The Linkielist

Linking ideas with the world

The Linkielist

Facebook releases Horizon, a reinforcement learning platform

Posted on by

Horizon is an open source end-to-end platform for applied reinforcement learning (RL) developed and used at Facebook. Horizon is built in Python and uses PyTorch for modeling and training and Caffe2 for model serving. The platform contains workflows to train popular deep RL algorithms and includes data preprocessing, feature transformation, distributed training, counterfactual policy evaluation, and optimized serving. For more detailed information about Horizon see the white paper here.

Algorithms Supported

Palau plans sunscreen ban to save coral

Posted on by

A spokesman for President Tommy Remengesau said there was scientific evidence that the chemicals found in most sunscreens are toxic to corals, even in minute doses.

He said Palau’s dive sites typically hosted about four boats an hour packed with tourists, leading to concerns a build-up of chemicals could see the reefs reach tipping point.

“On any given day that equates to gallons of sunscreen going into the ocean in Palau’s famous dive spots and snorkelling places,” he told AFP.

“We’re just looking at what we can do to prevent pollution getting into the environment.”

The government has passed a law banning “-toxic” sunscreen from January 1, 2020.

Anyone importing or selling banned sunscreen from that date faces a $1,000 fine, while tourists who bring it into the country will have it confiscated.

“The power to confiscate sunscreens should be enough to deter their non-commercial use, and these provisions walk a smart balance between educating tourists and scaring them away,” Remengesau told parliament after the bill passed last week.

Environmental pioneer

The US state of Hawaii announced a ban on reef toxic sunscreens in May this year, but it does not come into force until 2021, a year after Palau’s.

The Palau ban relates to sunscreens containing chemicals including oxybenzone, octocrylene and parabens, which covers most major brands.

Palau has long been a pioneer in marine protection, introducing the world’s first shark sanctuary in 2009, in a move that has been widely imitated.

It has also banned commercial fishing from its waters and last year introduced the “Palau Pledge” requiring international visitors to sign a promise stamped into their passport that they will respect the environment.

Craig Downs, executive director at the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Hawaii, said other nations would be watching Palau’s move closely.

“It’s the first country to ban these chemicals from tourism. I think it’s great, they’re being proactive,” he said.

“They don’t want to be like Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, where they’ve had to shut down beaches. The coral reefs around those beaches have died.”

Downs said there were numerous scientific papers pointing to a link between sunscreen chemicals and .

“What we’re saying is that where there are lots of tourists getting in the water, sunscreen pollution can have a detrimental effect on nearby coral reefs, as far as five kilometres (3.1 miles) away,” he said.

Downs called on manufacturers to “step up and innovate”, saying the chemicals used for UV protection had been largely unchanged for 50 years.

He said there were some sunscreens containing zinc oxide and titanium dioxide that were not reef toxic but added: “The other alternative we’ve been pushing is sunwear—cover up, wear a sunshirt.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-palau-sunscreen-coral.html#jCp

Source: Palau plans sunscreen ban to save coral

FlexPai is the world’s first phone with fully foldable screen: 4″ 2 sided phone or 7.8″ tablet

Posted on by

The first foldable phone is a reality – the FlexPai. Well, it’s actually a tablet as unfolded it boasts a 7.8” screen (4:3 aspect ratio). Folded, that drops to a more manageable 4”. And get this, this device is the first to use the 7nm Snapdragon 8150!

Back to the screen, it’s an AMOLED that folds down the middle. The software (dubbed Water OS) switches to using only half of the screen, displaying a wallpaper on the other half.

You get to choose which half you use, though, one has slightly more screen, the other is next to the dual camera, which can be used for selfies and video calls in this configuration. It’s a 16+20MP camera, by the way, the second camera module has a telephoto lens.

FlexPai is the world's first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150 FlexPai is the world's first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150 FlexPai is the world's first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150 FlexPai is the world's first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150 FlexPai is the world's first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150 FlexPai is the world's first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150
FlexPai is the world’s first flexible phone/tablet and the first with Snapdragon 8150

The FlexPai measures 7.6mm thick. However, it doesn’t fold flat so it’s thicker than than 15.2mm when folded (certainly near the “hinge”). The hinge is rated to being folded 200,000 times.

The device is powered by a 7nm Qualcomm chipset and only the Snapdragon 8150 fits that description. The base configuration has 6GB of RAM and 128GB storage, but other options include 8/256 and 8/512GB. A proprietary Ro-Charge fast charging tech is supported – it goes from 0% to 80% in an hour.

The price starts at CNY 9,000 – $1,300/€1,135 – which doesn’t seem so high considering that some Android flagships cost that much without a next-gen chipset or a foldable design.

Source: FlexPai is the world’s first foldable phone, first with Snapdragon 8150 too – GSMArena.com news

The CIA’s communications suffered a catastrophic compromise through Google scraping, killing ~30 agents

Posted on by

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide. The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.

[…]

One of the largest intelligence failures of the past decade started in Iran in 2009, when the Obama administration announced the discovery of a secret Iranian underground enrichment facility — part of Iran’s headlong drive for nuclear weapons. Angered about the breach, the Iranians went on a mole hunt, looking for foreign spies, said one former senior intelligence official.

The mole hunt wasn’t hard, in large part, because the communications system the CIA was using to communicate with agents was flawed. Former U.S. officials said the internet-based platform, which was first used in war zones in the Middle East, was not built to withstand the sophisticated counterintelligence efforts of a state actor like China or Iran. “It was never meant to be used long term for people to talk to sources,” said one former official. “The issue was that it was working well for too long, with too many people. But it was an elementary system.”

“Everyone was using it far beyond its intention,” said another former official.

[…]

Though the Iranians didn’t say precisely how they infiltrated the network, two former U.S. intelligence officials said that the Iranians cultivated a double agent who led them to the secret CIA communications system. This online system allowed CIA officers and their sources to communicate remotely in difficult operational environments like China and Iran, where in-person meetings are often dangerous.

[…]

In fact, the Iranians used Google to identify the website the CIA was using to communicate with agents. Because Google is continuously scraping the internet for information about all the world’s websites, it can function as a tremendous investigative tool — even for counter-espionage purposes. And Google’s search functions allow users to employ advanced operators — like “AND,” “OR,” and other, much more sophisticated ones — that weed out and isolate websites and online data with extreme specificity.

According to the former intelligence official, once the Iranian double agent showed Iranian intelligence the website used to communicate with his or her CIA handlers, they began to scour the internet for websites with similar digital signifiers or components — eventually hitting on the right string of advanced search terms to locate other secret CIA websites. From there, Iranian intelligence tracked who was visiting these sites, and from where, and began to unravel the wider CIA network.

[…]

But the events in Iran were not self-contained; they coincided roughly with a similar debacle in China in 2011 and 2012, where authorities rounded up and executed around 30 agents working for the U.S. (the New York Times first reported the extirpation of the CIA’s China sources in May 2017). Some U.S. intelligence officials also believe that former Beijing-based CIA officer Jerry Lee, who was charged with spying on behalf of the Chinese government in May 2018, was partially responsible for the destruction of the CIA’s China-based source network. But Lee’s betrayal does not explain the extent of the damage, or the rapidity with which Chinese intelligence was able to identify and destroy the network, said former officials.

[…]

As Iran was making fast inroads into the CIA’s covert communications system, back in Washington an internal complaint by a government contractor warning officials about precisely what was happening was winding its way through a Kafkaesque appeals system.

In 2008 — well before the Iranians had arrested any agents — a defense contractor named John Reidy, whose job it was to identify, contact and manage human sources for the CIA in Iran, had already sounded an alarm about a “massive intelligence failure” having to do with “communications” with sources. According to Reidy’s publicly available but heavily redacted whistleblower disclosure, by 2010 he said he was told that the “nightmare scenario” he had warned about regarding the secret communications platform had, in fact, occurred.

Reidy refused to discuss his case with Yahoo News. But two former government officials directly familiar with his disclosure and the investigation into the compromises in China and Iran tell Yahoo News that Reidy had identified the weaknesses — and early compromise — that eventually befell the entire covert communications platform.

Reidy’s case was complicated. After he blew the whistle, he was moved off of his subcontract with SAIC, a Virginia company that works on government information technology products and support. According to the public disclosure, he contacted the CIA inspector general and congressional investigators about his employment status but was met with resistance, partially because whistleblower protections are complicated for federal contractors, and he remained employed.

Meanwhile, throughout 2010 and 2011, the compromise continued to spread, and Reidy provided details to investigators. But by November 2011, Reidy was fired because of what his superiors said were conflicts of interest, as Reidy maintained his own side business. Reidy believed the real reason was retaliation.

[…]

“Can you imagine how different this whole story would’ve turned out if the CIA [inspector general] had acted on Reidy’s warnings instead of going after him?” said Kel McClanahan, Reidy’s attorney. “Can you imagine how different this whole story would’ve turned out if the congressional oversight committees had done oversight instead of taking CIA’s word that he was just a troublemaker?”

Irvin McCullough, a national security analyst with the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit that works with whistleblowers, put the issue in even starker terms. “This is one of the most catastrophic intelligence failures since Sept. 11,” he said. “And the CIA punished the person who brought the problem to light.”

Source: The CIA’s communications suffered a catastrophic compromise

NVIDIA Launches Year-Long Research Residency Program

Posted on by

If you’re a researcher looking to deepen your exposure to AI, NVIDIA invites you to apply to its new AI Research Residency program.

During the one-year, paid program, residents will be paired with an NVIDIA research scientist on a joint project and have the opportunity to publish and present their findings at prominent research conferences such as CVPR, ICLR and ICML.

The residency program is meant to encourage scholars with diverse academic backgrounds to pursue machine learning research, according to Jan Kautz, vice president of perception and learning research at NVIDIA.

“There’s currently a shortage of machine learning experts, and AI adoption for non-tech and smaller companies is hindered in part because there are not many people who understand AI,” said Kautz. “Our residency program is a way to broaden opportunities in the field to a more diverse set of researchers and spread the benefits of the technology to more people than ever.”

Applicants don’t need a background in AI, and those with doctoral degrees or equivalent expertise are encouraged to apply. Residents will work out of our Santa Clara location.

Source: NVIDIA Launches Year-Long Research Residency Program | The Official NVIDIA Blog

It’s Kind of Brilliant How This Dual-Screen Smartphone Avoids the Notch

Posted on by

Created by Chinese smartphone company Nubia (which is partially owned by ZTE), the Nubia X solves the problem of where to put the selfie cam on an all-screen phone by dodging the question entirely. That’s because instead of using the main 6.1-inch LCD screen and a front-facing camera to take selfies, you can simply flip the phone around and use its rear camera and 5.1-inch secondary 1520 x 720 OLED screen on the back to frame up your shot.

This solution might sound like overkill, but in some ways, it’s a much simpler overall design. Cameras are quickly becoming much more difficult and expensive to make than screens, and by only including one module on the back, it gives phone makers the ability to focus more on delivering a single, high quality photography experience.

On top of that, with the prevalence of so many phones designed with glass panels in front and back, the Nubia X shouldn’t be much more fragile than a typical handset. Also, that extra display can be used for way more than just selfies. Nubia says its rear, always-on display can show off your favorite art or be used as clock, or it can double as a full-on second display with access to all your standard Android screens and apps.

Now, the back of your phone doesn’t need to be reserved for blank glass.
Image: Nubia

Inside, the Nubia X’s specs look pretty solid as well—featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip, 6GB/8GB of RAM, up to 128GB of storage, and a sizable 3,800 mAh battery. And because there’s no room in front or back for a traditional fingerprint sensor, Nubia opted for an in-screen fingerprint reader like we’ve seen on the OnePlus 6T and Huawei Mate 20.

Source: It’s Kind of Brilliant How This Dual-Screen Smartphone Avoids the Notch

Flex Logix Says It’s Solved Deep Learning’s DRAM Problem

Posted on by

Deep learning has a DRAM problem. Systems designed to do difficult things in real time, such as telling a cat from a kid in a car’s backup camera video stream, are continuously shuttling the data that makes up the neural network’s guts from memory to the processor.

The problem, according to startup Flex Logix, isn’t a lack of storage for that data; it’s a lack of bandwidth between the processor and memory. Some systems need four or even eight DRAM chips to sling the 100s of gigabits to the processor, which adds a lot of space and consumes considerable power. Flex Logix says that the interconnect technology and tile-based architecture it developed for reconfigurable chips will lead to AI systems that need the bandwidth of only a single DRAM chip and consume one-tenth the power.

[…]

In developing the original technology for FPGAs, Wang noted that these chips were about 80 percent interconnect by area, and so he sought an architecture that would cut that area down and allow for more logic. He and his colleagues at UCLA adapted a kind of telecommunications architecture called a folded-Beneš network to do the job. This allowed for an FPGA architecture that looks like a bunch of tiles of logic and SRAM.

Distributing the SRAM in this specialized interconnect scheme winds up having a big impact on deep learning’s DRAM bandwidth problem, says Tate. “We’re displacing DRAM bandwidth with SRAM on the chip,” he says.

[…]

True apples-to-apples comparisons in deep learning are hard to come by. But Flex Logix’s analysis comparing a simulated 6 x 6-tile NMAX512 array with one DRAM chip against an Nvidia Tesla T4 with eight DRAMs showed the new architecture identifying 4,600 images per second versus Nvidia’s 3,920. The same size NMAX array hit 22 trillion operations per second on a real-time video processing test called YOLOv3 using one-tenth the DRAM bandwidth of other systems.

The designs for the first NMAX chips will be sent to the foundry for manufacture in the second half of 2019, says Tate.

Source: Flex Logix Says It’s Solved Deep Learning’s DRAM Problem – IEEE Spectrum

Experimental AI lie detector will help screen EU travelers

Posted on by

In the future, you might talk to an AI to cross borders in the European Union. The EU and Hungary’s National Police will run a six-month pilot project, iBorderCtrl, that will help screen travelers in Hungary, Greece and Latvia. The system will have you upload photos of your passport, visa and proof of funds, and then use a webcam to answer basic questions from a personalized AI border agent. The virtual officer will use AI to detect the facial microexpressions that can reveal when someone is lying. At the border, human agents will use that info to determine what to do next — if there are signs of lying or a photo mismatch, they’ll perform a more stringent check.

The real guards will use handhelds to automatically double-check documents and photos for these riskier visitors (including images from past crossings), and they’ll only take over once these travelers have gone through biometric verification (including face matching, fingerprinting and palm vein scans) and a re-evaluation of their risk levels. Anyone who passed the pre-border test, meanwhile, will skip all but a basic re-evaluation and having to present a QR code.

The pilot won’t start with live tests. Instead, it’ll begin with lab tests and will move on to “realistic conditions” along the borders. And there’s a good reason for this: the technology is very much experimental. iBorderCtrl was just 76 percent accurate in early testing, and the team only expects to improve that to 85 percent. There are no plans to prevent people from crossing the border if they fail the initial AI screening.

Source: Experimental AI lie detector will help screen EU travelers

Empathetic machines favored by skeptics but might creep out believers

Posted on by

Most people would appreciate a chatbot that offers sympathetic or empathetic responses, according to a team of researchers, but they added that reaction may rely on how comfortable the person is with the idea of a feeling machine.

In a study, the researchers reported that preferred receiving sympathetic and empathetic responses from a chatbot—a machine programmed to simulate a conversation—than receiving a response from a machine without emotions, said S. Shyam Sundar, James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. People express when they feel compassion for a person, whereas they express empathy when they are actually feeling the same emotions of the other person, said Sundar.

[…]

However, chatbots may become too personal for some people, said Bingjie Liu, a doctoral candidate in mass communications, who worked with Sundar on the study. She said that study participants who were leery of conscious machines indicated they were impressed by the chatbots that were programmed to deliver statements of sympathy and empathy.

“The majority of people in our sample did not really believe in machine emotion, so, in our interpretation, they took those expressions of empathy and sympathy as courtesies,” said Liu. “When we looked at people who have different beliefs, however, we found that people who think it’s possible that machines could have emotions had negative reactions to these expressions of sympathy and empathy from the chatbots.”

Source: Empathetic machines favored by skeptics but might creep out believers

Artificial intelligence bot trained to recognize galaxies

Posted on by

Researchers have taught an artificial intelligence program used to recognise faces on Facebook to identify galaxies in deep space.

The result is an AI bot named ClaRAN that scans images taken by radio telescopes.

Its job is to spot radio —galaxies that emit powerful radio jets from at their centres.

ClaRAN is the brainchild of big data specialist Dr. Chen Wu and astronomer Dr. Ivy Wong, both from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

Dr. Wong said black holes are found at the centre of most, if not all, galaxies.

“These supermassive black holes occasionally burp out jets that can be seen with a radio telescope,” she said.

“Over time, the jets can stretch a long way from their host galaxies, making it difficult for traditional computer programs to figure out where the galaxy is.

“That’s what we’re trying to teach ClaRAN to do.”

Dr. Wu said ClaRAN grew out of an open source version of Microsoft and Facebook’s object detection software.

He said the program was completely overhauled and trained to recognise galaxies instead of people.

ClaRAN itself is also open source and publicly available on GitHub.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-artificial-intelligence-bot-galaxies.html#jCp

Source: Artificial intelligence bot trained to recognize galaxies

Let’s store solar and wind energy – by using compressed air

Posted on by

Energy is already stored, of course, in batteries or various other technologies. Even reservoirs can act as huge stores of energy. However nothing that exists or is in development can store energy as well, and as cheaply, as compressed air.

The concept seems simple: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator.

Compressed air energy storage (or CAES), to give it its full name, can involve storing air in steel tanks or in much less expensive containments deep underwater. In some cases, high pressure air can be stored in caverns deep underground, either excavated directly out of hard rock or formed in large salt deposits by so-called “solution mining”, where water is pumped in and salty water comes out. Such salt caverns are often used to store natural gas.

Salt caverns are ideal for storing air as they are impermeable and don’t react with oxygen. Maria Avvakumova / shutterstock

Compressed air could easily deliver the required scale of storage, but it remains grossly undervalued by policymakers, funding bodies and the energy industry itself. This has stunted the development of the technology and means it is likely that much more expensive and less effective solutions will instead be adopted. At present, three key problems stand in the way of compressed air:

1. It’s not a single technology

The above description of how it works is an over-simplification. CAES is, in fact, not a single technology but a wide family that includes compression machinery, expansion machinery, heat exchangers, the design of air stores and the design of thermal stores. These all require meticulous engineering to get right.

An artist’s sketch of a proposed CAES plant above a disused limestone mine in Ohio. US Department of Energy

2. It’s better for longer-term storage

At the moment, wind and solar still make up only a small proportion of the overall sector. As electricity generated from fossil fuels can cover the overcast or wind-free days, renewable energy is often used straight away and only needs to be stored for short amounts of time. For these situations, batteries work quite well and can be economically viable.

Large-scale decarbonisation will require us to store energy for much longer periods, however, for instance from a sunny day to use on a cloudy day. CAES is especially suited for storage durations of some hours through to several days.

All affordable energy storage involves converting energy from the form of electricity to some other form and storing it in that other form. For pumped-hydro storage, for instance, the other form is water that has been lifted up to a great height. For CAES, that other form includes both heat and high-pressure air.

The UK’s largest pumped storage station is in Snowdonia, Wales. Water is pumped from a low level reservoir to a high one (seen here) during off peak hours, then released downhill to generate energy during peak hours. Hefin Owen, CC BY-SA

For such systems, there are separate costs for the equipment that does the conversion and for the storage itself. Systems like CAES and pumped-hydro involve relatively expensive equipment for the power conversion but very inexpensive provisions for the storage of energy. These systems, where small amounts of power can fill up very large amounts of storage, are therefore very economical for storing energy over a long period.

3. CAES lasts a lifetime

Private investment requires high rates of return. An indirect effect of this is that investors place less value on what utility may be left in an asset in the longer term.

In most CAES systems, costs are concentrated in things that naturally have very long lifetimes. For example, a solution-mined cavern in a salt deposit might reasonably be expected to operate for at least 100 years, while high power machines for compressing and expanding air can typically operate for 50 years or more. With returns over such a long timescale, there is a strong argument that at least some large-scale compressed air installations should be treated as national infrastructure projects financed by governments.

Two large compressed air plants were built decades ago, one in Huntorf, Germany and the other in McIntosh, Alabama. Both are still working extremely well. Many refer to these two plants to draw conclusions about how efficient CAES can be and how much or little it can cost.

But this is misleading and pointless. Both plants were designed with very different priorities from those relevant today. It is imperative that we now think again about compressed air energy storage and evaluate it properly in light of what can be achieved by exploiting modern methods and knowledge.

Source: Let’s store solar and wind energy – by using compressed air

AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry

Posted on by

AI can help chemists crack the molecular structure of crystals much faster than traditional modelling methods, according to research published in Nature Communications on Monday.

Scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a research institute in Switzerland, have built a machine learning programme called SwiftML to predict how the atoms in molecules shift when exposed to a magnetic field.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is commonly used to work out the structure of compounds. Groups of atoms oscillate at a specific frequencies, providing a tell-tale sign of the number and location of electrons each contains. But the technique is not good enough to reveal the full chemical structure of molecules, especially complex ones that can contain thousands of different atoms.

Another technique known as Density functional theory (DFT) is needed. It uses complex quantum chemistry calculations to map the density of electrons in a given area, and requires heavy computation. SwiftML, however, can do the job at a much quicker rate and can perform as accurately as DFT programmes in some cases.

“Even for relatively simple molecules, this model is almost 10,000 times faster than existing methods, and the advantage grows tremendously when considering more complex compounds,” said Michele Ceriotti, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor at the EPFL.

“To predict the NMR signature of a crystal with nearly 1,600 atoms, our technique – ShiftML – requires about six minutes; the same feat would have taken 16 years with conventional techniques.”

The researchers trained the system on the Cambridge Structural Database, a dataset containing calculated DFT chemical shifts for thousands of compounds. Each one is made up less than 200 atoms including carbon and hydrogen paired with oxygen or nitrogen. 2,000 structures were used for training and validation, and 500 were held back for testing.

SwiftML managed to calculate the chemical shifts for a molecule that had 86 atoms and the same chemical elements as cocaine, but arranged in a different crystal structure. The process took less than a minute of CPU time, compared around 62 to 150 CPU hours typically needed to calculate the chemical shift of a molecule containing 86 atoms using DFT.

The team hopes that SwiftML can be used to supplement NMR experiments to design new drugs. “This is really exciting because the massive acceleration in computation times will allow us to cover much larger conformational spaces and correctly determine structures where it was just not previously possible. This puts most of the complex contemporary drug molecules within reach,” says Lyndon Emsley, co-author of the study and a chemistry professor at EPFL.

Source: AI can predict the structure of chemical compounds thousands of times faster than quantum chemistry • The Register

MINI cars personalised with 3D printed parts – powered by Twikit

Posted on by

Advanced car personalization running on Twikbot®

Car personalization has been popular ever since. In which level it was applied depended on many factors like the availability of options from the car manufacturer itself or the artistic skills of some of its customers.

Today, car manufacturers already offer a wide range of pre-defined options. In the end though, options are limited to colors, finnishes and interior materials. This widely known car-configuration is already adapted within the automotive industry.

MINI Yours Customised powered by Twikit Twikbot Software

Beyond full-option

To stand out from the competition car brands are emerging towards more complex customization options. With new technologies like 3D printing and legacy manufacturing technologies like lasercutting and CNC, car parts can get personalized on a more advanced level.

MINI decided to tap into this, and became a pioneer in offering next level car individualization through an online platform where the end-consumer can personalize and design car parts for their own vehicle.

In order to enable personalized production at scale, the MINI yours customised experience runs on Twikit’s Twikbot platform technology. Our universal software supports the full customization journey, from product input, where all personalization assets are created, to front-end customer experience and the right output for production.

Source: Case – MINI Yours Customised – powered by Twikit

Qualcomm Says Apple Is $7 Billion Behind in Royalty Payments

Posted on by

Qualcomm Inc. says its fight with Apple Inc. over how much the chipmaker can charge for essential patented technology used in iPhones and iPads is getting pricey.

“They’re trying to destroy our business,” Qualcomm lawyer Evan Chesler said at a hearing Friday in federal court in San Diego. “They’re now $7 billion dollars behind in royalties. The house is on fire and there is $7 billion of property damage right now.”

Qualcomm wants as many as 56 patent-related claims and counterclaims cut from a lawsuit with Apple and its Asian manufacturers, arguing that these are just a sideshow to the broader licensing dispute between the companies. Apple, through its manufacturers, halted royalty payments to Qualcomm last year and the tech giants’ showdown has escalated into some 100 legal proceedings around the world.

Apple argues that Qualcomm is using its intellectual property to bully customers into paying excessive royalties even as it tries to duck scrutiny over whether its patents are valid. “You can’t just let Qualcomm walk away from this,” Apple’s lawyer, Ruffin Cordell, told the judge at Friday’s hearing.

Source: Technology – Bloomberg

Unsure why you can’t log into Office 365? So is Microsoft

Posted on by

Microsoft’s Office 365 has been giving some users cold sweats. No matter how hard they try to log in, they simply can’t access the service and haven’t been able to for hours – others say it has wobbled for days.

Sporadic reports of unrest began to emerge on Down Detector on Friday (26 October) in the UK and across the pond, stopped over the weekend and started again prior to 0800 GMT today. Office 365’s web woes have still not been resolved at the time of writing.

The first complaint was spotted on Twitter just after 0700 GMT.

Microsoft, at least initially, seemed to know nothing of the activation worries to which admin Tom Ruben referred, but he was backed up by others.

Admins raised support tickets with Microsoft but complained they’d only received acknowledgement of the outage early on in the screw-up and had precious else since.

Microsoft has said it is “investigating issues related to repeated credential prompts and users being unable to log in using the Outlook client under EX152471”. It asked admins to “please check the admin centre for more details”.

Source: Unsure why you can’t log into Office 365? So is Microsoft • The Register

Ouch – trusting the cloud can hurt!

‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ Earns Record-Breaking $725M Opening Weekend

Posted on by

“Red Dead Redemption 2” broke records in its first three days on sale, pulling in more than $725 million in worldwide retail sales and achieving the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, developer Rockstar Games announced.

That tops the highest-grossing movie in history, “Avengers: Infinity Wars,” which earned more than $640 million during its opening weekend earlier this year. But “Red Dead Redemption 2” still isn’t the highest grossing entertainment launch of all time. That honor also goes to Rockstar Games for “Grand Theft Auto V,” which earned more than $1 billion in sell-through in its first three days. Because “Grand Theft Auto V” launched on a Tuesday, it left the door open for “Red Dead Redemption 2’s” — which launched on a Friday — record-setting weekend.

Rockstar also reports that according to Sony Interactive Entertainment, “Red Dead Redemption 2” set records for highest ever pre-orders, highest day one sales and highest sales for the first three days in market on the PlayStation Network.

“Red Dead Redemption 2” is currently the highest critically reviewed game on the PlayStation 4, with an average score of 97 on Metacritic, and the top game on Xbox One, also with an average score of 97 on Metacritic.

Source: ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ Earns Record-Breaking $725M Opening Weekend – Variety

U.S. Indicts Chinese Hacker-Spies in Conspiracy to Steal Aerospace Secrets

Posted on by

The U.S. Justice Department has charged two Chinese intelligence officers, six hackers, and two aerospace company insiders in a sweeping conspiracy to steal confidential aerospace technology from U.S. and French companies.

For more than five years, two Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) spies are said to have run a team of hackers focusing on the theft of designs for a turbofan engine used in U.S. and European commercial airliners, according to an unsealed indictment (below) dated October 25. In a statement, the DOJ said a Chinese state-owned aerospace company was simultaneously working to develop a comparable engine.

“The threat posed by Chinese government-sponsored hacking activity is real and relentless,” FBI Special Agent in Charge John Brown of San Diego said in a statement. “Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the assistance of our private sector, international and U.S. government partners, is sending a strong message to the Chinese government and other foreign governments involved in hacking activities.”

The MSS officers involved were identified as Zha Rong, a division director in the Jiangsu Province regional department (JSSD), and Chai Meng, a JSSD section chief.

At the direction of the MSS officers, the hackers allegedly infiltrated a number of U.S. aerospace companies, including California-based Capstone Turbine, among others in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Oregon, the DOJ said. The officers are also said to have recruited at least two Chinese employees of a French aerospace manufacturer—insiders who allegedly aided the conspiracy by, among other criminal acts, installing the remote access trojan Sakula onto company computers.

Source: U.S. Indicts Chinese Hacker-Spies in Conspiracy to Steal Aerospace Secrets

China produces nano fibre that can lift 160 elephants – and a space elevator, better batteries?

Posted on by

A research team from Tsinghua University in Beijing has developed a fibre they say is so strong it could even be used to build an elevator to space.

They say just 1 cubic centimetre of the fibre – made from carbon nanotube – would not break under the weight of 160 elephants, or more than 800 tonnes. And that tiny piece of cable would weigh just 1.6 grams.

“This is a breakthrough,” said Wang Changqing, a scientist at a key space elevator research centre at Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian who was not involved in the Tsinghua study.

The Chinese team has developed a new “ultralong” fibre from carbon nanotube that they say is stronger than anything seen before, patenting the technology and publishing part of their research in the journal Nature Nanotechnology earlier this year.

“It is evident that the tensile strength of carbon nanotube bundles is at least 9 to 45 times that of other materials,” the team said in the paper.

They said the material would be “in great demand in many high-end fields such as sports equipment, ballistic armour, aeronautics, astronautics and even space elevators”.

[…]

Those cables would need to have tensile strength – to withstand stretching – of no less than 7 gigapascals, according to Nasa. In fact, the US space agency launched a global competition in 2005 to develop such a material, with a US$2 million prize attached. No one claimed the prize.

Now, the Tsinghua team, led by Wei Fei, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, says their latest carbon nanotube fibre has tensile strength of 80 gigapascals.

Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical molecules made up of carbon atoms that are linked in hexagonal shapes with diameters as small as 1 nanometre. They have the highest known tensile strength of any material – theoretically up to 300 gigapascals.

But for practical purposes, these carbon nanotubes must be bonded together in cable form, a process which is difficult and can affect the overall strength of the final product.

According to Wang, the space lift researcher, the transport system would need more than 30,000km of cable, and it would also need other structures such as a rail and a shield to protect against space debris and other environmental hazards.

[…]

Japan launched two satellites last month in an experiment to study elevator movement in space – the first time this has been done – involving a mini-lift travelling along a cable from one satellite to another. It has yet to report the results of the experiment. China has also conducted space tethering tests but the details were classified.

[…]

Song Liwei, who studies mechanical batteries at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, said if the carbon nanotube fibre could be mass-produced and if it significantly increased the energy density of mechanical batteries, it “would kill fossil fuel engines”.

Source: China produces nano fibre that can lift 160 elephants – and a space elevator? – NZ Herald

TimeTree :: The Timescale of Life: information on evolution

Posted on by

TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. Data from thousands of published studies are assembled into a searchable tree of life scaled to time. Three search modes are possible: Node Time – to find the divergence time of two species or higher taxa Timeline – to drill back through time and find evolutionary branches from the perspective of a single species Timetree – to build a timetree of a group of species or custom listTimepanels showing events in geological time and astronomical history are provided for comparison with timelines and timetrees. Results can be exported in different formats for additional analyses and publication.

time tree cats

Source: TimeTree :: The Timescale of Life

3D printers have ‘fingerprints,’ a discovery that could help trace 3D-printed guns

Posted on by

Like fingerprints, no 3D printer is exactly the same. That’s the takeaway from a new study that describes what’s believed to be the first accurate method for tracing a 3D-printed object to the machine it came from. The advancement could help law enforcement and intelligence agencies track the origin of 3D-printed guns, counterfeit products and other goods.

[…]

“3D printers are built to be the same. But there are slight variations in their hardware created during the manufacturing process that lead to unique, inevitable and unchangeable patterns in every object they print,” Xu says.

To test PrinTracker, the research team created five door keys each from 14 common 3D printers — 10 fused deposition modeling (FDM) printers and four stereolithography (SLA) printers.

With a common scanner, the researchers created digital images of each key. From there, they enhanced and filtered each image, identifying elements of the in-fill pattern. They then developed an algorithm to align and calculate the variations of each key to verify the authenticity of the fingerprint.

Having created a fingerprint database of the 14 3D printers, the researchers were able to match the key to its printer 99.8 percent of the time. They ran a separate series of tests 10 months later to determine if additional use of the printers would affect PrinTracker’s ability to match objects to their machine of origin. The results were the same.

The team also ran experiments involving keys damaged in various ways to obscure their identity. PrinTracker was 92 percent accurate in these tests.

Source: 3D printers have ‘fingerprints,’ a discovery that could help trace 3D-printed guns — ScienceDaily

Zero-day in popular jQuery File Upload plugin actively exploited for at least three years

Posted on by

For at least three years, hackers have abused a zero-day in one of the most popular jQuery plugins to plant web shells and take over vulnerable web servers, ZDNet has learned.

The vulnerability impacts the jQuery File Upload plugin authored by prodigious German developer Sebastian Tschan, most commonly known as Blueimp.

The plugin is the second most starred jQuery project on GitHub, after the jQuery framework itself. It is immensely popular, has been forked over 7,800 times, and has been integrated into hundreds, if not thousands, of other projects, such as CMSs, CRMs, Intranet solutions, WordPress plugins, Drupal add-ons, Joomla components, and so on.

A vulnerability in this plugin would be devastating, as it could open gaping security holes in a lot of platforms installed in a lot of sensitive places.

This worse case scenario is exactly what happened. Earlier this year, Larry Cashdollar, a security researcher for Akamai’s SIRT (Security Intelligence Response Team), has discovered a vulnerability in the plugin’s source code that handles file uploads to PHP servers.

Cashdollar says that attackers can abuse this vulnerability to upload malicious files on servers, such as backdoors and web shells.

Source: Zero-day in popular jQuery plugin actively exploited for at least three years | ZDNet

These New Photos of the World’s First 3D-Printed Steel Bridge Are Stunning

Posted on by

The creators of the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge, a 40-foot stainless steel structure titled simply “The Bridge” that looks tantalizingly otherworldly thanks to its unique construction methods, say it is now ready for installation in Amsterdam following its ongoing week on show at the Dutch Design Week from Oct. 20-28.

Photo: MX3D (Joris Laarman Lab)

The team at MX3D, which originally planned to build the Joris Laarman Lab-designed bridge in mid-air over a canal but later opted to construct it in a controlled environment away from pedestrians, told Gizmodo in a statement that it is now ready to commence the structure’s final installation in Amsterdam’s famed De Wallen red-light district. They’ve also shared a number of photos from the finished bridge, which is designed to look like two billowing sheets connected by organic curves of steel, on display at the festival. It looks fantastic:

“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)
“The Bridge” on display at Dutch Design Week.
Photo: MX3D (Adriaan de Groot)

As the construction method is new and has not previously been used in any such large-scale project, MX3D worked with Amsterdam officials to develop a new safety standard and have also coordinated with partners including the UK’s Alan Turing Institute to equip it with a network of sensors. MX3D told Gizmodo that once in place the structure will be capable of collecting data on “bridge traffic, structural integrity, and the surrounding neighborhood and environment,” with the information being “used as input for a ‘digital twin’ of the bridge” that will be monitored to detect any safety issues. A steel deck on the bottom of the bridge should also provide additional stability.

Source: These New Photos of the World’s First 3D-Printed Steel Bridge Are Stunning

Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them

Posted on by

If it seems as though the app you deleted last week is suddenly popping up everywhere, it may not be mere coincidence. Companies that cater to app makers have found ways to game both iOS and Android, enabling them to figure out which users have uninstalled a given piece of software lately—and making it easy to pelt the departed with ads aimed at winning them back.

Adjust, AppsFlyer, MoEngage, Localytics, and CleverTap are among the companies that offer uninstall trackers, usually as part of a broader set of developer tools. Their customers include T-Mobile US, Spotify Technology, and Yelp. (And Bloomberg Businessweek parent Bloomberg LP, which uses Localytics.) Critics say they’re a fresh reason to reassess online privacy rights and limit what companies can do with user data. “Most tech companies are not giving people nuanced privacy choices, if they give them choices at all,” says Jeremy Gillula, tech policy director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate.

Some providers say these tracking tools are meant to measure user reaction to app updates and other changes. Jude McColgan, chief executive officer of Boston’s Localytics, says he hasn’t seen clients use the technology to target former users with ads. Ehren Maedge, vice president for marketing and sales at MoEngage Inc. in San Francisco, says it’s up to the app makers not to do so. “The dialogue is between our customers and their end users,” he says. “If they violate users’ trust, it’s not going to go well for them.” Adjust, AppsFlyer, and CleverTap didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did T-Mobile, Spotify, or Yelp.

Uninstall tracking exploits a core element of Apple Inc.’s and Google’s mobile operating systems: push notifications. Developers have always been able to use so-called silent push notifications to ping installed apps at regular intervals without alerting the user—to refresh an inbox or social media feed while the app is running in the background, for example. But if the app doesn’t ping the developer back, the app is logged as uninstalled, and the uninstall tracking tools add those changes to the file associated with the given mobile device’s unique advertising ID, details that make it easy to identify just who’s holding the phone and advertise the app to them wherever they go.

The tools violate Apple and Google policies against using silent push notifications to build advertising audiences, says Alex Austin, CEO of Branch Metrics Inc., which makes software for developers but chose not to create an uninstall tracker. “It’s just generally sketchy to track people around the internet after they’ve opted out of using your product,” he says, adding that he expects Apple and Google to crack down on the practice soon. Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Source: Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them – Bloomberg

Facebook says it removed 8.7M child exploitation posts with new machine learning tech

Posted on by

Facebook announced today that it has removed 8.7 million pieces of content last quarter that violated its rules against child exploitation, thanks to new technology. The new AI and machine learning tech, which was developed and implemented over the past year by the company, removed 99 percent of those posts before anyone reported them, said Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, in a blog post.

The new technology examines posts for child nudity and other exploitative content when they are uploaded and, if necessary, photos and accounts are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Facebook had already been using photo-matching technology to compare newly uploaded photos with known images of child exploitation and revenge porn, but the new tools are meant to prevent previously unidentified content from being disseminated through its platform.

The technology isn’t perfect, with many parents complaining that innocuous photos of their kids have been removed. Davis addressed this in her post, writing that in order to “avoid even the potential for abuse, we take action on nonsexual content as well, like seemingly benign photos of children in the bath” and that this “comprehensive approach” is one reason Facebook removed as much content as it did last quarter.

But Facebook’s moderation technology is by no means perfect and many people believe it is not comprehensive or accurate enough. In addition to family snapshots, it’s also been criticized for removing content like the iconic 1972 photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, known as the “Napalm Girl,” fleeing naked after suffering third-degree burns in a South Vietnamese napalm attack on her village, a decision COO Sheryl Sandberg apologized for.

Source: Facebook says it removed 8.7M child exploitation posts with new machine learning tech | TechCrunch