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Several people have submitted leads to stories about how Ring Smart Doorbells might also alert people to the approach of law enforcement.

FBI: Ring Smart Doorbells Could Sabotage Cops

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Ring is the gift that keeps on giving...

From https://threatpost.com/fbi-ring-smart-doorbells-sabotage-cops/158837/

While privacy advocates have warned against Ring's partnerships with police, newly unearthed documents reveal FBI concerns about 'new challenges' smart doorbell footage could create for cops. The FBI is worried that Ring doorbell owners can use footage collected from their smart devices to keep tabs on police, newly uncovered documents show.

It's interesting to see that the FBI is 'concerned' about this pervasive surveillance being applied to cops for once instead of on 'the plebs', as opposed to sticking to the mantra they've been telling us the whole time: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

It is important to point out that the 'concerns' the FBI has, go way beyond the simple populace being able to check up on cops, so the article is a good read and will no doubt generate an interesting discussion.

Further reading even: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7047194-LES-FBI-Technical-Analysis-Bulletin-Internet-of.html

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery fleet gains FAA approval for trial commercial flights – TechCrunch:

Amazon has been granted an approval by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that will allow it to start trialing commercial deliveries via drone, Bloomberg reports. This certification is the same one granted to UPS and a handful of other companies, and while it doesn't mean that Amazon can immediately start operating a consumer drone delivery service for everyone, it does allow them to make progress toward that goal.

[...] Ultimately, any actual viable and practical system of drone delivery will require fully autonomous operation, without direct line-of-sight observation. Amazon has plans for its MK27 drones, which have a maximum 5 lb carrying capacity, to do just that, but it'll still likely be many years before the regulatory and air traffic control infrastructure is updated to the point where that can happen regularly.

Original Submission

'Just Passed a Guy in a Jetpack': Sightings at Los Angeles Airport Fuel Concern

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow96:

'Just passed a guy in a jetpack': sightings at Los Angeles airport fuel concern:

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating reports from airline pilots of someone flying a jetpack near Los Angeles international airport over the weekend.

[...] "Tower, American 1997, we just passed a guy in a jetpack," a pilot said.

"American 1997, OK, thank you, were they off to your left side or your right side?" the controller asked.

"Off the left side at maybe 300 yards or so at our altitude," the pilot said. Another pilot also reported a sighting.

"We just saw the guy pass by us in the jetpack," he said. The controller then advised another aircraft flight crew to use caution.

"The FBI is aware of the reports by pilots on Sunday and is working to determine what occurred," the agency said in a statement.

Inquiry Into 'Guy in Jetpack' Flying at LA Airport

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow96:

Inquiry into 'guy in jetpack' flying at LA airport:

The FBI is investigating reports that a "guy in a jetpack" was seen by pilots flying near Los Angeles' LAX airport nearby to where planes were landing.

The incident, which was recorded by air traffic controllers, happened on Sunday evening and was witnessed by pilots on two separate planes.

The apparent culprit was seen flying at an elevation of 3,000ft (915 meters).

[...] JetPack Aviation, based in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, boasts of being able to fly a person to 15,000ft, but the owner of the company told the LA Times on Tuesday that their product is not available for private use.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Rocket Lab secretly launched its own company-made satellite on latest flight:

Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab says it has successfully flown one of its own satellites, demonstrating that the spacecraft's design holds up in Earth orbit. It's the first time the company has flown its in-house cylindrical spacecraft, known as the Photon, which Rocket Lab hopes to sell to customers for use in ambitious deep-space missions.

The satellite was secretly a part of Rocket Lab's most recent launch. On August 30th, the company's Electron rocket took off from Rocket Lab's primary launch site in New Zealand, lofting a single satellite for the company Capella Space. But once the satellite had separated from the rocket, part of the Electron actually turned into a satellite and remained in orbit around Earth. The satellite was Electron's kick stage — a small platform that sits on top of the rocket, helping to give satellites on the vehicle an extra boost in space. After the satellite was deployed, Rocket Lab sent a command to make it start operating like a satellite.

[...] When asked why the company didn't announce the Photon demonstration prior to launch, Beck said he wanted to make sure they executed and delivered the product first. "Well, I kind of like to just do stuff, and make sure it's all good and it works before announcing it," Beck said during a press conference. He added that he hoped "this one will be a little bit less controversial than the Humanity Star."

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

As anyone who has ever straightened their hair knows, water is the enemy. Hair painstakingly straightened by heat will bounce back into curls the minute it touches water. Why? Because hair has shape memory. Its material properties allow it to change shape in response to certain stimuli and return to its original shape in response to others.

What if other materials, especially textiles, had this type of shape memory? Imagine a t-shirt with cooling vents that opened when exposed to moisture and closed when dry, or one-size-fits-all clothing that stretches or shrinks to a person's measurements.

Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a biocompatible material that can be 3-D-printed into any shape and pre-programmed with reversible shape memory. The material is made using keratin, a fibrous protein found in hair, nails and shells. The researchers extracted the keratin from leftover Agora wool used in textile manufacturing.

The research could help the broader effort of reducing waste in the fashion industry, one of the biggest polluters on the planet. Already, designers such as Stella McCarthy are reimagining how the industry uses materials, including wool.

Journal Reference:
Luca Cera et al, A bioinspired and hierarchically structured shape-memory material, Nature Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-020-0789-2

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

For the first time, U.S. officials have approved a small nuclear power plant design.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission [(NRC)] on Friday approved Portland-based NuScale Power's application for the small modular reactor that Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems plans to build at a U.S. Department of Energy site in eastern Idaho.

The small reactors can produce about 60 megawatts of energy, or enough to power more than 50,000 homes. The proposed project includes 12 small modular reactors. The first would be built in 2029, with the rest in 2030.

NuScale says the reactors have advanced safety features, including self-cooling and automatic shutdown.

"This is a significant milestone not only for NuScale, but also for the entire U.S. nuclear sector and the other advanced nuclear technologies that will follow," said NuScale Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Hopkins in a statement.

The cooperative pushing the effort will next need to submit an application to the NRC for a combined construction and operating license and expects this to be ready within two years.

Also at Ars Technica.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Facebook complains, Apple responds: iOS 14's big privacy change gets postponed:

Apple has postponed full enforcement of a feature of its upcoming iOS 14 software for iPhones that would require app developers to request users' permission to track them across apps for advertising purposes. This announcement comes in the wake of a public complaint from Facebook that the privacy policy could negatively impact the ad market in Apple's ecosystem.

The feature, announced at Apple's annual developer conference in June, would require app developers to notify a user of an app's intent to track the user's IDFA (ID for Advertisers). IDFA is used to track the user's behavior across multiple apps and deliver targeted ads based on that behavior. The change would also require the user to opt in to that tracking.

Apple's developer portal states:

In addition, on iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14, apps will be required to receive user permission to track users across apps or websites owned by other companies, or to access the device's advertising identifier. We are committed to ensuring users can choose whether or not they allow an app to track them. To give developers time to make necessary changes, apps will be required to obtain permission to track users starting early next year. More information, including an update to the App Store Review Guidelines, will follow this fall.

Previously:
iOS 14 Privacy Settings Will Tank Ad Targeting Business, Facebook Warns

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Noble metals dissolved without aqua regia[*]:

A common way of extracting noble metals from other materials is by dissolving that material in solution. However, dissolving noble metals remains a big challenge due to their low reactivity, and effective recycling of noble metals requires high dissolution rates and controllable selectivity.

'Noble metals can be dissolved using different hydrometallurgical methods. Unfortunately, all of them have drawbacks,' explains Serhiy Cherevko, who studies noble metal dissolution on a fundamental level at the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy but was not involved in this research. 'The most common approach is to use hydrochloric acid as a complexing agent and nitric acid, chlorine, or hydrogen peroxide as an oxidant.'

A mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid is also known as aqua regia, from the Latin for royal water, and is frequently used to dissolve gold and platinum in industry. However, it is a potentially dangerous mixture and there are environmental concerns related to its use. Because of this, there is a significant drive to find alternatives.

[...] Binnemans' team prepared a very concentrated mixture of hydrated AlCl3 and Al(NO3)3 to use as their solvent. They tested it on metal wires and spent automotive catalysts.

takyon writes:

ZTE announces the world's first phone with a behind-the-screen camera:

ZTE has officially announced the world's first commercial phone with a behind-the-screen camera: the ZTE Axon 20 5G. Shrinking phone bezels have made locating the front camera a major design point of phones for the past few years. We've seen big camera notches, small camera notches, round camera cutouts, and pop-up cameras. Rather than any of those compromises, the under-display camera lets you just put the camera under the display, and by peering through the pixels, you can still take a picture. It's the holy grail of front-camera design.

As we've seen in explainers from Xiaomi, these under-display cameras work by thinning out the pixels above the display, either by reducing the number of pixels or by making the pixels smaller, which allows more light to reach the camera. In the area above the camera, manufacturers will have to strike a balance between a denser display with lower-quality camera results or better camera output in exchange for an uglier above-the-camera display.

Also at CNX Software.

See also: Xiaomi's Third Generation Under-Display Camera Tech is Everything I Want

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Facebook halts Oculus Quest sales in Germany amid privacy concerns:

Facebook subsidiary Oculus says it has "temporarily paused" sales of Oculus Quest headsets to customers in Germany. Reports suggest the move is in response to concerns from German regulators about the recently announced requirement that all Oculus users will need to use a Facebook account by 2023 to log in to the device.

[...] Facebook declined an opportunity to provide additional comment to Ars Technica. But in a statement to German News site Heise Online (machine translation), the company said the move was due to "outstanding talks with German supervisory authorities... We were not obliged to take this measure, but proactively interrupted the sale."

Previously:
Facebook has Begun Ghosting the "Oculus" Moniker in its VR Division
Oculus to Begin Requiring Facebook Accounts to Use VR Headsets

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft launches a deepfake detector tool ahead of US election

Microsoft has added to the slowly growing pile of technologies aimed at spotting synthetic media (aka deepfakes) with the launch of a tool for analyzing videos and still photos to generate a manipulation score.

The tool, called Video Authenticator, provides what Microsoft calls "a percentage chance, or confidence score" that the media has been artificially manipulated.

"In the case of a video, it can provide this percentage in real-time on each frame as the video plays," it writes in a blog post announcing the tech. "It works by detecting the blending boundary of the deepfake and subtle fading or greyscale elements that might not be detectable by the human eye."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NSA spying exposed by Snowden was illegal and not very useful, court says:

The National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone metadata from telecom providers was illegal, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The court also found that the phone-metadata collection exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was not necessary for the arrests of terror suspects in a case that the US government cited in defending the necessity of the surveillance program.

The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the 2013 convictions of "four members of the Somali diaspora for sending, or conspiring to send, $10,900 to Somalia to support a foreign terrorist organization." But the Somalis' challenge of the NSA spying program yielded some significant findings. In part, the ineffectiveness of the phone-metadata collection helped ensure that the convictions would be upheld because the illegally collected metadata evidence wasn't significant enough to taint evidence that was legally collected by the government. The government got what it needed from a wiretap of defendant Basaaly Saeed Moalin's phone, not from the mass collection of metadata.

The court's three-judge panel unanimously "held that the metadata collection exceeded the scope of Congress's authorization in 50 U.S.C. § 1861, which required the government to make a showing of relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records, and that the program therefore violated that section of FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," the ruling said.

The judges also wrote that "the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans, including at least one of the defendants." But the judges didn't make a ruling on the potential Fourth Amendment violation because it wasn't necessary to decide the case. While "the Fourth Amendment requires notice to a criminal defendant" when prosecutors want to use evidence from surveillance at trial, the judges "did not decide whether the government failed to prove any required notice in this case because the lack of such notice did not prejudice the defendants," the ruling said.

Original Submission

The weird physics of levitating liquids and upside-down buoyancy [2 Marge!]

c0lo writes:

Nature video for the doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2643-8.

Vibration overcomes gravity on a levitating fluid

Counter-intuitive phenomena that arise in fluids under the action of vibration have attracted considerable research interest since the 1950s. For example, in a vibrating volume of fluid, gas bubbles can sink and heavy particles can rise. Moreover, a layer of fluid can be levitated above a layer of air by shaking the system vertically at a relatively high frequency (of the order of 100 hertz or more). Writing in Nature, Apffel et al. report another remarkable phenomenon associated with a vibrating, levitated layer of fluid: objects can float upside down on the lower interface of the fluid, as if gravity were inverted (Fig. 1). These phenomena have strong potential for practical use, for example in systems that involve gas bubbles suspended in fluids (such as bubble column reactors used for gas–liquid reactions), and for the segregation and transport of material inclusions in fluids (as used in mineral processing and waste-water treatment).

The extraordinary behaviours of vibrating fluids are just a small fraction of the surprising phenomena that arise as a result of high-frequency vibrations more generally. Probably the most well-documented examples are the Stephenson–Kapitza pendulum, in which a rigid pendulum balances upside down from a vibrating point of suspension, and the Chelomei pendulum, in which a washer that can slide along a rod seems to 'float' when the rod is vibrated vertically.

Kapitza pendulum - the downwards hanging equilibrium position becomes unstable
Chelomei's pendulum explained - a rod with a sliding disc, the ensemble being vibrated vertically.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Congrats to the wannabe APK noobtard for advancing the site's codebase despite me having extremely limited time to play. I added three lines of code and now Spam modded comments (and comment trees) auto-collapse and you can still moderate a comment as Spam even if it's already at the minimum score. Honestly, the folks using any other downmod on obvious Spam annoy me more than the noobtard does but that annoyance at least is now history. Changes are to hot code only, I'll put them in the repo as part of my next pull request.

Suck it, noob. --TMB

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

These Students Figured Out Their Tests Were Graded By Ai — And The Easy Way To Cheat:

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He'd completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He'd received a 50 out of 100. That wasn't on a practice test — it was his real grade.

[...] At first, Simmons tried to console her son. "I was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning," said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he'd received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers.

Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords — anything that seems relevant to the question.

[...] Apparently, that "word salad" is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test.

Edgenuity didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, but the company's online help center suggests this may be by design. According to the website, answers to certain questions receive 0% if they include no keywords, and 100% if they include at least one. Other questions earn a certain percentage based on the number of keywords included.

[...] Edgenuity offers over 300 online classes for middle and high school students[...].

Of course, short-answer questions aren't the only factor that impacts Edgenuity grades — Lazare's classes require other formats, including multiple-choice questions and single-word inputs. A developer familiar with the platform estimated that short answers make up less than five percent of Edgenuity's course content, and many of the eight students The Verge spoke to for this story confirmed that such tasks were a minority of their work. Still, the tactic has certainly impacted Lazare's class performance — he's now getting 100s on every assignment.

Original Submission