Cade Metz from The New York Times pays tribute to Tony Brooker, the mathematician and computer scientist who designed the programming language for the world's first commercial computer. Brooker died on Nov. 20 at the age of 94. From the report: Mr. Brooker had been immersed in early computer research at the University of Cambridge when one day, on his way home from a mountain-climbing trip in North Wales, he stopped at the University of Manchester to tour its computer lab, which was among the first of its kind. Dropping in unannounced, he introduced himself to Alan Turing, a founding father of the computer age, who at the time was the lab's deputy director. When Mr. Brooker described his own research at the University of Cambridge, he later recalled, Mr. Turing said, "Well, we can always employ someone like you." Soon they were colleagues.

Mr. Brooker joined the Manchester lab in October 1951, just after it installed a new machine called the Ferranti Mark 1. His job, he told the British Library in an interview in 2010, was to make the Mark 1 "usable." Mr. Turing had written a user's manual, but it was far from intuitive. To program the machine, engineers had to write in binary code -- patterns made up of 0s and 1s -- and they had to write them backward, from right to left, because this was the way the hardware read them. It was "extremely neat and very clever but pretty meaningless and very unfriendly," Mr. Brooker said. In the months that followed, Mr. Brooker wrote a language he called Autocode, based on ordinary numbers and letters. It allowed anyone to program the machine -- not just the limited group of trained engineers who understood the hardware. This marked the beginning of what were later called "high-level" programming languages -- languages that provide increasingly simple and intuitive ways of giving commands to computers, from the IBM mainframes of the 1960s to the PCs of the 1980s to the iPhones of today.

mschaffer writes: Apparently Facebook had a recent privacy problem of a different kind. A thief broke into an employee's car and stole equipment -- including hard drives that contained unencrypted personal data of former Facebook employees. "Out of abundance of caution," Facebook alerted their current and former employees about the theft. "The hard drives, which were unencrypted, included payroll data like employee names, bank account numbers and the last four digits of employees' social security numbers," reports Bloomberg. "The drives also included compensation information, including salaries, bonus amounts, and some equity details. In total, the drives contained personal data for about 29,000 U.S. employees who worked at Facebook in 2018."

"We worked with law enforcement as they investigated a recent car break-in and theft of an employee's bag containing company equipment with employee payroll information stored on it," the spokeswoman said in a statement shared with Bloomberg. "We have seen no evidence of abuse and believe this was a smash and grab crime rather than an attempt to steal employee information."

New submitter tubajock writes: According to NOLA.com, New Orleans City Hall workers were told by a PA system broadcast to immediately unplug all computer systems from the network [following a cyberattack that struck the city government]. The city website is also down and the city has implemented its Emergency Operations Center as well as contacted state and federal authorities for help. Beau Tidwell, a spokesman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell, said the cyberattack started sometime after 11 a.m. In addition to city hall workers, the New Orleans Police Department has also been told to shut down their computers and remove everything from the network.

Thankfully, 9-1-1 and 3-1-1 calls are not impacted by the attack and residents can still access the online 3-1-1 systems through its site, nola311.org.

At the 2019 Game Awards today, Microsoft revealed the name and console design of its next-generation gaming console: Xbox Series X. The Verge reports: The console itself looks far more like a PC than we've seen from previous Xbox consoles, and Microsoft's trailer provides a brief glimpse at the new design. The console itself is designed to be used in both vertical and horizontal orientations, and Microsoft's Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, promises that it will "deliver four times the processing power of Xbox One X in the most quiet and efficient way."

The Xbox Series X will include a custom-designed CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA architecture. Microsoft is also using an SSD on Xbox Series X, which promises to boost load times. Xbox Series X will also support 8K gaming, frame rates of up to 120 fps in games, ray tracing, and variable refresh rate support. Microsoft also revealed a new Xbox Wireless Controller today. "Its size and shape have been refined to accommodate an even wider range of people, and it also features a new Share button to make capturing screenshots and game clips simple," explains Spencer. This updated controller will work with existing Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs, and will ship with every Xbox Series X.

The San Francisco workforce of Spin, the e-scooter company owned by Ford, have unionized, in a first for the industry. Mashable reports: Having voted to unionize on Dec. 5, the workers were authorized to join the Teamsters Local 665 chapter on Wednesday. As well as office-based staff, scooter rental companies largely rely on a workforce of independent contractors, i.e. gig workers, to charge, maintain, relocate, and check the 85,000 or so vehicles scattered in cities around the U.S. But Spin says its entire San Francisco workforce of 100 people is comprised of W2 employees, and this is "the model" for its 60-plus other markets.

A Spin spokesperson told Mashable on Wednesday evening that the company would not be approaching the collective bargaining negotiations with an "adversarial" mindset, as it respects workers' right to unionize, and that the labor peace agreement the San Francisco office signed with the Teamsters earlier this year included a neutrality clause for that reason. "Spin has long differentiated itself with our workforce policies, choosing a W-2 model and local hiring over independent contractors and staffing agencies," the spokesperson said. "We believe investing in everyone from our headquarters to our warehouses leads to a safer, more reliable service." "We don't anticipate any changes to our work force from unionization."

MikeChino shares a report from Dwell: In Tabasco, Mexico, a family living below the poverty line recently visited their future home: a 3D-printed, 500-square foot structure with two bedrooms, one bath, a wraparound cement patio, and an awning over the front porch. It's one of two fully furnished homes -- printed in about 24 hours and finished by local nonprofit ECHALE -- that will soon make up a larger community of 50 dwellings with green spaces, parks, amenities, and basic utilities. Tabasco is a seismic zone, so the homes were engineered beyond standard safety requirements -- and they'll endure for generations. "Icon's printer, called the Vulcan II, isn't the first designed to build an entire house," notes Fast Company. "But the new Mexican neighborhood, which will have 50 of the homes, will be the first community to use this type of technology at scale."

New Story, the nonprofit leading the project, has posted a video about the homes on their YouTube channel.

dryriver writes: The sheer extent of the data privacy catastrophe happening -- everything software/hardware potentially spies on us, and we don't get to see what is in the source code or circuit diagrams -- got me thinking about an intriguing possibility. Will it ever be possible to design and manufacture your own CPU, GPU, ASIC or RAM chip right in your own home? 3D printers already allow 3D objects to be printed at home that would previously have required an injection molding machine. Inkjet printers can do high DPI color printouts at home that would previously have required a printing press. Could this ever happen for making computer hardware? A compact home machine that can print out DIY electronic circuits right in your home or garage? Could this machine look a bit like a large inkjet printer, where you load the electronics equivalent of "premium glossy photo paper" into the printer, and out comes a printed, etched, or otherwise created integrated circuit that just needs some electricity to start working? If such a machine or "electronics printer" is technically feasible, would the powers that be ever allow us to own one?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Academics from three universities across Europe have disclosed today a new attack that impacts the integrity of data stored inside Intel SGX, a highly-secured area of Intel CPUs. The attack, which researchers have named Plundervolt, exploits the interface through which an operating system can control an Intel processor's voltage and frequency -- the same interface that allows gamers to overclock their CPUs. Academics say they discovered that by tinkering with the amount of voltage and frequency a CPU receives, they can alter bits inside SGX to cause errors that can be exploited at a later point after the data has left the security of the SGX enclave. They say Plundervolt can be used to recover encryption keys or introduce bugs in previously secure software. Intel desktop, server, and mobile CPUs are impacted. A full list of vulnerable CPUs is available here. Intel has also released microcode (CPU firmware) and BIOS updates today that address the Plundervolt attack [by allowing users to disable the energy management interface at the source of the attack, if not needed]. Proof-of-concept code for reproducing attacks will be released on GitHub.

Intel chief executive Bob Swan says he's willing to let go the company's traditional dominance of the market for CPUs in order to meet the rising demand for newer, more specialized silicon chips for applications such as AI and autonomous cars. From a report: Intel's Bob Swan blames being focused on 90% CPU market share as a reason for missing opportunities and transitions, envisions Intel as having 30% of all-silicon TAM instead of majority CPU TAM. Just a few years ago, Intel owned more than 90% of the market share in the x86 CPU market. Many financial models used Intel's revenue as a proxy for the Total Available Market of the CPU sector. With a full-year revenue of $59.4 billion in 2017, you can estimate the total TAM of the CPU side of things at roughly $66 billion (2017 est). Bob Swan believes that this mindset of protecting a majority share in the CPU side has led to Intel becoming complacent and missing out on major opportunities. Bob even went as far as to say that he is trying to "destroy" this thinking of having a 90% market share in the CPU side and instead wants people to come into office thinking Intel has 30% market share in "all Silicon." Swan on how Intel got to the place where it is now: How we got here is really kind of threefold, one we got a lot faster than we expected and the demand for CPUs and servers grew much faster than we expected in 2018. You'll remember we came into 2018 projecting a 10% growth and we grew by 21% growth so the good news problem is that demand for our products in our transformation to a data-centric company was much higher than we expected. Secondly, we took on a 100% market share for smartphone modem and we decided that we would build it in our fabs, so we took on even more demand. And third, to exacerbate that, we slipped on bringing our 10nm to life and when that happens you build more and more performance into your last generation for us -- 14nm -- which means there is a higher core count and larger die size. So those three -- growing much faster than we thought, bringing modems inside and delaying 10nm resulted in a position where we didn't have flexible capacity.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Robots have replaced thousands of routine jobs on Wall Street. Now, they're coming for higher-ups.

That's the contention of Marcos Lopez de Prado, a Cornell University professor and the former head of machine learning at AQR Capital Management LLC, who testified in Washington on Friday about the impact of artificial intelligence on capital markets and jobs. The use of algorithms in electronic markets has automated the jobs of tens of thousands of execution traders worldwide, and it's also displaced people who model prices and risk or build investment portfolios, he said.

"Financial machine learning creates a number of challenges for the 6.14 million people employed in the finance and insurance industry, many of whom will lose their jobs -- not necessarily because they are replaced by machines, but because they are not trained to work alongside algorithms," Lopez de Prado told the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services.

An anonymous reader quotes Utility Dive: Average market prices for battery packs have plunged from $1,100 per kilowatt hour in 2010 to $156 per kilowatt hour in 2019, an 87% fall in real terms, according to a report released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). Prices are projected to fall to around $100 per kilowatt hour by 2023, driving electrification across the global economy, according to BNEF's forecast. BNEF's latest forecast, from its 2019 Battery Price Survey, is an example of how advancements in battery technology have driven down costs at rates faster than previously predicted. Three years ago, when battery prices were around $300 per kilowatt hour, BNEF projected they would fall to $120 per kilowatt hour by 2030...

The cost of lithium-ion batteries mandates the cost of electric vehicles for consumers and the ability of battery storage projects to compete in electricity markets. As they get cheaper, batteries will be used in more industry sectors. "For example, the electrification of commercial vehicles, like delivery vans, is becoming increasingly attractive," BNEF said.

Earlier this year, Amazon placed an order for 100,000 all-electric delivery vans from Michigan-based start-up manufacturer Rivian. Just this week, Reuters reported that DHL will run pilot programs for its StreetScooter electric delivery vehicles in U.S. cities, starting in 2020.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage," says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Hunt and his collaborators have devised a novel system to complement lithium-ion battery use for energy storage over the long run: Mountain Gravity Energy Storage, or MGES for short. Similar to hydroelectric power, MGES involves storing material at elevation to produce gravitational energy. The energy is recovered when the stored material falls and turns turbines to generate electricity. The group describes its system in a paper published November 6 in Energy.

"Instead of building a dam, we propose building a big sand or gravel reservoir," explains Hunt. The key to MGES lies in finding two mountaintop sites that have a suitable difference in elevation -- 1,000 meters is ideal. "The greater the height difference, the cheaper the technology," he says. The sites will look similar, with each comprised of a mine-like station to store the sand or gravel, and a filling station directly below it. Valves release the material into waiting vessels, which are then transported via cranes and motor-run cables to the upper site. There, the sand or gravel is stored -- for weeks, months, or even years -- until it's ready to be used. When the material is moved back down the mountain, that stored gravitational energy is released and converted into electrical energy. Not only is the system more environmentally friendly than pumped-storage hydropower and dams, but it's more flexible to meet varying energy demands.

"Hunt estimates that the annual cost of storing energy via this system will vary between $50 to $100 per megawatt hour (MWh)," the report adds. "And he says that the energy expended to transport materials to the upper sits will be offset by the amount of gravitational energy the system produces."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is taking delivery this month of the first batch of carbon-free aluminum produced by a Montreal-based venture, helping move the iPhone maker closer to its greenhouse-gas reduction goal. Elysis, a joint venture between Rio Tinto Group and Alcoa Corp. backed by Apple, uses new technology that emits pure oxygen when producing aluminum. Apple has said in an environment report that 80% of its emissions from an iPhone 8 came during the production phase. The metal is also used in iPads, Macs and Apple watches. Rio's commercial network is handling the first delivery to Apple, a Rio spokesman said in an email. The metal being shipped to Apple was produced at the Alcoa Technical Center in Pittsburgh. "This first sale is tangible evidence of our revolutionary work to transform and disrupt the conventional smelting process by making a process that is both more efficient and more sustainable," Benjamin Kahrs, an Alcoa executive vice president and Chief Innovation Officer, said in a statement.

Magic Leap just announced that they're in the midst of closing a Series E round of funding, but it sounds like they're going to have to clinch that investment with some pretty troubling sales numbers for their only device on the market. From a report: The Information is reporting [paywalled] that Magic Leap managed to sell just 6,000 units of its $2,300 Magic Leap One headset in its first six months on sale, a figure made worse by CEO Rony Abovitz's internal claims that he wanted the startup to sell at least one million units of the device in the first year, a goal the report states he was later convinced to rethink -- Abovitz later projected the company would sell 100,000 units in the first year. The report adds that Magic Leap's second-generation VR headset is "years away from launch" and the startup recently laid off dozens of employees. Magic Leaps counts Google, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Alibaba, Qualcomm, AT&T, Japan's NTT Docomo, and the government of Saudi Arabia among its investors.

Further reading: Magic Leap Finally Demoed Its Headset And It Is 'Disappointing'; Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap, Says Oculus Cofounder; Oculus CTO Carmack Downplays Consumer AR, Calls Magic Leap Overhyped; and The Magic Leap Con.

Japan's economy and industry ministry said Monday that it will start removing melted fuel from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2021. The milestone step of debris removal is considered the most difficult part of cleaning up the crisis-hit facility. ABC News reports: Nearly nine years after [the Fukushima nuclear power plant was wrecked by a massive earthquake and tsunami], the decommissioning of the plant, where three reactors melted, remains largely an uncertainty. The revised road map, to be formally approved later this month, lacks details on how the complex should look at the end but maintains a 30- to 40-year target to finish.

By far the toughest challenge is to remove the 800 tons of nuclear fuel in the three reactors that melted, fell from the cores and hardened at the bottom of their primary containment vessels. In the past two years, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), has made progress in gathering details mainly from two of the three reactors. In February, a small telescopic robot sent inside Unit 2 showed that small pieces of debris can come off and be lifted out. The milestone step of debris removal is scheduled to begin at Unit 2 by the end of 2021. [...] TEPCO started removing the fuel rods from the Unit 3 pool in April 2019 and aims to get all 566 removed by March 2021. Removal of the rods from Units 1 and 2 is to begin in 2023. By 2031, TEPCO also plans to remove thousands at two other units that survived the tsunami to be stored in dry casks on the compound. More than 6,300 fuel rods were in six reactor cooling pools at the time of the accident, and only the Unit 4 pool has been emptied. "Japan has yet to develop a plan to dispose of the highly radioactive waste that will come out of the reactors," the report adds. "Under the road map, the government and TEPCO will compile a plan sometime after the first decade of debris removal ending in 2031."

"Experts say a 30- to 40-year completion target for the decommissioning is too optimistic. Some have raised doubts if removing all of the melted fuel is doable and suggest an approach like Chernobyl -- contain the reactors and wait until radioactivity naturally decreases."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Road to VR: Qualcomm today announced Snapdragon XR2 5G, its latest chipset platform dedicated to the needs of standalone VR and AR headsets. The new platform is aimed at high-end devices with support for 3K x 3K displays at 90Hz, along with integrated 5G, accelerated AI processing, and up to seven simultaneous camera feeds for user and environment tracking. While XR1 was made for low-end devices, XR2 5G targets high-end standalone headsets, making it a candidate for Oculus Quest 2, Magic Leap 2, and similar next-gen devices.

XR2 offers up notable improvements over Snapdragon 835 (one of the most common chipsets found in current standalone headsets, including Quest); Qualcomm claims 2x performance in CPU & GPU, 4x increase in pixel throughput for video playback, and up to 6x resolution per-eye compared to Snapdragon 835 -- supporting up to 3K x 3K displays at 90Hz. [...] Notably, XR2 supports up to seven simultaneous camera feeds (up from four in prior platforms). This is key for advanced tracking, both of the environment and the user. [...] Qualcomm also says that XR2 offers low-latency pass-through video which could improve the pass-through video experience on headsets like Quest, and potentially enable a wider range of pass-through AR use-cases. Additionally XR2 boasts significantly accelerated AI processing; 11x compared to Snapdragon 835, which could greatly benefit the sort of operations used for turning incoming video feeds into useful tracking information.

In addition to the flagship Snapdragon 865 processor, Qualcomm announced details about its other new chip, the midrange Snapdragon 765. "The 765 might actually be the more interesting of the two, thanks to its integrated 5G modem and its likely future of powering cheaper, midrange devices," reports The Verge. From the report: Right now, there's not a lot of 5G devices out there, and the ones that are around tend to be very expensive. The upcoming 865 might help with that. By default, it'll only work with the X55 5G modem, meaning every Android flagship with a Snapdragon 865 (i.e., nearly all of them) will, in theory, be a 5G phone next year. But even cheaper Android phones with Qualcomm's top processor tend to cost upwards of $750. 700-series chips, on the other hand, are found in far cheaper phones, like HMD's Nokia phones, which hit much lower prices.

It's a much lower barrier to entry for 5G than anything currently available, and it could be a big part of making the next-generation network accessible to more customers, not just those who are willing to shell out for the top phones. In fact, it's possible that the Snapdragon 765 will enable better 5G experiences than phones with the 865. That's because, unlike the Snapdragon 865, the 765 has a less powerful X52 modem. It's capable of lower speeds (maxing out at 3.7 Gbps, instead of the 7 Gbps the X55 is theoretically capable of). But it has a big advantage: that 5G modem is integrated directly in the 765 chipset, meaning it should offer improved power efficiency (and, therefore, battery life) than the X55, which is its own separate chip. It'll also support a wider range of 5G standards than the current X50 modem, with Qualcomm promising support for mmWave and sub-6GHz, standalone and non-standalone 5G, and TDD and FDD with Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) network types. Both the Snapdragon 765 and 765G, which features a new Qualcomm Adreno 620 GPU, are expected to come to market in the first quarter of 2020.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Green energy advocates may soon be turning blue. A new membrane could unlock the potential of 'blue energy,' which uses chemical differences between fresh- and saltwater to generate electricity. If researchers can scale up the postage stamp -- size membrane in an affordable fashion, it could provide carbon-free power to millions of people in coastal nations where freshwater rivers meet the sea. Blue energy's promise stems from its scale: Rivers dump some 37,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater into the oceans every year. This intersection between fresh- and saltwater creates the potential to generate lots of electricity -- 2.6 terawatts, according to one recent estimate, roughly the amount that can be generated by 2,000 nuclear power plants. By pumping positive ions to the other side of a semipermeable membrane, researchers can create two pools of water: one with a positive charge, and one with a negative charge. If they then dunk electrodes in the pools and connect them with a wire, electrons will flow from the negatively charged to the positively charged side, generating electricity.

Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that's equipped with Apple's new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock," writes iFixit's Craig Lloyd. What this means is that there will likely be thousands of perfectly good Macs being parted out or scrapped instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them. From the report: Activation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it's ever lost or stolen, and it's built into the "Find My" service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When you're getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple's Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. In other words, they won't be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts.

That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can't reuse. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive -- oh, and it's an environmental nightmare. [...] The T2 security chip, however, erases any hope and makes it impossible to do anything on a Mac without the proper Apple ID credentials. Attempting any kind of hardware tinkering on a T2-enabled Mac activates a hardware lock, which can only be undone by connecting the device to Apple-authorized repair software. It's great for device security, but terrible for repair and refurbishment. While recyclers may not be dealing with as many locked Macs as locked iPhones (especially since Activation Lock on Macs is still very new, and there are specific software criteria that need to be met), it's only a matter of time before thousands upon thousands of perfectly working Macs are scrapped or shredded, for lack of an unknown password.

An anonymous reader shares an update to a 2017 study from the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute that claimed the manufacturing of big batteries for electric vehicles generates so much emissions that all later savings are canceled out. "Based on the data that it had to work with, the institute's study put the emissions at 150-200 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity -- one of the highest estimates that has been published," reports Ars Technica. "But IVL recently took another pass at this effort, incorporating newer data and some slightly different methods. This new study puts the emissions at 61-106kg, depending on the energy sources and efficiencies of different manufacturing plants. That cuts the estimate in half and puts it much more in line with other studies." From the report: So what accounts for the change, exactly? A few things are going on here. The first is a simple methodological change -- this study leaves out emissions associated with recycling the battery, which accounted for 15kg of CO2 in the 2017 estimate. There are different ways to define the boundaries of such a life-cycle analysis, including "cradle-to-grave" methods that cover disposal and "cradle-to-gate" methods that cover up to the point you receive the car. To make apples-to-apples comparisons, you have to know what kind of estimate you're looking at.

More importantly, the study took advantage of more recent data that measures emissions during critical steps in the manufacturing process. As the battery manufacturing industry matures, plants are running closer to capacity and with efficiency improvements. Battery chemistry, too, is shifting. [...] The cathodes and anodes of these batteries are made by mixing materials in a solvent (water or otherwise) and then evaporating the solvent to leave a powder behind. This drying dominates the energy use of the manufacturing process. More recent measurements of this process in operating plants are a major source of the difference between the new study and the 2017 study, which estimated 1.6 time to 3 times greater energy use for drying.

The new version also acknowledges that the electricity used in the manufacturing process is coming from cleaner sources and could potentially come entirely from renewables. That helps bring the low end of the estimated range down. Of the estimated 61-106kg of CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity, 59kg comes from the raw materials used in the battery. Then, the manufacturing process accounts for 2-47kg, depending on the mix of energy sources used. The 2017 study used a slightly higher number for raw materials -- 60-70kg of CO2 -- but estimated manufacturing emissions at 70-110kg. Then, it added emissions associated with recycling.