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Submission + - Poor Pilot Training Blamed for Virgin Galactic Crash (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: SpaceShipTwo co-pilot Michael Alsbury was not properly trained to realize the consequences of unlocking the vehicle’s hinged tail section too soon, a mistake that led to his death and the destruction of the ship during a test flight in California last year. Responsibility for the accident falls to SpaceShipTwo manufacturer Scaled Composites, a Mojave, Calif., company owned by Northrop Grumman Corp, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined at a webcast hearing on Tuesday. Poor oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees commercial spaceflights in the United States, was also a factor in the accident, the NTSB said.

Submission + - Superhydrophobic nano-wallpaint in San Francisco pisses back on public pissers 2 (bbc.com)

Submitted by monkeyzoo
monkeyzoo writes: San Francisco is testing an ultra-water-repellant paint on wallls in areas fraught with public urination problems. The paint is designed to repel the urine and soil the pisser's pants. "It's supposed to, when people urinate, bounce back and hit them on the pants and get them wet. Hopefully that will discourage them. We will put a sign to give them a heads up," said Mohammad Nuru, director of the San Francisco public works. A Florida company named Ultra-Tech produces the super-hydrophobic oleophobic nano-coating that was also recently used with success on walls in Hamburg, Germany [video] to discourage public urination. Signs posted there warn, "Do not pee here! We pee back!" Time will tell if this works better than the firehose employed in India.

Submission + - UK to give 18-year-olds right to delete embarrassing online past (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: People aged 18 and older could soon be allowed to delete embarrassing photographs of themselves from social networks as part of a government-backed scheme.

The iRights campaign will allow young adults to remove incriminating photos of themselves from Twitter and Facebook which could affect them in later life. The move is similar to legislation which came into force in California this year that gave teens rights to delete personal information online.

However, unlike in California, there are currently no plans to introduce a law in the UK forcing technology companies to oblige.

Submission + - Trillion-Dollar World Trade Deal Aims To Make IT Products Cheaper (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A new (tentative) global trade agreement, struck on Friday at a World Trade Organization meeting in Geneva, eliminates tariffs on more than 200 kinds of IT products, ranging from smartphones, routers, and ink cartridges to video game consoles and telecommunications satellites. A full list of products covered was published by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which called the ITA expansion 'great news for the American workers and businesses that design, manufacture, and export state-of-the-art technology and information products, ranging from MRI machines to semiconductors to video game consoles.' The deal covers $1.3 trillion worth of global trade, about 7 percent of total trade today.

Submission + - Musk, Woz, Hawking, and Robotics/AI Experts Urge Ban on Autonomous Weapons (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute urges governments to ban offensive autonomous weaponry. The letter is signed by high profile leaders in the science community and tech industry, such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak. It's also signed — more importantly — but literally hundreds of expert researchers in robotics and AI. They say, "The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce."

Submission + - 'Stagefright' Flaw: Compromise Android With Just a Text (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Up to 950 million Android phones may be vulnerable to a new exploit called "Stagefright," which lets attackers compromise a device through a simple multimedia text — even before the recipient sees it. Researchers from Zimperium zLabs reported the related bugs to Google in April. Google quickly accepted a patch and distributed it to manufacturers, but the researchers say they don't think the manufacturers have yet passed it on to most consumers. "The weaknesses reside in Stagefright, a media playback tool in Android. They are all “remote code execution” bugs, allowing malicious hackers to infiltrate devices and exfiltrate private data. All attackers would need to send out exploits would be mobile phone numbers, Drake noted. From there, they could send an exploit packaged in a Stagefright multimedia message (MMS), which would let them write code to the device and steal data from sections of the phone that can be reached with Stagefright’s permissions. That would allow for recording of audio and video, and snooping on photos stored in SD cards. Bluetooth would also be hackable via Stagefright."

Submission + - Computer science enrollments match NASDAQ's rises and fall (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: In March 2000, the NASDAQ composite index reached a historic high of 5,048, at just about the same time undergrad computer science enrollments hit a peak of nearly 24,000 students at Ph.D.-granting institutions in the U.S. and Canada, according to data collected by the Computing Research Association in its most recent annual Taulbee Survey. By 2005, computer science enrollments had halved, declining to just over 12,000. On July 17, the NASDAQ hit its highest point since 2000, reaching a composite index of 5,210. In 2014, computer science undergrad enrollments reached nearly, 24,000, almost equal to the 2000 high. Remarkably, it has taken nearly 15 years to reach the earlier enrollment peak.

Submission + - Steam Bug Allowed Password Resets Without Confirmation (kotaku.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Valve has fixed a bug in their account authentication system that allowed attackers to easily reset the password to a Steam account. When a Steam user forgets a password, he goes to an account recovery page and asks for a reset. The page then sends an email containing a short code to the address registered with the account. The problem was that Steam wasn't actually checking the codes sent via email. Attackers could simply request a reset and then submit a blank field when prompted for the code. Valve says the bug was active from July 21-25. A number of accounts were compromised, including some prominent streamers and Dota 2 pros. Valve issued password resets to those accounts with "suspicious" changes over the past several days.

Submission + - Hologram Causes Police to Shut Down Anti-violence Fundraiser in Indiana

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Chicago rapper by the name of Chief Keef has been making headlines recently after the city launched a campaign to deny his performance at an anti-violence event. The event was organized to raise funds for victims of recent Chicago murders in which another rapper was slain. Keef is currently wanted on warrants in the region but is living on the East Coast. He was expected to perform via a live stream projection. While Chicago officials worked to deny his performance from occurring in the city, promoters vowed that he would still perform.

A recent concert called Craze Fest was just held at the Wolf Lake Pavilion in Hammond Indiana. The Pavilion is part of a public park. The city of Hammond refused to let promoters hold the event unless they agreed that Chief Keef would not be allowed to perform.

Promoters agreed that Keef would not be at the event performing. Instead the promoters setup a live stream projection of the rapper and showed it at the end of the concert. Once the Hologram of Keef began performing, police rushed in and began shutting down the event.

This raises some interesting questions about free speech and the role of technology in it.

Here is some cellphone video of the event. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the raw video without subtitles — https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Here is a link to a local news article:

http://cltv.com/2015/07/26/chi...

Submission + - Where Did DirectX 12 Multiadapter Come From?

Submitted by Phopojijo
Phopojijo writes: While it looks like utilizing multiple GPUs in DirectX 12 will take off, much of this setup was exposed to game developers for years. Previously, it was held back by the low number of machines with (available) mismatched graphics, the lack of compute shader support in consoles, and the difficulty in using OpenCL for a video game product. While the editorial elaborates on each of these points, it doesn't mention Explicit Linked Multiadapter in DirectX 12, which allows game developers to make similar assumptions that AMD and NVIDIA do for CrossFire and SLI, respectively, making their job even easier.

Submission + - FCC Approves AT&T-DirecTV Purchase (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has granted approval to AT&T to purchase DirecTV for $48.5 billion. AT&T will become the largest provider of cable or satellite TV in the U.S., with 26.4 million subscribers. "Adding TV customers gives AT&T more power to negotiate with big media companies over prices for those channels. The deal also combines a nationwide satellite TV service, the country’s largest, with the No. 2 nationwide wireless network as time spent on mobile devices increases." The FCC did put conditions on the deal: AT&T must make fiber internet service available to 12.5 million people, offer cheaper internet plans to low-income customers, and not mess with the internet traffic of online video competitors.

Submission + - The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Imagine it’s the 1950s and you’re in charge of one of the world’s first electronic computers. A company approaches you and says: “We have 10 million words of French text that we’d like to translate into English. We could hire translators, but is there some way your computer could do the translation automatically?”

At this time, computers are still a novelty, and no one has ever done automated translation. But you decide to attempt it. You write a program that examines each sentence and tries to understand the grammatical structure. It looks for verbs, the nouns that go with the verbs, the adjectives modifying nouns, and so on. With the grammatical structure understood, your program converts the sentence structure into English and uses a French-English dictionary to translate individual words.

For several decades, most computer translation systems used ideas along these lines — long lists of rules expressing linguistic structure. But in the late 1980s, a team from IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., tried a radically different approach. They threw out almost everything we know about language — all the rules about verb tenses and noun placement — and instead created a statistical model.

Submission + - Firefox Will Soon Show You Which Tabs Are Making Noise, And Let You Mute Them

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is working on identifying Firefox tabs that are currently playing audio. The feature will show an icon if a tab is making sounds and let the user mute the playback. It’s worth noting that while Chrome has had audio indicators for more than a year now, it still doesn’t let you easily mute tabs. The option is available in Google’s browser, but it’s not enabled by default (you have to turn on the #enable-tab-audio-muting flag in chrome://flags/).

Submission + - Fiat Chrysler Recalls 1.4 Million Autos to fix remote hack (techno-stream.net)

Submitted by swinferno
swinferno writes: Fiat Chrysler announced on Friday that it’s recalling 1.4 million automobiles just days after hackers demonstrated a terrifying hack of a Jeep that was driving down the highway at 70 miles per hour.

They are offering a software patch for some of its internet-connected vehicles after a report showing hackers seizing control of a moving 2014 Jeep Cherokee. Cybersecurity experts Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller have publicly exposed a serious vulnerability that would allow hackers to take remote control of Fiat Chrysler Automobile (FCA) cars that run its Uconnect internet-accessing software for connected car features.

As major automakers continue to roll out cars with Wi-Fi features connecting the vehicles with smartphones and other devices, their innovations are likely to catch the eye of hackers as well as tech-hungry customers, opening up a new asphalt playing field in the arena of cybersecurity.

Submission + - Malaria Vaccine Passes Key Regulatory Hurdle (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports that the European Medicines Agency has approved the world's first malaria vaccine for real-world use. The vaccine is far from perfect, and the World Health Organization still has to make a final decision on it, but it's a key victory for GlaxoSmithKline, who have been developing the vaccine for three decades. "The best protection was among children aged five to 17 months who received three doses of the vaccine a month apart, plus a booster dose at 20 months. In this group, cases of severe malaria were cut by a third over four years." Unfortunately, the boosters are quite necessary for protection, and it doesn't protect young babies from malaria. The disease "kills around 584,000 people a year worldwide, most of them children under five in sub-Saharan Africa."

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As the trials of life continue to take their toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

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