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RandomFactor writes:

Franky Zapata flew his invention, a turbine engine powered flyboard, above the Champs-Elysees showing off to President Emmanual Macon, Angela Merkel and other EU leaders to steal the show at the Bastille Day military parade in central Paris.

Zapata, who first developed his device flying above water, says that the flyboard has the power to take off and reach speeds up to 190 kilometres an hour (118 mph) and run for 10 minutes.

The flyboard is closer to the 'Goblin Glider' from Spider Man than Marty McFly's hoverboard in both appearance and performance.

Videos of the flight

Zapata who was awarded €1.3 million in 2018 to develop an 'aeronautical micro-jet engine' that could be used by the military pointedly held a rifle during the flight, highlighting the potential military uses of the technology.

He is currently eyeing making a crossing of the English channel, although this will require refuelling in flight. The target date is July 25, 110 years to the day after Louis Bleriot historically made the same flight for the first time in an airplane.

Previous Hoverboard Related Coverage

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From New Atlas

Although it makes up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe, dark matter is frustratingly hard to pin down. In order to figure out what it is, much of the search is about ruling out what dark matter isn't, and now physicists at Stanford and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have narrowed it down further. Using observations of galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the team found that dark matter is likely lighter than previously thought – and interacts even less with normal matter.

For everything to fit together neatly, dark matter must have a lighter mass and must be "warmer" (i.e. moves a bit faster) than previously assumed. It also seems to interact even less often with regular matter – about a thousand times more weakly than the previous limit. That might explain why none of the many experiments designed to detect those interactions have registered any signals yet.

Original Submission

Chocolate writes:

A new virus is ripping through Android devices searching for new opportunities to infect more devices. Nicknamed "Agent Smith" after the Matrix character, the malware is thought to be spreading at an alarming rate.

It infects devices when the user installs an app that contains the malicious code, typically games installed from third-party sites.

From there, Agent Smith scours the device for other apps it can 'feed on' replacing them with a cloned, weaponised version without the user's permission.

Some apps Agent Smith is capable of replicating include WhatsApp, web browser Opera and SwiftKey. It's estimated infected devices contain on average 112 cloned apps.

The dodgy apps work fine and are difficult to detected as the malware is hidden from the device user.

"Armed with all the permissions users had granted to the real apps, Agent Smith was able to hijack other apps on the phone to display unwanted ads to users. That might not seem like a significant problem, but the same security flaws could be used to hijack banking, shopping and other sensitive apps," Check Point's Aviran Hazum said.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Facebook will never break through with Oculus, says one of the VR company's co-founders

Five years after its $2 billion purchase of Oculus, Facebook is still pushing forward in its efforts to bring virtual reality to a mainstream audience. But one of the company's six co-founders now doubts Oculus will ever break through.

Jack McCauley told CNBC he doesn't think there's a real market for VR gaming. With Facebook positioning its Oculus devices primarily as gaming machines, McCauley doesn't believe there's much of a market for the device. "If we were gonna sell, we would've sold," McCauley said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

[...] The $199 Oculus Go has sold a little more than 2 million units since its release in May 2018, according to estimates provided by market research firm SuperData, a Nielsen company. The Oculus Quest, which was released this May, has sold nearly 1.1 million units while the Oculus Rift has sold 547,000 units since the start of 2018, according to SuperData.

[...] Since leaving in November 2015, McCauley has enjoyed a semi-retired life. He's an innovator in residence at Berkeley's Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation and he continues to build all sorts of devices, such as a gun capable of shooting down drones, at his own research and development facility.

The cheaper, standalone headsets are selling more units. Add foveated rendering and other enhancements at the lower price points (rather than $1,599 like the Vive Pro Eye), and the experience could become much better.

Related: Oculus Rift: Dead in the Water?
HTC: Death of VR Greatly Exaggerated
As Sales Slide, Virtual Reality Fans Look to a Bright, Untethered Future
Virtual Reality Feels Like a Dream Gathering Dust
VR Gets Reality Check with Significant Decline in Investment
Creepy Messages Will be Found in Facebook's Oculus Touch VR Controllers

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Astronomers Think They've Spotted a Moon Forming Around an Exoplanet

Scientists have detected a signal around an exoplanet that might be the signature of a circumplanetary disk—a disk of debris that could one day form into exomoons.

Astronomers theorize that in Jupiter and Saturn's early days, the massive planets would trap debris into these orbiting circumplanetary disks. The mass from the disks could then do one of two things: fall onto the planet or clump up into moons. New results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile show off what might be evidence for one of these disks around a young exoplanet that's 370 light-years away from Earth.

The exoplanet at hand is called PDS 70c, the second-closest known exoplanet to the parent star PDS 70. It orbits far from its young (approximately 5 million-year-old) parent star, further than the distance between the Sun and Neptune and orbiting slightly closer than a vast ring of dust. Scientists first spotted evidence of PDS 70c earlier this year using the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The researchers interpreted their results not only to be the mark of an exoplanet but one that was gobbling up some of the gas and dust in its vicinity.

[...] The scientists claim that they have located a cloud of dust surrounding the large young planet, and inferred that the cloud was a circumplanetary disk. They estimated the disk's mass at between .002 to .0042 times the mass of the Earth, or somewhere around a quarter the mass of our own Moon.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Galileo sat-nav system experiences service outage

Europe's satellite-navigation system, Galileo, has suffered a major outage. The network has been offline since Friday due to what has been described as a "technical incident related to its ground infrastructure". The problem means all receivers, such as the latest smartphone models, will not be picking up any useable timing or positional information.

These devices will be relying instead on the data coming from the American Global Positioning System (GPS). Depending on the sat-nav chip they have installed, cell phones and other devices might also be making connections with the Russian (Glonass) and Chinese (Beidou) networks.

[...] The specialist sat-nav publication Inside GNSS said sources were telling it that the problem lay with a fault at a Precise Timing Facility (PTF) in Italy. A PTF generates and curates the reference time against which all clocks in the Galileo system are checked and calibrated.

The function on Galileo satellites that picks up distress beacon messages for search and rescue is said to be unaffected by the outage.

[...] Europe's alternative to GPS went "live" with initial services in December 2016 after 17 years of development. The European Commission promotes Galileo as more than just a back-up service; it is touted also as being more accurate and more robust.

Related: Galileo Satellites Experiencing Multiple Clock Failures
UK May Have to Deploy its Own Satellite Navigation System Due to Brexit
GPS is Getting Competition

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Mini-model of Stonehenge reveals how voices would have carried in original ancient monument

A team of researchers at the University of Salford in the U.K. has revealed how voices would have sounded 4,000 years ago inside of the Stonehenge monument. The group made a recording of their efforts and posted the results on SoundCloud.

Stonehenge is, of course, a monument built roughly 5,000 years ago by Neolithic people for unknown reasons—they left behind no written records. In modern times, the monument has become famous the world over, and attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. The researchers explored what a human voice would have sounded like inside the monument during its heyday. To find out, they applied a modern technique that has been used to help architects build concert halls with optimal sound characteristics. The technique involves building a small-scale model of a building prior to construction and blasting sounds at it at 12 times their normal frequency in a sound chamber to overcome the size differences.

[...] The researchers claim the voice in the recording sounds like it would have were the team member to have stood in the center of the monument while speaking all those years ago. They note that despite large spaces between the stones, a person's voice would have reverberated around the monument, producing an echoing effect. They also suggest it is not likely that the people who built the monument knew what impact it would have on a speaker's voice, but point out that it seems likely they would have taken advantage of the impressive acoustics.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Novel nanoparticles deliver CRISPR gene editing tools into the cell with much higher efficiency

A research collaboration between Tufts University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has led to the development of a significantly improved delivery mechanism for the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing method in the liver, according to a study published recently in the journal Advanced Materials. The delivery uses biodegradable synthetic lipid nanoparticles that carry the molecular editing tools into the cell to precisely alter the cells' genetic code with as much as 90 percent efficiency. The nanoparticles represent one of the most efficient CRISPR/Cas9 delivery tools reported so far, according to the researchers, and could help overcome technical hurdles to enable gene editing in a broad range of clinical therapeutic applications.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

The FBI plans more social media surveillance

The FBI wants to gather more information from social media. Today, it issued a call for contracts for a new social media monitoring tool. According to a request-for-proposals (RFP), it's looking for an "early alerting tool" that would help it monitor terrorist groups, domestic threats, criminal activity and the like.

The tool would provide the FBI with access to the full social media profiles of persons-of-interest. That could include information like user IDs, emails, IP addresses and telephone numbers. The tool would also allow the FBI to track people based on location, enable persistent keyword monitoring and provide access to personal social media history. According to the RFP, "The mission-critical exploitation of social media will enable the Bureau to detect, disrupt, and investigate an ever growing diverse range of threats to U.S. National interests."

But a tool of this nature is likely to raise a few red flags, despite the FBI's call for "ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met." The government doesn't have the best track record with regard to social media surveillance. Early this year, the ACLU sued the government over its use of social media surveillance of immigrants, and the Trump administration has proposed allowing officials to snoop on the social media accounts of Social Security disability recipients.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

QNAPCrypt is malware that specifically targets Linux based Network Attached Storage (NAS) file storage systems. This unusual breed of malware is currently in the wild and spreading via 15 separate campaigns.

NAS servers are an attractive target to ransomware authors for multiple reasons.

First, they often contain large amounts of important data, so people and companies will be more desperate to recover them than a typical client system.
Second, it is rare to deploy endpoint protections to them that watch for encryption activity, making it less likely to detect the malware before it has completed its business.

"What often happens in a ransomware attack would be that a desktop machine, which is Windows or OS X, would be compromised through an existing vulnerability or phishing campaign," [Chris Morales, head of security analytics at Vectra] explained. "Once the host is infected, malware is designed to propagate across user systems and encrypt network file servers that are connected to those systems. By targeting the network file server directly, it is highly likely the attack is circumventing detection by endpoint security tools that are monitoring for the local encryption behaviors."

The QNAPCrypt malware was initially stalled by Malware analysis tool company Intezer which took advantage of a design flaw in the generation of bitcoin wallets on the Command and Control (C2) server to effectively Denial-of-Service (DOS) the malware.

"[the C2 server] does not create a new wallet for each new victim in real time, but rather it pulls a wallet address from a fixed, predetermined list," explained the researchers.

Secondly, the list, being static, is also finite. "Once all of the wallets are allocated (or sent), the ransomware would not be able to continue its malicious operation in the victim's machine," they said.

This opened the door to Intezer being able to mount what was essentially a denial-of-service (DoS) attack by simulating the infection of more than 1,091 victims, forcing the attackers to run through their list of unique Bitcoin wallets to supply to their victims.

Once on a network, the malware attempts to scan and find NAS devices

Intezer determined that the initial attack vector for the campaigns is SSH brute-force attacks, so administrators should take care to update their credentials with strong passwords in order to avoid an infection.

Full Analysis of the QNAPCrypt Ransomware

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Evite has put a FAQ up this weekend admitting to a data breach that took place starting in late February and reported by the press in April.

According to the company "On May 14, 2019, we concluded that an unauthorized party had acquired an inactive data storage file associated with our user accounts."

The company is emailing affected users and resetting passwords, but taking no other customer facing action.

Potentially affected information could include names, usernames, email addresses, passwords, and, if optionally provided to us, dates of birth, phone numbers, and mailing addresses.

According to Evite, the data file contains data circa 2013 and earlier (why inactive six year old customer information is retained is not clarified.)

Another article about the breach quotes Matan Or-El, CEO of Cyber Risk Management firm Panorays:

"Businesses that incorporate Evite into their marketing activities should be concerned about this breach," he said in an email. "Typically not considered a critical vendor, apps such as Evite are not usually monitored or assessed on their security posture. Yet as this breach demonstrates, these apps hold the data of employees as well as customers. A breach to the application propagates as a security risk to the company. Companies must ensure that they evaluate and continuously monitor the security posture of the suppliers they are working with to avoid taking a hit due to their supply chain."

Evite is hardly alone in this, other companies breached by the same attacker recently include Canva, 500px, UnderArmor, ShareThis, GfyCat, Ge.tt, MyHeritage, Mindjolt, Wanelo, Yanolja, Moda Operandi, iCracked and others.

Recent publicly disclosed breaches can be found on HaveIBeenPwned's RSS feed and you can check your various email addresses here if you want to see what breaches have disclosed it.

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Shewanella Oneidensis is an oxygen tolerant gram-negative anaerobic metal reducing protobacterium discovered in lake Oneida, NY in 1988. Scientists have now shown that this bacterium can be used to produce graphene more cheaply, quickly, and greenly.

When mixed with oxidised graphite, which is relatively easy to produce, the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis removes most of the oxygen groups and leaves conductive graphene behind as a result. It's cheaper, faster, and more environmentally friendly than existing techniques to make the material.

Using this process, we might be able to create graphene at the sort of scale necessary for the next generation of computing and medical devices – utilising graphene's powerful mix of strength, flexibility, and conductivity.

"For real applications you need large amounts," says biologist Anne Meyer from the University of Rochester in New York.

"Producing these bulk amounts is challenging and typically results in graphene that is thicker and less pure. This is where our work came in."

Using Shewanella Oneidensis, researchers produced thinner, more stable, and durable graphene than that produced with current chemical manufacturing approaches. According to Meyer this cheaper, higher quality graphene opens up many possibilities

It could be used in field-effect transistor (FET) biosensors, devices that detect particular biological molecules, such as glucose monitoring for diabetics.

Because the bacteria production process usually leaves behind certain oxygen groups, the resulting graphene is well-suited to being able to bind to specific molecules – exactly what an FET biosensor needs to do.

This kind of graphene material could also be used as a conductive ink in circuit boards, in computer keyboards, or even in small wires to defrost car windshields. If needed, the bacteria process can be tweaked to produce graphene that's only conductive on one side.

This is only a first study investigating this approach, so a great deal more research will be required before they start building laptops out of bacterial byproducts.

Journal Reference
Creation of Conductive Graphene Materials by Bacterial Reduction Using Shewanella Oneidensis Benjamin A. E. Lehner, et al. 04 July 2019

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for AnonymousLuser:

Facebook VP: AI has a compute dependency problem

In one of his first public speaking appearances since joining Facebook to lead its AI initiatives, VP Jérôme Pesenti expressed concern about the growing amount of compute power needed to create powerful AI systems.

“I can tell you this is keeping me up at night,” Pesenti said. “The peak compute companies like Facebook and Google can afford for an experiment, we are reaching that already.”

More software innovation will be required if artificial intelligence is to grow unhindered, he said, and optimization of hardware and software — rather than brute force compute — may be critical to AI in years ahead.

Examples of systems less reliant on compute for innovative breakthroughs include Pluribus, an AI system developed by Facebook AI Research and Carnegie Mellon University and introduced today, that can take on world-class poker players. In an article in Science, researchers said Pluribus only required $150 in cloud computing to train.

The end of Moore’s Law means the compute needed to create the most advanced AI is going up.

In fact, Pesenti cited an OpenAI analysis that found the compute necessary to create state-of-the-art systems has gone up 10 times each year since 2012.

“We still see gains with increase of compute, but the pressure from the problem is just going to become bigger,” Pesenti said. “I think we will still continue to use more compute, you will still net, but it will go slower, because you cannot keep pace with 10 times a year. That’s just not possible.”

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/07/12/top-assange-defense-account-deleted-by-twitter/

One of the biggest Twitter accounts dedicated to circulating information and advocacy for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, @Unity4J, has been completely removed from the site. The operators of the account report that they have been given no reason for its removal by Twitter staff, and have received no response to their appeals.

Any Assange supporter active on Twitter will be familiar with the Unity4J account, which originated to help boost the wildly successful Unity4J online vigils in which well-known Assange defenders would appear to speak out against his persecution. As of this writing, the account has been gone for a day and a half.

"About 8:45am CST on Thursday July 11, one of our Unity4J Twitter team members went to retweet on the account and noticed that the account was no longer accessible," reports pro-Assange activist Christy Dopf, one of the operators of the account. "When each of us also attempted to access the account we all received the same message 'Account Suspended'. Twitter did not send us a reason or violation for the suspension. So an appeal was submitted. We did receive correspondence that Twitter got our request and the case is currently open. Unfortunately we do not have a timeline on how long this could take."

[Ed. note: The linked story variously uses "suspended", "removed", and "deleted"; seemingly interchangeably. When attempting to load "https://twitter.com/Unity4J the response was:

Account suspended

This account has been suspended. Learn more about why Twitter suspends accounts, or return to your timeline.

so it appears that there may be hope for the account to be unsuspended; time will tell. --martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Maintaining large-scale satellite constellations using logistics approach

Today, large-scale communication satellite constellations, also known as megaconstellations, have been more and more popular. OneWeb launched the first batch of satellites of an initial 650-satellite constellation in February 2019, and SpaceX also launched the first batch of its 12,000-satellite constellation in May 2019. On July 8, Amazon also filed an application with the FCC for its planned satellite constellation with 3,236 satellites. These satellite constellations are expected to be a game changer by realizing the worldwide satellite Internet service.

However, the unprecedently large scale of these megaconstellations also brings numerous challenges, some of which are hidden and not well-explored. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign identified a critical hidden challenge about replacing the broken satellites in megaconstellations and proposed a unique solution with inventory control methods.

"Maintaining these large-scale megaconstellations efficiently is far more complex than the traditional space systems. In fact, it has become more and more like a ground logistics problem that FedEx or UPS has been working on. So we tackled this megaconstellation maintenance problem leveraging the idea from ground logistics, which turns out to be not only unique and interesting but also very suitable in this context" said Koki Ho, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at U of I.

The challenge Ho described is to efficiently swap out a new satellite for one that breaks. For telecommunications companies, broken satellites mean interrupted communications and Internet service, which leads to disgruntled customers and loss of revenue.

"Deploying a large-scale constellation is one problem, but maintaining it is another possibly more challenging problem," Ho said. "When the satellites break, providing a spare quickly is important so there is little gap in the service. Companies need continuous service to provide global coverage. In order to achieve that, we need to have sufficient spares in orbit. The question is: how many would be sufficient. Can we think of a smarter way to use as few satellites as possible to satisfy the gap requirement?"

Original Submission