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takyon writes:

US House of Representatives passes bipartisan bill to fight opioid crisis

The measure, which passed 396 to 14, is the broadest of dozens of bills on the topic passed by the House over the past two weeks.

[...] Addiction advocates largely praise the measures as good steps forward, but say that much more work and funding is needed to tackle the issue's scale.

[...] The legislation, passed Friday, includes a range of measures to fight the epidemic, including lifting some limits on prescribing Buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid addiction. The bill also requires health-care professionals to write prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries electronically in order to better track prescriptions and to allow Medicare to cover treatment at addiction treatment clinics.

China says United States domestic opioid market the crux of crisis

China's drug control agency on Monday said the United States should do more to cut its demand for opioids to tackle the use of synthetic drug fentanyl, but it vowed to step up cooperation after Chinese production of the substance had been blamed for fuelling the U.S. opioid crisis.

[...] "China's drug control agencies, now and in the years to come, will place greater emphasis on drug control cooperation between China and the United States," Liu Yuejin, deputy head of China's National Narcotics Commission, told a news conference. "But I believe that to resolve this the more important issue is for the United States to strive to reduce and compress the great demand and drug consumption markets of opioids," he said. While China accepts that some new psychoactive substances, including fentanyl, manufactured in China are sold in the United States, the substances are not yet readily abused and trafficked in China itself, he said.

[...] Beijing has taken steps to crack down on the production and export of synthetic drugs, and has placed fentanyl and 22 other related compounds on its list of controlled substances.

See also: What's in the House's bills to address the opioid crisis — and what's not

It also remains unclear exactly how and when the Senate will craft its own legislation. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the legislation was a priority but acknowledged the Senate does not have a specific timeline for opioids legislation.

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takyon writes:

Without Facebook, Instagram Valued at $100 Billion

Did Facebook Inc. (FB) purchase Instagram for cheap? Recent valuations say so. A new estimate reveals that if Instagram were a standalone company, it would have been worth $100 billion today, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

The photo-sharing service recently hit 1 billion monthly active users, and the steadily increasing user base is expected to shoot revenue past $10 billion over the next 12 months. While parent company Facebook is reportedly losing younger audiences, its loss has been a boon to Instagram and other social media services including Snap Inc.'s (SNAP) Snapchat, owing to features that better appeal to younger people. (See also: Aging Facebook Losing Teens: Pew Research Survey.)

While Facebook continues to grow and has surpassed the 2.2 billion user milestone, Instagram is gaining new users at a rapid pace and is on course to get 2 billion users on its platform over the next five years, the study suggests. During the past year, Instagram contributed 10.6% to revenues at Facebook, per eMarketer data, while over the next year it is expected to account for around 16% of the parent company's revenue. Instagram's future growth may be accelerated by the recently launched IGTV, an iOS- and Android-supported app-based video hosting and sharing service that will compete head-on with Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL) YouTube service.

Also at BGR, The Mercury News, and Business Insider.

Related: Facebook/Instagram vs. Twitch and YouTube

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Register reports

Beating the unique identifiers that printers can add to documents for security purposes is possible: you just need to add extra dots beyond those that security tools already add. The trick is knowing where to add them.

[...] researchers from the Technical University of Dresden [...] Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe reckon they've cracked the challenge of knowing how to anonymise printed documents, and presented their work to the Association of Computer Machinery's 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security in Innsbruck, Austria [the week of June 22].

In this paper, the TU Dresden researchers explain that they tested 1,286 documents printed on machines from 18 manufacturers, creating an extraction algorithm to identify well-known dot-patterns--and at the same time, discovering four previously undiscovered patterns coding at 48, 64, 69, and 98 bits.

Identifying new patterns is important, from a privacy point of view, since as the authors points out, an activist in a dictatorship could easily be unmasked by their printer (unless they happen to use a Brother, Samsung, or Tektronix printer, none of which seemed to carry tracking codes, the researchers said).

[...] The group has published [a] toolkit that automates the obfuscation workflow, here.

Previous: "Printer Dot Sanitisation" Software Seeks to Cleanse Yellow-Dot Watermarks

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Watermarking has long been one of the tools used to track sources of pirated content so with the growth of live content streaming, it's becoming more important than ever. However, while broadcasters can use these marks to shut down infringing streams in a live situation, pirates are reportedly able to remove them using devices readily available on eBay.

[...] Since pirate streams are often captured from consumer decoders, a watermark denoting which subscriber account is being used can be embedded into the video. Once the mark is identified and matched with a customer device, the stream can be cut off at its source by the broadcaster. While it is possible to remove these codes, doing so isn’t always straightforward. Systems can place the watermark in any place at any time, meaning that some always slip through the net. However, others are more easily dealt with, as a report from security company Irdeto reveals.

“So-called ‘HashCode removal tools’ work in near real-time to strip away any kind of visual marks from a video feed. This ranges from unique fingerprints right down to the broadcaster’s on-screen logo that’s so familiar on many channels, both helping pirates to cover their tracks,” the company explains.

“These tools are so smart, they take a sample of the surrounding pixels and re-use them to replace the visual marks, so the viewer of the pirate stream barely notices any disturbance in the picture.”

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/live-tv-piracy-watermarking-defeated-by-devices-sold-on-ebay-180624/

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

TrueOS, once a FreeBSD distro, will change the focus of their project and become a full, separate fork. TrueOS was known especially for providing a nice FreeBSD desktop based on -CURRENT with the Lumina desktop environment and the ZFS file system by default. Now it is a full fork.

Essentially, TrueOs will become a downstream fork of FreeBSD. They will integrate newer software into the system, such as OpenRC and LibreSSL. They hope to stick to a 6-month release cycle.

From
It's FOSS : TrueOS Doesn't Want to Be 'BSD for Desktop' Anymore
FreeBSD News : TrueOS to become a fork of FreeBSD
TrueOS Blog : TrueOS to Focus on Core Operating System

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Remember the JWST? Yup:

NASA has again delayed the launch of its next-generation space observatory, known as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the space agency announced today. The telescope now has a new launch date of March 30th, 2021. It's the second delay to the project's timeline this year, and the third in the last nine months.

"We're all disappointed that the culmination of Webb and its launch is taking longer than expected, but we're creating something new here. We're dealing with cutting edge technology to perform an unprecedented mission, and I know that our teams are working hard and will successfully overcome the challenges," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a video statement. "In space we always have to look at the long term, and sometimes the complexities of our missions don't come together as soon as we wish. But we learn, we move ahead, and ultimately we succeed."

NASA pushed the launch of JWST, which is viewed as a more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, from 2019 to 2020 in March of this year. At the same time the space agency also convened an independent review board to assess the future of the project, which is running the risk of blowing by an $8 billion cost cap set by NASA in 2011. Going beyond that cost cap would mean that Congress has to reauthorize the program.

stormwyrm writes:

The BBC reports that a small outbreak of polio has been confirmed in Papua New Guinea, eighteen years after the disease was declared eradicated in the country.

"We are deeply concerned about this polio case in Papua New Guinea, and the fact that the virus is circulating," said Pascoe Kase, Papua New Guinea's heath secretary.

"Our immediate priority is to respond and prevent more children from being infected."

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the end of last week that the same virus that was found in the six-year-old boy was also found in samples taken from two healthy children in the same community, the WHO said. This means the virus is circulating in the community, representing an outbreak, it added. Immediate steps to stop the spread of the highly contagious disease include large-scale immunisation campaigns and strengthening surveillance systems that help detect it early.

Papua New Guinea has not had a case of wild poliovirus since 1996, and the country was certified as polio-free in 2000 along with the rest of the WHO Western Pacific Region.

Today, despite the outbreak, the disease remains endemic only in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where conspiracy theories about the vaccine (and not all of them are completely unfounded) hamper eradication efforts. Dr. Steven Novella has an article discussing the outbreak in more depth.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple, Samsung Resolve Smartphone Design Fight After 7 Years

Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. reached a settlement in their U.S. patent battle, ending a seven-year fight over smartphone designs that spanned the globe.

The string of lawsuits started in 2011 after Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder who died that year, threatened to go "thermonuclear" on rivals that used the Android operating system and accused Samsung of "slavishly" copying the iPhone design. The companies didn't disclose the terms of the accord and didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The ensuing litigation cost each company hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees and tested their reputations as innovators. Wednesday's settlement resolved the last outstanding dispute.

"The sumo wrestlers have tired of the wrestling match," said Paul Berghoff, a patent lawyer with McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff in Chicago who followed the cases over the years. "They both were tired and happy to stop paying the outside lawyers. We may never know who blinked first, who made the call."

Also at Axios.

Previously: Apple Wants to Ban Samsung Products - Again!
Four years later, Rounded Corners are Fair Game
Apple Wants Samsung to Cough Up $180M More in Patent Dispute
Supreme Court Says Samsung Doesn't Owe Apple $400 Million in Damages for Copying iPhone Look
Apple v. Samsung Proceeds to Fourth Jury Trial
Apple And Samsung Face Off In Court Over Design Patents Once Again

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

Congressional Democrats seeking to reinstate net neutrality rules are still 46 votes short of getting the measure through the House of Representatives.

The US Senate voted last month to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, with all members of the Democratic caucus and three Republicans voting in favor of net neutrality.

A discharge petition needs 218 signatures to force a House vote on the same net neutrality bill, and 218 votes would also be enough to pass the measure. So far, the petition has signatures from 172 representatives, all Democrats. That number hasn't changed in two weeks.

"We're 46 [signatures] away from being able to force a vote on the resolution to restore the Open Internet Order," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted yesterday.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/bill-to-save-net-neutrality-is-46-votes-short-in-us-house/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Stanford AI recreates chemistry's periodic table of elements

It took nearly a century of trial and error for human scientists to organize the periodic table of elements, arguably one of the greatest scientific achievements in chemistry, into its current form. A new artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by Stanford physicists accomplished the same feat in just a few hours.

Called Atom2Vec, the program successfully learned to distinguish between different atoms after analyzing a list of chemical compound names from an online database. The unsupervised AI then used concepts borrowed from the field of natural language processing – in particular, the idea that the properties of words can be understood by looking at other words surrounding them – to cluster the elements according to their chemical properties.

[...] Zhang and his group modeled Atom2Vec on an AI program that Google engineers created to parse natural language. Called Word2Vec, the language AI works by converting words into numerical codes, or vectors. By analyzing the vectors, the AI can estimate the probability of a word appearing in a text given the co-occurrence of other words.

[...] Zhang hopes that in the future, scientists can harness Atom2Vec's knowledge to discover and design new materials. "For this project, the AI program was unsupervised, but you could imagine giving it a goal and directing it to find, for example, a material that is highly efficient at converting sunlight to energy," Zhang said.

Wake me up when an AI discovers the Island of Stability.

Learning atoms for materials discovery (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1801181115) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Earth's first mission to a binary asteroid, for planetary defence

Planning for humankind's first mission to a binary asteroid system has entered its next engineering phase. ESA's proposed Hera mission would also be Europe's contribution to an ambitious planetary defence experiment.

Named for the Greek goddess of marriage, Hera would fly to the Didymos pair of Near-Earth asteroids: the 780 m-diameter mountain-sized main body is orbited by a 160 m moon, informally called 'Didymoon', about the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

[...] By the time Hera reaches Didymos, in 2026, Didymoon will have achieved historic significance: the first object in the Solar System to have its orbit shifted by human effort in a measurable way.

A NASA mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is due to collide with it in October 2022. The impact will lead to a change in the duration of Didymoon's orbit around the main body. Ground observatories all around the world will view the collision, but from a minimum distance of 11 million km away.

"Essential information will be missing following the DART impact – which is where Hera comes in," adds Ian. "Hera's close-up survey will give us the mass of Didymoon, the shape of the crater, as well as physical and dynamical properties of Didymoon.

65803 Didymos.

Also at Popular Mechanics.

Previously: NASA to Redirect an Asteroid's Moon With Kinetic Impact

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Saturn moon a step closer to hosting life

Scientists have found complex carbon-based molecules in the waters of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Compounds like this have only previously been found on Earth, and in some meteorites. They are thought to have formed in reactions between water and warm rock at the base of the moon's subsurface ocean.

Though not a sign of life, their presence suggests Enceladus could play host to living organisms. The discovery came from data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft.

Also at SwRI, ScienceAlert, Space.com, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and The Guardian.

Macromolecular organic compounds from the depths of Enceladus (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0246-4) (DX)

Related: Minerals In Plumes of Enceladus Indicate Hydrothermal Activity
Hydrogen Emitted by Enceladus, More Evidence of Plumes at Europa
Could a Dedicated Mission to Enceladus Detect Microbial Life There?
How the Cassini Mission Led a 'Paradigm Shift' in Search for Alien Life
Cassini Spacecraft Post-Mortem
Porous Core Could be Keeping Enceladus Warm
Yuri Milner Considering Privately Funded Mission to Enceladus
Organic Molecules Found on Ceres
NASA Finds Evidence of Water Plume on Europa
Organic Matter Found on Mars
Study Finds Evidence of More Organic Material on Ceres

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Version 7.0 of the SD standard finally raises the storage limit to above 2 TB, which was being rapidly approached by both full size SD cards (1 TB) and microSD cards (512 GB). It also adds an SD Express mode, which can raise speeds up to 985 MB/s, from a previous limit of 624 MB/s:

Soon you will be able to purchase new SD cards with the SD Version 7.0 specification. The new specification supports up to 985MB/s of throughput, which comes courtesy of PCIe and NVMe interfaces, and up to 128TB of capacity. That's quite the jump over the current 2TB limit.

985MB/s of throughput for a simple SD card may seem ludicrous, but higher-resolution video, VR, automotive use-cases, and IoT applications are steadily encroaching upon the performance limits of today's products.

[...] The specification has reserved space for new pins for future use, so it also provides room for forward progress (PDF). The specification also accommodates up to 1.8W of power consumption, which will help boost performance. The NVMe 1.3 protocol also brings several new features to SD cards, like Host Memory Buffer (HMB), which sets aside a small portion of system memory to boost performance, and Multi-Queue support, which improves performance during simultaneous file transfers.

Press release. Also at PetaPixel.

Previously: Western Digital Demos SD Card Using PCIe Gen 3 x1 Interface for 880 MB/s Read Speed

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Compressing your files is a good way to save space on your hard drive. At Dropbox's scale, it's not just a good idea; it is essential. Even a 1% improvement in compression efficiency can make a huge difference. That's why we conduct research into lossless compression algorithms that are highly tuned for certain classes of files and storage, like Lepton for jpeg images, and Pied-Piper-esque lossless video encoding. For other file types, Dropbox currently uses the zlib compression format, which saves almost 8% of disk storage.

We introduce DivANS, our latest open-source contribution to compression, in this blog post. DivANS is a new way of structuring compression programs to make them more open to innovation in the wider community, by separating compression into multiple stages that can each be improved independently:

Source: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/building-better-compression-together-with-divans/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Reality Winner pleads guilty to leaking NSA election hacking data

Reality Winner was expected to plead guilty to leaking NSA data, and she's done just that. The whistleblower has officially pleaded guilty to a charge of unlawful retention and dissemination of national defense information. Sentencing will have to wait, but the felony carries a maximum penalty of 63 months (5.25 years) with up to three years of supervised release.

Winner faced the charge after giving The Intercept NSA documents that showed Russia's military intelligence wing, the GRU, attempting to hijack the computers of 122 local election officials ahead of the 2016 American vote. The NSA had determined that Russia wanted to collect information about election-related hardware and software in what could have been a precursor to manipulating the vote itself.

Previously: Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia Document
Reality Winner NSA Leak Details Revealed by Court Transcript

Original Submission