SoylentNews

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Four academics from the Technical University in Dresden, Germany (TU Dresden) have created an app that detects and masks the hidden dot patterns that laser color printers secretly hide on all printed documents.

[...] In a press release published two weeks ago, the TU Dresden researchers said they created and released DEDA to ensure that citizens have full freedom of speech.

Their reasons are tied to the fact that while hidden printer dots pose no inconvenience to regular users, they are a danger for whistleblowers, persons who sometimes leak crucial documents revealing appalling abuses of power.

Source: App Masks Hidden Printer Tracking Dots to Keep Whistleblowers Safe

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The World Health Organization has proposed a behavioral addiction pathology for excessive video-game playing but not for the equivalent obsessiveness applied to smartphones. Maybe the problem is in the economy and industry lobbying more than the mind.

Forget the choice between gaming disorder and smartphone disorder, maybe it's productive to think of both, in part at least, as an invitation to pursue better consumer rights and protections rather than to proliferate more mental disorders. But the nuance of socioeconomics can't hold a candle to the terror of morbidity. To observe that gaming (or tech, or work, or tanning) has some concerning transactional issues isn't as sexy as saying that gaming is going to suck your children in to the maw of imminent harm. "Mental illness sounds scarier than consumer protections," Ferguson laments. "But people want scary."

From The Atlantic : Why Is There a 'Gaming Disorder' But No 'Smartphone Disorder?'

Earlier on SN :
World Health Organization Officially Lists "Gaming Disorder" in ICD (2018)
World Health Organization Will Recognize "Gaming Disorder" (2017)
Wired for Gaming: Brain Differences in Compulsive Video Game Players (2016)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Europe's biggest research fund cracks down on 'ethics dumping': The practice of conducting ethically dubious research in foreign countries is under fresh scrutiny.

Ethics dumping — doing research deemed unethical in a scientist's home country in a foreign setting with laxer ethical rules — will be rooted out in research funded by the European Union, officials announced last week.

Applications to the EU's €80-billion (US$93-billion) Horizon 2020 research fund will face fresh levels of scrutiny to make sure that research practices deemed unethical in Europe are not exported to other parts of the world. Wolfgang Burtscher, the European Commission's deputy director-general for research, made the announcement at the European Parliament in Brussels on 29 June.

Burtscher said that a new code of conduct developed to curb ethics dumping will soon be applied to all EU-funded research projects. That means applicants will be referred to the code when they submit their proposals, and ethics committees will use the document when considering grant applications.

Isidoros Karatzas, whose office is in charge of ethics review in the European Commission, calls ethics dumping "a real threat to the quality of science" and compares it to research misconduct. "What is important is that it does not take place, and that our researchers have the knowledge and awareness not to allow it to happen," he adds.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Cory Doctorow has written a column in which he analyzes the motives for Facebook as an example of surveillance capitalism. With the enormous trove of personal data — both raw and interpreted — whole populations can be used for blackmail, identity theft, and political manipulation. The profit margins are small however and he likens the process to recovering oil from used, oily rags.

It's as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he'd been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world's garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.

[...] That's because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

[...] Facebook doesn't have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn't convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

From Locus : Cory Doctorow: Zuck's Empire of Oily Rags

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Surrey makes breakthrough in perovskite solar cell technology

Perovskite based cells are widely viewed as the next generation of solar cells, offering similar power conversion efficiency (PCE) performance, but at a much lower cost than the market dominant crystalline silicon based solar cells.

In a study published by Science [DOI: 10.1126/science.aap9282] [DX], a team of researchers from Peking University and the Universities of Surrey, Oxford and Cambridge detail a new way to reduce an unwanted process called non-radiative recombination, where energy and efficiency is lost in perovskite solar cells.

The team created a technique called Solution-Process Secondary growth (SSG) which increased the voltage of inverted perovskite solar cells by 100 millivolts, reaching a high of 1.21 volts without compromising the quality of the solar cell or the electrical current flowing through a device. They tested the technique on a device which recorded a PCE of 20.9 per cent, the highest certified PCE for inverted perovskite solar cells ever recorded.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Kim Dotcom loses latest appeal against US extradition

Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has lost his latest court battle against extradition from New Zealand to the US. New Zealand's Court of Appeal upheld the decision that Mr Dotcom and three others can be extradited to stand trial for copyright infringement and fraud. The charges are related to Mr Dotcom's now defunct file-sharing website Megaupload, which allowed millions of people to download digital content.

Mr Dotcom and his co-accused have consistently denied the US charges. It is now up to New Zealand's Justice Minister Andrew Little to decide whether extradition should take place.

Mr Dotcom and his co-accused have one final legal option. "We will seek review with the NZ Supreme Court," his lawyer Ira Rothken tweeted.

Also at Ars Technica and NYT.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Workers are choosing to leave their jobs at the fastest rate since the internet boom 17 years ago and getting rewarded for it with bigger paychecks and/or more satisfying work.

Labor Department data show that 3.4 million Americans quit their jobs in April, near a 2001 peak and twice the 1.7 million who were laid off from jobs in April.

Job-hopping is happening across industries including retail, food service and construction, a sign of broad-based labor-market dynamism.

Workers have been made more confident by a strong economy and historically low unemployment, at 3.8% in May, the lowest since 2000. Ms. Enoch started getting interview opportunities the same day she began sending out applications online.

The trend could stoke broader wage growth and improve worker productivity, which have been sluggish in the past decade. Workers tend to get their biggest wage increases when they move from one job to another. Job-switchers saw roughly 30% larger annual pay increases in May than those who stayed put over the past 12 months, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

[...] The resurgence of job-hopping is particularly helpful for younger workers looking for footholds to launch their careers, said Erika McEntarfer, an economist at the Census Bureau. About 6.5% of workers under age 35 changed jobs in the first quarter of last year, versus 3.1% of those ages 35 to 54, according to census data.

"The people who are changing jobs, they skew young and they skew being placed in what you might call bad jobs, where the average pay is quite low relative to other jobs in the economy," Ms. McEntarfer said. Job-hopping could lead them into higher-paying industries, she said.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-this-economy-quitters-are-winning-1530702001

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The European Parliament has voted against a controversial proposed new copyright law that critics warned could imperil a free and open internet. The Copyright Directive, which contained the particularly concerning Article 13, was rejected by 318 votes to 278, with 31 abstentions. The EU's proposed copyright reforms will now be debated again in September, giving policymakers more time to discuss and refine the crucial dossier.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC he hoped that the music industry could find a way to compromise before the September debate.

Don't think about filtering everything everyone uploads to the internet. Instead, he added, they should look to renegotiating deals with platforms such as YouTube to get "fairer remuneration".

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

Netflix has begun testing a subscription price increase in Italy, that appears aimed at fighting account sharers.

Want even more from Netflix? Well, Netflix is testing a way to give you even more with a new Ultra Plan. This plan will reportedly cost €16.99 in Italy. That's works out to be about $19.80 USD. Now this plan has not officially launched yet, but Netflix is currently testing it as an option for some subscribers.

[...] So what do you get with the new high-end plan? Well, it looks like Netflix is testing new stream limitations on Netflix accounts. Currently, the SD plan gives you 1 stream the HD standard plan offers 2 and the Premium plan offers 4 streams. With this new Ultra plan the SD plan still provides only 1 stream but the HD plan will move to 1 stream and the Premium plan will drop to 2 streams. The Ultra plan will let you stream on 4 devices at once.

[...] Netflix has a history of testing out changes like this overseas before they bring them to the United States. This seems like an attempt to raise the price on the heaviest of users who want 4 streams. Or maybe a way to crack down on people sharing accounts instead of paying for their own.

Separately, it was announced that Netflix is in the process of removing user-provided reviews in stages:

Netflix is removing a desktop-only feature this summer that allowed users to read and write reviews of TV shows and movies on its website. But the shutdown is coming in stages. People will no longer be able to write their feedback on a show, similar to a Yelp review of a restaurant, by July 30. And in mid-August, people will no longer be able to read existing user reviews on Netflix either.

"We have notified members who have used the feature recently," Netflix spokesperson Smita Saran said in an email Thursday.

This isn't the first time the company has changed a feature used to provide feedback on its offerings.

The streaming service used to allow people to rate programs with one to five stars. But, early last year, the company changed it to a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. People criticized the move because Netflix provides a percent "match" based on what it determines you'll like or dislike from your thumbs up or down, negating the work users already put into rating content with stars. Forbes contributor Paul Tassi said the new system was "the epitome of uselessness." Netflix, meanwhile, has said it has received more ratings as a result.

Original Submission

MostCynical writes:

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Google allows companies to read Gmail users' inboxes.

Gmail users' private messages are sometimes read by employees at software companies, it has emerged, when the user installs certain apps and grants permission to their Google account.

Though users have to specifically agree to having their emails read when they install the apps, a report from The Wall Street Journal shows that this goes beyond software scanning the contents of email, and includes in some cases human developers reading the messages.

Motherboard has an article on finding which apps have access to your email.

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

The research paper FP-Scanner: The Privacy Implications of Browser Fingerprint Inconsistencies by Antoine Vastel, Pierre Laperdrix, Walter Rudametkin, and Romain Rouvoy, reveals that anti-fingerprinting techniques may not be as effective as developers claim they are.

The researchers investigated browser fingerprinting countermeasures to find out if these techniques would introduce inconsistencies and how these might impact user privacy.

The result is astonishing: not only is it possible to identify altered browser fingerprints, it is also sometimes possible to uncover the original values of fingerprint attributes that were altered by users.

The researchers developed FP-Scanner, a fingerprint scanner designed to explore "fingerprint attribute inconsistencies introduced by state-of-the-art countermeasures in order to detect if a given fingerprint is genuine or not".

The scanner detects a large number of attributes including HTTP headers, platform, fonts, screen resolution and more and checks them using various methods to find out whether they are genuine or fake.

[...] The developers provide analysis for user agent spoofers, random agent spoofer, canvas poiseners[sic] like Canvas Defender and Canvas FP Block, the Brave Browser, and other anti-fingerprinting techniques or implementations.

The researchers conclude that anti-fingerprinting techniques in browsers may make users more trackable rather than less because of the inconsistencies they introduce and use of these in the fingerprinting process.

[...] If you break the research down you will come to the conclusion that most anti-fingerprinting techniques are ineffective as it is possible to detect inconsistencies. While that would not be such a bad thing, the fact that these inconsistencies may be used to fingerprint users who value privacy is.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Programmer / software engineer Paul Smith has written a blog post about how to fix buffer bloat on your home network with OpenBSD 6.2 or newer. He goes into how to diagnose and solve unnecessary latencies if encountered when using OpenBSD-based home routers. Overly filled buffers can be caused by misprioritization of packets, which is a solvable problem once the reasons are identified.

The reason for this is a phenomenon called "bufferbloat". I'm not going to explain it in detail, there are plenty of good resources to read about it, including the eponymous Bufferbloat.net. Bufferbloat is the result of complex interactions between the software and hardware systems routing traffic around on the Internet. It causes higher latency in networks, even ones with plenty of bandwidth. In a nutshell, software queues in our routers are not letting certain packets through fast enough to ensure that things feel interactive and responsive. Pings, TCP ACKs, SSH connections, are all being held up behind a long line of packets that may not need to be delivered with the same urgency. There's enough bandwidth to process the queue, the trick is to do it more quickly and more fairly.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces and black holes

At a time when astronomers are building billion-dollar telescopes with mirrors 30 meters across, the 1.4-meter instrument being installed this month atop South Baldy Mountain in New Mexico may seem like a bit player. But over the next few years, nine more identical telescopes will join it on the grassy, 3200-meter summit, forming a Y-shaped array that will surpass any other optical telescope in its eye for detail. When it's complete around 2025, the $200 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) will have the equivalent resolution of a gigantic telescope 347 meters across.

MROI's small telescopes can't match the light-gathering power of its giant cousins, so it will be limited to bright targets. But by combining light from the spread-out telescopes, it is expected to make out small structures on stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and peer at supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies. It will even be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers above Earth, enabling it to spy on spy satellites.

That's one reason why the U.S. Air Force, which wants to monitor its own orbital assets and presumably those of others, is funding MROI. "They want to know: Did the boom break or did some part of the photovoltaic panels collapse?" says Michelle Creech-Eakman, an astronomer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and project scientist on MROI. But if the facility succeeds, its biggest impact could be on the field of astronomy, by drawing new attention to the promise of optical interferometry, a powerful but challenging strategy for extracting exquisitely sharp images from relatively small, cheap telescopes.

Wikipedia article on Astronomical Optical Interferometry.

Related: Very Large Telescope's MUSE Instrument Studies the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
Very Large Telescope's ESPRESSO Combines Light From All Four Unit Telescopes for the First Time
Very Large Telescope Captures First Direct Image of a Planet Being Formed

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Ubisoft is finished with 'finite experiences'

Your experience with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege never has to end, and Ubisoft is looking to bring that ongoing, long-lasting relationship to all of its games going forward. In an interview posted to its news blog, Ubisoft vice president Lionel Raynaud explained how the company wants to give players lots of smaller stories instead of one contained narrative that you finish and then forget.

This is part of the company's move toward games-as-a-service, where it constantly updates its releases to keep players coming back for months if not years. But Raynaud explained exactly how a number of smaller stories better serve both Ubisoft and its players.

"What drove this is the will to not give finite experiences," said Raynaud. "The idea was that you have this conflict, and the resolution, and then it's finished – you've killed the bad guy, for instance. We build a strong nemesis, and the goal of the game is to kill him or free the country, we've done that a few times in our games. But when you succeed, you have to leave the game, because there is nothing else to do. So the goal was to break this, and say that you will be the hero of a region or population many times, not just once. And if you get rid of a dictator or an oppressor, something else is going to happen in the world, and you will have a new goal."

Opening your wallet doesn't have to be a finite experience.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Last week, an incomplete scene featuring Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor surreptitiously hit the web, giving fans eager for leaks and spoilers a taste of what to expect from the next season of Doctor Who. But while in the entertainment business leaks and spoilers are part and parcel of the industry, in this case, the BBC is none too pleased about it.

In fact, the corporation has filed an application in a California court this week in an effort to expose the person who put the leaked footage online—hoping California’s Federal Court would put pressure on Tapatalk, whose messaging service was used to upload and disseminate a non-final, 53-second clip of Whittaker’s Doctor in action. The BBC isn’t accusing Tapatalk of any wrongdoing; rather, it just wants details on the user that uploaded the clip, so it can attempt to isolate just where in Doctor Who’s long line of production the clip got leaked.

Source: https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-bbc-is-heading-to-court-to-hunt-down-a-doctor-who-l-1827319614

Original Submission