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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

El Reg reports:

An outfit called "Hacbook" is channeling Psystar, offering Mac OS laptops for US$329.

The laptops are actually refurbished HP EliteBooks, with a 14-inch, 1600x900 display, Sandy Bridge i5 CPU, 802.11 a/b/g/n, up to 1TB of disk, and 8GB of RAM. That's a spec Apple could have sold you in about 2013.

[...] The machines ship with no operating system but do include an installer its makers say "shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes to set up."

Jack Kim, one of the people behind the project, suggests you buy an OS X licence from Apple.

[...] "We're merely selling kits that users can then do whatever they want with afterwards."

"It's optimized to run OS X, but you can install Linux or Windows on it and use it however you want--that's completely up to the user. If Apple contacts us with concerns we'll work together to solve them."

[...] It's not the first time someone's run up a version of OS X on much cheaper hardware. Those with long memories will recall Psystar, which fell victim to Cupertino's lawyers in 2009.

I wondered if these things come with Secure Boot--which I prefer to call Crippled Boot (orig)
or Security Theater Boot (orig). One source said that HP's 8460p did not. (orig)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Whistle-blowing site Wikileaks has been criticised for not doing enough to screen sensitive information found in documents released via the site. [...] What has AP found? The news organisation combed through the site and found many instances where sensitive personal information was easily viewable in documents and files.

In the worst cases the information revealed could put lives at risk or lead to people being jailed or harassed, it said.

It is not the only risk involved with information on the site. Security researcher Vesselin Bontchev found more than 3,000 links to files that contained malware. The links were in a dump of emails from Turkey's ruling political party, the AKP.

However, it has taken some action to make it harder to fall victim to malware in the AKP files - though the dangerous links have not been completely removed.

[...] Is harm being done? Human rights groups have asked Wikileaks many times to do more to censor information found in documents. They fear reprisals against aid workers, activists and civilians named in the leaked data.

In addition, AP said it had evidence that fraudsters had used credit card numbers and other personal details revealed in some documents. Other leaks have led to people losing their jobs, or have ended relationships.

The US government has condemned Wikileaks several times, saying its work has harmed diplomatic relations and put the lives of staff in sensitive positions at risk.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SES will launch a satellite using one of SpaceX's "flight-proven" rockets, or in other words, used goods:

The telecommunications giant SES is boldly going where no company has gone before by making history in inking a deal today, Aug. 30, to fly the expensive SES-10 commercial satellite on the first ever launch of a 'Flight-Proven' SpaceX booster.

Luxembourg-based SES and Hawthrone, CA-based SpaceX today jointly announced the agreement to "launch SES-10 on a flight-proven Falcon 9 orbital rocket booster" before the end of this year. "The satellite, which will be in a geostationary orbit and expand SES's capabilities across Latin America, is scheduled for launch in Q4 2016. SES-10 will be the first-ever satellite to launch on a SpaceX flight-proven rocket booster," according to a joint statement.

That first launch of a flight-proven Falcon 9 first stage will use the CRS-8 booster that delivered a SpaceX Dragon to the International Space Station in April 2016. The reflight could happen as soon as October 2016.

-- OriginalOwner_ adds The Register.

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

An Anonymous Soylentil 'Connor the Kicking Cog' writes:

Under two months ago I started working at a massive incumbent telecom company in their regional call center. From the start it has been a draining experience. The orientation lasted two days, alternating between how much the company loves us, especially veterans, and how unions are awful things. The first real day of training included a bunch of inane policies such as:

• In the first 90 Days no time off is allowed, even sick time, unless it was brought up during the interview process.
• During the 90 Days, missing a day of work for any reason causes a demerit which is given as a "verbal written warning".
• During the 90 Days, two demerits goes to "final written warning".
• During the 90 Days, three demerits is an automatic firing.
• At any time being more than 10 minutes but less than 2 hours late is a half demerit.
• At any time being more than 2 hours late is a full demerit.
• Time off can be used to counteract a demerit, but only if incurred after 90 days.
• Demerits incurred during the 90 Days do not "wash off" but the warnings do, and the threshold increases before warnings start.
• You cannot be promoted or make a lateral move before one year of service. This is repeated endlessly.
• You cannot be promoted or make a lateral move if you have any warnings within the last six months.
• If promoted after a year there is another new 90 Day period where no time off is allowed. Even if you have more than a decade of service this policy remains.
• The company does not hire for many positions from the outside, so you must do one year in a lower role before being considered. This is true even if you have done work at that level or even higher elsewhere.
• The shift you accepted during the hiring process cannot be changed for one year.
• If you change your shift after one year, you must wait another full year before you can change it again.

Call centers are regimented things, but these policies are so worker-hostile I am surprised staff turnover is not an issue already. The training completed before the 40 day mark, but was longer some time ago, yet the 90 day period remains.

Thankfully another company has hired me and all background checks have cleared so I will be departing from the soulless mega-corporation. Being a professional I would prefer not to needlessly burn bridges, but I am not going to give the customary two weeks notice. Based on the above policies I believe it is likely I will be immediately escorted out should I do so without any compensation for the two week period. Does anyone reading this believe they would "recoup their investment in training me" by keeping me on for those two weeks?

Is it worthwhile to state in my resignation email that these policies were major motivating factors in departing as soon as possible? Or would such an email only be cathartic for me at best? Or even a risk at worst?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Neuroscientists from the University of Budapest used brain scanners to investigate the brain activity of dogs when they heard their owner's voice, and specific words spoken by the owner. The dogs heard both meaningful and nonsense words spoken in praising and neutral tones. They found that dogs respond to actual words and not just the tone in which they are spoken, which suggests dogs do comprehend the words. Their work appears in the latest issue of Science.

When the scientists analyzed the brain scans, they saw that—regardless of the trainer's intonation—the dogs processed the meaningful words in the left hemisphere of the brain, just as humans do, they write this week in Science. But the dogs didn't do this for the meaningless words. "There's no acoustic reason for this difference," Andics says. "It shows that these words have meaning to dogs."

From the paper's abstract:

During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lexical and intonational information. We found a left-hemisphere bias for processing meaningful words, independently of intonation; a right auditory brain region for distinguishing intonationally marked and unmarked words; and increased activity in primary reward regions only when both lexical and intonational information were consistent with praise. Neural mechanisms to separately analyze and integrate word meaning and intonation in dogs suggest that this capacity can evolve in the absence of language.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Oregon State Fair is featuring award-winning weed:

Whether you're in Maine or Michigan, state fairs have their own smell — a mix of hot oil from the curly fries, and that unmistakable livestock tent. One exhibit at this summer's Oregon State Fair, though, has a particularly distinctive funk. It's the one introducing a new crop: marijuana.

"It was this year that the state legislature designated cannabis as a farm crop. And the general public should know what it's all about," says Don Morse, the head of the Oregon Cannabis Business Council. And the tent — which has a strong piney, somewhat skunky smell — features nine prize-winning marijuana plants. They're the first live pot plants that have ever been shown at a state fair.

The judges used a number of criteria, says Morse: spatial noding, leaf structure and aroma. To be clear, the judges at the fair in Salem, Ore., didn't actually sample the finished product. And the health and appearance of the plants don't necessarily translate to their potency, or how much of the psychoactive compounds are in the end result. But still, there's some glory to be had, says Mandy Seybert, one of the competitors.

"We've never shown anything at a state fair — it would be like my husband's dream to be able to show some of our cattle or his pigs or stuff," she says. "So it's a pretty big deal for us." Grower Seybert's livestock is back at the farm, but her cannabis plant took second place for the Indica variety. She's been fielding questions in the tent all day.

Also at Vice. The nine plants shown at the Oregon State Fair were the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in the Sativa, Indica, and Hybrid categories at the Oregon Cannabis Growers' Fair earlier in August.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers with France's INRIA are warning that 64-bit ciphers – which endure in TLS configurations and OpenVPN – need to go for the walk behind the shed.

The research institute's Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaëtan Leurent have demonstrated that a man-in-the-middle on a long-lived encrypted session can gather enough data for a "birthday attack" on Blowfish and triple DES encryption. They dubbed the attack "Sweet32".

Sophos' Paul Ducklin has a handy explanation of why it matters here.

The trick to Sweet32, the Duck writes, is the attackers worked out that with a big enough traffic sample, any repeated crypto block gives them a start towards breaking the encryption – and collisions are manageably common with a 64-bit block cipher like Blowfish or Triple-DES.

They call it a "birthday attack" because it works on a similar principle to what's known as the "birthday paradox" – the counter-intuitive statistic that with 23 random people in a room, there's a 50 per cent chance that two of them will share a birthday.

In the case of Sweet32 (the 32 being 50 per cent of the 64 bits in a cipher), the "magic number" is pretty big: the authors write that 785 GB of captured traffic will, under the right conditions, yield up the encrypted HTTP cookie and let them decrypt Blowfish- or Triple-DES-encrypted traffic.

[...] "Our attacks impact a majority of OpenVPN connections and an estimated 0.6% of HTTPS connections to popular websites. We expect that our attacks also impact a number of SSH and IPsec connections, but we do not have concrete measurements for these protocols" (emphasis added).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is recommending the use of cephalosporins to treat gonorrhea rather than quinolones, due to emergence of quinolone-resistant strains. However, some strains of gonorrhea are already resistant to drugs in the newly recommended class of antibiotics:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned back in 2012 that one of two drugs in the class of antibiotics the WHO now recommends, cephalosporins, was in danger of becoming useless to treat gonorrhea, at least in the U.S, and recommended that doctors stop prescribing it. Since then, the CDC's recommended treatment for gonorrhea has been a dual therapy, with the two antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin, but an analysis in July warned that the bacteria could even become resistant to that combination.

As for when antibiotic options will run out altogether, Teodora Wi of the WHO's Department of Reproductive Health and Research tells the journal Science, "We will have to have new drugs in 5 years, I think." The U.S. government is spending millions of dollars through the CDC and National Institutes of Health to develop new antibiotics and combat resistance.

The WHO also revised its guidelines for treating two other sexually transmitted infections, chlamydia and syphilis. Neither is facing severe antibiotic resistance. Syphilis, for example, can be treated with a single dose of penicillin, although there is a worldwide shortage of the drug.

Original Submission

stormwyrm writes:

The Chandra X-Ray observatory in concert with the ESO's UltraVISTA infrared telescope and the ALMA radio telescope have discovered the most distant galaxy cluster yet, designated CL J1001+0220. The galaxy cluster is 11.1 billion light years from Earth, and we may be seeing it just as it is forming. A paper describing these results is available. The extremely remote cluster is remarkable not only for its distance:

In addition to its extraordinary distance, CL J1001 is remarkable because of its high levels of star formation in galaxies near the center of the cluster. Within about 250,000 light years of the center of the cluster (its core), eleven massive galaxies are found and nine of those display high rates of formation. Specifically, stars are forming in the cluster core at a rate equivalent to about 3,400 Suns per year.

The large amount of growth through star formation in the galaxies in CL J1001 distinguishes it from other galaxy clusters found at distances of about 10 billion light years and closer, where little growth is occurring. These results suggest that elliptical galaxies in clusters may form their stars through more violent and shorter bursts of star formation than elliptical galaxies outside clusters.

The latest study shows that CL 1001 galaxy cluster may be undergoing a transformation from a galaxy cluster that is still forming, known as a "protocluster," to a mature one. Astronomers have never found a galaxy cluster at this precise stage. These results may also imply that star formation slows down in large galaxies within clusters after the galaxies have already come together during the development of a galaxy cluster.

[Continues...]

takyon writes:

The sample size of icy rocks that appear to have their orbits affected by a Neptune-like "Planet Nine" is growing larger:

For the past few years, [Scott] Sheppard of [the Carnegie Institution for Science], [Chadwick] Trujillo [of Northern Arizona University] and David Tholen of the University of Hawaii have been hunting for objects in the far outer solar system using several different instruments, including the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Dark Energy Camera, which is installed on a 4-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. [...] The astronomers discovered several dozen previously unknown bodies, including a roughly 155-mile-wide (250 km) object called [2014 FE72] that gets an incredible 4,000 AU from the sun at its most distant point. That puts it out in the outer Oort Cloud — the realm of comets.

[...] They also discovered two 125-mile-wide (200 km) objects, known as 2014 SR349 and 2013 FT28, that "cluster" in one of the key orbital parameters (known as argument of perihelion), furthering strengthening the case for Planet Nine's existence. (The objects' names reflect the years that they were first spotted in the survey; their discovery is being announced in the new study.) "We have 15 or so of these extreme objects now, and all of them cluster in this argument of perihelion angle," Sheppard said.

Furthermore, he added, the five most distant of these 15 extreme objects share similarities in another orbital characteristic as well, one called longitude of perihelion. Significantly, the far-flung five are too distant to be realistically affected by any gravitational tugs from Neptune (whose influence could be the reason the other 10 objects' longitudes of perihelion don't line up). It would take just two or three more such additional finds to put Planet Nine on solid ground, Sheppard said. "I think statistics-wise, in the next year to two years we'll probably find enough of these small, extreme objects to really say if Planet X exists or not," he said. [...] "We need like 10 or 20 of these smaller extreme objects, and we can probably nail down much better where Planet X would be out there," Sheppard said.

2014 SR349, 2013 FT28, and 2014 FE72.

Also at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Nearly half of the world's population is fed by industrial N₂ fixation, i. e., the [Haber-Bosch] process. Although exergonic in nature, NH₃ synthesis from N₂ and H₂ catalyzed by the fused Fe has to be conducted at elevated temperatures and high pressures. It consumes over 1 percent of the world's annual energy supply. Developing efficient catalysts that enable NH₃ synthesis under mild conditions is a grand scientific challenge and is of great practical need.

The ideal catalyst for NH₃ synthesis should have strong activation to N₂ (small activation energy Ea) but relatively weak binding to the activated N species (small EN), which is, unfortunately, unattainable by transition metals (TM) themselves because of the linear scaling relations between Ea and EN, i.e., a transition metal catalyst having strong activation to N₂ will have strong binding to the activated N, and vice versa. Such relations determine the rate of NH₃ synthesis over the TM catalyst, and therefore, although tremendous research efforts have been applied, the industrial catalyst used today is essentially the same as the original one developed by Mittasch in 1909.

The Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) research group led by Prof. CHEN Ping demonstrates, for the first time, that the scaling relations on catalytic NH₃ synthesis can be broken. Thus, NH₃ synthesis under mild reaction conditions can be achieved at an unprecedentedly high rate over a new set of catalysts.

The key element leading to this change is the employment of ionic hydride LiH. Distinctly different from proton or atomic H applied in biochemical, organometallic, and heterogeneous NH₃ formation, H in LiH bears a negative charge that ensures that LiH is a strong reducing agent breaking the TM-N bond, and an immediate H source abstracting N to Li to form LiNH₂. LiNH₂ can further split H₂, heterolytically giving off NH₃ and regenerating LiH. Through this mechanism (See Figure a), the activation of N₂ and the subsequent hydrogenation of N are carried out separately over the two reactive centers, i.e., TM and LiH, respectively, so that the direct influence of TM on the NH₃ formation rate is broken.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Both houses of the California legislature have passed a bill called SB-32 which would tell the California Air Resources Board "to ensure that statewide greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030." The state's Democratic governor has issued a statement indicating that he intends to sign it into law.

The Western States Petroleum Association and the California Manufacturers & Technology Association expressed their opposition to the bill.

links:

• the bill
• governor's statement
• Western States Petroleum Association statement
• San Jose Mercury-News
• UPI
• Vox

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel has announced that Kaby Lake mobile CPUs are coming in Q4 2016, with desktop CPUs coming in January:

As part of the release, Intel has mentioned that a number of key benefits for Kaby Lake will be based on an optimized 14nm process, called 14PLUS (or 14nm+, 14FF+). This process as a quick summary has a higher fin height and larger pitch, essentially giving a less-dense set of transistors that have more room to breathe. Normally a larger pitch means more voltage required, but this is offset by the fin height and Intel says is good for another few hundred MHz for performance. The less-dense design, in theory, may also help in overclocking, however we will have to wait until January to see those results.

[...] Intel hasn't gone into much detail regarding the new 14nm+ process itself in terms of specifics, but has listed a number of performance gains that come out of the new CPU. The fundamental microarchitecture between Skylake and the new Kaby Lake parts is practically unchanged (DMI 3.0 now allows PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drives from the integrated PCH), but the updated fin profile and reduced 'strain' by the larger fin pitch is being quoted as giving a 12% performance increase due to process alone, typically through additional frequency for the same power. The main benefits to KBL will be in that frequency due to the 14nm+ process as well as the new media capabilities.

There does not appear to be an improvement in instructions per clock between Skylake and Kaby Lake. Instead, clock speeds (particularly the turbo clock) are up by as much as a few hundred MHz. For example, the Skylake-based m7-6Y75 is being replaced by the i7-7Y75 with +100 MHz base clock and +500 MHz turbo clock. Similarly, the i7-6500U gives way to the i7-7500U with +200 MHz base and +400 MHz turbo. The change in the shape of the FinFET transistors has allowed greater power efficiency or higher clock speeds at the same power consumption. Kaby Lake also improves the "Speed Shift" feature that was introduced by Skylake, which can allow the CPU to ramp up to full performance more quickly (taking 10-15 ms instead of 30 ms for Skylake).

On the integrated GPU, Kaby Lake-U/Y introduces full hardware acceleration for encode and decode of 4K HEVC Main10 profile videos, as opposed to the "hybrid" CPU/GPU acceleration used by Skylake. Intel has also added full hardware decode support for VP9. The changes will allow 4K/2160p content to be decoded using a fraction of the CPU utilization and power consumption that Skylake required.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University presented their work on batteries powered by non-toxic melanin pigments at the American Chemical Society annual meeting. These batteries do not contain the typical toxic metals found in regular batteries, so they would be safer to use in medical devices that are meant to enter the body.

Besides their role in skin pigment, one of the things melanins are good at is attaching to metals, which is known as metal chelation.

'We thought, if they have this kind of electron exchange capability and this kind of cation chelation capability, then that really is what a battery material is in its essence,' Bettinger said at a press conference. 'We have really leveraged those existing properties in a different context and made this new invention.'

They found that their batteries can deliver 5 to 10 mW of power over a span of about 18 hours, which is optimal for powering ingestible medical devices that take about 20 hours to pass through the body.

Original Submission

cubancigar11 writes:

The BBC reports that the year-long simulation of near isolation in preparation for a trip to Mars, has ended successfully.

A team of six people have completed a Mars simulation in Hawaii, where they lived in near isolation for a year.

Since 29 August 2015, the group lived in close quarters in a dome, without fresh air, fresh food or privacy.

[...] The Nasa-funded study run by the University of Hawaii is the longest of its kind since a Russian mission that lasted 520 days.

Having survived their year in isolation, the crew members said they were confident a mission to Mars could succeed.

"I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," Cyprien Verseux, a crew member from France, told journalists. "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

Original Submission