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charon writes:

Yadong Yin [...] and his colleagues at the University of California at Riverside have invented a type of paper that can be printed on using just light, erased by heating, and reused up to 80 times.

Yin created nanoparticles, which are a million times smaller than the thickness of human hair, with the dye Prussian blue, or its chemical analogues, and titanium oxide, which is commonly used in white wall paint. This mixture is then applied to normal paper.

When the coating is exposed to ultraviolet light, electrons from titanium oxide move to the dye in the nanoparticle. This addition of electrons makes the blue dye turn white. Focusing the ultraviolet light into shapes, you can print white words on a blue background—or blue words on a white background, which are easier to read.

If left alone, the paper reverts to its original state in five days. That process can be accelerated by heating the paper to 120 °C (250 °F) for 10 minutes.

Original Submission

charon writes:

At Corning's headquarters in upstate New York, three people in bulky masks and silvery, spacesuit-like gear are working the research furnaces. They move gracefully and in harmony. They have to, to face a 1,600 °C furnace, grab an incandescent crucible of molten glass, pour out the material, and shape it before it hardens. One worker's glove begins to smoke; he seems to pay it no mind.

"They're doing a ballet," says Adam Ellison, a materials scientist at the company, watching the furnace workers as the glass dumps brimstone-like heat into the surrounding air. "It's hot as hell, the glass gets stiff very quickly, and you can only work with it for a few minutes," he says. Ellison would know—he helped develop the material they're pouring, which is branded Gorilla Glass and is found on many smartphones because it is tough, thin, and lightweight.

These researchers are helping Corning investigate just how much further it can push the properties of glass. If the company could make glass that is difficult to scratch and break but also bendy, it could open up entirely new product categories: cell phones and tablets that fold or roll, for example. Thin, flexible glass might also turn curvy surfaces such as car interiors into touch-screen displays.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603464/inside-the-far-out-glass-lab/

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The privacy-centric TAILS Linux distro (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) announces:

Tails 3.0 will require a 64-bit x86-64 compatible processor. As opposed to older versions of Tails, it will not work on 32-bit processors.

We have waited for years until we felt it was the right time to do this switch. Still, this was a hard decision for us to make.

[...] Our current goal is to release Tails 3.0, and stop supporting computers with a 32-bit processor, on June 13, 2017.

Announced February 1: Tails 2.10 is out.

The site's news page (which could REALLY use #FragmentIdentifiers MUCH more effectively) says:

Tails 2.11 is scheduled for March 3rd.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google is offloading its satellite imaging business, including several satellites:

Google will sell its Terra Bella business, which includes a group of SkySat Earth imaging satellites, to Planet Labs, the companies confirmed on Friday after TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden first reported that a deal was going down on January 25. Google's space-high view of the world in its mapping software isn't going anywhere, however – Google will continue to license Earth imaging for its use from Planet in a multi-year contract that's part of the sale arrangement.

In a blog post announcing the news, Planet Labs' Will Marshall notes that the seven high-res SkySat satellites it's acquiring as part of the deal will be "highly complimentary" to its existing fleet of medium res satellites, which includes 60 units in total. Planet's existing network can only get three to five meter resolution, while Google's satellites can manage "sub-meter," which is why images on Google Earth and Google Maps tend to be so crisp and clear, like the one you see above.

Bonus: Google listed what it considers its enemies in the company's annual report to investors:

• "Providers of digital video services, such as Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu."
• "Digital assistant providers, such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft."
• "Providers of enterprise cloud services, including Amazon and Microsoft."
• "Companies that design, manufacture, and market consumer electronics products."

It looks like Amazon, particularly AWS and Alexa, is the greatest competitive concern.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Martin Brinkmann reports via gHacks

Microsoft is working on a new Windows 10 SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) that the company named Windows 10 Cloud internally.

First signs of Windows 10 Cloud appeared a week or so ago on the Internet, but it was not clear back then what this new edition of Windows 10 would offer. Suggestions ranged from a cloud-based operating system to a subscription-based system similar to Office 365, and a successor of Windows RT.

[...] Windows 10 Cloud [is] a revival of the Windows RT version of Windows.

[...] Windows 10 Cloud [will] only run Windows Store applications and apps that Microsoft made to work with the operating system. Any legacy Windows 32 program [will] not work on systems running Windows 10 Cloud.

[...] Windows 10 Cloud is a work in progress. Things may change along the way before it is released.

Windows 10 Cloud behaves as you would expect it to behave. Cortana walks you through the first steps of setup on first start, and you may notice that quite a few apps are listed in Start after [OS] installation.

Some of these apps are first-party applications or games, while others [are] third-party applications. The selection includes Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, and on the games side, Age of Empires Castle Siege, Asphalt 8, and Royal Revolt, among others.

Most don't appear to be installed though, but merely links to the application's Windows Store entry.

[...] You are stuck with Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer as the browser, and with Windows Defender as the security solution.

Several comments there mention how this will be competing with Android, iOS, and Chromebooks. Do you see a viable niche for what Redmond is offering? ... or is 420 correct when he says, "a company [...] determined to put themselves out of business"?

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The Walt Disney Company, including Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Two Pic MC, have agreed to pay $100 million to settle (PDF) claims that they conspired to lower the wages of animators and visual effects employees.

The agreement between the "Disney Defendants" and former workers could be the final settlement for a series of legal claims against entertainment and high-tech companies that were accused of having "no poach" agreements that limited how much they recruited each others' workers.

Combined with earlier settlements with Sony, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky Studios, the class of animator plaintiffs will get about $160 million, assuming US District Judge Lucy Koh approves the settlements currently on the table.

A series of wage-fixing claims ensued from a 2010 government antitrust lawsuit over recruitment at high-tech companies including Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe. The government said the companies agreed to limits on how they hired each others' workers, which artificially suppressed wages in the tech sector. That led to class-action civil claims against the companies on behalf of current and former employees. The claims against several high-tech defendants paid out $415 million in 2015.

Source:
  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/disney-will-pay-out-100m-over-wage-suppression-claims/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Digital Rights Management (DRM)-protected media files can be used to reveal Tor Browser users' actual IP address and therefore possibly reveal their identity, HackerHouse researchers have demonstrated.

[...] Attackers who want to uncloak Windows users can encode a file and make it so that the authorization URL points to a page controlled by the attackers.

But, if they want the downloading and opening of the file to be performed without a security alert and the target having to approve the action, they must make sure that the DRM license has been signed correctly, and the Digital Signature Object, Content Encryption Object and Extended Content Encryption Object contain the appropriate cryptographic signing performed by an authorised Microsoft License Server profile.

"The objects are used with a Microsoft license server, configured via a DRM profile, when encoding objects using an SDK," the researchers explained.

[...] The researchers made sure to point out that this attack is limited to Windows users who run Tor Browser, and that it does not take advantage of a vulnerability in the actual browser. "TorBrowser does warn you that 3rd party files can expose your IP address and should be accessed in Tails," they noted.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/02/03/uncloaking-tor-browser-users-drm-protected-files/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-tremors-newborn-piglets-attributed-previously.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5217315/
http://viralzone.expasy.org/all_by_species/39.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pestivirus

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

The aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise (CVN 65) , was decommissioned during a ceremony held in the ship's hangar bay, Feb. 3. The ceremony not only marked the end the ship's nearly 55-year career, it also served as the very first decommissioning of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Capt. Todd Beltz, commanding officer of the Enterprise, addressed the ship's company, former commanding officers and distinguished visitors and spoke of where the true spirit of "The Big E" comes from. "For all that Enterprise represents to this nation, it's the people that bring this ship to life," said Beltz. "So as I stand in this ship that we all care so much about, I feel it's appropriate to underscore the contributions of the thousands of Sailors and individuals that kept this ship alive and made its reputation. We are 'The Big E.'"

Enterprise was the eighth naval vessel to carry the name. It was built by the Newport News Shipbuilding Co. and was christened Sep. 24, 1960, by Mrs. Bertha Irene Franke, wife of former Secretary of the Navy William B. Franke. The ship was put to sea in 1961 and safely steamed more than 1 million nautical miles on nuclear power over its entire career of more than 50 years.

CVN-80, a Gerald R Ford class aircraft carrier, is scheduled to begin construction in 2018, be delivered by 2025, and be in operation by 2027. She is tentatively slated to be named the USS Enterprise and will replace the USS Nimitz, currently the oldest US aircraft carrier still in service.

-- submitted from IRC

Related Video:
http://www.navy.mil/viewVideoDVIDS.asp?id=49&story_id=98707

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Since their introduction in 2002, Microsoft's pair of .NET programming languages, C# and Visual Basic.NET, have been close siblings. Although they look very different—one uses C-style braces, brackets, and lots of symbols, whereas the other looks a great deal more like English—their features have, for the most part, been very similar. This strategy was formalized in 2010, with Microsoft planning coevolution, to keep them if not identical then at least very similar in capability.

But the two languages have rather different audiences, and Microsoft has decided to change its development approach. The company has made two key findings. First, drawing on the annual Stack Overflow developer survey, it's clear that C# is popular among developers, whereas Visual Basic is not. This may not be indicative of a particular dislike for Visual Basic per se—there's likely to be a good proportion within that group who'd simply like to consolidate on a single language at their workplace—but is clearly a concern for the language's development.

Second, however, Microsoft has seen that Visual Basic has twice the share of new developers in Visual Studio as it does of all developers. This could indicate that Visual Basic is seen or promoted as an ideal beginners' language; it might also mean that programmers graduating from Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros in programs such as Word, Access, and Excel are picking the option that is superficially most comfortable for them. Visual Basic developers are generally creating business applications using WinForms, or occasionally ASP.NET Web Forms; the use of WinForms in particular again suggests that developers are seeking something similar to Office macros.

Accordingly, the development of the two languages is set to diverge. C# is going to continue to pick up more complex features. C# 7.0, for example, is adding integrated support for tuples and pattern matching syntax, the latest language features showing significant influence from functional programming languages like ML and Haskell. Visual Basic 15 is adding some of these, such as tuples, but it isn't going to match every new feature in C# 7.0. Going forward, it will be maintaining readability and keeping the number of different concepts manageable.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/microsofts-developer-strategy-c-for-fancy-features-visual-basic-for-beginners/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Anyone interested in hitching a ride on a laser to the next solar system?

Interstellar travel, a timeworn staple of science fiction, can already be science fact if one has cash to spare. For just $100 million or so, a customer could actually purchase a top-of-the-line commercial rocket and ride right out of the solar system. But patience would be key. If launched tomorrow toward the nearest port of call—Proxima b, a potentially habitable Earth-mass planet recently discovered in the triple star system of Alpha Centauri about four light-years away—that rocket would take 80,000 years to arrive.

Instead of spending $100 million on a slow boat to the stars, in April of last year the billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced he would use that same sum to forge a new path to Alpha Centauri within a human lifetime. Called Breakthrough Starshot, the initiative calls for largely abandoning rockets in favor of "light sails"—gossamer-thin reflective sheets that, once unfolded in space, could be propelled to very high speeds by laser beams. Starshot's tentative plans involve using conventional rockets to place thousands of one-gram, four-meter-wide light sails in Earth orbit as early as the 2040s. Each sail would be embedded with a one-centimeter-wide chip containing cameras, sensors, thrusters and a battery. From Earth orbit, each featherweight spacecraft would be boosted toward Alpha Centauri at 20 percent light-speed by a minutes-long pulse from a ground-based, 100-gigawatt laser array. The interstellar crossing would take just a little over 20 years, so the probes could reach Alpha Centauri in the 2060s.

But such high speeds come at a high price. Even the most conservative cost estimates for Starshot far exceed Milner's initial $100-million investment—the multi-decadal project could easily consume $10 billion, and perhaps much more, largely due to the enormous expense of building the ground-based laser array. Government assistance and international collaboration would likely be required. Moreover, the light sails that survive the 20-year voyage would pass through the Centauri system in a flash, moving so fast they would have only seconds to capture high-quality close-up images and other data from Proxima b and any neighboring planets that may be there. As they fall deeper into the dark between the stars, the light sails would attempt to transmit their precious findings back to Earth using laser beams no more powerful than the signal from a typical cell phone.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Decades ago Mexico City's air pollution was so poor, birds would fall out of the sky -- dead. Locals said living there was like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, according to one report. In response, Mexico City took several steps to try to improve air quality including restricting driving one or two days during the weekdays. The program has had negligible results.

In 2008, the city added driving restrictions on Saturdays in hopes of moving the needle but according to new research by Lucas W. Davis, an associate professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, extending the program one more day also isn't working.

[...] To determine the impact of Saturday restrictions, Davis analyzed hourly air pollution data from 29 monitoring stations around Mexico City from 2005 to 2012. He studied emission levels for carbon monoxide; nitric oxide; nitrogen dioxide; nitrogen oxide; ozone; large particulates; small particulates; and sulfur dioxide. None of these pollutants decreased as a result of Saturday driving restrictions.

[...] "People have found other ways to get around the driving restrictions," says Davis. "Some purchase multiple cars, others take taxis or Uber."

[...] "Test every car, test every year. If you have a car that's polluting the air, you can't drive it. Period," says Davis.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The regular consumption of salicylic acid, or its consumption in higher doses, could unexpectedly promote and prolong bacterial colonization, as shown by a joint study conducted by Monika Ehling-Schulz's group from the Institute of Microbiology, Vetmeduni Vienna, together with the research group of Fernanda Buzzola from the University of Buenos Aires. The research stays were in part funded by the Mobility Programme for Scientific and Technological Cooperation between Austria and Argentina.

Iron is an important trace element for the human body and plays an essential role in blood formation. The metabolism of many bacteria, including S. aureus, also depends on the availability of iron molecules. Salicylic acid forms complexes with iron ions in the blood and so deprives not only us but also the staphylococcal bacteria of this element. S. aureus modifies its metabolism if it obtains no or only insufficient iron. The microorganism reacts to the changed -- from its perspective, negative -- conditions through the intensified formation of a biofilm, a sort of layer of slime formed by the aggregation of individual bacteria, as Tom Grunert of the Institute for Microbiology at Vetmeduni Vienna explains. The accelerated biofilm production allows the bacteria to survive for an even longer period under unfavourable living conditions.

This increased biofilm formation is promoted by the regular or increased consumption of salicylic acid. As pain relief medication, this compound is usually not taken regularly. However, it also is a component of anti-acne preparations and certain exfoliate products, which are often used for a longer period of time. Since salicylic acid is found in fruits and vegetables, people who follow a mostly vegetarian diet might also affected. "These people consume a small dose of the substance virtually every day," says Grunert. The use of certain medications further increases the iron limitation. Taken orally, salicylic acid enters the blood circulation and forms there complexes with the iron ions.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Deterred by the security capabilities of chip cards for in-store payments, thieves have resorted to stealing credit-card numbers and passwords or opening new accounts with false credentials to use in making online payments for purchases, according to recent studies. Botnets also comprise some of the biggest increases in online card fraud.

"We predicted this [online fraud increase] would happen following [chip] cards in the banking industry years ago," said Mike Lynch, chief strategy officer at InAuth, a vendor of mobile and browser security products. (InAuth was recently purchased by American Express, but will remain a subsidiary.) Other countries, including Canada and Australia, also saw big jumps in online card fraud after chip cards were adopted, he said.

Lynch said the online fraud increase is probably higher for financial institutions than for merchants, but merchants are more open about the problem and discuss it more freely. "Banks don't typically want to disclose fraud," he said.

The amount of dollars put at risk by online fraud went up 55% from the second quarter of 2015 to the second quarter of 2016, according to the Pymnts.com study. That was a jump from $4.90 to $7.60 per $100 of online sales. For luxury goods alone, the dollars at risk were $12.10 per $100 in sales in late 2016.

Botnets were behind many of these attacks. The rate of attacks by botnets increased by 47% for the same period for all goods and by 87% for luxury goods alone, Pymnts.com said.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Graphics card maker Nvidia is putting a stop to the resale of bundled promotional game keys by tying them to a specific graphics card purchase.

Previously, retailers sent promotional game codes to customers that purchased a qualifying product. Those codes could then be redeemed on Nvidia's website, which spit out the relevant Steam, Uplay, Origin, or Microsoft Store key. Since the promotional game codes were not tied to a specific account, many users took to either gifting spare keys to friends or selling them on eBay in order to offset the cost of the graphics card purchase.

Now, users have to redeem codes via the GeForce Experience (GFE) app, which is directly linked to third-party services like Steam and Uplay. Users must also ensure that the requisite graphics card is "installed before redemption." GFE then performs "a hardware verification step to ensure the coupon code is redeemed on the system with the qualifying GPU."

Update: Nvidia has confirmed that while GFE checks to ensure a user has installed a qualifying graphics card like a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080, the game itself is not permanently linked to the hardware. GFE's hardware check is based only on the wider product range, and not on a specific serial number.

The company has also confirmed that the redemption process permanently adds the game to the appropriate third-party service. For example, if users redeems a promotional game key through to Steam, that game will be useable on any other device, just like normal Steam games. Users can also opt to uninstall GFE, or install a different graphics card, once the promotional code has been redeemed and still retain full ownership of the game. A full set of instructions for redeeming codes is now available on Nvidia's website.

Source:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/nvidia-game-codes-gfe-hardware/

Original Submission