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jas writes:

From a modality perspective, writers and programmers do the same thing, day after day. Both careers involve spending the bulk of their work day using a computer, though the tools marketed to and preferred by either industry are often diametrically opposed. While MacBooks are often the system of choice for digital creatives, ThinkPads are often seen in the hands of IT professionals. Users of either system are among the most vocal and opinionated, among laptop brands.

While Apple users have been increasingly seen grousing about the butterfly-switch keyboard, ThinkPad users, likewise, have complained about changes that have come to newer models, bringing them more in-line with standard, consumer-focused systems. Some criticize Lenovo's stewardship of the ThinkPad brand-after acquiring IBM's PC OEM division in 2005-though the company has worked to balance ThinkPad's visual design with the changing PC market.

TechRepublic's James Sanders interviews Jerry Paradise, Lenovo's vice president of global commercial portfolio and product management about screen ratios, soldered components, engineering 5G WWAN support, the potential of Linux preinstalled from the factory, and the original butterfly keyboard.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/meditations-on-first-thinkpad-how-lenovo-adapts-to-changes-in-the-pc-industry/

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Major outlets report on the passing of I. M. Pei, known for spectacular buildings around the world, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/may/17/im-pei-architect-audacious-daredevil-who-built-the-impossible mentions some of his better known successes like the pyramid Louvre extension in Paris and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Old gray lady is similar, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/arts/design/im-pei-buildings.html

Since I was in college in Boston in the 1970s, I'm more inclined to comment on his ego, which let him (and his firm) ignore their engineers and build the Hancock tower in downtown Copley Square. The first time the wind came up, large glass panes fell to the plaza below. For several years it was the "plywood tower" until multiple engineering fixes were applied. This Wiki article describes some of the work required: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hancock_Tower#Engineering_flaws Pieces of fallen glass were kept as souvenirs by many Bostonians.

I believe that Pei's engineers knew in advance that the vertical "blade" shape of the tower was close enough to an airfoil shape that it was going to have large twisting forces in the wind, but the architect convinced the customer (John Hancock Insurance) to go ahead without a full study in advance. Some of your submitting AC's back story came from a detailed personal conversation with the lead engineer for the retro-fitted dynamic dampers added at the top of the building--just one part of the repair process. He recalled carrying lead bricks up the elevators (on low wind days) to fill the two 300 ton weight boxes of the damping mechanism.

This building is rumored to have gone well over double the original budget.

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"exec" writes:

"Make memories": That's the slogan on the website for the photo storage app Ever, accompanied by a cursive logo and an example album titled "Weekend with Grandpa."

Everything about Ever's branding is warm and fuzzy, about sharing your "best moments" while freeing up space on your phone.

What isn't obvious on Ever's website or app — except for a brief reference that was added to the privacy policy after NBC News reached out to the company in April — is that the photos people share are used to train the company's facial recognition system, and that Ever then offers to sell that technology to private companies, law enforcement and the military.

In other words, what began in 2013 as another cloud storage app has pivoted toward a far more lucrative business known as Ever AI — without telling the app's millions of users.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-uploaded-photos-ever-app-then-company-used-them-n1003371

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

In the "broken windows theory," as it has come to be known, such characteristics convey the message that these places aren't monitored and crime will go unpunished. The theory has led police to crack down on minor crimes with the idea that this will prevent more serious crimes and inspired research on how disorder affects people's health.
...
However, the researchers did find a connection between disorder and mental health. They found that people who live in neighborhoods with more graffiti, abandoned buildings, and other such attributes experience more mental health problems and are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. But they say that this greater likelihood to abuse drugs and alcohol is associated with mental health, and is not directly caused by disorder.

So...disorder causes mental health problems which causes crime?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

Tesla has said it is updating the battery software in some of its models following two recent incidents where cars caught fire.
...
It follows reports that a parked car caught fire in Hong Kong, following a similar incident in Shanghai.
...
In a statement, the carmaker said: "As we continue our investigation of the root cause... we are revising charge and thermal management settings on Model S and Model X vehicles via an over-the-air software update that will begin rolling out today, to help further protect the battery and improve battery longevity."

Spontaneous combustion, not just for Spinal Tap anymore.

Original Submission

RS3 writes:

Security researchers have found a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel chips which, if exploited, can be used to steal sensitive information directly from the processor.,

The bugs are reminiscent of Meltdown and Spectre, which exploited a weakness in speculative execution, an important part of how modern processors work. Speculative execution helps processors predict to a certain degree what an application or operating system might need next and in the near-future, making the app run faster and more efficient. The processor will execute its predictions if they're needed, or discard them if they're not.

Both Meltdown and Spectre leaked sensitive data stored briefly in the processor, including secrets — such as passwords, secret keys and account tokens, and private messages.

Now some of the same researchers are back with an entirely new round of data-leaking bugs.

"ZombieLoad," as it's called, is a side-channel attack targeting Intel chips, allowing hackers to effectively exploit design flaws rather than injecting malicious code. Intel said ZombieLoad is made up of four bugs, which the researchers reported to the chip maker just a month ago.

Almost every computer with an Intel chips dating back to 2011 are affected by the vulnerabilities.

ZombieLoad takes its name from a "zombie load," an amount of data that the processor can't understand or properly process, forcing the processor to ask for help from the processor's microcode to prevent a crash. Apps are usually only able to see their own data, but this bug allows that data to bleed across those boundary walls. ZombieLoad will leak any data currently loaded by the processor's core, the researchers said. Intel said patches to the microcode will help clear the processor's buffers, preventing data from being read.

So far ARM and AMD are not known to be affected.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/zombieload-flaw-intel-processors/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

"agreeable individuals use Facebook to express their orientation to other people rather than to themselves," whereas "extroverts use Facebook as a relationship building mechanism". They add that neurotic people strive to bring out the best of themselves. Oddly, the personality traits of openness and conscientiousness do not seem to affect significantly Facebook use.

The bottom line is that extraversion is the main driver for Facebook use. Extroverts are heavy users and have more friends and interact with them and others at a higher rate. But, neurotic people also use it heavily to create a comprehensive and detailed profile of themselves to present to the public.

Betteridge says, "no."

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

In a paper published April 16th researchers make the case that we should designate and protect 85% of the solar system as 'protected wilderness'

We make a general argument that, as a matter of fixed policy, development should be limited to one eighth, with the remainder set aside. We argue that adopting a "one-eighth principle" is far less restrictive, overall, than it might seem. One eighth of the iron in the asteroid belt is more than a million times greater than all of the Earth's currently estimated iron ore reserves, and it may well suffice for centuries.

The rational for the limitation is more to do with the nature of human expansion rather than just protecting the environment of the rest of the solar system.

A limit of some sort is necessary because of the problems associated with exponential growth. We note that humans are poor at estimating the pace of such growth and, as a result, the limitations of a resource are hard to recognize before the final three doubling times. These three doublings take utilization successively from an eighth to a quarter, then to a half, and then to the point of exhaustion. Population growth and climate change are instances of unchecked exponential growth. Each places strains upon our available resources, each is a recognized problem that we would like to control, but attempts to do so at this comparatively late stage in their development have not been encouraging.

There are challenges and the authors point out that inaccessible resources, like Jupiter, should be excluded from the calculation and that more research is needed to even determine the amount of resources accessible with accuracy.

Assessing how many tons of potentially extractable resources are awaiting us on those worlds will require a lot more space exploration

Additionally, this is not a limit we are going to hit anytime soon

"Worldwide, the present rate of planetary mission launches is 15 per decade," the authors wrote. "At this rate, even just the nearly 200 worlds of the solar system that gravity has made spherical would take 130 years to visit once."

As an aside, it is not a given that resources in Jupiter are inaccessible with numerous articles on atmospheric mining and extraction approaches and even colonization of Jupiter available.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

In a presentation given on April 15th at the American Physical Society in Denver, Researcher Ana Bonaca of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics presented evidence for a "dark impactor" tearing through our galaxy's longest stellar stream - GD-1.

Stellar streams are lines of stars moving together across galaxies, often originating in smaller blobs of stars that collided with the galaxy in question. The stars in GD-1, remnants of a "globular cluster" that plunged into the Milky Way a long time ago, are stretched out in a long line across our sky.

Under normal conditions, the stream should be more or less a single line, stretched out by our galaxy's gravity, she said in her presentation. Astronomers would expect a single gap in the stream, at the point where the original globular cluster was before its stars drifted away in two directions. But Bonaca showed that GD-1 has a second gap. And that gap has a ragged edge — a region Bonaca called GD-1's "spur" — as if something huge plunged through the stream not long ago, dragging stars in its wake with its enormous gravity. GD-1, it seems, was hit with that unseen bullet

The impactor doesn't match the path of any luminous object according to Bonica. Additionally it is far more massive than a star, approximately a million times more massive than the sun, and between 10 and 20 parsecs across.

That leaves limited possibilities - possibly a black hole, but this would be a black hole on-par with the supermassive black holes found at the center of galaxies. Additionally

we'd expect to see some sign of it, like flares or radiation from its accretion disk. And most large galaxies seem to have just a single supermassive black hole at their center.

This leaves an intriguing possibility. A dark matter object or structure.

With no giant, bright objects visible zipping away from GD-1, and no evidence for a hidden, second supermassive black hole in our galaxy, the only obvious option left is a big clump of dark matter. That doesn't mean the object is definitely, 100%, absolutely made of dark matter, Bonaca said.

The findings are based on data obtained from the ESA Gaia mission.

Bonica's results were well received but have not yet been published in a peer reviewed journal.

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

From Eureka Alert

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and their colleagues from Germany and the Netherlands have achieved material magnetization switching on the shortest timescales, at a minimal energy cost. They have thus developed a prototype of energy-efficient data storage devices. The paper was published in the journal Nature.

The rapid development of information technology calls for data storage devices controlled by quantum mechanisms without energy losses. Maintaining data centers consumes over 3% of the power generated worldwide, and this figure is growing. While writing and reading information is a bottleneck for IT development, the fundamental laws of nature actually do not prohibit the existence of fast and energy-efficient data storage.

The most reliable way of storing data is to encode it as binary zeros and ones, which correspond to the orientations of the microscopic magnets, known as spins, in magnetic materials. This is how a computer hard drive stores information. To switch a bit between its two basic states, it is remagnetized via a magnetic field pulse. However, this operation requires much time and energy.

[...] "The idea was to use the previously discovered spin switching mechanism as an instrument for efficiently driving spins out of equilibrium and studying the fundamental limitations on the speed and energy cost of writing information. Our research focused on the so-called fingerprints of the mechanism with the maximum possible speed and minimum energy dissipation," commented study co-author Professor Alexey Kimel of Radboud University Nijmegen and MIREA.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1174-7 Temporal and spectral fingerprints of ultrafast all-coherent spin switching (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1174-7)

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Google is warning that the Bluetooth Low Energy version of the Titan security key it sells for two-factor authentication can be hijacked by nearby attackers, and the company is advising users to get a free replacement device that fixes the vulnerability.

A misconfiguration in the key's Bluetooth pairing protocols makes it possible for attackers within 30 feet to either communicate with the key or with the device it's paired with, Google Cloud Product Manager Christiaan Brand wrote in a post published on Wednesday.

[...] To tell if a Titan key is vulnerable, check the back of the device. If it has a "T1" or "T2," it's susceptible to the attack and is eligible for a free replacement. Brand said that security keys continued to represent one of the most meaningful ways to protect accounts and advised that people continue to use the keys while waiting for a new one. Titan security keys sell for $50 in the Google Store.

While people wait for a replacement, Brand recommended that users use keys in a private place that's not within 30 feet of a potential attacker. After signing in, users should immediately unpair the security key. An Android update scheduled for next month will automatically unpair Bluetooth security keys so users won't have to do it manually.

Source: ArsTechnica

[Note: Though it cautions about attackers within 30 feet (approximately 10 meters), the distance could be potentially much greater than that depending on the design of the antenna used by the attacker; cf an analogous technique described in How To Make a Wi-Fi Antenna Out Of a Pringles Can. --Ed.]

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) discovered a fraud scheme in late-2018 through which 757,760 IPv4 addresses worth between $9,850,880 and $14,397,440 were fraudulently obtained.

ARIN is a nonprofit corporation which distributes Internet number resources such as IPv4, IPv6, and Autonomous System numbers to organizations throughout the United States, Canada, and Caribbean and North Atlantic islands.

"On May 1, 2019, ARIN obtained a final and very favorable arbitration award which included revocation of all resources issued pursuant to fraud and $350,000 to ARIN for its legal fees," says a press release issued by ARIN on May 13.

ARIN was able to uncover and revoke the IPv4 addresses obtained through the fraud scheme following the arbitration [PDF] in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, with the individual and the company behind the scheme being charged in federal court in a twenty-counts of wire fraud indictment.

As a Department of Justice (DoJ) press release issued today says, the two accused parties "created and utilized 'Channel Partners,' which purported to consist of several individual businesses, all of whom acquired the right to IP addresses from the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN)."

Source: BleepingComputer

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

France: It measures 324 meters in height, weighs 7,300 tons and attracts more than seven million visitors each year: the Eiffel Tower, strongly contested during its construction, has become the symbol of Paris, which is celebrating its 130th anniversary this year.

This property of the City of Paris celebrated all over the world has not always been liked: its construction was accompanied by a "huge controversy, complaints and petitions" of opponents, says the deputy in charge of culture at the city hall of Paris, Christophe Girard.

On the occasion of the Universal Exhibition of 1889, which marked the centenary of the French Revolution, a great competition was launched, won by the industrialist Gustave Eiffel, much to the chagrin of many artists of the time including the writer Guy de Maupassant.

Built in two years, two months and five days, the one based on more than 18,000 pieces of iron is the symbol of a "technical and architectural performance". In the nineteenth century, "it is the symbol of a France that catches up with its industrial power" and becomes "the highlight of the 1889 exhibition," said Bertrand Lemoine, architect and historian.

https://www.asianage.com/life/travel/150519/130th-anniversary-of-the-eiffel-tower.html

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Cybercriminals are using a new method to evade detection to make sure that the traffic generated by their malicious campaigns is not being detected, a technique based on SSL/TLS signature randomization and dubbed cipher stunting.

The vast majority of malicious traffic on the Internet — including attacks against web apps, scraping, credential abuse, and more — is funneled via secure connections over SSL/TLS says Akamai's Threat Research Team in a report published today.

Akamai's report says that "From an attacker's perspective, tweaking SSL/TLS client behavior can be trivial for some aspects of fingerprinting evasion, but the difficulty can ramp up for others depending on the purpose of evasion or the bot in question. In such settings, many packages require deep levels of knowledge and understanding on the attacker's part in order to operate correctly."

This technique is used by attackers to evade detection and run their malicious campaigns undisturbed, with at least a few tens of thousands of TLS fingerprints being used for such purposes before the novel cipher stunting evasion method was observed by the researchers.

Source: BleepingComputer

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

The Guardian:

A mind-controlled hearing aid that allows the wearer to focus on particular voices has been created by scientists, who say it could transform the ability of those with hearing impairments to cope with noisy environments.

The device mimics the brain's natural ability to single out and amplify one voice against background conversation. Until now, even the most advanced hearing aids work by boosting all voices at once, which can be experienced as a cacophony of sound for the wearer, especially in crowded environments.

[...] The hearing aid first uses an algorithm to automatically separate the voices of multiple speakers. It then compares these audio tracks to the brain activity of the listener. Previous work by Mesgarani's lab found that it is possible to identify which person someone is paying attention to, as their brain activity tracks the sound waves of that voice most closely.

[...] The current version of the hearing aid, which involved direct implants into the brain, would be unsuitable for mainstream use. But the team believe it will be possible to create a non-invasive version of the device within the next five years, which would monitor brain activity using electrodes placed inside the ear, or under the skin of the scalp.

Finally some tech to help the stalkers among us.

Original Submission