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Swapnil Bhartiya, who runs the blog TFIR, had a chance to interview Linus Torvalds at Open Source Summit in the second half of August this year. (Some context: The interview, which was published this week, took place before Mr. Torvalds said he needs to take a step back to reflect on how he has dealt with the community over the years. Since then, we have learned that Mr. Torvalds is returning to his position.) In the wide-ranging interview, Mr. Torvalds has touched a wide-range of subjects, including formulating workarounds for the problematic hardware bugs (Meltdown, Spectre), and Chromebooks gaining traction (though it is still not a machine that he could use for his work yet). He also talked about companies gleaning a lot of data about their users, regulations, (a tad bit of politics), Linux community.

Greg Kroah-Hartman (aka Greg K-H) joined Mr. Bhartiya and Mr. Torvalds for the second half of the interview. On Sunday, Mr. Bhartiya published an additional interview of Mr. Kroah-Hartman.

Swapnil Bhartiya, who runs the blog TFIR, had a chance to interview Linus Torvalds at Open Source Summit in the second half of August this year. (Some context: The interview, which was published this week, took place before Mr. Torvalds said he needs to take a step back to reflect on how he has dealt with the community over the years. Since then, we have learned that Mr. Torvalds is returning to his position.) In the wide-ranging interview, Mr. Torvalds has touched a wide-range of subjects, including formulating workarounds for the problematic hardware bugs (Meltdown, Spectre), and Chromebooks gaining traction (though it is still not a machine that he could use for his work yet). He also talked about companies gleaning a lot of data about their users, regulations, (a tad bit of politics), Linux community.

Greg Kroah-Hartman (aka Greg K-H) joined Mr. Bhartiya and Mr. Torvalds for the second half of the interview. On Sunday, Mr. Bhartiya published an additional interview of Mr. Kroah-Hartman.

"When visiting a series of eight primary school class rooms recently, CS professor Judy Robertson talked to children aged 5-12 about how computers work and discussed pictures they drew of what they thought is inside a computer," writes Slashdot reader theodp:
"In my view," Robertson writes, "computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation — the machine. The world would be a tedious place if we had to do all out computational thinking ourselves; that's why we invented computers in the first place. Yet, the new school curricula across the world have lost focus on hardware and how code executes on it."

She notes, "What the pictures, and subsequent classroom discussions told me is that the children know names of components within a computer, and possibly some isolated facts about them. None of the pictures showed accurately how the components work together to perform computation, although the children were ready and willing to reason about this with their classmates. Although some of the children had programmed in the visual programming language, none of them knew how the commands they wrote in Scratch would be executed in the hardware inside a computer. One boy, who had been learning about variables in Scratch the previous day wanted to know whether if he looked in his computer he would really see apps with boxes full of variables in them."

Time to get the Walk-Through Computer (1990 video) out of mothballs?
"Many of the children knew the names of the components within a computer: a chip, memory, a disc, and they were often insistent that there should be a fan in there. They knew that there would be wires inside, and that it would need a battery to make it work...."

But one student confessed that while they knew that a computer was full of both devices and code, "I am not sure what it looked like so I just scribbled."

"In 2012, most CS teacher professional development was paid for by the National Science Foundation or Google." And in the years that followed, 80,000 primary and secondary school teachers received opportunities to learn how to teach computer science without paying any fees -- thanks to tech-bankrolled Code.org.

But is anyone taking the classes? Slashdot reader theodp quotes a Communications of the ACM post by University of Michigan professor Mark Guzdial: In 2013, Code.org began, and they changed the face of CS education in the United States . It started out as just a video (linked here, seen over 14 million times), and grew into an organization that created and provided curriculum, offered teacher professional development, and worked with states and districts around public policy initiatives. A recent report from Code.org showed that 44 states have enacted public policies to promote computing education in the five years from 2013 to 2018, and much of that happened through Code.org's influence....

Now, Code.org has announced that they are starting to scale back their funding, which begins a multi-year transition to shift the burden of paying for teacher professional development to the local regions.... The only question is whether it's too soon. Will local regions step up and demonstrate that they value computer science by paying for it...? I'd guess that many states have between 40% and 70% of their high schools now offering computer science. However, even though many schools offer computer science, there are still few students taking computer science.
Indiana reported that only 0.4% of Indiana high school students had enrolled in their most popular course. Meanwhile in one region in Texas, 54 of 159 high schools offer computer science, yet only 2.3% of their students have ever taken a computer science class. But of course, there's another issue.

"If Code.org (or NSF or Google) are paying for all the development of CS teachers, then the districts don't get to say, 'In our community we care about this and we care less about that.' The U.S. education system is organized around the local regions calling the shots, setting the priorities, and deciding what they want teachers to teach."

At this year's Uber Elevate Summit in May, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi discussed the possibility of a drone-based food delivery service. Now, it looks like a job posting has hinted that the company is looking to launch the service in 2021. Engadget reports: According to the Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to hire someone with "flight standards and training" experience, who can "enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations." If the info is legit, It looks like Uber is looking to keep development of the program under wraps as the job posting is no longer listed on its website. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, the drone-based delivery service has been dubbed "UberExpress," and will exist under the umbrella of Uber Eats. The job description reportedly described a desire for an applicant that can "help make delivery drones functional as soon as next year and commercially operational in multiple markets by 2021."

YouTube is creating a new Learning Fund program where it will invest $20 million toward education content. The announcement was made today by Malik Ducard, global head of learning. The Verge reports: Channels like TED-Ed, dedicated to educational Ted Talks, and Hank and John Green's Crash Course have already secured additional funding, according to YouTube's blog post. The company plans to invest in content from independent creators, like the Green brothers, as well as traditional news sources and educational organizations to broaden its content offering.

YouTube's Learning Fund has a nice ring to it, but it isn't a philanthropic charity. An FAQ about the program states that "successful applicants must enter into a written agreement with YouTube. This agreement will contain more details about required deliverables, payment timelines, and other terms and conditions." Creators must maintain a minimum of 25,000 subscribers. Those applying to the program also don't need to have a degree or proper certification in their field, "but successful applicants will be required to demonstrate that they have expertise and/or that the content they produce is verified by an expert in the field."

YouTube is creating a new Learning Fund program where it will invest $20 million toward education content. The announcement was made today by Malik Ducard, global head of learning. The Verge reports: Channels like TED-Ed, dedicated to educational Ted Talks, and Hank and John Green's Crash Course have already secured additional funding, according to YouTube's blog post. The company plans to invest in content from independent creators, like the Green brothers, as well as traditional news sources and educational organizations to broaden its content offering.

YouTube's Learning Fund has a nice ring to it, but it isn't a philanthropic charity. An FAQ about the program states that "successful applicants must enter into a written agreement with YouTube. This agreement will contain more details about required deliverables, payment timelines, and other terms and conditions." Creators must maintain a minimum of 25,000 subscribers. Those applying to the program also don't need to have a degree or proper certification in their field, "but successful applicants will be required to demonstrate that they have expertise and/or that the content they produce is verified by an expert in the field."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: [N]ew research published in ACS Applied Energy Materials shows that it's possible to 3D-print lithium-ion batteries into whatever shape you need. The problem that has stood in the way of 3D-printed lithium-ion batteries (at least, until now) is that the polymers traditionally used in this kind of printing aren't ionic conductors. The goal was to find a way to print custom-sized lithium-ion batteries in a cost-effective way using a regular, widely available 3D printer. In order to make the batteries conductive, the team led by Christopher Reyes and Benjamin Wiley infused the polylactic acid (PLA) usually used in 3D printing with an electrolyte solution. The researchers also incorporated graphene and carbon nanotubes into the design of the case to help increase conductivity. After these design modifications, the team was able to 3D print an LED bracelet, complete with a custom-sized lithium-ion battery. The battery was only able to power the bracelet for about 60 seconds, but the researchers have ideas for how to improve the capacity. For those interested, Engadget has a short video on the subject.

Andrew Liszewski, writing for io9: Casting anyone other than Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo just feels like sacrilege, but since Ford is now 76 years old, playing a younger version of himself would be all but impossible. Or at least impossible if you rely on the standard Hollywood de-aging tricks like makeup and CG. Artificial intelligence, it turns out, does a pretty amazing job at putting Ford back into the role of Solo. The YouTube channel "derpfakes" has been posting videos that demonstrate the impressive, and at times frightening, capabilities of image processing using artificial intelligence. Using a process called deep learning, an AI analyzes a large collection of photos of a given person, creating a comprehensive database of them in any almost any position and pose. It then uses that database to intelligently perform an automatic face replacement on a source clip, in this case replacing actor Alden Ehrenreich's face with Harrison Ford's.

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?

In a new video from robotics company Boston Dynamics, which Alphabet sold to SoftBank last year, a robot is shown hopping over a log and then up a series of blocks, an activity called parkour. From a report: In previous videos, the robot did a backflip -- now it's leaping over obstacles and climbing up large, uneven stairs with fleet-footed ease. But Atlas wasn't always so graceful. In some of the first videos where Boston Dynamics' robots could walk upright, way back in 2015, Atlas lumbered through the woods, looking like it was narrowly avoiding falling with each step, rather than moving with any kind of purpose.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Think of how ice skaters extend their arms and legs to slow down rotation coming out of jumps or spins. It's the same principle: conservation of angular momentum. Once the bottle is set in motion, its angular momentum remains constant. But shifting how the mass inside (the water) is distributed increases the bottle's rotational inertia (how much force is required to start or keep it moving). This slows down the bottle's rotational speed. Physicists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands decided to analyze the underlying physics [of flipping a half-full bottle of water so it lands upright] more thoroughly in a series of rigorous experiments and develop a theoretical model. For the first version of the experiment, they used a partially filled water bottle. For the second version, they reduced the variables from the large number of water molecules in the bottle to just two tennis balls in a cylindrical container. In both cases, their measurements clearly showed the dramatic decrease of the container's rotational speed, resulting in a nearly vertical descent, so the bottle landed neatly and upright. Tracking the sloshing of the liquid and the changing positions of the tennis balls demonstrated the redistribution of mass, shifting the moment of inertia.

Microsoft has unveiled "Project xCloud," its new game streaming service designed to work across consoles, PCs, and mobile devices. "Scaling and building out Project xCloud is a multi-year journey for us," explains Microsoft's cloud gaming chief Kareem Choudhry in a blog post. "We'll begin public trials in 2019 so we can learn and scale with different volumes and locations." The Verge reports: Microsoft has built custom hardware for its datacenters, as The Verge previously exclusively reported, so that existing and future Xbox games will be compatible with the services. Games will be streamed to devices, and Microsoft has been testing the xCloud service with Xbox wireless controllers connected to consoles, mobile devices, and PCs. Microsoft says its research teams are "creating ways to combat latency" via advanced network techniques combined with video encoding and decoding. This should make game streaming viable on 4G networks, too.

Security researcher Brian Krebs highlights several clever methods scammers are using to obtain your personal information. In one example, someone used a fully-automated voice to try and scam "a cybersecurity professional with more than 30 years of experience" by greeting him with a four-note AT&T jingle, "followed by a recorded voice saying AT&T was calling to prevent his phone service from being suspended for non-payment."

"It then prompted me to enter my security PIN to be connected to a billing department representative," Jon said. "My number was originally an AT&T number (it reports as Cingular Wireless) but I have been on T-Mobile for several years, so clearly a scam if I had any doubt. However, I suspect that the average Joe would fall for it." Krebs reports of another, more sophisticated scam attempted on Matt Haughey, the creator of the community Weblog MetaFilter and a writer at Slack: Haughey banks at a small Portland credit union, and last week he got a call on his mobile phone from an 800-number that matched the number his credit union uses. Actually, he got three calls from the same number in rapid succession. He ignored the first two, letting them both go to voicemail. But he picked up on the third call, thinking it must be something urgent and important. After all, his credit union had rarely ever called him. Haughey said he was greeted by a female voice who explained that the credit union had blocked two phony-looking charges in Ohio made to his debit/ATM card. She proceeded to then read him the last four digits of the card that was currently in his wallet. It checked out. Haughey told the lady that he would need a replacement card immediately because he was about to travel out of state to California. Without missing a beat, the caller said he could keep his card and that the credit union would simply block any future charges that weren't made in either Oregon or California.

This struck Haughey as a bit off. Why would the bank say they were freezing his card but then say they could keep it open for his upcoming trip? [...] The caller then read his entire home address to double check it was the correct destination to send a new card at the conclusion of his trip. Then the caller said she needed to verify his mother's maiden name. The voice in his head spoke out in protest again, but then banks had asked for this in the past. He provided it. Next she asked him to verify the three digit security code printed on the back of his card. Once more, the voice of caution in his brain was silenced: He'd given this code out previously in the few times he'd used his card to pay for something over the phone. Then she asked him for his current card PIN, just so she could apply that same PIN to the new card being mailed out, she assured him. Ding, ding, ding went the alarm bells in his head. Haughey hesitated, then asked the lady to repeat the question. When she did, he gave her the PIN, and she assured him she'd make sure his existing PIN also served as the PIN for his new card. Haughey said after hanging up he felt fairly certain the entire transaction was legitimate, although the part about her requesting the PIN kept nagging at him. Long story short, two fradulent charges were made on his account totaling $3,400. "People I've talked to about this say there's no way they'd fall for that, but when someone from a trustworthy number calls, says they're from your small town bank, and sounds incredibly professional, you'd fall for it, too," Haughey said.

It seems like everyone's curious about how the Apple Watch 4 detects falls. The Washington Post reports: In the interest of science, I've tried jumping off ledges and throwing myself onto furniture. The thing never went off. (The feature is on by default only for people older than 65, but I turned mine on.) It's possible, even likely, that the Watch could tell I was faking.

What's important is actual falls, not stunts. Apple says it studied the falls of 2,500 people of varying ages. Yet the company hasn't said how often it catches real falls or sets off false alarms. This isn't like claiming the "best camera ever" on a smartphone -- if Apple wants us to think of its products as life aids, it ought to show us the data. Even better: peer-reviewed studies. Apple's disclaimer says: "Apple Watch cannot detect all falls. The more physically active you are, the more likely you are to trigger Fall Detection due to high impact activity that can appear to be a fall."
But there's now also a new video by the Wall Street Journal that tests the watch's fall-detecting capabilities with a professional stuntwoman. Hot Hardware reports: The Wall Street Journal found that the Apple Watch did a very good job of detecting a serious fall while ignoring insignificant or outright fake falls. The stunt double performed a series of falls that are similar to falls in the slides that Apple showed in its keynote explaining the feature. In the testing, the watch was able to identify those falls and offer to call emergency services.

The most interesting part is that even though the stunt woman pulled some serious fake falls, complete with Hollywood-style tumbling down a hill, the Apple Watch was able to figure out if the fall was fake and didn't offer to call emergency services.
The Journal's reporter credits the watch's gyroscope and accelerometer, which can monitor numerous factors including both speed and wrist trajectory. Their conclusion?

"Turns out the Apple Watch really does know when you're just playing around."

"Linux runs the world, right? So we want to make sure that things are secure," says Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. When asked in a new video interview which bug makes them most angry, he first replies "the whole Spectre/Meltdown problem. What made us so mad, in a way, is we were fixing a bug in somebody else's layer!" One also interesting thing about the whole Spectre/Meltdown is the complexity of that black box of a CPU is much much larger than it used to be. Right? Because they're doing -- in order to eke out all the performance and all the new things like that, you have to do extra-special tricks and things like that. And they have been, and sometimes those tricks come back to bite you in the butt. And they have, in this case. So we have to work around that.
But a companion article on Linux.com notes that "Intel has changed its approach in light of these events. 'They are reworking on how they approach security bugs and how they work with the community because they know they did it wrong,' Kroah-Hartman said." (And the article adds that "for those who want to build a career in kernel space, security is a good place to get started...")

Kroah-Hartman points out in the video interview that "we're doing more and more testing, more and more builds," noting "This infrastructure we have is catching things at an earlier stage -- because it's there -- which is awesome to see." But security issues can persist thanks to outside vendors beyond their control. Linux.com reports: Hardening the kernel is not enough, vendors have to enable the new features and take advantage of them. That's not happening. Kroah-Hartman releases a stable kernel every week, and companies pick one to support for a longer period so that device manufacturers can take advantage of it. However, Kroah-Hartman has observed that, aside from the Google Pixel, most Android phones don't include the additional hardening features, meaning all those phones are vulnerable. "People need to enable this stuff," he said.

"I went out and bought all the top of the line phones based on kernel 4.4 to see which one actually updated. I found only one company that updated their kernel," he said. "I'm working through the whole supply chain trying to solve that problem because it's a tough problem. There are many different groups involved -- the SoC manufacturers, the carriers, and so on. The point is that they have to push the kernel that we create out to people."
"The good news," according to Linux.com, "is that unlike with consumer electronics, the big vendors like Red Hat and SUSE keep the kernel updated even in the enterprise environment. Modern systems with containers, pods, and virtualization make this even easier. It's effortless to update and reboot with no downtime."

On Thursday, the Senate passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which, among other things, renews funding for the Federal Aviation Administration and introduces new rules for airports and aircraft. But the bill, which now just needs to be signed by the president, also addresses drones. From a report: And while parts of the bill extend some aspects of drone use -- such as promoting drone package delivery and drone testing -- it also gives the federal government power to take down a private drone if it's seen as a "credible threat." The wording comes from another bill, the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018, which was strongly supported by the Department of Homeland Security and absorbed into the FAA Reauthorization Act. In June, as part of its argument as to why it needed more leeway when it comes to drones, the agency said that terrorist groups overseas "use commercially available [unmanned aircraft systems] to drop explosive payloads, deliver harmful substances and conduct illicit surveillance," and added that the devices are also used to transport drugs, interfere with law enforcement and expolit unsecured networks. Video -- What Happens When a Drone Hits an Airplane Wing?

Poor cellular reception doesn't appear to be the only issue affecting some new iPhone XS and XS Max owners. "Dozens of users have reported charging issues with their iPhone XS and XS Max devices, and shared their experiences on the MacRumors forums and Apple's support forums," reports The Verge. From the report: Specifically, users are experiencing issues where phones will not charge if the Lightning cable is plugged in while the device is asleep. The problem appears to be a software bug -- perhaps related to the phone's USB accessory settings -- and requires iPhones to be unlocked (or at least have the screen lit up) in order to begin charging. Tech vlogger Lewis Hilsenteger demonstrated the issues on nine different iPhone X, XS, and XS Max devices on his YouTube channel Unbox Therapy. Some iPhones respond immediately to being plugged into a charger, while others have to be tapped to awaken, and others freeze up. If you are experiencing this issue, you should find relief by upgrading to the iOS 12.1 beta, which apparently eliminates the problem entirely. "For now, others suggest going into Settings, FaceID and Passcode, scrolling down to 'Allow access when locked' and turning on USB Accessories," reports The Verge.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLan and developer of VLC media player, made the following announced Monday: AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft,...). AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free, while HEVC patents licenses are insanely high and very confusing.

The reference decoder for AV1 is great, but it's a research codebase, so it has a lot to improve. Therefore, the VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have started to work on a new decoder, sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media. The goal of this new decoder is: be small, be as fast as possible, be very cross-platform, correctly threaded, libre and (actually) Open Source. Without further due, the code: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d Recommended: A talk during VDD 2018 conference about dav1d.

Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai spoke with Patrick Wardle, the ex-NSA hacker who's organizing a security conference exclusively dedicated to Macs. Despite what Apple has famously promoted in the mid 2000s that Macs don't get "PC viruses," Mac computers do in fact have bugs, vulnerabilities, and even malware targeted at them. From the report: "People are peeking behind the curtain and realizing that the facade of Mac security is not always what it's cracked to be," Wardle told Motherboard in a phone interview. "Any company that designs software is going to have issues -- but Apple has perfected the art of a flawless public facade that masks many security issues." Wardle would know. After hacking primarily Windows computers at Fort Meade, for the last few years Wardle been finding several issues in MacOS, so many that he considers himself a "thorn" on Apple's side. But his conference is not an exercise in shaming or finger pointing, Wardle said he hopes to educate and teach people about Mac security, especially now that so many companies are using Macs as their corporate computers.

The conference is called Objective By the Sea, a wordplay on Objective-See, the name of Wardle's suite of free Mac security products (which is itself a wordplay on Apple's main programming language called Objective-C.) It will be held in Maui, Hawaii on November 3 and 4. The conference will be free for residents of Hawaii, and for patrons of Objective-See. That's why Wardle said he can't afford to pay for all speakers to attend, but he had no trouble finding people who wanted to participate. One group that doesn't want to come to Maui, at least for now, is Apple. Wardle said he reached out to the company, essentially offering it carte blanche to talk about whatever it wanted. But the company, so far, has not responded, according to him.

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: A passcode bypass vulnerability in Apple's new iOS version 12 could allow an attacker to access photos and contacts (including phone numbers and emails) on a locked iPhone. The hack allows someone with physical access to a vulnerable iPhone to sidestep the passcode authorization screen on iPhones running Apple's latest iOS 12 beta and iOS 12 operating systems. Threatpost was tipped off to the bypass by Jose Rodriguez, who describes himself as an Apple enthusiast and "office clerk" based in Spain who has also found previous iPhone hacks.

Rodriguez posted a video of the bypass on his YouTube channel under the YouTube account Videosdebarraquito, where he walks viewers through a complicated 37-step bypass process in Spanish. Threatpost has independently confirmed that the bypass works on a number of different iPhone models including Apple's newest model iPhone XS. The process involves tricking Siri and Apple's accessibility feature in iOS called VoiceOver to sidestep the device's passcode. The attack works provided the attacker has physical access to a device that has Siri enabled and Face ID either turned off or physically covered (by tape, for instance).

secwatcher shares a report from Threatpost: A passcode bypass vulnerability in Apple's new iOS version 12 could allow an attacker to access photos and contacts (including phone numbers and emails) on a locked iPhone. The hack allows someone with physical access to a vulnerable iPhone to sidestep the passcode authorization screen on iPhones running Apple's latest iOS 12 beta and iOS 12 operating systems. Threatpost was tipped off to the bypass by Jose Rodriguez, who describes himself as an Apple enthusiast and "office clerk" based in Spain who has also found previous iPhone hacks.

Rodriguez posted a video of the bypass on his YouTube channel under the YouTube account Videosdebarraquito, where he walks viewers through a complicated 37-step bypass process in Spanish. Threatpost has independently confirmed that the bypass works on a number of different iPhone models including Apple's newest model iPhone XS. The process involves tricking Siri and Apple's accessibility feature in iOS called VoiceOver to sidestep the device's passcode. The attack works provided the attacker has physical access to a device that has Siri enabled and Face ID either turned off or physically covered (by tape, for instance).

"On Wednesday, a Japanese company called ispace announced that it has two missions planned to the Moon within the next three years and that it has acquired ride-share launches on two Falcon 9 rockets to carry out those flights," reports Ars Technica. "The company's founder, Takeshi Hakamada, also said he has a long-term vision to have a city on the Moon visited by 10,000 people a year by 2040." From the report: The two missions ispace announced Wednesday are an orbiter launch in mid-2020 and a more complicated lander-and-rover mission a year later. Both will be secondary payloads on Falcon 9 rocket launches, being released by the rocket's second stage in geostationary transfer orbit. From there, they will proceed to the Moon under their own propulsive power.

During a teleconference with several reporters, Hakamada said the company hopes to demonstrate to potential customers the initial capability to deliver 30kg of payload to the lunar surface. But he also has longer-term plans that will allow it to serve customers seeking to reach the lunar surface with larger payloads. Plus, the company is developing the capability to mine ice from the lunar poles to convert the hydrogen and oxygen into rocket fuel. "Around 2030 we expect to begin developing propellant and sending it to spacecraft in space," Hakamada said. He hopes that by then, there will be several hundred people working on the Moon, or in lunar orbit, to support an industrial base. A decade later, by 2040, he envisions a city called "Moon Valley" on the lunar surface, with a diverse array of industries and thousands of visitors per year. "We believe we can establish such a world if we can actively develop our capability in the current speed," Hakamada said.

Qbertino writes: The German Web industry magazine T3N (think of it as the German TechCrunch) has an article about a test circuit and a test vehicle -- a modified Mercedes Benz limousine of the time -- that was set up by the German tire manufacturer Continental in order to test tires in a precisely reproducible set of tests. Hence the self-driving mechanism provided by a wire in the test track to send and receive signals from the car and to record data on the test runs on magnetic tape and other high-tech stuff from the time. Here's a short video, erm, film clip showing the setup in action -- driverless seat included. Today's artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen of course, but the entire setup itself seems pretty impressive and sophisticated.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has awarded the Tesla Model 3 with a five-star safety rating -- the highest possible score. This means that every car Tesla has built has earned a five-star rating. Jalopnik reports: The NHTSA tests cover three primary categories: Frontal Crash, Side Crash, and Rollover, and the Model 3 received the highest ratings in all categories. For some categories, it's easy to understand why Teslas do so well. Rollover resistance, for example, makes sense for cars that carry most of their weight at the very bottom, in the batteries sandwiched in the Tesla's chassis design. Other reasons for the remarkable crash safety may be that, without the need for a heavy chunk of metal as a drivetrain, effective and large crumple zones can be designed in, front and rear. The NHTSA has released videos of their frontal collision test, side pole collision test, and side collision test, for those who like watching these sort of things.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has awarded the Tesla Model 3 with a five-star safety rating -- the highest possible score. This means that every car Tesla has built has earned a five-star rating. Jalopnik reports: The NHTSA tests cover three primary categories: Frontal Crash, Side Crash, and Rollover, and the Model 3 received the highest ratings in all categories. For some categories, it's easy to understand why Teslas do so well. Rollover resistance, for example, makes sense for cars that carry most of their weight at the very bottom, in the batteries sandwiched in the Tesla's chassis design. Other reasons for the remarkable crash safety may be that, without the need for a heavy chunk of metal as a drivetrain, effective and large crumple zones can be designed in, front and rear. The NHTSA has released videos of their frontal collision test, side pole collision test, and side collision test, for those who like watching these sort of things.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has awarded the Tesla Model 3 with a five-star safety rating -- the highest possible score. This means that every car Tesla has built has earned a five-star rating. Jalopnik reports: The NHTSA tests cover three primary categories: Frontal Crash, Side Crash, and Rollover, and the Model 3 received the highest ratings in all categories. For some categories, it's easy to understand why Teslas do so well. Rollover resistance, for example, makes sense for cars that carry most of their weight at the very bottom, in the batteries sandwiched in the Tesla's chassis design. Other reasons for the remarkable crash safety may be that, without the need for a heavy chunk of metal as a drivetrain, effective and large crumple zones can be designed in, front and rear. The NHTSA has released videos of their frontal collision test, side pole collision test, and side collision test, for those who like watching these sort of things.

Which smartphone takes the best photos? For years, the unequivocal answer to that question has been the iPhone. Apple has, for years, taken pride in the pictures its iPhones are able to capture. And rightly so. But over the years, the competition has been catching up, and now it feels like it has stolen that crown from the iPhone. Here's a review of various reviews of the iPhones.

The Verge, reviewing the iPhone 6 launched in 2014: There's one feature that stands out, though, the one that most strongly makes the iPhone 6's case as the best smartphone on the planet: the camera. A year later, The Verge reviews the iPhone 6s: But these improvements aren't dramatic, since the previous rear camera was already terrific. Still, the new rear camera will maintain the iPhone's position as the best smartphone camera around. In another review, it said: I noticed slightly better macro performance and slightly better bokeh in a few shots, but Apple's been taking iPhone 6 photos and blowing them up to put on billboards for a year, so the bar is pretty damn high. Let's put it this way: the iPhone 6S is the best camera most people will ever own, but it's not going to keep anyone out of the market for a mirrorless rig. The camera review of the iPhone 7 Plus: This all adds up to a decent improvement, but the iPhone 6S was already operating at the top of the scale, bested only recently by the latest cameras in the Galaxy S7 and Note 7. In low light, that faster lens and optical image stabilization means that the 7 significantly outperforms the 6S. But compared to the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 7 is a step improvement, not a major leap. The camera review of the last year's iPhone 8 Plus: Over the past year, the S8 and Pixel pulled ahead of the iPhone 7 in various tests. Apple told me they don't look at benchmarks closely, but the images from the iPhone 8 camera definitely look more like Apple's competitors than before. Like Samsung, iPhone images are now more saturated by default, although Apple says it's still aiming for realism instead of the saturated colors and smoothing of the S8. And HDR is just on all the time, like the Pixel -- you can't turn it off, although you can set it to save a non-HDR image as well. We ran around shooting with an iPhone 8, a Pixel XL, and S8, and iPhone 7 on auto, and the iPhone 8 produced the most consistent and richest images of the group, although the Pixel was the clear winner several times, especially in extreme low light. The camera review of the $1,000 iPhone X, which was also launched last year: Now that we have an iPhone X and the Google Pixel 2, we're going to do a super in-depth camera comparison, but here's what I can tell you right now: the iPhone X has basically the same cameras as the iPhone 8, and the photos look almost exactly the same. And at the end of the day, I tend to prefer the photos from the Pixel 2 XL. And now, the camera review of the iPhone XS and XS Max, which The Verge published Tuesday (video): The camera upgrades in the XS over the X are significant. But I'm just going to come out and say this: I don't think the iPhone XS has better cameras than the [Google] Pixel 2 ... and Pixel 3 comes out in just a few weeks. Don't get me wrong, it's a really good camera, and I think people are going to like the photos it takes. But the Pixel 2 is the standard to beat and the iPhone XS doesn't do it for me.

An anonymous reader writes: Thursday the humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research held their 28th annual ceremony recognizing the real (but unusual) scientific research papers "that make people laugh, then think." And winning this year's coveted Literature prize was a paper titled "Life Is Too Short to RTFM: How Users Relate to Documentation and Excess Features in Consumer Products," which concluded that most people really, truly don't read the manual, "and most do not use all the features of the products that they own and use regularly..."

"Over-featuring and being forced to consult manuals also appears to cause negative emotional experiences."

Another team measured "the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile," which won them the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Other topics of research included self-colonoscopies, removing kidney stones with roller coasters, and (theoretical) cannibalism. "Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds," reports Ars Technica, "strictly enforced by an eight-year-old girl nicknamed 'Miss Sweetie-Poo,' who will interrupt those who exceed the time limit by repeating, 'Please stop. I'm bored.' Until they stop."
You can watch the whole wacky ceremony on YouTube. The awards are presented by actual Nobel Prize laureates -- and at least one past winner of an Ig Nobel Prize later went on to win an actual Nobel Prize.

The Weather Channel's 3-D, room-encompassing depiction of the Hurricane Florence storm surge took many by surprise on Friday (Second video). It doesn't tell, it shows, more bracingly than you'd think would be possible on a meteorological update, writes Wired. Here's how they did it. CNET: In one video, meteorologist Erika Navarro demonstrates what a progressive storm surge would mean at a human level. (Storm surge is simply the "abnormal rise of water generated by a storm" that is "produced by water being pushed toward the shore by the force of the winds," according to the National Hurricane Center.) "Storm surge is going to be potentially life-threatening for some areas along the US coastline," Navarro says. Then she demonstrates what's described as a "reasonable, worst-case scenario for areas along North Carolina." Here's where the video gets heart-in-throat scary. As Navarro stands and speaks, the weather maps behind her dissolve away, and she is shown standing in a computer-generated neighborhood. The CGI water rises behind her, setting a red car afloat and flooding homes.

[...] The Weather Channel has been using augmented reality since 2015. This year, it partnered with content and technology provider The Future Group and its impressive Immersive Mixed Reality technology, which uses Unreal Engine software. The tech debuted on TWC in June, when meteorologist Jim Cantore used it to walk viewers through what would happen if a tornado hit the channel's own studios. A demo showing the power of lightning followed in July. Reaction to the hurricane explainer has been overwhelmingly positive, said Michael Potts, Weather Channel's vice president of design. "It was created to evoke an automatic visceral reaction, to imagine that this could be real," Potts said. "And people are sharing it with friends and family as a warning tool. The amount of engagement across all of our platforms has been some of the highest we've ever seen." The neighborhood Navarro is standing in looks real, but it's all virtual graphics created in a new green-screen studio built at the channel's Atlanta headquarters. "All the graphics you see, from the cars, the street, the houses and the entire neighborhood are created using the Unreal Engine -- they are not real," Potts says. "The circle she is standing in is the presentation area, it's a 'safe' space that is not affected by the weather. ... The maps and data are all real-time and the atmospheric conditions are driven by the forecast." More on this here.

RoccamOccam writes: WebRender, an experimental GPU-based renderer for web content, written in Rust, is now enabled by default for Firefox Nightly users on desktop Windows 10 with Nvidia GPUs. The announcement was made on the mailing list.

Lin Clark provides an excellent overview of WebRender and, states, "with WebRender, we want apps to run at a silky smooth 60 frames per second (FPS) or better no matter how big the display is or how much of the page is changing from frame to frame. And it works. Pages that chug along at 15 FPS in Chrome or today's Firefox run at 60 FPS with WebRender.

In describing the WebRender approach Clark, asks, "what if we removed this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting every pixel on every frame? This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent. Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen."

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a new method to create deepfakes -- videos that make it look like someone said or did something they didn't say or do. They're usually manipulated using machine learning and have been a big problem for porn sites, as they can be used to create fake celebrity pornographic videos or revenge porn. According to Gizmodo, the researchers "have figured out a way to automatically transfer the 'style' of one person to another." From the report: "For instance, Barack Obama's style can be transformed into Donald Trump," the researchers wrote in the description of a YouTube video highlighting the outcome of this method. The video shows the facial expressions of John Oliver transferred to both Stephen Colbert and an animated frog, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Obama, and from Obama to Trump. The researchers describe the process in a paper as an "unsupervised data-driven approach." Like other methods of developing deepfakes, this one uses artificial intelligence. The paper doesn't exclusively deal in translating talking style and facial movements from one human to another -- it also includes examples with blooming flowers, sunrises and sunsets, and clouds and wind.

For the person-to-person deepfakes, the researchers cite examples of how certain mannerisms can be transferred, including "John Oliver's dimple while smiling, the shape of mouth characteristic of Donald Trump, and the facial mouth lines and smile of Stephen Colbert." The team used videos available to the public to develop these deepfakes. It's easy to see how these techniques might be applied in a more innocuous way...

MIT's "Dense Object Nets" or "DON" system uses machine vision to figure out what it's look at all by itself. "It generates a 'visual roadmap' -- basically, collections of visual data points arranged as coordinates," reports Engadget. "The system will also stitch each of these individual coordinate sets together into a larger coordinate set, the same way your phone can mesh numerous photos together into a single panoramic image. This enables the system to better and more intuitively understand the object's shape and how it works in the context of the environment around it." From the report: [T]he DON system will allow a robot to look at a cup of coffee, properly orient itself to the handle, and realize that the bottom of the mug needs to remain pointing down when the robot picks up the cup to avoid spilling its contents. What's more, the system will allow a robot to pick a specific object out of a pile of similar objects. The system relies on an RGB-D sensor which has a combination RGB-depth camera. Best of all, the system trains itself. There's no need to feed the AI hundreds upon thousands of images of an object to the DON in order to teach it. If you want the system to recognize a brown boot, you simply put the robot in a room with a brown boot for a little while. The system will automatically circle the boot, taking reference photos which it uses to generate the coordinate points, then trains itself based on what it's seen. The entire process takes less than an hour. MIT published a video on YouTube showing how the system works.

At this year's Open Source Summit, Linus Torvalds sat for a wide-ranging "keynote" interview with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at VMWare, which has been partially transcribed below. And Linus explained, among other things, why the last merge window was harder than others: One of the issues we have is when we've had these hardware security issues, and they've kept happening now, the last year -- they're kept under wraps. So we knew about the issue for the last several months, but because it was secret and we weren't allowed to talk about it, we couldn't do our usual open development model. We do the best we can, and people really care deeply about getting a good product out, but when you have to do things in secret, and when you can't use all the nice infrastructure for development and for testing that we have for all the usual code, it just is way more painful than it should be. And then that just means that, especially when the information becomes public during what is otherwise a busy period anyway, it's just annoying...

I still love speculative execution. Don't get me wrong. I used to work for a CPU company. We did it in software, back when I worked there. I think a CPU has to do speculative execution. It's somewhat sad that then people didn't always think about or didn't always heed the warnings about what can go wrong when you take a few shortcuts in the name of making it slightly simpler for everybody, because you're going to throw away all that work anyway, so why bother to do it right. And that's when the security -- every single security problem we've had has been basically of that kind, where people knew that "Hey, this is speculative work. If something goes wrong we'll throw all the data away, so we don't need to be as careful as we would otherwise." I think it was a good lesson for the industry, but it was certainly not a fun lesson for us on the OS side, where we had to do a lot of extra work for problems that weren't our problems.

It feels somehow unfair. I mean, when we have a security bug that was our own fault, it's like, "Okay, it was us screwing up. It's fair that we have to do all the work to then fix our own bugs." But it feels slightly less fair when you have to fix somebody else's...
"The good news -- I mean the really good news, and I'm serious about this -- is that the bugs have become clearly more and more esoteric," Linus adds. "So it impacts fewer and fewer cases, and clearly hardware people at Intel and other places are now so aware of it that I'm hoping we're really getting to the dregs of the hardware security bugs, and going forward we'll have much fewer of them. I think we're going to the better days, when A.) we got the bugs fixed, and B.) people were thinking about them beforehand."

There's a lot more, so read on for more excerpts...
When it comes to quantum computing, Linus says he's "a huge unbeliever in that whole thing. I don't think it will ever happen. And if I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure that I'll be long dead by the time people can prove me wrong..."

"Hey, it has been known to happen that I've been wrong before, so maybe the whole quantum thing is going to be a thing. But I think if you actually look at where hardware is going today, the much more relevant part is that traditional computers are not scaling, and people really don't see a lot of realistic paths forward to go on the hardware side. And I actually think that's probably healthy for the industry, eventually, and especially for us software people who have gotten kind of complacent...

"The saying used to be that every two years performance doubles, and that has clearly not been very true lately, and it's not going to be true going forward. And I think that's good. Maybe not fun, but it means that we'll maybe go back partly to the time where you cared more about performance on the software side, and you had to be more careful, and you can't just rely on hardware getting better all the time... I do think it's pretty clear that the whole Moore's Law thing is definitely not something you should take for granted. This very much impacts the hardware people, but I'm saying it also impacts, I think, us software people and especially us system people, where it means that software itself has to take that into account...

"I'm a software person, so asking me about hardware is kind of questionable to begin with. I'm actually a huge believer in neural networks. Back way in the days when I was at University, I was studying artificial intelligence -- the traditional kind of artificial intelligence -- and always felt that that was snake oil, and that the real model of AI is to actually look at what we know works, right? And I'm really happy to see that this is clearly the direction that the industry has been going lately."

Watch a 40-minute video of Linus's remarks on the Linux Foundation's page on YouTube.

At this year's Open Source Summit, Linus Torvalds sat for a wide-ranging "keynote" interview with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at VMWare, which has been partially transcribed below. And Linus explained, among other things, why the last merge window was harder than others: One of the issues we have is when we've had these hardware security issues, and they've kept happening now, the last year -- they're kept under wraps. So we knew about the issue for the last several months, but because it was secret and we weren't allowed to talk about it, we couldn't do our usual open development model. We do the best we can, and people really care deeply about getting a good product out, but when you have to do things in secret, and when you can't use all the nice infrastructure for development and for testing that we have for all the usual code, it just is way more painful than it should be. And then that just means that, especially when the information becomes public during what is otherwise a busy period anyway, it's just annoying...

I still love speculative execution. Don't get me wrong. I used to work for a CPU company. We did it in software, back when I worked there. I think a CPU has to do speculative execution. It's somewhat sad that then people didn't always think about or didn't always heed the warnings about what can go wrong when you take a few shortcuts in the name of making it slightly simpler for everybody, because you're going to throw away all that work anyway, so why bother to do it right. And that's when the security -- every single security problem we've had has been basically of that kind, where people knew that "Hey, this is speculative work. If something goes wrong we'll throw all the data away, so we don't need to be as careful as we would otherwise." I think it was a good lesson for the industry, but it was certainly not a fun lesson for us on the OS side, where we had to do a lot of extra work for problems that weren't our problems.

It feels somehow unfair. I mean, when we have a security bug that was our own fault, it's like, "Okay, it was us screwing up. It's fair that we have to do all the work to then fix our own bugs." But it feels slightly less fair when you have to fix somebody else's...
"The good news -- I mean the really good news, and I'm serious about this -- is that the bugs have become clearly more and more esoteric," Linus adds. "So it impacts fewer and fewer cases, and clearly hardware people at Intel and other places are now so aware of it that I'm hoping we're really getting to the dregs of the hardware security bugs, and going forward we'll have much fewer of them. I think we're going to the better days, when A.) we got the bugs fixed, and B.) people were thinking about them beforehand."

There's a lot more, so read on for more excerpts...
When it comes to quantum computing, Linus says he's "a huge unbeliever in that whole thing. I don't think it will ever happen. And if I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure that I'll be long dead by the time people can prove me wrong..."

"Hey, it has been known to happen that I've been wrong before, so maybe the whole quantum thing is going to be a thing. But I think if you actually look at where hardware is going today, the much more relevant part is that traditional computers are not scaling, and people really don't see a lot of realistic paths forward to go on the hardware side. And I actually think that's probably healthy for the industry, eventually, and especially for us software people who have gotten kind of complacent...

"The saying used to be that every two years performance doubles, and that has clearly not been very true lately, and it's not going to be true going forward. And I think that's good. Maybe not fun, but it means that we'll maybe go back partly to the time where you cared more about performance on the software side, and you had to be more careful, and you can't just rely on hardware getting better all the time... I do think it's pretty clear that the whole Moore's Law thing is definitely not something you should take for granted. This very much impacts the hardware people, but I'm saying it also impacts, I think, us software people and especially us system people, where it means that software itself has to take that into account...

"I'm a software person, so asking me about hardware is kind of questionable to begin with. I'm actually a huge believer in neural networks. Back way in the days when I was at University, I was studying artificial intelligence -- the traditional kind of artificial intelligence -- and always felt that that was snake oil, and that the real model of AI is to actually look at what we know works, right? And I'm really happy to see that this is clearly the direction that the industry has been going lately."

Watch a 40-minute video of Linus's remarks on the Linux Foundation's page on YouTube.

Elon Musk sat down with California comedian Joe Rogan on Thursday evening for a 2 1/2-hour podcast [YouTube video] that touched upon everything from flamethrowers and artificial intelligence to the end of the universe. Talking about AI, a subject Musk has long been very vocal about, he said artificial intelligence could turn out to be terrible or it could end up being great, but one thing that is certain is that it will be beyond human's control. From a report: "You kind of have to be optimistic about the future. There's no point in being pessimistic," said the head of Tesla and SpaceX. "I rather be optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right. [...] It's not necessarily bad, but it's going to be outside of human control. It's going to be very tempting to use AI as a weapon, said Musk. "It will be used as a weapon. The on ramp to serious AI will be more humans using it against eachother. That will be the danger."

Musk says he has tried to convince people to slow down where AI is concerned and regulate it, but nobody listened. "The way that regulation works is slow. Usually there will be some new technology that will cause damage or death, there will be an outcry, there will be an investigation," said the Tesla CEO. "Years will pass, there will be some insight committee, then rule making and oversight and eventually regulations. This all takes many years. This is the normal course of things." Musk used the example that it took ten years for seatbelts to become required, even though the number of deaths were obvious. He says this time frame doesn't work for AI. "We can't wait ten years to the point where something is dangerous to do something about AI. It will be too late," said Musk.

The world's largest offshore wind farm has opened off the northwest coast of England. "The wind farm has a capacity of 659 megawatts (MW), enough to power almost 600,000 homes, and overtakes the London Array off England's east cost which has a capacity of 630 MW," reports Reuters. From the report: The Walney Extension (as it is called) is made up of 87 turbines built by Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, and covers 145 square kilometers (55 square miles), which is equivalent to around 20,000 football pitches. The 40 eight-megawatt MHI Vestas turbines being used stand 195 meters (213 yards) tall and are the largest wind turbines in operation globally. Britain is the world's largest offshore wind market, hosting 36 percent of globally installed offshore wind capacity, data from the Global Wind Energy Council showed. Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014. The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years. You can view some drone footage of the offshore windfarm via Orsted.

Long time reader theodp writes: According to a Microsoft-commissioned survey, 50% of parents in the U.S. with children aged 18 and under believed coding and computer programming to be the most beneficial subject to their child's future employability ("compared to foreign language skills at 28%"). From the Microsoft Education blog post: "When asked about the technology industry's involvement, 75 percent of parents said they believe big tech companies should be involved in helping schools build kids' digital skills. Many companies, including Microsoft and organizations like Code.org, are working to do just that. Programs like TEALS, which is supported by Microsoft Philanthropies, pairs trained Computer Science professionals from across the technology industry with classroom teachers to team-teach the subject." In 2016, Microsoft partnered with Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo to help bring computer science education to every public K-12 school across the state, an initiative that Raimondo is now touting in her 2018 bid for re-election (political ad).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Research scientists at Queen's University's Human Media Lab have built a prototype touchscreen device that's neither smartphone nor tablet but kind of both -- and more besides. The device, which they've christened the MagicScroll, is inspired by ancient (papyrus/paper/parchment) scrolls so it takes a rolled-up, cylindrical form factor -- enabled by a flexible 7.5inch touchscreen housed in the casing. This novel form factor, which they made using 3D printing, means the device can be used like an erstwhile Rolodex (remember those?!) for flipping through on-screen contacts quickly by turning a physical rotary wheel built into the edge of the device. (They've actually added one on each end.) Then, when more information or a deeper dive is required, the user is able to pop the screen out of the casing to expand the visible display real estate. The flexible screen on the prototype has a resolution of 2K. So more mid-tier mobile phone of yore than crisp iPhone Retina display at this nascent stage. The scientists also reckon the scroll form factor offers a pleasing ergonomically option for making actual phone calls too, given that a rolled up scroll can sit snugly against the face. The team posted a video showing the prototype in action. They will be presenting the project at the MobileHCI conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Barcelona next month.

An anonymous reader writes: Strong gusts brought by Typhoon Cimaron on Friday, August 24, toppled a massive wind turbine in western Japan, local media reported. The 60-meter-tall turbine was located in a park on Awaji Island, 275 miles west of Tokyo, but was wrenched from its base in the early hours of Friday morning as the typhoon pummeled a large part of the Japanese archipelago. Fortunately no one was under the wind turbine when it came down, or indeed on it. Built in 2002, the turbine had been out of commission since May last year after being struck by lightning, according to the Japan Times. News footage showed how the turbine had been torn from its base by the strong winds, with its 20-meter-long blades badly damaged by the impact with the ground. It's not yet clear if the base had been weakened in some way prior to the typhoon.

harrymcc writes: Normally, a totaled Tesla is worth so little that they sell for peanuts at salvage auctions. But Berkeley, California engineer Phil Sadow buys trashed Tesla cars and gets them up and running again -- a feat which has required him to figure out how to root their software so he can run diagnostics normally unavailable to a tinkerer such as himself. Over at Fast Company, Daniel Terdiman tells the story of Sadow's work, which Tesla is apparently nonplussed about but has not tried to prevent. Slashdot reader Ingineerix also submitted the story, sharing an excerpt from the report: In a cramped warehouse in an industrial neighborhood in Berkeley, California, a Tesla Model 3 is ready to go. It's powered up, its display screen is on, and it's pumping out data. But there are some strange error messages. For one, the passenger door window is uncalibrated. For another, the autopilot electronic control unit is missing. These would be troubling signals for most Tesla owners. For Phil Sadow, though, they make perfect sense. After all, his Model 3 is lacking some very important components: its windows, its wheels, and the entire body frame. For the last three years, Sadow, a 49-year-old electrical engineer who also goes by the moniker Ingineer, has been rebuilding and selling salvaged Teslas. He's also taught a global community of fellow enthusiasts to do the same, charging an hourly rate as a consultant on other tinkerers' repair projects. All told, he says, he's rebuilt -- or helped other people rebuild -- almost 400 vehicles over the last three years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Between 2014 and 2017, the world's reefs endured the worst coral bleaching event in history, as the cyclical El Nino climate event combined with anthropogenic warming to cause unprecedented increases in water temperature. But the June survey, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's family foundation, found the Sulawesi reefs were surprisingly healthy. In fact they were in better condition than when they were originally surveyed in 2014 -- a surprise for British scientist Dr Emma Kennedy, who led the research team.

A combination of 360-degree imaging tech and Artificial Intelligence (AI) allowed scientists to gather and analyze more than 56,000 images of shallow water reefs. Over the course of a six-week voyage, the team deployed underwater scooters fitted with 360 degree cameras that allowed them to photograph up to 1.5 miles of reef per dive, covering a total of 1487 square miles in total. Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia then used cutting edge AI software to handle the normally laborious process of identifying and cataloguing the reef imagery. Using the latest Deep Learning tech, they 'taught' the AI how to detect patterns in the complex contours and textures of the reef imagery and thus recognize different types of coral and other reef invertebrates. Once the AI had shown between 400 and 600 images, it was able to process images autonomously. The Ocean Agency has published a short 2-minute video on YouTube about the Coral Triangle survey.

NASA's Sun-chasing Parker Solar Probe successfully launched this morning at 3:31AM. A couple hours later, NASA confirmed that the vessel was healthy.

The probe still has a ways to go before it's conducting scientific studies. "It'll spend its first week in space deploying its high-gain antenna, the first part of its electric field antennas and its magnetometer," reports Engadget. "In early September, the probe will start a roughly four-week instrument shakedown to be sure it's ready for science gathering." From the report: The trip to the Sun will take a while. NASA's probe will pass by Venus a total of seven times (starting in early October) as it uses the planet's gravity to whip itself ever closer to the star. The spacecraft will make its first close approach in early November, when it will travel 15 million miles from the Sun -- inside the Sun's corona (aka the solar atmosphere). Its closest approach will put it at just 3.8 million miles from the Sun, at which point it should be the fastest-ever human-made object with a speed of 430,000MPH. The first science data should return sometime in December. The New York Times has a neat video explaining how the Parker Solar Probe will touch the Sun. Meanwhile, Fox News has a dialogue-free clip of the actual launch.

NASA's Sun-chasing Parker Solar Probe successfully launched this morning at 3:31AM. A couple hours later, NASA confirmed that the vessel was healthy.

The probe still has a ways to go before it's conducting scientific studies. "It'll spend its first week in space deploying its high-gain antenna, the first part of its electric field antennas and its magnetometer," reports Engadget. "In early September, the probe will start a roughly four-week instrument shakedown to be sure it's ready for science gathering." From the report: The trip to the Sun will take a while. NASA's probe will pass by Venus a total of seven times (starting in early October) as it uses the planet's gravity to whip itself ever closer to the star. The spacecraft will make its first close approach in early November, when it will travel 15 million miles from the Sun -- inside the Sun's corona (aka the solar atmosphere). Its closest approach will put it at just 3.8 million miles from the Sun, at which point it should be the fastest-ever human-made object with a speed of 430,000MPH. The first science data should return sometime in December. The New York Times has a neat video explaining how the Parker Solar Probe will touch the Sun. Meanwhile, Fox News has a dialogue-free clip of the actual launch.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch the Parker Solar Probe for a seven-year mission to study the sun and its atmosphere. The spacecraft will take off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, traveling up to 430,000 miles per hour towards the star -- that will make it the fastest spacecraft ever. Assuming you're reading this story around the time it's published, you still have time to watch the launch via NASA's livestream. The launch window for the Parker Solar Probe opens at 3:33 a.m. ET Saturday, but the exact launch time is unknown.

The New York Times has published a story about Eugene N. Parker, the professor that the spacecraft was named after. It is the first time that NASA has named a mission for a living person. Here's an excerpt from the report: In a foundational paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Dr. Parker described how charged particles streamed continuously from the sun, like the flow of water spreading outward from a circular fountain. Almost no one believed him. [...] Four years later, Dr. Parker was vindicated when Mariner 2, a NASA spacecraft en route to Venus, measured energetic particles streaming through interplanetary space -- exactly what Dr. Parker had predicted. Scientists now call that stream of particles the solar wind. UPDATE: After several delays, the Sun-chasing probe successfully launched on August 12th at 3:31AM.

The Document Foundation said on Wednesday it is releasing LibreOffice 6.1, the latest major update to its productivity suite. It is available to download for Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. The new version offers, among other features, Colibre, a new icon theme for Windows based on Microsoft's icon design guidelines, which it says, makes the office suite visually appealing for users coming from the Microsoft environment. The Document Foundation also reworked the image handling feature on LibreOffice to make it "significantly faster and smoother thanks to a new graphic manager and an improved image lifecycle, with some advantages also when loading documents in Microsoft proprietary formats." Other new features and changes include: The reorganization of Draw menus with the addition of a new Page menu, for better UX consistency across the different modules. A major improvement for Base, only available in experimental mode: the old HSQLDB database engine has been deprecated, though still available, and the new Firebird database engine is now the default option (users are encouraged to migrate files using the migration assistant from HSQLDB to Firebird, or by exporting them to an external HSQLDB server). Significant improvements in all modules of LibreOffice Online, with changes to the user interface to make it more appealing and consistent with the desktop version. An improved EPUB export filter, in terms of link, table, image, font embedding and footnote support, with more options for customizing metadata. Online Help pages have been enriched with text and example files to guide the users through features, and are now easier to localize.

LibreOffice 6.1's new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 72% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as SIL and Pardus, and 28% are from individual volunteers. In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system text and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level. You can read the full changelog here. Here's a video that walks through the new features and changes that LibreOffice is receiving with v6.1.

This week the Internet Archive hosted an amazing Decentralized Web Summit, which united the makers who want to build a web "that's locked open for good." [Watch the videos here.] Vint Cerf was there, as was the technical product development leader for Microsoft's own decentralized identity efforts, several companies building the so-called punk rock Internet, "along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities." One talk even included Mike Judge, the creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, which recently included the decentralized web in its ongoing storyline.

Computing highlighted remarks by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Mitchell Baker, the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The ideology of the web's early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. "Money was considered evil," she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. "Advertising is the internet's original sin," Kahle told the packed room. "Advertising is winner-take-all, and that's how we've ended up with centralization and monopolies."

At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem -- recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally -- the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine.
Tristan Harris, who leads the Center for Humane Technology, "just hopes the pioneers of the new internet turn around to face the potential negative externalities of their products before it's too late," arguing that "If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health [issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've decentralized social harms and we can't even track them." But Tim Berners-Lee "remains hopeful".

"There's massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences," he told Computing. "There's a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data"... Meanwhile, there's the rise of "companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data" (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is "turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement".

"These are exciting times," said Berners-Lee.

This week the Internet Archive hosted an amazing Decentralized Web Summit, which united the makers who want to build a web "that's locked open for good." [Watch the videos here.] Vint Cerf was there, as was the technical product development leader for Microsoft's own decentralized identity efforts, several companies building the so-called punk rock Internet, "along with a handful of venture capitalists looking for opportunities." One talk even included Mike Judge, the creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, which recently included the decentralized web in its ongoing storyline.

Computing highlighted remarks by Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Mitchell Baker, the chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation. The ideology of the web's early pioneers, according to Baker, was free software and open source. "Money was considered evil," she said. So when companies came in to commercialize the internet, the original architects were unprepared. "Advertising is the internet's original sin," Kahle told the packed room. "Advertising is winner-take-all, and that's how we've ended up with centralization and monopolies."

At the conference, attendees presented utopian visions of how the future of the internet could look. Civil, a new media startup, proposed crowd-supported journalism using cryptocurrency micro-payments. Mastodon, a decentralized and encrypted social network, was commonly referenced as an alternative to Twitter. As Facebook and Google continue to monopolize the digital advertising ecosystem -- recent estimates say that the two companies control over 70% of digital advertising spending globally -- the promise of a decentralized web, free from the shackles of advertiser demands is fun to imagine.
Tristan Harris, who leads the Center for Humane Technology, "just hopes the pioneers of the new internet turn around to face the potential negative externalities of their products before it's too late," arguing that "If we decentralize the systems we already have without an honest recognition of the social harms that are being created -- mental health [issues], loneliness, addiction, polarization, conspiracy theories... then we've decentralized social harms and we can't even track them." But Tim Berners-Lee "remains hopeful".

"There's massive public awareness of the effects of social networks and the unintended consequences," he told Computing. "There's a huge backlash from people wanting to control their own data"... Meanwhile, there's the rise of "companies which respect user privacy and do not do anything at all with user data" (he namechecks social network MeWe to which he acts as an advisor), open-source collaborations like the data portability project (DTP) led by tech giants, and his own project Solid which is "turning from an experiment into a platform and the start of a movement".

"These are exciting times," said Berners-Lee.

Valve decided to remove a game from Steam after it was found to be turning players' computers into cryptocurrency miners. An anonymous reader shares the report from Polygon: The game is called Abstractism, which was said to not only infiltrate players' computers with mining software, but also dupe them through falsified items on the Steam Marketplace. But not long after these accusations started circulating, it has been taken off Steam. When Abstractism was up on the store, it was marketed as a "relaxing" platformer with a simple design. But YouTuber SidAlpha noticed that something was afoot, when someone on the Team Fortress 2 forums posted about how the game was tied into an item scam.

Players also noticed that the game used massive amounts of CPU and GPU, which Abstractism's developers claimed was because of the game's "high graphics settings," something quite uncharacteristic for a simple platformer. High CPU and GPU usage is another tell-tale sign that a computer is being used to mine cryptocurrency. Just hours after SidAlpha's video and the associated forum posts began to spread, Valve removed Abstractism from Steam, and the developer has been banned from Steam. All previously purchased Abstractism items have been tagged with "This item can no longer be bought or sold on the Community Market."

Kevin C. Tofel, writing for About Chromebooks: Having worked for a Google Chrome Marketing team over an 18 month period, I never saw a project that aggressively goes after Windows and Mac computers like the one that was published today [Editor's note: the video is unlisted, but accessible]. [...] As someone who has used (and often still does use) other platforms, I can't really disagree with the point of this video. For too long, computer users have had to deal with cryptic errors, updates that can take hours to install and the dreaded blue screen of death / spinning beach ball.

Granted, some of my personal experience with those issues was when I was in corporate IT for 15 years; that career ended for me (by choice) back in 2007. And clearly, all desktop / laptop platforms have improved since then. Even so, Google is highlighting the modern approach of Chromebooks with this short video and that's an important point.