SoylentNews

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.businessinsider.com/roku-files-for-an-initial-public-offering-2017-9

Roku has made official what's been rumored: It wants to go public.

The digital media player maker publicly filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday - the first big step for a company seeking an initial public offering (IPO) of its shares.

The company plans to list shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker "ROKU."

[...] As of June 30, Roku had 15.1 million active accounts on its service, according to the filing. Customers using Roku devices or TV's with its interface streamed 6.7 billion hours of internet video in the first half of 2017 - up 62% from the same period in 2016, the company said in the filing.

Original Submission

Tech Review warns of a possible investment scam?

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608749/in-a-sign-of-gene-editing-frenzy-startup-pitches-editing-without-crispr/

Having something better than CRISPR would be high-impact. But Homology's scientific results aren't yet widely accepted. In fact, several scientists told MIT Technology Review that they believe the claims are probably wrong.

"What's surprising is this company raised so much money on something thought to be untrue in the scientific community," says David Russell, a researcher at the University of Washington, in Seattle. "I think there is just a gene-editing frenzy."

Something about specially designed viruses that don't have to "slash open" human genes to change them. Sounds like something the herd (Wall St speculators) would be happy to get behind.

The paper has not yet been published, but here are some additional links to further information:

From Dr. Lowe's "In the Pipeline" blog - http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/08/31/good-craziness-and-bad-craziness
Conference abstract on the research - http://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/4399/presentation/1352
AAV vectors -- use in gene therapy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeno-associated_virus#Use_in_gene_therapy

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/30/distant-galaxy-sends-out-15-high-energy-radio-bursts/

Breakthrough Listen, an initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe, has detected 15 brief but powerful radio pulses emanating from a mysterious and repeating source – FRB 121102 – far across the universe.

Fast radio bursts are brief, bright pulses of radio emission from distant but largely unknown sources, and FRB 121102 is the only one known to repeat: more than 150 high-energy bursts have been observed coming from the object, which was identified last year as a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light years from Earth.

Also at: Universe Today, phys.org, and Newsweek,.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Following a controversy over Google's Eric Schmidt pressuring the New America Foundation into removing a critical blog post and firing the scholar who wrote it, a former Forbes journalist now working at Gizmodo has written about an incident in which Google allegedly pressured Forbes to kill a negative story:

The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.

Hill thought that seemed like a big story, so she contacted Google's PR shop for confirmation. Google essentially confirmed the story, and so Hill ran with it under the headline: "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers."

Hill described what happened next:

Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)

It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.

If true, does it reflect worse on Google or the clickbait and scriptwall outlet Forbes?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The United States has told Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco, in retaliation for Moscow's demands that the size of the US mission in Russia be cut, according to the State Department.

The announcement on Thursday also included a demand for a reduction in Russian diplomatic presence in Washington, DC, and New York by Saturday with the closure of a chancery annex in Washington, DC, and consular annex in New York.

Last month, Russia ordered the US to cut its diplomatic and technical staff in Russia by more than half, to 455 people, after Congress overwhelmingly approved new sanctions against Russia.

[...] "In the spirit of parity invoked by the Russians, we are requiring the Russian Government to close its Consulate General in San Francisco, a chancery annex in Washington, DC, and a consular annex in New York City," [Department of State spokeswoman Heather Nauert] said.

"These closures will need to be accomplished by September 2."

[...] In order to deal with the reduction of staff in Russia, Washington said last week it would have to sharply scale back visa services, a move that will hit Russian business travellers, tourists and students.

The Russian consulate in San Francisco handles work from seven states in the western US.

There are three other Russian consulates separate from the embassy in Washington, DC. They are in New York, Seattle and Houston.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/orders-closure-russia-consulate-san-francisco-170831162458674.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-diplomacy-idUSKCN1BB2CY
https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2017/08/273751.htm
http://www.russianembassy.org/article/comment-by-the-embassy-of-the-russian-federation-to-the-united-states-on-the-decision-of-the

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have thrown down the gauntlet to computer programmers to find a solution to a "simple" chess puzzle which could, in fact, take thousands of years to solve and net a $1M prize. Computer Scientist Professor Ian Gent and his colleagues, at the University of St Andrews, believe any program capable of solving the famous "Queens Puzzle" efficiently, would be so powerful, it would be capable of solving tasks currently considered impossible, such as decrypting the toughest security on the internet.

Devised in 1850, the Queens Puzzle originally challenged a player to place eight queens on a standard chessboard so that no two queens could attack each other. This means putting one queen in each row, so that no two queens are in the same column, and no two queens in the same diagonal. Although the problem has been solved by human beings, once the chess board increases to a large size no computer program can solve it.

The team found that once the chess board reached 1000 squares by 1000, computer progams could no longer cope with the vast number of options and sunk into a potentially eternal struggle akin to the fictional "super computer" Deep Thought in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which took seven and a half million years to provide an answer to the meaning of everything.

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-simple-chess-puzzle-key-1m.html

[Abstract]: "Complexity of n-Queens Completion"

[Source]: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2017/title,1539813,en.php

Any takers for this challenge?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament representing Germany, writes about documents leaked yesterday by Statewatch showing that the current EU Council presidency questions extra copyright for news snippets, but endorses censorship. The council presidency is currently held by Estonia. In that role, the Estonians have wisely backed off on proposals to eliminate the freedom to hyperlink, a topic covered earlier. However, they are for the time being in favor of establishing heavy censorship apparati to require monitoring and evaluating all uploads and posts, mandating blocking such posts or uploads should they be found in violation of copyright. Either proposal affects sites like SN quite heavily.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A large asteroid, 3122 Florence, has passed by Earth at a distance of around 7 million kilometers (about 0.047237 AU):

Asteroid Florence, a large near-Earth asteroid, will pass safely by Earth on Sept. 1, 2017, at a distance of about 4.4 million miles, (7.0 million kilometers, or about 18 Earth-Moon distances). Florence is among the largest near-Earth asteroids that are several miles in size; measurements from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and NEOWISE mission indicate it's about 2.7 miles (4.4 kilometers) in size.

"While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began."

This relatively close encounter provides an opportunity for scientists to study this asteroid up close. Florence is expected to be an excellent target for ground-based radar observations. Radar imaging is planned at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar in California and at the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The resulting radar images will show the real size of Florence and also could reveal surface details as small as about 30 feet (10 meters).

All that money just whizzing by.

Also at Space.com and BBC.

Original Submission

FakeBeldin writes:

Over at Medium, a blogger claims to have an inside source at NSA that claimed that the NSA put in effort to determine the person(s) behind Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin.

According to the blog, the NSA created a "fingerprint" of Nakamoto's writing style(s) and used this fingerprint as follows:

The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM (a court-approved front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts) and then through MUSCULAR (where the NSA copies the data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information among the data centers of Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook) the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match.

The blog goes on to discuss that it may be a Chinese or Russian individual or group, possibly a state actor. Of course, that's quite a claim so that would require quite a proof.

The blogger has updated the post to decline to substantiate these rumours.

What do you guys think: does the NSA have the capability to perform such an investigation? And is it cheap enough for them to waste it on this? If so, what's next? the NSA identifying the location of Jimmy Hoffa's body?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

One of Silicon Valley's most infamous recent startups is shutting down:

Juicero, the company that made its name by creating a proprietary juice-squeezing machine, is shutting down. The announcement comes from Juicero's website. In its post, the company writes that it is suspending the sale of both its juice packets and its Juicero Press device. The last juice packet delivery will occur next week. All customers have up to 90 days to request a refund for their purchase of the Juicero Press, regardless of when they bought it. Fortune reports that employees are being given 60 days notice.

Previously: Juicero Squeezed by Press and Internet

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

ArsTechnica has an interesting article about research being done into the waterworks of ancient Rome and how the amount of lead used seems to track with the rise and fall of Rome's fortunes.

The ancient Roman plumbing system was a legendary achievement in civil engineering, bringing fresh water to urbanites from hundreds of kilometers away. Wealthy Romans had hot and cold running water, as well as a sewage system that whisked waste away. Then, about 2200 years ago, the waterworks got an upgrade: the discovery of lead pipes (called fistulae in Latin) meant the entire system could be expanded dramatically. The city's infatuation with lead pipes led to the popular (and disputed) theory that Rome fell due to lead poisoning. Now, a new study reveals that the city's lead plumbing infrastructure was at its biggest and most complicated during the centuries leading up to the empire's peak.

Hugo Delile, an archaeologist with France's National Center for Scientific Research, worked with a team to analyze lead content in 12-meter soil cores taken from Rome's two harbors: the ancient Ostia (now 3km inland) and the artificially-created Portus. In a recent paper for Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the researchers explain how water gushing through Rome's pipes picked up lead particles. Runoff from Rome's plumbing system was dumped into the Tiber River, whose waters passed through both harbors. But the lead particles quickly sank in the less turbulent harbor waters, so Delile and his team hypothesized that depositional layers of lead in the soil cores would correlate to a more extensive network of lead pipes.

[...] Because it was so expensive, the city's plumbing system is a good proxy for Rome's fortunes. In their soil core from Ostia, Delile and his team even discovered evidence of the Roman Empire's horrific civil wars during the first century BCE. As war sucked gold from the state's coffers, there was no money to build new aqueducts nor to repair existing ones.

[...] Once the city had recovered from the hardships of the wars, the researchers saw a steady increase in lead over the years that span the Empire's height during the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.

[...] Delile and his colleagues saw the slow decline of Rome in the Ostia soil core, too. There was a strong drop in lead after the mid-3rd century CE, when the researchers note "no more aqueducts were built, and maintenance was on a smaller scale." They add that this phase of "receding [lead] contamination corresponds to the apparent decline of [lead] and [silver] mining and of overall economic activity in the Roman Empire."

PNAS, 2017. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1706334114

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The World Health Organization sets a list of medical conditions into well-used code called the "International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems," or ICD for short. The official alphanumeric ciphers are used in medical records and insurance claims worldwide, noting the wide range of ailments and conditions a human may experience—everything from "tuberculosis" and "gastric ulcers" to "struck by orca" and "burn due to water skis on fire."

The latter categories of unusual and puzzlingly specific conditions even inspired the 2014 book Struck by Orca: ICD-10 Illustrated.

But how often are these peculiar codes actually used? An insurance data company did the work to find out. The most bizarre ICD codes listed in the 2014 book, such as the title "struck by orca," were not used in the US in the last 12 months, which is both good and disappointing. But codes just slightly less bizarre were used—some quite a lot, such as W503: "accidental bite by another person."

You'll have to read the fine article to enjoy the rest, but the author does close the article with this little bit:

Of course, codes with such few uses may suffer from just transcription error, Amino notes. Still, be careful out there, especially around cows, sword fights, power tools, and pedestrian obstacles.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Comcast has sued the state of Vermont to try to avoid a requirement to build 550 miles of new cable lines.

Comcast's lawsuit against the Vermont Public Utility Commission (VPUC) was filed Monday in US District Court in Vermont and challenges several provisions in the cable company's new 11-year permit to offer services in the state. One of the conditions in the permit says that "Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into un-cabled areas during the [11-year] term."

Comcast would rather not do that. The company's court complaint says that Vermont is exceeding its authority under the federal Cable Act while also violating state law and Comcast's constitutional rights:

The VPUC claimed that it could impose the blanket 550-mile line extension mandate on Comcast because it is the "largest" cable operator in Vermont and can afford it. These discriminatory conditions contravene federal and state law, amount to undue speaker-based burdens on Comcast's protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution... and deprive Comcast and its subscribers of the benefits of Vermont law enjoyed by other cable operators and their subscribers without a just and rational basis, in violation of the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution.

[...] Comcast previously asked the VPUC to reconsider the conditions, but the agency denied the request. (Vermont Public Radio posted the documents that we've linked to and published a story on the lawsuit yesterday.)

Comcast entered Vermont by purchasing Adelphia in 2005, despite already being aware of state procedures that ascribe great importance "to building out cable networks to unserved areas to meet community needs," the VPUC's denial said.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/comcast-sues-vermont-to-avoid-building-550-miles-of-new-cable-lines/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

One or more hackers have been stealing celebrities' e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information by exploiting a bug on Instagram's servers, the company said Thursday.

Researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab said they recently spotted hackers in an underground forum advertising unnamed celebrities' personal details. In an e-mail, a Kaspersky Lab representative said the researchers privately reported a data-leaking bug to Instagram. The Kaspersky Lab researchers went on to say that exploiting the bug was "quite labor intensive" because each attack had to be done manually rather than using an automated script to bypass mathematical calculations Instagram performs to prevent abuse.

To exploit the bug, according to Kaspersky Lab, attackers used the outdated Instagram mobile app—specifically version 8.5.1, which was released last year—to select the password-reset option. To capture the request, the attackers sent it to a Web proxy rather than the real Instagram servers. The attackers then modified the captured request to substitute the username sent to the Web proxy with the username of targeted celebrities. The Instagram server would then send a JSON-formatted response that included the target's personal information. While the hackers used the outdated app to exploit the bug, the attack worked against all Instagram users, regardless of the app version they used.

A representative from the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service, meanwhile, said the exploited flaw resided in an Instagram programming interface. The representative said Instagram officials know of at least one person who actively exploited the bug.

According to Metro, this bug was also responsible for the hack into Selena Gomez's Instagram account earlier this week.

Instagram did note that no passwords were leaked as a result of this hack.

Sigh. Another day, another hack.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

This week, diesel truck engine company Cummins made an unusual announcement. In addition to several new high-efficiency diesel engines, it also showed off an all-electric truck called the Concept Class 7 Urban Hauler EV. The truck is just a concept at the moment, but it's coming in the nick of time—just as Tesla is about to announce its own semi EV.

The 18,000-pound tractor cab, built by Roush, comes with a 140kWh battery and is capable of hauling a 22-ton trailer. According to Forbes, Cummins hopes to be able to sell its battery to truck and bus manufacturers by 2019. Forbes says the truck can run for 100 miles and be recharged in an hour, although Cummins is allegedly working on improving the battery so that by 2020, that recharge time is reduced to 20 minutes.

In a press release, Cummins also said that its EV would come with a diesel-engine generator that could extend the range of the battery to 300 miles, which would offer 50-percent fuel savings compared to straight diesel trucks.

Cummins' news comes just after Reuters reported that Tesla's electric semis will likely have a range of 200 to 300 miles and come with autonomous functions. The trucking industry is a major polluter, and electrification is seen as an important component in reducing greenhouse gases from that sector, in addition to implementing fuel efficiency measures.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/08/ahead-of-tesla-semis-cummins-shows-off-all-electric-powertrain-concept/

Original Submission