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takyon writes:

Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web

This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months. Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it's game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon. For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over.

"We have to do it now," he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. "It's a historical moment." Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people's data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.

If all goes as planned, Inrupt will be to Solid what Netscape once was for many first-time users of the web: an easy way in. And like with Netscape, Berners-Lee hopes Inrupt will be just the first of many companies to emerge from Solid.

[...] [On] Solid, all the information is under his control. Every bit of data he creates or adds on Solid exists within a Solid pod–which is an acronym for personal online data store. These pods are what give Solid users control over their applications and information on the web. Anyone using the platform will get a Solid identity and Solid pod. This is how people, Berners-Lee says, will take back the power of the web from corporations.

How does Solid compare to Tor, I2P, Freenet, IPFS, Diaspora, etc.?

Related: Tim Berners-Lee Proposes an Online Magna Carta
Berners-Lee: World Wide Web is Spy Net
Tim Berners-Lee Just Gave us an Opening to Stop DRM in Web Standards
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Talks about the Web Again
Tim Berners-Lee Approved Web DRM, but W3C Member Organizations Have Two Weeks to Appeal
70+ Internet Luminaries Ring the Alarm on EU Copyright Filtering Proposal
One Year Since the W3C Sold Out the Web with EME

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takyon writes:

A decades-old pollutant is still threatening orca populations

Forty years ago, the US banned production of a class of organic pollutants called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. International efforts to deal with PCB contamination have had substantial success. But the fat-loving compounds are still hanging around, leaching into the environment from decades-old equipment, and lingering in the ocean food chain.

That lingering contamination can still cause problems for a range of species. Because of a unique blend of characteristics, however, orcas are particularly at risk. A paper in Science this week calculates just how bad those risks are, and the results are sobering: while some populations of orcas seem to be doing just fine, others are at risk of collapse.

Orcas, at the very high end of the food chain, absorb contaminants from what they eat, with their blubber soaking up and storing fat-compatible compounds like PCBs. Because they can live for 50 years or more, some individuals were exposed to PCB contamination back when it was at its highest and are still carrying that burden around. And it's a burden that gets passed between generations: because PCBs are stored in fat, females can transfer a huge amount of their own PCB load to their young during pregnancy and nursing.

The health consequences of this are serious. PCBs are linked to increased cancer risk, immune-system disruption, and reproductive problems. For a tiny calf receiving nearly half its mother's PCB contamination, the results can be fatal. And the death of an orca isn't the end of the cycle: a dead orca calf, sinking to the ocean bed where its carcass is scavenged, releases those PCBs back into the food web.

Predicting global killer whale population collapse from PCB pollution (DOI: 10.1126/science.aat1953) (DX)

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takyon writes:

Around thirty customers, including the Kennedy Space Center, have purchased soil simulants from the University of Central Florida:

The University of Central Florida is selling Martian dirt, $20 a kilogram plus shipping. [...] "The simulant is useful for research as we look to go to Mars," says Physics Professor Dan Britt, a member of UCF's Planetary Sciences Group. "If we are going to go, we'll need food, water and other essentials. As we are developing solutions, we need a way to test how these ideas will fare." For example, scientists looking for ways to grow food on Mars — cue the 2015 film The Martian — need to test their techniques on soil that most closely resembles the stuff on Mars.

[...] As a geologist and a physicist, he knows his dirt. Like a recipe, the ingredients can be mixed in different ways to mimic soil from various objects, including asteroids and planets. And because the formula is based on scientific methods and is published for all to use, even those not ordering through UCF can create dirt that can be used for experiments, which reduces the uncertainty level.

Kevin Cannon, the paper's lead author and a post-doctoral researcher who works with Britt at UCF, says there are different types of soil on Mars and on asteroids. On Earth, for example, we have black sand, white sand, clay and topsoil to name a few. On other worlds, you might find carbon-rich soils, clay-rich soils and salt-rich soils, he added. "With this technique, we can produce many variations," Cannon says. "Most of the minerals we need are found on Earth although some are very difficult to obtain."

Mars global simulant MGS-1: A Rocknest-based open standard for basaltic martian regolith simulants (DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2018.08.019) (DX)

Related: What Kinds of Veggies Can We Grow on Mars? NASA Wants to Know.
Is Anything Tough Enough to Survive On Mars?
Preliminary Results: Potatoes Could Grow in Mars Conditions
Mars Soil Could be Made into Bricks with Pressure Alone
Lunar Regolith Simulants Damage Cells

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chromas (from IRC) writes:

From research at McGill University, (Montréal, Québec, Canada) comes this report: Sex in plants requires thrust:

Plant sex relies on a combination of prodding and a lot of communication and guidance suggests a study published in the September 2018 issue of Technology.

It’s a process that is fraught with challenges. The sperm, two of which are housed in each grain of pollen, are unable to move on their own and the egg cell is deeply embedded in the pistil (the female tissues of the flower). So, to reach the egg the sperm rely on a pollen tube that extends into the pistil. These invasive tubes are the fastest growing cells in the plant kingdom, growing up to 1-2 cm (or 500x their original dimension) an hour, and can sometimes extend up to 30 cm, depending on the anatomy of the flower. To fertilize the egg, the pollen tube (which is between 1/20 and 1/5 of the width of a human hair) has to navigate through a maze of tissue, no matter what obstacles it encounters. The phenomenon is well-documented and known to require communication at cellular level with the female flower tissues, but relatively little is understood about the cell mechanics involved. So scientists from McGill and Concordia collaborated to look more closely at the growth force of individual pollen tubes using a microfluidic lab-on-a-chip.

chromas (from IRC) writes:

U.S. Unveils First Step Toward New Online Privacy Rules

The US administration called Tuesday for public comments on a "new approach to consumer data privacy" that could trigger fresh regulations of internet companies.

The Commerce Department said the announcement is part of an effort to "modernize US data privacy policy for the 21st century."

The move follows the implementation this year of ramped up data protection rules imposed by the European Union, and a new privacy law enacted in California.

Both measures will impact internet firms whose websites can be accessed around the globe.

Privacy and data protection have come into greater focus in response to these new laws, and also because of growing concerns on how private data is handled following revelations on the hijacking of millions of Facebook user profiles by a political consultancy ahead of the 2016 election.

"The United States has a long history of protecting individual privacy, but our challenges are growing as technology becomes more complex, interconnected and integrated into our daily lives," said David Redl, who heads the agency's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

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takyon writes:

Tesla and CEO Elon Musk will pay $40 million to settle SEC case

Tesla and Chief Executive Elon Musk have settled a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit that alleged the outspoken businessman misled investors about his prospective effort to take the electric-car company private.

Musk and the Palo Alto company agreed to pay a total of $40 million, and he will give up his chairmanship for at least three years. Musk, however, will remain chief executive and retain a seat on the company's board of directors. Tesla, meanwhile, is required to install an independent chairman and add two new board members, according to terms of the settlement, which the SEC announced Saturday.

Musk and Tesla will each pay $20 million to settle the case; both reached the deal without admitting wrongdoing. The company declined to comment.

The SEC charged Musk with fraud Thursday, alleging that his tweets about taking Tesla private — at $420 a share — were "false and misleading." As part of the lawsuit, it asked a federal court to remove him from the company's leadership and ban him from running a public company.

Also at Reuters.

SEC Settlement announcement.

Previously: Elon Musk Considers Taking Tesla Private
Elon Musk Accused by SEC of Misleading Investors in August Tweet [Updated]

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

eBay Partners with Red Pocket Mobile to Pair a Low-Cost Wireless Plan with Every Phone Sold:

“Red Pocket Mobile is the natural partner for us to launch our add-on wireless plan,” said David Grim, Category Manager at eBay. “Because Red Pocket works on all of America’s major networks, their service can apply to virtually all of the millions of phones sold on eBay.”

[...] Red Pocket’s most popular plan, by contrast, is just $30 per month. That plan provides 5GB of LTE data plus unlimited data at slower speeds, along with unlimited talk, text, and international calling to over 70 countries.

[...] For the occasional user, Red Pocket’s Basic Plan on eBay provides 100 minutes, 100 texts and 500MB of LTE data on any major network for just $5 per month.

Red Pocket has already sold thousands of its Bring Your Own Phone starter kits on eBay, where customers rate Red Pocket’s service 4.9 out of 5 stars. Red Pocket's sky-high customer rating is an extraordinary achievement in an industry that leaves most consumers frustrated with their provider.

Original Submission

Subsentient writes:

After nearly 6 years since R1/alpha4, Haiku R1/beta1 has been released.

[...] This release sees the addition of official x86_64 images, alongside the existing x86 32-bit ones.

[...] By far the largest change in this release is the addition of a complete package management system.

I'm very happy to see the progress alternative open source operating systems have made in recent years.

[Haiku -- an OS,
development continues,
open source is good.
Try your own --Ed.]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bizarre Particles Keep Flying Out of Antarctica's Ice, and They Might Shatter Modern Physics

There's something mysterious coming up from the frozen ground in Antarctica, and it could break physics as we know it. Physicists don't know what it is exactly. But they do know it's some sort of cosmic ray—a high-energy particle that's blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about—the collection of particles that make up what scientists call the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics—shouldn't be able to do that. Sure, there are low-energy neutrinos that can pierce through miles upon miles of rock unaffected. But high-energy neutrinos, as well as other high-energy particles, have "large cross-sections." That means that they'll almost always crash into something soon after zipping into the Earth and never make it out the other side.

And yet, since March 2016, researchers have been puzzling over two events in Antarctica where cosmic rays did burst out from the Earth, and were detected by NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA)—a balloon-borne antenna drifting over the southern continent. ANITA is designed to hunt cosmic rays from outer space, so the high-energy neutrino community was buzzing with excitement when the instrument detected particles that seemed to be blasting up from Earth instead of zooming down from space. Because cosmic rays shouldn't do that, scientists began to wonder whether these mysterious beams are made of particles never seen before.

[...] [In a new paper,] a team of astrophysicists from Penn State University showed that there have been more upward-going high-energy particles than those detected during the two ANITA events. Three times, they wrote, IceCube (another, larger neutrino observatory in Antarctica) detected similar particles, though no one had yet connected those events to the mystery at ANITA. And, combining the IceCube and ANITA data sets, the Penn State researchers calculated that, whatever particle is bursting up from the Earth, it has much less than a 1-in-3.5 million chance of being part of the Standard Model.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Goldman Sachs analyst estimates that Google will pay Apple $9 billion in 2018, and $12 billion in 2019 in order to remain the default search engine on the iPhone's Safari web browser:

Google pays Apple so that it remains the default search engine on the iPhone's Safari browser. Although neither Google nor Apple discuss the terms of the agreement, most analysts believe the payments are billions of dollars per year. In fact, the so-called "traffic acquisition cost" payments may be bigger than anyone on Wall Street thinks, Goldman Sachs analyst Rod Hall wrote in a note distributed to clients on Friday.

Google could pay Apple $9 billion in 2018, and $12 billion in 2019, according to the Goldman estimate.

"We believe this revenue is charged ratably based on the number of searches that users on Apple's platform originate from Siri or within the Safari browser," Hall wrote. "We believe Apple is one of the biggest channels of traffic acquisition for Google," he continued.

Goldman's report models Google's payments to Apple as a fraction of the money it makes on iOS through paid searches, and worked backwards from iOS market share, added a premium, and used a rate based on previous Google disclosures.

[...] In 2017, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimated that Google was paying Apple $3 billion per year. The only hard number we know for sure is that Google paid Apple $1 billion in 2014, thanks to court filings.

Also at Search Engine Land and BGR.

See also: At $12.85 per iPhone, Google's default search payment is probably a steal

Apple Looks Down on Ads But Takes Billions From Google

And if Goldman's $9 billion figure is close to correct, it also undermines Apple's opposition to digital advertising businesses. Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, is happy to tell anyone who will listen that his company is morally superior to those grubby companies such as Google and Facebook Inc. that make their money from harvesting people's digital data trails and using that information to target ads to every man, woman and infant.

Original Submission

chromas (from IRC) writes:

Scientists Can Now Peek Inside Mummies in a Whole New Way:

A revved-up version of traditional CT (computed tomography) scanning shows it’s possible to acquire microscopic-scale images of ancient Egyptian mummies, revealing previously unseen features such as blood vessels and nerves.

Non-destructive x-ray and CT scans are a boon to medical scientists and healthcare practitioners, but they’re also an indispensable tool for archaeologists who try not to disturb ancient remains any more than they have to. When it comes to studying ancient mummies, these scanning techniques have been used to sketch the rough outlines of soft tissue and hair, and even to reveal interior features such as muscles and bones.

A new proof-of-concept study published this week in Radiology shows a modified version of CT scanning, called phase-contrast CT scanning, can be used to do microscopic-scale imaging of soft-tissue in human mummies. This imaging technique detects the absorption and phase shift (similar to how light changes direction when it passes through a lens) that happens when x-rays pass through a solid object. The resulting images feature a higher level of contrast than traditional x-ray images.

The full journal article is available online and contains some impressive pictures.

Journal Reference:
Jenny Romell, William Vågberg, Mikael Romell, Sofia Häggman, Salima Ikram, Hans M. Hertz Soft-Tissue Imaging in a Human Mummy: Propagation-based Phase-Contrast CT Radiology DOI: https://doi.org/10.1148/radiol.2018180945

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Apple wins reversal in University of Wisconsin patent lawsuit

Apple Inc persuaded a federal appeals court on Friday to throw out a $234 million damages award in favor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's patent licensing arm for infringing a patent on computer processing technology.

In a 3-0 decision, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals said Apple deserved judgment as a matter of law, because jurors could not have found infringement based on evidence introduced in the liability phase of a 2015 trial.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, sued Apple in 2014, saying processors in Apple's iPhone 5s, 6 and 6 Plus smartphones infringed a 1998 patent describing a means to improve performance by predicting instructions given by users.

"We hold that no reasonable juror could have found literal infringement in this case," Chief Judge Sharon Prost wrote for the Washington, D.C.-based appeals court.

Also at The Verge and Engadget.

In a related development, the US International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled that they will not be imposing an import ban:

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The New York Times reports:

What do you call it when employers use Facebook’s advertising platform to show certain job ads only to men or just to people between the ages of 25 and 36?

How about when Google collects the whereabouts of its users — even after they deliberately turn off location history?

Or when AT&T shares its mobile customers’ locations with data brokers?

American policymakers often refer to such issues using a default umbrella term: privacy. That at least is the framework for a Senate Commerce Committee hearing scheduled for this Wednesday titled “Examining Safeguards for Consumer Data Privacy.”

[...] What is at stake here isn’t privacy, [it's] the right not to be observed. It’s how companies can use our data to invisibly shunt us in directions that may benefit them more than us.

takyon writes:

Facebook reportedly avoided DOJ wiretap of Messenger calls

As part of a case involving members of the MS-13 gang, the US Department of Justice has been pushing to get access to Facebook Messenger voice calls. It even attempted to hold Facebook in contempt of court last month when the company pushed back on a wiretap order. Now, Reuters reports that a US District Court judge ruled in favor of the social media giant, according to sources familiar with the matter, but because the proceedings are sealed, the reason why isn't yet clear.

Court filings have shown that the government was able to intercept phone calls and Messenger texts during its investigation, but three Messenger voice calls of interest were inaccessible.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Japan's Hopping Rovers Capture Amazing Views of Asteroid Ryugu (Video)

Two tiny, hopping rovers that landed on asteroid Ryugu last week have beamed back some incredible new views of the asteroid's rocky surface.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission dropped the two nearly identical rovers, named Minerva-II1A and Minerva-II1B, onto the surface of Ryugu on Sept. 21. In a new video from the eyes of Minerva-II1B, you can watch the sun move across the sky as its glaring sunlight reflects off the shiny rocks that cover Ryugu's surface.

Also at Hayabusa2 project website.

takyon: Additionally, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft has returned its highest resolution view of Ryugu, from when it dropped the Minerva rovers.

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