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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:43 | Votes:95

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @11:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the blinded-by-even-more-distant-oncoming-traffic dept.

Bloomberg:

Most people don’t turn on their car’s headlights and think, I wish they were brighter. Shuji Nakamura is not most people.

The Nobel Prize-winning illumination scientist has spent the past five years developing a laser-based lighting system. His company, SLD Laser, says the new design is 10 times brighter than today’s LED lights, capable of illuminating objects a kilometer away while using less power than any current technology. And unlike a regular, dumb headlight, the laser can potentially be integrated into current and forthcoming driver-assistance systems.

Do headlights need to be brighter?


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-files-are-belong-to-us dept.

Oh, SSH, IT Please see This: Malicious Servers can Fsck With Your PC's Files During scp Slurps

A decades-old oversight in the design of Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) tools can be exploited by malicious servers to unexpectedly alter victims' files on their client machines, it has emerged.

F-Secure's Harry Sintonen discovered a set of five CVE-listed vulnerabilities, which can be abused by evil servers to overwrite arbitrary files on a computer connected via SCP. If you use a vulnerable version of OpenSSH's scp, PuTTY's PSCP, or WinSCP, to securely transfer files from a remote server, that server may be able to secretly tamper with files on your local box that you do not expect the server to change.

[...] Sintonen explained that because rcp, on which scp is based, allows a server to control which files are sent, and without the scp client thoroughly checking it's getting its expected objects, an attacker can do things like overwrite the user's .bash_aliases file. This, in turn, would allow the attacker to run arbitrary commands on the victim's box when the user does routine stuff, like list a directory.

"Many scp clients fail to verify if the objects returned by the scp server match those it asked for. This issue dates back to 1983 and rcp, on which scp is based," Sintonen explained in his disclosure this month.

"A separate flaw in the client allows the target directory attributes to be changed arbitrarily. Finally, two vulnerabilities in clients may allow server to spoof the client output."

The CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) reports are:

  • CVE-2018-20685
  • CVE-2019-6111
  • CVE-2018-20684
  • CVE-2019-6109
  • CVE-2019-6110

Only WinSCP seems to have released an update that fixes these.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the lol dept.

Phys.org:

A few years ago, virtual reality was all the rage in Hollywood, helping to fuel the rise of Silicon Beach with the promise of reinventing the entertainment business.

At its peak, investors pumped $253 million into two dozen deals involving virtual and augmented reality start-ups in L.A. and Orange counties in 2016, hoping that pricey headsets projecting virtual worlds would become as popular as smartphones. But investment in the technology has slowed dramatically in recent years, and what seemed like a promising boom has largely fizzled.

Several California companies that raised millions of dollars have shut down or have laid off dozens of workers, as businesses scrambled to readjust their strategies in the face of lackluster consumer demand for VR headsets and a drought of capital.

Take heart, VR enthusiasts. It took several tries for video streaming to catch on, too.


Original Submission

posted by takyon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Eat-the-fish,-Mr.-Burns dept.

The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:

who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least

The paper's key finding is that:

the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.

Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:

the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.

It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as

Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
  
Where would you like to see this study done next?


Original Submission

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday January 15 2019, @04:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-NOT-give-them-the-finger dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Feds Can't Force You To Unlock Your iPhone With Finger Or Face, Judge Rules

A California judge has ruled that American cops can't force people to unlock a mobile phone with their face or finger. The ruling goes further to protect people's private lives from government searches than any before and is being hailed as a potentially landmark decision.

[...] But in a more significant part of the ruling, Judge Westmore declared that the government did not have the right, even with a warrant, to force suspects to incriminate themselves by unlocking their devices with their biological features. Previously, courts had decided biometric features, unlike passcodes, were not "testimonial." That was because a suspect would have to willingly and verbally give up a passcode, which is not the case with biometrics. A password was therefore deemed testimony, but body parts were not, and so not granted Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

That created a paradox: How could a passcode be treated differently to a finger or face, when any of the three could be used to unlock a device and expose a user's private life?

And that's just what Westmore focused on in her ruling. Declaring that "technology is outpacing the law," the judge wrote that fingerprints and face scans were not the same as "physical evidence" when considered in a context where those body features would be used to unlock a phone.

[...] There were other ways the government could get access to relevant data in the Facebook extortion case "that do not trample on the Fifth Amendment," Westmore added. They could, for instance, ask Facebook to provide Messenger communications, she suggested. Facebook has been willing to hand over such messages in a significant number of previous cases Forbes has reviewed.

[...] Andrew Crocker, senior staff attorney at the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the latest California ruling went a step further than he'd seen other courts go. In particular, Westmore observed alphanumeric passcodes and biometrics served the same purpose in unlocking phones.

[...] The magistrate judge decision could, of course, be overturned by a district court judge, as happened in Illinois in 2017 with a similar ruling. The best advice for anyone concerned about government overreach into their smartphones: Stick to a strong alphanumeric passcode that you won't be compelled to disclose.


Original Submission

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-ummmm-yes-and-no dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A billion-dollar question: What was really behind Qualcomm's surprise ten-digit gift to Apple?

The chip industry's strong-arm tactics have been laid bare this month in the anti-trust legal battle brought by America's Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Qualcomm.

[...] Qualcomm had sought to hide the fact that it paid $1bn to Apple to secure a five-year exclusive agreement with the company to introduce its cellular broadband modem into the iPhone. Even the judge at one point wasn't sure whether that fact has been disclosed or not.

The payment is critical in that the FTC claims that it proves Qualcomm was using its position as the owner of several "standard-essential patents", or SEPs, on communications technologies to cut deals it would never have been able to negotiate otherwise.

Qualcomm has refused to license that technology to its competitors and, since the patents are critical for smartphones, has used that position to force companies into signing contracts that they would never agree to otherwise, i.e. it is using its monopoly position to distort the market and is damaging competition. That's the FTC's case.

But Qualcomm paints the payment quite differently: it says that Apple insisted on the $1bn payment as an "incentive" and to cover the costs of switching to its radio modem chips from Infineon to Qualcomm in its new phone designs.

Such payments are apparently relatively common in the industry but Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf admitted in court that it was far bigger than normal. As Mollenkopf tells it, Qualcomm only pushed to become a sole supplier of chips to Apple after that $1bn incentive was insisted upon in an effort to recoup such a massive outlay. It wasn't, he claims, an effort to shut out rivals.

[...] The FTC wants to be able to force Qualcomm to license its SEPs (standard-essential patents) to competitors at a reasonable rate: something that it says would force greater competition into the market and remove Qualcomm's monopolistic hold.

It's not clear yet whether the FTC has managed to make a strong enough case but truth be told it doesn't look good for Qualcomm. In the end, it may all revolve around how the court decides to view the fact that it paid Apple a billion dollars to get its chips into iPhones. ®


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the seeds-of-chang'e dept.

China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout

Seeds taken up to the Moon by China's Chang'e-4 mission have sprouted, says China National Space Administration. It marks the first time any biological matter has grown on the Moon, and is being seen as a significant step towards long-term space exploration. [...] Plants have been grown on the International Space Station before but never on the Moon.

[...] The Chinese Moon lander was carrying among its cargo soil containing cotton and potato seeds, yeast and fruit fly eggs. The plants are in a sealed container on board the lander. The crops will try to form a mini biosphere - an artificial, self-sustaining environment.

[...] On Tuesday, Chinese state media said the cotton seeds had now grown buds. The ruling Communist Party's official mouthpiece the People's Daily tweeted an image of the sprouted seed, saying it marked "the completion of humankind's first biological experiment on the Moon".

Fred Watson, Australian Astronomical Observatory's astronomer-at-large, told the BBC the development was "good news". "It suggests that there might not be insurmountable problems for astronauts in future trying to grow their own crops on the moon in a controlled environment."

According to SCMP, a similar biosphere experiment will be conducted on Earth for comparison.

A Chang'e-5 lunar exploration vehicle could be launched by the end of 2019, and would include a 2 kg sample return. At least 3 more Chang'e missions are planned.

Previously: China's Chang'e 4 Spacecraft Lands on the Far Side of the Moon
Chang'e Lander Sends Back Far Side Panorama


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @12:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the circular-reasoning? dept.

Double star system flips planet-forming disk into pole position

New research led by an astronomer at the University of Warwick has found the first confirmed example of a double star system that has flipped its surrounding disc to a position that leaps over the orbital plane of those stars. The international team of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) to obtain high-resolution images of the Asteroid belt-sized disc.

The overall system presents the unusual sight of a thick hoop of gas and dust circling at right angles to the binary star orbit. Until now this setup only existed in theorists' minds, but the ALMA observation proves that polar discs of this type exist, and may even be relatively common.

A circumbinary protoplanetary disk in a polar configuration (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-018-0667-x) (DX)

Nearly all young stars are initially surrounded by 'protoplanetary' disks of gas and dust, and in the case of single stars at least 30% of these disks go on to form planets. The process of protoplanetary disk formation can result in initial misalignments, where the disk orbital plane is different from the stellar equator in single-star systems, or different from the binary orbital plane in systems with two stars. A quirk of the dynamics means that initially misaligned 'circumbinary' disks—those that surround two stars—are predicted to evolve to one of two possible stable configurations: one where the disk and binary orbital planes are coplanar and one where they are perpendicular (a 'polar' configuration). Previous work has found coplanar circumbinary disks6, but no polar examples were known until now. Here, we report the first discovery of a protoplanetary circumbinary disk in the polar configuration, supporting the predictions that such disks should exist. The disk shows some characteristics that are similar to disks around single stars, and that are attributed to dust growth. Thus, the first stages of planet formation appear able to proceed in polar circumbinary disks.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Tuesday January 15 2019, @10:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-sites-are-belong-to-us dept.

Popular Web-Hosting Platform Bluehost Riddled with Flaws, Researcher Claims:

He said that similar flaws were also found in the Dreamhost, HostGator, OVH and iPage web hosting platforms.

A researcher claims to have uncovered one-click client-side vulnerabilities in the popular Bluehost web hosting platform. These would allow cybercriminals to easily carry out complete account takeover, according to the analysis.

Independent researcher and bug-hunter Paulos Yibelo, working with Website Planet, set up a testing site with Bluehost, which powers more than 2 million sites around the world according to its "About Us" page. He found multiple account takeover and information leak vulnerabilities in the platform, as well as a lack of password verification when changing account credentials.

The highest-severity problem that Yibelo uncovered was a misconfiguration of cross-origin-resource-sharing (CORS), which allows websites to share resources across their domains.

[...] A second, moderately-high flaw would allow account takeover because of improper JSON request validation, opening the door to cross-site request forgery (CSRF).  The vulnerability allows attackers to change the email address of any Bluehost user to the address of their choice, and then reset the password using their new email to gain complete access to the victim's account. The attack is executed when a victim clicks a single malicious link or visits a single malicious website, according to Yibelo.

[...] A third, also moderately high vulnerability would allow account takeover by way of cross-site scripting (XSS). Yibelo determined that this (demonstrated in a proof-of-concept, here [0]) is exacerbated by the fact that Bluehost does not require a current password when changing one's email address, so an attacker can simply perform CSRF attack using this XSS vulnerability to take over any account; and, Bluehost doesn't have any HttpOnly flags on sensitive cookies, which means any JavaScript can access them and send them to a malicious attacker, and the attacker can use these cookies to authenticate as the user.

[...] And finally, a medium-severity issue arises because of improper CORS validation, which allows a man-In-the-middle attack.

[...] Threatpost reached out to Bluehost for comment on the findings, and will update this post with any response.

[...] It's worth noting the Bluehost isn't alone here – Yibelo said that similar flaws were also found in the Dreamhost, HostGator, OVH and iPage web hosting platforms.

[ 0Proof-of-concept: https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/dm/subdomain/redirect?domainkey="><script>alert(document.domain)</script> ]

[Update: Corrected above PoC by removing an extraneous space from "(document.d omain)" --martyb]


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-available-in-stores! dept.

Intel Core i9-9990XE : Up to 5.0 GHz, Auction Only

AnandTech has seen documents and supporting information from multiple sources that show that Intel is planning to release a new high-end desktop processor, the Core i9-9990XE. These documents show that the processors will not be sold at retail; rather they will only be sold to system integrators, and then only through a closed online auction.

This new processor will be the highest numbered processor in Intel's high-end desktop line. The current top processor is the i9-9980XE, an 18 core part with a base frequency of 3.5 GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.0 GHz. The i9-9990XE, on the other hand, is not simply the 9980XE with an increase in frequency.

The Core i9-9990XE will be a 14 core processor, but with a base frequency of 4.0 GHz and a turbo frequency of 5.0 GHz. This makes it a super-binned 9940X.

AMD Radeon VII: less than 5000 available, no custom cards

The new Radeon VII otherwise known as Radeon 7 is a revamped Vega graphics card, where at the end of the day it's just a Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerator that was released in November last year. We have the same Vega 20 GPU on the fresh new 7nm node, the same 16GB of HBM2 memory, and similar GPU clocks to the new Radeon VII graphics card.

Since the announcement I reached out to some industry contacts who said there will be "less than 5000" made. The same source said AMD is losing money on each card sold as they are, as I said before, just Radeon Instinct MI50 cards that are being re-purposed into 'new' Radeon VII cards.

The improved cooler will keep it cooler than the Radeon Instinct MI50, while the same 300W TDP applies. Even the Radeon Instinct MI50 performance falls between the GeForce RTX 2070 and RTX 2080, while the new Radeon VII has performance that equals and will sometimes (higher resolutions like 4K and beyond) beat the RTX 2080.

Previously: AMD Announces Radeon VII GPU, Teases Third-Generation Ryzen CPU


Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @07:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the GPU-prices-going-back-up-again? dept.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/01/14/russia-plans-tackle-us-sanctions-bitcoin-investment-says-kremlin/:

Russia is preparing an investment in Bitcoin to replace the US dollar as a reserve currency in a bid to tackle US sanctions, according to a Russian economist with close ties to the Kremlin.

Vladislav Ginko, an economist at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, a state-funded institution, said the government is taking steps to minimise the impact of US sanctions that have hit the Russian rouble by replacing some of its US dollar reserves with the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.

US sanctions on Russia over the past year have come after the poisoning of former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal. Mr Ginko believes Russia’s de-dollarisation decision is fundamentally a move to “protect its national interests” due to a possible interruption of “US nominated payments flows for Russian oil and gas” and claims investment could be as much as $10bn (£7.8bn).

At current rates of ~$4000 per bitcoin that would be ~ 2.5 million bitcoins, about 12% of the total number of bitcoins that will ever be issued (21 million).

As of 2019-01-15 03:00 UTC, Bitcoin is trading at $3672.01 according to coinbase.


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Tuesday January 15 2019, @05:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-are-you-looking-at? dept.

Russia Loses Control of Only Space Telescope:

Russia has lost control of its only space radio telescope but officials are working to re-establish communication, the country's beleaguered space agency said Monday.

The incident is the latest setback for Russia's debt-laden space industry, which in recent years has suffered the loss of spacecraft, satellites, and a failed manned launch.

Roscosmos said a US observatory detected signals from Russia's gigantic Spektr-R, or RadioAstron, telescope, which stopped responding to commands from Earth last Thursday.

Roscosmos said that meant the onboard systems were working independently.

The Spektr-R telescope was launched into orbit in 2011 to study black holes, neutron stars and Earth's magnetic field, among other subjects.

Complete with ground-based observatories and a 10-metre-long antenna, RadioAstron is one of the largest telescopes ever made.

A new failed attempt to regain control of the telescope ended at 2130 Moscow time (1830 GMT) on Monday, Russian news agencies quoted a Roscosmos official as saying.

Wikipedia's entry on Spektr-R notes:

Spektr-R[6] (or RadioAstron) is a Russian scientific satellite with a 10 m (33 ft) radio telescope on board. It was launched on 18 July 2011,[7] by Zenit-3F launcher, from Baikonur Cosmodrome to perform research on the structure and dynamics of radio sources within and beyond our galaxy. Together with some of the largest ground-based radio telescopes, this telescope forms interferometric baselines extending up to 350,000 km (220,000 mi).

[...] The main scientific goal of the mission is the study of astronomical objects with an angular resolution up to a few millionths of an arcsecond. This is accomplished by using the satellite in conjunction with ground-based observatories and interferometry techniques.

How large of an item on the Moon is required to subtend one millionth of an arc second as viewed from Earth?


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @04:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-a-big-aircraft-a-big-deal? dept.

https://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6586483/Worlds-longest-aircraft-Airlander-10-dubbed-Flying-Bum-set-production.html

The world's longest aircraft, dubbed 'The Flying Bum' is set to go into full production to take its first passengers to the skies after successful final tests.

It comes after the Airlander 10 prototype was retired after it collapsed and plummeted into a field.

Also at BBC:

The world's longest aircraft is to go into full production with a model that will take its first paying passengers.

It comes after the prototype £32m Airlander 10 - a combined plane and airship - was formally retired following successful final testing.

As a result, Bedford firm Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) has been given Production Organisation Approval from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

[...] The firm was given Design Organisation Approval from the European Aviation Safety Agency (Easa) in October.

Stephen McGlennan, HAV's chief executive, said 2018 had been very good, with Easa's backing a "huge highlight".


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @02:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the mostly-moving-story dept.

Eugeniu Iordachescu, a Romanian civil engineer who helped save some of Bucharest’s most emblematic churches from destruction in the 1980s by literally rolling them to safety, died on Jan. 4 at his home in Bucharest. He was 89.

[...] In the 1980s, Mr. Iordachescu was working at the Project Institute of Bucharest, a design and engineering center. Around that time Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, set about radically redesigning the center of the city, inspired by the architecture and the style of city planning he had seen on a visit to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.

[...] Mr. Iordachescu came up with the idea of digging under the buildings and putting a reinforced concrete support beneath them; the structures could then be placed on tracks. After that, engineers would sever the foundations and use hydraulic levers and mechanical pulleys to move the buildings to their new locations. Foundations would be put in place at the other end to support the relocated structures.

When he had first raised the idea with colleagues, Mr. Iordachescu was told that it wasn’t possible, that the buildings would fall over. He persuaded some engineers to try, and received verbal permission from government officials — though no one was willing to give permission in writing, in case the experiment failed.

“I find what they did extraordinary,” Viorel Speteanu, the editor of the book “Eugeniu Iordachescu: A Savior of Architectural Monuments,” said in an interview. “The ideas flew around. The movements of these buildings, both churches and civil buildings, I think this is an extraordinary achievement, and I will never stop praising him for his accomplishment.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/obituaries/eugeniu-iordachescu-dead.html


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Tuesday January 15 2019, @12:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-and-faster-and-cheaper...how'd-they-do-that? dept.

At AMD's CES 2019 keynote, CEO Lisa Su revealed the Radeon VII, a $700 GPU built on TSMC's "7nm" process. The GPU should have around the same performance and price as Nvidia's already-released RTX 2080. While it does not have any dedicated ray-tracing capabilities, it includes 16 GB of High Bandwidth Memory.

Nvidia's CEO has trashed his competitor's new GPU, calling it "underwhelming" and "lousy". Meanwhile, Nvidia has announced that it will support Adaptive Sync, the standardized version of AMD's FreeSync dynamic refresh rate and anti-screen tearing technology. Lisa Su also says that AMD is working on supporting ray tracing in future GPUs, but that the ecosystem is not ready yet.

Su also showed off a third-generation Ryzen CPU at the CES keynote, but did not announce a release date or lineup details. Like the second generation of Epyc server CPUs, the new Ryzen CPUs will be primarily built on TSMC's "7nm" process, but will include a "14nm" GlobalFoundries I/O part that includes the memory controllers and PCIe lanes. The CPUs will support PCIe 4.0.

The Ryzen 3000-series ("Matisse") should provide a roughly 15% single-threaded performance increase while significantly lowering power consumption. However, it has been speculated that the chips could include up to 16 cores or 8 cores with a separate graphics chiplet. AMD has denied that there will be a variant with integrated graphics, but Lisa Su has left the door open for 12- or 16-core versions of Ryzen, saying that "There is some extra room on that package, and I think you might expect we'll have more than eight cores". Here's "that package".

Also at The Verge.

Previously: Watch AMD's CES 2019 Keynote Live: 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm UK


Original Submission