time of the raid.

Rosas spent nearly 2 years in jail awaiting trial, which concluded Tuesday with a Nueces County jury finding him not guilty. Rosas' defense maintained, based on statements he made immediately following the shooting and later in jail that he did not know the men breaking into his home were police officers and there was no way he could've known, having been disoriented by the flash-bang stun grenade. "The case is so easy, this is a self-defense case," said Rosas' lawyer in closing arguments.

Rosas originally faced three counts of attempted capital murder, but the prosecution dropped those charges just before the trial began, opting instead to try him for three counts of aggravated assault on the police officers. The jury sided with his defense attorney's argument he had a right to defend his home and found him not guilty on all charges.

takyon: Also at the Corpus Christi Caller Times.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

According to c|net, Uber is preparing to launch self-driving cars in San Francisco, as it has done in Pittsburgh:

Uber's self-driving cars, accompanied by a human driver, have been traveling on the streets of San Francisco for the last three to four months. The company has said the cars are being used solely to collect data for maps. Mapping streets is part of readying autonomous vehicles for the open road, so they can identify routes and learn to detect obstacles.

Uber isn't saying when it's going to roll out its self-driving cars to passengers in San Francisco. The company declined to comment for this story. But CNET has learned that Uber will officially launch the program on Wednesday; we also learned that Uber worked in partnership with Volvo to develop the self-driving cars.

As of September, Uber didn't have a permit to run autonomous cars in California. It's unclear if the Department of Motor Vehicles has since given the company a permit. The DMV didn't return requests for comment.

So far, Uber's self-driving cars are available in only one US city -- Pittsburgh. After 18 months of testing, the company launched a small fleet of autonomous vehicles in September in the city. Now when riders hail an Uber there, they have a chance of being picked up in a self-driving car that's accompanied by a "safety driver." Uber said it plans to have 100 self-driving cars in Pittsburgh by the end of the year.

Also at The Verge .

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takyon writes:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10908/aquantia-launches-new-2g-5g-multi-gigabit-network-controllers-for-pcs

At the time in 2015, the 2.5G/5G standards were not yet ratified by IEEE. There were chips in the market, solely from Aquantia, for enterprise configurations that were happy to go with an evolving standard for their solution. From September 2016 this changed, and the standards have been ratified with Aquantia, Intel, Cisco and others all involved in the specification. Aquantia's earlier generation silicon adhered to the standard, and has been deployed in a number of enterprise backbone deployments to the tune of 5M ports a year. Today's announcement surrounds the launch of two new controllers based on the multi-gigabit standards aimed at more consumer level solutions – specifically 'client connectivity in enterprise, gaming and SMB applications'.

[...] For now, the AQtion 2.5G/5G controllers coming to market look to be a premium component, destined for high-end notebooks/PCs, and if the pricing is right, more expansive than the current array of 10G integrated options. One of the issues Aquantia will have, which they also acknowledge, is the switch problem that currently stops 10G being more widespread – the lack of consumer grade and consumer budget level switches. We were told that there are some enterprise models of 2.5G/5G switches currently for more backbone type of work, and it will be up to Aquantia's partners to spot opportunities in the consumer market. From a personal perspective, the switch side of the equation will be the slowest to change and be a defining aspect for the widespread adoption of this technology. We've seen this with 10G, or the fact that the Killer gaming NICs do not have corresponding switches/routers to assist in a number of features that might become irrelevant in a general network. Publicly Aquantia isn't stating which switch developers they are working with, and as before, leaving those companies to decide/announce their product lines, but I think the switch aspect will be more important to watch over 2017.

On performance metrics, Aquantia have told us that the AQ107 can achieve 9.5 Gbps in each direction in the 10G mode with a CPU utilization of 12-20%, and in 5G mode it can do 4.6 Gbps in each direction with 6-14% CPU use. Due to the higher clock rate of the controller, in 1G mode the controller is quoted as having has[sic] lower latency than standard 1G controllers. The AQC107, in 5G mode, will have a typical power consumption around 3W when in use.

Does anybody here need this caliber of Ethernet at home?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

EU-funded researchers have developed a new ultrafast X-ray technique which could revolutionise our understanding of structure and function at the atomic and molecular level.
...
The AXSIS team, led by Franz Kaertner, Professor of Physics at the University of Hamburg, has developed attosecond serial crystallography and spectroscopy which can give a full description of ultrafast processes atomically resolved in real space and on the electronic energy landscape. They believe this new technique will turn our understanding of structure and function at the atomic and molecular level on its head and help unravel fundamental processes in chemistry and biology.

The technique involves applying a fully coherent attosecond X-ray source based on coherent inverse Compton scattering off a free-electron crystal, developed by the project, to outrun radiation damage effects caused by the high X-ray irradiance needed to capture diffraction signals.

The team is also using this advance to optimise the entire instrumentation towards fundamental measurements of light absorption and excitation energy transfer. This includes X-ray pulse parameters, in tandem with sample delivery and crystal size as well as advanced X-ray detectors.

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GreatAuntAnesthesia writes:

According to The Guardian, Amazon has made real drone deliveries to real customers in Cambridge, UK. At present the "Prime Air" service is only available to two Amazon Prime customers with large gardens who happen to live close to Amazon's UK depot, but they hope to extend the service to dozens more in the coming months.

Apparently the drone was fully autonomous, with no human operator, and the time from placing an order to delivery was just 13 minutes. A video of the delivery can be found in the linked article.

Is this the future?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Asahi Breweries, Ltd. has paid nearly 10 billion euros in 2016 to buy European beer brands owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev NV:

Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. agreed to buy SABMiller Plc's central and eastern European assets from Anheuser-Busch InBev NV for 7.3 billion euros ($7.8 billion), in a move that catapults Japan's largest brewer to third place on the continent.

Asahi expects the acquisition -- which spans five countries and includes beer brands such as Pilsner Urquell, Kozel and Tyskie -- to close in the first half of 2017, the Tokyo-based brewer said in a statement Tuesday. The deal would help Asahi position its overseas business as a growth engine to transform itself into a global powerhouse, it said.

The deal further strengthens Asahi's foothold in Europe after the Japanese brewer agreed to pay 2.55 billion euros for AB InBev's Peroni and Grolsch brands earlier this year. For AB InBev, the divestment brings it a step closer to meeting the antitrust commitments that allowed it to buy SABMiller for about $100 billion.

Original Submission

charon writes:

Scientists at Kings College London performed a longitudinal study to test the 'Pareto principle' and found that adults who were greater users of public services were most likely to have had a low score on the intelligence and impulsivity test administered at age three.

"About 20 per cent of population is using the lion's share of a wide array of public services," said Prof Terrie Moffitt, of King's College and Duke University in North Carolina. "The same people use most of the NHS, the criminal courts, insurance claims, for disabling injury, pharmaceutical prescriptions and special welfare benefits.

"If we stopped there it might be fair to think these are lazy bums who are freeloading off the taxpayer and exploiting the public purse.

"But we also went further back into their childhood and found that 20 per cent begin their lives with mild problems with brain function and brain health when they were very small children.

"Looking at health examinations really changed the whole picture. It gives you a feeling of compassion for these people as opposed to a feeling of blame.

"Being able to predict which children will struggle is an opportunity to intervene in their lives very early to attempt to change their trajectories, for everyone's benefit and could bring big returns on investment for government."

Full Paper: Childhood forecasting of a small segment of the population with large economic burden DOI: 10.1038/s41562-016-0005

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

On a recent autumn morning, I did something that I have never done before, something that had never even occurred to me as a thing that I might do or should feel embarrassed about not doing: I cleaned my showerhead. It’s possible, I hope, that others of you are similarly negligent. If so, I am here to report, dear readers, that it was gross. I am the proud owner of a handsome matte-black rainfall-style showerhead. When I unscrewed it and peered inside, I was confronted with a slimy, slightly clotted dark film covering the stainless-steel interior. I sprayed it with everything I had and left it to marinate in a bucket of bleach while I called my mother to verify that showerhead cleaning was not something she’d told me to do years ago. (It wasn’t.)

My sudden showerhead conniption was set off, indirectly, by Rob Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State University. Dunn’s laboratory is focussed on getting to know humanity’s most intimate microbial neighbors—the invisible army of bacteria, fungi, mites, and molds that live on our skin, clothes, and household surfaces. Earlier this year, as part of that mission, Dunn and his colleagues launched the Showerhead Microbiome Project, sending five hundred sampling kits to volunteers across the United States and Europe. (The team is still recruiting; you can sign up online here.) My kit was No. 260. It came with a pair of blue nitrile gloves and a questionnaire that probed my cleaning and showering habits. “We’re great at inspiring shame,” Dunn said. The sampling process took about five minutes: I rubbed a cotton swab over the showerhead’s inner surfaces while trying not to gag, then used a few paper strips to test the chlorine, nitrate, iron content of my tap water, and its pH. And then, before I walked to the mailbox, I got to cleaning.

Dunn and his collaborators hope to be able to tell me sometime in the next few months which microbes I eradicated. Their first step will be to sequence the DNA present in my swabbed gunk, in order to identify what classes of organism are generally present. Since showerheads are extreme environments—Dunn called them “the desert washes of your home,” alternately soaking wet and bone dry—he expects their inhabitants to include not only bacteria and fungi but also more unusual creatures like amoebae, algae, and protists. “You may have worms,” Dunn told me. “There’s even some evidence in the Netherlands of little crustaceans.”

So my showerhead might have crabs?

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Yahoo! has disclosed another major breach of its users' data:

Yahoo! Inc. disclosed a second major security breach that may have affected more than 1 billion users, giving an update on its probe into hacks on its system before the sale of its main web businesses to Verizon Communications Inc. The company said in a statement that it hasn't been able to identify the "intrusion" associated with this theft by a third party in August 2013.

"Yahoo believes this incident is likely distinct from the incident the company disclosed" in September, according to the statement. The shares dropped as much as 2.6 percent in extended trading after the announcement. At that time, Yahoo said the personal information of at least 500 million users was stolen in an attack on its accounts in 2014, exposing a wide swath of its users ahead of the Verizon deal. The attacker was a "state-sponsored actor," and stolen information may have included names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, unencrypted security questions and answers, Yahoo has said.
In the 2013 hack disclosed Wednesday, Yahoo said compromised user account information may have included names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

The attackers might have gotten access to less info than Uncle Sam did.

Also at TechCrunch, WSJ, and Yahoo!'s Tumblr.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

One of the great bright lights of open-source software and user-driven community projects is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open-source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps.

It manages to duplicate most of Google Maps using primarily the contributions of enthusiastic users, too.

In my experience, OpenStreetMap is every bit as accurate as Google Maps and quite frequently surpasses it, particularly outside the US. That it is even anywhere close to Google Maps is a testament to massive amount of time and effort the OpenStreetMap community has invested in the project.

One place that Google Maps has always had OpenStreetMap beat, though, is Google Street View, for which – until relatively recently – there was no OSM equivalent.

Telenav, one of OSM's major supporters, has now launched a new project dubbed OpenStreetView with the goal of crowdsourcing street-level photography for OpenStreetMap across the globe.

Experience for yourself at https://www.openstreetmap.org.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Crowd-funding campaign that Soylentils might be interested in keeping an eye on:

Next Dynamics has developed a proprietary print head it calls "DigiJet", which works like a 3D version of the tried-and-true inkjet printing.

The NexD1 features six of these print heads, each with 200 nozzles that spray fine droplets of material onto the build surface, which is then hardened by a UV laser before moving onto the next layer. With a diameter of five microns for each nozzle, the machine is able to print at a resolution of down to 10 microns, within its build area of 8 in³ (20 cm³).

[...] Standing as a compact cube of 16.5 in³ (42 cm³), the NexD1 can house six cartridges at once, printing with and mixing different materials as desired. At the moment, these include the options of tough, flexible, transparent, CMYK-colored and conductive (more on those in a minute) resins, as well as supporting structures that can prop up overhanging sections before being washed off with water. The team is working with other manufacturers to expand that materials library.

But the most interesting of those materials is the conductive resin. Galvanized and infused with nano-particles, Next Dynamics claims its resin can be printed into circuit boards that are just as conductive as standard PCBs, unlike other electronic-printing devices like the Voxel8. Designed for rapid prototyping, the NexD1 can even build three-dimensional circuit boards.

The initial unit sounds a bit pricey, but it would be fun to have something like this in the workshop.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A group of first year students at Roskilde University, supervised by Dr Tina Hecksher, have shown that water-filled balloons behave very similarly to tiny water droplets, by bouncing them on a bed of nails.

Their work, published today in the European Journal of Physics in collaboration with Professor Julia Yeomans at Oxford University, was inspired by one of Professor Yeomans' previous papers studying water droplets bouncing on hydrophobic surfaces patterned with lattices of submillimetre-scale posts.

Dr Hecksher said: "We wanted to know if the so-called 'pancake bounce' effect - where the droplet lifts off the surface at its maximal extension - which was observed in the microscopic experiments could be replicated on a macroscopic scale.

"Scaling up the experiment allowed us to measure the impact forces in the pancake bounce, which gave a deeper insight into its dynamics. It also provides a really useful teaching tool to demonstrate to students in a very cost-effective, straightforward, and eye-catching way how these forces work."

The study compared the impact of the balloons - taking the place of water droplets - landing on a flat surface and on a bed of nails - modelling the submillimetre posts. Using large store-bought party balloons, a digital reflex camera running at 300 frames per second to record the impact in slow motion, and a piezoelectric sensor under the board to log the impact force, the team measured impacts at different velocities and the balloons' resulting behaviour.

Source: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-balloons-bed.html

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority will decide on December 15th whether to let three-person embryo trials proceed:

Authorities in the United Kingdom may soon approve clinical testing of the so-called "three-parent embryo" technique to prevent the transmission of potentially fatal genetic disease, despite ongoing concerns about its effectiveness. An advisory panel of the U.K. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), announced today that the procedure is ready for limited clinical testing, Nature reports, and HFEA is expected to make an official decision on whether to allow such trials on 15 December.

The first baby born using the technique occurred in September.

Original Submission

quietus brings a report regarding the EU's proposed changes to legislation to individual privacy on the internet to our attention:

Unlike the US, the EU has some fairly strict privacy laws. Anyone wishing to operate commercially in Europe has to comply with these regulations, but that is not resting easy with the (mainly) US organisations who feel that this will adversely affect their ability to use user's private data in order to target them with relevant advertisements. The EU wants to make it necessary, amongst other changes, for users to opt in to browser data tracking rather than the present opt-out.

Google, Facebook and other online advertising businesses face strict new privacy rules from Brussels on the ways they can track people online.

The new rules would compel websites and browsers, such as Google Chrome, to switch from a default of allowing users to opt out of online advertising to asking them to opt in to view adverts based on their browsing history, according to a leaked draft of new proposals from the European Commission.

The EU's executive arm will also tighten its regulatory grip over services such as WhatsApp and Skype as part of a sweeping overhaul of the bloc's "ePrivacy" directive, which dictates everything from online tracking to marketing emails.

Not unsurprisingly, the online advertisers are claiming that such a move will signal the end of the internet:

"This is very concerning — it's putting at risk the entire internet as we know it," said Yves Schwarzbart, head of policy and regulatory affairs at the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK. "Our number one concern is asking for prior permission. Advertising is the funding model of the internet, and helps publishers create better content. That whole model could be undermined."

Instead, web advertising groups will be forced to rely on internet browsers encouraging as many people as possible to opt in. "It is a big deal to opt in for the first time, but once you have done it — then you are good to go," said Eduardo Ustaran, a partner specialising in data protection at Hogan Lovells.

Furthermore:

[...] In a boon to the telecoms industry, operators will be able to use customer metadata, including when and to whom a call was made, in order to provide "value added services" such as advertising.

As part of the overhaul, rules around cookie warnings — the unpopular pop-up boxes that show when a website is tracking a user — will also be relaxed. Websites that use cookies to monitor things such as the number of visitors will not be required to warn users.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

BankInfoSecurity has a recent article on another data breach, this one at none other than KFC. More generally though it also discusses how loyalty programs are one of the new targets for data theft.

In the latest sign that when it comes to data, absolutely nothing is sacred, hackers have set their sights on fans of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

KFC, a Yum Brands chain, is warning 1.2 million members of its loyalty program in the U.K. and Ireland that their login credentials may have been compromised by attackers attempting to guess usernames and passwords. It's sent an email to all program members urging them to change their passwords.

"We take the online security of our fans very seriously, so we've advised all Colonel's Club members to change their passwords as a precaution, despite only a small number of accounts being directly affected," Brad Scheiner, Head of IT at KFC UK & Ireland, tells Information Security Media Group. "We don't store credit card details as part of our Colonel's Club rewards scheme, so no financial data was compromised."

Original Submission