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takyon writes:

We have to trade faster!

Solarflare Communications is an unheralded soldier in the eternal war on latency. With its founding in 2001, Solarflare took on the daunting raison d'être of grinding down latency from one product generation to the next for the most latency-sensitive use cases, such as high frequency trading. Today, the company has more than 1,400 customers using its networking I/O software and hardware to cut the time between decision and action. In high frequency trading, the latency gold standard is 200 nanoseconds. If you're an equity trader using a Bloomberg Terminal or Thomson Reuters Eikon, latency of more than 200 nanoseconds is considered to be shockingly pedestrian, putting you at risk of buying or selling a stock at a higher or lower price than the one you saw quoted. Now, with its announcement of TCPDirect, Solarflare said it has cut latency by 10X, to 20-30 nanoseconds.

[...] The CTO of an equity trading firm, who agreed to talk with HPCwire's sister [publication] EnterpriseTech anonymously, said his company has been a Solarflare customer for four years and that its IT department has validated Solarflare's claims for TCPDirect of 20-30 nanoseconds latency. He regards Solarflare as a partner that allows his firm to focus on core competencies, rather than devoting in-house time and resources to lowering latency. "It used to be the case that there weren't a lot of commercial, off-the-shelf products applicable to this space," he said. "If one of our competitors wanted to do something like this for competitive advantage, Solarflare can do it better, faster, cheaper, so they're basically disincentivized from doing so. In a sense this is leveling the playing field in our industry, and we like that because we want to do what we're good at, rather than spending our time working on hardware. We're pleased when external vendors provide state-of-the-art technology that we can leverage."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Meitu, a Chinese selfie editing app, has amassed billions in downloads since launching in 2008; it's been trendy in Asia for several years, and just recently began gaining popularity in the United States. The anime-style photo-editing tool, which is available through the Apple and Android app stores, features airbrushed, fairylike depictions of people.

But there's a serious privacy and security issue with the app, according to mobile security researchers who performed tests running the application, primarily on Android phones. The code instructs users' phones to send a large amount of data back to China, and possibly around the world.

That information that[sic] could potentially be used to spy on users and their communications.

Some of the application's permissions, presented before users download the app, include access to the calendar, camera, geolocation data, contacts, screen resolution, photos, the contents of  the phone's USB storage, and other data.

The application also appears to be collecting the unique ID, the IMEI number, of users' phones, according to Greg Linares, a security researcher who examined the application. The IMEI is a 15-digit long serial number that can pinpoint the phone's country of origin and individual model.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The New York Times (may be pay-walled) reports that Terry Gou, the CEO of Foxconn has confirmed rumours aired in December to the effect that the company is considering building an additional factory in the United States. Yahoo Finance UK says that the factory, if built, "could create about 30,000-50,000 jobs." The South China Morning Post reports that the facility, expected to cost more than $7 billion, would make dot-matrix displays (such as used in television sets and mobile phones) under the Sharp name. Mr. Gou remarked that:

Speaking in November, Gou had called on the incoming U.S. leaders to refrain from protectionist policies, The China Post had reported.

Additional coverage:

• The New York Times
• Korea Times
• Macworld
• USA Today
• Reuters

Related:
Foxconn Plans to Replace Nearly All Human Workers With Robots in Some Factories
Foxconn Acquires Sharp at a Lower Price Than Previously Agreed
Sharp Accepts $6.25 Billion Takeover Bid from Foxconn, but Foxconn is Wary of Debt
Softbank to Invest $50 Billion in the US

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix

Librecore is a new project aiming to be a new Coreboot downstream with a focus remaining on providing fully-free system firmware. Separately, Minifree/Libreboot has been accused (and admitted by Leah Rowe) to not paying a vendor for a completed contract.

Librecore was formed due to "[Libreboot lead developer Leah Rowe] alienating large portions of the community, plus the stagnant and hard to use libreboot firmware and build system." With Librecore, they are aiming to use industry-standard tools and build environments. Another different design decision is pursuing Petitboot as the payload for a more modern and useful interface over GRUB as a payload.

[An] email from [Timothy Pearson of Raptor Engineering, one of the developers involved with the formation of Librecore, says]

We strongly recommend that no person do any business with Minifree or its founder Leah Rowe, as they do not honor their legally binding contracts.

The author notes that Rowe sent him an email that attempts damage control while admitting that she gyped Pearson.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new study provides some of the first links between relatively common mutations in the blood cells of elderly humans and atherosclerosis.

Though cardiovascular disease, which is characterized in part by atherosclerosis, or plaque build-up, is a leading cause of death in the elderly, almost 60 percent of elderly patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) exhibit no conventional risk factors, or just one. This and other data suggest that age-dependent risk factors that haven't yet been identified may contribute to CVD.

[...] In this study, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) investigated whether there is a direct relationship between such [somatic DNA] mutations and atherosclerosis. They generated an experimental model to investigate how one of the genes commonly mutated in blood cells of elderly humans, TET2, affects plaque development. Plaque formation accelerated in the models transplanted with Tet2-deficient bone marrow cells, likely through increasing macrophage-driven inflammation in the artery wall. The results strengthen support for the hypothesis that hematopoietic mutations play a causal role in atherosclerosis.

Clonal hematopoiesis associated with Tet2 deficiency accelerates atherosclerosis development in mice. Science, 2017; eaag1381 DOI: 10.1126/science.aag1381

Original Submission

edIII writes:

Disney has issued a statement regarding the rumors of CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) being used to continue Carrie Fisher's roles in any upcoming movies:

We want to assure our fans that Lucasfilm has no plans to digitally recreate Carrie Fisher's performance as Princess or General Leia Organa.

Of course that would be after they already recreated her as young Princess Leia in Rogue One. I'm kinda torn because I found nothing funnier than her CGI face in that movie. Moff Tarkin was done quite well, but Leia looked like she had several strong psychedelic edibles and a glorious bowel movement just 2 minutes before.

Assuming that they could do it better, who is for recreating our favorite characters with CGI?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Individuals with tinnitus have poorer working memory, slower processing speeds and reaction times and deficiencies in selective attention. Neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections) has been the foundation for the creation of several cognitive enhancement programs intended to slow normal aging and potentially improve disorders such as attention deficits. Brain Fitness Program-Tinnitus (BFP-T) is a cognitive training program specially designed to exploit neuroplasticity for preservation and expansion of cognitive health in adults with tinnitus.

[...] Tinnitus assessment, neuroimaging, and cognitive testing were completed at baseline and 8 weeks later. The controls underwent neuroimaging and cognitive assessments.

The researchers found that patients with tinnitus in the BFP-T group had improvements in tinnitus perception, memory, attention, and concentration compared with patients in the non-BFP-T control group. Neuroimaging changes in brain systems responsible for attention and cognitive control were observed in patients who used the BFP-T. "A possible mechanistic explanation for these changes could be neuroplastic changes in key brain systems involved in cognitive control," the authors write.

No changes in behavioral measures were observed between the two tinnitus study groups.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward wrote in to tell us of an article from The New York Times :

If you've ever despaired of getting your vacuum cleaner fixed or thought that your broken lamp was a lost cause, there's hope. A worldwide movement is trying to reform our throwaway approach to possessions.

The movement's foundation is the Repair Cafe, a local meeting place that brings together people with broken items and repair coaches, or volunteers, with the expertise to fix them.

[...] "One of the things that makes it challenging and interesting is that we don't know what people are going to bring," Ray Pfau, an organizer of a Repair Cafe in Bolton, Mass., said in an email.

Lamps top the list of items brought in to be repaired, followed by vacuum cleaners, Mr. Wackman said. The types of repairs offered vary by location and reflect the particular talent in a community, he said.

New Paltz [in upstate New York] has a repair person with a national reputation as a doll expert. It also has a "Listening Corner" with a psychiatric nurse "because being listened to is a 'reparative act,' " he said.

The cafes invite people to bring their "beloved but broken" possessions to the gatherings, which are hosted in church basements, libraries, town halls and senior centers. The cafes make no guarantees that items will be fixed.

"All we can guarantee is that you will have an interesting time," Mr. Wackman said.

The gatherings tend to draw professionals, retirees and hobbyists who volunteer as repair coaches.

None in my area but I would be tempted to show up and help. I like to fix things and have a decent success rate, just coaxed some more life out of our ~30 year old garage door opener.

Similar article at: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/repair-cafe/ and the main website is at: https://repaircafe.org/en/about/ (also available for NL, FR, DE & ES)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/22/511134871/samsung-pins-blame-on-batteries-for-galaxy-note-7-meltdowns

In a packed press conference at its offices in southern Seoul Monday, the world's biggest smartphone maker again apologized to customers around the world for the bungling of its product release. Phones were initially recalled and replaced, but the replacement devices also began to catch fire.

Presentations at the announcement by outside investigators backed up Samsung's findings, which indicate batteries from supplier A were shorting because of a design flaw or in some cases a lack of insulation tape. And batteries from supplier B — which were issued in the replacement phones following the initial recall — were catching fire because of a separate manufacturing defect.

A story at Ars Technica provides additional information:

[Continues...]

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Source:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-aetna-obamacare-20170123-story.html

At what point does arbitrarily screwing with the healthcare of millions of people rise to the level of criminality?

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

A missile test involving Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent system ended in failure off the coast of Florida last year, a US defense official with direct knowledge of the incident told CNN on Monday.

The official told CNN that the incident, which happened last June in an the area off the Florida coast used by the US and the UK for missile tests, did not in involve a nuclear warhead.

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that the missile veered towards the US coast, but the US official told CNN that this trajectory was part of an automatic self-destruct sequence. The official said the missile diverted into the ocean -- an automatic procedure when missile electronics detect an anomaly.

A month after the test, the UK parliament approved the renewal of Trident at a cost of £40 billion. Unaware of the failure, members of the House of Commons voted by 472 votes to 117 in favor of renewal.

On Sunday, British Prime Minister Theresa May was asked four times during an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr Show whether she knew of the missile failure before the vote. May refused to answer.

Source:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/23/europe/trident-missile-failure-theresa-may/index.html

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The South Korean Presidential corruption scandal extends to the censorship of film and art:

South Korea's culture ministry apologized on Monday for a blacklist of artists which excluded them from government support, admitting there was a systematic effort to sideline critics of scandal-plagued President Park Geun-hye. The apology was the clearest admission yet of the blacklist of cultural and media figures critical of the impeached leader that has led to the arrests of her former chief of staff and the culture minister at the weekend for abuse of power.

"It is distressing and shameful that the ministry, which should have been the bulwark for freedom of artistic expression and creativity, has caused questions of fairness in assisting culture and arts with a list of artists to be excluded from public support," Vice Culture Minister Song Soo-keun said.

The blacklist, part of which was seen by Reuters, contains the names of thousands of actors, writers, film directors and others. It includes acclaimed film directors like Cannes award winner Park Chan-wook, Venice Film Festival top prize winner Kim Ki-duk and actors Moon So-ri and Song Gang-ho. None was immediately available for comment. Faced with a political crisis earlier in her term, the government and state entities used the blacklist as "guidelines" to penalize artists and censor content, a special prosecutor's office investigating an influence-peddling scandal said last week.

Related: South Korea Broadens Internet Censorship to Innocuous Music Videos
South Korean President Park Geun-hye Impeached
Samsung Vice Chairman a Suspect in South Korean Presidential Bribery Probe

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

As a software engineer and long time LastPass user, I've always been an advocate of password managers. With data breaches becoming more and more common these days, it's critical that we take steps to protect ourselves online. However, over the past year LastPass has made some decisions that have made me question their motives and ultimately has recently caused them to lose my business.

Last year LastPass introduced a new redesign of their vault in which they added nice pretty logos of all the sites in your vault.

This got me wondering, if LastPass is encrypting all of my data before it goes to their servers (like they claim) how are they able to show these logos to me when rendering the vault webpage? I turned to my browser's developer tools to find out.

The rest of the story relies fairly heavily on graphics to show what the author is doing. Worth a read to see the process in tracking down the problem.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Zebrafish learn to balance by darting forward when they feel wobbly, a principle that may also apply to humans, according to a study led by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center.

The fish make good models to understand human balance because they use similar brain circuits, say the study authors. The researchers hope their work will one day help therapists to better treat balance problems that affect one in three aging Americans, and for whom falls are a leading cause of death.

Published online January 19 in Current Biology, the new study found that early improvements in a zebrafish's balance emerge from its growing ability to execute quick swims in response to the perception of instability. Over time young fish learn to make corrective movements when unstable and become better at remaining stable.

"By untangling the forces used by the fish while swimming, and during the pauses between these corrective movements, we may have uncovered a foundational balance mechanism -- the mental command to start moving when unstable," says lead study investigator David Schoppik, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone.

Full paper: David E. Ehrlich, David Schoppik. Control of Movement Initiation Underlies the Development of Balance. Current Biology, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.003

Original Submission

tadas writes:

From CNN:

United Airlines resumed operations Sunday night after a computer problem temporarily grounded all domestic mainline flights, two sources familiar with the incident told CNN.

"The ground stop has been lifted," the airline announced on Twitter. "We're working to get flights on their way. We apologize for the inconvenience to our customers."

Earlier, United spokeswoman Maddie King told CNN that the flights were grounded due to an IT issue.

"We have issued a ground stop for all domestic mainline flights due to an IT issue," King said. "We are working as quickly as possible to resolve this issue and get our customers to their final destinations. We apologize for the inconvenience to our customers." Mainline flights are those operated by an airline's main operating unit, not regional alliances or subsidiaries.

The sources said the flights were grounded due to a problem with the communication system that airplanes use to send information to United operations. Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, is used to record and transmit a range of information, including departure times, as well as weight and balance, which is used to calculate takeoff speeds.

The system outage was an issue for planes that had yet to depart, as pilots need this information to safely take off. Planes already in the air were in no danger, the sources said. The issue did not affect communications between planes and air traffic control.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Free Software Foundation has published a new High Priority Projects list, the document it uses to highlight "a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users."

By publishing the list, the Foundation hopes to guide volunteers towards what it feels are the most impactful projects as the organisation pursues its goal to encourage development and use of free software that users can "run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve".

This year's list adds the following projects, presented in the no-particular-order chosen by the Foundation:

• Free phone operating system – probably the Replicant Android distribution, in order to bring free software to today's most common personal computing device
• Free personal assistant – A free Siri/Cortana/Alexa clone, perhaps based on Lucida or Mycroft (which last week emerged as a disk image for the Raspberry Pi)
• Decentralization, federation, and personal clouds – an attempt to federate web services so that users can see their data from multiple services in one place. Imagine one photo library spanning all the stuff you have in Facebook, Google and that old Flickr account and you'll get the idea
• Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community – Probably through the Outreachy project
• Accessibility and internationalization – So that everyone can use free software
• Free software adoption by governments – both as user and through code-sharing efforts like code.gov
• Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs – The foundation wants "manufacturers to publish designs for hardware under free licenses" but will settle for the release of "key technical specifications sufficient to write free drivers for their hardware." If they won't cooperate at all, then we'll have to reverse engineer the needed support."

[Continues...]