An anonymous reader shares a report: The ‘creator’ of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world’s most elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of Homeland Security know Satoshi’s real name. In fact, DHS will not publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire’s identity. Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications. Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him — his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the use the ‘writer invariant’ method of stylometry to compare Satoshi’s ‘known’ writings with trillions of writing samples from people across the globe. By taking Satoshi’s texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5, 000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a ‘fingerprint’ for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM and then through MUSCULAR, the NSA was able to place trillions of writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as Satoshi’s writings to find his true identity. The effort took less than a month and resulted in positive match. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10, 000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, “was way off.” It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms — at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers has upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal. All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up. Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren’t up to the task. “Diamond failure, ” they note, “is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH, ” where SMH means “solid metallic hydrogen” rather than “shaking my head.” The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample. After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally — they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen’s breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals The study has been published in the journal Science. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The European Commission will rule against Ireland’s tax dealings with Apple on Tuesday, two source familiar with the decision told Reuters, one of whom said Dublin would be told to recoup over 1 billion euros in back taxes. The European Commission accused Ireland in 2014 of dodging international tax rules by letting Apple shelter profits worth tens of billions of dollars from tax collectors in return for maintaining jobs. Apple and Ireland rejected the accusation; both have said they will appeal any adverse ruling. The source said the Commission will recommend a figure in back taxes that it expects to be collected, but it will be up to Irish authorities to calculate exactly what is owed. A bill in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.12 billion) would be far more than the 30 million euros each the European Commission previously ordered Dutch authorities to recover from U.S. coffee chain Starbucks and Luxembourg from Fiat Chrysler for their tax deals. When it opened the Apple investigation in 2014, the Commission told the Irish government that tax rulings it agreed in 1991 and 2007 with the iPhone maker amounted to state aid and might have broken EU laws. The Commission said the rulings were “reverse engineered” to ensure that Apple had a minimal Irish bill and that minutes of meetings between Apple representatives and Irish tax officials showed the company’s tax treatment had been “motivated by employment considerations.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Long-time Slashdot reader itwbennett writes: Lenovo is advising users to upgrade to version 3.3.003 of Lenovo Solution Center (LSC), which includes fixes for two high-severity vulnerabilities in the tool. [The tool] allows users to check their system’s virus and firewall status, update their Lenovo software, perform backups, check battery health, get registration and warranty information and run hardware tests. The CVE-2016-5249 vulnerability allows an attacker who already has control of a limited account on a PC to execute malicious code via the privileged LocalSystem account. And the CVE-2016-5248 vulnerability allows any local user to send a command to LSC.Services.SystemService in order to kill any other process on the system, privileged or not. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes from an opinionated article on TechCrunch by Tom Hadfield: If Facebook announces the “Messenger Bot Store” at F8, as many predict, it would be arguably the most consequential event for the tech industry since Apple announced the App Store and iPhone SDK in March 2008. Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users — more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. In January, TechCrunch first reported rumors of Facebook’s secret Chat SDK for building Messenger bots. If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Over the summer, The Information broke the news that AI-powered Facebook M would enable Messenger users to make purchases, restaurant reservations, and travel bookings within the messaging interface. A Messenger Bot Store would have far-reaching consequences not only for entrepreneurs and investors, but also developers and designers. Sam Lessin, the CEO of Fin, says the rise of chat-based user interfaces will mark “a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development.” For a time, bots were perceived to be plain-text exchanges and as such were often described as “invisible apps.” As Jonathan Libov at USV points out, “just because the container is a messenger doesn’t mean that all the apps inside are text-based.” Tomaz Stolfa says there is “unexplored potential in blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements.” If 800 million Facebook users start discovering bots in Messenger after F8, it will vindicate those who have been saying bots are the new apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
schwit1 writes A giant welding machine, built for NASA’s multi-billion dollar Space Launch System (SLS), has to be taken apart and rebuilt because the contractor failed to reinforce the floor, as required, prior to construction: “Sweden’s ESAB Welding & Cutting, which has its North American headquarters in Florence, South Carolina, built the the roughly 50-meter tall Vertical Assembly Center as a subcontractor to SLS contractor Boeing at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. ESAB was supposed to reinforce Michoud’s floor before installing the welding tool, but did not, NASA SLS Program Manager Todd May told SpaceNews after an April 15 panel session during the 31st Space Symposium here. As a result, the enormous machine leaned ever so slightly, cocking the rails that guide massive rings used to lift parts of the 8.4-meter-diameter SLS stages The rings wound up 0.06 degrees out of alignment, which may not sound like much, “but when you’re talking about something that’s 217 feet [66.14 meters] tall, that adds up, ” May said. Asked why ESAB did not reinforce the foundation as it was supposed to, May said only it was a result of “a miscommunication between two [Boeing] subcontractors and ESAB.” It is baffling how everyone at NASA, Boeing, and ESAB could have forgotten to do the reinforcing, even though it was specified in the contract. It also suggests that the quality control in the SLS rocket program has some serious problems. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The L.A. Times reports that for the first time since 2007, the FDA has approved a weight loss device (as opposed to a weight-loss drug), an implantable device called the Maestro Rechargeable System. Using electrical leads implanted just above the stomach and a regulator carried under the skin near the ribcage, the device suppresses signals carried by the vagus nerve. … The device adopts a variant of a “neuromodulation” technique long used in the treatment of epilepsy: by applying intermittent bursts of electrical current to the vagus nerve, it disrupts the signals that prompt the stomach to relax, expand and prepare for an influx of food. … The FDA approved the use of the device in adult patients with a body mass index, or BMI, between 35 and 45, who have at least one other obesity-related condition, such as type 2 diabetes. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
jfruh writes The U-blox SARA-U260 chip module is only 16 by 26 millimeters — and it’s just been certified to work with AT&T’s 3G network. While consumers want 4G speeds for their browsing needs, 3G is plenty fast for the innumerable automated systems that will be necessary for the Internet of Things to work. From the article: “The U-blox SARA-U260 module, which measures 16 by 26 millimeters, can handle voice calls. But it’s not designed for really small phones for tiny hands. Instead, it’s meant to carry the small amounts of data that machines are sending to each other over the ‘Internet of things, ‘ where geographic coverage — 3G’s strong suit — matters more than top speed. That means things like electric meters, fitness watches and in-car devices that insurance companies use to monitor policyholders’ driving.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Windows/Mac/Linux: Calibre, one of the best free ebook managers out there (and a great tool for removing DRM ), released a big update this week. Calibre 2.0 includes a new editor function, comparison tool, support for Android phones on OS X, and more. Read more…