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takyon writes:

Microsoft Significantly Misrepresented HoloLens 2's Field of View at Reveal

To significant anticipation, Microsoft revealed HoloLens 2 earlier this week at MWC 2019. By all accounts it looks like a beautiful and functional piece of technology and a big step forward for Microsoft's AR initiative. All of which makes it unfortunate that the company didn't strive to be clearer when illustrating one of the three key areas in which the headset is said to be improved over its predecessor. [...] For field of view—how much of your view is covered by the headset's display—[Alex] Kipman said that HoloLens 2 delivers "more than double" the field of view of the original HoloLens.

Within the AR and VR markets, the de facto descriptor used when talking about a headset's field of view is an angle specified to be the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal extent of the device's display from the perspective of the viewer. When I hear that one headset has "more than double" the field of view of another, it says to me that one of those angles has increased by a factor of ~2. It isn't perfect by any means, but it's how the industry has come to define field of view.

It turns out that's not what Kipman meant when he said "more than double." I reached out to Microsoft for clarity and found that what he was actually referring to was not a field of view angle, rather the field of view area, but that wasn't explained in the presentation at all, just (seemingly intentionally) vague statements of "more than twice the field of view."

[...] But then Kipman moved onto a part of the presentation which visually showed the difference between the field of view of HoloLens 1 and HoloLens 2, and that's when things really became misleading.

Microsoft chief defends controversial military HoloLens contract

Microsoft employees objecting to a US Army HoloLens contract aren't likely to get many concessions from their company's leadership. CEO Satya Nadella has defended the deal in a CNN interview, arguing that Microsoft made a "principled decision" not to deny technology to "institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy." The exec also asserted that Microsoft was "very transparent" when securing the contract and would "continue to have that dialogue" with staff.

Also at UploadVR, Ars Technica, and The Hill.

See also: Stick to Your Guns, Microsoft

Previously: U.S. Army Awards Microsoft a $480 Million HoloLens Contract
Microsoft Announces $3,500 HoloLens 2 With Wider Field of View and Other Improvements

Related: Google Drafting Ethics Policy for its Involvement in Military Projects
Google Will Not Continue Project Maven After Contract Expires in 2019

Original Submission

takyon writes:

FBI: End-to-End Encryption Is an Infectious Problem

Just in case there were any lingering doubts about U.S. law enforcement's stance on end-to-end encryption, which prevents information from being read by anyone but its intended recipient, FBI executive assistant director Amy Hess told the Wall Street Journal this week that its use "is a problem that infects law enforcement and the intelligence community more and more so every day."

The quote was published in a piece about efforts from the UK, Australia and India to undermine end-to-end encryption. All three countries have passed or proposed legislation that compels tech companies to supply certain information to government agencies. The laws vary in their specifics, including restrictions on to what information law enforcement can request access, but the gist is that they don't want any data to be completely inaccessible.

Related: FBI Chief Calls for National Talk Over Encryption vs. Safety
FBI Failed to Access 7,000 Encrypted Mobile Devices
DOJ: Strong Encryption That We Don't Have Access to is "Unreasonable"
Five Eyes Governments Get Even Tougher on Encryption
Apple Speaks Out Against Australian Anti-Encryption Law; Police Advised Not to Trigger Face ID
Australia Set to Pass Controversial Encryption Law
Split Key Cryptography is Back... Again – Why Government Back Doors Don't Work

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Huawei Mate X vs. Samsung Galaxy Fold: Ask the Press

The folding hybrid phone-tablets are probably the biggest story to come out of Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019.

Smartphones

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

Energizer 'thick boi' phone gives 50 days of battery life

The F(x)tec Pro 1 is a love letter to your old QWERTY keyboard phones

Oppo Demonstrates 5G Smartphone at MWC 2019

The Sony Xperia 1: A Long 21:9 HDR 4K OLED Smartphone

People Say a Weird Aspect of Nokia's New Smartphone Is Triggering Their Trypophobia

(It's a spider.)

Other

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

Lenovo's New 595-Gram Portable Display: The ThinkVision M14 USB-C Monitor

Lenovo to Launch a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Laptop with 5G

Nubia at MWC 2019: Wearable OLED Smartphone Coming to a Wrist Near You

Related: Royole Beats Samsung and Others in Race to Create the First Foldable Smartphone
More on Royole's Foldable Smartphone, the FlexPai
Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8cx, an ARM Chip Intended for Laptops
Samsung Announces the Galaxy Fold, a Phone-Tablet Hybrid Device
Micron and SanDisk (Western Digital) Announce 1 TB MicroSD Cards

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A fascinating new article in knowable magazine https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2017/rebranding-placebos

Indicates that a group of savvy scientists are looking at the potential for placebo as a front line therapy for a host of illnesses and conditions.
The article is rather long, but to summarize, placebo and its related effects are powerful. So powerful in fact that most medical therapies are only slightly more effective, while running the risk of serious side effects. Therefore the scientists pose the questions. Why not use placebo as a front line therapy, a first line of defense in most cases?

But for this to work, placebo would need a rebrand.
The problem with the placebo effect is that it stops working once a person knows that they are receiving the placebo.

So here is a thought. What if instead of using the word "placebo", we make it ok for doctors to write initial prescriptions for monosaccharide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosaccharide and Dihydrogen Monoxide DHMO therapy https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/dhmo.htm and / or other fancy chemical names for the ingredients actually in these placebos. Then a simple updating of wikipedia pages showing their efficacy in treatment of various ailments along with their relative safety. In otherwords, since we are a society that places our faith in chemicals, why not just give the chemicals in the placebos their due and forget the word "placebo" all together?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The little lander Beresheet hopes to make history in multiple ways this year.

The first commercial lander bound for the surface of the moon suffered a hiccup early Tuesday.

Israeli nonprofit organization SpaceIL's Beresheet spacecraft was supposed to perform an engine burn to raise its elliptical orbit around the Earth, but instead its computer unexpectedly reset itself. As a result, the maneuver was automatically cancelled.

[...] Shortly after the spacecraft was deployed from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last week, Beresheet's engineers found its star tracker, which helps determine its position in space, was sensitive to being blinded by the sun's rays. SpaceIL has said it's working on the issue

Representatives for SpaceIL didn't immediately respond to a request for more information on how the issues may affect Beresheet's mission timeline.

[...] Beresheet was built and launched on a relatively small budget of about $100 million, and as a result, it carries few of the backup systems that are included in typical NASA spacecraft.

Fortunately, SpaceIL says that so far Beresheet remains in communication with its control center and stands ready to try an orbit-boosting burn again.

Following a complicated set of orbits around Earth and then the moon, Beresheet is aiming to attempt a moon landing in April.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it's settled its first action against a marketer who used fake paid reviews to boost sales of its product on Amazon.

The FTC had accused Cure Encapsulations of paying AmazonVerifiedReviews.com to write and post fake reviews to maintain an average Amazon rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars for the company's garcinia cambogia weight-loss supplement. The agency had also accused the company of making false and unsubstantiated claims, including reviews that said the product caused weight loss of two or more pounds each and "literally blocks fat from forming."

[...] Under the terms of the proposed settlement, Cure Encapsulations is barred from making claims about the health benefits of dietary supplements without supporting clinical evidence. The defendants are also required to notify its customers of the allegations against it and identify for Amazon which reviews it purchased.

A $12.8 million judgment was levied against Cure Encapsulations, but it will be suspended when the company pays $50,000 to the FTC and fulfills other tax obligations. The full amount of the judgment will be immediately due if the commission finds the company misrepresented its financial condition.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Arizona utility reveals battery deals that give California a run for its money

Last week, Arizona Public Service (APS) announced that it would procure 850 megawatts of battery storage by 2025. APS, which is the largest utility in the southwestern state, also said it would add at least 100 MW of solar power to its grid by 2025.

According to Utility Dive, 450MW of that battery storage will be deployed by 2021, with a total of 1200 megawatt-hours of energy. The additional 400MW will be built before 2025, but the duration of those batteries is not yet confirmed. APS's statement notes that the new battery capacity will be built at existing solar plants.

The announcement is one of the largest made by a utility for battery storage. In July of last year, California's PG&E signed similarly large deals with Tesla, Vistra/Dynegy, and Hummingbird Energy Storage. Invenergy and AES will work with APS to provide the batteries in Arizona.

According to APS, the 100MW of new solar that will be built will be paired with 100MW/300 MWh of battery storage from the 2021 pool of deployments.

[...] Interestingly, APS also announced a new Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a 463 MW natural gas plant owned by Calpine. But APS noted in its statement that "instead of a traditional 20-year contract, the purchase agreement with Calpine is seven years, allowing APS the flexibility to take advantage of cleaner technologies in the future as they mature."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

US lawmakers kick off debate over online privacy

US lawmakers opened a debate Tuesday over privacy legislation in the first step by Congress toward regulation addressing a series of troublesome data protection abuses by tech firms.

Most companies have said they would accept new federal legislation in the wake of bombshell revelations about Facebook and other online platforms' mishandling of users' personal data.

Lawmakers face several key choices, including whether to adopt the model in the European Union's data protection rules, and whether to pre-empt the strict privacy rules adopted by California.

A House of Representatives committee hearing on Tuesday is to be followed by a Senate panel Wednesday where industry and interest groups will make recommendations on US legislation.

Legislators are likely to find broad agreement on the need for greater transparency regarding the collection and sharing of data, and on tougher enforcement for violations.

Beyond that, sharp differences exist on how tightly tech firms should be reined in.

"A federal law must include basic rights for individuals to access, correct, delete and port their personal data," said Nuala O'Connor, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital rights group, in testimony prepared for the House Energy and Commerce panel.

Original Submission

Apparition writes:

Security researches at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium in San Diego unveiled a series of new Thunderbolt vulnerabilities collectively named Thunderclap.

We look at the security of input/output devices that use the Thunderbolt interface, which is available via USB-C ports in many modern laptops. Our work also covers PCI Express (PCIe) peripherals which are found in desktops and servers.

Such ports offer very privileged, low-level, direct memory access (DMA), which gives peripherals much more privilege than regular USB devices. If no defences are used on the host, an attacker has unrestricted memory access, and can completely take control of a target computer: they can steal passwords, banking logins, encryption keys, browser sessions and private files, and they can also inject malicious software that can run anywhere in the system.

We studied the defences of existing systems in the face of malicious DMA-enabled peripheral devices and found them to be very weak.

[...] We built a fake network card that is capable of interacting with the operating system in the same way as a real one, including announcing itself correctly, causing drivers to attach, and sending and receiving network packets. To do this, we extracted a software model of an Intel E1000 from the QEMU full-system emulator and ran it on an FPGA. Because this is a software model, we can easily add malicious behaviour to find and exploit vulnerabilities.

We found the attack surface available to a network card was much richer and more nuanced than was previously thought. By examining the memory it was given access to while sending and receiving packets, our device was able to read traffic from networks that it wasn't supposed to. This included VPN plaintext and traffic from Unix domain sockets that should never leave the machine.

[...] More generally, since this is a new space of many vulnerabilities, rather than a specific example, we believe all operating systems are vulnerable to similar attacks, and that more substantial design changes will be needed to remedy these problems. We noticed similarities between the vulnerability surface available to malicious peripherals in the face of IOMMU protections and that of the kernel system call interface, long a source of operating system vulnerabilities. The kernel system call interface has been subjected to much scrutiny, security analysis, and code hardening over the years, which must now be applied to the interface between peripherals and the IOMMU.

In short, consider disabling Thunderbolt drivers on important machines now.

You can read up more on Thunderclap here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How Our Universe Could Emerge as a Hologram

The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according to an unknown pattern. And for 22 years, they've had a toy model of how emergent space-time can work: a theoretical "universe in a bottle," as its discoverer, Juan Maldacena, has described it.

The space-time filling the region inside the bottle—a continuum that bends and undulates, producing the force called gravity—exactly maps to a network of quantum particles living on the bottle's rigid, gravity-free surface. The interior "universe" projects from the lower-dimensional boundary system like a hologram. Maldacena's discovery of this hologram has given physicists a working example of a quantum theory of gravity.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the toy universe shows how space-time and gravity emerge in our universe. The bottle's interior is a dynamic, Escheresque place called anti–de Sitter (AdS) space that is negatively curved like a saddle. Different directions on the saddle curve in opposite ways, with one direction curving up and the other curving down. The curves tend toward vertical as you move away from the center, ultimately giving AdS space its outer boundary—a surface where quantum particles can interact to create the holographic universe inside. However, in reality, we inhabit a positively curved "de Sitter (dS) space," which resembles the surface of a sphere that's expanding without bounds.

Ever since 1997, when Maldacena discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence — a duality between AdS space and a "conformal field theory" describing quantum interactions on that space's boundary—physicists have sought an analogous description of space-time regions like ours that aren't bottled up. The only "boundary" of our universe is the infinite future. But the conceptual difficulty of projecting a hologram from quantum particles living in the infinite future has long stymied efforts to describe real space-time holographically.

[...] Patrick Hayden, a theoretical physicist and computer scientist at Stanford who studies the AdS/CFT correspondence and its relationship to quantum error correction, said he and other experts are mulling over Dong, Silverstein and Torroba's dS/dS model. He said it's too soon to tell whether insights about how space-time is woven and how quantum gravity works in AdS space will carry over to a de Sitter model. "But there's a path—something to be done," Hayden said. "You can formulate concrete mathematical questions. I think a lot is going to happen in the next few years."

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/22/an-arizona-cop-threatened-arrest-year-old-journalist-she-wasnt-backing-down/

When a small-town Arizona cop stopped a 12-year-old reporter who was chasing down a story tip on Monday, he probably had no idea what he was getting himself into.

Hilde Kate Lysiak, the preteen journalist whose exploits have inspired a Scholastic book series and an upcoming TV show, made a name for herself in 2016 by being the first to report on a grisly murder in her hometown, then firing back at the haters who suggested that a 9-year-old girl shouldn't be hanging around crime scenes. Since then, she has continued to break news about bank robberies, alleged rapes and other lurid crimes in the Orange Street News, the paper that she publishes out of her parents' home in Selinsgrove, Pa.

"NOTE TO DEALERS: OSN Will Not Be Intimidated," she wrote last month, after reportedly receiving threats because she had published text message exchanges between an alleged drug dealer and a woman whom he had reportedly solicited for sex.

So naturally, she didn't back down when Joseph Patterson, the town marshal in Patagonia, Ariz., allegedly threatened to throw her in juvenile jail on Monday, then falsely claimed it would be illegal for her to film him and publish the video on the Internet. Instead, she posted their exchange on YouTube and in the Orange Street News — which in turn prompted town officials to discipline Patterson, as the Nogales International was the first to report on Wednesday.

canopic jug writes:

Cryptographer Derek Zimmer at Private Internet Access' blog has a three-part series on the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and its second round of review for candidate algorithms for post-quantum cryptography. After a general audience introduction to what post-quantum cryptography is, he writes about the selection process used by NIST to eventually settle on a pair of algorithms. After several rounds, there will be only two algorithms selected. One will be for asymmetric public-key encryption, and the other will be for digital signatures. Parts 2 and 3 of his posts summarize each candidate algorithm individually.

NIST Round 2 and Post-Quantum Cryptography (part 1)
NIST Round 2 and Post-Quantum Cryptography – The New Asymmetric Algorithms (part 2)
NIST Round 2 and Post-Quantum Cryptography – The New Asymmetric Algorithms (part 3)

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

People already get the names wrong, so the USB group has doubled down on bad naming.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/usb-3-2-is-going-to-make-the-current-usb-branding-even-worse/

USB 3.0 was straightforward enough. A USB 3.0 connection ran at 5Gb/s, and slower connections were USB 2 or even USB 1.1. The new 5Gb/s data rate was branded "SuperSpeed USB," following USB 2's 480Mb/s "High Speed" and USB 1.1's 12Mb/s "Full Speed."

But then USB 3.1 came along and muddied the waters. Its big new feature was doubling the data rate to 10Gb/s. The logical thing would have been to identify existing 5Gb/s devices as "USB 3.0" and new 10Gb/s devices as "USB 3.1." But that's not what the USB-IF did. For reasons that remain hard to understand, the decision was made to retroactively rebrand USB 3.0: 5Gb/s 3.0 connections became "USB 3.1 Gen 1," with the 10Gb/s connections being "USB 3.1 Gen 2." The consumer branding is "SuperSpeed USB 10Gbps."

What this branding meant is that many manufacturers say that a device supports "USB 3.1" even if it's only a "USB 3.1 Gen 1" device running at 5Gb/s. Meanwhile, other manufacturers do the sensible thing: they use "USB 3.0" to denote 5Gb/s devices and reserve "USB 3.1" for 10Gb/s parts.

USB 3.2 doubles down on this confusion. 5Gb/s devices are now "USB 3.2 Gen 1." 10Gb/s devices become "USB 3.2 Gen 2." And 20Gb/s devices will be... "USB 3.2 Gen 2×2." Because they work by running two 10Gb/s connections along different pairs of wires simultaneously, and it's just obvious from arithmetic that you'd number the generations "1, 2, 2×2." Perhaps they're named for powers of two, starting with zero? The consumer branding is a more reasonable "SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to a new article in Phys.org https://phys.org/news/2019-02-repulsive-photons.html
Scientist have found a way to make photons repel each other

Long story short they convert the photons which normally do not interact into polaritons: https://www.nature.com/subjects/polaritons "Polaritons are hybrid particles made up of a photon strongly coupled to an electric dipole" and this allows the photons to repel since they have charge.

Looks like my light saber really can be made. Now I just need to find a source for Kyber Crystals https://www.starwars.com/databank/lightsaber-crystal

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1984:

Researchers break digital signatures for most desktop PDF viewers | ZDNet

A team of academics from the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany say they've managed to break the digital signing system and create fake signatures on 21 of 22 desktop PDF viewer apps and five out of seven online PDF digital signing services.

[...] The five-person research team has been working since early October 2018 together with experts from Germany's Computer Emergency Response Team (BSI-CERT) to notify impacted services.

The team went public with their findings over the weekend after all affected app makers and commercial companies finished patching their products.

The reason why researchers were willing to wait months so all products would receive fixes is because of the importance of PDF digital signatures.

Digitally signed PDF documents are admissible in court, can be used as legally-binding contracts, can be used to approve financial transactions, can be used for tax filing purposes, and can be used to relay government-approved press releases and announcements.

Having the ability to fake a digital signature on an official PDF document can help threat actors steal large amounts of money or cause chaos inside private companies and public institutions.

Original Submission