Tag: open source

New York’s District Attorney: Roll Back Apple’s iPhone Encryption

An anonymous reader quotes Mashable: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple’s encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant. “Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement, ” Vance said on Thursday. “Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside.” Vance said he’s got 423 “lawfully-seized Apple devices” that his employees can’t do anything with. Forty-two of those devices “pertain to homicide or attempted murder cases” according to the district attorney’s office, and a similar number “relate to sex crimes.” The argument, of course, is that the district attorney’s office would have an easier time solving crimes if they had access to these phones… Apple believes being forced to hack into phones at the government’s will is an unreasonable burden. ZDNet adds that “the call for federal legislation could be given a popular boost by president elect Donald Trump, who previously called for a boycott on Apple products when it refused to help the FBI.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New York’s District Attorney: Roll Back Apple’s iPhone Encryption

Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions

Dave Knott writes: A Canadian farmer has “helped lead to a researcher’s discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts, ” reports the CBC. “Joe Dorgan began feeding his cattle seaweed from nearby beaches more than a decade ago as a way to cut costs… Then researcher Rob Kinley of Dalhousie University caught wind of it.” He tested Dorgan’s seaweed mix, discovering that it reduced the methane in the cows’ burps and farts by about 20 per cent. “Kinley knew he was on to something, so he did further testing with 30 to 40 other seaweeds. That led him to a red seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis he says reduces methane in cows burps and farts to almost nothing.” “Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it’s not a small number, ” said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. “We’re talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars.” The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. “He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions

Intel Lays Roadmap For 100-Fold AI Performance Boost With Nervana and Knights

MojoKid writes: Intel is laying out its roadmap to advance artificial intelligence performance across the board. Nervana Systems, a company that Intel acquired just a few months ago, will play a pivotal role in the company’s efforts to make waves in an industry dominated by GPU-based solutions. Intel’s Nervana chips incorporate technology (which involves a fully-optimized software and hardware stack) that is specially tasked with reducing the amount of time required to train deep-learning models. Nervana hardware will initially be available as an add-in card that plugs into a PCIe slot, which is the quickest way for Intel to get this technology to customers. The first Nervana silicon, codenamed Lake Crest, will make its way to select Intel customers in H1 2017. Intel is also talking about Knights Mill, which is the next generation of the Xeon Phi processor family. The company claims that Knights Mill will deliver a 4x increase in deep learning performance compared to existing Xeon Phi processors and the combined solution with Nervana will offer orders of magnitude gains in deep learning performance. “We expect the Intel Nervana platform to produce breakthrough performance and dramatic reductions in the time to train complex neural networks, ” said Diane Bryant, Executive VP of Intel’s Data Center Group. “We expect Nervana’s technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster, ” added Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Lays Roadmap For 100-Fold AI Performance Boost With Nervana and Knights

Mozilla Releases Firefox 50

Mozilla has begun seeding the binary and source packages of the final release of Firefox 50 web browser on all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux and macOS. From a report on Softpedia: We have to admit that we expected to see some major features and improvements, but that hasn’t happened. The biggest new feature of the Firefox 50.0 release appears to be emoji for everyone. That’s right, the web browser now ships with built-in emoji for GNU/Linux distributions, as well as other operating systems that don’t include native emoji fonts by default, such as Windows 8.0 and previous versions. Also new, Firefox 50.0 now shows lock icon strikethrough for web pages that offer insecure password fields. Another interesting change that landed in the Mozilla Firefox 50.0 web browser is the ability to cycle through tabs in recently used order using the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut. Moreover, it’s now possible to search for whole words only using the “Find in page” feature. Last but not the least, printing was improved as well by using the Reader Mode, which now uses the accel-(opt/alt)-r keyboard shortcut, the Guarana (gn) locale is now supported, the rendering of dotted and dashed borders with rounded corners (border-radius) has been fixed as well. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mozilla Releases Firefox 50

Earth’s Plants Are Countering Some of the Effects of Climate Change

A new study published in Nature Communications has found that Earth’s plant life between 2002 and 2014 has absorbed so much carbon dioxide that the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere has slowed down, despite humans pumping out more CO2 than ever before. The study also found that between 1982 and 2009, “about 18m square kilometers of new vegetation had sprouted on Earth’s surface, an area roughly twice the size of the United States.” The Economist reports: In 2014 humans pumped about 35.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That figure has been climbing sharply since the middle of the 20th century, when only about 6 billion tons a year were emitted. As a consequence, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising too, from about 311 parts per million (ppm) in 1950 to just over 400 in 2015. Yet the rate at which it is rising seems to have slowed since the turn of the century. According to Dr Keenan, between 1959 and 1989 the rate at which CO2 levels were growing rose from 0.75ppm per year to 1.86. Since 2002, though, it has barely budged. In other words, although humans are pumping out more CO2 than ever, less of it than you might expect is lingering in the air. Filling the atmosphere with CO2 is a bit like filling a bath without a plug: the level will rise only if more water is coming out of the taps than is escaping down the drain. Climate scientists call the processes which remove CO2 from the air “sinks.” The oceans are one such sink. Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves. Towards the end of the 20th century around 50% of the CO2 emitted by humans each year was removed from the atmosphere this way. Now that number seems closer to 60%. Earth’s carbon sinks seem to have become more effective, but the precise details are still unclear. Using a mix of ground and atmospheric observations, satellite measurements and computer modeling, Dr Keenan and his colleagues have concluded that faster-growing land plants are the chief reason. That makes sense: as CO2 concentrations rise, photosynthesis speeds up. Studies conducted in greenhouses have found that plants can photosynthesis up to 40% faster when concentrations of CO2 are between 475 and 600ppm. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Earth’s Plants Are Countering Some of the Effects of Climate Change

Web of Trust, Downloaded 140M Times, Pulled From Extension Stores After Revelations That It Sells Users’ Data

According to multiple reports, Web of Trust, one of the top privacy and security extensions for web browsers with over 140 million downloads, collects and sells some of the data of its users — and it does without properly anonymizing it. Upon learning about this, Mozilla, Google and Opera quickly pulled the extension off their respective extension stores. From a report on The Register: A browser extension which was found to be harvesting users’ browsing histories and selling them to third parties has had its availability pulled from a number of web browsers’ add-on repositories. Last week, an investigative report by journalists at the Hamburg-based German television broadcaster, Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), revealed that Web of Trust Services (WoT) had been harvesting netizens’ web browsing histories through its browser add-on and then selling them to third parties. While WoT claimed it anonymised the data that it sold, the journalists were able to identify more than 50 users from the sample data it acquired from an intermediary. NDR quoted the data protection commissioner of Hamburg, Johannes Caspar, criticising WoT for not adequately establishing whether users consented to the tracking and selling of their browsing data. Those consent issues have resulted in the browser add-on being pulled from the add-on repositories of both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, although those who have already installed the extension in their browsers will need to manually uninstall it to stop their browsing being tracked. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Web of Trust, Downloaded 140M Times, Pulled From Extension Stores After Revelations That It Sells Users’ Data

First Color Images Produced By an Electron Microscope

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Imagine spending your whole life seeing the world in black and white, and then seeing a vase of roses in full color for the first time. That’s kind of what it was like for the scientists who have taken the first multicolor images of cells using an electron microscope. Electron microscopes can magnify an object up to 10 million times, allowing researchers to peer into the inner workings of, say, a cell or a fly’s eye, but until now they’ve only been able to see in black and white. The new advance — 15 years in the making — uses three different kinds of rare earth metals called lanthanides…layered one-by-one over cells on a microscope slide. The microscope detects when each metal loses electrons and records each unique loss as an artificial color. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Color Images Produced By an Electron Microscope

A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil

Big Hairy Ian shares this report from New Atlas: The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gallons of raw sewage that Americans create every day… [T]he raw sewage is placed in a reactor that’s basically a tube pressurized to 3, 000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit, which mimics the same geological process that turned prehistoric organic matter into crude oil by breaking it down into simple compounds, only…it takes minutes instead of epochs… The end product is very similar to fossil crude oil with a bit of oxygen and water mixed in and can be refined like crude oil using conventional fractionating plants. After six years of development, they’ve licensed the process for a $6 million pilot plant that’s expected to launch in 2018. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil

Adobe Is Working On ‘Photoshop For Audio’ That Will Let You Add Words Someone Never Said

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Adobe is working on a new piece of software that would act like a Photoshop for audio, according to Adobe developer Zeyu Jin, who spoke at the Adobe MAX conference in San Diego, California today. The software is codenamed Project VoCo, and it’s not clear at this time when it will materialize as a commercial product. The standout feature, however, is the ability to add words not originally found in the audio file. Like Photoshop, Project VoCo is designed to be a state-of-the-art audio editing application. Beyond your standard speech editing and noise cancellation features, Project VoCo can also apparently generate new words using a speaker’s recorded voice. Essentially, the software can understand the makeup of a person’s voice and replicate it, so long as there’s about 20 minutes of recorded speech. In Jin’s demo, the developer showcased how Project VoCo let him add a word to a sentence in a near-perfect replication of the speaker, according to Creative Bloq. So similar to how Photoshop ushered in a new era of editing and image creation, this tool could transform how audio engineers work with sound, polish clips, and clean up recordings and podcasts. “When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative, ” reads an official Adobe statement. “We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Adobe Is Working On ‘Photoshop For Audio’ That Will Let You Add Words Someone Never Said

Every Year of Smoking Causes About 150 New DNA Mutations That Can Make Cancer More Likely, Says Study

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: For every year that you continue your pack-a-day habit, the DNA in every cell in your lungs acquires about 150 new mutations. Some of those mutations may be harmless, but the more there are, the greater the risk that one or more of them will wind up causing cancer. The threat doesn’t stop there, according to a study in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. After a year of smoking a pack of cigarettes each day, the cells in the larynx pick up roughly 97 new mutations, those in the pharynx accumulate 39 new mutations, and cells in the oral cavity gain 23 new mutations. Even organs with no direct exposure to tobacco smoke appear to be affected. The researchers counted about 18 new mutations in every bladder cell and six new mutations in every liver cell for each “pack-year” that smokers smoked. The findings are based on a genetic analysis of 5, 243 cancers, including 2, 490 from smokers and 1, 063 from patients who said they had never smoked tobacco cigarettes. The researchers used powerful supercomputers to compare thousands of cancer genome sequences. The computers grouped the sequences into about 20 distinct categories, or “mutational signatures.” Mutations tied to five of these signatures were more common in tumors from smokers than in tumors from nonsmokers. One of the signatures involves a specific DNA nucleobase change — instead of a C for cytosine, there was an A for adenine — that “is very similar” to the change that occurs in the lab when cells are exposed to benzo[a]pyrene, a compound that the International Agency for Research on Cancer says is carcinogenic to humans. Most of the lung and larynx cancers obtained from smokers had this type of mutation, the researchers reported. They also found that the signature was more common among smokers than nonsmokers. Another mutational signature was characterized by Cs that should have been Ts (thymine) and vice versa. Although these changes can be found in all kinds of cancers, the signature was 1.3 to 5.1 times more common in tumors from smokers than in tumors from nonsmokers, according to the study. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every Year of Smoking Causes About 150 New DNA Mutations That Can Make Cancer More Likely, Says Study