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canopic jug writes:

Vincent Bernat writes in his blog about recent steps he took to increase privacy for his visitors and efficiency for the blog. He started out with excluding privacy-hostile modifications like Google Analytics, Disqus, third-party fonts, and much more. After reflection, he pared back and found the results better all around.

He addresses the following technologies one by one:

• Analytics
• Fonts
• Videos
• Comments
• Search engine
• Newsletter
• Java­Script
• Memento: CSP

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Amazon is reportedly working on a home robot that would follow users around and provide access to Alexa:

Amazon is reportedly developing its first robot for the home, according to Bloomberg. The project has been given the internal codename "Vesta," named after the Roman goddess of the hearth. It's being developed by Lab126, the Amazon hardware R&D center that previously built the Kindle, Fire Phone, and Echo.

There are no firm details on what Amazon's robot looks like or what purpose it will serve, but Bloomberg suggests it could be a sort of "mobile Alexa" — following users around their house to places where they can't speak directly to an Echo speaker. Prototype robots built by Amazon reportedly have computer vision software and cameras for navigation, and the company is said to be planning to seed devices in employees' homes by the end of the year. Bloomberg notes that the general public might be able to test such robot prototypes "as early as 2019."

From such scant details, it's difficult to know exactly what Amazon is planning, but it's safe to say that a home robot in this case does not mean some sort of "robot butler able to perform a variety of household chores." The technology needed for this sort of device just doesn't exist yet in the commercial sphere (although companies like Boston Dynamics are working on it).

The company's Amazon Robotics subsidiary, formerly Kiva Systems, makes robots for Amazon warehouses.

Amazon's Prometheans are going to kill your family from inside the comfort of your own home.

Also at TechCrunch.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Brave browser's basic attention token (BAT) technology is designed to let advertisers pay publishers. Brave users also will get a cut if they sign up to see ads.

Brave developed the basic attention token (BAT) as an alternative to regular money for the payments that flow from advertiser to website publishers. Brave plans to use BAT more broadly, though, for example also sending a portion of advertising revenue to you if you're using Brave and letting you spend BAT for premium content like news articles that otherwise would be behind a subscription paywall.

Most of that is in the future, though. Today, Brave can send BAT to website publishers, YouTubers and Twitch videogame streamers, all of whom can convert that BAT into ordinary money once they're verified. You can buy BAT on your own, but Brave has given away millions of dollars' worth through a few promotions. The next phase of the plan, though, is just to automatically lavish BAT on anyone using Brave, so you won't have to fret that you missed a promotional giveaway.

"We're getting to the point where we're giving users BAT all the time. We don't think we'll run out. We think users should get it," CEO and former Firefox leader Brendan Eich said. "We're going to do it continually."

The BAT giveaway plan is an important new phase in Brave's effort to salvage what's good about advertising on the internet -- free access to useful or entertaining services like Facebook, Google search and YouTube -- without downsides like privacy invasion and the sorts of political manipulations that Facebook partner Cambridge Analytica tried to enable.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

World's oldest person, last survivor of 19th century, dies in Japan at 117

The century of Lincoln, Darwin and Van Gogh has quietly passed into history with the death of the world's oldest known person and last survivor of the 19th century.

Nabi Tajima, 117, died in a hospital Saturday in Kikai, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan's Kyodo News reported. Tajima had been mostly bedridden at a nursing home in recent years. She was hospitalized about a month ago, family members told the news service.

Also at The Washington Post.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

A new microchip technology capable of optically transferring data could solve a severe bottleneck in current devices by speeding data transfer and reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude, according to an article published in the April 19, 2018 issue of Nature.

Researchers from Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley and University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method to fabricate silicon chips that can communicate with light and are no more expensive than current chip technology.

The electrical signaling bottleneck between current microelectronic chips has left light communication as one of the only options left for further technological progress. The traditional method of data transfer–electrical wires–has a limit on how fast and how far it can transfer data. It also uses a lot of power and generates heat. With the relentless demand for higher performance and lower power in electronics, these limits have been reached. But with this new development, that bottleneck can be solved.

"Instead of a single wire carrying around 10 gigabits per second, you can have a single optical fiber carrying 10 to 20 terabits per second—so a thousand times more in the same footprint," says Assistant Professor Milos Popovic (ECE), one of the principal investigators of the study, whose team was previously at University of Colorado Boulder where part of the work was done.

"If you replace a wire with an optical fiber, there are two ways you win," he says. "First, with light, you can send data at much higher frequencies without significant loss of energy as there is with copper wiring. Second, with optics, you can use many different colors of light in one fiber and each one can carry a data channel. The fibers can also be packed more closely together than copper wires can without crosstalk."

Source: http://www.bu.edu/eng/2018/04/18/a-new-era-of-microelectronics/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Ben Cox writes in his blog about visualizing IPv4 address space use by mapping the whole IPv4 Internet with Hilbert curves. While the IPv4 address space is quite large it is still small enough to be able to send a packet to each and every IP address. He goes a little into the background of the maths involved and then makes a comparison to the IPv4 address space back in 2012 using data from the Carna botnet.

[See, also: xkcd's MAP of the INTERNET, the IPv4 space, 2006. --martyb]

Earlier on SN: Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Microsoft has released a Chrome extension named "Windows Defender Browser Protection" that ports Windows Defender's —and inherently Edge's— anti-phishing technology to Google Chrome.

[...] Chrome users should be genuinely happy that they can now use both APIs for detecting phishing and malware-hosting URLs. The SmartScreen API isn't as known as Google's more famous Safe Browsing API, but works in the same way, and possibly even better.

An NSS Labs benchmark revealed that Edge (with its SmartScreen API) caught 99 percent of all phishing URLs thrown at it during a test last year, while Chrome only detected 87 percent of the malicious links users accessed.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-ports-anti-phishing-technology-to-google-chrome-extension/

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

A 19 year old teenager was charged with 'unauthorized use of a computer' after downloading over 7,000 records from the Nova Scotia Freedom-of-Information web portal. The teenager whose name has not been released, has been accused of stealing documents from the portal, with many of them being publicly accessible and redacted.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/teenager-charged-for-nova-scotia-freedom-of-information-web-portal-breach/

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Monitor screens and smartphones that can be rolled and folded up are applications that could become possible in the future thanks to the development of polymer (plastic) based semiconductors.

Electronics from these conducting plastics pave the way for affordable, flexible and printable electronic components. A major obstacle hindering the market introduction of plastic based light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) is their relatively limited stability.

After a few months of continuous operation their light-output starts to decrease. In spite of many investigations in both industry and academic laboratories the cause of this degradation effect is only poorly understood.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research have recently discovered the mechanism causing the PLED degradation.

[...] The research results are published in the latest edition of the scientific journal Nature Materials. By using a mixture of two polymers (plastics) the effect of the defects can be strongly suppressed, leasing[sic] to improved stability of the PLEDs.

See also: http://www.mpip-mainz.mpg.de/5308521/PM2018-10

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

[Laura Kampf] found a new use for an old Zippo lighter by turning it into a carrier for her screwdriver bits. There are several multitools out there which can accept standard screwdriver bits. The problem is carrying those bits around. Leaving a few bits in your pocket is a recipe for pocket holes and missing bits.

[Laura's] solution uses her old Zippo lighter. All she needs is the case, the lighter element itself can be saved for another project. A block of aluminum is cut and sanded down to a friction fit. Laura uses a band saw and bench sander for this. The aluminum block is then drilled out to fit four bits. Small neodymium magnets are taped into the holes with double-sided tape. These magnets retain the bits, ensuring none will fall out when the lighter is opened.

Does this mean we can start calling four bits a Zippo instead of a nibble now?

Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/04/20/zippo-keeps-your-bits-safe/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Infant and childhood food allergy has now been linked to a mix of environmental and genetic factors that must coexist to trigger the allergy, reports a new study. Those factors include genetics that alter skin absorbency, use of infant cleansing wipes that leave soap on the skin, skin exposure to allergens in dust and skin exposure to food from those providing infant care. The good news is factors leading to food allergy can be modified in the home environment.

Also at
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2018/april/food-allergy-is-linked-to-skin-exposure-and-genetics/ and http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaci.2018.02.003

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180406085504.htm

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

Two photo-sharing services are teaming up, as SmugMug buys Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary Oath. USA Today broke the news and interviewed SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who said he hopes to revitalize Flickr . At the same time, he said he's still figuring out his actual plans: "It sounds silly for the CEO to not to totally know what he's going to do, but we haven't built SmugMug on a master plan either. We try to listen to our customers and when enough of them ask for something that's important to them or to the community, we go and build it."

[...] In an FAQ about the deal, SmugMug says it will continue to operate Flickr as a separate site, with no merging of user accounts or photos: "Over time, we'll be migrating Flickr onto SmugMug's technology infrastructure, and your Flickr photos will move as a part of this migration — but the photos themselves will remain on Flickr."

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/smugmug-acquires-flickr/

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

Daniel Glazman believes that EPUB has reached a technical dead end.

• It is impossible to aggregate a set of web pages into a EPUB book through a trivial zip, and it is impossible to unzip an EPUB book and make it readable inside a Web browser even with graceful degradation.
• Despite the International Digital Publishing Forum merging with W3C in January 2017, EPUB continues to diverge from web standards.
• The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.

Mr. Glazman's solution? The WebBook format. From the announcement:

I have then decided to work on a different format for electronic books, called WebBook. A format strictly based on Web technologies and when I say "Web technologies", I mean the most basic ones: html, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and friends; the class of specifications all Web authors use and master on a daily basis. Not all details are decided or even ironed, the proposal is still a work in progress at this point, but I know where I want to go to.

[...] I have started from a list of requirements, something that was never done that way in the EPUB world:

theronb writes:

The hardest known human task has now been mastered by robots... assembling IKEA furniture (archive):

A team from Nanyang Technological University programmed a robot to create and execute a plan to piece together most of Ikea's $25 solid-pine Stefan chair on its own, calling on a medley of human skills to do so. The researchers explained their work in a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

"If you think about it, it requires perception, it requires you to plan a motion, it requires control between the robot and the environment, it requires transporting an object with two arms simultaneously," said Dr. Quang-Cuong Pham, an assistant professor of engineering at the university and one of the paper's authors. "Because this task requires so many interesting skills for robots, we felt that it could be a good project to push our capabilities to the limit."

He and his Nanyang colleagues who worked on the study, Francisco Suárez-Ruiz and Xian Zhou, aren't alone. In recent years, a handful of others have set out to teach robots to assemble Ikea furniture, a task that can mimic the manipulations robots can or may someday perform on factory floors and that involves a brand many know all too well. "It's something that almost everybody is familiar with and almost everybody hates doing," said Ross A. Knepper, an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University, whose research focuses on human-robot interaction.