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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:46 | Votes:100

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 16 2017, @08:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the smashing-news dept.

A Canadian passenger plane landed safely after it was hit by a drone in the first case of its kind in the country, a cabinet minister said Sunday.

With increasing numbers of unmanned aerial devices in the skies, collisions are still rare, but authorities around the world are looking at ways to keep jetliners out of harm's way.

The Canadian incident happened last Thursday when a drone collided with a domestic Skyjet plane approaching Jean-Lesage International Airport in Quebec City, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said in a statement.

"This is the first time a drone has hit a commercial aircraft in Canada and I am extremely relieved that the aircraft only sustained minor damage and was able to land safely," said the minister, a former astronaut.

The aircraft, carrying six passengers and two crew, was struck on its right wing at an altitude of about 450 meters (about 500 yards) and roughly three kilometers (two miles) from the airport, according to Le Journal de Quebec newspaper.

Well, don't keep us in suspense! Who won, the locomotive or the bumblebee?


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 16 2017, @07:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the quite-a-'bit'-faster dept.

Tired of slow internet connections? CableLabs announces a new version of DOCSIS 3.1 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) with Full Duplex 10Gbps connectivity. From an article at The Register:

Which is why an announcement by the cable industry's research and development arm, CableLabs, this week is such good news. The organization has completed work on an upgrade to the next-generation DOCSIS 3.1 spec that in the next few years will replace the "M" in Mbps with a "G" for gigabit.

DOCSIS 3.1 is the cutting edge of home cable technology, and big players such as Comcast in the US are testing it in specific markets with a new generation of modems. That testing and rollout of near-gigabit broadband in the US, UK, Canada and beyond has been somewhat marred, though, by the fact that high-speed DOCSIS 3.1 home gateways powered by Intel Puma chips suffer from annoying latency jittering under certain conditions, and can be trivially knocked offline by attackers. No fixes are available.

Those hardware problems aside, the DOCSIS 3.1 spec has another issue: it sticks to the age-old sucky 10-to-1 downlink-uplink ratio.

No longer with the Full Duplex Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 will allow broadband subscribers – in the next two years – to benefit from up to 10Gbps both up and down. And it will be possible on existing household connections rather than requiring the installation of new fiber.

[...] You can find out more about Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 on the CableLabs website.

So, you could reach your monthly 1 TB data cap allowance in just under 3 hours, assuming, of course that the upstream link is not so oversubscribed that you only actually get a fraction of that.

All kidding aside, that is a huge speed improvement. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that a 100GB BDXL Blu-ray disk could be downloaded in about 2 minutes. As the connection is full-duplex, it could be uploaded in about 2 minutes, too.

I can't even think of anything where that kind of speed would be useful in a home, except for making for speedier downloads of game/OS updates/installs and maybe for offsite backups.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 16 2017, @03:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-taking-after-the-leaders dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram and SoyCow1937

OnePlus mobiles are phoning home rather detailed information about handsets without any obvious permission or warnings, setting off another debate about what information our smartphones are emitting.

Software engineer Christopher Moore discovered that the information collected included the phone's International Mobile Equipment Identity, phone numbers, MAC addresses, and mobile network among other things. Moore further found that his OnePlus 2 was sending information about when he opened and closed applications or unlocked his phone to a domain at net.oneplus.odm.

OnePlus, for the uninitiated, is a Chinese smartphone manufacturer that specialises in developing and marketing Android phones, recently launching a higher-end model. Its earlier models gained a lot of cachet from their by-invitation-only status.

[...] Privacy-focused users have the option of stopping these data collecting system services every time they boot the phone or removing these via ADB (Android Debug Bridge utility), a process that wouldn't require an initial rooting of the device.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/12/oneplus_privacy_concerns/

According to The Verge,

Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus is collecting data from its users and transmitting it to a server along with each device's serial number, according to security researcher Chris Moore. In a January blog post (which has gained newfound attention this week), Moore detailed how OnePlus devices running OxygenOS record data at various points, including when a user locks or unlocks the screen; when apps are opened, used, and closed; and which Wi-Fi networks the device connects to. That's all relatively standard.

But OnePlus also collects the phone's IMEI, phone number, and mobile network names, so the data sent is identifiable to you personally with little to no effort required, which is what makes this very problematic. According to Moore, the code responsible for the data collection is part of OnePlus Device Manager and OnePlus Device Manager Provider. Moore says in his case, the services had sent off 16MB of data in 10 hours.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 16 2017, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the insane-in-the-m-brane dept.

I was initally under the impression that Postsingular and Hylozoic continued the Ware Tetralogy but these are two distinct fictional "universes". Although there is an expectation for authors to continually out-do themselves with ever more fantastical ideas, Postsingular fails to satisfy on multiple criteria. It is too knowingly in the present, using "tweet" in the contemporary context and also having search engines. It may be that Rudy Rucker's feedback from fans and increased knowledge about computing makes the book less entertaining.

Regardless, nanotechnology, synthetic telepathy, natural telepathy and multiple forms of teleportation are explored in depth in the context of reality television, augmented reality spam and post-scarcity economics. Several characters are introduced very poorly and Rudy Rucker continues a tradition of ridiculous character names. Thankfully, characters become more rounded as plot develops. One character, Dick Dibbs, is uncannily similar to Donald Trump and Postsingular accurately captures some of the North American 2016 pre-election hysteria almost 10 years before it occurred.

Given Rudy Rucker's previous dependence upon Penrose tiling in the Ware Tetralogy, it was surprising that it was only mentioned once, obliquely, when a building was described as having an irregular pattern of triangles. However, readers of Postsingular would benefit from an understanding of Cantor dust, reversible computing, quantum computing, entropy in the context of bitstrings, public key cryptography, timing attacks, nanobot gray goo scenarios, Planck units and the untestable pseudo-science of superstring theory.

The extensive writing notes are available and provide character background information, deleted scenes, book promotion details and interaction with publishers and literary agents. The latter may may of particular interest to lesser-known science fiction authors. The writing notes also reveal that Postsingular was heavily influenced by Charles Stross' Accelerando and the attempt to build and differentiate from this work may explain why Postsingular errs more towards Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon rather than the Ware Tetralogy.

Postsingular has numerous plot holes. For example, it is never explained why a telepathic race retains speech. Nor is it explained how a quantum shielded building remains unmapped when nanobots freely pass in and out of the area. There is also a pointlessly grating book-within-a-book which is being written by a needlessly exotic character. Furthermore, the book-within-a-book becomes an increasingly belated account of an event which would have experienced by every potential reader. By far, it is not the best example of A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

The climax is less satisfying than any of the Tetralogy books because allegiances switch freely and the final line-up of "good guys" win through superior firepower rather than moral imperative. Postsingular could have explored folklore, religion, memes and imagery in much more detail. Instead, it concentrated a rogue hacker saving the world, a corrupt politician, San Francisco counter-culture, an indifferent/malevolent AI, a boy genius and an evil genius with tertiary transsexual characteristics. I'm vaguely surprised that there wasn't an antagonist with an evil hand. Although Postsingular is inferior to Snowcrash and Accelerando, it is superior to Cryptonomicon, the Difference Engine and REAMDE. Despite much silliness, it is thoroughly enjoyable.

Postsingular is available under a restrictive Creative Commons licence. However, HTML and PDF versions may by truncated. An EPub [PKZip of XML] with SHA512 fafc56c94f71969535b5e568582cdfb3bcbbb951b7b00f6518492012c7b5488b82d580a77c6ecfdaf03b3b2af7ae0c100a461063dc65202c3766b41c87474d1c may be preferable. The sequel, Hylozoic, is available under commercial license.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the silver-(bitcoin)-lining dept.

From the Law of Unintended Consequences:

Endurance couch-surfer and WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange has thanked US authorities for the banking blockade that made it hard to donate fiat currencies to his organisation, because it inadvertently enriched the organisation.

The blockade first appeared in 2010, after the United States expressed its ire at WikiLeaks' publication of diplomatic cables. Not long afterwards, Mastercard and Visa stopped processing donations sent to the site.

WikiLeaks sued and won against Visa, but the blockade persisted. The organisation therefore sought alternative funding including Bitcoin.

Which brings us to an Assange Tweet from Sunday, as follows.

My deepest thanks to the US government, Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman for pushing Visa, MasterCard, Payal, AmEx, Mooneybookers, et al, into erecting an illegal banking blockade against @WikiLeaks starting in 2010. It caused us to invest in Bitcoin -- with > 50000% return. pic.twitter.com/9i8D69yxLC
        — Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) October 14, 2017

> 50,000%?


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @12:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-sky-is-slowly-descending dept.

Multiple Soylentils submitted stories about a newly-reported vulnerability that has been discovered in the WPA-2 protocol that secures communications on Wi-Fi networks. This is a significant vulnerability, but not quite as bad as some sensationalist headlines and stories would suggest. As I understand it, there is a 4-step process by which keys are exchanged to set up wireless encryption. An attacker can force a connection to repeat the 3rd step and thus force known values for the nonce. An attacker can leverage that information to break the encryption and, in many cases, eavesdrop on communications. In certain cases, it is possible to manipulate the communications and modify/insert a payload.

The vulnerability is in the protocol, not in a specific implementation. The spec fails to call out a mitigation that could preclude key re-use. So, it is an error of omission instead of an error of commission. An implementation can avoid this problem by refusing to reuse a previously received key.

The defect is primarily in the remote device, not in the base station. The researcher called out Android 6+ as being especially vulnerable.

A fix for BSD was silently released ahead of the announcement. I saw a report that Linux has already been patched, but without any supporting link.

The researcher, Mathy Vanhoef, has created a web site with details: https://www.krackattacks.com/. A research paper, Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2 (pdf), is available.

See the Vulnerability Notes Database for information on specific vendors.

Sensationalist reports are already appearing. For a calmer view, see Kevin Beaumont's take on this at Regarding Krack Attacks — WPA2 flaw where he notes:

  • It is patchable, both client and server (Wi-Fi) side.
  • Linux patches are available now. Linux distributions should have it very shortly.
  • The attack doesn't realistically doesn't[sic] work against Windows or iOS devices. The Group vuln is there, but it's not near enough to actually do anything of interest.
  • There is currently no publicly available code out there to attack this in the real world — you would need an incredibly high skill set and to be at the Wi-Fi base station to attack this.
  • Android is the issue, which is why the research paper concentrates on it. The issue with Android is people largely don't patch.

My suggestion for organisations is they ask their Wi-Fi network providers for patches — this is absolutely patchable, as per the researcher's own website.

Severe Flaw in WPA2 Protocol Leaves Wi-Fi Traffic Open to Eavesdropping

The Guardian has an article on it here https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/16/wpa2-wifi-security-vulnerable-hacking-us-government-warns.

Heres the researchers description...

We discovered serious weaknesses in WPA2, a protocol that secures all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. An attacker within range of a victim can exploit these weaknesses using key reinstallation attacks (KRACKs). Concretely, attackers can use this novel attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted. This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos, and so on. The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks. Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites.

From https://www.krackattacks.com

Severe Flaw in WPA2 Protocol Leaves Wi-Fi Traffic Open to Eavesdropping

Warning: This may give you a case of the Mondays:

An air of unease set into the security circles on Sunday as they prepared for the disclosure of high-severity vulnerabilities in the Wi-Fi Protected Access II protocol that make it possible for attackers to eavesdrop Wi-Fi traffic passing between computers and access points.

The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks. The research has been a closely guarded secret for weeks ahead of a coordinated disclosure that's scheduled for 8 a.m. Monday, east coast time. An advisory the US CERT recently distributed to about 100 organizations described the research this way:

US-CERT has become aware of several key management vulnerabilities in the 4-way handshake of the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) security protocol. The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, and others. Note that as protocol-level issues, most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected. The CERT/CC and the reporting researcher KU Leuven, will be publicly disclosing these vulnerabilities on 16 October 2017.

Wi-Fi WPA2 Security may be Irretrievably Broken

Woody Leonhard has been my go-to source for the status of safety and usability of updates to Windows for years. He's not usually prone to alarmism, so I'm looking at this announcement on his site with a great deal of trepidation:

There's a lot of buzz this weekend about a flaw that's purported to break security on most Wi-Fi connections, allowing an eavesdropper to snoop or use the connection without permission.

Said to involve CVE-2017-13077, 13078, 13079, 13080, 13081, 13082, 13084, 13086, 13087, 13088, when they're posted.

See this thread from @campuscodi and be watching Bleepingcomputer tomorrow for details.

The reference to the tweet by @campuscodi is to "Catalin Cimpanu [who] is the Security News Editor for Bleeping Computer, where he covers topics such as malware, breaches, vulnerabilities, exploits, hacking news, the Dark Web, and a few more." See the tweet for references to background papers which may be of assistance in understanding the nature of the flaw and possible preparations to help try and mitigate the breakage.

There is a web site — https://www.krackattacks.com/ — which was created on October 10 that seems to be a placeholder for posting the details when they are released.

Time to stock up on energy drinks, coffee, and Pringles®?


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2Original Submission #3

posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @11:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the THAT-was-just-the-appetizer dept.

Astronomers have discovered a star that appears to have engulfed around 15 Earth masses worth of rocky planets (not gas giants):

In mythology, the Titan Kronos devoured his children, including Poseidon (better known as the planet Neptune), Hades (Pluto) and three daughters. So when a group of Princeton astronomers discovered twin stars, one of which showed signs of having ingested a dozen or more rocky planets, they named them after Kronos and his lesser-known brother Krios. Their official designations are HD 240430 and HD 240429, and they are both about 350 light years from Earth.

The keys to the discovery were first confirming that the widely separated pair are in fact a binary pair, and secondly observing Kronos' strikingly unusual chemical abundance pattern, explained Semyeong Oh, a graduate student in astrophysical sciences who is lead author on a new paper describing Kronos and Krios.

[...] Other co-moving star pairs have had different chemistries, Oh explained, but none as dramatic as Kronos and Krios. Most stars that are as metal-rich as Kronos "have all the other elements enhanced at a similar level," she said, "whereas Kronos has volatile elements suppressed, which makes it really weird in the general context of stellar abundance patterns." In other words, Kronos had an unusually high level of rock-forming minerals, including magnesium, aluminum, silicon, iron, chromium and yttrium, without an equally high level of volatile compounds — those that are most often found in gas form, like oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and potassium.

[...] Oh and her colleagues calculated that gaining this many rock-forming minerals without many volatiles would require engulfing roughly 15 Earth-mass planets. Eating a gas giant wouldn't give the same result, Price-Whelan explained. Jupiter, for example, has an inner rocky core that could easily have 15 Earth masses of rocky material, but "if you were to take Jupiter and throw it into a star, Jupiter also has this huge gaseous envelope, so you'd also enhance carbon, nitrogen — the volatiles that Semyeong mentioned," he said. "To flip it around, you have to throw in a bunch of smaller planets."

While no known star has 15 Earth-sized planets in orbit around it, the Kepler space telescope has detected many multi-planet systems, said Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research. "I see no problem with there being more than 15 Earth masses of accretable material around a solar-type star." She pointed to Kepler-11, which has more than 22 Earth masses of material in six planets with close orbits, or HD 219134, which has at least 15 Earth masses of material in its inner four planets.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @08:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the virgin-territory dept.

Richard Branson, the billionaire behind the Virgin brand, has reportedly invested an undisclosed sum in Elon Musk's barmy Hyperloop supersonic tube train project.

Beardy gets to join the Hyperfruitloop board, according to the Beeb, and the firm will also add its ubiquitous Virgin moniker to Musk's firm's name, meaning it will now be known as Virgin Hyperloop One.

The rebrand and ascension of Branson to the board suggests that a large sum has made its way from billionaire Beardy into Hyperloop's coffers, though terms of the deal were not revealed.

"Ever since our creation, Virgin has been known for disruption and investing in innovative companies," burbled Beardy's PR flunkies. "Importantly, Virgin Hyperloop One will be all-electric and the team is working on ensuing it is a responsible and sustainable form of transport too."

"Virgin Hyperloop?"


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @06:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond! dept.

A Hall-effect thruster designed by University of Michigan researchers, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force has achieved a maximum thrust of 5.4 Newtons. The "X3" thruster uses three channels of plasma instead of a single channel like most Hall thrusters. It is designed to operate at 200 kW but has been tested at a range of 5 kW to 102 kW so far:

A thruster that's being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during recent tests, suggesting that the technology is on track to take humans to the Red Planet within the next 20 years, project team members said.

The X3 thruster, which was designed by researchers at the University of Michigan in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force, is a Hall thruster — a system that propels spacecraft by accelerating a stream of electrically charged atoms, known as ions. In the recent demonstration conducted at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio, the X3 broke records for the maximum power output, thrust and operating current achieved by a Hall thruster to date, according to the research team at the University of Michigan and representatives from NASA.

"We have shown that X3 can operate at over 100 kW of power," said Alec Gallimore, who is leading the project, in an interview with Space.com. "It operated at a huge range of power from 5 kW to 102 kW, with electrical current of up to 260 amperes. It generated 5.4 Newtons of thrust, which is the highest level of thrust achieved by any plasma thruster to date," added Gallimore, who is dean of engineering at the University of Michigan. The previous record was 3.3 Newtons, according to the school.

A manned Mars mission could require a thruster capable of operating at 500 kW-1 MW, if not more.

Previously: Researchers Improve the Design of Cylindrical Shaped Hall Thrusters


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 16 2017, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the gene-rich dept.

A new and non-viral approach to CRISPR has been used to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy in mice:

A new version of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology called CRISPR-Gold has successfully restored the correct sequence of the dystrophin gene in a mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a new study revealed.

Researchers found that an injection of CRISPR-Gold into DMD mice led to an 18-times-higher correction rate and a two-fold increase in a strength and agility test compared to control groups, according to a press release.

The study, "Nanoparticle delivery of Cas9 ribonucleoprotein and donor DNA in vivo induces homology-directed DNA repair," [DOI: 10.1038/s41551-017-0137-2] [DX] was published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

[...] Unfortunately, methods of delivering the components of this system, which include an RNA molecule called a guide RNA, a protein called the Cas9 nuclease, and the correct DNA sequence to replace the mutation (via donor DNA), have not been fully developed for human use. A primary technique used to deliver the components of this system relies on viruses, but this technique is plagued by complications and unwanted side effects.

In response, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a new approach called CRISPR-Gold, which used gold nanoparticles to deliver the components of this system in a mouse model of DMD. This method works by using gold nanoparticles to coat a modified DNA molecule that binds the donor DNA, which in turn is bound to Cas9 and the guide RNA.

This entire system is then coated by a polymer that will interact with a cell membrane and allow entry into a cell. Then, the components of the system are released into the cell as the coat breaks apart upon entry. The guide RNA, the Cas9 nuclease, and the donor DNA can then make their way into the nucleus and correct the mutation.

Also at TheScientist.

Previously: FDA Panel Recommends Rejection of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Treatment
Marathon Pharmaceuticals is Part of the Problem
Marathon Pharmaceuticals Cashes Out on Regulatory Loopholes
What is a Muscle Protein Doing in the Brain?


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Monday October 16 2017, @01:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the b-b-b-but-I-have-an-AMD! dept.

We've covered that it was possible and in theory how to do so before but I think having a proper How-To written up will save even us nerd types some hair pulling. Here's what you'll need to start:

  • an Intel-CPU-based target PC — that does not have Boot Guard enabled — on which you wish to disable the IME;
    • the target PC may be running an OEM BIOS (such as AMI, Dell etc.), or coreboot;
  • a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single board computer ('RPi3'), for use as an external flash programmer;
  • a spare >= 8GB microSD card (to hold the 64-bit Gentoo O/S image we will use for the RPi3);
  • an appropriate IC clip for your target PC's flash chip, e.g.:
    • a Pomona 5250 for SOIC-8 chips;
    • a Pomona 5208 for unsocketed DIP-8 chips, or
    • a Pomona 5252 for SOIC-16 chips;
  • 8 female-female connector wires (to attach the appropriate clip to the RPi3's GPIO header);
  • a maintenance manual for your target PC, where available, to assist in safe disassembly / reassembly; and
    • whatever tools are stipulated in the above.

Given the above list, you'll obviously need to be comfortable identifying and connecting an IC clip to your flash chip. So, it's not a procedure for most grandmothers but neither is especially complex or difficult for the vast majority of desktop machines (laptop/other difficulty will vary widely). Also, the guide explicitly does not cover PLCC or WSON flash chips, so you're out of luck here if your board has such.

Happy hacking, folks.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 15 2017, @11:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the liquid-methane-mudslides dept.

Titan, the largest of Saturn's more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare—they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years—they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected.

"I would have thought these would be once-a-millennium events, if even that," said Jonathan Mitchell, UCLA associate professor of planetary science and a senior author of the research, which was published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Geoscience. "So this is quite a surprise."

The storms create massive floods in terrain that are otherwise deserts. Titan's surface is strikingly similar to Earth's, with flowing rivers that spill into great lakes and seas, and the moon has storm clouds that bring seasonal, monsoon-like downpours, Mitchell said. But Titan's precipitation is liquid methane, not water.

"The most intense methane storms in our climate model dump at least a foot of rain a day, which comes close to what we saw in Houston from Hurricane Harvey this summer," said Mitchell, the principal investigator of UCLA's Titan climate modeling research group.

[...] On Earth, intense storms can trigger large flows of sediment that spread into low lands and form cone-shaped features called alluvial fans. In the new study, the UCLA scientists found that regional patterns of extreme rainfall on Titan are correlated with recent detections of alluvial fans, suggesting that they were formed by intense rainstorms.

The finding demonstrates the role of extreme precipitation in shaping Titan's surface, said Seulgi Moon, UCLA assistant professor of geomorphology and a co-senior author of the paper. Moon said the principle likely applies to Mars, which has large alluvial fans of its own, and to other planetary bodies. Greater understanding of the relationship between precipitation and the planetary surfaces could lead to new insights about the impact of climate change on Earth and other planets.

Methane hurricanes. Smoking not advised.

S. P. Faulk et al. Regional patterns of extreme precipitation on Titan consistent with observed alluvial fan distribution, Nature Geoscience (2017). DOI: 10.1038/ngeo3043


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 15 2017, @09:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-shocked dept.

https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/en/news/dutch-dpa-microsoft-breaches-data-protection-law-windows-10

Microsoft breaches the Dutch data protection law by processing personal data of people that use the Windows 10 operating system on their computers. This is the conclusion of the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) after its investigation of Windows 10 Home and Pro. Microsoft does not clearly inform users about the type of data it uses, and for which purpose. Also, people cannot provide valid consent for the processing of their personal data, because of the approach used by Microsoft. The company does not clearly inform users that it continuously collects personal data about the usage of apps and web surfing behaviour through its web browser Edge, when the default settings are used. Microsoft has indicated that it wants to end all violations. If this is not the case, the Dutch DPA can decide to impose a sanction on Microsoft.

[...] Due to Microsoft's approach users lack control of their data. They are not informed which data are being used for what purpose, neither that based on these data, personalised advertisements and recommendations can be presented, if those users have not opted out from these default settings on installation or afterwards.

[...] Microsoft can use the collected data for the various purposes, described in a very general way. Through this combination of purposes and the lack of transparency Microsoft cannot obtain a legal ground, such as consent, for the processing of data.

also at RT


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-wants-a-fat-warrant? dept.

A federal judge has approved a warrant for web hosting company DreamHost's records for DisruptJ20.org, a site that was used to plan anti-Trump protests on Inauguration Day. However, the scope of the warrant has been significantly narrowed:

"[W]hile the government has the right to execute its Warrant," D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert Morin wrote in his order, "it does not have the right to rummage through the information contained on DreamHost's website and discover the identity of, or access communications by, individuals not participating in alleged criminal activity, particularly those persons who were engaging in protected First Amendment activities."

The government sought the warrant as it gathers evidence for its cases against nearly 200 people charged with rioting on Jan. 20.

The judge's new order instructs DreamHost to redact identifying information of "innocent persons" who visited the website before providing the records to the government. It also dictates a protocol for incorporating procedural safeguards to comply with "First Amendment and Fourth Amendment considerations." Among other stipulations, the government must submit to the court its plan for permanently deleting from its possession all information not within the scope of the warrant.

DreamHost considered the judge's ruling a significant victory. "The new order is a far cry from the original warrant we received in July," DreamHost General Counsel Christopher Ghazarian wrote in a statement to NPR. "Absent a finding by the Court that probable cause of criminal activity exists, the government will not be able to uncover the identities of these users. There are also quite a few modifications that further reduce the government's ability to review unrelated data. This is another huge win not just for DreamHost, but for internet users around the world."

Also at Reason, The Register, Engadget, and Infosecurity Magazine.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-for-bugs-at-the-chip-buffet dept.

High Performance Computing (HPC) Chips – A Veritable Smorgasbord?

No this isn't about the song from Charlotte's Web or the Scandinavian predilection for open sandwiches; it's about the apparent newfound choice in the HPC CPU market.

For the first time since AMD's ill-fated launch of Bulldozer the answer to the question, 'Which CPU will be in my next HPC system?' doesn't have to be 'Whichever variety of Intel Xeon E5 they are selling when we procure'.

In fact, it's not just in the x86 market where there is now a genuine choice. Soon we will have at least two credible ARM v8 ISA CPUs (from Cavium and Qualcomm respectively) and IBM have gone all in on the Power architecture (having at one point in the last ten years had four competing HPC CPU lines – x86, Blue Gene, Power and Cell).

In fact, it may even be Intel that is left wondering which horse to back in the HPC CPU race with both Xeon lines looking insufficiently differentiated going forward. A symptom of this dilemma is the recent restructuring of the Xeon line along with associated pricing and feature segmentation.


Original Submission