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Phoenix666 writes:

NPR:

Nuclear power plants are so big, complicated and expensive to build that more are shutting down than opening up. An Oregon company, NuScale Power, wants to change that trend by building nuclear plants that are the opposite of existing ones: smaller, simpler and cheaper.

The company says its plant design using small modular reactors also could work well with renewable energy, such as wind and solar, by providing backup electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
...
NuScale's design doesn't depend on pumps or generators that could fail in an emergency because it uses passive cooling. The reactors would be in a containment vessel, underground and in a huge pool of water that can absorb heat.

Presumably the biggest risk of a NuScale reactor failing is radioactive gophers?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Honey pots and canaries are used increasingly now. They, especially the latter, can trigger an alarm once particular segments of an infrastructure are breached or under specific types of attack. However, dedicated honey pots are complex systems and require a lot of set up, maintenance, and monitoring to be of any use and not just liabilities. One way out might be to just scatter some fake SSH keys about the infrastructure and tie them to alarms. The question remains how useful they would be in practice.

The thought behind honey keys is similar to Honeywords, a concept published a while ago to help identify attempts to use data collected in breaches to gain unauthorized access to a user account. In our case, the attacker attempts to authenticate with the honey key, the action is logged (or another action chosen by the defender) and an alarm is sounded for use of the key.

Fortunately, the authorized_keys format permits an rarely[sic] used options field that aids greatly in this attempt.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

'ClusterDuck' is IBM's Rubber Duck-Inspired Wifi System for Emergency Relief

A new concept for providing emergency wifi to areas struck by natural disasters has completed a successful test in Puerto Rico. The system uses rubber duck-inspired devices to create what the developers are calling a "ClusterDuck" network for disaster victims to connect to.

It may sound like quackery, but this is a legitimate project backed by IBM. Project Owl [Organize, Whereabouts, Logistics] received $200,000 after winning IBM's 2018 Call for Code competition.

The Project Owl team has developed small rubber, waterproof, durable devices that, when deployed throughout an area, create a mesh wifi network that sends an emergency alert to all mobile devices in its parameter, instructing people how to connect to an emergency response portal. (The devices vaguely resemble rubber ducks.) The connecting "Papa Duck" software shows the location of everyone logged on to the network.

[...] Bloomberg reports that in March, Project Owl tested the system in areas of Puerto Rico that were hit the hardest during 2017's Hurricane Maria. The team used velcro to put the "DuckLink" devices on trees, sand dunes, cars, and balloons—creating a network that spanned one square mile.

Next, the team plans to test the program in Houston, Texas—another city that has been devastated by extreme weather in recent years.

Original Submission

James Orme writes:

Cash injected into the thriving tech sector from Europe jumped to a record high of £1.89 billion in 2018, up from £1.66 billion in 2017, according to new data from law firm Penningtons Manches.

The number of tech deals involving European funds rose marginally to 150 last year, compared to 149 deals in 2017, while the value of the deals rose by 14 percent, as the average investment size boomed.

The EU remains confident in the long-term prospects of the sector in the UK, the firm said, as the value of deals involving at least one EU investor rose to £1.53 billion, from £1.26 billion in 2017.

[...] The US remains the largest overseas investor in UK companies, with a third of the total funds secured by British firms coming from US backers. Silicon Valley remains a key source of investment, with 101 deals involving cash from the west coast of America.

Original Submission

JOTech writes:

Google has assembled thousands of Tensor Processor Units (TPUs) into giant programmable supercomputers and made them available on Google Cloud

[...] To be precise, Google has used a "two-dimensional toroidal" mesh network to enable multiple racks of TPUs to be programmable as one colossal AI supercomputer. The company says more than 1,000 TPU chips can be connected by the network.

Google claims each TPU v3 pod can deliver more than 100 petaFLOPS of computing power, which puts them amongst the world's top five supercomputers in terms of raw mathematical operations per second. Google added the caveat, however, that the pods operate at a lower numerical precision, making them more appropriate for superfast speech recognition or image classification – workloads that do not need high levels of precision.

Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/scalable-ai-supercomputers-now-available-as-a-service-on-google-cloud/

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

foxnews.com/us/states-seek-to-cut-off-religious-exemptions-for-vaccination

Connecticut's Attorney General gave state lawmakers the legal go-ahead Monday to pursue legislation that would prevent parents from exempting their children from vaccinations for religious reasons, a move that several states are considering amid a significant measles outbreak.

The non-binding ruling from William Tong, a Democrat, was released the same day public health officials in neighboring New York called on state legislators there to pass similar legislation . Most of the cases in the current outbreak have been in New York state.

[...] Connecticut is just one of several states considering whether to end longstanding laws that allow people to opt out of vaccinations for religious purposes. In the face of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, some have alleged religious exemptions have been abused by "anti-vaxxers" who believe vaccines are harmful despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But the proposals to eliminate the opt-outs have also sparked emotional debates about religious freedom and the rights of parents.

Most religions have no prohibitions against vaccinations, according to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee. Yet the number of people seeking the religious exemption in Connecticut has been consistently climbing. There were 316 issued during the 2003-04 school year, compared to 1,255 in the 2017-18 school year.

[...] All 50 states have laws requiring students to have certain vaccinations. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, all but Mississippi, West Virginia and California grant religious exemptions. As of Jan. 30, the conference said 17 states allowed people to exempt their children for personal, moral or other philosophical beliefs.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Larrabee Chapter Closes: Intel's Final Xeon Phi Processors Now in EOL

Intel this week initiated its product discontinuance plan for its remaining Xeon Phi 7200-series processors codenamed Knights Mill (KML), bringing an end to the family of processors that have now been superceded by the likes of Intel's 56-core Xeon Platinum 9200 family. Xeon Phi parts have been used primarily by supercomputers during its lifetime.

Customers interested in final Intel Xeon Phi 7295, 7285 and 7235 processors will have to place their final orders on these devices by August 9, 2019. Intel will ship the final Xeon Phi CPUs by July 31, 2020. Intel's Knights Mill processors feature 64, 68, or 72 upgraded Silvermont x86 cores paired with AVX-512 units and MCDRAM. The parts were essentially Knights Landing parts optimized for Deep Learning applications.

Also to be superceded by Intel Xe GPUs.

Related: Intel Discrete GPU Planned to be Released in 2020
Leaked Intel Discrete Graphics Roadmap Reveals Plans for "Seamless" Dual, Quad, and Octa-GPUs

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

California firefighters are enlisting help from some unusual allies to prevent more deadly wildfires from ripping across the state -- goats.

The Ventura County Fire Department is releasing hundreds of goats next week north of Los Angeles to eat dead brush that could become fuel for a fires.

"They'll eat until we like the way the landscape looks, and then we move them to another area," Captain Ken VanWig, who oversees the department's vegetation management program, said in an interview. "They're very effective."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Search engine and consumer privacy advocate DuckDuckGo has announced the "Do-Not-Track Act of 2019," a piece of draft legislation that would legally require sites to honor users' tracking preferences.

[...]If the act picks up steam and passes into law, sites would be required to cease certain user tracking methods, which means less data available to inform marketing and advertising campaigns.

The impact could also cascade into platforms that leverage consumer data, possibly making them less effective. For example, one of the advantages of advertising on a platform like Google or Facebook is the ability to target audiences. If a user enables DNT, the ads displayed to them when on browsing[sic] those websites won't be informed by their external browsing history.

[Ed Note: By proposed they mean "That's why we're announcing draft legislation that can serve as a starting point for legislators in America and beyond. "]

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

This weekend, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launched an airstrike at Hamas's Cyber HQ in an apparently first of its kind real-time physical response by a nation state targeting the source of a cyber attack (as far as we know).

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has launched a physical attack on Hamas in response to an alleged cyber attack. A strike launched by Israeli forces targeted a building in the Gaza Strip that was hosting Hamas cyber army.

The IDF adopted a hybrid approach, it first stopped the cyber attack carried out by Hamas, then once it [had] localized the source of the offensive launched an airstrike.

This is simultaneously an evolution in hybrid-warfare and a return to levels of physical violence in the conflict between Hamas and Israel that hasn't been seen for five years.

The United States has reserved the right to retaliate similarly against cyber attacks since 2011, but has not done so.

The US had considered kinetic responses to a cyber attack:

State-backed hacking and physical warfare have been on a slow but steady path toward convergence for about two decades, and both information security and warfare researchers say that it was only a matter of time before a nation launched a kinetic attack against enemy hackers. "When I joined the very first Cyber Command in April 1999, we were talking about that as a serious thing in case it was needed," says Jason Healey, a former staffer in the George W. Bush White House and current cyberconflict researcher at Columbia University. "I wouldn't say we necessarily had plans for it, but we were thinking it through."

That's an expensive wrench

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

New analysis by academics from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), part of the University of Oxford, predicts the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within fifty years, a trend that will have grave implications for how we treat our digital heritage in the future.

The analysis predicts that, based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members will die before 2100. In this scenario, the dead could outnumber the living by 2070. If the world's largest social network continues to expand at current rates, however, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century.

"These statistics give rise to new and difficult questions around who has the right to all this data, how should it be managed in the best interests of the families and friends of the deceased and its use by future historians to understand the past," said lead author Carl Öhman, a doctoral candidate at the OII.

"On a societal level, we have just begun asking these questions and we have a long way to go. The management of our digital remains will eventually affect everyone who uses social media, since all of us will one day pass away and leave our data behind. But the totality of the deceased user profiles also amounts to something larger than the sum of its parts. It is, or will at least become, part of our global digital heritage."

Co-author David Watson, also a DPhil student at the OII, explained: "Never before in history has such a vast archive of human behaviour and culture been assembled in one place. Controlling this archive will, in a sense, be to control our history. It is therefore important that we ensure that access to these historical data is not limited to a single for-profit firm. It is also important to make sure that future generations can use our digital heritage to understand their history."

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190427104813.htm

Carl J Öhman, David Watson. Are the dead taking over Facebook? A Big Data approach to the future of death online. Big Data & Society, 2019; 6 (1): 205395171984254 DOI: 10.1177/2053951719842540

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

After unveiling plans to launch a $199 Linux laptop with a Rockchip RK3399 processor earlier this year, the folks at Pine64 have been hard at work designing the hardware and software for the upcoming Pinebook Pro.

Now the team has posted a YouTube video showing off the latest prototype, and demonstrating that it has improved hardware, and support for 4K video playback (something the company's original Pinebook couldn't handle).

Pine64 still has some kinks to work out — audio isn't working on the current motherboard, and there are problems with charging, suspend and resume. But it looks like the Pinebook Pro could be ready to ship within months.

Source: https://liliputing.com/2019/05/pinebook-pro-update-the-199-linux-laptop-is-almost-ready-to-go.html

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil.

In the centre of a cold tiled room sits a monolithic glass cube. Inside, suspended from its upper ceiling, hangs a mercurial cylinder reflecting its surrounds like a monochrome kaleidoscope.

The scene is unmistakably sci-fi, but this dazzling object is not an extraterrestrial that has arrived unannounced, but an earthborn quantum computer, produced by the ever-enduring IBM and dubbed 'Q System One'.

IBM took the wraps off its new "integrated universal approximate" quantum system at CES last night, which Big Blue says is the world's first designed for enterprise and academic use.

Businesses and academics won't be able to (technically) get their hands on the new system however, as IBM will be keeping Q System One tucked away, leasing access only via IBM cloud.

Other quantum companies offer cloud access to their systems, a trend started by IBM several years ago. But by enlisting the company that makes display cases for the Mona Lisa and the crown jewels, IBM evidently thinks one way to attract a critical mass to its quantum cloud service is to produce the most attractive quantum block, on the block.

Source: https://techerati.com/news-hub/ibms-new-quantum-computer-will-have-you-drooling/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Tor Project, which created the Tor browser and administers it to this day, says it isn't surprised or takes issue with the CIA using its software.

"We believe onion services are a key next step in securing the web, similar to the standardization of https as more secure configuration than http, so it[sic] that sense, it is not a surprise that the CIA would want to take advantage of the privacy and security protections that onion services provide," said Stephanie Whited the communications director for the Tor Project in an email to Motherboard. "Tor software is free and open source, and so anyone can use it, including the CIA."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnyew/the-cia-will-use-its-new-dark-web-site-to-collect-anonymous-tips

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

For several weeks, citizens of North Olmsted, Ohio—a small town a few miles west of a NASA research center—have been plagued by a mysterious force that has blocked their garage openers and car key fobs from functioning. But after many attempts by amateur sleuths and expert technicians to determine the source of the vexation, the problem has been resolved.

According to the New York Times, North Olmsted officials first began receiving reports about the issue in late April. Since then more than a dozen residents of the town and the neighboring Fairview Park have told authorities about their inability to use garage door openers and key fobs.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/a-mysterious-force-has-been-blocking-car-key-fobs-in-th-1834551015

Original Submission