Worth Reading: Can Technology be Morally Neutral?

“Technology is neutral. It’s only how it’s used that can be good or bad.” Back in the 1960s and even up to the 1970s, a statement along those lines was often the standard response you got from an engineer or scientist if you raised questions about the dangers or moral implications of a given invention. The neutrality argument was used to defend radio, television, computers, and even nuclear energy. But Sheila Jasanoff, for one, would disagree. —MercatorNet

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Google levels up its cloud machine learning with new services

There's an arms race among public cloud providers to provide businesses with the best machine learning capabilities. Enterprises are increasingly interested in creating intelligent applications, and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are rushing to help meet their needs.Google fired its latest salvo on Tuesday, announcing a set of enhancements to its existing suite of cloud machine-learning capabilities. The first was a new Jobs API aimed at helping match job applicants with the right openings. In addition, the company is slashing the prices on its Cloud Vision API and launching an enhanced version of its translation API.On top of that, Google is offering GPUs in its cloud both through the company's managed services and its infrastructure-as-a-service product. Companies that want to roll their own machine learning systems and algorithms can now take advantage of the new hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Smartphones cause insomnia, study finds

Put that smartphone away or limit your use of it if you want to get a decent night’s sleep and stay healthy.Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco say they have confirmed that sleep deprivation is magnified by exposure to a kind of blue light emitted by the devices. And missing sleep can instigate deadly diseases, such as obesity and depression.“Longer average screen-time was associated with shorter sleep duration and worse sleep-efficiency,” the journal PLOS ONE says of the research on its website.Sleep took longer to come on and quality was generally poor, according to the researchers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel Sets Up Skylake Xeon For HPC, Knights Mill Xeon Phi For AI

With the “Skylake” Xeon E5 v5 processors not slated until the middle of next year and the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors and Omni-Path interconnect still ramping after entering the HPC space a year ago, there are no blockbuster announcements coming out of Intel this year at the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City. But there are some goodies for HPC shops that were unveiled at the event and the chip giant also set the stage for big changes in the coming year in both traditional HPC and its younger and fast-growing sibling, machine learning.

Speaking ahead of the …

Intel Sets Up Skylake Xeon For HPC, Knights Mill Xeon Phi For AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel packs more horsepower in its monster 22-core processor

CPU performance increases were ignored for years, but AMD put them back on the map with its upcoming Zen chip. This has rubbed off on Intel in a good way.Intel's taken its fastest server chip, the top-line 22-core Xeon E5-2699 v4 chip, and made some tweaks to squeeze out more CPU performance. It has created a new chip called the 22-core Xeon E5-2699A v4, which is about 5 percent faster.While 5 percent may sound like a small number, it's big for those installing thousands of servers running on the chips. Four-socket servers can have up to 88 CPU cores and run up a 20 percent gain in performance improvements.The new chip could also be used in workstations with the latest GPUs to create VR content or run engineering applications like SolidWorks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s latest Xeon chips based on Skylake due next year

Intel has moved to a new architecture called Kaby Lake for its PC chips, but it isn't done with the previous generation Skylake yet. The company will release new Xeon server chips based on Skylake in mid-2017, and they will boast big performance increases, said Barry Davis, general manager for the accelerated workload group at Intel. The Skylake Xeon chips will go into mainstream servers and could spark a big round of hardware upgrades, Davis said. Xeon chips aren't as visible as Intel's PC chips but remain extremely popular. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon buy thousands of servers loaded with Xeon chips to power their search, social networking, and artificial intelligence tasks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhones in China are randomly shutting down, owners say

A consumer protection group in China is asking Apple to investigate problems with iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s units automatically shutting off.Recently, iPhone customers in the country have been complaining about the problem to the China Consumers Association, the group said in a statement on Tuesday. The shutdowns occur when the phone’s battery charge drops to between 60 and 50 percent.The problem will persist despite upgrading to the latest version of iOS. It will also occur in both cold environments and at room temperature.  After the automatic shutdown, the phones will also fail to turn on without connecting to a power supply.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Super Mari-owned: Startling Nintendo-based vulnerability discovered in Ubuntu

A vulnerability in a multimedia framework present on Version 12.04.5 of Ubuntu can be exploited by sound files meant to be played on the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System, according to security researcher Chris Evans. The vulnerability is the result of a flaw in an audio decoder called libgstnsf.so, which allows gstreamer Version 0.10 to play the NSF files that the NES uses for music. NSF files, when played, use the host system’s hardware to create a virtualized version of the NES’ old 6502 processor and sound hardware in real time. +ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool Yule Tools 2016: Digital disruption at Santa's Workshop + Android deems Instagram worthy of its presenceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Super Mari-owned: Startling Nintendo-based vulnerability discovered in Ubuntu

A vulnerability in a multimedia framework present on Version 12.04.5 of Ubuntu can be exploited by sound files meant to be played on the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System, according to security researcher Chris Evans. The vulnerability is the result of a flaw in an audio decoder called libgstnsf.so, which allows gstreamer Version 0.10 to play the NSF files that the NES uses for music. NSF files, when played, use the host system’s hardware to create a virtualized version of the NES’ old 6502 processor and sound hardware in real time. +ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cool Yule Tools 2016: Digital disruption at Santa's Workshop + Android deems Instagram worthy of its presenceTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Exciting news from CheConf

Eclipse Che is a developer workspace server and cloud IDE. With Che, you can define a workspace with the project code files and all of their dependencies necessary to edit, build, run, and debug them. You can share your workspaces with other team members. And Che drives Codenvy, cloud workspaces for development teams, with access control and other features.

Docker and Eclipse Che
 

Today in the keynote at CheConf 2016, Tyler Jewell made several Docker related announcements.

  1. Che runs on your machine as a Docker container, and generates other containers for workspaces making it a fully Dockerized IDE.
  2. Docker now powers the Che CLI, including most Che utilities like IP lookup, curl, compiling Che, versioning, launching.
  3. Che has added support for Docker Compose files in workspaces, making it really easy to write and debug Compose-based applications, right in Che.
  4. Che agents, such as SSH or language servers for intellisense, are deployed as containers.
  5. Chedir is a command line utility for converting source repos into Dockerized workspaces.
  6. Che is now available in the Docker Store.
  7. Codenvy is packaged as a set of Docker containers. With docker-compose up you start up ten docker containers that run Codenvy on your network.
  8. Codenvy Continue reading

Reactive Malicious Domain Detection (ENTRADA)

One interesting trend of the last year or two is the rising use of data analytics and ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) in solving network engineering problems. Several ideas (and/or solutions) were presented this year at the IETF meeting in Seoul; this post takes a look at one of these. To lay the groundwork, botnets are often controlled through a set of domain names registered just for this purpose. In the same way, domain names are often registered just to provide a base for sending bulk mail (SPAM), phishing attacks, etc. It might be nice for registrars to make some attempt to remove such domains abused for malicious activities, but it’s difficult to know what “normal” activity might look like, or for the registrar to even track the usage of a particular domain to detect malicious activity. One of the papers presented in the Software Defined Network Research Group (SDNRG) addresses this problem directly.

The first problem is actually collecting enough information to analyze in a useful way. DNS servers, even top level domain (TLD) servers collect a huge amount of data—much more than most engineers might suspect. In fact, the DNS system is one of those vast sources of information Continue reading

GitLab ditches the public cloud

Popular developer platform GitLab has concluded that the public IaaS cloud is not an effective platform for hosting its open source file storage system with high input/output demands. So, GitLab is ditching the cloud.In a blog post explaining the decision, GitLab engineers say they’ll transition their CephFS storage tool to bare metal infrastructure that they will manage themselves. GitLab provides a platform to help teams of developers write, test and ship code. GitLab's storage issue is a prime example that not all workloads are ideally suited for the public cloud. GitLab is hardly the first company to pull an application from the public cloud; DropBox announced plans to build out its own cloud platform instead of using Amazon Web Service’s cloud earlier this year, for example. Still, many other enterprises are going all in on the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Netgear’s Arlo Go camera makes security more mobile

In the world of networked cameras used for security situations (in home and at work), most (if not all) of the devices required an external power source as well as access to a Wi-Fi network. Netgear, through its Arlo division/brand, wants to change that with its new line of cameras that run without external power as well as LTE network support. The Arlo Go Mobile HD Security Camera (model LTE-VML4030) uses 3G and 4G LTE (via the AT&T network) for its connectivity, letting users place the cameras in areas where Wi-Fi doesn’t exist (think rural, vacation cabins, marinas, farms, etc.). The camera features quick-charge rechargeable batteries, meaning you don’t have to put them near a power outlet (although you can keep it charged via power cord if you like). For local storage of video footage, a built-in microSD card slot is available (in case Internet access is disrupted). The camera also supports two-way audio (with its built-in microphone and speaker), motion and audio detection, night vision, live viewing and weatherproofing for outdoor placement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Netgear’s Arlo Go camera makes security more mobile

In the world of networked cameras used for security situations (in home and at work), most (if not all) of the devices required an external power source as well as access to a Wi-Fi network. Netgear, through its Arlo division/brand, wants to change that with its new line of cameras that run without external power as well as LTE network support. The Arlo Go Mobile HD Security Camera (model LTE-VML4030) uses 3G and 4G LTE (via the AT&T network) for its connectivity, letting users place the cameras in areas where Wi-Fi doesn’t exist (think rural, vacation cabins, marinas, farms, etc.). The camera features quick-charge rechargeable batteries, meaning you don’t have to put them near a power outlet (although you can keep it charged via power cord if you like). For local storage of video footage, a built-in microSD card slot is available (in case Internet access is disrupted). The camera also supports two-way audio (with its built-in microphone and speaker), motion and audio detection, night vision, live viewing and weatherproofing for outdoor placement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Deep Learning Supercomputer Approach to Cancer Research

Deep learning and machine learning are major themes at this year’s annual Supercomputing Conference (SC16), both in terms of vendors showcasing systems that are a fit for both high performance computing and machine learning, and in the revelation of new efforts to combine traditional simulations with neural networks for greater efficiency and insight.

We have already described this momentum in the context of announcements from supercomputer makers like Cray, which just unveiled a Pascal GPU-based addition to their modeling and simulation-oriented XC supercomputer line, complete with deep learning frameworks integrated into the stack. The question was, how many HPC workloads …

A Deep Learning Supercomputer Approach to Cancer Research was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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