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US Dept of Justice books one-way plane ticket in his name

A rape investigation involving everyone's favourite cupboard-dwelling WikiLeaker, Julian Assange, has been dropped, Swedish prosecutors told the world's press today.…

Microsoft Teams now has more than 20 million daily active users, a 50% spike in four months that puts the tool well ahead of its chief rival Slack. From a report: Microsoft revealed the number of Teams users for the first time in July, about a year after it first started offering a free version of the service. Teams has the advantage of being part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem with a pool of millions of users to pull from, setting it up for rapid growth. Last month, Slack said it had more than 12 million daily users, a 37 percent increase over the prior year. Despite trailing Microsoft in the number of users, Slack has said its high level engagement -- the average paid customer spends 9 hours a day on Slack and more than 90 minutes actively using it -- gives it an advantage in shaping the future of work. The two companies are in the midst of a fierce, multi-year rivalry for dominance of the competitive market for chat-based collaboration tools, which also includes tech giants Google and Facebook. Microsoft and Slack have been aggressive in making splashy announcements this year to showcase the growth of their platforms.

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Sweden has dropped an investigation into a rape allegation made against Julian Assange. From a report: The deputy chief prosecutor, Eva-Marie Persson, told a news conference: "I want to inform about my decision to discontinue the preliminary investigation." The decision on Tuesday follows a ruling in June by a Swedish court that Assange, who denies the accusation, should not be detained. Two months earlier, the WikiLeaks founder was evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had been living since 2012.

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Two high-level engineers and one managing director accused of stealing from Switchzilla

Cisco has filed a complaint against three former employees in the district court of Northern California, having accused them of stealing its intellectual property before jumping ship to a competitor.…

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via the BBC: According to a 2015 survey of the most annoying office noises by Avanta Serviced Office Group, conversations were rated the most vexing, closely followed by coughing, sneezing and sniffing, loud phone voices, ringing phones and whistling. Why do we find it so hard to be around these everyday noises? What is it about them that allows them to lodge in our brains and make it impossible to think? [...] Back in 2011, researchers from University College London and the University of London decided to find out. First of all, the researchers asked 118 female secondary school students to complete a questionnaire, which revealed how extroverted or introverted each was -- essentially, whether they thrive on socializing and being immersed in the outside world or if they find these experiences exhausting. Next the students were subjected to a battery of cognitive challenges -- and to add extra difficulty, they were asked to complete them while listening to British garage music, or the clamor of a classroom. A control group completed them in silence. As the researchers suspected, all the students performed better in silence. But they also found that, in general -- with the exception of one test -- the more extroverted they were, the less they were affected by noise. A person's level of extroversion is thought to be a key aspect of their personality -- one of the so-called 'Big Five' factors that determines who we are, along with things like how open we are to new experiences. According to one prominent theory, extroverts are inherently "understimulated," so they tend to seek out situations which increase their level of arousal -- like noisy environments. Meanwhile, introverts have the opposite problem; as the famous poet, novelist and introvert Charles Bukowski put it: "People empty me. I have to get away to refill." With this in mind, it makes sense that more introverted workers would be more affected by the background noise, since anything that increases their level of arousal, like music or the chatter of colleagues, could be overwhelming.

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Bare metal or run on any cloud thanks to, er, EPIC BlueData acquisition

HPE has announced its Kubernetes-based Container Platform, which can be deployed on bare metal, any public cloud or virtualized infrastructure. Availability is promised for early 2020.…

Over 60% access better than anything found in US and SK

5G in London is so far lagging behind Birmingham and Cardiff, according to research into the tech's early deployment.…

Analyst says firms insuring against hard exit by the UK

Figures from tech industry analyst Context show a remarkable jump in server, storage and networking sales in the Republic of Ireland through the last two quarters, pointing to companies continuing to invest in insurance against a hard Brexit.…

CEO insists firm can compete with big rivals on cloud

DXC is broken but fixable, the beleaguered outsourcing provider's new chief exec has assured the 130,000 employees still on its payroll.…

Freelance techies claim they face 20% pay cut

Exclusive IT contractors with the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) are mulling legal action following a decision to get rid of all freelancers ahead of controversial changes to UK off-payroll worker tax legislation next year.…

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have devised a system that can predict what different cars will do by determining how selfish or selfless a driver is. From a report: Specifically, they used something called social value orientation (SVO), which represents the degree to which someone is selfish ("egoistic") versus altruistic or cooperative ("prosocial"). The system then estimates drivers' SVOs to create real-time driving trajectories for self-driving cars. Testing their algorithm on the tasks of merging lanes and making unprotected left turns, the team showed that they could better predict the behavior of other cars by a factor of 25 percent. For example, in the left-turn simulations their car knew to wait when the approaching car had a more egoistic driver, and to then make the turn when the other car was more prosocial. To try to expand the car's social awareness, the CSAIL team combined methods from social psychology with game theory, a theoretical framework for conceiving social situations among competing players. The team modeled road scenarios where each driver tried to maximize their own utility and analyzed their "best responses" given the decisions of all other agents. Based on that small snippet of motion from other cars, the team's algorithm could then predict the surrounding cars' behavior as cooperative, altruistic, or egoistic -- grouping the first two as "prosocial." People's scores for these qualities rest on a continuum with respect to how much a person demonstrates care for themselves versus care for others. Here are some potential use cases of such a system: "Say you're a human driving along and a car suddenly enters your blind spot -- the system could give you a warning in the rear-view mirror that the car has an aggressive driver, allowing you to adjust accordingly. It could also allow self-driving cars to actually learn to exhibit more human-like behavior that will be easier for human drivers to understand." The team is planning to apply their system to pedestrians, bicycles, and other agents in driving environments. "In addition, they will be investigating other robotic systems acting among humans, such as household robots, and integrating SVO into their prediction and decision-making algorithms," the report says.

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Mind where you're pointing that thing, Al

Part 2 Welcome to the second part of our Apollo 12 retrospective, where we look at the breaking of cameras and the (almost) breaking of the lunar module pilot. You can read about the eventful launch in Part 1, here.…

Some concerned it hands too much power to too few

Microsoft has put its weight behind the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) security protocol, greatly increasing the likelihood of it becoming a default internet standard.…

The pool of companies itching for a slice of the $2.6 billion contracts has now grown to 14

A total of 14 companies have now entered the race to develop landers to deliver goodies to the Moon as NASA plans to send the first woman and the next man to our nearest rocky companion by 2024.…

Last year, China set a goal of 35 orbital launches and ended up with 39 launch attempts. "This year, China is set to pace the world again," reports Ars Technica. "Through Sunday, the country has launched 27 orbital missions, followed by Russia (19), and the United States (16). Although nearly a month and a half remain in this year, a maximum of six additional orbital launches are likely from the United States in 2019." From the report: To be fair, China's space launch program has not been without hiccups. The country's space program is still trying to bring its large Long March 5 vehicle back into service after a catastrophic failure during just its second mission, in July 2017. And the country had three failures in 2018 and 2019, compared to just one in the United States and Russia combined. The United States has taken a step back this year in part due to decreased activity by SpaceX. The company launched a record 21 missions last year but has so far launched 11 rockets in 2019. A flurry of missions remains possible in the next six weeks for the company, including a space station resupply mission in early December, a commercial satellite launch, and additional Starlink flights. Another big factor has been a slow year for United Launch Alliance. The Colorado-based company has launched just two Delta IV-Medium rockets this year, one Delta IV-Heavy, and a single Atlas V mission. The company may launch Boeing's Starliner spacecraft before the end of 2019, giving the Atlas V rocket a second launch. It is possible that Rocket Lab, which has flown its Electron rocket from New Zealand five times in 2019 and is planning at least one more mission before the end of the year, will have more launches than United Launch Alliance for the first time. Sometime next year, Rocket Lab should also begin to add to the US tally for orbital launches as it opens a new facility at Wallops Island, Virginia.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A YouTuber who used a royalty-free track supplied by YouTube itself has had all of his videos copyright claimed by companies including SonyATV and Warner Chappell. According to the music outfits, Matt Lownes' use the use of the track 'Dreams' by Joakim Karud means that they are now entitled to all of his revenue. [...] Worryingly, searches online show that not only are other people affected by similar mass complaints, but there may -- may -- be an explanation for what is going on here. "SonyATV & Warner Chappell have claimed 24 of my videos because the royalty free song Dreams by Joakim Karud (from the OFFICIAL YOUTUBE AUDIO LIBRARY BTW) uses a sample from Kenny Burrell Quartet's 'Weaver of Dream,'" a Twitter user wrote on Saturday. Sure enough, if one turns to the WhoSampled archive, Dreams is listed as having sampled Weaver of Dreams, a track from 1956 to which Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. own the copyrights. If the trend of claims against 'Dreams' continues, there is potential for huge upheaval on YouTube and elsewhere. Countless thousands of videos use the track and as a result it has become very well-known. Sadly, people trying to claim it as their own is nothing new but fingers crossed, common sense will sort out the present issues.

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AmiMoJo writes: A woman is suing a London NHS trust for not revealing her father had been diagnosed with Huntington's disease before she had her own child. She only discovered he carried the gene for the degenerative, incurable brain disorder after her daughter was born. The woman then found out she too carried the faulty gene, meaning her daughter has a 50% chance of having it. The story is tragic. In 2007 her father murdered her mother and was found to have Huntington's, which often results in confusion and violent behavior. She was already pregnant at the time and her father asked that she not be told as he feared she would abort the pregnancy. Doctors were in a bind, with doctor-patient confidentiality on one hand and a duty of care on the other. The woman is arguing that in cases of serious inherited diseases children should have a right to know. She says if she had known she would not have had a child, who has a 50:50 chance of also having Huntington's and will one day have to look after her confused and possibly violent mother.

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Country offline for third day in response to protests

Iran is offline and has been for three days after the government responded to widespread protests by killing the internet.…

MojoKid writes: Intel has unveiled its first discrete GPU solution that will hit the market in 2020, code name Ponte Vecchio. Based on 7nm silicon manufacturing and stack chiplet design with Intel's Foveros tech, Ponte Vecchio will target HPC markets for supercomputers and AI training in the datacenter. According to HotHardware, Ponte Vecchio will employ a combination of both its Foveros 3D packaging and EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) technologies, along with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and Compute Express Link (CXL), which will operate over the newly ratified PCIe 5.0 interface and serve as Ponte Vecchio's high-speed switch fabric connecting all GPU resources. Intel is billing Ponte Vecchio as its first exascale GPU, proving its meddle in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Aurora supercomputer. Aurora will employ a topology of six Ponte Vecchio GPUs and two Intel Xeon Scalable processors based on Intel's next generation Sapphire Rapids architecture, along with Optane DC Persistent Memory on a single blade. The new supercomputer is schedule to arrive sometime in 2021.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Sunday, Motherboard reported that the hacker or hackers known as Phineas Fisher targeted a bank, stole money and documents, and is offering other hackers $100,000 to carry out politically motivated hacks. Now, the bank Phineas Fisher targeted, Cayman National Bank from the Isle of Man, confirmed it has suffered a data breach. "It is known that Cayman National Bank (Isle of Man) Limited was amongst a number of banks targeted and subject to the same hacking activity," Cayman National told Motherboard in a statement issued Monday. "A criminal investigation is ongoing and Cayman National is co-operating with the relevant law enforcement authorities to identify the perpetrators of the data theft. Cayman National takes any breach of data security very seriously and a specialist IT forensic investigation is underway, with appropriate actions being taken to ensure that the clients of Cayman National's Isle of Man bank and trust companies are protected," the statement added. The statement doesn't name Phineas Fisher explicitly, but instead says the bank was the victim of a "criminal hacking group." "I robbed a bank and gave the money away," Phineas Fisher wrote in their most recent manifesto, adding that they breached the bank in 2016. "Computer hacking is a powerful tool to fight economic inequality." In its statement, Cayman National claimed it had found no evidence of financial loss either to its customers or Cayman National itself. Twitter account Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) posted a link to the copies of the servers of Cayman National Bank and Trust. "To make certain files easier to access, the two Athol servers were combined into a single archive. The raw Athol servers will be released next week, along with the launch of the Hunter Memorial Library which will make over 600,000 of the bank's emails searchable online," reads a follow-up tweet. The total size of data is about 2 terabytes.

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