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Fnord666 writes:

Access to cheap electricity can make or break a cryptocurrency mining operation, and firms angling to strike it rich in an industry where delays can and will cost digital money will do just about anything to get it, as soon as they can.

The latest move in the quest for bargain-basement kilowatt hours, as quickly as possible: building out local power grids with bespoke electrical substations.

Canadian company DMG Blockchain is building what it hopes will be a fully-functioning substation near the Southern British Columbia town of Castlegar, which is electrified by hydro power. When I spoke to Steven Eliscu, who leads corporate development for DMG, over the phone, he told me that building the substation costs millions of dollars and required the company to build its own access road to haul equipment to the site. The goal: to plug it into the local grid and have it power DMG's expanded mining operations by September.

"At the end of August we'll go through a commissioning process where the utility will test everything as a completed substation and make sure that the town doesn't blow up when we flip the switch," Eliscu told me over the phone.

Source: MotherBoard

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Federal Communications Commission today approved new rules that could let Google Fiber and other new Internet service providers gain faster access to utility poles.

The FCC's One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) rules will let companies attach wires to utility poles without waiting for the other users of the pole to move their own wires. Google Fiber says its deployment has stalled in multiple cities because Comcast and AT&T take a long time to get poles ready for new attachers. One Touch Make Ready rules let new attachers make all of the necessary wire adjustments themselves.

Comcast urged the FCC to "reject 'one-touch make-ready' proposals, which inure solely to the benefit of new entrants while unnecessarily risking harm to existing attachers and their customers."

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected this argument, saying that startups are unnecessarily delayed when they have to wait for incumbent ISPs before hanging wires.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

"Popcorn-Driven Robotic Actuators," a recent paper co-authored by Steven Ceron, mechanical engineering doctoral student, and Kirstin H. Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, examines how popcorn's unique qualities can power inexpensive robotic devices that grip, expand or change rigidity.

"The goal of our lab is to try to make very minimalistic robots which, when deployed in high numbers, can still accomplish great things," said Petersen, who runs Cornell's Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab. "Simple robots are cheap and less prone to failures and wear, so we can have many operating autonomously over a long time. So we are always looking for new and innovative ideas that will permit us to have more functionalities for less, and popcorn is one of those."

[...] Since kernels can't shrink once they've popped, a popcorn-powered mechanism can generally be used only once, though multiple uses are conceivable because popped kernels can dissolve in water, Ceron said.

The paper was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Petersen said she hopes it inspires researchers to explore the possibilities of other nontraditional materials.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The House of Representatives has combined the largely good Music Modernization Act with the CLASSICS Act, which would add new royalties and penalties to recordings made before 1972, without giving anything back to the public. That same mistake was replicated in the Senate with S. 2823.

The CLASSICS Act would extend federal copyright restrictions and penalties to sound recordings made between 1923 and 1972, making it so that songs recorded in that era would, for the first time, not be able to be streamed online without a license. Currently, various state laws govern this relationship, and those laws don't give record labels control over streaming.

The CLASSICS Act gives nothing back to the public. It doesn't increase access to pre-1972 recordings, which are already played regularly on Internet radio. And it doesn't let the public use these recordings without permission any sooner. While some recording artists and their heirs will receive money under the act, the main beneficiaries will be recording companies, who will control the use of classic recordings for another fifty years. Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won't enter the public domain until 2067. And users of recordings that are already over 90 years old will face the risk of federal copyright's massive, unpredictable penalties.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Researchers Claim Great Pyramid can Focus Electromagnetic Waves:

"Egyptian pyramids have always attracted great attention," said Andrey Evlyukhin, coauthor of the paper and an egghead at the ITMO University, Russia, earlier this week. "We as scientists were interested in them as well, so we decided to look at the Great Pyramid as a particle dissipating radio waves resonantly."

Computational models revealed that the pyramid's internal chambers and base were shaped in a way that can potentially concentrate radio waves using the phenomenon of resonance. Specifically, Evlyukhin asserted, the structure's inner spaces and foundation resonate when hit by external radio waves with a wavelength of 200 to 600 metres, and can control the propagation, scattering, and concentration of this electromagnetic energy.

[...] according to the paper:

It is revealed that the Pyramid's chambers can collect and concentrate electromagnetic energy ... At the shorter wavelengths, the electromagnetic energy accumulates in the chambers providing local spectral maxima for electric and magnetic fields. It is shown that basically the Pyramid scatters the electromagnetic waves and focuses them into the substrate region.

The full journal article is freely available:

"Electromagnetic properties of the Great Pyramid: First multipole resonances and energy concentration" Journal of Applied Physics 124, 034903 (2018); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5026556

Did the researchers really find something here, or is this just a light-hearted jab at new-age crystal woo-woo?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Computer security journalist Brian Krebs has posted in his blog that Reddit, a well-known social news aggravation site, has announced that an attacker compromised a several employee accounts at its cloud and source code hosting providers. The way in turned out to be Reddit's reliance on mobile text messages (SMS) in an imitation of two-factor authentication (2FA). Mobile application-based keys are an option. Hardware tokens would have also been reasonably secure instead but few sites do more than partially support them.

Reddit said the exposed data included internal source code as well as email addresses and obfuscated passwords for all Reddit users who registered accounts on the site prior to May 2007. The incident also exposed the email addresses of some users who had signed up to receive daily email digests of specific discussion threads.

Specific details of how the SMS messages were intercepted have not yet been made public.

Earlier on SN:
Google Defeats Employee Phishing With Physical Security Keys (2018)
SIM Hijacking as a Second Factor (2018)
Authentication Today: Moving Beyond Passwords (2018)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Add Topic: Software

CNBC reports Amazon Plans to Move Completely off Oracle Software by Early 2020:

Amazon's emergence as a major provider of data center technology has turned many of its longtime suppliers, including Oracle, into heated rivals.

Now Amazon is dealing yet another blow to Oracle. The e-commerce giant, having already moved much of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web Services, plans to be completely off Oracle's proprietary database software by the first quarter of 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.

The shift is another sign of Amazon's rapid ascent in enterprise computing and further shows how much Oracle is struggling to keep pace as businesses move workloads to the cloud and away from traditional data centers. Propelled in part by expansion at AWS, which reported 49 percent revenue growth for the second quarter, Amazon passed Alphabet earlier this year to become the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Washington Post (archive link) reports:

President Trump came to the defense of Sinclair Broadcast Group's proposed merger with Tribune Media, days after the Federal Communications Commission raised "serious concerns" about the deal and began legal proceedings to challenge it on grounds the companies had misled regulators.

Trump said Tuesday that it was "So sad and unfair" that the FCC, an independent agency, did not approve the merger, a $3.9 billion transaction that would create a conservative television giant that originally hoped to reach roughly 70 percent of U.S. households.

In his tweet, the president stressed how the deal would provide a "conservative voice for and of the People," though politics are not supposed to factor into merger considerations.

"Liberal Fake News NBC and Comcast gets approved, much bigger, but not Sinclair. Disgraceful!" the president tweeted.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The US has a shameful record when it comes to caring for its moms. As Ars has reported before, the rate of women dying during pregnancy or childbirth is higher—much higher—than in any other developed country. By some estimates, mothers die in the US at a rate six-times that seen in Italy and three-times the rate in the UK, for instance. And of those that survive, tens of thousands suffer devastating injuries and near-death experiences each year.

Nevertheless, health researchers, hospital organizations, policy makers, and state task forces have been working to understand and reverse the horrific numbers—often doing so with limited resources and reliance on volunteers. While reports have offered glimpses of the problem, a new investigation by USA Today provides one of the sharpest pictures yet.

Many of the pregnant women and mothers who suffer and die in this country do so from easily preventable, common complications—and hospitals know exactly what safety features and practices are needed to spare mothers' lives and suffering, they just aren't using them. Women are left to bleed to death because doctors don't bother monitoring blood loss. Women suffer strokes and seizures and even die because doctors and nurses fail to treat their high blood pressure in time. The bottom line is stunning, simple negligence.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

America doesn't have a jobs crisis. It has a 'good jobs' crisis – where too much employment is insecure, and poorly paid

The official rate of unemployment in America has plunged to a remarkably low 3.8%. The Federal Reserve forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 3.5% by the end of the year.

But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract workers with no job security, and an army of part-time workers desperate for full-time jobs. Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.

[...] The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

One week after celebrating the defeat of an Ebola outbreak in Équateur province, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has four new confirmed cases of the disease 2500 kilometers across the country in North Kivu province. The DRC's health ministry says there's no indication of a link between the outbreaks. "It's sad," says Yap Boum, a microbiologist based in Yaoundé who works with Doctors Without Borders, a nongovernmental organization that helped run an Ebola vaccine campaign against the previous outbreak.

Ebola is endemic in the DRC, which now has had 10 outbreaks since the virus first was discovered there in 1976. "Although we did not expect to face a 10th epidemic so early, the detection of the virus is an indicator of the proper functioning of the surveillance system," a DRC Ministry of Health communique said. Boum adds that the DRC villages today are much more connected than in the past, and many previous small outbreaks may have gone undetected.

The current outbreak is centered in Mangina, a village about 30 kilometers from the city of Béni, which is close to the famed Virunga National Park and the border of Uganda. The North Kivu health division notified the DRC Ministry of Health on 28 July that there were 26 cases of hemorrhagic fever in the area, with 20 deaths. The National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa confirmed that samples from four hospitalized patients tested positive for Ebola.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

martyb writes:

c|net reports:

It's official. Apple on Thursday became worth over $1 trillion. Yes, that's right, $1 trillion. As in $1,000,000,000,000.

Shortly before 9 a.m. PT on Thursday, Apple's stock hit $207.05 a share, giving it a market capitalization at that trillion-dollar mark. Apple -- the biggest public company in the world -- had 4,829,926,000 shares outstanding as of July 20, which meant its stock had to hit $207.05 to be worth $1 trillion.

The stock dipped below that level during Thursday's trading session but closed up 2.9 percent at $207.39, cementing the iPhone maker's new status as a trillion-dollar company and the first US public company to hit that level.

That made Apple worth more than all but the 15 richest countries in the world, based on 2017 data from the CIA World Factbook (that's the number with a gross domestic product totaling more than $1 trillion last year). And this is only the second time a public company has ever been valued in the 13 digits. PetroChina, an oil and gas company, topped $1 trillion for a short time on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2007.

Also at BBC, Ars Technica, and phys.org.

So, how many apples (the edible kind) could you buy with all that money and how big a pile would you have?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

With the last version of the Android P Developer Preview released, we're quickly heading toward the final build of another major Android version. And for Android P—aka version 9.0—battery life is a major focus. The Adaptive Battery feature will dole out background access to only the apps you use, a new auto brightness scheme has been devised, and the Android team has made changes to how background work runs on the CPU. All together, battery life should be batter (err, better) than ever.

To get a bit more detail about how all this works, we sat down with a pair of Android engineers: Benjamin Poiesz, group product manager for the Android Framework, and Tim Murray, a senior staff software engineer for Android. And over the course of our second fireside Android chat, we learned a bit more about Android P overall and some specific things about how Google goes about diagnosing and tracking battery life across the range of the OS' install base.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

In the US alone, more than 1,400 people are waiting for a lung transplant - there simply aren't enough donor lungs available to meet the need. Soon, though, patients might have a new source for brand new lungs: the lab.

[...] To grow the lungs, the researchers first created four lung scaffolds. To do this, they removed all of the cells and blood from pig lungs using a mix of sugar and detergent. This left them with just the proteins of each lung - essentially, its skeleton.

Next, they placed each scaffold in a tank containing a special mix of nutrients. They then added cells from recipient pigs' own lungs to each of the scaffolds and let the lungs grow for 30 days. Finally, they transplanted the four lab-grown lungs into the four recipient pigs.

Within two weeks, the transplanted lungs had already begun to establish the robust networks of blood vessels they need to survive.

Source: Bioengineered Lungs Grown in a Lab Successfully Transplanted Into Living Pigs

Original Submission

JesusAmieiro writes:

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal.

The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google's CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.

Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named "Maotai" and "Longfei." The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.

Or does it not? China denies google's plans for a censored version

[...] Chinese state-owned Securities Times, however, said reports of the return of Google's search engine to China were not true, citing information from "relevant departments".

But a Google employee familiar with the censored version of the search engine confirmed to Reuters that the project was alive and genuine.

On an internal message board, the employee wrote: "In my opinion, it is just as bad as the leak article mentions."

Original Submission