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takyon writes:

Google quits selling tablets

Google has quietly crept out of the tablet business, removing the "tablets" heading from its Android page. Perhaps it hoped no one would notice on a Friday and by Monday it would be old news, but Android Police caught them in the act. It was there yesterday, but it's gone today.

[...] Google in particular has struggled to make Android a convincing alternative to iOS in the tablet realm, and with this move has clearly indicated its preference for the Chrome OS side of things, where it has inherited the questionable (but lucrative) legacy of netbooks. They've also been working on broadening Android compatibility with that OS. So it shouldn't come as much surprise that the company is bowing out.

[...] Google's exit doesn't mean Android tablets are done for, of course. They'll still get made, primarily by Samsung, Amazon and a couple of others, and there will probably even be some nice ones. But if Google isn't selling them, it probably isn't prioritizing them as far as features and support.

Also at 9to5Google.

Related: All New Chromebooks to Support Android Apps
The first Chrome OS tablet is here
Apple Expected to Compete Against Chromebooks With Cheaper Education-Focused iPads
ChromeOS Gains the Ability to Run Linux Applications
Ask the Community: In the Market for a Modern Tablet

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

California's efforts to restrict Elon Musk's flamethrowers go down in flames

A California state bill that would have more heavily regulated the use of flamethrowers has now effectively fizzled out in a legislative committee.

In light of this development, there's nothing to stop Boring Company customers in California from receiving the company's sold-out flamethrowers.

On May 26, the day after the bill died in committee, CEO Elon Musk tweeted:

About to ship. @BoringCompany holding flamethrower pickup parties in a week or so, then deliveries begin. Check https://t.co/WTl3TOTOkt for details.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2018

Previously: Elon Musk's Boring Company Sells Flamethrowers

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

An artificial nerve system developed at Stanford gives prosthetic devices and robots a sense of touch

Stanford and Seoul National University researchers have developed an artificial sensory nerve system that can activate the twitch reflex in a cockroach and identify letters in the Braille alphabet.

The work, reported May 31 in Science, is a step toward creating artificial skin for prosthetic limbs, to restore sensation to amputees and, perhaps, one day give robots some type of reflex capability.

"We take skin for granted but it's a complex sensing, signaling and decision-making system," said Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering and one of the senior authors. "This artificial sensory nerve system is a step toward making skin-like sensory neural networks for all sorts of applications."

This milestone is part of Bao's quest to mimic how skin can stretch, repair itself and, most remarkably, act like a smart sensory network that knows not only how to transmit pleasant sensations to the brain, but also when to order the muscles to react reflexively to make prompt decisions.

A bioinspired flexible organic artificial afferent nerve (DOI: 10.1126/science.aao0098) (DX)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

Internet provider Grande Communications is requesting assistance from U.S. Marshals to serve piracy tracking company IP-Echelon. As part of the RIAA lawsuit, the ISP wants to find out more about a scam where IP-Echelon's name was abused by scammers to extract payments. Thus far, however, it has been unable to reach the company at its Hollywood office.

They used the name of piracy-tracking firm IP-Echelon and several major copyright holders, including HBO, to demand settlements for allegedly pirated content.

The DMCA scam was pretty convincing. The emails lacked IP-Echelon’s PGP signature but were good enough to fool some Internet providers into forwarding them. If anything, it revealed that these type of notices should be carefully vetted.

While we haven’t seen any reports of these fraudulent notices since, Internet provider Grande Communications has taken an interest in the matter, in preparation for its piracy liability case against the RIAA.

This case relies on DMCA notices sent by IP-Echelon competitor Rightscorp. The ISP is therefore eager to hear out IP-Echelon to find out more about the issue, noting that they received the scam emails as well.

“Grande has also received IP-Echelon infringement notices, which include both authenticated, PGP-signed infringement notices from IP-Echelon, as well as fake, non-PGP-signed notices which falsely claim to be from IP-Echelon,” Grande informed the court late last week.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/isp-wants-us-marshals-to-help-serve-piracy-tracking-outfit-180528/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/06/01/microsoft--github-acquisition-talks-resume.html

Microsoft held talks in the past few weeks to acquire software developer platform GitHub, Business Insider reports.

One person familiar with the discussions between the companies told CNBC that they had been considering a joint marketing partnership valued around $35 million, and that those discussions had progressed to a possible investment or outright acquisition. It is unclear whether talks are still ongoing, but this person said that GitHub's price for a full acquisition was more than Microsoft currently wanted to pay.

GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in its last funding round 2015, but the price tag for an acquisition could be $5 billion or more, based on a price that was floated last year.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/ori/ct-biz-facebook-google-chicago-expansion-ryan-ori-20180601-story,amp.html

Facebook and Google are mapping big expansions in Chicago, where real estate searches by two of the nation's other technology giants have been the center of attention.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook is negotiating to lease more than 200,000 square feet in a recently constructed office tower at 151 N. Franklin St. in the Loop, according to sources.

Meanwhile, sources said, Google plans to add more than 100,000 square feet of office space in the city's Fulton Market district, where the company already has a large Midwest headquarters.

The new Facebook space alone would be large enough to accommodate more than 1,000 employees.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) may be able to find new planets in our solar system, including the hypothesized planets Nine and Ten:

Overall, these estimates indicated that Planet 9/X was a super-Earth with anywhere between 5 to 20 Earth masses, and orbited the Sun at a distance of between 150 – 600 AU. Concurrently, these studies have also attempted to narrow down where this Super-Earth's orbit will take it throughout the outer Solar System, as evidenced by the perturbations it has on KBOs.

Unfortunately, the predicted locations and brightness of the object are not yet sufficiently constrained for astronomers to simply look in the right place at the right time and pick it out. In this respect, a large area sky survey must be carried out using moderately large telescopes with a very wide field of view. As Dr. Trilling told Universe Today via email:

"The predicted Planet X candidates are not particularly faint, but the possible locations on the sky are not very well constrained at all. Therefore, what you really need to find Planet X is a medium-depth telescope that covers a huge amount of sky. This is exactly LSST. LSST's sensitivity will be sufficient to find Planet X in almost all its (their) predicted configurations, and LSST will cover around half of the known sky to this depth. Furthermore, the cadence is well-matched to finding moving objects, and the data processing systems are very advanced. If you were going to design a tool to find Planet X, LSST is what you would design."

On the detectability of Planet X with LSST

takyon writes:

Cometh the cyborg: Improved integration of living muscles into robots

The team first constructed a robot skeleton on which to install the pair of functioning muscles. This included a rotatable joint, anchors where the muscles could attach, and electrodes to provide the stimulus to induce muscle contraction. For the living muscle part of the robot, rather than extract and use a muscle that had fully formed in the body, the team built one from scratch. For this, they used hydrogel sheets containing muscle precursor cells called myoblasts, holes to attach these sheets to the robot skeleton anchors, and stripes to encourage the muscle fibers to form in an aligned manner.

"Once we had built the muscles, we successfully used them as antagonistic pairs in the robot, with one contracting and the other expanding, just like in the body," study corresponding author Shoji Takeuchi says. "The fact that they were exerting opposing forces on each other stopped them shrinking and deteriorating, like in previous studies."

The team also tested the robots in different applications, including having one pick up and place a ring, and having two robots work in unison to pick up a square frame. The results showed that the robots could perform these tasks well, with activation of the muscles leading to flexing of a finger-like protuberance at the end of the robot by around 90°.

Also at National Geographic.

Biohybrid robot powered by an antagonistic pair of skeletal muscle tissues (open, DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aat4440) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

White Americans' fear of losing their socioeconomic standing in the face of demographic change may be driving opposition to welfare programs, even though whites are major beneficiaries of government poverty assistance, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

While social scientists have long posited that racial resentment fuels opposition to such anti-poverty programs as food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Aid to Needy Families, this is the first study to show the correlation experimentally, demonstrating a causal relationship between attitudes to welfare and threatened racial status.

"With policymakers proposing cuts to the social safety net, it's important to understand the dynamics that drive the welfare backlash," said study lead author Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley. "This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups."

The findings, to be published May 30 in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.

Notably, the study found anti-welfare sentiment to be selective insofar as threats to whites' standing led whites to oppose government assistance programs they believed largely benefit minorities, while not affecting their views of programs they thought were more likely to advantage whites.

"Our findings suggest that these threats lead whites to oppose programs they perceive as primarily benefiting racial minorities," said study senior author Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and social psychology at Stanford University.

[...] "Overall, these results suggest whites' perceptions of rising minority power and influence lead them to oppose welfare programs," Wetts said.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ultrasound-firewall for mobile phones

Defence against unwanted audio tracking by acoustic cookies

The permanent networking of mobile devices can endanger the privacy of users and lead to new forms of monitoring. New technologies such as Google Nearby and Silverpush use ultrasonic sounds to exchange information between devices via loudspeakers and microphones (also called "data over audio").

More and more of our devices communicate via this inaudible communication channel. Ultrasonic communication allows devices to be paired and information to be exchanged. It also makes it possible to track users and their behaviour over a number of devices, much like cookies on the Web. Almost every device with a microphone and a loudspeaker can send and receive ultrasonic sounds. Users are usually unaware of this inaudible and hidden data transmission.

The SoniControl project of St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences has developed a mobile application that detects acoustic cookies, brings them to the attention of users and if desired, blocks the tracking. The app is thus, in a sense, the first available ultrasound-firewall for smartphones and tablets. "The most challenging part of developing the app was to devise a method that can detect different existing ultrasound-transmission techniques reliably and in real time", said Matthias Zeppelzauer, Head of the project and Senior Researcher in the Media Computing research group of the Institute of Creative\Media/Technologies at St. Pölten UAS.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers create the first 3D-printed corneas

Researchers at Newcastle University have been able to 3D-print a biocompatible corneal framework using a new gel formulations that "keeps the stem cells alive whilst producing a material which is stiff enough to hold its shape but soft enough to be squeezed out the nozzle of a 3D printer."

There is a significant shortage of corneas available to transplant, with 10 million people worldwide requiring surgery to prevent corneal blindness as a result of diseases such as trachoma, an infectious eye disorder," wrote the researchers. "In addition, almost 5 million people suffer total blindness due to corneal scarring caused by burns, lacerations, abrasion or disease."

The product uses "human corneal stromal cells" from a donor cornea mixed with alginate and collagen to create bio-ink that can turn into a living cornea. This means that one donor cornea can help multiple patients.

[...] The corneas take ten minutes to print on a cheap 3D printer, a vast improvement on previous efforts. Further, the gel can keep stem cells alive for days, allowing you to print a few corneas over the course of a week.

Also at The Verge.

3D bioprinting of a corneal stroma equivalent (DOI: 10.1016/j.exer.2018.05.010) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Crown court judge stands accused of breaching the Computer Misuse Act after allegedly accessing a case file that she had a personal interest in. Her Honour Judge Karen Jane Holt appeared at Southwark Crown Court yesterday. It was said that in September 2016 she viewed the digital case file for one Cecil McCready, a music teacher found guilty last year of child sex crimes. It is understood the victim is not related to Holt.

Charged under the name Karen Smith, Holt is accused of "intending to secure unauthorised access to that programme and data, knowing at the time that such access was unauthorised". The Crown prosecutor's case against her hinges on whether her access to the judicial Digital Case System when she viewed McCready's file was authorised or not.

Holt, a criminal barrister with more than two decades' experience who was appointed as a recorder (part-time judge) in 2009, was locked in the dock for the duration of the hearing. The accusation against her was made under section 1(1) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Patrick Gibbs QC, Holt's barrister, told presiding judge Mr Justice Davis: "The Crown has... set out the documents which were viewed and the length of time for which they were viewed."

Prosecuting barrister Philip Evans QC told the court the accusations were "not a case of carelessness or stupidity, it is a deliberate attempt to access files".

Granting Holt unconditional bail and making preparations for a three-day trial, Mr Justice Davis said: "Mrs Smith, I have no doubt you have said this to people so it will come as no surprise to you that if you don't come on 9 July you will be tried in your absence."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/31/lawsuit-against-greenpeace-raises-freedom-speech-concerns

In a 2017 report on SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), the former United Nations expert on freedom of assembly wrote that SLAPPs pose significant threats to the rights of activists to freedom of expression, of assembly, and of association. The UN expert raised particular concerns about the potential use of the US racketeering law at issue in the Resolute case, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), as a vehicle for abusive SLAPP suits. This is because RICO allows corporations to label advocacy groups as "criminal enterprises" and claim enormous amounts in damages.

Freedom of expression is a pillar of democracy. Countries should examine their laws and ensure that they do not facilitate the abuse and proliferation of SLAPP lawsuits. In the face of serious threats to our environment, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and chemical pollution, it is critical for environmental activists and groups to be able to organize and freely express themselves without the threat of baseless lawsuits.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180531/06500839947/icanns-pre-emptive-attack-gdpr-thrown-out-court-germany.shtml

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has only just started to be enforced, but it is already creating some seriously big waves in the online world, as Techdirt has reported. Most of those are playing out in obvious ways, such as Max Schrems's formal GDPR complaints against Google and Facebook over "forced consent" (pdf). That hardly came as a shock -- he's been flagging up the move on Twitter for some time. But there's another saga underway that may have escaped people's notice. It involves ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which runs the Internet's namespace. Back in 2015, Mike memorably described the organization as "a total freaking mess", in an article about ICANN's "war against basic privacy". Given that history, it's perhaps no surprise that ICANN is having trouble coming to terms with the GDPR. The bone of contention is the information that is collected by the world's registrars for the Whois system, run by ICANN. EPAG, a Tucows-owned registrar based in Bonn, Germany, is concerned that this personal data might fall foul of the GDPR, and thus expose it to massive fines. As it wrote in a recent blog post:

We realized that the domain name registration process, as outlined in ICANN's 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, not only required us to collect and share information we didn't need, it also required us to collect and share people's information where we may not have a legal basis to do so. What's more, it required us to process personal information belonging to people with whom we may not even have a direct relationship, namely the Admin and Tech contacts [for each domain name].

All of those activities are potentially illegal under the GDPR. EPAG therefore built a new domain registration system with "consent management processes", and a data flow "aligned with the GDPR's principles". ICANN was not happy with this minimalist approach, and sought an injunction in Germany in order to "preserve Whois data" -- that is, to force EPAG to collect those administrative and technical contacts.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

They Let Their 15-Year-Old Son Smoke Pot to Stop His Seizures. Georgia Took Him Away. (archive)

The pharmaceuticals weren't working. The 15-year-old boy was having several seizures per day, and his parents were concerned his life was in danger. So Suzeanna and Matthew Brill, of Macon, Ga., decided in February to let their son try smoking marijuana — and his seizures stopped for 71 days, they say.

The Brills' decision led to the boy, David, being taken away from his parents, who face possible fines and jail time after being charged with reckless conduct for giving him the drug. David has now been in a group home for 30 days, and his seizures have returned. He is separated from the service dog that sniffed out his seizures, and he is able to communicate with his parents only during short visitations and phone calls.

They maintain they made the right decision for their son's health, despite their current predicament. "Even with the ramifications with the law, I don't care," said Mr. Brill, his stepfather. "For 71 days he was able to ride a bike, go play, lift weights. We were able to achieve that with David medicated not from Big Pharma, but David medicated with marijuana."

The Brill parents were jailed on April 20, and posted bond on April 25.

Since The New York Times published the article, Twiggs County Sheriff Darren Mitchum has received media attention and threatening phone calls, one of which he played back for reporters at a press conference.

Original Submission