Geoffrey Morrison from CNET explains how the optical cable is “dying a very slow death”: The official term for optical audio cable is “Toslink,” short for Toshiba Link. Developed in the early ’80s to connect their CD players to their receivers, it was a red laser optical version of the Sony/Phillips “Digital Interconnect Format” aka S/PDIF standard. You’ve seen standard S/PDIF connections a bunch too; they’re often called “coax digital.” Optical had certain benefits over copper cables, but they were also more fragile, and for a long time, more expensive. Though glass cables were available, for even more money, most optical cables were made from cheap plastic. This limited their range to in-room use, primarily. Through the ’90s and 2000’s, the optical cable was near-ubiquitous: The easiest way to get Dolby Digital and DTS from your cable/satellite box, TiVo, or DVD player to your receiver. Even in the early days of HDMI, right next to it would be the lowly optical cable, ready in case someone’s receiver didn’t accept HDMI. But now more and more gear are dropping optical. It’s gone completely on the latest Roku and Apple TV 4K, for example. It’s also disappeared from many smaller TVs, though it lingers on in larger ones, a potentially redundant backup to HDMI with ARC. The reason for this? Soundbars…

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Source: Slashdot – Is the Optical Cable Dying?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from WIRED: In a study published today in Nature Human Behavior, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh analyzed how suicidal individuals think and feel differently about life and death, by looking at patterns of how their brains light up in an fMRI machine. Then they trained a machine learning algorithm to isolate those signals — a frontal lobe flare at the mention of the word “death,” for example. The computational classifier was able to pick out the suicidal ideators with more than 90 percent accuracy (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). Furthermore, it was able to distinguish people who had actually attempted self-harm from those who had only thought about it. In today’s study, the researchers started with 17 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 who had recently reported suicidal ideation to their therapists. Then they recruited 17 neurotypical control participants and put them each inside an fMRI scanner. While inside the tube, subjects saw a random series of 30 words. Ten were generally positive, 10 were generally negative, and 10 were specifically associated with death and suicide. Then researchers asked the subjects to think about each word for three seconds as it showed up on a screen in front of them. “What does ‘trouble’ mean for you?” “What about ‘carefree,’ what’s the key concept there?” For each word, the researchers recorded the subjects’ cerebral blood flow to find out which parts of their brains seemed to be at work.

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Source: Slashdot – Algorithm Can Identify Suicidal People Using Brain Scans

Facebook said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time. Reuters reports: Facebook’s latest data on the Russia-linked posts – possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age – far exceeds the company’s previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to U.S. lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week. Twitter separately has found 2,752 accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company’s written testimony said. That estimate is up from a tally of 201 accounts that Twitter reported in September. Google, owned by Alphabet, said in a statement on Monday it had found $4,700 in Russia-linked ad spending during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, and that it would build a database of election ads. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, said in the written testimony that the 80,000 posts from Russia’s Internet Research Agency were a tiny fraction of content on Facebook, equal to one out of 23,000 posts.

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Source: Slashdot – Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts

Freshly Exhumed writes from a report via CBC.ca: To protect police investigative techniques that may or may not have been used in a Calgary Police Service investigation, their controversial cellphone surveillance device will remain so secretive not even the make and model can be released to the public, according to a court ruling released Monday. The MDI (Mobile Device Identifier) technology — colloquially called a StingRay after Harris Corporation’s IMSI device, which mimics cell towers and intercepts data from nearby phones — is controversial in part because in at least one Canadian case, prosecutors have taken watered down plea deals rather than disclose information related to the device.

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Source: Slashdot – Calgary Police Cellphone Surveillance Device Must Remain Top Secret, Judge Rules