Month: May 2018

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Syfy has canceled The Expanse, but its producers want to find it a new home

Syfy has canceled The Expanse, but its producers want to find it a new home

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Grace Lynn Kung as Doris (L), Terry Chen as Praxidike Meng (R).

Season three of the acclaimed sci-fi drama The Expanse is well underway, but unfortunately, it will be the last season to air on Syfy. The final episode will be the season finale slated for early July, Deadline reports. The Los Angeles-based production company behind the show says it will try to shop the series to other potential broadcasters or streaming platforms around town.

The Expanse, based on a series of popular novels by a duo of authors who write under the pen name James S.A. Corey, was critically acclaimed and beloved by fans, but it was expensive to produce, it delivered poor on-air ratings, and critically, Syfy had only first-run linear rights. In other words, the network did not have the OTT (over-the-top: streaming and other digital distribution as opposed to broadcast air) rights. For a show like The Expanse, OTT viewing is key for long-term revenue. The show was only made available on cable television or by purchasing episodes or season passes on digital storefronts like iTunes and Amazon.

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via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

May 11, 2018 at 06:38PM

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Icy Moon Of Jupiter Spews Water Plumes Into Space

Icy Moon Of Jupiter Spews Water Plumes Into Space

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This is an artist’s concept of a plume of water vapor thought to be ejected off of the frigid, icy surface of the Jovian moon Europa, located 500 million miles from the sun.

NASA, ESA, and K. Retherford


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NASA, ESA, and K. Retherford

This is an artist’s concept of a plume of water vapor thought to be ejected off of the frigid, icy surface of the Jovian moon Europa, located 500 million miles from the sun.

NASA, ESA, and K. Retherford

Scientists have new evidence that there are plumes of water erupting from the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa — plumes that could, maybe, possibly contain signs of life.

The evidence comes from data collected by the now-defunct Galileo spacecraft. Although the data has been available since it was collected in 1997, it’s only now that an analysis confirms the existence of water plumes.

For more than two decades, scientists have been convinced Europa has a liquid water ocean sloshing around beneath its icy outer crust. In the past six years, two teams of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope reported the possible existence of plumes. But as powerful as Hubble is, seeing something as small as a plume on a moon more than 380-million miles away is difficult.

“We’re looking for effects that are relatively small, and are pushing the spatial resolution of the telescope,” says astrophysicist Susana Deutsua of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Nonetheless, it made sense that Europa had plumes, since the Cassini spacecraft had definitely seen water plumes from Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn that’s similar to Europa.

“When we first saw those images, I think a lot of us in the community were very excited,” says planetary scientists Xianzhe Jia from the University of Michigan. Jia did his graduate work at the University of California Los Angeles where he focused on data collected by Galileo.

A year ago, Jia heard a scientific talk about the plumes. He learned that they were near the equator of Europa, a region Galileo had flown directly over in 1997.

“That’s the moment where we realized that we might have something in the old Galileo data that we never paid much attention to,” Jia says.

Galileo recorded tons of data in the seven plus years it orbiting Jupiter. Jia was particularly familiar with data from an instrument known as a magnetometer that measures magnetic fields.

Turns out plumes give off a distinctive signal that a magnetometer can measure.

“When we look at those data carefully, what we found is there’s some strange magnetic signals in those data that have never been explained before,” Jai says.

As Jia and his colleagues report in the journal, Nature Astronomy, the best explanation was the signals were indeed generated by plumes of water coming from Europa. This means future missions to Jupiter could fly through these plumes and look directly for signs of life.

So why hadn’t scientists figured this out when these data were recorded back in the 1997?

Margaret Kivelson was principle investigator of the magnetometer on Galileo. She remembers puzzling over the magnetometer signals.

She says her team had already made the outlandish but ultimately accurate suggestion that there was a liquid ocean under Europa’s icy crust. “To go from there to also there are geysers coming up from that ocean, we just weren’t ready for that,” Kivelson says.

Kivelson has been studying Jupiter and its moons for a long time. She’s looking forward to NASA’s next mission to the giant planet.

“I hate to tell you how old I’ll be when the mission gets to Europa, but that’s OK,” she says.

Kivelseon is 89 now. The mission may not arrive until 2028. You can do the math.

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via NPR Topics: News https://ift.tt/2m0CM10

May 14, 2018 at 10:08AM

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Accused robocall ‘kingpin’ fined a record $120 million

Accused robocall ‘kingpin’ fined a record $120 million

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The Federal Communications Commission has imposed a record fine on a Florida man who is accused of placing nearly 100 million robocalls.

The FCC said on Thursday that it was fining Adrian Abramovich of Miami $120 million for posing a threat to public safety with the “illegal” calls. The FCC, in a citation from June 22, 2017, said the robocalls went to “critical emergency phone lines” used by hospitals and medical providers, as well as cell phones and residential phones, without the recipients’ consent.

“The evidence indicates that Abramovich is the perpetrator of one of the largest—and most dangerous—illegal robocalling campaigns that the Commission has ever investigated,” said the FCC in its complaint.

Robocalls are automated telemarketing calls that the FCC considers illegal, unless the recipient agrees to be called.

The complaint says that Abramovich made 96 million robocalls during a three-month period in 2016 as a part of “telemarketing scheme.” In the 2017 complaint, he’s accused of using “neighbor spoofing” to get people to answer the calls, by falsely presenting the calls as coming from a local number.

The robocalls offered discounted travel services to Mexico, the Caribbean and Florida, from Expedia (EXPE), Marriott (MAR), Hilton (HLT) and TripAdvisor (TRIP), according to the complaint. The FCC said these “spoofed” calls had nothing to do with these companies, and are considered wire fraud.

“Abramovich tarnished the good will of these companies,” the FCC said in the complaint. The fine on Abramovich is the largest ever imposed by the FCC, the agency said.

A spokesperson for TripAdvisor told CNNMoney that it became aware in 2015 that some US consumers were receiving fake recorded calls “that illegally claimed to be associated with our brand” and the company had been working with the FCC to stop it.

“The list of brands impersonated by these fraudsters goes well beyond TripAdvisor and reads like a who’s who of well-known airlines, hoteliers and online travel agents,” said TripAdvisor in a statement.

Related: FCC cracks down on robocalling

Abramovich, whose lawyer did not immediately return messages from CNNMoney, has denied the accusations of fraud.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation called Abramovich to testify last month in a hearing called “abusive robocalls and how we can stop them.”

“The extent of my activities has been significantly overstated,” he said in his testimony. “I am not the kingpin of robocalling that is alleged.”

He also maintained that the offers were real. “The resorts associated with my telemarketing activities were indeed real resorts, offering real vacation packages,” he said.

Last year, the FCC voted for new rules allowing the phone companies to block robocall spoofing.

The FCC also said the number one complaint it receives from consumers are about robocalls.

“But it’s still happening and we’re still getting them,” said Michael Inouye, analyst for ABI Research. “The laws don’t appear to be particularly effective.”

Related: Apple, Google, Microsoft form robocall ‘strike force’

But Inouye said that it might be possible to cut back on robocalling, with proper coordination between the FCC and communications companies.

Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) joined a “strike force” in 2016 to try and reduce robocalls, at the direction of the FCC.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to make it go away completely, but you can definitely do things to reduce the number of calls you get today,” he said.

CNNMoney (New York) First published May 11, 2018: 2:27 PM ET

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via Business and financial news – CNNMoney.com https://ift.tt/UU2JWz

May 11, 2018 at 02:15PM

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Australia Bans Cash For All Purchases Over $7,500 Starting July of 2019

Australia Bans Cash For All Purchases Over $7,500 Starting July of 2019

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Australia’s Liberal Party government has announced that it will soon be illegal to purchase anything over $10,000 AU ($7,500 US) with cash. The government says it’s, “encouraging the transition to a digital society,” and cracking down on tax evasion. But not everyone is happy with the move.

“This will be bad news for criminal gangs, terrorists and those who are just trying to cheat on their tax or get a discount for letting someone else cheat on their tax,” Treasurer Scott Morrison said in a speech announcing the government’s new budget. “It’s not clever. It’s not OK. It’s a crime.”

The ban starts on July 1, 2019 and any payment over $10,000 will have to be made by check or credit/debit card. The government will enforce the measure by allocating roughly $300 million for what it calls the Black Economy Standing Taskforce. The goal is to drum up about $3 billion in new tax revenue over the next four years.

As The Guardian points out, one of the biggest targets for the new task force will be the illicit tobacco trade. Australia has the highest tax on cigarettes in the world, with an average pack costing about $40 AU ($30 US). But there’s a huge black market for cigarettes, which comes from both stolen goods and smuggling from outside the country. Taxes aren’t paid on cigarettes until the point of sale, so theft from tobacco warehouses is unusually common in Australia.

Australians have a strange relationship with cash—strange in the sense that they still use it. Roughly 37 percent of all commercial transactions in Australia are made using cash. That number is just 32 percent in the U.S. and 15 percent in Sweden. Many Swedes are angry about its slow move to a cashless society, arguing that going completely digital causes security concerns. And India began phasing out a whopping 86 percent of its currency in November of 2016 by invalidating 500 and 1,000-rupee notes as legal tender.

But there are also regional quirks that make the Australian government more prone to crack down on cash. For instance, it’s almost impossible to find a $100 bill in circulation in Australia. The Reserve Bank of Australia still prints the $100, so where do they all go? The rarity of the $100 note (nicknamed The Kermit for its green color) is attributed to both massive hoarding overseas as well as being the preferred method of payment for organized crime in Australia. Some Australian economists has even floated the idea of phasing out the Kermit, but there’s been significant pushback from the public.

While a ban on cash purchases over $10,000 may not seem like a big deal for the average person, plenty of small businesses are upset about the plan.

“It’s going to screw me—95 percent of my business is cash collections,” Paul Thomas, owner of Commander Security Services in Sydney, told News Corp this week. “On a monthly basis, we could process and move up to $4-5 million—either picking up cash, processing and EFT-ing it to customers’ accounts, or recarrying it from customers to their bank branch.”

Today it’s any sum over $10,000 in Australia, but anyone with their eyes open can see where this is going. We should expect governments to move away from cash over the next decade, just as currency anarchists continue to insist that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are the real future.

Researchers in the 1970s predicted that a widespread debit card system would be the perfect surveillance tool. And they weren’t exactly wrong. What they didn’t predict was what happens when a completely digital economy gets hacked. Equifax’s recent loss of so much personal data on virtually half of all Americans could feel like just a prelude to many more snafus to come.

[News Corp and The Guardian]

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via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com

May 11, 2018 at 07:09AM

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The Morning After: Robots running free

The Morning After: Robots running free

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Boston Dynamics

Welcome to Friday! We’re wrapping up our Google I/O coverage today, but we’ve also taken a behind-the-scenes look at how the Guardians of the Galaxy got a redesigned ship, a possible due date on the end of Net Neutrality and a robot frolicking in a field.

I didn’t sign up to take a Turing Test today.
Google: Duplex phone calling AI will identify itself

While the Duplex AI demo Google showed during I/O was impressive, it creeped many of us out by pretending to be human. On a phone call with apparently unaware restaurant and salon workers, the system peppered its conversation with “umms” and “ahhs” while setting up appointments. That tech might make it more comfortable to talk to, but now Google has confirmed that when it starts testing the feature in Google Assistant this summer, it will let people know they’re talking to an automated system.

How long does the battery last at full sprint? Asking for a human friend.
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot shows off its agility for the scouts

The humanoid robot took an untethered jog and showed off its vertical ability by leaping over a log. Atlas isn’t ready for a free agent NFL contract just yet, but comparing the robot’s smooth moves now to demos from 2009 shows just how far the technology has come.

Marvel’s most unorthodox heroes have a new home in ‘Avengers: Infinity War.’
Designing a spaceship for the Guardians of the Galaxy

Avengers: Infinity War is a jam-packed movie, flipping between superheroes young and old as they try to defend against Thanos. Almost every scene required a tremendous amount of computer-generated visual effects, meaning Marvel had to tap a small army of external partners to complete the project, including a company based in London and San Francisco called Territory Studio. The independent team worked on over a hundred 130 animated “screens” of make-believe software, with a lot of this work focused on the Guardians of the Galaxy’s spaceship. These exotic control panels are the tip of Territory’s contributions, which spanned tables, door air locks and a spherical escape pod. The company’s mission was to reinvent the UI — and by extension, the larger look and feel — of the Guardians’ moving home. It was a small piece of the movie but an important one to quickly convey how the group had been living since the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

There’s a slim chance the House and Senate could repeal, though.
Net Neutrality dies June 11th

Net Neutrality officially dies June 11th, almost three years to the day after it was put into law. In a press release from Ajit Pai’s office, he repeated his rhetoric that the internet was never broken and bemoaned Title II rules (more rigorous regulation which touches on throttling, blocking and paid prioritization of data) as being “heavy handed” and “outdated.”

The US Senate has forced a vote, scheduled for next week, to overturn Pai’s decision. If the Senate is successful, the House of Representatives will have to take similar measures before Pai’s framework is overruled. For now, a handful of states have passed their own bills upholding Title II provisions.

Ditch the dock.
Nintendo is making a $20 charging stand for the Switch

You can game on the Switch in various ways, but if you want to charge while playing in Tabletop mode, you’d have to be creative in finding ways to prop it up. Even if you do find a way, you’re at risk of ruining its cord, considering its charging port is at the bottom. Nintendo’s thankfully fixing that problem by releasing a $20 accessory, which serves as a charger and an adjustable stand. It’ll arrive next month, ready for that summer vacation / staycation.

But wait, there’s more…

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via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

May 11, 2018 at 05:51AM

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Google’s AI advances are equal parts worry and wonder

Google’s AI advances are equal parts worry and wonder

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ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

I laughed along with most of the audience at I/O 2018 when, in response to a restaurant rep asking it to hold on, Google Assistant said “Mmhmm”. But beneath our mirth lay a sense of wonder. The demo of Google Duplex, “an AI system for accomplishing real-world tasks over the phone,” was almost unbelievable. The artificially intelligent Assistant successfully made a reservation with a human being over the phone without the person knowing it wasn’t real. It even used sounds like “umm,” “uhh” and tonal inflections to create a more convincing, realistic cadence. It was like a scene straight out of a science fiction movie or Black Mirror.

When I played that clip again on Google’s blog post later, my wonder turned to unease. I dissected that conversation, analyzing all the ways that the AI mimicked human behavior. Its methods, I discovered, were incredibly sophisticated. It didn’t just insert random pauses or nonverbal sounds, but did so in places that made sense. And even the way it said things like “Ohh, I gotcha,” were so lifelike they were laden with meaning and subtext. Assistant conveyed rich, high-context information in simple sentences, just as we humans do — with sarcasm and ambiguity. How did it get so creepily real?

It’s been a year since CEO Sundar Pichai declared the intention to shift focus from “mobile first” to “AI first.” Since then, Google has invested heavily in machine learning research, developing frameworks to create more sophisticated applications that can basically think for themselves.

There’s no denying Google’s pivot to AI has brought some truly useful new features. Photos, for one, can identify the exact outline of a subject like your adorable toddler, and turn everything else in the picture grayscale to make a stylized picture. Or it can take an old black-and-white photo, identify the trees or the grass and colorize them appropriately. Meanwhile, the revamped News app will use AI to pick a variety of sources to deliver full, rounded perspectives on news stories. Smart Replies, which debuted in Inbox as early as 2015, and its logical extension Smart Compose, can save you the trouble of coming up with answers to your friends’ inane emails. In every one of Google’s vast array of products, AI has been inserted to improve performance and utility. They’re getting smarter and faster at understanding not just context but also our preferences and behaviors, meaning we can think less, and let the computers do that for us.

With Duplex, Assistant will be able to book restaurants and services for you via a phone call. Simply ask it to make you a haircut appointment on Tuesday between 10am and noon, for example, and Assistant will call your designated salon and sort out your reservation. It’s like having a real-life personal assistant, and if Google pulls this off, the convenience it offers would be immense.

Google

But Duplex doesn’t simply think for us, it emotes for us, as well. In an effort to prevent the person on the other end from catching on or feeling uncomfortable, the system has injected human imperfections in its speech to reproduce natural conversations.

How far are we (and Google and its peers) going to let AI go? How much of our tasks are we going to relegate to a disembodied voice? These aren’t new questions — the industry has been debating such ethical and philosophical issues for years. But before the Duplex demo, the idea of AI that can trick you into thinking it’s an actual human seemed unrealistic and far away. Suddenly though, answering those questions seems quite urgent.

The AI revolution had seemingly harmless beginnings. Neural networks applied to text recognition and translation brought great results, offering more accurate interpretations of languages as complex as Mandarin. Then they learned to identify faces the way we humans do, even from just a profile, beat us at complex games, and began to surpass real doctors in accurately predicting heart attacks. There seems to be no limit to what AI can do with enough training and models.

Close-up of emulation robotic operator with headset

It’s hard to imagine the goal isn’t to remove as much thought and effort on the user’s part as possible. Even if the trade-off for all that convenience is blurring the line between human and robot. AI’s already taken over as photographer in Google’s smart camera Clips, and to a lesser extent in phones like the Huawei P20 Pro and LG G7 ThinQ. The extension of that to the rest of our lives seems nigh.

With Duplex, Google currently leads its peers in the race to develop natural-sounding AI, and may perhaps even be close to creating a robot that can pass the Turing test. Other companies like Apple, Amazon and Facebook will surely redouble their own AI efforts, collectively pushing the limits of what machines can achieve.

I/O 2018 shows we’ve made significant progress in realizing something that’s existed mostly as a science fiction concept forever, but we’ve still barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. But, maybe it’s time that we pump the brakes, even if ever so slightly. We’re not past the point of no return, yet, and we should figure out, as a society, what our endgame is with AI. Do we want it to be a soulless helper? Or are we willing to wrestle with computers that behave in ways that are increasingly indistinguishable from a person?

Click here to catch up on the latest news from Google I/O 2018!

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via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

May 11, 2018 at 08:03AM

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Syfy drops ‘The Expanse’ after three seasons

Syfy drops ‘The Expanse’ after three seasons

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‘The Expanse’

Rafy/Syfy

After three seasons, The Expanse is coming to an end — at least on Syfy. Deadline reports that the cable network decided not to go forward with a fourth season of the show, however its producer, Alcon Television Group will look for another home. Described by network execs as Syfy’s “most ambitious effort to date” when it was originally announced, the show (based on a series of books by the same name) drove a shift on the network back toward larger-scale sci-fi in the vein of Battlestar Galactica.

However, it was expensive to make and reportedly had lower ratings than other shows like The Magicians and Krypton, and, perhaps most importantly, Syfy only had the rights to its first-run live airings. That meant the network did not benefit from digital sales or streaming which can be a sizeable share for sci-fi shows. Now fans will hope that another network or streaming service continues where Syfy left off, even as the Comcast/NBC-owned network announces launch dates for a summer slate that includes 12 Monkeys, Wynonna Earp, Killjoys and, of course, Sharknado 6.

Tech

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

May 11, 2018 at 04:03AM