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AnonTechie writes:

How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China's Surveillance State:

AN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to "drive innovation" — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

[...] After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian's role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In response, a Semptian employee sent documents showing that the company — under the guise of iNext — has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which it says can "store and analyze unlimited data."

Aegis can provide "a full view to the virtual world," the company claims in the documents, allowing government spies to see "the connections of everyone," including "location information for everyone in the country."

The system can also "block certain information [on the] internet from being visited," censoring content that the government does not want citizens to see, the documents show.

[The Semptian video demonstration showing how the Aegis system tracks people's movements is embedded in the article]

[Related Cloud Platform by IBM - China]: SuperVessel

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'A s--- show': uBiome just cut half its staff as the troubled poop-testing startup searches for a path forward after an FBI raid[*]

On a cloudy Wednesday morning in San Francisco, the moment uBiome's employees had been expecting for months finally arrived.

The beleaguered poop-testing startup began laying off about half its staff, as the company searches for a path forward after an FBI raid and the departures of its founders.

At uBiome's headquarters in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, people who'd just been let go began streaming out of a grey warehouse building around 9:30 a.m.

Some carried potted plants. One blasted the Phil Collins rock anthem "You'll be in my heart" out of iPhone speakers.

"It was a s--- show on Monday, it's a s--- show today," one said as she left, to no one in particular.

In all, uBiome cut 114 of the 229 people it employed, according to a person familiar with the situation — 42 from its US operations and 72 in Latin America.

See also: uBiome has stopped running its only lab test after the troubled poop-testing startup laid off half its workers[*]

[*] Free account signup may be required.

Also at: Yahoo!

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takyon writes:

After shocking leadership shakeup at NASA, new head of human exploration says moon 2024 is doable:

Less than 24 hours after being named head of human exploration at NASA, former astronaut Ken Bowersox said the agency is trying to speed up decision-making in its quest to reach the moon by 2024.

"The key is we need to fly when we're ready, but if we don't shoot for 2024 we have zero chance," Bowersox said Thursday at the American Astronautical Society's John Glenn Memorial Symposium. "Our attitude is to get as much of this going as we can — to move as fast as we can, as long as we can."

Bowersox' brief remarks in Cleveland follow the shocking announcement Wednesday night that Bill Gerstenmaier — a pillar in NASA's human exploration operations since 2005 — was out as the agency's associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

The announcement was made in a Wednesday email to NASA employees from Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "As you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars," he wrote. "In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes." He then named Bowersox — a 62-year-old veteran of five space shuttle flights — as Gerstenmaier's replacement.

The decision — which surprised many in the space community — comes as NASA continues a years-long struggle to keep its human exploration plans on track. Projects such as the Space Launch System rocket being built to launch humans to the moon and the commercial crew program, meant to alleviate the country's reliance on Russia for transportation to the International Space Station, are years behind schedule.

See also: To the Moon and beyond

Related: 2020s to Become the Decade of Lunar Re-Exploration
NASA Chief Says a Falcon Heavy Rocket Could Fly Humans to the Moon
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
Project Artemis: Return to the Moon to Cost Another $20-30 Billion

Original Submission

takyon writes:

F.T.C. Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion

The Federal Trade Commission has approved a fine of roughly $5 billion against Facebook for mishandling users' personal information, according to three people briefed on the vote, in what would be a landmark settlement that signals a newly aggressive stance by regulators toward the country's most powerful technology companies.

The much-anticipated settlement still needs final approval in the coming weeks from the Justice Department, which rarely rejects settlements reached by the agency. It would be the biggest fine by far levied by the federal government against a technology company, easily eclipsing the $22 million imposed on Google in 2012. The size of the penalty underscored the rising frustration among Washington officials with how Silicon Valley giants collect, store and use people's information.

It would also represent one of the most aggressive regulatory actions by the Trump administration, and a sign of the government's willingness to punish one of the country's biggest and most powerful companies. President Trump has dialed back regulations in many industries, but the Facebook settlement sets a new bar for privacy enforcement by United States officials, who have brought few cases against large technology companies.

Also at Reuters, CNBC, The Verge, MarketWatch, and CNN.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

For the second year in a row the Australia MyGov portal has gone down at tax time denying Australians access to digital services as they prepare to pay their taxes and process government service requests such as Medicare. The MyGov page currently throws a message saying "myGov is currently unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience". This is the second year in a row that this key service provided by the newly renamed Services Australia has suffered a significant outage during a peak usage period. The Australian government has made several decisions that result in citizens who want to claim Australian government payments or use government services must do so through the MyGov portal, including submitting tax returns online. Due to this the uptake of these digital services has resulted in them being slashdotted. With the move to bring more services online and require new government service offerings to be available through this portal will the Australian government provide the resources required to provide a stable service.

That's it, I'm using the paper form this year for my tax. I don't need a MyGov account to request the paper form, do I?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/12/mygov-crashes-as-thousands-try-to-submit-tax-returns

As thousands of Australians try to submit their tax returns, the main online portal for federal government services has gone down.

In an outage that will also affect thousands of welfare recipients across the country, the MyGov site appeared to be unavailable on Friday morning, returning an error.

The Department of Human Services said via MyGov's Twitter account there were "technical difficulties" with the website.

"We are urgently investigating the issue and we're working hard to fix this as quickly as possible," it repeatedly said in replies to people reporting the error.

A department of human services spokeswoman said: "Some services, including myGov, are currently unavailable or experiencing slowness. The department is working on the issue and apologises for the inconvenience."

"We're continuing to monitor the performance of our services closely, and in the past hour have seen signs of significant improvement."

The spokeswoman later added that the department would conduct a "thorough investigation into how the outage occurred" after its services were fully up and running".

Also at:
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/mygov-website-down-preventing-australians-from-completing-tax-returns-20190712-p526kx.html
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mygov-the-site-responsible-for-your-centrelink-medicare-tax-and-super-info-is-down-2019-7

Original Submission

Chocolate wrote in with a submission that was the inspiration for:

It's difficult to imagine that Friends, a show that ended 15 years ago, could be of any real importance to a modern streaming giant like Netflix.

In fact the sitcom, which features a bunch of 20-somethings living together in a time before streaming was even invented, is US Netflix's second-most watched show.

Today, Netflix announced that it's poised to lose its rights to broadcast the series to its original parent company, Warner, which plans to launch its own streaming service, HBO Max in the first quarter of 2020.

The blow follows another announcement in June that Netflix's number one series, the US version of The Office, is also being snatched back by its creators, NBCUniversal, to be broadcast exclusively in the US on its own yet-to-be-launched streaming service.

Old media, analysts are noting with no small amount of surprise, is suddenly bringing the fight to Netflix, and it looks like Netflix could be the one that gets knocked out, or at least very knocked around.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/home-entertainment/tv/huge-threat-to-netflix-revealed/news-story/e86f7778556735d22e4cd9f054fb51af

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

North Carolina may be a future destination for a Hyperloop One transit system. The company and several transit partners are exploring a hyperloop that could link Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and the RDU International Airport, near the Research Triangle Park. A pre-feasibility study suggested that traveling between Raleigh and Durham or Chapel Hill (a distance of around 30 miles) could take less than ten minutes, while hyperloop corridors in the region may ease traffic.

"North Carolina Research Triangle -- home to some of the country's top companies, universities and healthcare centers -- is an absolute prime location to examine hyperloop technology," said Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Jay Walder. Other several possible benefits highlighted include reliable travel times, improved road safety, a direct link to the airport and better logistics for cargo shipments. The hyperloop corridors could also be linked to the existing rail network and a proposed regional bus rapid transit system for the Research Triangle area.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/12/hyperloop-one-north-carolina-feasibility-study/

See also: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/12/another-state-is-looking-at-propelling-people-through-tubes-at-670-mph/

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Facebook and CMU's poker AI beat five pros at once (archive)

Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University have built another artificial intelligence bot that beat some top poker pros. While AI bots have been [able] to best professional players in one-on-one competition, Facebook claims it's the first time a bot has been able to beat top pros in "any major benchmark game" when there's more than one opponent at a time. Pluribus bested professionals in no-limit Texas Hold'em in a couple of different formats: five AI bots and one human, and one bot and five real-life players. The researchers behind Pluribus wrote in a paper published in Science that creating such a multiplayer poker bot "is a recognized AI milestone."

In the likes of chess and Go, everything is laid out in the open. But in poker, there's hidden information, namely the cards your opponents have. That brings different, complex strategies to poker not seen in other games, including bluffing. As such, AI bots have typically struggled to account for hidden information and effectively act on it.

Bluffing poses a particularly interesting challenge. A successful bluff can dramatically change a poker game in your favor, but do it too much and your deception becomes predictable. So the bot has to balance bluffing with betting on legitimately strong hands.

Also at BBC, The Verge, Ars Technica, and Facebook.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Back in 2017, Las Vegas' self-driving shuttle service got into a minor collision after just an hour into its year-long trial. While it truly was a minor incident and nobody got hurt, the fact that an autonomous vehicle was involved prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to launch a probe. Now, the agency has wrapped up its investigation and has revealed two probable causes for the incident. First is that the truck that collided with the shuttle didn't stop when it was supposed to, which is consistent with the local government's claim after the accident. The other is that the autonomous vehicle attendant didn't have easy access to the shuttle's manual controller.

Apparently, the truck driver thought the shuttle would stop at a "reasonable" distance from the truck. Although the shuttle did start slowing down when it was 98.4 feet away, it's not programmed to stop until it's only 9.8 feet away from obstacles. The attendant hit the emergency stop button when the vehicle was 10.2 feet away from the truck, but it clearly wasn't enough to prevent the incident.

In an interview with the investigators, the attendant said they considered switching to manual mode to move the shuttle out of the way, but they didn't have easy access to its handheld controller. [...] When the accident happened, the controller was stored in an enclosed space at one end of the passenger compartment.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/12/las-vegas-autonomous-shuttle-crash-probe/

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Mix Of These Foods Could Restore Healthy Microbes In Malnourished Kids

When children suffer from severe malnourishment, they don't just lose weight.

The condition wreaks havoc on biological systems throughout the body — including the microbiome, the healthy bacteria and other microbes that live in our digestive tracts. Those bacteria number in the trillions in every person and include hundreds of different species. They're essential for metabolism, bone growth, brain function, the immune system and other bodily functions.

In a study [open, DOI: 10.1126/science.aau4735] [DX] published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science, scientists in a renowned microbiology lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, report the development of a specialized food designed to rehabilitate gut microbes in severely malnourished children, a treatment that should facilitate both their immediate and long-term recovery.

The food — a spoon-fed paste made from chickpeas, soy, peanuts, bananas and a blend of oils and micronutrients — was shown to substantially boost microbiome health.

Also at STAT.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Hayabusa2 lands on an asteroid and sends back amazing pictures to prove it

Japan's Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu is an ambitious one to begin with, and the team recently made the decision to up the stakes with a second touchdown on the space rock's surface. Not only did all go as planned, but we now have the best shots of an asteroid's surface ever to be sent back to Earth.

[...] There was no guarantee this would happen, the JAXA team running the Hayabusa2 mission noted in a recent blog post. Any number of things could have resulted in a second touchdown being either too risky or not worth the trouble. Fortunately they concluded that the risk was acceptable and that this would be an important feat in more ways than one.

[...] In a brief update, JAXA provided a handful of pictures of the successful touchdown: 4 seconds before, the moment of impact, and 4 seconds after. It doesn't stay for long, more bounces off the surface than "lands."

Image bulletin.

162173 Ryugu.

Related: Hayabusa2 Reaches Asteroid 162173 Ryugu
Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Faces Difficulties in Landing and Collecting a Sample from an Asteroid

Original Submission

Microsoft stirs suspicions by adding telemetry files to security-only update

As expected, Windows Update dropped off several packages of security and reliability fixes for Windows 7 earlier this week, part of the normal Patch Tuesday delivery cycle for every version of Windows.

[...] What was surprising about this month's Security-only update, formally titled the "July 9, 2019—KB4507456 (Security-only update)," is that it bundled the Compatibility Appraiser, KB2952664, which is designed to identify issues that could prevent a Windows 7 PC from updating to Windows 10.

[...] I spent the afternoon poking through update files and security bulletins and trying to get an on-the-record response from Microsoft. I got a terse "no comment" from Redmond.

My research did, however, confirm that this is not a mistake, and it led me to a theory for why these mysterious files are shipping in an unexpected location. I strongly suspect that some part of the Appraiser component on Windows 7 SP1 had a security issue of its own. If that's the case, then the updates indisputably belong in a Security-only update.

And if they happen to get installed on systems where administrators had taken special precautions not to install those components, Microsoft's reaction seems to be, "Well ... tough." The Appraiser tool was offered via Windows Update, both separately and as part of a monthly rollup update two years ago; as a result, most of the declining population of Windows 7 PCs already has it installed.

Also at BetaNews & Ghacks

Fnord666 writes:

Are true crime podcasts as popular with Millenials as they are with Baby Boomers? Does the under-35 crowd listen to wellness podcasts? Nielsen, the company behind the TV ratings system, will begin to survey Americans about their podcast consumption habits in order to sell the data to podcast creators and ad networks.

The company's venture into the world of podcasting isn't as odd as you'd think. Nielsen Scarborough, the division of the company that is carrying out the operation, polls 200,000 people every year on everything from their craft beer drinking habits to how often they watch Mexican soccer. The surveys are conducted over the phone, online and in-person. For the podcast survey, they'll survey a sample of 30,000 people twice a year on everything from genre preferences to consumer buying habits. The end goal is better targeted advertising; companies will learn which podcasts their potential customers are more likely to consume. Nielsen has already secured its first clients, all companies that sell ads for podcasts. These include iHeartMedia, Cadence13, Midroll, Westwood One and cabana.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/11/nielsen-wants-to-track-podcast-data-by-calling-people/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

If you have credit card debt, it may be time to scale back what you spend on luxury purchases.

But we’re not talking about doing without small luxuries like your morning coffee or an afternoon snack – things like your car loan or lease, leisure travel, dining and more can make a bigger difference.

A new CreditCards.com poll shows U.S. consumers who have credit card debt are outspending debt-free households in seven of nine discretionary spending categories (see chart). However, few are willing to cut back on any of their luxury purchases.

In fact, 18 percent of Americans who have credit card debt are unwilling to trim expenses in nine categories, including dining out, leisure travel and clothing (see chart). This despite the fact that the average credit card APR is nearly 18 percent.

[...]Our luxury spending poll also found:

        - Many can live without dining out. Dining and takeout is the category all respondents – in debt or not – are most willing to cut in half. Still, less than half of those with credit card debt (48 percent) would trim their dining budgets, which average $2,186 per year.

        - But vacations are a big budget item many won’t budge on. The average household with card debt spends $2,211 per year on leisure travel. But only 3 in 10 of those respondents would be willing to cut their travel spending in half.

        - Cars, haircuts and cellphone plans are the biggest must-haves. The three categories people in debt were least willing to cut in half are personal care and beauty (23 percent), cellphone services and upgrades (25 percent) and car loans or leases (26 percent).

        - Cut my streaming? You’re dreaming. Only 39 percent of respondents with debt would be willing to cut back on subscriptions services such as Netflix, Spotify and Xbox Live. However, at $1,198 per year, it’s the second-least-costly luxury expense among this group.

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/luxury-spending-poll/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Clean energy and clean water are among the major challenges for sustainable development especially in emerging countries. But traditional approaches to electricity generation consume huge amounts of water. In the US and Europe about 50% of water withdrawals are for energy production.

Similarly, producing water for humans via desalination in countries with water scarcity is a huge consumer of energy. It's estimated that in Arab countries around 15% of electricity production is used to produce drinking water.

Now, researchers believe they have found a way to combine these actions in a single device.

Existing state-of-the-art solar panels face physical limits on the amount of sunlight they can actually turn into electricity. Normally about 10-20% of the sun that hits the panel becomes power. The rest of this heat is considered as waste.

In this experiment, the scientists designed a three stage membrane distillation unit and attached it to the back of the photovoltaic (PV) panel.

The membrane essentially evaporates seawater at relatively low temperatures. The researchers were able to produce three times more water than conventional solar stills while also generating electricity with an efficiency greater than 11%. This meant the device was generating nine times more power than had been achieved in previously published research.

"The waste heat from PV panels has really been ignored, no one has thought about it as a resource," said lead author Prof Peng Wang from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

"We use the heat to generate water vapour that gets transported across the membrane and then it condenses on the other side."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48910569

Original Submission