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Submission + - Tracking Patient Zero (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Martin S.
Martin S. writes: The New Scientist article is paywall, but all the substantive sources are directly linked below: There are a lot of conspiracy theories current floating around about the origin of COVID-19. However the problem with them is that there is absolutely no credible evidence to support their claims. There however penty of evidence to support the current contention for patient zero arising from a species jump somewhere between September and 1st December.

The Lancet medical journal, claimed the first person to be diagnosed with Covid-19, was on 1 December 2019 (a lot of earlier) and that person had "no contact" with the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market

https://www.bbc.com/future/art... https://www.thelancet.com/jour...

Subsequent evidence hints that the outbreak probably began before December. Viral genome analyses suggest that the virus jumped from animals to humans in November (The Lancet, http://doi.org/ggp6gz), but it could have happened as early as late September (Journal of Medical Virology, http://doi.org/ggjvv8).

https://www.newscientist.com/a... https://www.thelancet.com/jour...

The South China Morning Post reports on Chinese government documents that suggested the earliest case of covid-19 may have been a 55-year-old person from Hubei province who seems to have contracted the virus on 17 November.

https://www.newscientist.com/a...

Comment Godwin subsection (R) alert (Score 1) 144

by zazenation (#59034082) Attached to: Pentagon Testing Mass Surveillance Balloons Across the US

I can't help but chuckle every time the flying fickle finger of racism is vomited out in a response. I think that there should be a corollary to Godwin's Law regarding racism.

If people talk about ANY innocuous subject long enough, racism will inevitable be brought up -- e.g. a long discussion about music will devolve into the idea that pianos are racist because they have a majority white keys and that the black keys are repressed because they are further to the back on the keyboard...

Submission + - Bureau of Prisons tests cell phone jamming tech (justice.gov)

Submitted by Dave_Minsky
Dave_Minsky writes: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons tested micro-jamming technology this week at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina in a new effort to curb inmate use of contraband cell phones in federal prisons, according to an April 12, 2019 press release from the USDOJ. The test followed two other tests at a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland.

Per the release: âoeAfter the test is complete, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will analyze the data and prepare a report.â

Submission + - SPAM: GitHub is where China's Devs Go to Complain about China

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China is remarkably successful at scrubbing its Internet of social dissent. Twitter and Facebook have been blocked ever since deadly ethnic riots in 2009. Chinese social media platforms employ armies of internal censors to take down posts, images and even emojis.

But this month, coordinated dissent has popped up in an unexpected place: GitHub, the world's largest open-source site that lets programmers collaborate on code. (GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which is an NPR funder.)

Thousands of posts by China's beleaguered tech workers have deluged GitHub in the last month protesting "996" schedules — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — and demanding better working conditions.

Tech-savvy programmers in the world's most thoroughly censored cyberspace are turning to unconventional means to collectively organize. They created a "repository" or collaborative project GitHub called "996.ICU," based on a joke that a 996 schedule will send you to the intensive care unit. It's become one of the most popular projects on GitHub, with more than 190,000 GitHub members following the project.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - UK to fine and block websites over 'online harms' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Internet sites could be fined or blocked if they fail to tackle "online harms" such as terrorist propaganda and child abuse, under government plans.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has proposed an independent watchdog that will write a "code of practice" for tech companies.

Senior managers could be held liable for breaches, with a possible levy on the industry to fund the regulator. They are also consulting over blocking harmful websites or stopping them from being listed by search engines.

Submission + - House Democrats Refuse To Weaken Net Neutrality Bill, Defeat GOP Amendments (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday rejected Republican attempts to weaken a bill that would restore net neutrality rules. The House Commerce Committee yesterday approved the "Save the Internet Act" in a 30-22 party-line vote, potentially setting up a vote of the full House next week. The bill is short and simple—it would fully reinstate the rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2015, reversing the repeal led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in 2017.

Commerce Committee Republicans repeatedly introduced amendments that would weaken the bill but were consistently rebuffed by the committee's Democratic majority. "The Democrats beat back more than a dozen attempts from Republicans to gut the bill with amendments throughout the bill's markup that lasted 9.5 hours," The Hill reported yesterday. Republican amendments would have weakened the bill by doing the following: Exempt all 5G wireless services from net neutrality rules; Exempt all multi-gigabit broadband services from net neutrality rules; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that builds broadband service in any part of the U.S. that doesn't yet have download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps; Exempt from net neutrality rules any ISP that gets universal service funding from the FCC's Rural Health Care Program; Exempt ISPs that serve 250,000 or fewer subscribers from certain transparency rules that require public disclosure of network management practices; and Prevent the FCC from limiting the types of zero-rating (i.e., data cap exemptions) that ISPs can deploy.

Submission + - 3DFX Interactive Arises from the Grave to Launch New Voodoo Card

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: Yes, you read that right. 3DFX Interactive, once a king of the late 90's 3D processor add-on card market, has recently reformed from a group of ex-Nvidia and ATI/AMD employees. Their initial launch product will be the 'Voodoo 6' card and will be competing directly with NVidia's GeForce 2080 and AMD's top Vega graphics cards.

The Voodoo 6 card will follow on the heels of its predecessor, the ancient Voodoo 5 card from the year 2000, that used raw brawn (think multiple GPU chips per card) to compete with the Geforce 2 and ATI Radeon chipsets, its main competitors at the time. 3DFX will be using an updated version of its 'Voodoo Scalable Architecture (VSI) technology to hit numbers rivaling Nvidia and ATI's best. To hit these numbers 3DFX looks to stuff up to 10 GPU chips on a single card. Early reports are that massive heat sinks and fans will be needed to cool these cards, and a single Voodoo 6 is reported to draw up to 600W(!) of power. Needless to say a beefy power supply will be needed to accomodate these beasts.

In related news, (and what can only be a continuation of the late 90's/early 00's tech comeback), Intel will be releasing the Pentium V this fall in a surprising rebuke of its core architecture. Taking pages from older tech playbooks, the Pentium V will look to dominate CPU charts through raw speed, with early units clocking in at 6-7 GHz with a proprietary mineral oil cooling solution. This is achieved through massive pipelining, said to be updwards of 80 stages.

This exclusive information was gleaned through a secretive tech reporter who goes by the name A. P. Rilfools, who writes regularly for Wired magazine. They could not be reached for comment.

Submission + - China's People's Daily Expands Lucrative Censorship Consulting (trust.org)

Submitted by Koreantoast
Koreantoast writes: China's People.cn newspaper is expanding its army of internet censors as the firm grows its consulting firm to help companies vet and censor online content and advertisements. People.cn is the online unit of China's People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper.

Demand for online censoring services provided by Shanghai-listed People.cn has soared since last year after China tightened its already strict online censorship rules.As a unit of the People's Daily — the ruling Communist Party's mouthpiece — it is seen by clients as the go-to online censor. Investors concur, lifting shares in People.cn by around 240 percent since the start of 2019.

"The biggest advantage of People.cn is its precise grasp of policy trends," said An Fushuang, an independent analyst based in Shenzhen... People.cn has clinched deals with tech firms including leading news aggregator Jinri Toutiao to identify and delete material that does not meet government guidelines. Its other partners include Liangziyun, a Shenzhen-based tech company that operates nearly 1,000 social media accounts and has hundreds of millions of followers.

Full-year net income is expected to have risen as much as 140 percent, People.cn said in late January, the biggest annual increase since 2011. That would mean net profit of as high as 214.8 million yuan ($31.93 million). Revenue from its censoring business is forecast to have jumped 166 percent last year, the company said in a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Submission + - Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun Receive 2018 Turing Award (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by reporter
reporter writes: According to a report by The Washington Post, "To learn who's taking home the Turing Award, people might turn to their trusted talking bots, like Siri or Alexa. Or, in fact, some of the very technology the three winners helped bring to life.

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun have earned what's often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the tech world for their pioneering work in artificial intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery announced Wednesday. The researchers, working both independently and together, helped advance the thinking and application of neural networks, the technology that gives computers the ability to recognize patterns, interpret language and glean insights from complex data."

Submission + - Warner Music Signs Record Deal With An Algorithm (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, a press release went out to tech and music reporters claiming that little-known startup Endel had become the “first-ever algorithm to sign [a] major label deal” with Warner Music. The news was covered widely, with commentators tossing around phrases like “the end is nigh” while hand-wringing over the idea of coders coming for musicians’ label contracts. But the press release wasn’t exactly right, and questions about the future of music are even bigger than anyone thought. Endel is an app that generates reactive, personalized “soundscapes” to promote things like focus or relaxation. It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite “musical” in the traditional sense. It’s ambient, layering in things like washed-out white noise and long string notes. It’s the type of stuff that’s exploded on streaming platforms in recent years under newly invented genre names like “sleep.”

Although Endel signed a deal with Warner, the deal is crucially not for “an algorithm,” and Warner is not in control of Endel’s product. The label approached Endel with a distribution deal and Endel used its algorithm to create 600 short tracks on 20 albums that were then put on streaming services, returning a 50 / 50 royalty split to Endel. Unlike a typical major label record deal, Endel didn’t get any advance money paid upfront, and it retained ownership of the master recordings. Even if Endel had signed over the masters, the company could easily just make more: Dmitry Evgrafov, Endel’s composer and head of sound design, says all 600 tracks were made “with a click of a button.” There was minimal human involvement outside of chopping up the audio and mastering it for streaming. Endel even hired a third-party company to write the track titles. Five Endel albums have already been released, and 15 more are coming this year — all of which will be generated by code. In the future, Endel will be able to make infinite ambient tracks.

Submission + - When Charles Babbage played chess with the original Mechanical Turk (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: The 19th century British engineer Charles Babbage is sometimes called the father of the computer. But his first design for a massive computing machine, a contraption called the Difference Engine that had some 25,000 parts, was just a giant calculator intended to handle logarithmic tables. It wasn’t until he began designing his first Analytical Engine that he began to dream of a smart machine that could handle more general-purpose computations.

This short essay argues that Babbage’s creative leap was inspired by an early example of AI hype: A supposed chess-playing machine called The Turk that had astounded onlookers throughout the courts of Europe. Babbage played two games against the Turk, and lost both.

Comment Re:Project Exile (Score 1) 139

Thanks for the 411.

1) It doesn't surprise me that the tribal fiefdom mentality contributed to it.

2) I remember back in the day when I lived in MA that they had a "shall issue" FID card system for long guns and a "may issue" discretionary system for pistols that was up to the whim of the local sheriff (sigh).

3) Or they carry a BB gun or painted over red tip air-soft gun for intimidation then the family cries over the coffin and whine to the cameras when they get shot by police while being "unarmed"!
Which brings to mind. Now it seems that criminals use crazy excuses for being in possession of ANY contraband. I remember a story way back when where they caught some fool with drugs in his pocket and he said with a straight face that they weren't his pants!

The old adage, "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away" says it all.

   

Comment Project Exile (Score 1) 139

This response reminds me of the experimental program for illegal gun possession that was tried some decades ago -- Project Exile. You get caught with an illegal gun, you bought yourself a mandatory 5 year felony sentence -- regardless of how "innocent" you were of other crimes.
It seems to address all the right behavior for all the right reasons. I looked it up on Wiki and it seems that Rochester NY is the sole jurisdiction where it is still in practiced.
I remember reading in the distant past that it was not being enforced at the federal level for some unknown reason as I recall.
Too bad that the program didn't fly, makes perfect sense to address illegal firearms possession. Anyone know why it faded out?

Submission + - New Software Can Predict Landslides Weeks Before They Happen (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Australian researchers may have found a way to detect landslides as far as two weeks in advance, giving residents time to evacuate and engineers the opportunity to shore up slopes. Using AI and applied mathematics they’ve developed a software that can identify the subtle signs of an impending slide, signs that would be invisible to the naked eye. “Right now, a lot of the predictions [about where landslides will happen] are based on someone’s gut instinct on the location,” says Antoinette Tordesillas, a professor at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, who co-led the research. “We don’t rely on gut instinct. We want to develop an objective method here.” To develop the software, Tordesillas and her team used radar data from mining companies, which produce extremely detailed information of the surface movement of slopes. The team took the data and looked for patterns, eventually figuring out which networks of movements indicated unstable locations. They also used data from a landslide-prone Italian volcano to help develop the algorithm. The software can also incorporate data about other landslide risk factors, like rainfall and erosion, making the targeting even more precise. The data used for monitoring can come from radar based on the ground, on satellites or even in drones.

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