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An Anonymous Coward writes:

From the BBC.

The European Commission is planning to order websites to delete extremist content on their sites within an hour to avoid the risk of being fined. The regulation would affect Twitter, Facebook and YouTube among others. The crackdown would lead to the EU abandoning its current approach - where the firms self-police - in favour of explicit rules.

The shake-up comes in the wake of high-profile terror attacks across Europe over the past few years.

Julian King, the EU's commissioner for security, told the Financial Times [Subscription required] that the EU would "take stronger action in order to protect our citizens".

The BBC has confirmed the details of the report.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Scientists report they have successfully developed and tested the world's first ultrathin artificial retina that could vastly improve on existing implantable visualization technology for the blind. The flexible device, based on very thin 2-D materials, could someday restore sight to the millions of people with retinal diseases. And with a few modifications, the device could be used to track heart and brain activity.

The researchers are presenting their work today at the 256th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

"This is the first demonstration that you can use few-layer graphene and molybdenum disulfide to successfully fabricate an artificial retina," Nanshu Lu, Ph.D., says. "Although this research is still in its infancy, it is a very exciting starting point for the use of these materials to restore vision," she says, adding that this device could also be implanted elsewhere in the body to monitor heart and brain activities.

[...] Diseases such as macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and retinitis pigmentosa can damage or destroy retinal tissue, leading to vision loss or complete blindness. There is no cure for many of these diseases, but silicon-based retinal implants have restored a modicum of vision to some individuals. However, Lu says these devices are rigid, flat and fragile, making it hard for them to replicate the natural curvature of the retina. As a result, silicon-based retinal implants often produce blurry or distorted images and can cause long-term strain or damage to surrounding eye tissue, including the optic nerve. Lu, who is at the University of Texas at Austin, and her collaborator Dae-Hyeong Kim, Ph.D., who is at Seoul National University, sought to develop a thinner, more flexible alternative that would better mimic the shape and function of a natural retina.

The researchers used 2-D materials, including graphene and molybdenum disulfide, as well as thin layers of gold, alumina and silicon nitrate to create a flexible, high-density and curved sensor array. The device, which resembles the surface of a flattened soccer ball or icosahedron, conforms to the size and shape of a natural retina without mechanically disturbing it.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2018-08-artificial-retinas-based-d-materials.html.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The so-called "teledildonics patent," owned by a company that many would deem a "patent troll," has just expired. Now US sex toy companies can create the Internet-controlled vibrators, dildos, and whatever else of their dreams with significantly less fear of being sued.

On Friday, US Patent No. 6,368,268 expired after being on file with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for 20 years. The company that had previously held the patent, TZU Technologies, LLC, of Pasadena, California, had filed 10 lawsuits alleging infringement since 2015—one as recently as December 2017. All suits appear to have been settled, with TZU Technologies receiving a payout in exchange for dropping the lawsuit.

This expiration news was met with great fanfare in the sex toy corner of the Internet, even meriting a mention from @RikerGoogling.

"The race will be on to create the most fantastic orgasmic experience possible over an Internet connection," she wrote. "The SexTech market is exploding with demand, meaning that there will be a lot of money in it for businesses who are successful in that effort."

Meanwhile, Daniel Nazer, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also applauded the occasion.

"It's a classic example of how an overbroad patent can frustrate innovation," he emailed Ars. "To the extent the industry faces other challenges because of a stigma against sex tech or adult products, those will remain. But at least startups in the space won't immediately get sued."

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/cybersex-toy-industry-heats-up-as-infamous-teledildonics-patent-climaxes/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 16 have found an unexpected difference between men and women. On average, their studies show, men pick up on visual motion significantly faster than women do.

Individuals representing both sexes are good at reporting whether black and white bars on a screen are moving to the left or to the right -- requiring only a tenth of a second and often much less to make the right call, the researchers found. But, in comparison to men, women regularly took about 25 to 75 percent longer.

The researchers say that the faster perception of motion by males may not necessarily reflect better visual processing. They note that similar performance enhancements in this same task have been observed in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or depression and in older individuals. The authors speculate that processes in the brain that down-regulate neural activity are disrupted in these conditions and may also be weaker in males.

"We were very surprised," says Scott Murray at the University of Washington, Seattle. "There is very little evidence for sex differences in low-level visual processing, especially differences as large as those we found in our study."

Murray and co-author Duje Tadin, University of Rochester, say that the finding was "entirely serendipitous." They were using the visual motion task to study processing differences in individuals with ASD. ASD shows a large sex bias, with boys being about four times more likely to be diagnosed with the condition than girls. As a result, the researchers included sex as a factor in their analysis of control individuals in the study who didn't have ASD. The sex difference in visual perception of motion became immediately apparent.

To confirm the findings, the researchers asked other investigators who had used the same task in their own experiments for additional data representing larger numbers of study participants. And those independent data showed the same pattern of sex difference.

See also: Sex Differences in Visual Motion Processing. Current Biology, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.014 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.06.014 )

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180816143237.htm

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

If hackers can convince your phone company to turn over your number to them, they can defeat two-factor authentication that relies on text messaging.

Crypto investor Michael Terpin filed a $224 million lawsuit against AT&T in California federal court Wednesday alleging that the phone company’s negligence let hackers steal nearly $24 million in cryptocurrency from him, Reuters reports. He’s also seeking punitive damages.

Terpin says hackers were twice able to convince AT&T to connect his phone number to a SIM card they controlled, routing his calls and messages to them and enabling them to defeat two-factor authentication protections on his accounts. In one case, he says hackers also took control of his Skype account and convinced one of this clients to send money to them rather than Terpin.

The second hack came even after AT&T agreed to put an additional passcode on his account, when a fraudster visited an AT&T store in Connecticut and managed to hijack Terpin’s account without providing the code or a “scannable ID” as AT&T requires, he says.

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90219499/att-gets-sued-over-two-factor-security-flaws-and-23m-cryptocurrency-theft

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

If you’ve made any payments with a chip card, you’ve probably had awkward moments — those long seconds after you’ve inserted the card and everyone behind you is (literally or metaphorically) tapping their foot, waiting for the card to be processed. Well, Square has been working on this problem for a while now. Last fall, for example, CEO Jack Dorsey said the company had gotten the processing time down to under three seconds.

Today, the company is announcing that it’s shaved even more time off, and that Square contactless and chip Readers and Registers can now process chip cards in two seconds. To achieve this, it says it’s worked closely with payment partners — and it’s also streamlined the process so that you can remove your card as soon as it’s read, without waiting for the response from the card issuer.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/15/square-chip-cards/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

A new attack named VORACLE can recover HTTP traffic sent via encrypted VPN connections under certain conditions.

The attack was discovered by security researcher Ahamed Nafeez, who presented his findings at the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences held last week in Las Vegas.

[...] VORACLE is not a new attack per-se, but a variation and mix of older cryptographic attacks such as CRIME, TIME, and BREACH.

In those previous attacks, researchers discovered that they could recover data from TLS-encrypted connections if the data was compressed before it was encrypted.

Fixes for those attacks were deployed in 2012 and 2013, respectively, and HTTPS connections have been safe ever since.

But Nafeez discovered that the theoretical points of those attacks were still valid when it came to some type of VPN traffic.

Nafeez says that VPN services/clients that compress HTTP web traffic before encrypting it as part of the VPN connection are still vulnerable to those older attacks.

There are 3 workarounds listed: (1) switch to a non-OpenVPN protocol, (2) stay away from HTTP websites (HTTPS traffic is immune), or (3) use a Chromium-based browser.

Source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/voracle-attack-can-recover-http-data-from-vpn-connections/

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martyb writes:

We strive for openness about site operations here at SoylentNews. This story continues in that tradition.

tl;dr: We believe all services are now functioning properly and all issues have been attended to.

Problem Symptoms: I learned at 1212 UTC on Sunday 2018-08-19, that some pages on the site were returning 50x error codes. Sometimes, choosing 'back' in the browser and trying to resubmit the page would work. Oftentimes, it did not. We also started receiving reports of problems with our RSS and Atom feeds.

Read on past the break if you are interested in the steps taken to isolate and correct the problems.

takyon writes:

This Lab-Made Mineral Just Became a Key Candidate For Reducing CO₂ in The Atmosphere

Scientists just worked out a way of rapidly producing a mineral capable of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) - giving us a potentially exciting option for dealing with our increasingly overcooked planet. Magnesite, which is a type of magnesium carbonate, forms when magnesium combines with carbonic acid - CO₂ dissolved in water. If we can produce this mineral at a massive scale, it could safely store large amounts of carbon dioxide we simply don't need in our planet's atmosphere.

[...] Being able to make the mineral in the lab could be a major step forward in terms of how effective carbon sequestration might eventually be. "Using microspheres means that we were able to speed up magnesite formation by orders of magnitude," says [Ian] Power. "This process takes place at room temperature, meaning that magnesite production is extremely energy efficient."

[...] With a tonne of naturally-occurring magnesite able to capture around half a tonne of CO₂, we're going to need a lot of magnesite, and somewhere to put it all as well. As with other carbon capture processes, it's not yet clear whether this will successfully scale up as much as it needs to. That said, these new discoveries mean lab-made magnesite could one day be helpful – it puts the mineral on the table as an option for further investigation.

Abstract.

Related: Negative Emission Strategy: Active Carbon Capture
Carbon Capture From Air Closer to Commercial Viability

Original Submission

takyon writes:

HoloLens will help a children's hospital perform critical surgeries

A UK children's hospital plans to use Microsoft's HoloLens and Surface Hub during critical operations like heart surgery, Microsoft announced. Alder Hey hospital will employ the Surface Hub to let medical personnel collaborate and share images, while the HoloLens will be used directly in operating theaters. "Imaging a patient's heart from the inside and from the outside is absolutely essential," said Alder Hey cardiac surgeon Rafael Guerrero. "Microsoft HoloLens and mixed reality will, in the future, enable me to have a patient's scans in front of me while I'm doing the operation."

[...] We've already seen the potential for mixed reality in hospitals; for instance a company called Scopis created a HoloLens design platform for spinal surgeries. However, Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool is one of the first to adopt the tech. It's currently working with Black Marble, a Microsoft Partner, to pioneer new surgery-based Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for Surface Hub and HoloLens.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Trump DOJ has joined a lawsuit filed by the National Fair Housing Alliance against Facebook. In a so-called statement of interest, the department suggested that Facebook could be held liable if housing providers like real estate developers and landlords used the site's targeting tools to discriminate against prospective renters and buyers in advertising their properties. Such tools limit who can see ads based on factors like sex, religion and nationality, and advertising restricted along those lines violates the Fair Housing Act.

Also at NYT, Market Watch, NPR, Washington Post.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In recent issues, Technology Review has been running some science fiction short stories. I found "Noon in the antilibrary" to be timely, taking the concept of fake news to a logical extreme, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611829/noon-in-the-antilibrary/
It starts out with some action,

Marius cursed and jammed a mic stand between the crash bars of the TV studio door. "If SWAT's on its way, we don't have much time," he said.
"I don't understand." Michaela, who up until a couple of minutes ago had been streaming their interview live, still sat on one of the oval chairs under the hot lights. "What are they talking about?"

The subtitle (referenced in the Dept. line) could be:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the IoT.

It's a quick read, perhaps 5000 words.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Kroger launches autonomous grocery delivery service in Arizona

Starting today, residents of Scottsdale, Arizona have the opportunity to receive autonomous grocery deliveries from Fry's Food Stores—a brand owned by grocery giant Kroger. The technology is supplied by Nuro, a self-driving vehicle startup founded by two veterans of Google's self-driving car project. We profiled the company in May.

Kroger says that deliveries will have a flat $5.95 delivery fee, and customers can schedule same-day or next-day deliveries. Initially, the deliveries will be made by Nuro's fleet of modified Toyota Priuses with a safety driver behind the wheel. But Kroger expects to start using Nuro's production model—which doesn't even have space for a driver—this fall.

Kroger is the United States's largest supermarket chain by revenue, the second-largest general retailer (behind Walmart), and the eighteenth largest company in the United States.

Previously: An Unmanned Car May Soon Deliver Your Kroger Groceries

Related: Walmart and Waymo to Trial Driverless Shuttle Service in Phoenix for Grocery Pickups

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple files stored by teen in 'hacky hack hack' folder

A teenage boy from Australia has pleaded guilty to hacking into Apple's network and downloading internal files, according to reports. The 16-year-old accessed 90 gigabytes worth of files, breaking into the system many times over the course of a year from his suburban home in Melbourne, reports The Age newspaper.

It says he stored the documents in a folder called 'hacky hack hack'.

Apple insists that no customer data was compromised. But The Age reports that the boy had accessed customer accounts.

In a statement to the BBC, Apple said: "We vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats. In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement. We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised."

Also at Reuters.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Saint Louis University is placing 2,300 Echo Dots in student living spaces

Saint Louis University has announced that it will be placing Amazon Echo Dot devices, powered by Alexa for Business, in every student residence hall room or student apartment on campus. While other colleges, like Arizona State University, have put Echo Dots in student housing before, SLU says this is the first time a college will equip every student living space with an Amazon Alexa-enabled device.

[...] In regards to privacy concerns, SLU says that because it is using the Amazon Alexa for Business platform, every Echo Dot is managed by a central system that is not tied to any individual accounts. No personal information will be collected so all use is anonymous. The Echo Dots will also not keep any recordings of questions that are asked. If a student wants to opt out of using the Echo Dot given to them, they can simply store it, unplugged, and turn it in at the end of the school year.

Also at Engadget.

Original Submission