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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

UPDATE, March 23, 2018: President Donald Trump signed the $1.3 trillion government spending bill—which includes the CLOUD Act—into law Friday morning.

"People deserve the right to a better process." Those are the words of Jim McGovern, representative for Massachusetts and member of the House of Representatives Committee on Rules, when, after 8:00 PM EST on Wednesday, he and his colleagues were handed a 2,232-page bill to review and approve for a floor vote by the next morning.

In the final pages of the bill—meant only to appropriate future government spending—lawmakers snuck in a separate piece of legislation that made no mention of funds, salaries, or budget cuts. Instead, this final, tacked-on piece of legislation will erode privacy protections around the globe.

[...] As we wrote before, the CLOUD Act is a far-reaching, privacy-upending piece of legislation that will:

• Enable foreign police to collect and wiretap people's communications from U.S. companies, without obtaining a U.S. warrant.
• Allow foreign nations to demand personal data stored in the United States, without prior review by a judge.
• Allow the U.S. president to enter "executive agreements" that empower police in foreign nations that have weaker privacy laws than the United States to seize data in the United States while ignoring U.S. privacy laws.
• Allow foreign police to collect someone's data without notifying them about it.
• Empower U.S. police to grab any data, regardless if it's a U.S. person's or not, no matter where it is stored.

Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflected-cloud-act-passes

See also: As the CLOUD Act sneaks into the omnibus, big tech butts heads with privacy advocates

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Uber has exited the Southeast Asian ride-hailing market with a sale to Singapore-based Grab, which also operates in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia:

Uber is selling its South East Asia ride-share and food delivery businesses to regional rival Grab. The move marks a further retreat from international operations for Uber, after it sold its China business to local rival Didi Chuxing. Both firms describe the deal as a win for their passengers, but analysts warn it could mean higher prices.

Grab is South East Asia's most popular ride-sharing firm with millions of users across eight countries. Under the terms of the deal, Uber will take a 27.5% stake in Singapore-based Grab. Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, will also join Grab's board.

SoftBank is the biggest investor in both companies, and could also engineer an Uber exit from India, where it competes with Ola:

[...] real victory unquestionably belongs to Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group Corp., the single-biggest investor in both companies. As I wrote earlier this month, by engineering a retreat for the U.S. company before any more bloodletting for market share, Son ensures that six-year-old Grab will emerge as an early champion in a winner-takes-all business.

A faster path to profit for Uber could also boost its valuation ahead of a planned IPO next year. But at what cost? Having already surrendered China to Didi Chuxing, beating a retreat from Southeast Asia is a precursor to perhaps losing India, the lone remaining jewel in Uber's once-flourishing Asian empire.

In India, once again, SoftBank is the largest investor in Uber's main rival, Ola. Competition between the two apps has become ridiculous. For all the PR gobbledygook on how happy Uber and Ola drivers are, the reality is that many who took out bank loans to acquire new cars are hurting badly. There's a glut of ride-hailing cars; wages have collapsed. Banks are collecting on "DUD," -- my moniker for "distressed Uber debt" -- by repossessing vehicles.

Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, says there will be no more exits from global markets (in addition to China, Uber also left Russia). But SoftBank may continue to pursue a strategy of exiting emerging and less profitable markets in exchange for large stakes in competitors.

Related: SoftBank's $80-100 Billion "Vision Fund" Takes Shape
SoftBank to Invest Billions in Uber
SoftBank Devalues Uber by 30% With Latest Offer
SoftBank Acquires 20% of Uber While Massively Devaluing It

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

It turns out that Sierra Leone didn't really use blockchain in their election:

The National Election Commission (NEC) of Sierra Leone released an official statement on Twitter on March 18 to set the record straight. The tweet quoted the NEC Chair Mohamed Conteh saying that "the NEC has not used, and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process."

That also brings up another topic: there is a disturbing trend around the world for media to accept "tweets" as official communications from government representatives. Twitter is a filter, not a conduit for microblogging.

Previously on SN: Sierra Leone Becomes First Country With Blockchain-Powered Elections.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

The founder of a site that provided fan-created subtitles has lost his appeal against a conviction for copyright infringement. In 2017 a Swedish court found that the unauthorized distribution of movie subtitles is a crime, sentencing the then 32-year-old to probation and a fine. The Court of Appeal has now largely upheld that earlier verdict.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/founder-of-fan-made-subtitle-site-lose-copyright-infringement-appeal-180318/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are already dealing with numerous private lawsuits over non-consensual data sharing, but they now have to grapple with a state-level lawsuit. Illinois' Cook County has filed a lawsuit against both companies accusing them of violating the state's Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica allegedly broke the law by misrepresenting its "thisisyourdigitallife" app as an academic research tool when it was really meant to harvest personal data against Facebook's agreements. Facebook, meanwhile, was accused of falsely promising to protect user data and doing nothing to stop Cambridge Analytica for years after learning of its behavior.

Source: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica hit with first state lawsuit

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

[...] During the Manhattan Project, 640 women worked at Los Alamos — about 11 percent of the total workforce. Today, women comprise 32 percent of the Lab's workforce — 3,554 of 11,012 total employees. Women hold more than a quarter of management positions, and women are 22 percent of the professional R&D workforce.

[...] Take a look at that history via the following timeline, which highlights notable women at the Laboratory and their achievements, as well changes in federal legislation and the workplace that continue to make Los Alamos a great place for women to work.

[...] 1943: In the 1940s, a "computer" was a person — usually a woman — whose job it was to perform calculations by hand, sometimes with the aid of a mechanical calculator. Women with degrees in mathematics and the sciences often took jobs as computers because of discrimination in their own fields. As a consequence, many of the women who became computers were vastly overqualified for their positions. At Los Alamos, approximately 20 computers worked in the T-5 Computation group by the end of the summer of 1943.

Source: A short history of women at Los Alamos

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Dropbox Shares Leap in I.P.O., and Silicon Valley Smiles

Dropbox, the file-sharing company and Silicon Valley darling, had a strong market debut Friday, a reassuring sign for the technology industry and for the investors who have billions locked up in other highly valued but privately held start-ups.

Shares of San Francisco-based Dropbox soared above $30 shortly after trading in the stock opened Friday morning. That was 45 percent higher than the $21-per-share price at which the company sold 36 million shares on Thursday night. The initial public offering valued Dropbox at $9.2 billion.

[...] Founded in 2007 by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox has never turned an annual profit, despite strong sales growth.

Dropbox.

Also at Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and CNBC.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Japan's Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women

Every aging society faces distinct challenges. But Japan, with the world's oldest population (27.3 percent of its citizens are 65 or older, almost twice the share in the U.S.), has been dealing with one it didn't foresee: senior crime. Complaints and arrests involving elderly people, and women in particular, are taking place at rates above those of any other demographic group. Almost 1 in 5 women in Japanese prisons is a senior. Their crimes are usually minor—9 in 10 senior women who've been convicted were found guilty of shoplifting.

Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft? Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that's changing. From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than sixfold, to almost 6 million. And a 2017 survey by Tokyo's government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40 percent either don't have family or rarely speak with relatives. These people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.

[...] Neither the government nor the private sector has established an effective rehabilitation program for seniors, and the costs to keep them in prison are rising fast. Expenses associated with elder care helped push annual medical costs at correctional facilities past 6 billion yen (more than $50 million) in 2015, an 80 percent increase from a decade before. Specialized workers have been hired to help older inmates with bathing and toileting during the day, but at night these tasks are handled by guards.

At some facilities, being a correctional officer has come to resemble being a nursing-home attendant. Satomi Kezuka, a veteran officer at Tochigi Women's Prison, about 60 miles north of Tokyo, says her duties now include dealing with incontinence. "They are ashamed and hide their underwear," she says of the inmates. "I tell them to bring it to me, and I will have it washed." More than a third of female correctional officers quit their jobs within three years.

[...] [Ms. N, age 80:] "I can't tell you how much I enjoy working in the prison factory. The other day, when I was complimented on how efficient and meticulous I was, I grasped the joy of working. I regret that I never worked. My life would have been different. I enjoy my life in prison more. There are always people around, and I don't feel lonely here. When I got out the second time, I promised that I wouldn't go back. But when I was out, I couldn't help feeling nostalgic."

Kodokushi.

Related: Japan Has Aged Out of its Economic Miracle
Japan's Fertility Crisis is Creating Economic and Social Woes Never Seen Before
A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The web will soon be a little safer with the approval of this new security standard

TLS 1.3 makes a few prominent changes that should keep you safe.

• The "handshake" between client and server has been streamlined and encryption initiated earlier to minimize the amount of data transmitted in the clear.
• "Forward secrecy," meaning hackers can't skim decryption keys from one exchange and use it to decrypt others later.
• "Legacy" encryption algorithms have been removed as options, as these could occasionally be forced into use and their shortcomings leveraged to break the cipher on messages.
• A new "0-RTT," or zero round-trip time, mode in which the server and client that have established some preliminaries before can get right to sending data without introducing themselves to each other again.

The whole standard is 155 pages long, and really only other engineers will want to dig in. But it's available here if you'd like to peruse it or go into detail on one of the new features.

Also at The Register.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Kevin Chen writes a post in his blog about incentives and scaling from his two years as a teaching assistant. Specifically in his current post he addresses plagiarism in computer science and why it has still not stopped.

The most important goal is to keep the course fair for students who do honest work. Instructors must assign grades that accurately reflect performance. A student who grapples with a problem — becoming a stronger programmer in the process — should never receive a lower grade than one who copies and pastes.

Finally, as educators, we also hope that the accused student can learn difficult lessons about ethical behavior in the classroom rather than the workplace.

From his experience, every semester somewhere between 10% to 40% of the students carry out blatant, indisputable cases of plagiarism with an unknown amount of less clear cases left unaddressed. How does this match with soylentil's experiences here, either in computer science or other fields? The perspectives are likely quite different from institution to institution as well as whether you are still studying in college or university, recently graduated, or in a teaching role.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Self-taught rocket scientist finally blasts off into California sky

"Mad" Mike Hughes, the rocket man who believes the Earth is flat, propelled himself about 1,875 feet into the air Saturday before a hard landing in the Mojave Desert. He told The Associated Press that outside of an aching back he's fine after the launch near Amboy, California.

"Relieved," he said after being checked out by paramedics. "I'm tired of people saying I chickened out and didn't build a rocket. I'm tired of that stuff. I manned up and did it."

The launch in the desert town — about 200 miles east of Los Angeles — was originally scheduled in November. It was scrubbed several times due to logistical issues with the Bureau of Land Management and mechanical problems that kept popping up.

YouTube video

Previously: Flat Earther Plans Manned Steam-Powered Rocket Launch
Federal Government Denies Permission for Flat Earth Researcher's Rocket Launch

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

A poisoned version of MediaGet, an all-in-one BitTorrent client developed in Russia, was used to offload malicious cryptocurrency miners. According to research from Microsoft, the application helped to kick off the Dofoil campaign that targeted hundreds of thousands of computers. Mediaget says that the issue has been fully resolved at their end.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-poisoned-torrent-client-triggered-coin-miner-outbreak-180315/

Also, from Bleeping Computer:

"Our continued investigation on the Dofoil outbreak revealed that the March 6 campaign was a carefully planned attack with initial groundwork dating back to mid-February," the Windows Defender team said today in a new report.

Microsoft alleges hackers broke into MediaGet's infrastructure, and sometimes between February 12 and 19, attackers managed to replace the official MediaGet installer with one that also included a backdoor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Japanese researchers have optimized the design of laboratory-grown, synthetic diamonds. This brings the new technology one step closer to enhancing biosensing applications, such as magnetic brain imaging. The advantages of this layered, sandwichlike, diamond structure are described in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

[...] Diamonds designed with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers that can detect changes in magnetic fields are a powerful tool for biosensing technologies and used in the medical detection and diagnosis of disease. For instance, magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a neuroimaging technique used to map brain activity and trace pathological abnormalities, such as epileptic tissue.

[...] "At the moment, we have just demonstrated stabilization, but we expect it to also improve sensitivity," Mizuochi said. His team is currently testing the sensitivity of the new design to changes in magnetic fields, and hoping that this structure could be used for biosensing applications such as MEG.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

University of Groningen physicists, and colleagues from Nijmegen and Hong Kong, have induced superconductivity in a monolayer of tungsten disulfide. By using an increasing electric field, they were able to show how the material turns from an insulator into a superconductor and then back into a 're-entrant' insulator again. Their results show the typical 'dome-shaped' superconducting phase, and finally provide an explanation for this phenomenon. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 19 March.

The scientists, led by University of Groningen associate professor Justin Ye, used an electric field to induce superconductivity in a monolayer of the semiconductor tungsten disulfide (WS2). In the initial state with very few carriers, the WS2 behaves as an insulator. 'Basically, the electric field adds carriers to this normal band insulator, which increases the conductivity', explains Ye. At low temperatures, this initiates a superconducting state.

[...] 'This full range for the phase diagram, from insulator to superconductor and then to re-entry insulator, had never before been observed this clearly', says Ye. 'We managed it, because we worked with a truly 2D material and used ionic liquid to create an electric field that is much stronger than what is usually applied.' Normally, as more carriers are added to a bulk or quasi-2D system, the electric field is eventually blocked. Ye: 'But in a WS2 monolayer, our stronger field can still pass through, which is why we were able to observe the entire range and eventually reach the insulating phase.'

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

[...] The team of researchers have devised a way to factor large composite integers by harnessing the massive parallelism of novel computer architectures that mimic the functioning of the mammalian brain. So called neuromorphic computers operate under vastly different principles than conventional computers, such as laptops and mobile devices, all based on an architecture described by John von Neumann in 1945.

In the von Neumann architecture, memory is separate from the central processing unit, or CPU, which must read and write to memory over a bus. This bus has a limited bandwidth, and much of the time, the CPU is waiting to access memory, often referred to as the von Neumann bottleneck.

Neuromorphic computers, on the other hand, do not suffer from a von Neumann bottleneck. There is no CPU, memory, or bus. Instead, they incorporate many individual computation units, much like neurons in the brain.

These units are connected by physical or simulated pathways for passing data around, analogous to synaptic connections between neurons. Many neuromorphic devices operate based on the physical response properties of the underlying material, such as graphene lasers or magnetic tunnel junctions. Because of this, these devices consume orders of magnitude less energy than their von Neumann counterparts and can operate on a molecular time scale. As such, any algorithm capable of running on these devices stands to benefit from their capabilities.

Source: Brain-like computers moving closer to cracking codes

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Coral reefs are not just pretty and cool—beyond tourism dollars and once-in-a-lifetime diving experiences, they provide real utility to human society. They provide homes to about a quarter of the world’s fish, which many people rely on as a food source. They can act as a barrier to rising sea levels, and they can protect coastlines from eroding.

But thanks to all the carbon we’ve pumped into the air, coral reefs are disappearing. Fast. Part of that is heat stress, but CO₂ can also influence coral's ability to form reefs in the first place. A new experiment gives us our first look at how much this affects a complete reef ecosystem.

[...] CO₂ enrichment lowered the coral reef’s net community calcification by 34 percent compared to background. Previous laboratory experiments had estimated the calcification sensitivity of corals to be between 15 and 28 percent. The researchers who conducted this study suggest that their new results might show a larger impact because of the presence of crustose coralline algae in the ecosystem, which can alter the balance of carbonate ions. Alternatively, the calcification rate may increase in sensitivity as the concentration of carbonate ions in the water decreases, and this experiment has revealed a snowball effect that we could eventually see in the wild.

Original Submission