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The USA state of Florida has just opened up their highways to autonomous vehicle testing, https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/news/testing/unmanned-autonomous-vehicles-cleared-to-operate-in-florida.html

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has signed a new item of legislation in a bid to make Florida “the most autonomous vehicle-friendly state in the country”.

‘CS/HB 311: Autonomous Vehicles’ looks to remove some of the biggest barriers facing the advancement of autonomous vehicles, including allowing autonomous vehicles to operate without a human presence on board, providing all insurance parameters have been met.

“Signing this legislation paves the way for Florida to continue as a national leader in transportation innovation and technological advancement,” said DeSantis. “I would like to thank the bill sponsors, Senator Jeff Brandes and Representative Jason Fischer, for their work in making Florida the most autonomous vehicle-friendly state in the country.”
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AC (sarc) comment -- I guess Florida is the next state to be bought by the big AV companies. My prediction for the next fatality is an elderly person in a wheelchair. If the victim's family has some money, a big settlement will be made (unlike the homeless person pushing their bicycle in Arizona).

As someone noted here earlier, how many fatalities are acceptable before the technology is developed?

[How many fatalities and injuries are acceptable for non-autonomous vehicles? -Ed.]

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Early and regular cannabis use by youth is associated with alteration in brain circuits that support cognitive control

The development of neural circuits in youth, at a particularly important time in their lives, can be heavily influenced by external factors -- specifically the frequent and regular use of cannabis. A new study [...] reports that alterations in cognitive control -- an ensemble of processes by which the mind governs, regulates and guides behaviors, impulses, and decision-making based on goals are directly affected.

[...] The findings are based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired from 28 adolescents and young adults (aged 14-23 years) with significant cannabis use and 32 age and sex-matched non-using healthy controls. Participants were scanned during their performance of a Simon Spatial Incompatibility Task, a cognitive control task that requires resolving cognitive conflict to respond accurately.

Compared to their healthy counterparts, the adolescents and young adults with significant cannabis use showed reduced activation in the frontostriatal circuits that support cognitive control and conflict resolution.

The authors also examined the degree to which fluctuations in activity in relation to conflict resolution is synchronized across the different regions comprised in this frontostriatal circuit (that is, to what extent are regions functionally connected with each other). Although circuit connectivity did not differ between cannabis-using and non-using youth, the research team found an association between how early individuals began regularly using cannabis and the extent to which frontostriatal regions were disrupted, suggesting that earlier chronic use may have a larger impact on circuit development than use of later onset.

Deficient Functioning of Frontostriatal Circuits During the Resolution of Cognitive Conflict in Cannabis-Using Youth (DOI: 10.1016/j.jaac.2018.09.436)

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The launch of Facebook's Coin whitepaper happened yesterday, the same thing with that of Calibra, the wallet designated for Libra coin.

Although Libra follows some of the nitty-gritty of cryptocurrency as enshrined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the absconded creator of Bitcoin.

However, it is lacking in trust and falls short of the democratic principles envisioned by the faceless Bitcoin creator which makes cryptographic projects tow a different root from conventional currencies like US Dollars, Euro, and other fiats under government monitor and regulations.

[...] There is a new fork of the Facebook's newly launched cryptocurrency, Libra. The project branded as Libra Classic questioned the trust issues faced by Libra, a digital currency said to require no KYC since Facebook already has necessary information of its customers.

There are many questions posed to Facebook on Libra, one is the undemocratic issues faced by the digital asset since the reason Nakamoto invented cryptocurrency is to remove government's hands from currency.

The fork of Libra was announced few hours after Facebook's GlobalCoin unveiled its website, whitepaper and Testnet yesterday. Libra Classic, now has its commit page on Github.

The forked cryptocurrency is referenced as a privacy oriented, democratic version, of the Libra blockchain.

The Libra Classic was announced yesterday by Mikko Ohtamaa, CTO at TokenMarket, Europe leading investment platform.

https://todaysgazette.com/someone-just-hard-forked-facebooks-libra-coin-over-democratic-issues/

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takyon writes:

Secretive Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

Magic Leap Inc., a U.S. startup that makes a headset to project digital objects onto the real world, accused one of its former engineers of stealing its technology to create his own augmented reality device for China.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, Magic Leap alleges that Chi Xu, who left in 2016, exploited its confidential information to "quickly develop a prototype of lightweight, ergonomically designed, mixed reality glasses for use with smart phones and other devices that are strikingly similar" to the Florida-based startup's designs.

The lawsuit marks the latest accusation from an American firm of intellectual property theft by Chinese companies, a perennial sore point that's helped escalate tensions between the world's two largest economies. With more than $2 billion in financing, Magic Leap is one of the better-funded startups delving into so-called augmented or mixed reality, a technology that gives users the illusion that fantastical, three-dimensional digital objects exist in the physical world.

Many have accused Magic Leap of being vaporware. But now its precious vapors have been collected by people who could actually make something out of it.

Also at The Verge.

Previously: Magic Leap Bashed for Being Vaporware
Magic Leap Finally Announces a Product, But is It Still Vaporware?

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takyon writes:

Google says it's done making tablets and cancels two unreleased products

Google will not be launching a sequel to last year's Pixel Slate tablet, according to Business Insider and Computer World, and will instead focus its Chrome OS hardware efforts on traditional laptop devices like the Pixelbook. "For Google's first-party hardware efforts, we'll be focusing on Chrome OS laptops and will continue to support Pixel Slate," a spokesperson told Business Insider.

[...] Google went so far as to reveal that it has axed two in-development tablet products, moving the employees who had been working on them to other areas of the company. (Most have apparently joined the Pixelbook team.) The tablets were both smaller in size than the Pixel Slate and were planned for release "sometime after 2019." But disappointing quality assurance testing results led Google to completely abandon both devices. Google informed employees of its decision on Wednesday.

Also at TechCrunch.

Previously: Google Neglecting or Exiting the Android Tablet Business?
Google Hardware Makes Cuts to Laptop and Tablet Development, Cancels Products
Google Pixelbook Tablets and Laptops: Not Dead

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The US is looking to cap the number of H-1B visas granted to India due to recently enacted "data localization" laws.

India, which has upset firms such as Mastercard and irked the U.S. government with stringent new rules on data storage, is the largest recipient of these temporary visas, most of them to workers at big Indian technology firms. India receives about 70% of all US H-1B visas, but would be limited to between 10% and 15% of the annual quota.

[...]Most affected by any such caps would be India’s more than $150 billion IT sector, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Ltd, which uses H-1B visas to fly engineers and developers to service clients in the United States, its biggest market. Major Silicon Valley tech companies also hire workers using the visas.

Shares in Indian IT firms fell in early trade on Thursday after the Reuters story. Wipro Ltd fell around 4%, while Infosys and TCS fell more than 2% each. The broader Nifty IT index’s 1.8% fall was its biggest intraday percentage decline in over five weeks.

Also at: Fortune, The Economic Times (India), and MSN.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

AT&T Lays Off Thousands After Nabbing Billions In Tax Breaks And Regulatory Favors

Back in November of 2017 AT&T promised that if it received a tax break from the Trump administration, it would invest an additional $1 billion back into its network and employees. At the time, CEO Randall Stephenson proclaimed that "every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs." Not "entry-level jobs," AT&T promised, but "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year."

Yeah, about that.

The Trump tax cut resulted in AT&T getting billions in immediate tax relief, and roughly $3 billion in tax savings annually, in perpetuity. Yet when it came time for AT&T to re-invest this money back into its network and employees, AT&T actually did the opposite and began laying them off in droves. Unions claim AT&T has laid off an estimated 23,000 workers worldwide since the Trump tax plan, with investors and executives unsurprisingly pocketing the savings. This week, the word came down that AT&T would be laying off thousands more as it wraps up fiber deployment:

"Leaked internal documents confirmed most of the 1,800 planned job cuts. One AT&T surplus declaration shows that more than 900 of the surplus jobs come from the company's Southeast division in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. This document attributes most of the cuts to "economic" reasons and some to "technological/operational efficiency."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Aston Martin CEO claims Valkyrie will attempt a 'Ring record, report says - Roadshow

The automotive world has been freaking right the hell out about Aston Martin's technological tour-de-force: the Valkyrie. I mean, there's every reason to. It's got a naturally aspirated V12 that revs to more than 11,000 rpm and, combined with its hybrid system, makes nearly 1,200 horsepower.

Since the technical details started trickling out about this world-beating technological terror, people have been clamoring for it to make an attempt at the Nurburgring production car lap record. The current lap record of 6:44.97 is held by the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ and was set over a year ago.

Well, friends, it's time to get excited because Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer on Thursday told Australian publication Motoring that a renegade 'Ring record was in the car's future. He also stressed that while a record attempt would be made, the car was by no means designed for that purpose.

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aristarchus writes:

Facebook may be trying to censor hate-speech, but others are putting it to good use.

From CNN

Law enforcement agencies in Dallas and Florida on Thursday became the latest to announce they are investigating allegations some of their employees made offensive comments on Facebook after a watchdog group compiled screenshots of the posts and shared them in an online database.

The screenshots of the public posts, published in the Plain View Project's online database, purport to show officers or police department employees making hateful or racist remarks.

[...] Since its founding in 2017, the Plain View Project says it has compiled images of more than 5,000 social media posts and comments by more than 3,500 current and former police officers in eight jurisdictions throughout the US.
Researchers obtained rosters of police officers and then looked them up on Facebook, according to the project's website.

After examining the profiles to confirm they belonged to police officers, they reviewed public posts and comments to see if they would "undermine public trust and confidence in police."

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melikamp writes:

Hot on the heels of the news about the League of Entropy, I offer my own analysis of various challenges present in the quest for random bits. Thanks to the exposure of this development by SoylentNews, I dug up my old 2012 proposal and saw that LoE implemented something very similar, but fully automated. Remarkably, it took me some 7 years to realize that my original proposal can be easily adopted for robots, and now I am delighted to share with you a very basic description of the problem, the difficulties, and the implementation details.

And by the way, you may not think that when you see the format, but this is intended as a scholarly article, and it is currently in peer review phase — where it will remain for as long as it is useful — and there are people willing to maintain it. Please feel welcome to offer comments, ideas, corrections via email or xmpp, and I will do my best to create a review journal and credit everyone involved, as appropriate.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Hackers, farmers, and doctors unite! Support for Right to Repair laws slowly grows

In the US, manufacturers in everything from consumer technology to farming and agriculture have long constructed systems that limit where customers can go for repairs—remember the old "warranty void if broken" stickers found on game consoles or TVs? Today if you have a broken iPhone screen, for instance, Apple runs Genius Bars across the country where users must go for permitted fixes. Other companies parcel work out to a network of authorized vendors. Manufacturers generally argue these constraints are necessary to protect proprietary information that gives theirproduct a leg up in the overall marketplace.

Slowly but surely, though, consumers and third parties outside of vendor-sanctioned circles have been pushing to change this through so-called "right to repair" laws. These pieces of proposed legislation take different forms—19 states introduced some form of right to repair legislation in 2018, up from 12 in 2017—but generally they attempt to require companies, whether they are in the tech sector or not, to make their service manuals, diagnostic tools, and parts available to consumers and repair shops—not just select suppliers.

It's difficult to imagine a more convincing case for the notion that politics make strange bedfellows. Farmers, doctors, hospital administrators, hackers, and cellphone and tablet repair shops are aligned on one side of the right to repair argument, and opposite them are the biggest names in consumer technology, ag equipment and medical equipment. And given its prominence in the consumer technology repair space, IFixit.com has found itself at the forefront of the modern right to repair movement.

"The problem is that there are only two types of transaction in the United States: purchases and licenses," says Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of the Repair Association, a right to repair advocacy group partnering with iFixit to further the movement. "You don't own something if it's covered by an end-user license agreement. All you have is a right to use it according to the manufacturer's terms."

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Mozilla Firefox 67.0.3 Patches Actively Exploited Zero-Day

Mozilla released Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 to patch an actively exploited and critical severity vulnerability which could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on machines running vulnerable Firefox versions.

As Mozilla's security advisory says, the Firefox developers are "aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw" which could allow attackers who exploit this vulnerability to take control of affected systems.

The Firefox and Firefox ESR zero-day flaw fixed by Mozilla was reported by Google Project Zero's Samuel Groß and the Coinbase Security team.

The type confusion vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-11707occurs "when manipulating JavaScript objects due to issues in Array.pop."

Attackers could potentially trigger the type confusion by deceiving users of unpatched Firefox versions into visiting a maliciously crafted web page and, subsequently, executing arbitrary code on their systems.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also issued an alert advising users "to review the Mozilla Security Advisory for Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 and apply the necessary updates."

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463

t's not just multi-platform gaming giants suing cheaters. Niantic has sued members of Global++ for allegedly offering "unauthorized derivative" (read: hacked) versions of Pokémon Go, Ingress and even the still-in-beta Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The modified mobile apps not only violate intellectual property rights, Niantic said, but "undermine the integrity of the gaming experience" by helping players cheat. This hurts player enthusiasm for the games and thus could "interfere" with Niantic's business.

Some of the Global++ members are named, including reported leader Ryan Hunt and YouTube promoter Alen Hundur. There are also 20 anonymous members who haven't been identified so far.

Global++ hadn't directly answered the allegations, but it responded to the lawsuit by taking down its website and Discord servers. It said it was shutting down "indefinitely" in order to honor its "legal obligations."

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/16/niantic-sues-pokemon-go-cheaters/

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Record efficiency for a gas engine

At the end of May, the final meeting of the "Horizon 2020" project "GasOn" with the EU Commission took place in Brussels. The aim of this EU project was the further development of gas engines for cars and vans. Around 20 partners participated, including ETH Zurich and Empa as well as four European automobile manufacturers and well-known suppliers. Gas-powered vehicles generally emit less pollutants than petrol or diesel cars. They are likely to gain importance in the future due to their possibility of being powered by renewable energy.

[...] A highly efficient combustion process was implemented for a gas engine with two liters displacement: A lean gas mixture is ignited by means of a thimble-sized, flow-calmed prechamber. In the ETH laboratory for aerothermochemistry and combustion systems, basic experiments were carried out in optically accessible engines. These were used to investigate the behavior of the ignition in the prechamber and the overflow of the hot rays into the main combustion chamber. Based on these data, numerical tools were developed in order to calculate the processes in detail using computer simulations. These results allowed Volkswagen Group Research to optimize the design of the prechamber and the main combustion chamber. Empa scientists set up an engine accordingly and investigated the combustion process. An engine control system developed by the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control Technology at ETH Zurich was used, which coordinates the complex overall system and enables adaptation to new findings at the same time.

Compared to the state of the art, the consumption of the new gas engine with prechamber combustion process was reduced by 20 percent (converted into WLTP standard consumption for a mid-size passenger car). The peak efficiency in the best engine configuration was over 45 percent, with efficiencies of over 40 percent achieved over a wide operating range. Such values are currently only achieved by significantly larger engines, such as those used in commercial vehicles, stationary or marine applications. 45 percent is a new record for passenger car engines. By way of comparison, petrol engines typically have efficiencies of 35 to 40 percent. The GasOn project has not yet dealt with the exhaust gas treatment of such an engine; there is still need for further research, due to the lean combustion process.

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martyb writes:

One Legacy of Carl Sagan may Take Flight Next Week-A Working Solar Sail:

As early as next Monday night, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a cluster of 24 satellites for the US Air Force. Known as the Space Test Program-2 mission, the rocket will deposit its payloads into three different orbits. Perhaps the most intriguing satellite will be dropped off at the second stop—a circular orbit 720km above the Earth's surface. This is the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft.

After a week in space, allowing the satellites deposited in this orbit to drift apart, LightSail 2 will eject from its carrying case into open space. About the size of a loaf of bread, the 5-kg satellite will eventually unfurl into a solar sail 4 meters long by 5.6 meters tall. The Mylar material composing the sail is just 4.5 microns thick, or about one-tenth as thick as a human hair.

This experiment, which will attempt to harness the momentum of photons and "sail" through space, is the culmination of decades of work by The Planetary Society. "This goes back to the very beginning, to Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Lou Friedman," the organization's chief executive, Bill Nye, told Ars in an interview. "We are carrying on a legacy that has been with us since the founders. It's just an intriguing technology because it lowers the cost of going all over the place in the Solar System."

There were two prior attempts by the Planetary Society at deploying light sails. In 2005, the first stage of the rocket launching Cosmos 1 failed. In 2015, LightSail 1 was able to achieve orbit but experienced several technical difficulties from which lessons were learned and used to inform the design of this upcoming attempt with LightSail 2.

More details about the process can be found at the Planetary Society.

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