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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In case you missed it, last September Retro Games announced it was going to put out a mini version of 1982's Commodore 64 called the THEC64 Mini. The system actually shipped in Europe earlier this year, and is finally coming to North America on October 9, just in time for the holiday season. It's available for preorder now for $70.

Half the size of the original version, it comes with 64 preinstalled licensed games including Impossible Mission II, Boulder Dash, Jumpman, Pitstop II and Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe that may bring back some fond memories if you were born in the '60s or early '70s. Perhaps because it's too retro, it doesn't have quite the same kind of appeal as Nintendo's NES Classic or SNES Classic mini consoles, which sold out quickly at launch.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump did, or maybe didn't, write:

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg backtracks on comments about Holocaust deniers

Facebook may be locked in a battle against fake news, and now CEO Mark Zuckerberg is backtracking on claims that the social network won't ban Holocaust deniers.

Zuckerberg gave the explanation to Recode after the site aired audio of the Facebook founder claiming "abhorrent" content, the New York Post reported, had a right to spread across his massive social media network.

"I personally find Holocaust denial deeply offensive, and I absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that," Zuckerberg told the website later. "Of course if a post crossed a line into advocating for violence or hate against a particular group, it would be removed. … These issues are very challenging but I believe that often the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech."

Earlier, Zuckerberg had spoken differently.

"I don't think that we should be in the business of having people at Facebook who are deciding what is true and what isn't," he said, during an episode of the Recode Decode podcast on Wednesday.

Ed's note: And if there's one thing we can all agree on regarding limitations to freedom of speech online, it's that we'll never all agree regarding limitations to freedom of speech online!

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

Daily life in China is gated by security technology, from the body scanners and X-ray machines at every urban metro station to the demand for ID numbers on social media platforms so that dangerous speech can be traced and punished. Technologies once seen as potentially empowering the public have become tools for an increasingly dictatorial government—tools that Beijing is now determined to sell to the developing world.

In 2015, the Chinese government launched its Made in China 2025 plan to dominate cutting-edge technological industries. This was followed up last year for plans for the country to be a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence by 2030 and to build a $150 billion industry. The developing world is a big part of these ambitions. But China doesn’t just want to dominate these markets. It wants to use developing countries as a laboratory to improve its own surveillance technologies.

[...] The latest is CloudWalk Technology, a Guangzhou-based start-up that has signed a deal with the Zimbabwean government to provide a mass facial recognition program. The agreement is currently on hold until Zimbabwe’s elections on July 30. But if it goes through, it will enable Zimbabwe, a country with a bleak record on human rights, to replicate parts of the surveillance infrastructure that have made freedoms so limited in China. And by gaining access to a population with a racial mix far different from China’s, CloudWalk will be better able to train racial biases out of its facial recognition systems—a problem that has beleaguered facial recognition companies around the world and which could give China a vital edge.

[...] The deal between CloudWalk and the Zimbabwean government will not cover just CCTV cameras. According to a report in the Chinese state newspaper Science and Technology Daily, smart financial systems, airport, railway, and bus station security, and a national facial database will all be part of the project.

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/beijings-big-brother-tech-needs-african-faces/

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ brings us this report from AlterNet:

This Bold Plan to Fight Opioid Overdoses Could Save Lives--But Some Conservatives Think It's "Immoral"

With Ohio beset by a massive public health around opioid use and overdoses--more than 4,000 Ohioans died of opioid overdoses in 2016--the Cleveland Plain Dealer sent travel editor Susan Glaser to Amsterdam in search of innovative approaches to the problem. While there, she rediscovered Holland's long-standing, radical, and highly effective response to heroin addiction and properly asked whether it might be applied to good effect here.

The difference in drug-related death rates between the two countries is staggering. In the U.S., the drug overdose death rate is 245 per million, nearly twice the rate of its nearest competitor, Sweden, which came in second with 124 per million. But in Holland, the number is a vanishingly small 11 per million. In other words, Americans are more than 20 times more likely to die of drug overdoses than the Dutch.

For Plain Dealer readers, the figures that really hit home are the number of state overdose deaths compared to Holland. Ohio, with just under 12 million people, saw 4,050 drug overdose deaths in 2016; the Netherlands, with 17 million people, saw only 235.

What's the difference? The Dutch government provides free heroin to several score [where a score=20] hardcore heroin addicts and has been doing so for the past 20 years. Public health experts there say that in addition to lowering crime rates and improving the quality of life for users, the program is one reason overdose death rates there are so low. And the model could be applied here, said Amsterdam heroin clinic operator Ellen van den Hoogen.

[...]"It's not a program that is meant to help you stop," acknowledged van den Hoogen. "It keeps you addicted."

That's not a sentiment sits well with American moralizers, such as George W. Bush's drug czar, John Walters, whom Glaser consulted for the story. He suggested that providing addicts with drugs was immoral and not "real treatment," but he also resorted to lies about what the Dutch are doing.

He claimed the Dutch are "keeping people addicted for the purpose of controlling them" and that the Dutch have created "a colony of state-supported, locked-up addicts."

Your humble Ed (who rechopped the quoting, so head off to the full article(s) to see the full story) adds: of course, this is quite a contentious issue, digging deep into moralistic debate, and where clearly there's little agreed-upon objective truth and plenty of opinions. However, we are a community dotted widely round the globe, and so I'm sure there are plenty of stories of what has or has not worked in different locales.

Previous: Tens or Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Needed to Combat Opioid Crisis?
Portugal Cut Drug Addiction Rates in Half by Rejecting Criminalization

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Brian Krebs has written a blog post about how Google has been using security keys to neutralize phishing of their employees. It stops the phishing quite well but comes at a high cost. No, not the hardware cost of a security dongle, it's the cost of losing third-party mail applications like Thunderbird and their add-ons like Enigmail.

I have been using Advanced Protection for several months now without any major issues, although it did take me a few tries to get it set up correctly. One frustrating aspect of having it turned on is that it does not allow one to use third-party email applications like Mozilla’s Thunderbird or [others]. I found this frustrating because as far as I can tell there is no integrated solution in Gmail for PGP/OpenGPG email message encryption, and some readers prefer to share news tips this way. Previously, I had used Thunderbird along with a plugin called Enigmail to do that.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, means we have screwed ourselves out of performance.

Over the last few days we’ve seen outcry about Apple’s new MacBook Pro, which offers an optional top-end i9 processor, and how its performance is throttled to the point of parody as the laptop heats up over time.

Sparked by a video from YouTuber Dave Lee, who demonstrates that the only way to get Apple’s quoted performance from the MacBook Pro is by keeping it in a refrigerator, the outcry has been brutal.

Thousands of comments on the video say things like “Wow if it cant even maintain stock speeds that's pretty sad” and “Apple should offer a fridge that goes with the Macbook i9,” but the sobering reality is that this practice is normal across laptops—we’re just starting to see it more often.

[...] If Pro users really were Apple’s target market, the company could redesign these laptops to use the older, thicker MacBook Pro form factor from 2015. With that available space, and improvements in processor design, it would be able to better cool the same hardware and squeeze out more performance—but it’ll never happen. Thicker laptops would mean admitting failure.

Thinner and lighter is great, and if we’re honest, we’re all sucked in by the allure. The unfortunate reality for those of us that need these machines for work is that it’s just not good enough, and we’d welcome thicker machines in exchange for hardware that isn’t constrained by heat. Apple insists these new MacBooks are for ‘pro users,’ and while it has some of the best-in-class hardware design out there today, it simply doesn’t hold up if you push them hard enough.

The MacBook Pro isn’t designed for pro users at all, it’s a slick marketing machine designed to sell to the wealthy ‘prosumer’ that wouldn’t notice anyway. That much has been clear since the introduction of the Touch Bar and death of the SD slot—and it’s making a ton of money anyway.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-laptops-have-screwed-us-all

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Averting Toxic Chats: Computer Model Predicts When Online Conversations Turn Sour

The internet offers the potential for constructive dialogue and cooperation, but online conversations too often degenerate into personal attacks. In hopes that those attacks can be averted, researchers have created a model to predict which civil conversations might take a turn and derail.

After analyzing hundreds of exchanges between Wikipedia editors, the researchers developed a computer program that scans for warning signs in the language used by participants at the start of a conversation -- such as repeated, direct questioning or use of the word "you" -- to predict which initially civil conversations would go awry.

Early exchanges that included greetings, expressions of gratitude, hedges such as "it seems," and the words "I" and "we" were more likely to remain civil, the study found.

"We, as humans, have an intuition of whether a conversation is about to go awry, but it's often just a suspicion. We can't do it 100 percent of the time. We wonder if we can build systems to replicate or even go beyond this intuition," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil[*] said.

The computer model, which also considered Google's Perspective, a machine-learning tool for evaluating "toxicity," was correct around 65 percent of the time. Humans guessed correctly 72 percent of the time.

[...] The study analyzed 1,270 conversations that began civilly but degenerated into personal attacks, culled from 50 million conversations across 16 million Wikipedia "talk" pages, where editors discuss articles or other issues. They examined exchanges in pairs, comparing each conversation that ended badly with one that succeeded on the same topic, so the results weren't skewed by sensitive subject matter such as politics.

[*] Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil: assistant professor of information science and co-author of the paper Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure. (pdf)

The technique sounds useful for non-internet conversations, too... is there an app for that?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Update: Both launches successful. SpaceX tweeted that booster landing was successful, no word on SpaceX fairing recovery or either launch's satellite deployments.]

Wake up early Wednesday to see two launches within 15 minutes:

One Ariane 5. One Falcon 9. Fourteen satellites. It's a party.

The Western Hemisphere may host two launches within 15 minutes on Wednesday morning as both Arianespace and SpaceX prepare for satellite delivery missions. The launches are presently scheduled to occur between 7:25am ET (11:25 UTC) and 7:39am ET (11:39 UTC).

First up is Arianespace, with a mission launching from Kourou in French Guiana, over the Atlantic Ocean. This flight of the Ariane 5 ES rocket—the Ariane 5 fleet's third mission in 2018—will send four Galileo satellites into medium Earth orbit (at an altitude of 22,922km) for the European Commission. These satellites will form part of Europe's own global navigation system constellation.

[Ariane 5 live stream on YouTube. Scheduled for 7:25am ET (11:25 UTC); stream scheduled to start 25 minutes before launch.]

[...] Speaking of SpaceX, its rocket has a launch time less than 15 minutes after the scheduled Ariane 5 liftoff. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch from the west coast of the United States and seeks to deliver 10 Iridium NEXT satellites into a polar orbit 625km above the Earth.

This will be the third flight of the Block 5 version of the Falcon 9 rocket and, if the vehicle launches on Wednesday, it would be the company's second launch in just over two days.

Wednesday's flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California will also feature two separate recovery attempts. The Just Read the Instructions droneship will serve as a mobile landing platform for the Falcon 9's first stage, and the smaller Mr. Steven vessel—now equipped with a larger net—will attempt to catch one half of the rocket's payload fairing.

[SpaceX live stream on YouTube. Scheduled for 7:39am ET (11:39 UTC); stream scheduled to start 15 minutes before launch.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Finding a planet has a 10 years orbit in a few months

To discover and confirm the presence of a planet around stars other than the Sun, astronomers wait until it has completed three orbits. However, this very effective technique has its drawbacks since it cannot confirm the presence of planets at relatively long periods (it is ideally suited for periods of a few days to a few months). To overcome this obstacle, a team of astronomers under the direction of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have developed a method that makes it possible to ensure the presence of a planet in a few months, even if it takes 10 years to circle its star: this new method is described for the first time in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

[...] By analysing data from the space telescope K2, one star showed a significant long-duration temporary decrease of luminosity, the signature of a possible transit, in other words, the passage of a planet in front of its star. "We had to analyse hundreds of light curves" explains the astronomer, to find one where such a transit was unequivocal.

[...] [Lead researcher] Helen Giles consulted recent data from the Gaïa mission to determine the diameter of the star referenced as EPIC248847494 and its distance, 1500 light-years away from the planet Earth. With that knowledge and the fact that the transit lasted 53 hours, she found that the planet is located at 4.5 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth, and that consequently it takes about 10 years to orbit once. The key question left to answer was whether it was a planet and not a star. The Euler telescope of the UNIGE in Chile would provide the answer. By measuring the radial velocity of the star, which makes it possible to deduce the mass of the planet, she was able to show that the mass of the object is less than 13 times that of Jupiter -- well below the minimum mass of a star (at least 80 times the mass of Jupiter).

The longest period transiting planet candidate from K2

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Tesla has asked some suppliers to refund a portion of what the electric-car company has spent previously, an appeal that reflects the auto maker’s urgency to sustain operations during a critical production period.

This is bad news if you pre-ordered and were thinking about getting a refund but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-asks-suppliers-for-cash-back-to-help-turn-a-profit-1532301091 (Paywalled.)

See also: Miami Herald and electrek.co, which adds:

Update: Tesla sent us a full statement:

“Negotiation is a standard part of the procurement process, and now that we’re in a stronger position with Model 3 production ramping, it is a good time to improve our competitive advantage in this area. We’re focused on reaching a more sustainable long term cost basis, not just finding one-time reductions for this quarter, and that’s good for Tesla, our shareholders, and our suppliers who will also benefit from our increasing production volume and future growth opportunities. We asked fewer than 10 suppliers for a reduction in total capex project spend for long-term projects that began in 2016 but are still not complete, and any changes with these suppliers would improve our future cash flows, but not impact our ability to achieve profitability in Q3. The remainder of our discussions with suppliers are entirely focused on future parts price and design or process changes that will help us lower fundamental costs rather than prior period adjustments of capex projects. This is the right thing to do.”

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

As of today, Google begins shipping Chrome 68 which flags all sites served over the HTTP scheme as being "not secure". This is because the connection is, well, not secure so it seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say! We've known this has been coming for a long time now both through observing the changes in the industry and Google specifically saying "this is coming". Yet somehow, we've arrived at today with a sizable chunk of the web still serving traffic insecurely:

The majority of the Internet’s top 1M most popular sites will show up as “Not Secure” in @GoogleChrome starting July 24th. Make sure your site redirects to #HTTPS, so you don’t have the same problem. @Cloudflare makes it easy! #SecureOnChrome https://t.co/G2a0gi2aM8 pic.twitter.com/r2HWkfRofW

— Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) July 23, 2018

Who are these people?! After all the advanced warnings combined with all we know to be bad about serving even static sites over HTTP, what sort of sites are left that are neglecting such a fundamental security and privacy basic? I wanted to find out which is why today, in conjunction with Scott Helme, we're launching Why No HTTPS? You can find it over at WhyNoHTTPS.com (served over HTTPS, of course), and it's a who's who of the world's biggest websites not redirecting insecure traffic to the secure scheme:

The article continues with a list of "The World's Most Popular Websites Loaded Insecurely", tools and techniques used to gather the data, different responses based on the version of curl, differences accessing the bare domain name versus with the "www." prefix, and asks for any corrections. One can also access the aforementioned website set up specifically for tracking these results: https://whynohttps.com/.

Source: https://www.troyhunt.com/why-no-https-heres-the-worlds-largest-websites-not-redirecting-insecure-requests/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hyperloop test pod sets speed record

A competition helping to drive development of the futuristic hyperloop transport system has been won by engineering students from Munich. The hyperloop idea involves passengers in pods travelling at very high speeds down sealed tunnels. The team's pod hit 457km/h (290mph) on a 1.2km (0.75 mile) test track.

Run by the SpaceX aerospace company, the competition aims to refine the technologies that could underpin the super-fast transport system. The win is the third in a row for the Technical University of Munich team.

[...] In the latest round of the competition, the Munich team, Warr Hyperloop, outpaced rival capsules, which could manage speeds of only 88mph (Delft University) and 55mph (EPF Loop, from Switzerland), to beat its own record speed, 323km/h, set in the second competition, in September 2017.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bitter pill: China vaccine scandal sparks fury, roils markets

A vaccine scandal in China, which has prompted angry reactions from citizens fed up with safety scares, is sending ripples across the local drug market and threatening Chinese ambitions to play a larger role in the global pharmaceutical space.

Shares in Chinese vaccine makers and biotech firms fell across the board on Monday after Premier Li Keqiang slammed Changsheng Biotechnology Co for having crossed a moral red line and called for swift action.

Changsheng has been found to have faked production documents related to a rabies vaccine that is given to babies as young as three months, underscoring the difficulties China faces in cleaning up the image of the world's second-biggest drug industry as it aims to promote its vaccines globally.

While there have been no known reports of people being harmed by the vaccine, the regulator ordered Changsheng to halt production and recall the product after the scandal emerged earlier this month.

The case has gone viral in China, where sensitivity over food and drug safety is extremely high after a slew of scandals over the last decade. It was among the most hotly discussed topics on microblogging website Sina Weibo on Monday.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

For most of us, it’s hard to imagine life without the internet.

For better or worse, we’ve become hyper-dependent on the digital universe housed in our screens. We use it on a daily basis to communicate with friends, book flights, shop, skim the news, watch movies and television shows, and stay up-to-date on Kim Kardashian’s derrière.

As access to the internet has improved in the past two decades, the offline population has steeply declined: today, only 11% of Americans don’t use the internet, down from 48% in 2000.

[...] The stories here represent only a small sample of Americans who don’t use the internet, and the reasons why.

Rich writes:

Almost a year has passed since the last minor update of KiCad, the most popular FLOSS application for schematic and circuit board design. Now the KiCad development team has presented the new and improved KiCad 5.0 release: http://kicad-pcb.org/blog/2018/07/KiCad-5--a-new-generation/. In addition to a good number of improvements to the application itself, the often criticized part libraries have been completely overhauled. KiCad binaries will be available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Original Submission