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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Privacy Online News reports

Denmark's ISPs are collectively putting their foot down and will no longer surrender identifying subscriber information to the copyright industry's lawyer armies. This follows a ruling in neighboring Norway, where the Supreme Court ruled that ISP Telenor is under no obligation to surrender subscriber identities, observing that the infraction of the copyright distribution monopoly is not nearly a serious enough issue to breach telecommunications privacy. This has the potential to end a long time of copyright industry free reign in Denmark, and will likely create a long series of court cases.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

If it seems like every week, there's another terrorist attack – well, you're not wrong. According to one crowdsourcing map, there have been over 500 attacks around the world since the start of 2017, with over 3,500 fatalities. For a period in 2016, ISIS-initiated attacks were occurring, on average, every 84 hours.

Despite improvements in methods and coordination among law enforcement agencies over the past 25 years, they're still hamstrung in a number of ways. With large public gatherings of people becoming more attractive targets for terrorists, what are the best strategies moving forward?

[...] But despite huge budgets and the presence of thousands of added security personnel, it's virtually impossible to prevent a determined terrorist, or guarantee absolute safety. While security efforts for events like the Olympic Games have escalated, terrorists today no longer wait for major events that draw global interest.

[...] The odds are in favor of terrorists. All they have to do is succeed once, no matter how many times they try. For public safety professionals to be fully successful, they have to prevent 100 percent of the terror attempts. It's a number to aspire to, but even the most experienced countries fighting terror – such as Israel and the U.K. – can't measure up to this standard.

[...] These days, it's necessary to consider any place where crowds congregate as vulnerable "soft targets" for the attackers. To better prepare for securing soft targets (and this isn't to say threats against "hard targets," like planes, buildings and infrastructure, have diminished) law enforcement agencies must improve coordination among one another, whether it's via intelligence, information sharing and training. And then there's the need for deconfliction, which refers to avoiding self-defeating behavior – from interagency rivalries and poor communication to insufficient coordination – by people who are on the same side.

[...] Given that there is no way to guarantee complete safety, and that the threat assessment expects more attacks, there are two more elements that ought to receive more attention: community resilience and community policing.

https://theconversation.com/how-can-we-better-protect-crowds-from-terrorism-78443

[Related]:

1996 Atlanta Olympic Games: https://www.britannica.com/event/Atlanta-Olympic-Games-bombing-of-1996

Secure Airport Design: https://skift.com/2016/07/04/how-smart-airport-design-can-make-spaces-more-secure/

Do you agree with this assessment of the security situation ? What do you think could be done to mitigate the effects of such asymmetric warfare ?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A Chinese dating app for lesbians that has more than five million users has been shut down.

The app, Rela, is no longer available in the Android or Apple app stores, and its website and Sina Weibo account have been deleted.

Users began to notice that the app was not accessible last week. It is unclear why it has been shut down.

Rela told its users on WeChat that the service had been suspended for an "important adjustment in service".

"Rela has always been with you and please await its return!"

[...] The state internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has not commented on the shutdown.

Some users have suggested that it was connected to Rela's support for parents of LGBT children who wanted to take part in a "marriage market" in Shanghai on 20 May.

Shutting down such apps must be especially significant for users in socially conservative societies.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Edward Snowden said that from contacts he has had with those in the White House and in President Obama's orbit, "we've come to understand that [Obama] was personally wounded as a result of these disclosures," which prompted Snowden to seek asylum outside the country.

[...] Snowden also addressed the notion of President Obama pardoning him. Based on communications he had with Obama's White House and those in the former president's orbit, Snowden realized he would not receive a pardon because the information Snowden leaked significantly damaged Obama's legacy.

[...] It had long been speculated, leading up to Obama's final hours in office, that he would grant Snowden a 11th hour pardon.

Snowden, however, disputed this notion saying, "I don't think it was a likely case. I'm not even sure it was a possible case, because the president himself was the one most personally embarrassed by these disclosures."

"[Obama] campaigned in 2007...on the platform of saying he would end exactly this kind of warrantless mass surveillance," Snowden continued. "In secret, instead of ending this programs, he entrenched them and expanded them. He made their reach greater, he made their use more common, he normalized what had been an unlawful and unpopular program of the George Bush administration and made it a new American tradition."

Will Obama's legacy come to be, as Snowden seems to suggest, that he normalized police state surveillance?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers have found that a one paragraph letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 was "uncritically cited as evidence that addiction was rare with long-term opioid therapy" [emphasis in original retained]:

Canadian researchers have traced the origins of the opioid crisis to one letter published almost 40 years ago.

The letter, which said opioids were not addictive, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1980.

Dr David Juurlink says the journal's prestige helped fuel the misguided belief that opioids were safe.

His research found that the letter was cited more than 600 times, usually to argue that opioids were not addictive.

On Wednesday, the NEJM published Dr Juurlink's rebuttal to the 1980 letter, along with his team's analysis of the number of times the letter was cited by other researchers.

The two names to blame? Dr. Hershel Jick and his assistant Jane Porter. Dr. Jick did not anticipate the misuse of his short letter:

Jick still works at Boston University School of Medicine. He told the Associated Press this week that he is "essentially mortified that that letter to the editor was used as an excuse to do what these drug companies did."

"They used this letter to spread the word that these drugs were not very addictive," he said. Jick noted that he testified as a government witness in a lawsuit some years ago concerning the marketing of pain drugs.

A 1980 Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc1700150) (DX)

Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics (DOI: 10.1056/NEJM198001103020221) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/scientists-imbue-robots-curiosity

Over the years, scientists have worked on algorithms for curiosity, but copying human inquisitiveness has been tricky. For example, most methods aren't capable of assessing artificial agents' gaps in knowledge to predict what will be interesting before they see it. (Humans can sometimes judge how interesting a book will be by its cover.)

Todd Hester, a computer scientist currently at Google DeepMind in London hoped to do better. "I was looking for ways to make computers learn more intelligently, and explore as a human would," he says. "Don't explore everything, and don't explore randomly, but try to do something a little smarter."

So Hester and Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, developed a new algorithm, Targeted Exploration with Variance-And-Novelty-Intrinsic-Rewards (TEXPLORE-VENIR), that relies on a technique called reinforcement learning. In reinforcement learning, a program tries something, and if the move brings it closer to some ultimate goal, such as the end of a maze, it receives a small reward and is more likely to try the maneuver again in the future. DeepMind has used reinforcement learning to allow programs to master Atari games and the board game Go through random experimentation. But TEXPLORE-VENIR, like other curiosity algorithms, also sets an internal goal for which the program rewards itself for comprehending something new, even if the knowledge doesn't get it closer to the ultimate goal.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung has added a so-called "4nm" process to its roadmap:

At the annual Samsung Foundry Forum, Samsung announced its foundry's roadmap for the next few years, which includes an 18nm FD-SOI [(Fully Depleted – Silicon on Insulator)] generation targeting low-cost IoT chips as well as 8nm, 7nm, 6nm, 5nm, and even 4nm process generations.

[...] 7LPP (7nm Low Power Plus): 7LPP will be the first semiconductor process technology to use an EUV lithography solution. 250W of maximum EUV source power, which is the most important milestone for EUV insertion into high volume production, was developed by the collaborative efforts of Samsung and ASML. EUV lithography deployment will break the barriers of Moore's law scaling, paving the way for single nanometer semiconductor technology generations.

[...] The 4LPP process generation will be Samsung's first to use a "Gate All Around FET" (GAAFET) transistor structure, with Samsung's own implementation dubbed "Multi Bridge Channel FET" (MBCFET). The technology uses a "Nanosheet" device to overcome the physical limitations of the FinFET architecture.

Source.

But how many transistors per square millimeter is it?

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

New Jersey Spotlight reports

Three Mile Island may be the next nuclear power plant to be shuttered by its owner unless it gets financial help to keep the facility afloat.

Exelon Corp., the owner of the Pennsylvania generating station, announced yesterday it will retire the plant by or about September 30, 2019 absent any change in that state's policies dealing with nuclear power.

The announcement is the latest by an owner of a nuclear plant to threaten or close its facility unless given financial assistance to make the facility profitable, a drama that could play out soon in New Jersey with its three nuclear units operated by the Public Service Enterprise Group in South Jersey.

If Exelon follows through on its threat, it would mean the Oyster Creek plant in Lacey Township, also owned by the Chicago energy giant, could outlast TMI, the site of the nation's biggest nuclear accident when it had a partial meltdown in 1979.

Oyster Creek, the country's oldest commercial nuclear plant, agreed to shut down at the end of 2019 under a settlement worked out with the Christie administration in 2010.

[...] Environmentalists oppose extending the incentives renewable sources obtain to nuclear, because unlike solar, wind, and water, the former is not sustainable. “It’s not renewable; you have to keep buying the fuel,’’ said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The lone Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament is warning of a new anti-piracy proposal circulating among MEPs:

Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda has warned that efforts are underway to sabotage the Parliamentary process relating to the EU's plans for mandatory piracy filtering. The Pirate Party member says there's now just over a week to protest against an 'alternative compromise' text that makes current plans look "tame".

[...] [The] EU is currently moving forward with reforms that could limit the protections currently enjoyed by platforms like YouTube. In short, sites that allow users to upload content will be forced to partner up with content providers to aggressively filter all user uploads for infringing content, thus limiting the number of infringing works eventually communicated to the public. Even as they stand the proposals are being heavily protested (1,2,3) but according to Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda, a new threat has appeared on the horizon.

Ahead of a crucial June 8 vote on how to move forward, Reda says that some in the corridors of power are now "resorting to dirty tactics" to defend and extend the already "disastrous plans" by any means. Specifically, Reda accuses MEP Pascal Arimont from the European People's Party (EPP) of trying to sabotage the Parliamentary process, by going behind negotiators' backs and pushing a new filtering proposal text that makes the "original bad proposal look tame in comparison." Reda says that in the face of other MEPs' efforts to come up with a compromise text upon which all of them are agreed, Arimont has been encouraging some MEPs to rebel against their negotiators. He wants them to support his own super-aggressive "alternative compromise" text that shows disregard for the Charter of Fundamental Rights and principles of EU law.

Julia Reda's blog post.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bloomberg reports:

Donald Trump next week will send Congress a proposal to hand over control of the U.S. air-traffic control system to a non-profit corporation, part of a week-long push for his infrastructure plan, said Gary Cohn, the president's chief economic adviser.

The proposal, which Trump will release on Monday in an Oval Office ceremony and Rose Garden event, will kick off what Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, called the formal launch of the president's infrastructure initiative. Later in the week, Trump plans to travel to Ohio and Kentucky to garner support for his plan -- a key campaign promise -- to channel $1 trillion into the nation's roads, bridges, inland waterways and other public facilities.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports:

The European Parliament, Council, and Commission have all decided that the in-El Reg's-view-inexplicable WiFi4EU project is a fine idea worthy of €120m to ensure "every European village and every city with free wireless internet ac­cess around the main centres of public life by 2020".

The agreement between the Parliament, Council, and Commission will see "6,000 to 8,000 municipalities" offered the chance to participate in a "simple and non-bureaucratic process" that will see them handed the cash needed to buy, install, and maintain WiFi kit for three years. Cities and towns have to pay for internet services themselves.

The initial factsheet for the project said it would bring WiFi to "parks, squares, libraries, public buildings to benefit citizens and institutions with a public mission".

That language is absent from the canned statement about the funding for the project. But we do get the caveat that grants under the scheme will only be made in "areas where a similar public or private offer does not yet exist".

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Ensuring there are applications ready to churn out useful science when the first U.S. exascale computers arrive in the 2021-2023 timeframe is Doug Kothe's job. No pressure. He's not alone, of course. The U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is a complicated effort with many interrelated parts and contributors, all necessary for success. Yet Kothe's job as director of application development is one of the more visible and daunting and perhaps best described by his boss, Paul Messina, ECP director.

"We think of 50 times [current] performance on applications [as the exascale measure of merit], unfortunately there's a kink in this," said Messina. "The kink is people won't be running today's jobs in these exascale systems. We want exascale systems to do things we can't do today and we need to figure out a way to quantify that. In some cases it will be relatively easy – just achieving much greater resolutions – but in many cases it will be enabling additional physics to more faithfully represent the phenomena. We want to focus on measuring every capable exascale system based on full applications tackling real problems compared to what they can do today."

[...] By way of review, ECP is a collaborative effort of two Department of Energy organizations—the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Six applications areas have been singled out: national security; energy security, economic security, scientific discovery; earth science; and health care. In terms of app-dev, that's translated into 21 Science & Energy application projects, 3 NNSA application projects, and 1 DOE / NIH application project (precision medicine for cancer).

Source: https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/05/29/doug-kothe-race-build-exascale-applications/

Original Submission

Armed police respond to serious incidents at London Bridge and Borough Market – with members of the public urged to reach areas of safety.

Since late yesterday evening [Saturday, 3 June], the Metropolitan Police Service has been responding to incidents in the London Bridge and Borough Market areas of south London. We are treating this as a terrorist incident and a full investigation is already underway, led by the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.

[...] Six people have been killed in terror attacks on London Bridge and at Borough Market.
Three male suspects have been shot dead by police.
Canisters seen around the body of at least one of the suspects have been “established to be hoaxes”, police said.
Police believe all of those directly responsible for the attack have been killed.

[...] Since March there has been the Westminster attack by Khalid Masood, who mowed down pedestrians near parliament and stabbed a policeman, resulting in six deaths, including his own: and the Manchester bombing two weeks ago that killed 22. And now London again.

[...] An editor in the Sun’s London Bridge Street office says police confirmed that a number of blasts heard [...] were controlled explosions.

Source: The Guardian

An investigation into the foreign funding of extremist Islamist groups may never be published, the Home Office has admitted.

The inquiry commissioned by David Cameron, was launched as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats in December 2015, in exchange for the party supporting the extension of British airstrikes against Isis into Syria.

But although it was due to be published in the spring of 2016, it has not been completed and may never be made public due to its "sensitive" contents.

It is thought to focus on Saudi Arabia, which the UK recently approved £3.5bn worth of arms export licences to.

Source: The Independent

takyon writes:

Google is testing a single self-driving commercial truck on a private track in California. The company may be looking to compete with Otto, a self-driving truck company that Uber acquired in August:

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle unit of Alphabet Inc., is testing a self-driving truck. The company, formerly known as Google's autonomous car venture, has installed its self-driving technology on a single Class 8 Peterbilt truck. Waymo has begun tests at a private track in California and plans road tests in Arizona later in the year. For now, it is keeping a driver behind the wheel at all times.

The company, which has millions of miles of on-road experience with autonomous cars, wants to learn how self-driving technology works in larger vehicles. Trucks in the heaviest Class 8 weight segment handle differently than passenger cars. They accelerate and brake more slowly. Their turning radius is far larger. They have giant blind spots. All of this requires that the sensors that provide data to the computer systems driving the truck be positioned differently than where they would be on a car.

"Self-driving technology can transport people and things much more safely than we do today and reduce the thousands of trucking-related deaths each year," Waymo said in a statement. "We're taking our eight years of experience in building self-driving hardware and software and conducting a technical exploration into how our technology can integrate into a truck."

Also at Reuters, TechCrunch, The Verge, and CNET.

Original Submission

McGruber writes:

Federal and California state law enforcement authorities have broken up a sophisticated auto-theft ring run by a Tijuana-based motorcycle club that swiped 150 Jeep Wranglers in San Diego County over the past several years. The Jeeps, worth $4.5 million, were sold in Mexico or stripped for parts that were then sold in Mexico.

Authorities said the thieves exploited a design feature of the Jeep Wrangler, gained access to a proprietary database that contains codes used to create duplicate keys for each car and then used a high-tech computer to get away with the cars.

Thieves would target a Jeep in a San Diego neighborhood, getting the critical vehicle identification number. Armed with that, they accessed the key database, which contained two special codes: one for creating a pattern to make a new key and the second that programmed a computer chip in the key that was linked to the car's computer system.

It's not precisely clear how the thieves got access to the database, but a car dealership in Cabo San Lucas at the tip of the Baja peninsula appears to be involved.

Link: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/courts/sd-me-countywide-crime-20170530-story.html

Original Submission