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canopic jug writes:

Programmer David Given has done the leg work to contact and ask R. T. Russel about releasing the Z80-based BBC BASIC as Free Software. It is now available under the non-reciprocal zlib license:

As part of the work I've been doing with cpmish I've been trying to track down the copyright holders of some of the more classic pieces of CP/M software and asking them to license it in a way that allows redistribution. One of the people I contacted was R.T. Russell, the author of the classic Z80 BBC BASIC, and he very kindly sent me the source and agreed to allow it to be distributed under the terms of the zlib license. So it's now open source!

[...] So the reason why this is important is that BASIC has, rightly, a reputation for being a pretty terrible language; but BBC BASIC was a dialect specifically commissioned by the BBC in 1981 as an educational aid. As a result, BBC BASIC supports named procedures, local variables, recursion, and other structured programming features. Unlike Microsoft BASIC, you can write proper structured, maintainable programs in BBC BASIC without needing to refer to any line numbers anywhere. And it'll run faster that way: [...]

[...] The original version was written by Sophie Wilson at Acorn in 1981 for their 6502-based range of BBC Micro computers and during the early eighties every school child in the United Kingdom was exposed to it, spawning a whole generation of bedroom programmers.

Earlier on SN:

• Portion of Gary Kildall's Memoir Made Public (2016)
• Andrew Kay Dies at 95 (2014)

[Ed's Comment: 170619-0724UTC. Added additional link to the original story]

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

From reporting by The Daily Dot.

Conservative psychologist/alt-right guru Jordan Peterson officially announced that he is launching what he calls a "free speech platform" known as Thinkspot.

Peterson insists that Thinkspot will adhere to his principles of anti-censorship so strongly that the platform will only ban or remove users if it is ordered to do so by the U.S. court of law. Because there's no way that could go horribly wrong.

Peterson also mentioned that Thinkspot will have a minimum word count as opposed to a maximum. "If minimum comment length is 50 words, you're gonna have to put a little thought into it," Peterson said to the right-wing outlet NewsBusters. "Even if you're being a troll, you'll be a quasi-witty troll."

Thinkspot is being marketed as a creator-to-consumer payment processor such as Patreon while also serving as an alternative to services such as Twitter and YouTube.

Thinkspot has an intended release date of August 2019.

Original Submission

captain normal writes:

San Francisco Chronicle: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Intelligent-robot-surveillance-poses-13999070.php

"Businesses and the government have spent years installing millions of surveillance cameras across the United States. Now that technology is on the verge of getting a major upgrade, the American Civil Liberties Union warns in a new report.

"Advancements in artificial intelligence could supercharge surveillance, allowing camera owners to identify "unusual" behavior, recognize actions like hugging or kissing, easily seek out embarrassing footage and estimate a person's age or, possibly, even their disposition, the group argues.

[...] "The United States is, by various estimates, home to tens of millions of surveillance cameras. While many of those devices have been around for years, it has been widely understood that it would be unfeasible, if not impossible, for each device to be constantly monitored and its footage carefully categorized and documented, Stanley notes in the report, titled "The Dawn of Robot Surveillance." Even the Justice Department has said that watching such footage is "boring and mesmerizing" and that attention fades after about 20 minutes.

"But improvements to technology created to actively monitor such feeds, known by several names including "video analytics," are poised to change that, ensuring that every second of footage can be analyzed.

[...] "The ability to constantly analyze and learn from a video feed could help self-driving cars understand their surroundings, retail stores track their products and health professionals monitor their patients, he said. It can also be used to scrutinize the routines and actions of individuals on an enormous scale, the ACLU warns."

My Grand Mother always used to warn me, "you can't get away with anything bad because God is always watching you."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Bridenstine estimates Artemis cost at $20–30 billion

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a television interview June 13 that it will cost the agency an additional $20 billion to $30 billion to return humans to the moon, the first range of costs given by the agency for the program.

In an interview with CNN, Bridenstine said that estimate would be above earlier projections for costs of existing elements of what's now called the Artemis program, such as the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

"For the whole program, to get a sustainable presence on the moon, we're looking at between 20 and 30 billion dollars," he said. "When we talk about the 20 to 30 billion dollars, it would be 20 or 30 billion on top of the normal NASA budget but, of course, that would be spread over five years."

[...] The lack of cost estimates for Artemis had become a point of frustration for members of Congress. "For us in Congress to be able to grapple with these things, we need some idea of how much of a cost is expected to be incurred over the next five years," said Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) during a June 11 hearing by the House Science Committee's space subcommittee on NASA's science program where he sought, unsuccessfully, to get a cost estimate like the one Bridenstine provided in the interview.

Also at The Verge.

Previously: Here's Why NASA's Audacious Return to the Moon Just Might Work
Lockheed Martin Proposes Streamlined Lunar Gateway for 2024 Manned Lunar Landing
Artemis: NASA to Receive $1.6 Billion for 2024 Manned Moon Landing
NASA Orders First Segment of Lunar Station for 2024 Artemis Moon Mission

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Chewy raises $1 billion in IPO

It will rain cats and dogs on Wall Street Friday: Online pet supplies retailer Chewy is set to make its debut. And it should be a strong one. Chewy, which was bought by retailer PetSmart in 2017 for nearly $3.4 billion in 2017, priced its initial public offering Thursday at $22 a share. That's above the expected range and values Chewy at $8.8 billion. The company will raise $1 billion from the stock sale and will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CHWY.

Chewy is growing rapidly, despite competitive threats from Amazon (AMZN) as well as food giant General Mills (GIS), which recently acquired pet food seller Blue Buffalo.

Sales soared 68% last year to more than $3.5 billion. But the company is still losing money. It reported a net loss of $268 million in 2018, following a $338 million loss a year earlier.

Unicorn meat.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Oldest evidence of cannabis smoking found in ancient Chinese cemetery

The broken wooden braziers, unearthed from 2,500-year-old tombs in Western China, contained burned, blackened stones, and the interior of the wooden vessels also looked charred. To find out what had been burned in them, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences archaeologist Yemin Yang and his colleagues used gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to analyze small samples of the charred wood and the residue from the stones.

Their analysis turned up a chemical called cannabinol, or CBN—an unmistakable chemical signature of cannabis. Those ancient chemical traces offer an important clue in the history of human drug use and the domestic history of cannabis.

[...] Although cannabis has turned up at other sites, from Western China to the Altai Mountains in Siberia, archaeologists have never found such direct indications that ancient people were lighting it up. Elsewhere, cannabis plants buried with the dead may be a sign that people ate parts of the plant for a similar effect (although brownies wouldn't be invented for millennia). But without doing a similar chemical analysis on human remains from those graves, archaeologists can't say for sure. At other sites, like a burial in the Altai Mountains of Siberia where archaeologists found a small tent, a bowl, and a pouch of cannabis seeds, it's pretty reasonable to speculate that the cannabis involved may have been intended for use as a drug.

[...] The burned residue in the Jirzankou braziers provides the first direct evidence of people burning cannabis for its smoke, but it's also the first unambiguous indication of people using the plant specifically for its mind-altering effects. Yang and his colleagues' chemical analysis found that the cannabis plants burned at the cemetery had been very high in THC, which makes them different from domesticated hemp plants and from most of the wild cannabis that grows on hillsides from the Caucasus to Western China.

The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391) (DX)

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Space debris is a constant threat to astronauts, satellites, space stations, and billionaire tourists. Gonzalo Sánchez and his colleagues of the E.T. PACK Project have come up with an approach that can be used to deorbit satellites in the future.

The ESA's Space Debris Office estimates that there are over 34,000 pieces of large debris in Low Earth Orbit consisting of dead satellites, boosters, dropped wrenches, paint flecks and all manner of other assorted junk. At some difficult to predict point in the future it is possible, as the amount of this debris increases, for a cascading effect known as the Kessler syndrome to occur making Low Earth Orbit extremely dangerous and effectively closing it off for use.

The new satellite deorbiting technology is intended to help avoid this outcome and is called the Electrodynamic Tether technology for Passive Consumable-less deorbit Kit (E.T.PACK) system.

The key to this system is a low work-function tether that consists of a strip of aluminum tape coated with a special material that allows it to emit electrons when illuminated by the Sun. This causes the tether to become attracted to Earth's magnetic field via the Lorentz Force, effectively lowering its altitude until it burns up in Earth's atmosphere.

The tether itself would measure 2 cm (0.8 in) in width, 50 microns in thickness, and several kilometers in length. During the launch of the satellite, the tether would be rolled up in a reel and only deployed once the satellite was in orbit. In this way, future satellites would be able to self-destruct and not become part of the space debris problem.

The project, which is funded by the European Commissions is expected to conclude in three years culminating in a prototype for a demonstration flight. The technology has captured the interest of the ESA and various space industries.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

The India Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in July is planning to launch a triple-threat mission to the Moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission, will launch July 14 at 5:51 p.m. EDT (2151 GMT).

The Chandrayaan-2 mission will include an orbiter, a lander "Vikram" and a rover "Pragyan".

After launch, Chandrayaan-2 will spend about 16 days orbiting Earth, raising its orbit slowly over time before heading to the moon, the Times of India reported. It should take the mission about five days to reach the moon, after which Chandryaan-2 will spend 27 days in lunar orbit before releasing the Vikram lander.

If all goes well, Vikram will touch down near the moon's south pole on Sept. 6 in what promises to be a harrowing 15-minute landing sequence, ISRO officials have said.

"The 15-minute operation - in which Vikram makes the final descent and soft-lands - will be the most terrifying as we have never attempted such a complex mission," ISRO chairman K Sivan said in a June 11 press conference according to the Times of India.

The solar-powered Vikram is expected to deploy the small Pragyan rover about four hours after landing. Together, the lander and rover are designed to last about one lunar day (14 Earth days) on the moon's surface, while the Chandrayaan-2 orbtier[sic] continues its mission for a full year, according to an ISRO overview.

Similar to the ill-fated Beresheet lander, the Vikram lander is carrying

a NASA experiment called the Laser Retro-reflector Array for Lunar Landers, a mirror-like device designed to reflect laser signals that can be used to pinpoint the Vikram lander's location and measure the distance between the Earth and moon.

In all the Orbiter, Lander, and Rover carry 13 different scientific instruments between them to study the moon from orbit and the surface, 8 of which are on the orbiter and will continue functioning long after the lander and rover.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Great engineers love solving problems. Fortunately for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Lisa Su is one of them, and she has a knack for dealing with the semiconductor industry's hardest ones.

After getting her doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Su, 49, played a key leadership role in IBM 's groundbreaking work using copper to replace aluminum interconnects in computer chips, making them faster and more energy efficient.

In 2012, the year she joined AMD, the company was in trouble. AMD lost more than $1 billion as its products drastically underperformed Intel's. But Su was undaunted and excited to come aboard. "I've always been attracted to solving really tough problems," she says. "Problems actually create opportunities."

After becoming CEO in October 2014, she quickly refocused the company on its core high-performance computing business, establishing an ironclad policy of meeting commitments to customers.

[...]

During Su's tenure as CEO, AMD stock has risen more than 800%. The shares are up 80% this year through June 10, and AMD was the No. 1–performing stock in the S&P 500 index last year.

Su's technical expertise and intuition were critical to this resurgence. "I love spending time with the engineers, going into the lab, and getting a feel for what the real challenges are, because it just helps me make better decisions on the business," she says.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/gms-mary-barra-amds-lisa-su-and-more-of-the-worlds-best-ceos-51560566096

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Researchers have developed a way using lasers outside the skin to detect and destroy melanoma cancer cells spreading through the blood. The method is ~1000x more sensitive than current detection methods which require drawing blood.

This approach monitors the entire blood supply of the patient for cancer cells, where current methods examine only a few milliliters which may not contain melanoma cells even if they are circulating.

The new technology, dubbed the Cytophone, uses pulses of laser light on the outside of the skin to heat up cells in the blood. But the laser only heats up melanoma cells — not healthy cells — because these cells carry a dark pigment called melanin, which absorbs the light. The Cytophone then uses an ultrasound technique to detect the teensy, tiny waves emitted by this heating effect.

Researchers have tested the technology on over two dozen light-skinned patients (dark skinned individuals have lower incidence of melanoma) and successfully identified circulating tumor cells 96% of the time with no false positives.

[T]he team also found that after the treatment, the cancer patients had fewer circulating tumor cells. "We used a relatively low energy" with the primary purpose of diagnosing rather than treating the cancer, Zharov said. Yet, even at that low energy, the laser beam seemed able to destroy the cancer cells.

Here's how it works: As the melanin absorbs the heat, the water around the melanin inside the cells begins to evaporate, producing a bubble that expands and collapses, mechanically destroying the cell, Zharov said.

The researchers have also demonstrated the ability in the lab to target breast cancer cells which do not carry melanin by using a marker that binds to those cells.

Most cancer deaths occur due to metastases from the initial tumor to vital organs as a result of circulating tumor cells spreading. Reducing or halting metastasis has significant therapeutic potential.

Journal Reference
In vivo liquid biopsy using Cytophone platform for photoacoustic detection of circulating tumor cells in patients with melanoma

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

Academics have come up with a new technique that leaks data about users' browsers; enough to defeat anti-fingerprinting systems and privacy-preserving browser extensions to provide ways to identify users by their browser and underlying platform in a way that has not been done before. Called "JavaScript Template Attack," this new technique revolves around the concept of JavaScript properties and the default values that browser engines return for basic JavaScript queries seeking the value of a certain property.

The researchers, all three from the Graz University of Technology, in Austria, created a system that automates the querying and collection of thousands of JavaScript properties and their default values from a user's environment.

The basic idea was to automate these queries and then rotate browsers, operating systems, hardware platform, and browser extensions, to collect the default values of all known JavaScript properties for each environment/installation. Researchers then built a matrix of each environment's default properties values, creating a template -- hence the name of JavaScript Template Attack -- for each possible detection scenario, listing all environment-dependent property values.

The research team says these templates can be used at a later point to scan a visiting user and detect specific environment details based on the default property values the user's browser's returns.

This data can be used for creating user profiles (for traffic/user fingerprinting) that break user anonymity or for devious means, like refining the targeting of zero-day exploits.

[...] Furthermore, because browsers makers tend to improve their software with new Web APIs -- all of which are controllable via JavaScript -- the number of JavaScript properties has grown in the past years and is expected to grow, and improve the accuracy of JavaScript Template Attacks even more.

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/javascript-template-attacks-expose-new-browser-fingerprinting-vectors/

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

Google's cloud is getting very big, but it plans on getting bigger.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google announced Thursday that it plans to buy Looker, a business-intelligence and big-data analytics company, for $2.6 billion in cash.

[...] The acquisition builds on an existing four-year-old partnership between the companies, which already share more than 350 joint customers like Buzzfeed, Hearst, Sunrun and Yahoo, Google said in a news release,

Also reported at:

• https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/google-to-acquire-analytics-startup-looker-for-2-6-billion/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2019/06/07/4-reasons-google-bought-looker/#5ae933486dcd

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for RandomFactor

Robotic asteroid mining spacecraft wins a grant from NASA - Universe Today

Back in April, NASA once again put out the call for proposals for the next generation of robotic explorers and missions. As part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, this consisted of researchers, scientists, and entrepreneurs coming together to submit early studies of new concepts that could one-day help advance NASA's space exploration goals.

One concept that was selected for Phase III of development was a breakthrough mission and flight system called Mini Bee. This small, robotic mining craft was designed by the Trans Astronautica (TransAstra) Corporation to assist with deep-space missions. It is hoped that by leveraging this flight system architecture, the Mini-bee will enable the full-scale industrialization of space as well as human settlement.

The Mini-bee concept is essentially a technology-demonstrator for a family of flight system architectures known as Asteroid Provided In-situ Supplies (Apis). These systems range in size from the experimental Mini Bee (which weighs 250 kg or 550 lbs) to the larger Honey Bee and Queen Bee – which would be capable of capturing asteroids measuring 10 and 40 m (33 and 130 ft) in diameter, respectively.

The Mini Bee utilizes a series of innovative technologies, which includes optical mining method of resource harvesting (aka. laser mining), a spacecraft architecture that relies on sunlight to enable faster spacecraft, and an asteroid containment system similar to the one that was proposed for NASA's now-scrapped Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM).

Further Reading: NASA, TransAstra Corporation

Previous: https://www.universetoday.com/142543/saltwater-similar-to-the-earths-oceans-has-been-seen-on-europa-another-good-reason-why-we-really-need-to-visit-this-place

Original Submission

upstart writes for SoyCow4463:

SQL Injection Attacks Represent Two-Third of All Web App Attacks

For its "State of the Internet" report, Akamai analyzed data gathered from users of its Web application firewall technology between November 2017 and March 2019. The exercise shows that SQL injection (SQLi) now represents nearly two-thirds (65.1%) of all Web application attacks. That's up sharply from the 44% of Web application layer attacks that SQLi represented just two years ago.

Local File Inclusion (LFI) attacks, which, like SQLi, are also enabled by a Web application's failure to properly validate user input, accounted for another 24.7% of attacks. Together, SQLi and LFI attacks represented 89.8% of all attacks at the Web application layer over the 17-month period of Akamai's study.

[...] SQL injection errors and cross-site scripting (XSS) errors have topped, or nearly topped, the Open Web Application Security Project's (OWASP) list of top 10 Web vulnerabilities for more than a decade. Just this week, in fact, HackerOne published a report showing XSS errors to be by far the most common security vulnerability in Web apps across organizations. Both XSS and SQLi are well understood, and many researchers have catalogued the dangers associated with them for years.

The fact that so many Web apps still have them reflects the relatively scant attention paid to security in the application development stage, says Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai. "It is not that the developers are making errors," he says. "It is system that we put them into that is dangerous."

[...] Akamai's data^[pdf] shows most Web application attacks originate from inside the US and most targets are US-based as well. Of the nearly 4 billion application-layer attacks that Akamai counted over the 17-month period, some 2.7 billion targeted US organizations. Companies in the UK, Germany, Brazil, and India were also relatively heavily targeted. though nowhere nearly as much as US companies.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Efforts To Decriminalize Magic Mushrooms Beginning To Sprout Nationally

Denver and Oakland recently passed measures decriminalizing magic mushrooms, and it appears to be part of a larger, slow-moving movement to make psilocybin (the mushrooms' psychedelic ingredient) available for treatments for depression and other medicinal purposes, and, of course, recreational purposes.

• Oregon: The Pacific Northwest is considering a 2020 ballot measure to allow Oregonians to use "guided psilocybin services" for therapeutic purposes. The Psilocybin Service Initiative is the organization behind the measure, and it is working to get the 100,000 petition signatures needed to secure a place on the state's 2020 election ballot.
• California: After the Oakland measure passed, an organization called Decriminalize California is working on a statewide decriminalization measure for the 2020 election. (A similar measure failed to garner enough petition signatures last year.) According to the organization's strategy timeline, it is fundraising in advance of its fall campaign for petition signatures and promotion.
• Iowa: State Representative Jeff Shipley, a Republican with a libertarian streak, introduced two magic mushroom-focused bills in February. One bill would remove psilocybin from Iowa's list of controlled substances, and the second would allow medical usage of the substance. Since their introduction, the bills have languished in Iowa's house.

Oakland's decriminalization covers hallucinogens derived from plants or fungi, including but not limited to psilocybin-containing mushrooms and mescaline-containing peyote.

See also: Oakland City Council looks to decriminalize 'magic mushrooms' after Denver vote
Oakland Second US City to Legalize Magic Mushrooms
Oakland Decriminalizes Hallucinogenic 'Magic Mushrooms' And Peyote

Previously: Denver, Colorado Will Vote on Psilocybin Decriminalization Initiative on May 7
Psilocybin Mushroom Decriminalization Narrowly Approved in Denver, Colorado

Original Submission