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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Uber is freezing hiring for software engineers and product managers across its US and Canadian workforce, the company acknowledged to Bloomberg on Friday. The shift was reported by Yahoo earlier in the day. The freeze does not apply to Uber's autonomous vehicle and freight shipping divisions.

The news comes a day after Uber reported second quarter operating losses of $5.4 billion—a new record for the company. That figure exaggerates Uber's quarterly burn rate because it includes more than $4 billion in one-time charges related to Uber's initial public offering. Still, excluding IPO-related charges still leaves around $1.2 billion in operating losses, worse than the $1 billion the firm lost in the first quarter.

Uber recently laid off 400 marketing workers. According to Yahoo, Uber employees are worried that this could be a prelude to broader cuts as the company's struggles to stem its losses.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Russia explosion: Five confirmed dead in rocket blast

Five people were killed and three injured following a rocket explosion on an Arctic naval test range in Russia on Thursday, state nuclear company Rosatom confirmed. Rosatom said the accident occurred during tests on a liquid propellant rocket engine. The three injured staff members suffered serious burns in the accident. Authorities had previously said that two people died and six were injured in the blast at the site in Nyonoksa.

The company told Russian media that its engineering and technical team had been working on the "isotope power source" for the propulsion system. The Nyonoksa site carries out tests for virtually every missile system used by the Russian navy, including sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and anti-aircraft missiles.

Authorities in Severodvinsk, 47km (29 miles) east of Nyonoksa said that radiation levels shortly after the blast were higher than normal for about 40 minutes but returned to normal. Locals have rushed to buy medical iodine, with pharmacies' stocks of iodine reported to be running out in the cities of Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk. The rush for iodine was reported earlier by a news website for the Arkhangelsk region, 29.ru.

Also at The Guardian, NBC, and CNN.

See also: U.S.-Based Experts Suspect Russia Blast Involved Nuclear-Powered Missile

Update: Russia Confirms Radioactive Materials Were Involved in Deadly Blast

In a statement released at 1 a.m. Saturday, Russia's nuclear energy company, Rosatom, said five employees had died, in addition to the two military personnel previously confirmed dead, as a result of a test on Thursday morning involving "isotopic sources of fuel on a liquid propulsion unit."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The Gulf Stream, the warm current that brings the east coast of Florida the mixed blessings of abundant swordfish, mild winters and stronger hurricanes, may be weakening because of climate change.

Visible from the air as a ribbon of cobalt blue water a few miles off the coast, the Gulf Stream forms part of a clockwise system of currents that transports warm water from the tropics up the east coast and across the Atlantic to northwestern Europe. In the frigid climate near Greenland, the water cools, sinks and flows south again, rolling through the deep ocean toward the tropics.

This marine circulatory system has reached its weakest point in 1,600 years, recent studies show, having lost about 15% of its strength since the mid-20th century. Scientists disagree on whether climate change or natural cycles account for the slowdown. But a consensus has emerged that climate change will lead to a slower Gulf Stream system in the future, as melting ice sheets in Greenland disrupt the system with discharges of cold fresh water.

A weaker Gulf Stream would mean higher sea levels for Florida's east coast. It could lead to colder winters in northern Europe (one reason many scientists prefer the term climate change to global warming). And it could mean that a lot of the heat that would have gone to Europe would stay along the U.S. east coast and in Florida.

"If you slow down the sinking of water in the North Atlantic, that means you have a pileup of waters along the eastern seaboard of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico," said Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group. "That means that you have increased regional sea level rise just from that ocean circulation change. So that's not good for New York City, Norfolk or along Florida."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

barbara hudson writes:

Things finally came to a head on slashdot last night, and now anonymous posts are banned. No more anonymous nazi ASCII art, no anonymous racism, and no APK. More in this journal entry [Ed's Comment: And lots of interesting comments too ...].

It's one way to combat anonymous hate speech and forum spam.

[Editor (JR) We've looked at the site but we cannot find an announcement that anonymous posts are actually banned; it might simply be a case that the software is not working correctly, although it would seem to be an unlikely cause. Does anyone in our community have any additional information to categorically prove or disprove that anonymous comments are disabled?

Furthermore, as there are many more comments in the journal entry than there are here, I would recommend making any new comments on BarbaraHudson's journal entry rather than splitting the discussion into two.]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Squad, the 'anti-bro startup,' is creating a safe space for teenage girls online – TechCrunch

Squad, an app that allows you to video chat and share your phone screen with a friend in real time, has tapped into a demographic clamoring for a safe space to gather online. Without any marketing, the startup has collected 450,000 registered users in eight months, 70% of which are teenage girls. So far this year, users have clocked in 1 million hours inside Squad calls.

“Completely accidentally we’ve developed this global audience of users and it’s girls all over the world,” Squad co-founder and chief executive officer Esther Crawford tells TechCrunch. “In India, it’s girls. In Saudi Arabia, it’s girls. In the U.S., it’s girls. Even without us localizing it, girls all over the world are finding it.”

“We want to be a place where girls can come and hang out,” – Squad co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford.

Crawford describes Squad, which she’s built alongside her co-founder and chief technology officer Ethan Sutin, as the “anti-bro startup.” Not only because it’s led by a woman and boasts a cap table that’s 30% women and 30% people of color, but because she’s completely rewriting the consumer social startup playbook.

“We are trying to learn from the best in what they did but get rid of the shit,” Crawford said, referring to Snap, WhatsApp, Twitch and others. Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, has become a social gathering place for Gen Z, she explains, but like many other communities on the internet, it’s failed its female users.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Security researchers have cracked Apple's FaceID biometric system yet again. But there's an unusual caveat to this trick: to successfully unlock an iPhone, the attackers first need to make sure the victim is out cold.

[...] So why do you need glasses to pull off the attack? Well, it turns out FaceID scans eyes differently when people wear glasses.

"We found weak points in FaceID," the researchers explain. "It allows users to unlock while wearing glasses [...] if you are wearing glasses, it won't extract 3D information from the eye area when it recognizes the glasses." Using this trick, the researchers were able to unlock a victim's phone and even transfer their funds through a mobile payment app.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/plugged/2019/08/09/apple-faceid-iphone-broken-biometric/

Also at ThreatPost

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Luxembourg has called on its EU neighbours to relax their drug laws as its health minister confirmed plans to become the first European country to legalise cannabis production and consumption.

“This drug policy we had over the last 50 years did not work,” Etienne Schneider told Politico. “Forbidding everything made it just more interesting to young people … I’m hoping all of us will get a more open-minded attitude toward drugs.”

Residents over the age of 18 are expected to be able to buy the drug for recreational use legally within two years. The state will regulate production and distribution through a cannabis agency.

Draft legislation is expected to be unveiled later this year providing further detail on the types of cannabis that will be on sale and the level of tax that will be imposed.

Schneider said the legislation was likely to include a ban on non-residents buying cannabis in order to dissuade drug-tourism. Home-growing is also likely to be prohibited.

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow7671

Epic vows to support 'Ooblets' studio following exclusivity harassment

Indie studio Glumberland, developer of cute and quirky life simulator Ooblets, announced its decision to sign a PC exclusivity deal with Epic Games last week. It essentially secured the company's future, but it has has also become the target of widespread harassment as a result of locking its PC title to the Epic Games Store.

Glumberland's original announcement of the exclusive was light-hearted, saying "this is all low-stakes video game stuff we're dealing with here" and that it was "[n]othing to get worked up about." The exclusivity deal will bring some much-needed cash to the project, as the developers explained on Twitter: "I know this is a hot-button issue for some folks but getting some funding is going to make a huge difference for Ooblets."

A certain section of the gaming community reacted to the announcement with unbridled fury, however, unleashing a wave of harassment onto the studio's two developers. The extreme reaction included someone faking a screenshot purporting to show developer Ben Wasser, who is Jewish, saying "gamers would be better off in gas chambers."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

If you're one of Australia's 1.4 million shiftworkers, eating at irregular times is just par for the course -- but have you ever stopped to think about the impact this might have on your body?

In a new research study by the University of South Australia, researchers have investigated whether altering food intake during the nightshift could optimise how shiftworkers feel during the night and reduce their sleepiness.

Testing the impact of either a snack, a meal, or no food at all, the study found that a simple snack was the best choice for maximising alertness and productivity.

Lead researcher and UniSA PhD candidate Charlotte Gupta says the finding has the potential to help thousands of shiftworkers who work during the night.

"In today's 24/7 economy, working the nightshift is increasingly common, with many industries -- health care, aviation, transport and mining -- requiring employees to work around the clock," Gupta says.

"As a nightshift worker, finding ways to manage your alertness when your body is naturally primed for sleep can be really challenging.

"We know that many nightshift workers eat on-shift to help them stay awake, but until now, no research has shown whether this is good or bad for their health and performance.

"This is the first study to investigate how workers feel and perform after eating different amounts of food.

"The findings will inform the most strategic eating patterns on-shift and can hopefully contribute to more alert and better performing workers."

Charlotte C Gupta, et. al. Subjective Hunger, Gastric Upset, and Sleepiness in Response to Altered Meal Timing during Simulated Shiftwork. Nutrients, 2019; 11 (6): 1352 DOI: 10.3390/nu11061352

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow7671

QualPwn Bugs In Snapdragon SoC Can Attack Android Over the Air

Two serious vulnerabilities in Qualcomm's Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC) WLAN firmware could be leveraged to compromise the modem and the Android kernel over the air.

The flaws were found in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and 845 WLAN component. The tests were made on Google Pixel 2 and 3 but any unpatched phone running one of the two SoCs is vulnerable.

Security researchers from Tencent's Blade team found that one one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-10538, with a high severity rating)  allows attackers to compromise the WLAN and the chip's modem over-the-air.

The second one is a buffer overflow tracked as CVE-2019-10540; it received a critical severity rating and an attacker can exploit it to compromise the Android Kernel from the WLAN component.

The researchers informed both Google and Qualcomm about the flaws and exploitation is currently possible only on Android phones that have not been patched with the latest security updates that rolled out today.

Qualcomm on June 3 published a security bulletin to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to allow them to prepare the Android update for their devices.

The chip maker advises "end users to update their devices as patches become available from OEMs."

Despite patches being available, a high number of phones is likely to remain vulnerable for a long time as the devices may no longer be eligible for updates from the vendor.

Also, not all makers are ready to push the Android update when Google releases it. It is common to see security updates for phones still supported by their maker reach devices with weeks of delay.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Using advanced experiments on neuronal cultures and large scale simulations, scientists have demonstrated a new type of ultrafast artificial intelligence algorithms -- based on the very slow brain dynamics -- which outperform learning rates achieved to date by state-of-the-art learning algorithms.

Machine learning, introduced 70 years ago, is based on evidence of the dynamics of learning in our brain. Using the speed of modern computers and large data sets, deep learning algorithms have recently produced results comparable to those of human experts in various applicable fields, but with different characteristics that are distant from current knowledge of learning in neuroscience.

Using advanced experiments on neuronal cultures and large scale simulations, a group of scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel has demonstrated a new type of ultrafast artifical intelligence algorithms -- based on the very slow brain dynamics -- which outperform learning rates achieved to date by state-of-the-art learning algorithms.

In an article published today in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers rebuild the bridge between neuroscience and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that has been left virtually useless for almost 70 years.

"The current scientific and technological viewpoint is that neurobiology and machine learning are two distinct disciplines that advanced independently," said the study's lead author, Prof. Ido Kanter, of Bar-Ilan University's Department of Physics and Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center. "The absence of expectedly reciprocal influence is puzzling."

"The number of neurons in a brain is less than the number of bits in a typical disc size of modern personal computers, and the computational speed of the brain is like the second hand on a clock, even slower than the first computer invented over 70 years ago," he continued. "In addition, the brain's learning rules are very complicated and remote from the principles of learning steps in current artificial intelligence algorithms," added Prof. Kanter, whose research team includes Herut Uzan, Shira Sardi, Amir Goldental and Roni Vardi.

Herut Uzan, Shira Sardi, Amir Goldental, Roni Vardi, Ido Kanter. Biological learning curves outperform existing ones in artificial intelligence algorithms. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-48016-4

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A parent whose child goes to a high school in the Wake County Public School System has been sued after criticizing the math curriculum used in the district.

Utah-based "Mathematics Vision Project" or "MVP," filed a lawsuit against Blain Dillard, whose son attends Green Hope High in Cary.

Dillard has been vocal about his opposition to the MVP curriculum, which is student-driven and focuses on group work, posting on his website, blog and social media.

The lawsuit obtained by ABC11 said, "In or around March 2019, Dillard commenced a crusade against MVP, claiming that MVP is ineffective and has harmed many students."

It alleges that some of Dillard's statements were false and defamatory and harmed the company financially.

https://abc11.com/education/wake-schools-parent-sued-after-criticizing-math-curriculum/5430840/

Original Submission

dwilson writes:

The 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler was the first to muse about the structure of snowflakes. Why are they so symmetrical? How does one side know how long the opposite side has grown? Kepler thought it was all down to what we would now call a "morphogenic field" – that things want to have the form they have. Science has since discounted this idea. But the question of why snowflakes and similar structures are so symmetrical is nevertheless not entirely understood.

Modern science shows just how fundamental the question is: look at all the spiral galaxies out there. They can be half a million light years across, but they still preserve their symmetry. How? In our new study, published in Scientific Reports, we present an explanation.

We have shown that information and "entropy" – a measure of the disorder of a system – are linked together ("info-entropy") in a way exactly analogous to electric and magnetic fields ("electromagnetism"). Electric currents produce magnetic fields, while changing magnetic fields produce electric currents. Information and entropy influence each other in the same way.

[...] This means that we don't actually need dark matter after all. According to our model, the galactic entropy gives rise to such a large quantity of additional energy that it modifies the observed dynamics of the galaxy – making stars at the edge move faster than expected. This is exactly what dark matter was meant to explain. The energy isn't directly observable as mass, but its presence is certainly supported by the astronomical observations – explaining why dark matter searches have so far found nothing.

https://theconversation.com/keplers-forgotten-ideas-about-symmetry-help-explain-spiral-galaxies-without-the-need-for-dark-matter-new-research-121017

Original Submission

barbara hudson writes:

If you're into going to Canada for lower drug prices, things should get even better after the middle of next year. Canada is going to be changing the way it calculates the price of medication, which will lower costs. Canada can do this because, unlike the USA, Canadian regulators are allowed to determine when a patent monopoly is being abused and act accordingly.

Canada Promises to Save Billions with Tweaks to Patent Drug System:

Canadians can expect to pay less for prescription drugs as early as next summer

The federal government is making changes to the way it will evaluate new drug prices, a tweak it says will save Canadians billions over the next 10 years.

On Friday, the government released changes to the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, first set up in 1987 as a shield against what the government calls "excessive prices," set to come into force next July.

"The [board] relies on outdated regulatory tools and information that foreign medicine pricing authorities updated years ago. As a result, list prices for patented medicines in Canada are now among the highest in the world," notes a release from Health Canada.

Under the new regulations, the board will no longer compare prices with the United States and Switzerland, which have some of the world's highest drug prices, when figuring out what companies are allowed to charge. It will still compare drug prices to France, Germany and Italy, and has added Japan, Spain, Norway, Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands to the list.

The board will also now have to consider a drug's "value to and financial impact on consumers in the health system" when determining if a price is excessive.

"These bold reforms will both make prescription drugs more affordable and accessible for all Canadians saving them an estimated $13 billion in the next decade and lay the foundation for national pharmacare," the federal health agency said in a statement.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.redgamingtech.com/navi-20-series-is-known-internally-as-the-nvidia-killer-exclusive/

AMD currently have an answer to Nvidia’s mid-range offerings with their RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT graphics cards, and in the next few weeks, custom variants of those GPUs will be filtering onto store shelves from AIBs[*] such as PowerColor.

But, with the discontinuation of the Radeon VII graphics cards (although, Radeon VII wasn’t that much faster than RX 5700 XT when overclocked anyway), AMD doesn’t have a graphics card to compete with Nvidia’s higher performance model graphics cards, such as the RTX 2080 Super, and of course the RTX 2080 Ti.

Navi 10 (which is the GPU found inside the heart of the RX 5700 series) goes up to 2,560 shaders (40 Compute Units), and sports the first generation RDNA architecture. This architecture is significantly more efficient than say, Vega, when it comes to gaming tasks.

There has been no shortage of rumors that the company are working on a ‘bigger die’ variant of Navi, with up to 4,096 Shaders and even Lisa Su has teased that they are coming. This is on top of several benchmark leaks for what we believe is Navi 14, which sports 24 Compute Units, and would appear to be a GPU designed around competing with Nvidia’s GTX 16 cards.

So now I have set the stage, I’d like to bring in what I was told last night by a source who has been reliable in the past via a phone call. I have in the past leaked the 7/7 release date for Ryzen 3000 and Navi (I was original source of this leak), Leaked the existence of 7nm Vega for Gamers (then also the Radeon VII details and images prior to its launch), and also leaked several things for RDNA (including the second generation featuring Ray Tracing).