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.

According to Bloomberg, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation "spent $200 million over seven years funding sanitation research, showcased some 20 novel toilet and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertilizer." Gates told the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday that these technologies at the event "are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years." From the report: Holding a beaker of human excreta that, Gates said, contained as many as 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder explained to a 400-strong crowd that new approaches for sterilizing human waste may help end almost 500,000 infant deaths and save $233 billion annually in costs linked to diarrhea, cholera and other diseases caused by poor water, sanitation and hygiene. One approach from the California Institute of Technology that Gates said he finds "super interesting" integrates an electrochemical reactor to break down water and human waste into fertilizer and hydrogen, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells as energy.

The reinvented toilet market, which has attracted companies including Japan's LIXIL Group, could generate $6 billion a year worldwide by 2030, according to Gates. The initial demand for the reinvented toilet will be in places like schools, apartment buildings, and community bathroom facilities. As adoption of these multi-unit toilets increases, and costs decline, a new category of reinvented household toilets will become available, the Gates Foundation said.

Daylight Saving Time ended in the United States on Sunday, bumping the clocks back an hour. The change happened in Europe a week earlier, meaning the time difference between the continents was momentarily smaller. It's another confusing wrinkle in a confusing temporal process that confounds the world. From a story: Today, 70 countries change their clocks midyear for Daylight Saving Time, including most of North America, Europe and parts of South America and New Zealand. China, Japan, India and most countries near the equator don't fall back or jump ahead. In much of Asia and South America, the Daylight Saving Time shift was adopted, but then abandoned. It has never been observed in most of Africa. While the United States extended its Daylight Saving Time in 2005 and Florida wants to make it its standard time, other countries are moving to ditch the practice.

The European Union is weighing a plan to abandon shifting from daylight saving time midyear. "Millions ... believe that summertime should be all the time," the European Union's chief executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German reporters in August. Juncker was referring, in part, to an online poll conducted by the E.U., which found that changing clocks is tremendously unpopular. (As my colleague Rick Noack pointed out, however, there are methodological problems: "The largest share of participants came from one country -- Germany -- where the time switch has been a somewhat odd front-page topic for years. But any E.U. decision would also impact the 27 other member states.")

Plamen Angelov of the University of Lancaster, in Britain, has an idea that he hopes will make train delays rarer. From a report: Often, Dr Angelov observes, the problem is not the inefficiency of operators but the behaviour of passengers -- the "platform-train interface", to use railway parlance. When trains arrive, passengers crowd around the doors waiting to board, restricting the flow of those getting off. When they are about to depart, people often hold doors open, delaying that departure. (A recent study by Japan's Railway Bureau found that passengers attempting to board trains after their scheduled departure times accounted for almost 50% of delays.) Passengers also frequently stand too close to the carriages for safety. Waiting for malefactors to move back behind the yellow safety line on a platform might hold a train up for less than a minute. But over the course of a journey those minutes add up. Even a slight delay is compounded if it causes a train to slip out of its running order and be held at a subsequent station, or be required to follow a slower service.

Dr Angelov thinks that applying artificial intelligence to the problem might help. And that is what he and his team are doing. Using images from the cctv cameras already mounted in carriages and on platforms, their system employs algorithms that have been trained to detect objects such as people, luggage, pushchairs and bicycles. It then measures the movements and positions of these objects relative to areas such as the train doors or the yellow safety line and uses this information to predict problems. The cameras in the carriages detect how busy particular doors are getting as passengers leave their seats and gather next to the exits when the train approaches a station. At the same time, the station cameras monitor the numbers waiting for the train to arrive, whereabouts they are standing along the platform, and how encumbered they are. The two sets of data can then be compared, providing warning of likely areas of congestion. This permits passengers -- particularly those on the platform -- to be directed to doors that will be less busy.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on President Donald Trump's personal cellphone and using the information gleaned to better influence his behavior. This should surprise no one, writes Bruce Schneier. From a story: Security experts have been talking about the potential security vulnerabilities in Trump's cellphone use since he became president. And President Barack Obama bristled at -- but acquiesced to -- the security rules prohibiting him from using a "regular" cellphone throughout his presidency. Three broader questions obviously emerge from the story. Who else is listening in on Trump's cellphone calls? What about the cellphones of other world leaders and senior government officials? And -- most personal of all -- what about my cellphone calls?

There are two basic places to eavesdrop on pretty much any communications system: at the end points and during transmission. This means that a cellphone attacker can either compromise one of the two phones or eavesdrop on the cellular network. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. The NSA seems to prefer bulk eavesdropping on the planet's major communications links and then picking out individuals of interest. In 2016, WikiLeaks published a series of classified documents listing "target selectors": phone numbers the NSA searches for and records. These included senior government officials of Germany -- among them Chancellor Angela Merkel -- France, Japan, and other countries.

Other countries don't have the same worldwide reach that the NSA has, and must use other methods to intercept cellphone calls. We don't know details of which countries do what, but we know a lot about the vulnerabilities. Insecurities in the phone network itself are so easily exploited that 60 Minutes eavesdropped on a U.S. congressman's phone live on camera in 2016. Back in 2005, unknown attackers targeted the cellphones of many Greek politicians by hacking the country's phone network and turning on an already-installed eavesdropping capability. The NSA even implanted eavesdropping capabilities in networking equipment destined for the Syrian Telephone Company. Alternatively, an attacker could intercept the radio signals between a cellphone and a tower. Encryption ranges from very weak to possibly strong, depending on which flavor the system uses. Don't think the attacker has to put his eavesdropping antenna on the White House lawn; the Russian Embassy is close enough.

Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) has given the cryptocurrency industry self-regulatory status, permitting the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association to police and sanction exchanges for any violations. From a report: The government has been reviewing its approach toward an industry that has been hit twice by large-scale thefts. The FSA approval gives the industry association rights to set rules to safeguard customer assets, prevent money laundering, and give operational guidelines. The association will also have to police compliance. "It's a very fast moving industry. It's better for experts to make rules in a timely manner than bureaucrats do," a senior FSA official said in a briefing, declining to be named. Similar officially sanctioned bodies exist in industries such as securities brokerages.

The New York Times has revealed new details on the circumstances that surrounded Andy Rubin's departure from Google in 2014. According to the report, Google "investigated sexual misconduct claims against Rubin, which revolved around an incident in which he allegedly coerced another Google employee into 'performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013,'" The Verge reports. "Despite reportedly finding the claims credible -- to the point that Page decided Rubin needed to go -- Google gave him a $90 million exit package. The last $2 million of that agreement will be paid out next month." From the report: Before that payout, and during the initial stages of its investigation in 2014, Google awarded Rubin "a stock grant worth $150 million." The move gave Rubin, at that time a highly-valued executive at the company, major financial incentive for sticking around after he'd moved on from Android to focus his efforts on a robotics unit. The Times says it's unclear whether Page or Google's leadership committee knew about the misconduct allegations when they approved that huge grant. But they certainly did when reaching the $90 million figure as Rubin headed out the door, and Page offered public praise for Rubin in announcing his departure. After he left, Google proceeded to invest in his VC, Playground Ventures. And the company even allowed him to delay paying back a $14 million loan it'd given him "to buy a beach estate in Japan." In a statement to the New York Times, Google said: "[W]e investigate and take action, including termination. In recent years, we've taken a particularly hard line on inappropriate conduct by people in positions of authority. We're working hard to keep improving how we handle this type of behavior."

UPDATE: Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email to employees Thursday in response to the report, saying 48 employees have been fired for sexual misconduct over the last two years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics.

The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in our oceans. But the paper suggests that microplastics are entering our bodies through other means, as well. To conduct the study, they selected volunteers from each country who kept food diaries for a week and provided stool samples. Dr. Philipp Schwabl, a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna who led the study, and his colleagues analyzed the samples with a spectrometer. Up to nine different kinds of plastics were detected, ranging in size from .002 to .02 inches. The most common plastics detected were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate -- both major components of plastic bottles and caps.

The European Space Agency is launching a spacecraft to explore the mysteries of Mercury. BepiColombo, named after the Italian mathematician and engineer Giuseppe "Bepi" Colombo, is set to launch at 9:45 p.m. ET Friday aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana. The launch will be livestreamed via ESA's website. NPR reports: The spacecraft is actually made up of two probes: One will go into orbit close to the planet, while the other, supplied by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will orbit farther away, measuring Mercury's magnetic field. "What this lets you do is look at that space environment around Mercury from two different perspectives at exactly the same time," says Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That gives a clearer picture of what's changing during the 88 days it takes Mercury to make one revolution around the sun.

Radar measurements from Earth first suggested that there was ice on Mercury. Earlier this decade, NASA's Messenger mission was able to confirm that the ice was actually there. But Messenger only came close enough to see the ice at Mercury's north pole. The real icy action, Chabot says, is at the south pole. "The largest crater to host these water ice deposits is right smack dab at the south pole of Mercury," she says. "And so I'm very excited that BepiColombo is going to be in an orbit that passes much closer to the southern hemisphere." BepiColombo will take a rather circuitous path to Mercury. It will fly by Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury six times before it is in the right orientation to go into orbit around the innermost planet in our solar system. The entire trip will take slightly more than seven years. When BepiColombo gets into orbit, it may be able to see where Messenger crash-landed on the planet. It is estimated to have made a crater about 60 feet across.

UPDATE: BepiColombo successfully blasted off from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana, marking the third ever mission to Mercury. "Launching BepiColombo is a huge milestone for ESA (the European Space Agency) and JAXA, and there will be many great successes to come," ESA Director General Jan Woerner said in a statement. "Beyond completing the challenging journey, this mission will return a huge bounty of science."

schwit1 shares a report: The U.S. is back on top as the most competitive country in the world, regaining the No. 1 spot for the first time since 2008 in an index produced by the World Economic Forum [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], which said the country could still do better on social issues. America climbed one place in the rankings of 140 countries, with the top five rounded out by Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Japan. All five countries' scores rose from 2017, with the U.S. notching the second-biggest gain after Japan's. [...] The Global Competitiveness Report this year assessed 140 countries on 98 indicators that measure business investment and productivity. The indicators are organized into 12 main drivers of productivity including the nations' institutions, tech savvy, infrastructure, education systems, market size and innovation.

Rival semiconductor giants ARM and Intel have agreed to work together to manage networks of connected devices from both firms, clearing a major stumbling block to market growth of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). From a report: Britain's ARM, a unit of Japan's Softbank, said on Monday it had struck a strategic partnership with Intel to use common standards developed by Intel for managing IoT devices, connections and data. The IoT involves connecting simple chips that detect distance, motion, temperature, pressure and images to be used in an ever wider range of electronics such as lights, parking meters or refrigerators.

Some of the world's dumbest electronics devices get smarter by becoming connected into cloud networks, but also harder to protect. ARM's agreement to adopt Intel standards for securely managing such networks marks a breakthrough that promises to drive the spread of IoT across many industries, the two companies said.

According to the Henley Passport Index, compiled by global citizenship and residence advisory firm Henley & PartnersCitizens, Japan now has the most powerful passport on the planet. From a report: Having gained visa-free access to Myanmar earlier this month, Japanese citizens can now enjoy visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to a whopping 190 destinations around the world -- knocking Singapore, with 189 destinations, into second place. Germany, which began 2018 in the top spot, is now in third place with 188 destinations, tied with France and South Korea. Uzbekistan lifted visa requirements for French nationals on October 5, having already granted visa-free access to Japanese and Singaporean citizens in early February.

Japanese retailer Uniqlo in Tokyo's Ariake district has managed to cut 90% of its staff and replace them with robots that are capable of inspecting and sorting the clothing housed there. The automation also allows them to operate 24 hours a day. Quartz reports: The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The Japan News described how the automation works: "The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information. When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said."

The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).