According to The Planetary Society, LightSail 2 has successfully raised its orbit using solar sailing, making it the first small spacecraft to demonstrate the concept. From the report: Since unfurling the spacecraft's silver solar sail last week, mission managers have been optimizing the way the spacecraft orients itself during solar sailing. After a few tweaks, LightSail 2 began raising its orbit around the Earth. In the past 4 days, the spacecraft has raised its orbital high point, or apogee, by about 2 kilometers. The perigee, or low point of its orbit, has dropped by a similar amount, which is consistent with pre-flight expectations for the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft. The mission team has confirmed the apogee increase can only be attributed to solar sailing, meaning LightSail 2 has successfully completed its primary goal of demonstrating flight by light for CubeSats.

The milestone makes LightSail 2 the first spacecraft to use solar sailing for propulsion in Earth orbit, the first small spacecraft to demonstrate solar sailing, and just the second-ever solar sail spacecraft to successfully fly, following Japan's IKAROS, which launched in 2010. LightSail 2 is also the first crowdfunded spacecraft to successfully demonstrate a new form of propulsion. The mission team will continue raising LightSail 2's orbit for roughly a month, until the perigee decreases to the point where atmospheric drag overcomes the thrust from solar sailing. During the orbit-raising period, the team will continue optimizing the performance of the solar sail.

Google on Wednesday announced it's making its Titan Security Key available via the Google Store in multiple new countries: Canada, France, Japan and the United Kingdom. Google launched the second-factor security key last year, starting with availability in the US. From a report: Google touts the Titan Security Key as one of the best ways to protect Google Accounts from hacking and phishing, especially high-value accounts that are regularly probed and attacked. The key is used as part of Google's Advanced Protection Program. Based on FIDO open standards, the security key comes in both USB and Bluetooth varieties. Back in May, Google had to issue replacements for the Bluetooth keys due to a vulnerability in the pairing process.

An anonymous reader writes: To stay on Beijing's good side, U.S. filmmakers are willing to kowtow to China's authoritarian regime, and there seems no limit to their willingness to acquiesce. Take Top Gun: Maverick, a long-awaited sequel to the 1986 classic action film that made Tom Cruise a superstar. After the sequel's trailer was unveiled at San Diego's ComicCon last week, alert fans noted that the iconic leather flight jacket worn by Cruise's character in the original film had been altered. All of the patches from the original film were there except for flags representing Chinese adversaries Japan and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Those flags were missing. The culprits were soon pretty obvious. The Hollywood Reporter found that the Chinese company Tencent is co-financing the sequel. Co-producing the film along with Paramount Pictures is Skydance, which is partially owned by Tencent.

"Top Gun is an American classic, and it's incredibly disappointing to see Hollywood elites appease the Chinese Communist Party," Senator Ted Cruz of Texas lamented to the Washington Free Beacon. "The Party uses China's economy to silence dissent against its brutal repression and to erode the sovereignty of American allies like Taiwan. Hollywood is afraid to stand up for free speech and is enabling the Party's campaign against Taiwan." Senator Lindsey Graham, a colleague of Cruz's, chimed in. "I hate to see the flag removed because of Chinese financing," he said in an interview with TMZ. "It's nothing the government can do, but I think it sucks." Nor is Top Gun: Maverick the only example of genuflection. China is almost uniformly portrayed in American movies as a technologically advanced superpower (see movies such as The Martian, 2012, and Looper). In Looper, a science-fiction drama, a time-traveler is learning French and saving his money so that he can move to Paris. But his boss, who is from the future, says he is making a mistake.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nature: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people.

Until March, Japan explicitly forbid the growth of animal embryos containing human cells beyond 14 days or the transplant of such embryos into a surrogate uterus. That month Japan's education and science ministry issued new guidelines allowing the creation of human-animal embryos that can be transplanted into surrogate animals and brought to term. Nakauchi's experiments are the first to be approved under Japan's new rules, by a committee of experts in the science ministry. Final approval from the ministry is expected next month. Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal's organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

Japan's SoftBank Group unveiled a second technology megafund even bigger than its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, answering skeptics who questioned whether anyone could raise so much in such a short time. From a report: Vision Fund 2, as the company is calling it, expects to gather some $108 billion in capital from more than a dozen investors that have signed memorandums of understanding, ranging from Apple, and Microsoft to Kazakhstan's sovereign-wealth fund, SoftBank said Friday. Some $38 billion of that capital will come from SoftBank itself, funded by proceeds from the first Vision Fund.

Other investors including Goldman Sachs Group are in active talks to invest, people familiar with the matter said Thursday, and the fund's size is likely to grow. [...] The planned inauguration of the second fund is a victory for SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, who started the first Vision Fund just two years ago amid widespread doubt about its viability.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Several people have been killed after an apparent arson attack gutted a building at Kyoto Animation, one of Japan's most renowned anime studios. NHK reports that 33 people are confirmed dead and many more have been injured. An explosion was heard around the studio at around 10.30AM local time. Police are questioning a man in his 40s who was seen spreading and lighting a gasoline-like liquid in the 1st Studio building, which is said to be where most of Kyoto Animation's mainline production takes place. The Mainichi Shinbun newspaper reports that the man said he started the fire. Kyoto Animation, also known as KyoAni, is best known for series like K-On! and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya, and release standalone feature A Silent Voice in 2016. Netflix picked up the streaming rights to KyoAni's Violet Evergarden series and made it available worldwide last year.

UPDATE: Several sources are now reporting that the man who set fire to the building screamed angrily, "they faked it." According to The Daily Beast, "The word he used in Japanese, pakuri, can reference stealing an idea, ripping off a product, or plagiarizing someone else's work."

Japan's government is leading a global push to set up an international network for cryptocurrency payments, similar to the SWIFT network used by banks, in an effort to fight money laundering, Reuters reports. From the report: Tokyo aims to have the network in place in the next few years, the person said, declining to be identified because the information has not been made public. A team related to the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will monitor its development and Japan will cooperate with other countries, the source said. It remains unclear how the cryptocurrency network would work. SWIFT is the international payments messaging system used by banks to send money around the world.

You'll be able to complete the trifecta of tiny 16-bit throwback systems on March 19, 2020, when Konami releases the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. From a report: It'll include Dracula X, Bonk's Revenge, Gradius and many more games, including many Japanese exclusives. Konami said last week that it will sell the device exclusively through Amazon, with preorders opening up on Monday, July 15 during the online retailer's "Prime Day" promotion. The U.S. will get the TurboGrafx-shaped device shown above, while Japan will get a version modeled after the PC Engine and Europe's model will be styled after the CoreGrafx revision. No price has been announced for the U.S. model, but the Japanese one will cost 10,500 yen or around $100. The game library will be almost identical across all three systems, including 24 American versions of games and 26 Japanese versions. There is a little bit of overlap between the two -- for example, both the U.S. and Japanese versions of the action RPG Neutopia are included. That means it's not quite 50 games total, but it's still a rich lineup, which even includes CD-ROM games and some games from the Japanese SuperGrafx system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: South Korea has warned that an escalating trade dispute with Japan could hurt the global tech industry. President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that Japan's decision to restrict exports to South Korea of materials used in memory chips are a "blow to the economy" and threaten to disrupt global supplies. Japan announced earlier this month that companies would need a government license to export three materials to South Korea. The materials -- fluorinated polyamides, photoresists and hydrogen fluoride -- are used to make memory chips and smartphones.

The export controls are a massive headache for South Korean firms Samsung and SK Hynix, who between them control over 63% of the global memory chip market, according to the latest figures from the Korea International Trade Association. South Korean firms sourced 94% of fluorinated polyamides, 92% of photoresists and about 44% of hydrogen fluoride from Japan In the first quarter of this year, data from the association showed. Samsung, the world's biggest seller of smartphones, said in a statement to CNN Business that it was "assessing the current situation and reviewing a number of measures to minimize the impact on our production."

Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitpoint announced it lost 3.5 billion yen (roughly $32 million) worth of cryptocurrency assets after a hack that happened late yesterday, July 11. From a report: The exchange suspended all deposits and withdrawals this morning to investigate the hack, it said in a press release. In a more detailed document released by RemixPoint, the legal entity behind Bitpoint, the company said that hackers stole funds from both of its "hot" and "cold" wallets. This suggests the exchange's network was thoroughly compromised. Hot wallets are used to store funds for current transactions, while the cold wallets are offline devices storing emergency and long-term funds. Bitpoint reported the attackers stole funds in five cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ripple, and Ethereal. The exchange said it detected the hack because of errors related to the remittance of Ripple funds to customers. Twenty-seven minutes after detecting the errors, Bitpoint admins realized they had been hacked, and three hours later, they discovered thefts from other cryptocurrency assets.

Japan's Hayabusa2 probe touched down on a distant asteroid on Thursday, the space agency said, on a mission to collect samples that could shed light on the history of the solar system. The Japan Times reports: "The control room received Doppler data showing that the probe appears to have touched down successfully," Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency spokesman Takayuki Tomobe said. "But Doppler only shows the speed and altitude so we will need definitive confirmation," he added. Additional data readings are expected later in the day. The landing is the second time it has touched down on the desolate asteroid as part of a complex mission that has also involved sending rovers and robots. The mission hopes to collect pristine materials from beneath the surface of the asteroid that could provide insights into what the solar system was like at its birth, some 4.6 billion years ago.

To get at those crucial materials, in April an "impactor" was fired from Hayabusa2 toward Ryugu in a risky process that created a crater on the asteroid's surface and stirred up material that had not previously been exposed to the atmosphere. The second touchdown required special preparations because any problems could mean the probe loses the precious materials already gathered during its first landing. The probe had been expected to make a brief touchdown on an area some 20 meters away from the center of the crater to collect the unidentified materials believed to be "ejecta" from the blast.

On Monday, 7-Eleven launched a smartphone payment service for its 20,000 stores in Japan. By Thursday $510,000 had been stolen from the people using it -- as many as 900 customers.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared this follow-up article, which points out that it's also possible that email addresses and birth dates have been accessed from among the new app's 1.5 million registered users: Tsuyoshi Kobayashi, president of Seven Pay Co., told a press conference in Tokyo that the company will compensate users for the losses caused by fraudulent access and that it has already suspended accepting new users or allowing users of the service to add money to its smartphone application. The estimated amount of losses the company announced is as of 6 a.m. Thursday and the damage could expand...

The parent company said someone, who had accessed their accounts and used the registered numbers of their credit or debit cards, purchased items at its convenience stores. The items included packs of cigarettes, which can be easily converted into cash, it said, adding there was a case in which a huge quantity worth 100,000 yen [$921] was purchased all at once at one of its outlets...

According to Seven & i Holdings, some customers reported their losses on Tuesday and unauthorized access from China and other locations outside Japan was confirmed... Police arrested two Chinese men on Thursday in connection with the problem, investigative sources said. They are suspected of illegally using the ID and password of a customer Wednesday in an attempt to buy electric cigarette cartridges worth around 200,000 yen [$1,843] at a 7-Eleven shop in Tokyo.
Nikkei Asian Review reports that one of the suspects "received instructions about gaining unauthorized access to 7pay accounts via WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. The Metropolitan Police Department suspects the involvement of an international criminal organization." (Japan Times reports that one man was asked to do "some shopping" after which they would receive "a reward".)

Nikkei Asian Review also notes that the Japanese government has been pushing to to have a least 40% of all payments be cashless by the mid-2020s -- including generous government tax incentives -- which one consumer finance writer says has "overheated" the market, while "the quality of services has declined in some cases."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Toyota is testing a new and improved version of the solar power cells it previously launched on the Japan-exclusive Prius PHV, in a pilot along with partners Sharp and Japanese national research organization NEDO. This demo car's prototype cells can convert solar energy at 34% and up, which is much better than the existing commercial version's 22.5%. And, unlike its predecessor, it also can charge the car's driving battery while the car is actually moving, recouping significant range while the vehicle is in use. The new system will provide up to 44.5 km (27.7 miles) of additional range per day while parked and soaking up sun, and can add up to 56.3 km (35 miles) of power to both the driving system and the auxiliary power battery on board, which runs the AC, navigation and more.

Using a redesigned solar battery cell film that measures only 0.03 mm (that's 0.001 inches), the vehicle's engineers could put the film over a much broader surface area of the vehicle compared to the existing production version, with solar cells that wrap around covered body components, the rear door and the hood with relative ease. And as mentioned, the system can now work while the car is actually driving, thanks to changes in how generated power is fed to the system, which is a huge step up from the last generation, which could only push power to that auxiliary battery to run the radio, etc. when in motion. This new test vehicle will hit the road in Japan in late July, and perform trials across a range of different regions to test its abilities in different weather and driving conditions.

Approximately 900 customers of 7-Eleven Japan have lost a collective of $510,000 after hackers hijacked their 7pay app accounts and made illegal charges in their names. From a report: The incident was caused by an appalling security lapse in the design of the company's 7pay mobile payment app, which 7-Eleven Japan launched in the country on Monday, July 1. The 7pay mobile app was designed to show a barcode on the phone's screen when customers reach the 7-Eleven cashier counters. The cashier scans the barcode, and the bought goods are charged to the user's 7pay app and the customer's credit or debit cards that have been saved in the account. However, in a mind-boggling turn of events, the app contained a password reset function that was incredibly poorly designed. It allowed anyone to request a password reset for other people's accounts, but have the password reset link sent to their email address, instead of the legitimate account owner.

A senior U.S. official told the Commerce Department's enforcement staff this week that China's Huawei should still be treated as blacklisted, days after U.S. President Donald Trump sowed confusion with a vow to ease a ban on sales to the firm. From a report: Trump surprised markets on Saturday by promising Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan that he would allow U.S. companies to sell products to Huawei Technologies. In May, the company was added to the so-called Entity List, which bans American firms from selling to it without special permission, as punishment for actions against U.S. national security interests. Trump's announcement on Saturday -- an olive branch to Beijing to revive stalled trade talks -- was cheered by U.S. chipmakers eager to maintain sales to Huawei, the world's largest telecoms equipment maker and a key U.S. customer.

But Trump's comments also spawned confusion among industry players and government officials struggling to understand what Huawei policy he had unveiled. In an email to enforcement staff on Monday that was seen by Reuters, John Sonderman, Deputy Director of the Office of Export Enforcement, in the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), sought to clarify how agents should approach license requests by firms seeking approval to sell to Huawei.

Last month, Japan's high-speed rail network suffered a massive power outage that cancelled a total of 26 trains and delayed an estimated 12,000 passengers. The cause of the outage? A single, small slug. CNN reports: During a later inspection of the network's electrical equipment, the company's engineers discovered a dead slug, measuring about 2 to 3 centimeters (0.7 to 1.1 inches) long. According to a company spokesman, the slug had burned to death after touching an electrical cable leading to the mass power failure. Although it was discovered on May 30, shortly after the outage, the reason for the disruption wasn't revealed for more than a month.

Slashddot reader dcblogs quote Tech Target: Ten years ago, China had 21 systems on the Top500 list of the world's largest supercomputing systems. It now has 219, according to the biannual listing, which was updated just this week. At its current pace of development, China may have half of the supercomputing systems on the Top500 list by 2021.... U.S. supercomputers make up 116 of the latest Top500 list.

Despite being well behind China in total system count, the U.S. leads in overall performance, as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. The HPL benchmark is used to solve linear equations. The U.S. has about 38% of the aggregate Top500 list performance. China is in second, at nearly 30% of the performance total. But this performance metric has flip-flopped between China and the U.S., because it's heavily weighted by the largest systems. The U.S. owns the top two spots on the latest Top500 list, thanks to two IBM supercomputers at U.S. national laboratories. These systems, Summit and Sierra, alone, represent 15.6% of the HPL performance measure.
Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, says China is concerned the U.S. may limit its x86 chip imports, and while China may look to ARM, they're also investigating the RISC-V processor architecture.

Paresh Kharya, director of product marketing at Nvidia, tells Tech Target "We expect x86 CPUs to remain dominant in the short term. But there's growing interest in ARM for supercomputing, as evidenced by projects in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Supercomputing centers want choice in CPU architecture."

The Trump administration added five Chinese entities to a United States blacklist on Friday, further restricting China's access to American technology and stoking already high tensions as President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China prepare to meet in Japan next week. From a report: The Commerce Department announced that it would add four Chinese companies and one Chinese institute to an "entity list," saying they posed risks to American national security or foreign policy interests [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The move essentially bars the entities, which include one of China's leading supercomputer makers, Sugon, and a number of its subsidiaries set up to design microchips, from buying American technology and components without a waiver from the United States government.

The move could all but cripple these Chinese businesses, which rely on American chips and other technology to manufacture advanced electronics. Those added to the entity list also include Higon, Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit, Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology, and Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology, which lead China's development of high performance computing, some of which is used in military applications like simulating nuclear explosions, the Commerce Department said. Each of the aforementioned companies does businesses under a variety of other names.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Last month, as Americans tuned in to the final episode of "Game of Thrones," Japan was indulging in its own television fantasy world. In this one, a woman dares to leave work at 6 p.m. sharp. The determination of Yui Higashiyama, a 30-something project manager who wants nothing more than to get out of the office and into her favorite bar for happy hour, rocks the fictional web design firm where she works. A conniving supervisor and overachieving co-workers try to foil her plans. When her team faces a seemingly impossible deadline in Episode 9, she puts aside her steely commitment to work-life balance, dramatically declaring, "I will work overtime!" Ms. Higashiyama is the protagonist of "I Will Not Work Overtime, Period!" -- a modest television hit in Japan that has struck a chord in a country with a dangerously intense, at times deadly, national work ethic (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source).

It has prompted workers to talk about their own difficulties in finding work-life balance, even as Japan's major corporations and government officials have increasingly encouraged them to ease off. In April, just in time for the debut of the TV show, a new law took effect limiting overtime to no more than 45 hours a month and 360 hours per year, barring special circumstances. And Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has promoted a program it calls Premium Fridays, asking employers to let employees leave a few hours early on the last Friday of every month. On the show, the enlightened chief executive at Ms. Higashiyama's company encourages workers to leave the office on time. What holds her co-workers back are employees and supervisors who simply cannot stop themselves -- a feeling familiar to fans of the show.

Some users of Yahoo Japan are rising up against Japan's biggest web portal after the rollout of a new rating system that's being compared with a social-scoring initiative in China. From a report: The 48 million people with a Yahoo! Japan ID will have to opt-out within a privacy settings webpage if they don't want to be rated. The score is based on a variety of factors and is calculated based on inputs such as payment history, shopping reviews, whether a user canceled bookings and the amount of identifiable personal information. Unless users opt out, their ratings may be accessible to freelance jobs site Crowdworks, Yahoo's bike-sharing service and other businesses. Makoto Niida, a longtime Yahoo user, opted out of the rating system when he learned about it. "It's a big deal that the service was enabled by default," Niida said. "The way they created services that benefit businesses without clear explanations to their users reminds me of China's surveillance society." Yahoo's new credit-score program follows efforts by Mizuho Financial Group, NTT Docomo and other companies to use algorithms to assign ratings to consumers. Japan doesn't have a system similar to FICO in the U.S., so businesses in the world's third-largest economy have come up with their own solutions to determine financial trustworthiness.