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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Hanwang, the facial-recognition company that has placed 2 million of its cameras at entrance gates across the world, started preparing for the coronavirus in early January.

Huang Lei, the company’s chief technical officer, said that even before the new virus was widely known about, he had begun to get requests from hospitals at the centre of the outbreak in Hubei province to update its software to recognise nurses wearing masks.

[...] If three or five clients ask for the same thing . . . we’ll see that as important,” said Mr Huang, adding that its cameras previously only recognised people in masks half the time, compared with 99.5 percent accuracy for a full face image.

[...] The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a person if the first attempt to identify them fails.

“The problem of masked facial recognition is not new, but belongs to the family of facial recognition with occlusion,” Mr Huang said, adding that his company had first encountered similar issues with people with beards in Turkey and Pakistan, as well as with northern Chinese customers wearing winter clothing that covered their ears and face.

Counter-intuitively, training facial recognition algorithms to recognize masked faces involves throwing data away. A team at the University of Bradford published a study last year showing they could train a facial recognition program to accurately recognize half-faces by deleting parts of the photos they used to train the software.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Some local schoolboards have already rolled out full remote learning curricula, starting Monday (seems to me there have been plans in the works for years to make something like this happen this fast.) Others appear flat-footed and clueless. We did some homeschooling with our kids a couple of years ago, and the one website that really clicked with us was (shameless plug) https://ixl.com .

I know we had a Soylent story just over a week ago asking for alternatives to the ubiquitous (and well deserved first place recommendation) Khan. Now that it's a little less abstract, and looking more certain that the kids won't be returning to physical school buildings until the fall... what do you look for in online learning services?

Our criteria were: easy for the kids to self-learn the material as presented, easy to track progress and identify areas where extra instruction might help, clear documentation of subjects covered and relative mastery of each, easy for kids to self-select appropriate subject areas to study, reasonable cost.

Khan certainly presents material clearly, and the cost can't be beat, but we found IXL to be superior in the other areas, and when you think about the tremendous number of hours invested by you and your kids in the learning system, the cost isn't really significant ($20/month for one, $24 for two).

Has anybody else taken a serious plunge into online learning and found something "better than Khan" for your purposes?

[Ed. addition follows. --martyb]

See our previous story: Student Privacy Laws Still Apply if Coronavirus Just Closed Your School and take a close look at future provider's security and privacy practices. From the article linked to in the previous story https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/watch-out-for-privacy-pitfalls-if-your-school-is-suddenly-online-only/:

canopic jug writes:

The Fed­er­al Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court of Germany (FCC) has delivered a decisive win for software users and developers around Europe. In a recently-published court decision, 2 BvR 739/17 (in German) from February, it has declared that the Act of Approval to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC) is void. The Unified Patent Court has been widely considered to be a shell for bringing software patents into Europe through the side door, in violation of international treaties which prohibit by name patents on programs for computers.

The Act of Approval to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court ("the Act of Approval") to confer sovereign powers on the Unified Patent Court is void. In its outcome, it amends the Constitution in substantive terms, though it has not been approved by the Bundestag with the required two-thirds majority. This is what the Second Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court decided on a constitutional complaint in an order published today. In its reasoning, the Senate stated that, in order to safeguard their right to influence the process of European integration by democratic means, this, in principle, also entails the right of citizens that sovereign powers be conferred only in the ways provided for by the Basic Law. An act of approval to an international treaty that has been adopted in violation thereof cannot provide democratic legitimation for the exercise of public authority by the EU or any other international institution supplementary to or otherwise closely tied to the EU.

Once more for emphasis, software is protected by copyright law and that governs distribution. Patents govern usage and function, regardless of origin. So had the EPC gone through and forced software patents into Europe, neither clean room nor independent implementations would have protected either end-users, software-using businesses, or developers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Since Monday, Tesla has been under pressure from officials in Alameda County to shut down operations of its car factory in Fremont, California, to fight the spread of the coronavirus. On Thursday, Tesla finally announced it would halt vehicle manufacturing in Fremont.

"We have decided to temporarily suspend production at our factory in Fremont, from end of day March 23, which will allow an orderly shutdown," Tesla said in a post on its website.

March 23 is next Monday—a full week after officials in seven Bay Area counties ordered non-essential businesses to close down. To make sure there was no confusion about Tesla's status, Alameda County tweeted on Tuesday that Tesla was not an essential business.

But Tesla persisted. In recent weeks, Elon Musk has been a vocal skeptic of efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus. "Danger of panic still far exceeds danger of corona," Musk tweeted on Monday.

Previously:
Alameda County Sheriff Pressures Tesla to Shut Down Fremont Factory

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

NIST, DHS Publish Guidance on Securing Virtual Meetings, VPNs:

With people worldwide forced to work from home due to the coronavirus epidemic, NIST and DHS published a series of recommendations on how to ensure that virtual meetings and connections to enterprise networks are protected from prying eyes.

[...] The security of virtual meetings might often be an afterthought, but basic precautions can ensure that they don't lead to data breaches or other security incidents, says Jeff Greene, director of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Most virtual meeting services have built-in security features, but following an organization's policies for virtual meeting security should ensure strong protection. Organizations should also consider limiting the reuse of access codes, using one-time PINs or meeting identifier codes, and adopting multi-factor authentication.

[...] "This list is not all-encompassing, nor must you use every tool for every virtual meeting. Know your organization's policies, think about the sensitivity of the topics to be discussed, factor in the logistics of the meeting, and pick the measures that make sense for each situation," Greene notes.

[2020-03-21 15:06:00 UTC: Update 1:
(1) Reminder: this has so far been implemented only on our *development* server (https://dev.soylentnews.org/); it has NOT yet been rolled out to this (the production) servers.
(2) The control (now a simple text link, no longer a button) no longer defaults to taking up a whole physical line immediately above the first comment.
(3) Please note that in certain corner-cases, it is possible that screen size limitations may cause an overflow onto the next line.
(4) And the control should now appear aligned-right in the story header. =)
--martyb]

[2020-03-21 15:42:00 UTC: Update 2: Fixed typo in the first of the above two links to our dev server. --martyb]

martyb writes:

This is a follow-up to: Changing the Site UI to Making Long Stories Easier to Navigate -- Input Requested.

Wow! Thanks for all the positive feedback to the previous story! I knew the implementation was a bit rough around the edges, so I very much appreciate the positive, constructive feedback that was provided!

Based on your input -- primarily displeasure in having a single button take up a whole physical line -- I have modified the in-memory template on our development server to now provide a textual link in the story header right after the printer icon. It should only appear when viewing the story by itself; there should be no indication of this on the main page.

To repeat, this is only on our development server so far; it is not yest implemented on our production server (i.e. what you see here).

In short, should this get rolled out to production?

1. Yes.
2. Yes, with these suggested changes.
3. No.

Please refer to the previous story (linked above) for test scenarios and reply with any issues you may find!

teamwork++

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Former Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski leaves federal court in San Jose, California, after a hearing in September 2019.

Anthony Levandowski, former Google engineer and a pioneer of self-driving car tech, agreed to plead guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets from the internet giant.

Levandowski left Google in 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, which was quickly acquired by Uber for $680 million. These actions set off a chain of events that led to Google's autonomous vehicle unit, Waymo, suing Uber over alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. That lawsuit settled in February 2018 with Uber agreeing to pay Waymo $245 million.

The prosecutors indicted Levandowski in August in a suit that involves 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google. The activities allegedly took place as he prepared to leave the search giant to build out Uber's self-driving car operation. 

Levandowski pleaded guilty to one count of trade secret theft in an agreement in which federal prosecutors agree to drop the remaining charges, according to a filing with the US District Court of the Northern District of California. The plea carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Google has completely canceled Google I/O 2020
There will be no I/O this year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic

Google has completely canceled Google I/O 2020, its biggest event of the year, due to the ongoing spread of the novel coronavirus. The company announced on March 3rd that it canceled the physical I/O event, but now the whole thing is off.

"Out of concern for the health and safety of our developers, employees, and local communities — and in line with recent 'shelter in place' orders by the local Bay Area counties — we sadly will not be holding I/O in any capacity this year," Google said in a statement on the I/O website. "Right now, the most important thing all of us can do is focus our attention on helping people with the new challenges we all face. Please know that we remain committed to finding other ways to share platform updates with you through our developer blogs and community forums."

I always look forward to watching Google I/O on YouTube. I'll miss it.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

NASA spent a decade and nearly $1 billion for a single launch tower:

"NASA exacerbated these issues by accepting unproven and untested designs."

A new report published Tuesday by NASA's inspector general looks into the development of a mobile launch tower for the agency's Space Launch System rocket.

The analysis finds that the total cost of constructing and modifying the structure, known as Mobile Launcher-1, is "at least" $927 million. This includes the original $234 million development cost to build the tower to support the Ares I rocket.

After this rocket was canceled in 2010, NASA then spent an additional $693 million to redesign and modify the structure for the SLS rocket. Notably, NASA's original estimate for modifying the launch tower was just $54 million, according to the report by Inspector General Paul Martin.

<no-sarcasm>
Does NASA understand what a sunk cost is?
</no-sarcasm>

Related: NASA to Launch 247 Petabytes of Data Into AWS - but Forgot About Egress Costs

Original Submission

martyb writes:

A new tweet from @CGTNOfficial China Global Television Network, or CGTN, is a multi-language, multi-platform media grouping. reports

#BREAKING#China reports 34 #COVID19 infections on Wednesday, all are cases that originated abroad, with 8 more deaths Chinese mainland reports zero new domestically transmitted #COVID19 cases

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

YouTube is following Netflix by reducing streaming quality due to coronavirus:

YouTube is following Netflix's lead in cutting the quality of its video streaming from high definition to standard in the European Union, it confirmed to CNET, as the bloc's leaders try to reduce strain on the internet during the coronavirus outbreak. Since more people are working from home and children are staying out of school, internet usage has spiked.

"We are in ongoing conversations with the regulators, governments and network operators all over Europe, and are making a commitment to temporarily default all traffic in the UK and the EU to standard definition," the Google-owned video streaming service said in a statement.

The service said it had seen "only a few usage peaks," but is reducing the default quality in the EU for 30 days. Video quality can still be manually adjusted.

European Commissioner Thierry Breton called on streaming services to switch to standard definition "when HD is not necessary" on Thursday. YouTube decided to reduce its default streaming quality after Breton spoke to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki, as previously reported by Reuters.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Wen Ping, an ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, wondered whether a specific type of scent molecule might help undertaker bees find their fallen hive mates. Ants, bees, and other insects are covered in compounds called cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs), which compose part of the waxy coating on their cuticles (the shiny parts of their exoskeletons) and help prevent them from drying out. While the insects are alive, these molecules are continually released into the air and are used to recognize fellow hive members.

Wen speculated that less of the pheromones were being released into the air after a bee died and its body temperature decreased. When he used chemical methods of detecting gases to test this hypothesis, he confirmed that cooled dead bees were indeed emitting fewer volatile CHCs than living bees.

Wen then designed a series of experiments to see whether undertaker bees were picking up on this change. He turned to five hives belonging to Asian honey bees (Apis cerana Fabricius), a small, hardy insect found across Asia, and began to heat up the corpses of perished honey bees. When he placed regular, cool dead bees in a hive, workers always removed them within half an hour. However, when he placed the bee in a heated petri dish and warmed it up by a few degrees Celsius, it often took undertakers several hours to even notice the body. That’s presumably because the warm bee body was releasing close to the same amount of CHCs as a living bee, he reports in a preprint published this month on bioRxiv.

To seal the deal, Wen washed the CHCs off dead bees with hexane, which can dissolve waxes and oils, heated them up to about the temperature of a live bee, and placed them back in their respective hives. The undertakers sprang into action and removed nearly 90% of the hot, clean dead bees within half an hour. That suggests it’s not temperature, but the absence of CHC emissions that undertakers use to diagnose death.

Journal Reference:
Ping Wen. Death recognition by undertaker bees, bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.03.05.978262)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Rutgers researchers have discovered the origins of the protein structures responsible for metabolism: simple molecules that powered early life on Earth and serve as chemical signals that NASA could use to search for life on other planets.

[...] Their study, which predicts what the earliest proteins looked like 3.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists retraced, like a many thousand piece puzzle, the evolution of enzymes (proteins) from the present to the deep past. The solution to the puzzle required two missing pieces, and life on Earth could not exist without them. By constructing a network connected by their roles in metabolism, this team discovered the missing pieces.

"We know very little about how life started on our planet. This work allowed us to glimpse deep in time and propose the earliest metabolic proteins," said co-author Vikas Nanda, a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a resident faculty member at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine.

"Our predictions will be tested in the laboratory to better understand the origins of life on Earth and to inform how life may originate elsewhere. We are building models of proteins in the lab and testing whether they can trigger reactions critical for early metabolism."

[...] The Rutgers team focused on two protein "folds" that are likely the first structures in early metabolism. They are a ferredoxin fold that binds iron-sulfur compounds, and a "Rossmann" fold, which binds nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA). These are two pieces of the puzzle that must fit in the evolution of life.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Moonchild, the lead developer of the Pale Moon browser writes:

"Dear Web Developer(s),

While, as a software developer ourselves, we understand very well that new features are exciting to use and integrate into your work, we ask that you please consider not adopting Google WebComponents in your designs. This is especially important if you are a web developer creating frameworks for websites to use.
With Google WebComponents here we mean the use of CustomElements and Shadow DOM, especially when used in combination, and in dynamically created document structures (e.g. using module loading/unloading and/or slotted elements).

Why is this important?

For several reasons, but primarily because it completely goes against the traditional structure of the web being an open and accessible place that isn't inherently locked down to opaque structures or a single client. WebComponents used "in full" (i.e. dynamically) inherently creates complex web page structures that cannot be saved, archived or even displayed outside of the designated targeted browsers (primarily Google Chrome).
One could even say that this is setting the web up for becoming fully content-controlled."

https://about.google/: "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

Useful to... whom?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Elon Musk's SpaceX will send astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time in May, NASA said, announcing the first crewed launch from the United States to the platform since 2011.

The tech entrepreneur's company will launch a Falcon 9 rocket to transport NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in a first for the space agency as it looks to cut costs.

"NASA and SpaceX are currently targeting no earlier than mid-to-late May for launch," the US space agency said in a statement Wednesday.

In March, Musk's Crew Dragon capsule made a round trip to the ISS, which is in orbit more than 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, with a mannequin on board, before returning to the Atlantic after six days in space.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission