advertising – Page 12 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Ancient Tablet Reveals Babylonians Discovered Trigonometry

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Trigonometry, the study of the lengths and angles of triangles, sends most modern high schoolers scurrying to their cellphones to look up angles, sines, and cosines. Now, a fresh look at a 3700-year-old clay tablet suggests that Babylonian mathematicians not only developed the first trig table, beating the Greeks to the punch by more than 1000 years, but that they also figured out an entirely new way to look at the subject. However, other experts on the clay tablet, known as Plimpton 322 (P322), say the new work is speculative at best. Consisting of four columns and 15 rows of numbers inscribed in cuneiform, the famous P322 tablet was discovered in the early 1900s in what is now southern Iraq by archaeologist, antiquities dealer, and diplomat Edgar Banks, the inspiration for the fictional character Indiana Jones. Now stored at Columbia University, the tablet first garnered attention in the 1940s, when historians recognized that its cuneiform inscriptions contain a series of numbers echoing the Pythagorean theorem, which explains the relationship of the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. (The theorem: The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides.) But why ancient scribes generated and sorted these numbers in the first place has been debated for decades. Mathematician Daniel Mansfield of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) realized that the information he needed was in missing pieces of P322 that had been reconstructed by other researchers. He and UNSW mathematician Norman Wildberger concluded that the Babylonians expressed trigonometry in terms of exact ratios of the lengths of the sides of right triangles, rather than by angles, using their base 60 form of mathematics, they report today in Historia Mathematica. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
Ancient Tablet Reveals Babylonians Discovered Trigonometry

Engineers Discover How To Make Antennas For Wireless Communication 100x Smaller Than Their Current Size

Engineers have figured out how to make antennas for wireless communication 100 times smaller than their current size, an advance that could lead to tiny brain implants, micro-medical devices, or phones you can wear on your finger. Science Magazine reports: The new mini-antennas play off the difference between electromagnetic (EM) waves, such as light and radio waves, and acoustic waves, such as sound and inaudible vibrations. EM waves are fluctuations in an electromagnetic field, and they travel at light speed — an astounding 300, 000, 000 meters per second. Acoustic waves are the jiggling of matter, and they travel at the much slower speed of sound — in a solid, typically a few thousand meters per second. So, at any given frequency, an EM wave has a much longer wavelength than an acoustic wave. Antennas receive information by resonating with EM waves, which they convert into electrical voltage. For such resonance to occur, a traditional antenna’s length must roughly match the wavelength of the EM wave it receives, meaning that the antenna must be relatively big. However, like a guitar string, an antenna can also resonate with acoustic waves. The new antennas take advantage of this fact. They will pick up EM waves of a given frequency if its size matches the wavelength of the much shorter acoustic waves of the same frequency. That means that that for any given signal frequency, the antennas can be much smaller. The trick is, of course, to quickly turn the incoming EM waves into acoustic waves. The team created two kinds of acoustic antennas. One has a circular membrane, which works for frequencies in the gigahertz range, including those for WiFi. The other has a rectangular membrane, suitable for megahertz frequencies used for TV and radio. Each is less than a millimeter across, and both can be manufactured together on a single chip. When researchers tested one of the antennas in a specially insulated room, they found that compared to a conventional ring antenna of the same size, it sent and received 2.5 gigahertz signals about 100, 000 times more efficiently, they report in Nature Communications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the original post:
Engineers Discover How To Make Antennas For Wireless Communication 100x Smaller Than Their Current Size

Microsoft Speech Recognition Now As Accurate As Professional Transcribers

An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: Microsoft announced today that its conversational speech recognition system has reached a 5.1% error rate, its lowest so far. This surpasses the 5.9% error rate reached last year by a group of researchers from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research and puts its accuracy on par with professional human transcribers who have advantages like the ability to listen to text several times. Both studies transcribed recordings from the Switchboard corpus, a collection of about 2, 400 telephone conversations that have been used by researchers to test speech recognition systems since the early 1990s. The new study was performed by a group of researchers at Microsoft AI and Research with the goal of achieving the same level of accuracy as a group of human transcribers who were able to listen to what they were transcribing several times, access its conversational context and work with other transcribers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PlayStation 4 Update 5.0 Officially Revealed

After the PlayStation 4’s 5.0 update was leaked last week, Sony decided to officially reveal what’s coming in the update. GameSpot highlights the new features in their report: Some of the enhancements center around streaming using the PS4’s built-in broadcasting capabilities. PS4 Pro users will be able to stream in 1080p and 60 FPS, provided their connection is strong enough, and PSVR users will be able to see new messages and comments coming through while broadcasting. PSVR is also adding 5.1ch and 7.1ch virtual surround sound support. Next up, the PS4’s Friends List is being updated with greater management tools, such as the ability to set up separate lists of friends. You’ll be able to create a list of all the people you play Destiny with and send them all an invite, for example. This feature replaces the old Favorite Groups tab. In another move to help reduce the amount of time spent in menus, the Quick Menu is being updated to have more options. For example, you’ll be able to check on download progress and see new party invites. You can also leave a party from within that menu and see your current Spotify playlist. Notifications are also being improved when watching films and TV, as you can now disable message and other notification pop-ups while watching media. You can also change how much of a message is displayed, as well as its color, when playing or watching any form of content. Finally, Parental Control features are being overhauled in favor of what Sony calls “Family on PSN.” This replaces the old Master/Sub account system; instead, one user is deemed the Family Manager, and they can set up other accounts and appoint them as a Parent/Guardian, Adult, or Child. Parents or Guardians can restrict Child accounts in their “use of online features and communication with other players, set restrictions for games, restrict the use of the internet browser, and set spending limits for PlayStation Store.” Note that Sony says the first time any North American user tries to set up an Adult account, they will be charged $0.50 “to verify that you are an adult.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shipping Company Maersk Says June Cyberattack Could Cost It Up To $300 Million

An anonymous reader shares an article: Container shipping company A.P. Moller Maersk on Tuesday said it expects that computer issues triggered by the NotPetya cyberattack will cost the company as much as $300 million in lost revenue. “In the last week of the [second] quarter we were hit by a cyber-attack, which mainly impacted Maersk Line, APM Terminals and Damco, ” Maersk CEO Soren Skou said in a statement. “Business volumes were negatively affected for a couple of weeks in July and as a consequence, our Q3 results will be impacted. We expect that the cyber-attack will impact results negatively by USD 200-300m.” Maersk Line was able to take bookings from existing customers two days after the attack, and things gradually got back to normal over the following week, the company said. It said it did not lose third-party data as a result of the attack. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Shipping Company Maersk Says June Cyberattack Could Cost It Up To $300 Million

Netflix Co-Founder’s Crazy Plan: Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want

Mitch Lowe, a founder of Netflix, has a crazy idea. Through his new startup MoviePass, he wants to subsidize our film habit, letting us go to the theater once a day for about the price of a single ticket. From a report: Lowe, an early Netflix executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company’s movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens. MoviePass could lose a lot of money subsidizing people’s movie habits. So the company also raised cash on Tuesday by selling a majority stake to Helios and Matheson Analytics, a small, publicly traded data firm in New York. Theater operators should certainly welcome any effort to increase sales. The top four cinema operators, led by AMC Entertainment, lost $1.3 billion in market value early this month after a disappointing summer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
Netflix Co-Founder’s Crazy Plan: Pay $10 a Month, Go to the Movies All You Want

Russian Group That Hacked DNC Used NSA Attack Code In Attack On Hotels

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Russian government-sponsored group accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee last year has likely been infecting other targets of interest with the help of a potent Windows exploit developed by, and later stolen from, the National Security Agency, researchers said Friday. Eternal Blue, as the exploit is code-named, is one of scores of advanced NSA attacks that have been released over the past year by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. It was published in April in the group’s most damaging release to date. Its ability to spread from computer to computer without any user action was the engine that allowed the WCry ransomware worm, which appropriated the leaked exploit, to shut down computers worldwide in May. Eternal Blue also played a role in the spread of NotPetya, a follow-on worm that caused major disruptions in June. Now, researchers at security firm FireEye say they’re moderately confident the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear, APT 28, and other names has also used Eternal Blue, this time in a campaign that targeted people of interest as they connected to hotel Wi-Fi networks. In July, the campaign started using Eternal Blue to spread from computer to computer inside various staff and guest networks, company researchers Lindsay Smith and Ben Read wrote in a blog post. While the researchers didn’t directly observe those attacks being used to infect guest computers connected to the network, they said a related campaign from last year used the control of hotel Wi-Fi services to obtain login credentials from guest devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Russian Group That Hacked DNC Used NSA Attack Code In Attack On Hotels

Intel Unveils One-Petabyte Storage Servers For Data Centers

Slashdot reader #9, 219 Guy Smiley shared this report on a new breed of high-density flash storage. The Inquirer reports: Intel has unveiled a brand new form factor for solid state disc drives (SSDs)… Intel Optane’s new “ruler” format will allow up to a petabyte of storage on a single 1U server rack… By using 3D-NAND, the ruler crams in even more data and will provide more stability with less chance of catastrophic failure with data loss. The company has promised that the Ruler will have more bandwidth, input/output operations per second and lower latency than SAS… As part of the announcement, Intel also announced a range of “hard drive replacement” SSDs — the S4500 and S4600 0 which are said to have the highest density 32-layer 3D NAND on the market, and are specifically aimed at data centres that want to move to solid state simply and if necessary, in stages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
Intel Unveils One-Petabyte Storage Servers For Data Centers

A New Amiga Will Go On Sale In Late 2017

An anonymous reader quote the Register: The world’s getting a new Amiga for Christmas. Yes, that Amiga — the seminal Commodore microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs plus slick and speedy graphics to the masses from 1985 to 1996… The platform died when Commodore went bankrupt, but enthusiasm for the Amiga persisted and various clones and efforts to preserve AmigaOS continue to this day. One such effort, from Apollo Accelerators, emerged last week: the company’s forthcoming “Vampire V4” can work as a standalone Amiga or an accelerator for older Amigas… There’s also 512MB of RAM, 40-and-44-pin FastIDE connectors, Ethernet, a pair of USB ports and MicroSD for storage [PDF]. Micro USB gets power to the board. A school in Michigan used the same Amiga for 30 years. Whenever it broke, they actually phoned up the high school student who original set it up in 1987 and had him come over to fix it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
A New Amiga Will Go On Sale In Late 2017

Salesforce Fires Red Team Staffers Who Gave Defcon Talk

Josh Schwartz, Salesforce’s director of offensive security, and John Cramb, a senior offensive security engineer, have been fired by the company after they gave talk at the Defcon security conference talk in Las Vegas last month, reports ZDNet. Schwartz and Cramb were presenting the details of their tool, called Meatpistol, a “modular malware implant framework (PDF)” similar in intent to the Metasploit toolkit used by many penetration testers. The tool, “pitched as taking ‘the boring work’ out of pen-testing to make red teams, including at Salesforce, more efficient and effective”, was anticipated to be released as open source at the time of the presentation, but Salesforce has held back the code. From the report: The two were fired “as soon as they got off stage” by a senior Salesforce executive, according to one of several people who witnessed the firing and offered their accounts. The unnamed Salesforce executive is said to have sent a text message to the duo half an hour before they were expected on stage to not to give the talk, but the message wasn’t seen until after the talk had ended. The talk had been months in the making. Salesforce executives were first made aware of the project in a February meeting, and they had signed off on the project, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting. The tool was expected to be released later as an open-source project, allowing other red teams to use the project in their own companies. But in another text message seen by Schwartz and Cramb an hour before their talk, the same Salesforce executive told the speakers that they should not announce the public release of the code, despite a publicized and widely anticipated release. Later, on stage, Schwartz told attendees that he would fight to get the tool published. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the original post:
Salesforce Fires Red Team Staffers Who Gave Defcon Talk