SoylentNews

Phoenix666 writes:

Two graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference.

Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it.

A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from a shadowy US government agency. If they publicly discussed their findings, the letter said, it would be deemed legally equivalent to exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power.

Stanford's lawyer said he thought they could defend any case by citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech. But the university could cover legal costs only for professors. So the students were persuaded to keep schtum.

What was this information that US spooks considered so dangerous? Were the students proposing to read out the genetic code of smallpox or lift the lid on some shocking presidential conspiracy?

No: they were planning to give the International Symposium on Information Theory an update on their work on public key cryptography.

Phoenix666 writes:

In April 1952, Japan’s sovereignty was restored, but the U.S. continued to maintain a major presence in the country — and that is where the NSA’s story begins.

According to the agency’s documents, its relationship with Japan dates back to the 1950s. NSA’s presence in the country was for many years managed out of a “cover office” in the Minato area of downtown Tokyo, within a U.S. military compound called the Hardy Barracks. From there, NSA maintained close relations with a Japanese surveillance agency that it refers to as Japan’s Directorate for Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT.

At first, the NSA appears to have kept a low profile in Japan, concealing details about its presence and operating undercover. But as its relationship with the country developed, that changed. By 2007, the agency had determined that “cover operations are no longer required” and it relocated its main office in Japan to a space within the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. “NSA’s partnership with Japan continues to grow in importance,” the agency noted in a classified October 2007 report, adding that it planned to take the country “to the next level as an intelligence partner with the U.S.”

There is no escape from the long arm of the NSA.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Launching today is AMD's new Radeon RX 500 series. As we're covering in our companion launch article, the RX 500 series is a refresh of Polaris, bringing about newer, faster SKUs based on the existing Polaris 10 and 11 GPUs. Also joining the family is a newer, smaller GPU, Polaris 12, which will be the basis of the Radeon RX 550. AMD is using an updated revision of Polaris for all of these products, so there are some minor clockspeed improvements and a new memory state that have been baked into the RX 500 family that is not present in the RX 400 family, which makes the new RX 500 parts a bit more interesting.

The first Radeon RX 500 cards out of the gate are the Radeon RX 580 and the Radeon 570, which we're reviewing today. These SKUs are pretty straightforward: take the new Polaris 10 GPU revision, plug it into more powerful boards, turn up the clockspeeds a bit, and you have a new SKU. AMD hasn't done anything wild here – the configurations haven't changed, and in fact TBPs have gone up – so relative to the RX 480 and RX 470, at the end of the day it's a set of slightly more powerful cards for the same price as before.

Because these are just minor performance improvements over the existing RX 480 and RX 470 cards, these newer cards replace the RX 400 cards in AMD's product stack, but they aren't intended as upgrades for existing owners. Instead they're meant to tempt owners of cards like the R9 280 and R9 380 series who didn't already upgrade to Polaris. For those owners who did hold off, their reward is a slightly more powerful upgrade option in 2017 than they would have gotten in 2016.

Another article at PC World

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Remote access Trojans are mainly used to steal consumer data, either for consumers themselves or the conglomerate keeping this information safe from prying eyes. However, it appears criminals are looking at a different approach for these tools right now. A new open source remote access Trojan can now be used to extract data from the Telegram communication platform.

It is never a good sign when end-to-end encrypted communication tools are vulnerable to remote access Trojans. Unfortunately for all Telegram users, they have now become an official target for cybercriminals who make use of the RATAttack toolkit. This new open-source hacking tool has been unveiled by security researchers late last night, as it could have major consequences for all Telegram users.

Source: https://themerkle.com/open-source-remote-access-trojan-targets-telegram-users/

Original Submission

Gaaark writes:

A company called Apis Cor has 3D printed a (tiny) house in 24 hours for $10,000, which comes out to about $275/m².

Reconstructing Buckingham Palace at 77,000 m² this way would cost only about $21 million. According to a 2010 estimate in The Guardian: "you could build a new energy-efficient replica of the palace for a knock-down £320m", which translates to $552 million.

So: 3D printing the palace would save over a HALF BILLION DOLLARS! Muahahaha (pinkies up!).

Video of the building process.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

According to a story appearing in The Economist, several companies are developing software that can, with only a relatively short sample of a person's speech, produce a "clone" of their saying nearly anything. CandyVoice is a phone app developed by a new Parisian company that only needs 160 or so French or English phrases from which it can extract sufficient information to read plain text in that person's voice. Carnegie Mellon University has a similar program called Festvox. The Chinese internet giant, Baidu, claims it has software which needs only about 50 sentences. And now, Vivotext, a voice-cloning firm headed by Gershon Silbert in Tel Aviv, looks to expand on that as it licenses its software to Hasbro.

More troubling, any voice—including that of a stranger—can be cloned if decent recordings are available on YouTube or elsewhere. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, led by Nitesh Saxena, were able to use Festvox to clone voices based on only five minutes of speech retrieved online. When tested against voice-biometrics software like that used by many banks to block unauthorised access to accounts, more than 80% of the fake voices tricked the computer. Alan Black, one of Festvox's developers, reckons systems that rely on voice-ID software are now "deeply, fundamentally insecure".

And, lest people get smug about the inferiority of machines, humans have proved only a little harder to fool than software is. Dr Saxena and his colleagues asked volunteers if a voice sample belonged to a person whose real speech they had just listened to for about 90 seconds. The volunteers recognised cloned speech as such only half the time (ie, no better than chance). The upshot, according to George Papcun, an expert witness paid to detect faked recordings produced as evidence in court, is the emergence of a technology with "enormous potential value for disinformation". Dr Papcun, who previously worked as a speech-synthesis scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a weapons establishment in New Mexico, ponders on things like the ability to clone an enemy leader's voice in wartime.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Jessica Goodheart authored a story in Capital & Main (co-published by Slate) which reports:

While SolarCity has been an incredible job engine, for some workers the pace of growth has come at a cost. In lawsuits and interviews, workers allege being denied overtime, meal and bathroom breaks, minimum wages, and complain about managers' inattention to quality and safety.

"At first it was good", [former SolarCity employee George] Estrada remembers. But four years later, after SolarCity had exploded in size, from 2,500 employees to more than 15,000, Estrada quit, disillusioned by what he says was the company's focus on meeting sales goals over workmanship and the well-being of its employees.

[...] The industry also includes smaller regional firms such as Sullivan Solar Power in San Diego, where Estrada went to work after leaving SolarCity. Started in 2004, Sullivan Solar Power built its customer base slowly and aimed at creating a highly trained and well-compensated workforce. Estrada would find a different pace of work there, one that he says has allowed him to focus more care on each customer and to build a future as a skilled electrician, able to find work in any industry.

butthurt writes:

Various news outlets are reporting that the UK's prime minister, Theresa May, has called for a general election to be held on 8 June. The Conservative Party Web site has a transcript of her public statement, which can also be heard in a video.

The call for a snap election has now been backed by parliament.

May surprised allies and opponents [...] when she announced her plan to bring forward an election that was not due until 2020, saying she needed to avoid a clash of priorities in the sensitive final stages of the two-year Brexit talks.

After addressing a rowdy session of the House of Commons, May won the support of 522 lawmakers in the 650-seat parliament for an election on June 8. Only 13 voted against.

With May seen winning a new five-year mandate and boosting her majority in parliament by perhaps 100 seats, the pound held close to six-and-a-half month highs on hopes she may be able to clinch a smoother, more phased departure from the EU and minimise damage to the UK economy.

[...] The former interior minister, who became prime minister without an election when her predecessor David Cameron quit after last year's referendum vote for Brexit, enjoys a runaway lead over the main opposition Labour Party in opinion polls.

This is a notable change from the position taken over the last few months where May had said after the EU referendum, a "period of stability" was needed. "There isn’t going to be one. It isn’t going to happen. There is not going to be a general election," said the prime minister's spokesman less than a month ago.

Coverage (many of these are editorials):

• The Sun
• New Statesman
• New Statesman
• The Independent
• The Independent
• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• The New York Times
• The Irish Times
• BBC News
• Daily Mail

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/power-struggle-erupts-utah-cancer-institute-over-director-s-firing

The abrupt dismissal of the head of a Utah cancer center is causing backlash from its faculty—and its major philanthropic funder—in a struggle over the center's autonomy from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And nearly 2000 researchers have signed a petition calling on the university to reverse its decision.

For 11 years, prominent cell biologist Mary Beckerle has headed the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), which is based at the university but receives its funding largely from philanthropic donations, revenue from its cancer hospital, and grants from state and from the National institutes of Health. In an email to some clinical staff on Monday, university President David Pershing and Vivian Lee, senior vice president for health sciences, announced that Beckerle would step down "effective yesterday," but would "remain on faculty as a distinguished professor in biology." Beckerle, who has not responded to Science's request for comment, told The Salt Lake Tribune that she had learned of her dismissal in an email less than an hour earlier.

Details have been scant from the university, which also did not respond to a comment request. But Beckerle's colleagues contend that the move amounts to a hostile takeover by the university aimed at capturing the cancer clinic's revenue, and other prominent scientists are rallying unquestioningly around her.

Also at Deseret News. Change.org petition. University of Utah Health press release.

Original Submission

User a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- writes:

Sky News reports:

Hacking is ensnaring teenagers who would otherwise be unlikely to be involved in traditional crime, says a National Crime Agency [UK] report.

It aims to understand how teenagers become hackers and is based on interviews with eight young people cautioned or sentenced for hacking offences.

The average age of cybercrime suspects was 17 years old and that the availability of low-level hacking tools "encourages criminal behaviour", it said.

[...] The NCA report suggested that targeted interventions towards teenagers at the early stages of hacking can steer them away from criminal hacking.

"Just say no" to hacking tools.

Additional reporting: BBC

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) has updated its Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (Public-PAIR) service so that it no longer supports HTTPS (secure) access. From the announcement with emphasis added:

Public PAIR Maintenance and Outage

The USPTO will be performing maintenance on the Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (Public Pair) beginning at 12:01 a.m., Friday, April 21 and ending at 2 a.m., Friday, April 21 ET.

During the maintenance period, Public PAIR will be unavailable.

Immediately after the maintenance, users will only be able to access Public PAIR through URLs beginning with HTTP, such as http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair. Past URLs using HTTPS to access Public Pair, such as https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, will no longer work.

Can anyone explain why there would be this seemingly backwards move to insecure communications?

Original Submission

Soylentbob writes:

On April 12th, a terror-attack against the team of one of the major German soccer clubs, BVB, was reported by several news agencies. The attack was carried out with three bombs, enclosed by metal bolts for maximum damage. Luckily, only one player was injured at his hand. Some clumsy letters found at the scene pointed to an Islamic background, another equally clumsy pamphlet pointed to the left-wing, but due to the bad spelling and grammar was immediately suspected to be a false flag, potentially set by some right-wing extremist.

As evident by the links above, the media happily picked up the Islamic theme; the German right-wing party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, alternative for Germany) also happily embraced the opportunity.

Turns out, the actual background seems to be a completely different one, neither political nor religious: The BVB is in the stock market. The perpetrator bought "put" options and tried to kill as many team-members as possible to make a fortune when the stocks would plummet.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

On Wednesday, April 19th, in a seminar titled "An Air-Breathing Metal-Combustion Power Plant for Venus in situ Exploration", NASA engineer Michael Paul presented a novel idea where existing technology could be used to make longer-duration missions to Venus.

To recap the history of Venus exploration, very few probes have ever been able to explore its atmosphere or surface for long. Not surprising, considering that the atmospheric pressure on Venus is 92 times what it is here on Earth at sea level. Not to mention the fact that Venus is also the hottest planet in the solar system – with average surface temperatures of 737 K (462 °C; 863.6 °F).

Hence why those few probes that actually explored the atmosphere and surface in detail – like the Soviet-era Venera probes and landers and NASA's Pioneer Venus multiprobe – were only able to return data for a matter of hours. All other missions to Venus have either taken the form of orbiters or consisted of spacecraft conducting flybys while en route to other destinations.

[...] "What can you do with other power systems in places where the Sun just doesn't shine? Okay, so you want to get to the surface of Venus and last more than a couple of hours. And I think that in the last 10 or 15 years, all the missions that [were proposed] to the surface of Venus pretty much had a two-hour timeline. And those were all proposed, none of those missions were actually flown. And that's in line with the 2 hours that the Russian landers survived when they got there, to the surface of Venus."

Post-Nihilist writes:

I really fear spiders but I love to read about them: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-tarantulas-lateral-eyes-distance.html:

A necessary part of any animal's sense of direction is a positioning system to detect the relationship between where it is and where it wants to go; this is known as odometry. Tarantula wolf spiders have four sets of eyes, and a study from the Autonomous University of Madrid shows that they use their posterior lateral eyes and anterior lateral eyes to establish the distance they have traveled.

[...] "To calculate the distance it has traveled, the animal needs an odometer that registers the route, its location with respect to the finish point, which would be the burrow, and a 'compass' to track the direction of travel," said Joaquin Ortega Escobar, lead author of a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology on the function of each eye in these processes.

The tarantula wolf spider's median eyes measure the angle of polarised light, comprising its 'compass'; it detects direction using its anterior lateral eyes. Through this research, the scientists have learned that it is principally the anterior lateral eyes—which until now had not been analysed—and to a lesser extent, the posterior lateral eyes, that tarantula wolf spiders use to measure the distance to their nest.

[...] In previous work with the lateral eyes of other animals, such as desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis), the researchers observed that animals moving across a grid of black and white bands, like those used in the tarantula wolf spider study, with the ventral region of their compound eyes (the part that perceives the grid) covered did not present a significant difference in the return trip to the nest compared to when the eyes were uncovered.

"The situations of these two animals are analogous. In the case of the spider, it is the anterior lateral eye that perceives the ventral field of view, while in the ant it is the ventral region of the compound eye. Spiders have simple eyes like our own, rather than compound eyes," Ortega Escobar said.

An abstract is available; full article (pdf) is pay-walled.

Original Submission

kaszz writes:

LinkedIn apologizes for trying to sneak in a new update that informed some iPhone users, without further explanation, that their "app" would begin sharing their data with nearby users.

The update prompted outrage on Twitter after cybersecurity expert Rik Ferguson received a strange alert when he opened the resume app to read a new message: "LinkedIn would like to make data available to nearby Bluetooth devices even when you're not using the app."
That gave Ferguson, vice president of research at the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, a handful of concerns, he told Vocativ. Among them: "the lack of specificity, which data, when, under what conditions, to which devices, why does it need to happen when I'm not using the app, what are the benefits to me, where is the feature announcement and explanation, why wasn't it listed in the app update details."

A mobile app asking for additional permissions isn't a novel occurrence, but broad requests are often met with skepticism from privacy advocates and security researchers. Many shopping apps, for instance, leave a user's bluetooth connection turned on, allowing marketers to track you as you enter a store and linger near certain products.
Reached for comment, LinkedIn said it's a mistake — that some iPhone users were accidentally subject to undeveloped test feature the company is still working on.

My take on how it would work is that whenever you come into the range of another computerphone with bluetooth active — which for class 2 is 10 meters (33 ft) — the LinkedIn app would pop up a quick summary of each other's resume.

Perfect for those times when you visit a big meeting with people A and their LinkedIn app show you just recently had a gig with corporation B that they really hate. As for apologizing, do remember that large corporations only retreat if the alternative hurts economically. For background information it might be good to know that LinkedIn was bought in 2016 by Microsoft, which happens to be very much in on the phone-home theme. Now if Tinder would auto-share in the same manner the various habits with any nearby phone during family gatherings, that would be a real hilarious circus starter.

Original Submission