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takyon writes:

Mitsubishi's Verbatim, Known for CD, DVD and BD Optical Media, Sold to CMC

This month Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. decided to sell its legendary Verbatim business unit to CMC Magnetics. Verbatim is primarily known for its recordable optical media, but the company also sells USB flash drives, DAS devices, accessories, and so on.

Under the terms of the agreement, CMC will pay Mitsubishi Chemical $32 million in cash for Verbatim-related assets, including patents, technologies, sales network, and other. Being one of the pioneers of blank floppy disk and optical media, Verbatim owns a large portfolio of IP for discs, including production methods, various coatings, and other technologies. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi Chemical has used the brand to market USB flash drives, SSDs, DAS devices, power banks, various accessories, and even 3D printing filaments. It is unclear whether CMC is also set to get these businesses and whether it intends to keep them running.

CMC has manufactured Verbatim-branded optical media for a while now using Verbatim's technologies, so change of ownership is not expected to result in change of quality. Meanwhile, since the whole Verbatim supply chain will now belong to CMC, it is possible to expect the media to get slightly cheaper. Furthermore, with IP from Verbatim, CMC will be able to improve its own-brand products without paying for a license.

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takyon writes:

Trump reversed course on Huawei. What happens now?

Six weeks after Huawei was blacklisted by the US government, President Donald Trump had what the Chinese telecom firm described as a "U-turn." Trump said Saturday that "US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei," allowing the transactions won't present a "great, national emergency problem."

Trump's comments at the G20 in Japan came after a widely anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jingping. The two sides met to discuss the impasse in the trade dispute, and Huawei, one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, has become a flash point in the battle.

In May, the US Commerce Department banned sales of American-made goods to Huawei without first obtaining a license. US officials have accused the company of working to undermine US national security and foreign policy interests. Trump said Huawei was still part of the ongoing trade discussions between Washington and Beijing, but for now, he would move to resume allowing US companies to sell parts to the Chinese firm.

Also at Android Authority and Business Insider:

President Trump has said US firms can continue selling to Huawei, apparently contradicting a Commerce Department trade blacklist on the Chinese tech firm.

See also: A China-U.S. Trade Truce Could Enshrine a Global Economic Shift

Previously: New Law Bans U.S. Government from Buying Equipment from Chinese Telecom Giants ZTE and Huawei
Huawei Working on its Own OS to Prepare for "Worst-Case Scenario" of Being Deprived of Android
Google Pulls Huawei's Android License
The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google's Iron Grip On Android
Huawei Calls on U.S. to Adjust its Approach to Tackle Cybersecurity Effectively
Google Doesn't Want Huawei Ban Because It Would Result in an Android Competitor
Huawei Soldiers on, Announces Nova 5 and Kirin 810

Related: U.S. Reaches Deal to Keep China's ZTE in Business: Congressional Aide
US Hits China's ZTE with $1 Billion Penalty

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upstart writes for Bytram:

How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples

Shadows from the Walls of Death, printed in 1874 and measuring about 22 by 30 inches, is a noteworthy book for two reasons: its rarity, and the fact that, if you touch it, it might kill you. It contains just under a hundred wallpaper samples, each of which is saturated with potentially dangerous levels of arsenic.

The book is the work of Dr. Robert M. Kedzie, a Union surgeon during the American Civil War and later professor of chemistry at Michigan State Agricultural college (now MSU). When he came to serve on the state’s Board of Health in the 1870s, he set out to raise awareness about the dangers of arsenic-pigmented wallpaper. Though a lethal toxin, arsenic can be mixed with copper and made into beautiful paints and pigments, most commonly Scheele’s Green or Paris Green. This was no fringe phenomenon: near the end of the 19th century, the American Medical Association estimated that as much as 65 percent of all wallpaper in the United States contained arsenic.

[...] Of the original 100 copies, only four remain. Most libraries, concerned about poisoning their patrons, destroyed their volumes. Two of the surviving books remain in Michigan—one at MSU and the other at the University of Michigan. MSU’s copy rests on an unassuming shelf in the library’s Special Collections division, housed in an appropriately green box. Each page is individually encapsulated in plastic so that researchers and the curious can handle it without fear.

[...] The other two copies of Shadows have made their way to the Harvard University Medical School and the National Library of Medicine, which has digitized the entire volume and made it freely available online. That was no simple task: Dr. Stephen Greenberg, head of the rare books and early manuscripts section of the NLM’s History of Medicine division, says workers had to suit up in protective gear before handling the book.

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MostCynical writes:

A Supreme Court judge in New South Wales, Australia, has just made a ruling that media organizations are liable for allegedly defamatory comments posted on their public Facebook pages.

Articles in The Conversation and elsewhere discuss the ruling, suggesting that operators of commercial Facebook pages may need to hide all comments by default so that they can be checked for defamation before they are seen by the public.

The problem is that Facebook was not designed for users to pre-moderate comments. It was built to deliver us “frictionless”, immediate communication.

Dylan Voller, a Former Northern Territory youth detainee sued three media organizations, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, and the Centralian Advocate. Voller claims that comments on 10 Facebook posts published in 2016 and 2017 in the Facebook pages of the three media outlets carry a series of false and defamatory imputations against him.

Although he did not ask for the comments to be taken down, Voller launched defamation proceedings against the three media organisazions in the Supreme Court. His argument is that the media organizations published the comments of third parties.

A preliminary decision was issued by Justice Stephen Rothman stating that Mr. Voller has proven the alleged publication of the comments by the media organizations. As such, he ordered the media organizations to pay Mr. Voller the costs of the hearing. The court has not decided yet whether the comments are indeed defamatory.

This means that comments by members of the public on articles posted to public social media pages of media companies are now the responsibility of the media companies - who can be sued for defamation.

Note, Australia has no 'free speech', except by tradition (the fundamental difference between the U.S and places such as Australia and the UK are the fact that the US decided to write its laws down - whereas Australia and the UK use the the Westminster system of government, where

courts have ability to address silence or ambiguity in the statutory law through the development of common law.

SN could be held liable for defamatory comments!
 

Original Submission

In a new book, Policing the Open Road, How Cars Transformed American Freedom http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980860 the author makes the claim that the USA's slippery slope toward a totalitarian or police state (often discussed on SN) started when cars became popular. Before that time (about 100 years ago), most policing was handled by various non-gov't organizations and the professional police force was small. With the advent of the car, everyone (rich and poor, upstanding citizen or rogue) broke traffic laws and police forces expanded to deal with it--testing constitutional rights in the courts and many other aspects of our society.

The Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/law-justice/sarah-seo-how-cars-transformed-policing has a extended book review which is well worth a read. Here's a clip:

Before cars, police mainly dealt with those on the margins of society. Voluntary associations governed everyone else. Churches enforced moral norms, trade groups managed business relations, and social clubs maintained social harmony. Citizens and private groups, including banks and insurance companies, pursued criminal investigations and initiated prosecutions. Aside from the constable or sheriff, who worked for the court and mainly executed warrants, publicly-funded police rarely took part in private enforcement efforts. A nineteenth-century treatise on the “duties of sheriffs and constables” indicates that the bulk of their work was to serve summonses, warrants, and writs, as well as to supervise prisoners. Large cities began establishing police forces in the mid-nineteenth century, but even so, municipal coffers did not support the extent of protection that wealthier neighborhoods and business districts sought. A system of “special policemen” licensed by the government but paid for by private citizens—private security, essentially—filled the void.

This would all soon change when Americans embraced the “horseless carriage.” In 1910 the number of registered passenger cars was just under 500,000. That figure exploded to over 8 million in 1920 and to nearly 18 million in 1925—a thirty-fivefold increase in fifteen years. New regulatory and police practices soon developed to respond to cars’ mass adoption. Soon no one could drive without taking a test, applying for a license, registering the car, and buying insurance. And that was just the beginning. Once a person set out for a drive, speed limits, stoplights, checkpoints, and all the other requirements of the traffic code restricted how one could drive.

But towns and cities quickly ran into an enforcement problem: everybody violated traffic laws. Noncompliance was not a new phenomenon, but violations of the rules of the road presented a different quandary for two reasons. First, drivers included respectable people, and their numbers were growing every year. Second, traffic lawbreaking resulted in tremendous damage, injury, and death, and those numbers were increasing every day. It soon became clear that the public’s interest in street and highway safety required more policing.

This meant that everyone became subject to discretionary policing. The well-off were among the first to buy cars, as were farmers who needed cars for more practical reasons. Even if independent farmers may not have been as wealthy as the early auto enthusiasts, as a group, they enjoyed social standing in a country with a strong sense of agrarian virtue. Driving quickly became a middle-class, or what used to be called “business-class,” phenomenon by the mid-1920s, when car ownership passed a tipping point: 55.7 percent of families in the United States owned a car in 1926, and 18 percent of those had more than one. But even the rest of the population who did not drive and instead walked were policed, too, for the regulation of drivers on public streets also required the regulation of pedestrians on those same streets.

This completely transformed U.S. society. ...

So much for that fantasy of the open road!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

NPR https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-000-wallets-around-the-globe-can-teach-us-about-honesty reports on some unconventional research, wallets were dropped around the world with different amounts of money in them and the researchers kept track of how many were returned.

I'll save you the suspense, wallets with more money (up to $100 was tested) were more likely to be returned! Including a key in the wallet roughly increased the rate of return by 10%.

The rates at which people tried to return the wallets varied a lot by country, even though the presence of money in the wallet almost always increased the chances. In Denmark, for example, researchers saw more than 80% of wallets with money reported. Peru saw a little over 10%.

The researchers think wealth could be a factor, but there's a lot more research needed to explain the differences. "Now the problem is that we don't really know whether wealth affects honesty or it's the other way around" — whether honesty contributes to a country's relative wealth, says Cohn.

Countries with higher rates of primary education were also more likely to see high rates of lost wallets being reported.

Full text of the paper is at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712 It starts out with:

Honest behavior is a central feature of economic and social life (1, 2). Without honesty, promises are broken, contracts go unenforced, taxes remain unpaid, and governments become corrupt.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Europe sizzles on sixth day of deadly heatwave

Europe sweltered Saturday on the sixth day of a widespread, deadly heatwave that has fuelled record-breaking temperatures, huge blazes and pollution peaks. With France, Italy, Spain and some central European nations posting all-time high temperatures, officials pleaded with people to take precautions, with promise of reprieve from Sunday.

The heat has officially claimed four lives in France, two in Italy and another two in Spain, including a 17-year-old harvest worker, a 33-year-old roofer and a 72-year-old homeless man.

The hot spell sparked several blazes, including in Spain where firefighters were again battling high flames in strong winds and blistering heat Saturday just after they managed to contain another inferno after nearly 72 hours. A fire that started Friday in the central Spanish town of Almorox burnt at least 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres), spilling over into the Madrid region and forcing the evacuation of a village, emergency services said.

In France, about 40 fires were reported, razing about 600 hectares and dozens of houses in the Gard department in the country's south.

Original Submission

upstart writes for Bytram:

Sneaky deals are keeping cheaper generic medicines off the market

A bill — AB 824 — now making its way through the Legislature would prohibit agreements among drug companies involving "anything of value" changing hands to delay introduction of a generic alternative to a brand-name medicine.

The legislation already has been passed by the Assembly. It's scheduled to be voted upon Wednesday by the Senate Health Committee.

"We know these agreements happen. Everyone knows it," Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg), the author of the bill, told me.

[...] About 90% of all U.S. drug sales involve generics, which are intended to be cheaper alternatives to brand-name drugs once a sufficient amount of time has passed for the original maker to recoup its research and development costs.

Healthcare advocates say pharmaceutical companies figured out years ago that they can reap even greater profits by encouraging generic manufacturers to stay away from some of the most lucrative brand-name meds.

This is typically done by direct payments or promises of profit sharing, or by the brand-name maker pledging not to bring out its own "authorized" generic to compete directly with the generic manufacturer. The deals are often reached during settlements of patent litigation.

The Federal Trade Commission estimates that pay-for-delay deals cost American consumers $3.5 billion a year in the form of higher drug prices.

"Pay-for-delay agreements are 'win-win' for the companies," the FTC said in a 2010 study. "Brand-name pharmaceutical prices stay high, and the brand and generic share the benefits of the brand's monopoly profits."

A more recent analysis by the California Public Interest Research Group found that pay-for-delay deals keep cheaper generics off the market for an average of five years after patent rules allow their introduction.

This allows drug companies to charge for a brand-name med as much as 33 times what a generic alternative would cost, the analysis found.

Original Submission

chromas writes:

ProPublica:

Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior's performance on this April afternoon didn't disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren't enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression.

A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D'Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound — a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold. As she hacked and rasped, a message popped up on its web interface: "StressedVoice detected."

"There we go," D'Anna said with amusement, looking at the screen. "There's my coughs."

The students were helping ProPublica test an aggression detector that's used in hundreds of schools, health care facilities, banks, stores and prisons worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S. Sound Intelligence, the Dutch company that makes the software for the device, plans to open an office this year in Chicago, where its chief executive will be based.

[...] By deploying surveillance technology in public spaces like hallways and cafeterias, device makers and school officials hope to anticipate and prevent everything from mass shootings to underage smoking. Sound Intelligence also markets add-on packages to recognize the sounds of gunshots, car alarms and broken glass, while Hauppauge, New York-based Soter Technologies develops sensors that determine if students are vaping in the school bathroom. The Lockport school district in upstate New York is planning a facial-recognition system to identify intruders on campus.

Yet ProPublica's analysis, as well as the experiences of some U.S. schools and hospitals that have used Sound Intelligence's aggression detector, suggest that it can be less than reliable. At the heart of the device is what the company calls a machine learning algorithm. Our research found that it tends to equate aggression with rough, strained noises in a relatively high pitch, like D'Anna's coughing. A 1994 YouTube clip of abrasive-sounding comedian Gilbert Gottfried ("Is it hot in here or am I crazy?") set off the detector, which analyzes sound but doesn't take words or meaning into account. Although a Louroe spokesman said the detector doesn't intrude on student privacy because it only captures sound patterns deemed aggressive, its microphones allow administrators to record, replay and store those snippets of conversation indefinitely.

[...] To test the algorithm, ProPublica purchased a microphone from Louroe Electronics and licensed the aggression detection software. We rewired the device so we could measure its output while testing pre-recorded audio clips. We then recorded high school students and examined which types of sounds set off the detector.

We found that higher-pitched, rough and strained vocalizations tended to trigger the algorithm. For example, it frequently triggered for sounds like laughing, coughing, cheering and loud discussions. While female high school students tended to trigger false positives when singing, laughing and speaking, their high-pitched shrieking often failed to do so.

I recommend clicking through to read the whole thing, as well as their methodology.

Original Submission

Chocolate writes:

An inventor is claiming to have made pills that make farts smell like chocolate and lily of the valley instead of the usual foul stench which would make an onion cry. Christian Poincheval, 69, said he got the idea while "at a table with friends after a copious meal when we nearly asphyxiated ourselves. The pills are technically "dietary supplements" made from natural ingredients. There is also a powdered version available for dogs. In the world of bodyhacks surely this must win.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Yellowstone National Park’s Steamboat Geyser sped up its eruption cycle earlier in June, setting a new mark for recorded intervals between eruptions.

The geyser’s shortest rest between noted eruptions occurred June 15 when it blasted steam and water into the air only three days, three hours and 48 minutes after its previous spouting June 12.

Earlier quick recharges included a 1982 eruption after only four days, 19 hours and 43 minutes. On June 15, 2018, it went off after four days, 15 hours, 49 minutes. And on Sept. 12, 2018, it gushed forth after four days, 18 hours and 3 minutes.

Why have the eruptions sped up?

“I wish I could tell you,” said Michael Manga, of the University of California, Berkeley, who studies geysers.

[...]Manga added that it “should trouble everyone” that scientists can’t better explain geysers, since they are similar in many respects to their much more dangerous cousin, the volcano.

https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/yellowstone-s-tallest-geyser-breaks-its-record-for-shortest-time/article_af8e9ec4-1504-5113-8798-3cd3ac0700ff.html

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

SpaceX's Starlink program launched an initial sixty satellites on May 23. At least three of these "are no longer in service" and "will passively deorbit." according to a spokesperson for the company.

In other words, the three spacecraft failed and will fall back to Earth, likely within a year because of their relatively low orbit of 273 miles (440 kilometers) above the planet's surface.

SpaceX seems relatively unfazed by the failures, though, since the company never expected all of them to function perfectly given the mission's experimental nature.

SpaceX intentionally implemented the satellites with minor variations.

On a brighter note, 45 of the satellites, which are equipped with small ion engines for maneuvering, have already reached their intended orbits. Five are moving towards their orbits, and five are pending evaluation before maneuvering. Another "[t]wo satellites are being intentionally deorbited to simulate an end of life disposal."

[N]ow that the majority of the satellites have reached their operational altitude, SpaceX will begin using the constellation to start transmitting broadband signals, testing the latency and capacity by streaming videos and playing some high bandwidth video games using gateways throughout North America.

The Starlink program was stung by early comments that the program was negatively affecting astronomy and SpaceX

added that it "continues to monitor the visibility of the satellites as they approach their final orbit" and that they will be measured for their visibility from the ground once there. Those comments are likely meant to address concerns lodged by astronomers about the reflectivity of Starlink spacecraft

The satellites are designed to completely disintegrate upon entering Earth's atmosphere, and the failures may help drive future iterations.

Previous Coverage
Most of SpaceX's Starlink Internet Satellites are Already on Track
SpaceX Satellites Pose New Headache for Astronomers
Third Time's the Charm! SpaceX Launch Good; Starlink Satellite Deployment Coming Up [Updated]
SpaceX to Launch 60 Starlink Satellites: Postponed 1 Day Due to Upper Altitude Winds [UPDATE 2]
SpaceX to Launch 60 Starlink Satellites at Once, and More
SpaceX's First Dedicated Starlink Launch Set for May; Amazon Hired SpaceX Execs for Project Kuiper

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Microsoft is seeking to join Linux private security board

Microsoft's relationship with the Linux community wasn't exactly rosy under Ballmer, who is notorious for having hated Linux with a passion. Satya Nadella has been working to change that, and the company is a high-paying, platinum member of the Linux Foundation, a move that has been treated with skepticism by the community, given its anti-establishment inclinations.

In a new move, the company is looking to join the linux-distros and oss-security mailing lists, which are used by representatives from Linux distributions as a private channel where they can report and coordinate on security issues – which one depending on the severity and whether they've been disclosed to the public.

[...] [Sasha] Levin, who is an active contributor to the Linux Kernel, also noted that Microsoft's Linux builds are not based on other distributions from members such as Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Red Hat and Chrome OS, and that Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation can vouch for him.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://puri.sm/posts/purisms-librem-key-is-now-the-first-and-only-usb-security-token-to-be-made-in-the-usa/

[...] Initially manufactured in-part by partner Nitrokey, Purism is now manufacturing Librem Keys entirely from Purism’s Carlsbad, California headquarters – the same U.S. facility used to manufacture its Librem 5 smartphone devkits in 2018. Version 2 also stores up to 4096-bit RSA keys and up to 512-bit ECC keys and securely generates keys directly on the device.

Supply chain security is a rising concern due to the lack of control hardware companies have over manufacturing links. Threats include security hacks, malware concerns, cyber-espionage, and even copyright theft. Purism sees protection of its supply chain as an existentially important issue, and has invested in supply chain improvements including the launch of Librem Key V2.

Original Submission

upstart writes for Bytram:

Researchers teleport information within a diamond

"Quantum teleportation permits the transfer of quantum information into an otherwise inaccessible space," said Hideo Kosaka, a professor of engineering at Yokohama National University and an author on the study. "It also permits the transfer of information into a quantum memory without revealing or destroying the stored quantum information."

The inaccessible space, in this case, consisted of carbon atoms in diamond. Made of linked, yet individually contained, carbon atoms, a diamond holds the perfect conditions for quantum teleportation.

A carbon atom holds six protons and six neutrons in its nucleus, surrounded by six spinning electrons. As the atoms bond into a diamond, they form a notably strong lattice. However, diamonds can have complex defects, such as when a nitrogen atom exists in one of two adjacent vacancies where carbon atoms should be. This defect is called a nitrogen vacancy center.

Surrounded by carbon atoms, the nucleus structure of the nitrogen atom creates what Kosaka calls a nanomagnet.

To manipulate an electron and a carbon isotope in the vacancy, Kosaka and the team attached a wire about a quarter the width of a human hair to the surface of a diamond. They applied a microwave and a radio wave to the wire to build an oscillating magnetic field around the diamond. They shaped the microwave to create the optimal, controlled conditions for the transfer of quantum information within the diamond.

Kosaka then used the nitrogen nanomagnet to anchor an electron. Using the microwave and radio waves, Kosaka forced the electron spin to entangle with a carbon nuclear spin—the angular momentum of the electron and the nucleus of a carbon atom. The electron spin breaks down under a magnetic field created by the nanomagnet, making it susceptible to entanglement. Once the two pieces are entangled, meaning their physical characteristics are so intertwined they cannot be described individually, a photon that holds quantum information is introduced, and the electron absorbs the photon. The absorption allows the polarization state of the photon to be transferred into the carbon, which is mediated by the entangled electron, demonstrating a teleportation of information at the quantum level.

Quantum teleportation-based state transfer of photon polarization into a carbon spin in diamond (DOI: 10.1038/s42005-019-0158-0)

Original Submission