Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: On August 30, a startup plans to add its "smart pavement" to an intersection in an industrial corner of Denver, Colorado. The company has encased assorted electronics within four slabs of concrete and will wedge those slabs into the road between a Pepsi Co. bottling plant and two parking lots. Integrated Roadways says its product, which can deduce the speed, weight, and direction of a vehicle from the basket of sensors buried in the pavement, will face its first real-world test at that discreet Denver junction. If this trial goes well, the startup "will replace 500 meters of pavement along a dangerous curve in Highway 285, just south of Denver, with its product in early 2019," reports IEEE Spectrum. The sensors will be able to detect when a driver careens off the road's edge and alert authorities. It even has the ability to prompt officials to reconfigure lanes to relieve congestion.

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Facebook believes they can use machine learning to speed up magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Computer scientists from the social networking site are working with New York University's medical school on the project. CNNMoney reports: NYU is providing an anonymous dataset of 10,000 MRI exams, a trove that will include as many as three million images of knees, brains and livers. Researchers will use the data to train an algorithm, using a method called deep learning, to recognize the arrangement of bones, muscles, ligaments, and other things that make up the human body. Building this knowledge into the software that powers an MRI machine will allow the AI to create a portion of the image, saving time. Making the tests faster would allow radiologists to perform a wider variety of tests.

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Here's a Node app that backs up a bunch of files from my blog onto a GitHub repository every night. So in case my servers ever go offline, there's another copy of the content, kept current automatically, on GitHub. It's good starter code for your own backup app. I rewrote it in the last couple of days to also back up the glossary and a few other files that were being copied by another process running in Frontier.

John Dvorak shares the secret of successful trolling of Mac zealots.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A "legacy system" was to blame for exposing the contact information of attendees of this year's Black Hat security conference. Colorado-based pen tester and security researcher who goes by the handle NinjaStyle said it would have taken about six hours to collect all the registered attendees' names, email and home addresses, company names and phone numbers from anyone who registered for the 2018 conference. In a blog post, he explained that he used a reader to access the data on his NFC-enabled conference badge, which stored his name in plaintext and other scrambled data. The badge also contained a web address to download BCard, a business card reader app. After decompiling the BCard app, the researcher found an API endpoint in its code, which he used to pull his own data from the server without any security checks. By enumerating and cycling through unique badge ID numbers, he was able to download a few hundred Black Hat attendee records from the server. The API was not rate limited either at all or enough to prevent the mass downloading of attendee records, the blog post said. The legacy system's API was disabled within a day of the disclosure. Black Hat said in a statement: "Thanks to them for disclosing this promptly and responsibly to our technology partner, who addressed the vulnerability immediately. We're working with our partner to ensure this isn't an issue in the future."

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A backlash against the app stores of Apple and Google is gaining steam, with a growing number of companies saying the tech giants are collecting too high a tax for connecting consumers to developers' wares. From a report: Netflix and video game makers Epic Games and Valve are among companies that have recently tried to bypass the app stores or complained about the cost of the tolls Apple and Google charge. Grumbling about app store economics isn't new. But the number of complaints, combined with new ways of reaching users, regulatory scrutiny and competitive pressure are threatening to undermine what have become digital goldmines for Apple and Google. "It feels like something bubbling up here," said Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie. "The dollars are just getting so big. They just don't want to be paying Apple and Google billions." Apple and Google launched their app stores in 2008, and they soon grew into powerful marketplaces that matched the creations of millions of independent developers with billions of smartphone users. In exchange, the companies take up to 30 percent of the money consumers pay developers.

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Inside Higher Ed has a story about the Berkman blogs. They raise the right issues. Can't we do better than just throwing away archives, esp from a project that yielded such good results. I'm also not sure what Berkman meant about the blogs being antiquated. They seem to be saying people would be better off writing on Facebook or Twitter. Blogs have significant advantages over writing for social networks. There are tradeoffs. Perhaps the server software hasn't been updated. That could be a problem. We can help with the decisions Harvard is making. But there has to be communication first. I've gone first.

Very few Rohingya have returned to Myanmar, and some of those that went back were tortured and thrown in jail, HRW says.

Peace Now NGO says 96 percent of homes approved are located in isolated settlements.

In a survey of more than 1,000 "white-collar workers" across the U.S., people reported checking their email an average of 2.5 hours each weekday. The average person checks work email more than three hours each day, according to Adobe, which conducted the survey. From a report: According to the report, email is most popular among people between the ages of 25 and 34 -- today's Millennial generation, roughly. That group spends an average of 6.4 hours in their Inboxes each day, compared to 5.8 hours for those between the ages of 18 and 24. For the first time in the three years Adobe has conducted the survey, email isn't the sole most desirable way to communicate with colleagues. Instead, face-to-face conversations are tied with it as the top communication method at work. When it's time for tough conversations, though -- like quitting a job -- face-to-face conversations have lost some ground. Just 52% of those between the ages of 25 and 34 say they would use a face-to-face conversation to quit a job. That number jumps to 77% among those over the age of 35.

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Government will 'hold direct talks' with Taliban without foreign powers' involvement, Afghan official says in Kabul.

Saudi Arabia calls off both domestic and international stock listing of state oil giant Aramco, sources tell Reuters.

Amazon just got yet another competitor in the ebook and audiobook space: Walmart launched its very own digital book store Wednesday, selling ebooks as well as audiobooks through its website and dedicated apps. From a report: The retail giant's digital book service is being powered by Kobo, the ebook company owned by Japan's Rakuten. Through the partnership, Walmart customers are now able to buy from a catalog of more than six million books, which can be read through dedicated mobile apps as well as Kobo's line of ebook readers. Walmart is also launching a Kobo-powered audiobook subscription service for $9.99 per month. For that price, consumers get one book credit per month. Audiobooks will be accessible even after a subscription is cancelled. As part of the partnership, Walmart will also start to sell so-called digital book cards that can be redeemed online for ebooks in 3500 stores.

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Just got this email from Google saying that some pages of mine are violating their Adsense policy. As far as I can recall, I don't have Google ads on any of my pages. Maybe at one time I tried it out on the XML-RPC site, but I don't think they're there anymore. Whatever. I tried to find a listing somewhere of the errors, and their site doesn't make it easy to find, if it's there at all.

Plastic waste collected at the Volvo Ocean Race is recycled and used to make items such as plastic benches.