sconeu writes: Dick Gordon, pilot of Gemini 11 and command module pilot of Apollo 12, has died at the age of 88. Gordon was also slated to command the cancelled Apollo 18 mission. "Dick Gordon is an American hero, and a true renaissance man by any measure. He was an American naval officer and aviator, chemist, test pilot, NASA astronaut, professional football executive, oil and gas executive and generous contributor to worthy causes," said Curt Brown, board chairman of the Orlando-based Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and an astronaut and veteran of six space flights. "He was in a category all his own." The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation has a touching write-up that details Gordon's childhood and career successes. You can read the full article here.

schwit1 writes: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved the use of a common bacterium to kill wild mosquitoes that transmit viruses such as dengue, yellow fever and Zika, Nature's news team has learned. On November 3rd, the agency told biotechnology start-up MosquitoMate that it could release the bacterium Wolbachia pipientis into the environment as a tool against the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus). Lab-reared mosquitoes will deliver the bacterium to wild mosquito populations. The decision -- which the EPA has not formally announced -- allows the company, which is based in Lexington, Kentucky, to release the bacteria-infected mosquitoes in 20 U.S. states and Washington DC.

MosquitoMate will rear the Wolbachia-infected A. albopictus mosquitoes in its laboratories, and then sort males from females. Then the laboratory males, which don't bite, will be released at treatment sites. When these males mate with wild females, which do not carry the same strain of Wolbachia, the resulting fertilized eggs don't hatch because the paternal chromosomes do not form properly. The company says that over time, as more of the Wolbachia-infected males are released and breed with the wild partners, the pest population of A. albopictus mosquitoes dwindles. Other insects, including other species of mosquito, are not harmed by the practice, says Stephen Dobson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and founder of MosquitoMate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A crippling flaw affecting millions -- and possibly hundreds of millions -- of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes security settings is considerably easier to exploit than originally reported, cryptographers declared over the weekend. The assessment came as Estonia abruptly suspended 760,000 national ID cards used for voting, filing taxes, and encrypting sensitive documents. The critical weakness allows attackers to calculate the private portion of any vulnerable key using nothing more than the corresponding public portion. Hackers can then use the private key to impersonate key owners, decrypt sensitive data, sneak malicious code into digitally signed software, and bypass protections that prevent accessing or tampering with stolen PCs. When researchers first disclosed the flaw three weeks ago, they estimated it would cost an attacker renting time on a commercial cloud service an average of $38 and 25 minutes to break a vulnerable 1024-bit key and $20,000 and nine days for a 2048-bit key. Organizations known to use keys vulnerable to ROCA—named for the Return of the Coppersmith Attack the factorization method is based on—have largely downplayed the severity of the weakness.

On Sunday, researchers Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange reported they developed an attack that was 25 percent more efficient than the one created by original ROCA researchers. The new attack was solely the result of Bernstein and Lange based only on the public disclosure information from October 16, which at the time omitted specifics of the factorization attack in an attempt to increase the time hackers would need to carry out real-world attacks. After creating their more efficient attack, they submitted it to the original researchers. The release last week of the original attack may help to improve attacks further and to stoke additional improvements from other researchers as well.

walterbyrd shares a report from Futurism: This new source of energy, according to researchers Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner, comes from the fusion of subatomic particles known as quarks. These particles are usually produced as a result of colliding atoms that move at high speeds within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where these component parts split from their parent atoms. It doesn't stop there, however, as these disassociated quarks also tend to collide with one another and fuse into particles called baryons. It is this fusion of quarks that Karliner and Rosner focused on, as they found that this fusion is capable of producing energy even greater than what's produced in hydrogen fusion. In particular, they studied how fused quarks configure into what's called a doubly-charmed baryon. Fusing quarks require 130 MeV to become doubly-charmed baryons, which, in turn, releases energy that's 12 MeV more energy. Turning their calculations to heavier bottom quarks, which need 230 MeV to fuse, they found that a resulting baryon could produce approximately 138 MeV of net energy -- about eight times more than what hydrogen fusion releases. The new study has been published in the journal Nature.

One of the more interesting tidbits from today's earnings letter to Snap investors is the development of a new user-interface for Snapchat. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said: "One thing we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback." He confirms that a redesigned, easier-to-use Snapchat is coming. The Verge reports: And it sounds like whatever's on the way is far bigger than just some minor user experience tweaks. Spiegel says that "there is a strong likelihood that the redesign of our application will be disruptive to our business in the short term, and we don't yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application." Rethinking the way Snapchat works could certainly open the app to a huge audience of new users. Spiegel is right in calling out the usability complaints; Snap had to include a manual for using Snapchat in its IPO filing, which is a good indicator that it's not the most intuitive software in the world. But as Spiegel warms, drastic changes could also alienate some users and undercut Snap's cool factor. If you've taken the time to learn every corner of the app and master its tricks, you get it. Now, all of that is likely going to change. The earnings letter didn't give a release date for the new, improved Snapchat. The company's third quarter earnings report also revealed $39.9 million in losses stemming from unsold Spectacles. The camera-equipped glasses accounted for about 9% of Snap's losses in the quarter.

Corephotonics, an Israeli maker of dual-lens camera technologies for smartphones, has filed a lawsuit against Apple this week alleging that the iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus infringe upon four of its patents. Mac Rumors reports: The patents, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office between November 2013 and June 2016, relate to dual-lens camera technologies appropriate for smartphones, including optical zoom and a mini telephoto lens assembly: U.S. Patent No. 9,402,032; U.S. Patent No. 9,568,712; U.S. Patent No. 9,185,291; U.S. Patent No. 9,538,152. Corephotonics alleges that the two iPhone models copy its patented telephoto lens design, optical zoom method, and a method for intelligently fusing images from the wide-angle and telephoto lenses to improve image quality. iPhone X isn't listed as an infringing product, despite having a dual-lens camera, perhaps because the device launched just four days ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: How should we think about new and future technologies? The two main stances seem to be extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. A better approach would be careful planning and management. Optimists tend to overlook the fact that the technological successes of the past required a lot of social engineering before their benefits became widely shared. Countries like Maoist China and North Korea implemented perverse economic systems that withheld the bounty of modern technology from most of their citizens. And poor countries didn't really begin to beat poverty until decades after colonialism ended. Pessimists, meanwhile, often assume that new technologies can be stopped in their tracks by act of popular will. They probably can't. Even the most impoverished, repressive regimes of the 20th century adopted new technologies, and often suffered their worst consequences. Scientific research and invention, meanwhile, can be forbidden in one country or another, but probably not at the global level: Someone, somewhere, will study even the scariest ideas.

A better approach, then, is technology management. We should be as realistic as we can about each innovation's potential benefits and dangers. And instead of thinking about how to suppress new technologies, we should think about how to regulate them and channel them toward broad social benefit. Emerging technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are at our doorstep, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. But letting them develop haphazardly entails large risks. Instead, government and industry need to be funding proactive efforts to bring them into widespread, well-regulated use. In the end, technology is what we choose to make of it.

Twitter is rolling out an update around the world to allow users to post 280-character tweets. The company first announced the controversial plan to move beyond its traditional 140 characters back in September, noting at the time how a longer character count allowed users to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet. TechCrunch reports: At the time of its original announcement, the company cited data backing up its decision that referenced how the character constraints impacted users differently, depending on their language. Twitter said that those who tweeted in languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese were able to express around double the amount of information in a single character, compared with users who spoke English, Spanish, Portuguese or French, for example. In today's blog post about the public launch of 280 characters, Twitter aims to assuage people's fears that their timelines will fill with expanded tweets. The company said that during the trial period, people continued to tweet below 140 characters most of the time -- after the novelty of being able to use more characters wore off. Specifically, Twitter found that only 5 percent of tweets were sent out with more than 140 characters and of those, only 2 percent were over 190 characters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, Syria announced that it would sign the Paris climate agreement -- a landmark deal that commits almost 200 countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming. With Nicaragua also joining the deal last month, the United States is now the only country in the world that opposes it. In June, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, unless it is renegotiated to be "fair" to the United States. But other countries in the deal, such as France, Germany, and Italy, said that's not possible. The Trump administration is also taking steps to roll back regulations passed under former President Barack Obama to achieve the emissions reduction goals set under the Paris deal. The U.S. is the second largest emitter of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the world after China. "With Syria's decision, the relentless commitment of the global community to deliver on Paris is more evident than ever," Paula Caballero, director of the climate change program at the World Resources Institute, told the Times. "The U.S.'s stark isolation should give Trump reason to reconsider his ill-advised announcement and join the rest of the world in tackling climate change."

YouTuber Tom Scott was invited to visit Cloudflare's San Francisco headquarters to check out the company's wall of lava lamps. These decorative novelty items -- while neat to look at -- serve a special purpose for the internet security company. Cloudflare takes pictures and video of the lava lamps to turn them into "a stream of random, unpredictable bytes," which is used to help create the keys that encrypt the traffic that flow through Cloudflare's network. ZDNet reports: Cloudflare is a DNS service which also offers distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection, security, free SSL, encryption, and domain name services. Cloudflare is known for providing good standards of encryption, but it seems the secret is out -- this reputation is built in part on lava lamps. Roughly 10 percent of the Internet's traffic passes through Cloudflare, and as the firm deals with so much encrypted traffic, many random numbers are required. According to Nick Sullivan, Cloudfare's head of cryptography, this is where the lava lamps shine. Instead of relying on code to generate these numbers for cryptographic purposes, the lava lamps and the random lights, swirling blobs and movements are recorded and photographs are taken. The information is then fed into a data center and Linux kernels which then seed random number generators used to create keys to encrypt traffic. "Every time you take a picture with a camera there's going to be some sort of static, some sort of noise," Sullivan said. "So it's not only just where the bubbles are flowing through the lava lamp; it is the state of the air, the ambient light -- every tiny change impacts the stream of data." Cloudflare also reportedly uses a "chaotic pendulum" in its London office to generate randomness, and in Singapore, they use a radioactive source.

The Register's Thomas Claburn, interviews Jim Jagielski, Apache Software Foundation President and Apache OpenOffice project mentor. From the story: Despite being the subject of a deathwatch -- perhaps mainly by fans of rival LibreOffice -- AOO appears to be rather popular, with the 4.1.4 update racking up at least 1.6 million downloads. [...] While AOO and the ASF formulate a formal statement of direction for the project, Jagielski said more or less that all's well. "AOO is not, and isn't designed to be, the 'super coolest open source office suite with all the latest bells and whistles,'" Jagielski continued. "Our research shows that a 'basic,' functional office suite, which is streamlined with a 'simple' and uncluttered, uncomplicated UI, serves an incredible under-represented community. "Other office suites are focusing on the 'power user' which is a valuable market, for sure, but the real power and range for an open-source office suite alternative is the vast majority which is the 'rest of us. Sometimes we all forget how empowering open source is to the entire world."

An anonymous reader shares a report: After almost a decade, Google's parent company Alphabet is getting closer to fulfilling its promise of rolling out cars that can take anyone anywhere without a driver behind the wheel. Alphabet's self-driving car company, Waymo, is introducing truly driverless cars to public roads for the first time, the company's CEO John Krafcik announced today at the Web Summit conference. That means there won't have to be a person sitting in the driver's seat, waiting to take over, and that the car's computer system will complete all parts of the driving task -- though for now, only in some of the company's cars in Phoenix, Ariz. While this move is still geographically limited, it marks the beginnings of Alphabet's driverless future finally becoming a reality. No other company has succeeded in operating a fleet of fully driverless cars on public roads.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Facebook is testing new technology that is designed to help victims of revenge porn acts. It works on a database of file hashes, a cryptographic signature computed for each file. Facebook says that once an abuser tries to upload an image marked as "revenge porn" in its database, its system will block the upload process. This will work for images shared on the main Facebook service, but also for images shared privately via Messenger, Facebook's IM app. The weird thing is that in order to build a database of "revenge porn" file hashes, Facebook will rely on potential victims uploading a copy of the nude photo in advance. This process involves the victim sending a copy of the nude photo to his own account, via Facebook Messenger. This implies uploading a copy of the nude photo on Facebook Messenger, the very same act the victim is trying to prevent. The victim can then report the photo to Facebook, which will create a hash of the image that the social network will use to block further uploads of the same photo.

Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google's deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. Speaking at a conference on Tuesday, Ng said he would like to see a "new New Deal" that pays people displaced by technology to study, offering an incentive to learn new skills and reenter the workforce. From a report: Speaking at MIT Technology Review's annual EmTech MIT conference in Cambridge, MA, on Tuesday, Ng said he's visited call centers and spoken to workers, knowing that his teams of software engineers will then write software that will automate aspects of their work. "There are many professions in the crosshairs of AI teams across the world," he said. Ng, who's currently working on a startup called Deeplearning.ai that helps train people on deep-learning technology, has some ideas for helping those in jobs he thinks will be automated, from call-center workers to radiologists, truck drivers, and the like. His suggestion is for an updated version of the New Deal -- the Depression-era economic programs that invested in, among other things, getting unemployed Americans back to work -- that pays displaced workers to learn new job skills.

An anonymous reader shares a USA Today report: Elon Musk isn't the only high-profile figure concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence. Scientist Stephen Hawking warned AI could serve as the "worst event in the history of our civilization" unless humanity is prepared for its possible risks. Hawking made the remarks during the opening night of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Hawking expects AI to transform every part of our lives, with the potential to undo damage done to the Earth and cure diseases. However, Hawking said AI could also spur the creation of powerful autonomous weapons of terror that could be used as a tool "by the few to oppress the many." "Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst," he said. Hawking called for more research in AI on how to best use the technology, as well as implored scientists to think about AI's impact. "Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus our thinking on not only making AI more capable and successful, but maximizing its societal benefit," he said.