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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Surely our readers are well aware of all the downsides of owning an airplane. Certainly the cost of fuel is a big one. Birds are a problem, probably. That bill from the traveling propeller sharpener is a killer too...right? Alright fine, we admit it, nobody here at Hackaday owns an airplane. But probably neither do most of you; so don't look so smug, pal.

But if you did own a plane, or at least work at a small airport, you’d know that moving the things around on the ground is kind of a hassle. Smaller planes can be pulled by hand, but once they get up to a certain size you’ll want some kind of vehicle to help out. [Anthony DiPilato] wanted a way to move around a roughly 5,200 pound Cessna 310, and decided that all the commercial options were too expensive. So he built his own Arduino powered tank to muscle the airplane around the tarmac (if site is down try Google cache), and his journey from idea to finished product is absolutely fascinating to see.

So the idea here is pretty simple. A little metal cart equipped with two beefy motors, an Arduino Mega, a pair of motor controllers, and a HC-08 Bluetooth module so you can control it from your phone. How hard could it be, right? Well, it turns out combining all those raw components into a little machine that's strong enough to tow a full-scale aircraft takes some trial and error.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/06/19/an-arduino-powered-tank-built-to-pull-planes/

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

AlterNet reports

When Republicans in Congress passed a big, fat tax break bill in December, they insisted it meant American workers would be singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" all the way to the bank. The payoff from the tax cut would be raises totaling $4,000 to $9,000, the President's Council of Economic Advisers assured workers. But something bad happened to workers on their way to the repository. They never got that money.

In fact, their real wages declined because of higher inflation. At the same time, the amount workers had to pay in interest on loans for cars and credit cards increased. And, to top it off, Republicans threatened to make workers pay for the tax break with cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So now, workers across America are wondering, "Where's that raise?". It's nowhere to be found.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that wages for production and nonsupervisory workers decreased by 0.1 percent from May 2017 to May 2018 when inflation is factored in. The compensation for all workers together, including supervisors, rose an underwhelming 0.1 percent from April 2018 to May 2018.

That's not what congressional Republicans promised workers. They said corporations, which got the biggest, fattest tax cuts of all, would use that extra money to increase wages. Some workers got one-time bonuses and an even smaller number received raises. But not many. The group Americans for Tax Fairness estimates it's 4.3 percent of all U.S. workers.

The New York Times story about this record breaker describes the phenomena this way: "Companies buy back their shares when they believe they have nothing better to do with their money than to return capital to shareholders." So despite promises from the GOP and the President's Council of Economic Advisers, corporations believed further enriching their own executives and shareholders was a much better way to use the money than increasing workers' wages--wages that have been stagnant for decades.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HPE is building the world's first petascale supercomputer powered by ARM processors. It will reach 2.3 petaflops of peak performance:

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 18, 2018 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced its collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to deliver the world's largest Arm supercomputer. As part of the Vanguard program, Astra, the new Arm-based system, will be used by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to run advanced modeling and simulation workloads for addressing areas such as national security, energy and science.

[...] Astra will be deployed at Sandia National Laboratories and will run on the HPE Apollo 70. This purpose-built HPC platform is based on the Cavium ThunderX2 Arm processor. Astra is comprised of over 145,000 cores in 2,592 dual-processor servers and offers greater density with four compute nodes in a 2U form factor.

The supercomputer will draw 1.2 MW, giving a possible efficiency of 1.92 gigaflops per Watt. That's only good enough to put it around #131 on the November 2017 Green500 list (the top 5 systems exceed 14 gigaflops per Watt).

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Verizon and AT&T have promised to stop selling their mobile customers' location information to third-party data brokers following a security problem that leaked the real-time location of US cell phone users. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently urged all four major carriers to stop the practice, and today he published responses he received from Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint. Wyden's statement praised Verizon for "taking quick action to protect its customers' privacy and security," but he criticized the other carriers for not making the same promise.

"After my investigation and follow-up reports revealed that middlemen are selling Americans' location to the highest bidder without their consent or making it available on insecure Web portals, Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off," Wyden said. "In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint seem content to continuing to sell their customers' private information to these shady middle men, Americans' privacy be damned."

AT&T changed its stance shortly after Wyden's statement. "Our top priority is to protect our customers' information, and, to that end, we will be ending our work with aggregators for these services as soon as practical in a way that preserves important, potential lifesaving services like emergency roadside assistance," AT&T said in a statement to Ars.

Sen. Wyden recognized AT&T's change on Twitter and called on T-Mobile and Sprint to follow suit.

[...] Sprint announced that it is changing their data sharing practices about two hours after the Ars story published. "Sprint is beginning the process of terminating its current contracts with data aggregators to whom we provide location data," Sprint told Ars. "This will take some time in order to unwind services to consumers, such as roadside assistance and fraud prevention services." Sprint said that it previously "suspended all data sharing" with LocationSmart, a data broker involved in the controversy. Sprint said that it stopped providing data to LocationSmart on May 25.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-will-stop-selling-your-phones-location-to-data-brokers/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Surgeon Atul Gawande selected as CEO of new health care company from Amazon, partners

Dr. Atul Gawande — the prominent physician, prolific writer, and all-around health care celebrity — will become the chief executive of the new health care company launched by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, the three companies announced Wednesday.

Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who teaches at Harvard's medical and public health schools, will take charge of the new organization July 9. In a note sent to friends and colleagues, Gawande said that he is not giving up his positions at Harvard or the Brigham and that he will keep writing, including for the New Yorker. But he said he will transition from being executive director to chairman of Ariadne Labs, which works on solving problems in health systems around the world.

The new company will be based in Boston.

[...] Not much has been revealed about the new health care enterprise from the three corporate giants; in the release Wednesday, it doesn't even have a name. The new organization is meant to come up with ways to address the health care costs for the companies' employees, though its founders have indicated they hope that it comes up with solutions that could be spread across the entire U.S. health system.

Also at CNBC and TechCrunch.

Previously: Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase to Offer Their Own Health Care to U.S. Employees

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich, has resigned because of a "a violation of Intel's non-fraternisation policy". The BBC reports:

Chipmaker Intel has announced that its chief executive, Brian Krzanich, is stepping down with immediate effect because of "a violation of Intel's non-fraternisation policy".

[...] Intel said an inquiry had revealed that Mr Krzanich had had a consensual relationship with an Intel employee, which was against company rules.

His successor has been named as Robert Swan, currently the company's chief financial officer.

The company said the relevant policy applied to all managers.

"Given the expectation that all employees will respect Intel's values and adhere to the company's code of conduct, the board has accepted Mr Krzanich's resignation."

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Wave Computing today announced that it has acquired MIPS Tech, Inc. (formerly MIPS Technologies), a global leader in RISC processor Intellectual Property (IP) and licensable CPU cores. The acquisition will accelerate Wave's strategy of offering AI acceleration from the Datacenter to the Edge of Cloud by extending the company's products beyond AI systems to now also include AI-enabled embedded solutions.

[...] For example, Datacenter-centric AI applications today need many weeks to train using coprocessors such as GPUs, only to require a different architecture for inferencing at the Edge. The lack of a common AI platform, from Datacenter to Edge, slows market growth and reduces productivity of data scientists in fields such as autonomously driven vehicles, IoT sensors and more.

[...] "Wave's integration of two industry-leading compute architectures in a single data plane/control plane solution – Dataflow and Von Neumann – will be truly unique and an industry-first. It will fuel new, ground-breaking innovations in AI and other fields."

MIPS architecture.

Source: Wave Computing Acquires MIPS Technologies

Related: Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Wave Computing and Others Adopt 64-Bit MIPS Cores

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Malicious hackers are mass exploiting a critical vulnerability in D-Link DSL routers in an attempt to make them part of Satori, the potent Internet-of-things botnet that is used to take down websites and mine digital coins, researchers said.

[...] Over the past five days, researchers said, Satori has started mass exploiting a critical vulnerability in the D-Link DSL 2750B, a combination router and DSL modem that's used by subscribers of Verizon and other ISPs. Attack code exploiting the two-year-old remote code-execution vulnerability was published last month, although Satori's customized payload delivers a worm. That means infections can spread from device to device with no end-user interaction required. D-Link's website doesn't show a patch being available for the unindexed vulnerability, and D-Link representatives didn't respond to an email seeking comment for this post.

[...] It's not immediately clear what people with a vulnerable D-Link device can do to protect themselves from these attacks. Ars has asked both D-Link and Radware to provide guidance. In the meantime, people using one should strongly consider replacing it.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/widely-used-d-link-modemrouter-under-mass-attack-by-potent-iot-botnet/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Adobe unveils improved Adobe Scan app, new Office 365 integrations

Adobe today announced a slew of updates and integrations across Adobe Document Cloud, its suite of cloud-based apps for converting and processing PDFs. The company's free document scanning app for Android and iOS, Adobe Scan, is getting some improvements thanks to machine learning. Adobe Sign, its electronic signature service, is now deeply integrated with Microsoft Dynamics and offers access to LinkedIn customer details, plus a self-service tool for fielding GDPR requests. And starting this week, enterprise and team Acrobat DC users who subscribe to Office 365 can create PDFs from the ribbon menu in the web-based versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and SharePoint.

[...] In September 2017, Microsoft partnered with Adobe to make Adobe Sign the "preferred e-signature solution" for its customers. Expanding on that collaboration, Sign and Adobe PDF are gaining new integrations with Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365.

Specifically, Microsoft Dynamics customers can now pull customer data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and embed Adobe Sign into Dynamics workflows. In addition, Adobe Sign has been granted authorization from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), an assessment and authorization program to which U.S. federal agencies must adhere, and includes a privacy administrator role that includes the aforementioned GDPR request tool.

On the Office 365 side of things, new shortcuts in the ribbon of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint web apps allow you to convert documents into PDFs with optional password protection. Adobe PDF archiving, conversion, and distribution tools are also now available from within OneDrive and SharePoint.

Also at The Verge and PCWorld.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Canada becomes second nation in the world to legalize marijuana

Recreational marijuana use will soon be legal in Canada after the Senate passed a "historic" bill on Tuesday with a vote of 52-29. Canada is only the second country in the world -- and the first G7 nation -- to implement legislation to permit a nationwide marijuana market. In the neighboring US, nine states and the District of Columbia now allow for recreational marijuana use, and 30 allow for medical use.

Bill C-45, otherwise known as the Cannabis Act, stems from a campaign pledge of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to keep marijuana away from underage users and reduce related crime. The act to legalize the recreational use of weed was first introduced on April 13, 2017, and was later passed at the House of Commons in November. The Senate passage of the bill was the final hurdle in the process.

Uruguay was the first country to legalize marijuana's production, sale and consumption in December 2013.

Also at CBC, BBC, NPR, Reuters, and The Guardian.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA's Space Launch System: Rocketing Towards Cancellation?

The National Space Society recently held a conference in Los Angeles, and SLS was apparently a hot topic at the gathering. Over the course of four days of mingling with space industry muckety-mucks, Politico Space reports it heard multiple rumblings that bode ill for the Space Launch System money-pot.

For one thing, SLS has been marketed as key to NASA's efforts to eventually put astronauts on Mars. But as Politico reports, attendees at the conference expressed doubts as to "the wisdom or efficacy of a crewed mission to Mars in the next decade." California Republican and House space subcommittee member Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, for one, criticized the technology as too immature to support a manned Mars mission, saying "I think all this talk about going to Mars has been premature," and warning that NASA won't actually be ready to conduct a manned Mars mission before "20 years from now, maybe more."

Astronaut Chris Hadfield says the rockets from NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin won't take people to Mars

[Chris] Hadfield, who's now retired, shares his expertise about rockets, spaceships, spacewalking, and Mars exploration in a new web course on the online platform MasterClass. To follow up on those lessons, we asked Hadfield what he thinks about the future rocket ships of three major players in the new space race: NASA's Space Launch System, SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket, and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

[...] "Personally, I don't think any of those three rockets is taking people to Mars," Hadfield told Business Insider. " I don't think those are a practical way to send people to Mars because they're dangerous and it takes too long."

Response to Hadfield's remarks: SpaceX BFR can be used for massive space development, orbital, lunar and Mars colonization

takyon writes:

New technique could help scientists create a gene in just 1 day

Creating a new gene in a single day could soon be possible, thanks to a new technique that mimics the way the body copies its own DNA. Though the technology needs to clear a few more hurdles, it could one day let researchers speedily rewrite microbe genes, enabling them to synthesize new medicines and fuels on the fly.

[...] Church says the new approach is not quite ready to dethrone conventional DNA synthesis. So far, the group has made oligos only 10 bases long. And there are still a few writing problems, as the approach was only 98% accurate at writing DNA in the desired sequence, below the 99% accuracy of the traditional approach. "It's cool for a first demonstration," Palluk says. "But it's not quite there yet."

In order to write oligos up to 1000 bases long, the approach will likely need to be 99.9% accurate. If it gets there, Church says it could help revolutionize not just synthetic biology's efforts to write and test new genes, but also enable efforts to write massive libraries of data in DNA to create a compact archive the firehoses of information coming from giant science projects such as astronomy surveys, which could then be fished out and read out later.

Also at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

De novo DNA synthesis using polymerase-nucleotide conjugates (DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4173) (DX)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The time has come for Apple to pay for the infamous Error 53 that bricked iPhones and iPads taken to a third party for repairs.

The Federal Court of Australia announced Monday its order for Apple to pay AU$9 million (around US $6.8 million converted) for telling customers who encountered the error they weren't entitled to a refund.

The error was first reported in 2016. If you fixed a cracked screen or a failing Touch ID-enabled home button through a third party not licensed by Apple, "security checks" would render your iPhone or iPad unusable, showing only the message "Error 53".

Apple explained the message as a security measure to protect the iPhone's fingerprint sensor from exploitation. It released an iOS 9.2.1 update later that February to restore bricked devices, but reports showed it did not re-enable Touch ID and customers complained they still lost photos, documents and apps.

In April 2017, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced a legal battle with Apple in the Federal Court of Australia. It said Apple violated customers' rights under Australian Consumer Law to repairs for devices bricked by Error 53.

Then, in June 2017, the ACCC conducted an undercover operation involving 13 calls with Apple retailers in Australia, in which Apple representatives allegedly said Apple did not have responsibility to remedy faulty iPhones repaired by an unauthorised third party.

Apple has since admitted that from February 2015 to February 2016, its US website and Apple staff in Australian stores and on customer service phone calls said to 275 Australian customers affected by Error 53 it wasn't responsible for a remedy.

But according to Australian Consumer Law, that's not on.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

The UK National Museum of Computing will open its new Bombe gallery this weekend at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes after a successful crowdfunding campaign to put the WWII code-breaking machines on display.

"We even hope to have a Colossus operator veteran present so that they can exchange notes – something they could never do during the war!" said the museum in a statement.

The Bombe was developed as part of Britain's efforts to break Nazi Germany's military ciphers and intercept war plans. Cryptologists used the electro-mechanical machines to speed up their deciphering of Germany's Enigma messages.

"Visitors will be able to see the world-famous Bombe reconstruction in action and learn how it broke Enigma messages – and compare it to the acclaimed working Colossus reconstruction and discover how it was the key to breaking Lorenz messages," the museum added.

[...] Saturday, 23 June, the day that the Bombe gallery opens to the public, is also Alan Turing's 106th birthday. Wartime re-enactors "will bring the history alive and give a sense of the wartime atmosphere" on the day, while families are encouraged to enjoy a cream tea and some retro computer games.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/19/tnmoc_bombe_gallery_opening/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, today announced the release of the 2017 edition of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS), building upon 15 years of projecting technology needs for evolving the semiconductor and computer industries. The IRDS is an IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Industry Connections (IC) Program sponsored by the IEEE Rebooting Computing (IEEE RC) Initiative, which has taken a lead in building a comprehensive view of the devices, components, systems, architecture, and software that comprise the global computing ecosystem.

According to Paolo A. Gargini, IEEE and Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP) Fellow, and Chairman of IRDS, "Over the past decade the structure and requirements of the electronics industry have evolved well beyond the semiconductor's industry requirements. In line with the changes in the new electronics ecosystem, the 2017 IRDS has integrated system requirements with device requirements and identified some new powerful solutions that will support and revolutionize the electronics industry for the next 15 years."

According to William Tonti, IEEE Fellow and IEEE Future Directions Sr. Director, "The IRDS presents an end-to-end continuum of computing as requirements evolve into multiple platforms."

Source: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/ieee-releases-the-international-roadmap-for-devices-and-systems-irds/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

IBM researchers use analog memory to train deep neural networks faster and more efficiently

Deep neural networks normally require fast, powerful graphical processing unit (GPU) hardware accelerators to support the needed high speed and computational accuracy — such as the GPU devices used in the just-announced Summit supercomputer. But GPUs are highly energy-intensive, making their use expensive and limiting their future growth, the researchers explain in a recent paper published in Nature.

Instead, the IBM researchers used large arrays of non-volatile analog memory devices (which use continuously variable signals rather than binary 0s and 1s) to perform computations. Those arrays allowed the researchers to create, in hardware, the same scale and precision of AI calculations that are achieved by more energy-intensive systems in software, but running hundreds of times faster and at hundreds of times lower power — without sacrificing the ability to create deep learning systems.

The trick was to replace conventional von Neumann architecture, which is "constrained by the time and energy spent moving data back and forth between the memory and the processor (the 'von Neumann bottleneck')," the researchers explain in the paper. "By contrast, in a non-von Neumann scheme, computing is done at the location of the data [in memory], with the strengths of the synaptic connections (the 'weights') stored and adjusted directly in memory.

Equivalent-accuracy accelerated neural-network training using analogue memory (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0180-5) (DX)

Original Submission