SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Back in 2015, Microsoft trumpeted the opening of a new factory in Wilsonville, stamping “Made in Portland, Oregon” on each and every huge touch-screen computer it made in the US. The company hired more than 100 people to build Surface Hubs. The Surface Hub is an extremely expensive machine, at ~$22,000, so this obviously wasn’t a high volume product. But Microsoft insisted it could make the economics work.

Now, just two years later, Microsoft has announced that it will close the Wilsonville plant and fire all 124 employees that worked there. Panos Panay, head of Surface development, went to the plant and announced that Microsoft is consolidating its manufacturing and will build the Surface Hub in the same place as its other Surface devices. Microsoft has previously disclosed that it builds its Surface hardware in China, so that’s the assumed location for these new products as well.

The company hasn’t explained, in public or to its Wilsonville employees, why it gave up on domestic manufacturing so quickly and didn’t respond to repeated inquiries for comment. But the only thing surprising about Microsoft’s decision is that it tried to make its computers in the US in the first place.

These layoffs are ironic, arriving even as President Trump heralds “Made in America” week. In reality, virtually all tech manufacturing is now done in East Asian countries like China and Taiwan. For all the emphasis placed on manufacturing jobs and the blue collar workers that have them, US-based manufacturing has shrunk drastically over the past 47 years.

In 1970, manufacturing jobs accounted for 25 percent of all US employment. Today, manufacturing jobs are just 8.5 percent of all non-farm payroll employment. That’s not to say that manufacturing jobs are unimportant. But in the US, employment in this sector peaked in 1979 and has fallen dramatically even since 2000.

The problem with manufacturing in the United States isn’t just a question of wages. It’s also about supply lines, and how easy it is to hire and train qualified employees and source proper components. As The Oregonian reports, the vast outsourcing of manufacturing to foreign countries has made it easier to source components and industrial supplies from China or Vietnam than it is to buy them locally.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

An issue facing medical scientists has been creating non-rigid robots small enough to work in environments that are impossible for surgeons to access. While there has been some success in this field; some have managed to make soft, centimeter-sized devices for example; overall, this goal has evaded experts.

Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston University, have developed a new process that allows the creation of millimeter-sized flexible robots. Published in Advanced Materials, the researchers outlined how they made a tiny device that had micrometer-scale features, meaning it could operate in small, inaccessible areas.

I, of course, mean a robotic soft spider modeled after the Australian peacock spider. Which, for your information, looks like this:

They created their version of this horror from a single piece of an elastic-like material. And, it looks like this:

[...] The smallest soft robotic systems still tend to be very simple, with usually only one degree of freedom, which means that they can only actuate one particular change in shape or type of movement. In other words, this would make them pretty useful for micro-operations that involve movement in more than one direction, which, and let;s be honest here, is most of them.

[...] By developing a new hybrid technology that merges three different fabrication techniques, we created a soft robotic spider made only of silicone rubber with 18 degrees of freedom, encompassing changes in structure, motion, and color, and with tiny features in the micrometer range. The idea behind creating the, uh, soft robot spider was to show the potential of this new fabrication process. This is a first-of-its-kind technology called a Microfluidic Origami for Reconfigurable Pneumatic/Hydraulic (MORPH) device.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/science/2018/08/08/these-soft-tiny-robot-spiders-might-operate-on-you-someday/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Arm Unveils Client CPU Performance Roadmap Through 2020 - Taking Intel Head On

Today's roadmap now publicly discloses the codenames of the next two generations of CPU cores following the A76 – Deimos and Hercules. Both future cores are based on the new A76 micro-architecture and will introduce respective evolutionary refinements and incremental updates for the Austin cores.

The A76 being a 2018 product – and we should be hearing more on the first commercial devices on 7nm towards the end of the year and coming months, Deimos is its 2019 successor aiming at more wide-spread 7nm adoption. Hercules is said to be the next iteration of the microarchitecture for 2020 products and the first 5nm implementations. This is as far as Arm is willing to project in the future for today's disclosure, as the Sophia team is working on the next big microarchitecture push, which I suspect will be the successor to Hercules in 2021.

Part of today's announcement is Arm's reiteration of the performance and power goals of the A76 against competing platforms from Intel. The measurement metric today was the performance of a SPECint2006 Speed run under Linux while complied under GCC7. The power metrics represent the whole SoC "TDP", meaning CPU, interconnect and memory controllers – essentially the active platform power much in a similar way we've been representing smartphone mobile power in recent mobile deep-dive articles.

Here a Cortex A76 based system running at up to 3GHz is said to match the single-thread performance of an Intel Core i5-7300U running at its maximum 3.5GHz turbo operating speed, all while doing it within a TDP of less than 5W, versus "15W" for the Intel system. I'm not too happy with the power presentation done here by Arm as we kind of have an apples-and-oranges comparison; the Arm estimates here are meant to represent actual power consumption under the single-threaded SPEC workload while the Intel figures are the official TDP figures of the SKU – which obviously don't directly apply to this scenario.

Also at TechCrunch.

See also: Arm Maps Out Attack on Intel Core i5
ARM's First Client PC Roadmap Makes Bold Claims, Doesn't Back Them Up
ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips

Related: ARM Based Laptop DIY Kit Ready to Hit the Shops
First ARM Snapdragon-Based Windows 10 S Systems Announced
Laptop and Phone Convergence at CES
Snapdragon 1000 ARM SoC Could Compete With Low-Power Intel Chips in Laptops

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Y Combinator to set up China arm with former Baidu executive Qi Lu as chief

American start-up incubator Y Combinator is setting up shop in China, with a new unit to be led by former Baidu chief operating officer Qi Lu.

Sam Altman, Y Combinator's president, said in a company announcement Wednesday that China had been "an important missing piece of our puzzle" when it came to sourcing new start-ups to take under its wing.

"We think that a significant percentage of the largest technology companies that are founded in the next decade — companies at the scale of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — will be based in the U.S. and China," Altman said. "YC's greatest strength is our founder community and with the launch of YC China we believe we have a special opportunity to include many more Chinese founders in our global community."

Google's back in China. Now it's time to do a search for entrepreneurs.

Y Combinator.

Also at CNN.

See also: Y Combinator invests in a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant

Related: The Basic Income Experiment by Y Combinator Draws Nearer
A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is "100 Percent Fatal"

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Nearly 30,000 people came to Las Vegas last week for the 26^th edition of DEF CON, the iconic security conference. And no small amount of the mental energy of that vast crowd was spent on one particular thing: the conference badge.

This year's badges, designed by Tymkrs, were elevated works of printed circuit board art with a collection of LED-lit features, including red and green human figures and a color-shifting DEF CON logo. But it quickly becomes apparent that there was a lot more going on here than just blinking lights.

DEF CON alternates year to year between electronic, hackable badges and non-electronic ones; last year's badges were a throwback design intended to celebrate the conference's 25^th anniversary. But every year, the badges include some sort of clue to a cryptographic challenge—three years ago, the badge was an actual vinyl record that required attendees to find a turntable to hear the puzzle clue.

DEF CON's theme this year was "1983," and the Tymkrs badge itself is, among other things, a gaming platform that evokes 1980s text-based adventures and handheld button-mashers. It's also a hardware hacking challenge.

[...] By plugging a USB-C cable into the badge and connecting it to a computer, attendees were able to access a game screen in a character-based terminal—either by using a terminal application such as PuTTY on Windows or using Linux or MacOS command line tools such as screen. The DEF CON logo at the bottom of the badge doubles as a directional controller, and the "26" on the badge is action controls.

Source: Ars Technica

Original Submission

martyb writes:

President Trump Relaxes US Cyber-Attacks Rules:

President Trump has signed an order relaxing rules around the use of cyber-weapons, the Wall Street Journal reports.[*]

It is a reversal of guidelines, drawn up under President Obama, which required a large number of federal agencies to be involved in any decision to launch a cyber-attack.

[...] The US administration is under pressure to deal with cyber-threats, amid growing concerns that state-sponsored hacks could hit critical infrastructure.

Prof Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at the University of Surrey, told the BBC: "We are in a era when certain governments are acting aggressively in cyber-space, and that is rightly condemned by governments such as that in the US.

"To respond in kind is not necessarily the way to de-escalate the situation."

He added: "You wouldn't allow a pre-emptive physical attack without thorough analysis and approval at the highest levels, so why would cyber-attacks be any different?"

[*] Paywalled.

Let's hope extreme care is taken to identify the actual source of an attack, rather than the apparent source.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Josh Mitchell's Defcon presentation analyzes the security of five popular brands of police bodycams (Vievu, Patrol Eyes, Fire Cam, Digital Ally, and CeeSc) and reveals that they are universally terrible, though the Digital Ally models are the least bad of the batch, as Wired's Lily Hay Newman reports.

All the devices use predictable network addresses that can be used to remotely sense and identify the cameras when they switch on. Attackers could pinpoint intense police activity by watching for groups of cameras that all switch on at the same place and time.

None of the devices use code-signing, making them typical of garbagey Internet of Shit devices. That means that attackers can slip arbitrary code into them. And none of them cryptographically sign the video they take, which would be a relatively strong way of detecting tampering by police officers, their departments, or criminals.

Source: Boing Boing

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Since 2016, Sacramento County officials have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud, the Sacramento Bee reported over the weekend.

Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance Director Ann Edwards confirmed to the paper that welfare fraud investigators working under the DHA have used the data for two years on a "case-by-case" basis. Edwards said the DHA pays about $5,000 annually for access to the database.

Abbreviated LPR, license plate readers are essentially cameras that upload photographs to a searchable database of images of license plates. Each image captured by these cameras is annotated with information on the registered owner, the make and model of the car, and time-stamped GPS data on where it was last spotted. Those with access, usually police, can search the database using a full or partial license plate number, a date or time, year and model of a car, and so on.

Source: Gizmodo

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ordinary wi-fi could be used to detect weapons and explosives in public places, according to a study led by the Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Wireless signals can penetrate bags to measure the dimensions of metal objects or estimate the volume of liquids, researchers claim. Initial tests appeared to show that the system was at least 95% accurate.

[...] The team behind the research tested 15 types of objects and six types of bags. The wi-fi system had success rates of 99% for recognising dangerous objects, 98% for metal and 95% for liquids. When objects were wrapped inside bags, the accuracy rate dropped to about 90%.

The low-cost system requires a wi-fi device with two or three antennas and can be integrated into existing wi-fi networks. The system works by analysing what happens when wireless signals penetrate and bounce off objects and materials.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Smallest transistor switches current with a single atom in solid electrolyte:

At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), physicist Professor Thomas Schimmel and his team have developed a single-atom transistor, the world's smallest. This quantum electronics component switches electrical current by controlled repositioning of a single atom, now also in the solid state in a gel electrolyte. The single-atom transistor works at room temperature and consumes very little energy, which opens up entirely new perspectives for information technology. The transistor is presented in Advanced Materials.

[...] In Advanced Materials, the KIT researchers present the transistor that reaches the limits of miniaturization. The scientists produced two minute metallic contacts. Between them, there is a gap as wide as a single metal atom. "By an electric control pulse, we position a single silver atom into this gap and close the circuit," Professor Thomas Schimmel explains. "When the silver atom is removed again, the circuit is interrupted." The world's smallest transistor switches current through the controlled reversible movement of a single atom. Contrary to conventional quantum electronics components, the single-atom transistor does not only work at extremely low temperatures near absolute zero, i.e. -273°C, but already at room temperature. This is a big advantage for future applications.

The advance heralds a means of dramatically reducing the amount of electricity required to power electronic devices.

Full journal article is paywalled; free abstract: Fangqing Xie, Andreas Peukert, Thorsten Bender, Christian Obermair, Florian Wertz, Philipp Schmieder, Thomas Schimmel. Quasi-Solid-State Single-Atom Transistors. Advanced Materials, 2018; 30 (31): 1801225 DOI: 10.1002/adma.201801225

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

SkimReaper, subject of a USENIX Security paper, detects most common card skimmers.

[...] At the USENIX Security Symposium here today, University of Florida researcher Nolen Scaife presented the results of a research project he undertook with Christian Peeters and Patrick Traynor to effectively detect some types of "skimmers"—maliciously placed devices designed to surreptitiously capture the magnetic stripe data and PIN codes of debit and credit cards as they are inserted into automated teller machines and point-of-sale systems. The researchers developed SkimReaper, a device that can sense when multiple read heads are present—a telltale sign of the presence of a skimmer.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/08/researchers-develop-device-to-aid-in-hunt-for-stealthy-atm-card-skimmers/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Broadband providers have spent years lobbying against utility-style regulations that protect consumers from high prices and bad service.

But now, broadband lobby groups are arguing that Internet service is similar to utilities such as electricity, gas distribution, roads, and water and sewer networks. In the providers' view, the essential nature of broadband doesn't require more regulation to protect consumers. Instead, they argue that broadband's utility-like status is reason for the government to give ISPs more money.

[...] "Like electricity, broadband is essential to every American," USTelecom CEO Jonathan Spalter and NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield wrote Monday in an op-ed for The Topeka Capital-Journal. "Yet US broadband infrastructure has been financed largely by the private sector without assurance that such costs can be recovered through increased consumer rates."

[...] While ISPs want the benefits of being treated like utilities—such as pole attachment rights and access to public rights-of-way—they oppose traditional utility-style obligations such as regulated prices and deployment to all Americans.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/isps-want-to-be-utilities-but-only-to-get-more-money-from-the-government/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After intense discussions regarding the ethical, legal, and social implications of this technology, conversations were initiated at the NIH that led to the establishment of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) in 1974. The RAC's mission was to advise the NIH director on research that used emerging technologies involving manipulation of nucleic acids — a mission that was eventually expanded to encompass the review and discussion of protocols for gene therapy in humans. In 1990, the FDA oversaw the first U.S. human gene-therapy trial, which involved pediatric patients with adenosine deaminase deficiency and was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Although no major safety concerns were initially reported, over the course of the 1990s it became evident that many questions regarding the safety and efficacy of gene therapy remained unanswered. These unknowns were brought into sharp focus in 1999 when Jesse Gelsinger died of a massive immune response during a safety trial of gene therapy for ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency.1 This tragic death led to closer scrutiny of the field, including a greater focus on open dialogue and increased regulatory oversight.

[...] In changes proposed on August 17, 2018, in the Federal Register, the NIH and the FDA seek to reduce the duplicative oversight burden by further limiting the role of the NIH and RAC in assessing gene-therapy protocols and reviewing their safety information. Specifically, these proposals will eliminate RAC review and reporting requirements to the NIH for human gene-therapy protocols. They will also revise the responsibilities of institutional Biosafety Committees, which have local oversight for this research, making their review of human gene-therapy protocols consistent with review of other research subject to the NIH Guidelines. Such streamlining will also appropriately place the focus of the NIH Guidelines squarely back on laboratory biosafety.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1810628

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

[...] In a study published today in the journal Science Robotics, researchers from Germany and the UK demonstrated that children are susceptible to peer pressure from robots. The findings, say the researchers, show that, as robots and AIs become integrated into social spaces, we need to be careful about the influence they wield, especially on the young.

The paper's authors ask, "For example, if robots recommend products, services, or preferences, will compliance [...] be higher than with more traditional advertising methods?" They note that robots are being introduced to plenty of other domains where social influence could be important, including health care, education, and security.

[...] Although it's the susceptibility of the children that leaps out in this experiment, the fact that the adults were not swayed by the bots is also significant. That's because it goes against an established theory in sociology known as "computer are social actors," or CASA. This theory, which was first outlined in a 1996 book, states that humans tend to interact with computers as if they were fellow humans. The results of this study show that there are limits to this theory, although Belpaeme says he and his colleagues were not surprised by this.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/15/17688120/social-influence-robots-ai-peer-pressure-children

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Pasta purists insist on plonking dry spaghetti into the boiling pot whole, but should you rebel against convention and try to break the strands in half, you'll probably end up with a mess of scattered pieces.

[...] It wasn't until 2006 that a pair of French physicists successfully explained the dynamics at work and solved the mystery. They found that, counterintuitively, a spaghetti strand produces a "kick back" traveling wave as it breaks. This wave temporarily increases the curvature in other sections, leading to many more breaks.

[...] This isn't just fun and games for the sake of idle curiosity (not that there's anything wrong with that). A collaboration between Audoly and Columbia University computer scientist Eitan Grinspun led to developing an Adobe paint brush that bends and moves, introduced in Adobe Illustrator 5 and Adobe Paint Brush 5. The MIT scientists say their new work could be used to better understand how cracks form and spread in similarly structured materials and brittle structures—bridge spans, for instance, or human bones. The secret could lie in the pasta.

Source: MIT scientists crack the case of breaking spaghetti in two

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

A popular Firefox add-on is secretly logging users' browsing history, according to reports from the author of the uBlock Origin ad blocker and Mike Kuketz, a German privacy and security blogger. The add-on in question is named Web Security and is currently installed by 222,746 Firefox users, according to the official Mozilla Add-ons Portal. The add-on's description claims Web Security "actively protects you from malware, tampered websites or phishing sites that aim to steal your personal data."

Its high install count and positive reviews got the add-on on a list of recommended security and privacy add-ons on the official Firefox blog last week.

But this boost of attention from the Mozilla team didn't go down as intended. Hours after Mozilla's blog post, Raymond Hill, the author of the uBlock Origin ad blocker pointed out on Reddit that the add-on exhibited a weird behavior.

"With this extension, I see that for every page you load in your browser, there is a POST to http://136.243.163.73 Hill said. "The posted data is garbled, maybe someone will have the time to investigate further."

Hill's warning went under the radar for a few days until yesterday, when Kuketz, a popular German blogger, posted an article about the same behavior. Hours later, a user on Kuketz's forum managed to decode the "garbled" data, revealing that the add-on was secretly sending the URL of visited pages to a German server. Under normal circumstances, a Firefox add-on that needs to scan for threats might be entitled to check the URLs it scans on a remote server, but according to a format of the data the add-on was sending to the remote server, Web Security appears to be logging more than the current URL.

The data shows the plugin tracking individual users by an ID, along with their browsing pattern, logging how users went from an "oldUrl" to a "newUrl." This logging pattern is a bit excessive and against Mozilla's Addon Portal guidelines that prohibit add-ons from logging users' browsing history.

Source: Firefox Add-On With 220,000+ Installs Caught Collecting Users' Browsing History

Original Submission