Slashdot Mirror

Recycled plastic is already used to make some products, such as guttering and sewage pipes. Now attention is turning to roads. From a report: On September 11th in Zwolle, a town in the Netherlands, a 30-metre bicycle track made from 70% recycled plastic and the rest from polypropylene was opened [Warning: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. It will be used to test a product called PlasticRoad, which is being developed by two Dutch firms -- KWS, a road builder, and Wavin, a firm that makes plastic piping -- in partnership with Total, a French oil-and-gas firm. PlasticRoad is prefabricated in a factory as modular sections. The sections are then transported to the site and laid end to end on a suitable foundation, such as sand. Because these sections are hollow, internal channels can be incorporated into them for drainage, along with conduits for services such as gas and electricity. For the Zwolle project, sections that were 2.4 metres long and 3 metres wide were used. These were fitted with sensors to measure things such as temperature, flexing and the flow of water through the drainage channels. A second pilot cycleway is being built in the nearby town of Giethoorn.

If all goes well, the inventors hope to develop the idea and make the sections entirely from recycled plastic. Paths, car parks and railway platforms could follow. Eventually, sections for use as actual roads are planned. These could contain sensors for traffic monitoring. In time, the circuits in the plastic roads might extend to assisting autonomous vehicles and recharging electric cars wirelessly. Prefabricated plastic roads should last two-to-three times longer than conventional roads and cost less, the companies claim, mainly because construction times would be reduced by almost two-thirds. Anti-slip surfaces could be incorporated, too, including crushed stones which are traditionally used to dress road surfaces. The sections, when replaced, can also be recycled. But engineers will be watching to see how the track stands up to wear and tear and if the hollow structure causes resonance, which would make such a road unduly noisy.

Chrome OS 70, which Google plans to release in the second half of next month, will include native support for SMB file shares, giving it built-in access to files stored on Windows servers. With this, Chrome OS users can add SMB file shares to the Files app and use them to store and load documents. From a report: Currently, using these network resources requires the use of an extension that adds a similar ability to add file shares to the Files app. Google has been working to make Files a more capable application. As well as integrating support for networked files, the company is also experimenting with giving it more access to Android files, something that will streamline the use of Android applications by exposing their data files to Chrome OS apps. The SMB support helps smooth a pain point when mixing Chromebooks with other systems: it makes it easier to use Chrome OS with corporate file servers, home networked storage devices, and of course, Windows PCs. Instead of needing the extra extension to be installed, these things will just work out of the box.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: An international consortium involving over 50 institutions has announced an ambitious project to assemble high-quality genome sequences of all 66,000 vertebrate species on Earth, including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. With an estimated total cost of $600 million dollars, it's a project of biblical proportions. It's called the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), and it's being organized by a consortium called Genome 10K, or G10K. As its name implies, this group had initially planned to sequence the genomes of at least 10,000 vertebrate species, but now, owing to tremendous advances and cost reductions in gene sequencing technologies, G10K has decided to up the ante, aiming to sequence both a male and female individual from each of the approximately 66,000 vertebrate species on Earth. Cofounders of the project announced the new goal yesterday at a press briefing held during the opening session of the 2018 Genome 10K conference, currently being held at Rockefeller University in New York City. The project will involve over 150 experts from 50 institutions in 12 countries.

Three years ago, Apple introduced 3D Touch for the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, a pressure-sensitive feature that uses capacitive sensors integrated into the smartphone's display to sense three degrees of pressure in a user's touch and respond differently based on the amount of pressure exerted. It's a neat idea as it has allowed users to interact with the user interface in a completely new way. Now, with the release of the new iPhone XR, Apple seems to be on the way to phasing it out. The Verge reports: While both the new iPhone XS and XS Max include 3D Touch, Apple has chosen not to include the feature on the iPhone XR. Yes, that phone is cheaper, and Apple had to strip out some features, but 3D Touch has been included on iPhones in that price range since it was introduced not too long ago, so this feels less like necessary cost savings and more like planned omission. There have always been a few core problems with 3D Touch. For one, its use often amounted to the right click of a mouse, which is funny coming from the company that famously refused to put a dedicated right button on its mice or trackpads. And selecting from those right click options was rarely faster or a substantially more useful way of getting something done than just tapping the button and manually navigating to where you needed to go. People also didn't know the feature was there. The iPhone did little to train users on 3D Touch. And even the people who knew it was there had no way to tell which icons supported it without just 3D pressing everything to see what happened.

Apple isn't entirely removing the concept of 3D Touch from the iPhone XR. Instead, the phone will include something Apple is calling Haptic Touch, which will make a click when you activate a button's secondary feature by pressing and holding it. But that replacement underscores just how useless 3D Touch has really become: it's not more than a very, very fancy long press. That's something phones have always been capable of. And despite the name, I've found long press features to be faster and easier to use than their 3D Touch equivalent. Instagram, for instance, lets you preview photos with a 3D Touch on the iPhone or a long press on Android. I find the Android version to be simpler and quicker. Here's what Apple's marketing leader, Phil Schiller, had to say about the feature back in 2015 when it was first introduced: "'Engineering-wise, the hardware to build a display that does what [3D Touch] does is unbelievably hard,' says Schiller. 'And we're going to waste a whole year of engineering -- really, two -- at a tremendous amount of cost and investment in manufacturing if it doesn't do something that [people] are going to use. If it's just a demo feature and a month later nobody is really using it, this is a huge waste of engineering talent.'"

A senior Google research scientist has quit the company in protest over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China. The Intercept: Jack Poulson worked for Google's research and machine intelligence department, where he was focused on improving the accuracy of the company's search systems. In early August, Poulson raised concerns with his managers at Google after The Intercept revealed that the internet giant was secretly developing a Chinese search app for Android devices. The search system, code-named Dragonfly, was designed to remove content that China's authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. After entering into discussions with his bosses, Poulson decided in mid-August that he could no longer work for Google. He tendered his resignation and his last day at the company was August 31. He told The Intercept in an interview that he believes he is one of about five of the company's employees to resign over Dragonfly. He felt it was his "ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments," he said.

On Tuesday night, the Hawthorne City Council gave Elon Musk's Boring Company the green light to build a prototype for a new garage that would connect passenger cars to the entrepreneur's envisioned underground hyperloop. The Mercury News reports: Musk's Boring Company recently bought a private residence abutting the one-mile underground tunnel it already built beneath 120th Street between Hawthorne Boulevard and Prairie Avenue near SpaceX. The garage at the residence would connect to the tunnel. But as part of its approval, the company agreed not to open the test elevator to the public or to have cars move in and out of the garage from the street. Cars would enter the tunnel from the SpaceX campus, move through the tunnel and on to the garage and then back to SpaceX, so the test process would not create additional traffic on the street. The company wants to show that it can utilize an elevator and short tunnel spur for developing a high-speed underground public transportation system. It plans to rent the house as well.

As sketched out in public documents, a car would drive onto a "skate" that connects to a hyperloop track, such as the ones being developed by two private companies and recently featured in the collegiate Hyperloop Competition at SpaceX. The company also on Tuesday earned approval for a separate short spur from its existing tunnel in order to remove a boring machine that it first intended to leave in the ground. Originally, the company planned to bore a two-mile length of tunnel, but as company representative Jane Labanowski explained to the City Council, they identified an opportunity to remove its expensive cutter head. So, it now plans to reduce the tunnel length to just one mile and extricate it from another piece of property the company recently purchased.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: While the European Union voted this week to pass its widely-criticized new Copyright Directive, activists and members of European Parliament say there's still a chance of keeping the EU from fully implementing the worst parts of the troubling proposal. The most controversial aspects of the plan remain twofold: Article 11, which would require EU News outlets to pay a "link tax" just to share anything more than "insubstantial" snippets of published content, and Article 13, which would require that EU member countries implement the kind of automated copyright filters that have been a chaotic mess here in the States. Other problematic measures were passed as well, including Article 12a, which prohibits sports fans from posting their own photos or videos of sporting events online, while stating that only event "organizers" have the right to do so.

That said, all hope is not lost. While some variant of Article 11 and Article 13 is likely be approved next spring, public pressure could force inclusion of additional safeguards for end users, Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda told me in an email. "While the overall bill was adopted with a comfortable majority, the outcome was more narrow for the two controversial articles (366:297 and 393:279)," Reda said. "Since the final vote will be close to the next European elections, that leaves open a small chance that massive public protest against these provisions may still convince MEPs to kill the entire bill." If passed, individual EU countries will be able to interpret the Directive as they see fit, though Reda believes they will likely steer toward stricter interpretation. "The real hope for repeal in my opinion is in the courts," author and activist Cory Doctorow said. "There's simply no way this passes EU Constitutional muster -- it's generalized filtering and mass surveillance by another name. The fact that they claim to be looking for 'infringement' doesn't change that."

Longtime Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein adds: [...] These articles now enter a period of negotiation with EU member states, and then are subject to final votes next year, probably in the spring. So now's the time for the rest of the world to show Europe some special "tough love" -- to help them understand what their Internet island universe will look like if these terrible articles are ever actually implemented.
UPDATE: The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a report slamming the proposal, offering a number of ways people can fight back.

European authorities are planning to slap internet companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook with big fines if they don't take down extremist content within one hour. From a report: European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in a speech Wednesday that the Commission is proposing the new rules as part of efforts to step up the bloc's security. He said that removing material within an hour is important because it's "the critical window in which the greatest damage is done." The EU's executive body said "propaganda that prepares, incites or glorifies acts of terrorism" must be taken offline. Content would be flagged up by national authorities, who would issue removal orders to the internet companies hosting it. Those companies would be given one hour to delete it. The proposal, which still needs approval from EU lawmakers and member states, would be a departure for the EU, which until now has allowed online companies to a take a voluntary approach to battling extremist content. The one-hour rule was among a series of recommendations the Commission made in March to fight the spread of extremist content online.

Two years before Equifax stunned the world with the announcement it had been hacked, the credit-reporting company believed it was the victim of another theft, only this time at the hands of Chinese spies, WSJ reported Wednesday. From the report: In the previously undisclosed incident, security officials feared that former employees had removed thousands of pages of proprietary information before leaving and heading to jobs in China. Materials included code for planned new products, human-resources files and manuals. Equifax went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Investigators from the company and the FBI came to view events at Equifax as potentially a huge theft of data -- not of consumers' personal data, as happened with the subsequent 2017 hacking of Equifax's files, but of confidential business information. Equifax security officials briefed the then-chief executive, Richard Smith, at a fall 2015 meeting, spreading high stacks of paper across the length of the boardroom table. The voluminous printouts represented what they feared was stolen. Adding to suspicions, the Chinese government had recently asked eight companies to help it build a national credit-reporting system. At one point, Equifax grew so worried it began building a way to monitor the computer activity of all of its ethnic-Chinese employees, according to people familiar with the investigation. The resource-heavy project, which raised legal concerns internally, was short-lived.

T-Mobile and Ericsson have signed a multi-year $3.5 billion agreement to build out T-Mobile's 5G infrastructure. The telecommunications company "will deploy Ericsson's Radio System portfolio, including 5G New Radio and NR hardware and software compliant with 3GPP standards," reports ZDNet. From the report: According to the companies, the contract also encompasses Ericsson's digital services solutions, including dynamic orchestration, business support systems or BSS, and Ericsson Cloud Core. Meanwhile, T-Mobile's already installed base of Ericsson Radio System radios will be able to run 5G NR technology via remote software installation. T-Mobile and Ericsson rival Nokia also announced a $3.5 billion 5G deal back in July. Add it up and T-Mobile is investing $7 billion in 5G between the two companies. As part the Nokia agreement, T-Mobile said it would use Nokia's 5G network technology including software, services and hardware. The carrier also said Nokia would help make its "600 MHz and 28 GHz millimeter wave 5G capabilities compliant with 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) standards" -- echoing its current plans with Ericsson. In other 5G-related news, Verizon will begin offering installation of its 5G home broadband in select markets on October 1st. "Customers [in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento] will be able to begin ordering service once the installation is complete, with pricing set at $50 for Verizon Wireless customers and $70 for non-VZW customers," reports PhoneDog. Network speeds are expected to be around 300Mbps, with peak speeds nearing 1Gbps. There will also be no data caps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Now a startup developing all solid-state batteries (ASSB) secured backing from several high-profile investors, including several automakers, as it claims a breakthrough for the technology that will enable better electric cars. Solid Power is a Colorado-based startup that spun out of a battery research program at the University of Colorado Boulder. The company claims to have achieved a breakthrough by incorporating a high-capacity lithium metal anode in lithium batteries -- creating a solid-state cell with an energy capacity "2-3X higher" than conventional lithium-ion. They have already attracted investments from important companies, like A123 Systems and more recently BMW, which planned to validate their battery technology for the automotive market. Now they are announcing this week the addition Hyundai, Samsung and several others to the list as they close a $20 million series A round of financing. They are now working with two automakers and two battery cell suppliers for the auto industry. Some of the advantages that they claim their technology has over current batteries, as mentioned in their press release, include:

- 2-3x higher energy vs. current lithium-ion
- Substantially improved safety due to the elimination of the volatile, flammable, and corrosive liquid electrolyte as used in lithium-ion
- Low-cost battery-pack designs through: Minimization of safety features and elimination of pack cooling
- Greatly simplified cell, module, and pack designs through the elimination of the need for liquid containment
- High manufacturability due to compatibility with automated, industry-standard, roll-to-roll production

Solid Power plans to use the funds from its Series A investment to "scale-up production via a multi-MWh roll-to-roll facility, which will be fully constructed and installed by the end of 2018 and fully operational in 2019." The battery cells produced at this new facility "will be utilized for preliminary qualification of the company's solid-state cells for multiple markets including automotive, aerospace and defense."

A village in Switzerland has decided to go ahead with an experiment on basic income, with a payout of 2,500 francs ($2,570) per month. The next step is to raise money to finance the plan via crowdfunding. From a report: More than 50 percent of the inhabitants of Rheinau, close to the German border, signed up for the project, according to the organizers website. At least half the 1,300 inhabitants needed to say 'yes,' and the count stood at 692 on Monday. The submitted ballots still have to be checked against government data to ensure eligibility. The decision comes two years after a proposal for a nationwide unconditional state stipend failed to pass in a national vote. Rheinau, on the banks of the river Rhine an hour by train from the banking hub of Zurich, was selected by filmmaker Rebecca Panian for the basic income trial. She says she became fascinated by the notion during the national debate before up the 2016 vote, decided to select a village as a guinea pig, and make a documentary.

An anonymous reader shares an exclusive report from Reuters: President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order as soon as Wednesday that will slap sanctions on any foreign companies or people who interfere in U.S. elections, based on intelligence agency findings, two sources familiar with the matter said. Trump's decision to sign an executive order coincides with intelligence agencies, military and law enforcement preparing to defend the Nov. 6 congressional elections from predicted foreign attacks even as Trump derides a special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Sanction targets could include individual people or entire companies accused of interfering in U.S. elections by cyber attacks or other means, a U.S. official told Reuters. The order will put a range of agencies in charge of deciding if meddling occurred, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and including the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Homeland Security Department, the sources said. Based on a recent draft of the order reviewed by the U.S. official, it will require any federal agency aware of election interference by foreigners to take the information to the office of Director of National Intelligence. Election interference will be defined in the order as hacking attempts against "election infrastructure," and efforts to sway public opinion through coordinated digital propaganda or systematic leaks of private political information. UPDATE: The story has been updated with additional information from Reuters.

The EU is preparing to vote Wednesday on sweeping new copyright guidelines that could dramatically reshape the internet and potentially harm your ability to share content online. From a report: As noted previously, the proposal is being driven by rights holders frightened by technological change, including brick and mortar publishers eager to blame companies like Google for their failure to evolve in the modern internet era. And while the EU's new Copyright Directive may be a well intentioned effort to modernize EU copyright rules, it still contains numerous provisions that could significantly harm the open internet. Most of those provisions remain largely intact despite a July vote that sent the proposal back to the drawing board in the wake of widespread activist backlash. The most problematic provisions of the plan include new licensing fees for sharing anything more than "insubstantial" portions of content. Such a "link tax" could prove costly for small news outlets, and, depending on final wording, could put volunteer-centric organizations like Wikipedia at risk since the original proposal failed to include a noncommercial exception.

The most controversial component of the plan mandates that any website that lets users upload text, sounds, images, code, or other copyrighted works for public consumption (read: most of them) would need to employ automated copyright systems that filter these submissions against a database of copyrighted works at the website owner's expense. As we've consistently highlighted, such filters routinely don't work very well.

Almost half of American households will have a smart speaker by next year, according to a new study from Adobe. From a report: The study, released Monday, finds that 32% of the country already owns a smart speaker and another 16% plan on getting one this holiday season. And just as importantly, people are using those speakers. "Technology trends come and go, but we think voice is here to stay," said Colin Morris, director of product management for Adobe Analytics, in a statement. "Consumers continue to embrace voice as a means to engage their devices and the Internet. It's a trend that has fundamentally changed the face of computing." A notable indicator of the growing popularity of the speakers is how comfortable people are talking to the device in front of others. And that number is on the rise: 72% of smart speaker owners say they use voice assistants in front of others. (Only 29% of people without a smart speaker are comfortable with doing so.) Further reading: Google Home Outships Amazon Echo for Second Quarter in Row.

A nonprofit has deployed a multimillion-dollar floating boom designed to corral plastic debris littering the Pacific Ocean (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The 2,000-foot-long structure left San Francisco Bay on Saturday. According to The New York Times, Ocean Cleanup "aims to trap up to 150,000 pounds of plastic during the boom's first year at sea." From the report: Within five years, with the creation of dozens more booms, the organization hopes to clean half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Over the next several days, the boom will be towed to a site where it will undergo two weeks of testing. If everything goes as planned, the boom will then be brought to the garbage patch, nearly 1,400 miles offshore, where it is expected to arrive by mid-October, said Boyan Slat, 24, the Dutch inventor and entrepreneur who founded Ocean Cleanup.

The cleanup system is supposed to work like this: After the boom detaches from the towing vessel, the current is expected to pull it into the shape of a "U." As it drifts along, propelled by the wind and waves, it should trap plastic "like Pac-Man," the foundation said on its website. The captured plastic would then be transported back to land, sorted and recycled. The boom has an impenetrable skirt that hangs nearly 10 feet below to catch smaller pieces of plastic. The nonprofit said marine life would be able to pass underneath.

Back in 2014, Mozilla partnered with Bing to translate webpages via Firefox in a similar fashion to Chrome's implementation of Google Translate. The company also added support for Yandex Translate in Firefox 41 in mid-2015, but it went all dark soon after and very few updates were issued. Now, Mozilla is finally starting to add support for Google Translate to the translation engine built into Firefox. gHacks reports: While the feature is not fully functional yet, it is an indicator that Mozilla has not forgotten the translate feature completely. Users who enable the translate functionality in Firefox on about:config will notice that Google is the selected translation engine. Google Translate cannot be used currently in Firefox; the browser throws an error message when you hit the translate button in the UI. Bing and Yandex don't seem to work either at this point in time even though Firefox seems to try and translate the page. The "there has been an error translating this page" error is thrown eventually as well. Google Translate requires API access keys and that is usually only available if companies or users pay for the key. It is unclear if Mozilla plans to make a deal with Google or if users will be required to use their own API keys for the functionality. The latter would surely be very limiting.

A Dubai-based engineering firm is planning to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to help provide fresh drinking water to the desert city's rapidly-growing population. Stuff.co.nz reports: The National Advisor Bureau (NABL), a private engineering firm, wants to schlep a glacial iceberg from Antarctica -- weighing approximately 100 million tons -- to Dubai, via an intermediate stop in either Perth, Australia, or Cape Town, South Africa. If the iceberg doesn't melt along the way, the firm will sell the water to Dubai's government. Dubai, which is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, is growing so rapidly that a solution to the city's looming water crisis must be found, according to the city's largest English-language newspaper, The Khaleej Times.

The company is beginning a pilot study in November to examine the feasibility of the iceberg-towing project. According to Alshehi, the firm will use satellite imagery to look for a suitable iceberg -- which he says should be between 2000 feet (609 meters) and 7000 feet (2.1 kilometers) long -- and then try and tow it to either Australia or South Africa. Once the iceberg gets to its first stop, it will be towed the rest of the way. Because icebergs are so heavy, the company will need multiple ships to assist with towing, and it will use the ocean's prevailing currents to their advantage. Alshehi told NBC that even if 30 percent of the iceberg melts on the journey, it will still be able to provide between 100 million and 200 million cubic meters of fresh water -- enough for 1 million people to stay hydrated for five years. Last month, Alshehi told NBC: "If we succeed with this project, it could solve one of the world's biggest problems. So if we show this is viable, it could ultimately help not only the UAE, but all humanity."

Facebook is planning to open a new data center in Singapore in 2022. The more than $1 billion facility will be located in the west of the country, according to the BBC. From the report: It has been designed as an 11-floor structure, in an attempt to conserve space in the crowded nation, according to Facebook. One analyst told the BBC it was another sign of the country's popularity with large technology companies. The new, 170,000-sq-m (1.8-million-sq-ft) data centre will support "hundreds" of local jobs. Facebook said it expected the building to be powered by 100% renewable energy and noted that it would feature a liquid cooling system that minimized water and power use.

Sony is the latest multinational conglomerate corporation to announce plans to have all its energy come from renewable sources by 2040. Nikkei Asian Review reports: The electronics company has 111 business sites around the world. Renewables will supply all power used not only in manufacturing televisions and cameras, but also in such content creation work as moviemaking. The goal will be achieved through such means as installing solar panels atop production facilities and purchasing green-certified power. Sony will gradually increase use of such energy, aiming first for a rate of 30% in 2030. Sony has already gone fully green in Europe. But 80% of the group's energy consumption is in Japan, mainly because of semiconductor manufacturing. Purchasing solar power facilities will likely be pursued as well.