 Researchers Call Chronic Inflammation 'A Substantial Public Health Crisis'
UPI reports:
Roughly half of all deaths worldwide are caused by inflammation-related diseases. Now, a team of international researchers is calling on physicians to focus greater attention on the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of severe, chronic inflammation so that people can live longer, healthier lives.
In a commentary published Friday in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers at 22 institutions describe how persistent and severe inflammation in the body is often a precursor for
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Will Plunging Battery Prices Start a Boom In Electric Power?
An anonymous reader quotes Utility Dive:
Average market prices for battery packs have plunged from $1,100 per kilowatt hour in 2010 to $156 per kilowatt hour in 2019, an 87% fall in real terms, according to a report released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). Prices are projected to fall to around $100 per kilowatt hour by 2023, driving electrification across the global economy, according to BNEF's forecast. BNEF's latest forecast, from its 2019 Battery Price Survey, is an exampl
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'Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?'
ProPublica has determined that dozens of state and local agencies have purchased "SCAN" training from a company called LSI for reviewing a suspect's written statements -- even though there's no scientific evidence that it works.
Local, state and federal agencies from the Louisville Metro Police Department to the Michigan State Police to the U.S. State Department have paid for SCAN training. The LSI website lists 417 agencies nationwide, from small-town police departments to the military, th
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Volkswagen Headquarters Raided Again After They Disclosed New Diesel Filtering 'Issue'
"Reuters is reporting that German public prosecutors have again raided the Wolfsburg headquarters of Volkswagen in the latest investigation into the carmaker's diesel emissions," writes Slashdot reader McGruber.
The purpose of the raid was to "confiscate documents," the article reports:
Volkswagen, which admitted in 2015 to cheating U.S. emissions tests on diesel engines, said it was fully cooperating with the authorities, but viewed the investigation as unfounded.... The carmaker said it h
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The U.S. Considers Ban on Exporting Surveillance Technology To China
The South China Morning Post reports that the U.S. may be taking a stand against China. This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a new bill that would "tighten export controls on China-bound U.S. technology that could be used to 'suppress individual privacy, freedom of movement and other basic human rights' [and] ordering the U.S. president, within four months of the legislation's enactment, to submit to Congress a list of Chinese officials deemed responsible for, or complicit in, huma
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Remembering Star Trek Writer DC Fontana, 1939-2019
Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger brings the news that D. C. Fontana, an influential story editor and writer on the original 1960s TV series Star Trek, has died this week. People reports:
The writer is credited with developing the Spock character's backstory and "expanding Vulcan culture," SyFy reported of her massive contribution to the beloved sci-fi series. Fontana was the one who came up with Spock's childhood history revealed in "Yesteryear," an episode in Star Trek: The Animated Seri
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Jury Sides With Elon Musk, Rejects $190M Defamation Claim Over Tweet
Aighearach (Slashdot reader #97,333) shared this story from Reuters:
Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk emerged victorious on Friday from a closely watched defamation trial as a federal court jury swiftly rejected the $190 million claim brought against him by a British cave explorer who Musk had branded a "pedo guy" on Twitter. The unanimous verdict by a panel of five women and three men was returned after roughly 45 minutes of deliberation on the fourth day of Musk's trial.
Legal experts believe i
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Why Is Russia's Suspected Internet Cable Spy Ship In the Mid-Atlantic?
"Russia's controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October," writes defense analyst H I Sutton this week in Forbes.
He adds that the ship "is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables."
Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System). I suspect that going dark on AIS is a deliberate measure to frustrate efforts to analy
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Apple Fails To Stop Class Action Lawsuit Over MacBook Butterfly Keyboards
Mark Wilson quotes BetaNews: Apple has failed in an attempt to block a class action lawsuit being brought against it by a customer who claimed the company concealed the problematic nature of the butterfly keyboard design used in MacBooks.
The proposed lawsuit not only alleges that Apple concealed the fact that MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air keyboards were prone to failure, but also that design defects left customers out of pocket because of Apple's failure to provide an effective fix.
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Hospitals' New Issue: A 'Glut' of Machines Making Alarm Sounds
"Tens of thousands of alarms shriek, beep and buzz every day in every U.S. hospital," reports Fierce Healthcare -- even though most of them aren't urgent, disturb the patients, and won't get immediate attention anyways:
The glut of noise means that the medical staff is less likely to respond. Alarms have ranked as one of the top 10 health technological hazards every year since 2007, according to the research firm ECRI Institute. That could mean staffs were too swamped with alarms to notice a
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How Fake News Is Still Fooling Facebook's Fact-Checking Systems
Slashdot reader peterthegreat321 shared an article from Medium's technology blog OneZero revealing the "cracks, loopholes, and limitations in Facebook's systems that bad actors are busily exploiting."
Facebook says it's proud of the progress it has made, though it acknowledges there's more to be done. "Multiple independent studies have found that we've cut the amount of fake news on Facebook by more than half since the 2016 election," the company said in a statement to OneZero. "That still me
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Scientists Propose Using Mountains To Build a New Type of Battery For Long-Term Energy Storage
An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage," says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Hunt and his collaborators have devised a novel system to complement lithium-ion battery use for energy storage over the long run: Mountain Gravity Energy Storage, or MGES for short. Similar to hydroelectric power, MGES involves st
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Hour of Code Will Teach Kids How To Use AI To Judge Who Is 'Awesome' Or Not
theodp writes: In 2003, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously faced expulsion from Harvard after launching FaceMash, a type of "hot or not" website for Harvard students that asked visitors to review pictures of female students and rate their attractiveness. So perhaps it's fitting that during next week's Hour of Code, Facebook-sponsored Code.org's signature tutorial will introduce schoolchildren aged 8 and up to Artificial Intelligence concepts by asking them to review pictures of fish and rate
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Recordings Reveal That Plants Make Ultrasonic Squeals When Stressed
Researchers have discovered that plants make airborne sounds when stressed, which they say "could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops," reports New Scientist. From the report: Itzhak Khait and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that tomato and tobacco plants made sounds at frequencies humans cannot hear when stressed by a lack of water or when their stem is cut. Microphones placed 10 centimeters from the plants picked up so
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Early Humans Domesticated Themselves, New Genetic Evidence Suggests
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: A new study -- citing genetic evidence from a disorder that in some ways mirrors elements of domestication -- suggests modern humans domesticated themselves after they split from their extinct relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, approximately 600,000 years ago. Domestication encompasses a whole suite of genetic changes that arise as a species is bred to be friendlier and less aggressive. In dogs and domesticated foxes, for example, m
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Anti-Vaxxer Arrested As Samoa Executes Mass-Vaccination Campaign To Stop Measles Outbreak
Koreantoast writes: The Samoan government arrested a prominent local anti-vaxxer who was attempting to disrupt a mass vaccination campaign to stop an ongoing measles epidemic. Edwin Tamasese was arrested and charged with incitement, facing up to two years in prison after attempting to dissuade people from participating in the mass vaccination campaign and encouraging unproven "alternative treatments" such as Vitamin C supplements and papaya leaf extract. The small island nation of Samoa is curre
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Qualcomm To Offer GPU Driver Updates On Google Play Store For Some Snapdragon Chips
MojoKid writes: At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii this week, Qualcomm unveiled the new Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, which enable next year's flagship 5G Android phones with more performance, a stronger Tensor-based AI processor and a very interesting new forthcoming feature not yet offered for any smartphone platform to date. The company announced that it will eventually start delivering driver updates for its Adreno GPU engines on board the Snapdragon 865 as downloadable packages via
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Deepfake Porn Is Evolving To Give People Total Control Over Women's Bodies
samleecole shares a report from Motherboard: A lineup of female celebrities stand in front of you. Their faces move, smile, and blink as you move around them. They're fully nude, hairless, waiting for you to decide what you'll do to them as you peruse a menu of sex positions. This isn't just another deepfake porn video, or the kind of interactive, 3D-generated porn Motherboard reported on last month, but a hybrid of both which gives people even more control of women's virtual bodies. This new ty
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Social Media Platforms Leave 95 Percent of Reported Fake Accounts Up, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The report comes this week from researchers with the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence (StratCom). Through the four-month period between May and August of this year, the research team conducted an experiment to see just how easy it is to buy your way into a network of fake accounts and how hard it is to get social media platforms to do anything about it. The research team spent about $332 to purchase engagement on Facebook, I
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Trump Administration Drops Plans For Mandatory Face Scans of Citizens
schwit1 shares a report from U.S. News & World Report: The Department of Homeland Security is dropping plans to propose a regulation requiring all travelers -- including U.S. citizens -- to have their photos taken and faces scanned by facial recognition technology when entering and exiting the country, according to multiple reports. The proposed rule was slated to be issued in July of next year and would be part of a larger effort by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to better track those w
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FTC Finds Cambridge Analytica Deceived Facebook Users
The Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that they had found Cambridge Analytica deceived consumers about the collection of Facebook data for voter profiling and targeting. "The [FTC] also found that Cambridge Analytica engaged in deceptive practices relating to its participation in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework -- a pact on the cross-border transfer of personal data," adds Reuters. From the report: The agency order prohibits Cambridge Analytica from misrepresenting the extent to which
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Apple May Use Carbon-Free Aluminum In New iPhones
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is taking delivery this month of the first batch of carbon-free aluminum produced by a Montreal-based venture, helping move the iPhone maker closer to its greenhouse-gas reduction goal. Elysis, a joint venture between Rio Tinto Group and Alcoa Corp. backed by Apple, uses new technology that emits pure oxygen when producing aluminum. Apple has said in an environment report that 80% of its emissions from an iPhone 8 came during the producti
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European Plan To Tackle Space Debris? Hug it Out
The European Space Agency is working to tackle the issue of space debris with the technological version of a big hug. From a report: It hopes to be able to use tentacle-like mechanical arms to embrace a dead satellite and remove it from orbit. Other options considered include casting a net over the object, using a single robotic arm or firing a harpoon. At Esa's ministerial council last month, the agency allocated $450 million to space safety programmes, some of which will go towards a mission a
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EU Study Shows Online Piracy is Complex and Not Easy To Grasp
The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has released a new study which suggests that piracy is dropping in Europe. While the research is limited to site-based piracy, it has some interesting findings. Countries with a lower average income per person visit pirate sites more often, for example. In addition, the study shows that awareness of legal options doesn't always decrease piracy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Keep Your IoT Devices on a Separate Network, FBI Says
The FBI says owners of IoT (Internet of Things) devices should isolate this equipment on a separate WiFi network, different from the one they're using for their primary devices, such as laptops, desktops, or smartphones. From a report: "Your fridge and your laptop should not be on the same network," the FBI's Portland office said in a weekly tech advice column. "Keep your most private, sensitive data on a separate system from your other IoT devices," it added. The same advice -- to keep devices
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NFL Turns To Amazon For Help Addressing Player Injuries
After signing a pact with the Seattle Seahawks last week, Amazon Web Service announced a much larger deal with the NFL to use its technology to address concussions and other devastating injuries. From a report: AWS will provide artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to the NFL with the hope that eventually, the league will be able to predict the risk of player injuries, it announced on Thursday. Amazon Rekognition, Amazon ML Solutions Lab and Amazon SageMaker will be used by the NFL'
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GM And LG Chem Plan $2.3 Billion Electric Battery Venture In Ohio
General Motors and LG Chemical plan to make battery cells for electric-powered vehicles, unveiling a joint venture that they expect to create more than 1,100 jobs in northeast Ohio. The companies say they'll invest up to $2.3 billion in the venture. From a report: The project is centered around Lordstown, Ohio, where GM shuttered a plant last March that had produced the Chevrolet Cruze. The new plant in the Lordstown area will make battery cells for GM's upcoming all-electric vehicles, from a Ca
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W3C Recommends WebAssembly To Push the Limits For Speed, Efficiency and Responsiveness
The WebAssembly Working Group has published today the three WebAssembly specifications as W3C Recommendations, marking the arrival of a new language for the Web which allows code to run in the browser. From a report: WebAssembly Core Specification defines a low-level virtual machine which closely mimicks the functionality of many microprocessors upon which it is run. Either through Just-In-Time compilation or interpretation, the WebAssembly engine can perform at nearly the speed of code compiled
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Bernie Sanders Unveils $150 Billion Plan To Expand High-Speed Internet Access
On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) announced a new plan aimed at expanding broadband internet access across the country and dismantling what he referred to as "internet and cable monopolies." From a report: In his sweeping "High-Speed Internet for All" proposal, Sanders calls for broadband to be considered a public utility, much like electricity, and calls access "a basic human right." The plan would provide $150 billion in grants and technical assistance to states and communities for the pur
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Keybase Moves To Stop Onslaught of Spammers on Encrypted Message Platform
From a report: Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file shar
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Fractured Forests Are Endangering Wildlife, Scientists Find
The world's forests are being carved into pieces. In tropical regions, animals are likely to pay a heavy price. From a report: Around the world, humans are fracturing vast forests. Highways snake through the Amazon's rain forests, and Indonesia plans an ambitious transportation grid in Borneo, through some of the largest untouched expanses of tropical forests. If you were to parachute at random into any of the planet's forests, you'd probably land a mile or less from its edge, according to a rec
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Scientists Fed an Ancient Earth Organism Space Metals. It Started 'Dancing'
Scientists have discovered that a single-celled organism, a descendant of some of the earliest living creatures on Earth, is able to colonize a meteorite, growing and synthesizing nutrients. From a report: Their experiment, published on Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, may give us a way to look for the signatures of past life on other planets. "This process was very enigmatic and exciting, how the chemical energy of a stone fragment can be transformed into the biochemical energy of a li
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Netflix Is Spending $420 Million on Indian Content, CEO Says
Netflix is plowing 30 billion rupees ($420 million) this year and next to produce more local content in India, one of the biggest and most-crowded markets for the world's largest paid streaming-service provider. From a report: "You'll start to see a lot of stuff hit the screen, big investment," Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings said at an event in New Delhi on Friday. "We're really trying to invest in that becoming more Indian in the content offering." The Los Gatos, California-based company
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142,000 People, Mostly Children, Died From Measles In 2018
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: More than 140,000 people died from measles last year as the number of cases around the world surged once again, official estimates suggest. Most of the lives cut short were children aged under five. The situation has been described by health experts as staggering, an outrage, a tragedy and easily preventable with vaccines. Huge progress has been made since the year 2000, but there is concern that incidence of measles is now edging up. In 2018, the U.K. - al
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A Two-Hour Fan-Made Audio Drama About BioShock
sandbagger writes: BioShock: After Midnight is an original story detailing events that took place in Rapture before the protagonist of the first BioShock game arrived at the city of Rapture. It's a sprawling noir story, following a private eye, an Adam fiend whose fallen in love with Atlas, and the crazed cult members of Sofia Lamb.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Fukushima Melted Fuel Removal Begins 2021, End State Unknown
Japan's economy and industry ministry said Monday that it will start removing melted fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2021. The milestone step of debris removal is considered the most difficult part of cleaning up the crisis-hit facility. ABC News reports: Nearly nine years after [the Fukushima nuclear power plant was wrecked by a massive earthquake and tsunami], the decommissioning of the plant, where three reactors melted, remains largely an uncertainty. The revised road
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Nestle Cannot Claim Bottled Water Is 'Essential Public Service,' Court Rules
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Michigan's second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestle's Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company's commercial water-bottling operation is "not an essential public service" or a public water supply. The court of appeals ruling is a victory for Osceola township, a small mid-Michigan town that blocked Nestle from building a pumping station that doesn't comply with its zoning laws. But the case could also throw a wrench in Ne
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The Case For Portland-To-Vancouver High-Speed Rail
At the Cascadia Rail Summit outside Seattle, a fledgling scheme to bring high-speed rail from Portland to Vancouver found an enthusiastic reception. Gregory Scruggs writes via CityLab: Only 175 miles separate Portland from Seattle. Then it's another 140 miles north to Vancouver, British Columbia. The three Pacific Northwest cities, which together form the Cascadia megaregion, are currently served by Amtrak service that tops out at 79 mph, shares track with BNSF freight trains, and runs infrequen
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Most of the Largest US Voting Districts Are Vulnerable To Email Spoofing
Researchers at Valimail found that only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Valimail, which has a commercial stake in the email security space, looked at the largest three electoral districts in each U.S. state, and found only 10 out of 187 domains were protected with DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender's email and rejects fraudulent or spoofed ema
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Snapdragon XR2 Chip To Enable Standalone Headsets With 3K x 3K Resolution, 7 Cameras
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Road to VR: Qualcomm today announced Snapdragon XR2 5G, its latest chipset platform dedicated to the needs of standalone VR and AR headsets. The new platform is aimed at high-end devices with support for 3K x 3K displays at 90Hz, along with integrated 5G, accelerated AI processing, and up to seven simultaneous camera feeds for user and environment tracking. While XR1 was made for low-end devices, XR2 5G targets high-end standalone headsets, making it a ca
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Apple Will Reportedly Release An iPhone Without Any Ports In 2021
Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says there will be four new OLED iPhone models in 2020, followed by a new iPhone without a Lightning port in 2021. 9to5Mac reports: In 2021, Kuo is predicting a followup to the iPhone SE 2 as well as a new iPhone model without Lightning connectivity. Kuo says that this would "provide the completely wireless experience," meaning there would be no ports at all rather than a switch to USB-C from Lightning. Kuo implies that Apple only plans to remove the Lightning port fro
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The US Is Suspected of Killing a Terrorist In Syria Using Missile With Knife Warhead
pgmrdlm shares a report from Business Insider: A suspected terrorist in Syria was reportedly killed with a rare U.S. missile packed with swords, according to multiple reports. The weapon that shredded the car did not explode. While the driver's side was torn apart, the vehicle was actually mostly intact. The deadly precision weapon was, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal in May, designed by the U.S. to reduce civilian casualties. The Journal noted that the R9X has been used cover
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Filmmakers Sue State Department Over Social Media Surveillance Rules
A group of filmmakers have sued the State Department for making visa applicants hand over details about their social media accounts. "The lawsuit argues that the requirement unconstitutionally discourages applicants from speaking online -- and, conversely, discourages people who post political speech from trying to enter the U.S.," reports The Verge. From the report: This lawsuit, filed by the Doc Society and the International Documentary Association, challenges the decision on First Amendment g
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China Resurrects Great Cannon For DDoS Attacks On Hong Kong Forum
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: After more than two years since it's been used the last time, the Chinese government deployed an infamous DDoS tool named the "Great Cannon" to launch attacks against LIHKG, an online forum where Hong Kong residents are organizing anti-Beijing protests. [...] DDoS attacks with the Great Cannon have been rare, mainly because they tend to generate a lot of bad press for the Chinese government. But in a report published today, AT&T Cybersecurity s
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44 Million Microsoft Users Reused Passwords in the First Three Months of 2019
The Microsoft threat research team scanned all Microsoft user accounts and found that 44 million users were employing usernames and passwords that leaked online following security breaches at other online services. From a report: The scan took place between January and March 2019. Microsoft said it scanned user accounts using a database of over three billion leaked credentials, which it obtained from multiple sources, such as law enforcement and public databases. The scan effectively helped Micr
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Advocates Call For FTC Probe of 'Kidtech'
A collection of 31 advocacy groups is pressing the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to dig into how digital media companies advertise to children and collect their data. From a report: The request for the FTC to use its subpoena authority to probe so-called kidtech companies comes as the agency considers updates to how it implements a children's online privacy law. The coalition, which includes the Center for Digital Democracy and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, argues the FTC
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The Most Copied StackOverflow Java Code Snippet Contains a Bug
The admission comes from the author of the snippet itself, Andreas Lundblad, a Java developer at Palantir, and one of the highest-ranked contributors to StackOverflow, a Q&A website for programming-related topics. From a report: An academic paper [PDF] published in 2018 identified a code snippet Lundblad posted on the site as the most copied Java code taken from StackOverflow and then re-used in open source projects. The code snippet was provided as an answer to a StackOverflow question post
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Facebook Sues Chinese Malware Operator For Abusing Its Ad Platform
Facebook today filed a lawsuit against a Chinese company and two Chinese nationals for abusing the Facebook ad platform to run a malware scheme. From a report: The accused are ILikeAd Media International Company, a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2016, and Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao, the two men behind it. Facebook said today that ILikeAd used Facebook ads to lure victims into downloading and installing malware. Once installed, the malware would compromise victims' Facebook accounts and use
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New Linux Vulnerability Lets Attackers Hijack VPN Connections
An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found a new vulnerability allowing potential attackers to hijack VPN connections on affected *NIX devices and inject arbitrary data payloads into IPv4 and IPv6 TCP streams. They disclosed the security flaw tracked as CVE-2019-14899 to distros and the Linux kernel security team, as well as to others impacted such as Systemd, Google, Apple, OpenVPN, and WireGuard. The vulnerability is known to impact most Linux distributions and Unix-like operating
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The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders
Shannon Bond, writing for NPR: Inside a bright red building in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, cooks plunge baskets of french fries into hot oil, make chicken sandwiches and wrap falafel in pita bread. If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, it's a familiar scene. But what's missing here are waiters and customers. Every dish is placed in a to-go box or bag. Delivery drivers line up in a waiting area ready for the name on their order to be called. Behind the counter, racks of metal she
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Lawmakers Are Ready To Crack Down on Robocalls
A shared hatred of robocalls is one issue uniting the House during a divisive impeachment inquiry. From a report: House lawmakers yesterday passed a bipartisan bill aimed to crack down on the fraudulent auto-dial callers by a nearly unanimous 417-to-3 vote. The legislation, known as the TRACED Act, now moves to the Senate, where it is co-sponsored by Senate GOP Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and is expected to pass. The bill's passage amid broad Congressional gridlock -- on the very day the House Judi
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SpaceX Sends Dragon Soaring To the ISS
A Falcon 9 rocket launched on Thursday from Florida, delivering its Dragon spacecraft into orbit. From a report: The first stage then made a safe landing on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. The company's webcast ended without any coverage of the second stage's six-hour coast to demonstrate a capability for an unnamed customer. This was the tenth Falcon 9 launch of 2019. Overall the rocket has now launched 76 times. Sometime in 2020, among rockets in active service, the Falcon 9 will
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A Billion Surveillance Cameras Forecast To Be Watching Within Two Years
As governments and companies invest more in security networks, hundreds of millions more surveillance cameras will be watching the world in 2021, mostly in China, according to a new report. From a report: The report, from industry researcher IHS Market, to be released Thursday, said the number of cameras used for surveillance would climb above 1 billion by the end of 2021. That would represent an almost 30% increase from the 770 million cameras today. China would continue to account for a little
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The One-Traffic-Light Town With Some of the Fastest Internet in the US
Connecting rural America to broadband is a popular talking point on the campaign trail. In one Kentucky community, it's already a way of life. From a report: McKee, an Appalachian town of about twelve hundred tucked into the Pigeon Roost Creek valley, is the seat of Jackson County, one of the poorest counties in the country. There's a sit-down restaurant, Opal's, that serves the weekday breakfast-and-lunch crowd, one traffic light, a library, a few health clinics, eight churches, a Dairy Queen,
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Scientists' Brains Shrank a Bit After an Extended Stay in Antarctica
Socially isolated and faced with a persistently white polar landscape, a long-term crew of an Antarctic research station saw a portion of their brains shrink during their stay, a small study finds. From a report: "It's very exciting to see the white desert at the beginning," says physiologist Alexander Stahn, who began the research while at Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin. "But then it's always the same." The crew of eight scientists and researchers and a cook lived and worked at the German r
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World's Most-Isolated City Lures NASA Talent in Hunt for Resources Tech
It was a video of a waving robot that attracted NASA to the world's most isolated city. Engineers at Woodside Petroleum Ltd. in Perth, Australia, were just "messing around" teaching a toy robot to wave when they filmed it, Chief Technology Officer Shaun Gregory told a conference recently, but NASA liked what it saw. From a report: The U.S. space agency got in touch, and the two are now studying how to use robot technology to tackle problems in remote and difficult locations. This sort of collabo
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Hackers Trick Venture Capital Firm Into Sending Them $1 Million
Security researchers at Check Point say the company has uncovered evidence that Chinese hackers
managed to hijack $1 million in seed money during a wire transfer between a Chinese venture capital firm and an Israeli startup -- without either side realizing anything was wrong. From a report: The VC firm and the startup, whose names Check Point hasn't released, reached out to the security firm after the funds failed to arrive. Once Check Point dug into the details, it discovered a man in the midd
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Huawei Launches New Legal Challenge Against US Ban
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has launched a legal challenge to a decision by US regulators to classify it as a national security threat. From a report: It comes after the US Federal Communications Commission put curbs on rural mobile providers using a $8.5bn government fund to buy Huawei equipment. The firm said evidence that it was a threat to security "does not exist." The move is the latest in a series of challenges between Huawei and the US. The company has asked the US Court of Appeal to o
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FCC Says Wireless Carriers Lie About Coverage 40% of the Time
A new FCC study confirms what most people already knew: when it comes to wireless coverage maps, your mobile carrier is often lying to you. From a report: If you head to any major wireless carrier website, you'll be inundated with claims of coast to coast, uniform availability of wireless broadband. But, as countless studies have shown, these claims usually have only a tenuous relation to reality, something you've likely noticed if you've ever driving across the country or stopped by mobile carr
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US Shows a 'Concerning Lack of Regard For the Privacy of People's Biometrics'
Mark Wilson shares a report from BetaNews: When it comes to the extensive and invasive use of biometric data, the USA is one of the worst offenders in the world, faring only slightly better than China. According to research conducted by Comparitech, which rated 50 countries according to how, where and why biometrics were taken and how they are stored, the U.S. ranked as the fourth worst country. Topping the list is China, followed by Malaysia and Pakistan.
While Comparitech did not look at e
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Even 50-Year-Old Climate Models Correctly Predicted Global Warming
sciencehabit writes: Climate change doubters have a favorite target: climate models. They claim that computer simulations conducted decades ago didn't accurately predict current warming, so the public should be wary of the predictive power of newer models. Now, the most sweeping evaluation of these older models -- some half a century old -- shows most of them were indeed accurate. "How much warming we are having today is pretty much right on where models have predicted," says the study's lead au
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Qualcomm's Snapdragon 765 Chip Could Usher In the First Affordable 5G Phones
In addition to the flagship Snapdragon 865 processor, Qualcomm announced details about its other new chip, the midrange Snapdragon 765. "The 765 might actually be the more interesting of the two, thanks to its integrated 5G modem and its likely future of powering cheaper, midrange devices," reports The Verge. From the report: Right now, there's not a lot of 5G devices out there, and the ones that are around tend to be very expensive. The upcoming 865 might help with that. By default, it'll only
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New Iranian Wiper Discovered In Attacks On Middle Eastern Companies
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: IBM X-Force, the company's security unit, has published a report of a new form of "wiper" malware connected to threat groups in Iran and used in a destructive attack against companies in the Middle East. The sample was discovered in a response to an attack on what an IBM spokesperson described as "a new environment in the [Middle East] -- not in Saudi Arabia, but another regional rival of Iran." Dubbed ZeroCleare, the malware is "a likely co
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Rivers Could Generate 2,000 Nuclear Power Plants Worth of Energy With 'Blue' Membrane
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Green energy advocates may soon be turning blue. A new membrane could unlock the potential of 'blue energy,' which uses chemical differences between fresh- and saltwater to generate electricity. If researchers can scale up the postage stamp -- size membrane in an affordable fashion, it could provide carbon-free power to millions of people in coastal nations where freshwater rivers meet the sea. Blue energy's promise stems from its scale: Rivers
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TikTok's Parent Company Sued For Collecting Data On Kids
TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is being sued after allegedly violating child privacy laws and collecting the data of young users through the video app, which was formerly called Musical.ly. The Verge reports: ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017, which it later rebranded as the enormously popular social video app TikTok. According to the December 3rd complaint, ByteDance has collected data from Musical.ly users under the age of 13 without their parents' explicit consent "since at least 201
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Ford Will Turn McDonald's Used Coffee Bean Husks Into Car Parts
Ford will soon start using coffee chaff from McDonald's to manufacture auto parts like headlamp housings and other interior and exterior components. "In addition to making Ford vehicles a little bit 'greener,' the coffee chaff -- or the waste produced by coffee during the roasting process -- will apparently also help the company make parts that are 20 percent lighter," reports Engadget. From the report: Ford already uses various sustainable materials like soy and tree cellulose in an effort to o
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China Gene-Edited Baby Experiment 'May Have Created Unintended Mutations'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The gene editing performed on Chinese twins to immunize them against HIV may have failed and created unintended mutations, scientists have said after the original research was made public for the first time. Excerpts from the manuscript were released by the MIT Technology Review to show how Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui ignored ethical and scientific norms in creating the twins Lula and Nana, whose birth in late 2018 sent shockwaves throug
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Apple's Activation Lock Will Make It Very Difficult To Refurbish Macs
Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that's equipped with Apple's new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock," writes iFixit's Craig Lloyd. What this means is that there will likely be thousands of perfectly good Macs being parted out or scrapped instead of being put into the hands of people
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Google Halts Political Ads In Singapore As Election Looms
Google has stopped accepting political ads in Singapore months before a widely expected election. Reuters reports: In email correspondence between the Singapore Democratic Party and a senior Google public policy official, the tech firm said it "will not accept advertising regulated by the Code of Practice for Transparency of Online Political Advertisements." The new code of practice, part of a controversial 'fake news' law introduced in October, requires advertising intermediaries to maintain de
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Study That Argued EVs Aren't Cleaner Gets an Update
An anonymous reader shares an update to a 2017 study from the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute that claimed the manufacturing of big batteries for electric vehicles generates so much emissions that all later savings are canceled out. "Based on the data that it had to work with, the institute's study put the emissions at 150-200 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity -- one of the highest estimates that has been published," reports Ars Technica. "But IVL re
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Microsoft is Still Planning a Cheaper, Disc-Less Next-Gen Xbox, Report Says
In June, Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, a new iteration of the Xbox that the company said would "set a new bar for console power, speed and performance." What Microsoft didn't say is that it is also working on a lower-cost, disc-less version of Scarlett, code-named Lockhart, Kotaku reported Wednesday, citing four people briefed on the company's plans. From a report: If those names sound familiar, that's because they've been floating around for a while. The earliest rumors about Microsoft'
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Google Fiber Eliminates 100Mbps Plan For New Customers
Google Fiber, the division of Google parent company Alphabet that provides fiber-to-the-premises service in the U.S., will no longer sell 100Mbps broadband plans to new customers. From a report: In a blog post this morning, Fiber announced that it'll only offer gigabit (1,000Mbps) plans going forward in all 18 regions where it's launched to date. The gigabit plan's pricing -- $70 per month -- won't change, nor will its terms. (There's no data cap or throttle to speak of.) And starting tomorrow,
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NASA Spacecraft Unraveling Sun's Mysteries as it Spirals Closer To Our Star
In August of last year, NASA sent a spacecraft hurtling toward the inner Solar System, with the aim of getting some answers about the mysterious star at the center of our cosmic neighborhood. Now more than a year later, that tiny robot has started to decode some of the mysteries surrounding our Sun's behavior, after venturing closer to our parent star than any human-made object has before. From a report: That spacecraft is NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized vehicle designed to withstand temp
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The iPhone 11 Pro's Location Data Puzzler
Brian Krebs: One of the more curious behaviors of Apple's new iPhone 11 Pro is that it intermittently seeks the user's location information even when all applications and system services on the phone are individually set to never request this data. Apple says this is by design, but that response seems at odds with the company's own privacy policy. The privacy policy available from the iPhone's Location Services screen says, "If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-
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Amazon Proposes a Home Robot that Asks You Questions When It's Confused
An anonymous reader shares a report: AI models invariably encounter ambiguous situations that they struggle to respond to with instructions alone. That's problematic for autonomous agents tasked with, say, navigating an apartment, because they run the risk of becoming stuck when presented with several paths. To solve this, researchers at Amazon's Alexa AI division developed a framework that endows agents with the ability to ask for help in certain situations. Using what's called a model-confusio
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The Curse of Outdated DRM Claims Another Vicim, 'Tron: Evolution'
As of this week, players who owned a legitimate copy of Tron: Evolution they paid for but never played it, no longer can. From a report: Tron: Evolution, a tie-in game for the 2010 Tron: Legacy film, used SecurRom, a form of digital rights management (DRM), and publisher Disney hasn't paid its bill. This means Disney can no longer authenticate purchases and "unlock" copies of the game that people bought but haven't used yet. Players first noticed they couldn't play the game after purchasing it i
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Hyperscale Data Center Spending Hits Record $31B In Q3
The fastest-growing data center market segment returned to growth mode in the third quarter of 2019, with global hyperscale capex spending exceeding $31 billion, up 8 percent year over year. From a report: The $31 billion is the second-highest spending quarter in history in terms of the amount hyperscale operators -- led by Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft -- are spending on building, expanding and equipping data centers, according to IT research and market firm Synergy Research Gro
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Climate Change is Forcing One Person From Their Home Every Two Seconds, Oxfam Says
Climate-fueled disasters have forced about 20 million people a year to leave their homes in the past decade -- equivalent to one every two seconds -- according to a new report from Oxfam. From a news report: This makes the climate the biggest driver of internal displacement for the period, with the world's poorer countries at the highest risk, despite their smaller contributions to global carbon pollution compared to richer nations. People are seven times more likely to be internally displaced b
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How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America
From a report: When the English translation of "The Three-Body Problem" was published in 2014, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction. President Barack Obama praised the novel, calling it "just wildly imaginative." Mark Zuckerberg recommended it to his tens of millions of Facebook followers; George R.R. Martin blogged about it. Publishers around the world chased after translation rights, which eventually sold in 26 languages, including Turkish and Estonian. It won the 2015
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2020 US Census Plagued By Hacking Threats, Cost Overruns
Reuters reports: In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation's once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor. The bureau chose Pegasystems, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective. Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems, according to Reuters interviews with six technology professionals currently or formerl
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Two Malicious Python Libraries Caught Stealing SSH and GPG Keys
The Python security team removed two trojanized Python libraries from PyPI (Python Package Index) that were caught stealing SSH and GPG keys from the projects of infected developers. From a report: The two libraries were created by the same developer and mimicked other more popular libraries -- using a technique called typosquatting to register similarly-looking names. The first is "python3-dateutil," which imitated the popular "dateutil" library. The second is "jeIlyfish" (the first L is an I),
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In a First, Amazon Launches a Battery-powered Portable Echo Speaker in India
After launching nearly a dozen Echo speaker models in India in two years, Amazon said on Wednesday it is adding a new variant to the mix that addresses one of the most requested features from customers in the nation: Portability. From a report: The e-commerce giant today unveiled the Echo Input Portable Smart Speaker Edition, a new variant in the lineup that includes a built-in battery. The 4,800mAh enclosed battery will offer up to 10 hours of continuous music playing or up to 11 hours of stand
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Plex Launches Free, Ad-Supported Video Service in 200-Plus Countries, Territories
Media center app maker Plex officially launched its ad-supported video service with movies and TV shows from MGM, Warner Bros., Lionsgate and Legendary Wednesday. The service will be available in more than 200 countries and territories, making it the first ad-supported video service with a nearly global reach. From a report: Getting the rights to launch in so many countries was key to bringing ad-supported video to Plex, said CEO Keith Valory in a recent interview with Variety. "More than half o
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He Gave a Cryptocurrency Talk In North Korea. The US Arrested Him.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: He was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a "disruptive technologist" and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise as a force for good. But then, in April, Virgil Griffith traveled to North Korea with a visa he had obtained from a diplomatic mission in New York City, going through China to circumvent an American travel ban. He gave a talk at a conference in Pyongyang about how to use cryptocurrency and blockcha
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Brother of Drug Lord Pablo Escobar Launches 'Unbreakable' Foldable Smartphone
Roberto Escobar, brother of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, has announced a foldable smartphone that is "very difficult to break" thanks to the screen's "special type of plastic." The Escobar Fold 1, as it is called, significantly undercuts Samsung's Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X with a price of only $349. Neowin reports: While all the foldable phones announced so far have a price tag of at least $1,500+, the Escobar Fold 1 will be available from only $349 which includes free shipping and a ca
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India's Crashed Vikram Moon Lander Spotted On Lunar Surface
A NASA satellite has found India's Vikram lander, which crashed on the lunar surface in September. The Guardian reports: Nasa released an image taken by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that showed the site of the spacecraft's impact and associated debris field, with parts scattered over almost two dozen locations spanning several kilometers. In a statement, Nasa said it had released a mosaic image of the site on 26 September, inviting the public to search it for signs of the lander.
I
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Huawei Manages To Make Smartphones Without American Chips
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Huawei's latest phone, which it unveiled in September -- the Mate 30 with a curved display and wide-angle cameras that competes with Apple's iPhone 11 -- contained no U.S. parts, according to an analysis by UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, a Japanese technology lab that took the device apart to inspect its insides. In May, the Trump administration banned U.S. shipments to Huawei as trade tensions with Beijing escalated. That mo
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Ring Reportedly Outed Camera Owners To Police With a Heat Map
Amazon-owned home surveillance company Ring gave law enforcement a heat map that let police see all devices installed in an area, allowing them to view users down to the street level. CNET first reported the news. From a report: While the feature was removed in July, law enforcement could reportedly use the function to search for the concentration of cameras in a neighborhood, and even see circles drawn around individual user locations. The documents that revealed the feature were obtained by a
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FBI Asked Sony For Data On User Who Used PlayStation Network To Sell Cocaine
According to Motherboard, the FBI applied for a search warrant in October compelling Sony to provide data on a PlayStation 4 user who was allegedly part of a cocaine distribution network. The application even asks for what games the alleged drug dealer played, and his progress in them. From the report: "The Provider is hereby ordered to disclose the above information to the Government within 14 days of service of this warrant," the search warrant application, filed on October 22 in the Western D
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A Bug In Microsoft's Login System Put Users At Risk of Account Hijacks
Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its login system that could have been used to trick unsuspecting victims into giving over complete access to their online accounts. TechCrunch reports: The bug allowed attackers to quietly steal account tokens, which websites and apps use to grant users access to their accounts without requiring them to constantly re-enter their passwords. These tokens are created by an app or a website in place of a username and password after a user logs in. That keeps th
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Dutch Politician Faces 3 Years In Prison For Hacking iCloud Accounts, Leaking Nudes
An anonymous reader writes: "Dutch prosecutors have asked a judge for a three-year prison sentence for a local politician who doubled as a hacker and breached the personal iCloud accounts of more than 100 women, stealing and then leaking sexually explicit photos and videos online," reports ZDNet. The hacker (VVD politician Mitchel van der K.) is believed to have been part of the Celebgate (TheFappening) movement. Between 2015 and 2017, van der K. used credentials leaked at other sites to hack in
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FaceApp and Other Russian Apps Pose Potential Counterintelligence Threats, Says FBI
The FBI warned in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Monday that it considers mobile applications developed in Russia, including the popular photo-aging app "FaceApp," to be "potential counterintelligence threats." Axios reports: FaceApp is a Russian-owned mobile application that allows users to upload photos of themselves and see what they may look like at a different age. Experts warned about potential privacy and national security concerns when the app spiked in popular
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The Rise and Fall of the PlayStation Supercomputers
"On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation, The Verge shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers," writes Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket. From the report: Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's campus, sucking up energy and investigating astrophysics. It's a popular stop for tours trying to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their parents, and it's one of the few living legacies
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Amazon Unveils New Server Chip To Compete With Intel's Product
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services has developed a more powerful version of its own chips to power services for cloud-computing customers, as well as some of AWS's own programs. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy on Tuesday introduced a second-generation chip, called Graviton2, aimed at general-purpose computing tasks. He didn't specify a release date. The company last year unveiled its first line of Graviton chips, which it said would support new versions of its
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Google Founders Resign From Alphabet Leadership, Sundar Pichai Becomes CEO
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is adding another responsibility to his job: Pichai will also be the CEO of parent holding company Alphabet going forward, taking the helm from co-founder and longtime CEO Larry Page. From a report: Additionally, co-founder Sergey Brin will be resigning from his post as the president of Alphabet. Brin and Page jointly announced the leadership change in a blog post Tuesday afternoon, writing: "Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sun
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Amazon Introduces Fraud Detector and CodeGuru
Amazon is leveraging machine learning to fight fraud, audit code, transcribe calls, and index enterprise data. From a report: Today during a keynote at its Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, the tech giant debuted Amazon Fraud Detector, a fully managed service that detects anomalies in transactions, and CodeGuru, which automates code review while identifying the most "expensive" lines of code. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. With Fraud Detector (in previ
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Qualcomm's Next-gen Snapdragon 865 Mobile Chip Focuses on 5G
Qualcomm uncorked this year's version of its Snapdragon Technology Summit by announcing the names of its two new upcoming Snapdragon chips, the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765/765G. Not surprisingly, the emphasis this year is on 5G, and the "AI" which those chips will apply for software enhancements. From a report: Because this is the Snapdragon Technology Summit, we expect to hear more details of each of these chips in the coming days. For now, however, Qualcomm is just teasing the names
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Genius Sues Google For 'No Less Than $50M', Alleging 'Anticompetitive Practices' Over Lyrics
The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group, is suing Google for "unethical, unfair and anticompetitive" behavior. From a report: Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to drop because its lyrics -- which are annotated by its contributors -- are being copied, and then published by Google via the tech giant's lyrics partner, LyricFind. The lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday (December 3) and seeks "no less than $50 million" in "combined minimum damages" from both Go
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Russia To Upgrade Homegrown Encyclopedia After Putin Pans Wikipedia
Russia is to set up a new online site for its national encyclopedia after President Vladimir Putin said Wikipedia was unreliable and should be replaced. From a report: The move will ensure people can find "reliable information that is constantly updated on the basis of scientifically verified sources of knowledge," a government resolution said. Putin last month proposed replacing the crowd-sourced online encyclopedia Wikipedia with an electronic version of the Great Russian Encyclopaedia - the s
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