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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Code-repository GitHub has raised the alarm about a pending European copyright proposal could force it to implement automated filtering systems – referred to by detractors as "censorship machines" – that would hinder developers working with free and open source software.

The proposal, part of Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive from 2016, has been working its way through the legislative process.

In a blog post on Wednesday GitHub explained that the shakeup was designed to address the perception that there's a "value gap" between the money streaming-media platforms make from uploaded content and what content creators actually get paid.

"However, the way it's written captures many other types of content, including code," San Francisco-based GitHub said.

If passed, the rules would require code hosting platforms to take preemptive action to prevent copyrighted material from being shared without the appropriate license.

[...] Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament and a representative of the Pirate Party in Germany, argues that the proposed requirements would force GitHub to negotiate a license from every single developer and would "kill the platforms economy in Europe."

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/15/eu_copyright_proposal_could_limit_github_code/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A startup is 3D printing houses in under a day at a cost of about $10,000 each, and hopes to get it down to $4,000 each:

ICON has developed a method for printing a single-story 650-square-foot house out of cement in only 12 to 24 hours, a fraction of the time it takes for new construction. If all goes according to plan, a community made up of about 100 homes will be constructed for residents in El Salvador next year. The company has partnered with New Story, a nonprofit that is vested in international housing solutions. "We have been building homes for communities in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia," Alexandria Lafci, co-founder of New Story, tells The Verge.

[...] Using the Vulcan printer, ICON can print an entire home for $10,000 and plans to bring costs down to $4,000 per house. "It's much cheaper than the typical American home," Ballard says. It's capable of printing a home that's 800 square feet, a significantly bigger structure than properties pushed by the tiny home movement, which top out at about 400 square feet. In contrast, the average New York apartment is about 866 square feet.

The model has a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a curved porch. "There are a few other companies that have printed homes and structures," Ballard says. "But they are printed in a warehouse, or they look like Yoda huts. For this venture to succeed, they have to be the best houses." The use of cement as a common material will help normalize the process for potential tenants that question the sturdiness of the structure. "I think if we were printing in plastic we would encounter some issues."

Also at Fortune, Wired, and BGR.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A survey of U.S. government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was flagged as spam at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Computer Security Incident Response Center. UCS's Center for Science and Democracy director has attributed the low response rate at EPA and other agencies to a "culture of fear":

A periodic survey of U.S. federal scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) caused a bit of a kerfuffle at U.S. EPA last month. For the ninth time since 2005, the science advocacy group sent out a survey to more than 63,000 federal scientists across 16 agencies to gather information about what's happening inside the federal government in relation to scientific integrity. Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said his staff reached out to the agencies to let them know the survey was forthcoming: a memo EPA apparently missed.

"The unannounced, unauthorized, and perhaps illegal message found below this message was sent to me today," Brian Melzian, an EPA oceanographer in Rhode Island, wrote in a Feb. 12 email to EPA's Computer Security Incident Response Center (CSIRC) and others obtained by UCS. [...] Melzian continued: "Finally, if the message found below is legitimate and not bogus, these organizations have been grossly negligent and incompetent for distributing this message without first being authorized and approved by EPA." Rosenberg said while UCS did inform EPA the survey was coming, he is not required to do so and it's up to the agencies to choose whether and how they inform employees about it.

[...] While the survey will remain open for another couple of weeks, the response rate so far has been low — a fact Rosenberg attributes to fear of retaliation. "It suggests the climate and culture for scientists is really fearful," he said. "The culture we've seen more broadly in this administration has been either dismissal or hostility toward science." A spokesman for EPA said it didn't make sense to him that employees would be afraid to fill out the survey since it is anonymous but declined to comment further.

As of March 2, response rates for EPA hovered around 2 percent, with 296 completed surveys, compared with NOAA's response rate, which was 4.1 percent with 460 completed surveys. Still, in 2015 NOAA's response rate was 19.6 percent with 2,388 completed responses.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The peer-reviewed open access journal PLoS ONE describes the validation of a 3D-printed stethoscope which will soon have plans available under a free and open license. The cost to make an entire stethoscope using these plans is estimated to be between $2.5 to $5 USD. The resulting stethoscope apparently functions as well as the market gold standard, the Littmann Cardiology III.

The modern acoustic stethoscope is a useful clinical tool used to detect subtle, pathological changes in cardiac, pulmonary and vascular sounds. Currently, brand-name stethoscopes are expensive despite limited innovations in design or fabrication in recent decades. Consequently, the high cost of high quality, brand name models serves as a barrier to clinicians practicing in various settings, especially in low- and middle-income countries. In this publication, we describe the design and validation of a low-cost open-access (Free/Libre) 3D-printed stethoscope which is comparable to the Littmann Cardiology III for use in low-access clinics.

[...] and the dissemination of plans and bills of material through a Free and open source license.

All the raw data needed to reproduce the analysis, including graphs, figures, and conclusions, are found on Github at https://github.com/GliaX/Stethoscope/tree/master/Testing

From PLoS : Validation of an effective, low cost, Free/open access 3D-printed stethoscope

[Ed: as of posting there is no license on the Github documents. Thus as per the Berne Convention it is not yet freely available, until explicitly published under an open license such as CC or similar. ]

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Three popular VPN services have been found to leak private user information, which if exploited could be used to identify users.

The report, published Tuesday, reveals several vulnerabilities in Hotspot Shield, Zenmate, and PureVPN -- all of which promise to provide privacy for their users.

But the research reveals bugs that can leak real-world IP addresses, which in some cases can identify individual users and determine a user's location.

In the case of Hotspot Shield, three separate bugs in how the company's Chrome extension handles proxy auto-config scripts -- used to direct traffic to the right places -- leaked both IP and DNS addresses, which undermines the effectiveness of privacy and anonymity services.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/more-privacy-busting-bugs-found-in-popular-vpn-services/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Signs of symbolic behavior emerged at the dawn of our species in Africa

More than 320,000 years ago in the Rift Valley of Africa, some early innovators adopted a new technology: They eschewed the clunky, palm-size stone hand axes that their ancestors had used for more than a million years in favor of a sleek new toolkit. Like new generations of cellphones today, their Middle Stone Age (MSA) blades and points were smaller and more precise than the old so-called Acheulean hand axes and scrapers.

These toolmakers in the Olorgesailie Basin in Kenya chose as raw materials shiny black obsidian and white and green chert, rocks they had to get from distant sources or through trade networks. In another first, they chiseled red and black rocks, probably to use as crayons to color their bodies or spears—an early sign of symbolic behavior. "This is indicative of a gear change in behavior, toolmaking, and material culture," says evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who studies social networks.

A trio of papers released online in Science today documents this remarkable technological transition. Although other sites have yielded MSA tools, the new, securely dated chronology nudges the transition back by at least 20,000 years, matching when our species, Homo sapiens, is now thought to have emerged. By analyzing artifacts over time at one site, the papers also show that these behaviors developed as climate swings intensified, supporting the idea that environmental variability drove innovation.

Related:

Environmental dynamics during the onset of the Middle Stone Age in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2200) (DX)

Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age transition in eastern Africa (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2216) (DX)

Long-distance stone transport and pigment use in the earliest Middle Stone Age (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2646) (DX)

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

On 14 March 2018, Microsoft announced that it was open sourcing its Azure Service Fabric.

The Azure Service Fabric is a distributed application platform which aids in deploying microservices, highly available applications and containers on the Azure cloud (someone else's, in this case, Microsoft, servers) platform.

The announcement (via a blog post from the Microsoft Service Fabric Team) states:

At this point we have the Service Fabric repo up on GitHub with Linux build and test tools, which means you can clone the repo, build Service Fabric for Linux, run basic tests, open issues, and submit pull requests. We're working hard to get the Windows build environment migrated over as well, along with a complete CI environment.

[...] For now, you can compile and test Service Fabric for Linux, everything from the low-level clustering and federation layers all the way up to process and container activation. We are also opening it up for contributions, albeit at a limited pace as we work on moving everything out into the open.

The github repo main page gives current status on the open sourcing process:

takyon writes:

Voice-acting rights halt effort to put Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4

An ambitious modding project that sought to recreate Fallout 3 inside Fallout 4 is shutting down over unforeseen legal issues surrounding the original game's voice acting.

"The Capital Wasteland: A Road To Liberty" project was a five-person effort to implement the base content of Fallout 3 as a mod for Fallout 4, complete with the latter game's graphical and engine improvements. In a message to supporters, though, project lead NafNaf_95 writes that the mod has been shut down after a conversation with Bethesda, in which it "became clear our planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen."

That planned approach involved an audio extraction tool that would have taken the voice acting from legitimate Fallout 3 files and converted them to a form that could be used in a Fallout 4 mod. Bethesda and an outside lawyer advised the Capital Wasteland team that extracting this licensed content, which wasn't fully owned by Bethesda, would be legally questionable under copyright law and could make the modders legally liable for damages.

Apparently, having installed copies of the two games and running a utility is not good enough for Bethesda's lawyers.

Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google and LG will show off an OLED display for virtual reality headsets that could have a resolution of around 5500×3000:

Google and LG are set to present an 18-megapixel 4.3-inch OLED headset display with 1443 ppi and a higher refresh rate of 120Hz during the Display Week 2018 trade show in late May. The display will have a wide field of view and high acuity. The advanced program for the expo was spotted by Android Police via OLED-Info.

Those specs make the forthcoming headset better than most of what's on the market. Screens like the new HTC Vive Pro and Oculus Rift only boast total resolutions of 2880 x 1600 and 2160 x 1200, respectively.

From the Display Week 2018 Symposium Program:

The world's highest resolution (18 megapixel, 1443 ppi) OLED-on-glass display was developed. White OLED with color filter structure was used for high-density pixelization, and an n-type LTPS backplane was chosen for higher electron mobility compared to mobile phone displays. A custom high bandwidth driver IC was fabricated. Foveated driving logic for VR and AR applications was implemented.

The competing "Pimax 8K" uses two 3840×2160 panels to hit 7680×2160 with a 200° field of view. Shipments of that headset have been delayed to April or later. A 2017 StarVR headset used two 2560×1440 panels for a 210° field of view. Two of the panels from Google and LG could add up to around 11000×3000 (based on The Verge's guess), 12000×3000 (36 megapixels), or 11314×3182 (36 megapixels, 32:9 aspect ratio).

Recall that AMD has envisioned VR resolution reaching 16K per eye (a grand total of 30720×8640, or over 265 megapixels).

List of common resolutions.

Also at UploadVR and Android Authority.

Related: Is Screen Resolution Good Enough Considering the Fovea Centralis of the Eye?
AU Optronics to Ship 8K Panels to TV Manufacturers in H1 2018

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA Dawn Reveals Recent Changes in Ceres' Surface

NASA's Dawn mission has found recently exposed deposits that give us new information on the materials in the crust and how they are changing, according to two papers published March 14 in Science Advances that document the new findings.

Observations obtained by the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) on the Dawn spacecraft previously found water ice in a dozen sites on Ceres. The new study revealed the abundance of ice on the northern wall of Juling Crater, a crater 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter. The new observations, conducted from April through October 2016, show an increase in the amount of ice on the crater wall.

"This is the first direct detection of change on the surface of Ceres," said Andrea Raponi of the Institute of Astrophysics and Planetary Science in Rome.

[...] In a second study, VIR observations also reveal new information about the variability of Ceres' crust, and suggest recent surface changes, in the form of newly exposed material.

[...] This study, led by Giacomo Carrozzo of the Institute of Astrophysics and Planetary Science, identified 12 sites rich in sodium carbonates and examined in detail several areas of a few square miles that show where water is present as part of the carbonate structure. The study marks the first time hydrated carbonate has been found on the surface of Ceres, or any other planetary body besides Earth, giving us new information about the dwarf planet's chemical evolution.

Ceres.

Variations in the amount of water ice on Ceres' surface suggest a seasonal water cycle (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao3757) (DX)

Nature, formation, and distribution of carbonates on Ceres (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1701645) (DX)

Previously: Ceres's Cryovolcanoes Viscously Relax Into Nothingness
Organic Molecules Found on Ceres
Ceres May Have Had a Global Surface Ocean in the Past
Bright Areas on Ceres Suggest Geologic Activity

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

In the ongoing open access debate, which oldmedia publishers have been able to drag out for decades, oldmedia publishers have repeatedly made the assertion that articles in their very expensive journals are greatly improved during the publication process. Glyn Moody, writing at Techdirt, discusses the lack of value added by expensive, subscription-only journals over the original, freely-available pre-prints of the very same papers, thus negating the claims from the oldmedia publishers.

Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.

Scientific method requires that hypotheses be testable, and that means publishing anything necessary for a third party to reproduce an experiment. So some might even say that if your research ends up behind a paywall, then what you are doing is not even science in the formal sense of the concept.

Previously on SN :
New York Times Opinion Piece on Open Access Publishing (2016)
India's Ministry of Science & Technology Join Open-Access Push (2015)
Open Access Papers Read and Cited More (2014)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Pharmaceutical giants are holding sessions about topics such as childhood cancer and anti-aging drugs at South by Southwest (SXSW). But it is the lightly regulated "biohacks" that seem to get all of the attention:

"I'm here to make the argument that you have a moral imperative, if you're an employer, to hack your employees," said Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof 360, during a session called "Would You Let Your Boss Biohack You?"

Asprey's company sells products with names like Brain Octane Oil, containing supplements Silicon Valley calls nootropics, which are purported to enhance cognitive function. He is also a biohacker. That means he takes nootropics to improve his performance in life, refuses to ingest a long list of chemicals that includes fluoride, and averages six hours and six minutes of sleep every night. During his talk, Asprey was wearing sienna-toned sunglasses, which, he explained, were hacking the light.

At Bulletproof, every employee has access to nootropics and is encouraged to expand his or her mind accordingly. Asprey is particularly fond of modafinil, which he calls "the Limitless drug" in reference to a 2011 movie in which Bradley Cooper finds a pill that makes him a genius. Sold under the brand name Provigil, modafinil got Asprey through the Wharton School, he said, and it has "the safety profile of ibuprofen," a statement with which the Drug Enforcement Administration would disagree.

takyon writes:

Largest U.S. radio company iHeartMedia files for bankruptcy

IHeartMedia Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Thursday as the largest U.S. radio station owner reached an in-principle agreement with creditors to restructure its overwhelming debt load.

The company, which filed for bankruptcy along with some of its units, said it ‍reached the agreement with holders of more than $10 billion of its outstanding debt for a balance sheet restructuring, which would reduce its debt by more than $10 billion.

IHeartMedia, which has struggled with $20 billion of debt and falling revenue at its 858 radio stations, said cash on hand and cash generated from ongoing operations will be sufficient to fund the business during the bankruptcy process.

iHeartMedia.

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

Oklahoma plans to start carrying out executions with nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used in the U.S. but that some states have already approved amid difficulties with lethal injections.

At a news conference Wednesday, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Mike Hunter and Corrections Director Joe M. Allbaugh said that over the next few months the state would develop a protocol for using nitrogen.

[...] In recent years, Oklahoma and other states have struggled to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections, the most common execution method but one that has increasingly faced scrutiny.

In 2015, a state court put a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma after a series of botched executions, including one in which an inmate convulsed for 43 minutes before dying and another in which the wrong drug was administered.

Oklahoma is poised to become the first state to use nitrogen gas in executions

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Suppose, a litre of cola costs US$3.15. If you buy one third of a litre of cola, how much would you pay?

The above may seem like a rather basic question. Something that you would perhaps expect the vast majority of adults to be able to answer? Particularly if they are allowed to use a calculator.

Unfortunately, the reality is that a large number of adults across the world struggle with even such basic financial tasks (the correct answer is US$1.05, by the way).

[...] In many other countries, the situation is even worse. Four in every ten adults in places like England, Canada, Spain and the US can't make this straightforward calculation – even when they had a calculator to hand. Similarly, less than half of adults in places like Chile, Turkey and South Korea can get the right answer.

-- submitted from IRC

High number of adults unable to do basic mathematical tasks

Original Submission