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takyon writes:

The VideoLAN project, which is based in France, was contacted by a French tax authority due to a torrent site linking to the VLC Media Player:

A few hours ago, Next INpact reported that VideoLAN had received a letter from the [National Tax Investigation Branch of the French Ministry for the Economy and Finance], asking for detailed information on Torrent9.biz. The reason for the inquiry is that the site in question, also accessible via Torrent9.me, has a help section that explains how people can download torrents. This guide ends with a link to the VLC Media Player, as can be seen below [image].

While the Internet is full of links, the National Tax Investigation Branch suspected that VideoLAN was closely involved with the torrent site, asking the organization to hand over all sorts of documentation. Specifically, they requested "complete customer details," "bank details," "payment methods of the customer and date of last payment," and a copy of the "referencing contract" for the Torrent9.biz and Torrent9.me domains.

When confronted with the usual request by a reporter, the Ministry of Economy and Finance didn't give in. Instead, it reportedly stated that "if they have a link to your website, it's because you pay them: SEO is not free..," suggesting some kind of active cooperation. VideoLAN received quite a bit of support after the news broke as many people had trouble wrapping their head around the absurd situation. After a storm of protests, the authorities eventually decided to back down. In a response on Twitter, the ministry described the situation as an 'error of judgment,' adding that failures like this can always happen.

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takyon writes:

Walmart is canning a premium online ordering service and expanding its free shipping on various items instead:

Walmart announced free two-day shipping to home and stores on more than two million items, without a membership fee. The new offer is available starting at 8 a.m. EST today. With this announcement, Walmart has also lowered the minimum purchase required for free shipping to home to $35, from $50. Items being shipped to stores continue to have no price threshold.*

[...] Walmart's free two-day shipping will be available on the items customers shop the most, including household essentials such as baby necessities, pet products, food, like cereal and peanut butter, cleaning supplies and beauty favorites, as well as top electronics and toys.

[...] *Freight and marketplace are not included. Program is available in the contiguous United States.

Walmart recently bought Jet.com, an online e-commerce company with "an attractive brand with proven appeal, especially with Millennials, the first generation of true digital natives".

Meanwhile, Amazon is expanding its digital advertising business (before potential customers realize the scale of online ad fraud) and ordering the production of anime.

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charon writes:

Forget chemicals, catalysts and expensive machinery — a Kansas State University team of physicists has discovered a way to mass-produce graphene with three ingredients: hydrocarbon gas, oxygen and a spark plug.

Their method is simple: Fill a chamber with acetylene or ethylene gas and oxygen. Use a vehicle spark plug to create a contained detonation. Collect the graphene that forms afterward.

Chris Sorensen, Cortelyou-Rust university distinguished professor of physics, is the lead inventor of the recently issued patent, "Process for high-yield production of graphene via detonation of carbon-containing material". Other Kansas State University researchers involved include Arjun Nepal, postdoctoral researcher and instructor of physics, and Gajendra Prasad Singh, former visiting scientist.

"We have discovered a viable process to make graphene," Sorensen said. "Our process has many positive properties, from the economic feasibility, the possibility for large-scale production and the lack of nasty chemicals. What might be the best property of all is that the energy required to make a gram of graphene through our process is much less than other processes because all it takes is a single spark."

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charon writes:

Hunter-gatherers and farming villagers who live in worlds without lightbulbs or thermostats sleep slightly less at night than smartphone-toting city slickers, researchers say.

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, people in societies without electricity do not sleep more than those in industrial societies like ours," says UCLA psychiatrist and sleep researcher Jerome Siegel, who was not involved in the new research.

Different patterns of slumber and wakefulness in each of these groups highlight the flexibility of human sleep — and also point to potential health dangers in how members of Western societies sleep, conclude evolutionary biologist David Samson of Duke University and colleagues. Compared with other primates, human evolution featured a shift toward sleeping more deeply over shorter time periods, providing more time for learning new skills and knowledge as cultures expanded, the researchers propose. Humans also evolved an ability to revise sleep schedules based on daily work schedules and environmental factors such as temperature.

Samson's team describes sleep patterns in 33 East African Hadza hunter-gatherers over a total of 393 days in a paper published online January 7 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The team's separate report on slumber among 21 rural farmers in Madagascar over 292 days will appear later this year in the American Journal of Human Biology.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

When we first introduced Google Voice our goal was to create "one number for life"—a phone number that's tied to you, rather than a single device or a location. Since then, millions of people have signed up to use Google Voice to call, text and get voicemail on all their devices. It's been several years since we've made significant updates to the Google Voice apps (and by several, we mean around five ;)), but today we're bringing a fresh set of features to Google Voice with updates to our apps on Android, iOS and the web.

Source: https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updates-our-google-voice-apps/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Newly released images showcase the incredible closeness with which NASA's Cassini spacecraft, now in its "Ring-Grazing" orbits phase, is observing Saturn's dazzling rings of icy debris.

The views are some of the closest-ever images of the outer parts of the main rings, giving scientists an eagerly awaited opportunity to observe features with names like "straw" and "propellers." Although Cassini saw these features earlier in the mission, the spacecraft's current, special orbits are now providing opportunities to see them in greater detail. The new images resolve details as small as 0.3 miles (550 meters), which is on the scale of Earth's tallest buildings.

Cassini is now about halfway through its penultimate mission phase—20 orbits that dive past the outer edge of the main ring system. The ring-grazing orbits began last November, and will continue until late April, when Cassini begins its grand finale. During the 22 finale orbits, Cassini will repeatedly plunge through the gap between the rings and Saturn. The first finale plunge is scheduled for April 26.

Source: https://m.phys.org/news/2017-01-views-saturn-unprecedented.html

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Google made a change in Chrome 57 that removes options from the browser to manage plugins such as Google Widevine, Adobe Flash, or the Chrome PDF Viewer.

If you load chrome://plugins in Chrome 56 or earlier, a list of installed plugins is displayed to you. The list includes information about each plugin, including a name and description, location on the local system, version, and options to disable it or set it to "always run".

You can use it to disable plugins that you don't require. While you can do the same for some plugins, Flash and PDF Viewer, using Chrome's Settings, the same is not possible for the DRM plugin Widevine, and any other plugin Google may add to Chrome in the future.

Starting with Chrome 57, that option is no longer available. This means essentially that Chrome users won't be able to disable -- some -- plugins anymore, or even list the plugins that are installed in the web browser.

Please note that this affects Google Chrome and Chromium.

Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/29/google-removes-plugin-controls-from-chrome/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dropbox's latest tool for businesses, a piece of collaborative editing software called Paper, is launching globally today. Paper has been in the works at Dropbox for quite some time, having first been announced in October of 2015 before entering a public beta phase in August of last year. Dropbox's software is similar to Google's suite of workplace cloud apps. Paper — itself a minimal document editor and writing tool like Google Docs — is the focal point, while all of Dropbox's other services and features now plug into and augment the experience.

Paper is Dropbox's latest attempt to court businesses away from Microsoft and Google, or at the very least to encourage companies to pay for Dropbox services on top of what they already use institutionally. It's part of Dropbox's ongoing shift away from consumer storage and apps and toward enterprise software that is both more lucrative and self-sustaining. The company shut down its Mailbox email app and Carousel photo storage service back in 2015. In place of its consumer focus, Dropbox has been pouring more resources into Paper and other projects that make its mobile apps and website a place to perform work, instead of a barebones destination for files.

The biggest question now is whether Paper is the transformative product Dropbox wants it to be. Because many organizations do already pay for Office 365 or Google's G Suite, Dropbox knows that it must play nice with competitors' products or risk alienating workers who either enjoy using Microsoft Word or Google Sheets or do so out of necessity. To that end, Dropbox Paper isn't focused solely on creation. It will let you import, edit, and collaborate on a number of other file types from Google, Microsoft, and others.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/30/14435582/dropbox-paper-business-app-launch-date-ios-android-web

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maxwell demon writes:

Not only in America, teaching evolution is under attack. Indeed, future Turkish children will likely not learn about evolution in school, as soL international reports:

İsmet Yılmaz, the Minister of National Education in Turkey on Friday announced the new curriculum draft for school. After the draft is finalized, textbooks will be published based on the new draft to be used starting from 2017-2018 academic year.

The new curriculum draft brings some radical changes:

[...] Evolution Theory is excluded from Biology courses. The related unit named "The Origins of Life and the Evolution" is replaced with "Living Beings and Environment".

This is actually not the first strike against evolution in Turkey:

In 2013, the government had made a regulation, which let the Intelligent Design model to be included in the curriculum besides the Evolution Theory.

Also at Turkish Minute: Gov't removes evolution theory from new school curriculum

Related: What is Turkey's problem with Darwin?

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takyon informs us of a conjunction:

You won't have to get out your telescopes to see Mars, Venus and the moon put on a show, Jan. 31.

The three celestial objects will be exceptionally close to each other on Tuesday night in a rare celestial treat called a conjunction.

[...] Kief says the best time to watch the conjunction is after sunset, starting at 8 p.m. PT. [Editor's Note: UTC-8]

He says to identify Venus, look for the glowing object that has a red and yellow tinge to it. Venus will shine slightly brighter than Mars, since it's closer to the Earth. Mars has an orange and red tinge to it.

And remember, if the celestial object you're looking at twinkles, it's probably not a planet.

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takyon writes:

Scientists have found the "earliest known" ancestor of humans, and it had no need of an anus:

Researchers have discovered the earliest known ancestor of humans - along with a vast range of other species. They say that fossilised traces of the 540-million-year-old creature are "exquisitely well preserved". The microscopic sea animal is the earliest known step on the evolutionary path that led to fish and - eventually - to humans. Details of the discovery from central China appear in Nature [DOI: 10.1038/nature21072] [DX] journal.

The research team says that Saccorhytus is the most primitive example of a category of animals called "deuterostomes" which are common ancestors of a broad range of species, including vertebrates (backboned animals). Saccorhytus was about a millimetre in size, and is thought to have lived between grains of sand on the sea bed.

Also at St John's College Cambridge.
[Ed Note: Link generates SSL warning in Firefox]

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Phoenix666 writes:

Hungry penguins have inspired a novel way of making sure computer code in smart cars does not crash. Tools based on the way the birds co-operatively hunt for fish are being developed to test different ways of organising in-car software. The tools look for safe ways to organise code in the same way that penguins seek food sources in the open ocean. Experts said such testing systems would be vital as cars get more connected.

Engineers have often turned to nature for good solutions to tricky problems, said Prof Yiannis Papadopoulos, a computer scientist at the University of Hull who, together with Dr Youcef Gheraibia from Algeria, developed the penguin-inspired testing system. The way ants pass messages among nest-mates has helped telecoms firms keep telephone networks running, and many robots get around using methods of locomotion based on the ways animals move.

Penguins were another candidate, said Prof Papadopoulos, because millions of years of evolution has helped them develop very efficient hunting strategies. This was useful behaviour to copy, he said, because it showed that penguins had solved a tricky optimisation problem - how to ensure as many penguins as possible get enough to eat. [...] "There must be something special about their hunting strategy," he said, adding that an inefficient strategy would mean many birds starved.

Tux was not involved.

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Phoenix666 writes:

What if there were a wearable fitness device that could monitor your blood pressure continuously, 24 hours a day?

Unfortunately, blood pressure (BP) measurements currently require the use of a cuff that temporarily stops blood flow. So a wearable BP "watch" using today's technology would squeeze your wrist every few minutes, making it impracticable to use – not to mention annoying.

A better method might gauge subtle pressure changes at the surface of your skin above one of the main wrist arteries – the radial artery – without regularly cutting off your circulation. But before scientists can create this new technology, they need to understand what the pressure inside a blood vessel "looks" like on the surface of the skin. And to do that, they must make a physical model that can be used to test wearable devices in a laboratory.

NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) is currently collaborating with Tufts University's School of Medicine to develop just such a model, a blood pressure wrist "phantom" – essentially a fake arm that mimics the mechanical properties of blood pulsing through an artery surrounded by human tissue.

All watches are not wearable?

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charon writes:

This thought provoking and somewhat frightening article in Vanity Fair describes the state of play of technology which has the potential to warp our world-view far beyond anything before.

At corporations and universities across the country, incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake. Or, in the simplest of terms, advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news—real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews—in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways. One research paper published last year by professors at Stanford University and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg demonstrated how technologists can record video of someone talking and then change their facial expressions in real time. The professors' technology could take a news clip of, say, Vladimir Putin, and alter his facial expressions in real time in hard-to-detect ways. In fact, in this video demonstrating the technology, the researchers show how they did manipulate Putin's facial expressions and responses, among those of other people, too.

This is eerie, to say the least. But it's only one part of the future fake-news menace. Other similar technologies have been in the works in universities and research labs for years, but they have never really pulled off what computers can do today. Take for example "The Digital Emily Project," a study in which researchers created digital actors that could be used in lieu of real people. For the past several years, the results have been crude and easily detectable as digital re-creations. But technologies that are now used by Hollywood and the video-game industry have largely rendered digital avatars almost indecipherable from real people. (Go and watch the latest Star Wars to see if you can tell which actors are real and which are computer-generated. I bet you can't tell the difference.) You could imagine some political group utilizing that technology to create a fake hidden video clip of President Trump telling Rex Tillerson that he plans to drop a nuclear bomb on China. The velocity with which news clips spread across social media would also mean that the administration would have frightfully little time to respond before a fake-news story turned into an international crisis.

Audio advancements may be just as harrowing. At its annual developer's conference, in November, Adobe showed off a new product that has been nicknamed "Photoshop for audio." The product allows users to feed about ten to 20 minutes of someone's voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice. The resultant voice, which is comprised of the person's phonemes, or the distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in each language, doesn't sound even remotely computer-generated or made up. It sounds real. This sort of technology could facilitate the ability to feed one of Trump's interviews or stump speeches into the application, and then type sentences or paragraphs in his spoken voice. You could very easily imagine someone creating fake audio of Trump explaining how he dislikes Mike Pence, or how he lied about his taxes, or that he did indeed enjoy that alleged "golden shower" in the Russian hotel suite. Then you could circulate that audio around the Internet as a comment that was overheard on a hot microphone. Worse, you could imagine a scenario in which someone uses Trump's voice to call another world leader and threaten some sort of violent action. And perhaps worst of all, as the quality of imitation gets better and better, it will become increasingly difficult to discern between what is real behavior and what isn't.

Regardless of what ideology you subscribe to, what politician you support, what media source you visit; you fundamentally must be able to trust the information you see. If there is no way, barring forensic analysis, to tell truth or falsehood, how can we know anything? Plausible lies could literally be the end of the world.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Japanese video game company Namco, has died at age 91. Nakamura is widely known as the "Father of Pac-Man" for his role in bringing the arcade classic—created by designer Toru Iwatani in 1980—to Japan and to the US via a licensing deal with Midway.

Nakamura originally founded the company as Nakamura Manufacturing, selling coin-operated children's rides to a department store in Yokohama, Japan. He later changed the name of the company to Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (NAMMCo!) and began producing electromechanical arcade machines like 1976's Namco F-1.

Namco hit the big time when Nakamura shrewdly purchased the struggling Atari Japan from owner Nolan Bushnell for $500,000—far higher than the $80,000 offered by Sega. The deal granted Namco an exclusive license to distribute Atari's games in Japan for ten years and led to the development and release of original games such as Gee Bee and Galaxian.

Did Pac-man fever drive you crazy?

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Phoenix666 writes:

A UK, Canadian and Italian study has provided what researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram.

Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang), have found there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe -- in fact, as much as there is for the traditional explanation of these irregularities using the theory of cosmic inflation.
...
A holographic universe, an idea first suggested in the 1990s, is one where all the information, which makes up our 3D 'reality' (plus time) is contained in a 2D surface on its boundaries.

Professor Kostas Skenderis of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton explains: "Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions (and your perception of time) in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded!"

So there is a reason you feel like you're living in the Matrix.

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