By BeauHD from
Slashdot's double-whammy department:
The state of California is looking into taxing its thriving rocket industry. The Franchise Tax Board has issued a proposed regulation for public comment that would require companies that launch spacecraft to pay a tax based upon "mileage" traveled by that spacecraft from California. Ars Technica reports: The proposal says that California-based companies that launch spacecraft will have to pay a tax based upon "mileage" traveled by that spacecraft from California. (No, we're not exactly sure what this means, either). The proposed regulations were first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Thomas Lo Grossman, a tax attorney at the Franchise Tax Board, told the newspaper that the rules are designed to mirror the ways taxes are levied on terrestrial transportation and logistics firms operating in California, like trucking or train companies. The tax board is seeking public input from now until June 16, when it is expected to vote on the proposed tax. The federal government already has its own taxes for commercial space companies, and until now no other state has proposed taxing commercial spaceflight. In fact most other states, including places like Florida, Texas, and Georgia, offer launch providers tax incentives to move business into their areas.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's straight-out-of-a-science-fiction-movie department:
boley1 writes: Like a plot from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) movie, evil is waking up as permafrost melts due to weather or natural, man-made, local, and/or global climate change. (Take your pick of any or all -- doesn't matter -- the plot and result is roughly the same.) According the the BBC, a 12-year-old boy died and at least twenty people were hospitalized after being infected by a disease (anthrax) that lay buried in the ice for 75 years. "The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost," reports BBC. "There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed." In this case, bringing back the disease was accidental, but the story goes on to give examples of scientists (no indication of whether they are mad or not) purposefully seeing what ancient bacteria and virus they can resurrect from the ice. How many more diseases are lurking in the ice? Will The Andromeda Strain be released by meddling scientists or global warming?
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's family-comes-first department:
MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled information regarding a new Xeon processor family today, some of which will be based on the company's Skylake-SP architecture. Intel will have four levels of Xeon processors that scale with respect to feature support and core counts. Intel is calling it the Xeon Scalable Family with Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum processors. Today, Xeon model names follow a fairly easy-to-understand format. Take for example the Xeon E5-4640 v4. "E5" in this case means that it is in the middle of Intel's current stack in terms of features and capabilities, where the "4" signifies use in a 4-socket system. Finally, the "v4" represents the architecture. With this change, a model like the one above would become Intel Xeon Gold 4640, as an example. Regardless, the chips will include support for AVX-512 instructions, QuickAssist and Volume Management Device (VMD) technologies that will take advantage of NVMe solid-state drives. The platform will also support complementary processing engines and IO technologies like Intel FPGAs, Xeon Phi accelerators and Silicon Photonics connectivity. Intel notes the processors will be arriving to market this summer.
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By BeauHD from
Slashdot's come-back-to-haunt department:
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For almost six years, Google knew about the exact technique that someone used to trick around one million people into giving away access to their Google accounts to hackers on Wednesday. Even more worrisome: other hackers might have known about this technique as well. On October 4, 2011, a researcher speculated in a mailing list that hackers could trick users into giving them access to their accounts by simply posing as a trustworthy app. This attack, the researcher argued in the message, hinges on creating a malicious application and registering it on the OAuth service under a name like "Google," exploiting the trust that users have in the OAuth authorization process. OAuth is a standard that allows users to grant websites or applications access to their online email and social networking accounts, or parts of their accounts, without giving up their passwords. "Imagine someone registers a client application with an OAuth service, let's call it Foobar, and he names his client app 'Google, Inc.'. The Foobar authorization server will engage the user with 'Google, Inc. is requesting permission to do the following,'" Andre DeMarre wrote in the message sent to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the independent organization responsible for many of the internet's operating standards. "The resource owner might reason, 'I see that I'm legitimately on the https://www.foobar.com/ site, and Foobar is telling me that Google wants permission. I trust Foobar and Google, so I'll click Allow,'" DeMarre concluded. As it turns out, DeMarre claims he warned Google directly about this vulnerability in 2012, and suggested that Google address it by checking to see ensure the name of any given app matched the URL of the company behind it. In a Hacker News post, DeMarre said he reported this attack vector back then, and got a "modest bounty" for it.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's watching-tech-fiction-on-TV department:
'The Circle' (a techno-thriller movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson) is a dated, far-fetched parable about an imaginary villain -- and far less scary than its television counterpart, says Alyssa Bereznak, a staff writer at The Ringer. An anonymous reader shares the article, removing the excerpts that could spoil the plot: Hollywood is keen on illustrating the awesome power of modern-day tech companies and the elite class of entrepreneurs who run them. But lately the most effective way to do that is not to focus on what's possible, but to illustrate the real-life personalities that control the near future of tech. Stylistically, a show like HBO's Silicon Valley couldn't be further from a production like The Circle, and yet it succeeds in threading together a host of issues in tech culture, including major corporations' monopoly-like power to squash competitors, manipulate the unwitting tech press, and bypass the interests of their employees and users for the sake of better stock prices. Now at the beginning of its fourth season, the show is lauded for its highly researched, accurate depictions of the Bay Area's power players -- so much so that it has spurred at least one Business Insider post dedicated to identifying each character's real-life inspiration. (The show has even featured a handful of cameos from the industry's power brokers, including Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt.) Even if it does take place in a comedy created by the man who gave us Beavis and Butt-Head, the show's researched interpretation of real life is a much more compelling way to display the tech world's flaws, rather than simply relying on imagined scaremongering.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's what'-happening department:
An anonymous reader writes: Since I am not living in my home country, I frequently use two different SIM cards and prefer having a phone with dual-sim support. This limits your choice significantly when buying a new device and last time I bought one, I opted for the Wileyfox Swift. It was cheap, had most features I desired and shipped with CyanogenMod (Android) -- which, I thought, might indicate that Wileyfox delivers a slim, privacy-aware system. Yesterday, I was delighted to see that Wileyfox provides an update to a new version of Android (7.1.1) and I didn't hesitate long to install the upgrade. Concerns that the hardware might not hold-up to the new system showed to be unfounded and everything seemed to work just fine. But when I realised that the dialler now labelled itself as 'truecaller' -- something I had never heard of, shoot, I didn't even know the dialler is an app -- it gave rise to a bad suspicion: Is some of my phone's core functionality now provided by a 3rd-party app? Indeed. Does it respect my privacy? No. Can I uninstall it again? No. Was I ever asked to comply with their terms and conditions? Of course not. On top of this, Truecaller doesn't seem to have a clean background. Here's how an Indian daily (Truecaller seems to be popular in emerging regions) described the app: Truecaller is a popular app that shows you contact details of unknown numbers calling you. It crowdsources contact details from all its users' address books. So even if you've never used the service, your name and number could be on Truecaller's database, thanks to someone else who's saved your contact details and allowed the app to access them.
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'This Isn't AI'
Posted by News Fetcher on May 04 '17 at 11:21 AM
By msmash from
Slashdot's reality-check department:
The Amazon Echo, a 'smart' speaker developed by Amazon.com, gets many things right. You can ask it to for weather updates, check news, and to play music, and Alexa, the AI powering the device, won't disappoint. But how smart is Alexa? Programmer Terence Eden put it to a simple test to find out. From a blog post: I can now query my solar panels via my Alexa Amazon Dot Echo. I flatter myself as a reasonably competent techie and programmer, but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite! I wanted something simple. When I say "Solar Panels", call this API, then say this phrase. That's the kind of thing which should take 5 minutes in something like IFTTT . Instead, it took around two hours of following out-of-date official tutorials, and whinging on Twitter, before I got my basic service up and running. [...] It's not so bad, but it does reveal Amazon's contempt for developers. Several of the steps contained errors, it involves multiple logins, random clicks, and a bunch of copy & pasting. Dull and complex. A frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying experience. I ended up using StackOverflow to correct errors in my code because the documentation was so woefully lacking. I kinda thought that Amazon would hear "solar panels" and work out the rest of the query using fancy neural network magic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The developer has to manually code every single possible permutation of the phrase that they expect to hear. This isn't AI. Voice interfaces are the command line. But you don't get tab-to-complete. Amazon allows you to test your code by typing rather than speaking. I spent a frustrating 10 minutes trying to work out why my example code didn't work. Want to know why? I was typing "favourite" rather than the American spelling. Big Data my shiny metal arse.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's a-look-at-the-gatekeepers department:
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this week, AV-TEST evaluated 19 security suites and found that only three of them seemed to be well protected from savvy potential hackers. First, some context about the tests: The first test measured how well each program uses address space layout randomization (ASLR) and data execution prevention (DEP). Briefly, ASLR randomizes a computer's memory allocation, making it harder for an attacker to target a particular process in a program; DEP is a Windows protocol that designates some memory as non-executable space (other operating systems do this under different names), making it harder (or impossible) for unauthorized programs to run in that space. The second test measured whether the AV programs digitally signed their software-update files. Signing is a way of determining a file's origin and authenticity; unsigned files could be more easily substituted with malicious ones. The final test was the simplest, and determined whether an AV manufacturers delivered its software updates via the encrypted HTTPS web protocol. Lack of encryption makes it easy for an attacker to stage a man-in-the-middle attack by intercepting the data transmission, altering the data and then sending the data back on its way. Of the 19 programs tested, only three succeeded on all counts: Bitdefender Internet Security 2017, ESET Internet Security 10 and Kaspersky Internet Security 17.0. It's difficult to rank the rest of the programs, as each one succeeded and failed to varying degrees.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's going-forward department:
Elon Musk's SpaceX has laid out a plan to create a network of internet-providing satellites around Earth. The company hopes to start launching satellites into space in 2019, and will continue to send them in phases until 2024, when the network is expected to reach capacity. From a report:On Wednesday, Patricia Cooper, SpaceX's vice president of satellite government affairs, said later this year, the company will start testing the satellites themselves, launch one prototype before the end of the year and another during the "early months" of 2018. Following that, SpaceX will begin its satellite launch campaign in 2019. "The remaining satellites in the constellation will be launched in phases through 2024," Cooper said before the Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology. [...] SpaceX argues that the U.S. lags behind other developed nations in broadband speed and price competitiveness, while many rural areas are not serviced by traditional internet providers. The company's satellites will provide a "mesh network" in space that will be able to deliver high broadband speeds without the need for cables.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's aftermath department:
Apple is such a powerful company that, for third-party suppliers, it's hard not to become reliant on the cash that it pays you. Engadget adds: But when Apple says that it's done, choosing to move whatever technology you provide in house, the results can be really painful. Imagination Technologies is one such supplier, famously designing the iPhone's PowerVR graphics as well as pushing MIPS, a rival to ARM. But back in March, Imagination publicly announced that Apple was ditching it in favor of its own graphics silicon. Now, Imagination has revealed that it's going to take Apple to dispute resolution, maintaining that the iPhone maker used Imagination's IP without permission. It's the second chipmaker in recent months who believes Apple isn't playing fair, with Qualcomm counter-suing Apple in its own licensing dispute. Secondly, Imagination is going to have to sell off MIPS and Ensigma, two parts of its business that aren't as profitable as PowerVR. Gamers with long memories will remember that MIPS designed the CPUs that lurked inside the PlayStation, PS2 and Nintendo 64.
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By msmash from
Slashdot's privacy-woes department:
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: A team of researchers from the Brunswick Technical University in Germany has discovered an alarming number of Android apps (234, to be exact) that employ ultrasonic tracking beacons to track users and their nearby environment. Their research paper focused on the technology of ultrasound cross-device tracking (uXDT) that became very popular in the last three years. uXDT is the practice of advertisers hiding ultrasounds in their ads. When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that are picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones. SDKs embedded in apps installed on those devices relay the beacon back to the online advertiser, who then knows that the user of TV "x" is also the owner of smartphone "Y" and links their two previous advertising profiles together, creating a broader picture of the user's interests, device portfolio, home, and even family members.
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