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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How to hack your face to dodge the rise of facial recognition tech

UK police forces are increasingly experimenting with controversial new facial recognition (FR) technology for crowd control and locating suspects. Critics, however, have labeled the trials a shambles, pointing to the high error rate and even higher cost of the program.

Documents released under Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that collectively South Wales Police and London's Metropolitan Police have spent millions of pounds on trials of the technology, despite the fact that both systems have been shown to have an error rate over 90 per cent.

Similar trials around the world have raised concerns around the technology, including in San Francisco where privacy advocates are calling for a ban on the use of FR by law enforcement.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash:

As the Lion Air crew fought to control their diving Boeing Co. 737 Max 8, they got help from an unexpected source: an off-duty pilot who happened to be riding in the cockpit.

That extra pilot, who was seated in the cockpit jumpseat, correctly diagnosed the problem and told the crew how to disable a malfunctioning flight-control system and save the plane, according to two people familiar with Indonesia's investigation.

The next day, under command of a different crew facing what investigators said was an identical malfunction, the jetliner crashed into the Java Sea killing all 189 aboard.

[...] The previously undisclosed detail on the earlier Lion Air flight represents a new clue in the mystery of how some 737 Max pilots faced with the malfunction have been able to avert disaster while the others lost control of their planes and crashed. The presence of a third pilot in the cockpit wasn't contained in Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee's Nov. 28 report on the crash and hasn't previously been reported.

The so-called dead-head pilot on the earlier flight from Bali to Jakarta told the crew to cut power to the motor driving the nose down, according to the people familiar, part of a checklist that all pilots are required to memorize.

[...] The Indonesia safety committee report said the plane had had multiple failures on previous flights and hadn't been properly repaired.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel to Stop Developing Compute Cards

Intel will not develop new Compute Cards, the company has confirmed to Tom's Hardware. Compute Cards were Intel's vision of modular computing that would allow customers to continually update point of sale systems, all-in-one desktops, laptops and other devices. Pull out one card, replace it with another, and you have a new CPU, plus RAM and storage.

"We continue to believe modular computing is a market where there are many opportunities for innovation," an Intel spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "However, as we look at the best way to address this opportunity, we've made the decision that we will not develop new Compute Card products moving forward. We will continue to sell and support the current Compute Card products through 2019 to ensure our customers receive the support they need with their current solutions, and we are thankful for their partnership on this change."

Oh yeah, that was a thing.

Here's some EOMA68 news from 2018:

Remember The EOMA68 Computer Card Project? It Hopes To Ship This Year
A libre GPU effort based on RISC-V, Rust, LLVM and Vulkan by the developer of an earth-friendly computer
The EOMA68 Libre Computer Developer Wants To Tackle A Quad-Core RISC-V Libre SoC Design

Previously: Intel Announces Compute Card, a Small and Flat Form Factor for Computing

Related: EOMA68 Free/Libre and Modular Computing Devices
Intel Discontinues Edison, Galileo, and Joule Product Lines

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Recently published in theBMJ:

Findings suggest that an offspring's risk of autism spectrum disorder increases following prenatal exposure to ambient pesticides within 2000 m of their mother's residence during pregnancy, compared with offspring of women from the same agricultural region without such exposure. Infant exposure could further increase risks for autism spectrum disorder with comorbid intellectual disability.

Risk of autism spectrum disorder was associated with prenatal exposure to glyphosate (odds ratio 1.16, 95% confidence interval 1.06 to 1.27), chlorpyrifos (1.13, 1.05 to 1.23), diazinon (1.11, 1.01 to 1.21), malathion (1.11, 1.01 to 1.22), avermectin (1.12, 1.04 to 1.22), and permethrin (1.10, 1.01 to 1.20).

For autism spectrum disorder with intellectual disability, estimated odds ratios were higher (by about 30%) for prenatal exposure to glyphosate (1.33, 1.05 to 1.69), chlorpyrifos (1.27, 1.04 to 1.56), diazinon (1.41, 1.15 to 1.73), permethrin (1.46, 1.20 to 1.78), methyl bromide (1.33, 1.07 to 1.64), and myclobutanil (1.32, 1.09 to 1.60); exposure in the first year of life increased the odds for the disorder with comorbid intellectual disability by up to 50% for some pesticide substances.

This story has been kicking around for over 10 years, my first recollection of it was an Italian study I read back in 2007, though this is the first time I have seen Permethrin implicated as a risk factor.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

"He's Literally Suing an Imaginary Cow": Late-Night Hosts Mock Rep. Devin Nunes:

On Monday, Devin Nunes' cow was an obscure Twitter account with around 1,200 followers. Then Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) filed a lawsuit demanding that Twitter and several Twitter accounts—including the user behind the pseudonymous cow—pay him $250 million for the "pain, insult, embarrassment, humiliation, emotional distress and mental suffering, and injury to his personal and professional reputations" caused by their tweets.

Now, Devin Nunes' cow has more than 420,000[*] Twitter followers—that's more than Nunes himself, who has 395,000 followers.

It's a beautiful example of the Streisand Effect. Nunes appears to have filed the lawsuit in part to raise his own profile within the conservative movement, as the lawsuit was peppered with gratuitous swipes at the Democratic Party, Fusion GPS, and other high-profile villains in the conservative pantheon.

But the lawsuit appears to have done more to raise the profile of Devin Nunes' cow than it did Nunes himself. Television comedians Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and Stephen Colbert all had fun at Nunes' expense on Tuesday night.

"He's literally suing an imaginary cow," Kimmel said, noting that Nunes had co-sponsored the Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act during the last session of Congress. "We can't have livestock insulting our elected officials. This DevinCow account obviously really bothers Devin Nunes. So in the interest of civility, I'm asking you please don't follow @DevinCow on Twitter."

[...] Santa Clara University legal scholar Eric Goldman is skeptical that Nunes will win his lawsuit. The law gives online service providers like Twitter broad immunity for content posted by its users. As for Devin Nunes' cow, many of the supposedly defamatory statements made by the parody account are clearly non-actionable opinions.

[*] 420,000 at the time the linked story was posted (2019-03-20 18:42:00 UTC). At the time of this submission (2019-03-21 03:42:03 UTC) the count had risen to 534K. That works out to adding 1000 followers every 5 minutes or so.

Following @DevinCow on Twitter could reveal moooving comments on all that is at steak in this rare social medium... you can run but you can't hide.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.

Facebook is probing a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users and stored it in plain text on internal company servers. That’s according to a senior Facebook employee [ . . . . ]

My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords. [ . . . . ]

Both Github and Twitter were forced to admit similar stumbles in recent months, but in both of those cases the plain text user passwords were available to a relatively small number of people

[ . . . . ] the issue first came to light in January 2019 when security engineers reviewing some new code noticed passwords were being inadvertently logged in plain text.

If I had a Facebook account, I would be reassured by Facebook's reassuring reassurances.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Minds + Machines (MMX) have started 2019 on a high with the release of a company update last week for the year to the end of 2018. During the 12 month period domain registrations were up 38% to 1.84m year-on-year with steady growth since the year-end 31 December 2018. This includes around 1.65 million for their 30 new gTLDs. The rest of the registrations would be for the 4 gTLDs MMX acquired from ICM Registry: .sex, .adult, .porn and .xxx.

Billings were up 129% year-on-year due to a combination of the first time ICM contribution and a significant increase in billings from China, up over 40% year-on-year, greatly helped by .luxe registrations and healthy ongoing .vip sales. Meanwhile, .law and MMX’s US portfolio are also performing well, up over 9% when compared to the same period last year with Germany 6% ahead of last year.

[...]As part of the .luxe R&D project, which looks to provide a standardised naming convention for blockchain addresses, MMX announced it is now working with the lead developers of the Namecoin blockchain and XAYA platform to develop an easy-to-use naming solution that will integrate human readable .luxe addresses with bitcoin alphanumeric addresses in a fully secure and decentralised fashion that broadly mirrors their .luxe Ethereum naming solution that successfully launched in Q4 2018. As a result, it will be possible to securely associate memorable .luxe names not just to Ethereum alphanumeric addresses but also to bitcoin alphanumeric addresses, such as an individual’s bitcoin wallet, as well as potentially use .luxe names within the XAYA decentralised gaming universe. It is expected the .luxe bitcoin naming service will go live in H2 2019.

http://domainincite.com/23988-donuts-founder-replaces-pitts-as-mmxs-premium-guru
http://www.lse.co.uk/regulatory-news-article.asp?ArticleCode=eoi54z8d&ArticleHeadline=Company_Update_and_Notice_of_Results

Original Submission

t-3 writes:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/houston-area-chemical-fire-expected-burn-days-n984686:

The blaze at a site along the Houston Ship Channel in Deer Park, Texas, began Sunday when a leak from a tank containing volatile naphtha ignited and spread to others in the same complex, the company said. The tanks hold tens of thousands of barrels of products used to boost gasoline octane, make solvents and plastics.

The blaze has not disrupted nearby refineries or shipping at the country's busiest petrochemical port, authorities said. The Houston Ship Channel is home to nine U.S. oil refineries that process 2.3 million barrels per day (bpd), or 12 percent of the national total.

[...]"There has been no affect[sic] on vessel traffic other than at the two terminals," said J.J. Plunkett, port agent at the Houston Pilots, whose members guide ships in and out of the channel. Ship access to docks at the ITC and Vopak terminals was restricted by the U.S. Coast Guard, he said.

Air emissions tests detected the presence of a volatile organic compound six miles away from the facility. Levels were below those considered hazardous, ITC said.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Deer-Park-chemical-fire-extinguished-overnight-13702369.php:

t-3 writes:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/india-starry-dwarf-frog-species-no-close-relatives

A tiny new frog species discovered in tropical forests of southwest India has been one of a kind for millions of years.

Palaniswamy Vijayakumar and his colleagues first spotted the new species one night in 2010 while surveying frogs and reptiles roughly 1,300 meters up in India’s Western Ghats mountain range. The frog hardly stood out — its brown back, orange belly and starlike spots acted as camouflage against the dark hues and water droplets on the forest floor. And at only 2 to 2.9 centimeters long, “it can sit on your thumb,” says Vijayakumar, a biogeographer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Dubbed the starry dwarf frog by the team, the frog didn’t seem special among the dozens of other possibly new species discovered on the trip. But analysis of its DNA, anatomy and geographic distribution told a different story. The frog represents the sole known species of a lineage dating back 57 million to 76 million years ago, the researchers report March 12 in PeerJ. That’s around when the Indian subcontinent was merging with Asia after breaking away from Madagascar.

S. P. Vijayakumar et al. A new ancient lineage of frog (Anura: Nyctibatrachidae: Astrobatrachinae subfam. nov.) endemic to the Western Ghats of peninsular India. PeerJ. Published online March 12, 2019. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6457.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

On November 11, 2018, a deep rumble ricocheted around the world, one that humans couldn’t feel but that registered quite clearly on seismometers. A new pre-print paper about the event is now suggesting that it was caused by the largest offshore volcanic event in recorded history.

Originating 30 miles east of the island of Mayotte, near Madagascar, the mid-November signal immediately caught the attention of a disparate group of geoscientists. They subsequently took to Twitter to express their fascination over this mysterious event—one even joked about a “giant prehistoric sea monster.”

[...]According to the data from the onshore GPS stations, as well as the seismic signals—including the weird November 11 event—the rumbling is definitely being generated by volcanic activity of some sort. The way the ground on Mayotte is moving implies that the seafloor off its eastern shoreline is sinking at a rate of around 0.4 inches per month. At the same time, Mayotte itself is shifting eastward at a rate of 0.63 inches per month. Both indicate something huge underground is on the move, causing some serious deflation.

[...]Helen Robinson, a geothermal expert and PhD candidate at Glasgow University, compared it to volumes of other submarine eruptions. From the 1998 Axial Seamount eruption offshore from Oregon, to the Havre paroxysm north of New Zealand on the Kermadec arc, “it certainly seems this is the largest submarine event in terms of volume on record,” she told Gizmodo.

https://gizmodo.com/mysterious-planetwide-rumble-may-have-come-from-the-lar-1833327445

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

According to an article posted on a major news aggregator in 2015, Matter and Antimatter Are Mirror Images

As it turns out, maybe, but not so much inside

Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University have confirmed that matter and antimatter decay differently for elementary particles containing charmed quarks.

Distinguished Professor Sheldon Stone says the findings are a first, although matter-antimatter asymmetry has been observed before

[...]Using LHC data, they identified both versions of the particle, well into the tens of millions, and counted the number of times each particle decayed into new byproducts.

"The ratio of the two possible outcomes should have been identical for both sets of particles, but we found that the ratios differed by about a tenth of a percent," Stone says. "This proves that charmed matter and antimatter particles are not totally interchangeable."

Adds Polyakov, "Particles might look the same on the outside, but they behave differently on the inside. That is the puzzle of antimatter."

Matter and antimatter behaving differently is not a new concept and has been observed before in particles with strange quarks and with beauty quarks:

What makes this study unique, Stone concludes, is that it is the first time anyone has witnessed particles with charmed quarks being asymmetrical: "It's one for the history books."

A step closer, but still no where close to explaining the disparity between matter and antimatter.

Bearded Spock is laughing at us.

According to Wikipedia: CP violation:

In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry (or charge conjugation parity symmetry): the combination of C-symmetry (charge conjugation symmetry) and P-symmetry (parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry) while its spatial coordinates are inverted ("mirror" or P symmetry).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

MillerCoors sues Anheuser-Busch over controversial Bud Light Super Bowl ad

MillerCoors filed a lawsuit Thursday against Anheuser-Busch InBev, claiming that its rival's Bud Light ad shown during the Super Bowl is false advertising meant to deceive customers and misuses the Miller and Coors trademarks.

The company is seeking an injunction to stop Bud Light from continuing the ad campaign. MillerCoors is also asking for a trial by jury and for the defendant to pay its legal fees. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch first reported and posted the lawsuit, which was filed in a Wisconsin federal court.

The lawsuit is the latest retaliation from the U.S. subsidiary of Molson Coors Brewing for the Bud Light campaign that shamed Miller Lite and Coors Light for using corn syrup. Backlash from both the targeted brewer and corn industry growers followed. After the ad aired, MillerCoors said that none of its final products contain the ingredient, which is used during the brewing process.

[I think this is the advertisement. --Ed.

Also at Bloomberg, The Hill, AdAge, and WISN.

Related: Why WalMart Ice Cream Doesn't Melt
Playing Small is Okay, Says Judge in "Craft Beer" Case
AB InBev-SAB Miller Deal Approved by Shareholders

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Boeing delays by months test flights for U.S. human space program: sources

Boeing Co has delayed by at least three months its first uncrewed flight to the International Space Station under NASA's human spaceflight program, and pushed its crewed flight until November, industry sources said on Wednesday.

Reuters reported last month that NASA has warned Boeing and rival contractor SpaceX of design and safety concerns the companies need to address before flying humans to space.

Boeing's first test flight was slated for April but it has been pushed to August, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The new schedule means that Boeing's crewed mission, initially scheduled for August, will be delayed until November.

Also at Spaceflight Insider, Astronomy Magazine, and BGR.

Related:

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

Boeing Crewed Test Flight to the ISS May be Upgraded to a Full Mission
SpaceX and Boeing Not Ready to Transport Astronauts to the International Space Station
SpaceX, Boeing (and NASA) Push Back 1st Test Launches of Private Spaceships
NASA Prepared to Purchase Two More Soyuz Seats From Roscosmos
SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Gets NASA Thumbs-Up for March Test Flight
Unmanned Crew Dragon 2 Docks With ISS
Dragon has Docked-But the Real Pucker Moment for SpaceX's Capsule Awaits [Updated]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung HBM2E 'Flashbolt' Memory for GPUs: 16 GB Per Stack, 3.2 Gbps

Samsung has introduced the industry's first memory that correspond to the HBM2E specification. The company's new Flashbolt memory stacks increase performance by 33% and offer double per-die as well as double per-package capacity. Samsung introduced its HBM2E DRAMs at GTC, indicating that the gaming market is a target market for this memory.

Samsung's Flashbolt KGSDs (known good stacked die) are based on eight 16-Gb memory dies interconnected using TSVs (through silicon vias) in an 8-Hi stack configuration. Every Flashbolt package features a 1024-bit bus with a 3.2 Gbps data transfer speed per pin, thus offering up to 410 GB/s of bandwidth per KGSD.

Samsung positions its Flashbolt KGSDs for next-gen datacenter, HPC, AI/ML, and graphics applications. By using four Flashbolt stacks with a processor featuring a 4096-bit memory interface, developers can get 64 GB of memory with a 1.64 TB/s peak bandwidth, something that will be a great advantage for capacity and bandwidth-hungry chips. With two KGSDs they get 32 GB of DRAM with an 820 GB/s peak bandwidth.

Also at Tom's Hardware.

Previously: Samsung Increases Production of 8 GB High Bandwidth Memory 2.0 Stacks
JEDEC Updates High Bandwidth Memory Standard With New 12-Hi Stacks

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The EU fines Google $1.69 billion for bundling search and advertising

Google and the EU's European Commission are making all sorts of announcements lately. Fresh off the revelation that Google would implement a browser and search-engine picker in EU-sold Android devices, Google's advertising division is getting slapped with a fine next, to the tune of €1.5 billion ($1.69 billion). The European Commission's latest antitrust ruling says that Google's bundling of its advertising platform with its custom search engine program is anti-competitive toward other ad providers.

The particular wing of Google's advertising empire the Commission is concerned with here is "AdSense for Search." Adsense for Search does not refer to the famous ads above Google.com search results but, instead, are ads displayed in "Custom Search" results that can be embedded inside their websites.

Related: EU Fines Google $5 Billion for Android Antitrust Violations
Google Case Set to Examine if EU Data Rules Extend Globally

Original Submission