Earlier this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second generation of its HoloLens augmented reality visor. Today, the $3,500 HoloLens 2 is going on sale in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand, the same countries where it was previously available for pre-order. From a report: Ahead of the launch, I got to spend some time with the latest model, after a brief demo in Barcelona earlier this year. Users will immediately notice the larger field of view, which still doesn't cover your full field of view, but offers a far better experience compared to the first version (where you often felt like you were looking at the virtual objects through a stamp-sized window). The team also greatly enhanced the overall feel of wearing the device. It's not light, at 1.3 pounds, but with the front visor that flips up and the new mounting system that is far more comfortable. In regular use, existing users will also immediately notice the new gestures for opening up the Start menu (this is Windows 10, after all). Instead of a 'bloom' gesture, which often resulted in false positives, you now simply tap on the palm of your hand, where a Microsoft logo now appears when you look at it.

Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan said Monday that they have found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices' microphones. The New York Times reports: In one case, they said, they opened a garage door by shining a laser beam at a voice assistant that was connected to it. They also climbed 140 feet to the top of a bell tower at the University of Michigan and successfully controlled a Google Home device on the fourth floor of an office building 230 feet away. And by focusing their lasers using a telephoto lens, they said, they were able to hijack a voice assistant more than 350 feet away. Opening the garage door was easy, the researchers said. With the light commands, the researchers could have hijacked any digital smart systems attached to the voice-controlled assistants.

They said they could have easily switched light switches on and off, made online purchases or opened a front door protected by a smart lock. They even could have remotely unlocked or started a car that was connected to the device. The researchers, who studied the light flaw for seven months, said they had discovered that the microphones in the devices would respond to light as if it were sound. Inside each microphone is a small plate called a diaphragm that moves when sound hits it. That movement can be replicated by focusing a laser or a flashlight at the diaphragm, which converts it into electric signals, they said. The rest of the system then responds the way it would to sound. While the researchers said they had notified several companies to the light vulnerability, most microphones would need to be redesigned to remedy the problem. And simply covering the microphone with a piece of tape wouldn't solve it.

The findings of the vulnerability can be found here.

MS Power User reports on the results of a 2,300-employee experiment by Microsoft with a four-day work week: In August this year, Microsoft Japan ran an experiment where for one month they had a 3 day weekend, taking Friday off. This was paid leave and did not impact the worker's usual vacation allocation.

Some results were predictable. Workers were happier and took 25.4 percent fewer days off during the month. There were also savings from spending less time at work. 23.1 percent less electricity was used and 58.7 percent fewer pages were printed. More importantly from a bottom-line standpoint, however, productivity went up 39.9%, as fewer and shorter meetings were held, often virtually rather than in person.

A team of researchers from Japan has found compelling evidence of two fisheries collapsing due to use of neonicotinoid pesticides by nearby rice farmers. "In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes their study of fishery water quality data over two decades and what they learned from it," reports Phys.Org. "Olaf Jensen with Rutgers University has published a Perspective piece discussing the work by the team in the same journal issue." From the report: Back in 1993, fishermen working at two fisheries on the lake found that yields had suddenly dropped dramatically. The reason for it was not known but many suspected it was tied to the use of neonicotinoid pesticides by nearby farmers -- a new practice. To find out if that was indeed the case, the researchers gathered data obtained by other teams studying the lake over a period ten years before and after the collapse of the fisheries.

In looking at the results, the researchers found that the year following the first use of neonicotinoid pesticides in the local area, the amount of zooplankton in the lake nosedived. This was followed by a very swift drop in population of the fish that fed on them. More specifically, they found that zooplankton biomass shrank by approximately 83 percent. That year the smelt harvest was just 22 tons, a dramatic drop from an average haul of 240 tons each year. The researchers note that they also studied other factors that might have led to fishery collapse, such as nutrient depletion or changes in oxygen or salt concentrations. They report that they were not able to find any evidence showing that there might have been something other than pesticides killing the food fish ate leaving them to starve.

ARM will keep supplying Huawei with its chip designs at least through the next generation, the company said today. From a report: That's a reversal from earlier this year, when ARM had reportedly notified personnel to halt all dealings with the Chinese company. "ARM can provide support to HiSilicon for the Armv8-A architecture, as well as the next generation of that architecture, following a comprehensive review of both architectures, which have been determined to be of non-U.S. origin," the company told Engadget in a statement. ARM, purchased by Japan's Softbank for $32 billion back in 2016, was forced to halt its business with Huawei after the US effectively forbade US companies from dealing with it. Last month, Huawei was forced to release the Mate 30 Pro without Google Play, Google Maps, YouTube and other key Google services. However, it was able to find alternative suppliers for other components and makes its own Kirin 990 mobile processor for the Mate 30 using ARM's design architecture.

Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologized for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices. The Register reports: The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room. Facial recognition tech will let customers into their room and then a bedside robot will assist with other requirements. However several weeks ago a security researcher revealed on Twitter that he had warned HIS Group in July about the bed-bots being easily accessible, noting they sported "unsigned code" allowing a user to tap an NFC tag to the back of robot's head and allow access via the streaming app of their choice.

Having heard nothing, the researcher made the hack public on October 13. The vulnerability allows guests to gain access to cameras and microphones in the robot remotely so they could watch and listen to anyone in the room in the future. The hotel is one of a chain of 10 in Japan which use a variety of robots instead of meat-based staff. So far the reference is only to Tapia robots at one hotel, although it is not clear if the rest of the chain uses different devices. The HIS Group tweeted: "We apologize for any uneasiness caused," according to the Tokyo Reporter. The paper was told that the company had decided the risks of unauthorized access were low, however, the robots have now been updated.

"While Facebook's upcoming cryptocurrency Libra struggles to keep partners on board and regulators happy, an alternative called OpenLibra is here to address some of Libra's potential shortcomings," reports Mashable: Announced at Ethereum Foundation's Devcon 5 conference in Osaka, Japan, OpenLibra is described as an "open platform for financial inclusion," with a telling tagline: "Not run by Facebook." OpenLibra aims to be compatible with Libra in a technical sense, meaning someone building an app on the Libra platform should be able to easily deploy it to OpenLibra as well. OpenLibra's token's value will be pegged to the value of the Libra token.

But while Libra will be a permissioned blockchain (meaning, roughly, that only permitted parties will be able to run a Libra node), OpenLibra will be permissionless from the start. There's an important difference in governance, too. Libra will initially be run by a foundation comprised of up to a 100 corporations and non-profits. It's not entirely clear how OpenLibra will be governed, but the 26-strong "core team" of the project includes people related to cryptocurrency projects such as Ethereum and Cosmos.

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing, with the caption: "Enhance, zoom in... more... more... straight out of CSI." From the report: Last month a Japanese entertainer named Ena Matsuoka was attacked in front of her home in Tokyo. Her alleged attacker, an obsessed fan, was able to figure out where she lived by zooming in on a high resolution photo and identifying a bus stop reflected in her pupils. According to Asia One, the alleged attacker "even approximated the storey Matsuoka lived on based on the windows and the angle of the sunlight in her eyes."

"This is a highly charged story," began Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, announcing that a trio of chemists who spent decades developing the lithium ion battery were today awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work. From a report: These batteries, small and powerful compared to older battery technology, made possible pocket-sized mobile phones, laptop computers, electric cars, and renewable energy devices such as solar panels that can help address the problems of climate change, Ramstrom says. The prize will be shared by John B. Goodenough from the University of Texas at Austin, M. Stanley Whittingham from Binghamton University in New York, and Akira Yoshino, who works at Asahi Kasei Corporation and Meijo University in Japan. They will split the roughly $1 million award. Lithium batteries have been touted as Nobel-worthy for years, says Bonnie Charpentier, president of the American Chemical Society. "I think that it's magnificent that Goodenough won this year," she says, noting that at age 97 he is the oldest Nobel laureate. Yoshino is 71, showing that the research stretched across generations.

Indeed, it was in the 1970s that Whittingham began investigating the use of lithium, the smallest and lightest metal in the periodic table of the elements. That size and weight made it possible to pack a lot of lithium into a small space, unlike the large and heavy lead-acid batteries that dominated at the time. Lithium had another advantage: it easily gave up its electrons, and batteries produce electricity when electrons flow from one end, called the anode, to the other end, called the cathode. Whittingham put metallic lithium in one end and a layered material called titanitum disulphide at the other; the titanium had spaces that could capture the flowing electrons. However, this combination of materials also had the unfortunate potential to explode. Slashdot interviewed Goodenough two years ago. You can read the interview here.

The Trump administration has begun inserting legal protections into recent trade agreements that shield online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube from lawsuits, a move that could help lock in America's tech-friendly regulations around the world even as they are being newly questioned at home. From a report: The protections, which stem from a 1990s law, have already been tucked into the administration's two biggest trade deals -- the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and a pact with Japan that President Trump signed on Monday. American negotiators have proposed including the language in other prospective deals, including with the European Union, Britain and members of the World Trade Organization. The administration's push is the latest salvo in a global fight over who sets the rules for the internet. While the rules for trading goods have largely been written -- often by the United States -- the world has far fewer standards for digital products. Countries are rushing into this vacuum, and in most cases writing regulations that are far more restrictive than the tech industry would prefer.

Europe has enacted tough policies to curb the behavior of companies like Facebook and Google and passed laws to deal with privacy, hate speech and disinformation. China has largely cordoned itself off from the rest of the internet, allowing Beijing to censor political content and bolster Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent. In India, Indonesia, Russia and Vietnam, governments are introducing regulations to ostensibly protect their citizens' privacy and build domestic internet industries that critics say will stymie the ability of American companies to provide services in those countries. The United States wants its more permissive rules to form the basis for worldwide regulation. But there is a rising debate about whether its regime of internet regulations has failed to protect consumer privacy, encouraged the spread of disinformation and supported a powerful forum for harassment and bullying.

The American rules, codified in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, shield online platforms from many lawsuits related to user content and protect them from legal challenges stemming from how they moderate content. Those rules are largely credited with fueling Silicon Valley's rapid growth. The language in the trade deals echoes those provisions but contains some differences. That freedom has come under intense criticism from lawmakers and advocates. They say the 23-year-old law has allowed companies like Facebook and Google to avoid responsibility for harm associated with content that reaches billions of users. That anger has been compounded by revelations about the role of Silicon Valley's business practices in the spread of disinformation and treatment of user data.

Japan's sole pager provider, Tokyo Telemessage Inc, will shut down radio signals for its services Tuesday, ending support for the device first introduced in the country half a century ago. Japan Today reports: In recent years, the device had been favored mainly by those working in hospitals, where cellphone use was once discouraged because of concerns over the effect of electromagnetic waves on medical devices and where cellphone reception can sometimes be poor. Beeper services in Japan began in 1968 with the predecessor of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. Users would call a specific number via a landline, causing the device to emit a beeping sound. But from the late 1980s onward, the popularity of pagers grew as they could be used to send messages combining numbers and text characters.

The number of pager users exceeded 10 million in 1996, with the device becoming one of the defining symbols of a subculture among female high school students along with "loose socks" and taking photos in puri-kura photo booths. However, beeper services declined with the introduction of mobile phones. The number of pager users further decreased as e-mailing, texting as well as taking and sending pictures by phone became standard.

Some members of the WeWork board are said to be unhappy with its leadership and plan to push WeWork CEO Adam Neumann to step down, according to several media reports. From a report: The reports say the board members are connected to Japan's SoftBank Group, WeWork's biggest investor. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets cited anonymous sources familiar with the matter. WeWork parent the We Company declined to comment and SoftBank did not respond to a request for comment. Concerns about Neumann's management style has roiled the company, with a recent report in the Journal alleging that the CEO had reportedly smoked marijuana on a Gulfstream G650 private jet while traveling across the Atlantic. The jet's owner, said to be worried about transporting marijuana across borders, reportedly recalled the aircraft, according to the Journal.

The team overseeing the Hayabusa2 mission for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is putting the vehicle through its paces one more time as it prepares to release the last rover it has on board. "That rehearsal, which took place Sept. 16 (Sept. 17 local time at mission control), sent two target markers toward the asteroid," reports Space.com. From the report: Each target marker is a reflective ball that's about 4 inches (10 centimeters) across and filled with smaller balls -- like a high-tech beanbag. Hayabusa2 launched with five of these markers and had already deployed two, one last October and one in May. Two more left the spacecraft during the rehearsal this week, according to JAXA. During the procedure, the spacecraft photographed the target markers every 4 seconds, producing the raw material that mission personnel have turned into stunning would-be multiple-exposure images.

As the camera snapped, the target marker itself stayed more or less in the same place, while the spacecraft itself rose at a speed of about 4 inches per second, according to a statement from JAXA. All told, the target markers took a few days to reach the asteroid's surface, on account of the space rock's very weak gravity. Since deploying the two target markers, Hayabusa2 has focused on observing the pair, which it will continue to do until Sept. 23, according to JAXA. The agency has not yet announced when it will deploy the spacecraft's final rover. That deployment marks the last task Hayabusa2 needs to complete before it ferries its precious space-rock cargo back to Earth. The spacecraft will leave Ryugu in November or December.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists have set a new limit on the mass of nature's lightest particle of matter. The neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV) -- less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron -- say experimenters with the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Reported on September 13 at a meeting in Toyama, Japan, the new result halves the previous limit of 2 eV.

Physicists have tried to measure the neutrino's mass for decades. However, the particle barely interacts with ordinary matter. So to deduce its mass, researchers study the radioactive "[Beta] decay" of tritium, in which a nucleus spits out an electron and a neutrino. By precisely measuring the maximum energy of the ejected electrons, physicists can infer the mass of the unobserved neutrinos. KATRIN (above) takes this classic approach to the ultimate limit, employing a 23-meter-long blimplike spectrometer to measure the electron from tritium with unprecedented precision. Cosmological measurements already suggest the neutrino cannot weigh more than about 0.1 eV, but that estimate is based on several assumptions. So KATRIN physicists argue that their better, directly measured limit on neutrino mass is likely to make cosmology models more reliable.

A growing number of countries are following China's lead in deploying artificial intelligence to track citizens, according to a research group's report published Tuesday. From a report: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says at least 75 countries are actively using AI tools such as facial recognition for surveillance. The index of countries where some form of AI surveillance is used includes liberal democracies such as the United States and France as well as more autocratic regimes. Relying on a survey of public records and media reports, the report says Chinese tech companies led by Huawei and Hikvision are supplying much of the AI surveillance technology to countries around the world. Other companies such as Japan's NEC and U.S.-based IBM, Palantir and Cisco are also major international providers of AI surveillance tools.

Hikvision declined comment Tuesday. The other companies mentioned in the report didn't immediately return requests for comment. The report encompasses a broad range of AI tools that have some public safety component. The group's index doesn't distinguish between legitimate public safety tools and unlawful or harmful uses such as spying on political opponents. "I hope citizens will ask tougher questions about how this type of technology is used and what type of impacts it will have," said the report's author, Steven Feldstein, a Carnegie Endowment fellow and associate professor at Boise State University. Many of the projects cited in Feldstein's report are "smart city" systems in which a municipal government installs an array of sensors, cameras and other internet-connected devices to gather information and communicate with one another.

Put together the best solar panels money can buy, super-efficient batteries and decades of car-making know-how and, theoretically, a vehicle might run forever. From a report: That's the audacious motivation behind a project by Toyota Motor, Sharp and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan, or NEDO, to test a Prius that could revolutionize transportation. "The solar car's advantage is that -- while it can't drive for a long range -- it's really independent of charging facilities," said Koji Makino, a project manager at Toyota. Even if fully electric cars overtake petroleum-powered vehicles in sales, they still need to be plugged in, which means building a network of charging stations across the globe. The sun, on the other hand, shines everywhere for free, and when that energy is paired with enough battery capacity to propel automobiles at night, solar-powered cars could leapfrog all the new-energy technologies being developed, from plug-in hybrids to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, in one fell swoop.

The Department of Justice today announced the arrest of 281 suspects in connection with email scams and wire transfer fraud. The action is the biggest of its kind yet against this type of digital scammer, and is a strong symbol of law enforcement's sense of urgency in trying to contain a rapidly growing threat. Wired reports: You're familiar with crimes like this, even if you don't know them by their proper name of "business email compromise" schemes. It involves the coordinated crafting of compelling scam emails that trick employees or vulnerable individuals into sending money, then using strategic mules to wire the funds back to the perpetrators. Such scams have ballooned in recent years, costing victims tens of billions of dollars over time. The DOJ said the new round of arrests took four months to carry out across 10 countries, and resulted in the seizure of almost $3.7 million.

Tuesday's law enforcement initiative, dubbed Operation reWired, involved extensive international coordination to make 167 arrests in Nigeria, 74 in the United States, 18 in Turkey, and 15 in Ghana. The remainder took place in France, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom. Research and law enforcement investigations have shown that a large proportion of all email scamming originates in West Africa, specifically Nigeria, but the scams have spread, partly because some West African actors have moved around the world. The new arrest of 281 suspects involved global coordination among law enforcement agencies. In the U.S. alone, Operation reWired involved the DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury, the State Department, and the Postal Inspection Service.

omfglearntoplay shares a report from CNN: Eight years after Japan's worst nuclear disaster, the government is not sure what to do with the contaminated water that remains -- but its environment minister says dumping it into the ocean might be the only choice. To cool fuel cores at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant, operator Tokyo Electric has pumped in tens of thousands of tons of water over the years, according to Japanese national broadcaster NHK. Once used and contaminated, the water is put into storage. Now, storage space is running out. And during a televised press conference Tuesday, Japan's environment minister Yoshiaki Harada said he believed the only solution was to "release it into the ocean and dilute it." "There are no other options," he said. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga emphasized that a decision has not yet been made. "There is no fact that the method of disposal of contaminated water has been decided," he said. "The government would like to make a decision after making thorough discussion."

Chipmakers have spent two decades pouring investment into a revolutionary new technique to push the limits of physics and cram more transistors onto slices of silicon. Now that technology is on the cusp of going mainstream, thanks to a secretive Japanese company that's mastered the skill of manipulating light for applications from squid fishing to cinema projection. From a report: Ushio announced July it had cleared a key milestone, perfecting the powerful, ultra-precise lights needed to test chip designs based on extreme ultraviolet lithography or EUV, the process through which the next generation of semiconductors will be made. With that, the Japanese company became a major player in future chipmaking. "The infrastructure is now mostly ready," Chief Executive Officer Koji Naito said in an interview. "Testing equipment was one of the things holding back EUV. With that piece in place, production efficiency and yields can go up." Ushio's advances cement its position among a coterie of little-known Japanese companies indispensable to the production of the world's consumer electronics. The Tokyo-based company developed a light source for equipment used to test what are known as masks: glass squares slightly bigger than a CD case that act as a stencil for chip designs. These templates have to be absolutely perfect, as even a tiny defect in one of them can render every chip in a large batch unusable.

Long-time Slashdot reader rinka shares an article about "the place where the Sun will be re-born on Earth": The world's best scientists are trying to create a 'miniature Sun' on Earth to tap its fusion energy, costing over €20 billion... [G]lobally ITER is the most expensive science project on Earth ever to be undertaken in the 21st century. The total weight of the ITER reactor will be about 28,000 tonnes...

Being made collaboratively by USA, Russia, South Korea, China, Japan, European Union and India as equal partners or participating in this mega effort are countries that together hold 50% of the world's population accounting for about 85% of the global GDP... Dr Mark Henderson, a scientist at ITER, said, "This place to me is the coolest place on Earth, because here in the near future we will have a little Sun on Earth and it will be a 150 million degrees Celsius so it will be the hottest place on Earth, ten times hotter than our Sun...."

The project is a herculean effort and operations are expected to start by 2025. Later a full scale electricity generating unit called the DEMO reactor is scheduled to be completed by 2040... On being asked how much carbon dioxide the main culprit for global warming would be released from the ITER project Dr Luce quips "only the carbon dioxide the scientists exhale". The radioactive substances generated from reactions would be the sort that can die off in a hundred years.
Its ultimate goal is to create "an unlimited supply of clean energy."