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Phoenix666 writes:

Science Magazine:

For the 19 December test, U.S. Department of Energy researchers set off a 50-ton chemical explosion roughly 300 meters underground to generate a magnitude-3 or -4 tremor—partly to verify the agency’s ability to detect underground nuclear explosions. But researchers also lofted two helium-filled balloons over the site, one tethered and another free floating, each a few hundred meters above the ground. The balloons carried barometers to measure changes in atmospheric pressure and detect the earthquake’s infrasound waves, low-frequency acoustic vibrations below the threshold of human hearing.

A similar setup could one day float high in the atmosphere of Venus. At the planet’s surface, conditions are infernal: Temperatures are high enough to melt lead, and pressures are so overwhelming that they would crush a submarine. It would be hard for any lander to survive long enough to detect a tremor. But 50 kilometers above the surface, temperatures and pressures are remarkably clement, perfect for a long-lived balloon (aside from a touch of sulfuric acid in the greenhouse atmosphere, which is 96% carbon dioxide). In 1985, the Soviet Union showed it could be done, flying two balloons for 2.5 days in this layer. They only stopped recording data when their batteries ran out.

Five Weeks in a Balloon, Venusian style.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Venture Beat:

The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privacy watchdogs.

Narendra Modi’s government late Thursday broadened the scope of Section 69 of the nation’s IT Act, 2000 to require a subscriber, service provider, or any person in charge of a computer to “extend all facilities and technical assistance to the agencies.” Failure to comply with the agencies could result in seven years of imprisonment and an unspecified fine.

In a clarification posted today, the Ministry of Home Affairs said each case of interception, monitoring, and decryption is to be approved by the competent authority, which is the Union Home Secretary.

The move should do wonders for the Indian IT industry.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

The roast Christmas dinner is a valued tradition for many families in the UK and across the globe.

The health implications and environmental impacts of our diet have now become a regular discussion topic, with sustainable dietary advice recommending that we reduce meat consumption and increase the amount of plant-based proteins, fruits and vegetables we eat.

But what does this practically mean at Christmas? And how can we make our Christmas dinner more sustainable? Here are some tips to help you reduce the environmental impact of your Christmas feast.

tl;dr; eat turkey, cook it with sous vide, nuke the potatoes and veggies, eat what you take. Thank goodness no more recommendations to eat insects; they must have finally conceded that dog won't hunt...

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Two arrested after drones delay flights and force cancellations at Gatwick Airport

UK police say they have made two arrests in connection with criminal drone activity at Gatwick Airport, and urged the public and passengers around the airport to remain vigilant. Britain's second-largest airport reopened on Friday after a mystery saboteur wrought 36 hours of travel chaos for more than 100,000 Christmas travellers by using drones to play cat-and-mouse with police snipers and the army. [...] The defence ministry refused to comment on what technology was deployed, but drone experts said airports needed to deploy specialist radar reinforced by thermal imaging technology to detect such unmanned flying vehicles.

See also: Gatwick drones: Two arrested over flight disruption

A 47-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman, from Crawley, were arrested in the town at about 22:00 GMT on Friday.

Previously: Army Called in Amid UK Drone Chaos (Updated)

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Phoenix666 writes:

El Reg:

Some technologies lurking under the 5G umbrella promise to reshape the entire communications sector, creating new uses and businesses we can't imagine today. Ofcom showed it was hip to a few of these this week with a radical new way of opening up the airwaves.

Ofcom is allowing bidders to run their own local low-power networks at a very low cost, like selling electricity you generate at home back to the National Grid. And this won't even need 5G.

This was announced alongside Ofcom's 700MHz/3.4GHz spectrum auction on 18 December. It's a consultation on sharing three bands of spectrum with a new bidding model. So if you're a campus or an enterprise, a large public space around a town hall, theatre or stadium, you may be able to bid to run your own low-power local network, accessible using popular radio equipment such as a smartphone. Even temporary uses – "Glasto-net"* – are possible.

The Telecoms won't like this.

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Phoenix666 writes:

New Atlas:

It's tricky to routinely inspect jet engines and other machines without taking them apart, which is a costly and time-consuming process. Now, a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute has developed small, insect-like robots that can climb inside and through machines to inspect them, saving the trouble of pulling them apart if there's nothing that needs fixing.

The robots are based on the team's previous creation, which they call the Harvard Ambulatory Micro-Robot (HAMR). These small, four-legged robots scurry around like insects, and a more recent version gained the ability to walk across the surface of water.

The latest model has been named HAMR-E, where the E stands for Electro-adhesion. To climb vertical surfaces and cling upside down, the robots have new footpads that stick to the metallic surfaces through electrostatic forces. The pads are made of a polyimide-insulated copper electrode, and the robots can switch the electric field off to lift each foot off the surface, before turning it back on when it takes the next step. These pads are also flexible, so as to let the bots climb curved surfaces – a handy skill, inside a jet engine.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New Atlas:

It was just this July that Japan's Yanmar Agri Corporation unveiled a line of driverless agricultural tractors. Now, as part of the same Smartpilot system, the company has announced an autonomous rice seedling-transplanter.

Known as the YR8D, A, the new diesel-powered vehicle is wirelessly programmed/monitored via an included waterproof 10.1-inch tablet. It can operate in either of two modes, depending on rice paddy conditions and other factors.

In Linear Mode, it automatically moves in straight lines through the paddy, with an onboard driver manually steering the vehicle through the turn-arounds at the end of each row. In Auto Mode, it's able to remain completely driverless, handling the turns on its own. Additionally, its seedling-planting mechanism automatically moves up and down in response to the level of the terrain.

Just in time to solve the labor shortage in rice production.

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Phoenix666 writes:

The Ringer:

The product of three exhausting and exhilarating years of labor by a team of roughly 15 people who didn’t know enough to be daunted by the task they undertook, Baldur’s Gate was a genre-stretching, disc-space-testing hybrid that broke new narrative, technical, and gameplay ground and established the identity of one of the past two decades’ most storied studios. “It just redefined expectations of what a role-playing game could be,” Oster says. “I think it really relaunched the whole concept of what a Western RPG is.”

Was Baldur's Gate that important, or just a reprise of Ultima?

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

The FBI has seized control of 15 websites that let people pay to knock individuals and other sites offline.

The so-called booters sought to swamp targets with huge amounts of data in what are known as distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Three US men have been charged with allegedly offering DDoS services.

"DDoS-for-hire services such as these pose a significant national threat," US Attorney for Alaska Bryan Schroder said in a statement.

The FBI says more than 200,000 attacks have been launched via just one booter site.

Did the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) just paint a giant DDoS target on its back?

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

In 2003, scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Center made the first-ever detection of trace amounts of methane in Mars' atmosphere, a find which was confirmed a year later by the ESA's Mars Express orbiter. In December of 2014, the Curiosity rover detected a tenfold spike of methane at the base of the Gale Crater, and uncovered evidence that indicated that Mars has a seasonal methane cycle, where levels peak in the late northern summer.

The existence of methane gas on Mars has been long been held to be potential evidence for the existence of past or present life. So it was quite the downer last week (on Dec. 12th) when the science team behind one of the ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spectrometers announced that they had found no traces of methane in Mars' atmosphere.

Maybe the Martians are hiding.

Original Submission

hendrikboom writes:

It appears Facebook has a tool for automatically suggesting bug fixes.

• Facebook has built a tool called Getafix that automatically finds fixes for bugs and offers them to engineers to approve. This allows engineers to work more effectively, and it promotes better overall code quality.
• We believe Getafix is the first tool of its kind to be deployed to production at Facebook scale, contributing to the stability and performance of apps that billions of people use.
• Getafix powers Sapfix, which suggests fixes for bugs that our Sapienz testing tool finds. Getafix also provides fixes for bugs found by Infer, our static testing tool.
• Because Getafix learns from engineers’ past code fixes, its recommendations are intuitive for engineers to review.
• Getafix improves upon previous auto-fix technology by using more powerful techniques for learning fix patterns from past code changes. Getafix uses a more powerful clustering algorithm and also analyzes the context around the particular lines of problematic code to find more appropriate fixes.

I wonder how easy it is to start accepting fixes without properly examining them. I wonder if the time saved in actually coding the fix is irrelevant compared with the time you would otherwise take to find the correct fix.

It will easily fix the obvious symptoms of a bug without addressing the real problem. The illusion of productivity.

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takyon writes:

U.S., Supporting Mexico's Plan, Will Invest $5.8 Billion in Central America

The United States, joining an effort by Mexico, will commit to investing billions in Central America in hopes of ending the poverty, violence and drug-trafficking that are driving thousands of people in the region to undertake the difficult trek to the United States, the State Department announced on Tuesday.

Mexico's new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, introduced what he called a "Marshall Plan" last week to address the root causes of Central American migration: a $30 billion initiative to invest in the region and welcome migrants into Mexico with visas, health care and employment.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration signaled its support for the plan, saying it was committing $5.8 billion in private and public investments in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Much of that amount, however, was previously committed or contingent on the identification of "commercially viable projects."

Also at The Washington Post and The Hill.

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18149120/google-lens-ai-camera-recognize-detect-1-billion-items

Google's AI-powered camera tool can now recognize over a billion items, the company wrote in a new blog post. Google Lens launched last year in a preliminary version on Photos and Assistant with only around 250,000 items within its repertoire.

The expansion comes over a year after the Google Lens' optical character recognition engine has been trained on reading more product labels. By recognizing text, Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods. It has also been fed more data from photos taken by smartphones, so Google says the feature is overall more reliable than before.

The 1 billion items figure comes from products available through Google Shopping, so it likely doesn't include more obscure, unshoppable objects, such as a gaming console from the 1990s or the first edition of a rare book. But it covers a huge range of things that could appease someone who's simply just looking up an item they're curious about.

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takyon writes:

Altria board approves $13 billion investment in e-cigarette company Juul

Altria's board of directors has approved its $12.8 billion investment in leading e-cigarette manufacturer Juul, with a formal announcement planned for Thursday before market open, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Juul's board is meeting to consider the deal.

Tobacco giant Altria will invest $12.8 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul, which values the e-cigarette company at $38 billion, the people said. The deal combines the maker of the best-selling cigarette with the best-selling e-cigarette and comes as both companies are under pressure.

The deal marks a turning point for Juul. The company has positioned itself as anti-tobacco, with a mission to help to wean adults off combustible cigarettes, which are responsible for killing about half a million Americans every year. With this deal, though, it will be partly owned by one of the world's biggest tobacco giants.

As such, Juul stipulated a number of conditions to help ensure the Altria deal furthers its goals. As part of the agreement, Altria would add Juul coupons to Marlboro and other cigarette packs and give Juul some of its prime shelf space, the people familiar said.

Also at NYT, Reuters, and The Verge.

See also: Marlboro maker Altria nears deal to take 35 percent stake in leading e-cigarette company Juul, sources say
$1.3 million: the average bonus Juul employees get after a deal with a cigarette maker

[$38 billion] makes Juul Labs Inc. more valuable than Airbnb and Elon Musk's SpaceX, according to Bloomberg News.

Previously: E-Cig Maker Juul Valued at $15-16 Billion
FDA Raided E-Cigarette Maker Juul to Look for Evidence That the Company Targets Minors
Juul Boosts Lobbying Spending as Potential E-Cigarette Regulations Loom
Marlboro Owner Invests $1.8 Billion in Cannabis Company

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Recent upgrades that depend on the new Linux getrandom() syscall can cause OpenSSH to delay starting for tens of minutes while waiting for enough bytes of randomness. There are currently not any feasible work-arounds.

Systemd makes this behaviour worse, see issue #4271, #4513 and #10621.
Basically as of now the entropy file saved as /var/lib/systemd/random-seed will not - drumroll - add entropy to the random pool when played back during boot. Actually it will. It will just not be accounted for. So Linux doesn't know. And continues blocking getrandom(). This is obviously different from SysVinit times when /var/lib/urandom/random-seed (that you still have laying around on updated systems) made sure the system carried enough entropy over reboot to continue working right after enough of the system was booted.

#4167 is a re-opened discussion about systemd eating randomness early at boot (hashmaps in PID 0...). Some Debian folks participate in the recent discussion and it is worth reading if you want to learn about the mess that booting a Linux system has become.

While we're talking systemd ... #10676 also means systems will use RDRAND in the future despite Ted Ts'o's warning on RDRAND [Archive.org mirror and mirrored locally as 130905_Ted_Tso_on_RDRAND.pdf, 205kB as Google+ will be discontinued in April 2019].

Related post: OneRNG: a Fully-Open Entropy Generator (2014)

Original Submission