electronics – Tech Today w/ Ken May

With ingestible pill, you can track fart development in real time on your phone

Enlarge / The ingestible electronic pill. (credit: RMIT University ) Scientists often hope to break ground with their research. But a group of Australian researchers would likely be happy with breaking wind. The team developed an ingestible electronic capsule to monitor gas levels in the human gut. When it’s paired with a pocket-sized receiver and a mobile phone app, the pill reports tail-wind conditions in real time as it passes from the stomach to the colon. The researchers, led by Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh of RMIT University and Peter Gibson of Monash University, reported their invention Monday in Nature Electronics . The authors are optimistic that the capsule’s gas readings can help clear the air over the inner workings of our intricate innards and the multitudes of microbes they contain. Such fume data could clarify the conditions of each section of the gut, what microbes are up to, and which foods may cause problems in the system. Until now, collecting such data has been a challenge. Methods to bottle it involved cumbersome and invasive tubing and inconvenient whole-body calorimetry. Popping the electronic pill is a breeze in comparison. And early human trials have already hinted that the pill can provide new information about intestinal wind patterns and gaseous turbulence from different foods. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ubuntu 17.10 Temporarily Pulled Due To A BIOS Corrupting Problem

An anonymous reader writes: Canonical has temporarily pulled the download links for Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” from the Ubuntu website due to ongoing reports of some laptops finding their BIOS corrupted after installing this latest Ubuntu release. The issue is appearing most frequently with Lenovo laptops but there are also reports of issues with other laptop vendors as well. This issue appears to stem from the Intel SPI driver in the 17.10’s Linux 4.13 kernel corrupting the BIOS for a select number of laptop motherboards. Canonical is aware of this issue and is planning to disable the Intel SPI drivers in their kernel builds. Canonical’s hardware enablement team has already verified this works around the problem, but doesn’t provide any benefit if your BIOS is already corrupted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

If you tried to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. NASA announces: Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs, ” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. “With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years, ” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

Linux Has a USB Driver Security Problem

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: USB drivers included in the Linux kernel are rife with security flaws that in some cases can be exploited to run untrusted code and take over users’ computers. The vast majority of these vulnerabilities came to light on Monday, when Google security expert Andrey Konovalov informed the Linux community of 14 vulnerabilities he found in the Linux kernel USB subsystem. “All of them can be triggered with a crafted malicious USB device in case an attacker has physical access to the machine, ” Konovalov said. The 14 flaws are actually part of a larger list of 79 flaws Konovalov found in Linux kernel USB drivers during the past months. Not all of these 79 vulnerabilities have been reported, let alone patched. Most are simple DoS (Denial of Service) bugs that freeze or restart the OS, but some allow attackers to elevate privileges and execute malicious code. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Has a USB Driver Security Problem

Justice Department Demands Five Twitter Users’ Personal Info Over an Emoji

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Back in May, the Justice Department — apparently lacking anything better to do with its time — sent a subpoena to Twitter, demanding a whole bunch of information on five Twitter users, including a few names that regular Techdirt readers may be familiar with. If you can’t see that, it’s a subpoena asking for information on the following five Twitter users: @dawg8u (“Mike Honcho”), @abtnatural (“Virgil”), @Popehat (Ken White), @associatesmind (Keith Lee) and @PogoWasRight (Dissent Doe). I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about three of those five in previous Techdirt posts. Either way, they’re folks who are quite active in legal/privacy issues on Twitter. And what info does the DOJ want on them? Well, basically everything: [users’ names, addresses, IP addresses associated with their time on Twitter, phone numbers and credit card or bank account numbers.] That’s a fair bit of information. Why the hell would the DOJ want all that? Would you believe it appears to be over a single tweet from someone to each of those five individuals that consists entirely of a smiley face? I wish I was kidding. Here’s the tweet and then I’ll get into the somewhat convoluted back story. The tweet is up as I write this, but here’s a screenshot in case it disappears. The Department of Justice’s subpoena is intended to address allegations that Shafer, who has a history of spotting weak encryption and drawing attention to it, cyberstalked an FBI agent after the agency raided his home. Vanity Fair summarizes the incident: “In 2013, Shafer discovered that FairCom’s data-encryption package had actually exposed a dentist’s office to data theft. An F.T.C. settlement later validated Shafer’s reporting, but in 2016, when another dentist’s office responded to Shafer’s disclosure by claiming he’d violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and broken the law, the F.B.I. raided his home and confiscated many of his electronics. Shafer was particularly annoyed at F.B.I. Special Agent Nathan Hopp, who helped to conduct the raid, and who was later involved in a different case: in March, he compiled a criminal complaint involving the F.B.I.’s arrest of a troll for tweeting a flashing GIF at journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who is epileptic. Shafer began to compile publicly available information about Hopp, sharing his findings on Twitter. The Twitter users named in the subpoena had started a separate discussion about Hopp, with one user calling Hopp the “least busy F.B.I. agent of all time, ” a claim that prompted Shafer’s smiley-faced tweet.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Justice Department Demands Five Twitter Users’ Personal Info Over an Emoji

Samsung made a giant 34-foot LED TV for movie theaters

So you just spent $120, 000 on a 120-inch 4K HDR screen and think you’ve got the biggest, baddest TV around? Nope! Samsung has unveiled the Cinema LED Screen that’s an epic 10.3 meters (33.8 feet, or 406 inches). It runs at full 4K (4, 096 x 2, 160) resolution, features an (unnamed) HDR and peaks out at 146 fL of brighntess, “ten times greater than that offered by standard projector technologies, ” Samsung said in a news release. The set offers a “distortion-free” presentation with deep blacks, accurate whites and bright colors “at a nearly infinite contrast ratio, ” Samsung says. While it didn’t say so, the extra brightness might improve 3D films, which normally look dim with projection systems due to the polarized glasses. To complement the image quality, Samsung worked with JBL by Harman on the sound tech. That system features speakers around the screen, proprietary audio processing tech, and “Sculpted Surround Sound” from JBL to provide dramatic and faithful audio. Samsung Electronics unveiled the model at the Lotte Cinema in Korea, saying it’s the “first ever commercial Cinema LED Screen” it has installed. The average cinema screen size is around 50 feet, but the 33.8-foot Cinema Screen would be a good fit in smallish multiplex rooms. Samsung says it adapts to a wider range of dark and ambient lighting situations, making it work well for corporate events, sports viewing and gaming competitions. For films, it would certainly offer a very different experience than a projector, but might feel too much like you’re watching TV in public for some cinephiles. Samsung is obviously one of the few companies out there, perhaps along with LG, that could even create such a giant LED screen. The model was certified by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), meaning it can showcase films in theaters with unaltered color spectrum accuracy. As for the price, unless you’ve got an 80-foot yacht parked in the harbor, it’s probably best not to ask. Source: Samsung

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Samsung made a giant 34-foot LED TV for movie theaters

New Solar Plane Plans Non-Stop Flight Around The World

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: [A] Russian tycoon and his Renova Group plan a record-breaking effort to send a plane around the world nonstop using only the power of the sun. If all goes well, a single pilot will fly for five days straight at altitudes of up to 10 miles, about a third higher than commercial airliners. The project isn’t just a stunt. The glider-style airplane with a 36-meter (120-foot) wingspan will be a test of technologies that are set to be used to build new generations of autonomous craft for the military and business, say aerospace experts. They will fly continuously, have far greater reach and control than satellites and expand broadcast, communication and spying capabilities around the globe… “Our flight should prove that it’s possible to make long-distance flights using solar energy, ” said Mikhail Lifshitz, Renova’s director of high-tech asset development and a qualified pilot-instructor. A “flying laboratory” test-plane will be ready by year-end, Lifshitz said in an interview. The plane will conserve power by slowly gliding down from the high altitudes at night — without ever touching the ground. In comparison a solar plane (partially funded by Google) already circled the earth last year — but it took 22 days, and made 17 different stops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Solar Plane Plans Non-Stop Flight Around The World

Microsoft’s true holographic display fits in your glasses

A lot of the technology billed as holographic, well, isn’t. Not even HoloLens . Real holography requires a laser-generated 3D image, and it’s no mean feat to stuff that into something you can comfortably wear. Microsoft just made some important progress, however. Its researchers have developed a true, near-eye holographic whose optics can fit inside a regular pair of glasses. The mirrors and the liquid crystal on silicon needed to achieve the effect sit inside the frame — it’s only the electronics that have to stay outside. While this extra-compact size would normally result in an unusable picture, corrections in the holographic projector make it easy to read details down to individual pixels. The tech giant has also tackled some problems with generating those holograms. Its team took advantage of eye-tracked rendering (that is, providing the most visual detail where you’re looking) and GPU-boosted algorithms to generate high-detail holograms in real time, complete with realistic focus and vision correction. You wouldn’t necessarily need a set of corrective eyewear to compensate for astigmatism or other eyesight issues. Microsoft is quick to point out that this doesn’t necessarily hint at its hardware plans. It’s just as well — the tech still faces some serious limitations. Besides the necessity of external electronics, the glasses only produce a monoscopic picture. A stereoscopic image is another challenge altogether. If everything comes together, though, you could have a real holographic display that’s comfortable to wear all day long. Whether you’re a doctor , designer or gamer , you could plunge yourself into augmented reality without a bulky headset weighing you down. Source: Microsoft Research

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Microsoft’s true holographic display fits in your glasses

Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies

Another day, another cryptocurrency clusterfuck. This week, the creator of the tipping bot “dogetipbot”—a service that let Reddit users “tip” each other in Dogecoin— announced that his company is broke, he’s broke, and the bot is broke because he spent all the coins, after he himself ran out of money. Read more…

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Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies

Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies

Another day, another cryptocurrency clusterfuck. This week, the creator of the tipping bot “dogetipbot”—a service that let Reddit users “tip” each other in Dogecoin— announced that his company is broke, he’s broke, and the bot is broke because he spent all the coins, after he himself ran out of money. Read more…

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Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies