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Friday, August 3rd, 2018
| Time | Event |
| 12:03a | Cryptocurrency Miners Are Building Their Own Electricity Infrastructure ted_pikul shares a report from Motherboard: Access to cheap electricity can make or break a cryptocurrency mining operation. The latest move in the quest for bargain-basement power rates: building out local power grids. Canadian company DMG Blockchain is building what it hopes will be a fully-functioning substation in Southern British Columbia, which is electrified by hydro power. Building the substation is costing millions of dollars and required building an access road to haul equipment. "[...] the utility will test everything as a completed substation and make sure that the town doesn't blow up when we flip the switch," Steven Eliscu of DMG Blockchain said. 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 1:25a | Motorola Launches Verizon-Exclusive Moto Z3 Smartphone, 5G Moto Mod Motorola unveiled their new flagship Moto Z3 smartphone today that's upgradeable to 5G. Like other Moto Z phones, the Z3 includes support for Moto Mods, including a new 5G Moto Mod that will let you use Verizon's mobile 5G network when it launches in 2019. The new Mod contains a Snapdragon X50 modem and 2,000mAh battery to help you stay connected to the 5G network. PhoneDog reports: The Moto Z3 is a Motorola phone that's exclusive to Verizon in the U.S. Specs for this Android 8.1-powered smartphone include a 6.01-inch 2160x1080 Super AMOLED screen and 8MP wide angle front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture. Around back there's a dual rear camera setup with two 12MP cameras, one RGB and one monochrome, along with laser autofocus and portrait mode support. Inside the Moto Z3 lives an octa-core Snapdragon 835 processor along with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of built-in storage, and a microSD card slot. There's a 3000mAh battery and a USB-C port for recharging that battery, as well as support for Motorola's TurboPower solution to recharge in a hurry. Unfortunately, there's no 3.5mm headphone jack to be found here. All of those features are crammed into a body with a water repellent coating. Rounding things out is a side-mounted fingerprint reader and support for face unlock.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 1:00p | New Study Finds It's Harder To Turn Off a Robot When It's Begging For Its Life An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: [A] recent experiment by German researchers demonstrates that people will refuse to turn a robot off if it begs for its life. In the study, published in the open access journal PLOS One, 89 volunteers were recruited to complete a pair of tasks with the help of Nao, a small humanoid robot. The participants were told that the tasks (which involved answering a series of either / or questions, like "Do you prefer pasta or pizza?"; and organizing a weekly schedule) were to improve Nao's learning algorithms. But this was just a cover story, and the real test came after these tasks were completed, and scientists asked participants to turn off the robot. In roughly half of experiments, the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging: "No! Please do not switch me off!" When this happened, the human volunteers were likely to refuse to turn the bot off. Of the 43 volunteers who heard Nao's pleas, 13 refused. And the remaining 30 took, on average, twice as long to comply compared to those who did not not hear the desperate cries at all.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 2:00p | AMD Creates Quad Core Zen SoC with 24 Vega CUs for Chinese Consoles An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has cornered the x86 console market with its handy semi-custom mix of processors and graphics. While we slowly await the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, today AMD and Zhongshan Subor announced that a custom chip has been made for a new gaming PC and an upcoming console for the Chinese market. The announcement states that a custom chip has been created for Subor that is based on four Zen cores running at 3.0 GHz and 24 compute units of Vega running at 1.3 GHz. The chip is supported by 8GB of GDDR5 memory, which the press release states is also embedded onto the chip, however it is likely to actually be on the package instead. [...] Assuming that this custom chip is a single chip design, with CPU and GPU, this means that AMD is handily gaining custom contracts and designing custom chip designs for its customers, even for consoles that won't have the mass western appeal such as the Xbox or Playstation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 6:20p | GE Engineer With Ties To China Accused of Stealing Power Plant Technology An anonymous reader quotes a report from TheStreet: General Electric stock was little changed on Friday, August 3, as a GE engineer with ties to China who has been accused of stealing proprietary power-turbine technology has been released on bond. Xiaoqing Zheng, 56, has been in custody since Wednesday when the FBI raided his home in Niskayuna, New York, near Albany. A federal judge on Thursday set a $100,000 bond; Zheng offered his family's home as collateral and was released on Friday. He was ordered to wear an electronic monitoring device and limit his travel, according to multiple media reports. Zheng, who is a U.S. citizen, was hired by GE in 2008 to work as a principal engineer for the company's power division, according to an affidavit by an FBI agent filed in federal court in Albany. Zheng is "suspected of taking/stealing, on multiple occasions via sophisticated means, data files from GE's laboratories that contain GE's trade secret information involving turbine technology," the FBI said in its affidavit. He also took "elaborate means" to conceal the removal of GE data files. "The primary focus of this affidavit is Zheng's action in 2018 in which he encrypted GE data files containing trade secret information, and thereafter sent the trade secret information from his GE work computer to Zheng's personal e-mail address hidden in the binary code of a digital photograph via a process known as steganography," the FBI said. "Additionally, the secondary focus of this affidavit is Zheng's actions in 2014 in which he downloaded more than 19,000 files from GE's computer network onto an external storage device, believed by GE investigators to have been a personal thumb drive." Zheng's attorney disputed the allegations, saying Zheng "transmitted information on his own patents to himself and to no one else."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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