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An Anonymous Coward writes:

In a video, Dr. Abrasive recounts his several-year-long reverse engineering project, ultimately leading to the creation of a plug-in expansion board which can load software from a USB flash device.

The Sega Saturn contains a 32-bit CPU (Hitachi SuperH) solely for operating the system's CD-ROM drive. The chip has an internal ROM which is normally inaccessible, and this is where the copy protection code exists. It checks for a special track on Saturn game CDs which can't be duplicated onto CD-Rs, preventing any data access to unauthorized discs. While previous attempts to read the internal ROM by decapping the chip had failed, mounting it on a custom PCB finally enabled a hack to dump the contents. However, this did not immediately lead to a workaround for the copy protection.

The Saturn also included an expansion slot for an MPEG video decoder to play Video CDs. Examining the inner workings of this device opened up the possibility of bypassing the CD block altogether.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

From the LA Times:

The launch manifest for Los Angeles-based Rocket Lab is starting to fill up. The small-satellite launch company said Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with Earth-imaging satellite firm Planet for three dedicated launches on its Electron rocket.

The launches will take place from the company's Mahia Penninsula launch site.

SpaceNews reports:

[...] each launch will carry is still being determined, but will likely be between 20 and 25. Each Dove is a three-unit cubesat with a mass of about five kilograms.

The schedule for the launches will depend on the development of Electron, which has yet to make its first flight. Safyan said that if the Electron test program goes well, the first Planet launch, likely to sun-synchronous orbit, could be as soon as the second quarter of 2017.

Although the terms of the deal weren't announced, Rocket Lab quotes a price of about $5 million (USD) per launch for the Electron.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Like a freshly cracked diet soda, suspicions have been fizzing away for years that artificial sweeteners may not be the best way to slim down

A vast body of research suggests that sugar substitutes, despite having far fewer calories than sugar itself, can wreak various forms of metabolic havoc such as upping diabetes risk and—perhaps paradoxically—causing weight gain in the long term. A new study published Tuesday in Cell Metabolism suggests that artificial sweeteners mimic a starvation state in the brain, causing some organisms to seek energy by eating more food.

In the study—a collaboration between researchers from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Center and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research—fruit flies were fed either a diet of yeast and sucrose or one with the synthetic sweetener sucralose, used in a variety of low-calorie foods. Flies fed the sugar-free diet for five or more days consumed 30 percent more calories than those on sugar. When sucralose was removed from their diet, calorie consumption in the formerly sugar-free group fell back to normal.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-artificial-sweeteners-may-cause-us-to-eat-more/

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takyon writes:

Scientists have built a brain observatory that monitors mouse brain activity in response to visual stimuli:

Letting mice watch Orson Welles movies may help scientists explain human consciousness. At least that's one premise of the Allen Brain Observatory, which launched Wednesday and lets anyone with an Internet connection study a mouse brain as it responds to visual information.

"Think of it as a telescope, but a telescope that is looking at the brain," says Christof Koch, chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which created the observatory.

[...] There's no easy way to study a person's brain as it makes sense of visual information. So the observatory has been gathering huge amounts of data on mice, which have a visual system that is very similar to the one found in people. The data come from mice that run on a wheel as still images and movies appear on a screen in front of them. For the mice, it's a lot like watching TV on a treadmill at the gym.

But these mice have been genetically altered in a way that allows a computer to monitor the activity of about 18,000 neurons as they respond to different images. "We can look at those neurons and from that decode literally what goes through the mind of the mouse," Koch says. Those neurons were pretty active when the mice watched the first few minutes of Orson Welles' film noir classic Touch of Evil. The film is good for mouse experiments because "It's black and white and it has nice contrasts and it has a long shot without having many interruptions," Koch says.

At one point, the camera follows a couple through the streets of a Mexican border town. As a mouse watches the action, its brain activity changes in response to the images. For example, brain cells that respond to vertical lines start firing as the couple moves past a building with vertical columns. That response is just one tiny part of the brain system that allows a mouse to create an internal map of its world. Other experiments show which brain cells fire when a mouse recognizes another animal, like a butterfly.

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dryriver writes:

Graphics cards manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD have gone to great pains recently to point out that to experience Virtual Reality with a VR headset properly, you need a GPU capable of pushing at least a steady 90 FPS per eye, or a total of at least 180 FPS for both eyes, and at high resolutions to boot. This of course requires the purchase of the latest, greatest high-end GPUs made by these manufacturers, alongside the money you are already plonking down for your new VR headset and a good, fast gaming-class PC.

This raises an interesting question: virtually every LCD/LED TV manufactured in the last 5 — 6 years has a "Realtime Motion Compensation" feature built in. This is the not-so-new-at-all technique of taking, say, a football match broadcast live at 30 FPS or Hz, and algorithmically generating extra in-between frames in realtime, thus giving you a hypersmooth 200 — 400 FPS/Hz image on the TV set, with no visible stutter or strobing whatsoever. This technology is not new. It is cheap enough to include in virtually every TV set at every price level (thus the hardware that performs the realtime motion compensating cannot cost more than a few dollars in total). And the technique should, in theory, work just fine with the output of a GPU trying to drive a VR headset.

Now suppose you have a entry level or mid-range GPU capable of pushing only 40 — 60 FPS in a VR application (or a measly 20 — 30 FPS per eye, making for a truly terrible VR experience). You could, in theory add some cheap Motion Compensation circuitry to that GPU and get 100 — 200 FPS or more per eye. Heck, you might even be able to program a few GPU cores to run the motion compensating as a realtime GPU shader as the rest of the GPU is rendering a game or VR experience.

So my question: Why don't GPUs for VR use Realtime Motion Compensation techniques to increase the FPS pushed into the VR headset? Would this not make far more financial sense for the average VR user than having to buy a monstrously powerful GPU to experience VR at all?

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Think back...did you learn Morse code in Boy Scouts or Girl Guides or in a junior high programming course? Was there an odd-looking, kind of green, gangly kid there, possibly in a space suit? Someone apparently taught the Martians Morse code, or so it seems.

From Gizmodo:

NASA has spotted something strange and beautiful in the sands of Mars -- a remarkable dune field that looks eerily similar to Morse code. And it has a message for us.

The dunes [..] were recently spotted by Hi-RISE, a visible light and near-IR camera that's been snapping stunning portraits of the Red Planet's surface from its perch aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter since 2006. According to Veronica Bray, the Hi-RISE targeting specialist who analyzed the image, dot and dash features like these have been spotted on Mars before[...]

Specifically, a nearby circular depression (probably a sand-filled impact crater) has "focused the wind, and also limited the amount of sand available for formation of the dunes," Bray told Gizmodo.

So...the burning question: "What's the message for us?"

NEE NED ZB 6TNN DEIBEDH SIEFI EBEEE SSIEI ESEE SEEE !!

Original Submission

Beryllium Sphere (r) writes:

If you've ever wanted to consolidate your social media accounts, Power Ventures offered a way. With your permission, they'd log into your social media accounts and automatically collect data from them.

As Captain Reynolds [Ed - A character in the 2002 US TV series 'Firefly", apparently] said, the world is full of middlemen and they don't like to be bypassed. Facebook blocked Power's IP addresses and then sued under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/12/9th-circuit-its-a-federal-crime-to-visit-a-website-after-being-told-not-to-visit-it/ for a lawyer's dissection of the 9th Circuit's opinion that Power did violate the CFAA, and https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/12/13-17102.pdf for the text of the opinion.

This was a lawsuit, not a criminal case. Imagine, though, an overzealous Federal prosecutor looking for a way to wreck someone's life. Trying a business model that Facebook doesn't like could, under this ruling, leave you with a felony record if it got pursued as a criminal case.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A virtual private network (VPN) provider has exited Russia following the seizure of some servers. The seizure comes months ahead of a deadline to comply with a new data retention law:

Private Internet Access is informing users that some of its servers in Russia may have been seized by the authorities. The company believes that it may have been targeted due to its strict no-logging policy, something which puts it at odds with Russian data-retention rules.

[...] In an email sent out to its users, PIA explains that due to the passing of a new law last year which requires Internet providers to hold logs of Internet traffic for up to a year, it has become a target for Russian authorities. "We believe that due to the enforcement regime surrounding this new law, some of our Russian Servers (RU) were recently seized by Russian Authorities, without notice or any type of due process. We think it's because we are the most outspoken and only verified no-log VPN provider," PIA announced.

The law to which PIA refers was passed by Russia's State Duma in July 2014 and enacted September 2015. It requires that all web services store the user data of Russians within the country. This means that international companies could be forced to have a physical local presence, to which Russian authorities potentially have access. While the deadline for compliance is technically September 2016, Private Internet Access says that given the server seizure and future privacy implications, it will no longer be doing business in the region.

"Upon learning of the [seizures], we immediately discontinued our Russian gateways and will no longer be doing business in the region," the company says. "Luckily, since we do not log any traffic or session data, period, no data has been compromised. Our users are, and will always be, private and secure."

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

Caleb Scharf and Leroy Cronin describe an equation to estimate the frequency of "origin-of-life" events on a planetary scale in their paper, "Quantifying the origins of life on a planetary scale" which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 4.

Even better...Space.com writer Sarah Lewin explains this result on livescience.com for us. The basic description is as a series of steps.

The new equation breaks down the process of abiogenesis -- the formation of life from nonliving components -- into a series of simpler factors. Those factors incorporate the planet's conditions, the ingredients needed to form life and the likelihood of those ingredients getting into the right configuration for life to emerge. As with the Drake equation, each of the terms is straightforward to describe, but each hides additional complexity and room for new research.

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill dumped nearly 3 million barrels of crude oil into the northern Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Six years is a long time, and the disaster has slipped from the minds of many in that time. (Aided, no doubt by the kind of "There's Nothing To See Here" headlines that Treehugger captured on July 30, 2010.)

But, still, in the real world the legacy continues.

On Monday (July 11) University of California - Riverside reported on research looking at some of the effects of "weathered oil":

[...] A research team led by an environmental scientist at the University of California, Riverside has now found that ultraviolet light is changing the structure of the DWH [Deepwater Horizon] oil components into something more toxic, further threatening numerous commercially and ecologically important fishes.

"Ours is the first experiment evaluating the effects of DWH oil on the genetic responses of Mahi embryos and larvae," said Daniel Schlenk, a professor of aquatic ecotoxicology, who led the study published in Environmental Science and Technology. "It is also the first experiment of this nature on a lifestage and species that was likely exposed to the oil. We found that the weathering of oil had more significant changes in gene expression related to critical functions in the embryos and larvae than the un-weathered oil. Our results predict that there are multiple targets of oil for toxicity to this species at the embryonic life stage."

"We found that the heart, eye and neurological function were affected," Schlenk said. "In collaboration with other consortia members from the Universities of Miami, Texas, and North Texas, we are now following up with these results. Previous studies have shown that the heart is the primary target for oil. Our study shows that in addition to heart function, risk and recovery should also examine eye and neuronal function."

It is important to understand how contaminants cause toxicity in order to increase certainty in risk assessment.

"By understanding how fossil fuels cause toxicity we can have a better understanding of the risks associated with these contaminants and determine regulatory or management strategies that reduce risks of these substances," he said. "To this day, we remain uncertain of the magnitude of the DWH oil spill effects, particularly in sensitive life stages of fish. We are also uncertain of whether biota exposed to the oil can recover, or have recovered, from this event. And we are still uncertain about how compounds present in oil or any other combustion byproduct or fossil fuel cause toxicity."

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Space.com reports (Tor-friendly link) that amateur satellite tracker Thomas Dorman has created imagery that suggests China's Tiangong-1 space station "is in a slow roll." If that is the situation, its motion is not under control and its solar panels are not aimed at the Sun.

In March, official news agency Xinhua reported that "Tiangong-1 terminated its data service" and that

The flight orbit of the space lab, which will descend gradually in the coming months, is under continued and close monitoring, according to the [manned space engineering] office, which said the orbiter will burn up in the atmosphere eventually.

The official statement and Dorman's observations have led to speculation that the craft's descent may take place in an uncontrolled manner, increasing the possibility that debris will fall in populated areas.

Additional coverage:

• Inquisitr
• The Independent
• Shanghaiist
• India Times
• Indian Express

Original Submission

Lake Okeechobee Algae Bloom From Hell

fork(2) writes:

"It was obvious on a July 1 airplane tour: Algae bunched up on the west side of the St. Lucie Lock and Dam before pouring through the gates and into the canal, like Black Friday shoppers jostling to squeeze through the just-opened doors of a big-box store." [USA Today]

From an NPR article:

"There's no way to describe it," says John Skinner, a boat salesman in Stuart. But he still tries. "I would say hundreds of dead animals that have been baking in the sun for weeks."

Live Science explains:

A huge bloom of toxic algae that took over Florida's largest freshwater lake has been captured in stunning images taken from space.

The NASA images show an expanse of blue-green algae that covered Lake Okeechobee in Florida this summer. The toxic bloom appeared in May and expanded to 33 square miles (85 square kilometers) in area, covering a good chunk of the 730-square-mile (1,913 square km) body of water -- the second-largest lake entirely within the contiguous United States (second only to Lake Michigan).

[...] Lake Okeechobee is experiencing this persistent bloom in part because of the wet winter, which caused other lakes and rivers to swell, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. As a result, many water districts chose to drain their bodies of water earlier in the season, funneling the warm, nitrogen-rich water through the St. Erie Canal, which then emptied into Lake Okeechobee. The result was a tenacious toxic bloom that caused Florida Gov. Rick Scott to call a state of emergency in the nearby counties on June 29.

[Continues...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/13/riffle_next_gen_anonymity/

Next week, top eggheads will unveil a new anonymizing internet tool that they claim is snoop-proof and faster and more reliable against attack than Tor.

Dubbed Riffle, the system was developed by MIT and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. It uses the same onion-encryption system as Tor, which wraps messages in layers of encryption as they travel through the anonymizing network to disguise the route they've taken.

Riffle [paper PDF], like Tor, runs connections through a mix network of nodes, bouncing packets from system to system to obscure the origin. What separates Riffle from Tor is that the former has extra defenses to prevent spies from unmasking its users.

Protecting anonymized users from being identified is a major concern all round because these networks are used by whistleblowers, journalists, government workers and folks trying to evade censorship blocks, where unmasking them could lead to imprisonment or death.

Original Submission

BeaverCleaver writes:

Engineers at the Georgia Institute of technology have demonstrated that piles of silicon dioxide particles coated with ethylene glycol can conduct heat much more effectively that plain silicon dioxide or ethylene glycol. This could have benefits for a range of electronic devices - light, cheap heatsinks that do not also conduct electricity have many benefits. The present experimental nano particles already show thermal properties similar to expensive polymer heat-transfer compounds, although more work needs to be done to find a more stable coating than ethylene glycol. (Which itself has a long history in thermal management, being a primary component of antifreeze)

http://m.phys.org/news/2016-07-sand-cool-electronic-devices.html has the details.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

The National Geographic reports on a letter published in Current Biology (full article is paywalled). Archaeologists excavated what they call

a distinctive stone tool assemblage created by a non-human animal in the New World, the Brazilian bearded capuchin monkey (Sapajus libidinosus).

They say that the monkeys used the "stone hammers and anvils" to break open the nuts of cashews. The tools are believed to date from about 600 or 700 years ago. The authors say they are "the oldest non-human tools known outside of Africa."

Original Submission