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DannyB writes:

Check out the new MSPaintIDE on GitHub.

A video of it demonstrates creating a simple "hello world" type application. About one minute later in the video, you can see how easy it is to create a small GUI application that pops up a simple dialog box.

MS Paint brings unique advantages as a source code editor for Java. You can erase source code you no longer want. You can re-arrange source code. Correct mistakes. Etc.

Then the IDE (integrated development environment) can then OCR your code, update your project tree, compile, and produce a completed executable build. Try doing that with a stupid ordinary plain ol' text editor!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Trump’s Tax Law Threatened TurboTax’s Profits. So the Company Started Charging the Disabled, the Unemployed and Students.

The 2017 tax overhaul vastly expanded the number of people who could file simplified tax returns, a boon to millions of Americans.

But the new law directly threatened the lucrative business of Intuit, the maker of TurboTax.

Although the company draws in customers with the promise of a "free" product, its fortunes depend on getting as many customers as possible to pay. It had been regularly charging $100 or more for returns that included itemized deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations. Under the new law, many wealthier taxpayers would no longer be filing that form, qualifying them to use the company's free software.

Intuit executives came up with a way to preserve the company's hefty profit margins: It began charging more low-income people. Which ones? Individuals with disabilities, the unemployed and people who owe money on student loans, all of whom use tax forms that TurboTax previously included for free.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

SpaceX's Starhopper engulfed in fireball after critical Raptor static fire test

SpaceX's Starhopper was engulfed in a fireball shortly after a static fire ignition of its Raptor engine, almost certainly delaying the low-fidelity Starship prototype and testbed's first untethered flight.

With any luck, Raptor, Starhopper, and SpaceX's spartan Boca Chica facilities have escaped relatively unharmed. Regardless, even if Raptor's static fire was technically successful, some repairs will likely be necessary and the off-nominal behavior that occurred after the ignition test will have to be dealt with and understood to prevent such behavior during future Starhopper operations.

[...] Due to the inherently low quality of video captured through thousands of feet of thick, humid Texas air, it's almost impossible to make specific details out. However, shortly after the static fire ignition and shutdown, some viewers believe that there was fire visible at one or several points on Starhopper, although what looks like fire could easily be a simple reflection of the active flare stack just a few hundred feet away.

Hopefully hurt nobody is, damages minimal they are, and lots of telemetry collected it was.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Go language will not be adding a "try" keyword in the next major version, despite this being a major part of what was proposed for version 1.14.

Go, an open source language developed by Google, features static typing and native code compilation. It is around the 15th most popular language according to the Redmonk rankings.

Error handling in Go is currently based on using if statements to compare a returned error value to nil. If it is nil, no error occurred. This requires developers to write a lot of if statements.

"In general Go programs have too much code-checking errors and not enough code handling them," wrote Google principal engineer Russ Cox in an overview of the error-handling problem in Go.

A try statement was proposed to help reduce the coding burden. Upon further reflection:

That proposal has now been abandoned. Robert Griesemer, one of the original designers of Go, announced the decision in a post yesterday.

[...] “Making an exit point of a function that isn't a return, and is meant to be commonplace, may lead to much less readable code,” said one user.

The outcome is a good one insofar as the Go community has proved able to make and withdraw a major proposal without rancour. And as for error handling, no doubt the team will, um, try again.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

The machine that made the Moon missions possible

We've all been there: you're working on something important, your PC crashes, and you lose all your progress.

Such a failure was not an option during the Apollo missions, the first time ever that a computer was entrusted with handling flight control and life support systems—and therefore the lives of the astronauts on board.

Despite an infamous false alarm during lunar descent that sent Commander Neil Armstrong's heart rate racing, it was a resounding success that laid the groundwork for everything from modern avionics to multitasking operating systems.

Here are some of the ways the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), millions of times less powerful than a 2019 smartphone, shaped the world we live in today:

• Microchip revolution
• Multitasking
• Real-time input
• Passing the test

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Facebook open-sources Hermes JavaScript engine to improve React Native Android app performance

Facebook is continuing its open-sourcing spree with the launch of a new JavaScript engine designed to improve the performance of big apps on Android devices, the company announced today at the Chain React conference in Portland, Oregon.

Mobile apps are getting increasingly larger, which can pose problems — particularly for devices with limited storage or processing power. This is one reason many big tech firms, including Spotify, Uber, and Facebook itself, have taken to launching “lite” versions of their apps. But what if developers could improve the performance of their main apps by using an optimized JavaScript engine that reduces the download size and boosts startup performance?

That’s what Facebook set out to do first with its own suite of apps, for which it developed the Hermes JavaScript engine, which is now available on GitHub for any developer to use.

“To increase the performance of Facebook’s apps, we have teams that continuously improve our JavaScript code and platforms,” the company wrote in a blog post. “As we analyzed performance data, we noticed that the JavaScript engine itself was a significant factor in startup performance and download size. With this data in hand, we knew we had to optimize JavaScript performance in the more constrained environments of a mobile phone compared to a desktop or laptop.”

According to Facebook, Hermes helps improve three core app attributes: time-to-interact (TTI), which is the time it takes from launching an app to when it becomes fully loaded and usable; download size (Android .APK size); and memory utilization.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Anthem thinks its 'virtuous cycle' with Doc.ai can improve patient care

Last August, major insurer Anthem announced a 12-month trial with startup Doc.ai to see if artificial intelligence could find patterns in people’s experience of allergies. With the trial coming to its scheduled completion, Anthem describes the partnership as a “virtuous cycle” that lets the insurer benefit from data and insights it couldn’t acquire on its own.

“We are sitting on this amazing data set that we are allowed to use for doing process improvements to health care, but which will be very restricted,” said Ted Goldstein, chief artificial intelligence officer for Anthem AI, at Transform 2019.

An AI-driven startup has more leeway than a traditional medical company would. “But a startup company, of course, can give the apps out to the world and collect data ... they can develop hypotheses there, which we can then look and observe to see in our data set,” he said.

Doc.ai aims to let users manage their own health data, which it says is stored locally on users’ devices to prevent hacking. The company has also enrolled interested users in studies on Crohn’s disease and colitis.

“We’re doing this because we have not yet had the opportunity to collect all that real data in one place to try to understand how [it] connects,” Doc.ai cofounder and COO Sam De Brouwer said of her company’s mission.

She said even small amounts of data can help predict a user’s future health. “It is possible already in health care, just based on your age and sex, to give you some level of predictions about health risks and other things,” she said.

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Coral reefs are considered one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet and are dying at alarming rates around the world. Scientists attribute coral bleaching and ultimately massive coral death to a number of environmental stressors, in particular, warming water temperatures due to climate change.

A study published in the international journal Marine Biology, reveals what's really killing coral reefs. With 30 years of unique data from Looe Key Reef in the lower Florida Keys, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and collaborators have discovered that the problem of coral bleaching is not just due to a warming planet, but also a planet that is simultaneously being enriched with reactive nitrogen from multiple sources.

Improperly treated sewage, fertilizers and top soil are elevating nitrogen levels, which are causing phosphorus starvation in the corals, reducing their temperature threshold for "bleaching." These coral reefs were dying off long before they were impacted by rising water temperatures. This study represents the longest record of reactive nutrients and algae concentrations for coral reefs anywhere in the world.

"Our results provide compelling evidence that nitrogen loading from the Florida Keys and greater Everglades ecosystem caused by humans, rather than warming temperatures, is the primary driver of coral reef degradation at Looe Key Sanctuary Preservation Area during our long-term study," said Brian Lapointe, Ph.D., senior author and a research professor at FAU's Harbor Branch.

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-years-unique-reveal-coral-reefs.html

-- submitted from IRC

Brian E. Lapointe et al. Nitrogen enrichment, altered stoichiometry, and coral reef decline at Looe Key, Florida Keys, USA: a 3-decade study, Marine Biology (2019). DOI: 10.1007/s00227-019-3538-9

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Musk's Newest Startup is Venturing into a Series of Hard Problems:

Tonight [Tuesday, July 16, 2019], Elon Musk has scheduled an event where he intends to unveil his plans for Neuralink, a startup company he announced back in 2017, then went silent on. If you go to the Neuralink website now, all you'll find is a vague description of its goal to develop an "ultra-high-bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." These interfaces have been under development for a while, typically under the monicker of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. And, while there have been some notable successes in the academic-research world, there's a notable lack of products on the market.

The slow progress comes, in part, because a successful BCI has to tackle multiple hard problems and, in part, because the regulatory and market conditions are challenging. Ahead of tonight's announcement, we'll take a look at all of these and then see how Musk and the people who advise him have decided to tackle them.

[...] An effective BCI means figuring out how to get the nervous system to communicate with digital hardware. Doing so requires solving three problems, which I'll call reading, coding, and feedback. We'll go through each of these below.

martyb writes:

Google Nuked Tech Support Ads to Kill off Scammers. OK. It Also Blew Away Legit Repair Shops. Not OK:

Collateral damage: Web advert crackdown broke our fix-it businesses, sigh owners

With America's trade watchdog on Tuesday hosting a workshop in Washington DC on restrictions that limit the feasibility of repair devices, hardware rehab forum iFixit has penned an open letter to the FTC to complain about Google's ad policies that hinder the mending of machines.

Last August, the Chocolate Factory announced that because its ad system lacks an easy way to distinguish between legitimate businesses and scammers, it was planning to institute a verification program limiting ads for third-party tech support and repair services to legitimate providers.

In theory, Google's program should cut down on scammers who pay for online ads that promote computer troubleshooting, virus remediation, or other security-related assistance, only to rip off victims or hijack their machines.

And Google's program may well be thwarting these crooks, though at the cost of denying legitimate repair businesses the ability to market themselves to customers.

"By treating all third-party repair as a fraud-prone liability, and directing all interest in device repair to their own Maps and search results, Google is severely handicapping repair businesses, prioritizing purchases over repair and reuse, and deciding which companies customers can turn to when they need to fix electronics," explained Kevin Purdy, a writer for iFixit.

If it's not broke, don't fix it. If it is broke... can't fix it?

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Ramanujan Machine Automatically Generates Conjectures for Fundamental Constants:

A team of researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology has built what they describe as a Ramanujan machine—a device that automatically generates conjectures (mathematical statements that are proposed as true statements) for fundamental constants. They have written a paper describing their device and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server. They have also created a webpage for people who wish to allow the network to use their computer's process cycles, suggest a proof or develop code toward new mathematical structures.

The Ramanujan machine is named for famed Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician who grew up in India and was "discovered" by fellow mathematician G.H. Hardy. After moving to England, he became a fixture at Cambridge, where he shook up the math world with his unorthodox mathematics—instead of pounding away at math proofs, he obtained results to famous problems through intuition and then let others find the proofs for them. Because of this, he was sometimes described as a conjecture machine, pulling formulas out of thin air as if they received from a higher being—sometimes in dreams. In this new effort, the researchers in Israel have sought to replicate this approach using computing power.

The Ramanujan machine is more of a concept than an actual machine—it exists as a network of computers running algorithms dedicated to finding conjectures about fundamental constants in the form of continued fractions—these are defined as fractions of infinite length where the denominator is a certain quantity plus a fraction, where a latter fraction has a similar denominator, etc.) The purpose of the machine is to come up with conjectures (in the form of mathematical formulas) that humans can analyze, and hopefully prove to be true mathematically. The team that created the machine is hoping that their idea will inspire future generations of mathematicians—to that end, they note that any new algorithms, proofs or conjectures developed by a participant will be named after them. The researchers note that their machine has already discovered dozens of new conjectures.

The Abstract and full paper are available on arXiv.org.

takyon writes:

Linux May Gain Protection Against Hyper-Threading Attacks

Oracle security researchers have been working on security feature for Linux kernels that could protect Linux-based systems against attacks that affect Intel's Hyper-Threading (HT) feature. Multiple side-channel threats the feature's vulnerable against, including L1TF/Foreshadow and the MDS attacks, have been revealed over the past few months.

The Oracle developers didn't specify whether or not the recent MDS[*] attacks against Intel's HT would also be mitigated through its Kernel Address Space Isolation (KASI), only that it will protect against L1TF/Foreshadow. Other side-channel attacks seem to be up for debate, as any extra isolation being introduced into the kernel could potentially impact the performance of Linux systems.

[...] They're now looking for suggestions on how to improve the feature before they attempt to merge it into an official release of the Linux kernel.

[*] MDS — Microarchitectural Data Sampling. See the explanation by Intel and an in-depth description and analysis at https://mdsattacks.com/.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Peddlers of Medical Misinformation Are Using Social Media 'Censorship' as a Selling Point

Speech OnlineSpeech OnlineThis week, we're looking at the state of free speech on the internet, how we got here, and where we're going.  

No one has ever accused Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed Health Ranger, of being an understated guy, but recent events have taken him to new, shouty heights. After Adams' website, Natural News, had its page suspended by Facebook in June for violating the company's spam policies, Adams likened the suspension to genocide and said President Trump should use the military, if necessary, to break up tech companies. But Adams—and other peddlers of medical misinformation, including many anti-vaccine personalities—are also working hard to make their supposed muzzling by social media companies into a selling point and a profit-driver.

In an email blast on June 30, Adams accused Google of gaming search results to "to defame and attack all natural health topics, all while banning natural health websites from its search results." He added that the search engine giant "has gone all-in with Monsanto, Big Pharma, chemotherapy, pesticides, 5G, geoengineering, fluoride and every other poison you can imagine."

And then, naturally, he turned around and offered to sell his audience the supplements So Powerful That Google Is Trying to Hide Them (emphasis his):

P.S. Despite Google's malicious attacks on health and nutrition, the truth is that nutritional supplements works. For the next day or so, we've got an event running on PQQ, CoQ10 and other specialty supplements that dramatically increase your intake of cell-supporting nutrients (including brain-supporting nutrients). Check out the details here.

It is emblematic of the strange moment we've arrived at in the selling of misinformation online, particularly the medical variety. In recent months, several social media giants have announced their intention to crack down on that misinformation, including most particularly anti-vaccine content. (Pinterest made the "vaccine" hashtag literally impossible to search for since virtually every search resultshowed up anti-vax content.)

Appalbarry writes:

Hot on the heels of "Savage Tick-Clone Armies are Sucking Cows to Death" comes an assertion that the US Pentagon is responsible for introducing Lyme-disease-carrying ticks into North America. According to a story in the Global Canadian newspaper "a bill has been passed in the House of Representatives which requires the Department of Defence to investigate whether research on biological weapons using insects took place in a 25-year period and whether these insects were released into the public realm either accidentally or on purpose."

The claim originated in the book 'Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons' by Kris Newby. The book tells the tale of "Willy Burgdorfer, the man who discovered the microbe behind Lyme Disease, revealing his secret role in developing bug-borne biological weapons, and raising terrifying questions about the genesis of the epidemic of tick-borne diseases affecting millions of Americans today."

In presenting the amendment in the House, New Jersey Republican Rep. Christopher H. Smith asked "With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States — with an estimated 300,000 to 437,000 new cases diagnosed each year and 10-20 percent of all patients suffering from chronic Lyme disease — Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true. And have these experiments caused Lyme disease and other tick-borne disease to mutate and to spread?"

Also at CBS News.

Related: Lyme Disease Lowers Quality of Life Significantly
Long-Underfunded Lyme Disease Research Gets an Injection of Money—and Ideas
New Approaches to Detecting Lyme Disease in Development

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

One year ago the IETF published TLS 1.3 in RFC 8446. Here is what is different from previous versions.

TLS 1.3 is the seventh iteration of the SSL/TLS protocol, having been preceded by SSL 1.0, SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, TLS 1.1, and TLS 1.2.

TLS 1.2 has been serving the internet faithfully for a decade now, yet nearly 25% of the Alexa Top 100,000 still doesn't support it. That's problematic, because making the jump from TLS 1.2 to to TLS 1.3 is already a fairly large change. Upgrading from even older protocols will require even more configuration.

Now, that's not to imply upgrading is prohibitively difficult, it's more to illustrate that one of the biggest challenges that's going to face TLS 1.3, at least for the next year or so, is the rate of adoption.

As of the end of last year, just over 17% of the Alexa Top 100,000 supported TLS 1.3.

Here are the primary differences in TLS 1.3 and prior versions:

- Eliminates support for outmoded algorithms and ciphers
- Eliminates RSA key exchange, mandates Perfect Forward Secrecy
- Reduces the number of negotiations in the handshake
- Reduces the number of algorithms in a cipher suite to 2
- Eliminates block mode ciphers and mandates AEAD bulk encryption
- Uses HKDF cryptographic extraction and key derivation
- Offers 1-RTT mode and Zero Round Trip Resumption
- Signs the entire handshake, an improvement of TLS 1.2
- Supports additional elliptic curves

In short, TLS 1.3 is faster to establish, faster to reestablish, streamlined throughout, and more secure than previous versions of SSL and TLS.

Most popular browser clients already support TLS 1.3. Server library versions supporting TLS 1.3 include

- OpenSSL 1.1.1
- GnuTLS 3.5.x
- Google's Boring SSL (current)
- Facebook's Fizz (current)

What's in your server?

Original Submission