Daily Archives: March 13, 2017

Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission

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A small yellow robot submarine, called Boaty McBoatface after a competition to name a new polar research ship backfired, is being sent on its first Antarctic mission.

Boaty, which has arguably one of the most famous names in recent maritime history, is a new type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which will be able to travel under ice, reach depths of 6,000 metres, and transmit the data it collects to researchers via a radio link.

Its mission will be to investigate water flow and turbulence in the dark depths of the Orkney Passage, a 3.5km deep region of the Southern Ocean. The data it collects will help scientists understand how the ocean is responding to global warming.

Source: Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission | World news | The Guardian

The real miracle is that the dour bastards at the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) who opened a competition to name their new ship and then blasted the resultant name, have decided to use the chosen name for something at all, even if it is a sad little submarine.

MXNet – Amazon machine learning Open sourced

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MXNet stands for mix and maximize. The idea is to combine the power of declartive programming together with imperative programming. In its core, a dynamic dependency scheduler that automatically parallelizes both symbolic and imperative operations on the fly. A graph optimization layer on top of that makes symbolic execution fast and memory efficient. The library is portable and lightweight, and it scales to multiple GPUs and multiple machines.

Source: MXNet

Cloudbleed: How to deal with it

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The duration (2016–09–22 to 2017–02–20) and potential breadth of information exposed is huge — Cloudflare has over 2 million websites on its network, and data from any of these is potentially exposed. Cloudflare has said the actual impact is relatively minor, so I believe only limited amounts of information were actually disseminated. Essentially, broad range of data was potentially at risk, but the risk to any individual piece of data was very low. Regardless, unless it can be shown conclusively that your data was NOT compromised, it would be prudent to consider the possibility it has been compromised.
[…]
From an individual perspective, this is straightforward —the most effective mitigation is to change your passwords. While this is on all probability not necessary (it is unlikely your passwords were exposed in this incident), it will absolutely improve your security from both this potential compromise and many other, far more likely security issues. Cloudflare is behind many of the largest consumer web services (Uber, Fitbit, OKCupid, …), so rather than trying to identify which services are on Cloudflare, the most cautious is use this as an opportunity to rotate ALL passwords on all of your sites. This will improve your security, although the primary benefit is from threats unrelated to this incident.

Source: Cloudbleed: How to deal with it – octal – Medium

Kerala saves Rs 300 crore ($45m) as schools switch to open software

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The Kerala government has made a saving of Rs 300 crore through introduction and adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in the school education sector, said a state government official on Sunday.

IT became a compulsory subject in Kerala schools from 2003, but it was in 2005 only that FOSS was introduced in a phased manner and started to replace proprietary software. The decision made by the curriculum committee to implement it in the higher secondary sector has also been completed now.

K. Anwar Sadath, executive director IT@School, said they have been entrusted the job for easy classroom transaction of chapters including customisation of applications, teachers’ training, and video tutorials.

“The proprietary version of this software would have incurred a minimum cost of Rs 150,000 per machine in terms of licence fee. Hence, the minimum savings in a year (considering 20,000 machines) is Rs 300 crore. It’s not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software licence enables not only teachers and students but also the general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish,” he said.

Source: Kerala saves Rs 300 crore as schools switch to open software

Preinstalled Malware Targeting Mobile Users

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The Check Point Mobile Threat Prevention has recently detected a severe infection in 38 Android devices, belonging to a large telecommunications company and a multinational technology company. While this is not unusual, one detail of the attacks stands out. In all instances, the malware was not downloaded to the device as a result of the users’ use, it arrived with it.

According to the findings, the malware were already present on the devices even before the users received them. The malicious apps were not part of the official ROM supplied by the vendor, and were added somewhere along the supply chain. Six of the malware instances were added by a malicious actor to the device’s ROM using system privileges, meaning they couldn’t be removed by the user and the device had to be re-flashed.

Source: Preinstalled Malware Targeting Mobile Users | Check Point Blog

Researchers create new form of matter—supersolid is crystalline and superfluid at the same time

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By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.

“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”

Physicists had predicted the possibility of supersolids but had not observed them in the lab. They theorized that solid helium could become superfluid if helium atoms could move around in a solid crystal of helium, effectively becoming a supersolid. However, the experimental proof remained elusive.

Source: Researchers create new form of matter—supersolid is crystalline and superfluid at the same time

Apis Cor. 3D building printer

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Apis Cor are the first company to develop a mobile construction 3D printer which is capable of printing whole buildings completely on site.Also we are people. Engineers, managers, builders and inventors sharing one common idea – to change the construction industry so that millions of people will have an opportunity to improve their living conditions.On the six continents of Earth there are families which cannot afford to buy or build a house. A good accommodation is costly. And waiting for it to get construction takes more than a single month.So it used to be. Today – it’s different.Today we have a 3D printing technology, new building materials and a mobile 3D printer to build affordable, eco-friendly houses within a single day, capable of lasting up to 175 years

Source: Who we are | Apis Cor. We print buildings

IBM Q opens up usage of their quantum computer

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IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science. While technologies like AI can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.

Source: IBM Q – US

Sponge can soak up and release spilled oil hundreds of times

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A new material can absorb up to 90 times its own weight in spilled oil and then be squeezed out like a sponge and reused, raising hopes for easier clean-up of oil spill sites.

But to determine whether this material could help sort out a big spill in marine waters, they needed to perform a special large-scale test.
Recreating a spill

To do this, the team made an array of square pads of the sponge material measuring around 6 square metres. “We made a lot of the foam, and then these pieces of foam were placed inside mesh bags – basically laundry bags, with sewn channels to house the foam,” Darling says.

The researchers suspended their sponge-filled bags from a bridge over a large pool specially designed for practising emergency responses to oil spills.

They then dragged the sponges behind a pipe spewing crude oil to test the material’s capability to remove oil from the water. They next sent the sponges through a wringer to remove the oil and then repeated the process, carrying out many tests over multiple days.

Source: Sponge can soak up and release spilled oil hundreds of times | New Scientist