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Is Silicon Valley Building a Chinese-Style Social Credit System? Published on September 01, 2019 at 10:10AM schwit1 shared this thought-provoking article from Fast Company: Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China's social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies. Here are some of the elements of America's growing social credit system. - The New York State Department of Financial Services announced earlier this year that life insurance companies can base premiums on what they find in your social media posts... - Airbnb can disable your account for life for any reason it chooses, and it reserves the right to not tell you the reason... - You can be banned from communications apps, too. For example, you can be banned on WhatsA

EFF Warns: 'Don't Play in Google's Privacy Sandbox' Published on September 01, 2019 at 07:10AM An EFF analysis looks at the problems with some of Google's new "Privacy Sandbox" proposals, a few of which it calls "downright dangerous": Perhaps the most fleshed-out proposal in the Sandbox is the conversion measurement API. This is trying to tackle a problem as old as online ads: how can you know whether the people clicking on an ad ultimately buy the product it advertised....? Google's ID field can contain 64 bits of information -- a number between 1 and 18 quintillion. This will allow advertisers to attach a unique ID to each and every ad impression they serve, and, potentially, to connect ad conversions with individual users. If a user interacts with multiple ads from the same advertiser around the web, these IDs can help the advertiser build a profile of the user's browsing habits. Even worse is Google's proposal for Federated Lear

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The Big Levandowski: Could an Uber Engineer's Indictment Discourage Workers From Changing Jobs? Published on September 01, 2019 at 04:10AM Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For nearly 20 years," writes WIRED's Alex Davies in How Anthony Levandowski Put Himself at the Center of an Industry, "the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil. None, though, deny that whether for good or ill, the benefit of society or himself, Levandowski has played a propulsive role in the development of self-driving tech." But that's of little comfort to Levandowski, who was charged by the Feds earlier this week with stealin

'Why PHP Still Beats Your Next Favourite Alternative' Published on September 01, 2019 at 04:10AM Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: On PHPday in Verona (Italy) Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gave an enlightening talk on PHP and its history. 25 years of PHP (video of the talk) is ripe with details on PHP, the design choices behind the web's favorite server-side templating language and with explanations on why what you may think of as an inconsistent mess actually makes perfect sense just the way it is. Very insightful, fun, interesting and a must-watch for PHP lovers and haters alike. Introducing one slide, Lerdorf remembers that in the 1990s, "the web looked like this -- CGI bins written in C." But he also shows his first computers from the 1980s at the beginning of the talk, before moving on to screenshots of Gopher, and then of the Mosaic browser. "This changed everything. And not just for me, for everybody... "Everybody around at the time,

Should the Linux Kernel Accept Drivers Written In Rust? Published on September 01, 2019 at 03:10AM Packt's recent story about Rust had the headline "Rust is the future of systems programming, C is the new Assembly." But there was an interesting discussion about the story on LWN.net. One reader suggested letting people write drivers for the Linux kernel in Rust. ("There's a good chance that encouraging people to submit their wacky drivers in Rust would improve the quality of the driver, partly because you can focus attention on the unsafe parts.") And that comment drew an interesting follow-up: "I spoke with Greg Kroah-Hartman, and he said he'd be willing to accept a framework in the kernel for writing drivers in Rust, as long as 1) for now it wasn't enabled by default (even if you did "make allyesconfig") so that people don't *need* Rust to build the kernel, and 2) it shows real benefits beyond writing C, such as safe wrappers fo

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Intel Engineer Launches Working Group To Bring Rust 'Full Parity With C' Published on September 01, 2019 at 02:04AM Someone from the Rust language governance team gave an interesting talk at this year's Open Source Technology Summit. Josh Triplett (who is also a principal engineer at Intel), discussed "what Intel is contributing to bring Rust to full parity with C," in a talk titled Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming. An anonymous reader quotes Packt: Triplett believes that C is now becoming what Assembly was years ago. "C is the new Assembly," he concludes. Developers are looking for a high-level language that not only addresses the problems in C that can't be fixed but also leverage other exciting features that these languages provide. Such a language that aims to be compelling enough to make developers move from C should be memory safe, provide automatic memory management, security, and much more... "Achieving parity with C i

Scientists Excited By Discovery of an Impossibly Large Black Hole Published on September 01, 2019 at 01:04AM In 2017 several scientists co-signed a wager at the Aspen Center for Physics that a black hole wouldn't be discovered between 55 and 130 solar masses. They may have lost, reports the Atlantic: Black-hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible. "The prediction is no black holes, not even a few" in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in an email. "But of course we know nature often finds a way...." Whereas most of the colliding black holes that wiggle LIGO's and Virgo's instruments probably originated as pairs of isolated stars (binary star systems being common in the cosmos), MIT's Carl

Intermittent Fasting May Be As Beneficial As Counting Calories Published on September 01, 2019 at 12:04AM "A type of intermittent fasting that calls for eating nothing one day, and then whatever a person wants the next, can be done safely for several months and comes with a number of health benefits, a study has found." An anonymous reader quotes Today.com: Alternate day fasting improved cardiovascular markers, reducing blood pressure and heart rate after four weeks, researchers reported in Cell Metabolism on Tuesday. People who followed the plan for six months also had lower levels of LDL "bad" cholesterol and triglycerides compared to those who ate normally. Overall, they ate about 37% fewer calories, lost weight and had an "improved fat distribution," reducing the fat in their trunk and abdomen by about 14% on average. Researchers saw no adverse effects from alternate day fasting even after six months, concluding the strategy seems to be as beneficial

The Internet Is Coming To the Rest of the Animal Kingdom Published on August 31, 2019 at 11:04PM Wave723 shared this article from September's issue of IEEE Spectrum about an usual project by a leading group of cognitive biologists and computer scientists: Dubbed the Interspecies Internet, the project aims to provide intelligent animals such as elephants, dolphins, magpies, and great apes with a means to communicate among each other and with people online. And through artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other digital technologies, researchers hope to crack the code of all the chirps, yips, growls, and whistles that underpin animal communication. Oh, and musician Peter Gabriel is involved. "We can use data analysis and technology tools to give non-humans a lot more choice and control," the former Genesis frontman, dressed in his signature Nehru-style collar shirt and loose, open waistcoat, told IEEE Spectrum at the inaugural Interspecies Internet Workshop, held

Some of the World's Most-Cited Scientists Have a Secret That's Just Been Exposed Published on August 31, 2019 at 10:04PM Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes Science Alert: Among the 100,000 most cited scientists between 1996 to 2017, there's a stealthy pocket of researchers who represent "extreme self-citations and 'citation farms' (relatively small clusters of authors massively citing each other's papers)," explain the authors of the new study, led by physician turned meta-researcher John Ioannidis from Stanford University. Ioannidis helps to run Stanford's meta-research innovation centre, called Metrics, which looks at identifying and solving systemic problems in scientific research. One of those problems, Ioannidis says, is how self-citations compromise the reliability of citation metrics as a whole, especially at the hands of extreme self-citers and their associated clusters. "I think that self-citation farms are far more common tha

'The Joys of Being a Late Tech Adopter' Published on August 31, 2019 at 09:04PM An anonymous reader quotes the lead consumer technology writer for the New York Times: I'm neither a Luddite nor a cheapskate. But after testing hundreds of tech products -- and buying some along the way -- over the last dozen years, I've come to a conclusion: People will almost always get more joy from technology the longer they wait for it to mature. [Alternate URL here.] Cutting-edge gadgets can invoke awe and temptation, but being an early adopter involves risk, and the downsides usually outweigh the benefits. Keep this in mind when, starting next month, we enter the end-of-the-year tech frenzy. That's when companies like Apple, Samsung and Google will try to woo us with hot new gadgets, including premium smartphones, tablets and wearable computers... [M]y default recommendation is to resist hitting the "Buy" button and to wait unless you absolutely need to replace your o

Is Perl 6 Being Renamed? Published on August 31, 2019 at 08:04PM An anonymous reader quotes a blog post by Curtis Poe , a freelance Perl/Agile/testing consultant and the author of the Wrox book Beginning Perl: By now, many of you have seen the Perl 6 Github issue "Perl" in the name "Perl 6" is confusing and irritating. The issue suggested renaming Perl 6. While some may think that the name of the issue is trolling, or offensive, the actual issue was created by Elizabeth (Liz) Mattijsen, one of the core Perl 6 developers, a long-time Perl 5 developer, and with her spouse, Wendy, has long been an enthusiastic support of Perl 5/6. There is no trolling here. There is a lot of deep thought, careful discussion, and a genuine desire to find a way to bypass some deeply divisive issues in the Perl community. While the proposed name was "camelia", Damian Conway made a strong argument in favor of "raku" and it appears the community is leaning towards this

Google Contractors In Pittsburgh Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union Published on August 31, 2019 at 06:30PM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Contract workers at Google's office in Pittsburgh have just announced their intention to unionize. 66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they're asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at "helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively." "Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long," HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a

Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged Published on August 31, 2019 at 03:30PM After analyzing high-growth companies in the United States, a team of economists discovered that most superstar entrepreneurs are middle-aged. Their study is being published in the journal American Economic Review: Insights. The New York Times reports: The researchers looked at start-ups established between 2007 and 2014 and analyzed the top 0.1 percent -- defined as those with the fastest growth in employment and sales. The average age of those companies' founders was 45. There are, of course, famous counterexamples. Mark Zuckerberg was 19 when he co-founded Facebook. Bill Gates was 19 when he founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak. The origin stories of those companies and a handful of others helped to shape a myth that tech, and American innovation overall, is fueled by wunderkinds. But fresh-faced founders are the exceptio

Plasma Thrusters For Small Satellite Systems Hit Hyper Drive Published on August 31, 2019 at 12:30PM Greg Nichols reporting for ZDNet: A company that makes propulsion systems for small satellites, Orbion Space Technology, has announced $9.2M in Series A funding. The round was led by Material Impact, a venture firm focused on translating early stage materials technologies into products and companies. Orbion has developed a very Star Trek-sounding technology that may prove to be a crucial component of an emerging New Space industry, the first-ever Hall-effect plasma thrusters for small satellites, dubbed the Aurora system. The company plans to use the capital from this round to support mass production of its thrusters. Hall-effect plasma thrusters are a type of ion drive in which a propellant is accelerated by an electric field. The technology has been around since the 1960s, and Hall-effect thrusters were in use on Soviet satellites between 1972 and 1990. What's new is the size of

Mutant Sheep Are Being Bred In Lab To Fight Lethal Child Brain Disease Published on August 31, 2019 at 09:00AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have created a flock of sheep that carry the gene for a lethal inherited brain disorder in humans. The condition, Batten disease, usually starts in childhood and is invariably fatal, often within a few years of diagnosis. The project, which is designed to test treatments for the disease, is based at Edinburgh University's Roslin Institute, where cloning techniques were used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996. The scientists acknowledge that the approach could be controversial as it involves creating animals programmed to die, but stress that their aim is to alleviate human suffering. There are several types of Batten disease, said project leader Tom Wishart. "One of the more rapid types is CLN1, and that's what we have recreated in our sheep." The Roslin scientists used the gene-editing techni

CRISPR Now Cuts and Splices Whole Chromosomes Published on August 31, 2019 at 07:33AM Researchers report they've adapted CRISPR and combined it with other tools to cut and splice large genome fragments with ease. The study, conducted by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K., has been published in this week's issue of Science. Science Magazine reports: The tried and true tools of genetic engineering simply can't handle long stretches of DNA. Restriction enzymes, the standard tool for cutting DNA, can snip chunks of genetic material and join the ends to form small circular segments that can be moved out of one cell and into another. (Stretches of linear DNA don't survive long before other enzymes, called endonucleases, destroy them.) But the circles can accommodate at most a couple of hundred thousand bases, and synthetic biologists often want to move large segments of chromosomes containing multiple genes,