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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Facebook is facing questions about data sharing with Apple, Amazon and other device makers.

Facebook may have violated a 2011 FTC consent degree by giving Apple, Samsung, BlackBerry and other device makers detailed access to user data, according to the New York Times. The social network struck partnerships with at least 60 device makers so that they could offer messaging, "Like" buttons and other features without the need for an app. However, an NYT reporter found that the BlackBerry Hub, for one, was able to glean private data from 556 of his friends, including their religious and political leanings and events they planned to attend.

It could also access other information, including unique identifiers, on 294,258 friends of his friends. The finding appears to fly in the face of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments to Congress in March, when he said that "every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own. You have complete control over who sees it and how you share it." Facebook started phasing out the program in April, but it's still in effect for many of the partners.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Trump has nominated Geoffrey Starks as the FCC's newest Commissioner, but little is known about his views.

It's now clear who will (likely) take FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn's seat now that she's stepping down. President Trump has signaled his intent to nominate Geoffrey Starks to fulfill the remainder of a five-year Commissioner term that began on June 30th, 2017, when Clyburn's stint officially ended. The transition will take place if and when the Senate confirms his appointment, although there's a good chance of that happening when Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer has backed the nomination. Just how this will shape the FCC's decisions remains murky, though.

Starks has been an assistant bureau chief at the FCC enforcement division for the past three years, and before then was a senior counsel for the Justice Department. He's the classic heads-down regulator, then. However, that's about all people know. It's not yet certain where he stands on net neutrality or the FCC's overall anti-regulatory stance under Chairman Ajit Pai.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/02/trump-nominates-geoffrey-starks-as-fcc-commissioner/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

A crucial vote is coming up later this month in the EU's move to change its copyright laws. The proposed plans included mandatory content filters and a so-called link tax to be paid by sites linking to other sites, articles 13 and 11 respectively. TorrentFreak writes about the current status of the legislation and of the deadline to fix or block the proposed EU copyright legislation is coming up quickly and time is running out to salvage the situation regarding rules which will drastically affect the Internet.

Earlier on SN
European Copyright Law Isn't Great. It Could Soon Get a Lot Worse
Censorship Machines Are Coming: It's Time for the Free Software Community to Use its Political Clout
Compromises on Copyright Maximalism are Clearly No Longer on the EU Agenda

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Researchers have used a computational neural network, a form of artificial intelligence, to 'learn' how a nanoparticle's structure affects the way it scatters light, based on thousands of examples. The approach may help physicists tackle research problems in ways that could be orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.

The innovation uses computational neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence, to "learn" how a nanoparticle's structure affects its behavior, in this case the way it scatters different colors of light, based on thousands of training examples. Then, having learned the relationship, the program can essentially be run backward to design a particle with a desired set of light-scattering properties -- a process called inverse design.

The findings are being reported in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by MIT senior John Peurifoy, research affiliate Yichen Shen, graduate student Li Jing, professor of physics Marin Soljacic, and five others.

While the approach could ultimately lead to practical applications, Soljacic says, the work is primarily of scientific interest as a way of predicting the physical properties of a variety of nanoengineered materials without requiring the computationally intensive simulation processes that are typically used to tackle such problems.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

Scientists have for the first time shown how a single molecule expressed in the brain affects how we learn new tasks and acquire new memories. The discovery has profound implications for understanding why some older people, including those living with dementia and those with neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's, struggle in remembering recent facts (short-term memory) and adapting to new tasks.

[...] The findings, published in the journal Neuron, are led by Dr Sonia A.L. Correa from the University of Bradford and Dr Angela M. Mabb from Georgia State University in the US and in collaboration with Dr Mark Wall from the University of Warwick. They mark an important breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms in the brain that control cognitive abilities. The team already knew the importance of the protein Arc in learning and memory. Arc is a key protein in enabling synaptic connections and is switched on during learning and, when no longer needed, switched off rapidly.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180531142654.htm

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

Car makers like Jaguar Land Rover and Peugeot have been accused of using special software to raise spare parts prices.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/04/car-makers-used-software-to-raise-spare-parts-prices/

Ever had the nagging suspicion that your car's manufacturer was charging outrageous prices for parts simply because it could? Software might be to blame. Reuters has obtained documents from a lawsuit indicating that Jaguar Land Rover, Peugeot, Renault and other automakers have been using Accenture software (Partneo) that recommended price increases for spare parts based on "perceived value." If a brand badge or other component looked expensive, Partneo would suggest raising the price up to a level that drivers would still be willing to pay. It would even distinguish parts based on whether or not there was "pricing supervision" over certain parts (say, from insurance companies or focused publications) to avoid sparking an outcry.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Collective gravity, not Planet Nine, may explain the orbits of 'detached objects'

Bumper car-like interactions at the edges of our solar system—and not a mysterious ninth planet—may explain the the dynamics of strange bodies called "detached objects," according to a new study. CU Boulder Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers have offered up a new theory for the existence of planetary oddities like Sedna—an icy minor planet that circles the sun at a distance of nearly 8 billion miles. Scientists have struggled to explain why Sedna and a handful of other bodies at that distance look separated from the rest of the solar system. [...] The researchers presented their findings today at a press briefing at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which runs from June 3-7 in Denver, Colorado.

[...] [Jacob] Fleisig had calculated that the orbits of icy objects beyond Neptune circle the sun like the hands of a clock. Some of those orbits, such as those belonging to asteroids, move like the minute hand, or relatively fast and in tandem. Others, the orbits of bigger objects like Sedna, move more slowly. They're the hour hand. Eventually, those hands meet. "You see a pileup of the orbits of smaller objects to one side of the sun," said Fleisig, who is the lead author of the new research. "These orbits crash into the bigger body, and what happens is those interactions will change its orbit from an oval shape to a more circular shape." In other words, Sedna's orbit goes from normal to detached, entirely because of those small-scale interactions.

Also at Popular Mechanics, where Planet Nine proposer Konstantin Batygin disputes the findings:

Batygin, of Caltech, tells Popular Mechanics that any sufficiently strong gravitational encounter could detach an object from Neptune's embrace, but for the distant small bodies of the Kuiper belt to have done so through "self-gravity"—as the CU model proposes—there would need to be about five to ten times the mass of Earth in the outer parts of the Kuiper belt. There isn't.

"Unfortunately, the self-gravity story suffers from the following complications," Batygin says. "Both observational and theoretical estimates place the total mass of the Kuiper belt at a value significantly smaller than that of the Earth [only 1 to 10 percent Earth's mass]. As a consequence, Kuiper belt objects generally behave like test-particles enslaved by Neptune's gravitational pull, rather than a self-interacting group of planetoids."

Planet Nine.

Related: Planet Nine's Existence Disfavoured by New Data
Medieval Records Could Point the Way to Planet Nine
Another Trans-Neptunian Object With a High Orbital Inclination Points to Planet Nine
Outer Solar System Origins Survey Discovers Over 800 Trans-Neptunian Objects
LSST Could be the Key to Finding New Planets in Our Solar System

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NVIDIA wants to power intelligent robots with Jetson Xavier

NVIDIA is hoping to play a bigger role in the future of robotics with its Isaac platform, powered by the new Jetson Xavier system-on-a-chip. If that name sounds familiar, it's because it's relying on the same the processor from the Xavier Drive self-driving SOC. The Xavier is over twenty times faster than the existing Jetson TX2 platform, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed at Computex today. While that last SoC was useful for products like delivery robots and drones, Huang is calling the Xavier the "world's first computer for intelligent robots."

Under the hood, Jetson Xavier has six different processors: An octa-core Arm CPU; a Volta Tensor Core GPU; two NVDLA deep learning chips, as well as vision, video and image processors. Xavier is capable of 30 trillion operations per second, and it sports over 9 billion transistors. Just like with self-driving cars, all of that horsepower will help with things like sensor processing and computer vision. After all, a robot won't be truly intelligent until it can easily maneuver through any environment and naturally interact with humans and other machines.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that new GeForce GPUs will not launch until "a long time from now".

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

Among all of the announcements by Apple at 2018 Worldwide Developers Conference today, comes the tidbit that OpenGL will be deprecated in macOS 10.14. The deprecation of OpenGL on Macs has potential implications for Linux gaming.

With news doing the rounds about the latest update to macOS, it turns out they're finally admitting they're doing nothing with their support of OpenGL and it's to be deprecated.

[...]

Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.

[...] However, this could have a big impact on Linux gaming, for better or worse. It could lead to developers either dropping Mac support due to the small market share and not being worth having to learn another (closed) API, or it could mean them dropping OpenGL in favour of Metal and not doing Linux version for the smaller again market share.

So far it's not looking good for Apple as many of the few Macintosh video game developers are raging on Twitter about this decision.

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

Netmarketshare reports that Mozilla Firefox's share of the desktop and notebook computer web browser market has fallen below ten percent.

Firefox had a market share of 12.63% in June 2017 according to Netmarketshare and even managed to rise above the 13% mark in 2017 before its share fell to 9.92% in May 2018.

Google Chrome, Firefox's biggest rival in the browser world, managed to increase its massive lead from 60.08% in June 2017 to 62.85% in May 2018.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer dropped a percent point to 11.82% in May 2018 and Microsoft's Edge browser gained less than 0.50% to 4.26% over the year.

[...] Netmarketshare collects usage stats and does not get "real" numbers from companies like Mozilla, Google or Microsoft. The company monitors the use of browsers on a subset of Internet sites and creates the market share reports using the data it collects.

While that is certainly good enough for trends if the number of monitored user interactions is high enough, it is not completely accurate and real-world values can be different based on a number of factors. While it is unlikely that they differ a lot, it is certainly possible that the share is different to the one reported by the company.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Monsanto, a brand name activists love to hate, will disappear as Bayer takes over:

These days Monsanto is shorthand for, as NPR's Dan Charles has put it, "lots of things that some people love to hate": Genetically modified crops, which Monsanto invented. Seed patents, which Monsanto has fought to defend. Herbicides such as Monsanto's Roundup, which protesters have sharply criticized for its possible health risks. Big agriculture in general, of which Monsanto was the reviled figurehead.

And soon Monsanto will be no more. Bayer, the German pharmaceutical giant and pesticide powerhouse, announced in 2016 it would be buying Monsanto in an all-cash deal for more than $60 billion. Now, as the merger approaches, Bayer has confirmed what many suspected: In the merger, the politically charged name "Monsanto" will be disappearing. The combined company will be known simply as Bayer, while product names will remain the same. The move is not exactly a surprise — it makes sense that Bayer might want to weed out some of the intense negative associations associated with the Monsanto brand. In a way, it's an indication of how successful anti-Monsanto protesters have been in shaping public perception.

In the company's latest statement, Bayer implicitly acknowledged how hostile debates over genetically modified crops and other agricultural products have become. "We aim to deepen our dialogue with society. We will listen to our critics and work together where we find common ground," the chairman of Bayer's board of management, Werner Baumann, said in the statement. "Agriculture is too important to allow ideological differences to bring progress to a standstill. We have to talk to each other. We need to listen to each other. It's the only way to build bridges."

Also at Reuters.

Previously: Bayer AG Offers to Buy Monsanto
Bayer Purchases Monsanto for Around $66 Billion

Roundup: Monsanto Ordered to Pay $93M to Small Town for Poisoning Citizens
RoundUp Glyphosate Found to Cause Kidney Failure and Elude Tests
Cancer Hazard vs. Risk - Glyphosate
Use of Dicamba-Resistant Monsanto Crops Leads to Soybean Death
GMO Grass That 'Escaped' Defies Eradication, Divides Grass Seed Industry
Glyphosate Linked to Liver Damage

Original Submission   Alternate Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

UAV aircraft provide new insights into the formation of the smallest particles in Arctic

Investigations of the atmosphere by means of unmanned mini-airplanes can contribute significantly to the investigation of the causes of Arctic climate change, as they provide an insight into ground-level air layers that are not monitored by other measuring stations.

This is the conclusion drawn by a German research team from current measurements that have just taken place on Spitsbergen. It was possible to observe the formation of new particles in the air, which can later evolve to clouds and have an influence on climate change. It is still not understood in detail why the Arctic is warming more than twice as strong as other regions of the earth. The measurement campaign on Spitsbergen, which will run until the end of May, was the first joint deployment of mini research aircraft developed in Germany in a polar region.

Airborne observations of newly formed boundary layer aerosol particles under cloudy conditions (open, DOI: 10.5194/acp-2017-1133) (DX)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TSA Has Been Compiling A Shitlist Of Travelers It Just Doesn't Like

The TSA is the worst. Super-secret watchlists can keep people from flying -- people deemed too dangerous to travel but not dangerous enough to arrest. This isn't the TSA's fault. Not these lists. Those are maintained by agencies who could possibly cobble together enough intel to build a flimsy case against these "dangerous" would-be travelers.

The TSA, however, maintains its own database of travelers. It can't necessarily keep them from boarding airplanes, but it can give agents a heads up that the person in the queue probably needs to be detained and hassled. [via Boing Boing]

[...] It's an agency shitlist, and only the TSA knows who's on it. This list doesn't contain people who've actually assaulted agents, but people who've expressed their displeasure with intrusive gropings through words or non-violent deeds. The agency's official statements make it clear this is an arbitrary way to punish travelers who make agents unhappy, noting that it neither requires "injury" to a TSA employee nor the intent to do so. Instead, the list contains anyone who presents a "challenge" to the "safe and effective completion of screening."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

An evolutionary adaptation that doesn't directly rely on new mutations - Blind cave fish harnessed an epigenetic system to shut down eye development

Mexican tetra swam from surface waters into their caves around 1.5 million years ago. Like naked mole rats—another species that lives underground, in perennial darkness—they have no eyes. But whereas key genes controlling eye development in naked mole rats have mutations that inactivate them, there are no such inactivating mutations in the genes of the Mexican cave fish.

But mutations aren't the only way to change gene activity, and new research suggests a different explanation for the fish's lack of eyes. Epigenetic regulation is a means of controlling gene activity that does not alter the DNA sequence of the genes themselves. Genes undergoing epigenetic regulation can still make normal proteins, but the amount of the protein they make is modulated.

One method of epigenetic regulation is the addition of methyl groups to the DNA that controls the activity of specific genes. It is efficient, since it can be used to alter a whole bunch of genes at once. And it seems to explain the Mexican cave fish eye degeneration that has occurred over the past million years—a proverbial blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

An epigenetic mechanism for cavefish eye degeneration (DOI: 10.1038/s41559-018-0569-4) (DX)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

On the 29th anniversary of the crackdown in Beijing, protesters are reenacting the historic face-off between a lone man and a Chinese tank. [...] Better known as “Tank Man”, he is one of the most enduring images of China’s violent military crackdown on democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, known in China as liusi, or June 4th.

On the 29th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, protesters are reenacting the face-off under hashtags including #Tankman2018, #Tankmen2018, a campaign started by Chinese artist and cartoonist, Badiucao. According to Badiucao, Tank Man represents “something lost in China’s young generation now — the idealism, passion, sense of responsibility, and confidence that an individual can make a change”, he said. “Tank Man is very relevant today and people should see it. Society has not changed much since the massacre for the oppression has never stopped”.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/04/tankman2018-hero-of-tiananmen-protest-remembered-across-globe

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8093

New Machine Learning Approach Could Accelerate Bioengineering

Scientists from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to use machine learning to dramatically accelerate the design of microbes that produce biofuel.

Their computer algorithm starts with abundant data about the proteins and metabolites in a biofuel-producing microbial pathway, but no information about how the pathway actually works. It then uses data from previous experiments to learn how the pathway will behave. The scientists used the technique to automatically predict the amount of biofuel produced by pathways that have been added to E. coli bacterial cells.

The new approach is much faster than the current way to predict the behavior of pathways, and promises to speed up the development of biomolecules for many applications in addition to commercially viable biofuels, such as drugs that fight antibiotic-resistant infections and crops that withstand drought.

A machine learning approach to predict metabolic pathway dynamics from time-series multiomics data (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41540-018-0054-3) (DX)

Original Submission