SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Showtime, a premium cable, satellite, and streaming television service owned by CBS, included JavaScript on two of its domains that used users' web browsers to mine the cryptocurrency Monero:

The websites of US telly giant CBS's Showtime contained JavaScript that secretly commandeered viewers' web browsers over the weekend to mine cryptocurrency.

The flagship Showtime.com and its instant-access ShowtimeAnytime.com sibling silently pulled in code that caused browsers to blow spare processor time calculating new Monero coins – a privacy-focused alternative to the ever-popular Bitcoin. The hidden software typically consumed as much as 60 per cent of CPU capacity on computers visiting the sites.

The scripts were written by Code Hive, a legit outfit that provides JavaScript to website owners: webmasters add the code to their pages so that they can earn slivers of cash from each visitor as an alternative to serving adverts to generate revenue. Over time, money mined by the Code-Hive-hosted scripts adds up and is transferred from Coin Hive to the site's administrators. One Monero coin, 1 XMR, is worth about $92 right now.

However, it's extremely unlikely that a large corporation like CBS would smuggle such a piece of mining code onto its dot-coms – especially since it charges subscribers to watch the hit TV shows online – suggesting someone hacked the websites' source code to insert the mining JavaScript and make a quick buck.

The JavaScript, which appeared on the sites at the start of the weekend and vanished by Monday, sits between HTML comment tags that appear to be an insert from web analytics biz New Relic. Again, it is unlikely that an analytics company would deliberately stash coin-mining scripts onto its customers' pages, so the code must have come from another source – or was injected by miscreants who had compromised Showtime's systems.

Also at PCMag.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Amazon Echo Show is an Alexa-powered voice assistant product that includes a touchscreen and a camera. Google has pulled support for YouTube on the device:

Google's popular video-sharing site appears to have disappeared from Amazon's device due to a dispute over how YouTube should work on the Echo Show. According to Amazon, Google pulled support for YouTube on the Echo Show on Tuesday afternoon:

Google made a change today at around 3 pm. YouTube used to be available to our shared customers on Echo Show. As of this afternoon, Google has chosen to no longer make YouTube available on Echo Show, without explanation and without notification to customers. There is no technical reason for that decision, which is disappointing and hurts both of our customers.

But Google accused Amazon of breaking its rules on the way YouTube is presented, adding that talks between the two companies haven't yielded a solution.

We've been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, working towards an agreement that provides great experiences for customers on both platforms. Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience. We hope to be able to reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon.

The move is likely related to YouTube functionality desktop users are used [to] that is lacking from the Echo Show, including being able to share, recommend and comment on videos.

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A discovery by Princeton University scientists, reported Aug. 2 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, demonstrates that humans don't have the monopoly on building the world's tiniest machines. The Princeton researchers found a lasso-shaped bacterial molecule capable of altering its configuration when exposed to heat, a shape-changing ability akin to that used to operate certain synthetic molecular machines. The lasso is a type of molecular chain known as a peptide.

"The discovery of this lasso peptide, which we named benenodin-1, demonstrates that we might look to biology as well as engineering for source material in developing molecular devices," said A. James Link, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton who was the senior author on the paper.

While the applications are still mostly speculative, the potential uses for molecular machines are enormous, spanning everything from microrobots that deliver drugs in the human body to new types of materials that adapt in real time to environmental changes such as fluctuations in heat, light or moisture.

A naturally occurring switching mechanism has tantalizing possibilities for organic technology.

Chuhan Zong et al. Lasso Peptide Benenodin-1 Is a Thermally Actuated [1]Rotaxane Switch, Journal of the American Chemical Society (2017). DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b04830

Original Submission

takyon writes:

OSIRIS-REx has captured an image of Earth as it flew by our planet for a gravity assist:

"The dark vertical streaks at the top of the image are caused by short exposure times (less than three milliseconds)," NASA officials wrote in an image description Tuesday (Sept. 26). "Short exposure times are required for imaging an object as bright as Earth, but are not anticipated for an object as dark as the asteroid Bennu, which the camera was designed to image."

The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer — launched on Sept. 8, 2016. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will arrive at the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) Bennu late next year.

OSIRIS-REx will study the rock from orbit for more than 18 months and then head in to snag a sample of dirt and gravel from Bennu's surface in July 2020. This material will parachute to Earth's surface inside a special return capsule in September 2023.

101955 Bennu.

Previously: OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission - Launch Successful

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.fau.eu/2017/09/25/news/research/the-fastest-light-driven-current-source/

Controlling electronic current is essential to modern electronics, as data and signals are transferred by streams of electrons which are controlled at high speed. Demands on transmission speeds are also increasing as technology develops. Scientists from the Chair of Laser Physics and the Chair of Applied Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have succeeded in switching on a current with a desired direction in graphene using a single laser pulse within a femtosecond ­­ – a femtosecond corresponds to the millionth part of a billionth of a second. This is more than a thousand times faster compared to the most efficient transistors today.

[...] For their experiments, the scientists fired extremely short laser pulses with specially engineered waveforms onto graphene. When these light waves hit the graphene, the electrons inside were hurled in one direction, like a whiplash. 'Under intense optical fields, a current was generated within a fraction of an optical cycle – a half femtosecond. It was surprising that despite these enormous forces, quantum mechanics still plays a key role,' explains Dr. Takuya Higuchi from the Chair of Laser Physics, the first author of the publication.

Light-field-driven currents in graphene (DOI: 10.1038/nature23900) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Atari will crowdfund an "Ataribox" console this fall, but it can do much more than play old Atari games:

Atari released more details about its Ataribox game console today, disclosing for the first time that the machine will run Linux on an Advanced Micro Devices processor and cost $250 to $300.

In an exclusive interview last week with GamesBeat, Ataribox creator and general manager Feargal Mac (short for Mac Conuladh) said Atari will begin a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo this fall and launch the Ataribox in the spring of 2018. The Ataribox will launch with a large back catalog of the publisher's classic games. The idea is to create a box that makes people feel nostalgic about the past, but it's also capable of running the independent games they want to play today, like Minecraft or Terraria.

The new box will have an AMD custom processor with Radeon graphics. It will run the Linux operating system, with a user interface it's customizing for TVs. Mac said that the machine will run PC games, but it will also be capable of doing streaming, running apps, browsing the web, and playing music. As far as games go, the machine will run the kind of games that a mid-range PC can do today, but it won't run Triple-A games that require high-end PC performance.

[...] "People are used to the flexibility of a PC, but most connected TV devices have closed systems and content stores," he said. "We wanted to create a killer TV product where people can game, stream and browse with as much freedom as possible, including accessing pre-owned games from other content providers."

So it's a PC that comes preloaded with Pong, Asteroids, and presumably E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Who needs this?

Also at PCWorld, BGR, Gizmodo, and Techpowerup.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

It seems whoever owns the Atari name [takyon: Atari, SA] is going to cash in with a new Linux and AMD based "console". I guess Hollywood is not the only one that can drag up old properties and wring the blood from them. Might make a decent Steambox, I suppose. Also, wouldn't be complete without crowdfunding!

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

Phoenix666 writes:

The Brazilian government backed off a controversial proposal to authorize private companies to mine a sprawling Amazon reserve Monday after blistering domestic and international criticism.

President Michel Temer's office will issue a new decree Tuesday that "restores the conditions of the area, according to the document that instituted the reserve in 1984," the Ministry of Mines and Energy said in a statement.

Last week, environmental activist group Greenpeace said at least 14 illegal mines and eight clandestine landing strips were already being used by miners in the Denmark-sized reserve known as Renca in the eastern Amazon.

Greenpeace said this showed the risks faced by Renca even without Temer's earlier proposal for ending a ban on large-scale foreign mining in the mineral-rich region.

Temer's decree signed on August 25 on opening up Renca—rich in gold, manganese, iron and copper—was suspended days later after an international outcry.

Mining condoned by the government will not happen, but illegal mining will continue?

Original Submission

frojack writes:

As reported by Techtimes, When it comes to unlocking your Android phone, Patterns are out and Pins are back in.

The full study: Towards Baselines for Shoulder Surfing on Mobile Authentication (PDF) (open, DOI: 10.1145/3134600.3134609) (DX) was conducted by the Naval Academy and University of Maryland.

Security researchers at the U.S. Naval Academy, together with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, published a study showing how a casual onlooker can visually memorize a person's pattern then recreate it with ease. In the tests, they found that two out of three people were able to recreate six-point unlock patterns purely by looking at them from 5 or 6 feet away.

[...] Those same conditions were then replicated with a more traditional six-digit PIN code, which proved far more difficult, with only one out of 10 observers able to recreate the PIN code after peeking.

With multiple chances to view your pattern or pin, the ability of an observer to unlock your phone grows:

In the online tests, 64 percent were able to recreate the Android-style pattern after merely one viewing, but that shot up to 80 percent after a second viewing. PIN codes, meanwhile, rendered much lower vulnerability percentages: only 11 percent were able to identify a six-digit PIN after viewing it once, and 27 percent after viewing it twice.

Apple's new FaceID, previously covered Here on SN and explained more fully on Techcrunch's extensive article has its own problems and annoyances, as well as the fear of being grabbed by police, cuffed, and your phone being held in front of your face before you have time to hit 5 button presses it takes to shut off FaceID. The phone is too new for any independent tests to have been run using pictures or movies of your face.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 submitted:

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not "conservatism" in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called "the Gods of the Market Place." We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.

As I think about it, I'm not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn't a "teaching" with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It's what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

Bret Stephens's speech warrants a full read. It makes valuable points that we all need to hear, even on SN.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

There is growing interest in the potential for a technology known as brain fingerprinting to be used in the fight against crime and terrorism, but it's far from reliable.

Its use without consent violates human rights. And importantly, the technology (as it currently exists) can be tricked.

Brain fingerprinting seeks to detect deception by essentially reading thoughts. It works by using electroencephelography (EEG) to read the electrical activity of the brain, with the aim of trying to identify a phenomenon known as the P300 response [DOI: 10.1097/00004691-199210000-00002] [DX].

The P300 response is a noticeable spike in the brain's electrical activity, which usually occurs within one-third of a second of being shown a familiar stimulus. The idea is that our subconscious brain has an uncontrollable and measurable response to familiar stimuli that the machine can register.

Imagine, for example, that a particular knife was used in a murder, and police show an image of it to their lead suspect who denies the crime. If the suspect registers a P300 response and thus a positive recognition of the knife, this would seem to suggest he's lying. Alternatively, if the suspect doesn't register a positive recognition, maybe police have the wrong guy.

Could you escape culpability for your crimes by taking a roofie afterward?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Apple is switching the default provider of its web searches from Siri, Search inside iOS (formerly called Spotlight) and Spotlight on the Mac. So, for instance, if Siri falls back to a web search on iOS when you ask it a question, you're now going to get Google results instead of Bing. Updated below with a statement from Microsoft.

Consistency is Apple's main motivation given for switching the results from Microsoft's Bing to Google in these cases. Safari on Mac and iOS already currently use Google search as the default provider, thanks to a deal worth billions to Apple (and Google) over the last decade. This change will now mirror those results when Siri, the iOS Search bar or Spotlight is used.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

These are the latest "smart glasses" and they promise to turn your nose into a remote control

Using electrooculography sensors, Itchy Nose lets you reject a phone call, skip a song, or pause video through simple nosey tasks such as rubbing, flicking or pushing your [nose].

By aiming these sensors from the glasses at the nose, the glasses measure the "changing electric potential" as the wearer engages the several gestures.

The whole point is to make wearing tech a less-invasive interaction for those who are in social situations.

I can just imagine the hilarity that will ensue when I come down with a runny nose.

Also at The Verge.

Itchy nose: discreet gesture interaction using EOG sensors in smart eyewear (open, DOI: 10.1145/3123021.3123060) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41399497

Dyson, the engineering company best known for its vacuum cleaners and fans, plans to spend £2bn developing a "radical" electric car. The battery-powered vehicle is due to be launched in 2020. Dyson says 400 staff have been working on the secret project for the past two years at its headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.

However, the car does not yet exist, with no prototype built, and a factory site is yet to be chosen. Sir James declined to give further details of the project. "Competition for new technology in the automotive industry is fierce and we must do everything we can to keep the specifics of our vehicle confidential," he told staff in an email. Important points that are undecided or secret include the firm's expected annual production total, the cost of the car, or its range or top speed.

Sir James said about £1bn would be spent on developing the car, with another £1bn on making the battery.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Lucara Diamond Corp. has sold the 1,109-carat "Lesedi La Rona" diamond for $53 million, roughly $47,790 a carat:

The Lesedi La Rona, or "our light" in the Tswana language spoken in Botswana, went unsold at a Sotheby's auction in London last year. It had been expected to sell for about $86 million.

The Vancouver-based company, known for producing some of the world's biggest and best stones, unearthed the diamond at its Karowe mine in Botswana. In May 2016, Lucara sold the smaller 813-carat The Constellation diamond for a record $63 million, or about $77,500 a carat, to Dubai-based rough-diamond trading company Nemesis International DMCC.

The Lesedi La Rona is the third largest rough diamond ever found.

Previous coverage:
Three Huge Diamonds Found in Botswana
Huge Diamond to be Sold at Auction.

Original Submission

Both Phoenix666 and takyon wrote:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has revealed he uses an Android-powered smartphone, rather than a Windows one.

"Recently, I actually did switch to an Android phone," he said, speaking on Fox News on Sunday.

Microsoft's own Windows-powered phones have failed to make a significant impact on the smartphone market, which is dominated by devices running Google's Android operating system.

However, Mr Gates said he had installed lots of Microsoft apps on his phone.

When asked whether he also had an iPhone, perhaps as a secondary device, he replied: "No, no iPhone."

He did not reveal which particular smartphone he currently uses.

Beware the chef who won't eat his own cooking.

Also at VentureBeat and CNET

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2