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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

"We have an ongoing dialogue with a lot of tech companies in a variety of different areas," he [Rod Rosenstein] told Politico Pro. "There's some areas where they are cooperative with us. But on this particular issue of encryption, the tech companies are moving in the opposite direction. They're moving in favor of more and more warrant-proof encryption."

[...] In the interview, Rosenstein also said he "favors strong encryption."

"I favor strong encryption, because the stronger the encryption, the more secure data is against criminals who are trying to commit fraud," he explained. "And I'm in favor of that, because that means less business for us prosecuting cases of people who have stolen data and hacked into computer networks and done all sorts of damage. So I'm in favor of strong encryption."

[...] He later added that the claim that the "absolutist position" that strong encryption should be by definition, unbreakable, is "unreasonable."

[...] Rosenstein closed his interview by noting that he understands re-engineering encryption to accommodate government may make it weaker.

"And I think that's a legitimate issue that we can debate—how much risk are we willing to take in return for the reward?" he said.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/doj-strong-encryption-that-we-dont-have-access-to-is-unreasonable/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

A crippling flaw affecting millions—and possibly hundreds of millions—of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes security settings is considerably easier to exploit than originally reported, cryptographers declared over the weekend. The assessment came as Estonia abruptly suspended 760,000 national ID cards used for voting, filing taxes, and encrypting sensitive documents.

The critical weakness allows attackers to calculate the private portion of any vulnerable key using nothing more than the corresponding public portion. Hackers can then use the private key to impersonate key owners, decrypt sensitive data, sneak malicious code into digitally signed software, and bypass protections that prevent accessing or tampering with stolen PCs.

[...] One of the scenarios Bernstein and Lange presented in Sunday's post is that serious attackers can further reduce costs by buying dedicated computer gear, possibly equipped with GPU, field programmable gate array, and application-specific integrated circuit chips, which are often better suited for the types of mathematical operations used in factorization attacks. The estimates provided by the original researchers were based on the cost of renting equipment, which isn't as cost-effective when factorizing large numbers of keys. They also noted that compromising just 10 percent of cards used in country-wide voting might be enough to tip an election.

Source: Flaw crippling millions of crypto keys is worse than first disclosed

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Phoenix666 writes:

For nearly 30 years, London-based reptile enthusiast and musician Steve Ludwin has been injecting snake venom—a practice that has almost killed him.

It may now help save thousands of lives, as researchers search for a new antidote based on his body's response to the toxic fluids.

"It sounds very crazy what I am doing but it turns out that it potentially has lots of health benefits," Ludwin, the tattooed 51-year-old told AFP in the living room of his home in the British capital.

Ludwin demonstrated his decades-old habit by firmly holding the head of a green Pope's tree viper—Trimeresurus popeiorum—and extracting a few drops of its venom.

Minutes later, he has injected the fluid into his arm using a syringe.

The scientists hope to produce cheaper anti-venom from the antibodies in his blood.

[Please note that this is very dangerous and Mr. Ludwin has almost died a number of times. Don't try this at home! - Ed]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft is integrating LinkedIn with Word:

Writing and updating your résumé is a task that few of us enjoy. Microsoft is hoping to make it a little less painful with a new feature coming to Word called Resume Assistant.

Resume Assistant will detect that you're writing a résumé and offer insights and suggestions culled from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a vast repository of both résumés and job openings and lets you see how other people describe their skillsets and which skills employers are looking for.

The feature will also show job openings that are suitable for your résumé directly within Word, putting résumé writers directly in contact with recruiters.

The feature is now available to a select few Office 365 subscribers:

Resume Assistant is available today to Office 365 subscribers as part of the Insiders program and those subscribers must have the latest version of Word on Windows. It will be generally available to Office 365/Microsoft 365 subscribers "in the coming months." Resume Assistant will be available in all Office 365 commercial and consumer plans, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed.

Error: No jobs were found to be suitable based on your résumé. You are overqualified and too old.

How to Land a Dream Job With Microsoft Resume Assistant

Step 1: Lie.

Related: Microsoft to Buy LinkedIn for $26.2 Billion in Cash
LinkedIn Introduces "Open Candidates" Feature to Help Employees Look for a Better Job
LinkedIn Apologizes for Attempted Privacy Breach
LinkedIn Mulls Producing Videos; May Buy Rights From Sports Leagues

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takyon writes:

YouTube to crack down on inappropriate content masked as kids' cartoons

Recent news stories and blog posts highlighted the underbelly of YouTube Kids, Google's children-friendly version of the wide world of YouTube. While all content on YouTube Kids is meant to be suitable for children under the age of 13, some inappropriate videos using animations, cartoons, and child-focused keywords manage to get past YouTube's algorithms and in front of kids' eyes. Now, YouTube will implement a new policy in an attempt to make the whole of YouTube safer: it will age-restrict inappropriate videos masquerading as children's content in the main YouTube app.

[...] Also, all age-restricted content is not eligible for advertising, which will undoubtedly hit the wallets of the creators making these videos. While it's hard to understand why anyone would make a video about Peppa Pig drinking bleach or a bunch of superheroes and villains participating in a cartoonish yet violent "nursery rhyme," it's been a decent way to make money on YouTube. Some of these videos have amassed hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of views, gleaning ad dollars and channel popularity.

Check the related videos to see some bizarre clickbait. Some are even live action skits performed by adults.

Are we doing enough to traumatize our kids?

Also at The Verge and Medium.

Related: YouTube's "Ad-Friendly" Content Policy may Push one of its Biggest Stars off the Site
Google Fails to Stop Major Brands From Pulling Ads From YouTube

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Phoenix666 writes:

They'll pay you upfront, but will you pay for the rest of your life?

While 54% of Americans lived in rural places in 1910, that number fell to 19 percent by 2010, Zillow reported. To revive their communities, these places are hoping that everything from cash grants to paying off student loans and giving away free land will help draw a younger generation to them.

But it's not just small towns that hope to draw more people to them with these programs. Some cities like Baltimore and even entire states like Alaska will pay you to be their newest resident.

Tribune, Kansas will pay off $15,000 of your student loans. Marne, Iowa will give you free land if you build a house that's at least 1,200 ft² on it. Baltimore, Maryland will give you a $5,000, 5yr forgivable loan and $10,000 down payment toward rehabilitating abandoned homes.

Tempted?

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takyon writes:

Intel isn't just poaching a prominent AMD employee. Intel is planning a return to the discrete GPU market:

On Monday, Intel announced that it had penned a deal with AMD to have the latter provide a discrete GPU to be integrated onto a future Intel SoC. On Tuesday, AMD announced that their chief GPU architect, Raja Koduri, was leaving the company. Now today the saga continues, as Intel is announcing that they have hired Raja Koduri to serve as their own GPU chief architect. And Raja's task will not be a small one; with his hire, Intel will be developing their own high-end discrete GPUs.

[...] [In] perhaps the only news that can outshine the fact that Raja Koduri is joining Intel, is what he will be doing for Intel. As part of today's revelation, Intel has announced that they are instituting a new top-to-bottom GPU strategy. At the bottom, the company wants to extend their existing iGPU market into new classes of edge devices, and while Intel doesn't go into much more detail than this, the fact that they use the term "edge" strongly implies that we're talking about IoT-class devices, where edge goes hand-in-hand with neural network inference. This is a field Intel already plays in to some extent with their Atom processors on the GPU side, and their Movidius neural compute engines on the dedicated silicon sign.

However in what's likely the most exciting part of this news for PC enthusiasts and the tech industry as a whole, is that in aiming at the top of the market, Intel will once again be going back into developing discrete GPUs. The company has tried this route twice before; once in the early days with the i740 in the late 90s, and again with the aborted Larrabee project in the late 2000s. However even though these efforts never panned out quite like Intel has hoped, the company has continued to develop their GPU architecture and GPU-like devices, the latter embodying the massive parallel compute focused Xeon Phi family.

Yet while Intel has GPU-like products for certain markets, the company doesn't have a proper GPU solution once you get beyond their existing GT4-class iGPUs, which are, roughly speaking, on par with $150 or so discrete GPUs. Which is to say that Intel doesn't have access to the midrange market or above with their iGPUs. With the hiring of Raja and Intel's new direction, the company is going to be expanding into full discrete GPUs for what the company calls "a broad range of computing segments."

Phoenix666 writes:

The genes don't lie:

A large international team of researchers has found that Neolithic hunter-gatherers living in several parts of Europe interbred with farmers from the Near East. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes comparing DNA from several early groups in Europe and evidence of interbreeding.

The Neolithic period, often described as the New Stone Age, was a period of human history from approximately 15,000 BCE to 3,000 BCE. It was a time defined by the development of settlements and the refinement of tools and the arts. Prior research has shown that people living in what is now Germany, Hungary and Spain were mostly hunter-gatherers during the early Neolithic period, but were "replaced" by farmers moving in from the Near East (Anatolia). In this new effort, the researchers suggest that interbreeding between the two groups led to the decline of the hunter-gatherers. The end result is that most modern Europeans are descended from the Near East immigrant farmers, but have remnants of hunter-gatherer DNA.

To learn more about the early history of humans in Europe, the researchers obtained and analyzed 180 DNA samples of people from early Hungary, Germany and Spain dating from between 6,000 and 2,200 BCE.

Ironic that Europeans resist admitting Turkey to the EU when they're descended from people from Asia Minor.

Mark Lipson et al. Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature24476

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Phoenix666 writes:

Brazil has lagged far behind in the shift to solar power, but the continent's biggest facility now being built in the south-east aims to give the country its place in the sun.

The plant in Pirapora, in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais, has 1.2 million solar panels, covering the equivalent of more than 1,200 soccer fields.

It first began producing power in September, with the second of three phases in the project going online this Thursday.

The whole thing, operated by French energy giant EDF Energies Nouvelles, should be operational before the second quarter of 2018, boasting a capacity of 400 megawatts. That's enough to meet the annual demand of 420,000 households.

Brazil is already achieved energy independence, so projects like this will help cement that.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Voice-enabled smart speakers to reach 55% of U.S. households by 2022, says report

Adoption of voice-powered smart speakers is taking off. According to a new report from Juniper Research out this morning, smart devices like the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Sonos One will be installed in a majority – that is, 55 percent – of U.S. households by the year 2022. By that time, over 70 million households will have at least one of these smart speakers in their home, and the total number of installed devices will top 175 million.

The new forecast follows other reports pointing to growth in the voice-enabled speaker market, including one from eMarketer this spring which said that 35.6 million U.S. consumers would use a voice-activated device at least once per month in 2017, representing 128.9 percent growth over last year.

Despite the increased adoption of smart speakers with voice control capabilities, the new report points out that the majority of voice assistant usage won't be through these in-home devices. Instead, the most usage will occur on smartphones, with over 5 billion assistants installed on smartphones worldwide by 2022.

Amazon teaches Alexa Japanese for Echo's next destination

Amazon's Echo, Plus and Dot speakers will finally be available in Japan starting next week. To prepare for the devices' arrival in the island nation, the e-retail giant taught the voice assistant how to understand and respond in the Japanese language. Alexa SVP Tom Taylor said the company designed an all-new experience "from the ground up for Japanese customers, including a new Japanese voice, local knowledge and over 250 skills from Japanese developers."

Related: Amazon Dominates Voice-Controlled Speaker Market
Amazon is Working on Smart Glasses to House Alexa AI, Says FT
Google Pulls YouTube off of the Amazon Echo Show
Amazon's Alexa Adds Ability to Order from Best Buy

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takyon writes:

Balloons operated by Google, AT&T, and T-Mobile have provided Internet connectivity to about 100,000 residents in Hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico, although about half of the cell sites servicing the island of 3.5 million people are down:

Alphabet's Project Loon, which last month partnered with AT&T and T-Mobile to bring LTE connectivity to disaster-stricken Puerto Rico, says its helium air balloons have delivered internet to 100,000 residents on the island. A significant portion of Puerto Rico, still struggling to recover from the effects of Hurricane Maria, is still without cell tower reception, with the Federal Communications Commission reporting earlier today that nearly 44 percent of Puerto Rico cell sites are still out of service. Loon deployed balloons in late October in what was its fastest-ever deployment in an effort to help residents get back online as soon as possible.

Also at Engadget and 9to5Google.

Previously: Alphabet Deploys Project Loon Balloons to Puerto Rico

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/science/chimps-sanctuaries-research.html

The era of biomedical research on chimpanzees in the United States is effectively over. Given the nearly 100-year history of experimenting on chimps, the changes seemed to come fairly quickly once they began.

In 2011, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, declared that the N.I.H. would fund no new biomedical research using chimps, which he described as "our closest relatives in the animal kingdom" deserving of "special consideration and respect."

[...] Dr. Collins's decision reflected widespread ethical concerns among scientists about the treatment of such social, intelligent animals. But on a practical level, the care of chimps is costly, and they aren't always a good model in which to study human diseases. They're also a magnet for public concern.

[...] By 2015, the N.I.H. had gone through several stages of decision-making and concluded that it would retire all chimps it owned, retaining none for potential emergency use — in case of a human epidemic, for instance. The agency owns about 220 chimps outside of those now in sanctuaries and supports another 80, which will also be retired.

takyon writes:

Apple Is Ramping Up Work on AR Headset to Succeed iPhone

Apple Inc., seeking a breakthrough product to succeed the iPhone, aims to have technology ready for an augmented-reality [AR] headset in 2019 and could ship a product as early as 2020.

Unlike the current generation of virtual reality [VR] headsets that use a smartphone as the engine and screen, Apple's device will have its own display and run on a new chip and operating system, according to people familiar with the situation. The development timeline is very aggressive and could still change, said the people, who requested anonymity to speak freely about a private matter.

While virtual reality immerses the user in a digital world, augmented reality overlays images and data on the real one. The applications for AR are endless, from a basketball fan getting stats while watching a game to a mechanic streaming instructions on how to fix a specific piece of equipment. Apple isn't the only company working on the technology. Google, which drew derision for $1,500 smart glasses a few years ago, is developing a business-oriented variant. Startup Meta has developed a headset with a focus on education and medical uses.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook considers AR less isolating than VR and as potentially revolutionary as the smartphone. He has talked up the technology on Good Morning America and gives it as almost much attention during earnings calls as sales growth. "We're already seeing things that will transform the way you work, play, connect and learn," he said in the most recent call. "Put simply, we believe AR is going to change the way we use technology forever."

Apple declined to comment.

The operating system on the devices is reportedly called "rOS".

Also at CNBC, AppleInsider, and 9to5Mac (opinion).

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

A recent study paints a sobering picture about the state of our oceans.

According to the paper, published last month in Environmental Science and Technology, rivers deposit up to 4 million metric tonnes of plastic into the sea -- and about 95 per cent of that comes from just 10 waterways.

Previous studies suggested about 67 per cent of plastic in the oceans came from 20 rivers. For this study, researchers out of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Science used a larger data set to reach their findings, sampling from 79 sites along 57 rivers around the world.

Eight of the 10 rivers are in Asia. [...]

• Yangtze River, Yellow Sea, Asia
• Indus River, Arabian Sea, Asia
• Yellow River (Huang He), Yellow Sea, Asia
• Hai River, Yellow Sea, Asia
• Nile, Mediterranean Sea, Africa
• Meghna/Bramaputra/Ganges, Bay of Bengal, Asia
• Pearl River (Zhujiang), South China Sea, Asia
• Amur River (Heilong Jiang), Sea of Okhotsk, Asia
• Niger River, Gulf of Guinea, Africa
• Mekong River, South China Sea, Asia

Source: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/ninety-five-percent-of-plastic-in-sea-comes-from-just-ten-rivers/89034/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Stanford researchers develop a gel for growing large quantities of neural stem cells

[Sarah] Heilshorn described a solution to the dual challenges of growing and preserving neural stem cells in a state where they are still able to mature into many different cell types. The first challenge is that growing stem cells in quantity requires space. Like traditional farming, it is a two-dimensional affair. If you want more wheat, corn or stem cells, you need more surface area. Culturing stem cells, therefore, requires a lot of relatively expensive laboratory real estate, not to mention the energy and nutrients necessary to pull it all off.

The second challenge is that once they've divided many times in a lab dish, stem cells do not easily remain in the ideal state of readiness to become other types of cells. Researchers refer to this quality as "stemness." Heilshorn found that for the neural stem cells she was working with, maintaining the cells' stemness requires the cells to be touching.

Heilshorn's team was working with a particular type of stem cell that matures into neurons and other cells of the nervous system. These types of cells, if produced in sufficient quantities, could generate therapies to repair spinal cord injuries, counteract traumatic brain injury or cure some of the most severe degenerative disorders of the nervous system, like Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases.

Heilshorn's solution involves the use of better materials in which to grow stem cells. Her lab has developed new polymer-based gels that allow the cells to be grown in three dimensions instead of two. This new 3-D process takes up less than 1 percent of the lab space required by current stem cell culturing techniques. And because cells are so tiny, the 3-D gel stack is just a single millimeter tall, roughly the thickness of a dime. "For a 3-D culture, we need only a 4-inch-by-4-inch plot of lab space, or about 16 square inches. A 2-D culture requires a plot four feet by four feet, or about 16 square feet," more than 100-times the space, according to first author Chris Madl, a recent doctoral graduate in bioengineering from Heilshorn's lab.

Maintenance of neural progenitor cell stemness in 3D hydrogels requires matrix remodelling (DOI: 10.1038/nmat5020) (DX)

Related: First Serotonin Neurons Made from Human Stem Cells
Scientists Develop Very Early Stage Human Stem Cell Lines for the First Time
Millions of Functional Human Cells Can be Created in Days With OPTi-OX

Original Submission