By BeauHD from
Slashdot's big-ambitions department:
chiefcrash shares a report from The New York Times about a man who wants to build a community based on the blockchain technology introduced by Bitcoin: An enormous plot of land in the Nevada desert -- bigger than nearby Reno -- has been the subject of local intrigue since a company with no history, Blockchains L.L.C., bought it for $170 million in cash this year. The man who owns the company, a lawyer and cryptocurrency millionaire named Jeffrey Berns, put on a helmet and climbed into a Polaris off-road vehicle last week to give a tour of the sprawling property and dispel a bit of the mystery. He imagines a sort of experimental community spread over about a hundred square miles, where houses, schools, commercial districts and production studios will be built. The centerpiece of this giant project will be the blockchain, a new kind of database that was introduced by Bitcoin. So far, he said, he has spent $300 million on the land, offices, planning and a staff of 70 people. And buying 67,000 largely undeveloped acres is a bit of old-fashioned, real estate risk-taking. Still, Mr. Berns said his ambition was not to be a real estate magnate or even to get rich -- or richer. He is promising to give away all decision-making power for the project and 90 percent of any dividends it generates to a corporate structure that will be held by residents, employees and future investors. That structure, which he calls a "distributed collaborative entity," is supposed to operate on a blockchain where everyone's ownership rights and voting powers will be recorded in a digital wallet. "In a keynote spectacle at Devcon4 in Prague, Berns announced some of their plans for the future, as well as some of their recent activities, such as buying two nuclear bomb shelters, a mountain fortress in Switzerland, and a bank," adds Slashdot reader chiefcrash.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's stranger-things department:
An app you may have never heard about is growing at an impressive rate. From a report: Beijing-based ByteDance's 2017 acquisition of tween and teen-focused social app Musical.ly is paying off. The company this year merged Musical.ly with its own short video app TikTok as a means of entering the U.S. market. Today, the result of that merger is sitting at the top of the U.S. App Store, ahead of Facebook. More importantly, it recently surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat in monthly installs for the first time in September. According to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, TikTok's installs were higher than those of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in the U.S. last month. It surpassed the four other apps in terms of daily downloads on September 29, with 29.7 percent the downloads from this cohort of apps, the firm says. Further reading: China's King of Internet Fluff Wants to Conquer the World.
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Making Trains Run on Time
Posted by News Fetcher on November 02 '18 at 01:10 PM
By msmash from
Slashdot's closer-look department:
Plamen Angelov of the University of Lancaster, in Britain, has an idea that he hopes will make train delays rarer. From a report: Often, Dr Angelov observes, the problem is not the inefficiency of operators but the behaviour of passengers -- the "platform-train interface", to use railway parlance. When trains arrive, passengers crowd around the doors waiting to board, restricting the flow of those getting off. When they are about to depart, people often hold doors open, delaying that departure. (A recent study by Japan's Railway Bureau found that passengers attempting to board trains after their scheduled departure times accounted for almost 50% of delays.) Passengers also frequently stand too close to the carriages for safety. Waiting for malefactors to move back behind the yellow safety line on a platform might hold a train up for less than a minute. But over the course of a journey those minutes add up. Even a slight delay is compounded if it causes a train to slip out of its running order and be held at a subsequent station, or be required to follow a slower service. Dr Angelov thinks that applying artificial intelligence to the problem might help. And that is what he and his team are doing. Using images from the cctv cameras already mounted in carriages and on platforms, their system employs algorithms that have been trained to detect objects such as people, luggage, pushchairs and bicycles. It then measures the movements and positions of these objects relative to areas such as the train doors or the yellow safety line and uses this information to predict problems. The cameras in the carriages detect how busy particular doors are getting as passengers leave their seats and gather next to the exits when the train approaches a station. At the same time, the station cameras monitor the numbers waiting for the train to arrive, whereabouts they are standing along the platform, and how encumbered they are. The two sets of data can then be compared, providing warning of likely areas of congestion. This permits passengers -- particularly those on the platform -- to be directed to doors that will be less busy.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's new-lows-for-the-juggernaut department:
Multiple readers have shared a report: Apparently fueled by anti-Semitism and the bogus narrative that outside forces are scheming to exterminate the white race, Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish congregants as they gathered inside their Pittsburgh synagogue, federal prosecutors allege. But despite long-running international efforts to debunk the idea of a "white genocide," Facebook was still selling advertisers the ability to market to those with an interest in that myth just days after the bloodshed. Earlier this week, The Intercept was able to select "white genocide conspiracy theory" as a pre-defined "detailed targeting" criterion on the social network to promote two articles to an interest group that Facebook pegged at 168,000 users large and defined as "people who have expressed an interest or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory." The paid promotion was approved by Facebook's advertising wing. After we contacted the company for comment, Facebook promptly deleted the targeting category, apologized, and said it should have never existed in the first place. Our reporting technique was the same as one used by the investigative news outlet ProPublica to report, just over one year ago, that in addition to soccer dads and Arianna Grande fans, "the world's largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of 'Jew hater,' 'How to burn jews,' or, 'History of "why jews ruin the world."" The report exposed how little Facebook was doing to vet marketers, who pay the company to leverage personal information and inclinations in order to gain users' attention -- and who provide the foundation for its entire business model.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's how-about-that department:
An anonymous reader shares a report: When you ask him about the challenges facing the blockchain system he founded five years ago, Vitalik Buterin often launches into a rapid-fire lecture full of Ethereum-specific jargon. But ask him about his own role in the technology's future, and he quickly becomes more circumspect. There's no doubt that Buterin, 24, is still the guiding light for the idealistic community that has sprung up around his creation. That's been front and center this week in Prague, where thousands of developers, investors, and entrepreneurs have gathered for Devcon, the annual "family reunion" organized by the nonprofit Ethereum Foundation. The most popular discussion topic is Buterin's vision for "Ethereum 2.0," a future iteration meant to be capable of operating efficiently at a much larger scale -- and appeal to a much broader user base -- than it can today. But in a conversation with MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of Devcon, Buterin said it's time for him to start fading into the background as "a necessary part of the growth of the community."
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By msmash from
Slashdot's closer-look department:
For centuries, science was a multilingual affair, powered by French, German, English and other tongues. But since the early 1970s, English has become the undisputed lingua franca of scientific papers, conferences, and discourse. From a report: English-speaking countries now have a huge leg up in technical research, including the current rages -- artificial intelligence and quantum computing. But, while English is highly unlikely to be dethroned, its advantages are eroding due to an increasingly healthy research environment in China, the fast transmission of research papers across the internet, and AI-aided translation technology that is shrinking the language barrier. [...] The dominance of English gives native speakers a huge advantage, says Michael Gordin, a Princeton professor who specializes in the role of language in technological advance.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's ever-growing-list-of-holes department:
Intel processors are impacted by a new vulnerability that can allow attackers to leak encrypted data from the CPU's internal processes. From a report: The new vulnerability, which has received the codename of PortSmash, has been discovered by a team of five academics from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Technical University of Havana, Cuba. Researchers have classified PortSmash as a side-channel attack. In computer security terms, a side-channel attack describes a technique used for leaking encrypted data from a computer's memory or CPU, which works by recording and analyzing discrepancies in operation times, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks, or even sound to gain additional info that may help break encryption algorithms and recovering the CPU's processed data. Researchers say PortSmash impacts all CPUs that use a Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) architecture, a technology that allows multiple computing threads to be executed simultaneously on a CPU core. [...] Researchers say they've already confirmed that PortSmash impacts Intel CPUs which support the company's Hyper-Threading (HT) technology, Intel's proprietary implementation of SMT.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's show-and-tell department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Thursday, Russian officials held a press conference to reveal that they have determined what caused last month's Soyuz mid-flight failure. The culprit: a damaged sensor on one of the rocket's four boosters responsible for stage separation. With the investigation complete, the officials announced that they will move up the date of the next crew launch to the International Space Station. Russian space agency officials confirmed that the faulty sensor, designed to signal stage separation, had caused one of the boosters to improperly separate. This led the first and second stages of the rocket to collide, which then triggered the vehicle's emergency abort system.
Video of the incident, released today by the space agency, shows the accident from the rocket's point of view. In it, the booster in question strikes the core of the rocket, causing a significant jolt, which triggered the abort. According to officials, the afflicted sensor rod was bent slightly during the assembly of the rocket. To check for any handling errors that might have also affected other rockets, Russian officials said that all assembled Soyuz rockets -- and their attached booster pack -- will be taken apart and put together anew.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's only-time-will-tell department:
TTL0 shares a report from The Times of Israel: Iranian infrastructure and strategic networks have come under attack in the last few days by a computer virus similar to Stuxnet but "more violent, more advanced and more sophisticated," and Israeli officials are refusing to discuss what role, if any, they may have had in the operation, an Israeli TV report said Wednesday. "Remember Stuxnet, the virus that penetrated the computers of the Iranian nuclear industry?" the report on Israel's Hadashot news asked. Iran "has admitted in the past few days that it is again facing a similar attack, from a more violent, more advanced and more sophisticated virus than before, that has hit infrastructure and strategic networks." The Iranians, the TV report went on, are "not admitting, of course, how much damage has been caused." On Sunday, Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran's civil defense agency, said Tehran had neutralized a new version of Stuxnet, Reuters reported. Stuxnet penetrated Iran's nuclear program, "taking control and sabotaging parts of its enrichment processes by speeding up its centrifuges," the report notes. We'll update this story when more details become available.
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NASA's Dawn Spacecraft Is Dead
Posted by News Fetcher on November 01 '18 at 11:50 PM
By BeauHD from
Slashdot's bad-week-for-space-explorers department:
NASA's Dawn spacecraft has run out of fuel, leading the agency to officially end its mission of exploring the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. "Today, we celebrate the end of our Dawn mission -- its incredible technical achievements, the vital science it gave us and the entire team who enabled the spacecraft to make these discoveries," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "The astounding images and data that Dawn collected from Vesta and Ceres are critical to understanding the history and evolution of our solar system," Zurbuchen added. Space.com reports: The $467 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, which are about 330 miles (530 kilometers) and 590 miles (950 km) wide, respectively. Scientists regard these two bodies as leftovers from the solar system's planet-formation period, which explains the mission's name. Dawn arrived at Vesta in July 2011, then scrutinized the object from orbit for 14 months. The probe's work revealed many intriguing details about Vesta. For example, liquid water once flowed across the protoplanet's surface (likely after buried ice was melted by meteorite impacts), and Vesta sports a towering peak near its south pole that's nearly as tall as Mars' famous Olympus Mons volcano. Dawn left Vesta in September 2012. The mission team concluded that Dawn had run out of hydrazine after the probe missed scheduled communication check-ins yesterday (Oct. 31) and today. Hydrazine is the fuel used by Dawn's pointing thrusters, so the spacecraft can no longer orient itself to study Ceres, relay data to Earth or recharge its solar panels. Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres for at least 20 years, and probably much longer than that. Mission team members have said there's a greater than 99 percent probability that the probe won't spiral down onto Ceres' frigid, battered surface for at least five more decades. It's been a rough week for space explorers as not only did Dawn run out of fuel, but the Kepler telescope did too and had to be retired.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's many-caveats-apply department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world's largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents. The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer. But he cautioned that the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter, and thus cannot "be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience." Moreover, the rat study examined the effects of a radio frequency associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago. Any concerns arising from the study thus would seem to apply mainly to early adopters who used those bygone devices, not to users of current models. The lowest level of radiation in the federal study was equal to the maximum exposure that federal regulations allow for cellphone users. That level of exposure rarely occurs in typical cellphone use, the toxicology agency said. The highest level was four times higher than the permitted maximum. The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years -- far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old. Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population. "The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called schwannomas, compared to none in the control group," the NYT reports. It's worth nothing that the rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz, the frequency used in the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 90s, when the study was first conceived. For comparison, fourth generation (4G) and fifth generation (5G) phones employ much higher frequencies, which are "far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats," the NYT reports.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's future-is-now department:
Imperial College London will be using holograms of lecturers to teach students from afar. "Imperial will initially limit its use to its Business School's activities but expects the technology could eventually become common," reports the BBC. From the report: Strictly speaking, the illusions are not holograms but neither are they the Pepper's Ghost effect used by politicians including French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well the entertainment industry. Instead, they use a technique developed by a Canadian company, Arht Media. "The problem with Pepper's Ghost is that it can be intricate to set up and can cost about $200,000 to run an event," said Dr David Lefevre, director of Imperial's Edtech Lab. "This is simpler -- you project upon a glass screen, and a backdrop behind it uses software to give it an illusion of depth. "It runs at the low thousands each time, so for the first time universities can afford it." To send their image, lecturers need to use a "capture studio," which involves filming them against a black backdrop while being lit from both sides.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's rendered-useless department:
Two new zero-day vulnerabilities called "Bleeding Bit" have been revealed by security firm Armis, impacting Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) chips used in millions of Cisco, Meraki, and Aruba wireless access points (APs). "Developed by Texas Instruments (TI), the vulnerable BLE chips are used by roughly 70 to 80 percent of business wireless access points today by way of Cisco, Meraki and Aruba products," reports ZDNet. From the report: The first vulnerability, CVE-2018-16986, impacts Cisco and Meraki APs using TI BLE chips. Attacks can remotely send multiple benign BLE broadcast messages, called "advertising packets," which are stored on the memory of the vulnerable chip. As long as a target device's BLE is turned on, these packets -- which contain hidden malicious code to be invoked later on -- can be used together with an overflow packet to trigger an overflow of critical memory. If exploited, attackers are able to trigger memory corruption in the chip's BLE stack, creating a scenario in which the threat actor is able to access an operating system and hijack devices, create a backdoor, and remotely execute malicious code.
The second vulnerability, CVE-2018-7080, is present in the over-the-air firmware download (OAD) feature of TI chips used in Aruba Wi-Fi access point Series 300 systems. The vulnerability is technically a leftover development backdoor tool. This oversight, the failure to remove such a powerful development tool, could permit attackers to compromise the system by gaining a foothold into a vulnerable access point. "It allows an attacker to access and install a completely new and different version of the firmware -- effectively rewriting the operating system of the device," the company says. "The OAD feature doesn't offer a security mechanism that differentiates a "good" or trusted firmware update from a potentially malicious update."
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