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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Lots of companies are working to develop self-driving cars. And almost all of them use lidar, a type of sensor that uses lasers to build a three-dimensional map of the world around the car. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk argues that these companies are making a big mistake. "They're all going to dump lidar," Elon Musk said at an April event showcasing Tesla's self-driving technology. "Anyone relying on lidar is doomed."

"Lidar is really a shortcut," added Tesla AI guru Andrej Karpathy. "It sidesteps the fundamental problems of visual recognition that is necessary for autonomy. It gives a false sense of progress, and is ultimately a crutch."

In recent weeks I asked a number of experts about these claims. And I encountered a lot of skepticism. "In a sense all of these sensors are crutches," argued Greg McGuire, a researcher at MCity, the University of Michigan's testing ground for autonomous vehicles. "That's what we build, as engineers, as a society—we build crutches."

Self-driving cars are going to need to be extremely safe and reliable to be accepted by society, McGuire said. And a key principle for high reliability is redundancy. Any single sensor will fail eventually. Using several different types of sensors makes it less likely that a single sensor's failure will lead to disaster.

"Once you get out into the real world, and get beyond ideal conditions, there's so much variability," argues industry analyst (and former automotive engineer) Sam Abuelsamid. "It's theoretically possible that you can do it with cameras alone, but to really have the confidence that the system is seeing what it thinks it's seeing, it's better to have other orthogonal sensing modes"—sensing modes like lidar.

Previously: Robo-Taxis and 'the Best Chip in the World'

Related: Affordable LIDAR Chips for Self-Driving Vehicles
Why Experts Believe Cheaper, Better Lidar is Right Around the Corner
Stanford Researchers Develop Non-Line-of-Sight LIDAR Imaging Procedure
Self Driving Cars May Get a New (non LiDAR) Way to See
Nikon Will Help Build Velodyne's Lidar Sensors for Future Self-Driving Cars

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

RHEL clone Oracle Linux 8, released a few weeks ago, has been deployed to the public mirror. So you now have no-registration-required access to a production-ready 8 to evaluate while we await CentOS 8. Download from here.

Many other distributions are available at https://mirrors.kernel.org

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

AlterEgo, [Arnav] Kapur's new wearable device system, can detect what you're saying when you're talking to yourself, even if you're completely silent and not moving your mouth.

The technology involves a system of sensors that detect the minuscule neuromuscular signals sent by the brain to the vocal cords and muscles of the throat and tongue. These signals are sent out whenever we speak to ourselves silently, even if we make no sounds. The device feeds the signals through an A.I., which "reads" them and turns them into words. The user hears the A.I.'s responses through a microphone that conducts sound through the bones of the skull and ear, making them silent to others. Users can also respond out loud using artificial voice technology.

[...] Kapur is currently testing the device on people with communication limitations through various hospitals and rehabilitation centers in the Boston area. These limitations could be caused by stroke, cerebral palsy or neurodegenerative diseases like ALS. In the case of ALS, the disease affects the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, progressively robbing people of their ability to use their muscles, including those that control speech. But their brains still send speech signals to the vocal cords and the 100-plus muscles involved in speaking. AlterEgo can capture those signals and turn them into speech. According to Kapur's research^[pdf], the system is about 92 percent accurate.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/device-can-hear-voice-inside-your-head-180972785/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

James Cook University scientists have discovered a common honey bee disease can be deadly to native Australian wild bees and can be transmitted by flowers—the first time this link has been made.

JCU's Associate Professor Lori Lach oversaw the study investigating the susceptibility of Australian stingless or "sugar bag" bees to Nosema ceranae—a parasite that causes European honey bees to become less active, develop an increase in appetite, and die prematurely.

"Pathogen spillover from bees kept by bee keepers to wild bee populations is increasingly considered as a possible cause of wild pollinator decline. Spillover has been frequently documented, but not much is known about the pathogen's virulence in wild bees or how long pathogens can survive on a flower," said Terence Purkiss, the honors student who conducted the study.

[...] "About two thirds of the flowers exposed to infected European honey bees were found to be carrying Nosema ceranae spores. In every case, at least one stingless bee that foraged on the flowers contracted the pathogen. What this means is that wild bees can be infected with the disease by sharing a flower with an infected European bee ," said Dr. Lach.

Five out of the six stingless bee hives the researchers monitored over five months tested positive for the pathogen at least once.

Pathogen spillover from Apis mellifera to a stingless bee^[$], Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.1071)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Farmers who want to produce bigger chickens, fewer greenhouse gas-filled cow burps or healthier animals are increasingly able to turn to one tiny source: microbes.

Although probiotics, which contain microbes, and prebiotics, which encourage the growth of microbes in animals' guts, are already used in the animal health and growth, there is little understanding of how microorganisms and animals interact.

"It's quite unbelievable but … the way probiotics and prebiotics are discovered is by trial and error," said Dr. Antton Alberdi, assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

"Someone will say: "This microbial strain looks really good, so let's try giving it to 10,000 chickens." Usually there is almost no tracking what happens inside the animal."

Dr. Alberdi is scientific manager of a project called HoloFood, which aims to strengthen the evidence surrounding microbes and how they interact with animals, and help companies develop more effective products.

Eventually companies could make more targeted products for farmed animals that use microbes to improve the ratio of muscle to fat, make animals less stressed, stop them from getting infections, or make them grow larger with less food.

The idea is that if plants and intensively farmed animals need fewer resources—like food, antibiotics, chemical inputs—and there is less waste caused by disease and spoilage, it will decrease pressure on the environment.

"It is about meeting the need for cheap protein in a way that's environmentally responsible," said Tom Gilbert, professor of palaeogenomics at the University of Copenhagen, who leads HoloFood.

"The more efficient the food conversion … the less polluting it is," he added.

[...] Other microbes under study include those that may help produce health-boosting fermented foods, or even reduce greenhouse gas emissions from cattle and other ruminants.

"If we can kill those methane-producing microbes—either through the introduction of other microbes or specific types of food—then there's a great deal of benefit that can be gained from that," Dr. Cotter added.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow7671

Monzo admits to storing payment card PINs in internal logs

Monzo, a mobile-only bank operating in the UK, admitted today to storing payment card PINs inside internal logs.

The company is now notifying all impacted customers and urging users to change card PINs the next time they use a cash machine.

Monzo described the issue as a "bug" that occurred when Monzo customers used two specific features of their Monzo mobile apps -- namely the feature that reminds users of their card number and the feature for canceling standing orders.

When Monzo customers used one of these two features, they'd be asked to enter their account PIN, for authorization purposes, but unbeknowst to them, the PIN would also be logged inside Monzo's internal logs.

Monzo said these logs were encrypted and that only a few employees had access to the data stored inside.

Monzo worked over the weekend to purge logs of customer PINs

The company said it discovered the bug on Friday, August 2, and spent all weekend removing PIN numbers[*] from its internal logs.

As soon as it finished this operation, Monzo published a statement on its site on Monday morning, August 5.

The company also published an update for its mobile app on Saturday, August 3, so the apps won't send the account PIN code to Monzo servers anymore.

The company said that all users should update their mobile apps. Users who had their PINs recorded in Monzo's logs received email notifications. Users who didn't receive an email, were not impacted, the bank said. The number of affected users is around 480,000.

[*] PIN number: Personal Identification Number number. =)

See also: ZDnet.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes for Sulla:

Robot tail developed to balance out human body and stop people from falling over

The strap-on appendage, known as Arque, has been developed by researchers at Keio University in Japan.

[...] The tail can be be adjusted to fit whoever is wearing it by adding or removing modular "vertebrae", the Fast Company reports .

Small weights can also be inserted inside each vertebrae to help offset the wearer's weight.

[...] Artificial muscles inside the robotic tail control its movement by contracting and expanding using an external pressurised air system that resembles a lawn mower or giant vacuum.

Because the prototype tail has to remain tethered to this system, the wearer is not able to move very far using it.

[...] The tail was presented last week at the 2019 SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles , which focuses on graphics, gaming, and emerging technology.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Torrential rain in the Midlands and North of England that saw half a month's rain fall in one day caused such volumes of water to pass through the spillway of the Toddbrook Reservoir dam, above the town of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, that the protective concrete facing was damaged—badly enough to put the dam at risk of a full collapse.

Were the dam to fail this would be the first dam breech in the UK since 1925, when the Llyn Eigiau dam burst when its foundations failed in Wales, and its floodwaters overtopped the Coedty reservoir dam downstream, causing it to also fail and flood the valley at the cost of 16 lives. With emergency work underway and more rain forecast, this is still a very real possibility for the Whaley Bridge dam.

The dam above Whaley Bridge is an earthfill or embankment dam built in the 1830s using a mix of soil and gravel. The massive volume of water cascading down through the hills of Derbyshire's Peak District from the heavy rain meant the floodwaters increased the reservoir water level up to the dam's crest and onto the concrete spillway. Most dams are equipped with these concrete structures for the safe and controlled release of excessive flood water downstream.

But in Whaley Bridge the concrete spillway has collapsed under the torrent of high-speed waters, leaving a substantial hole across about a fifth of the face of the spillway. In fact, the current concrete spillway was installed at Whaley Bridge in around 1969 after it suffered similar damage in the winter of 1964.

Original Submission

upstart writes for AnonymousLuser:

Everything Cops Say About Amazon's Ring Is Scripted or Approved by Ring

Amazon's home security company Ring has garnered enormous control over the ways in which its law enforcement partners are allowed to portray its products, going as far as to review and even author statements attributed to police in the press, according to emails and documents obtained by Gizmodo.

This summer, Ring even urged a Florida police department to delay announcing its partnership with the company for weeks, telling officials that it preferred to keep the spotlight on a separate initiative launched by the city, designed to incentivize the purchase of its home surveillance products.

[...] Contracts and other documents obtained from police departments in three states show that Ring pre-writes almost all of the messages shared by police across social media, and attempts to legally obligate police to give the company final say on all statements about its products, even those shared with the press. (In exchange, police are also given the ability to approve any Ring press releases that directly reference the partnering police agency.)

[...] Ring said in a statement that its subsidy programs are different than those it enacts directly with law enforcement. "Because these programs are negotiated and implemented separately, we strive to also keep communication around these programs separate," it said. "This helps residents clearly understand each program, their benefits, and their unique differences."

This arrow looks like it is pointing right but it's actually pointing left. This illusion relies on a clever combination of reflection, perspective, and viewing angle. The illusion arrow was invented by mathematician Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji University in Japan. Understandably, people vented their rage on social media.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The new millimeter-wave network, or what AT&T calls "5G+," will be available in "parts" of New York City, though parts may be a bit of a stretch. In its release, AT&T acknowledges that the service will be in "limited areas initially" with a company spokesperson telling CNET that the new service will be available first in parts "near and around East Village, Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park."

[...] "As a densely-populated, global business and entertainment hub, New York City stands to benefit greatly from having access to 5G, and we've been eager to introduce the service here," said Amy Kramer, president of AT&T's New York region, in a statement. "While our initial availability in NYC is a limited introduction at launch, we're committed to working closely with the City to extend coverage to more neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs."

[...] It is still unclear when AT&T will make 5G available to everyone, but the company plans to deploy a nationwide 5G network on its wider-ranging "sub-6" spectrum in the "first half of 2020."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A phenomenon that makes coral spawn more than once a year is improving the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef.

The discovery was made by University of Queensland and CSIRO researchers investigating whether corals that split their spawning over multiple months are more successful at spreading their offspring across different reefs.

Dr. Karlo Hock, from UQ's School of Biological Sciences, said coral mass spawning events are one of the most spectacular events in the oceans.

"They're incredibly beautiful," Dr. Hock said.

"On Australia's Great Barrier Reef, all coral colonies typically spawn only once per year, over several nights after the full moon, as the water warms up in late spring."

Study co-author Dr. Christopher Doropoulos from the CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere said sometimes however, coral split their spawning over two successive months.

"This helps them synchronise their reproduction to the best environmental conditions and moon phases," he said.

"While reproductive success during split spawning may be lower than usual because it can lead to reduced fertilisation, we found that the release of eggs in two separate smaller events gives the corals a second and improved chance of finding a new home reef."

Split spawning increases robustness of coral larval supply and inter-reef connectivity, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11367-7)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/08/the-risk-of-weak-online-banking-passwords/

If you bank online and choose weak or re-used passwords, there’s a decent chance your account could be pilfered by cyberthieves — even if your bank offers multi-factor authentication as part of its login process. This story is about how crooks increasingly are abusing third-party financial aggregation services like Mint, Plaid, Yodlee, YNAB and others to surveil and drain consumer accounts online.

Crooks are constantly probing bank Web sites for customer accounts protected by weak or recycled passwords. Most often, the attacker will use lists of email addresses and passwords stolen en masse from hacked sites and then try those same credentials to see if they permit online access to accounts at a range of banks.

[...] From there, thieves can take the list of successful logins and feed them into apps that rely on application programming interfaces (API)s from one of several personal financial data aggregators which help users track their balances, budgets and spending across multiple banks.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/bans-on-plastic-bags-can-backfire

Governments are increasingly banning the use of plastic products, such as carryout bags, straws, utensils, and microbeads. The goal is to reduce the amount of plastic going into landfills and waterways. And the logic is that banning something should make it less abundant.

However, this logic falls short if people actually reuse those items instead of buying new ones. For example, so-called “single-use” plastic carryout bags can have a multitude of unseen second lives—as trash-bin liners, dog poop bags, and storage receptacles.

A U.K. government study calculated that a shopper would need to reuse a cotton carryout bag 131 times to reduce its global warming potential—its expected total contribution to climate change—below that of plastic carryout bags used once to carry newly purchased goods. To have less impact on the climate than plastic carryout bags also reused as trash bags, consumers would need to use the cotton bag 327 times.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://globalnews.ca/news/5730770/tardigrades-on-moon/

A tiny species of nearly indestructible creatures may have just taken over the moon before humans — although we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Thousands of microscopic tardigrades likely survived a lunar lander crash into the moon last April, according to the founder of an Earth archive project.

The Israeli-run lunar lander, dubbed Beresheet, was supposed to be the first privately-funded spacecraft to touch down on the moon. Its payload included a DVD-sized library created by the Arch Mission Foundation, which contained vast troves of information and thousands of dehydrated tardigrades.

The spacecraft slammed into the lunar surface on April 11 after operators lost control of it during the final landing sequence.

Original Submission