Bost 7 News

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Bin Laden Family ‘Henchman’ Is Arrested in Philippines

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Mahmoud Afif Abdeljalil was once considered a close associate of Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law and a financier for Al Qaeda.

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Malaysia durian rush creates thorny environmental problem

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Expected demand from China sparks interest in durian, and concern that rapid expansion will put forests at risk.

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Sudan activists call for million-man march on Thursday

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Sudanese protesters demand justice for the rising number of protesters being killed while campaigning for change.

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Palestinian killed, three Israeli soldiers hurt in Gaza shooting

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Israeli military claims the man crossed the Gaza border into Israel overnight and shot at officers.

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Your Thursday Briefing

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Jeffrey Epstein, Brexit, Democratic Debates: Here’s what you need to know.

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How Sydney Destroyed Its Trams For Love of the Car

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Guardian about the questionable decision in the 1950s to get rid of Sydney's trams in favor of private cars. From the report: In the late 1950s Sydney ripped up its tram network, once one of the largest in the world. Nearly 1,000 trams -- some only a few years old -- were rolled to the workshops in the city's eastern suburbs and stripped of anything that could be sold, before being unceremoniously tipped on their sides, doused with sump oil and set ablaze. Barely a decade before its closure, Sydney's tram system had carried 400 million passenger journeys a year on a network of more than 250km, primarily serving the eastern, southern and inner-west suburbs, and stretching as far north as Narrabeen at its peak. But the explosion of car traffic in the postwar years persuaded the New South Wales government that urban freeways were the way of the future (the first in Australia, the Cahill Expressway, opened in 1958), and trams were an impediment to that vision. The destruction of the network from the mid-50s was swift and brutal. In 1958 the bizarre castellated Fort Macquarie depot at Circular Quay was demolished to make way for the Opera House, and the lines along George Street were torn up. The last Sydney tram ran on 25 February 1961 from Hunter Street to La Perouse (along much of the same route now being rebuilt), packed to the rafters and greeted by crowds of people, before it joined the dismal procession to "burning hill" at Randwick. Mathew Hounsell, a senior research consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, has called the destruction of the network "the largest organized vandalism in our nation's history." He says the decisions made in the 50s had a disastrous long-term effect. "When the trams were removed from Sydney, mass transport patronage plummeted and private car usage soared. Our space-saving trams were replaced with ever-more space-hungry cars, causing ever-worsening traffic. That wasn't how the planners saw it at the time. They were strongly swayed by powerful international influences, which chimed with the unstoppable rise of private car ownership in Australia. The trams are slowly returning, as the city painfully rebuilds a tiny part of its old system. "The construction of 12.8km of light rail from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kingsford will cost $2.7 billion at the latest estimate, has caused untold misery to shops and other businesses in its path and will be almost a year overdue by the time even the first section is open," the report says. "The new line hardly represents a fundamental shift in Sydney's transport thinking, coming as it does alongside the vast 'congestion-busting' WestConnex freeway project, and further investment in metro rail (a separate light rail link is also under construction at Parramatta). But it is a reminder that the city might have looked very different today but for the decision taken in the 1950s -- and ruthlessly carried out -- to prioritize motor transport."

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Second US Democratic debate night two: What did candidates say?

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other Democratic 2020 candidates clash over healthcare and immigration.

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US believes Osama bin Laden's son Hamza is dead: report

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Three US officials confirmed Hamza's death to a TV station while another report says he died in the last two years.

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Egypt must end human rights abuses of political prisoners: group

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Egyptian political prisoners on hunger strike demand medical care, family visits, end of their human rights abuse

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Researchers Develop Speedy Soft Robot That's More Robust Than a Cockroach

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Researchers from Tsinghua University in China and University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new kind of soft robot that looks like a bent strip of paper, but is able to move at 20 body lengths per second and survive being stomped on. The robot has been presented in the current issue of Science Robotics. IEEE Spectrum reports: This prototype robot measures just 3 centimeters by 1.5 cm. It takes a scanning electron microscope to actually see what the robot is made of -- a thermoplastic layer is sandwiched by palladium-gold electrodes, bonded with adhesive silicone to a structural plastic at the bottom. When an AC voltage (as low as 8 volts but typically about 60 volts) is run through the electrodes, the thermoplastic extends and contracts, causing the robot's back to flex and the little "foot" to shuffle. A complete step cycle takes just 50 milliseconds, yielding a 200 hertz gait. And technically, the robot "runs," since it does have a brief aerial phase. The researchers also put together a prototype with two legs instead of one, which was able to demonstrate a potentially faster galloping gait by spending more time in the air. They suggest that robots like these could be used for "environmental exploration, structural inspection, information reconnaissance, and disaster relief," which are the sorts of things that you suggest that your robot could be used for when you really have no idea what it could be used for. But this work is certainly impressive, with speed and robustness that are largely unmatched by other soft robots. An untethered version seems possible due to the relatively low voltages required to drive the robot, and if they can put some peanut-sized sensors on there as well, practical applications might actually be forthcoming sometime soon.

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Kelly Craft, Trump Nominee for U.N. Ambassador, Confirmed by Senate

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Senators voted largely along party lines to confirm Ms. Craft, who became the American ambassador to Canada in 2017.

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Cisco To Pay $8.6 Million Fine For Selling Hackable Surveillance Tech

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a claim that it sold video surveillance software it knew was vulnerable to hackers to hospitals, airports, schools, state governments and federal agencies. SFGate reports: The tech giant continued to sell the software and didn't fix the massive security weakness for about four years after a whistleblower alerted the company about it in 2008, according to a settlement unsealed Wednesday with the Justice Department and 15 states as well as the District of Columbia. Hackers could use the flaw not just to spy on video footage but to turn surveillance cameras on and off, delete footage and even potentially compromise other connected physical security systems such as alarms or locks - all without being detected, according to Hamsa Mahendranathan, an attorney at Constantine Cannon, which represented whistleblower James Glenn. The settlement marks the first time a company has been forced to pay out under a federal whistleblower law for not having adequate cybersecurity protections.

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Spotify Keeps Big Lead Over Apple Music But Disappoints With 108M Subscribers

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

In its second-quarter report, Spotify said its subscribers rose 31% year over year to hit 108 million subscribers at the end of June. "That figure was weaker than Spotify expected but keeps it well above its closest competitor, Apple Music, which had 60 million subscribers as of June," reports CNET. From the report: Spotify also said Wednesday that 232 million people now use its service at least once a month, up 29% from a year earlier. Spotify, unlike Apple, has a free tier that lets anyone listen to music with advertising. Apple has never disclosed a monthly-active-user stat; almost all people who use Apple Music are subscribers. Spotify's growth in monthly active users beat the best-case prediction the company made in April, coming in 4 million above the 228 million high end of guidance. But its subscribers -- who make Spotify way more money than ad-supported free listeners -- were at the low end of its expectations. Its 108 million figure scraped into its guidance range of 107 million to 110 million. Its subscriber growth was relatively weaker because fewer people signed up for its heavily discounted student plan. Spotify also said it would make up for the latest quarter's shortfall by the end of the year. Looking ahead, Spotify predicted that it will have 110 million to 114 million paid subscribers by the end of September and that its monthly active users will increase to between 240 million and 245 million. By the end of the year, it expects to cross the milestone of a quarter of a billion monthly listeners.

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Hamza bin Laden, Son of Qaeda Founder, Is Dead

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

The United States had a role in the operation that killed the younger Mr. bin Laden, officials said. But other details, including where he died, remained unknown.

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North Korea says it tested new rocket system

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

State news agency says leader Kim Jong Un supervised the test firings and had expressed 'satisfaction' over the outcome.

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India’s ‘Coffee King’ Found Dead Amid Financial Troubles

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

V.G. Siddhartha beat Starbucks to dominate India’s retail coffee industry, but he also faced growing debt and pressure from the tax authorities.

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French Startup Transition-One Plans a $5,600 Electric Makeover For Your Old Diesel Car

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About 5,000 euros ($5,600) are set to buy your 10-year-old combustion clunker an electric makeover -- and offer a cut-price way to avoid driving bans across European cities. French startup Transition-One has developed retrofitting technology that adds an electric engine, batteries and a connected dashboard into older models of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Volkswagen AG, Renault SA and PSA Group for about 8,500 euros, or 5,000 euros after government subsidies in France. In the prototype Twingo, three battery packs are fitted in front and two in what used to be the gas tank. The whole pack, bought from a Tesla Inc. parts reseller, weighs 120 kilograms (265 pounds). To compare, Renault's electric Zoe has a 290 kilogram battery for a 210 kilometer driving range. Prices start at around 23,000 euros excluding battery rental battery. The transition takes less than a day, leaving the original stick shift and gear box and installing the plug behind the hatch that drivers usually pop open to refill the tank. Founder Aymeric Libeau, whose previous experiences include co-founding software company Pentalog Group, has worked on retrofitting for two years, and tested the method with a French business school. He is looking to raise 6 million euros to build a factory he says would be capable of churning out as many as 4,000 vehicles next year. Libeau expects French and European regulator approval by the end of the year and will start pre-orders in September to test demand.

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India’s Parliament OKs Ending Instant Divorce for Muslims

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

More than 20 countries, including neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, have banned the practice.

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Hong Kong Charges Dozens of Protesters With Rioting, and Clashes Erupt

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

The charges, which carry a 10-year prison term, stirred more public anger about the government’s response to mass demonstrations.

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Arabic, Muslim symbols ordered taken down in China's capital

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Campaign in Beijing marks a new phase in drive aimed at ensuring religions conform to mainstream Chinese culture.

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Rupert Stadler, Ex-Audi Chief, Charged With Fraud in Diesel Scandal

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Mr. Stadler, who led Volkswagen’s Audi luxury car division, was charged in Munich with fraud and illegal advertising tied to the company’s diesel emissions scandal.

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A Provocateur on the Front Lines of China’s War of Words With the U.S.

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, is a combative public voice for Xi Jinping’s government at a time of open rivalry with the United States.

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University of California Sues Five Major Retailers Over Edison-Style LED Bulbs

By July 31, 2019 No comments:

The University of California is suing five major retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, IKEA, and Bed Bath & Beyond, for infringing on four patents related to "filament" LED light bulbs. Reuters reports: These patents relate to what the university called the "reinvention of the light bulb" by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara led by professor Shuji Nakamura, who won the 2014 Nobel prize for physics. The university is seeking unspecified damages, including royalties, in lawsuits filed with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, and wants the retailers to enter license agreements. It has also asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to open a probe into the retailers' conduct, saying the retailers have failed to require their suppliers to honor the university's patents. Filament LED light bulbs are sometimes called "Edison" or "vintage" bulbs because they resemble light bulbs created by Thomas Edison that have glowing filaments visible inside. According to the university's lawyers at Nixon Peabody, the litigation is the first-of-its-kind "direct patent enforcement" campaign against an entire industry. The university said it was intended "to spearhead a broader, national response to the existential threat" posed by the "widespread disregard" for the patent rights of universities, including when schools encourage the private sector to develop commercial products containing their research.

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Philippines protests 'swarming' of over 100 Chinese vessels

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

President Rodrigo Duterte's national security adviser reveals that 113 Chinese vessels were spotted near Pag-asa island.

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ASEAN meeting: North Korean tensions, trade to dominate talks

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

North Korea's nuclear issues, China's expansionist plans and trade war likely to feature in Southeast Asian summit.

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At least 28 killed as Afghan bus hits 'Taliban' bomb

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

All victims were civilians, mostly women and children, and the death toll may rise higher, Farah official says.

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Sudan's schools shut after student deaths

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Ruling military council orders nationwide schools closure after schoolchildren die in Monday protest

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Second US Democratic debate night one: What did candidates say?

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Warren and Sanders offer unabashed defence of their progressive policies during the second 2020 Democratic debate.

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Sudan's schools shut after student deaths

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Ruling military council orders nationwide schools closure after school children die in Monday protest

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Playing for time: China, Hong Kong and its deepening protests

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

China seems to indicate further reliance on police - not military - force to contain Hong Kong protesters.

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Syria's hospitals bombed: UN Security Council calls for inquiry

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Growing frustration over the inaction of the United Nations as the Syrian government continues to hit Idlib's hospitals.

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Ex-Tehran mayor sentenced to death over wife's murder in Iran

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Mohammad Ali Najafi, an Iranian reformist and an economic adviser to President Rouhani, plans to appeal verdict.

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Your Wednesday Briefing

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Boris Johnson, Democratic Party, North Korea: Here’s what you need to know.

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China Is On Track To Beat Its Peak-Emissions Pledge

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

A new study led by Haikun Wang, Xi Lu, and Yu Deng examines the relationship between economic growth and emissions to project that China's should peak in the early 2020s. Ars Technica reports: The analysis uses data from 50 Chinese cities for a representative sampling of the factors at work across the country. The cities combine to account for about 35% of national emissions, 30% of the population, and 50% of total gross domestic product (GDP). These cities vary widely, from types of industry to affluence to sources of power on the local grid. But the researchers see evidence that these metropolises follow an economic relationship known as the environmental Kuznets curve -- emissions per capita stops increasing once a certain GDP per capita is reached. The idea is basically that dirty growth eventually provides the resources to switch to cleaner options. After adjusting for things like location (whether a city's electricity is supplied mainly by coal or by nuclear and renewables) and the population density of cities of different sizes, the researchers calculated that emissions reach a peak when per-capita emissions hit about 10 tons of CO2 per year. That happens at an average per-capita GDP of US$21,000. When China signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, it was at an average of about 7.5 tons of CO2 per person per year and a per-capita GDP of $13,500. Based on World Bank economic projections, the researchers calculate China should hit $21,000 -- and so peak emissions -- between 2021 and 2025. That would equate to peak national emissions of 13-16 billion tons of CO2 per year, compared to emissions of roughly 10 billion tons of CO2 in 2015. (For context, the United States is emitting around 5.5 billion tons of CO2 each year with a little less than a quarter of China's population.)

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Dozens charged with rioting to appear in Hong Kong court

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Riot charges against 44 defendants are the most serious case brought to court since protests began last month.

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Researchers Demonstrate Two-Track Algorithm For Detecting Deepfakes

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers have demonstrated a new algorithm for detecting so-called deepfake images -- those altered imperceptibly by AI systems, potentially for nefarious purposes. Initial tests of the algorithm picked out phony from undoctored images down to the individual pixel level with between 71 and 95 percent accuracy, depending on the sample data set used. The algorithm has not yet been expanded to include the detection of deepfake videos. One component of the algorithm is a variety of a so-called "recurrent neural network," which splits the image in question into small patches and looks at those patches pixel by pixel. The neural network has been trained by letting it examine thousands of both deepfake and genuine images, so it has learned some of the qualities that make fakes stand out at the single-pixel level. Another portion of the algorithm, on a parallel track to the part looking at single pixels, passes the whole image through a series of encoding filters -- almost as if it were performing an image compression, as when you click the "compress image" box when saving a TIFF or a JPEG. These filters, in a mathematical sense, enable the algorithm to consider the entire image at larger, more holistic levels. The algorithm then compares the output of the pixel-by-pixel and higher-level encoding filter analyses. When these parallel analyses trigger red flags over the same region of an image, it is then tagged as a possible deepfake. The deepfake-detecting algorithm has been described in a recent IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

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The Hottest Phones For the Next Billion Users Aren't Smartphones

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Millions of first-time internet consumers from the Ivory Coast to India and Indonesia are connecting to the web on smart feature phones that cost only about $25. "[T]hese hybrid phones, fueled by inexpensive mobile data, provide some basic apps and internet access in addition to calling and texting," the Wall Street Journal reports. From the report: While global smartphone sales began sliding last year as markets became saturated, smart feature phone shipments tripled to around 75 million from 2017, according to research firm Counterpoint. Some 84 million are likely to be shipped this year. Even as rich nations start to roll out 5G technologies, some 3.4 billion people around the world remain cut off from the internet, according to We Are Social, another research firm. Most of them already use traditional, unconnected mobile phones, meaning they can easily make the transition to similarly shaped devices capable of high-speed web connections. Smart feature phones aren't only inexpensive, but they also have physical keypads that are less intimidating than touch screens for those new to the technology. Meanwhile, their batteries last for days, a bonus in places where electricity is unreliable. There is a trade-off for the low price. The devices typically have slower and less powerful components, only basic cameras and their screens are usually just a few inches in size, factors that contribute to their longer battery life. There also are fewer apps available for smart feature phones.

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India’s Parliament OKs Ending Instant Divorce for Muslims

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

More than 20 countries, including neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, have banned the practice.

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Google Reveals Fistful of Flaws In Apple's iMessage App

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Google researchers have shared details of five flaws in Apple's iMessage software that could make its devices vulnerable to attack. The BBC reports: In one case, the researchers said the vulnerability was so severe that the only way to rescue a targeted iPhone would be to delete all the data off it. Another example, they said, could be used to copy files off a device without requiring the owner to do anything to aid the hack. Apple released fixes last week. But the researchers said they had also flagged a sixth problem to Apple, which had not been rectified in the update to its mobile operating system. Apple's own notes about iOS 12.4 indicate that the unfixed flaw could give hackers a means to crash an app or execute commands of their own on recent iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches if they were able to discover it. Apple has not commented on this specific issue, but has urged users to install the new version of iOS, which addresses Google's other discoveries as well as a further range of glitches and threats. One of the two Google researchers involved - Natalie Silvanovich - intends to share more details of her findings at a presentation at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas next month.

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AT&T Kills DirecTV Now Brand Name As TV Subscribers Leave In Droves

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is eliminating the DirecTV Now brand name it uses for its struggling Internet-based TV service. DirecTV Now will become "AT&T TV Now" later this summer, AT&T announced today. DirecTV Now (the future "AT&T TV Now") offers a bundle of linear TV channels, similar to traditional cable or satellite services, and AT&T said its core offering won't be changed. AT&T's 2015 purchase of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV network, doesn't seem to be paying off as AT&T hoped. AT&T launched DirecTV Now -- a stripped-down, online-only version of DirecTV -- in 2016, and it was immediately plagued by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels. While the technical problems got sorted out, AT&T's subscriber gains were short-lived. As we wrote last week, AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019 after announcing a series of price increases. The 946,000-subscriber loss consisted of a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in AT&T's DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services, as well as 168,000 lost subscribers to DirecTV Now. The losses are much bigger when you look at the past year instead of just the past three months. Including all three services, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2018 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. DirecTV Now subscribers dropped from 1.8 million to 1.3 million in the past year. The report notes that the satellite TV service will still keep the DirecTV name, at least for the time being. AT&T said the actual DirecTV Now service will remain the same despite the name change. "Our DirecTV Now subscribers will simply need to re-accept the terms of service and their streaming will continue as usual without interruption," AT&T said.

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China defends controversial re-education centres for Uighurs

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

Amid allegations of rights abuses, Xinjiang governor insists centres are necessary to fight 'extremism' and 'terrorism'.

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How You Move Your Phone Can Reveal Insights Into Your Personality

By July 30, 2019 No comments:

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: It may sound strange at first, but a team of researchers in Australia has come up with a method to predict your personality traits using just the accelerometer in your phone. Well, that and your call and messaging activity logs. Also, the system works for some traits better than others. But it's an interesting take on how we may find connections through such seemingly unrelated things. In this case, we start at the Big Five personality traits. These have been used in psychology since the 1980's to help classify five dominant parts of our personalities. These five traits are extraversion (outgoing vs reserved), openness (curious vs cautious), neuroticism (confidence vs nervous), agreeableness (compassionate vs detached) and conscientiousness (organised vs easy-going). The researchers analysed 52 people's phone habits between March 2010 and July 2011. Each participant was given a phone with sensing and collection software on it, which gave the researchers information on when and how much the phone was moving (accelerometer data), as well as the number and time of day of all calls and messages. The participants were also asked to complete a Big Five survey to score their personalities on the five traits. Then, the team also created a list of features related to the aspects of phone use they measured, that might potentially determine personality traits; for example, physical activity on weekend nights might predict extraversion, or the number of calls one makes might predict agreeableness. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that some of the phone features really did predict some of the personality traits for the 52 participants. The phone data best predicted neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion, but had trouble predicting the other two traits, especially openness. "There's also the issue of whether the team were actually looking at personality traits, or if the personality traits could be masked by other factors," the report adds. "For instance, neuroticism may be associated with different regularity of activity intensity in the night, however we cannot rule out many other possible explanations (e.g. neurotic people are more prone to stress and therefore - if this is the case, anyone with different personality traits that are stressed will still exhibit the same results)." The study has been published in the journal Computer.

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Syria's war: Idlib's hospitals under attack, at least 14 killed

By July 29, 2019 No comments:

Civilians, medical workers and health centres have all been hit by government air attacks.

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China Says It Has Released Most Muslims Held in Camps. That’s Difficult to Prove.

By July 29, 2019 No comments:

The announcement is impossible to independently verify in tightly controlled Xinjiang, and runs counter to accounts of detentions compiled by activists.

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Capital One Says Hacker Breached Accounts of 100 Million People; Ex-Amazon Employee Arrested

By July 29, 2019 No comments:

CaptainDork shares a report from Forbes: Capital One said Monday that sensitive financial information -- including social security and bank account numbers -- from over 100 million people were exposed in a massive data breach that led to the arrest of former Amazon employee Paige Thompson, a hacker who lives in Seattle. The information was taken from credit card applications submitted to the Virginia-based bank from 2005-2019. These included names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and self-reported income. Additionally, Capital One said that 140,000 Social Security and 80,000 linked bank account numbers were compromised as well as fragments of transaction data from a total of 23 days during 2016, 2017 and 2018. No credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were exposed. Individuals whose information was compromised in the breach will be notified by Capital One. According to court documents, Paige Thompson was arrested for hacking into cloud computer servers rented by Capital One. Investigators say Thompson previously worked at the cloud computing company whose servers were breached, but did not name the company. "Thompson's resume, which is still online, and her LinkedIn profile indicate that she worked at Amazon, which operates the popular cloud computing business Amazon Web Services, from 2015-2016," reports Forbes. "Thompson allegedly posted the information from the hack on her Github profile, which included a link to her resume, leading the FBI to her. The hack occurred on March 22 or 23, the court documents say, but no one at Capital One knew the bank had been breached until four months later when an anonymous security researcher alerted them."

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