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First Bionic Fingertip Implant Delivers Sensational Results
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 05:42 PM

By BeauHD from Slashdot's sensational-textures department:
Zothecula writes: Dennis Aabo Sorensen may be missing a hand, but he nonetheless recently felt rough and smooth textures using a fingertip on that arm. The fingertip was electronic, and was surgically hard-wired to nerves in his upper arm. He is reportedly the first person in the world to recognize texture using a bionic fingertip connected to electrodes that were surgically implanted above his stump. The device was created by scientists from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and Italy's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna research institute. While it was wired to Sorensen, a machine moved it across rough and smooth plastic surfaces. Sensors in the fingertip generated electrical signals as they deformed in response to the topography of those surfaces, and transmitted those signals to the nerves in a series of electrical spikes -- this was reportedly an imitation of the "language of the nervous system." He was able to differentiate between the two surfaces with an accuracy of 96 percent.

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Microsoft To Court: Make Comcast Give Us Windows-Pirating Subscriber's Info
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 04:21 PM

By BeauHD from Slashdot's let-me-at-em department:
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is using the IP address 'voluntarily' collected during its software activation process to sue a Comcast subscriber for pirating thousands of copies of Windows and Office. The Redmond giant wants the court to issue a subpoena which will force Comcast to hand over the pirating subscriber's info. If the infringing IP address belongs to another ISP which obtained it via Comcast, then Microsoft wants that ISP's info and the right to subpoena it as well. "Defendants activated and attempted to activate at least several thousand copies of Microsoft software, much of which was pirated and unlicensed," Microsoft's legal team wrote. The product keys "known to have been stolen" from Microsoft's supply chain were used to activate Windows 8, Windows 7, Office 2010, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008. The product keys, Microsoft said, were used "more times than is authorized by the applicable software license," used by "someone other than the authorized licensee," or were "activated outside the region for which they were intended." Whether or not the IP traces back to a Comcast subscriber or was assigned by Comcast to a different ISP, as the The Register pointed out, "It would be a significant gaffe on behalf of the alleged pirates if the IP address data pointed to their real identifies."

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Snowden: FBI's Claim It Can't Unlock The San Bernardino iPhone Is 'Bullshit'
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 04:21 PM

By BeauHD from Slashdot's respectively-disagree department:
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI's attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force. Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: "The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that's bullshit." Snowden then went on to tweet his support for an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI's claims in the case are fraudulent. Apple's clash with the FBI comes to a head in California this month when the two will meet in federal court to debate whether the smartphone manufacturer should be required to weaken security settings on the iPhone of the shooter.

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MIT Creates Algorithm That Speeds Up Page Load Time By 34%
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 03:02 PM

By BeauHD from Slashdot's time-is-money department:
An anonymous reader writes: MIT researchers have created an algorithm that analyzes web pages and creates dependency graphs for all network resources that need to be loaded (CSS, JS, images, etc.). The algorithm, called Polaris, will be presented this week at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference, and is said to be able to cut down page load times by 34%, on average. The larger and more resources a web page contains, the better the algorithm's efficiency gets -- which should be useful on today's JavaScript-heavy sites.

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Google Launches Android N Developer Preview And Beta Program
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 03:02 PM

By BeauHD from Slashdot's surprise-announcement department:
Google is releasing Android N Preview to developers today. The early release is meant to collect feedback sooner than usual, and even includes a new way to download the update. Instead of installing a drive image, you can participate in an Android Beta Program that installs pre-release versions over the air (as long as you have a relatively recent Nexus device or the Pixel C). The biggest attraction, by far, is a new multi-window mode, which lets you use split-screen modes on phones and tablets, and even specify minimum allowable dimensions. There's even a picture-in-picture video mode, too, so you can keep watching YouTube while you message your friends. Other improvements in the preview include direct reply notifications that let you reply to a message right from an alert, iOS-style. Also, Android N optionally bundles notifications from the same app so that they don't clutter your view. Marshmallow's Doze feature has been improved to save battery life whenever the screen turns off, and coders can take advantage of Java 8 features. Google is also working to reduce the memory needs of Android via Project Svelte, allowing the Android OS to run smoothly on lower specced devices.

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Ubuntu Drops Support For AMD's Catalyst GPU Driver
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 01:42 PM

By timothy from Slashdot's burning-bridges-theory department:
An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and newer will no longer be supporting AMD's widely-used Catalyst Linux (fglrx) driver. AMD has dropped support for this proprietary AMD driver in favor of encouraging users to use the open-source AMDGPU/Radeon drivers. While the fglrx/Catalyst driver is notorious among Linux gamers, this will represent a regression for many AMD Linux users due to the open-source driver only having OpenGL 4.1 support compared to OpenGL 4.5 in Catalyst, lower performance in common gaming workloads, incomplete OpenCL compute support, no CrossFire multi-GPU support, and other missing features. Much of the missing functionality will end up being implemented by AMD's new AMDGPU driver stack but that is still months away from being truly ready and will only benefit the very latest Radeon GPUs while the fglrx-free Ubuntu 16.04 is set to ship in April.

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What Airbnb's Blockchain Authentication Proposal Means For Online Privacy
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 01:42 PM

By timothy from Slashdot's what-about-anonymous-bnb department:
An anonymous reader writes: Nathan Blecharcyzk, one of the co-founders at home rental platform Airbnb, has detailed the company's interest in blockchain technologies to help establish user reputation and trust. He revealed that in 2016 Airbnb would be looking into blockchain integration, or a similar distributed ledger system, to authenticate a user's reputation and establish trust on the platform. The proposal marks a potentially revolutionary step for e-commerce sites and peer opinion platforms looking to identify and filter out damaging reviews planted by competitors and trolls, or self-promoting posts which can mislead consumers. However, while protecting the integrity of some, the introduction of a blockchain-based reputation system holds a potential threat to anonymity and privacy online. A distributed and irreversible system for trust management, which stores personal data, could offer a hotbed for doxing and identity theft – and even undermine an individual's right to be forgotten.

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How Sliced Meat May Have Driven Human Evolution
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 12:21 PM

By timothy from Slashdot's mashed-or-shredded-didn't-make-the-cut department:
sciencehabit writes: The most tedious part of a chimpanzee's life is chewing. Our primate cousins spend six hours a day gnashing fruits and the occasional monkey carcass — all made possible by the same type of big teeth and large jaws our early ancestors had. So why are our own teeth and jaws so much smaller? A new study credits the advent of simple stone tools to slice meat and pound root vegetables, which could have dramatically reduced the time and force needed to chew, thus allowing our more immediate ancestors to evolve the physical features required for speech. The abstract for the (paywalled) article is more informative than many.

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Pentagon Admits Deploying Spy Drones Over US, Claims All Were 'Lawful'
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 12:21 PM

By timothy from Slashdot's if-you-pass-a-bad-law department:
lightbox32 writes with this excerpt from MSN News confirming what many people suspected with the proliferation of military and law-enforcement drones would happen, already has: A report by a Pentagon inspector general, made public under a Freedom of Information Act request, said spy drones on non-military missions have occurred fewer than 20 times between 2006 and 2015 and always in compliance with existing law. ... The use of unmanned aerial surveillance (UAS) drones over U.S. surfaced in 2013 when then-FBI director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that the bureau employed spy drones to aid investigations, but in a "very, very minimal way, very seldom." The inspector general analysis was completed March 20, 2015, but not released publicly until last Friday. ... The report quoted a military law review article that said "the appetite to use them (spy drones) in the domestic environment to collect airborne imagery continues to grow, as does Congressional and media interest in their deployment."

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There's No End In Sight For Data Storage Capacity
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 12:21 PM

By timothy from Slashdot's heat-death-of-the-universe-comes-to-mind department:
Lucas123 writes: Several key technologies are coming to market in the next three years that will ensure data storage will not only keep up with but exceed demand. Heat-assisted magnetic recording and bit-patterned media promise to increase hard drive capacity initially by 40% and later by 10-fold, or as Seagate's marketing proclaims: 20TB hard drives by 2020. At the same time, resistive RAM technologies, such as Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint, promise storage-class memory that's 1,000 times faster and more resilient than today's NAND flash, but it will be expensive — at first. Meanwhile, NAND flash makers have created roadmaps for 3D NAND technology that will grow to more than 100 layers in the next two to three generations, increasing performance and capacity while ultimately lowering costs to that of hard drives."Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk.

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Microsoft Releases First Public Preview of RTVS Under MIT and GPLv2 Licenses
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 12:21 PM

By timothy from Slashdot's perfect-for-piracy department:
shutdown -p now writes: Microsoft has released the first public preview of RTVS (R Tools for Visual Studio), an extension for Visual Studio that adds support for the R (GNU S) programming language. The product is open source, and while most of the code is under the MIT license, some components are GPLv2, in accordance with the R license.

That's not the first time this week (or this year) that Microsoft's open source efforts have been front-page news; with its new role in the Eclipse Foundation, too, the company's angling toward being one of the largest open source companies around, even if that's a small part of its business model.

Update: 03/09 19:03 GMT by T : Speaking of which: reader Salgak1 writes with his first submission, linking the Register's report that Microsoft has released a Debian-based Linux distro, called SONIC. "It is optimized for network switching, and apparently is a localized version of the
"Azure Cloud Switch" released into the Azure cloud hosting system. Question is, is it just another Microsoft "Embrace, Extend. Extinguish" strategy in action?"

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Microsoft Releases First Public Preview of RTVS Under MIT and GPLv2 Licenses
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 11:01 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's perfect-for-piracy department:
shutdown -p now writes: Microsoft has released the first public preview of RTVS (R Tools for Visual Studio), an extension for Visual Studio that adds support for the R (GNU S) programming language. The product is open source, and while most of the code is under the MIT license, some components are GPLv2, in accordance with the R license.

That's not the first time this week (or this year) that Microsoft's open source efforts have been front-page news; with its new role in the Eclipse Foundation, too, the company's angling toward being one of the largest open source companies around, even if that's a small part of its business model.

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China Car-Tracking Scheme Could Allow Higher Fuel Prices For Gas-Guzzling Cars
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 11:01 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's more-for-you-less-for-him department:
An anonymous reader writes: In the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, traditionally a test-bed for nationwide infrastructure and technology schemes, 200,000 vehicles have been experimentally hooked into a real-time traffic-monitoring system based on RFID and roadside monitoring stations. China's state-owned Aerospace Science and Industry Corp (CASC) claims that such intense monitoring will be necessary for the driverless cars of the future, and to foil license-plate forgeries. On Monday the general manager of Chinese auto manufacturer Great Wall Motor suggested that a monitoring scheme of such scope could also be used to introduce a wide range of usage-based levies, and to easily ensure that less efficient cars could be charged more for fuel at gas stations.

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Hacking Internet-Connected Trucks and Buses
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 09:42 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's kitt-would-be-most-displeased department:
An anonymous reader writes: Among the things one can find with Shodan, the search engine for the Internet of Things, are trucks, buses and delivery vans that have been equipped with the Telematics Gateway Unit device and a modem to connect to the Internet. What's more, security researcher Jose Carlos Norte says that this setup can be misused by malicious individuals to monitor and control these vehicles: discover their position, their speed, and so on, as well as to change some of those parameters, e.g. change the vehicle's route, or put up a geo-fence for it (he says he does not now what such a change would cause).

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Pentagon Office Planning 'Avatar' Fighters and Fighter-Launched Drone Swarms
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 09:42 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's why-use-people department:
schwit1 writes: High over Alaska last summer, the Pentagon experimented with new, secret prototypes: Micro-drones that can be launched from the flare dispensers of moving F-16s and F/A-18 fighter jets. Canisters containing the tiny aircraft descended from the jets on parachutes before breaking open, allowing wings on each drone to swing out and catch the wind. Inch-wide propellers on the back provided propulsion as they found one another and created a swarm.

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Home Depot Will Pay Up To $19.5 Million For Massive 2014 Data Breach
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 08:21 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's thanks-for-the-new-credit-card-again-and-again department:
itwbennett writes: In remedy for the 2014 data breach that included the theft of data pertaining to about 56 million payment cards, as well as 53 million email addresses, Home Depot has reportedly agreed to pay $13 million to reimburse customers for their losses and $6.5 million to provide them with 18 months of identity protection services. And while the company was not required to admit wrongdoing, it has agreed to hire a chief information security officer.

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2015's Electricity Retirements: 80 Percent Coal Plants
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 08:21 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's how-will-we-fill-the-stockings? department:
AmiMoJo writes: In the US, electricity demand is growing very slowly, which means that capacity additions don't have to exceed retirements by much in order to keep the grid functioning. Tracking the comings and goings from the electric grid can help provide a picture of the country's changing energy mix. The Energy Information Administration, which provides data on the US' electric grid, says 18GW of capacity were retired this past year, more than 80 percent of it coal-fired. More than 27GW of utility-scale projects will replace that this year. Note that much of the new generating hardware is wind and solar, but the plants being replaced often had low capacity factors due to their age and high pollutant output.

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Former NSA, CIA Director Michael Hayden Sides With Apple Over FBI
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 06:51 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's what-does-this-guy-know? department:
cold fjord writes: General Michael Hayden (Retired), who served as head of both the NSA and CIA, has taken a position supporting Apple in its conflict with the FBI. Apple is fighting a court order to assist the FBI in breaking into the government owned phone used by one of the two dead terrorists responsible for the recent San Bernardino massacre. General Hayden stated, "You can argue this on constitutional grounds. Does the government have the right to do this? Frankly, I think the government does have a right to do it. You can do balancing privacy and security dead men don't have a right to privacy. I don't use those lenses. My lens is the security lens, and frankly, it's a close but clear call that Apple's right on just raw security grounds. ... I get why the FBI wants to get into the phones but this may be a case where we've got to give up some things in law enforcement and even counter terrorism in order to preserve this aspect, our cybersecurity."

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Google's AlphaGo Beats Lee Se-dol In the First Match
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 06:51 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's went-or-will-have-gone department:
New submitter Fref writes with news from The Verge that "A huge milestone has just been reached in the field of artificial intelligence: AlphaGo, the program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has defeated legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in the first of five historic matches being held in Seoul, South Korea. Lee resigned after about three and a half hours, with 28 minutes and 28 seconds remaining on his clock. "Lee will face off against AlphaGo again tomorrow and on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Also at the New York Times. Science magazine says the loss may be less significant than it seems at first.

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Why Japan Is Facing Pressure To Return To Military Research
Posted by News Fetcher on March 09 '16 at 05:31 AM

By timothy from Slashdot's social-pressure-is-strong department:
An anonymous reader writes: China's growing nation status has Japan reconsidering its 70-year old ban on military research projects, as Japanese defense circles actively seek to take advantage of the country's vanguard position in robotic technology. Pressure from the government is also mounting, as authorities try to find means to bring university researchers into the defense fold — particularly to meet the challenge of a more aggressive Chinese military. Funding cuts in Japanese higher education, combined with a weakened economy and governmental austerity measures, may make the allure of military funding irresistible to researchers and academic institutions.

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