The study, published in the journal Cell, compared ‘brain organoids’ – 3-D tissues grown from stem cells which model early brain development—that were grown from human, gorilla and chimpanzee stem cells.
Similar to actual brains, the human brain organoids grew a lot larger than the organoids from other apes.
[…]
During the early stages of brain development, neurons are made by stem cells called neural progenitors. These progenitor cells initially have a cylindrical shape that makes it easy for them to split into identical daughter cells with the same shape.
The more times the neural progenitor cells multiply at this stage, the more neurons there will be later.
As the cells mature and slow their multiplication, they elongate, forming a shape like a stretched ice-cream cone.
Previously, research in mice had shown that their neural progenitor cells mature into a conical shape and slow their multiplication within hours.
Now, brain organoids have allowed researchers to uncover how this development happens in humans, gorillas and chimpanzees.
They found that in gorillas and chimpanzees this transition takes a long time, occurring over approximately five days.
After only 5 days, gorilla neural progenitor cells have matured into a conical shape (right), while human cells (left) remain cylindrical. Credit: S.Benito-Kwiecinski/MRC LMB/Cell
Human progenitors were even more delayed in this transition, taking around seven days. The human progenitor cells maintained their cylinder-like shape for longer than other apes and during this time they split more frequently, producing more cells.
This difference in the speed of transition from neural progenitors to neurons means that the human cells have more time to multiply. This could be largely responsible for the approximately three-fold greater number of neurons in human brains compared with gorilla or chimpanzee brains.
[…]
To uncover the genetic mechanism driving these differences, the researchers compared gene expression—which genes are turned on and off—in the human brain organoids versus the other apes.
They identified differences in a gene called ‘ZEB2’, which was turned on sooner in gorilla brain organoids than in the human organoids.
To test the effects of the gene in gorilla progenitor cells, they delayed the effects of ZEB2. This slowed the maturation of the progenitor cells, making the gorilla brain organoids develop more similarly to human—slower and larger.
Conversely, turning on the ZEB2 gene sooner in human progenitor cells promoted premature transition in human organoids, so that they developed more like ape organoids.
The researchers note that organoids are a model and, like all models, do not to fully replicate real brains, especially mature brain function. But for fundamental questions about our evolution, these brain tissues in a dish provide an unprecedented view into key stages of brain development that would be impossible to study otherwise.
Richard Stallman’s return to the Free Software Foundation’s board of directors has drawn condemnation from many people in the free software community. An open letter signed by hundreds of people today called for Stallman to be removed again and for the FSF’s entire board to resign. Letter signers include Neil McGovern, GNOME Foundation executive director and former Debian Project Leader; Deb Nicholson, general manager of the Open Source Initiative; Matthew Garrett, a former member of the FSF board of directors; seven of the eight members of the X.org Foundation board of directors; Elana Hashman of the Debian Technical Committee, Open Source Initiative, and Kubernetes project; Molly de Blanc of the Debian Project and GNOME Foundation; and more than 300 others. That number has been rising quickly today: the open letter contains instructions for signing it.
The letter said all members of the FSF board should be removed because they ‘have enabled and empowered RMS for years. They demonstrate this again by permitting him to rejoin the FSF Board. It is time for RMS to step back from the free software, tech ethics, digital rights, and tech communities, for he cannot provide the leadership we need.’ The letter also called for Stallman to be removed from his position leading the GNU Project. “We urge those in a position to do so to stop supporting the Free Software Foundation,” they wrote. “Refuse to contribute to projects related to the FSF and RMS. Do not speak at or attend FSF events, or events that welcome RMS and his brand of intolerance. We ask for contributors to free software projects to take a stand against bigotry and hate within their projects. While doing these things, tell these communities and the FSF why.” UPDATE: For a quick summary of the controversy, long-time Slashdot reader Jogar the Barbarian recommends this article from It’s Foss.
Your misleading quoting is mendacious, wrong, and sickening from someone on Slashdot who ought to know better. Here is the RMS quote, as quoted by the MIT cancellor (I’ve bolded the parts that you tried to hide):
RMS:
The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.
The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem. … Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).
The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.
We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
This really frightens me. Moridineas, you have provided the precise quote, and it is absolutely clear that you are right. Stallman did not speak in vague metaphors or with sloppy grammar. What was written is clear as crystal, and easily objectively verified by absolutely anyone who bothers to read the quote.
The objective truth here is Stallman DID NOT say that these girls were entirely willing. If he had said that, we would all be having a very different conversation here. But he did not, and that is that. He speculated that they presented as entirely willing. This is a completely different statement, and it is not the moral sin that Stallman is being accused of committing.
And yet, there is an army of angry people adamantly insisting that he said they were entirely willing. People who seem to be otherwise intelligent and capable of understanding English. Every one of these people can read the quote just like you did, and see that he did not say what they insist he said.
So what is motivating this? How can so many otherwise-normal people insist on an obvious lie to the point of insisting that so many people resign? What is wrong with these people? Don’t they care about the truth? Doesn’t that matter?
What good is speaking precisely when people will just change what you say and then crucify you for it?
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is everywhere these days. If you fire up a scanner on your phone and walk around the neighborhood, we’d be willing to bet you’d pick up dozens if not hundreds of devices. By extension, from fitness bands to light bulbs, it’s equally likely that you’re going to want to talk to some of these BLE gadgets at some point. But how?
Well, watching this three part video series from [Stuart Patterson] would be a good start. He covers how to get a cheap nRF52480 BLE dongle configured for sniffing, pulling the packets out of the air with Wireshark, and perhaps most crucially, how to duplicate the commands coming from a device’s companion application on the ESP32.
Testing out the sniffed commands.
The first video in the series is focused on getting a Windows box setup for BLE sniffing, so readers who aren’t currently living under Microsoft’s boot heel may want to skip ahead to the second installment. That’s where things really start heating up, as [Stuart] demonstrates how you can intercept commands being sent to the target device.
It’s worth noting that little attempt is made to actually decode what the commands mean. In this particular application, it’s enough to simply replay the commands using the ESP32’s BLE hardware, which is explained in the third video. Obviously this technique might not work on more advanced devices, but it should still give you a solid base to work from.
In the end, [Stuart] takes an LED lamp that could only be controlled with a smartphone application and turns it into something he can talk to on his own terms. Once the ESP32 can send commands to the lamp, it only takes a bit more code to spin up a web interface or REST API so you can control the device from your computer or other gadget on the network. While naturally the finer points will differ, this same overall workflow should allow you to get control of whatever BLE gizmo you’ve got your eye on.
Working from home, whether as a permanent option or as part of hybrid models, may become standard, and so the corporate world needs to consider how best to keep their networks protected whilst also catering to a remote workforce.
To this end, Cloudflare has contributed a new zero-trust solution for browser sessions. On Tuesday, the web security firm launched Cloudflare Browser Isolation, software that creates a “gap” between browsers and end-user devices in the interests of safety.
Instead of employees launching local browser sessions to access work-related resources or collaborative tools, the service runs the original, requested web page in the cloud and streams a replica to the end-user.
Cloudflare says that tapping into the firm’s global network to run browser sessions circumvents the usual speed downgrades and potential lag caused by typical, pixel-based streaming.
As there is no direct browser link, this can mitigate the risk of exploits, phishing, and cyberattacks. In addition, Cloudflare automatically blocks high-risk websites based on existing threat intelligence.
The solution has now been made available through Cloudflare for Teams.
One of the world’s most important international shipping arteries remains blocked this evening after the MV Ever Given, a 1,300-foot, 220,000-ton container ship, ran aground and got stuck almost completely sideways in the Suez Canal—cutting off a vital shipping lane between Europe and Asia and leading to a massive backup of over a hundred giant vessels as attempts to refloat the ship have so far failed, according to Bloomberg, local reports and satellite data.
Loaded with nearly 20,000 containers, the Panama-flagged MV Ever Given—notably one of the largest container ships in the world—was sailing from China for Rotterdam in the Netherlands and had just left port in Suez, Egypt at the southern edge of the canal when it ran aground Tuesday morning. It’s not known yet how exactly it happened, but at only 80 feet deep and 673 feet wide, the canal offers little room for maneuvering, relatively speaking, should a huge ship veer off course or suffer some sort of control failure.
via Twitter
Satellite tracking data and photos from the scene show a flotilla of small tugs and even a land-bound excavator have spend all day trying to free the ship, but so far, it remains lodged lengthwise across the canal. There’s literally no room for anything larger than a tugboat to pass by. The fleet director for the company that manages the Ever Given confirmed to Bloomberg that the ship suffered a “grounding incident” but added there were no injuries or reports of any pollution.
Several internet companies repelled DDOS attacks on Monday night. Among them are at least three Internet providers Freedom Internet, Tweak and Kabelnoord.
Web hosting company TransIP also faced a DDOS attack targeting so-called name servers on Monday.
While averting this attack and resolving its consequences, the company was hit by a second, more violent attack on the entire infrastructure.
It is not clear whether there is any link between the attacks.
Yandex, Russia’s multi-hyphenate internet giant, began testing its autonomous cars on Moscow’s icy winter roads over three years ago. The goal was to create a “universal” self-driving vehicle that could safely maneuver around different cities across the globe. Now, Yandex says its trials have been a resounding success. The vehicles recently hit a major milestone by driving over six million miles (10 million kilometers) in autonomous mode, with the majority of the distance traveled in the Russian capital.
That’s significant because Moscow poses some of the most difficult weather conditions in the world. In January alone, the city was hit by a Balkan cyclone that blanketed the streets in snow and caused temperatures to plummet to as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius (-13 degrees Fahrenheit). For self-driving cars — which rely on light-emitting sensors, known as LIDAR, to track the distance between objects — snowfall and condensation can play havoc with visibility.
Yandex
To overcome the hazardous conditions, Yandex says it cranked up its LIDAR performance by implementing neural networks to filter snow from the lidar point cloud, thereby enhancing the clarity of objects and obstacles around the vehicle. It also fed historical winter driving data in to the system to help it to distinguish car exhaust fumes and heating vent condensation clouds. To top it all, Yandex claims the neural “filters” can help its vehicles beat human drivers in identifying pedestrians obscured by winter mist.
Driving on Moscow’s roads also helped improve the tech’s traffic navigation. The system was able to adjust to both sleet and harder icy conditions over time, according to Yandex, allowing it to gradually make better decisions on everything from acceleration to braking to switching lanes. In addition, the winter conditions pushed the system’s built-in localization tech to adapt to hazards such as hidden road signs and street boundaries and snow piles the “size of buildings.” This was made possible by the live mapping, motion, position and movement data measured by the system’s mix of sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes.
When it launched the Moscow trial in 2017, Yandex was among the first to put autonomous cars through their paces in a harsh, frosty climate. But, soon after, Google followed suit by taking its Waymo project to the snowy streets of Ohio and Michigan.
An otherwise meaningless game during Monday’s preliminary stage of the $200,000 Magnus Carlsen Invitational left a pair of grandmasters in stitches while thrusting one of chess’s most bizarre and least effective openings into the mainstream.
Norway’s Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura of the United States had already qualified for the knockout stage of the competition with one game left to play between them. Carlsen, the world’s top-ranked player and reigning world champion, started the dead rubber typically enough by moving his king’s pawn with the common 1 e4. Nakamura, the five-time US champion and current world No 18, mirrored it with 1 … e5. And then all hell broke loose.
Carlsen inched his king one space forward to the rank where his pawn had started. The self-destructive opening (2 Ke2) is known as the bongcloud for a simple reason: you’d have to be stoned to the gills to think it was a good idea.
The wink-wink move immediately sent Nakamura, who’s been a visible champion of the bongcloud in recent years, into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Naturally, the American played along with 2 … Ke7, which marked the first double bongcloud ever played in a major tournament and its official entry to chess theory (namely, the Bongcloud Counter-Gambit: Hotbox Variation).
[…]
Why is the bongcloud so bad? For one, it manages to break practically all of the principles you’re taught about chess openings from day one: it doesn’t fight for the center, it leaves the king exposed and it wastes time, all while eliminating the possibility of castling and managing to impede the development of the bishop and queen. Even the worst openings tend to have some redeeming quality. The bongcloud, not so much.
What makes it funny (well, not to everyone) is the idea that two of the best players on the planet would use an opening so pure in its defiance of conventional wisdom.
This bongcloud has been a cult favorite in chess circles since the dawn of the internet, a popularity only fueled by Bobby Fischer’s rumored deployment of the opening in his alleged series of games with Nigel Short on the Internet Chess Club back in 2000. But its origins as a meme can be traced to Andrew Fabbro’s underground book Winning with the Bongcloud, a pitch-perfect parody of chess opening manuals and the purple, ponderous language that fills their pages.
In jade waters off Hong Kong’s eastern shoreline, scientists are thrilled to spot a cuttlefish protecting her eggs inside an artificial, 3D-printed clay seabed helping to restore the city’s fragile coral reefs.
[…]
Around 84 species of coral are found in Hong Kong’s waters, scientists say, more diverse than those found in the Caribbean Sea.
Most can be found on remote inlets, far from the sediment-filled Pearl River Delta and its busy shipping channels.
[…]
They have begun using 3D printed tiles that work as an artificial bed for corals to latch onto and thrive, with promising results.
“The first time we put down the tiles, there were a few fish around,” she told AFP on a recent inspection by University of Hong Kong (HKU) researchers.
Now the artificially produced reef laid down last summer is teeming with wildlife, including the cuttlefish, something Yu described as “very, very exciting”.
[…]
Corals are colonies of billions of living polyp invertebrates and are hugely sensitive to temperature changes.
When they get too hot, they lose their vibrant colour and die.
Repopulating a dead or damaged reef requires suitable ground for the remaining coral larvae to latch onto and build a new home—and the printed tiles have so far proven dependable.
“3D printing allows us to customise a tile or a solution for any type of environment and I think that’s the real potential that the technology brings,” David Baker, an associate professor at HKU’s School of Biological Sciences who led development of the technology, told AFP.
Tiles carrying 400 coral fragments have been laid on a 40 square-metre (430 square-foot) section of sea floor in the marine park.
“The corals now on the tiles definitely survive better than the traditional way of transplantation,” said Yu, putting the success rate at around 90 percent.
Some projects around the world have deliberately sunk ships or concrete onto the sea floor to encourage coral growth. And while those methods have had some success, they can change the chemistry of the water.
The tiles used in the Hong Kong project are made with terracotta, minimising the environmental impact.
“Clay is basically soil, so soil you can find everywhere on earth,” said Christian Lange, an associate professor from HKU’s Department of Architecture.
It leaves water chemistry unchanged, Lange added, and if a tile fails to spawn a new colony it will simply erode without leaving a trace.
It’s been well established by now that the agricultural systems producing our food contribute at least one fifth of global anthropogenic carbon emissions—and up to a third if waste and transportation are factored in. A troubling new report points to a previously overlooked source: an industrial fishing process practiced by dozens of countries around the world, including the United States, China, and the E.U.
The study, published today in the scientific journal Nature, is the first to calculate the carbon cost of bottom trawling, in which fishing fleets drag immense weighted nets along the ocean floor, scraping up fish, shellfish and crustaceans along with significant portions of their habitats.
According to calculations conducted by the report’s 26 authors, bottom trawling is responsible for one gigaton of carbon emissions a year—a higher annual total than (pre-pandemic) aviation emissions. Not only does the practice contribute to climate change, it is extremely damaging to ocean biodiversity—the “equivalent of ploughing an old-growth forest into the ground, over and over and over again until there is nothing left” according to lead author Enric Sala, a marine biologist who is also National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence.
Bottom trawling is also one of the least cost effective methods of fishing. Most locations have been trawled so many times, there is little left worth catching, says Sala. “Without government subsidies, no one would be making a penny.” But Sala didn’t set out to condemn bottom trawlers when he designed the research project back in 2018. He was looking for the incentives that just might make the fishing industry, and governments, give up on the practice on their own. The carbon findings may just do the trick.
[…]
Refuting a long-held view that ocean protection harms fisheries, the study found that well placed marine protected areas (MPAs) that ban fishing would actually boost the production of marine life by functioning as fish nurseries and biodiversity generators capable of seeding stocks elsewhere. According to the study results, protecting the right places could increase the global seafood catch by over 8 million metric tons a year, despite the challenges of overfishing and climate change.
Bottom trawling, however, would have to stop, says Sala. While mangroves, kelp forests and sea grass meadows are good at capturing carbon, the bottom of the ocean, piled deep with marine animal debris, is a far greater carbon sink. But when the trawlers’ weighted nets scrape the sea floor that carbon is released back into the water. Excess carbon in water turns it acidic, which is damaging to sea life.
Worse still, the practice also impacts the ocean’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon: if the water is already saturated from sources down below, it will be unable to absorb human-caused emissions from above, hamstringing one of our best assets in the fight against climate change. By combining publicly-available data on global bottom trawler activity with pixel-level assessments of carbon stored in the top layers of ocean sediments, Sala and his team were able to calculate the amount of emissions produced by the technique, down to the level of national fleets. The European Union, for example, releases 274,718,086 metric tons of marine sediment carbon into the ocean a year, while Chinese fleets release 769,294,185 metric tons, and the United States releases 19,373,438.
Nissan has found a second-life for old LEAF batteries inside mobile machines that help workers at Nissan factories worldwide. The old batteries are being used in automated guided vehicles or AGVs used for various tasks inside the manufacturing facilities, including delivering parts to workers on the assembly line.
AGVs are used as robotic mail carriers operating on magnetic tracks taking mail and parts exactly where they’re needed on the assembly line. The idea is to use the AGV to deliver parts so the worker doesn’t waste time searching for a component and can stay focused on installing parts. Nissan and other automotive manufacturers have found that AGVs are indispensable when it comes to saving time and increasing productivity on the assembly line.
Nissan currently operates more than 4000 AGVs around the world at its various manufacturing facilities. The factories have a system that includes 30-second automatic quick charging to keep battery packs on the electric vehicles topped off and working correctly. AGVs also have sensors that keep them operating on a set route and allow them to stop when needed. They also have wireless communications capabilities that enable them to communicate with each other to avoid collisions.
Nissan says that it has been exploring ways to reuse old LEAF batteries since 2010. The first-generation LEAF used a 24-kilowatt hour battery pack made by combining 48 modules. Nissan said eight years ago, its engineers discovered a way to take three of those modules and repackage them to fit inside the AGV. Last year, the engineers began to repurpose used battery modules instead of using new ones to power the AGVs. The team also found the repurposed LEAF batteries last a lot longer thanks to their lithium-ion design compared to the lead-acid batteries used previously.
A bit of seaweed in cattle feed could reduce methane emissions from beef cattle as much as 82 percent, according to new findings from researchers at the University of California, Davis. The results, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, could pave the way for the sustainable production of livestock throughout the world.
“We now have sound evidence that seaweed in cattle diet is effective at reducing greenhouse gases and that the efficacy does not diminish over time,”
[…]
Over the course of five months last summer, Kebreab and Roque added scant amounts of seaweed to the diet of 21 beef cattle and tracked their weight gain and methane emissions. Cattle that consumed doses of about 80 grams (3 ounces) of seaweed gained as much weight as their herd mates while burping out 82 percent less methane into the atmosphere. Kebreab and Roque are building on their earlier work with dairy cattle, which was the world’s first experiment reported that used seaweed in cattle.
[…]
Results from a taste-test panel found no differences in the flavor of the beef from seaweed-fed steers compared with a control group. Similar tests with dairy cattle showed that seaweed had no impact on the taste of milk.
Also, scientists are studying ways to farm the type of seaweed—Asparagopsis taxiformis—that Kebreab’s team used in the tests. There is not enough of it in the wild for broad application.
Another challenge: How do ranchers provide seaweed supplements to grazing cattle on the open range? That’s the subject of Kebreab’s next study.
Microsoft is reporting an outage of Office 365, including Microsoft Teams. On its status page, Microsoft adds: Users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft services. User impact: Users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365 services, including the Service Health Dashboard. More info: Any service that leverages Azure Active Directory (AAD) may be affected. This includes but is not limited to Microsoft Teams, Forms, Exchange Online, Intune and Yammer. Current status: We’ve identified the underlying cause of the problem and are taking steps to mitigate impact. We’ll provide an updated ETA on resolution as soon as one is available. Scope of impact: This issue could affect any user.
Researchers at ETH Zurich and Empa have chemically modified wood and made it more compressible, turning it into a mini-generator. When compressed, it generates an electrical voltage. Such wood could serve as a biosensor or as a building material that harvests energy.
Ingo Burgert and his team at public research university ETH Zurich and Swiss federal laboratory Empa have proven that wood is much more than just a building material. Their research enhances the properties of wood in order to use it for new applications. For instance, they have already developed high-strength, water-repellent, and magnetizable wood.
[…]
When a piezoelectric material is elastically deformed, it generates an electrical voltage. Measurement technology, in particular, exploits this phenomenon by using sensors that generate a charge signal when mechanically stressed.
[…]
Wood also has a natural piezoelectric effect but only generates a very low electrical voltage. If one wants to increase the voltage, the chemical composition of the wood must be changed – and this also makes it more compressible.
[…]
In order to convert wood into an easily formable material, one component of the cell walls must be dissolved. Wood cell walls consist of three basic substances: lignin, hemicellulose, and cellulose. “Lignin is the stabilizing substance that trees need to grow tall. Without lignin, which connects the cells and prevents the stiff cellulose fibrils from buckling, this would not be possible,” says Burgert.
[…]
The researchers achieved this “delignification” by placing wood in a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid. The acid dissolves the lignin, leaving a framework of cellulose layers. “The process retains the hierarchical structure of wood and prevents disassembly of the individual fibers,” Burgert explains.
Even a little pressure can generate usable energy in the wooden sponge. Photo: ACS Nano/Empa
In this way, a piece of balsa wood becomes a white, wooden sponge, made up of layer upon layer of thin cellulose. The sponge can simply be compressed and then returns to its original shape. “The wood sponge generates an electrical voltage 85 times higher than that of native [untreated] wood,” says Sun.
A mini-generator in the wooden floor
The team subjected a test cube with a side length of approximately 1.5 cm to around 600 load cycles. The wooden sponge proved surprisingly stable: For each load, the researchers measured a voltage of approximately 0.63 volts, which would be appropriate for a sensor. In further experiments, the team tested the scalability of this mini-generator. If 30 such wooden blocks are connected up and evenly loaded with the body weight of an adult, enough electricity is generated to power a simple LCD display.
Treatment with fungus instead of chemicals
In a follow-up study just published in Science Advances, the ETH-Empa research team went one step further, seeking to produce the wooden sponge without using chemicals. The researchers found the solution in nature: The fungus Ganoderma applanatum causes white rot in wood and degrades the lignin and hemicellulose gently. “Although the electrical voltage generated was lower in initial tests than with chemically treated wood, the fungal process is more environmentally friendly,” says Burgert.
Google will reduce the service fee it charges Android developers from 30 per cent to 15 per cent, though only on the first $1m in Google Play revenue.
[…]
Google’s change of heart follows a similarly structured fee abatement by Apple last year and lawsuits filed recently in the US, the UK, and Australia by Epic Games against both Apple and Google over their app store commissions and restrictions.
“Apple and Google demand that game developers use their payment processing service, which charges an exorbitant rate of 30 per cent,” Epic Games said in its announcement of its lawsuit in Australia. “Apple and Google block developers from using more efficient payment methods such as Mastercard (including Apple Card), Visa, and PayPal, which charge rates of 2.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent, and therefore prevent developers from passing the savings on to customers.”
[…]
Google’s Android revenue concession also arrives in the wake of federal and state antitrust lawsuits against the company and iOS app makers banding together to lobby against Apple’s platform limitations. In 2018, the European Union concluded Google had abused its control over the Android platform and fined the company €4.3bn ($5bn) for forcing hardware makers to pre-install Google apps in order to access the Google Play app store.
A PR move – follow the money
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, dismissed the fee reduction as a public relations ploy.
“It’s a self-serving gambit: the far majority of developers will get this new 15 per cent rate and thus be less inclined to fight, but the far majority of revenue is in apps with the 30 per cent rate,” he said via Twitter. “So Google and Apple can continue to inflate prices and fleece consumers with their app taxes.”
According to app analytics biz Sensor Tower, iOS app makers earnings less than $1m account for 97.5 per cent of publishers but only 4.8 percent of the $59.3bn in the Apple App Store revenue between January 1 and October 31, 2020.
The rule amendments [PDF], just approved by the American state’s Office of Administrative Law, were proposed last October after a set of initial rules for enforcing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) were adopted last August, a month after CCPA enforcement began.
The CCPA amendments:
Clarify that businesses operating offline need to provide a way to opt-out of data sales.
Establish a standard Opt-Out Icon for notice and consent of data sales.
Prohibit designs that impair or subvert a consumer’s choice to opt-out.
Require that opting out takes no more steps or clicks than opting in.
Ban confusing language, like the double negative “Don’t not sell my information,” when presenting an opt-out choice.
Forbid asking for personal information not necessary to carry out an opt-out request.
Disallow forcing people to scroll through a privacy policy if they’ve opted out or to review reasons not to opt-out.
[…]
Research published in 2019 found 22 companies selling manipulative interface design or dark patterns as a service and found 1,841 examples on 1,267 websites employing these dubious techniques out of 11,000 surveyed.
After years of aggressively fighting any efforts to force it to recognize its drivers as employees, on Tuesday Uber performed a U-turn on the streets of Britain and recognized all of its drivers as working for the company rather than serving as freelancers.
The change is the result of a court ruling last month that entitled workers to seek more pay and benefits but resisted classifying them as employees. That decision by the UK’s Supreme Court, making it definitive, was unanimous, and actively rejected Uber’s argument that it was just a technology platform that connected suppliers with customers. The court was having none of that, and decided that since Uber set the prices, connected drivers and passengers, and decided which route the drivers should follow, it was more employer than platform.
The ride-hailing app maker initially downplayed the legal loss, and argued the decision only directly benefited the handful of drivers in that specific case. However, experts pointed out that every other Uber driver in the UK could cite the ruling at a tribunal to demand what was owed to them, and reality has since dawned on Uber.
As such, Uber has complied with the court’s wishes, and said that its 70,000 UK drivers will henceforth be “workers” entitled to a minimum wage – £8.72 ($12.11) an hour – plus vacation pay, and a pension plan. The details are laid out in this filing [PDF] to America’s financial watchdog.
Holograms aren’t new, but a desktop machine that spits them out could be available soon, presuming LitiHolo’s Kickstarter pans out. The machine will have a $1600 retail price and fits in a two-foot square. It can generate 4×5 inch holograms with 1mm hogels (the holo equivalent of a pixel).
The machine allows for 23 view zones per hogel and can create moving holograms with a few seconds of motion — like the famous kiss-blowing holograms.
Of course, you’ll also need a special self-developing film and a way to get 3D images into the printer such as software or a camera set up to do a 3D scan. In the 4×5 size, the film runs about $13 a plate which will create one hologram.
Since 5 inches is 127 mm the hogel resolution of the result is about 101×127, and the samples on the website and the video below certainly don’t look like they are in HD.
Will people pay $1600 for low-resolution holograms? More importantly, is there a market for grainy holograms that would let you earn back the investment? Maybe not, but that hasn’t stopped us from buying 3D printers and other workshop toys. Plus, if this catches on, what will be available in ten years time?
Facebook has taken the wraps off a project called Learning from Videos. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and learn audio, textual, and visual representations in public user videos on the social network.
Learning from Videos has a number of aims, such as improving Facebook AI systems related to content recommendations and policy enforcement. The project is in its early stages, but it’s already bearing fruit. Facebook says it has already harnessed the tech to enhance Instagram Reels recommendations, such as surfacing videos of people doing the same dance to the same music. The system is showing improved results in speech recognition errors as well, which could bolster auto-captioning features and make it easier to detect hate speech in videos.
[…]
The company says the project is looking at videos in hundreds of languages and from almost every country. This aspect of the project will make AI systems more accurate and allow them to “adapt to our fast moving world and recognize the nuances and visual cues across different cultures and regions.”
Facebook says that it’s keeping privacy in mind when it comes to Learning from Videos. “We’re building and maintaining a strong privacy foundation that uses automated solutions to enforce privacy at scale,” it wrote in a blog post. “By embedding this work at the infrastructure level, we can consistently apply privacy requirements across our systems and support efforts like AI. This includes implementing technical safeguards throughout the data lifecycle.”
indie developer Jason Rohrer has added a new wrinkle by creating an NFT auction using artwork he commissioned from other people in 2012—long before NFTs were ever created.
NFT is short for “non-fungible token,” a cryptographic token that is, unto itself, one of a kind. NFTs have been tied to images, videos, and even basketball collectibles, with some selling for millions of dollars. The images and videos can exist anywhere—on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, or what have you—and their original creators can still maintain rights to those works. So what people are really paying for is a token that they verifiably own, via blockchain technology. The value of these tokens is derived entirely from artificial scarcity. While NFTs have been around since 2017, they’ve skyrocketed in popularity in recent months, with (mostly) prominent, established artists cashing in on an unregulated speculative market that has attracted wealthy buyers in droves. It is also, as with many things related to the blockchain, an environmental catastrophe that is riddled with scams.
This week, Rohrer, creator of indie standout games like Passage, The Castle Doctrine, and One Hour One Life, debuted an NFT auction called “The Crypto Doctrine.” It’s a Dutch auction, meaning that prices start high and fall over time. It launched with 155 paintings that Rohrer originally commissioned in 2012 for use in The Castle Doctrine, a controversial game about home defense.
“Inside the game world, only one player can own each painting, but paintings can be stolen by other players through in-game burglaries, which are completely legal,” reads The Crypto Doctrine’s description. “In the real world, only one person can own each non-fungible painting token, but tokens can be stolen by other people through real-life burglaries, which are completely illegal. Please acquire your tokens responsibly.”
As of today, there are 145 paintings in the auction. This, Rohrer told Kotaku, is because three artists have gotten in touch with him asking to have their paintings removed, and he has complied.
Artists were surprised to see their works appear in The Crypto Doctrine, and others took umbrage on their behalf in the responses to Rohrer’s tweet about the auction. In an email, Rohrer told Kotaku that he did not ask permission to sell people’s works as NFTs “mostly because having email conversations with 50+ people would exceed my bandwidth as a solo creator.” Rohrer does not believe many of the paintings will sell, though he did say that people have placed bids on two of them. He added that if any works do sell, he will share the resulting windfall with their creators.
Originally, Rohrer obtained these works in 2012 from creators he characterizes as “personal friends and relatives.” For this reason, he says, there were “no written contracts” involved. The page he made requesting artwork at the time informed creators that “your artwork will be auctioned, bought, prized, collected, coveted, stolen, re-stolen, reclaimed by the state, and auctioned again. Over and over, for the effective life of my game.” Granted, this was in reference to in-game actions and auctions—not real-life ones.
When word reached voice actress and writer Ashly Burch, whose work is part of the auction, she had yet to hear of NFTs. After doing some research, however, she was not pleased to learn that her art was being sold in that form.
“I definitely did not consent to him selling the art as an NFT,” she told Kotaku in a DM. “I mean, it was years ago. And the understanding was that it would be a piece of art in the game. That’s it…Definitely did not foresee this particular development.”
“I am not a fan, to put it mildly, but am deeply opposed to the current trend towards artificial scarcity of digital objects, for numerous reasons,” Nealen told Kotaku in an email. “The fact that this selfish, techno-anarchist move is also causing unprecedented environmental damage-in a time when we need the opposite-just solidifies my stance…I couldn’t care less whether Jason ‘claims ownership’ over my (infinitely replicable) digital art. But you can see that, for me, being at all involved with the enormous scam and betrayal of humanity that the blockchain represents, that’s simply a step too far.”
Whereas Earth has always been a terrestrial, rocky world, GJ 1132 b began its life as a gaseous, Neptune-like planet. But as new research shows, a nearby red dwarf obliterated its original hydrogen- and helium-rich atmosphere with powerful radiation, so GJ 1132 b, having been stripped down to its rocky core, is now technically a terrestrial planet. The new paper will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal, but a preprint is available at the arXiv.
The authors of the paper reached these conclusions based on direct observations of the exoplanet and theoretical modeling. The telescope of choice was the Hubble Space Telescope, which allowed the team to spot the “secondary atmosphere,” which consists of molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and an aerosol haze resembling smog on Earth.
“It’s super exciting because we believe the atmosphere that we see now was regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere,” Raissa Estrela, a co-author of the study and a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, explained in a statement. “We first thought that these highly irradiated planets could be pretty boring because we believed that they lost their atmospheres. But we looked at existing observations of this planet with Hubble and said, ‘Oh no, there is an atmosphere there.’
In terms of an explanation, the authors say much of the planet’s current hydrogen was retained from before, having been absorbed into the molten magma mantle. Volcanic processes are now causing this stored hydrogen to leak out from below, refueling the new atmosphere, according to the research.
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a “wearable microgrid” that harvests and stores energy from the human body to power small electronics. It consists of three main parts: sweat-powered biofuel cells, motion-powered devices called triboelectric generators, and energy-storing supercapacitors. All parts are flexible, washable and can be screen printed onto clothing.
The technology, reported in a paper published Mar. 9 in Nature Communications, draws inspiration from community microgrids.
“We’re applying the concept of the microgrid to create wearable systems that are powered sustainably, reliably and independently,” said co-first author Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Just like a city microgrid integrates a variety of local, renewable power sources like wind and solar, a wearable microgrid integrates devices that locally harvest energy from different parts of the body, like sweat and movement, while containing energy storage.”
The wearable microgrid is built from a combination of flexible electronic parts that were developed by the Nanobioelectronics team of UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang, who is the director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego and corresponding author on the current study. Each part is screen printed onto a shirt and placed in a way that optimizes the amount of energy collected.
A pair of good dice is a guilty pleasure for a tabletop RPG gamer. You can never have enough, but I can tell you this: None are going to be as flashy as Pixels. These dice have an ace up their sleeve that the rest of your dice don’t have, because they light up and allow you to play online.
Yes, Pixels are electronic dice. Externally they look like ordinary resin dice, but when you throw them, their numbers light up using programmable LEDs. This alone would be enough for many players to smash the buy button on Kickstarter, where the product has already raised $2 million. But there’s more: The Pixels have a Bluetooth connection.
These days it’s not easy to get together with friends to play. Lockdowns have made things very complicated, but even without a pandemic, RPG players live in different cities, move to other countries, or simply can’t meet for meet several hours at other people’s houses on a regular basis. Online role-playing platforms that allow you to play different games over video calls are popping up, and these dice are compatible with popular services like D&D Beyond, Roll20, and Foundry.
Gif: Pixels
Both the lights and the Bluetooth run on small batteries and one die lasts around five hours on a charge. You can also turn off the LEDs to get in 20,000 rolls before the battery dies. Charging is wireless and uses an inductor hidden under one of its faces. The dice are sold separately or in kits containing D20, D12, D10, D8, D6, and D4 models.
The ability to present three-dimensional (3D) scenes with continuous depth sensation has a profound impact on virtual and augmented reality, human–computer interaction, education and training.
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The computationally taxing Fresnel diffraction simulation further places an explicit trade-off between image quality and runtime, making dynamic holography impractical4. Here we demonstrate a deep-learning-based CGH pipeline capable of synthesizing a photorealistic colour 3D hologram from a single RGB-depth image in real time. Our convolutional neural network (CNN) is extremely memory efficient (below 620 kilobytes) and runs at 60 hertz for a resolution of 1,920 × 1,080 pixels on a single consumer-grade graphics processing unit. Leveraging low-power on-device artificial intelligence acceleration chips, our CNN also runs interactively on mobile (iPhone 11 Pro at 1.1 hertz) and edge (Google Edge TPU at 2.0 hertz) devices, promising real-time performance in future-generation virtual and augmented-reality mobile headsets.
What this means is that they can make really nice holograms (3D objects) on your phone for a fraction of the memory costs than other methods, by using lookup tables.
The cracking of the expensive messaging app, called “Sky ECC,” was what allowed over 1,500 police officers across Belgium to be simultaneously deployed in at least 200 raids, many of which were centred around Antwerp and involved special forces.
Investigators succeeded in cracking Sky ECC at the end of last year, according to reporting by De Standaard, and as a result were able to sort through thousands of messages major criminals were sending each other over the course of a month.
Information gained from those conversations is what led to Tuesday’s historic operation, two years in the making.
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Sky ECC became popular with drug criminals after its successor Encrochat was cracked in 2020 by French and Dutch investigators, who were able to intercept over 100 million messages sent via the app.
That led to over a hundred suspects being arrested in the Netherlands, uncovering a network of laboratories where crystal meth and other drugs were being produced and allowing police to seize 8,000 kilos of cocaine and almost €20 million.
A number of investigations are also still currently underway in Belgium based on the information from that cracking. While it led to panic among major criminal operations in the Netherlands, there wasn’t much of a reaction at the time in the Belgian underworld.
“Almost everyone in Antwerp switched from Encrochat to Sky two years ago,” a source told the Gazet van Antwerpen in July last year, adding that major Antwerp criminals in Dubai also used Sky ECC.
The company, which calls itself “the world’s most secure messaging app,” had previously said “hacking is impossible.” It defended its services, stating they “strongly believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.”
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https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18535476&cid=61195246 / Brain-Fu