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canopic jug writes:

Stage 9 was a non-commercial, virtual reality recreation of Star Trek The Next Generation's Enterprise starship. It allowed fans of the series to explore the beloved vessel and immerse themselves in the chief setting of the series. It was built over the past two years using Unreal Engine 4 by fans who have taken great pains to state that the project was not affiliated or licensed with CBS or Paramount and that they weren't doing this to make money, only to artistically demonstrate their fandom. That did not stop CBS from sending a cease and desist letter, thus shutting down the project as CBS was reportedly unwilling to engage in dialog.

From Techdirt : CBS Bullies Fan Star Trek Project To Shut Down Despite Creators' Pleas For Instructions On Being Legit
and at Ars Technica : Amazing NCC-1701-D simulator issues final command: "all stop"
and at TorrentFreak : CBS Shuts Down Stage 9, a Fan-Made Recreation of the USS Enterprise

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

c|net:

Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors is a sweet superhero tale where, yes, a group of younger heroes come together to battle an extremist group. But more importantly than that, it's a superhero tale with diversity oozing out of every animated frame.
...
Ms. Marvel, who idolizes Captain Marvel and is inspired by her, instead leads the Secret Warriors movie, showcasing her origin tale, her relationship with her mother and her struggle for acceptance in a culture that is adverse to the creation of the Inhumans -- the latter being people who gain superpowers after getting into contact with a gas substance called Terrigen Mists.

What Secret Warriors is doing particularly well is that it isn't shying away from its focus on diversity in any part of its plot. In particular, the storyline aims at a brewing conflict between humans and an extremist group of Inhumans, the latter believing that a war between the two groups is inevitable. Khan ends up stuck in the middle, as an Inhuman herself who doesn't believe the conflict is needed.

Another refreshing carryover from Marvel comics is America Chavez. Her origin story, which sees Chavez's two mothers sacrificing themselves to protect their daughter, remains completely intact and sympathetic. Chavez herself demonstrates herself as a formidable ally, having super strength and the ability to fly. It's a nice start for LGBT representation on the animated side of the Marvel universe for now.

Wasn't Captain Marvel a man?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Pew Research:

The shares of U.S. adults who say they use the internet, use social media, own a smartphone or own a tablet computer are all nearly identical to the shares who said so in 2016. The share who say they have broadband internet service at home currently stands at 65% – nearly identical to the 67% who said this in a survey conducted in summer 2015. And when it comes to desktop or laptop ownership, there has actually been a small dip in the overall numbers over the last two years – from 78% in 2016 to 73% today.

A contributing factor behind this slowing growth is that parts of the population have reached near-saturation levels of adoption of some technologies. Put simply, in some instances there just aren't many non-users left. For example, nine-in-ten or more adults younger than 50 say they go online or own a smartphone. And a similar share of those in higher-income households have laptops or desktops.

The poor, the rural, the elderly, and those who couldn't care less are the hold-outs.

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

Country's first 'robot sex brothel' set to open in Texas prompts backlash: report

The first so-called 'robot sex brothel' in the U.S. slated to open in the Houston area this month has prompted a massive backlash from residents and activists who say it will ruin the neighborhood. The company opened its first location last year near Toronto, where $60 buys a half-hour alone with a robot sex doll, according to the Washington Examiner. The dolls start at $2,500 to buy.

Update: Houston officials halt plans to open first US 'robot brothel'

Houston city officials have ordered at least a temporary halt to a Canadian company's plan to open a so-called "robot brothel" in the city. The Houston Chronicle reported that building inspectors ordered the halt after determining that the company, Kinky S Dolls, lacked the permits required for demolition and construction at a former 2,500 sq ft hair salon in the Galleria area of the city.

takyon: Change.org petition aiming to "Keep Robot Brothels Out of Houston".

Also at ABC7.

See also: 'Robot sex brothel' slated to open is not wanted, Houston's mayor says

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Microsoft Releases Crown Jewels — From 1982!

If you look back 30 or so years ago, it wasn’t clear what was going to happen with personal computers. One thing most people would have bet on, though, was that CP/M — the operating system from Digital Research — would keep growing and power whatever new machines were available. Except it didn’t. MS-DOS took over the word and led — eventually — to the huge number of Windows computers we know today. Microsoft has released the source code to MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 on GitHub.

Microsoft — then another fledgling computer company — had written some BASIC interpreters and wanted in on the operating system space. They paid the princely sum of $75,000 to Seattle Computer Products for something called QDOS written by [Tim Paterson]. Rebranded as MS-DOS, the first version appeared in late 1981 and version 1.25 was out about a year later.

While you might not think having MS-DOS source code is a big deal, there’s still a lot of life left in DOS and it is also interesting from an educational and historical perspective. If you don’t want to read x86 assembly language, there’s also the BASIC source for the samples (paradoxically, in the bin subdirectory) along with compiled COM files for old friends like EDLIN and DEBUG.

[...] If this gets you wanting to write some new DOS programs, you can actually use GCC now. Or if you want to play the DONKEY.BAS file, QB64 would probably work.

Also at The Register.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Android, Debian and Ubuntu users are still at risk.

https://threatpost.com/another-linux-kernel-bug-surfaces-allowing-root-access/137800/

A high-severity cache invalidation bug in the Linux kernel has been uncovered, which could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the targeted system.

This is the second kernel flaw in Linux to debut in the last week; a local-privilege escalation issue was also recently discovered.

The flaw (CVE-2018-17182), which exists in Linux memory management in kernel versions 3.16 through 4.18.8, can be exploited in many different ways, “even from relatively strongly sandboxed contexts,” according to Jann Horn, a researcher with Google Project Zero.

The Linux team fixed the problem in the upstream kernel tree within two days of Horn responsibly reporting it on Sept. 18, which Horn said was “exceptionally fast, compared to the fix times of other software vendors.”

The bad news is that Debian stable and Ubuntu releases 16.04 and 18.04 have not yet patched the vulnerability – and Android users remain at risk.

“Android only ships security updates once a month,” Horn said, in a blog post on the flaw this week. “Therefore, when a security-critical fix is available in an upstream stable kernel, it can still take weeks before the fix is actually available to users—especially if the security impact is not announced publicly.”

The Flaw

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

When you get down to the single atom level, atoms which are magnetic, no longer remain stable. "What defines a permanent magnet is that it has a north and a south pole, which remains in the same orientation," professor of Scanning Probe Microscopy Alexander Khajetoorians explains, "But when you get down to a single atom, the north and south pole of the atom start to flip and do not know what direction they should point, as they become extremely sensitive to their surroundings. If you want a magnetic atom to hold information, it cannot flip. For the last ten years researchers have been asking: in order for the atom to stop flipping, how many atoms are needed to stabilize the magnet, and how long can it hold it information before it flips again? In the last two years, scientists in Lausanne and at IBM Almaden have figured out how to keep the atom from flipping, showing that a single atom can be a memory. To do this, researchers had to use very low temperatures, 40 Kelvin or -233 degrees Celsius. This technology is limited to extremely low temperature."

Scientists at Radboud University took a different approach. By choosing a special substrate – semiconducting black phosphorus -, they discovered a new way to store information within single cobalt atoms, that bypasses the conventional problems with instability. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, where a sharp metal tip moves across their surface just a few atoms away, they could "see" single cobalt atoms on the surface of black phosphorus. Because of the extremely high resolution and the special properties of the material, they directly showed that the single cobalt atoms could be manipulated into one of two bit states.
...
Right now, the elements that store hard drive bits are still a thousand times bigger than an atom. Khajetoorians: "What this work means is that, if we could construct a real hard drive from all these atoms – and we are still a long way from that – you could store thousands of times more information."

Hardware manufacturers are gonna have to fight electric vehicles for the world's supply of cobalt.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The FBI used a suspect's face to unlock his iPhone in Ohio case

When Apple debuted Face ID with the iPhone X last year, it raised an interesting legal question: can you be compelled to unlock your phone by looking at it? In an apparent first, Forbes reports that the FBI got a suspect to unlock his phone during a raid in August.

In August, the FBI raided the home of Grant Michalski, looking for evidence that he had sent or received child pornography. They were armed with a search warrant [warning: this documentation contains explicit descriptions of sexual abuse] which allowed them to search Michalski's computer for evidence, and during the raid, agents recovered his iPhone X.

The agents who found the iPhone asked Michalski to unlock the device via Face ID, which he did. They "placed the [phone] into airplane mode and examined it by looking through the files and folders manually and documenting the findings with pictures."

The facial unlocking was voluntary (or so they claim), and the Columbus Police and FBI have devices capable of bypassing the phone's passcode protection. So much for security.

Also at AppleInsider.

Original Submission

Bytram (from IRC) writes:

Estonia sues Gemalto for 152 mln euros over ID card flaws:

TALLINN, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Estonian police are seeking to recover 152 million euros ($178 mln) in a lawsuit filed on Thursday against digital security firm Gemalto, following a recall last year when security flaws were found in citizen ID cards produced by the firm.

The vulnerabilities to hacker attacks found in government- issued ID cards supplied by the Franco-Dutch company marked an embarrassing setback for Estonia, which has billed itself as the world’s most digitalised “e-government”.

Most of its 1.3 million people use electronic ID cards to access public services digitally.

Estonia’s Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) said in a statement Gemalto had created private key codes for individual cards, leaving the government IDs vulnerable to external cyber attack, rather than embedding it on the card’s chip as promised.

Local Ed. checking in, here are some recent stories that contain a few of the twist in the saga (which did begin quite a while back) from the state news service (in English):
https://news.err.ee/864881/gemalto-152-million-ppa-claim-disproportionate
https://news.err.ee/859618/ppa-say-no-to-id-card-compromise-gemalto-still-hope-for-accord-with-state https://news.err.ee/688602/id-card-crisis-cost-information-system-authority-1-million
-- FP

Original Submission

Bytram (from IRC) writes:

California gov. signs nation's strictest net neutrality rules into law:

California Governor Jerry Brown today signed net neutrality legislation into law, setting up a legal showdown pitting his state against Internet service providers and the Federal Communications Commission.

The California net neutrality bill, previously approved by the state Assembly and Senate despite protests from AT&T and cable lobbyists, imposes rules similar to those previously enforced by the FCC.

"While the Trump administration does everything in its power to undermine our democracy, we in California will continue to do what's right for our residents," California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), author of the net neutrality bill, said today.

California's legal authority to impose its own net neutrality rules will be tested in court. The FCC's recent repeal of federal rules said that states aren't allowed to impose net neutrality rules, and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called California's net neutrality bill "illegal."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The Wall Street Journal reports Saudi Arabia Shelves Work on SoftBank's $200 Billion Solar Project (paywalled, alternate URL):

Saudi Arabia has put on hold a $200 billion plan with SoftBank Group Corp. to build the world's biggest solar-power-generation project, said Saudi government officials, setting back another eye-catching transformation project in the kingdom.

The stalled solar project marks a setback for a partnership between Saudi Arabia and SoftBank that has pursued ambitious ideas. Together, they have created a $100 billion fund for technology company investments that has resulted in a rush of new money flooding into startups.

The solar project would have turned the world's most important oil producer into a giant in solar power, ultimately generating about 200 gigawatts of energy -- more than three times the country's daily needs. The plan was announced by SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in New York last March and was meant to be an extension of their partnership.

Now, officials and a Saudi government adviser said, no one is actively working on the project.

Instead, the officials and the adviser said the Saudi kingdom is working up a broader, more practical strategy to boost renewable energy, to be announced in late October around the time of an investment conference in Riyadh. The announcement will help resolve the confusion that the SoftBank plan created and clarify the kingdom's renewable energy goals, a Saudi official said.

The original plan was based on Saudi Arabia completing an IPO of the Saudi Aramco oil company which was, at one time, estimated to raise $2 trillion. Then the price of oil dropped. The price has recovered somewhat, but an IPO would certainly be more lucrative if the price of oil were higher. So spending from the proceeds of the IPO on a solar farm have been pushed back.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Canada signs on to U.S.-led renewal of war on drugs

Canada was rebuked on Monday by a group of world leaders and experts on drug policy for endorsing a Trump-led declaration renewing the "war on drugs" and for passing up a critical moment to provide global leadership on drug regulation.

The Trudeau government's decision to sign on to the declaration, released by the White House on the sidelines of U.S. President Donald Trump's first attendance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, contradicts Ottawa's previous skepticism of Washington's drugs war at home and abroad, and comes just weeks before cannabis legalization in Canada.

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark said she believed that both Canada and Mexico − which also signed the declaration even though president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has repeatedly said that the "war on drugs" has failed and he will pursue new policy − likely have signed on reluctantly, held hostage by the North American free-trade agreement talks in Washington, over which a critical deadline looms.

Countries that signed the "Global Call to Action on the World Drug Problem" were promised an invitation for their leader to attend a kick-off event with Mr. Trump in New York. The statement was not drafted in the usual multilateral process of a declaration from the UN and the wording was presented as non-negotiable. One hundred and thirty countries signed but 63 did not; the dissenters include major U.S. allies such as Germany, Norway and Spain.

Previously: Canada Becomes the Second Nation to Legalize Cannabis

Related: WP says Marijuana Legalization Makes World a Better Place

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

In today's snail mail was a flyer from Google Ads to my small company, "Reach more customers searching for your business." These things are coming in nearly as frequently as the AOL floppies of yore.

Next to this heading was a picture of a phone with "engineering consultant" in the Google search bar. Under that was the name of my company, as if it had been found by a search. The full company name is:
Anonymous Engineering Associates, Inc.
but maybe you can guess what mindless truncation did to that--yes, right there on the cover to the advert, and also inside it said,

Anonymous Engineering, Ass...
4.7 ***** 112 Reviews

I wondered why Google Ads had a reason to insult me, so I called the number inside, 1-855-287-5178 to complain about the incompetent ad agency or whoever programmed that variable data printing. Got a guy, only a few seconds on hold (since I was a potential customer), but when I tried to explain, he tried to tell me that this snail mail card, with "Copyright 2018. Google..." on the back wasn't from Google Ads!

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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)

Original Submission