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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

YouTube has removed "hundreds" of videos advertising an essay-writing service, EduBirdie, following a BBC investigation that concluded over 250 channels were promoting the Ukraine-based company.

According to the BBC, the investigation ultimately discovered more than 1,400 videos with over 700 million views promoting EduBirdie, with the topics covering "range of interests including: pranks, video games, fashion and dating." After the BBC revealed the results of the investigation, YouTube advised the channels in question that promoting cheating services was a violation of its policies against "academic aids," which specifically prohibit both test-taking services and paper-writing companies. It further told them that videos featuring EduBirdie plugs would be removed if the creators didn't do so themselves.

Numerous YouTubers complained that they had lost numerous videos as a result of the purge, with several saying dozens had disappeared. One channel claimed that 138 of their videos had been removed. According to the BBC, some said they were in the process of editing out the endorsements when the videos went down

Source: https://gizmodo.com/youtubers-are-mad-again-after-youtube-deletes-videos-wi-1825803083

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Since 1978, one million hectares of mangroves have been cut down in Myanmar. In the Ayerwaddy Delta in the south, mangrove forests have been significantly depleted - often cut down to make way for shrimp and rice farming, as well as charcoal production and collecting palm oil. Worldwide, 35 percent of the world's mangroves are now lost.

[...] Mangroves play a vital role in the fight against climate change and extreme weather events such as cyclones. They help mitigate carbon emissions, as well as protect vulnerable coastal communities from extreme weather, while strengthening seafood stocks up to 50 percent. While Meung and many locals have tried taking matters into their own hands, planting over 400,000 seedlings by hand to try and repopulate the mangrove population, the activity has taken three years and there is a lot more yet to be done before another cyclone hits.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/earthrise/2018/04/cyclone-shield-breathing-life-myanmar-mangroves-180430100914882.html

takyon: A team from BioCarbon Engineering is helping to plant new mangrove trees using drones:

Bremley Lyngdoh, founder and CEO of Worldview Impact and a board member of Worldview International, said a single pilot can use the drones, courtesy of BioCarbon Engineering, to plant about 100,000 seeds per day. The drones can fire one seedpod into the soil every minute and fly for approximately half an hour at a time.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

About 350,000 implantable defilibrators are up for a firmware update, to address potentially life-threatening vulnerabilities.

Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical) has released another upgrade to the firmware installed on certain implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillator (CRT-D) devices. The update will strengthen the devices' protection against unauthorized access, as the provider said in a statement on its website: "It is intended to prevent anyone other than your doctor from changing your device settings."

The patch is part a planned series of updates that began with pacemakers, programmers and remote monitoring systems in 2017, following 2016 claims by researchers that the then-St. Jude's cardiac implant ecosystem was rife with cybersecurity flaws that could result in "catastrophic results."

Source: https://threatpost.com/abbott-addresses-life-threatening-flaw-in-a-half-million-pacemakers/131709/

Related: A Doctor Trying to Save Medical Devices from Hackers
Security Researcher Hacks Her Own Pacemaker
Updated: University of Michigan Says Flaws That MedSec Reported Aren't That Serious
Fatal Flaws in Ten Pacemakers Make for Denial of Life Attacks
After Lawsuits and Denial, Pacemaker Vendor Finally Admits its Product is Hackable
8,000 Vulnerabilities Found in Software to Manage Cardiac Devices
465,000 US Patients Told That Their Pacemaker Needs a Firmware Upgrade

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

The California Consumer Privacy Act's backers have turned in 625,000 signatures in their effort to get the measure on the California ballot in November, they said Thursday.

The proposed initiative aims to allow consumers to see what personal information companies are collecting about them and ask the companies to stop selling that information, and also seeks to hold businesses accountable for data breaches.

[...] The measure is opposed by companies such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Google, which have all donated $200,000 each to fight the measure. Facebook has also given $200,000 to the opposition. However, Facebook last month said it would leave the effort to fight the initiative.

Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/03/california-privacy-measures-backers-submit-signatures/

The California Consumer Personal Information Disclosure and Sale Initiative (#17-0039) may appear on the ballot in California as an initiated state statute on November 6, 2018.

See also: Facebook withdraws from group fighting a major California privacy initiative

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harsh writes:

Measles exposure warning issued for four New York counties

A traveler from Europe may have exposed people to measles in Chemung, Genesee, Livingston and Niagara counties, the New York state Department of Health warned Saturday. The traveler, who has a confirmed case of measles, visited multiple sites in upstate New York on April 30, and May 1-2. Anyone who visited the following locations on these dates and times could have been exposed:

• Old Country Buffet, 821 Country Route 64, Elmira, between 1 and 4 p.m. April 30.
• Ontario Travel Plaza on the New York state Thruway in Le Roy, between 4 and 6:30 p.m. April 30.
• Sheraton Niagara Falls, 300 3rd Street, Niagara Falls, from 5:30 p.m. April 30 to 9:30 a.m. on May 2.
• Niagara Falls Urgent Care, 3117 Military Road. Suite 2, Niagara Falls, between 3 and 6 p.m. May 1.
• Exit 5 on Interstate 390 in Dansville, from 9:30 a.m. to noon May 2.

The times reflect the period that the infected person was in these areas and a two-hour period after the individual left the area. The virus remains alive in the air and on surfaces for up to two hours.

takyon: Measles outbreaks have been reported in Okinawa, Pennsylvania, and Missouri recently.

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Microsoft Working on a Fix for Windows 10 Meltdown Patch Bypass

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Microsoft's patches for the Meltdown vulnerability have had a fatal flaw all these past months, according to Alex Ionescu, a security researcher with cyber-security firm Crowdstrike. Only patches for Windows 10 versions were affected, the researcher wrote today in a tweet. Microsoft quietly fixed the issue on Windows 10 Redstone 4 (v1803), also known as the April 2018 Update, released on Monday.

"Welp, it turns out the Meltdown patches for Windows 10 had a fatal flaw: calling NtCallEnclave returned back to user space with the full kernel page table directory, completely undermining the mitigation," Ionescu wrote.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-working-on-a-fix-for-windows-10-meltdown-patch-bypass/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

They are similar to ultra-thin patches, their shape can be freely chosen, and they work anywhere on the body. With such sensors on the skin, mobile devices like smartphones and smartwatches can be operated more intuitively and discreetly than ever before. Computer scientists at Saarland University have now developed sensors that even laypeople can produce with a little effort. The special feature: the sensors make it possible, for the first time, to capture touches on the body very precisesly, even from multiple fingers. The researchers have successfully tested their prototypes in four different applications.

[...] The sensor, named Multi-Touch Skin, looks similar in structure to the touch displays that are well known from smartphones. Two electrode layers, each arrayed in rows and colums, when stacked on top of each other, form a kind of coordinate system, at whose intersections the electrical capacitance is constantly measured. This is lowered at the point where fingers touch the sensor, because the fingers conduct electricity and therefore allow the charge to drain away.

These changes are captured at each point, and thus touches from multiple fingers can be detected.

[...] The usefulness of this new freedom of form is made particularly clear by one of the four test prototypes, each of which the scientists produced with their novel fabrication methods: Since this sensor is similar in form to an ear, it is placed on the back of a test participant‘s right ear. The participant can swipe upward or downward on it, in order to use it as a volume control. Swiping right or left changes the song being played, while touching with a flat finger stops the song.

For the Saarbrücken scientists, Multi-Touch Skin is further proof that research into on-skin interfaces is worthwhile. In the future, they want to focus on providing even more advanced sensor design programs, and to develop sensors that capture multiple sensory modalities.

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canopic jug writes:

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) has now posted the winning entries from its 25^th event. The summary of winning entries does NOT contain brief explanations of each winning entry, so you can try to spot the tricks yourself. If you don't mind seeing a brief summary of each entry, there is an alternate page with spoilers linked to from the main page.

The goals of the IOCCC are to write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program within the contest's rules, while showing the importance of programming style, in an ironic way. It stresses the C compilers with unusual code and illustrates some of the subtleties of the C language. Lastly it provides a safe forum for poor C code.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Last December, Ashley Sehatti sold her 2015 Jetta back to a local Volkswagen dealership in California. So when the calendar turned over, she didn't understand why she was still getting sent monthly reports about the car's health. After another one came in April, she finally logged on to VW's online portal for Car-Net, the telematics system that runs in many of the company's modern cars.

To her surprise, Sehatti saw the location of her old Jetta on a map, up-to-date mileage, and the status of the car's locks and lights. It had been resold, and yet she still had access to some of the car's systems. "There was nothing in place to stop me from accessing the full UI," she says over email.

What Sehatti hadn't realized is that Volkswagen puts the burden of disabling access to Car-Net squarely on the customer in its terms of service agreement when they decide to sell or exchange a car — even if the car is going back to a VW dealer.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/4/17303644/volkswagen-car-net-security-location-access

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Simulating complex systems on supercomputers requires that scientists get hundreds of thousands, even millions of processor cores working together in parallel. Managing cooperation on this scale is no simple task. One challenge is assigning the workload given to each processor core. Unfortunately, complexity isn't distributed evenly across space and time in real-world systems. For example, in biology, a cell nucleus has far more molecules crammed into a small space than the more dilute, watery cytoplasm that surrounds it. Simulating nuclei therefore requires far more computing power and time than modeling other parts. Such situations lead to a mismatch in which some cores are asked to pull more weight than others.

To solve these load imbalances, Christoph Junghans, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and his colleagues are developing algorithms with many applications across high-performance computing (HPC).

"If you're doing any kind of parallel simulation, and you have a bit of imbalance, all the other cores have to wait for the slowest one," Junghans says, a problem that compounds as the computing system's size grows. "The bigger you go on scale, the more these tiny imbalances matter." On a system like LANL's Trinity supercomputer up to 999,999 cores could idle, waiting on a single one to complete a task.

To work around these imbalances, scientists must devise ways to break apart, or decompose, a problem's most complex components into smaller portions. Multiple processors can then tackle those subdomains.

The work could help researchers move toward using exascale computers that can perform one billion billion calculations per second, or one exaflops, efficiently. Though not yet available, the Department of Energy is developing such machines, which would include 100 times more cores than are found in most current supercomputers. Using a process known as co-design, teams of researchers are seeking ways to devise hardware and software together so that current supercomputers and future exascale systems carry out complex calculations as efficiently as possible. Fixing load imbalance is part and parcel of co-design.

Source:
https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/los-alamos-scientists-attack-load-balancing-challenge

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

A chemical reaction [Alan Turing] suggested can now be done, and it makes a great membrane.

Many chemical reactions end up going to completion, with all the possible reactants doing their thing and producing a product that's distributed uniformly within the reaction chamber. But under the right conditions, some chemical reactions don't reach equilibrium. These reactions are what interested Turing, since they could generate complex patterns.

Turing's paper on the topic focused on a reaction that could be controlled by the addition of two chemicals: an activator that promotes it and an inhibitor that slows it down. If you simply mix the two into a reaction, the outcome will simply depend on the balance between these two chemicals. But as Turing showed, interesting things can happen if you diffuse them into a reaction from different locations. And if the two chemicals diffuse at different rates, you can get complex patterns or reaction products like spots or tiger stripes.

Turing's paper describing these reactions came out in 1952; it wasn't until the 1990s that someone actually figured out how to make this happen. Now, researchers may have discovered a way to put Turing's ideas to practical use.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

A team of researchers in Germany and at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how infrared laser pulses can shift electrons between two different states, the classic 1 and 0, in a thin sheet of semiconductor

"Ordinary electronics are in the range of gigahertz, one billion operations per second. This method is a million times faster," said Mackillo Kira, U-M professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

He led the theoretical part of the study, to be published in the journal Nature, collaborating with physicists at the University of Marburg in Germany. The experiment was done at the University of Regensburg in Germany.

[... Quantum computer] qubits are hard to make because quantum states are extremely fragile. The main commercial route, pursued by companies such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft and D-Wave, uses superconducting circuits—loops of wire cooled to extremely cold temperatures (-321°F or less), at which the electrons stop colliding with each other and instead form shared quantum states through a phenomenon known as coherence.

Rather than finding a way to hang onto a quantum state for a long time, the new study demonstrates a way to do the processing before the states fall apart.

"In the long run, we see a realistic chance of introducing quantum information devices that perform operations faster than a single oscillation of a lightwave," said Rupert Huber, professor of physics at the University of Regensburg, who led the experiment. "The material is relatively easy to make, it works in room temperature air, and at just a few atoms thick, it is maximally compact."

Source: http://www.opli.net/opli_magazine/eo/2018/light-could-make-semiconductor-computers-a-million-times-faster-or-even-go-quantum-may-news/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941

Pai accused of reverse Robin Hood for business buddies:

This week, one year after the US government's General Accountability Office (GAO) formally recommended that it do so, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved $8bn it held in a private bank to the US Treasury.

But even though the move has long been planned for and anticipated, it has caused a furious reaction from the organization's own commissioners as well as lawmakers who are concerned it will result in money being pulled away from citizens and given to giant corporations.

The $8bn is the regulator's Universal Service Fund – a program used to subsidize telephone bills and broadband connections for lower-income citizens across the nation. Everyone pays into that fund, typically through a small monthly fee, around 9 cents, on your phone bill.

[...] "In the dark of night last week, without taking any vote the FCC moved billions of USF dollars to a new account," railed Jessica Rosenworcel on Twitter. "In doing so it sacrificed $50 million in annual interest that could have been used to support rural broadband, telemedicine & internet in schools. That's a shame."

Two days later, Rosenworcel was joined by her fellow Democratic commissioner Mignon Clyburn, who also took to Twitter to complain. "The transfer of USF dollars to the US Treasury is now underway," she complained. "What does this mean for us? A loss of more than $55,000,000 in annual interest which could have provided service to 495,495 Lifeline subscribers. Fiscal responsibility? Not!"

Source:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/04/fcc_8bn_us_treasury_universal_service_fund/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Investments in and development of wind power in the US are very unevenly distributed. That is shown in four animated maps at Vox in their article, the stunningly lopsided growth of wind power in the US, in 4 maps. They explore why a huge swath of the country has almost no wind turbines at all.

[...] The major driver to invest in wind in many states is renewable portfolio standards, which mandate a minimum amount of electricity to come from renewable sources, like hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal power plants. While federal incentives like the production tax credit, which benefits wind energy installations, apply across the country, state-level programs make a major difference on the ground.

“The states that have stronger RPSs are the places where you see renewables being deployed more actively,” said Ian Baring-Gould, a technology deployment manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “In places that don’t have RPSs, the utilities don’t have as much motivation to develop renewables.”

Take a wild guess which states don’t have RPSs

Wind speeds are not even around the country, so turbine distribution is not expected to be either. However, there is a long way to go before the turbine distribution reaches parity with the potential.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA has launched InSight, a Mars lander that will study the interior of Mars and measure "Marsquakes":

Initially flying through early-morning fog, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air force Base's Space Launch Complex 3 to send NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander on a six-month journey to Mars.

[...] InSight is a 794-pound (360-kilogram) robotic lander designed to study the interior structure of Mars. With its two solar panels deployed the lander is 19 feet 8 inches (6 meters) long. Based on the design of NASA's 2008 Phoenix lander, the spacecraft is designed to use its eight-foot (2.4 meter) robotic arm to place a seismometer, a wind and thermal shield to protect that instrument and a self-burrowing temperature probe on the Martian surface. The probe will use these science instruments and a radio experiment called RISE to study the deep interior of Mars to learn about how all rocky planets, including the Earth, formed. The InSight mission is part of NASA's Discovery Program.

"The Discovery Program is all about doing firsts, getting to places that we've never been to before, and this mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability to compare that with the Earth," said NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green during a NASA pre-launch briefing on May 3. "This is of fundamental importance for us to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way is today."

NASA's next Mars mission will be Mars 2020, a rover currently scheduled to launch in July 2020. InSight is the Discovery Program's 12th mission. The next two to launch will be Lucy (2021) and Psyche (2022). NASA will launch the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) no earlier than May 19.

Also at BBC and USA Today.

See also: Are We There Yet? How scientists and engineers handle a spacecraft's months-long journey to Mars

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