linkedin – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Unknown Language Discovered in Malaysia

Researchers have cataloged close to 7, 000 distinct human languages on Earth, per Linguistic Society of America’s latest count. That may seem like a pretty exhaustive list, but it hasn’t stopped anthropologists and linguists from continuing to encounter new languages, like one recently discovered in a village in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula. From a report: According to a press release, researchers from Lund University in Sweden discovered the language during a project called Tongues of the Semang. The documentation effort in villages of the ethnic Semang people was intended to collect data on their languages, which belong to an Austoasiatic language family called Aslian. While researchers were studying a language called Jahai in one village, they came to understand that not everyone there was speaking it. “We realized that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai, ” says Joanne Yager, lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Linguist Typology. “Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Unknown Language Discovered in Malaysia

Why Paper Jams Persist

A trivial problem reveals the limits of technology. Fascinating story from The New Yorker: Unsurprisingly, the engineers who specialize in paper jams see them differently. Engineers tend to work in narrow subspecialties, but solving a jam requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, computer programming, and interface design. “It’s the ultimate challenge, ” Ruiz said. “I wouldn’t characterize it as annoying, ” Vicki Warner, who leads a team of printer engineers at Xerox, said of discovering a new kind of paper jam. “I would characterize it as almost exciting.” When she graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology, in 2006, her friends took jobs in trendy fields, such as automotive design. During her interview at Xerox, however, another engineer showed her the inside of a printing press. All Xerox printers look basically the same: a million-dollar printing press is like an office copier, but twenty-four feet long and eight feet high. Warner watched as the heavy, pale-gray double doors swung open to reveal a steampunk wonderland of gears, wheels, conveyor belts, and circuit boards. As in an office copier, green plastic handles offer access to the “paper path” — the winding route, from “feeder” to “stacker, ” along which sheets of paper are shocked and soaked, curled and decurled, vacuumed and superheated. “Printers are essentially paper torture chambers, ” Warner said, smiling behind her glasses. “I thought, This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Paper Jams Persist

‘Sinking’ Pacific Nation Tuvalu Is Actually Getting Bigger

mi shares a report from Phys.Org: The Pacific nation of Tuvalu — long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels — is actually growing in size, new research shows. A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery. It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu’s total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average. Co-author Paul Kench said the research, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, challenged the assumption that low-lying island nations would be swamped as the sea rose. It found factors such as wave patterns and sediment dumped by storms could offset the erosion caused by rising water levels. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Sinking’ Pacific Nation Tuvalu Is Actually Getting Bigger

Hackers Manage To Run Linux On a Nintendo Switch

Romain Dillet reports via TechCrunch: Hacker group fail0verflow shared a photo of a Nintendo Switch running Debian, a distribution of Linux. The group claims that Nintendo can’t fix the vulnerability with future firmware patches. According to fail0verflow, there’s a flaw in the boot ROM in Nvidia’s Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip. When your console starts, it reads and executes a piece of code stored in a read-only memory (hence the name ROM). This code contains instructions about the booting process. It means that the boot ROM is stored on the chip when Nvidia manufactures it and it can’t be altered in any way after that. Even if Nintendo issues a software update, this software update won’t affect the boot ROM. And as the console loads the boot ROM immediately after pressing the power button, there’s no way to bypass it. The only way to fix it would be to manufacture new Nvidia Tegra X1 chips. So it’s possible that Nintendo asks Nvidia to fix the issue so that new consoles don’t have this vulnerability. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FDA Declares Popular Alt-Medicine Kratom an Opioid

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Food and Drug Administration declared the popular herbal product kratom to be an opioid on Tuesday, opening a new front in its battle to get people to stop using it. New research shows kratom acts in the brain just as opioids do, FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said in a statement. And he said the agency has documented 44 cases in which kratom at least helped kill people — often otherwise healthy young people. “Taken in total, the scientific evidence we’ve evaluated about kratom provides a clear picture of the biologic effect of this substance, ” Gottlieb wrote. “Kratom should not be used to treat medical conditions, nor should it be used as an alternative to prescription opioids. There is no evidence to indicate that kratom is safe or effective for any medical use.” The FDA released detailed accounts of several of the deaths. The victims often had mixed kratom with other substances, including chemicals taken out of inhalers and found in over-the-counter cold and flu drugs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FDA Declares Popular Alt-Medicine Kratom an Opioid

Foxconn Unit To Cut Over 10,000 Jobs As Robotics Take Over

According to Nikkei Asian Review, “Foxconn’s panel arm Innolux is planning to slash more than 10, 000 jobs this year as part of the company’s aggressive efforts to increase the use of automation in manufacturing.” Honorary Chairman Tuan Hsing-Chien said in a press conference on Tuesday: “We will reduce our total workforce to less than 50, 000 people by the end of this year, from some 60, 000 staff at the end of 2017.” From the report: Innolux is a liquid crystal display-making affiliate of major iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn Technology Group. Tuan is also a technology adviser to Foxconn, Sharp and Innolux. Tuan said up to 75% of production will be fully automated by the end of 2018. Most of Innolux’s factories are in Taiwan. Tuan’s pledge came a few days after Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou said the company would pour in some $342 million to overhaul its manufacturing process by using artificial intelligence. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Windows Vista Ended Up Being a Mess

alaskana98 shares an article called “What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider’s Retrospective.” Ben Fathi, formerly a manager of various teams at Microsoft responsible for storage, file systems, high availability/clustering, file level network protocols, distributed file systems, and related technologies and later security, writes: Imagine supporting that same OS for a dozen years or more for a population of billions of customers, millions of companies, thousands of partners, hundreds of scenarios, and dozens of form factors — and you’ll begin to have an inkling of the support and compatibility nightmare. In hindsight, Linux has been more successful in this respect. The open source community and approach to software development is undoubtedly part of the solution. The modular and pluggable architecture of Unix/Linux is also a big architectural improvement in this respect. An organization, sooner or later, ships its org chart as its product; the Windows organization was no different. Open source doesn’t have that problem… I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to “patch” kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel — the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our “friends”, the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies? I like how the essay ends. “Was it an incredibly complex product with an amazingly huge ecosystem (the largest in the world at that time)? Yup, that it was. Could we have done better? Yup, you bet… Hindsight is 20/20.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Windows Vista Ended Up Being a Mess

Japan Launches the World’s Smallest Satellite-Carrying Rocket

Japan has launched the world’s smallest satellite-carrying rocket. Long-time Slashdot reader hey! writes: Last week Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully placed a three-kilogram cubesat into an 180 x 1, 500 kilometer orbit at 31 degrees inclination to the equator. The payload was launched on a modified sounding rocket, called the SS-520-5. The assembled rocket weighed a mere 2600 kilograms [2.87 tons] on the launchpad, making the SS-520-5 the smallest vehicle ever to put an object into orbit. Note that the difference in the SS-520’s modest orbital capacity of four kilograms and its ability to launch 140 kilograms to 1000 kilometers on a suborbital flight. That shows how much more difficult it is to put an object into orbit than it is to merely send it into space. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Japan Launches the World’s Smallest Satellite-Carrying Rocket

Wells Fargo Hit With ‘Unprecedented’ Punishment Over Fake Accounts

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The Federal Reserve has dropped the hammer on Wells Fargo, [handing] down unprecedented punishment late Friday for what it called the bank’s “widespread consumer abuses, ” including its notorious creation of millions of fake customer accounts. Wells Fargo won’t be allowed to get any bigger than it was at the end of last year — $2 trillion in assets — until the Fed is satisfied that it has cleaned up its act. Under pressure from the Fed, the bank agreed to remove three people from the board of directors by April and a fourth by the end of the year. It is the first time the Federal Reserve has imposed a cap on the entire assets of a financial institution, according to a Fed official. “We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank, ” outgoing Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said in a statement. Friday was her last day on the job…. Wells Fargo admitted that its workers responded to wildly unrealistic sales goals by creating as many as 3.5 million fake accounts. The bank has also said it forced up to 570, 000 customers into unneeded auto insurance… About 20, 000 of those customers had their cars wrongfully repossessed in part due to these unwanted insurance charges. In August, Wells Fargo was sued by small business owners who say the bank used deceptive language to dupe mom-and-pop businesses into paying “massive early termination fees.” The company was in the headlines again in October for charging about 110, 000 mortgage borrowers undue fees. One U.S. congressman argued that the harsh penalty “demonstrates that we have the tools to rein in Wall Street — if our regulators have the guts to use them.” Wells Fargo has also spent $3.3 billion on legal bills in just the last three months of 2017. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Wells Fargo Hit With ‘Unprecedented’ Punishment Over Fake Accounts

Five Major Credit Cards Are Now Blocking Cryptocurrency Purchases

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup said Friday they are no longer allowing customers to buy cryptocurrencies using credit cards. “At this time, we are not processing cryptocurrency purchases using credit cards, due to the volatility and risk involved, ” a J.P. Morgan Chase spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We will review the issue as the market evolves.” A Bank of America spokesperson also said in an email that the bank has decided to decline credit card purchases of cryptocurrencies. Citigroup said in a statement that it has “made the decision to no longer permit credit card purchases of cryptocurrency. We will continue to review our policy as this market evolves.” Earlier in January, Capital One Financial said it has decided to ban cryptocurrency purchases with its cards. Discover Financial Services has effectively prohibited cryptocurrency purchases with its credit cards since 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Five Major Credit Cards Are Now Blocking Cryptocurrency Purchases