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Unofficial.
URI # AMC, Sony Will Hand Out NFTs To 'Spider-Man' Advance Ticket Buyers
AMC and Sony Pictures are giving away 86,000 NFTs to Stubs Premiere, A-List
and Investor Connect members who buy or reserve tickets for Spider-Man: No
Way Home showings on December 16th. Engadget reports: Redeem a code through a
special website and you'll get one of 100 designs available through the more
eco-friendly Wax blockchain. You'll need to order your tickets through the AMC
Theatres website or mobile app when pre-orders launch on November 29th. If you
qualify, you'll get your code on December 22nd and will have until March 1st,
2022 to claim the NFT.
URI # Airbus A340 Plane Lands On Antarctica For First Time
An anonymous reader quotes a report from India Today: For the first time in
history, a commercial Airbus plane made a successful landing on the white
continent of Antarctica. One of the company's A340 planes touched down on an
ice runway earlier this month, paving the way for more tourism on the frozen
landmass. The A340 took off on the morning of November 2 from Cape Town, South
Africa before flying 2,500 nautical miles (4,630 km) to Antarctica. It then
achieved an aviation first by successfully landing on a runway made of "blue
glacial ice," according to the aircraft's pilot, Captain Carlos Mirpuri.
CNN reported that the historic flight was operated by Hi Fly, a boutique
aviation company, and was chartered by Wolf's Gang luxury adventure camp. The
aircraft will be used this season to fly a small number of tourists, alongside
scientists and cargo to the icy continent. There was "attention and anxiety" in
he cockpit as the 190-tonne plane approached the runway in Antarctica. Captain
Mirpuri detailed how the runway had to have special grooves carved into it to
allow for more friction as the aircraft landed, which would have otherwise
slipped down the icy course due to its heavy supply cargo. The pilots also had
o wear special eye gear due to the glare coming off the polar ice. Thankfully,
Mirpuri and the rest of the A340's crew managed to land safely and they took
less than three hours to deliver all of the cargo.
URI # World's First Living Robots Can Now Reproduce, Scientists Say
The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms,
known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants
and animals. CNN reports: Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed
frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than
a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020
after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and
self-heal. Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont,
Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically
Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of
biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.
[T]hey found that the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms [...]. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.
The xenobots are very early technology -- think of a 1940s computer -- and don't
yet have any practical applications. However, this combination of molecular
biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a host of tasks
in the body and the environment, according to the researchers. This may include
hings like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems and
regenerative medicine. While the prospect of self-replicating biotechnology
could spark concern, the researchers said that the living machines were entirely
contained in a lab and easily extinguished, as they are biodegradable and
regulated by ethics experts. "Most people think of robots as made of metals and
ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which
is act on its own on behalf of people," said Josh Bongard, a computer science
professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of
he study, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "In
hat way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically
unmodified frog cell."
"The AI didn't program these machines in the way we usually think about writing
code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this Pac-Man shape," Bongard
said. "The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the
xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process."
URI # Intel Is Stockpiling Legacy Technology For Security Research
James Rundle writes via the Wall Street Journal: A few years ago, executives
at Intel began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens
of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn't
have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers
could test it for security flaws. [...] Intel's answer to this conundrum was
o create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already
had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology
and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in
mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of
2019. The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more
han 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can
be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled
and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment
at all times. Even its location is secret -- Intel representatives declined to
say where exactly it is.
The lab brings commercial value to Intel, [said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager
of Intel's product assurance and security unit.], citing company research that
shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that
proactively test their products. [...] The lab has changed Intel's product
development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with
echnical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10
years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian
said. "Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware
again," he said.
URI # South Korea Will Use VR To Determine If the Elderly Can Keep Driving
The Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) is pushing for the implementation of
conditional driver's licenses for the elderly by 2025, Yonhap News reports. How
hey'll determine who gets to keep their licenses will be via virtual
reality. The Next Web reports: As of Monday, a three-year research project
has been introduced, which will employ VR tech to assess whether drivers aged
65 years and older can remain behind the wheel. The program's total budget is
expected to reach approximately $3 million (3.6 billion won). Contrary to other
countries around the word, South Korea has no strict regulations regarding the
driving license of seniors, unless they test positive for dementia. Currently,
wo measures apply: the three-year license renewal period for those aged 75
years and older, and the voluntary return of the driver's license for people
over 65 years-old. However, the KNPA is still raising concerns over the number
of accidents attributed to senior drivers, as well as the continuous aging of
he country's population.
The VR test will asses driving, cognitive, and memory skills using a VR headset,
close to how virtual reality technology is used in dementia clinics to check the
brain functions of older people. While the specifics are yet to be disclosed,
a similar academic research by independent scientists has run an experiment,
esting driving performance evaluation based on virtual reality tech. The
researchers conducted driving simulator experiments to measure various driving
behaviors under many different driving conditions, in order to examine the
participants' visual acuity. The virtual simulations included two scenarios:
daytime and nighttime highway driving. In both cases, three unexpected incidents
were created to test the drivers' performance [...].
URI # Big Tech Firms Should Pay ISPs To Upgrade Networks, Telcos In Europe Claim
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The CEOs of 13 large
European telecom companies today called on tech giants -- presumably including
Netflix and other big US companies -- to pay for a portion of the Internet
service providers' network upgrade costs. In a "joint CEO statement," the
European telcos described their proposal as a "renewed effort to rebalance
he relationship between global technology giants and the European digital
ecosystem." The letter makes an argument similar to one that AT&T and other
US-based ISPs have made at times over the past 15 years, that tech companies
delivering content over the Internet get a "free" ride and should subsidize
he cost of building last-mile networks that connect homes to broadband
access. These arguments generally don't mention the fact that tech giants
already pay for their own Internet bandwidth costs and that Netflix and others
have built their own content-delivery networks to help deliver the traffic that
home-Internet customers choose to receive.
Today's letter from European ISPs was signed by the CEOs of A1 Telekom Austria
Group, Vivacom, Proximus Group, Telenor Group, KPN, Altice Portugal, Deutsche
Telekom, BT Group, Telia Company, Telefonica, Vodafone Group, Orange Group, and
Swisscom. They wrote: "Large and increasing part of network traffic is generated
and monetized by big tech platforms, but it requires continuous, intensive
network investment and planning by the telecommunications sector. This model --
which enables EU citizens to enjoy the fruits of the digital transformation --
can only be sustainable if such big tech platforms also contribute fairly to
network costs." The European telcos didn't mention any specific tech giants,
but Reuters wrote today that "US-listed giants such as Netflix and Facebook
are companies they have in mind." The letter also discusses other regulatory
opics related to fiber and mobile broadband, saying that "regulation must fully
reflect market realities... Namely, that telecom operators compete face-to-face
with services by big tech."
URI # AMD Allegedly Jacking Up RX 6000 GPU Prices by 10 Percent
As wafer costs increase, so are the costs of GPUs. According to a post on the
Board Forums, AMD says it's increasing the price of its RX 6000 series GPUs
by 10 percent across the board. ExtremeTech reports: This pricing change will
apparently occur in the next shipment of GPUs to its partners, which will
apparently drive up the price of these GPUs by $20 to $40 USD. This news arrives
just in time for the holiday shopping season, when demand for GPUs is expected
o increase even more, as if that is even possible.
According to a translation of the board posting, AMD is citing TSMC wafer costs
as the reason for the change, and as we reported earlier, sub-16nm prices,
including 12nm, 7nm, and 5nm, are said to have increased roughly 10 percent,
while TSMC's older nodes have gone up by as much as 20 percent. AMD seems to be
passing this price increase along to its partners, who in turn are passing it
along to us, the customer, or the scalper, as it were. Then the scalper passes
it along to us, the gamers. Although, as Videocardz points out AMD also produces
its CPUs at TSMC and there hasn't been a similar across-the-board increase,
which is curious.
URI # Nissan Lays Out $17.6 Billion Plan To Electrify Its Future
Nissan has announced plans to spend around $17.6 billion over the next five
years to accelerate the roll-out of electric vehicles. "And to emphasize
hat point, Nissan unveiled a pack of delightful EV concepts, including an
adorable pickup truck, an outdoorsy SUV, and a sleek sports car," reports The
Verge. From the report: Nissan said it will produce 23 new electrified models
by 2030, 15 of which will be fully electric. The company is targeting a 50
percent electrification mix for its Nissan and Infiniti brands by the end
of the decade. In the US, Nissan plans to take things a little slower, only
argeting 40 percent of its sales to be EVs by 2040. On batteries, Nissan is
pursuing what it calls "all-solid-state batteries (ASSB)" by 2028. The company
is preparing a "pilot plant" in Yokohama, Japan, for early 2024. Solid-state
batteries could theoretically charge faster, hold more power, and last longer
han traditional lithium-ion batteries, which use liquid electrolytes to move
energy around. While solid-state batteries have eluded researchers for years,
some companies claim that a breakthrough is nearly at hand.
Nissan says that solid-state batteries will help make EVs more affordable by
reducing the price of battery packs down to $75 per kWh by 2028. The company
aims to bring it further down to $65 per kWh to achieve cost parity between
EV and gasoline vehicles in the future. To underline its commitment to an
electric future, Nissan revealed a handful of EV concepts: a small pickup
ruck called Surf-Out; a boxy crossover called Hang-Out; a compact SUV called
Chill-Out; and a convertible sports car called Max-Out. [...] It's an impressive
commitment, but Nissan notably stopped short of making the same promise that
other automakers have to phase out the production of gas-powered vehicles. For
example, Volvo and General Motors have vowed to become EV-only companies by 2030
and 2040, respectively.
URI # Fired Employees Sue Google For Breaching 'Don't Be Evil' Part of Contract
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Three former Google
employees who were fired by the company in 2019 sued Google on Monday,
claiming that the company violated the part of its code of conduct that
says "Don't Be Evil." "Don't Be Evil" was, famously, Google's motto for
years. The company moved away from the motto after renaming itself Alphabet
in 2015, but "Don't Be Evil" is still part of the company's official employee
code of conduct: "Remember don't be evil, and if you see something that you
hink isn't right -- speak up!," the final line of Google's code of conduct
states. Employees are expected to sign the contract as a condition of their
employment at Google.
The new lawsuit, which alleges a breach of contract by Google, comes as part
of drawn out legal proceedings between Google and three former employees
who were fired within minutes of each other on November 25, 2019. Google
claimed to fire the workers for leaking "confidential" information to the
press, and because they engaged in "systematic searches" for information
"outside the scope of their job." But the software engineers say they were
fired for protesting Google's decision to sell cloud computing software to
Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which at the time was caging migrants
and separating parents from children. They circulated a company-wide petition
requesting Google affirm that it would not collaborate with CBP or ICE. The
hree workers, Rebecca Rivers, Paul Duke, and Sophie Waldman, are now suing
Google for allegedly violating its own code of conduct as well as California
public policy. California sued Trump in 2019 over the indefinite detention
of migrant children. "The new complaint alleges that all three of the fired
employees saw Google's collaboration with CBP under the Trump administration
as 'evil' and had followed Google's mandate to call out unethical conduct by
protesting the company's actions," the report adds. "It claims that Google
never informed the fired employees that they had in any way violated the
company's 'data security policy,' and that none of the employees had engaged
in 'systematic searches.' They had only accessed documents that any full-time
Google employee could have found on their own, court documents say."
URI # Amazon Builds Out Network To Speed Delivery, Handle Holiday Crunch
Online retail giant has nearly doubled its fulfillment capacity since the start
of the Covid-19 pandemic. From a report: In the past two years, Amazon.com has
added workers at an unprecedented clip to keep up with a pandemic-induced surge
in demand. As it has done so, an even bigger expansion drew less attention: The
company is close to doubling the size of its fulfillment network. Amazon
blanketed the country with more than 450 new facilities used to store, sort and
ship items, according to logistics consultant MWPVL International, doubling
down on a logistics empire that aims to deliver items in one day or less, and
increasingly to do so without the help of third-party shippers.
Many of the new buildings are concentrated near big cities, putting more items
for sale on the website closer to large population centers. The facilities also
include more than two dozen smaller outposts stocked mostly with bestselling
items, allowing the company to prepare for supply disruptions while also
expanding fast-shipping capabilities, according to MWPVL. During the pandemic,
Amazon put on hold its promise to deliver many items to customers in one
day. Nevertheless, the company continued to build out a network capable of such
a feat. The work prepared Amazon for an unusual holiday shopping season in which
a national labor shortage and global supply-chain challenges have constrained
he ability of many companies to obtain and deliver certain products in as
imely a manner as they did in the past.
Amazon has encouraged customers to shop early this year due to the supply-chain
issues, and company executives have said they are "ready to deliver" and have
been preparing for the holidays since the start of the year. As of mid-November,
more than 98% of parcels that arrived at Amazon's delivery centers, which
ypically are in close proximity to packages' final destinations, were being
delivered the next day, according to estimates from research firm ShipMatrix. At
he same time, some items like household products and sporting goods were
showing delivery windows of a few days, ShipMatrix said, emphasizing Amazon's
message to shop early. Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, said
he company's inventory increased in preparation for the busy period. For the
first time in a while, he said, the company is not capacity-constrained.
URI # Ghost Kitchens Are Proving To Be a Messy Business
Seeking to leverage a boom in food-delivery apps, Reef and competitors build
restaurant kitchens in warehouses or trailers, which are meant to be cheaper and
nimbler than traditional storefronts. From a report: Business models vary, but
Reef generally acts as a franchisee, preparing and selling food with its own
workers and paying a restaurant brand a percentage of each order. The concept
has become particularly popular during the pandemic, as food delivery became
clutch for many consumers and restaurants looked for cheaper places to prepare
food they were delivering, not serving. Investors have poured more than $3.5
billion into ghost-kitchen startups in the past three years, according to data
racker PitchBook Data, a large slug of funding for a fledgling sector. Much
of that funding has come from tech-focused investors who want the rapid growth
often seen in software companies -- and delivery apps, such as DoorDash.
Reef's operational strains illustrate the challenges of meeting investors'
high expectations in the food business, a sector typically defined by low
profit margins and modest growth and one that depends on executing daily in
he nondigital economy with workers, supplies and logistics. Reef, backed by
investors including SoftBank Group, has said it plans to add thousands of mobile
kitchens in parking lots around the world. The company says it currently has
about 350. Big brands have begun to warm to the concept. Chick-fil-A and Yum
Brands' KFC have been experimenting with their own versions of ghost kitchens,
seeing them as a potential area for growth. Wendy's has joined with Reef in
a deal that calls for Reef to open and operate up to 700 locations in North
America, and the U.K. Reef's rivals include CloudKitchens, founded by Travis
Kalanick, who co-founded Uber Technologies.
URI # 'Cyber Grinches' Snatching Toys Should Be Stopped, Lawmakers Say
A group of Democrats wants to stop the Grinch from stealing Christmas. Except
his time around the spoilsport they're targeting is not a furry green creature,
but a robot. From a report: Lawmakers including Senators Richard Blumenthal and
Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to crack down on "cyber Grinches" using bots to
quickly snap up entire inventories of popular holiday toys and resell them at
higher prices. Their actions could make some of the items almost impossible to
buy, the politicians say, exacerbating shortages sparked by supply chain woes.
URI # Stamping Bar Codes on Cells To Solve Medical Mysteries
No one really knew why some patients with a white blood cell cancer called
chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or C.L.L., relapsed after treatment and got a
second cancer. Were some cancer cells just resistant? An unexpected answer
o this mystery has been found using a new technique that researchers call
bar coding: The treatment does not always target the right cells. From a
report: Scientists discovered that the cancer does not always originate in
he mature bone marrow cells where it is found and where textbooks say it
originates. Instead, for some patients, the mother lode of the cancer can be
primitive bone marrow cells, the stem cells, that give rise to all of the
body's white and red blood cells. Those cells, not affected by the chemotherapy
reatment, can spawn new cancer cells, causing a relapse. The discovery is one
early fruit of the bar coding method, which is aiding the study of the origins
of cancer and other diseases. The results are too new to have led to patient
herapies. But they are leading to provocative discoveries that are expected to
inspire novel methods for treating diseases.
The method works by marking individual cells with a stamp that is passed on
o all of a cell's progeny. Researchers can look at a cell, note its bar code
and trace its lineage back to its parents, grandparents, great-grandparents
-- all the way back to its origins -- because each cell that arose from the
original bar coded cell has the same stamp. The idea for bar coding during
embryonic development originated with Dr. Jay Shendure and his colleagues
at the University of Washington, and this class of methods was anointed the
breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2018. Now there is a variety
of methods for bar coding ranging from embryo cells to cancer cells to mature
cells.
For example, Dr. Shendure and another group of colleagues at the University of
Pennsylvania are using bar codes in mice with pancreatic cancer to study the
spread of cancer cells in their bodies. In the case of C.L.L. above, Dr. Vijay
Sankaran at Boston Children's Hospital and his colleagues bar coded human cancer
cells by taking advantage of innocuous, naturally occurring mutations that mark
individual cells and are inherited by their progeny. Bar coding, Dr. Sankaran
said, "starts to give us a view of cancer that we never had before."
URI # Israel and Iran Broaden Cyberwar To Attack Civilian Targets
Iranians couldn't buy gas. Israelis found their intimate dating details posted
online. The Iran-Israel shadow war is now hitting ordinary citizens. From a
report: Millions of ordinary people in Iran and Israel recently found themselves
caught in the crossfire of a cyberwar between their countries. In Tehran, a
dentist drove around for hours in search of gasoline, waiting in long lines at
four gas stations only to come away empty. In Tel Aviv, a well-known broadcaster
panicked as the intimate details of his sex life, and those of hundreds of
housands of others stolen from an L.G.B.T.Q. dating site, were uploaded on
social media. For years, Israel and Iran have engaged in a covert war, by land,
sea, air and computer, but the targets have usually been military or government
related. Now, the cyberwar has widened to target civilians on a large scale. In
recent weeks, a cyberattack on Iran's nationwide fuel distribution system
paralyzed the country's 4,300 gas stations, which took 12 days to have service
fully restored.
That attack was attributed to Israel by two U.S. defense officials, who spoke on
he condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. It
was followed days later by cyberattacks in Israel against a major medical
facility and a popular L.G.B.T.Q. dating site, attacks Israeli officials have
attributed to Iran. The escalation comes as American authorities have warned
of Iranian attempts to hack the computer networks of hospitals and other
critical infrastructure in the United States. As hopes fade for a diplomatic
resurrection of the Iranian nuclear agreement, such attacks are only likely to
proliferate. Hacks have been seeping into civilian arenas for months. Iran's
national railroad was attacked in July, but that relatively unsophisticated
hack may not have been Israeli. And Iran is accused of making a failed attack
on Israel's water system last year. The latest attacks are thought to be the
first to do widespread harm to large numbers of civilians. Nondefense computer
networks are generally less secure than those tied to state security assets.
URI # Chinese Province Targets Journalists, Foreign Students With Planned New Surveillance System
Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned
a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and
international students among other "suspicious people," Reuters reported
Monday, citing internal documents. From the report: A July 29 tender document
published on the Henan provincial government's procurement website -- reported
in the media for the first time -- details plans for a system that can compile
individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial
recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases. A 5
million yuan ($782,000) contract was awarded on Sept. 17 to Chinese tech company
Neusoft (600718.SS), which was required to finish building the system within
wo months of signing the contract, separate documents published on the Henan
government procurement website showed. Reuters was unable to establish if the
system is currently operating.
China is trying to build what some security experts describe as one of the
world's most sophisticated surveillance technology networks, with millions of
cameras in public places and increasing use of techniques such as smartphone
monitoring and facial recognition. U.S.-based surveillance research firm IPVM,
which has closely tracked the network's expansion and first identified the Henan
document, said the tender was unique in specifying journalists as surveillance
argets and providing a blueprint for public security authorities to quickly
locate them and obstruct their work.