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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The BBC is reporting that North Korea has fired another missile:

North Korea has fired a missile eastwards from its capital, Pyongyang, towards Japan, media reports say.

Japan said that the missile likely passed over its territory and has warned residents to take shelter, local media report.

South Korea and the US are analysing the details of the launch, the South's military said.

Al Jazeera reports:

The projectile was launched at 6:57am (21:57GMT Thursday) and flew over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido before falling into the Pacific Ocean - 2,000km east of Cape Erimo, said Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga.

"Japan protests the latest launch in the strongest terms and will take appropriate and timely action at the United Nations and elsewhere, staying in close contact with the United States and South Korea," Suga told reporters.

South Korea's defence ministry said the missile travelled about 3,700km and reached a maximum altitude of 770km - both higher and further than previous tests.

Just more saber rattling? Another step in escalation? What's next?

Original Submission

We had two Soylentils submit stories concerning the end of "non-conformist" dorms at MIT.

At MIT, Senior House is No More

Runaway1956 writes:

This was Senior House, the oldest dormitory on campus, built in 1916 by the architect William Welles Bosworth. For 101 years it welcomed freshman and returning students. Since the ’60s it was a proudly anarchic community of creative misfits and self-described outcasts—the special kind of brilliant oddballs who couldn’t or didn’t want to fit in with the mainstream eggheads at MIT. Some did drugs and dropped out. Some did drugs and graduated. Others were proudly “straight edge,” eschewing drugs and regarding their bodies and minds as pristine temples. Many went on to create startups, join huge tech firms, and change the technological world as we know it.

Senior House was the gravitational center of alternative culture at MIT, characterized by extremes. For example, since 1963 its courtyard was the site for an annual Dionysian festival that began with a whole steer being hauled atop a pit and roasted on an open flame. The bacchanal ended three days later when there was no more mud left to wrestle in or drinks to gulp. By the time the third dawn came, friendships had been forged, tire swings had been swung, meat had been devoured, some drugs had probably been snorted or smoked, jobs had been offered, and lives had been changed.

takyon writes:

President Trump has blocked Canyon Bridge Capital Partners LLC from acquiring Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, using the authority granted by the Exon–Florio Amendment. Lattice Semiconductor makes programmable logic devices including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs):

President Trump on Wednesday blocked a China-backed investor from buying an American semiconductor maker over national security concerns, a rare move that could signal more aggressive scrutiny of China's deal-making ambitions. The deal for Lattice Semiconductor has provided a test of the president's economic and diplomatic relationship with China.

[...] The White House said on Wednesday that it prevented the acquisition of Lattice Semiconductor, in part because the United States government relies on the company's products. The integrity of the semiconductor industry, it said, was vital.

The White House also raised concerns over the buyer's close ties to Beijing. The investment group included China Venture Capital Fund Corporation, which is owned by state-backed entities, the White House said.

The decision could foretell trouble for other Chinese deals under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency group that examines takeovers of American companies by foreign buyers and makes recommendations to the president. The group, which operates largely in secrecy, is also looking at the proposed purchase of MoneyGram International by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group.

Also at Bloomberg and BBC.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/news/a28198/nasa-satellites-predict-malaria-outbreaks/

Malaria is one of the world's most deadly diseases, made even more deadly by the fact that it tends to affect mostly remote communities. This makes it difficult to track and control malaria outbreaks when they happen, resulting in more severe outbreaks and more victims. To solve this problem, a group of researchers have turned to an unlikely source: NASA satellites.

[...] NASA satellites can be used to track weather patterns, temperatures, and water levels in order to find the ponds and puddles where those mosquitoes breed. The researchers used NASA weather satellites, combined with a computer model called the Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS), in order to track and predict temperatures, rainfall levels, soil moisture content, and vegetation. This information can tell the researchers where most of the mosquitoes are going to be.

"It's an exercise in indirect reasoning," says investigator Ben Zaitchik. "These models let us predict where the soil moisture is going to be in a condition that will allow for breeding sites to form."

But mosquitoes are only half the equation. The researchers also need to know where the people are going to be, and for this they rely on a combination of census data and seasonal migration studies, informed by the same NASA data used to track mosquitoes.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The hunt for habitable (and already inhabited) worlds has largely focused on a "Goldilocks zone" around a star, where it's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist. But astrobiologists have begun to broaden their search – thanks to discoveries by NASA's Cassini orbiter.

Saturn sits too far from the sun for its rays to melt ice, and yet Cassini discovered that one of the planet's moons, Enceladus, has a vast ocean sloshing beneath its icy crust. Instead of sunlight, tidal forces keep Enceladus's ocean warm. The gravity of Saturn pulls at Enceladus's core, driving thermal processes that create a new Goldilocks zone inside the moon itself.

"It's definitely been a paradigm shift in where you might find life," says Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker.

Still, it takes a lot more than water to make a place habitable. But here, too, Enceladus delivers. Icy geysers fueled by Enceladus's ocean shoot out from cracks in the moon's surface, allowing the Cassini spacecraft to sample them directly during flybys. What it found is that Enceladus has almost everything required for life as we know it: a source of energy, a source of carbon, and salts and minerals.

Thank goodness for Cassini, after that whole thing about being banned from Europa.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is now running a campaign to require that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The reason being that if it is public money, the code should be public as well. General benefits include overall tax savings, increased collaboration, public service, and fostering innovation. Money is currently being wasted on code that cannot be modified or even studied, let alone redistributed. Code paid for by the people should be available to the people!

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

The kitchen assistant, known as 'Flippy', was designed by a startup called Miso Robotics which specializes in "technology that assists and empowers chefs to make food consistently and perfectly, at prices everyone can afford."

[...] Flippy uses feedback-loops that reinforce its good behavior so it gets better with each flip of the burger. Unlike an assembly line robot that needs to have everything positioned in an exact ordered pattern, Flippy's machine learning algorithms allow it to pick uncooked burgers from a stack or flip those already on the grill. Hardware like cameras helps Flippy see and navigate its surroundings while sensors inform the robot when a burger is ready or still raw. Meanwhile, an integrated system that sends orders from the counter back to the kitchen informs Flippy just how many raw burgers it should be prepping.

Flippy in action!

Source: http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/burger-robot-flipping-meat-0432432/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Speaking at the Noisebridge hackerspace Tuesday evening, Chelsea Manning implored a crowd of makers, nerds, and developers to be ethical coders.

"As a coder, I know that you can build a system and it works, but you're thinking about the immediate result, you're not thinking about that this particular code could be misused, or it could be used in a different manner," she said, as part of a conversation with Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman.

Altman began the conversation by asking about artificial intelligence and underscoring some of the risks in that field.

"We're now using huge datasets with all kinds of personal data, that we don't even know what information we're putting out there and what it's getting collected for," Manning said. "Our AI systems are getting better and better and better, and we don't know what the social consequences of that are. The code that we write, the bias that you see in some of the systems that you see, we don't know if we're causing feedback loops with those kinds of bias."

[...] "The tools that you make for marketing can also be used to kill people," Manning continued. "We have an obligation to think of the tools that we're making and how we're using them and not just churn out code for whatever reason. You want to think about how your end-user could misuse your code."

Guns don't kill people, code kills people.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to a leaked law proposal, which has been obtained by the Swedish Internet provider Bahnhof, the Swedish government is doubling down on the court-banned and hated data retention surveillance. As a Western first, they're also planning to introduce VPN surveillance, taking a page out of Russia's and China's oppression playbooks, and are mandating that the Internet be built not to optimize speed and throughput, but to optimize governmental surveillance.

takyon: A Privacy International report has found that 21 EU member states (including Sweden) have data retention legislation that may not comply with Court of Justice of the European Union judgments. Also at TechCrunch.

Original Submission

MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

The Washington Post is reporting U.S. moves to ban Kaspersky software in federal agencies amid concerns of Russian espionage:

Acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke ordered that Kaspersky Lab software be barred from federal civilian government networks, giving agencies a timeline to get rid of it, according to several officials familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. Duke ordered the scrub on the grounds that the company has connections to the Russian government and its software poses a security risk.

[...] "The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security."

[...] The directive comes months after the federal General Services Administration, the agency in charge of government purchasing, removed Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors. In doing so, the GSA suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Kremlin backdoor access to the systems the company protects.

Someone that is in a position to know all about it tells me that Kaspersky doesn't detect malware created by the Russian Business Network. My fear is that if I named that someone, the RBN will give that someone a bad hair day.

[Ed. addition follows]

The full text of the DHS notice is available at https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/09/13/dhs-statement-issuance-binding-operational-directive-17-01.

Previously:
FBI Reportedly Advising Companies to Ditch Kaspersky Apps.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

On March 13th, 1989 a surge of energy from the sun, from a "coronal mass ejection", had a startling impact on Canada. Within 92 seconds, the resulting geomagnetic storm took down Quebec's electricity grid for nine hours. It could have been worse. On July 23rd 2012 particles from a much larger solar ejection blew across the orbital path of Earth, missing it by days. Had it hit America, the resulting geomagnetic storm would have destroyed perhaps a quarter of high-voltage transformers, according to Storm Analysis Consultants in Duluth, Minnesota. Future geomagnetic storms are inevitable.

And that is not the only threat to the grid. A transformer-wrecking electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would be produced by a nuclear bomb, designed to maximise its yield of gamma rays, if detonated high up, be it tethered to a big cluster of weather balloons or carried on a satellite or missile.

[...] After the surge, telecom switches and internet routers are dead. Air-traffic control is down. Within a day, some shoppers in supermarkets turn to looting (many, unable to use credit and debit cards, cannot pay even if they wanted to). After two days, market shelves are bare. On the third day, backup diesel generators begin to sputter out. Though fuel cannot be pumped, siphoning from vehicles, authorised by martial law, keeps most prisons, police stations and hospitals running for another week.

takyon writes:

Some news outlets reported that Western Digital was close to acquiring Toshiba's memory business, but that had not been finalized as of Tuesday:

Toshiba Corp now favors a group led by Bain Capital LP and SK Hynix Inc to buy its prized semiconductor business, as it failed to bridge key gaps with its business partner and rival bidder Western Digital Corp, two people briefed on the matter said on Tuesday.

The dramatic twist in the sale process, beset by legal wrangling and revised bids, comes just a day before Toshiba's latest deadline. The Japanese conglomerate, which needs to sell the chip business to plug a huge hole in its finances, had been trying to seal a deal by Wednesday with the Western Digital group but now hopes to reach agreement with the Bain group by next week, said the sources, who declined to be identified as the talks were private.

A Toshiba spokesman said the firm could not comment on details of the talks. The parties have already missed two deadlines by Toshiba's banks, which want a deal to pump $18 billion or more into the company to pull it out of negative shareholder equity and prevent it from being delisted. Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, an external Toshiba director, told reporters earlier on Tuesday that although the deadline is important, it is also important that negotiations head in a good direction.

Apple, a buyer of Toshiba's NAND chips, reportedly threatened Western Digital with a boycott of its products if it took complete control of Toshiba's memory business. But it did offer $460 million in acquisition financing for a group including WD as long as WD remained a minority investor.

Update: Toshiba says it favors a bid from a group led by Bain Capital, but is still open to better offers.

Toshiba to focus on chip talks with Bain, but doesn't rule out other suitors

Start the Bidding War, Toshiba

Previously: Broadcom and Japanese Government Considering Bid for Toshiba's Semiconductor Unit
Samsung Could Boost NAND Production Capacity, WD Intervenes in Toshiba Memory Sale
Toshiba Sues Western Digital as it Seeks to Sell its Memory Business to a Third Party

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Evidence of ground ice has been found on Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt:

Research at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has revealed new evidence for the occurrence of ground ice on the protoplanet Vesta.

[...] The team used a special technique called "bistatic radar" on the Dawn spacecraft to explore the surface texture of Vesta at the scale of a few inches. On some orbits, when the spacecraft was about to travel behind Vesta from Earth's perspective, its radio communications waves bounced off Vesta's surface, and mission personnel on the ground at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) received the signals back on Earth.

Vesta was thought to be a dry body:

Now, thanks to the latest round of results from NASA's Dawn mission, we have learned Asimov was right about Vesta all along. As researchers at the University of Southern California write in Tuesday's Nature Communications [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00434-6] [DX], the probe discovered unusually large smooth regions on the otherwise craggy asteroids. The researchers linked these with higher hydrogen concentrations, which in turn strongly suggest the presence of ground ice on Vesta.

"It was believed to be a dry body," NASA researcher Essam Heggy, Ph.D. tells Inverse, saying previous evidence for water on Vesta had, at best, been ambiguous. Dawn's findings erase those ambiguities. It's just the latest of many findings in recent years showing that water and ice are damn near everywhere in the solar system, adding Vesta to a list that already includes Mars, the moons Europa and Enceladus, and its fellow asteroid Ceres. "The more we search, the more we find ice and water in the solar system," says Heggy, "and the more we realize water is not unique to our planet."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Apple Watch Series 3 looks, acts, and feels almost exactly the same as the Series 2 with a key difference—LTE wireless connectivity, whether your iPhone is nearby or not. We tested the Series 3 on-site at Apple's unveiling event, including trying just a few of the new features.
...
The Series 3 watch still uses your iPhone's connection when the phone is nearby, but as soon as you move away from the phone, the Series 3 LTE seamlessly kicks in. We weren't able to test this at the event; all the Watches on display were flying solo, sans phones.

You can make calls directly from the Watch by tapping a button on the top-left corner of the watch face. From there, you can browse contacts to reach out to through a few interfaces: favorites, recents, contacts, and the keypad. So it's just like using your phone—or really, like the previous Apple Watch, for the most part. The difference is that you can do it anywhere.

The Watch intelligently picks up your voice, and you do not have to hold it up to your mouth—in ideal conditions, anyway.

Dick Tracy fans rejoice.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Uber's attempt to move Waymo's trade secrets lawsuit out of an appeals court and to an arbitrator has not succeeded:

Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo can proceed with a planned October trial over claims Uber Technologies Inc. stole trade secrets for self-driving vehicles after a U.S. appeals court declined to punt the case to an arbitrator and rejected an effort to keep Waymo from seeing critical evidence.

Uber had argued the dispute should be considered in secret before an arbitrator because the heart of Waymo's allegations are related to the actions of engineer Anthony Levandowski, a former employee of both companies. Uber's appeal was rejected Wednesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, as was Levandowski's request that Waymo not be allowed to see a report by a cyberforensics firm that looked into Uber's purchase of his company, Otto LLC.

Levandowski's employment contract with Waymo included a broad provision that any disputes would go before an arbitrator. Waymo never sued Levandowski; instead the question of whether he violated that contract is before an arbitrator, with a hearing scheduled for April. A three-judge appeals court panel said that requirement didn't extend to Uber. Waymo pledged not to rely on the Levandowski employment contract in its case, though Uber argued that wasn't a realistic promise.

Also at Reuters.

Previously: Waymo Drops Three of Four Patent Claims Against Uber
Uber's Former CEO Travis and Google Co-Founder Both Face Deposition in Trade Secrets Case
Text Messages Between Uber's Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski Released

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

It is the height of a highly destructive hurricane season in the United States. The devastation of Harvey in Texas and Louisiana caused nearly 300,000 customers to lose electricity service, and Hurricane Irma has cut service to millions of people. Soon, winter storms will bring wind and snow to much of the country.

Anxious people everywhere worry about the impact these storms might have on their safety, comfort and convenience. Will they disrupt my commute to work? My children's ride to school? My electricity service?

When it comes to electricity, people turn their attention to the power lines overhead and wonder if their electricity service might be more secure if those lines were buried underground. But having studied this question for utilities and regulators, I can say the answer is not that straightforward. Burying power lines, also called undergrounding, is expensive, requires the involvement of many stakeholders and might not solve the problem at all.

Would burying power lines render them more weather-proof?

Read the full article on The Conversation.

Original Submission