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takyon writes:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-231&rn=news.xml&rst=6935

In its final week, Cassini will pass several milestones en route to its science-rich Saturn plunge. (Times below are predicted and may change slightly; see https://go.nasa.gov/2wbaCBT for updated times.)

• Sept. 9 Cassini will make the last of 22 passes between Saturn itself and its rings -- closest approach is 1,044 miles (1,680 kilometers) above the clouds tops.
• Sept. 11 -- Cassini will make a distant flyby of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Even though the spacecraft will be at 73,974 miles (119,049 kilometers) away, the gravitational influence of the moon will slow down the spacecraft slightly as it speeds past. A few days later, instead of passing through the outermost fringes of Saturn's atmosphere, Cassini will dive in too deep to survive the friction and heating.
• Sept. 14 -- Cassini's imaging cameras take their last look around the Saturn system, sending back pictures of moons Titan and Enceladus, the hexagon-shaped jet stream around the planet's north pole, and features in the rings.
• Sept. 14 (5:45 p.m. EDT / 2:45 p.m. PDT / 9:45 p.m. UTC) -- Cassini turns its antenna to point at Earth, begins a communications link that will continue until end of mission, and sends back its final images and other data collected along the way.
• Sept. 15 (4:37 a.m. EDT / 1:37 a.m. PDT / 8:37 a.m. UTC) -- The "final plunge" begins. The spacecraft starts a 5-minute roll to position INMS for optimal sampling of the atmosphere, transmitting data in near real time from now to end of mission.
• Sept. 15 (7:53 a.m. EDT / 4:53 a.m. PDT / 11:53 a.m. UTC) -- Cassini enters Saturn's atmosphere. Its thrusters fire at 10 percent of their capacity to maintain directional stability, enabling the spacecraft's high-gain antenna to remain pointed at Earth and allowing continued transmission of data.
• Sept. 15 (7:54 a.m. EDT / 4:54 a.m. PDT / 11:54 a.m. UTC) -- Cassini's thrusters are at 100 percent of capacity. Atmospheric forces overwhelm the thrusters' capacity to maintain control of the spacecraft's orientation, and the high-gain antenna loses its lock on Earth. At this moment, expected to occur about 940 miles (1,510 kilometers) above Saturn's cloud tops, communication from the spacecraft will cease, and Cassini's mission of exploration will have concluded. The spacecraft will break up like a meteor moments later.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pcie-4.0-5.0-pci-sig-specfication,35325.html

PCIe is the ubiquitous engine that pulls a big part of the computing locomotive down the track—it touches nearly every device in your computer. As such, it is the linchpin for the development of many other technologies, such as storage, networking, GPUs, chipsets, and many other devices. Considering its importance, it isn't surprising to find the PCI-SIG with 750 members worldwide. Unfortunately, large organizations tend to move slowly, and PCIe 4.0 is undoubtedly late to market. PCIe 3.0 debuted in 2010 within the normal four-year cadence, but PCIe 4.0 isn't projected to land in significant quantities until the end of 2017—a seven-year gap.

PCI-SIG representatives attributed part of the delay to industry stagnation. The PCIe 3.0 interface was sufficient for storage, networking, graphics cards, and other devices, for the first several years after its introduction. Over the last two years, a sudden wellspring of innovation exposed PCIe 3.0's throughput deficiencies. Artificial intelligence craves increased GPU throughput, storage devices are migrating to the PCIe bus with the NVMe protocol, and as a result, networking suddenly has an insatiable appetite for more bandwidth.

The industry needs PCIe 4.0 to land soon, and PCI-SIG assures us it will ratify the new specification by the end of 2017. The sluggish ratification process hasn't hampered adoption entirely, though. Several IP vendors already offer 16GT/s controllers, and many vendors have already implemented PCIe 4.0 PHYs into their next-generation products. These companies are plowing ahead with the 0.9 revision of the specification, whereas the final ratified spec debuts at 1.0. PCI-SIG says it is accelerating the development and feedback processes, along with simplifying early specification revisions, in a bid to reduce time to market for future specifications. PCI-SIG indicates that PCIe 4.0 will be a short-lived specification because the organization has fast-tracked PCIe 5.0 for final release in 2019.

[...] AMD has slated PCIe 4.0 for 2020. We imagine Intel is also chomping at the bit to deploy PCIe 4.0 3D XPoint and NVMe SSDs, but the company remains silent on its timeline.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

After a somewhat successful takeover of BlackBerry devices, TCL Corporation is planning on releasing Palm-branded devices next year:

TCL actually bought the Palm name back in 2014, four years after HP acquired the brand and then shuttered its products a year later after they underperformed. That seemed a tragic end for Palm, which had led the late 90s and 2000s consumer device market with its PDAs and early smartphones, like the Pilot and Pre, respectively. But it looks like TCL is going to introduce an undisclosed number of devices under the Palm name early next year.

That's all we really know, thanks to an interview the company's marketing manager Stefan Streit gave to Android Planet¹. While he wouldn't divulge what kind of devices would be included, he did tease that smartphones could be a possibility. The only other thing he revealed was Palm's intended place in TCL's portfolio. Rather than try to spice up the brand for new consumers, Streit mentioned that the new Palm devices would be geared toward users familiar with the old ones that ruled the gadget world before the new millennium. Whether that impacts their design or just how they'll be marketed is unclear.

It will be interesting to see if they make anything of it, or if it will just be a rebranded handset like the DTEK line. Perhaps they will ship with StyleTap or something similar for all you PalmOS needs.
[1]: Dutch

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SanDisk (Western Digital) has announced a 400 GB MicroSD card for $250:

In 2015, SanDisk released the world's first 200GB microSDXC storage media using TLC flash technology. Today the company announced a successor, the Ultra MicroSDXC UHS-I, which doubles capacity to a massive 400GB housed within a card roughly the size of your finger nail.

This form factor is now the de facto standard for several classes of devices that span a wide range of product types. Most modern cell phones and tablets have standardized on microSD, and the technology has also penetrated other devices, such as drones and game consoles.

This new 400GB model can hold up to 40 hours of Full HD video and has a transfer speed of up to 100 MBps. That comes out to transferring up to 1,200 photos per minute. The card also meets the A1 App Performance Class specification built by the SD Association to ensure high random performance. The specification insists that products carrying the logo can meet or exceed 1,500 random read IOPS and 500 random write IOPS for quick loading of mobile optimized applications.

Time to update your sneakernet bandwidth calculations with this and a 787 Dreamliner.

Also at Engadget, The Verge, and PC Magazine.

Previously: Samsung Announces 256 GB MicroSD Card

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Ars Technica is reporting that 465,000 patients have been told to visit their doctor to patch a critical pacemaker vulnerability.

Cardiac pacemakers are small devices that are implanted in a patient's upper chest to correct abnormal or irregular heart rhythms. Pacemakers are generally outfitted with small radio-frequency equipment so the devices can be maintained remotely. That way, new surgeries aren't required after they're implanted. Like many wireless devices, pacemakers from Abbott Laboratories contain critical flaws that allow hijackers within radio range to seize control while the pacemakers are running.

"If there were a successful attack, an unauthorized individual (i.e., a nearby attacker) could gain access and issue commands to the implanted medical device through radio frequency (RF) transmission capability, and those unauthorized commands could modify device settings (e.g., stop pacing) or impact device functionality," Abbott representatives wrote in an open letter to doctors.

Also covered at Reuters.

The Abbot open letter also highlights that the upgrade process is not flawless:

Based on our previous firmware update experience, as with any software update, there is a very
low rate of malfunction resulting from the update. These risks (and their associated rates) include
but are not limited to:
  * reloading of previous firmware version due to incomplete update (0.161%),
  * loss of currently programmed device settings (0.023%),
  * complete loss of device functionality (0.003%), and
  * loss of diagnostic data (not reported).

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Jolla, of "where's my tablet" fame, has announced a plan the sell their SailfishOS for Sony Xperia X phones as an aftermartket upgrade. From the announcement:

Here are the hard facts you need to know:

Sales start date: September 27, 2017. Product – what you will get:

• Sailfish OS image to flash to your Xperia device – our target is to have the downloadable image ready by October 11
• Android support, predictive text input, and MS exchange support as downloads from Jolla Store to your device
• SW updates for one year, after which a continuation program will follow
• Clear instructions and support for downloads & installation
• Jolla Customer Care service

Availability: EU, Norway, Switzerland; US & CA to be confirmed. Price: 49,90€ (including VAT)

Seems like quite the bizarre move for a company that has lost so much consumer faith.

Seen on Phoronix

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Cory Duplantis of Cisco Talos unearthed a LabVIEW code execution flaw which can be triggered by the victim opening a specially crafted VI file.

LabVIEW, the widely used system design and development platform developed by National Instruments, sports a memory corruption vulnerability that could lead to code execution.

LabVIEW is commonly used for building data acquisition, instrument control, and industrial automation systems on a variety of operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux and Unix.

The vulnerability was discovered by Cory Duplantis of Cisco Talos earlier this year, and reported to the company.

It can be triggered by the victim opening a specially crafted VI file – a proprietary file format that's comparable to the EXE file format.

"Although there is no published specification for the [VI] file format, inspecting the files shows that they contain a section named 'RSRC', presumably containing resource information," Cisco noted.

"Modulating the values within this section of a VI file can cause a controlled looping condition resulting in an arbitrary null write. This vulnerability can be used by an attacker to create a specially crafted VI file that when opened results in the execution of code supplied by the attacker. The consequences of a successful compromise of a system that interacts with the physical world, such as a data acquisition and control systems, may be critical to safety."

More details about the flaw can be found in this report. It affects the latest stable LabVIEW version (LabVIEW 2016 version 16.0), but it's possible that earlier iterations are also vulnerable.

Additional Information:
http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/08/vulnerability-spotlight-code-execution.html
CVE-2017-2779

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/08/30/labview-code-execution-flaw/

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

About 150 people have been treated in hospital and hundreds more affected by an unknown gas which hit the East Sussex coast.

Birling Gap beach was evacuated on Sunday [August 27] after people reported breathing difficulties, stinging eyes and vomiting when a "mist" appeared.

Sussex Police said on Monday morning the gas cloud appeared to have cleared.

Agencies are investigating the cause and have not ruled out either on-shore or off-shore locations.

In the past, chemicals have drifted across from European industrial units, but Sussex Police said: "Weather models suggest that an onshore source in northern France is very unlikely."

The Coastguard said it was working with its French counterparts and looking into vessels that were in the area at the time.

East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service said it was "extremely unlikely" the substance involved was chlorine.

First it was a sonic attack on US diplomats in Cuba, now potentially a chemical attack on British beach goers. What gives?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm574058.htm

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a historic action today making the first gene therapy available in the United States, ushering in a new approach to the treatment of cancer and other serious and life-threatening diseases.

The FDA approved Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) for certain pediatric and young adult patients with a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).

"We're entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient's own cells to attack a deadly cancer," said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. "New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold out the potential to transform medicine and create an inflection point in our ability to treat and even cure many intractable illnesses. At the FDA, we're committed to helping expedite the development and review of groundbreaking treatments that have the potential to be life-saving."

Kymriah, a cell-based gene therapy, is approved in the United States for the treatment of patients up to 25 years of age with B-cell precursor ALL that is refractory or in second or later relapse.

Kymriah is a genetically-modified autologous T-cell immunotherapy. Each dose of Kymriah is a customized treatment created using an individual patient's own T-cells, a type of white blood cell known as a lymphocyte. The patient's T-cells are collected and sent to a manufacturing center where they are genetically modified to include a new gene that contains a specific protein (a chimeric antigen receptor or CAR) that directs the T-cells to target and kill leukemia cells that have a specific antigen (CD19) on the surface. Once the cells are modified, they are infused back into the patient to kill the cancer cells.

Also at NPR, CNN, BBC, and FierceBiotech.
Novartis press release.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A Game You Can Control With Your Mind

When you pull the headset over your eyes and the game begins, you are transported to a tiny room with white walls. Your task is to break out of the room, but you cannot use your hands. There is no joystick or game pad. You must use your thoughts.

You turn toward a ball on the floor, and your brain sends a command to pick it up. With another thought, you send the ball crashing into a mirror, breaking the glass and revealing a few numbers scribbled on a wall. You mentally type those numbers into a large keypad by the door. And you are out.

Designed by Neurable, a small start-up founded by Ramses Alcaide, an electrical engineer and neuroscientist, the game offers what you might call a computer mouse for the mind, a way of selecting items in a virtual world with your thoughts.

Incorporating a headset with virtual reality goggles and sensors that can read your brain waves, this prototype is a few years from the market. And it is limited in what it can do. You cannot select an object with your mind unless you first look in its general direction, narrowing the number of items you may be considering.

But it works. I recently played the game, which has the working title Awakening, when Mr. Alcaide and two Neurable employees passed through San Francisco, and a few hundred others tried it this month at the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Los Angeles.

The prototype is among the earliest fruits of a widespread effort to embrace technology that was once science fiction — and in some ways still is. Driven by recent investments from the United States government and by the herd mentality that so often characterizes the tech world, a number of a start-ups and bigger companies like Facebook are working on ways to mentally control machines. They are also looking for smoother ways to use virtual reality technology.

"Neurotechnology has become cool," said Ed Boyden, a professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the M.I.T. Media Lab who advises one of those start-ups.

The article also discusses Elon Musk's company Neuralink.

Related: Elon Musk Launches Company to Link Your Brain to a Computer
Neuralink Aims to Market a Brain-Computer Interface Product Within 4 Years
Brain-Computer Interfaces Revolutionized Using Silicon Electronics
University Researchers Band Together to "Make Girls Moe"

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to The Guardian Google is a major funder of the New America Foundation, some researchers of which criticized monopolies and lauded the EU for levying a record fine for Google for antitrust reasons. This apparently wasn't received well at the advertisement company and subsequently the team who did the research got the boot.

Now might be a good time to consider your dependence on all services GOOG.

The New America Foundation is one of the leading left-leaning policy groups in the US and is led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, an author, foreign policy analyst and political scientist. In June, Barry Lynn, a senior fellow who led the thinktank's Open Markets initiative, wrote a blogpost praising the EU's decision to levy a record €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules and abusing its market dominance. "Google's market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today," Lynn wrote.

According to The New York Times, shortly after the post was published Schmidt, who chaired New America until 2016, contacted Slaughter to communicate his displeasure.

The blogpost was temporarily removed from New America's website before being reposted. Days later, Slaughter told Lynn that "the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways", according to an email from Slaughter to Lynn obtained by the Times. Slaughter said the decision was "in no way based on the content of your work" although she she accused Lynn of "imperiling the institution as a whole".

New America has received roughly $21m from Google, Schmidt and his family foundation since 1999. The organisation's main conference room in Washington DC is called the Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.

Lynn and his 10-strong team have now set up Citizens Against Monopoly. "Is Google trying to censor journalists and researchers who fight dangerous monopolies?" the website asks. "Sadly, the answer is: YES."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Residents near a chemical plant in Crosby, TX — approximately 25 miles (40km) northeast of Houston — have been evacuated due to the possibility of an explosion:

Arkema SA expects chemicals to catch fire or explode at its heavily flooded plant in Crosby, Texas in the coming days because the plant has lost power to its chemical cooling systems, a company official said on Wednesday.

The company evacuated remaining workers on Tuesday, and Harris County ordered the evacuation of residents in a 1.5-mile(2.4-km) radius of the plant that makes organic peroxides used in the production of plastic resins, polystyrene, paints and other products.

Richard Rowe, chief executive officer of Arkema's North America unit, told reporters that chemicals on the site will catch fire and explode if they are not properly cooled.

Arkema expects that to happen within the next six days as temperatures rise. He said the company has no way to prevent that because the plant is swamped by about 6 feet (1.83 m) of water due to flooding from Harvey, which came ashore in Texas last week as a powerful Category 4 hurricane.

"Materials could now explode and cause a subsequent and intense fire. The high water that exists on site, and the lack of power, leave us with no way to prevent it," Rowe said. He said he believes a fire would be "largely sustained on our site but we are trying to be conservative."

From the company's web site:

Our Crosby facility makes organic peroxides, a family of compounds that are used in everything from making pharmaceuticals to construction materials. But organic peroxides may burn if not stored and handled under the right conditions. At Crosby, we prepared for what we recognized could be a worst case scenario. We had redundant contingency plans in place. Right now, we have an unprecedented 6 feet of water at the plant. We have lost primary power and two sources of emergency backup power. As a result, we have lost critical refrigeration of the materials on site that could now explode and cause a subsequent intense fire. The high water and lack of power leave us with no way to prevent it. We have evacuated our personnel for their own safety. The federal, state and local authorities were contacted a few days ago, and we are working very closely with them to manage this matter. They have ordered the surrounding community to be evacuated, too.

Also at ABC and The Washington Post.

Original Submission

[Update 1]: Fluorine (the web front end) has been back in the rotation since last night and we'll be checking on and bringing up Neon (the db node) tonight. Cross your fingers because if we can't get Neon up and happy by Friday 10:00 PM EDT^[*], we'll have to temporarily down the site and copy the db over to our dev server to even keep the site online until we can get a db node back up.

[Update 2]: NC: I successfully CPRed neon, and was able to bring the DB cluster back into sync. I've stopped helium's database services so we're running on neon only now, and getting ready to migrate it after installing updates and such. With luck nothing blows up.

[Update 3]: Nothing blew up. All should be copacetic except for needing to update Neon tomorrow sometime.

* That's the deadline they've given us to move Helium (our other db node) over to the Dallas 2 facility, or they'll do it automatically themselves.

martyb writes:

As most of you are already aware, Linode is our web hosting provider. A recent email from them informed us:

We recently announced our new Dallas 2 facility. Over the coming months, we'll be migrating all Linodes to this new, state-of-the-art facility. We're reaching out to let you know your Linode has been entered into a migration queue to move from Dallas 1 to Dallas 2.

We were informed in a separate email that the neon and helium servers were scheduled for an automatic migration. Manual migration was possible, if preferred. That's no big deal as we have redundancy on those servers. The site should continue functioning without a hiccup.

About an hour ago, we received another email saying that fluorine (one of our two web front ends) was also scheduled for migration. That one is a bit more interesting as that server also runs ipnd¹ and slashd² — daemons for which we have no redundancy.

Well, NCommander, TheMightyBuzzard and I happened to be on IRC at the same time as the fluorine migration notice arrived. No time like the present! So fluorine has been migrated. While we were at it, why not migrate neon, too? About 10 minutes later and that was been completed, as well. We discussed whether to migrate helium as well, but decided to hold off.

We did not anticipate any problems... but we found some pages loaded slowly and we were occasionally getting 403 and 503 errors. There are some issues with slower communications between the data centers than what we had within the same data center. Thanks to redundancy, it is not critical we get everything back up and running for the site to run, but it would definitely be best to not run in this configuration indefinitely.

The current state of the world? "one web frontend and one db node are shitting themselves. we're limping along on one of each but with backups in case of emergency." and... "fluorine is technically up but not in the rotation for serving up pages. it's just doing slashd and ipnd."

Hat tip to NCommander and TheMightyBuzzard -- I really enjoy watching these guys in action -- they know their stuff and we are truly fortunate to have them volunteer on SoylentNews.

[1] Instant Payments Notification Daemon
[2] The Daemon that makes it all work

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Seems that astronomers have located the nova remnant of a star that exploded some 600 years ago.

According to Space.com:

After decades of hunting, astronomers have tracked down the origin of a nova first recorded by Korean royal astrologers nearly 600 years ago.

Evidently, Korean records are slightly different than more recent Western ones:

When the researchers first looked about three decades ago where the records seemed to say the nova was, they could not find it: "It turns out we were looking in the wrong place," Shara said. "When it comes to analyzing ancient records, it can be a challenge interpreting them correctly."

Of course, what is more interesting, is that a Nova Stella, a new star that is clearly visible, was recorded in Korea, but not in Europe. A similar situation exists with the "guest star" that resulted in the Crab Nebula, which exploded in 1054, and was recorded by Chinese astronomers. This was a supernova, and the star was so bright it could be seen during daylight, but no mention of it exists in European records.

Aristotelian doctrine, and that of the Church, was that the Heavens were unchanging, so comets were very disturbing, and new stars so unthinkable that they could not be seen? And it was Tycho Brahe and Kepler's discovery of Stella Novae that set the stage for modern astronomy.

Other coverage, including info on "dwarf nova" erupting at the same system.

Proper-motion age dating of the progeny of Nova Scorpii AD 1437 (DOI: 10.1038/nature23644) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/29/politics/turkish-embassy-indictments/index.html

A DC grand jury returned indictments against 15 Turkish security officials and four other individuals Tuesday on charges of attacking protesters during an incident outside the Turkish ambassador's residence on May 16, 2017. The violence took place during Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit to the US.

CNN previously reported that nine people were injured in the melee, though witness and Turkish authorities have offered conflicting accounts of who was involved and who was to blame. All defendants were also indicted with "bias crime enhancements" -- referring to hate crimes -- to the charges.

The Turkish embassy says the protesters were affiliated with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which is a designated terror group in Turkey, the US and Europe, and has been engaged in a 30-year conflict with the Turkish government. Turkey alleges the protesters "began aggressively provoking Turkish-American citizens who had peacefully assembled to greet the President." In June, DC Police Chief Peter Newsham said that "there's no indication at all that the protesters were a terrorist group."

Also at Reuters and The Hill.

Previously: Violence at Turkish Embassy in Washington
Erdogan Decries 'Unacceptable' US Arrest Warrants for Staff in Washington Brawl

Original Submission