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martyb writes:

Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32:

Years ago — back before the launch of Windows 8 — Microsoft announced that going forward, app development would be driven by fundamentally different rules and capabilities than what had been the case before. Applications distributed via the Windows Store would be written to new standards, with new rules about what data they could access and which languages were supported. Older Win32 apps would still run, but they were ultimately intended to be replaced by an entirely new suite of applications written under new design rules, and distributed through the Windows Store.

Pretty much none of this actually happened. The Windows Store went on to become a dead-letter trainwreck of applications no one wanted or used. It was stuffed with counterfeit apps for applications like Facebook that pretended to be genuine products. Microsoft recently removed its own Office installer from the Windows Store. Over the years, Microsoft has tried rebranding its own software development push in various ways, but none of it has sparked much interest in creating UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps. Now, the company is taking multiple steps to allow Win32 applications to take advantage of the same features it's rolled out for UWP in the past. While Microsoft isn't admitting defeat in its effort to push everyone into using the Windows Store, that's what this practically amounts to.

"You've told us that you would like us to continue to decouple many parts of the Universal Windows Platform so that you can adopt them incrementally," Microsoft corporate vice president Kevin Gallo wrote this week, in a developer-centric blog post. "Allowing you to use our platform and tools to meet you where your customers are going – empowering you to deliver rich, intelligent experiences that put people at the center."

But doesn't everyone want a program that plays for sure on Windows?

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martyb writes:

Fellow AI Nerds, Beware: Google Cloud Glitch Leaves Nvidia T4 GPUs off Estimated Bills for Some Virtual Machines:

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. There appears to be a bug in the Google Cloud Platform online user interface that may lead engineers into thinking they're renting GPU-accelerated virtual machines for free, when, really, they're not.

Anyone hoodwinked by the glitch will realize the Compute Engine resource is not gratis, and actually costing potentially several hundreds of dollars a month, the next time they look at their cloud bill. It's not going to bankrupt anyone, but it is something that you may trip up over, so consider this a heads up. You may even encounter a similar gremlin in future, or on another cloud platform. It can happen.

We found out about the bug from Soufian Salim, an AI engineer at French software startup Bee4win, who wanted to train a neural network model using Nvidia's spanking new Tesla T4 GPUs. He had spun up a virtual machine instance from the Google Cloud marketplace – specifically, the AI Platform Deep Learning VM Image – and configured it to use a bunch of T4s to speed up calculations.

[...] Google does offer free T4s on its Colaboratory platform. Here, developers can run specific AI models in Jupyter notebooks using Google's cloud resources at no charge at all. Salim said his model wasn't using the Colab service, however, and neither was our model. We're also aware that you can use T4s for free via certain non-AI promotions, such as within a BlazingSQL Colaboratory environment. These aren't production environments, though, and are for testing purposes, hence the freebie GPUs.

[...] Salim's inkling that it was simply a user interface bug, and that he would eventually be billed by a backend system for the T4 GPUs, was later confirmed when he discovered that Bee4win was indeed charged for the rented graphics processors despite it not appearing on the estimated costs. "As I suspected, we were billed for the GPU, at about 0.9$/hour. It was an UI error," he told The Register on Thursday.

The problem hasn't been fixed, so be warned. A Google spokesperson told us on Friday: "We are aware that some customers are not seeing estimated charges for T4 GPUs on the marketplace web interface before creating virtual machines, and we are working to fix the pricing estimator."

Maybe Google needs an AI to figure out the pricing?

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James Orme writes:

The race to disrupt Hong Kong's traditional banking sector is heating up with four new major companies winning licenses to create virtual banks in the city.

The latest players to be granted licenses are Tencent Holdings Ltd., Ant Financial, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. and Xiaomi Corp. The latest approvals follow three licenses granted in March to a variety of joint ventures backed by the likes of Standard Chartered, Ctrip and ZhongAn.

Tencent is partnering with ICBC's Hong Kong Unit, HKEX, Hillhouse Capital and Perfect Ridge in a venture called Infinium Ltd. Xiaomi and Ant received their permits via local entities.

The four virtual banks plan to launch their services in six to nine months. In a statement, HKMA said it will "closely monitor" their operations once they have commenced business.

Norman Chan, chief executive of the HKMA, said: "We are pleased to grant four more virtual banking licences today. The HKMA is now working closely with the 8 virtual bank licensees to prepare for the launch of their business operations in accordance with their plans."

Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/tencent-and-ant-financial-latest-firms-to-be-awarded-virtual-banking-licenses-in-hong-kong/

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Recently, on a dazzling morning in Palm Springs, California, Vivienne Sze took to a small stage to deliver perhaps the most nerve-racking presentation of her career.

She knew the subject matter inside-out. She was to tell the audience about the chips, being developed in her lab at MIT, that promise to bring powerful artificial intelligence to a multitude of devices where power is limited, beyond the reach of the vast data centers where most AI computations take place. However, the event—and the audience—gave Sze pause.

[...] Newly designed chips, like the ones being developed in Sze's lab, may be crucial to future progress in AI—including stuff like the drones and robots found at MARS. Until now, AI software has largely run on graphical chips, but new hardware could make AI algorithms more powerful, which would unlock new applications. New AI chips could make warehouse robots more common or let smartphones create photo-realistic augmented-reality scenery.

Sze's chips are both extremely efficient and flexible in their design, something that is crucial for a field that's evolving incredibly quickly.

The microchips are designed to squeeze more out of the "deep-learning" AI algorithms that have already turned the world upside down. And in the process, they may inspire those algorithms themselves to evolve. "We need new hardware because Moore's law has slowed down," Sze says, referring to the axiom coined by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that predicted that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every 18 months—leading to a commensurate performance boost in computer power.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613305/this-chip-was-demoed-at-jeff-bezoss-secretive-tech-conference-it-could-be-key-to-the-future/

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takyon writes:

Exclusive: Google releases 53 gender fluid emoji

[As emojis] become more inclusive, each becomes less universal. Jennifer Daniel, designer at Google, thinks about this deep irony at the heart of visual language all the time. She traces it back to the age-old problem with the male bathroom symbol. "That person could be man, woman, anyone," she says. "But they had to add a little detail, that dress, and suddenly that person symbol doesn't mean person anymore; it means man. And that culture means a man-centered culture."

While Daniel can't fix our bathroom signage, as the director of Android emojis, she can fix another problem: The lack of gender-neutral symbols in texting. She can give us the zombies, merpeople, children, weightlifters that are neither male nor female. "We're not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji–and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants," says Daniel. "But you can create something that feels more inclusive."

Google is launching 53 updated, gender ambiguous emoji as part of a beta release for Pixel smartphones this week (they'll come to all Android Q phones later this year). Whether Google calls them "non-binary" or not, they have been designed to live between the existing male and female emoji and recognize gender as a spectrum. Given that Google collaborates with many of its rivals on emoji, it's likely that Apple and others will release their takes on genderless emoji later this year.

RandomFactor writes:

Commissioners for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) testifying before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday called for a national privacy law.

Such a law would regulate how large tech and social media companies collect, manage, and retain user data.

The lack of a National Privacy Law

keeps the country from parity with the EU and its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)...

...or, for that matter, with the state of California, with its California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Several national privacy bills have been introduced in the past 12 months. One, called the Data Care Act (DCA), was introduced by 15 senators and has strong industry support from the likes of Facebook, Apple, Verizon, Google, Twitter, Mozilla and Microsoft. Another was introduced by Washington Senator Suzan Delbene, another by Senator Ron Wyden dubbed the Consumer Data Protection Act, and still another called the American Data Dissemination (ADD) Act by Senator Marco Rubio.

Besides consumer protection, the FTC is looking for more power. Commissioners asked Congress to strengthen the agency's ability to police violations, asking for more resources and greater authority to impose penalties.

The usual concerns attend the bills such as costs to small businesses and startups, compatibility with and effect on existing privacy laws, and resistance to continuing to allow California to dictate in the tech sector.

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James Orme writes:

A British fact-checking firm is to receive a share of 25 million dollars (£19.1 million) worth of Google investment after being chosen as a winner in an AI competition.

Full Fact was named among the 20 winners of Google's AI Impact Challenge and will now receive consultation help and mentoring from the technology giant.

The company is working on a project that develops tools which use artificial intelligence to carry out fact-checking at scale and cut down on misinformation.

Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/british-fact-checking-charity-secures-25-million-ai-grant-from-google/

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James Orme writes:

The UK Government has still not made a final decision on the inclusion of Huawei in the UK's 5G networks, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright has said.

Mr Wright warned some assumptions about Huawei and how embedded it was in some parts of existing networks were "wrong" and was not helping the debate.

Giving evidence to MPs at the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, he said concerns raised about Huawei were less about the threat of espionage but because of engineering issues with the firm's equipment.

Fears have been raised that Huawei could be used by the Chinese state as a route to spy on the West, with the US pressuring allies to distance themselves from the company.

But Mr Wright said Huawei was already the subject of stricter analysis than many other companies because of the "nature of Huawei and where it comes from".

Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/huawei-hysteria-is-a-false-alarm-culture-secretary-tells-mps/

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NPC-131072 writes:

From SFChronicle

A pending deal to sell almost half of Park Tower, one of San Francisco's tallest office buildings, could lead to $539 million changing hands and set the new skyscraper's value at more than a billion dollars — an almost unprecedented sum.

But the city will get nothing from the deal, at least in the form of the transfer taxes it collects on most sales of real estate.

That's because owners MetLife, John Buck Co. and Golub plan to sell a 49% stake in the property at 250 Howard St., where the office space is fully leased to Facebook.

Since less than half of the property is trading, the deal won't count as a change in ownership, exempting it from San Francisco's 3% transfer tax on deals over $25 million, said Jeffry Bernstein, a partner and tax expert at law firm Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass. If it was subject to the tax, the city would receive more than $16 million.

[...] San Francisco voters increased the transfer tax on property sales over $5 million in a 2016 ballot measure, in an effort to make City College free for residents. While voters can change transfer tax rates, Bernstein said any efforts to make sales of partial ownership stakes subject to the tax would "have to come out of Sacramento."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Britain's answer to 'King Tut's tomb' found on roadside

Excited archeologists on Thursday hailed an ancient burial site found on the side of a road near a pub and a budget supermarket as Britain's answer to the tomb of Egypt's King Tutankhamun.

The small bump on a patch of grass in the county of Essex just northeast of London did not look like much when UK researchers first spotted it in 2003.

"The thing that's so strange about it is that it was such an unpromising-looking site," Museum of London Archaeology's (MOLA) director of research Sophie Jackson said.

But a team of 40 MOLA archeologists still decided to give it a shot.

Years of meticulous digging and carbon dating have now led them to conclude that they have stumbled onto an Anglo-Saxon burial chamber of a prince whose likes have never before been found in Britain.

The 1,400-year-old tomb is believed to be the oldest example of a Christian Anglo-Saxon royal burial.

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upstart writes:

Source Code Discovery Sheds Light on the Business of Malware

[...] Beyond the sophistication of the malware in question, and the length of time it remained undetected, the source code itself revealed an interesting and, for security professionals, somewhat worrying approach to the development of its core product, which borrowed from modern DevOps theory. 

[...] It’s important for APT success, therefore, that malware is written in such a way that it can be easily given to any member of the team with the assurance that they’re able to produce a product of the same high quality that a campaign’s creators have come to expect. If those creators want to scale up their campaigns, they must ensure that any new team member is able to quickly and easily get to grips with the task at hand. 

Analysis of Carbanak’s source code revealed a series of features that would allow it to be iterated by a team of developers in just this way, removing the risk of being hindered by single points of failure, such as a key malware engineer being off sick or moved onto another task. Essentially, it was a highly effective software assembly line.

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Hackers Stole $41M of Bitcoin on One of World's Largest Crypto Exchanges

realDonaldTrump writes:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/hackers-stole-41-million-bitcoin-worlds-largest-crypto-exchange

Binance, one of the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced it has been a victim of a massive security breach.

The exchange said late Tuesday that hackers have run off with over 7,000 bitcoin worth an estimated $41 million after they used a "variety of techniques, including phishing and viruses," to tab into its systems.

Bitcoin Stolen in Binance Hack Moved to Seven Addresses

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Bitcoin Stolen in Binance Hack Moved to Seven Addresses

Proceedings from yesterday’s hack of cryptocurrency exchangeBinance have been moved to seven addresses, crypto news outlet The Block reports on May 9.

The breach resulted in about 7,074 bitcoins (BTC) — worth nearly $42.8 million at press time — being stolen from the exchange’s hot wallet. The transaction had 44 outputs, 21 of which were native Segregated Witness addresses, and those addresses received 99.97% of the funds.

According to The Block, the funds from those 44 addresses have been reportedly since moved to seven addresses, six of which hold 1,060.6 BTC, while one holds 707.1 BTC. Previously, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing firm Confirm had reported that its analysis showed how 1,227 BTC were moved to two new addresses, one holding 707 coins, while the other one 520.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhaodevoted his live AMA on Twitter yesterday to address community concerns in the wake of the hack, also discussing the idea of a Bitcoin chain reorganization.

As Cointelegraph reported yesterday, eight people have been arrested in Spain for allegedly operating a money laundering scheme involving cryptocurrencies.

Earlier this week, famous American economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz reiterated his negative stance on cryptocurrencies, stating that he thinks “we should shut down the cryptocurrencies.”

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canopic jug writes:

Eric Rescorla has a blog post over at Mozilla about the technical details on the recent Firefox add-on outage. He covers the background of how they use certificates, how they tried to mitigate the damage from the outage, how they worked to solve the problem without breaking more things, deployment of the replacement certificate, and why it took so long to fix.

Recently, Firefox had an incident in which most add-ons stopped working. This was due to an error on our end: we let one of the certificates used to sign add-ons expire which had the effect of disabling the vast majority of add-ons. Now that we've fixed the problem for most users and most people's add-ons are restored, I wanted to walk through the details of what happened, why, and how we repaired it.

There were a lot of work arounds discussed here and elsewhere, some of them quite stupid so, lastly, remember to undo any temporary work-arounds that might have been deployed last weekend.

Earlier on SN: In Firefox All Extensions Disabled Due to Expiration of Intermediate Signing Cert

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takyon writes:

Traces of five drugs found on 1000-year-old South American ritual kit

A 1000-year-old collection of drug paraphernalia found in a rock shelter in Bolivia features traces of five psychoactive chemicals, including cocaine and components of ayahuasca. This is the largest number of psychoactive compounds detected in a single archaeological find in South America, the researchers say. The plants they come from aren't native to the highland area where they were found, so they may have been brought there by trading networks or travelling shamans.

[...] Radiocarbon dating puts the date of the bag at AD 905 to 1170, roughly coinciding with the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, a once-powerful Andean civilisation that endured for around five centuries. Drugs are thought to have played an important role in Tiwanaku culture, possibly in healing ceremonies and religious rituals believed to enable contact with the dead.

Melanie Miller at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and her colleagues used mass spectrometry to analyse samples from the pouch and plant stems. They detected five psychoactive compounds: cocaine, benzoylecgonine (BZE), bufotenine, harmine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

Also at Berkeley News, Science Magazine, National Geographic, and ScienceAlert.

Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1902174116) (DX)

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NPC-131072 writes:

From APA

Anger may be more harmful to an older person's physical health than sadness, potentially increasing inflammation, which is associated with such chronic illnesses as heart disease, arthritis and cancer, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"As most people age, they simply cannot do the activities they once did, or they may experience the loss of a spouse or a decline in their physical mobility and they can become angry," said Meaghan A. Barlow, MA, of Concordia University, lead author of the study, which was published in Psychology and Aging. "Our study showed that anger can lead to the development of chronic illnesses, whereas sadness did not."

Barlow and her co-authors examined whether anger and sadness contributed to inflammation, an immune response by the body to perceived threats, such as infection or tissue damage. While inflammation in general helps protect the body and assists in healing, long-lasting inflammation can lead to chronic illnesses in old age, according to the authors.

[...] "If we better understand which negative emotions are harmful, not harmful or even beneficial to older people, we can teach them how to cope with loss in a healthy way," said Barlow. "This may help them let go of their anger."

"Is Anger, but Not Sadness, Associated With Chronic Inflammation and Illness in Older Adulthood?" by Meaghan A. Barlow, MA, Carsten Wrosch, PhD, Jean-Philippe Gouin, PhD, Concordia University, and Ute Kunzmann, PhD, University of Leipzig. Psychology and Aging. Published May 9, 2019.

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