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Phoenix666 writes:

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.

A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale,¹ reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.

There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading.

Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

(Emphasis in original retained.)

At the top, researchers who generate +$950,440 in positive externalities; at the bottom, financiers who generate -$104,000 in negative externalities. In a glaring omission, telephone sanitisers were not listed.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Hacking vending machines has been around a long time—remember those globe candy machines? One method of absconding with the goods from this type of vending machine relied on Scotch tape or already-chewed gum. The tape or gum was stuck to the coin destined for the candy machine. If everything went right, the coin would stay in place, and several pieces of candy or gum could be had by carefully rocking the crank back and forth.

As vending machines become more intricate so have the hacks, except for the "brute-force" approach. That's where someone—usually an irate customer deprived of their purchase—violently rocks the machine until what they are after drops out of the screw mechanism and can be jimmied out of the swinging door near the bottom.

Needless to say, that approach tends to draw attention to the perpetrator—not a good thing in highly-secured buildings. Besides, today's vending machines are likely to be bolted to the floor or each other and are much more sophisticated—possibly containing machine intelligence, and belonging to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Hacking this kind of vending machine obviously requires a more refined approach. The type security professionals working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) might conjure up, according to journalists Jason Leopold and David Mack, who first broke the story A Bunch Of CIA Contractors Got Fired For Stealing Snacks From Vending Machines. In their BuzzFeed post, the two writers state, "Several CIA contractors were kicked out of the Agency for stealing more than $3,000 in snacks from vending machines according to official documents... ."

Source: TechRepublic

Read the full Office of Inspector General report from October 2013. on Document Cloud.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Caltech has created a camera without a lens:

Traditional cameras—even those on the thinnest of cell phones—cannot be truly flat due to their optics: lenses that require a certain shape and size in order to function. At Caltech, engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image.

[...] "Here, like most other things in life, timing is everything. With our new system, you can selectively look in a desired direction and at a very small part of the picture in front of you at any given time, by controlling the timing with femto-second—quadrillionth of a second—precision," says Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech, and the principal investigator of a paper describing the new camera. The paper was presented at the Optical Society of America's (OSA) Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and published online by the OSA in the OSA Technical Digest in March 2017.

"We've created a single thin layer of integrated silicon photonics that emulates the lens and sensor of a digital camera, reducing the thickness and cost of digital cameras. It can mimic a regular lens, but can switch from a fish-eye to a telephoto lens instantaneously—with just a simple adjustment in the way the array receives light," Hajimiri says.

Does this have implications for astronomy?

"The applications are endless," says graduate student Behrooz Abiri (MS '12), coauthor of the OSA paper. "Even in today's smartphones, the camera is the component that limits how thin your phone can get. Once scaled up, this technology can make lenses and thick cameras obsolete. It may even have implications for astronomy by enabling ultra-light, ultra-thin enormous flat telescopes on the ground or in space."

Okay.

Paper: An 8x8 Heterodyne Lens-less OPA Camera

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

BGR reports that Samsung is to offer the Galaxy Note 7 FE, a mobile phone built with components from the company's recalled Galaxy Note 7. The device is set to go on sale in South Korea on 7 July for "below 700,000 South Korean won ($616)".

Previously:

Source of Samsung Note 7 Fires Announced
"Galaxy Note 7" Wi-Fi SSID Delays U.S. Flight
Samsung Software Update Will Brick Few Note 7s Left in the Wild
Samsung Takes Out Full-Page Ads to Apologise for the Note 7
Samsung Posts 30 Percent Profit Plunge on Note 7 Crisis
Samsung 'Blocks' Exploding Note 7 Parody Videos
UPDATE: Samsung Halts Galaxy Note 7 Production
Samsung Faces the Prospect of a Second Galaxy Note 7 Recall
Florida Man Sues Samsung Over Galaxy Note 7 that Exploded in His Pants
Samsung Recalls Galaxy Note 7 due to 'Exploding' Batteries

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Although "offensive cyber" seems to have a different definition to my re-collection, Britain's Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, gave a speech at Cyber 2017 outlining how the Ministry of Defence is tackling today's cyber threats:

A stronger password here, a Windows update there, and we would have stood an even better chance of warding off the Parliamentary and Wannacry attacks. So my second point is that the MOD has a key role to play in contributing to a culture of resilience. That's why we set up the Defence Cyber Partnership Programme (DCPP) to ensure that companies with whom we have defence contracts are properly protecting themselves and meeting a host of cyber security standards.

Strengthening our deterrence

But there's a third way in which we can protect our national infrastructure, and that's by strengthening our deterrence. So we're using our rising budget to invest our £178bn in full spectrum capability, from carriers to Ajax armoured vehicles, fifth generation F35 to the latest UAVs, signalling to potential cyber strikers that the price of an online attack could invite a response from any domain, air, land, sea or cyber space. And when it comes to the latter, we're making sure that offensive cyber is now an integral part of our arsenal. We now have the skills to expose cyber criminals, to them hunt down and to prosecute them, to respond in kind to any assault at a time of our choosing.

Our National Offensive Cyber Planning allows us to integrate cyber into all our military operations. And I can confirm that we are now using offensive cyber routinely in the war against Daesh, not only in Iraq but also in the campaign to liberate Raqqa and other towns on the Euphrates. Offensive cyber there is already beginning to have a major effect on degrading Daesh's capabilities.

Unfortunately, the Vault7 leaks show that at least one nation-state believes it is able to imitate attacks from other nation-states:

What was once conspiracy is now fact, as it appears the CIA has essentially developed their own NSA without the oversight. Under the Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), over 5,000 hackers have produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware targeting everything from anti-virus software to commonly used consumer devices. This includes malware which makes it look like it was planted by a foreign government or hacker. This includes Russia, essentially proving the CIA has the ability to plant evidence to make it look like Russian hackers were the culprits. This potentially disrupts and discredits the entire Russia hacking narrative being pushed by the media.

So, under Britain's official foreign policy, when a country has sustained attacks or just a flaky infrastructure, that's sufficient justification to bomb a random country rather than attack the wrong computers. After Iraq was bombed for having Weapons of Mass Distraction and bombed again due to Saudi Arabian terrorists, will North Korea get bombed due to NHS failure?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dr. Lowe, from In The Pipeline, writes about the development of a vaccine for heroin:

At first thought, that might seem like a weird idea. Drugs of abuse, such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine et al. are small molecules, and as such are too small to set off immune responses on their own. But a strategy could be to attach them to some larger protein that can raise antibodies – if those antibodies recognize the drug-labeled part of the protein conjugate, they may well retain activity against the drug molecule in its free state.

[...] It's been a long road. The first morphine immunoconjugate was described in 1970, and a morphine vaccine was tested in rabbits in 1975. But very little progress in the field occurred over the next twenty years or so, partly because methadone treatment for heroin addiction had become widely used. It's interesting to note, though, that vaccine development work against amphetamine seems to have followed a roughly similar path

[...] It would seem that we really are getting close to human clinical trials for some of these, which will be quite interesting. A drug-abuse vaccine is not going to be magic, though. Because of the specificity of the immune response, someone who's been vaccinated against heroin would almost certainly still respond to morphine, and most definitely would to compounds like fentanyl or oxycodone [...] But vaccines could, at the same time, provide the extra help needed for people to finally break free of a particular drug, and addicts who are really trying to quit need all the help that they can get.

I'd say that last part is the key. One of the big issues in drug addiction is (in the end) a philosophical argument about free will (which would explain why it never gets resolved!) Is drug addiction a disease, a choice, a behavior, a biochemical problem. . .the arguments go on forever, complicated by the way that different people attach different meanings to those terms.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/06/26/a-heroin-vaccine
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.7b03334

Original Submission

takyon writes:

First it was unveiled, now it has launched. AMD has launched the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition at $999 for the air-cooled version and $1499 for liquid-cooled. The High Bandwidth Memory 2.0 included has been confirmed to be two stacks of 8-layer 8 GB HBM:

After what appears to be a very unusual false start, AMD has now formally launched their new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card. First announced back in mid-May, the unusual card, which AMD is all but going out of their way to dissuade their usual consumer base from buying, will be available today for $999. Meanwhile its liquid cooled counterpart, which was also announced at the time, will be available later on in Q3 for $1499.

Interestingly, both of these official prices are some $200-$300 below the prices first listed by SabrePC two weeks ago in the false start. To date AMD hasn't commented on what happened there, however it's worth noting that SabrePC is as of press time still listing the cards for their previous prices, with both cards reporting as being in-stock.

[...] Feeding the GPU is AMD's previously announced dual stack HBM2 configuration, which is now confirmed to be a pair of 8 layer, 8GB "8-Hi" stacks. AMD has the Vega FE's memory clocked at just under 1.9Gbps, which gives the card a total memory bandwidth of 483GB/sec. And for anyone paying close attention to AMD's naming scheme here, they are officially calling this "HBC" memory – a callback to Vega's High Bandwidth Cache design.

Original Submission

NewNic writes:

Recently launched and not yet operational, the HMS Queen Elizabeth's computers are running Windows XP.

The ship's officers defend this, claiming that the ship is secure, but the phrasing of their comments suggests that they really don't have a clue:
"It's not the system itself, of course, that's vulnerable, it's the security that surrounds it.
So the security is vulnerable?

"I want to reassure you about Queen Elizabeth, the security around its computer system is properly protected and we don't have any vulnerability on that particular score."

Apparently, where you buy your computers makes Windows XP more secure:
"The ship is well designed and there has been a very, very stringent procurement train that has ensured we are less susceptible to cyber than most."

He added: "We are a very sanitised procurement train. I would say, compared to the NHS buying computers off the shelf, we are probably better than that. If you think more Nasa and less NHS you are probably in the right place."

Didn't they learn from recent events how even air-gapped computers can be compromised?

Also covered at The Register, The Times, and The Guardian.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-attack-idUSKBN19I1TD

A ransomware attack hit computers across the world on Tuesday, taking out servers at Russia's biggest oil company, disrupting operations at Ukrainian banks, and shutting down computers at multinational shipping and advertising firms.

Cyber security experts said those behind the attack appeared to have exploited the same type of hacking tool used in the WannaCry ransomware attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in May before a British researcher created a kill-switch.

"It's like WannaCry all over again," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with Helsinki-based cyber security firm F-Secure.

He said he expected the outbreak to spread in the Americas as workers turned on vulnerable machines, allowing the virus to attack. "This could hit the U.S.A. pretty bad," he said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was monitoring reports of cyber attacks around the world and coordinating with other countries.

The first reports of organizations being hit emerged from Russia and Ukraine, but the impact quickly spread westwards to computers in Romania, the Netherlands, Norway, and Britain.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Many recent outages/attacks have a pattern and a UK power grid outage is anticipated.

Previous WannaCrypt coverage.

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

Phoenix666 writes:

A move by China to save the planet has delivered a price shock to the global shipping industry just as it was starting to emerge from its worst slump in almost a decade.

China manufacturers make 90 percent of all containers used on ships to carry all manner of finished products and commodities around the world. They're the workhorses of the global economy. As part of their pledge to cut emissions by 70 percent by the end of this year, these companies are coating containers with water-borne paints that release less toxic fumes than oil-based varieties before China starts levying a green tax in January 2018.

It's a noble effort—yet one that's delivered an unintended blow to the shipping industry. About 70 percent of container production capacity in China has been shut down as manufacturers retool their factories to allow for the usage of the new paints, sending prices soaring as much as 69 percent from last year's lows, said Teo Siong Seng, chief executive officer at Singamas Container Holdings Ltd., the world's No. 2 maker.

It's not just the container manufacturers shutting down to retool, but that the new water-based paint takes 20 hours to dry vs. 4 hours for conventional paints.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Don't be scared. It's just one little genome:

Advances in technology have made it much easier, faster and less expensive to do whole genome sequencing — to spell out all three billion letters in a person's genetic code. Falling costs have given rise to speculation that it could soon become a routine part of medical care, perhaps as routine as checking your blood pressure.

But will such tests, which can be done for as little as $1,000, prove useful, or needlessly scary?

The first closely-controlled study [DOI: 10.7326/M17-0188] [DX] aimed at answering that question suggests that doctors and their patients can handle the flood of information the tests would produce. The study was published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

"We can actually do genome sequencing in normal, healthy individuals without adverse consequences — and actually with identification of some important findings," says Teri Manolio, director of the division of genomic medicine at the National Human Genome Institute, which funded the study. Manolio wrote an editorial [DOI: 10.7326/M17-1518] [DX] accompanying the paper.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SSDs with 64 layers of 3D NAND are now available:

Today Intel is introducing their SSD 545s, the first product with their new 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory and, in a move that gives Intel a little bit of bragging rights, the first SSD on the market to use 64-layer 3D NAND from any manufacturer.

The Intel SSD 545s is a mainstream consumer SSD, which these days means it's using the SATA interface and TLC NAND flash. The 545s is the successor to last year's Intel SSD 540s, which was in many ways a filler product to cover up inconvenient gaps in Intel's SSD technology roadmap. When the 540s launched, Intel's first generation of 3D NAND was not quite ready, and Intel had no cost-competitive planar NAND of their own due to skipping the 16nm node at IMFT. This forced Intel to use 16nm TLC from SK Hynix in the 540s. Less unusual for Intel, the 540s also used a third-party SSD controller: Silicon Motion's SM2258. Silicon Motion's SSD controllers are seldom the fastest, but performance is usually decent and the cost is low. Intel's in-house SATA SSD controllers were enterprise-focused and not ready to compete in the new TLC-based consumer market.

[...] Intel will be using their smaller 256Gb 64L TLC die for all capacities of the 545s, rather than adopting the 512Gb 64L TLC part for the larger models. The 512Gb die is not yet in volume production and Intel plans to have the full range of 545s models on the market before the 512Gb parts are available in volume. Once the 512Gb parts are available we can expect to seem them used in other product families to enable even higher drive capacities, but it is reassuring to see Intel choosing the performance advantages of smaller more numerous dies for the mainstream consumer product range. Meanwhile, over the rest of this year, Intel plans to incorporate 64L 3D NAND into SSDs in every product segment. Most of those products are still under wraps, but the Pro 5450s and E 5100s are on the way as the OEM and embedded versions of the 545s.

Previously: SK Hynix Plans 72-Layer 512 Gb NAND for Late 2017
64-Layer 3D NAND at Computex
SK Hynix Developing 96 and 128-Layer TLC 3D NAND

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A new strategy for sending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean monitoring, and deep-sea exploration.

By taking advantage of the dynamic rotation generated as acoustic waves travel, the orbital angular momenta, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to pack more channels onto a single frequency, effectively increasing the amount of information capable of being transmitted.

They demonstrated this by encoding in binary form the letters that make up the word "Berkeley," and transmitting the information along an acoustic signal that would normally carry less data. They describe their findings in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...] While human activity below the surface of the sea increases, the ability to communicate underwater has not kept pace, limited in large part by physics. Microwaves are quickly absorbed in water, so transmissions cannot get far. Optical communication is no better since light gets scattered by underwater microparticles when traveling over long distances.

Low frequency acoustics is the option that remains for long-range underwater communication. Applications for sonar abound, including navigation, seafloor mapping, fishing, offshore oil surveying, and vessel detection.

However, the tradeoff with acoustic communication, particularly with distances of 200 meters or more, is that the available bandwidth is limited to a frequency range within 20 kilohertz. Frequency that low limits the rate of data transmission to tens of kilobits per second, a speed that harkens back to the days of dialup internet connections and 56-kilobit-per-second modems, the researchers said.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1704450114

Transmitting data acoustically could tip off the dolphins and whales to our plans...

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Following the discontinuation of the NES Classic Edition, Nintendo has announced a September release of another miniature, retro game console with pre-loaded games. It will come in two versions: one for Europe, Australia, Japan and the UK; the other for America. They will differ in styling and in the included games. US Gamer lists the games that will be built into both versions. Star Fox 2, written circa 1995, is to be released for the first time as one of the built-in games.

The consoles will be powered by USB and will not include a mains adaptor; output will be over HDMI and

all games included in the Nintendo Classic Mini: Super Nintendo Entertainment System are the original US 60 Hz releases.

Two controllers will be hard-wired.

As usual, the console is expected to be in short supply. Nintendo's share price fell after the announcement.

additional coverage:

• official announcement (in Japanese)
• Polygon (about short supply)
• Express (about short supply in UK)
• BBC News
• Engadget
• Wikipedia article
• The Verge (about Star Fox 2)
• Polygon (about Star Fox 2)

previous stories:
Nintendo to Bring $60 "Retro" Video Gaming Console to U.S. Market
Nintendo to Discontinue NES Classic Edition/NES Classic Mini

Original Submission

takyon writes:

IBM has a customer for its neuromorphic chips, and it is using terms like "neurons per rack" to describe the system's capabilities:

IBM and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) today announced they are collaborating on a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing system powered by a 64-chip array of the IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System. The scalable platform IBM is building for AFRL will feature an end-to-end software ecosystem designed to enable deep neural-network learning and information discovery. The system's advanced pattern recognition and sensory processing power will be the equivalent of 64 million neurons and 16 billion synapses, while the processor component will consume the energy equivalent of a dim light bulb – a mere 10 watts to power.

[...] The IBM TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System can efficiently convert data (such as images, video, audio and text) from multiple, distributed sensors into symbols in real time. AFRL will combine this "right-brain" perception capability of the system with the "left-brain" symbol processing capabilities of conventional computer systems. The large scale of the system will enable both "data parallelism" where multiple data sources can be run in parallel against the same neural network and "model parallelism" where independent neural networks form an ensemble that can be run in parallel on the same data.

"AFRL was the earliest adopter of TrueNorth for converting data into decisions," said Daniel S. Goddard, director, information directorate, U.S. Air Force Research Lab. "The new neurosynaptic system will be used to enable new computing capabilities important to AFRL's mission to explore, prototype and demonstrate high-impact, game-changing technologies that enable the Air Force and the nation to maintain its superior technical advantage."

Reprint and some more stuff.

Original Submission

BK writes:

According to The Wall Street Journal:

The European Union's antitrust regulator on Tuesday fined Alphabet Inc.'s Google a record €2.42 billion ($2.71 billion) for favoring its own comparison-shopping service in search results and ordered the search giant to apply the same methods to rivals as its own when displaying their services.

[...] If the ruling sets a precedent that holds, these firms might all have to rethink how they make products that—like Google's search engine—have become more than just tools, but dominant gateways to the wider internet.

From The New York Times:

While the fine will garner attention, the focus will most likely shift quickly to the changes that Google will have to make to comply with the antitrust decision, potentially leaving it vulnerable to regular monitoring of its closely guarded search algorithm.

CNBC adds that, based on a filing, Google expects to ultimately pay this fine.

Original Submission