SoylentNews

takyon writes:

A second Apple employee was charged with stealing self-driving car project secrets

The Federal Bureau of Investigation accused an Apple employee, who is a Chinese citizen, of attempting to steal trade secrets related to the company's autonomous car project, according to a charging document that was unsealed on Wednesday. It's the second time the FBI has charged an Apple employee for trying to steal intellectual property related to the project in the last seven months. The news was first reported by NBC's Bay Area affiliate.

The new charge comes at a time of high tension between the United States and China. The two countries are locked in a trade war, and various US government agencies have accused China of engaging in multiple schemes — some dating back decades — to steal intellectual property from leading technology companies.

Jizhong Chen, a Chinese national, was charged with theft of trade secrets based on actions that allegedly date back to when he was hired last summer as a hardware developer. He was one of 5,000 Apple employees who was looped in on the company's self-driving car effort, known as "Project Titan," which has been operating in secret for years. (The company also recently laid off about 200 employees from the project.) Furthermore, he was also one of 1,200 "core" employees who directly work on the project. Chen was on the electrical engineering team, according to the charging document.

Previously: Apple Engineer Accused of Downloading Driverless Car Trade Secrets for Chinese Company

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Sen. Mark Warner, shown here in 2018, said Wednesday that he's drafting legislation to require major tech platforms to get informed consent from users whose data is collected in market research.

After a year of asking Facebook to explain its approach to privacy, at least two US senators still have questions.

Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, each took the company to task Wednesday in light of reports that it paid teens as young as 13 to download an app that could track their every action on their phones.

In separate press releases, the senators pointed to growing frustration with the social media giant for not being clear about its data collection practices. For his part, Warner said he is drafting a bill to require major companies to get informed consent from users whose data becomes the target of market research.

"I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook's data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection," Warner wrote in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. But a spokesperson told CNET earlier Wednesday that Facebook didn't share the data it collected and users knew what they were signing up for. Less than 5 percent of the users were teens and all signed parental consent forms, the spokesperson said. 

Warner also asked Facebook for a fuller accounting of how it came to approve the apps, which had deep access to track activity on mobile phones, including apps that Facebook was competing with.

Markey took issue with the ethics of targeting teens with an offer they might not have the maturity to access.

"It is inherently manipulative to offer teens money in exchange for their personal information when younger users don't have a clear understanding how much data they're handing over and how sensitive it is," he said.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Insys exec allegedly gave lap dance to doctor while pushing deadly opioid

A former regional sales director for Insys Therapeutics allegedly gave a lap dance to a doctor as the company was pushing him to prescribe its deadly opioid painkiller to patients. That's according to multiple reports of testimony given Tuesday from a former Insys colleague in a federal court in Boston.

The testimony is part of a federal racketeering trial getting underway this week against Insys founder John Kapoor and four former executives, including the sales director, Sunrise Lee. Federal prosecutors allege that the Insys executives used bribes and kickbacks to get doctors to prescribe the company's powerful and addictive fentanyl spray, called Subsys—which was intended only for cancer patients experiencing pain that's not alleviated by other medications (aka "breakthrough pain"). The former executives are also accused of misleading and defrauding health insurance companies that ended up covering the drug for patients who did not need it. A congressional investigation in 2017 concluded that Insys sales representatives bluntly lied and tricked insurers to do that—and the investigators released the tapes to prove it.

Previously: Opioid Crisis Official; Insys Therapeutics Billionaire Founder Charged; Walgreens Stocks Narcan
The More Opioids Doctors Prescribe, the More Money They Make

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Jail is not top of most people's bucket list of places to visit, but for some it is becoming increasingly attractive. I had heard anecdotal stories of homeless in the UK committing petty crimes in the hope of being given a warm bed and a meal, but in Japan it seems that the elderly are taking things to a whole new level:

Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave - the proportion of crimes committed by people over the age of 65 has been steadily increasing for 20 years. The BBC's Ed Butler asks why.

At a halfway house in Hiroshima - for criminals who are being released from jail back into the community - 69-year-old Toshio Takata tells me he broke the law because he was poor. He wanted somewhere to live free of charge, even if it was behind bars.

"I reached pension age and then I ran out of money. So it occurred to me - perhaps I could live for free if I lived in jail," he says.

"So I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station and told the guy there: 'Look, I took this.'"

The plan worked. This was Toshio's first offence, committed when he was 62, but Japanese courts treat petty theft seriously, so it was enough to get him a one-year sentence.

Small, slender, and with a tendency to giggle, Toshio looks nothing like a habitual criminal, much less someone who'd threaten women with knives. But after he was released from his first sentence, that's exactly what he did.

"I went to a park and just threatened them. I wasn't intending to do any harm. I just showed the knife to them hoping one of them would call the police. One did."

Altogether, Toshio has spent half of the last eight years in jail.

I ask him if he likes being in prison, and he points out an additional financial upside - his pension continues to be paid even while he's inside.

"It's not that I like it but I can stay there for free," he says. "And when I get out I have saved some money. So it is not that painful."

Toshio represents a striking trend in Japanese crime. In a remarkably law-abiding society, a rapidly growing proportion of crimes is carried about by over-65s. In 1997 this age group accounted for about one in 20 convictions but 20 years later the figure had grown to more than one in five - a rate that far outstrips the growth of the over-65s as a proportion of the population (though they now make up more than a quarter of the total).

To my mind, there is something wrong with the way we take care of the elderly or those who are significantly poorer than the average when their most attractive option is jail.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Full-time Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) developer Drew DeVault has written a blog post about why he chose Flask for his version control system, sr.ht. sr.ht is similar to GitLab and GitHub but is 100% FLOSS and somewhat decentralized. People are both able and encouraged to host on their own machines. The web pages for the web interface average less that 10 KiB and contain neither tracking nor JavaScript.

sr.ht is a large, production-scale suite of web applications (I call them "mini-services", as they strike a balance between microservices and monolithic applications) which are built in Python with Flask. David Lord, one of the maintainers of Flask, reached out to me when he heard about sr.ht and saw that it was built with Flask. At his urging, I'd like to share the rationale behind the decision and how it's turned out in the long run.

The whole of sr.ht is now in public alpha.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

IBM hopes 1 million faces will help fight bias in facial recognition

IBM thinks the data being used to train facial recognition systems isn't diverse enough.

The tech giant released a trove of data containing 1 million images of faces taken from a Flickr dataset with 100 million photos and videos.

The images are annotated with tags related to features including craniofacial measurements, facial symmetry, age and gender.

Researchers at the company hope that these specific details will help developers train their artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition systems to identify faces more fairly and accurately.

And then the police adopted the new facial recognition algorithms and everyone lived happily ever after.

IBM blog post. Also at TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Engineers translate brain signals directly into speech

In a scientific first, Columbia [University] neuroengineers have created a system that translates thought into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone's brain activity, the technology can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. This breakthrough, which harnesses the power of speech synthesizers and artificial intelligence, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain. It also lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak, such as those living with as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or recovering from stroke, regain their ability to communicate with the outside world.

[...] Decades of research has shown that when people speak -- or even imagine speaking -- telltale patterns of activity appear in their brain. Distinct (but recognizable) pattern of signals also emerge when we listen to someone speak, or imagine listening. Experts, trying to record and decode these patterns, see a future in which thoughts need not remain hidden inside the brain -- but instead could be translated into verbal speech at will.

[...] [The] researchers asked [epilepsy] patients to listen to speakers reciting digits between 0 to 9, while recording brain signals that could then be run through the vocoder. The sound produced by the vocoder in response to those signals was analyzed and cleaned up by neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence that mimics the structure of neurons in the biological brain.

The end result was a robotic-sounding voice reciting a sequence of numbers. To test the accuracy of the recording, Dr. [Nima] Mesgarani and his team tasked individuals to listen to the recording and report what they heard. "We found that people could understand and repeat the sounds about 75% of the time, which is well above and beyond any previous attempts," said Dr. Mesgarani. The improvement in intelligibility was especially evident when comparing the new recordings to the earlier, spectrogram-based attempts. "The sensitive vocoder and powerful neural networks represented the sounds the patients had originally listened to with surprising accuracy."

Dr. Mesgarani and his team plan to test more complicated words and sentences next, and they want to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking. Ultimately, they hope their system could be part of an implant, similar to those worn by some epilepsy patients, that translates the wearer's thoughts directly into words.

Towards reconstructing intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-37359-z) (DX)

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump inform us of a story:

Scientists may have discovered the oldest Earth rock ever—on the Moon. A lunar sample returned by the Apollo 14 astronauts may contain a bit of Earth from about 4 billion years ago. The research about this possible relic from the Hadean Earth is published today in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

An international team of scientists associated with the Center for Lunar Science and Exploration (CLSE), part of NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, found evidence that the rock was launched from Earth by a large impacting asteroid or comet. This impact jettisoned material through Earth's primitive atmosphere, into space, where it collided with the surface of the Moon (which was three times closer to Earth than it is now) about 4 billion years ago. The rock was subsequently mixed with other lunar surface materials into one sample.

NASA: Earth's Oldest Rock Found on the Moon
Also at Fox News: Moon discovery: Ancient 4-billion-year-old relic found on lunar surface

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Germs in Your Gut Are Talking to Your Brain. Scientists Want to Know What They're Saying.

[...] The scientists eventually discovered changes in the brains of these antisocial mice. One region, called the amygdala, is important for processing social emotions. In germ-free mice, the neurons in the amygdala make unusual sets of proteins, changing the connections they make with other cells.

Studies of humans revealed some surprising patterns, too. Children with autism have unusual patterns of microbial species in their stool. Differences in the gut bacteria of people with a host of other brain-based conditions also have been reported.

But none of these associations proves cause and effect. Finding an unusual microbiome in people with Alzheimer's doesn't mean that the bacteria drive the disease. It could be the reverse: People with Alzheimer's disease often change their eating habits, for example, and that switch might favor different species of gut microbes.

Fecal transplants can help pin down these links. In his research on Alzheimer's, Dr. Sisodia and his colleagues transferred stool from ordinary mice into the mice they had treated with antibiotics. Once their microbiomes were restored, the antibiotic-treated mice started developing protein clumps again.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Newborn babies are born with the innate skills needed to pick out words from language, a new study published in Developmental Science reveals.

Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition.

[...] The researchers discovered two mechanisms in three-day-old infants, which give them the skills to pick out words in a stream of sounds.

The first mechanism is known as prosody, the melody of language, allow us to recognise when a word starts and stops.

The second is called the statistics of language, which describes how we compute the frequency of when sounds in a word come together.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Binge and heavy drinking may trigger a long-lasting genetic change, resulting in an even greater craving for alcohol, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

"We found that people who drink heavily may be changing their DNA in a way that makes them crave alcohol even more," said Distinguished Professor Dipak K. Sarkar, senior author of the study and director of the Endocrine Program in the Department of Animal Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "This may help explain why alcoholism is such a powerful addiction, and may one day contribute to new ways to treat alcoholism or help prevent at-risk people from becoming addicted."

In 2016, more than 3 million people died from the harmful use of alcohol, according a World Health Organization report. That is 5 percent of all global deaths. More than three-quarters of alcohol-caused deaths were among men. The harmful use of alcohol also caused 5.1 percent of the worldwide toll of disease and injuries.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung Breaks Terabyte Threshold for Smartphone Storage with Industry's First 1TB Embedded Universal Flash Storage

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the industry's first one-terabyte (TB) embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 2.1, for use in next-generation mobile applications. Just four years after introducing the first UFS solution, the 128-gigabyte (GB) eUFS, Samsung has passed the much-anticipated terabyte threshold in smartphone storage. Smartphone enthusiasts will soon be able to enjoy storage capacity comparable to a premium notebook PC, without having to pair their phones with additional memory cards.

[...] Within the same package size (11.5mm x 13.0mm), the 1TB eUFS solution doubles the capacity of the previous 512GB version by combining 16 stacked layers of Samsung's most advanced 512-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash memory and a newly developed proprietary controller.

It has been speculated that the 1 TB chips are destined for the Samsung Galaxy S10.

The UFS package is smaller than a microSD card (which is 15.0mm × 11.0mm × 1.0mm), so 1 TB microSD cards could be produced soon. The current record is 512 GB.

Previously: Samsung 256 GB UFS 2.0 Phone Storage is Faster than some SATA SSDs
Samsung to Offer New Type of Flash Memory Card
Samsung Announces 512 GB NAND Chips for Smartphones

Original Submission

mmarujo writes:

Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android "Facebook Research" app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page.

[...] Ads for the program run by uTest on Instagram and Snapchat sought teens 13-17 years old for a "paid social media research study." The sign-up page for the Facebook Research program administered by Applause doesn't mention Facebook, but seeks users "Age: 13-35 (parental consent required for ages 13-17)." If minors try to sign-up, they're asked to get their parents' permission with a form that reveal's Facebook's involvement and says "There are no known risks associated with the project, however you acknowledge that the inherent nature of the project involves the tracking of personal information via your child's use of apps. You will be compensated by Applause for your child's participation."

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

Original Submission

messymerry writes:

Over the past year or so, I have had an alarmingly high number of USB flash drives fail into "read only" mode. Something like six or more. These varied from cheap Chinese eBay stuff to name brands pretty much equally. So, I got to thinking: How many have failed on me over the last decade or so. Practically none that I can recall. What has changed in manufacture or design that might account for this or is it just coincidental.

I did a search using Startpage, and Duck Duck Go, and didn't find anything that might validate my observations. Please tell me, am I imagining this or is it a real phenomenon? Have any of you noticed increased failure rates of USB flash drives.

There is a motivation to try to get users to migrate from external storage to the cloud. I'm not comfortable with that. I'm strictly VFR. No clouds, low, and slow.

Thanks for any insights you might choose to offer.

Original Submission

After the Australian senate forced an extension to the MyHealthRecord opt out hundreds of thousands of Australians have contacted the digital health agency to opt out of the new controversial online health database. With one day left privacy advocates are advising everyday people to opt out of having an online health record created before one is automatically created for them and their existing Medicare data is sucked in.

It's an expensive honeypot waiting to be pilfered.

Original Submission