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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Groundbreaking research shows that neurological health depends as much on signals sent by the body's large, leg muscles to the brain as it does on directives from the brain to the muscles. Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience⁰, the study fundamentally alters brain and nervous system medicine — giving doctors new clues as to why patients with motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy and other neurological diseases often rapidly decline when their movement becomes limited.

"Our study supports the notion that people who are unable to do load-bearing exercises — such as patients who are bed-ridden, or even astronauts on extended travel — not only lose muscle mass, but their body chemistry is altered at the cellular level and even their nervous system is adversely impacted," says Dr. Raffaella Adami from the Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy.

The study involved restricting mice from using their hind legs, but not their front legs, over a period of 28 days. The mice continued to eat and groom normally and did not exhibit stress. At the end of the trial, the researchers examined an area of the brain called the sub-ventricular zone, which in many mammals has the role of maintaining nerve cell health. It is also the area where neural stem cells produce new neurons.

Limiting physical activity decreased the number of neural stem cells by 70 percent compared to a control group of mice, which were allowed to roam. Furthermore, both neurons and oligodendrocytes — specialized cells that support and insulate nerve cells — didn't fully mature when exercise was severely reduced.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

A team of security researchers has a solid claim to $10,000, after meeting the three requirements of Bitfi's second bug bounty on its cryptocurrency wallet.

Remember John McAfee’s supposedly “unhackable” cryptocurrency wallet? It appears a group of researchers is about to prove the once-lauded antivirus pioneer wrong.

After cracking the so-called Bitfi wallet to play legendary game DOOM on it, today the researchers were able to successfully send signed transactions with the device – that is despite the “security” mechanisms Bitfi has in place to prevent attackers from doing that.

Well, that's a transaction made with a MitMed Bitfi, with the phrase and seed being sent to a remote machine. [...] That sounds a lot like Bounty 2 to me.

With this development in mind, the researchers believe they have fulfilled the conditions of Bitfi's $10,000 bug bounty. Bitfi had three criteria to claim the rewards: namely that researchers should be able to prove they can modify the device, connect to the Bitfi server, and send sensitive data with the device.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/13/bitfi-cryptocurrency-wallet-bounty/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

To tame chaos in powerful semiconductor lasers, which causes instabilities, scientists have introduced another kind of chaos.

[...] Their technique, published today in Science, uses 'quantum chaos' to prevent the laser filaments, which lead to the instabilities, from forming in the first place. By creating quantum (wave) chaos in the cavity used to create the laser, the laser itself remains steady.

Professor Ortwin Hess, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, contributed much of the theory, simulation and interpretation of the new system. He said: "The way the optical filaments, which cause the laser instabilities, grow and resist control is for the laser a bit like the unruly behaviour of tornadoes. Once they form, they move about chaotically, causing destruction in their wake.

"However, tornadoes are more likely to form and move about over flat country. For example, in America they form frequently in beautiful Oklahoma but not as often in hilly West Virginia. The hills appear to be a key difference -- they prevent tornadoes from being able to form or move around.

"In the same way, by creating a 'hilly' optical landscape right inside our lasers using quantum chaos, we don't allow the filaments -- our optical tornados -- to form or grow out of control."

[...] To create a different kind of chaos -- the quantum chaotic landscape -- the team designed a new shape of cavity for the laser. Most cavities are cuboid in shape, but by using a D-shaped cavity, the team were able to induce quantum chaos in the light bouncing around.

This quantum chaos acts on a smaller scale than the wavelength of the light, creating the optical 'hills' that help to dispel the optical 'tornadoes'.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Some people have a plan, the digital equivalent of living will, or have chosen "family" option in a password management package such as LastPass or have entrusted a book of passwords to a family member.

But the consequences of doing nothing are not as neutral as some might expect and were spelled out during an informative presentation by Chris Boyd of Malwarebyes at BSides in Manchester on Thursday. The presentation, cheerily titled "The digital entropy of death", covered what could happen to your carefully curated online presence after you log off.

Miscreants are already targeting obviously abandoned profiles. Boyd explained that in some cases it's easier for fraudsters to gain hold of these accounts than the account-holders' relatives, because crooks know the systems better and controls - although present - are often deeply embedded on the sites such as Facebook, Twitter et al.

Alongside regular postings asking for help on Facebook due to compromise of dead people’s logins (examples here and here) there’s also the problem of “cloning”.

"Facebook users have reported receiving friend requests from accounts associated with dead friends and family members," The Independent reports. "Such requests appear to be the result of cloning or hacking scams that see criminals try [to] add people on the site, and then use that friendship as a way of stealing money from them or running other cons."

canopic jug writes:

Back in May, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Julia Reda wrote a blog post warning of pending legislation promoting out-of-control censorship. Now she has noticed that out-of-control censorship machines removed her article warning of out-of-control censorship machines, thus proving her point about how these proposed laws would be misused.

A few days ago, about a dozen articles and campaign sites criticising EU plans for copyright censorship machines silently vanished from the world’s most popular search engine. Proving their point in the most blatant possible way, the sites were removed by exactly what they were warning of: Copyright censorship machines.

Among the websites that were made impossible to find: A blog post of mine in which I inform Europeans about where their governments stand on online censorship in the name of copyright and a campaign site warning of copyright law that favors corporations over free speech.

SN has had many articles on the topic, which unfortunately continues to press.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Who Left Open the Cookie Jar? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Third-Party Cookie Policies: [PDF 342KB]

Abstract: Nowadays, cookies are the most prominent mechanism to identify and authenticate users on the Internet. Although protected by the Same Origin Policy, popular browsers include cookies in all requests, even when these are cross-site. Unfortunately, these third-party cookies enable both cross-site attacks and third-party tracking. As a response to these nefarious consequences, various countermeasures have been developed in the form of browser extensions or even protection mechanisms that are built directly into the browser.

In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of these defense mechanisms by leveraging a framework that automatically evaluates the enforcement of the policies imposed to third-party requests. By applying our framework, which generates a comprehensive set of test cases covering various web mechanisms, we identify several flaws in the policy implementations of the 7 browsers and 46 browser extensions that were evaluated. We find that even built-in protection mechanisms can be circumvented by multiple novel techniques we discover. Based on these results, we argue that our proposed framework is a much-needed tool to detect bypasses and evaluate solutions to the exposed leaks. Finally, we analyze the origin of the identified bypass techniques, and find that these are due to a variety of implementation, configuration and design flaws.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/telesur-english-facebook-censorship-news

TeleSUR English is a rare voice of dissent to US foreign policy. Is that why Facebook deleted its page?

[...] Then yesterday came the announcement that the Facebook page of teleSUR English, the English language version of the Venezuela-based television network sponsored by five Latin American governments, had been removed from the social media platform with no reason given, the second time this has happened this year. When the administrator of the left-wing site Revolution News scheduled an article from teleSUR English covering this incident of censorship to be posted to his own outlet’s Facebook page, he received a request from Facebook within seconds asking him to secure his account and confirm his primary location. (TeleSUR English has now been reinstated).

The point here isn’t that these cases are the same. According to Facebook and others, Jones was removed for violating their policies against hate speech, whereas it’s never been made clear why teleSUR English has been removed from Facebook twice now. But both point to the trouble of turning wealthy, corporate tech overlords into moderators of content.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Nintendo's Switch has been hiding a buried "VrMode" for over a year

Hackers have uncovered and tested a screen-splitting "VR Mode" that has been buried in the Switch's system-level firmware for over a year. The discovery suggests that Nintendo at least toyed with the idea that the tablet system could serve as a stereoscopic display for a virtual reality headset.

Switch hackers first discovered and documented references to a "VrMode" in the Switch OS' Applet Manager services back in December when analyzing the June 2017 release of version 3.0.0 of the system's firmware. But the community doesn't seem to have done much testing of the internal functions "IsVrModeEnabled" and "SetVrModeEnabled" at the time. [...] [Using] those functions to enable the Switch's VR mode splits the screen vertically into two identical half-sized images, in much the way other VR displays split an LCD screen to create a stereoscopic 3D effect.

[...] Despite the discovery of this VrMode code (and previous hacked-together proof-of-concept tests from individual Switch owners), it's hard to imagine the Switch's large form factor, 720p resolution screen, and relatively low-end gyroscope would lead to a very robust VR experience. That said, some industry watchers continue to speculate about a potential PS4 Pro/Xbox One X-style mid-generation hardware update for the Switch, which could provide the extra horsepower needed to enable passable virtual reality on the platform (Nintendo has not even hinted at any such plans, though).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Earliest galaxies found 'on our cosmic doorstep'

Some of the earliest galaxies to form in the Universe are sitting on our cosmic doorstep, according to a study. These faint objects close to the Milky Way could be more than 13 billion years old, researchers from the universities of Durham and Harvard explain. They formed upwards of a hundred million years after the Big Bang and contained some of the first stars to light up the cosmos. The findings are published in the Astrophysical Journal.

[...] Prof Carlos Frenk, from Durham University, UK, said: "Finding some of the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe orbiting in the Milky Way's own backyard is the astronomical equivalent of finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited the Earth. It is hugely exciting."

Lead author Dr Sownak Bose, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US, told BBC News: "For some of these tiny satellites, maybe 50% or even 90% of their mass was assembled at a time when the Universe was less than one billion years old."

Separately: Hubble Paints Picture of the Evolving Universe

Astronomers using the ultraviolet vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have captured one of the largest panoramic views of the fire and fury of star birth in the distant universe. The field features approximately 15,000 galaxies, about 12,000 of which are forming stars. Hubble's ultraviolet vision opens a new window on the evolving universe, tracking the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years back to the cosmos' busiest star-forming period, which happened about 3 billion years after the big bang.

[...] The program, called the Hubble Deep UV (HDUV) Legacy Survey, extends and builds on the previous Hubble multi-wavelength data in the CANDELS-Deep (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey) fields within the central part of the GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. This mosaic is 14 times the area of the Hubble Ultra Violet Ultra Deep Field released in 2014.

Also at Popular Mechanics.

The Imprint of Cosmic Reionization on the Luminosity Function of Galaxies (DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aacbc4) (DX)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Doctors Aren't Being Candid About the Money They Get From Big Pharma

Physicians who get paid extra by pharmaceutical and medical device companies often aren't forthcoming about the money in their research papers, according to a study [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamasurg.2018.2576] [DX] out Wednesday in JAMA Surgery. It found that many of the doctors who receive the most in industry payments only occasionally disclose their potential financial conflicts when publishing relevant research.

[...] In 2013, as part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government established the Open Payments Database, which tracks reported payments, funding, and ownership stakes the pharmaceutical industry gives to physicians and hospitals. [Mehraneh Jafari of the University of California] and her team pored through the data from 2015, isolating the top 100 doctors who had gotten paid that year by surgical and medical device companies. They then searched through all of those doctors' papers published in 2016, scrutinizing the COI disclosure sections.

The doctors had collectively been paid more than $12 million in 2015, with the median payment coming in at just under $100,000. Of those 100 doctors, 64 published research the next year. About half of the 412 articles published by them concerned research that should have merited a disclosure of the payments, such as from a medical device company whose products were used in the study. But only a third of the 225 papers flagged by Jafari and her team actually did. Worse still, 85 percent of the authors had at least one paper where they failed to list their conflicts.

Despite the findings, Jafari doesn't think it's a matter of sinister intent on the doctors' part. "You can't really blame the physicians—it's the system that's broken," she said. "There's different guidelines from different journals, and it's hard, especially if you're a prolific researcher, to keep track of them."

Original Submission

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