From a report on Axios: Cyence, an economic modeling platform, shared some data with Axios that show the ramifications: Losses of $150 million for S&P 500 companies. Losses of $160 million for U.S. financial services companies using the infrastructure. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Outage Cost S&P 500 Companies $150M
Lucas123 writes: Toshiba has begun shipping samples of its third-generation 3D NAND memory product, a chip with 64 stacked flash cells that it said will enable a 1TB chip shipping later this spring. The new flash memory product has 65% greater capacity than the previous generation technology, which used 48 layers of NAND flash cells. The chip will be used in data centers and consumer SSD products. The technology announcement comes even as suitors are eyeing buying a majority share of the company’s memory business. Along with a previous report about Western Digital, Foxxcon, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have now also thrown their hats in the ring to purchase a majority share in Toshiba’s memory spin-off, according to a new report in the Nikkei’s Asian Review. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Toshiba Plans To Ship a 1TB Flash Chip To Manufacturers This Spring
According to a ruling by judges at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the disputed patents on the gene-editing tool CRISPR belong to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “The ruling comes a little over two months after a high-profile court hearing, during which MIT and University of California, Berkeley heatedly argued about who should own CRISPR, ” The Verge reports. From their report: STAT News reported that the decision was one sentence long. The three judges decided that the Broad patents are different enough from the ones the University of California applied for that the Broad patents stand. The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn’t so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn’t how the science world views her work, STAT points out: “Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500, 000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450, 000 Japan Prize in 2017, ” the outlet notes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Patent Office Rules CRISPR Patents, Potentially Worth Billions, Belong To Broad Institute
Kaspersky Lab surveyed 16, 750 people and concluded that often negative experiences on social experience overpower their positive effects — and they’re doing something about it. JustAnotherOldGuy pointed us to their latest announcement. 59% have felt unhappy when they have seen friends’ posts from a party they were not invited to, and 45% revealed that their friends’ happy holiday pictures have had a negative influence on them. Furthermore, 37% also admitted that looking at past happy posts of their own can leave them with the feeling that their own past was better than their present life. Previous research has also demonstrated peoples’ frustration with social media as 78% admitted that they have considered leaving social networks altogether. The only thing that makes people stay on social media is the fear of losing their digital memories, such as photos, and contacts with their friends. To help people decide more freely if they want to stay in social media or leave without losing their digital memories, Kaspersky Lab is developing a new app — FFForget will allow people to back up all of their memories from the social networks they use and keep them in a safe, encrypted memory container and will give people the freedom to leave any network whenever they want, without losing what belongs to them — their digital lives. The FFForget app will be released in 2017, but there’s already a web page where you can sign up for early access. Kaspersky plans to monetize this by creating both a free version of the app — limited to one social network — and a $1.99-per-month version which automatically backs up social content from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Instagram in real-time with a fancier interface and more powerful encryption. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Kaspersky Lab Promises New Backup Tool To Help Unhappy Social Media Users Quit
Scientists have detected thousands of exoplanets in recent years, by catching dips in light as they orbit their parent stars. These days, finding new ones isn’t usually such a big deal. But taking direct images of exoplanets, and turning them into videos so we can watch their orbits, makes these faraway worlds a… Read more…
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Incredible Animations Show Real Exoplanets Orbiting Their Stars
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is offering a big new update that should affect anyone who’s ever used Google’s translation services. From a report on CNBC: The new version will be rolling out in 2017 via Google Cloud, Pichai said. “We have improved our translation ability more in one single year than all our improvements over the last 10 years combined, ” Pichai told investors in a quarterly call, after parent company Alphabet reported mixed results. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Translate Is About To Get a Lot Better, Thanks To Its Machine Learning Push
After many years and at least one false start , Apple announced at WWDC last year that it would begin shipping a new, modern file system in 2017. Dubbed APFS (for Apple File System), it is designed to improve support for solid-state storage and encryption and to safeguard data integrity. When released, it will finally replace the nearly two-decade-old HFS+ filesystem that Apple has been tacking new features onto since 1998. An early version of APFS was included in macOS Sierra as a beta for developers to experiment with, but it was intentionally limited in some important ways; it couldn’t be used as a boot drive, it didn’t support Fusion Drives, and you can’t back up APFS volumes with Time Machine. We weren’t expecting to hear more about a final APFS rollout until this year’s WWDC, but it looks like Apple is getting ready to start the party already: according to the beta release notes for iOS 10.3 , devices that are upgraded will automatically have their HFS+ file systems converted to APFS. From the release notes: When you update to iOS 10.3, your iOS device will update its file system to Apple File System (APFS). This conversion preserves existing data on your device. However, as with any software update, it is recommended that you create a backup of your device before updating. Apple’s stated end goal is to perform an in-place file system conversion for all its currently supported devices, including all Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches. iOS 10.3 will provide some early information on how reliable that conversion will be. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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APFS is coming soon: iOS 10.3 will automatically upgrade your filesystem
China, the world’s second largest economy, is pouring 1.5 billion yuan ($168 million) into a program aimed at making it rain in its usually arid northwestern region. From a report: No stranger to using technologies like cloud seeding to influence and even control weather patterns, China’s top economic planners recently gave the go ahead for what will be one of the country’s largest weather-modification projects, reports the South China Morning Post. According to the Post, a feasibility study by the country’s meteorological agency concluded that the three-year program could see a rise in precipitation over an area of 960, 000 sq km, or as much as 10% of the country’s landmass. The multi-million dollar budget allocated by the National Development and Reform Commission will reportedly cover the cost for four new aircraft and updates to eight existing planes, nearly 900 rocket launch systems and over 1, 800 digital control devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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China Is Splashing $168 Million To Make It Rain
Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham) After several weeks of beta testing, Apple has released iOS 10.2.1 to the public today. The update is fairly minor and includes no major improvements to core iOS apps or features. The release notes say only that it fixes bugs and includes security improvements. The security page for the update lists a number of vulnerabilities in the kernel, WebKit, and the Contacts app that have all been fixed. Apple also addressed a bug that could allow attackers to briefly access the home screen on an Activation Locked iPad that had been reset . The update is available for everything that runs iOS 10: the iPhone 5 and newer, the fourth-generation iPad and newer, the iPad Mini 2 and newer, both iPad Pros, and the sixth-generation iPod Touch. Small updates for watchOS 3 and tvOS 10 , both of which are iOS-based, have been released as well. The release of iOS 10.2.1 clears the deck for betas of iOS 10.3, which is likely to be the final major revision to iOS 10 before work begins in earnest on iOS 11. We don’t know much about what Apple plans to include in this next update, but older rumors suggest that it may renew focus on the iPad in advance of some new tablet launches in the spring. Hope also springs eternal about a dark mode for iOS. Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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iOS 10.2.1 is all about fixing bugs and patching security holes
Last May, Ars reported that a critical vulnerability in a widely used image-processing application left a huge number of websites open to attacks that allowed hackers to execute malicious code on the underlying servers. More than five months later, Facebook paid a $40,000 bounty after discovering it was among those at risk. On Tuesday, researcher Andrey Leonov, said he was able to exploit the vulnerability in the ImageMagick application by using a tunneling technique based on the domain name system that bypassed Facebook firewalls. The firewalls had successfully protected against his earlier exploit attempts. Large numbers of websites use ImageMagick to quickly resize images uploaded by users. “I am glad to be the one of those who broke the Facebook,” Leonov wrote in a blog post that gave a blow-by-blow account of how he exploited the ImageMagick vulnerability. Two days after the researcher privately shared the exploit with Facebook security personnel, they patched their systems. Ten days after that, they paid Leonov $40,000, one of the biggest bounties Facebook has ever paid. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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That critical “ImageTragick” bug Ars warned you about? It cost Facebook $40k