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An Anonymous Coward writes:

It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card's shell. The flash drive has a README file, a copy of my résumé, and some of my photography. The shell has several games and Unix classics such as fortune and rogue, a small 2048, and a small MicroPython interpreter.

All this is accomplished on a very small 8MB flash chip. The bootloader fits in 256KB, the kernel is 1.6MB, and the whole root filesystem is 2.4MB.

[...] The whole thing costs under $3.

https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-card-runs-linux/

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Amazon's Choice Products Aren't Always What They Claim to Be:

The Amazon's Choice badges customers turn to for endorsed or recommended products were found sometimes to be fake or even unsafe.

An investigation published by the Wall Street Journal reveals that the Amazon's Choice badge can be attached to products that make false claims, have safety concerns, or are even manipulated by the sellers. The investigation said that while there are legitimate listings with a badge, customers should double-check what is "endorsed" by the tech giant.

The Journal identified that the badge is more likely to appear on Amazon's AmazonBasics products and that sellers were able to manipulate the endorsement by promoting specific keywords in the products' description or contained other brand names.

Examples of fake or illegitimate Amazon's Choice products named in the investigation include cellphone chargers that claim they are made by Apple but are a completely different brand, as well as a fat burner supplement, which makes claims that are against Amazon's policies.

Amazon's Choice badges were created in 2015 to coincide with the Amazon Alexa, so people could say, "Alexa, buy a cell phone charger," and Alexa would add the top Amazon's choice result to the shopping cart.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Greetings!

To those of you who may be celebrating a holiday at this time of year, on behalf of the staff at SoylentNews, please accept my best wishes to you and those you hold dear.

For Fun:

With glee I am pleased to announce that The Mighty Buzzard has given a gift to all registered users on the site. These are good until 2019-12-26 00:10:00.

Thank You!

As the end of the year approaches, I extend my humble thanks to all of you who have subscribed to SoylentNews!

As of this writing, we have received $1799.47 towards a goal of $2000.00 for the second half of the year. All funds received go directly to supporting the site: web hosting, domain name renewal, tax preparation, etc. Nobody has ever received any money for their work on SoylentNews. We are staffed entirely by volunteers who give of their free time to keep the site running and the story queue filled. By my estimate, we have probably passed the minimum funds received that are needed to support the site for this half of the year... but actually reaching the goal would give us a bit of a cushion against the unexpected. To those who have let their subscription lapse and to those who may have never subscribed before: please subscribe and help us meet our goal.

Folding@Home:

Rarely mentioned, but SoylentNews does have a folding@home team which recently surpassed one billion points earned and now holds 218th place in the entire world! Here are views of their progress individually and as a team. Their efforts contribute to helping medical research into Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, and many forms of cancer, among other diseases.

This Year So Far:

The SoylentNews web site has been available 24 hours day, 7 days a week... except for a couple relatively brief unplanned outages. Further our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been available throughout this time, as well. (There may have been a brief downtime due to scheduled Linode maintenance on our servers.) Also, behind the scenes, all the supporting back-end stuff has been chugging along: web servers, databases, caches, E-Mail processing, and lots more. Those of you who have been with us since the start remember the frequent site crashes of those early days. Often several times per day! The rarity of site crashes, now, is a testament to the hard work of many people who gave of their time and expertise to make SoylentNews so stable, today.

These are the folk who quietly mind the underpinnings of and automate everything so well you don't even know they are there and would likely feel embarrassed if attention were brouht to them. Please join me in thanking them, anyway!

Some Numbers:

The editorial staff at SoylentNews has posted 4,884 stories to SoylentNews since 2019-01-01. With a very conservative estimate of 5 minutes per story, that amounts to 407 hours' time. Put another way, that is 10 full-time person-weeks.

Please join me in thanking the editors who have so generously given of their free time to make this happen!

Thanks Again!

Lastly, I am taking advantage of this opportunity to again thank everyone who offered their support during my recent health issue. I'm still a little wobbly typing with my left hand's pinky, but as things could have gone, I'll take this any day of the week, instead! It is my sincere hope that by sharing my experience, it may help someone else make a change in their life and avoid my experience or much worse.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Facebook removes accounts with AI-generated profile photos:

Facebook on Friday removed what it called a global network of more than 900 accounts, pages, and groups from its platform and Instagram that allegedly used deceptive practices to push pro-Trump narratives to about 55 million users. The network used fake accounts, artificial amplification, and, notably, profile photos of fake faces generated using artificial intelligence to spread polarizing, predominantly right-wing content around the Web, including on Twitter and YouTube.

It represents an alarming new development in the information wars, as it appears to be the first large-scale deployment of AI-generated images in a social network. In a report on the influence operation, researchers from disinformation groups Graphika and DFRLab noted that this was the first time they had seen the technology used to support an inauthentic social media campaign.

The images were used to enhance the authenticity of some of the 610 Facebook accounts, 156 groups, 89 pages, and 72 Instagram accounts associated with "The BL," a digital news outlet that described itself as a "pure mountain spring, moistening the heart of every reader" on Facebook before it was removed. Facebook's investigation connected The BL to The Epoch Times, a conservative media organization with ties to Chinese spiritual group Falun Gong and a history of aggressive support for Donald Trump.

takyon writes:

Universal Notifies Theaters 'Cats' Is Being Updated With "Improved Visual Effects"

How many lives does Cats have?

On Friday — the movie's opening day — Universal notified thousands of theaters they will be receiving an updated version of Tom Hooper's troubled film with "some improved visual effects," according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

The move is unheard of for a finished title already in release, according to cinema operators and Hollywood studio executives. Insiders say it is being done at Hooper's request.

Cats — which has been savaged by critics — is in need of any help it can get at the box office after opening to $2.6 million on Friday and receiving a C+ CinemaScore from moviegoers.

Also at Time.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Trump signs defense bill establishing U.S. Space Force: What comes next

President Donald Trump on Dec. 20 signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. The bill creates the U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces.

Trump signed the NDAA flanked by top defense and military officials at a ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.

"Today marks a landmark achievement as we officially inaugurate the newest branch or our military, the U.S. Space Force," Trump said. "This is very big and important moment."

The NDAA authorizes the establishment of the U.S. Space Force as a separate military branch to reside within the Department of the Air Force, the same way the Marine Corps is organized as an independent service in the Department of the Navy.

The USSF has launched a website.

See also:

U.S. Space Command eager to hand over space traffic duties to Commerce Department
U.S. Space Command chief Raymond: 'I'm really excited for the Space Force'
NDAA conference agreement establishes U.S. Space Force, directs major overhaul of space acquisitions
Barrett: Air Force to 'move out smartly' on Space Force
Space Force may finally become real — but it won't be an overhaul
Following standup of U.S. Space Force, Air Force bases could be renamed as space bases

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Atomic-level studies of the architecture of tiny sodium channel proteins, critical to generating electrical signals that start off each beat of the heart, are imparting striking details about their function, malfunctions, disruption by many disease mutations, and response to medication.

This structural information could become the basis for developing better diagnostics and drugs for life-threatening heart rhythm problems, according to the researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine working in this area.

Their latest findings appear Dec. 19 in Cell in the paper, "Structure of the Cardiac Sodium Channel." The senior authors are William Catterall and Ning Zheng, both UW School of Medicine professors of pharmacology. The first authors are Daohau Jiang and Hui Shi, UW postdoctoral fellows in pharmacology.

"The cardiac sodium channel not only initiates the heartbeat, mutations in it also cause deadly arrhythmias, and antiarrhythmic drugs act directly on it to control cardiac rhythms," explained Catterall.

The heart is both a plumbing and electrical marvel. For each heartbeat, electrical waves travel across a healthy heart in a pattern that controls its filling and pumping in a tightly coordinated manner. The rate at which the impulse is propagated through the heart tissue relies on actions taking place at the molecular level in tiny protein pores present in cardiac cell membranes.

[...] The activation and quick inactivation of these voltage-gated sodium channels are part of a series of electrical and physiological events that maintain a steady heartbeat. "Sodium channels operate in concert with calcium channels and potassium channels to drive the heartbeat at a consistent frequency for our entire lives," Zheng noted.

When sodium channels don't work properly, the heart can be in trouble, even to the point of having dangerously fast and uncoordinated contractions that are life-threatening, the researchers explained.

Specifically, the NaV (Latin abbreviation for sodium, V for voltage) 1.5 channel has such an indispensable role that certain mutations in those channels can be fatal, because other sodium channels in the heart cannot compensate for their loss. These mutations can cause dangerous arrhythmias in adults and even sudden death in children and young athletes.

Journal Reference:

Daohua Jiang, Hui Shi, Lige Tonggu, Tamer M. Gamal El-Din, Michael J. Lenaeus, Yan Zhao, Craig Yoshioka, Ning Zheng, William A. Catterall. Structure of the Cardiac Sodium Channel. Cell, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.11.041

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Uber has agreed to pay $4.4m to settle claims it allowed employees to be sexually harassed and then allowed retaliation against them when they came forward.

In a deal struck with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) this week, the ride broker has agreed to put the money into a fund that will be used by the EEOC to pay back those employees who were faced with harassment. The commission described Uber as allowing "a culture of sexual harassment and retaliation against individuals who complained about such harassment."

The fund will be available to employees who believe they experienced harassment and/or retaliation for reporting harassment between January 2014 and June 2019. That period covers the bulk of the reign of Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO, whose "tech bro" culture was blamed for creating a notoriously hostile climate for women working at Uber.

Kalanick would eventually step down from the company and, under new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber has undertaken a prolonged charm offensive in an effort to clean up its public image.

The $4.4m fund will be the latest step in that effort, as Uber has agreed to not only pay up the money, but also establish what was described as "a system for identifying employees who have been the subject of more than one harassment complaint and for identifying managers who fail to respond to concerns of sexual harassment in a timely manner."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4408:

No, Spotify, you shouldn't have sent mysterious USB drives to journalists – TechCrunch:

Last week, Spotify sent a number of USB drives to reporters with a note: “Play me.”

It’s not uncommon for reporters to receive USB drives in the post. Companies distribute USB drives all the time, including at tech conferences, often containing promotional materials or large files, such as videos that would otherwise be difficult to get into as many hands as possible.

But anyone with basic security training under their hat — which here at TechCrunch we have — will know to never plug in a USB drive without taking some precautions first.

Concerned but undeterred, we safely examined the contents of the Spotify drive using a disposable version of Ubuntu Linux (using a live CD) on a spare computer. It was benign and contained a single audio file. “This is Alex Goldman, and you’ve just been hacked,” the file played.

The drive was just a promotion for a new Spotify podcast. Because of course it was.

Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and founder of Rendition Infosec, called the move “amazingly tone deaf” to encourage reporters into plugging in the drives to their computers.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Why I dislike what "quantum supremacy" is doing to computing research:

The big quantum buzzword these days is "quantum supremacy." (It's a term I despise, even as I acknowledge that the concept has some utility. I will explain in a moment). Unfortunately, this means that some researchers have focused on quantum supremacy as an end in itself, building useless devices to get there.

Now, optical quantum computers have joined the club with a painstakingly configured device that doesn't quite manage to demonstrate quantum supremacy. But before we get to the news, let's delve into the world of quantum supremacy.

"Quantum supremacy" boils down to a failure of mathematics, combined with a fear that the well will run dry before we've drunk our fill.

In a perfect world, a quantum computer operates perfectly. In this perfect world, you can generate a mathematical proof that shows a quantum computer will always outperform a classical computer on certain tasks, no matter how fast the classical computer is. Our world, however, is slightly less than perfect, and our quantum computers are not ideal, so these mathematical proofs might not apply.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4408:

Plenty of Fish app leaked profile data set to private – TechCrunch:

Dating app Plenty of Fish has pushed out a fix for its app after a security researcher found it was leaking information that users had set to “private” on their profiles.

The app was always silently returning users’ first names and postal ZIP codes, according to The App Analyst, a mobile expert who writes about his analyses of popular apps on his eponymous blog.

The leaking data was not immediately visible to app users, and the data was scrambled to make it difficult to read. But using freely available tools designed to analyze network traffic, the researcher found it was possible to reveal the information about users as their profiles appeared on his phone.

In one case, the App Analyst found enough information to identify where a particular user lived, he told TechCrunch.

Plenty of Fish has more than 150 million registered users, according to its parent company IAC. In recent years, law enforcement has warned about the threats some people face on dating apps, like Plenty of Fish. Reports suggest sex attacks involving dating apps have risen in the past five years. And those in the LGBTQ+ community on these apps also face safety threats from both individuals and governments, prompting apps like Tinder to proactively warn their LGBTQ+ users when they visit regions and states with restrictive and oppressive laws against same-sex partners.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Cascade:

Video analytics paves way for smart cities:

The dream of smart cities is bearing fruit in projects around the globe. In fact the global market was valued at $900 billion in 2018 and was projected to grow by 18 per cent between 2019 and 2029, as Persistence Market Research has suggested.

The Internet of Things is likewise, and in synchronicity, evolving and boasting a wide range of devices from industrial to home use. A recent report from Navigant solidifies this evolution as the market for smart home devices is forecasted to record a 21.6% growth between 2019 and 2028, which will result in an increase in annual revenue from $12.6 billion to $72.9 billion during the period. 

New sensor technology, which is one key component to IoT, is beginning to transform the way our cities function. Along with cloud services an entirely smart city is no longer a pipe-dream but a possible reality – and one of the keys to the evolution of our cities will be in the formation of a new experience for its users.

This can take many forms – we will see a whole host of sensors which can detect and report traffic incidents automatically, identify areas of overcrowding, route additional public transport to busy areas in real time; or in more dangerous areas, even detect gunfire.

While the applications of smart sensors will be numerous for our cities’ infrastructure, citizens are also likely to feel the change in our retail spaces where businesses are actively looking to offer extraordinary experiences and where technology can make a big difference. 

As smart city projects get off the ground they will create a virtuous circle by collecting and analysing citizen data in all sorts of ways, from vehicle and pedestrian traffic flows to energy consumption and waste management. Citizens and communities will be able to act with planned and optimised lives with utilities and shared or public services orchestrated for efficiency, sustainability, and wellbeing. 

Cloud Cities?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX ships Starship hardware from Florida to Texas to speed up production

After appearing unexpectedly at SpaceX's Port Canaveral docks last month, several large pieces of Starship flight and manufacturing hardware were successfully shipped from Florida to Texas, arriving at the company's Boca Chica build and launch site two weeks ago.

Previously discussed on Teslarati, the hardware transfer signals a significant shift in the development strategy for SpaceX's next-generation Starship-Super Heavy launch vehicle. Most notably, SpaceX has chosen to prioritize Texas in the near term while the company's Florida facilities instead aim for longer-tail milestones like the first Super Heavy-capable launch site and a new production facility located much closer to that launch site.

While the hardware SpaceX has sent over is relatively minor in the scope of producing a brand new Starship prototype, it will at least somewhat expedite the process thanks to the inclusion of what appears to be a completed propellant tank dome. Additionally, it's possible that this December 8th hardware delivery will not be the last – a large amount of hardware remains at SpaceX's Cocoa, Florida Starship production facility, including several ring sections and a nearly finished nose section, among a number of other parts.

As discussed last month, SpaceX has reportedly decided to more or less shutter its [Cocoa, FL] facilities, transferring all permanent employees who wished to stay to Boca Chica, TX, Cape Canaveral, FL, or Hawthorne, CA facilities. SpaceX's Starship presence in Florida is in no way done but it does sound like it's in for at least several months of downtime.

SpaceX is building a steel launch mount and water-cooled flame diverter for launching Starships at the Kennedy Space Center's LC-39A pad in Florida.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space:

Founded in 2012 by Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter of Biosphere 2 fame, World View was originally conceived as a platform for human journeys to the upper stratosphere. Given that only a handful of people have piloted stratospheric balloons and lived to tell the tale, it was an ambitious goal—but the company had the technical chops to back it up. In 2014, MacCallum and Poynter worked together on a mission to send Google executive Alan Eustace on a record-breaking space-diving journey to 136,000 feet suspended beneath a stratospheric balloon.

But it wasn't at all clear there was enough demand for ferrying humans to the upper stratosphere, so in February, World View tapped Ryan Hartman, the former president and CEO of the drone company Insitu, to retool the company as a data services platform. The idea is to use long-lasting stratospheric balloons to collect high-resolution images of Earth and sell this data to the government and private companies.

Given his background in drones, Hartman is intimately familiar with the concept of Earth surveillance as a service. He says World View aims to fill a niche that can't be met by more conventional technologies like drones and satellites, which involve compromises in the quality of images, the area these images cover, and the frequency with which images are collected. Stratospheric balloons promise cheap access to incredibly high-resolution images that can be collected anywhere on Earth. Using off-the-shelf imaging hardware, World View can take photos with 15-centimeter resolution from 75,000 feet, and its custom-made cameras will soon be capable of 5 centimeters.

According to Hartman, World View's system is sensitive enough to tell whether a person on the ground is "holding a shovel or a gun." Unsurprisingly, perhaps, World View has attracted the interest of the US Department of Defense, which Hartman says will be one of the company's first customers when it starts selling its data next year. He says the company has also received a lot of attention from the energy sector, which is interested in using the image data to monitor its oil and gas wells, transmission lines, and other critical assets.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and the University of Tokyo have developed a technique for the reversible conversion of 3-D lipid vesicles into 2-D ultra-thin nanosheets. Both the stable nanosheets and the reversible 2-D-3-D conversion process can find various applications in the pharmaceutical, bioengineering, food, and cosmetic sciences.

An astonishing number of recent technological advances and novel engineering applications go hand in hand with progress in the field of materials science. The design and manipulation of materials at the nanoscale (that is, on the order of billionths of a meter) has become a hot topic. In particular, nanosheets, which are ultra-thin 2-D planar structures with a surface ranging from several micrometers to millimeters, have recently attracted much attention because of their outstanding mechanical, electrical, and optical properties. For example, organic nanosheets have great potential as biomedical or biotechnological tools, while inorganic nanosheets could be useful for energy storage and harvesting.

But what about going from a 2-D nanosheet vesicle form by modifying specific conditions, such as pH, or using an enzyme (Fig. 1), and found that the reaction was reversible.

More information: Naohiko Shimada et al, Cationic Copolymer‐Chaperoned 2D–3D Reversible Conversion of Lipid Membranes, Advanced Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1002/adma.201904032

Original Submission