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upstart writes:

Why EFF Flew a Plane Over Apple's Headquarters:

For the last month, civil liberties and human rights organizations, researchers, and customers have demanded that Apple cancel its plan to install photo-scanning software onto devices. This software poses an enormous danger to privacy and security. Apple has heard the message, and announced that it would delay the system while consulting with various groups about its impact.

[...] The delay may well be a diversionary tactic. Every September, Apple holds one of its big product announcement events, where Apple executives detail the new devices and features coming out. Apple likely didn’t want concerns about the phone-scanning features to steal the spotlight.

But we can’t let Apple’s disastrous phone-scanning idea fade into the background, only to be announced with minimal changes down the road. To make sure Apple is listening to our concerns, EFF turned to an old-school messaging system: aerial advertising.

During Apple’s event, a plane circled the company’s headquarters carrying an impossible-to-miss message: Apple, don’t scan our phones! The evening before Apple’s event, protestors also rallied nationwide in front of Apple stores. The company needs to hear us, and not just dismiss the serious problems with its scanning plan. A delay is not a cancellation, and the company has also been dismissive of some concerns, referring to them as “confusion” about the new features.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Fossilized footprints show humans made it to North America much earlier than first thought:

North and South America were the last continents to be settled by humans, but exactly when that started is a topic that has divided archaeologists.

The commonly held view is that people arrived in North America from Asia via Beringia, a land bridge that once connected the two continents, at the end of the Ice Age around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago. But more recent -- and some contested -- discoveries have suggested humans might have been in North America earlier.

Now, researchers studying fossilized human footprints in New Mexico say they have the first unequivocal evidence that humans were in North America at least 23,000 years ago.

"The peopling of the Americas is one of those things that has been for many years very contentious and a lot of archeologists hold views with almost religious zeal," said Matthew Bennett, a professor and specialist in ancient footprints at Bournemouth University and author of a study on the new findings that published in the journal Science on Thursday.

"One of the problems is that there is very few data points," he added.

Bennett and his colleagues were able to accurately date 61 footprints by radiocarbon dating layers of aquatic plant seeds that had been preserved above and below them. The prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin in White Sands National Park, were made 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, the researchers found.

Journal Reference:
Matthew R. Bennett, David Bustos, Jeffrey S. Pigati, et al. Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum^[$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mapping words to colors:

No language has words for all the blues of a wind-churned sea or the greens and golds of a wildflower meadow in late summer. Globally, different languages have divvied up the world of color using their own set of labels, from just a few to dozens.

The question of how humans have done this -- ascribe a finite vocabulary to the multitude of perceivable colors -- has been long studied, and consistent patterns have emerged, even across wildly divergent languages and cultures. Yet slight differences among languages persist, and what is less understood is how the differing communicative needs of local cultures drive those differences. Do some cultures need to talk about certain colors more than others, and how does that shape their language?

In a new study, researchers led by Colin Twomey, [...] and Joshua Plotkin [...] address these questions, developing an algorithm capable of inferring a culture's communicative needs -- the imperative to talk about certain colors -- using previously collected data from 130 diverse languages.

Their findings underscore that, indeed, cultures across the globe differ in their need to communicate about certain colors. Linking almost all languages, however, is an emphasis on communicating about warm colors -- reds and yellows -- that are known to draw the human eye and that correspond with the colors of ripe fruits in primate diets.

"Their results were so astonishing," Plotkin says. "They demanded explanation."

Substantial research followed, some of which suggested that one major reason for the remarkable similarities between languages' color vocabularies came down to physiology.

"Languages differ, cultures differ, but our eyes are the same," says Plotkin.

But another reason for the overarching similarities could be that humans, regardless of what language they speak, are more interested in talking about certain colors than others.

Journal Reference:
Colin R. Twomey, Gareth Roberts, David H. Brainard, et al. What we talk about when we talk about colors [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2109237118)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tech giants quietly buy up dozens of companies a year. Regulators are finally noticing.:

A soaring number of mergers and acquisitions, many of them never publicly announced, is overwhelming antitrust regulators, a major problem for the Biden administration’s hopes of intensifying scrutiny of corporate power centers like Silicon Valley.

Already this year, companies across all industries have sought to buy or merge with others worth at least $92 million almost 3,000 times — roughly 40 percent more than before the pandemic in 2019 — according to federal data. Regulators at the Federal Trade Commission, charged with upholding competition laws alongside the Justice Department, are warning they are unable to adequately review this magnitude of activity.

Regulators and antitrust advocates are particularly worried about acquisitions by Silicon Valley giants. While big acquisitions, like Amazon’s plans to purchase MGM, are the subject of press scrutiny and regulatory attention, hundreds of other purchases fly under the radar because of financial market guidelines and antitrust laws, which only require companies to disclose their largest deals. As they seek to take on tech titans’ power, regulators are increasingly paying attention to how tech companies gobble up smaller potential competitors before they have a chance to develop enough to provide consumers with serious alternatives.

But limited resources, and what some regulators consider an outdated antitrust framework, represent a direct threat to the administration’s goal of cracking down on what it sees as excess corporate power in certain industries. The White House, key policymakers such as FTC Chair Lina Khan and progressives on Capitol Hill have signaled intense interest in taking on monopolies, and the inability to keep up with the pace of mergers represents a major challenge.

Courts also have been deeply skeptical of arguments that tech giants are illegal monopolies, issuing two recent decisions rejecting antitrust allegations made against Facebook and Apple.

That means the quiet and rapid acquisitions of other companies by tech giants is having an unforeseen effect on the economy, experts warn.

“We won’t know the effects of the concentration that’s happening for some time, and neither will the general public,” said Krista Brown, a senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, a liberal think tank that studies antitrust policy. “If we don’t have a record of what’s happening or what type of oversight and competition enforcement are working, then we will have missed an opportunity to know where things are slipping.”

The FTC requires companies to report every acquisition worth more than $92 million. In a study released Wednesday, the FTC said Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon together made 616 acquisitions from 2010 to 2019 that fell below that reporting threshold but were worth at least $1 million. Many of those acquisitions probably were never disclosed at all.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explains why Blue Origin’s Starship lawsuit makes no sense

[....] After the details broke in new court documents filed on Wednesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk weighed in on Twitter to offer his take on why the arguments Blue Origin has hinged its lawsuit on make very little sense.

Elon Musk tweeted:

We always do flight readiness reviews! This argument makes no sense.

[....] most of the opening argument is legible. In short, Blue Origin appears to have abandoned the vast majority of arguments it threw about prior to suing NASA and the US government and is now almost exclusively hinging its case on the claim that SpaceX violated NASA’s procurement process by failing to account for a specific kind of prelaunch review before every HLS-related Starship launch.

[....] As Blue Origin has exhaustively reminded anyone within earshot for the last five months, SpaceX’s Starship Moon lander proposal is extremely complex and NASA is taking an undeniable risk (of delays, not for astronauts) by choosing SpaceX. Nevertheless, NASA’s Kathy Lueders and a source evaluation panel made it abundantly clear in public selection statement that SpaceX’s proposal was by far the most competent, offering far a far superior management approach and technical risk no worse than Blue Origin’s far smaller, drastically less capable lander.

[....] Curiously, Blue Origin nevertheless does make a few coherent and seemingly fact-based arguments in the document. Perhaps most notably, it claims that when NASA ultimately concluded that it didn’t have funds for even a single award (a known fact) and asked SpaceX – its first choice – to make slight contract modifications to make the financial side of things work, NASA consciously chose to waive the need for an FRR before every HLS Starship launch. Only via purported cost savings from those waived reviews, Blue Origin claims, was NASA able to afford SpaceX’s proposal – which, it’s worth noting, was more than twice as cheap as the next cheapest option (Blue Origin).

One thing Blue Origin's New Shepard has going for it: suborbital hops don't need a "waste management system".

See also:
Judge Releases Redacted Lunar Lander Lawsuit from Bezos’ Blue Origin Against NASA-SpaceX Contract

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Apple turns post-lawsuit tables on Epic, will block Fortnite on iOS:

Weeks after Epic's apparent "win" against Apple in the Epic Games v. Apple case, Apple issued a letter denying Epic's request to have its developer license agreement reinstated until all legal options are exhausted. This effectively bans Fortnite and any other software from the game maker from returning to Apple's App Store for years.

Epic was handed an initial victory when the US District Court for Northern California issued an injunction on September 10 ordering Apple to open up in-game payment options for all developers. At the time, the injunction was something of a moral victory for Epic—allowing the developer to keep its in-game payment systems in its free-to-play Fortnite intact while avoiding paying Apple a 30 percent fee that had previously covered all in-app transactions.

But now Epic has faced a significant reversal of fortune.

The better thing would be to ban all micro-transactions. Instead this is more like a couple thieves divvying up the loot from the candy they stole from children. Sure, they didn't "steal anything", but kids aren't allowed to play the slot machines in Casinos, either.

Previously:
Apple Can No Longer Force Developers to Use In-App Purchasing, Judge Rules
Valve Gets Dragged into Apple and Epic’s Legal Fight Over Fortnite
Judge Dismisses Apple’s “Theft” Claims in Epic Games Lawsuit
Microsoft Thumbs its Nose at Apple With New “App Fairness” Policy
Your iPhone Copy of Fortnite is About to Become Out of Date [Updated]
Judge Issues Restraining Order Protecting Unreal Engine Development on iOS
Microsoft Issues Statement in Support of Epic Games to Remain on Apple Ecosystem
Epic-Apple Feud Could Also Affect Third-Party Unreal Engine Games
Fortnite Maker Sues Apple after Removal of Game From App Store

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Engineers Figured out how to Cook 3D-printed Chicken With Lasers :

Who hasn't dreamt of coming home after a long day and simply pressing a few buttons to get a hot, home-cooked 3D-printed meal, courtesy of one's digital personal chef? It might make microwaves and conventional frozen TV dinners obsolete. Engineers at Columbia University are trying to make that fantasy a reality, and they've now figured out how to simultaneously 3D-print and cook layers of pureed chicken, according to a recent paper published in the journal npj Science of Food. Sure, it's not on the same level as the Star Trek replicator, which could synthesize complete meals on demand, but it's a start.

[...] The scientists purchased raw chicken breast from a local convenience store and then pureed it in a food processor to get a smooth, uniform consistency. They removed any tendons and refrigerated the samples before repackaging them into 3D-printing syringe barrels to avoid clogging. The cooking apparatus used a high-powered diode laser, a set of mirror galvanometers (devices that detect electrical current by deflecting light beams), a fixture for custom 3D printing, laser shielding, and a removable tray on which to cook the 3D-printed chicken.

DannyB writes:

Congress to NASA: What comes after the International Space Station?

Questions of how long the station — already over 20 years old — can last and how international and industry partnerships might drive activity in low Earth orbit (LEO) filled a two-hour hearing held by the House Science, Space and Technology's subcommittee on space and aeronautics on Tuesday (Sept. 21). The International Space Station partners are currently committed to operating the orbiting laboratory until 2024. NASA has long argued that the facility is safe to occupy until at least 2028 and the U.S. space agency's Administrator Bill Nelson has endorsed keeping the station operational until 2030.

But some worry that pushing the lab so far beyond its design lifetime is courting disaster, particularly as a string of incidents have shown the facility's wizened age. (Construction of the station began in 1998.)

[....] "We did experience a gap in our transportation system when we retired the shuttle that we do not wish to repeat with our U.S. human presence in low Earth orbit," Robyn Gatens, NASA's director for the International Space Station (ISS), said during the hearing.

[....] "The first and foremost indicator is that we have commercial LEO destinations to transition to," Gatens said. "That may sound pretty obvious, but that's a prerequisite so that we don't have a gap in low Earth orbit." Other indicators include the structural health of the International Space Station and the development of commercial markets, she said.

What should America do next in space after the ISS?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Facebook paid FTC $4.9B more than required to shield Zuckerberg, lawsuit alleges:

In a newly unsealed lawsuit, Facebook shareholders allege that the company intentionally overpaid a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission fine to protect CEO Mark Zuckerberg from further government scrutiny.

"Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other Facebook directors agreed to authorize a multi-billion settlement with the FTC as an express quid pro quo to protect Zuckerberg from being named in the FTC's complaint, made subject to personal liability, or even required to sit for a deposition," the lawsuit says (emphasis in the original). An early draft of the order obtained by The Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act shows that the commission was considering holding Zuckerberg responsible.

The FTC levied the fine in July 2019 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw political operatives harvesting the personal data of 50 million Facebook users without their consent. (The lawsuit says only 0.31 percent of the affected users consented.) The fine (which was a record for privacy-related penalties) was 50 times larger than the maximum prescribed by a previous FTC consent decree, the lawsuit alleges. It was also well in excess of the previous record fine of $168 million.

"Facebook's maximum monetary exposure was $104,751,390—about $4.9 billion less than it agreed to pay," shareholders said in the lawsuit. The overpayment, they said, is a breach of fiduciary duty.

The lawsuit also alleges that, by withholding information about the Cambridge Analytica leak, executives and board members, including Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, engaged in insider trading. "After Zuckerberg learned of Cambridge Analytica's massive extraction of Facebook user data, he and the entities controlled by him significantly accelerated his sales of Facebook shares," the lawsuit says.

DannyB writes:

The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous:

The Intelligence Community has deployed ad-blocking technology, according to a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.

Lots of people who use ad blockers say they do it to block malicious ads that can sometimes hack their devices or harvest sensitive information on them. It turns out, the NSA, CIA, and other agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) are also blocking ads potentially for the same sorts of reasons.

The IC, which also includes the parts of the FBI, DEA, and DHS, and various DoD elements, has deployed ad-blocking technology on a wide scale, according to a copy of a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.

[...] In addition, Motherboard has reported on how data brokers may obtain information via a process called real-time bidding. Before an advertisement is placed into a person's app or browsing session, companies bid on whether their own advert will win the ad spot. As part of that process, participating companies can gather data on people, known as bidstream data, even if they don't win the ad placement.

[...] "This information would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns," the letter read.

If the preceding weren't bad enough, digital advertisers make bad tap dancers because they expect to be paid per click.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/we-need-software-updates-forever

I recently did some Marie Kondo–inspired housecleaning: Anything that didn't bring me joy got binned. In the process, I unearthed some old gadgets that made me smile. One was my venerable Nokia N95, a proto-smartphone, the first to sport GPS. Another was a craptastic Android tablet—a relic of an era when each year I would purchase the best tablet I could for less than $100 (Australian!), just to see how much you could get for that little. And there was my beloved Sony PlayStation Portable. While I rarely used it, I loved what the PSP represented: a high-powered handheld device, another forerunner of today's smartphone, though one designed for gaming rather than talking.

These nifty antiques shared a common problem: Although each booted up successfully, none of them really work anymore. In 2014, Nokia sold off its smartphone division to Microsoft in a fire sale; then Microsoft spiked the whole effort. These moves make my N95 an orphan product from a defunct division of a massive company. Without new firmware, it's essentially useless. My craptastic tablet and PSP similarly need a software refresh. Yet neither of them can log into or even locate the appropriate update servers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Leaked Apple Training Videos Show How It Undermines Third-Party Repair:

Leaked training videos Apple made for its authorized repair partners show how the company trains repair technicians to undermine third party companies and talk customers into buying more expensive first party repairs.

[...] The training videos are meant to help Apple’s certified repair stores navigate a world where customers can get replacement parts far cheaper than what Apple charges for basic repairs. For years, Apple has made it harder for independent repair stores to fix phones, nudging customers to go to Apple stores instead. In response, there's been a rising right-to-repair movement that wants to make it easier for people to repair their own stuff. 

Andrey Shumeyko, a member of a community of Apple enthusiasts that seek, publicize, and trade any kind of information that Apple would like to keep under wraps, sent the eight videos with Motherboard. The videos are not public, as they are only intended for Apple store employees and authorized independent repair technicians (these are called Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASP). Shumeyko said the videos were stored on an Apple platform, where a bug allowed him to access them without having to provide a login.    

AASP launched in 2016 as a way for some independent stores to make basic repairs to Apple devices. AASP stores must open their stores to unannounced audits by Apple, and face a mountain of restrictions on what they can and can’t fix.

upstart writes:

Elon Musk says Inspiration4 crew had 'challenges' with the toilet, promises upgrade:

SpaceX's Inspiration4 orbital mission with four non-professional astronauts was by all accounts quite a triumph for space history, space tourism and fundraising for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. However, there may have been some tense moments when it came to using the toilet on board the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted Monday night that the Inspiration4 crew had some "challenges" with the loo. He promised upgrades for future missions.

[...] SpaceX hasn't revealed much about how the toilet works, but Isaacman told Insider in July that the facilities were located near the spacecraft's large cupola window with a curtain to allow for a wee bit of privacy. He described the toilet as having "one hell of a view."

[...] Inspiration4 spent three days in orbit before returning to Earth with a splashdown on Saturday. That's three days of using the bathroom in microgravity while in very close quarters with others. Upon hearing of the mission's potty problems, bidet company Tushy said its product engineers were standing at the ready to develop the first ever space bidet, the Tushy Ass Blast 9000.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Smallest-Ever Human-Made Flying Structure Is A Winged Microchip, Scientists Say

It's neither a bird nor a plane, but a winged microchip as small as a grain of sand that can be carried by the wind as it monitors such things as pollution levels or the spread of airborne diseases.

The tiny microfliers, whose development by engineers at Northwestern University was detailed in an article published by Nature this week, are being billed as the smallest-ever human-made flying structures.

The devices don't have a motor; engineers were instead inspired by the maple tree's free-falling propeller seeds — technically known as samara fruit. The engineers optimized the aerodynamics of the microfliers so that "as these structures fall through the air, the interaction between the air and those wings cause a rotational motion that creates a very stable, slow-falling velocity," said John A. Rogers, who led the development of the devices.

[...] The wind would scatter the tiny microchips, which could sense their surrounding environments and collect information. The scientists say they could potentially be used to monitor for contamination, surveil populations or even track diseases.

Three-dimensional electronic microfliers inspired by wind-dispersed seeds

Journal Reference:
Bong Hoon Kim, Kan Li, Jin-Tae Kim, et al. Three-dimensional electronic microfliers inspired by wind-dispersed seeds, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03847-y)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new method for removing lead from drinking water: Engineers have designed a relatively low-cost, energy-efficient approach to treating water contaminated with heavy metals:

The new system is the latest in a series of applications based on initial findings six years ago by members of the same research team, initially developed for desalination of seawater or brackish water, and later adapted for removing radioactive compounds from the cooling water of nuclear power plants. The new version is the first such method that might be applicable for treating household water supplies, as well as industrial uses.

[...] The biggest challenge in trying to remove lead is that it is generally present in such tiny concentrations, vastly exceeded by other elements or compounds. For example, sodium is typically present in drinking water at a concentration of tens of parts per million, whereas lead can be highly toxic at just a few parts per billion. Most existing processes, such as reverse osmosis or distillation, remove everything at once, Alkhadra explains. This not only takes much more energy than would be needed for a selective removal, but it's counterproductive since small amounts of elements such as sodium and magnesium are actually essential for healthy drinking water.

The new approach uses a process called shock electrodialysis, in which an electric field is used to produce a shockwave inside an electrically charged porous material carrying the contaminated water. The shock wave propagates from one side to the other as the voltage increases, leaving behind a zone where the metal ions are depleted, and separating the feed stream into a brine and a fresh stream. The process results in a 95 percent reduction of lead from the outgoing fresh stream.

[...] The process still has its limitations, as it has only been demonstrated at small laboratory scale and at quite slow flow rates. Scaling up the process to make it practical for in-home use will require further research, and larger-scale industrial uses will take even longer.

Journal Reference:
Huanhuan Tian, Mohammad A. Alkhadra, Kameron M. Conforti, et al. Continuous and Selective Removal of Lead from Drinking Water by Shock Electrodialysis, ACS ES&T Water (DOI: 10.1021/acsestwater.1c00234)

Original Submission