The "real version" of Photoshop is coming to the iPad next year, complete with a user interface similar to the desktop application and all the main tools. Ars Technica reports: Photoshop for iPad has a user interface structured similarly to the desktop application. It is immediately familiar to users of the application but tuned for touch screens, with larger targets and adaptations for the tablet as well as gestures to streamline workflows. Both touch and pencil input are supported. The interface is somewhat simpler than the desktop version, and although the same Photoshop code is running under the hood to ensure there's no loss of fidelity, not every feature will be available in the mobile version. The first release will contain the main tools while Adobe plans to add more in the future. Cloud syncing is a key element of Photoshop on iPad. Edits made on the iPad will be synchronized transparently with the desktop -- no conversions or import/export process to go through. Using a feature not available in the iPad version should then be as simple as hitting save and then opening the file on the desktop, picking up where you left off. Adobe is also reportedly building a tablet painting app called Project Gemini, which "simulates real brushes, paints, and materials as well as the interactions between them," reports Ars. "It combines raster graphics, vector drawing, and the Photoshop engine into a single application designed for artwork and illustration."

Reader merbs shares a report about Magic Leap, a US-based startup valued at north of $6 billion and which counts Google, Alibaba, Warner Bros, AT&T, and several top Silicon Valley venture capital firms as its investors. The company, which held its first developer conference this week, announced that it is making its $2,295 AR headset available in more states in the United States. Journalist Brian Merchant attended the conference and shares the other part of the story. From a story: After spending two days at LEAPcon, I feel it is my duty -- in the name of instilling a modicum of sanity into an age where a company that has never actually sold a product to a consumer can be worth a billion dollars more than the entire GDP of Fiji -- to inform you that it is not. Magic Leap clearly wants its public launch to appear huge -- who wouldn't? In decidedly Magic Leapian fashion, the company covered an entire side of LA Mart, the 12-story building in downtown Los Angeles where the conference was to be held, with a psychedelic image of an astronaut and the tagline 'Free Your Mind'. In similarly Leapian fashion, the actual demos and keynote took place in the basement, where a wrong turn could land you in shipping and receiving and cell reception was nil.

[...] You know that weird sensation when it feels like everyone around you is participating in some mild mass hallucination, and you missed the dosing? The old 'what am I possibly missing here' phenomenon? That's how I felt at LEAP a lot of the time, amidst crowds of people dropping buzzwords and acronym soup at light speed, and then again while I was reading reviews of the device afterwards -- somehow, despite years of failing to deliver anything of substance, lots of the press is still in Leap's thrall. Demo after demo, I felt like, sure, that was kind of neat. The games were charming, if often glitchy and simplistic, and yes, it might be helpful for architects to be able to blow up and walk around their designs. I liked the developers, who were smart and funny. Some of the graphics and interactions were very nicely rendered. But there wasn't anything -- besides a single demo, which I'll get to in a second -- that I'd feel compelled to ever do again. It felt genuinely crazy to me that people could get too excited about this, especially after years of decent VR and the Hololens, without having a distinct monetary incentive to do so.

As many have noted, the hardware is still extremely limiting. The technology underpinning these experiences seems genuinely advanced, and if it were not for a multi-year blitzkrieg marketing campaign insisting a reality where pixels blend seamlessly with IRL physics was imminent, it might have felt truly impressive. (Whether or not it's advanced enough to eventually give rise to Leap's prior promises is an entirely open question at this point.) For now, the field of vision is fairly small and unwieldy, so images are constantly vanishing from view as you look around. If you get too close to them, objects will get chopped up or move awkwardly. And if you do get a good view, some objects appear low res and transparent; some looked like cheap holograms from an old sci-fi film. Text was bleary and often doubled up in layers that made it hard to read, and white screens looked harsh -- I loaded Google on the Helio browser and immediately had to shut my eyes. Further reading: Magic Leap is Pushing To Land a Contract With US Army To Build AR Devices For Soldiers To Use On Combat Missions, Documents Reveal.

Earlier this year, we heard rumors that Google was working on a game-streaming service. It looks like those rumors were true. From a report: The company today unveiled "Project Stream," and while Google calls this a "technical test" to see how well game streaming to Chrome works, it's clear that this is the foundational technology for a game-streaming service.

To sweeten the pot, Google is launching this test in partnership with Ubisoft and giving a limited number of players free access to Assassin's Creed Odyssey for the duration of the test. You can sign up for the test now; starting on October 5, Google will invite a limited number of participants to play the game for free in Chrome. As Google notes, the team wanted to work with a AAA title because that's obviously far more of a challenge than working with a less graphics-intense game. And for any game-streaming service to be playable, the latency has to be minimal and the graphics can't be worse than on a local machine.

"Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer," writes the Boston Globe. Slashdot reader sandbagger explains: "Boston Public Schools asked MIT graduate students Sebastien Martin and Arthur Delarue to build an algorithm that could do the enormously complicated work of changing start times at dozens of schools -- and re-routing the hundreds of buses that serve them. In theory this would also help with student alertness...." MIT also reported that "Approximately 50 superfluous routes could be eliminated using the new method, saving the school district between $3 million and $5 million annually."

The Globe reports: They took to the new project with gusto, working 14- and 15-hour days to meet a tight deadline -- and occasionally waking up in the middle of the night to feed new information to a sprawling MIT data center. The machine they constructed was a marvel. Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options -- that's 1 followed by 120 zeroes -- the algorithm landed on a plan that would trim the district's $100 million-plus transportation budget while shifting the overwhelming majority of high school students into later start times.... But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed. Angry parents signed an online petition and filled the school committee chamber, turning the plan into one of the biggest crises of Mayor Marty Walsh's tenure. The city summarily dropped it. The failure would eventually play a role in the superintendent's resignation...

Big districts stagger their start times so a single fleet of buses can serve every school: dropping off high school students early in the morning, then circling back to get the elementary and middle school kids. If you're going to push high school start times back, then you've probably got to move a lot of elementary and middle schools into earlier time slots. The district knew that going in, and officials dutifully quizzed thousands of parents and teachers at every grade level about their preferred start times. But they never directly confronted constituents with the sort of dramatic change the algorithm would eventually propose -- shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."

But will the whole drama play out again? "Last year, even after everything went sideways in Boston, some 80 school districts from around the country reached out to the whiz kids from MIT, eager for the algorithm to solve their problems."

Nikita Prokopov, a software programmer and author of Fira Code, a popular programming font, AnyBar, a universal status indicator, and some open-source Clojure libraries, writes: Remember times when an OS, apps and all your data fit on a floppy? Your desktop todo app is probably written in Electron and thus has userland driver for Xbox 360 controller in it, can render 3d graphics and play audio and take photos with your web camera. A simple text chat is notorious for its load speed and memory consumption. Yes, you really have to count Slack in as a resource-heavy application. I mean, chatroom and barebones text editor, those are supposed to be two of the less demanding apps in the whole world. Welcome to 2018.

At least it works, you might say. Well, bigger doesn't imply better. Bigger means someone has lost control. Bigger means we don't know what's going on. Bigger means complexity tax, performance tax, reliability tax. This is not the norm and should not become the norm. Overweight apps should mean a red flag. They should mean run away scared. 16Gb Android phone was perfectly fine 3 years ago. Today with Android 8.1 it's barely usable because each app has become at least twice as big for no apparent reason. There are no additional functions. They are not faster or more optimized. They don't look different. They just...grow?

iPhone 4s was released with iOS 5, but can barely run iOS 9. And it's not because iOS 9 is that much superior -- it's basically the same. But their new hardware is faster, so they made software slower. Don't worry -- you got exciting new capabilities like...running the same apps with the same speed! I dunno. [...] Nobody understands anything at this point. Neither they want to. We just throw barely baked shit out there, hope for the best and call it "startup wisdom." Web pages ask you to refresh if anything goes wrong. Who has time to figure out what happened? Any web app produces a constant stream of "random" JS errors in the wild, even on compatible browsers.

[...] It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore. Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs. Build systems are inherently unreliable and periodically require full clean, even though all info for invalidation is there. Nothing stops us from making build process reliable, predictable and 100% reproducible. Just nobody thinks it's important. NPM has stayed in "sometimes works" state for years.

According to "several real-world tests and synthetic benchmarks," the new iPhone XS and XS Max, equipped with the world's first 7-nanometer A12 Bionic processor, are the world's fastest smartphones, reports Tom's Guide. They even significantly outperform Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 chip. From the report: Geekbench 4 is a benchmark that measures overall performance, and no other phone comes close to Apple's new handsets on this test. The iPhone Xs notched 11,420, and the iPhone Xs Max hit 11,515. The older iPhone X scored 10,357, so that's about an 11 percent improvement. There's a lot more distance between the new iPhones and Android flagships. The fastest Android phone around, the OnePlus 6, scored 9,088 on Geekbench 4 with its 8GB of RAM, while the Galaxy Note 9 reached 8,876.

To test real-world performance, we use the Adobe Premiere Clips app to transcode a 2-minute 4K video to 1080p. The iPhone X was miles ahead last year with a time of just 42 seconds. This time around, the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max knocked it down further to 39 seconds. The Galaxy S9+ took 2 minutes and 32 seconds to complete the task, and that's the fastest we've seen from an Android phone. The OnePlus 6 finished in 3:45, and the LG G7 ThinQ took 3:16. One good way to measure real-world performance is to see how long it takes for a phone to load demanding apps. Because the phones have the same processor for this round, we just used the iPhone Xs Max and put it up against the iPhone X and the Galaxy Note 9. The iPhone XS Max was faster every time, including a 15-second victory in Fortnite over the Note 9 and 3-second win in Asphalt 9. The phones were closer in Pokemon Go but the iPhone XS Max still came out on top. The new iPhones did lag behind the competition in the 3DMark Slingshot Extreme test, which measures graphics performance by evaluating everything from rendering to volumetric lighting. The iPhone XS Max and iPhone X received scores of 4,244 and 4,339, respectively, while the OnePlus 6 received a score of 5,124.

As for the GFXBench 5 test, the iPhone XS Max achieved 1,604.7 frames on the Aztec Ruins portion of the test, and 1,744.44 frames in the Car Chase test," reports Tom's Guide. "The Note 9 was far behind at 851.7 and 1,103 frames, respectively. However, the Galaxy S9+ edged past the iPhone XS Max on this test."

Paul Alcorn reporting for Tom's Hardware: AMD listed the Ryzen 7 2800H and the Ryzen 5 2600H on its website. These new processors bring the inherent goodness of the Raven Ridge architecture, found in the Ryzen 5 2400G and the Ryzen 3 2200G, to gaming notebooks. As such, these processors come with AMD's Zen compute cores paired with the Vega graphics architecture, and they are also AMD's first processors to support DDR4-3200 as a base specification. Both new models feature a similar design as their desktop counterparts, albeit with slightly redesigned in frequencies to adjust for the flimsy cooling in mobile form factors and battery life limitations. That's reflected in the processors' reduced 45W TDP (thermal design power), which is much lower than the 65W TDP found on the desktop parts. AMD does give vendors some wiggle room with a configurable TDP (cTDP) range that spans between 35W and 45W.

The Ryzen 7 2800H is analogous to the 2400G, but it comes with a 3.3 GHz base and 3.8 GHz boost clocks. The four-core, eight-thread CPU is complemented by Vega graphics with 11 CU (Compute Unit) clocked up to a max of 1,300 MHz, which is a nice boost over its desktop counterpart. The Ryzen 5 2600H is similar to the 2200G, but it's four cores are hyper-threaded, which is a big bonus. The Vega graphics come with 8 CUs and boost up to 1,100 MHz.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZDNet: A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in the WebKit rendering engine used by Safari that crashes and restarts the iOS devices -- iPhones and iPads. The vulnerability can be exploited by loading an HTML page that uses specially crafted CSS code. The CSS code isn't very complex and tries to apply a CSS effect known as backdrop-filter to a series of nested page segments (DIVs). Backdrop-filter is a relative new CSS property and works by blurring or color shifting to the area behind an element. This is a heavy processing task, and some software engineers and web developers have speculated that the rendering of this effect takes a toll on iOS' graphics processing library, eventually leading to a crash of the mobile OS altogether.

Nvidia's new "Scanner" tool for the company's newest GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards will provide one-click overclocking. PCWorld reports: Nvidia Scanner isn't actually a tool you can download. Instead, it's an API that developers can implement, similar to how current GeForce overclocking software relies on Nvidia's NVAPI. Tom Peterson, Nvidia's director of technical marketing, says all of the major overclocking programs will implement Scanner. You simply press the Test button, and the software starts walking through your graphics card's volt frequency curve, running arithmetic tests all the while. If the overclock starts pushing too far, Nvidia Scanner will discover a math error before your card crashes. When that happens, Scanner ramps up your card's voltage and starts testing again. After about 20 minutes, Scanner will have a complete understanding of your RTX card's capabilities, and automatically generate an overclocking profile built to squeeze as much performance as possible out of it without crashing. Easy-peasy. PCWorld's Brad Chacos mentions a demonstration where "Nvidia's Tom Peterson showed Nvidia Scanner pushing the GeForce RTX 2080 -- which ships with a 1,710MHz boost clock -- all the way to 2,130MHz at 1,068mV."

The Weather Channel's 3-D, room-encompassing depiction of the Hurricane Florence storm surge took many by surprise on Friday (Second video). It doesn't tell, it shows, more bracingly than you'd think would be possible on a meteorological update, writes Wired. Here's how they did it. CNET: In one video, meteorologist Erika Navarro demonstrates what a progressive storm surge would mean at a human level. (Storm surge is simply the "abnormal rise of water generated by a storm" that is "produced by water being pushed toward the shore by the force of the winds," according to the National Hurricane Center.) "Storm surge is going to be potentially life-threatening for some areas along the US coastline," Navarro says. Then she demonstrates what's described as a "reasonable, worst-case scenario for areas along North Carolina." Here's where the video gets heart-in-throat scary. As Navarro stands and speaks, the weather maps behind her dissolve away, and she is shown standing in a computer-generated neighborhood. The CGI water rises behind her, setting a red car afloat and flooding homes.

[...] The Weather Channel has been using augmented reality since 2015. This year, it partnered with content and technology provider The Future Group and its impressive Immersive Mixed Reality technology, which uses Unreal Engine software. The tech debuted on TWC in June, when meteorologist Jim Cantore used it to walk viewers through what would happen if a tornado hit the channel's own studios. A demo showing the power of lightning followed in July. Reaction to the hurricane explainer has been overwhelmingly positive, said Michael Potts, Weather Channel's vice president of design. "It was created to evoke an automatic visceral reaction, to imagine that this could be real," Potts said. "And people are sharing it with friends and family as a warning tool. The amount of engagement across all of our platforms has been some of the highest we've ever seen." The neighborhood Navarro is standing in looks real, but it's all virtual graphics created in a new green-screen studio built at the channel's Atlanta headquarters. "All the graphics you see, from the cars, the street, the houses and the entire neighborhood are created using the Unreal Engine -- they are not real," Potts says. "The circle she is standing in is the presentation area, it's a 'safe' space that is not affected by the weather. ... The maps and data are all real-time and the atmospheric conditions are driven by the forecast." More on this here.

Designed to run on minimal hardware, Elive is very much a passion project of its leader, Samuel F Baggen. Based on Debian, the first version took a bow in 2005. The second stable version made an appearance in 2010 and it has been a long eight years for the third stable version to become available. The Register: Elive has an impressively low bar to entry, with hardware requirements for the distribution coming in at 256 MB RAM and a 500 MHz CPU, meaning that some very elderly silicon is theoretically going to be able to enjoy the highly polished Enlightenment desktop. "Theoretically" because after The Register took Elive 3.0.0 out for a spin on a relatively low-powered laptop, we'd frankly baulk at running it on anything much slower than a 533MHz Core 2 with at least 512 MB RAM. However, the Enlightenment UI is undeniably an attractive desktop, particularly if a macOS-alike dock is your thing, and runs at an impressive lick even on hardware that lacks graphics acceleration.

At its core, Elive is based on the Debian 8 distribution (aka Jessie), using the 3.16 kernel and version 0.17.6 of the Enlightenment X11 Window Manager. It comes replete with a full set of applications, including the ubiquitous LibreOffice and Gimp, along with a variety of productivity and entertainment tools, some of which are Elive's own. Unlike the previous version of Elive, 3.0.0 removes the requirement of donating to the project in order to install the thing locally (although Baggen was quick to tell The Reg that cost-free alternatives existed, but often with annoying processes).

AMD announced two new second-generation Ryzen CPUs this morning. From a report: The Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X bring Precision Boost 2 and XFR 2 to quad-core Ryzens without integrated graphics, but there's a catch: these chips appear to be available exclusively to system integrators and OEMs for use in prebuilt systems. AMD is debuting the Ryzen 5 2500X in cooperation with Acer in the form of the Nitro 50 desktop PC. AMD says the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.

Facebook is suing BlackBerry, claiming the company stole its voice-messaging technology and other patented processes. The social media company is seeking unspecified damages for infringement of six patents. Bloomberg reports: In addition to the voice-messaging patent, Facebook cites infringement of patented technology that improves how a mobile device delivers graphics, video and audio and another that centralizes tracking and analysis of GPS data. In March, BlackBerry sued Facebook in federal court in Los Angeles, accusing the social media giant of infringing on its mobile messaging patents. BlackBerry claimed Facebook made unauthorized use of its technology in its own instant messenger service, Facebook Messenger, and in WhatsApp Messenger and Instagram.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since 2007, Pokemon Essentials has been a crucial part of the Pokemon fan game community. As a free mod for the paid RPG Maker software, Pokemon Essentials offers all the graphics, music, maps, and tilesets a fan game maker needs to craft their own Poke-adventure. Fans of the tool congregated around the PokeCommunity forums and a dedicated Pokemon Essentials wiki to download files, share creations, and discuss the scene. Earlier this week, however, PokeCommunity forum moderator Marin announced that "the Pokemon Essentials wikia and all downloads for it have been taken down due to a copyright claim by Nintendo of America." That means "we will not allow Pokemon Essentials or any of its assets to be hosted or distributed on PokeCommunity," the announcement reads. "We sincerely apologize that we have to do this, but there is no going around it." Fandom, the company that hosts the wiki, confirmed to the Verge that it had "received a DMCA notice on behalf of Nintendo notifying us of content that was in violation of its copyright holdings. After carefully assessing the violations in regards to the Pokemon Essentials wiki, we came to a decision to take it down."

During a pre-Gamescom 2018 livestream from Cologne, Germany, Nvidia on Monday unveiled new GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti high-end graphics cards. These new 20-series cards will succeed Nvidia's current top-of-the-line GPUs, the GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti. While the company usually waits to launch the more powerful Ti version of a GPU, this time around, it's releasing the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti at once. Polygon adds: They won't come cheap. The Nvidia-manufactured Founders Edition versions will cost $599 for the RTX 2070, $799 for the RTX 2080 and $1,199 for the RTX 2080 Ti. The latter two cards are expected to ship "on or around" Sept. 20, while there is no estimated release date for the RTX 2070. Pre-orders are currently available for the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced different "starting at" prices during the keynote presentation. Huang's presentation said the RTX 2070 will start at $499, the RTX 2080 at $699 and the RTX 2080 Ti at $999. Asked for clarification, an Nvidia representative told Polygon that these amounts reflect retail prices for third-party manufacturers' cards.

The RTX 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti will be the first consumer-level graphics cards based on Nvidia's next-generation Turing architecture, which the company announced earlier this month at the SIGGRAPH computing conference. At that time, Nvidia also revealed its first Turing-based products: three GPUs in the company's Quadro line, which is geared toward professional applications. All three of the new RTX cards will feature built-in support for real-time ray tracing, a rendering and lighting technique for photorealistic graphics that gaming companies are starting to introduce this year

MojoKid shares a report from Hot Hardware: We been hearing a lot about NVIDA's next-generation GPU architecture since late last year, and today NVIDIA is announcing the first products based on Turing. NVIDIA is targeting the professional graphics market first with its new Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000 and RTX 5000 GPUs. Turing GPU architecture replaces Pascal, which has served both the consumer and professional markets since 2016. But as its 8th generation GPU architecture, NVIDIA is ushering in a number of advances with Turing and it's billed as the "world's first ray-tracing GPU." When it comes to content creators, NVIDIA claims that with the power of Turing, "applications can simulate the physical world at 6x the speed of the previous Pascal generation."

Getting down to brass tacks, the entry-level Quadro RTX 5000 has 3,072 CUDA cores, 384 Tensor cores, and will come with 16GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory. Its ray-tracing performance is dialed in at 6 GigaRays/sec, according to NVIDIA. Both the Quadro RTX 6000 and RTX 8000 have 4,608 CUDA cores and 576 Tensor cores; the only difference between the two is that the former has 24GB of GDDR6, while the latter doubles that to 48GB. Ray-tracing performance for both of these GPUs tops out at 10 GigaRays/sec. NVIDIA is also claiming up to 16TFLOPs compute performance for the Quadro RTX 8000. NVIDIA's new Quadro GPUs will also be among the first to support both USB-C and VirtualLink for next-generation virtual reality and mixed reality headsets. Other VirtualLink backers include AMD, Oculus, Microsoft and Valve. The Quadro RTX 5000, RTX 6000 and RTX 8000 will all be available during the fourth quarter of 2018 priced at $2,300, $6,300 and $10,000 respectively.

fstack writes: Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.18 as the newest kernel bringing a Steam Controller kernel driver, Spectre updates for ARM64, power management updates, a "Restartable Services" system call, AMD Radeon graphics driver improvements, V3D DRM as Broadcom's new graphics driver, DM writecache support, USB 3.2 support, and many other updates. Linus Torvalds wrote of the 4.18 final release: "It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates. Mostly networking, but some vfs race fixes (mentioned in the rc8 announcement as 'pending') and a couple of driver fixes (scsi, networking, i2c). Some other minor random things (arm crypto fix, parisc memory ordering fix)." In a separate article, Phoronix details all the changes and new features available in this release.

According to a new report from Wccftech, Intel will introduce new Core i9, i7, and i5 chips on October 1st that will be branded as 9th generation processors. The Verge reports: The mainstream flagship processor, Intel's Core i9-9900K, is expected to ship with 8 cores and 16 threads. Leaked documents show that this will be the first mainstream Core i9 desktop processor, and will include 16 MB of L3 cache and Intel's UHD 620 graphics chip. Even Intel's 9th gen Core i7 processor is expected to ship with 8 cores and 8 threads (up from the current 6 cores), with the Core i5 shipping with 6 cores and 6 threads. Intel is reportedly launching its unlocked overclockable processors first, followed by more 9th generation processors early next year.

David Gerard has concerns about the Joint Photographic Experts Group (the ISO working group handling the JPEG standard for image compression). "They seem to think they can advance the cause of DRM for JPEG images...with a bit of applied blockchain." He bases that charge on the fact that the JPEG committee organized a special session on blockchain, and then created an ad hoc group to define use cases. After six months' collaboration, the group has produced a white paper -- "Towards a Standardized Framework for Media Blockchain" -- as announced in the press release following the 80th meeting in July. The Executive Summary declares, "Fake news, copyright violation, media forensics, privacy and security are emerging challenges for digital media. JPEG has determined that blockchain technology has great potential as a technology component to address these challenges in transparent and trustable media transactions... [T]he standardization committee continues to work on improving various components of the standard. This includes incorporation of new technologies addressing current challenges related to transparent and trustable media transactions such as JPEG Privacy and Security."

"JPEG Privacy and Security" is described later in the paper. "JPEG Privacy & Security aims at developing a standard for realizing secure image information sharing, capable of ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual property rights."

That is, "Privacy and Security" is a euphemism for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in JPEG.... Chair of the group Dr, Frederik Temmermans stressed to me that "JPEG is not working on DRM in particular but on a more generic framework that supports privacy and security features." But DRM is very much a significant part of this.

Dozens of trading groups are manipulating the price of cryptocurrencies on some of the largest online exchanges, generating at least $825 million in trading activity over the past six months -- and hundreds of millions in losses for those caught on the wrong side, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. From a report: In a review of trading data and online communications among traders between January and the end of July, the Journal identified 175 "pump and dump" schemes involving 121 different digital coins, which show a sudden rise in price and an equally sudden fall minutes later.

A pump-and-dump scheme is one of the oldest types of market fraud: Traders talk up the price of an asset before dumping it for a profit and leaving fooled investors with shrunken shares. The Securities and Exchange Commission regularly brings civil cases alleging pump and dumps using publicly traded stocks. Manipulations of cryptocurrencies are no different, but regulators have yet to bring a case in the more opaque market for them. The SEC declined to comment.