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canopic jug writes:

The FCC will reveal vote to repeal net neutrality this week

The new rules are expected to be announced on Wednesday, whilst most Americans are distracted by getting home to loved ones for Thanksgiving.

This will then be followed by a vote on 10 December, which would see the 2015 rules designed to protect the internet being torn down.

[...] The important point, as we've said before, is that once the genie is out of the bottle, getting it back in is almost impossible and for our readers outside the US, don't think this doesn't affect you - everything that passes through US servers will be affected in some way and will knock on to you.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The magnets can tightly target drug release:

A team of researchers with the University of Georgia in Athens has developed a technique for controlling chemical reactions that release drugs inside the body. In their paper published in the journal Nature Catalysis, the group describes coating chemicals to prevent a reaction from occurring until the application of a magnetic field that releases a desired drug.

In some medical applications, it is better for a medical treatment if a chemical can be applied directly to a certain part of the body and nowhere else. Chemicals meant to treat tumors are the prime example—chemotherapy drugs act on every cell they contact, causing a host of negative side effects. In this new effort, the group took a novel approach to solving this problem, using a magnet to force coated chemicals together, prompting a drug releasing reaction.

To provide a means for controlling when chemicals come into contact inside the body, the researchers created tiny packets by first coating iron oxide nanoparticles with silica and then coating them further with two types of polymers, which, when combined, form a brush-like structure. Each of the packets was then loaded with either an enzyme or a substrate meant to react with the enzyme, and, of course, the drug to be released.

The technique is intended to better target chemotherapy in cancer treatments such that only tumors are exposed to the chemical agents. It is hoped the more precise targeting can avoid the side effects of chemotherapy.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Speed cameras have been the focus of motorists' anger and frustration for years, although we are told repeatedly that they are an effective means of reducing death and injury on the roads. But is this really the case?

Whether speed cameras actually do save lives seems an easy assertion to test: measure the numbers of casualties at a site over a period, say two years; introduce a speed camera; re-measure the number of casualties over an equal period, and any reduction is due to the camera. But it's not really that simple. Many other factors are at play that might make cameras appear to be more effective than they really are. And these factors are often ignored when evaluating the performance of speed cameras at improving road safety.

Do speed cameras actually save lives?

[...] In road safety data, there is a general tendency for collision incidents at a site to reduce anyway following a short-term rise in their number, without any treatment (such as a speed camera) being applied. In statistics, this is known as regression-to-the-mean (or RTM). We also know that the long-term trend in collisions has generally been downward due to factors such as improved vehicle safety and better driver education[PDF].

So if we observe a reduction in casualties at a site following the installation of a camera, we need to ask how much of this reduction would have happened anyway (the RTM effect)? How much is due to general trends in road safety? And how much can we actually attribute to the camera itself?

[...] To make matters worse, half of the UK's fixed speed cameras may not even be turned on. So the situation is far from simple.

Methods to accurately account for RTM and trend often require knowledge of advanced statistics which may not always be available within a road safety team, and so it is likely that these confounding factors are not being considered consistently across the country.

[...] So, do speed cameras save lives? The answer is almost certainly yes, but probably not always to the extent that people are led to believe.

https://theconversation.com/do-speed-cameras-really-save-lives-87701

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Stuff will be flown into space for the purpose of burning it so people can look at it:

Meteor showers are an awe-inspiring sight, and skywatchers often plan well in advance for their shot at spotting shooting stars as they rain down from the heavens. The rare events have, up until now, been a totally natural phenomenon, but one company is planning on turning on-demand meteor showers into big business, and it's scheduled its first man-made shooting star showcase for early 2019.

The company, called ALE, has created a spectacle it calls Sky Canvas, and it's as close to controlled meteor showers as we may ever get. What makes it so interesting is that this isn't some kind of slight of hand or illusion, but actual material dropped from special satellites burning up in the atmosphere to produce a brilliant light show overhead. It's wild, wild stuff.

The cube-shaped satellites that control ALE's Sky Canvas are tiny — less than two feet on each side — but they carry the proprietary pellets that create the "shooting stars" and can be controlled remotely from the ground. On command, the satellites release their payload, which then falls to Earth and, after coming into contact with the intense friction of the atmosphere, ignite.

Manmade explosions over Hiroshima?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-11-scientists-countries-negative-global-environmental.html

Human well-being will be severely jeopardized by negative trends in some types of environmental harm, such as a changing climate, deforestation, loss of access to fresh water, species extinctions and human population growth, scientists warn in today's issue of BioScience, an international journal.

The viewpoint article—"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"—was signed by more than 15,000 scientists in 184 countries.

The warning came with steps that can be taken to reverse negative trends, but the authors suggested that it may take a groundswell of public pressure to convince political leaders to take the right corrective actions. Such activities could include establishing more terrestrial and marine reserves, strengthening enforcement of anti-poaching laws and restraints on wildlife trade, expanding family planning and educational programs for women, promoting a dietary shift toward plant-based foods and massively adopting renewable energy and other "green" technologies.

Global trends have worsened since 1992, the authors wrote, when more than 1,700 scientists—including a majority of the living Nobel laureates at the time—signed a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" published by the Union of Concerned Scientists. In the last 25 years, trends in nine environmental issues suggest that humanity is continuing to risk its future. However, the article also reports that progress has been made in addressing some trends during this time.

The article was written by an international team led by William Ripple, distinguished professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University. The authors used data maintained by government agencies, nonprofit organizations and individual researchers to warn of "substantial and irreversible harm" to the Earth.

"Some people might be tempted to dismiss this evidence and think we are just being alarmist," said Ripple. "Scientists are in the business of analyzing data and looking at the long-term consequences. Those who signed this second warning aren't just raising a false alarm. They are acknowledging the obvious signs that we are heading down an unsustainable path. We are hoping that our paper will ignite a wide-spread public debate about the global environment and climate."

Other links:

Here is the official page where you can read the full article, endorse the article, view signatories, and endorsers

Direct link to full article in PDF

The 1992 version

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The fiftieth TOP500 list has been released. Although there has been little change at the top of the list, China now dominates the list in terms of the number of systems, rising to 202 from 160 in June, with the U.S. falling to 143 systems from 169. However, this seems to be the result of Chinese vendors pushing more commercial systems to get on the list:

An examination of the new systems China is adding to the list indicates concerted efforts by Chinese vendors Inspur, Lenovo, Sugon and more recently Huawei to benchmark loosely coupled Web/cloud systems that strain the definition of HPC. To wit, 68 out of the 96 systems that China introduced onto the latest list utilize 10G networking and none are deployed at research sites. The benchmarking of Internet and telecom systems for Top500 glory is not new. You can see similar fingerprints on the list (current and historical) from HPE and IBM, but China has doubled down. For comparison's sake, the US put 19 new systems on the list and eight of those rely on 10G networking. [...] Snell provided additional perspective: "What we're seeing is a concerted effort to list systems in China, particularly from China-based system vendors. The submission rules allow for what is essentially benchmarking by proxy. If Linpack is run and verified on one system, the result can be assumed for other systems of the same (or greater) configuration, so it's possible to put together concerted efforts to list more systems, whether out of a desire to show apparent market share, or simply for national pride."

Sunway TaihuLight continues to lead the list at just over 93 petaflops. The Gyoukou supercomputer has jumped from #69 (~1.677 petaflops) in the June list to #4 (~19.136 petaflops). Due to its use of PEZY "manycore" processors, Gyoukou is now the supercomputer with the highest number of cores in the list's history (19,860,000). The Trinity supercomputer has been upgraded with Xeon Phi processors, more than tripling the core count and bringing performance to ~14.137 petaflops (#7) from ~8.1 petaflops (#10). Each of the top 10 supercomputers now has a measured LINPACK performance of at least 10 petaflops.

The #100 system has an Rmax of 1.283 petaflops, up from 1.193 petaflops in June. The #500 system has an Rmax of 548.7 teraflops, up from 432.2 teraflops in June. 181 systems have a performance of at least 1 petaflops, up from 138 systems. The combined peformance of the top 500 systems is 845 petaflops, up from 749 petaflops.

Things are a little more interesting on the Green500 list. The Shoubu system B has an efficiency of 17.009 gigaflops per Watt, up from TSUBAME3.0's 14.11 GFLOPS/W at the #1 position in June (TSUBAME3.0 quadrupled its performance while its efficiency dipped to 13.704 GFLOPS/W (#6) on the new list). The top 4 systems all exceed 15 GFLOPS/W. #5 on the Green500 list is Gyoukou, which is #4 on the TOP500. Piz Daint is hanging in there at #10 on the Green500 list and #3 on the TOP500.

All of the new top 3 systems on the Green500 list (and Gyoukou at #5) use the PEZY-SC2 manycore processor. The SC2 has 2,048 cores and 8 threads per core, and has a single-precision peak performance of about 8.192 TFLOPS. Each SC2 also includes six MIPS management cores, making it possible to eliminate the need for an Intel Xeon host processor, although that has not been done in any of the new systems.

At 17 GFLOPS/W, it would take about 58.8 megawatts to power a 1 exaflops supercomputer. 20-25 MW is the preferred power level for initial exascale systems, although we may see a 40 MW system.

Previously: New List of TOP500 Supercomputers [Updated]

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

The Global Cyber Alliance has given the world a new free Domain Name Service resolver, and advanced it as offering unusually strong security and privacy features.

The Quad9 DNS service, at 9.9.9.9, not only turns URIs into IP addresses, but also checks them against IBM X-Force's threat intelligence database. Those checks protect agains landing on any of the 40 billion evil sites and images X-Force has found to be dangerous.

The Alliance (GCA) was co-founded by the City of London Police, the District Attorney of New York County and the Center for Internet Security and styled itself "an international, cross-sector effort designed to confront, address, and prevent malicious cyber activity."

[...] The organisation promised that records of user lookups would not be put out to pasture in data farms: "Information about the websites consumers visit, where they live and what device they use are often captured by some DNS services and used for marketing or other purposes", it said. Quad9 won't "store, correlate, or otherwise leverage" personal information.

[...] If you're one of the lucky few whose ISP offers IPv6, there's a Quad9 resolver for you at 2620:fe::fe (the PCH public resolver).

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/20/quad9_secure_private_dns_resolver/

takyon: Do you want to give the City of London Police control of your DNS?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Antarctic glacier's rough belly exposed

The melting Antarctic ice stream that is currently adding most to sea-level rise may be more resilient to change than previously recognised. New radar images reveal the mighty Pine Island Glacier (PIG) to be sitting on a rugged rock bed populated by big hills, tall cliffs and deep scour marks. Such features are likely to slow the ice body's retreat as the climate warms, researchers say. The study appears in the journal Nature Communications [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01597-y] [DX].

"We've imaged the shape of the bed at a smaller scale than ever before and the message is really quite profound for the ice flow and potentially for the retreat of the glacier," said lead author Dr Rob Bingham from Edinburgh University. "Where the bed is flat - that's where we will see major retreat. But where we see these large hills and these other rough features - that's where we may see the retreat slowed if not stemmed," he told BBC News.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

A bug bounty hunter shared evidence; DJI called him a hacker and threatened with CFAA.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/dji-left-private-keys-for-ssl-cloud-storage-in-public-view-and-exposed-customers/

DJI, the Chinese company that manufactures the popular Phantom brand of consumer quadcopter drones, was informed in September that developers had left the private keys for both the "wildcard" certificate for all the company's Web domains and the keys to cloud storage accounts on Amazon Web Services exposed publicly in code posted to GitHub. Using the data, researcher Kevin Finisterre was able to access flight log data and images uploaded by DJI customers, including photos of government IDs, drivers licenses, and passports. Some of the data included flight logs from accounts associated with government and military domains.

Finisterre found the security error after beginning to probe DJI's systems under DJI's bug bounty program, which was announced in August. But as Finisterre worked to document the bug with the company, he got increasing pushback—including a threat of charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). DJI refused to offer any protection against legal action in the company's "final offer" for the data. So Finisterre dropped out of the program and published his findings publicly yesterday, along with a narrative entitled, "Why I walked away from $30,000 of DJI bounty money."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

wrought_plastic writes:

Quoted from the http://tidbits.com/article/17633: "If you're running macOS 10.12 Sierra or earlier, and do not want to upgrade to 10.13 High Sierra right now, be careful because Apple has started pushing High Sierra to older Macs and making it all too easy to upgrade inadvertently." [...]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Marvell is buying Cavium. Both are "fabless" semiconductor manufacturers:

Chipmaker Marvell Technology Group Ltd (MRVL.O) said it would buy smaller rival Cavium Inc (CAVM.O) in a $6 billion deal, as it seeks to expand its wireless connectivity business in a fast consolidating semiconductor industry.

[...] Hamilton, Bermuda-based Marvell makes chips for storage devices while San Jose, California-based Cavium builds network equipment. "With Marvell facing secular challenges on its core chip business, this acquisition is a smart strategic move which puts the company in a stronger competitive position for the coming years," said GBH Insights analyst Daniel Ives.

Marvell, which has been trying to diversify from its storage devices business, had come under pressure from Starboard Value LP last year, when the activist investor called the company undervalued. "This is an exciting combination of two very complementary companies that together equal more than the sum of their parts," Marvell's Chief Executive Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Also at Ars Technica.

Related: HPC Chips Abound

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has offered some very choice words about different approaches security, during a discussion about whitelisting features proposed for version 4.15 of the Linux kernel. Torvalds' ire was directed at open software aficionado and member of Google's Pixel security team Kees Cook, who he has previously accused of idiocy. Cook earned this round of shoutiness after he posted a request to "Please pull these hardened usercopy changes for v4.15-rc1."

[...] Torvalds has long been unafraid to express himself in whatever language he chooses on the kernel and has earned criticism for allowing it to become a toxic workplace. He's shrugged off those accusations with an argument that his strong language is not personal, as he is defending Linux rather than criticising individuals. On this occasion his strong language is directed at a team and Cook's approach to security, rather than directly at Cook himself. It's still a nasty lot of language to have directed at anyone.

Some 'security people are f*cking morons' says Linus Torvalds

[Reference]: [GIT PULL] usercopy whitelisting for v4.15-rc1
[Linus' Response]: Re: [GIT PULL] usercopy whitelisting for v4.15-rc1

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Over at Newsweek, Hannah Osborne is reporting - First Human Head Transplant Successfully Performed on Corpse, Sergio Canavero Announces — Key bits:

Scientists have carried out a head transplant on a human corpse, the neurosurgeon behind the operation has announced.

At a press conference in Vienna, Austria, Sergio Canavero said his team was able to remove the head from one body and connect it to the body of another by fusing the spine, nerves and blood vessels. He said the next step will be to carry out the operation on a living person, The Telegraph reports.

"The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done. A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage,” he said. "And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent.”

Canavero said a “high number” of people have volunteered to be his first head transplant patient. It is thought he will carry out the operation in China in December.

Because, of course, some of us are aware of the special dynamics of the intersection between Ethics, Journalism, and the Chinese government.

And then the next kicker to sufficiently anti-bait the click:

The Italian neurosurgeon did not present any evidence of his claims at the conference.

But, who knows what gruesome story we'll hear about in December.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Texas Rangers have served Apple a warrant for iPhone and iCloud data connected to the recent mass shooter Devin Patrick Kelley. However, it is unknown whether Kelley actually used iCloud to store data, and unlikely that Apple will be able or willing to help unlock the iPhone:

Texas Rangers investigating the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs have served a search warrant on Silicon Valley giant Apple Inc. and are seeking digital photos, messages, documents and other types of data that might have been stored by gunman Devin Patrick Kelley, who was found with an iPhone after he killed himself.

Court records obtained by the San Antonio Express-News show Texas Ranger Kevin Wright obtained search warrants on Nov. 9 for files stored on Kelley's iPhone, a second mobile phone found near his body and for files stored in Kelley's iCloud account — Apple's digital archive that can sync iPhone files.

The iCloud feature is an optional service. Obtaining such records, if they exist, directly from Apple could aid authorities investigating the worst mass shooting in modern Texas history. Apple's policy regarding iCloud content states that material may be provided to law enforcement agencies if they obtain search warrants.

In addition, the FBI may have already screwed it up.

Also at Engadget, BGR, and Fast Company.

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump informs us of:

Source:

Nebraska regulators approved an alternative route Monday for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. It was the last major regulatory hurdle facing project operator TransCanada Corp., though opponents say another round of federal approval may now be needed.

The Nebraska Public Service Commission's ruling was on the Nebraska route TransCanada has proposed to complete the $8 billion, 1,179-mile (1,897-kilometer) pipeline to deliver oil from Alberta, Canada, to Texas Gulf Coast refineries. The proposed Keystone XL route would cross parts of Montana, South Dakota and most of Nebraska to Steele City, Nebraska.

The long-delayed project was rejected by President Barack Obama in 2015, citing concerns about carbon pollution. President Donald Trump revived it in March, approving a permit.

[...] The five-member Nebraska Public Service Commission was forbidden by law from factoring pipeline safety or the risk of spills into its decision because pipeline safety is a federal responsibility. So, it couldn't take into account a spill of 210,000 gallons (790,000 liters) of oil on the existing Keystone pipeline in South Dakota announced on Thursday.

Also at Alternative Keystone XL route gets approved in Nebraska

Original Submission