Didier “Ice” Iceman

L'Amazonie péruvienne a perdu 1,97 million d'hectares de surface entre 2001 et 2016, soit plus de 123.000 hectares chaque année.

Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant were meant to be controlled by live human voices, but all three AI assistants are susceptible to hidden commands undetectable to the human ear, researchers in China and the United States have discovered. From a report: The New York Times reports today that the assistants can be controlled using subsonic commands hidden in radio music, YouTube videos, or even white noise played over speakers, a potentially huge security risk for users. According to the report, the assistants can be made to dial phone numbers, launch websites, make purchases, and access smart home accessories -- such as door locks -- at the same time as human listeners are perceiving anything from completely different spoken text to recordings of music. In some cases, assistants can be instructed to take pictures or send text messages, receiving commands from up to 25 feet away through a building's open windows. Researchers at Berkeley said that they can modestly alter audio files "to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a powerful tool, but recent incidents have shown that there's no winning with facial recognition.

(Washington) — Three Americans detained in North Korea for more than a year are on their way back to the U.S. with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday in the latest sign of improving relations between the two longtime adversary nations.

Trump said on Twitter that Pompeo was “in the air” and was with “the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting.” The president, who had been hinting about an imminent release, said he would greet them at Andrews Air Force Base at 2 a.m. Thursday.

The release of the detainees came as Pompeo visited North Korea on Wednesday to finalize plans for a historic summit between Trump and the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Trump said on Twitter that there had been a “good meeting with Kim Jong Un,” adding: “Date & Place set.”

North Korea had accused Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song and Tony Kim, all Korean-Americans, of anti-state activities but their arrests were widely seen as politically motivated and had compounded the dire state of relations over the isolated nation’s nuclear weapons.

They had been held for periods ranging between one and two years. They were the latest in a series of Americans who have been detained by North Korea in recent years for seemingly small offenses and typically freed when senior U.S. officials or statesmen personally visited to bail them out.

Pompeo, in his visit, discussed the agenda for a potential Trump-Kim summit in a meeting with Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the central committee of North Korea’s ruling party.

Later, Pompeo said the senior official had been a great partner in working to make the summit a success.

“For decades, we have been adversaries. Now we are hopeful that we can work together to resolve this conflict,” Pompeo said, adding that “there are many challenges along the way.”

Kim noted the improved relations between the Koreas, as well as the North’s policy to “concentrate all efforts into economic progress” in the country.

“This is not a result of sanctions that have been imposed from outside,” he added, citing the will of the Korean people. That contradicted Trump, who has said repeatedly that his pressure tactics brought North Korea to the negotiating table.

Pompeo’s trip, his second to North Korea this year, had not been publicly disclosed when he flew out of Washington late Monday aboard an Air Force jetliner. Trump announced the mission Tuesday afternoon as he laid out his case for withdrawing from a landmark nuclear deal with Iran, another bitter U.S. adversary.

Minutes later, Pompeo arrived in Japan to refuel before flying on to Pyongyang. Accompanying him were a handful of senior aides, a security detail and two journalists — one from The Associated Press and one from The Washington Post, both given roughly four hours’ notice of his departure.

When the flight arrived Wednesday morning in Pyongyang, North Korean officials were on hand to greet Pompeo. A motorcade took Pompeo and his delegation to the Koryo Hotel, the main hotel for foreigners in Pyongyang.

The trip came just days after North Korea expressed displeasure with Washington for comments suggesting that massive U.S. pressure had pushed Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table.

Pompeo, who first traveled to North Korea as CIA chief in early April, is only the second sitting secretary of state to visit the reclusive nation with which the U.S. is still technically at war. The first was Madeleine Albright, who went in 2000 as part of an unsuccessful bid to arrange a meeting between then-President Bill Clinton and Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il.

“Plans are being made, relationships are building, hopefully a deal will happen and with the help of China, South Korea and Japan a future of great prosperity and security can be achieved for everyone,” Trump said at the White House as he announced Pompeo’s visit on Wednesday.

Pompeo’s first trip to Pyongyang, over Easter weekend before he was confirmed as secretary of state, was a closely held secret. News of it did not emerge until just before his Senate confirmation vote less than two weeks ago. Shortly afterward, the White House released photographs of Pompeo and Kim.

Pompeo told reporters that his first visit was to test the North’s seriousness of pledges to South Korea on easing tensions. This trip was “to put in place a framework for a successful summit,” he said.

The Trump-Kim meeting is expected later this month or in early June.

“I think it would be a great gesture if they would agree to do so,” Pompeo said, adding that it would be difficult to hold a leaders’ summit if the prisoners remained captive.

Pompeo’s visit to Pyongyang aimed to lock down the date and venue for a formal announcement. It came just a day after Kim returned from China, his second trip to the neighboring country in six weeks to meet with President Xi Jinping.

A Trump-Kim meeting seemed a remote possibility just a few months ago when the two leaders were trading threats and insults over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile tests. But momentum for diplomacy built this year as North and South Korea have moved to ease tensions, including with their own leaders’ summit late last month.

In March, Trump unexpectedly accepted an offer of talks from Kim after the North Korean dictator agreed to suspend nuclear and missile tests and discuss “denuclearization.” According to South Korea, Kim says he’s willing to give up his nukes if the United States commits to a formal end to the Korean War and pledges not to attack the North.

Kim was quoted by China’s official news agency Xinhua as saying on Monday, “I hope to build mutual trust with the U.S. through dialogue.” He added that a political resolution of tensions on the Korean Peninsula and denuclearization should proceed in stages, with all sides moving in concert.

But his exact demands for relinquishing weapons that his nation spent decades building remain unclear. Previous U.S. efforts to negotiate an end to the North’s nuclear weapons program failed under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.

Pompeo and officials traveling with him said the Trump administration would not repeat mistakes of the past, which they described as accepting gradual, incremental and long-term disarmament in exchange for immediate benefits.

“We will not relieve sanctions until such time as we have achieved our objectives,” Pompeo said. “We’re not going to do this in small increments where the world is essentially coerced into relieving economic pressure.”

Trump has said that withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea is “not on the table.” Some 28,500 U.S. forces are based in the allied nation, a military presence that has been preserved to deter North Korea since the war ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.

After weeks of positive signals, though, North Korea on Sunday dismissed what it called “misleading” claims that Trump’s policy of maximum political pressure and sanctions are what drove the North to talks. A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman warned the claims are a “dangerous attempt” to ruin a budding detente on the Korean Peninsula after the summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

____

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Ken Thomas in Washington contributed to this report.

A new invention could give researchers a dynamic tool to study the brain’s role in various behaviors.

It’s a neuroscientist’s dream: being able to track the millions of interactions among brain cells in animals that move about freely, behaving as they would under natural circumstances. The new technology is a step towards realizing that goal.

Although designed for use with mice, information gleaned from the technology could someday shed light on neuronal activity in humans as well, says Alipasha Vaziri, who led the its development as head of the Laboratory of Neurotechnology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University. For example, it might allow us to better understand the neuronal basis of brain disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Vaziri says the tool provides an opening to an exciting range of discoveries. As an animal moves about its environment, for instance, some neurons direct spatial navigation while others receive sensory feedback from changes to the body’s position or the visual system.

“Until now, no one has been able to detect how these different neurons, which can be located at different depths within a volume of brain tissue, dynamically interact with each other in a freely moving rodent,” says Vaziri. Similarly, the tool can be used to record the interplay among neurons when two animals meet and interact socially.

Light show

The technology consists of a tiny microscope attached to a mouse’s head and outfitted with a specialized group of lenses called a microlens array.

These lenses enable the microscope to capture images from multiple angles and depths on a sensor chip, producing a three-dimensional record of neurons blinking on and off as they communicate with each other through electrochemical impulses. (In the experiments, the mouse neurons are genetically modified to light up when they become activated.) A coaxial cable attached to the top of the microscope transmits the data for recording.

The head-mounted gear weighs only four grams, but Vaziri expects that planned modifications will make it even lighter.

Once the microlens array captures sensor images from within a volume of brain tissue, the next challenge is to process this raw data. Brain tissue is opaque, making it difficult to pinpoint the source of each neuronal light flash. Vaziri’s team solved this problem, which is the result of so-called scattering, by developing a new computer algorithm.

Scientists see neurons fire in brain of flying bat

“The algorithm utilizes the statistical properties of neurons’ distribution in space and in activity,” Vaziri explains, “while extracting additional information from the scattered emission light. This enables their activity to be simultaneously and faithfully recorded within a volume despite the highly scattering tissue properties.”

The result is a clear image that shows individual neurons flashing in sequence.

A better way

Vaziri’s lab has previously applied this algorithm, known by the acronym SID, in studies in which researchers secured the heads of the mice in fixed positions. Their latest research is the first to demonstrate that researchers can use these inventions together with a tiny microscope called the Miniscope, which a collaborating team at the University of California, Los Angeles developed, to measure neuronal activity volumetrically in unconstrained animals.

The technology, if widely adopted, could offer several advantages over two-photon microscopy, a broadly used neuroscience tool. For example, two-photon microscopy records neuronal activity within individual focal planes—thin, virtual “slices” of the sample—that then are combined to create a three-dimensional image.

Holographic brain device would edit our senses and memories

In contrast, Vaziri’s method immediately captures data in three dimensions over an entire volume of tissue, making it faster and more effective.

Vaziri plans to continue developing tools to record neuronal activity in even larger portions of the brain than currently possible, and at higher speeds and resolution.

“We hope this work will ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of how the brain processes information underlying the generation of behavior,” he says.

A paper describing the work appears in Nature Methods.

Source: Rockefeller University

The post Tool gives scientists a glimpse of real-time brain activity appeared first on Futurity.

Moments after he declared the U.S. was pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, President Trump seemed to abruptly switch topics to announce that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on his way to North Korea to prepare for Trump’s meeting with the nuclear-armed despot Kim Jong Un.

What seemed to be a jarring aside was actually part of Trump’s decision to reimpose U.S. sanctions against Iran.

Over the past two months, Trump has come to see his policy toward North Korea as a success and believes his unusual combination of insults and biting economic sanctions appears to have brought Kim to the table. Now, Trump wants run the same playbook against Iran.

“Today’s action sends a critical message: The United States no longer makes empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them,” Trump said, standing at a lectern in the White House’s Diplomatic Room. Then he brought up Pompeo’s trip: “In fact, at this very moment, Secretary Pompeo is on his way to North Korea in preparation for my upcoming meeting with Kim Jong Un. Plans are being made. Relationships are building.”

Foreign policy experts have warned for months that if Trump backs out of the Iran deal, it will make it harder to convince North Korea that the U.S. will live up to any commitments brokered as part of an agreement to remove nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula. But Trump and his aides disagree. Ditching the Iran deal, in their view, shows North Korea’s young despot that Trump won’t accept terms that allow for Kim to eventually restart a nuclear program.

“Another aspect of the withdrawal that was announced today is to establish positions of strength for the United States, and it will have implications not simply for Iran, but for the forthcoming meeting with Kim Jong Un of North Korea,” National Security Advisor John Bolton told reporters in the White House press room after the President spoke. “The message to North Korea is the President wants a real deal.”

While he’s on the ground in North Korea, Pompeo will be asking Kim to discuss returning to commitments North Korea made when it signed the South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which included shutting down uranium enrichment and plutonium processing, among other things, Bolton said.

Non-proliferation experts said Trump may be generating a crisis where there wasn’t one. Iran has limited its capacity to enrich uranium, and by going back on the U.S. part of the bargain, Trump may be risking that. Trump’s action doesn’t automatically end the deal — China, Russia, Germany, France and the U.K. were also signatories of the deal and have said they would continue to adhere to the terms — but it exposes foreign companies to possible U.S. penalties for doing business in Iran.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani chastised the U.S. for not living up to its commitments, but indicated Iran may try to weather the restoration of U.S. sanctions, hoping to continue doing business with other signatories of the 2015 deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “It is possible that we will face some problems for two or three months, but we will pass through this,” Rouhani said, adding that Iran would like to keep “working with the world and constructive engagement with the world.”

Trump’s negotiating skills — honed in the New York real estate world — are still being tested on the world stage. He hasn’t gotten any permanent concessions out of North Korea yet, and his saber rattling on trade has yet to show dramatic results for the U.S.

“It’s not clear that the Art of the Deal works,” said Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has advocated or fixing shortcomings in the Iran deal. “Obviously Trump has an appetite for risk that has led him to huge successes and four bankruptcies. This is clearly another example of a hugely risky negotiating strategy that could yield extremely positive results or be a potential disaster.”

The President’s decision to pull out from the deal is “foreign policy malpractice,” said Thomas Countryman, a 35-year career diplomat who retired last year after leading the State Department’s nonproliferation efforts. It creates a long list of concerns, he said, including provoking Iran to restart uranium enrichment, handicapping ongoing IAEA nuclear facility inspections, and stoking tensions in an already tumultuous region.

“It’s an unjustified decision with no explanation on how to improve the JCPOA or prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Countryman said. “This is not a Trump Hotel where you can go to bankruptcy court and start all over again. Multilateral agreements don’t work that way.”

With reporting from W.J. Hennigan/Washington

Google today announced Chrome OS is getting Linux support. "As a result, Chromebooks will soon be able to run Linux apps and execute Linux commands," reports VentureBeat. "A preview of Linux on the Pixelbook will be released first, with support for more devices coming soon." From the report: "Just go to wherever you normally get those apps, whether it's on the websites or through apt-get in the Linux terminal, and seamless get those apps like any other Linux distribution," Chrome OS director of product management Kan Liu told VentureBeat. Support for Linux apps means developers will finally be able to use a Google device to develop for Google's platforms, rather than having to depend on Windows, Mac, or Linux machines. And because Chrome OS doesn't just run Chrome OS-specific apps anymore, developers will be able to create, test, and run any Android or web app for phones, tablets, and laptops all on their Chromebooks. Without having to switch devices, you can run your favorite IDE -- as long as there is a Debian Linux version (for the curious, Google is specifically using Debian Stretch here -- code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command line.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google introduces new features to make life easier, and to help the company collect more data on users.

President Donald Trump promised crippling sanctions targeting Iran and anyone that helps develop its nuclear program as he announced the U.S. will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

“We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction,” Trump said in remarks at the White House. “Any nation that helps Iran in its quest for nuclear weapons could also be strongly sanctioned by the United States.”

But one country the sanctions could also hurt that he didn’t mention: the United States.

The new sanctions will target the Iranian oil sector, reducing energy companies’ business with Iran and increasing the price of oil. But the reduced Iranian supply could lead to sustained high oil prices and further geopolitical instability, in turn contributing to inflation and slowing economic growth at home.

“The consumers are going to shoulder the bill,” says Greg Sharenow, an executive vice president at PIMCO, an investment management firm. “The U.S. economy will face headwinds from prices that will come as a natural result of this.”

Read More: How Talks with North Korea Convinced Trump to Scrap the Iran Deal

The consequences of withdrawing from the agreement may not be clear in the short term. In fact, Iranian oil production will likely remain steady or even increase as foreign companies try to establish a higher baseline from which to negotiate reductions.

But the effect of sanctions will likely pick up as sanctions take effect, analysts say. A report from Barclay’s bank suggests that Iranian oil supply could be reduced by up to 600,000 barrels per day, approximately a third of its exports in 2016. The country was the world’s fifth greatest oil producer in 2017.

The prospect of losing Iranian oil supply is one of many factors that has led prices of the commodity to rise rapidly in recent months to more than $70 a barrel, up nearly 50% from over a year ago. Falling production in Venezuela amidst the country’s political upheaval, general geopolitical instability in the Middle East and cuts to production orchestrated by OPEC and Saudi Arabia have all contributed to high prices.

Energy companies in the U.S. could potentially make up for some the supply difficulties by increasing production of abundant shale and offshore oil. Indeed, some analysts say they expect the U.S. supply could stem the effects of lost Iranian supply.

But those companies face their own set of challenges. The U.S. oil and gas industry faces a labor shortage particularly in some of its high-growth regions and the industry has struggled to build the pipeline infrastructure necessary to ship their product around the country. The companies are likely to spend additional revenue from higher prices on share buybacks, distributions to shareholders and paying down debts, says Sharenow.

Americans consumers may soon notice the pinch. Retail gas prices have ticked up and are expected to be at the highest summer levels in four years, according to a projection from the Energy Information Administration. Consumers in the past have cut spending as gas prices eat into their discretionary budget.

The White House appears aware of the threat that rising oil prices pose to the economic growth of the Trump era. Trump himself targeted OPEC on Twitter in April as oil prices continued to rise.

Beyond tweets, the Administration could try to push Saudi Arabia and other oil rich allies to increase production. But Saudi Arabia benefits from increased prices and the IMF estimates that the country will need prices at $70 a barrel to break even. Saudi officials have said they would like to see prices continue upward. Indeed, the country orchestrated a production cut with OPEC and Russia to nudge prices in that direction. But Saudi officials also do not want prices to cross $100 a barrel, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

“The Saudis have signaled that they’re interested in continuing,” says Antoine Halff, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and the former chief oil analyst at the International Energy Agency. “Their price appetite is only increasing.”

That means a higher bill for the U.S. — and a new economic and geopolitical challenge for Trump.

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La publication d’une enquête sur le nouveau propriétaire du Phnom Penh Post déclenche démissions et limogeages en cascade au sein du journal. Une saignée dans l’un des derniers journaux indépendants du pays. 

Le président américain a décidé le 8 mai de rompre l'accord sur le nucléaire iranien, qui cherche à brider les ambitions nucléaires de la République islamique, mais contre lequel ferraille Donald Trump depuis plusieurs années, assisté de son compère israélien Benyamin Netanyahou. Et tant pis si, à quelques jours d'un sommet avec le Nord-Coréen Kim Jong-un, un désengagement des États-Unis devait plutôt apparaître comme un « mauvais signal »…

- Défense en ligne / États-Unis, Armement nucléaire, Iran, Diplomatie, France, Géopolitique

The Mystical Underpinnings of Facebook's Anti-Fake-News Algorithms.

D’après The Observer, des collaborateurs du président américain ont demandé à des enquêteurs privés de trouver des éléments à charge contre des négociateurs américains de l’accord sur le nucléaire avec l’Iran.

Je dois vous dire très honnêtement que c'est un peu contraint et forcé que je reviens à Firefox !

Comme beaucoup de personnes (…ou pas), j’ai lu les propositions du rapport Villani sur l’intelligence artificielle. Et comme je n’attends pas ce genre de rapport pour me poser des questions sur ma propre activité, j’ai regardé ce que je pouvais améliorer. L’occasion de faire des tests et de clôturer enfin des expériences. Je sais que j’ai… Lire la suite Blog-tuto : Et si j’étais intelligent… artificiellement →

Whether or not the autonomous Pacifica minivan was at fault, it's bad news for a young industry trying to prove it can makes roads safer for everyone.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Researchers have found eight new flaws in computer central processing units that resemble the Meltdown and Spectre bugs revealed in January, a German computing magazine reported on Thursday. The magazine, called c't, said it was aware of Intel's plans to patch the flaws, adding that some chips designed by ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan's Softbank, might be affected, while work was continuing to establish whether Advanced Micro Devices chips were vulnerable. Meltdown and Spectre bugs could reveal the contents of a computer's central processing unit -- designed to be a secure inner sanctum -- either by bypassing hardware barriers or by tricking applications into giving up secret information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

J’avais testé, il y a deux ans, des solutions libres de sauvegarde en ligne/Nuage/Cloud (Cozy et Owncloud) en terme d’ergonomie et de fonctionnalités. Depuis, les cartes ont été rebattues et je m’intéresse plus à l’aspect financier, tout en expliquant à quoi ça peut bien servir pour M. et Mme Toulemonde. En effet, il faut bien… Lire la suite Test : Les nuages peuvent-ils être libre? Comparatif de solutions de Cloud grand-public →

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Newzoo's 2018 Global Games Market Forecast now predicts that mobile games will make up a slim majority (51 percent) of all worldwide gaming revenue this year (including smartphones and tablets, but not dedicated gaming handhelds). That's up from 34 percent in 2015 and just 18 percent in 2012. Console and PC games will split the remainder of the pie relatively evenly in 2018, at 25 percent and 24 percent of worldwide spending, respectively. The growth of the mobile market doesn't show any signs of stopping, either: by 2021, Newzoo estimates that 59 percent of all gaming spending will go to mobile platforms, with console and PC games dividing up the scraps. The report finds that China is responsible for 28 percent of all gaming spending in the world, up from 24 percent in 2015. "Mobile gaming is overrepresented in the world's biggest gaming market, responsible for 61 percent of all Chinese gaming revenue and poised to grow to 70 percent by 2021," reports Ars. Japan's overall spending on mobile games is nearly on par with the United States, despite the country having one-third as many gamers overall.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California, along with seventeen other states, announced a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency today over its recent rollback of Obama-era vehicle emissions and fuel economy standards. The states argue that the EPA "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in overturning the previous administration's decision. The Verge reports: The standards in question were drawn up in 2009 and adopted in 2012. They laid out a path for automakers to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by reaching an average fleet fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2024. Since the program was charting a course that stretched out more than a decade into the future, it was written into the rules that the EPA would have to perform a "mid-term evaluation" before April 1st, 2018. This review would serve two purposes: assess whether automakers were on track, and then use that information to determine if the last section of the standards (which apply to model year 2022-2025 cars) were still feasible. The EPA, under Barack Obama, kicked off this review process ahead of schedule in the summer of 2016 when it published an extensive 1,200-page technical assessment that analyzed whether the standards were working. In January 2017, the outgoing EPA wrapped this evaluation and determined that the bar was not set too high. In fact, it argued, automakers were overwhelmingly compliant. The Trump EPA's decision in April did not set new standards -- it simply argued that there were problems with the existing standards. In the meantime, the agency and the Department of Transportation are currently working together to craft and officially propose new standards. But the previous standards that the EPA said were inappropriate will technically remain in place until that happens.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an exclusive in-person interview, Zuckerberg discusses F8 and Facebook's trust issues.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Regulators, publishers, and privacy watchdogs say moves by the tech giants may leave European internet users no better off.