A patent application published this week by Microsoft adds more fuel to the fire about the possibility of a new hybrid dual-screen Microsoft Surface device that blurs the lines between phone and tablet. From a report: The patent filing is for a "hinged device" with a "first and second portion" that includes a "flexible display." It would sport a hinge in the middle, similar in appearance to the one on the Surface Book, as well as familiar smartphone components like a bezel and camera. The inventor listed on the document is Kabir Siddiqui, who has been named on previous patent documents related to a foldable Surface device. He's also credited with inventing features like the Surface kickstand and camera. The patents represent one of the clearest signs yet that Microsoft has shown interest in building a "new and disruptive" category that includes elements of a smartphone, tablet and computer all in one. Rumblings of a new Surface phone-like device, under the codename Andromeda, have persisted for years, though the company has yet to confirm such a plan.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Somewhere in the United States, someone is getting into an Uber en route to a WeWork co-working space. Their dog is with a walker whom they hired through the app Wag. They will eat a lunch delivered by DoorDash, while participating in several chat conversations on Slack. And, for all of it, they have an unlikely benefactor to thank: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Long before the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi vanished, the kingdom has sought influence in the West -- perhaps intended, in part, to make us forget what it is. A medieval theocracy that still beheads by sword, doubling as a modern nation with malls (including a planned mall offering indoor skiing), Saudi Arabia has been called "an ISIS that made it." Remarkably, the country has avoided pariah status in the United States thanks to our thirst for oil, Riyadh's carefully cultivated ties with Washington, its big arms purchases, and the two countries' shared interest in counterterrorism. But lately the Saudis have been growing their circle of American enablers, pouring billions into Silicon Valley technology companies.

While an earlier generation of Saudi leaders, like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, invested billions of dollars in blue-chip companies in the United States, the kingdom's new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has shifted Saudi Arabia's investment attention from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest swinging checkbooks, working mostly through a $100 billion fund raised by SoftBank (a Japanese company), which has swashbuckled its way through the technology industry, often taking multibillion-dollar stakes in promising companies. The Public Investment Fund put $45 billion into SoftBank's first Vision Fund, and Bloomberg recently reported that the Saudi fund would invest another $45 billion into SoftBank's second Vision Fund. SoftBank, with the help of that Saudi money, is now said to be the largest shareholder in Uber. It has also put significant money into a long list of start-ups that includes Wag, DoorDash, WeWork, Plenty, Cruise, Katerra, Nvidia and Slack. As the world fills up car tanks with gas and climate change worsens, Saudi Arabia reaps enormous profits -- and some of that money shows up in the bank accounts of fast-growing companies that love to talk about "making the world a better place."

A new study in Frontiers in Psychology examined why people struggle so much to solve statistical problems, particularly why we show a marked preference for complicated solutions over simpler, more intuitive ones. Chalk it up to our resistance to change. From a report: The study concluded that fixed mindsets are to blame: we tend to stick with the familiar methods we learned in school, blinding us to the existence of a simpler solution. Roughly 96 percent of the general population struggles with solving problems relating to statistics and probability. Yet being a well-informed citizen in the 21st century requires us to be able to engage competently with these kinds of tasks, even if we don't encounter them in a professional setting. "As soon as you pick up a newspaper, you're confronted with so many numbers and statistics that you need to interpret correctly," says co-author Patrick Weber, a graduate student in math education at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Most of us fall far short of the mark.

Part of the problem is the counterintuitive way in which such problems are typically presented. Meadows presented his evidence in the so-called "natural frequency format" (for example, 1 in 10 people), rather than in terms of a percentage (10 percent of the population). That was a smart decision, since 1-in-10 a more intuitive, jury-friendly approach. Recent studies have shown that performance rates on many statistical tasks increased from four percent to 24 percent when the problems were presented using the natural frequency format.

The Pentagon on Friday said there has been a cyber breach of Defense Department travel records that compromised the personal information and credit card data of U.S. military and civilian personnel. From a report: According to a U.S. official familiar with the matter, the breach could have affected as many as 30,000 workers, but that number may grow as the investigation continues. The breach could have happened some months ago but was only recently discovered. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the breach is under investigation, said that no classified information was compromised. According to a Pentagon statement, a department cyber team informed leaders about the breach on Oct. 4. Lt. Col. Joseph Buccino, a Pentagon spokesman, said the department is still gathering information on the size and scope of the hack and who did it. "It's important to understand that this was a breach of a single commercial vendor that provided service to a very small percentage of the total population" of Defense Department personnel, said Buccino.

On Tuesday, Microsoft expressed its intent to bid on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract -- a contract that represents a $10 billion project to build cloud services for the Department of Defense. The contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what technologies Microsoft would be building for the Department of Defense. At an industry day for JEDI, DoD Chief Management Officer John H. Gibson II explained the program's impact, saying, "We need to be very clear. This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our department." This has ruffled a few feathers inside the Redmond-based software giant. In an open letter published Saturday, an unspecified number of Microsoft employees stated their disapproval. They wrote: Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of "empowering every person on the planet to achieve more," not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same. A race to the bottom is not an ethical position. Like those who took action at Google, Salesforce, and Amazon, we ask all employees of tech companies to ask how your work will be used, where it will be applied, and act according to your principles.

We need to put JEDI in perspective. This is a secretive $10 billion project with the ambition of building "a more lethal" military force overseen by the Trump Administration. The Google workers who protested these collaborations and forced the company to take action saw this. We do too. So we ask, what are Microsoft's A.I. Principles, especially regarding the violent application of powerful A.I. technology? How will workers, who build and maintain these services in the first place, know whether our work is being used to aid profiling, surveillance, or killing? Earlier this year Microsoft published "The Future Computed," examining the applications and potential dangers of A.I. It argues that strong ethical principles are necessary for the development of A.I. that will benefit people, and defines six core principles: "fair, reliable and safe, private and secure, inclusive, transparent, and accountable."

With JEDI, Microsoft executives are on track to betray these principles in exchange for short-term profits. If Microsoft is to be accountable for the products and services it makes, we need clear ethical guidelines and meaningful accountability governing how we determine which uses of our technology are acceptable, and which are off the table. Microsoft has already acknowledged the dangers of the tech it builds, even calling on the federal government to regulate A.I. technologies. But there is no law preventing the company from exercising its own internal scrutiny and standing by its own ethical compass. Further reading: Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Competition.

An anonymous reader quotes New York magazine: Salmon are just the latest entry in a growing cornucopia of animal faces loaded into databases. For some animals, the biometric data gathered from them is being used to aid in conservation efforts. For others, the resulting AI could help ward off poachers. While partly creepy and partly very cute, monitoring of these animals can both help protect their populations and ensure safe, traceable livestock for developing communities...

U.K. researchers are using online resources like Flickr and Instagram to help build and strengthen a database that will eventually help track global tiger populations in real time. Once collected, the photos are analyzed by everyday people in a free app called Wildsense... The mighty lion is being surveilled too. Conservationists and wildlife teachers are using facial recognition to keep tabs on a database of over 1,000 lions... Wildlife experts are tracking elephants to protect them from encroaching poachers. Using Google's Cloud AutoML Vision machine learning software, the technology will uniquely identify elephants in the wild. According to the Evening Standard, the tech will even send out an alert if it detects poachers in the same frame.

The story of whale facial tracking is one of crowdsourcing success. After struggling to distinguish specific whales from one another on his own, marine biologist Christian Khan uploaded the photos to data-competition site Kaggle and, within four months, data-science company Deepsense was able to accurately detect individual whale faces with 87% accuracy. Since then, detection rates have steadily improved and are helping conservationists track and monitor the struggling aquatic giant.
U.S. researchers are trying to protect "the world's most endangered animal" with LemurFaceID, which is able to accurately differentiate between two lemur faces with 97% accuracy. But "In the livestock surveillance arms race China is definitely leading the charge," the article notes, citing e-commerce giant JD.com and its use of facial recognition to monitor herds of pigs to detect their age, weight, and diet.

And one Chinese company even offers a blockchain-based chicken tracking system (codenamed "GoGo Chicken") with an app that can link a grocery store chicken to "its birthplace, what food it ate and how many steps it walked during its life."

MIT Technology Review recently discussed new attempts to replace the standard 'QWERY' keyboard layout, including Tap, "a one-handed gadget that fits over your fingers like rubbery brass knuckles and connects wirelessly to your smartphone." It's supposed to free you from clunky physical keyboards and act as a go-anywhere typing interface. A promotional video shows smiling people wearing Tap and typing with one hand on a leg, on an arm, and even (perhaps jokingly) on some guy's forehead... But when I tried it, the reality of using Tap was neither fun nor funny. Unlike a conventional QWERTY keyboard, Tap required me to think a lot, because I had to tap my fingers in not-very-intuitive combinations to create letters: an A is your thumb, a B is your index finger and pinky, a C is all your fingers except the index.
The article also acknowledges the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout and other alternatives like the one-handed Twiddler keyboard, but argues that "neither managed to dent QWERTY's dominance." [W]hat if the future is no input interface at all? Neurable is a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's working on a way to type simply by thinking. It uses an electrode-dotted headband connected to a VR headset to track brain activity. Machine learning helps figure out what letter you're trying to select and anticipate which key you'll want next. After you select several keys, it can fill in the rest of the word, says cofounder and CEO Ramses Alcaide....

Then there's the device being built over at CTRL-Labs: an armband that detects the activity of muscle fibers in the arm. One use could be to replace gaming controllers. For another feature in the works, algorithms use the data to figure out what it is that your hands are trying to type, even if they're barely moving. CEO and cofounder Thomas Reardon, who previously created Microsoft's Internet Explorer, says this too is a neural interface, of a sort. Whether you're typing or dictating, you're using your brain to turn muscles on and off, he points out.
While a developer version will be shipped this year, Reardon "admits that it is still not good enough for him to toss his trusty mid-'80s IBM Model M keyboard, which he says still 'sounds like rolling thunder' when he types." But do any Slashdot readers have their own suggestions or experiences to share?

Can anything replace 'QWERTY' keyboards?

"Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic," writes Slashdot reader Dan Drollette. "It ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer." From their article: These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic's sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic's warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today's temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees -- let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, "We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.⦠If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences."
In related news, a court in The Hague "has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world's climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming. Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 -- measured against 1990 levels -- higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte's liberal administration. The ruling -- which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom -- will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda."

Meanwhile, a new article in GQ cites estimates that more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies, complaining that "there is no 'free market' incentive to prevent disaster."

Douglas Rushkoff, long-time open source advocate (and currently a professor of Digital Economics at the City University of New York, Queens College), is calling Universal Basic Incomes "no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement." Uber's business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating. When it's looked at the way a software developer would, it's clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that's fundamentally flawed. The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you're doing something wrong or "leaving money on the table."

Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps. Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely.... Soon, consumers simply can't consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone's data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend. To the rescue comes UBI.

The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.... Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords... if Silicon Valley's UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future's Marina Gorbis... As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It's the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they've sexually harassed. It's hush money.
Rushkoff's conclusion? "Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need."

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: On the same day Facebook announced that it had carried out its biggest purge yet of American accounts peddling disinformation, the company quietly made another revelation: It had removed 66 accounts, pages and apps linked to Russian firms that build facial recognition software for the Russian government. Facebook said Thursday that it had removed any accounts associated with SocialDataHub and its sister firm, Fubutech, because the companies violated its policies by scraping data from the social network. "Facebook has reason to believe your work for the government has included matching photos from individuals' personal social media accounts in order to identify them," the company said in a cease-and-desist letter to SocialDataHub that was dated Tuesday and viewed by The New York Times...

As Facebook is taking a closer look at its own products amid increasing scrutiny and public outcry, it is increasingly finding examples of companies that have been exploiting its global social network for questionable ends.... Artur Khachuyan, the 26-year-old chief executive of SocialDataHub and Fubutech, said in an interview Friday that Fubutech scraped data from the web, particularly Google search and the Russian search engine Yandex, to build a database of Russian citizens and their images that the government can use for facial recognition. "We don't know exactly what they do with it," he said.... At one point in a 30-minute phone interview, he said the Russian Defense Ministry was a client but later said he could not name Fubutech's government clients.
The two Russian companies have been around for over four years, "relying in part on Facebook data," the Times reports.

"At the top of the SocialDataHub's website, there is a single line: 'We know everything about everybody.'"

There's now a giant, inflatable rat covered in crypto code across from the Federal Reserve. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The bitcoin rat, first noted on Reddit, was created by Nelson Saiers, an artist and former hedge fund manager, according to Coindesk. The art installation, which appeared earlier this week and is temporary, is intended as much as a tribute to bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto as much as it is a condemnation of the Fed and critics of cryptocurrencies. "The sculpture's supposed to kind of reflect the spirit of Satoshi and what he's trying to do," Saiers told Coindesk, who noted the rat image was inspired in part by another titan of traditional finance. "Warren Buffett called bitcoin 'rat poison squared' but if the Fed's a rat, then maybe rat poison is a good thing," he said... "This is a very iconic image for protest," Saiers told blockchain news site Breaker. "Somewhere in the heart of bitcoin is a bit of protest of big bank bailouts."

That idea appeared to be lost on some Redditors, who claimed they spotted the bitcoin rat in the wilds of Wall Street but didn't immediately see its significance. "I walked past it today," one wrote. "Had no idea it was about Bitcoin."

"It's cool, but people walking by won't understand it," said another. "I don't even understand it. Needs a BTC logo or something."

MOX hoped to convert plutonium from Cold War bombs into fuel for nuclear power plants, but even though the project was about 70% complete, Washington has pulled the plug. Slashdot reader Mr. Dollar Ton shared this story from Reuters: The Department of Energy told Senate and House of Representatives committees in May that MOX, a type of specialized nuclear recycling plant that has never been built in the United States, would cost about $48 billion more than the $7.6 billion already spent on it. Instead of completing MOX, the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, wants to blend the 34 tonnes of deadly plutonium -- enough to make about 8,000 nuclear weapons -- with an inert substance and bury it underground in New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Burying the plutonium would cost nearly $20 billion over the next two decades and would require 400 jobs at Savannah River, the Department of Energy has estimated.

"The first published RPG was Dungeons & Dragons, shortly followed by some other imitative games," Greg Stafford once said. "Chaosium, however, was never content to imitate but published games that were original in style of play, content and design."

Greg Stafford died Thursday at the age of 71. Long-time Slashdot reader argStyopa shares this memorial from Chaosium's Michael O'Brien. As one of the greatest game designers of all time; winner of too many awards to count; and a friend, mentor, guide, and inspiration to generations of gamers, "the Grand Shaman of Gaming" influenced the universe of tabletop gaming beyond measure. Greg founded The Chaosium in 1975... Under his leadership, the company quickly became renowned for its originality and creativity, and was responsible for introducing numerous things to the hobby that are standards today. As John Wick (7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings) memorably said, "The older I get, the more I hear young RPG designers say 'Never been done before!' And then I just point at something Greg Stafford did a few decades ago."

Greg's work in roleplaying games, board games, and fiction have been acclaimed as some of the most engaging and innovative of all time. There will doubtless be many valedictory messages over the coming days from the countless people that Greg inspired and enthused across his many interests and passions -- Glorantha, Oaxaca, King Arthur, shamanism, mythology and more. For now, we leave you with the words of the Myth maker himself, speaking at the 2018 ENnies Awards ceremony, his last public engagement
"When I started Chaosium in 1975... we never imagined, truly, that it would reach the magnitude that it has today," Stafford tells the audience. "It went through a long period of being some strange thing that just random geeks did... I figure when role-playing games get on The X-Files and The Simpsons, we've made it..."

""It's true that it's not us. We're a bunch of obsessive-compulsive, detail-minded game designers, people looking desperately for a job that doesn't make them wear a tie to work, artists who would've never had a market without our industry. We all do a lot of work, but in fact we're just a small handful of people, and truly the phenomenon that we have today is not due to us, but is due to you, the fans and the players. We really appreciate everything that you've done... I want to say thank you to all of you fans."

The forum at Basic Roleplaying Central has started a condolences thread.

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.