Washington Bill Makes It Illegal To Sell Gadgets Without Replaceable Batteries

Jason Koebler writes: A bill that would make it easier to fix your electronics is rapidly hurtling through the Washington state legislature. The bill’s ascent is fueled by Apple’s iPhone-throttling controversy, which has placed a renewed focus on the fact that our electronics have become increasingly difficult to repair. Starting in 2019, the bill would ban the sale of electronics that are designed “in such a way as to prevent reasonable diagnostic or repair functions by an independent repair provider. Preventing reasonable diagnostic or repair functions includes permanently affixing a battery in a manner that makes it difficult or impossible to remove.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Washington Bill Makes It Illegal To Sell Gadgets Without Replaceable Batteries

Apple Prepares MacOS Users For Discontinuation of 32-Bit App Support

Last year, Apple announced that macOS High Sierra “will be the last macOS release to support 32-bit apps without compromise.” Now, in the macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 beta, Apple is notifying users of the impending change, too. “To prepare for a future release of macOS in which 32-bit software will no longer run without compromise, starting in macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, a user is notified on the launch of an app that depends on 32-bit software. The alert appears only once per app, ” Apple says in the beta release notes. Ars Technica reports: When users attempt to launch a 32-bit app in 10.13.4, it will still launch, but it will do so with a warning message notifying the user that the app will eventually not be compatible with the operating system unless it is updated. This follows the same approach that Apple took with iOS, which completed its sunset of 32-bit app support with iOS 11 last fall. Developers and users curious about how this will play out will be able to look at the similar process in iOS for context. On January 1 of this year, Apple stopped accepting 32-bit app submissions in the Mac App Store. This June, the company will also stop accepting updates for existing 32-bit applications. iOS followed a similar progression, with 32-bit app submissions ending in February of 2015 and acceptance of app updates for 32-bit apps ending in June of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Prepares MacOS Users For Discontinuation of 32-Bit App Support

AppRiver Report: 1,000% Increase in Phishing Attacks in 2017

Email & web-based spam & malware attacks impact global organizations in 2017, a cybersecurity study conducted by AppRiver shows. The post AppRiver Report: 1, 000% Increase in Phishing Attacks in 2017 appeared first on MSSP Alert .

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AppRiver Report: 1,000% Increase in Phishing Attacks in 2017

Intel Plans To Release Chips That Have Built-in Meltdown and Spectre Protections Later This Year

Intel plans to release chips that have built-in protections against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks later this year, company CEO Brian Krzanich said during company’s quarterly earnings call this week. From a report: The company has “assigned some of our very best minds” to work on addressing the vulnerability that’s exploited by those attacks, Krzanich said on a conference call following Intel’s quarterly earnings announcement. That will result in “silicon-based” changes to the company’s future chips, he said. “We’ve been working around clock” to address the vulnerability and attacks, Krzanich said. But, he added, “we’re acutely aware we have more to do.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Plans To Release Chips That Have Built-in Meltdown and Spectre Protections Later This Year

Floating 1,600dpi 3D projections made by pushing around flecks of cellulose and hitting them with a laser

Physicists at BYU have demonstrated a volumetric projection system that works by using a laser to unevenly heat single cellulose molecules in order to shove them around in 3D space, then painting the positioned molecules with lasers that cause them to glow; by choreographic both sets of lasers, extremely high-resolution moving images can be attained. (more…)

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Floating 1,600dpi 3D projections made by pushing around flecks of cellulose and hitting them with a laser

Compression ignition engines are a big breakthrough—we got to try one

Mazda IRVINE, Calif.—Despite rumors to the contrary, the internal combustion engine is far from dead. Recently we’ve seen several technological advances that will significantly boost the efficiency of gasoline-powered engines. One of these, first reported back in August 2017 , is Mazda’s breakthrough with compression ignition. On Tuesday, Mazda invited us to its R&D facility in California to learn more about this clever new Skyactiv-X engine, but more importantly we actually got to drive it on the road. What’s so special about this engine then? (credit: Mazda) The idea behind Skyactiv-X is to be able to run the engine with as lean a fuel-air mixture (known as λ) as possible. Because very lean combustion is cooler than a stoichiometric reaction (where λ=1 and there is exactly enough air to completely burn each molecule of fuel but no more), less energy is wasted as heat. What’s more, the exhaust gases contain fewer nasty nitrogen oxides, and the unused air gets put to work. It absorbs the combustion heat and then expands and pushes down on the piston. The result is a cleaner, more efficient, and more powerful engine. And Skyactiv-X uses a very lean mix: a λ up to 2.5. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Compression ignition engines are a big breakthrough—we got to try one

Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books

In Ankara, Turkey, one person’s trash is literally another’s treasure. Garbage collectors started saving books once destined for the landfill and opened a public library. CNN reports : For months, the garbage men gathered forsaken books. As word of the collection spread, residents also began donating books directly. Initially, the books were only for employees and their families to borrow. But as the collection grew and interest spread throughout the community, the library was eventually opened to the public in September of last year… Today, the library has over 6,000 books ranging from literature to nonfiction. There is also a popular kid’s section with comic books and an entire section for scientific research. Books in English and French are also available for bilingual visitors. The library is housed in a previously vacant brick factory at the sanitation department headquarters… The collection grew so large the library now loans the salvaged books to schools, educational programs, and even prisons. ( For Reading Addicts ), image via CNN

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Garbage collectors open a public library with discarded books

Deepfakes has democratized the creation of extremely realistic video faceswapping, especially in porn

Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography. (more…)

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Deepfakes has democratized the creation of extremely realistic video faceswapping, especially in porn

How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA

dmoberhaus writes: A 26-year-old Belgian PhD student named Sander Wuytz recently solved a 3-year-old puzzle that had locked the private key to 1 Bitcoin in a strand of synthetic DNA. Motherboard spoke with the student about how they managed to crack the puzzle, just days before it was set to expire. From the report: “As detailed by Nick Goldman, a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in his pioneering Nature paper on DNA storage, to encode information into DNA you take a text or binary file and rewrite it in base-3 (so rather than just ones and zeroes, there are zeroes, ones, and twos). This is then used to encode the data in the building blocks of life, the four nucleobases cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine. As Wuyts explained to me, coding the data as nucleobases depended upon which nucleobase came before. So, for instance, if the previous base was adenine and the next pieces of data is a 0, it is coded as cytosine. If the next piece of data is a 1, it’s coded as guanine, and so on. After the data is encoded as synthetic DNA fragments, these fragments are used to identify and read the actual files stored in the DNA. In the case of the Bitcoin challenge, there were a total of nine files contained in the DNA fragments. The files were encrypted with a keystream, which is a random series of characters that is included with the actual plain text message to obfuscate its meaning. The keystream code had been provided by Goldman in a document explaining the competition. After running the code, Wuyts was able to combine the DNA fragments in the correct order to form one long piece of DNA. After working out some technical kinks, Wuyts was able to convert the DNA sequence into plain text, revealing the private key and unlocking the bitcoin (as well as some artefacts, including a drawing of James Joyce and the logo for the European Bioinformatics Institute). He had cracked the puzzle just five days before it was set to expire.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA

A salamander with a genome 10 times the size of ours regrows lost limbs

Enlarge / It’s so cute! Let’s chop off its leg in the name of science. It’ll grow back. (credit: IMP Vienna ) Some human tissues, like the liver and muscles, retain the ability to regrow after damage. But most of our bodies do not—if you lose a limb, the limb’s gone. But elsewhere in the animal kingdom, regeneration is much more widespread. Many reptiles can regrow tails, and some salamanders can replace entire limbs. More distantly related worms called planaria can be cut into multiple pieces and see each piece regrow an entirely new body. There are a couple of organisms that have been extensively studied due to their ability to regenerate: the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea and a type of salamander called an axolotl ( Ambystoma mexicanum ). But those studies have been limited by the fact that we don’t have a complete catalog of genes for these organisms. Attempts to correct that were bogged down by the fact that the genomes appeared to be littered with duplicate copies of virus-like DNA—in the case of the axolotl, enough to balloon its genome up to 10 times the size of our own. Now, researchers have figured out a way to overcome that hurdle, and they have gotten high-quality copies of both the planarian’s and the axolotl’s genomes. Unfortunately, the copies don’t shed much light on the animals’ regeneration abilities. And all that extra DNA carried by the axolotl doesn’t seem to be doing anything useful in particular. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A salamander with a genome 10 times the size of ours regrows lost limbs