Where are you? That's not just a metaphysical question, but increasingly a geopolitical challenge that is putting tech giants like Apple and Alphabet in a tough position. From a report: Countries around the world, including China, Japan, India and the United Kingdom plus the European Union are exploring, testing and deploying satellites to build out their own positioning capabilities. That's a massive change for the United States, which for decades has had a practical monopoly on determining the location of objects through its Global Positioning System (GPS), a military service of the Air Force built during the Cold War that has allowed commercial uses since mid-2000 (for a short history of GPS, check out this article, or for the comprehensive history, here's the book-length treatment).

Owning GPS has a number of advantages, but the first and most important is that global military and commercial users depend on this service of the U.S. government, putting location targeting ultimately at the mercy of the Pentagon. The development of the technology and the deployment of positioning satellites also provides a spillover advantage for the space industry. Today, the only global alternative to that system is Russia's GLONASS, which reached full global coverage a couple of years ago following an aggressive program by Russian president Vladimir Putin to rebuild it after it had degraded following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Now, a number of other countries want to reduce their dependency on the U.S. and get those economic benefits. Perhaps no where is that more obvious than with China, which has made building out a global alternative to GPS a top national priority. Its Beidou navigation system has been slowly building up since 2000, mostly focused on providing service in Asia.

A day after the US Department of Justice charged two Chinese nationals for being members of a state-sponsored hacking group and accused the Chinese government of orchestrating a string of hacks around the world, five other governments have stepped in with similar accusations. From a report: Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK have published official statements today formally blaming China of hacking their government agencies and local companies. All statements are in regards to the supposed involvement of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) in supporting the activity of a hacking group known as APT10. In a DOJ indictment yesterday, the US says this group hacked companies in 12 countries, and later breached cloud service providers, wormed through their infrastructure, and hacked even more companies. US officials said the primary purpose of these hacks was to steal trade secrets and intellectual property that the Chinese government later passed to local Chinese companies, helping create an unfair advantage for local firms on the global market.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Work four days a week, but get paid for five? It sounds too good to be true, but companies around the world that have cut their work week have found that it leads to higher productivity, more motivated staff and less burnout. "It is much healthier and we do a better job if we're not working crazy hours," said Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder of Berlin-based project management software company Planio, who introduced a four-day week to the company's 10-member staff earlier this year.

In New Zealand, trust company Perpetual Guardian reported a fall in stress and a jump in staff engagement after it tested a 32-hour week earlier this year. Even in Japan, the government is encouraging companies to allow Monday mornings off, although other schemes in the workaholic country to persuade employees to take it easy have had little effect. Britain's Trades Union Congress (TUC) is pushing for the whole country to move to a four-day week by the end of the century, a drive supported by the opposition Labour party. The TUC argues that a shorter week is a way for workers to share in the wealth generated by new technologies like machine learning and robotics, just as they won the right to the weekend off during the industrial revolution.

schwit1 shares a report from The Times: It will shake houses and tall buildings, and unleash a 100ft tsunami on one of the most densely populated and industrialized coastlines in the world. It could kill and injure close to a million people. It will almost certainly come in the next few decades. Now, the Japanese government is making plans to evacuate millions of people in anticipation of what could be one of the worst natural disasters in history (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). It is known as the Nankai Trough megaquake. The Japanese government has previously estimated that there is a 70 to 80 percent chance that such an event will take place in the next 30 years and that the earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, could kill 323,000 people and injure 623,000. Unfortunately, the report doesn't outline how the government plans to get people out of harm's way. The city with the most people in the danger zone is Nagoya, Japan's fourth largest city and home to 2.3 million people. "The home of the nation's industry Hamamatsu is also at risk and home to over 800,000 people," reports The Irish Sun.

There are some 8 million abandoned homes -- or akiya -- in Japanese suburbia, according to The Japan Times . And if you've got a visa allowing you to live in Japan, some of them can be yours for free or very low prices, and the government may give you a subsidy to renovate one. From a report: There are even databases devoted to helping people find these homes, known as "akiya banks." What's driving the government to give away homes? In part, it has to do with Japan's aging population: According to the World Bank, the country's population decreased by -0.2% in 2017 alone, while China and the U.S. slowly grew 0.6% and 0.7% respectively. There are simply fewer people in Japan than there once were -- roughly 1.3 million fewer people than in 2010 by one count [paywall].

Ericsson has confirmed that a fault with its software was the source of yesterday's massive network outage, which took millions of smartphones offline across the UK and Japan and created issues in almost a dozen countries. From a report: In a statement, Ericsson said that the root cause was an expired certificate, and that "the faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned." The statement notes that network services were restored to most customers on Thursday, while UK operator O2 said that its 4G network was back up as of early Friday morning.

Although much of the focus was paid to outages on O2 in the UK and Softbank in Japan. Ericsson later confirmed to Softbank that issues had simultaneously affected telecom carriers who'd installed Ericsson-made devices across a total of 11 countries. Softbank said that the outage affected its own network for just over four hours.

Tokyo Telemessage, Japan's last pager provider, has announced that it will end service to its 1,500 remaining users in September 2019. It will bring a national end to telecommunication beepers, 50 years after their introduction. The BBC reports: The once-popular devices are able to receive and show wireless messages. Users would then find a phone to call the sender back. Developed in the 1950s and 1960s, they grew in popularity in the 1980s. By 1996, Tokyo Telemessage had 1.2 million subscribers. However, the rise of mobile phones rendered the pager obsolete, and few remain worldwide. Emergency services, however, continue to use the reliable technology -- including in the UK.

AmiMoJo writes: Japanese broadcaster NHK is launching the world's first 8K TV channel with a special edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey. NHK asked Warner Bros. to scan the original negatives at 8K specially for the channel.

8K offers 16 times the resolution of standard HD, 120 frames per second progressive scan, and 24 channels of sound. NHK is hoping to broadcast the 2020 Tokyo Olympics on the channel.
17 other channels also began broadcasting 4K programming today, according to Japan Times, even though, as Engadget points out, "almost no one has an 8K display, and most of the people who do need a special receiver and antenna just to pick up the signal... Also, HDMI 2.1 hasn't been implemented in any of these displays yet, so just getting the signal from box to TV requires plugging in four HDMI cables."

NHK's channel will broadcast for 12 hours a day, reports the BBC, adding that Samsung already sells an 8K TV for $15,000, and that LG has announced one too, while Engadget reports that Sharp sells one for $6,600.

schwit1 shares a report: More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners' knowledge. The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs.

But other countries that are major markets for electronic vehicles -- the United States, Japan, across Europe -- do not collect this kind of real-time data. And critics say the information collected in China is beyond what is needed to meet the country's stated goals. It could be used not only to undermine foreign carmakers' competitive position, but also for surveillance -- particularly in China, where there are few protections on personal privacy. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshalling big data and artificial intelligence to create a more perfect kind of policing, capable of predicting and eliminating perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party.

With Shikoku Electric Power Company's 890 megawatt (MW) Ikata-3 reactor, Japan has restarted a total of five nuclear reactors in 2018. "Japan had suspended its nuclear fleet in 2013 for mandatory safety checks and upgrades following the 2011 Fukushima accident, and before 2018 only four reactors had been restarted," reports OilVoice. From the report: Following the Fukushima accident, as each Japanese nuclear reactor entered its scheduled maintenance and refueling outage, it was not returned to operation. Between September 2013 and August 2015, Japan's entire reactor fleet was suspended from operation, leaving the country with no nuclear generation. Sendai Units 1 and 2, in Japan's Kagoshima Prefecture, were the first reactors to be restarted in August and October 2015, respectively.

The restart of Japan's nuclear power plants requires the approval of both Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) and the central government, as well as consent from the governments of local prefectures. In July 2013, the NRA issued more stringent safety regulations to address issues dealing with tsunamis and seismic events, complete loss of station power, and emergency preparedness. As part of Japan's long-term energy policy, issued in April 2014, the central government called for the nuclear share of total electricity generation to reach 20%-22% by 2030, which would require 25 to 30 reactors to be in operation by then. In 2017, four operating nuclear reactors provided 3% of Japan's total electricity generation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday released data that shows life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicide in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from opioid drugs. "Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year's increase," The Wall Street Journal adds. From the report: Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation's prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care. The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations. Life expectancy is 84.1 years in Japan and 83.7 years in Switzerland, first and second in the most-recent ranking by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. ranks 29th.

White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation's most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men. As drug and suicide mortality has risen, deaths from heart disease, the nation's leading killer, went down only slightly, failing to offset the increases in mortality from other causes and prolonging another worrisome trend.

American business journalist Joe Nocera writes in a Bloomberg article about "how badly things have deteriorated for the U.S. car makers," after the recent news that both General Motors and Ford will soon be exiting the sedan market in the country. Slashdot reader gollum123 shares the report: Much of the analysis about Ford and GM's exit from the sedan market stressed that sedan sales have lost ground in recent years "as consumers have gravitated toward pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles," as the New York Times put it. If you look at the historical sales figures of the top Japanese sedans, you'll see a small decline in recent years, but nothing like the big drop-off in sales that have hammered the American companies. So in addition to the overall decline in sedan sales, there is a second, largely overlooked, dynamic taking place: Americans have only stopped buying American sedans, not Japanese sedans. The American car companies now say they are going to count on profits from trucks and SUVs while moving toward autonomous and all-electric vehicles. They had better hope that transition takes place quickly.

I couldn't help noticing that while the top three selling vehicles in the U.S. are, indeed, American-made trucks, No. 4 on the list is Nissan's top SUV, the Rogue, the sales of which have gone from 18,000 in 2007 to 403,000 last year. No. 5 is a Toyota SUV, the Rav4 (407,000 in 2017). No. 6 is the Honda CR-V (378,000). And the leading American SUV? It's the Chevy Equinox. Last year, Chevrolet sold 290,000 of them -- 100,000 fewer than the Toyota Camry.

Japanese researchers have developed a technique for automatic colorization in anime production. "To promote efficiency and automation in anime production, the research team focused on the possibility of automating the colorization of trace images in the finishing process of anime production," reports Brightsurf. "By integrating the anime production technology and know-how of IMAGICA GROUP and OLM Digital with the machine learning, computer graphics and vision technology of NAIST, the research team succeeded in developing the world's first technique for automatic colorization of Japanese anime production." From the report: After the trace image cleaning in a pre-processing step, automatic colorization is performed according to the color script of the character using a deep learning-based image segmentation algorithm. The colorization result is refined in a post-process step using voting techniques for each closed region. This technique will be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2018, an international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, to be held in Tokyo, Japan on Dec. 4-7. While this technique is still in the preliminary research stage, the research team will further improve its accuracy and validate it in production within the anime production studio. The product of this will be available for commercialization from 2020.

The Federal Trade Commission this week agreed to investigate video game loot boxes, accepting an official request by Senator Maggie Hassan. In a Congressional oversight committee hearing yesterday, FTC chairman Joe Simons affirmed Sen. Hassan's request that loot boxes be investigated. From a report: During her turn to ask questions at the hearing, Hassan cited a recent report by Great Britain's Gambling Commission that found 31% of children in the country had at one point or another paid money to open a loot box, a well as moves by Belgium (which prompted Square Enix to pull three mobile games from the country), Japan, and other countries to limit how loot boxes can be used in games. "Given the seriousness of this issue, I think it is in fact time for the FTC to investigate these mechanisms to ensure that children are being adequately protected and to educate parents about potential addiction or other negative impacts of these games," Hassan said. "Would you commit to undertaking this project and keeping this committee informed about it?" In response, Simons said "yes," but declined to go into any more detail about the FTC's current position on loot boxes and whether they constitute a form of gambling. Despite vocal criticism from Hassan and a few others on the topic, regulators have not been jumping to get involved in the debate.

The US government is reportedly trying to persuade its foreign allies' wireless and internet providers to avoid Huawei equipment. From a report: Officials have spoken to their counterparts and telecom bosses in Germany, Italy, Japan and other friendly countries where the Chinese company's equipment is already in use, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. The US is reportedly particularly worried about the use of Huawei equipment in countries with American military bases, since most nonsensitive communication travels via commercial networks, and it's concerned about Chinese meddling.

A month after Apple's new iPhone XR release, the company is set to discount the device in Japan, The Wall Street Journal reports. From the report: Less than a month after releasing the iPhone XR, Apple is moving to offer subsidies to mobile-network operators in Japan to shore up sales of its least expensive new smartphone, people familiar with the matter said. The de facto discount of the handset, coupled with cuts in production plans, are a sign of limited enthusiasm among consumers for the model, which has fewer features than Apple's other two new releases and costs more than still-popular older models like the iPhone 8.

AmiMoJo writes: A man in Japan used GPS spoofing to fake 2.7 million visits to shops in the Aeon Kyushu chain. Each visit rewarded him with two "WAON" points, with the total worth around 5.3 million yen ($45,000). The man used 45 laptops to continually spoof GPS readings and launch the Aeon Kyushu app, collecting two points each time.

Futurepower(R) shares a report: A lot of people don't use computers. Most of them aren't in charge of a nation's cybersecurity. But one is. Japanese lawmakers were aghast on Wednesday when Yoshitaka Sakurada, 68, the minister who heads the government's cybersecurity office, said during questioning in Parliament that he had no need for the devices, and appeared confused when asked basic technology questions. "I have been independently running my own business since I was 25 years old," he said. When computer use is necessary, he said, "I order my employees or secretaries" to do it. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] "I don't type on a computer," he added.

Asked by a lawmaker if nuclear power plants allowed the use of USB drives, a common technology widely considered to be a security risk, Mr. Sakurada did not seem to understand what they were. "I don't know details well," he said. "So how about having an expert answer your question if necessary, how's that?" The comments were immediately criticized. "I can't believe that a person who never used a computer is in charge of cybersecurity measures," said Masato Imai, an opposition lawmaker.

wiredmikey writes: Apple iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy S9 and Xiaomi Mi 6 smartphones were all hacked on the first day of the Pwn2Own Tokyo 2018 contest taking place this week alongside the PacSec security conference in Tokyo, Japan. Pwn2Own Tokyo 2018 participants earned a total of $225,000 on the first day of the event. On the second day, at least two teams will make additional attempts to hack the iPhone X and the Xiaomi Mi 6.

China has been pushed into third place on a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. From a report: The latest list by Top 500, published twice a year, puts two US machines -- Summit and Sierra -- in the top two places. The US has five entries in the top 10, with other entries from Switzerland, Germany and Japan. However, overall China has 227 machines in the top 500, while the US has 109. Summit can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Both Summit and Sierra were built by the tech giant IBM. China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which this time last year was the world's most powerful machine, is now ranked at number three, while the country also has the fourth spot in the list.