Slashdot Mirror

Rei writes: With an estimated 8,670 Model 3s delivered, a race is on as competitors and owners work to figure out its limits and explore the tech behind it. Many-time Tesla teardown expert "Ingineerix" has posted a series of videos and discussed his findings on Reddit. Among them: what appears to be the industry's first switched reluctance motor, a massive "smuggling compartment" allocated for a future front-wheel motor, no physical fuses (all solid-state), significant wiring harness length reductions via the use of multiple body controllers, a swappable crash energy absorption system, a liquid-cooled compute unit, and redundant controllers for all safety-related systems. He followed up by posting a screenshot of the car tricked into "factory mode" to reveal its internal specs, including a 1200A max discharge current, 370kW max discharge power, and a 76 kWh pack with 72,5kWh usable. Meanwhile, Munro and Associates tore down a Model 3 for an undisclosed, "not Tesla" client, releasing a video criticizing its build quality and for difficulty in accessing the HV cables in the event of an accident (Munroe's claims were dismissed by Ingineerix). Meanwhile, engineers from German automakers were extremely impressed by what they found during their teardown -- particularly the power electronics system, which they described as "compact, expandable, fully integrated, modular, easily accessible, well-protected, reasonably priced and astonishingly clever in many details." Other owners have been putting their cars on dynamometers to measure their power. Drag Times suffered some skid and measured a conflicting 281 / 327.6 hp with 552 lb-ft torque. Contrarily, Tesla Repair Channel found consistent readings around 250hp when starting from 30mph, but consistently around 390 hp when starting from 10mph. The reason for the discrepancy is not yet clear.

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185) writes that the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities have become "a serious distraction" for sysadmins trying to apply patches and keep up with new fixes, sharing an HPE article described as "what other sysadmins have done so far, as well as their current plans and long-term strategy, not to mention how to communicate progress to management." Everyone has applied patches. But that sounds ever so simple. Ron, an IT admin, summarizes the situation succinctly: "More like applied, applied another, removed, I think re-applied, I give up, and have no clue where I am anymore." That is, sysadmins are ready to apply patches -- when a patch exists. "I applied the patches for Meltdown but I am still waiting for Spectre patches from manufacturers," explains an IT pro named Nick... Vendors have released, pulled back, re-released, and re-pulled back patches, explains Chase, a network administrator. "Everyone is so concerned by this that they rushed code out without testing it enough, leading to what I've heard referred to as 'speculative reboots'..."

The confusion -- and rumored performance hits -- are causing some sysadmins to adopt a "watch carefully" and "wait and see" approach... "The problem is that the patches don't come at no cost in terms of performance. In fact, some patches have warnings about the potential side effects," says Sandra, who recently retired from 30 years of sysadmin work. "Projections of how badly performance will be affected range from 'You won't notice it' to 'significantly impacted.'" Plus, IT staff have to look into whether the patches themselves could break something. They're looking for vulnerabilities and running tests to evaluate how patched systems might break down or be open to other problems.
The article concludes that "everyone knows that Spectre and Meltdown patches are just Band-Aids," with some now looking at buying new servers. One university systems engineer says "I would be curious to see what the new performance figures for Intel vs. AMD (vs. ARM?) turn out to be."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Japanese engineering researchers say they have created a tiny electronic light the size of a firefly which rides waves of ultrasound, and could eventually figure in applications ranging from moving displays to projection mapping. Named Luciola for its resemblance to the firefly, the featherweight levitating particle weighs 16.2 mg, has a diameter of 3.5 mm (0.14 inch), and emits a red glimmer that can just about illuminate text. But its minuscule size belies the power of the 285 microspeakers emitting ultrasonic waves that hold up the light, and have a frequency inaudible to the human ear, allowing Luciola to operate in apparent total silence. It took two years for Luciola to get this far, said circuit design specialist Makoto Takamiya, a member of the Kawahara Universal Information Network Project that developed the device. The developers expect Luciola to find applications in the so-called Internet of Things, in which regular objects, such as cars, or domestic appliances such as air-conditioners, are connected to networks to send and receive data. Equipped with movement or temperature sensors, Luciola could fly to such objects to deliver a message or help to make moving displays with multiple lights that can detect the presence of humans, or participate in futuristic projection mapping events.

There are two types of people in this world: those who know how to convert PDFs into Word documents and those who are indicted for money laundering. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is the second kind of person , Slate reports. From the report: Back in October, a grand jury indictment charged Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates with a variety of crimes, including conspiring "to defraud the United States." On Thursday, special counsel Robert Mueller filed a new indictment against the pair, substantially expanding the charges. As one former federal prosecutor told the Washington Post, Manafort and Gates' methods appear to have been "extensive and bold and greedy with a capital 'G,' but ... not all that sophisticated." One new detail from the indictment, however, points to just how unsophisticated Manafort seems to have been. Here's the relevant passage from the indictment. I've bolded the most important bits:

Manafort and Gates made numerous false and fraudulent representations to secure the loans. For example, Manafort provided the bank with doctored [profit and loss statements] for [Davis Manafort Inc.] for both 2015 and 2016, overstating its income by millions of dollars. The doctored 2015 DMI P&L submitted to Lender D was the same false statement previously submitted to Lender C, which overstated DMI's income by more than $4 million. The doctored 2016 DMI P&L was inflated by Manafort by more than $3.5 million. To create the false 2016 P&L, on or about October 21, 2016, Manafort emailed Gates a .pdf version of the real 2016 DMI P&L, which showed a loss of more than $600,000. Gates converted that .pdf into a "Word" document so that it could be edited, which Gates sent back to Manafort. Manafort altered that "Word" document by adding more than $3.5 million in income. He then sent this falsified P&L to Gates and asked that the "Word" document be converted back to a .pdf, which Gates did and returned to Manafort. Manafort then sent the falsified 2016 DMI P&L .pdf to Lender D. So here's the essence of what went wrong for Manafort and Gates, according to Mueller's investigation: Manafort allegedly wanted to falsify his company's income, but he couldn't figure out how to edit the PDF.

More than 40% of global log-in attempts are malicious thanks to bot-driven credential stuffing attacks, according to the latest report from Akamai. From a report: The cloud delivery provider's latest State of the Internet/Security report for Q4 2017 comprised analysis from over 7.3 trillion bot requests per month. It claimed that such requests account for over 30% of all web traffic across its platform per day, excluding video streaming. However, malicious activity has seen a sharp increase, as cyber-criminals look to switch botnets from DDoS attacks to using stolen credentials to try to access online accounts. Of the 17 billion login requests Akamai tracked in November and December, over two-fifths (43%) were used for credential abuse. The figure rose to a staggering 82% for the hospitality industry.

Earlier this week, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro claimed that a new state-sponsored cryptocurrency called the petro raised $735 million on the first day of its sale. ArsTechnica dives deep on the matter to suggest that it's all a farce. From the report: The government hasn't provided any way to independently verify that $735 million figure. And there's reason to doubt almost everything the Venezuelan government has said about the project. Moreover, there's little reason to believe that the petro will maintain its value over time. The Venezuelan government has portrayed petro tokens as backed by Venezuela's vast oil reserves, but they're not. The government is merely promising to accept tax payments in petros at a government-determined exchange rate linked to oil prices. Given the Venezuelan government's history of manipulating exchange rates, experts say investors should be wary of this arrangement. Moreover, the petro scheme has been opposed by opposition legislators in Venezuela's opposition-controlled legislature. They say that the Maduro government is essentially issuing oil-backed debt, and legally that can't be done without approval from the legislature. If Maduro falls from power in the future, his successor might refuse to honor petro redemptions.

Occupational licensing -- the practice of regulating who can do what jobs -- has been on the rise for decades. In 1950 one in 20 employed Americans required a licence to work. By 2017 that had risen to more than one in five. From a report: The trend partly reflects an economic shift towards service industries, in which licences are more common. But it has also been driven by a growing number of professions successfully lobbying state governments to make it harder to enter their industries. Most studies find that licensing requirements raise wages in a profession by around 10%, probably by making it harder for competitors to set up shop.

Lobbyists justify licences by claiming consumers need protection from unqualified providers. In many cases this is obviously a charade. Forty-one states license makeup artists, as if wielding concealer requires government oversight. Thirteen license bartending; in nine, those who wish to pull pints must first pass an exam. Such examples are popular among critics of licensing, because the threat from unlicensed staff in low-skilled jobs seems paltry. Yet they are not representative of the broader harm done by licensing, which affects crowds of more highly educated workers like Ms Varnam. Among those with only a high-school education, 13% are licensed. The figure for those with postgraduate degrees is 45%.

[...] One way of telling that many licences are superfluous is the sheer variance in the law across states. About 1,100 occupations are regulated in at least one state, but fewer than 60 are regulated in all 50, according to a report from 2015 by Barack Obama's White House. Yet a handful of high-earning professions are regulated everywhere. In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.

UPSat is the first open source -- both hardware and software -- satellite to have ever been launched in orbit. Pierros Papadeas, the Director of Operations for Libre Space Foundation, which helped build the UPSat, talked about the project at FOSDEM, a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event focused on free and open-source software development. You can watch the talk here; and read an interview of him with folks at FOSDEM ahead of the talk here. Two excerpts from the interview: Q: What challenges did you encounter while designing, building, testing and eventually launching UPSat in orbit?
PP: The challenges where numerous, starting with the financial ones. Lack of appropriate funding led us to invest heavily in the project (through Libre Space Foundation funds) to ensure its successful completion. Countless volunteer participation was also key to the success. On the technical side, with minimal documentation and knowledge sharing around space projects we had to re-invent the wheel and discover many procedures and practices in a really short time-frame (6 months - unheard for a space mission). Lack of tools and equipment made our building process a creative exploration as we had to figure out ways to achieve specific tasks resorting to purpose-built projects in our local lab (hackerspace.gr). Testing and verification facilities where also a challenge mainly as we had to undergo much more extensive tests than other missions, having none of our components already "flight proven". Again creativity and countless hours of negotiations and documentation got us to the final delivery point. Launching UPSat in orbit was secured once the delivery happened, but as any typical space mission it came with long delays and timeline push-backs.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?
Through this talk we would like to raise awareness for open source initiatives in space, and inspire open source technologists (engineers, programmers, analysts, makers) to engage in an open source project. We would also love to gather feedback and ideas on next steps and provide contribution opportunities for interested parties.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Researchers at the University of South Carolina and China's Zhejiang University have created an algorithm that can spot whether your kid is accidentally trying to, say, order from Amazon without your knowing. There are already plenty of activity-monitoring apps that aim to control what kids do on phones, but parents need to add them and turn them on, and they could be disabled by tech-savvy children. The researchers figured that automated age-range detection would make it easier for parents to hand their phones over to curious children without worrying that the kids will stumble upon an inappropriate website or get into a work e-mail account.

The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it. The app had participants unlock an Android phone and then play a numbers-based game on it, so that the researchers could record a variety of taps and swipes. They also tracked things like the amount of pressure applied by a user's finger and the area it encompassed. The researchers used the resulting data to train an age-detecting algorithm that they say is 84 percent accurate with just one swipe on the screen -- a figure that goes up to 97 percent after eight swipes.

A new zoning ordinance that quietly went into effect this week has residents trying to figure out what comes next for Airbnb's presence in Detroit. Many hosts have received notices that the city has outlawed Airbnb for R1 and R2 zoning. Curbed Detroit reports: The new zoning ordinance apparently went through the Planning Commission and City Council in 2017, and went into effect this week. The text added to the amendment states: "Use of a dwelling to accommodate paid overnight guests is prohibited as a home occupation; notwithstanding this regulation, public accommodations, including bed and breakfast inns outside the R1 and R2 Districts, are permitted as provided in Sec. 61-12-46 of this Code." The vast majority of Airbnb units in Detroit are in R1 and R2 districts. These do not include places like lofts, apartments, or larger developments. Airbnb has issued a statement saying: "We're very disappointed by this turn of events. Airbnb has served as an economic engine for middle class Detroiters, many of whom rely on the supplemental income to stay in their homes. We hope that the city listens to our host community and permits home sharing in these residential zones."

Andrew Flemming and Geoff Fowler, both 29, along with their friend and business partner, Will Hamilton, 37, were pouring their creative energies into a high-tech training device the likes of which the sporting world had never seen. They were building a better broom. From a report: Not just any broom, but one that they thought could be essential to the sport of curling, which relies on the best broom handling out there as teams strategically cajole a polished granite rock across a sheet of ice. They wound up calling it the SmartBroom, and in a sport that can come across as vaguely primordial, their piece of 21st-century gadgetry could play a role in determining who wins gold at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Each SmartBroom has four sensors in the broom head that relay data to a small display unit. Hamilton took one for a spin down the ice, and the data was instantaneous -- line graphs along with a slew of numbers that showed his force in pounds and his stroke rate in hertz. Hamilton also pointed to a figure that he described as his "sweeping performance index," or S.P.I., a metric that combines power and speed in one easy-to-digest figure. Patrick Janssen, a world-class curler from Canada, has consistently registered an S.P.I. in the 2,800 range. The numbers by themselves might not mean much, Flemming said, but subtle changes in technique can lead to big differences in the quality of each stroke. And now curlers have that information at their disposal. They can experiment to see which stroke works best for them.

Twitter has officially suspended Bitfinex'ed -- a notorious internet sleuth who has long speculated that popular exchange desk Bitfinex has quietly been printing its dollar-pegged Tether digital tokens out of thin air, a move that could lead to the collapse of Bitcoin and perhaps even the entire market, The Next Web reports. From the report: In an email to TNW, Bitifinex'ed said that Twitter has yet to clarify the reasons for the suspension. "This account has been suspended," the message reads. It is worth noting that in addition to the claims made against Bitfinex and Tether, Bitfinex'ed has previously accused other well-known figures within the crypto-community of foul play. Indeed, earlier in January the anonymous investigator suggested Litecoin Charlie Lee might have engaged in insider trading during his time at Coinbase. Lee ultimately denied these claims. In the aftermath of this altercation, waves of Lee supporters took to Twitter to condemn the premises of the piece Bitfinex'ed authored.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Original Stitch has all the trappings of an e-commerce success story. The pitch is simple: Original Stitch uses computer-vision software to review photos of your most beloved dress shirts uploaded to the company website, then delivers perfectly tailored copies. We tried it -- the only problem was that it didn't work. When the first shirt arrived too tight around the chest and too long in the sleeves, we figured an editor's sloppy photography was to blame, but the problems persisted with a second attempt. A third shirt, ordered under a different name to make sure we wouldn't get special treatment, could barely be buttoned up. The sleeves felt like tourniquets. "We tried to push the envelope," Original Stitch founder Jin Koh acknowledged after we confronted him with the results. "Obviously, it's still in beta." In December, three months after launching the service, Koh quietly pulled it down. He's returned to asking users to fill out a questionnaire with their own measurements while he works out the bugs.

Sony's PlayStation 3 sales stand at around 80 million -- which means its successor, the current gen PlayStation 4, will soon surpass it. From a report: The Japanese electronics giant sold 9 million PlayStation 4 consoles from October through December, it said on Friday in its latest quarterly earnings report. Sales for the console were at 67.5 million as of Sept. 30 2017, according to Sony's previous quarterly earnings report, bringing the total to 76.5 million. The PlayStation 2 remains Sony's best-selling console, with over 150 million units sold. These figures come days after Nintendo on Wednesday revealed the Switch, released last March, is up to 14.8 million in sales. Sales of Microsoft's Xbox One are estimated by VGChartz to be around 36 million.

Two and a half years after the company made it available to the general public, Windows 10 is now the most popular operating system from Microsoft, according to analytics firm StatCounter. From a report: Every month, StatCounter reports on the state of the desktop operating system market. Since October last year, the analyst company's figures have shown the gap between Windows 10 and Windows 7 narrowing. It looked as if the newer OS would overtake the older one in November, but that didn't happen, and it didn't happen in December either. However, in January, according to StatCounter, Windows 10 finally claimed the top spot. The latest figures show Windows 10 on 42.78 percent, up from 41.69 percent in December 2017. That's an increase of 1.09 percentage points.

Today, Google announced that it removed more than 700,000 apps that violated Google Play's policies, or 70 percent more apps than the year before. "Google does not share total Google Play app numbers anymore, so we have to rely on third-party estimates to put this 70 percent figure into perspective," reports VentureBeat. "Statista pegs the total number of apps on Google Play at 2.6 million in December 2016 and 3.5 million in December 2017, a 35 percent growth. How many of those were bad apps, however, is anyone's guess." From the report: All we know is that the number of bad apps removed grew faster than the total number of apps in the store, which makes sense if you take into account the next statistic Google revealed today: 99 percent of apps with abusive content were identified and rejected before anyone could install them in 2017. This was possible, Google says, thanks to its implementation of machine learning models and techniques to detect abusive app content and behaviors such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware. The company claims that the odds of getting malware is 10x lower via Google Play than if you install apps from outside sources.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Since its discovery over a hundred years ago, the 240-page Voynich manuscript, filled with seemingly coded language and inscrutable illustrations, of has confounded linguists and cryptographers. Using artificial intelligence, Canadian researchers have taken a huge step forward in unraveling the document's hidden meaning. Named after Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who procured the manuscript in 1912, the document is written in an unknown script that encodes an unknown language -- a double-whammy of unknowns that has, until this point, been impossible to interpret. The Voynich manuscript contains hundreds of fragile pages, some missing, with hand-written text going from left to right. Most pages are adorned with illustrations of diagrams, including plants, nude figures, and astronomical symbols. But as for the meaning of the text -- nothing. No clue. For Greg Kondrak, an expert in natural language processing at the University of Alberta, this seemed a perfect task for artificial intelligence. With the help of his grad student Bradley Hauer, the computer scientists have taken a big step in cracking the code, discovering that the text is written in what appears to be the Hebrew language, and with letters arranged in a fixed pattern. To be fair, the researchers still don't know the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, but the stage is now set for other experts to join the investigation. The researchers used an AI to study "the text of the 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' as it was written in 380 different languages, looking for patterns," reports Gizmodo. Following this training, the AI analyzed the Voynich gibberish, concluding with a high rate of certainty that the text was written in encoded Hebrew."

The researchers then entertained a hypothesis that the script was created with alphagrams, words in which text has been replaced by an alphabetically ordered anagram. "Armed with the knowledge that text was originally coded from Hebrew, the researchers devised an algorithm that could take these anagrams and create real Hebrew words." Finally, "the researchers deciphered the opening phrase of the manuscript" and ran it through Google Translate to convert it into passable English: "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people." The study appears in Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics .

Amazon's indoor rainforest-like office space opened today after being in development for seven years. CNBC reports of what can be found inside the Spheres: The Spheres' three glass domes house some 40,000 plants of 400 species. Amazon, famous for its demanding work culture, hopes the Spheres' lush environs will let employees reflect and have chance encounters, spawning new products or plans. The space is more like a greenhouse than a typical office. Instead of enclosed conference rooms or desks, there are walkways and unconventional meeting spaces with chairs. Amazon has invested $3.7 billion on buildings and infrastructure in Seattle from 2010 to summer 2017, a figure that has public officials competing for its "HQ2" salivating. Amazon has said it expects to invest more than $5 billion in construction of HQ2 and to create as many as 50,000 jobs. The Spheres, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, will become part of Amazon's guided campus tours. Members of the public can also visit an exhibit at the Spheres by appointment starting Tuesday.

An anonymous reader quotes Quartz: Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it's the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter. This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the "panpsychist" view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose...

"Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume," says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. "Arthur Eddington" -- the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity in the early 20th century -- "argued there's a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap"...

An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn't the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it's more like seeing it as a "cosmic mess." Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement -- the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they're separated by such immense distances there can't be a causal signal between them -- suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts. Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness.

Gnome contributor Tobias Bernard is on a crusade against title bars -- "the largely empty bars at the top of some application windows [that] contain only the window title and a close button." Instead he wants to see header bars -- "a newer, more flexible pattern that allows putting window controls and other UI elements in the same bar." Tobias Bernard writes: Header bars are client-side decorations (CSD), which means they are drawn by the app rather than the display server. This allows for better integration between application and window chrome. All GNOME apps (except for Terminal) have moved to header bars over the past few years, and so have many third-party apps. However, there are still a few holdouts.
He's announcing the CSD Initiative, "an effort to get apps (both GNOME and third-party) to drop title bars and adopt GNOME-style client-side decorations... The only way to solve this problem long-term is to patch applications upstream to not use title bars. So this is what we'll have to do."

• Talk to the maintainers and convince them that this is a good idea
• Do the design work of adapting the layout and make mockups
• Figure out what is required at a technical level
• Actually implement the new layout and get it merged

Implementation is already in progress for Firefox, though it has not yet been started for other high-priority apps like LibreOffice, GNOME Terminal, and Skype. "If you want to help with any of the above tasks," writes Tobias, "come talk to us on #gnome-design on IRC/Matrix."