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takyon writes:

AMD's Latest Radeon Drivers Finally Bring Official Support to Ryzen Mobile

When Ryzen Mobile launched in October of 2017, most probably did not envision the poor state its drivers would be in for over a year. AMD never released an official driver for its Raven Ridge-based mobile APUs, so users had to rely on OEMs like HP that only released a single driver in November.

But at CES 2019, AMD promised to fix the situation with official support for Ryzen Mobile through its Adrenaline drivers. Those are the same drivers that already supported AMD's desktop APUs based on the same Raven Ridge architecture used for Ryzen Mobile. Today, AMD finally delivered on that promise with its newest 19.2.3 drivers.

According to AMD's release notes, the new driver offers an average of 10% more performance in gaming compared to the October Ryzen Mobile driver, and in eSports titles specifically, an average of 17% more performance. Of the games tested, most of them showed double-digit performance gains, especially Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. These kinds of gains could easily turn an unplayable experience into one that is playable, and such extreme gains are seen because this driver is a year and a half newer than the launch revision.

Also at Engadget.

Related: AMD Finally Pushing Out Open-Source Vulkan Driver
AMD Ceases Graphics Driver Development for 32-Bit Operating Systems

Original Submission

takyon writes:

How KaiOS claimed the third-place mobile crown

In December 2015, Mozilla announced it would be abandoning Firefox OS as a smartphone platform. Many assumed the company's withdrawal would kill any hope of a mobile operating system built around the open web, rather than a combination of native apps and tightly-controlled storefronts. In the last few years, plenty of so-called "alternative" smartphone platforms, including Ubuntu Touch and Windows 10 Mobile, have faded into obscurity, too. Jolla has struggled on with Sailfish OS, but it's never felt like a true challenger to the Android and iOS duopoly. Three years later and a surprising competitor has emerged: KaiOS. The relative newcomer, which makes feature phones smarter, is already running on more than 80 million devices worldwide. How did it grow so big, so quickly? With a little help from Firefox OS.

[...] The operating system that emerged is quite different to Firefox OS. The user interface, for instance, is built around phones with physical keys and non-touch displays. The application icons are smaller and you'll often see a contextual strip at the bottom of the screen with physical input options such as "Cancel" and "Okay." KaiOS optimized the platform for low-end hardware -- it only requires 256MB of RAM to run -- and, crucially, kept support for modern connectivity such as 3G, 4G, WiFi, GPS and NFC.

Feature phones are normally associated with emerging markets such as India and Brazil. KaiOS, however, started in the US with the Alcatel-branded Go Flip. Codeville and his team persuaded AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile to stock the handset because of their proven track record while working at TCL. Those deals then allowed the company to win a contract with Jio, a mobile network in India owned by a massive conglomerate called Reliance Industries. Together they built the JioPhone, a candybar-style device with a 2.4-inch display and 512MB of RAM. It was effectively given away with ultra-competitive 4G plans.

[...] Google Assistant was a particularly important addition. For many, voice is a faster way of typing than pecking a classic one-through-nine keypad with their thumbs. The Assistant talks back, too, which makes the platform viable for people with poor literacy skills.

Previously: $25 Firefox OS Smartphone Coming to India
Mozilla Adding Granular App Permissions to Firefox OS
Geeksphone Stops Support for FirefoxOS with No Warning
Mozilla to Cease Development of Firefox OS
The Story of Firefox OS
Google Invests $22 Million in the OS Powering Nokia Feature Phones

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A new platform developed by MIT and Harvard University researchers ensures that web services adhere to users' preferences on how their data are stored and shared in the cloud.

In today's world of cloud computing, users of mobile apps and web services store personal data on remote data center servers. These data may include photos, social media profiles, email addresses, and even fitness data from wearable devices. Services often aggregate multiple users' data across servers to gain insights on, say, consumer shopping patterns to help recommend new items to specific users, or may share data with advertisers. Traditionally, however, users haven't had the power to restrict how their data are processed and shared.

In a paper [pdf] being presented at this week's USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference, the researchers describe a platform, called Riverbed, that forces data center servers to only use data in ways that users explicitly approve.

canopic jug writes:

A recent report on climate simulations show that global warming could break up stratocumulus clouds^[$], letting in more energy as High CO₂ levels break up stratocumulus cloud decks, once the levels rise above 1,200 ppm. Stratocumulus provide no precipitation but do cover about 20% of the low-latitude oceans and are especially prevalent in the subtropics, cooling by providing shade. If they disappear then, according to calculations, the added sunlight hitting the ground or ocean would increase temperatures by over 8°C.

Now, new findings reported today in the journal Nature Geoscience make the case that the effects of cloud loss are dramatic enough to explain ancient warming episodes like the PETM — and to precipitate future disaster. Climate physicists at the California Institute of Technology performed a state-of-the-art simulation of stratocumulus clouds, the low-lying, blankety kind that have by far the largest cooling effect on the planet. The simulation revealed a tipping point: a level of warming at which stratocumulus clouds break up altogether. The disappearance occurs when the concentration of CO₂ in the simulated atmosphere reaches 1,200 parts per million — a level that fossil fuel burning could push us past in about a century, under “business-as-usual” emissions scenarios. In the simulation, when the tipping point is breached, Earth’s temperature soars 8 degrees Celsius, in addition to the 4 degrees of warming or more caused by the CO₂ directly.

Once clouds go away, the simulated climate “goes over a cliff,” said Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A leading authority on atmospheric physics, Emanuel called the new findings “very plausible,” though, as he noted, scientists must now make an effort to independently replicate the work.

To imagine 12 degrees of warming, think of crocodiles swimming in the Arctic and of the scorched, mostly lifeless equatorial regions during the PETM. If carbon emissions aren’t curbed quickly enough and the tipping point is breached, “that would be truly devastating climate change,” said Caltech’s Tapio Schneider, who performed the new simulation with Colleen Kaul and Kyle Pressel.

Huber said the stratocumulus tipping point helps explain the volatility that’s evident in the paleoclimate record. He thinks it might be one of many unknown instabilities in Earth’s climate. “Schneider and co-authors have cracked open Pandora’s box of potential climate surprises,” he said, adding that, as the mechanisms behind vanishing clouds become clear, “all of a sudden this enormous sensitivity that is apparent from past climates isn’t something that’s just in the past. It becomes a vision of the future.”

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Tips for committing suicide are appearing in children's cartoons on YouTube and the YouTube Kids app.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/youtube-kids-cartoons-include-tips-for-committing-suicide-docs-warn/

YouTube Kids is theoretically a curated collection of videos that are safe for kids. Apparently, someone forgot to tell YouTube/Google that. Sure, YouTube probably has some butt covering clause in their EULA. That doesn't excuse such an oversight, though. It's very easy to see overworked, stressed parents, giving their kids access to YouTube/YouTube Kids. Kids have enough to deal with, without having to deal with grown-ups twisted thoughts. This seems more like insidious minds at work to me. What do you think?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

What happens to research that is funded by taxpayers? A lot ends up in subscription-only journals, protected from the eyes of most by a paywall.

But a new initiative known as Plan S could change that. Plan S focuses on making all publicly funded research immediately fully and freely available by open access publication.

It sounds like a good idea – but there are possible downsides. This model could potentially undermine peer review, the process vital for ensuring the rigour and quality of published research. It could also increase costs of publication for researchers and funding bodies. So let's do Plan S right.

Taxpayers will have the right to see the research they paid for?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

To fix the potholes and crumbling roads, federal, state and local governments rely on fuel taxes, which raise more than US$80 billion a year and pay for around three-quarters of what the U.S. spends on building new roads and maintaining them.

I recently purchased an electric car, the Tesla Model 3. While swerving down a particularly rutted highway in New York, the economist in me began to wonder, what will happen to the roads as fewer and fewer cars run on gasoline? Who will pay to fix the streets?

Will toll roads become universal to bridge the funding gap?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Scientists are puzzling over the discovery of a dead humpback whale in the Amazon jungle, about 50 feet from the ocean shore.

The calf was found on Friday on the tropical forest floor of Marajó Island, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon river, after reports that vultures were scavenging on the carcass. It was photographed and examined by the wildlife nonprofit Bicho D'água Institute and the region’s Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation, and Environment (SEMMA).

Estimated to be about one year old, the whale baby was already eight meters (26 feet) from head to tail, according to an Instagram post from Bicho D'água. Adult humpback whales can grow to twice that size.

The team is not sure exactly how the whale ended up in the jungle.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59xwnn/theres-a-dead-humpback-whale-in-the-amazon-jungle-and-nobody-knows-why

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Two companies have announced 1 terabyte microSDXC cards at Mobile World Congress 2019:

Micron's fingernail-sized card uses 96-layer 3D NAND configured as QLC (4bits/cell) storage and delivers up to 100MB/s read and 95MB/s write burst performance helped by a dynamically sized SLC cache.

WD's SanDisk's UHS-I microSDXC, meanwhile, boasts "up to" speeds of 160MB/s reads and 90MB/s writes.

[...] Random IO is up to 4,000 IOPS for reads and 2,000 for writes for both Micron and SanDisk's kit.

The SanDisk 1 TB microSD card will launch at $450 in April, or $200 for a 512 GB version.

The Secure Digital 3.01 specification defines a maximum capacity of 2 TB (2048 GB) for SDXC and microSDXC cards. The Secure Digital 7.0 specification introduced the Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) format with a maximum capacity of 128 TB.

Also at Tom's Hardware, The Verge.

See also: 512 GB of UFS 3.0 Storage: Western Digital iNAND MC EU511

Previously: SanDisk Announces a 400 GB MicroSD Card
Half a Terabyte in Your Smartphone? Yup. That's Possible Now
Samsung Announces Production of 1 Terabyte Universal Flash Storage for Smartphones

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Surveillance firm asks Mozilla to be included in Firefox's certificate whitelist

[...] The vendor is named DarkMatter, a cyber-security firm based in the United Arab Emirates that has been known to sell surveillance and hacking services to oppressive regimes in the Middle East

[...] On one side Mozilla is pressured by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, and The Intercept to decline DarkMatter's request, while on the other side DarkMatter claims it never abused its TLS certificate issuance powers for anything bad, hence there's no reason to treat it any differently from other CAs that have applied in the past.

Fears and paranoia are high because Mozilla's list of trusted root certificates is also used by some Linux distros. Many fear that once approved on Mozilla's certificate store list, DarkMatter may be able to issue TLS certificates that will be able to intercept internet traffic without triggering any errors on some Linux systems, usually deployed in data centers and at cloud service providers.

In Google Groups and Bugzilla discussions on its request, DarkMatter has denied any wrongdoing or any intention to do so.

The company has already been granted the ability to issue TLS certificates via an intermediary, a company called QuoVadis, now owned by DigiCert.

Also at Electronic Frontier Foundation

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A school in Québec has created a zone where kids can be turbulent and throw each other to the ground:

Some Quebec elementary schools experiment with letting kids play rough

[...] Bernier believes that, rather than encouraging violence, the project actually prevents it by showing kids how to expend their energy in an appropriate way.

“We’re not seeing (violence), because we ban violence,” she said. “The kids who are there to hit are immediately taken out,” she said.

Lenore Skenazy, a New York-based author and speaker who founded the website Free Range Kids, said humans and almost every animal species, have been play-fighting since the dawn of time.

“To act like that is automatically aggressive and evil and cruel is to misinterpret a basic stage of childhood,” she said in a phone interview.

For safety reasons they forbid kicks, punches and they teach kids how to fall.

I feel that this measure has the possibility to be of immense help to the young boys that are struggling in schools. I don't know about the situation in the states but here in Québec boys are less successful than girls at getting a high school diploma, and it only gets worse from there.

Article in French.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Physicists Just Solved a 35-Year-Old Mystery Hidden Inside Atomic Cores

Here's a mysterious truth that scientists have known since 1983: Protons and neutrons act differently when they're inside an atom, versus floating freely through space. Specifically, the subatomic particles that make up those protons and neutrons, called quarks, slow down massively once they're confined to a nucleus in an atom.

Physicists really didn't like this, because neutrons are neutrons whether they're inside an atom or not. And protons are protons. Both protons and neutrons (which together make up the class of particles called "nucleons") are made up of three smaller particles, called quarks, bound together by the strong force.

"When you put quarks into a nucleus, they start to move slower, and that is very weird," said study co-author Or Hen, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's strange because the powerful interactions between quarks mainly determine their speed, whereas forces that bind the nucleus (and also act on quarks inside the nucleus) are supposed to be very weak, Hen added.

[...] Their data strongly suggest, Hen said, that the quarks in most nucleons don't change at all when they enter a nucleus. But those few involved in nucleon pairs change their behavior so dramatically that they skew the average results in any experiment. That many quarks packed into such a small space causes some dramatic strong force effects. The EMC effect is the result of just a minority of anomalies, rather than a change to the behavior of all protons and neutrons.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

CNet:

For starters, the 8-megapixel camera has an IR sensor and transmitter for 3D-mapping and motion-captioning purposes. This enables the G8 to use 3D mapping for face unlock, similar to the Apple iPhone's Face ID feature. And because the previous G7 only used 2D facial recognition, face unlock on the G8 is more secure and it can be done in low-light conditions.

The G8 also allows you to unlock the phone by scanning the veins in your hand. (Yes, you read that correctly.) LG calls this new biometric authentication Hand ID. The phone's IR sensor gathers information from the hemoglobin in your blood, and renders a unique image of your veins inside your hand. Hovering your hand over the camera, you won't need to touch your phone at all to unlock it.

Can it unlock with vein patterns in general, or just on hands?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Medical Xpress:

Australians report having sex once or twice a week, on average. For Brits, it's less than once a week, while Americans report having sex two to three times a week.

We can't know for sure how often individuals actually have sex. Some people may incorrectly report their sexual frequency, either by mistake or on purpose. But the national estimates data are based on representative samples, so they're a useful guide.
...
In fact, Australians and Americans are having less sex than they used to in past decades.

Aussies had sex about 20 times fewer in 2013 than a decade before. Americans had sex nine times fewer, on average, in 2014 than a decade before.

Increased competition for our free time from smartphones, expanded entertainment options, and other sources is cited as causes for the drop in frequency.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

ICANN Calls For DNSSEC Deployment For All Unsecured Domains Following Domain Hijacking Attempts

Following increasing reports of malicious activity targeting the DNS infrastructure, ICANN is calling for full deployment of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all unsecured domain names. The organisation also reaffirms its commitment to engage in collaborative efforts to ensure the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet's global identifier systems.

As one of many entities engaged in the decentralised management of the Internet, ICANN is specifically responsible for coordinating the top-most level of the DNS to ensure its stable and secure operation and universal resolvability.

On 15 February 2019, in response to reports of attacks against key parts of the DNS infrastructure, ICANN offered a checklist of recommended security precautions for members of the domain name industry, registries, registrars, resellers, and related others, to proactively take to protect their systems, their customers' systems and information reachable via the DNS.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Once-endangered carnivorous mammals such as otters, polecats and pine martens have staged a remarkable comeback in Britain in recent decades, a new review shows.

The study found that – with the exception of wildcats – the status of Britain's native mammalian carnivores (badger, fox, otter, pine marten, polecat, stoat and weasel) has "markedly improved" since the 1960s.

The species have largely "done it for themselves" – recovering once harmful human activities had been stopped or reduced, according to scientists from the University of Exeter, Vincent Wildlife Trust, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and Scottish Natural Heritage.

Hunting, trapping, control by gamekeepers, use of toxic chemicals and destruction of habitats contributed to the decline of most predatory mammals in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

The UK population grew from 53 million to 75 million over the same period--perhaps man and wildlife can co-exist.

Original Submission