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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey

Next week, NASA is scheduled to send human technology closer to a star than ever before. What they learn could change our understanding of, well, the whole galaxy.

The Parker Solar Probe is a mission set to orbit the Sun at just 3.8 million miles. Compare that to Earth's average distance of 93 million miles, or Mercury's average distance of 36 million miles. The spacecraft will need to shield itself from temperatures as high as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit in order to find answers to the many questions scientists still have about our Sun and stars in general.

"The message is simple," Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told Gizmodo. "By understanding our Sun in this way, [it will] connect the dots between how the Sun works, how it affects the Earth and other worlds throughout the Solar System, and... how we look at planetary systems around other stars."

[...] The probe is at Cape Canaveral, loaded into a Delta IV heavy rocket. Following its August 11-at-the-earliest launch, it will hurtle towards the Solar System's center at speeds as fast as 430,000 miles per hour, according to a NASA fact sheet. It will pass our neighboring planet Venus seven times for a gravitationally assisted slow down, studying our gassy neighbor along the way, before arriving at its final solar orbit.

[...] The mission comes with extreme challenges that the project engineers have done their best to prepare for. An 8-foot-wide, 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield protects the probe, keeping its instruments at a cozy 85 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA. The outside face of the shield is coated with white ceramic paint to further reflect heat away from the probe.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/nasas-sun-probe-set-to-launch-next-week-on-its-journey-1828053654

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takyon writes:

NASA's New Horizons team will again attempt observations of a stellar occultation of 2014 MU₆₉, provisionally nicknamed Ultima Thule. Previous observations made when the object passed in front of a background star suggested that it was a contact binary and may have a small moon:

The goal is to learn as much as possible about 2014 MU₆₉, nicknamed Ultima Thule, which New Horizons will zoom past on Jan. 1, 2019. "This occultation will give us hints about what to expect at Ultima Thule and help us refine our flyby plans," New Horizons occultation-event leader Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement.

This is not the mission team's first shadow rodeo. Last summer, scientists traveled to Argentina and South Africa for occultation observations; the Argentina crew hit the jackpot, gathering data that helped set the planned flyby distance at 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers).

[...] Ultima Thule lies about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km) beyond Pluto, which New Horizons famously flew by in July 2015. Scientists think Ultima Thule is about 20 miles (32 km) across if it's a single object; if it's two bodies, each component is probably 9 miles to 12 miles (15 to 21 km) long.

An occultation was used to determine that the dwarf planet Haumea may have a ring system in addition to its two known moons.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

KTLA-TV reports:

As authorities sifted the rubble from the fire that burned more than 1,000 residences in Shasta County, they were startled by what they encountered. A soaring transmission tower was tipped over. Tiles were torn off the roofs of homes. Massive trees were uprooted.

Vehicles were moved. In one spot, a fence post was bent around a tree, with the bark on one side sheared off.

[...] This was not typical wildfire damage. Rather, it was strong evidence of a giant, powerful spinning vortex that accompanied the Carr fire on July 26. The tornado-like condition, lasting an hour and a half and fueled by extreme heat and intensely dry brush as California heats up to record levels, was captured in dramatic videos that have come to symbolize the destructive power of what is now California's sixth-most destructive fire.

Wikipedia has an article on fire whirls.

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Fnord666 writes:

Identity theft protection firm LifeLock — a company that's built a name for itself based on the promise of helping consumers protect their identities online — may have actually exposed customers to additional attacks from ID thieves and phishers. The company just fixed a vulnerability on its site that allowed anyone with a Web browser to index email addresses associated with millions of customer accounts, or to unsubscribe users from all communications from the company.

The upshot of this weakness is that cyber criminals could harvest the data and use it in targeted phishing campaigns that spoof LifeLock's brand. Of course, phishers could spam the entire world looking for LifeLock customers without the aid of this flaw, but nevertheless the design of the company's site suggests that whoever put it together lacked a basic understanding of Web site authentication and security.

Source: Krebs on Security

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takyon writes:

Huawei Declares Ambition to Be No.1 After Dethroning Apple

Huawei Technologies Co., which just edged past Apple Inc. to become the world's second-largest smartphone maker, wants to be top of the heap before the end of 2019.

The Chinese giant shipped more than 95 million phones in the first six months, up about 30 percent from a year earlier. Consumer division chief Richard Yu on Friday said he wants Huawei to be No. 1 in smartphones by the fourth quarter of next year, with a market share of more than 20 percent -- despite acknowledging its virtual absence in a pivotal U.S. market.

Huawei this year overcame a global slump by grabbing sales from Apple and current leader Samsung Electronics Co. The fast-growing consumer division has helped Huawei, the leader in global telecommunications equipment, get past lackluster demand from carriers globally. Despite barely making a dent in the U.S., it's managed to build a strong presence in $600-plus phones in markets from Europe to Africa, which in turn allowed it to break Apple's and Samsung's years-long stranglehold on the global market.

Also at WSJ, Business Insider, and CNBC.

See also: Global tablet sales decline, with only Apple and Huawei showing growth

Related: Huawei CEO Still Committed to the U.S. Market
Rural Wireless Association Opposes U.S. Government Ban on Huawei and ZTE Equipment
Huawei Has Ended Support for Unlocking Bootloaders on Its Devices
Apple Becomes First US Company to Exceed $1 Trillion Market Capitalization

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takyon writes:

North Korea continuing nuclear programme - UN report

North Korea has not stopped its nuclear and missile programmes, violating UN sanctions, a report commissioned by the UN Security Council says. It also says Pyongyang has resorted to a "massive increase" of illegal ship-to-ship transfers of oil products and has been trying to sell weapons abroad.

The confidential report by a panel of independent experts was submitted to the UN Security Council on Friday. North Korea has so far not commented on the document's findings.

Last week, US officials said Pyongyang appeared to be building new ballistic missiles despite recent warming ties with US President Donald Trump's administration and pledges to denuclearise. Unnamed US officials told the Washington Post that spy satellites had spotted continuing activity at a site that has produced ballistic missiles.

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Fnord666 writes:

A SIM swap is when a cellphone carrier transfers a phone number to a new SIM card. This happens all the time for legitimate reasons when customers change phones or carriers and want to keep their number, or when they lose their phone. [...] Sometimes, criminals perform these hacks by tricking customer representatives into believing they are the targets. Other times, according to several people involved in the SIM hijacking community, researchers who have investigated it, and one recent reported case, criminals use what they call "plugs": telecom company insiders who get paid to perform illegal swaps.

"Everyone uses them," someone who claimed to be a SIM hijacker told me in a recent chat. "When you tell someone they can make money, they do it."

How criminals find the employees in the first place can vary. Some SIM hijackers I spoke to told me they approach them through shared friends in real life, others told me they just comb LinkedIn, Reddit or social media sites, such as it happened with Dixon.

[...] "This is not new," Dixon told me, referring to SIM swapping. "T-Mobile has had this issue for years and they seem to not be doing anything about it."

It's unclear how long these "plugs" last. In theory, carriers should have systems in place to check which employee was behind an unauthorized port out or SIM swap. Moe The God, a hacker who recently took over the Twitter account of a pro wrestler by hijacking his phone number, told me he has one insider at AT&T and one at Verizon. The first has been working for him since February, the second one since April.

"I just pay them," the hacker told me in an online chat.

Source: MotherBoard

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Fnord666 writes:

Standalone navigation devices are a dying breed. These days vehicles tend to have navigators plumbed into their dashboards, and as long as there's a smartphone to hand... well, there's an app for that. Demand for the devices nosedived years ago, but the technology underpinning them is alive and well, floating out there in space. What we all know as GPS wasn't operational until the mid '90s, though this was predated by Transit, the first satellite-based geolocation network completed in the '60s. But the first automated in-car navigation system was developed long before we had the technology to put anything into space.

The concept of the modern navigator can be traced back to the early 1930s and the creation of the Iter-Auto. Manufactured by an Italian company based in Rome, the contraption was designed to be mounted to your car's dashboard and loaded with routes printed on long paper scrolls. It was hooked up to the vehicle's speedometer, and so the scroll would wind automatically in proportion with distance travelled. The maps themselves also included alerts of upcoming road features, like bridges and level crossings, as well as garages, hotels and such -- much like their digital equivalents today.

Source: Engadget

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Fnord666 writes:

With help from dedicated hardware boxes, live streaming piracy has seen a massive user growth in recent years.

While there are hundreds of free live streaming sites and tools, there's also a huge market for paid pirate services, which charge a fraction of the cost of their legal counterparts.

One company that has kept a close eye on these developments is Irdeto. The anti-piracy outfit has assisted copyright holders and law enforcement on several occasions and has helped bring down some of the largest offenders.

However, the problem isn't going away, not even when criminal law enforcement gets involved. One of the problems is that it's relatively easy for pirate IPTV providers to operate in the open, helped by reputable payment processors such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.

This is one of the main conclusions of research published by Irdeto this week.

Source: TorrentFreak

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takyon writes:

Bacteria are becoming resistant to alcohol-based disinfectants:

Because of the growing numbers of so-called superbugs, hospitals have introduced more stringent cleaning routines. Part of the regimen involves alcohol-based disinfectants, such as hand rubs, positioned in and around hospital wards. Since their introduction, there has been a significant reduction in the number of hospital-based infections. Containing 70 percent isopropyl or ethyl alcohol, alcohol-based hand rubs kill bacteria quickly and effectively.

Over recent years, researchers have noted a steady rise in the number of serious infections caused by one particular drug-resistant bacterium — Enterococcus faecium. Despite the wide use of alcohol-based disinfectants, E. faecium is now a leading cause of hospital-acquired infections. Dr. Sacha Pidot and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia set out to understand whether this increased infection rate might be because the bacterium is growing resistant to alcohol. Their findings were published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine [DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aar6115] [DX].

Also at Live Science.

Increasing tolerance of hospital Enterococcus faecium to handwash alcohols:

takyon writes:

AMD Creates Quad Core Zen SoC with 24 Vega CUs for Chinese Consoles

AMD has cornered the x86 console market with its handy semi-custom mix of processors and graphics. While we slowly await the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, today AMD and Zhongshan Subor announced that a custom chip has been made for a new gaming PC and an upcoming console for the Chinese market.

The announcement states that a custom chip has been created for Subor that is based on four Zen cores running at 3.0 GHz and 24 compute units of Vega running at 1.3 GHz. The chip is supported by 8GB of GDDR5 memory, which the press release states is also embedded onto the chip, however it is likely to actually be on the package instead. Compare this to the specifications of AMD's current SoC designs, such as the Ryzen 5 2400G, which has four Zen cores and 11 Vega CUs. Or Intel's multi-chip design featuring four Intel cores and an AMD-based 24 compute unit GPU paired with 4GB of HBM2 memory. There is also AMD's Vega Mobile chip, which is expected to be in the 24-32 compute unit range, however this is also paired with 4GB of HBM2.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Home retail chain Brookstone has filed for bankruptcy for the second time since 2014 after more than four decades of business. Barring 35 airport locations, all of its US outlets will be shut down.

For many, Brookstone's exit from the shopping scene may be as bittersweet as when The Sharper Image closed its doors in 2008, or SkyMall's demise seven years later. Its quirky assemblage of non-essentials -- 3D printing pens, Parrot AR Drones and gigantic Dance Dance Revolution remote controls -- offered customers a welcome escape from the throes of everyday life, and a chance to buy obscure gifts.

[...] Brookstone's CEO Piau Phang Foo said it was a 'difficult' decision to shut down mall stores, but is still keen to continue operations "with a smaller physical footprint". So Brookstone hasn't been completely extinguished from the retail map -- you'll just need to seek out its novelty products online from now on.

Source: Engadget

Original Submission

NASA Announces Astronauts for First Commercial Crew Missions

Fnord666 writes:

Today, NASA announced the astronaut selection for the first Commercial Crew flights, which will finally restore the ability to launch astronauts from American soil. Boeing's first test flight, which is scheduled for mid-2019, will have Eric Boe, social media-savvy astronaut Chris Ferguson and rookie Nicole Aunapu Mann on board. SpaceX's inaugural Crew Dragon voyage, targeting April 2019, will have Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins as crew.

NASA also announced the astronauts for the first missions, which will be long-duration and dock with the International Space Station. Suni Williams, who is best known for running the Boston Marathon on an ISS treadmill, will be joined by rookie astronaut Josh Cassada. And finally, the second SpaceX demo flight will be crewed by Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

Source: Engadget

NASA Names First Astronauts to Fly on American Spacecraft; SpaceX Poised to Fly Crew Before Boeing

takyon writes:

NASA has selected nine American astronauts who will fly on SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner:

Fnord666 writes:

A school board in South Carolina has launched a pilot program to get rid of snow days and instead have students work from home when the weather turns treacherous. Beyond depriving schoolkids of the joys of weather-enforced truancy, the plan will exacerbate the region's digital divide for student who don't have internet access at home.

Anderson County School District Five will be the first region to participate in the pilot program this upcoming school year. In the past, Anderson County had makeup days tacked on to the end of the school year in lieu of days missed due to bad weather, but most kids ended up just skipping them, according to a local news report.

Students from grades 3 through 12 in the school board are already given Chromebooks to use at home, so in the event of a snow day or other inclement weather that causes a shutdown, kids will be expected to log on from home, communicate with teachers, and complete assignments.

Source: MotherBoard

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Maps now zooms out to a globe instead of a flat Earth

Google is finished thinking two-dimensionally with Maps and now shows the Earth as a globe rather than a flat "Mercator" projection as before. You won't notice the change when you first open the app, but if you zoom out far enough, you'll eventually get a moon's-eye view of our world. That means you'll see the world in a more realistic way: "With 3D Globe Mode on Google Maps desktop, Greenland's projection is no longer the size of Africa," Google Maps said on Twitter.

Also at TechCrunch.

Original Submission