The Telegraph reports: Peter Scott-Morgan stands, wide-eyed and tearful. "Good. Grief." he says quietly. "I was unprepared for the emotion... It's quite extraordinary. It really is." Using an exoskeleton, Scott-Morgan is experiencing what it is like to stand for the first time in months after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017, the same incurable condition that killed scientist Stephen Hawking. The remarkable step, however, is just the first in the 62-year-old's bold journey to control his disease by becoming the world's first, full-fledged cyborg. "Think of it as a science experiment," he laughs. "This is cyborg territory, and I intend to be a human guinea pig to see just how far we can turn science fiction into reality." Eventually, Scott-Morgan wants the exoskeleton to encase his upper body, giving him superhuman strength and the ability to tower above "flesh and blood" humans. A mind-reading computer will be plugged directly into his brain, expressing his thoughts almost instantly. Meanwhile, his paralyzed face will be replaced by a hyper-realistic avatar that will move in time with a speech synthesizer... Scott-Morgan says he isn't deteriorating but becoming a new version of himself — one that will eventually pave the way for a breed of humans that can augment their capabilities using technology... Instead of answering a question by laboriously typing out individual letters using a gaze tracker, in a similar way to Hawking, he will rely on the AI to provide a full and instant response. Eventually, the machine will speak for itself using phrases it has learned from Scott-Morgan — crossing a controversial line in what it means to be human.... Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: A recent update to Windows 10 took away the ability for consumers to permanently disable Defender, the built-in antivirus software, no matter what the reason. However, Defender should voluntarily step aside if it detects the installation of a third-party AV program (emphasis on should). Before the update, if a user wanted to disable Defender on a permanent basis, they could edit a registry key called DisableAntiSpyware. That is no longer the case. "DisableAntiSpyware is intended to be used by OEMs and IT Pros to disable Microsoft Defender Antivirus and deploy another antivirus product during deployment. This is a legacy setting that is no longer necessary as Microsoft Defender antivirus automatically turns itself off when it detects another antivirus program. This setting is not intended for consumer devices, and we've decided to remove this registry key," Microsoft explains in a support document.

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Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert -- one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers -- believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained. TorrentFreak reports: After a period of what seemed like calm, this year it became clear that the site's old enemies, Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, were again working to get closer to the site and its operators. We've covered the back story in detail but in summary, the site is alleged to have used Swedish VPN provider OVPN to hide its true location and Rights Alliance is now engaged in legal action to get its hands on whatever information the VPN provider may hold. The most recent move, playing out this week, is that Rights Alliance has provided testimony from an expert witness, one that has masses of experience in the VPN field. The name 'Cure53' may not sound familiar to regular Internet users but the cyber-security company is well known for its first-class abilities in penetration testing. So much so, in fact, that the company has audited some of the most popular VPN providers in the world, including Mullvad, Surfshark, and TunnelBear. Given its experience in the field, it's no surprise that Rights Alliance has also sought the expert opinion of someone involved in Cure 53 to assess this VPN-related matter. Importantly, there doesn't appear to be any conflict of interest here, since the conclusions drawn are purely technical in nature and rely on experience and general facts, something we will touch on later. The expert opinion, which appeared in court documents reviewed by TorrentFreak this week, is from Jesper Larsson, who works at security company Ox4a but is involved with Cure 53 where he "regularly" performs penetration tests against the "ten largest VPN Providers in the world." His testimony reveals that he has been commissioned by Sara Lindback of Rights Alliance to comment on how a VPN service works and specifically, what information might potentially be stored at OVPN in relation to The Pirate Bay. "It is clear on OVPN's website that it strives to protect its users; privacy by storing as little user data as possible in their databases," the testimony filed with the court and obtained by TorrentFreak reads. "Although [OVPN] strive to store as little data as possible, there must be data connecting users and identities to make the VPN service work. In this case, a user has paid for a VPN account with the ability to connect a public static address to OVPN which the user has then chosen to link to the file sharing site 'the piratebay,' i.e the user has configured his VPN account to point to the given domain." [...] "For this type of configuration to be possible, data about the configuration must be stored at OVPN at least during the time when the account is active," Larsson continues. "It should be considered extremely likely that the user or identity associated with the above configuration is stored in a user database where a given user can be connected to the VPN configuration, configuration regarding where the static IP address should be pointed to, and payment information that should describe how long a given account is active and which payment method the user has used. OVPN should thus be able to search its VPN servers for the given IP address, or alternatively search in their user databases or in backups of these to locate a given user or identity," the security expert adds.

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Citizen scientists have spotted almost 100 of our sun's nearest neighbors. Space.com reports: In a new study, members of the public -- including both professional scientists and volunteers -- discovered 95 brown dwarfs (celestial objects too big to be considered planets and too small to be considered stars) near our sun through the NASA-funded citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They made this discovery with the help of astronomers using the National Science Foundations National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. Brown dwarfs are unusual celestial objects -- much heavier than planets but not massive enough to become stars. The celestial objects can be seriously hot (think thousands of degrees Fahrenheit), but these 95 newly-discovered neighbors are surprisingly cool. Some of these weird worlds are even relatively close to Earth's temperature and could be cool enough to have water clouds in their atmospheres, according to the statement.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Palantir, a Silicon Valley company with strong links to the defense and intelligence communities, is poised to be the latest in a string of tech companies to offer shares on Wall Street well before turning a profit. The company sent financial documents to its investors on Thursday night, ahead of its planned debut on the public markets this year. The documents, obtained by The New York Times, offer the first full look into the company's financials and operations and show growing operating expenses as well as deep losses. Palantir's revenue in 2019 was $742.5 million, nearly 25 percent more than the year before. Its net loss of $580 million was about the same as 2018. And expenses were up 2 percent in 2019 to a little more than $1 billion. The company, which has raised more than $3 billion in funding and is valued by private market investors at $20 billion, has not turned a profit since it was founded in 2003. As early as 2014, Palantir hadfanned expectations that it would soon hit $1 billion in revenue. Six years later, it appears to be closing in on that goal. In the first six months of this year, Palantir's revenue was $481 million. According to the documents, first reported by TechCrunch, Palantir plans to go public via a direct listing, "in which no new shares are issued and no new funds are raised," the report says. "In most direct listings, shareholders are not bound by a traditional lockup period before they can sell their stock. But Palantir has imposed a 180-day lockup period. It will allow shareholders to sell 20 percent of their common stock immediately, but they must wait for the lockup to expire to sell more." "Palantir has arranged a structure to ensure that its founders retain power. They have a special class of shares, Class F, that will have a variable number of votes to ensure the founders control 49.999999 percent of the company's voting power, even if they sell some of their shares. The company argued to its investors that this structure would allow it to stay 'Founder-led' after it went public."

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Microsoft is signing deals with foreign governments to offer cloud-infrastructure packages similar to the bundle it assembled for the U.S. Defense Department, according to CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud offering for the Defense Department provides cloud-based computing and storage resources at all government security classification levels, as well as devices that can work offline until they sync back with cloud infrastructure. The Pentagon awarded the JEDI contract to Microsoft in October. The contract is worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Outside the U.S., Microsoft has seen interest in the type of relationship that it has formed with the Pentagon, said one of the people. Specifically, Microsoft has committed to staffing the Pentagon initiative with people who hold sufficient government security clearances, and to delivering a group of existing products and services, as opposed to specially built technologies, at a customized price. Microsoft employees began work on cloud contracts for foreign governments after it became clear that the JEDI work would be put on hold because of a legal challenge from Amazon, Microsoft's main rival in cloud computing, this person said. The company plans to announce the effort later this year, one person said, adding that intelligence agencies and militaries outside the U.S. might use it. Another person briefed on the work said Microsoft already has foreign cloud government contracts, despite that it has not announced the new strategy yet. It's not clear which countries Microsoft is most focused on. "We've worked with governments around the world on a longstanding and reliable basis for four decades," a spokesperson told CNBC in an email. "We have government customers using our products to enhance their services with the latest in commercial innovations, deeply engage and connect with citizens in powerful ways, and empower government employees with the modern tools they need to be more efficient and effective, and to give them time back to focus on their agency mission."

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Stuart Schechter, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, is launching DiceKeys, a simple kit for physically generating a single super-secure key that can serve as the basis for creating all the most important passwords in your life for years or even decades to come. Wired reports: With little more than a plastic contraption that looks a bit like a Boggle set and an accompanying web app to scan the resulting dice roll, DiceKeys creates a highly random, mathematically unguessable key. You can then use that key to derive master passwords for password managers, as the seed to create a U2F key for two-factor authentication, or even as the secret key for cryptocurrency wallets. Perhaps most importantly, the box of dice is designed to serve as a permanent, offline key to regenerate that master password, crypto key, or U2F token if it gets lost, forgotten, or broken. Schechter intends for most DiceKeys users to only ever roll their set once. After shaking the keys in a bag, the user dumps them into their plastic box, then snaps the lid closed to permanently lock them into place. The user then scans the dice box with the DiceKeys app -- currently a web app hosted at DiceKeys.app -- that accesses their laptop, phone, or iPad camera. That app generates a cryptographic key based on the dice, checking the barcode-like symbols on the faces to ensure it interpreted the dice's characters and orientation correctly. Despite the current version of the DiceKeys app being hosted on the web, Schechter says that it's designed so that no data ever leaves the user's device. Thanks to the different numbers and letters on each key face as well as the dices' orientations, the resulting arrangement has around 196 bits of entropy, Schechter says, meaning there are 296 different possibilities for how the dice could be positioned. Schechter estimates that's roughly as many possibilities as there are atoms in four or five thousand solar systems.

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The site of a Scottish nuclear power facility should be available for other uses in 313 years' time, according to a new report. The BBC reports: Dounreay, near Thurso, was the UK site for the development of fast reactor research from 1955 to 1994. The facility on the north Caithness coast is in the process of being closed down, demolished and cleaned up. However, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said it would be 2333 before the 148-acre site is safe for reuse. The date forms part of the authority's newly-published draft strategy. They said "credible options" for the site in future will be developed over the next two years. Buildings to be demolished include the distinctive dome-shaped Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR). Important stages in the removal of radioactive material from the Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR) are expected to be competed over the next three years. A target date has also been set for the clean-up of a highly contaminated area called the Shaft. Waste is to be removed from the Shaft by 2029, according to the NDA report.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this week, an advertising agency emerged with a video bragging about an ad-campaign concept: We'll invade gaming-filled Twitch chat rooms and post ads for your brand for cheap. The attached video was exactly the kind of cringe you might expect from "brand engages with video game culture," with edgy yet inoffensive quotes, footage of fake games, and digitally altered voices. But what looked like a fake ad concept has turned out to be very real -- and after examining how Twitch works, the whole thing looks like a possible FTC violation. The ad campaign, run by the Ogilvy agency on behalf of Burger King, relied on a common Twitch trope of donating to game-streaming hosts. "Affiliate" Twitch users are eligible to receive cash from viewers, either in the form of flat-rate subscriptions or variable one-time donations, and hosts often encourage this by adding text-to-voice automation to the process. So if you pay a certain amount, a voice will read your statement out loud -- and hosts usually retroactively react to weird and offensive statements made by these systems instead of pre-screening them. (They're busy playing a game, after all.) Ogilvy's promotion revolved around the low cost of entry for these text-to-voice prompts. Their ads, written to promote a fast-food chain, were attached to specific dollar amounts. One example, as explained by Twitch streamer Ross "RubberNinja" O'Donovan (not to be confused with that other Ninja), went as follows: "I just donated $5 to tell you that you can spend $5 and get [a combined meal on our app]. It seems like a twisted strategy." O'Donovan went on to post his disdain for American fast food and compared it to what he ate when he lived in Australia, which prompted Ogilvy's "THE_KING_OF_STREAM" account to donate another $5 and make a joke about Australian food. Ogilvy had described the ad campaign as run by a "bot," implying automation, but O'Donovan's example implies some form of human control and curation in terms of reacting to Twitch host pushback. In a Thursday report, Kotaku's Nathan Grayson went sniffing around to discover many other examples of Ogilvy's ads playing out on real Twitch channels over the course of the week -- and the Kotaku report quoted pretty much all of those hosts decrying this practice. [...] More crucially for Ogilvy and Burger King, however, is the matter of how those ads appeared: as sneaky "fan" declarations in chat rooms. Though the campaign was largely run by the aforementioned "THE_KING_OF_STREAM" account and appeared as such in Twitch chat rooms, it wasn't in any way represented by Twitch as a sponsor's account, nor were the posts labeled as "#ad" or other clear markings. As O'Donovan and other streamers have made clear, that kind of transparency would have gotten such chat statements instantly deleted or modded for violating individual channel rules. While the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has clear guidance about "deceptive" online advertising, and it demands that channel hosts comply with FTC guidance to make sure sponsored statements are easily identified, Ogilvy may have slipped through the FTC's current guidance cracks.

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Electric trucks have the potential to displace enough oil to make a "significant dent" in transportation sector CO2 emissions, per a Rhodium Group analysis. Axios reports: There's lots of buzz -- and a lot of money -- around electric trucks these days. It estimates the long-term effects of a recent 15-state nonbinding pact (PDF) to bolster the use of zero-emissions heavy trucks and other medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. California, one of the states, also recently approved mandatory regulations on greatly increasing zero-emissions truck sales between 2024 and 2045. The study also explores the impact if these state efforts were transformed into a nationwide mandate, which would mean more than half the U.S. medium- and heavy-duty fleet would be electric by 2045. "If the [15-state] MOU were expanded nationally, the impact would increase six-fold. By 2035, cumulative oil demand would fall by 806 to 843 million barrels, expanding to 4.6 to 4.9 billion barrels by 2045," Rhodium finds. "The long-term effect of expanding California's approach nationally would reduce oil consumption in 2045 by 16 to 17%," the Aug. 13 analysis notes.

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WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update its iOS app -- until or unless he adds in-app purchases so Apple can extract its 30 percent cut of the money. The Verge reports: Here's the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn't sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery's Ben Thompson. The app simply lets you make a website for free. There isn't even an option to buy a unique dot-com or even dot-blog domain name from the iPhone and iPad app -- it simply assigns you a free WordPress domain name and 3GB of space. Is Apple seriously asking for WordPress owner Automattic to share a cut of all its domain name revenue? How would it even know which customers used the app? Or was this all a mistake? Apple, Automattic, and Mullenweg didn't immediately reply to requests for comment. As the article points out, all of this is happening in the shadow of Epic Games' gigantic fight against Apple, one that Apple responded to this very afternoon.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Every day, like clockwork, to-do lists for those protesting against Belarus' authoritarian leader appear in the popular Telegram messaging app. They lay out goals, give times and locations of rallies with business-like precision, and offer spirited encouragement. The app has become an indispensable tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have rocked Belarus since Aug. 9, when election officials announced that President Alexander Lukashenko -- whom some call "Europe's last dictator" -- had won a landslide victory to extend his 26-year rule in a vote widely seen as rigged. Peaceful protesters who poured onto the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings from police. The opposition candidate, schoolteacher Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, left for Lithuania -- under duress, her campaign said -- and authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader. That's where Telegram -- which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements -- came in. Some of its channels helped unconnected, scattered rallies mature into well-coordinated action. The people who run the channels, which used to offer political news, now post updates, videos and photos of the turmoil sent in from users, locations of heavy police presence, contacts of human rights activists and calls for new demonstrations -- something Belarusian opposition leaders have refrained from doing publicly themselves. Tens of thousands of people all across the country have responded to those calls. In a matter of days, the channels -- NEXTA, NEXTA Live and Belarus of the Brain are the most popular -- have become the main method for facilitating the protests, said Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian analyst and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. "The fate of the country has never depended so much on one [piece] of technology," Viacorka said.

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Apple responded to Epic Games' lawsuit accusing it of anticompetitive behavior in how it controls the App Store, telling the court that the Fortnite maker violated Apple's rules and shouldn't be placed back into the store temporarily while the legal battle rages. From a report: In its filing, Apple alleges that Epic Games asked for an individual arrangement with Apple, producing three emails from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney that bolster its claim. This is Apple's first significant legal response to Epic Games after the dispute between the two companies spilled into the courts. It comes the week after Epic Games released a direct payment mechanism inside Fortnite designed to bypass the App Store's payment system, from which Apple takes a 30% cut. Apple subsequently removed Fortnite from its store for violating its policies. People who already have Fortnite installed on their iPhones can continue to play, but cannot update or download the app for the first time.

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The ongoing persecution by the Chinese government of Uyghur Muslims is far from a distant problem. Recent reporting has identified Uyghur forced labor in the supply chain of major global brands, including BMW, Ralph Lauren, Samsung, and Sony. From a report: Now, as school districts scramble to obtain electronic devices for a school year that may be primarily virtual, some children may end up using computers assembled by Uyghurs working in inhumane conditions. Shipping records show that since the start of the pandemic, Lenovo has imported an estimated 258,000 laptops from a Chinese manufacturer that has participated in a troubling labor scheme and been singled out by the U.S. government for violating human rights. The revelations serve as a reminder of how much of the supply chain is tied to forced labor and how many products that will aid us through the Covid-19 pandemic may be manufactured under duress. The Lenovo computers were made by the manufacturer Hefei Bitland, which participates in a Chinese government program to provide factories with cheap labor from persecuted Uyghurs. Some of the computers included lightweight Chromebooks bound for public schools in the U.S. -- and some were delivered even after the company was placed on a government list restricting trade. After they arrived at port, sources say, Lenovo apparently removed a portion of the computers from distribution; over the past few weeks, multiple school districts have reported holdups in their orders of Lenovo Chromebooks.

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Want a movie where a protagonist your age, race, sexuality, gender, and religion becomes an Olympic swimmer? You got it. Want a movie where someone demographically identical to your boss gets squeezed to death and devoured by a Burmese python? Your wish is its command. From a report: Want to leave out the specifics and let fate decide what never-before-imagined movie will be entertaining you this evening? Black Box has you covered. After you make your choices -- and of course pay a nominal fee for the serious computational heavy lifting necessarily involved -- your order is received at Black Box HQ, and an original movie will be on its way shortly. Black Box converts your specifications into data -- or if you didn't ask for anything specific, a blob of randomly generated numerical noise will do -- and the creation process can begin. That first collection of ones and zeros will become a prompt, and will be fed into a type of A.I. called a transformer, which will spit out the text screenplay for your movie through a process a little like the autocomplete function on your smartphone. That screenplay will then be fed into a variation on today's vector quantized variational autoencoders -- neural nets that generate music, basically -- producing chopped up little bits of sound that, when strung together, form an audio version of the spoken dialogue and sound effects in your custom movie, plus an orchestral score. Finally, in the most challenging part of the process, those 90 minutes of audio, along with the screenplay, get fed into the world's most sophisticated GAN, or generative adversarial network. Working scene by scene, the Black Box GAN would generate a cast of live action characters -- lifelike humans, or at least human-esque avatars -- built from the ground up, along with all of the settings, monsters, car chases, dogs, cats, and little surprises that make it feel like a real movie.

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Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. From a report: At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations. But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades.

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Ann Syrdal, a psychologist and computer science researcher who helped develop synthetic voices that sounded like women, laying the groundwork for such modern digital assistants as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, died on July 24 at her home in San Jose, Calif. She was 74. From a report: Her daughter Kristen Lasky said the cause was cancer. As a researcher at AT&T, Dr. Syrdal was part of a small community of scientists who began developing synthetic speech systems in the mid-1980s. It was not an entirely new phenomenon; AT&T had unveiled one of the first synthetic voices, developed at its Bell Labs, at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. But more than 40 years later, despite increasingly powerful computers, speech synthesis was still relatively primitive. "It just sounded robotic," said Tom Gruber, who worked on synthetic speech systems in the early '80s and went on to create the digital assistant that became Siri when Apple acquired it in 2010.

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An anonymous reader writes: The FBI and local police have made tens of arrests across the tri-state area this week as part of a crackdown against multiple criminal gangs who exploited a glitch in the software of Santander ATMs to cash-out more money than was stored on cards. According to reports in local media, the bulk of the arrests took place in Hamilton (20 suspects), across towns in Morris County (19), and Sayreville (11). Smaller groups of suspects were also detained in Bloomfield, Robbinsville, and Holmdel, while reports of suspicious cash-outs were also recorded in Woodbridge, towns across the Middlesex County, Booton, Randolph, Montville, South Windsor, Hoboken, Newark, and even in New York City itself, in Brooklyn. Based on information ZDNet received from a Santander spokesperson, sources in the threat intelligence community, and details released by police departments in the affected towns, criminal gangs appear to have found a bug in the software of Santander ATMs.

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