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takyon writes:

U.S., Supporting Mexico's Plan, Will Invest $5.8 Billion in Central America

The United States, joining an effort by Mexico, will commit to investing billions in Central America in hopes of ending the poverty, violence and drug-trafficking that are driving thousands of people in the region to undertake the difficult trek to the United States, the State Department announced on Tuesday.

Mexico's new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, introduced what he called a "Marshall Plan" last week to address the root causes of Central American migration: a $30 billion initiative to invest in the region and welcome migrants into Mexico with visas, health care and employment.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration signaled its support for the plan, saying it was committing $5.8 billion in private and public investments in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Much of that amount, however, was previously committed or contingent on the identification of "commercially viable projects."

Also at The Washington Post and The Hill.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18149120/google-lens-ai-camera-recognize-detect-1-billion-items

Google's AI-powered camera tool can now recognize over a billion items, the company wrote in a new blog post. Google Lens launched last year in a preliminary version on Photos and Assistant with only around 250,000 items within its repertoire.

The expansion comes over a year after the Google Lens' optical character recognition engine has been trained on reading more product labels. By recognizing text, Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods. It has also been fed more data from photos taken by smartphones, so Google says the feature is overall more reliable than before.

The 1 billion items figure comes from products available through Google Shopping, so it likely doesn't include more obscure, unshoppable objects, such as a gaming console from the 1990s or the first edition of a rare book. But it covers a huge range of things that could appease someone who's simply just looking up an item they're curious about.

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takyon writes:

Altria board approves $13 billion investment in e-cigarette company Juul

Altria's board of directors has approved its $12.8 billion investment in leading e-cigarette manufacturer Juul, with a formal announcement planned for Thursday before market open, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Juul's board is meeting to consider the deal.

Tobacco giant Altria will invest $12.8 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul, which values the e-cigarette company at $38 billion, the people said. The deal combines the maker of the best-selling cigarette with the best-selling e-cigarette and comes as both companies are under pressure.

The deal marks a turning point for Juul. The company has positioned itself as anti-tobacco, with a mission to help to wean adults off combustible cigarettes, which are responsible for killing about half a million Americans every year. With this deal, though, it will be partly owned by one of the world's biggest tobacco giants.

As such, Juul stipulated a number of conditions to help ensure the Altria deal furthers its goals. As part of the agreement, Altria would add Juul coupons to Marlboro and other cigarette packs and give Juul some of its prime shelf space, the people familiar said.

Also at NYT, Reuters, and The Verge.

See also: Marlboro maker Altria nears deal to take 35 percent stake in leading e-cigarette company Juul, sources say
$1.3 million: the average bonus Juul employees get after a deal with a cigarette maker

[$38 billion] makes Juul Labs Inc. more valuable than Airbnb and Elon Musk's SpaceX, according to Bloomberg News.

Previously: E-Cig Maker Juul Valued at $15-16 Billion
FDA Raided E-Cigarette Maker Juul to Look for Evidence That the Company Targets Minors
Juul Boosts Lobbying Spending as Potential E-Cigarette Regulations Loom
Marlboro Owner Invests $1.8 Billion in Cannabis Company

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canopic jug writes:

Recent upgrades that depend on the new Linux getrandom() syscall can cause OpenSSH to delay starting for tens of minutes while waiting for enough bytes of randomness. There are currently not any feasible work-arounds.

Systemd makes this behaviour worse, see issue #4271, #4513 and #10621.
Basically as of now the entropy file saved as /var/lib/systemd/random-seed will not - drumroll - add entropy to the random pool when played back during boot. Actually it will. It will just not be accounted for. So Linux doesn't know. And continues blocking getrandom(). This is obviously different from SysVinit times when /var/lib/urandom/random-seed (that you still have laying around on updated systems) made sure the system carried enough entropy over reboot to continue working right after enough of the system was booted.

#4167 is a re-opened discussion about systemd eating randomness early at boot (hashmaps in PID 0...). Some Debian folks participate in the recent discussion and it is worth reading if you want to learn about the mess that booting a Linux system has become.

While we're talking systemd ... #10676 also means systems will use RDRAND in the future despite Ted Ts'o's warning on RDRAND [Archive.org mirror and mirrored locally as 130905_Ted_Tso_on_RDRAND.pdf, 205kB as Google+ will be discontinued in April 2019].

Related post: OneRNG: a Fully-Open Entropy Generator (2014)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

A Southern California man has become the latest person to sue the federal government over what he says is an unconstitutional search of his phone at the Los Angeles International Airport.

According to his lawsuit, which was recently filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Haisam Elsharkawi had arrived at LAX on February 9, 2017 and was headed to Saudi Arabia to go on a hajj, the Muslim religious pilgrimage.

After clearing the security checkpoint, Elsharkawi, an American citizen, was pulled aside from the Turkish Airlines boarding line by a Customs and Border Protection officer, who began questioning him about how much cash he was carrying and where he was going. Elsharkawi complied with the officer's inquiries and dutifully followed him to a nearby table.

"As the questioning continued and became increasingly aggressive, Mr. Elsharkawi asked if there was a problem and whether he needed an attorney," the complaint states. "Officer Rivas then accused Mr. Elsharkawi of hiding something because of his request for an attorney."

Soon after, another agent, Officer Rodriguez, began searching Elsharkawi's pockets and discovered his phone. Rodriguez asked Elsharkawi to unlock his phone, which he declined to do. He then also refused to answer further questions without having an attorney present.

Another officer told Elsharkawi that he was not under arrest and as such had no right to an attorney—at which point he asked to be released.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/man-sues-feds-after-being-detained-for-refusing-to-unlock-his-phone-at-airport/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-world-work-fourdayweek/burnout-stress-lead-more-companies-to-try-a-four-day-work-week-idUSKBN1OG0GY

It sounds too good to be true, but companies around the world that have cut their work week have found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout.

"It is much healthier and we do a better job if we're not working crazy hours," said Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder of Berlin-based project management software company Planio, who introduced a four-day week to the company's 10-member staff earlier this year.

In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian reported a fall in stress and a jump in staff engagement after it tested a 32-hour week earlier this year.

Even in Japan, the government is encouraging companies to allow Monday mornings off, although other schemes in the workaholic country to persuade employees to take it easy have had little effect.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Prime and Punishment: Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as if they'd been cut and pasted from elsewhere. "I didn't know what was going on, whether it was a glitch or whether somebody was trying to mess with us," Plansky says.

As a precaution, he reported the reviews to Amazon. Most of them vanished days later — problem solved — and Plansky reimmersed himself in the work of running a six-employee, multimillion-dollar weapons accessory business on Amazon. Then, two weeks later, the trap sprang. "You have manipulated product reviews on our site," an email from Amazon read. "This is against our policies. As a result, you may no longer sell on Amazon.com, and your listings have been removed from our site."

A rival had framed Plansky for buying five-star reviews, a high crime in the world of Amazon. The funds in his account were immediately frozen, and his listings were shut down. Getting his store back would take him on a surreal weeks-long journey through Amazon's bureaucracy, one that began with the click of a button at the bottom of his suspension message that read "appeal decision."

When you buy something on Amazon, the odds are, you aren't buying it from Amazon at all. Plansky is one of 6 million sellers on Amazon Marketplace, the company's third-party platform. They are largely hidden from customers, but behind any item for sale, there could be dozens of sellers, all competing for your click. This year, Marketplace sales were almost double those of Amazon retail itself, according to Marketplace Pulse, making the seller platform alone the largest e-commerce business in the US.

Long read about manipulation in Amazon's marketplace, featuring various stories like the one above.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Google denies altering YouTube code to break Microsoft Edge

A former Microsoft intern has revealed details of a YouTube incident that has convinced some Edge browser engineers that Google added code to purposely break compatibility. In a post on Hacker News, Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern at Microsoft, lays out details and claims about an incident earlier this year. Microsoft has since announced the company is moving from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the open source Chromium project for its Edge browser.

[...] The claims are surprising if they're genuine, and they come months after a Mozilla program manager claimed a separate YouTube redesign made the site "5x slower in Firefox and Edge." That incident led Edge, Safari, and Firefox users to revert to scripts to improve the YouTube experience. Google was also at the center of claims it intentionally blocked access to Google Maps for Windows Phone users years ago.

[...] Google disputes Bakita's claims, and says the YouTube blank div was merely a bug that was fixed after it was reported. "YouTube does not add code designed to defeat optimizations in other browsers, and works quickly to fix bugs when they're discovered," says a YouTube spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. "We regularly engage with other browser vendors through standards bodies, the Web Platform Tests project, the open-source Chromium project and more to improve browser interoperability."

Previously: Is Google Using an "Embrace, Extend..." Strategy?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

High School Student Injects The Book Of Genesis Into His Body

A student has injected himself with the Book of Genesis and the surah Ar-Ra'd (part of the Qur'an) because he "wondered whether it would be possible".

Adrien Locatelli, a high school student in Grenoble, France, decided to inject himself with several religious texts.

"Recent studies have reported that it is possible to convert any type of information into DNA for the purpose of storage," he wrote, publishing his initial results on the Open Science Framework.

"Since it is possible to convert digital information into DNA, I wondered whether it would be possible to convert a religious text into DNA and to inject it in a living being."

Seems like a good origin story for a religious superhero.

Related: Man Who Attempted DIY Gene Therapy Found Dead
Biohacker With Implanted Card Escapes Conviction

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Cybersecurity failures raise threat of 'deadly missile attacks,' Pentagon watchdog says

Cybersecurity lapses as basic as neglecting to encrypt classified flash drives and failing to put physical locks on critical computer servers leave the United States vulnerable to deadly missile attacks, the Defense Department's internal watchdog says in a new report.

The report, dated Dec. 10 but not made public until Friday, sums up eight months of investigation of the nation's ballistic missile defense system by the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General, or IG.

The audit examined five of the 104 Defense Department facilities that manage ballistic missile defense systems and technical information.

The facilities aren't identified in the heavily redacted 44-page report. But the report makes numerous specific references to programs involving the Army, the Navy and the Missile Defense Agency.

"The Army, Navy and MDA did not protect networks and systems that process, store and transmit [ballistic missile defense] technical information from unauthorized access and use," the declassified report concludes.

The shortcomings could lead to the disclosure of "critical details that compromise the integrity, confidentiality and availability of [ballistic missile defense] technical information," it says. Twice, it warns that such disclosure "could allow U.S. adversaries to circumvent [ballistic missile defense] capabilities, leaving the United States vulnerable to deadly missile attacks."

Security Controls at DoD Facilities for Protecting Ballistic Missile Defense System Technical Information

See also: Cyber Tests Showed 'Nearly All' New Pentagon Weapons Vulnerable To Attack, GAO Says (October)

WEAPON SYSTEMS CYBERSECURITY: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities

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takyon writes:

FCC fines Swarm Technologies $900K over unauthorized satellite launch

Back in March came the surprising news that a satellite communications company still more or less in stealth mode had launched several tiny craft into orbit — against the explicit instructions of the FCC. The company, Swarm Technologies, now faces a $900,000 penalty from the agency, as well as extra oversight of its continuing operations.

[...] Unfortunately, the units are so small — about a quarter the size of a standard cubesat, which is already quite tiny — that the FCC felt they would be too difficult to track, and did not approve the launch.

Swarm, perhaps thinking it better to ask forgiveness than file the paperwork for permission, launched anyway in January aboard India's PSLV-C40, which carried more than a dozen other passengers to space as well. (I asked Swarm and the launch provider, Spaceflight, at the time for comment but never heard back.) The FCC obviously didn't like this, and began an investigation shortly afterwards.

Slap on the wrist?

Also at Engadget and Quartz.

Previously: India Launches 31 Satellites, Puts Cartosat-2 Into Orbit
FCC Accuses Startup of Unauthorized Launch of Commercial Satellites

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

BBC:

The Army has deployed "specialist equipment" to Gatwick Airport as the travel chaos caused by drone activity shows no sign of abating. Tens of thousands of passengers on several airlines have been disrupted by drones flying over the airport. In a tweet, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson had confirmed the military deployment.

He said: "The armed forces have a range of unique capabilities and this isn't something we would usually deploy but we are there to assist and do everything we can so that they are in a position to open the airport at the earliest opportunity."

Gatwick's runway has been shut since Wednesday night because devices have been repeatedly flown over the airfield.

Free insightful mods for the most creative solution.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Better security achieved with randomly generating biological encryption keys

"Currently, encryption is done with mathematical algorithms that are called one-way functions," said Saptarshi Das, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, Penn State. "These are easy to create in one direction, but very difficult to do in the opposite direction."

An example of this is multiplying two prime numbers. Assuming the original numbers are very large, reverse engineering from the result becomes very time and computer-resource heavy.

"However, now that computers are becoming more powerful and quantum computing is on the horizon, using encryption that relies on its effectiveness because it is monumentally time consuming to decrypt won't fly anymore," Das said.

[...] The researchers are currently using 2,000 T cells per encryption key. The team reports in a recent issue of Advanced Theory and Simulations that even if someone knows the key generation mechanism, including cell type, cell density, key generation rate and key sampling instance, it is impossible for anyone to breach the system. It is simply not possible from that information to bust the encryption.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Houseplant with added rabbit DNA could reduce air pollution, study shows

A humble houseplant with a dash of rabbit DNA could help lower our exposure to indoor air pollution, research suggests. Scientists have revealed that by inserting a rabbit gene into devil's ivy (Epipremnum aureum) the plant is able to clean the surrounding air by breaking down chemicals such as benzene and chloroform, which in certain concentrations can harm health.

The researchers say these chemicals end up in household air as a result of everyday activities, with chloroform released from chlorinated water during showering, and benzene from sources including outside air and smoking.

"The levels aren't very high, but they are high enough to be of concern," said Prof Stuart Strand, a co-author of the study from the University of Washington, adding that some studies in developed countries had suggested some of these volatile chemicals could approach industrial limits within homes – a particular concern for children.

[...] In an attempt to reduce human exposure to such substances, scientists say they have inserted a synthetic form of the rabbit version of a gene known as P450 2e1 into devil's ivy. This gene is found in many mammals, including humans, and produces an enzyme that breaks down a range of chemicals in the body. While it has been inserted into plants before, including poplar trees, researchers say their study shows the trick also works for houseplants.

Also at BGR.

Greatly Enhanced Removal of Volatile Organic Carcinogens by a Genetically Modified Houseplant, Pothos Ivy (Epipremnum aureum) Expressing the Mammalian Cytochrome P450 2e1 Gene (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.8b04811) (DX)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Some iPad Pros ship a little bent, and Apple says that's normal

Gadget-makers have long played with the idea of bendable displays, but this isn't what they were going for: Apple has confirmed that some brand-new iPad Pro units have a slight bend to them—and this is expected and not a defect.

There are numerous stories and images of very slight bends on brand-new devices on the MacRumors forums, and The Verge's Chris Welch observed the same issue in his own iPad.

When The Verge reached out to Apple for comment, the company told the publication that the bending is "a side effect of the device's manufacturing process and shouldn't worsen over time or negatively affect the flagship iPad's performance in any practical way." (The Verge's words.) Apple says the bending happens as a result of a cooling process used on the components when the device is manufactured.

Defective gadget return policy:

1. Have you recently purchased a nice shiny "defective" gadget? Good, it should be under warranty.
2. Is it actually defective? Maybe it's bent or has some other flaw? Good, good, we wouldn't want to be selling you something broken.
3. Did you purchase it from Apple? Specifically, did you buy a nice, shiny new iPad Pro? You know, the one that can cost you upwards of $1k? Don't worry, it's supposed to be that way. You didn't get a defective device or damaged goods. You got what you paid for. A bent iPad Pro.

Original Submission