Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password


Site News

Join our Folding@Home team:
Main F@H site
Our team page


Funding Goal
For 6-month period:
2022-07-01 to 2022-12-31
(All amounts are estimated)
Base Goal:
$3500.00

Currently:
$438.92

12.5%

Covers transactions:
2022-07-02 10:17:28 ..
2022-10-05 12:33:58 UTC
(SPIDs: [1838..1866])
Last Update:
2022-10-05 14:04:11 UTC --fnord666

Support us: Subscribe Here
and buy SoylentNews Swag


We always have a place for talented people, visit the Get Involved section on the wiki to see how you can make SoylentNews better.

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:46 | Votes:109

posted by martyb on Friday July 12 2019, @10:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-Atari-in-sight dept.

Hayabusa2 lands on an asteroid and sends back amazing pictures to prove it

Japan's Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu is an ambitious one to begin with, and the team recently made the decision to up the stakes with a second touchdown on the space rock's surface. Not only did all go as planned, but we now have the best shots of an asteroid's surface ever to be sent back to Earth.

[...] There was no guarantee this would happen, the JAXA team running the Hayabusa2 mission noted in a recent blog post. Any number of things could have resulted in a second touchdown being either too risky or not worth the trouble. Fortunately they concluded that the risk was acceptable and that this would be an important feat in more ways than one.

[...] In a brief update, JAXA provided a handful of pictures of the successful touchdown: 4 seconds before, the moment of impact, and 4 seconds after. It doesn't stay for long, more bounces off the surface than "lands."

Image bulletin.

162173 Ryugu.

Related: Hayabusa2 Reaches Asteroid 162173 Ryugu
Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Faces Difficulties in Landing and Collecting a Sample from an Asteroid


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Friday July 12 2019, @08:48PM   Printer-friendly

As expected, Windows Update dropped off several packages of security and reliability fixes for Windows 7 earlier this week, part of the normal Patch Tuesday delivery cycle for every version of Windows.

[...] What was surprising about this month's Security-only update, formally titled the "July 9, 2019—KB4507456 (Security-only update)," is that it bundled the Compatibility Appraiser, KB2952664, which is designed to identify issues that could prevent a Windows 7 PC from updating to Windows 10.

[...] I spent the afternoon poking through update files and security bulletins and trying to get an on-the-record response from Microsoft. I got a terse "no comment" from Redmond.

My research did, however, confirm that this is not a mistake, and it led me to a theory for why these mysterious files are shipping in an unexpected location. I strongly suspect that some part of the Appraiser component on Windows 7 SP1 had a security issue of its own. If that's the case, then the updates indisputably belong in a Security-only update.

And if they happen to get installed on systems where administrators had taken special precautions not to install those components, Microsoft's reaction seems to be, "Well ... tough." The Appraiser tool was offered via Windows Update, both separately and as part of a monthly rollup update two years ago; as a result, most of the declining population of Windows 7 PCs already has it installed.

Also at BetaNews & Ghacks

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/upgrade/upgrade-readiness-deployment-script

ConfigScript.ps1 is pretty interesting.

Of note is there are different versions of DiagTrack (the script checks the version):
https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/windows-itpro-docs/issues/3347

There is a blog post on it:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Analytics-Blog/How-does-Upgrade-Readiness-in-WA-collects-application-inventory/ba-p/213586

Upgrade Readiness in Windows Analytics provides an inventory of devices and applications for enrolled devices. We've had a lot of customers ask about the details of how this works, and this blog post is meant to answer those questions.

[...] This data is collected by an OS component called "Appraiser", which is built into Windows (require a KB to be installed on Windows 7/8.1 devices, per below).

[...] Core Inventory (apps, drivers) data collection is triggered via a scheduled nightly task "Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser" which runs every 24 hours. This assumes the system is awake and idle for long enough period to complete the scan. If the device was found inactive we resume the scan on the next available opportunity. This data is only sent to Microsoft if the device is opted in for CDO (Commercial Data Opt-in) on Win7/8.1 or Basic level in Windows 10.

Mozilla have https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1197768


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Friday July 12 2019, @07:20PM   Printer-friendly

Are true crime podcasts as popular with Millenials as they are with Baby Boomers? Does the under-35 crowd listen to wellness podcasts? Nielsen, the company behind the TV ratings system, will begin to survey Americans about their podcast consumption habits in order to sell the data to podcast creators and ad networks.

The company's venture into the world of podcasting isn't as odd as you'd think. Nielsen Scarborough, the division of the company that is carrying out the operation, polls 200,000 people every year on everything from their craft beer drinking habits to how often they watch Mexican soccer. The surveys are conducted over the phone, online and in-person. For the podcast survey, they'll survey a sample of 30,000 people twice a year on everything from genre preferences to consumer buying habits. The end goal is better targeted advertising; companies will learn which podcasts their potential customers are more likely to consume. Nielsen has already secured its first clients, all companies that sell ads for podcasts. These include iHeartMedia, Cadence13, Midroll, Westwood One and cabana.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/11/nielsen-wants-to-track-podcast-data-by-calling-people/


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday July 12 2019, @05:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can-spend-until-I-reach-my-credit-limit,-right? dept.

If you have credit card debt, it may be time to scale back what you spend on luxury purchases.

But we’re not talking about doing without small luxuries like your morning coffee or an afternoon snack – things like your car loan or lease, leisure travel, dining and more can make a bigger difference.

A new CreditCards.com poll shows U.S. consumers who have credit card debt are outspending debt-free households in seven of nine discretionary spending categories (see chart). However, few are willing to cut back on any of their luxury purchases.

In fact, 18 percent of Americans who have credit card debt are unwilling to trim expenses in nine categories, including dining out, leisure travel and clothing (see chart). This despite the fact that the average credit card APR is nearly 18 percent.

[...]Our luxury spending poll also found:

        - Many can live without dining out. Dining and takeout is the category all respondents – in debt or not – are most willing to cut in half. Still, less than half of those with credit card debt (48 percent) would trim their dining budgets, which average $2,186 per year.

        - But vacations are a big budget item many won’t budge on. The average household with card debt spends $2,211 per year on leisure travel. But only 3 in 10 of those respondents would be willing to cut their travel spending in half.

        - Cars, haircuts and cellphone plans are the biggest must-haves. The three categories people in debt were least willing to cut in half are personal care and beauty (23 percent), cellphone services and upgrades (25 percent) and car loans or leases (26 percent).

        - Cut my streaming? You’re dreaming. Only 39 percent of respondents with debt would be willing to cut back on subscriptions services such as Netflix, Spotify and Xbox Live. However, at $1,198 per year, it’s the second-least-costly luxury expense among this group.

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/luxury-spending-poll/


Original Submission

posted by CoolHand on Friday July 12 2019, @04:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the two-for-one-deal dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Clean energy and clean water are among the major challenges for sustainable development especially in emerging countries. But traditional approaches to electricity generation consume huge amounts of water. In the US and Europe about 50% of water withdrawals are for energy production.

Similarly, producing water for humans via desalination in countries with water scarcity is a huge consumer of energy. It's estimated that in Arab countries around 15% of electricity production is used to produce drinking water.

Now, researchers believe they have found a way to combine these actions in a single device.

Existing state-of-the-art solar panels face physical limits on the amount of sunlight they can actually turn into electricity. Normally about 10-20% of the sun that hits the panel becomes power. The rest of this heat is considered as waste.

In this experiment, the scientists designed a three stage membrane distillation unit and attached it to the back of the photovoltaic (PV) panel.

The membrane essentially evaporates seawater at relatively low temperatures. The researchers were able to produce three times more water than conventional solar stills while also generating electricity with an efficiency greater than 11%. This meant the device was generating nine times more power than had been achieved in previously published research.

"The waste heat from PV panels has really been ignored, no one has thought about it as a resource," said lead author Prof Peng Wang from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

"We use the heat to generate water vapour that gets transported across the membrane and then it condenses on the other side."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48910569


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @02:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the stick-to-slurpees dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

7-Eleven's Bad App Design Let Criminals Steal More Than $500,000

Privacy and Security

Hundreds of 7-Eleven customers who downloaded a new mobile payment app in Japan were robbed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars due to some staggeringly idiotic security lapses in the app.

Yahoo Japan reports that 7-Eleven Japan released the 7pay app on July 1, and within a day customers started complaining about suspicious charges to their linked payment cards. On July 3, the company confirmed accounts could be accessed by third parties and announced it would stop charging credit and debit cards through the app.

According to the Yahoo report, hackers simply needed to input a customer's birthdate, phone number, and email address to request a password reset link. But it seems that a hacker could even request that the reset link be sent to whatever email address they wanted. It also seems that if a customer hadn't entered a birthdate, then the app would default to January 1, 2019, which would make it even easier for a fraudster to gain access.

Also at:
https://techbeacon.com/security/7-elevens-7pay-app-hacked-day-due-appalling-security-lapse https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/06/7-eleven-japan-app-security-loss/


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @12:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the eye-in-the-sky dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Surface Rupture from Ridgecrest Earthquake Spotted from Space (Photo)

One of last week's powerful Southern California earthquakes created a crack in the planet's crust that's visible from space.

Photos snapped on Saturday (July 6) by tiny Earth-observing Dove satellites, which are built and operated by San Francisco-based company Planet, show a new surface rupture near the desert town of Ridgecrest, about 125 miles (200 kilometers) northeast of Los Angeles.

[...] Planet's Dove cubesats are tiny but extremely capable: Their bodies are smaller than a loaf of bread, but the craft can capture photos with a resolution of 10 feet to 16.5 feet (3 to 5 meters). Planet (previously known as Planet Labs) currently has more than 100 operational Doves in low-Earth orbit, whose imagery the company sells to a variety of customers.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @11:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-think-he-saurus? dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

In 2003, while excavating the enormous bones of a Supersaurus nicknamed "Jimbo," Wyoming Dinosaur Center paleontologist Bill Wahl spotted something funny. About four inches above the main bone layer, in what was thought to be fossil-free rock that could be chipped away, there lay an accumulation of tiny bones.

At first, Wyoming Dinosaur Center paleontologist Jessica Lippincott says, it seemed like the remains might belong to a flying pterosaur—a non-dinosaur reptile that lived during the same time. But further examination revealed that the bones represent something never seen before: a new species of raptor-like dinosaur, the oldest yet found in North America. "We have the smallest dinosaur and the largest dinosaur found in Wyoming, both in the same quarry," Lippincott says.

Those bones, representing a partial skeleton, were used to name the new dinosaur Hesperornithoides miessleri today in the journal PeerJ. Described by University of Wisconsin-Madison paleontologist and artist Scott Hartman and colleagues, this dinosaur is categorized as an early member of a group of svelte, small, sickle-clawed dinosaurs known to experts as troodontids. These were raptor-like dinosaurs related to the group that contains more famous carnivores like Velociraptor, as well as the forerunners of birds.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/discovery-raptor-dinosaur-adds-new-wrinkle-origin-birds-180972588/


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @09:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the waistline-constant? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Exactly how fast is the universe expanding? Astrophysicists are closing in on the Hubble constant

Scientists are still not completely sure, but a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has used the neutron star merger detected in 2017 to come up with a more precise value for this figure, known as the Hubble constant. Their work appears in the current issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.

"The Hubble constant is one of the most fundamental pieces of information that describes the state of the universe in the past, present and future," said Kenta Hotokezaka, the Lyman Spitzer, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow in Princeton's Department of Astrophysical Sciences. "So we'd like to know what its value is."

Currently, the two most successful techniques for estimating the Hubble constant are based on observations of either the cosmic microwave background or stars blowing themselves to pieces in the distant universe.

But those figures disagree: Measurements of exploding stars -- Type Ia supernovae -- suggest that the universe is expanding faster than is predicted by Planck observations of the cosmic microwave background.

"So either one of them is incorrect, or the models of the physics which underpin them are wrong," said Hotokezaka. "We'd like to know what is really happening in the universe, so we need a third, independent check."

He and his colleagues -- Princeton's NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow Kento Masuda, Ore Gottlieb and Ehud Nakar from Tel Aviv University in Israel, Samaya Nissanke from the University of Amsterdam, Gregg Hallinan and Kunal Mooley from the California Institute of Technology, and Adam Deller from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia -- found that independent check by using the merger of two neutron stars.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @08:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the news-about-bugs dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Last ever VW Beetle model rolls off Mexican production line

German auto giant Volkswagen launched the final edition of its iconic "Beetle" car from its Mexican factory on Wednesday at a ceremony accompanied by a Mariachi band.

The bug-shaped sedan rolled off the production line to rapturous applause, the last iteration of a model first manufactured in the late 1930s in Germany and 1954 in Puebla, central Mexico.

"The loss of the Beetle after three generations and almost seven decades should provoke a wide variety of emotions," said Steffen Reiche, the CEO of Volkswagen Mexico.

[...] Dozens of factory workers had turned up from early morning to put the final touches on the car, which was unveiled after seven hours of work.

The employees wore bright yellow tops bearing the words: Thanks Beetle, as the unveiling proceeded in a festive atmosphere tinged with nostalgia for a car that has generated a loyal following like almost no other.

"Who couldn't want a car like this, made with Mexican hands?" said Roberto Benitez, a 40-year-old production technician.

"It's always sad, you feel like part of one. That's the daily work, full shifts to get the best results, it makes me proud," added Francisco Bueno, a 25-year-old employee.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @06:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the positive-outcomes dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Knowing BRCA status associated with better breast cancer outcomes even without surgery

"The problem is that genetic screening for BRCA by a saliva or blood test is not recommended by any medical body or health care organization in healthy Ashkenazi Jewish women without a strong family history. Therefore, the way women usually find out they have the BRCA gene is only after they are diagnosed with breast cancer, at which time we've lost the opportunity to offer surgery that could prevent breast cancer or start high-risk breast cancer screening at an age young enough to detect cancers earlier," says Rachel Rabinovitch, MD, FASTRO, CU Cancer Center investigator and professor in the CU School of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology.

[...] "We found that women who knew they were BRCA positive and chose to keep their breasts were much more likely to be diagnosed with noninvasive breast cancer, earlier stage invasive breast cancer, and need less morbid cancer therapy; but most importantly their survival was better," Rabinovitch says, suggesting that results argue for routine BRCA screening in women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

"However even among those of us who did the study, we do not agree on when is the best age for genetic screening," Rabinovitch says. "My colleagues who live in Israel suggest it should be done at age 30 (the age at which significant cancer risk begins), but I think that's too late."


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @05:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the tweets-are-for-birds dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Trump's Twitter blocks violate First Amendment rights, appeals court affirms

It's one thing for most of us to block Twitter users who annoy us, but it's a violation of those users' First Amendment rights for the president to do so, a federal appeals court confirmed.

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Tuesday issued an opinion supporting an earlier federal court ruling that as long as Donald Trump is a public official, he cannot block people (which prevents them from reading his feed or responding to his comments) he disagrees with on Twitter.

The opinion (PDF) is narrow, specific, and unanimous, with all three judges concurring. "We do not consider or decide whether an elected official violates the Constitution by excluding persons from a wholly private social media account," the judges write, "Nor do we consider whether private social media companies are bound by the First Amendment when policing their platforms."

But, they continue, "The First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees.... Once the President has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants, he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with."

"The irony of all this," the opinion concludes, "is that we write at a time in the history of this nation when the conduct of our government and its officials is subject to wide-open, robust debate. This debate encompasses an extraordinarily broad range of ideas and viewpoints and generates a level of passion and intensity the likes of which have rarely been seen. This debate, as uncomfortable and unpleasant as it frequently may be, is nonetheless a good thing. In resolving this appeal, we remind the litigants and the public that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the best response to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less."

[Update 20190713_080924 UTC: Part of what distinguishes this case from other politician's use of twitter is that on June 6, 2017 it was reported:

At the daily White House press briefing, press secretary Sean Spicer said the President's tweets are considered official White House statements, saying the President is the "most effective messenger on his agenda."

--martyb]


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 12 2019, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the tickled-to-death dept.

Savage Tick-Clone Armies are Sucking Cows to Death; Experts Fear for Humans:

Spreading invasive tick spawns without mating and can transmit deadly disease.

Ravenous swarms of cloned ticks have killed a fifth cow in North Carolina by exsanguination—that is, by draining it of blood—the state's Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services warned this week.

Experts fear that the bloodthirsty throngs, which were first noticed in the United States in 2017, will continue their rampage, siphoning life out of animals and eventually transmitting diseases, potentially deadly ones, to humans.

Just last month, infectious disease researchers in New York reported the first case of the tick species biting a human in the US. The finding was "unsurprising" given the tick's ferocious nature, according to Dr. Bobbi S. Pritt, director of the Clinical Parasitology Laboratory in Mayo Clinic. And it's "extremely worrisome for several reasons," she wrote in a commentary for the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The tick—the Asian longhorned tick, or Haemaphysalis longicornis—was first found terrorizing a sheep in New Jersey in 2017 and has established local populations in at least 10 states since it sneaked in. Its invasive sweep is due in large part to the fact that a single well-fed female can spawn up to 2,000 tick clones parthenogenetically—that is, without mating—in a matter of weeks. And unlike other ticks that tend to feast on a victim for no more than seven days, mobs of H. longicorni can latch on for up to 19 days.

According to the new report out of North Carolina, the latest victim there was a young bull in Surry County at the border with Virginia. At the time of its death, the doomed beast had more than 1,000 ticks on him. The official cause of death was acute anemia, which is typically associated with severe hemorrhaging. The bull's owner had lost four other cattle the same way since 2018.

The case echoes the first report of the tick, which stalked a lone sheep paddocked in an affluent neighborhood in New Jersey in August 2017. The animal was besieged by hundreds of ticks, which scrambled up the legs of health investigators when they walked in to survey the situation.

See also:

More information about the tick can be found at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at Wikipedia.

Previously:
US Invaded by Savage Tick that Sucks Animals Dry, Spawns Without Mating
Invasive Exsanguinating Tick Spreading.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday July 12 2019, @01:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the failure-to-maintain-the-deflector-shields dept.

New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth's climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an "umbrella effect."

When galactic cosmic rays increased during the Earth's last geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, the umbrella effect of low-cloud cover led to high atmospheric pressure in Siberia, causing the East Asian winter monsoon to become stronger. This is evidence that galactic cosmic rays influence changes in the Earth's climate. The findings were made by a research team led by Professor Masayuki Hyodo (Research Center for Inland Seas, Kobe University) and published on June 28 in the online edition of Scientific Reports.

The Svensmark Effect is a hypothesis that galactic cosmic rays induce low cloud formation and influence the Earth's climate. Tests based on recent meteorological observation data only show minute changes in the amounts of galactic cosmic rays and cloud cover, making it hard to prove this theory. However, during the last geomagnetic reversal transition, when the amount of galactic cosmic rays increased dramatically, there was also a large increase in cloud cover, so it should be possible to detect the impact of cosmic rays on climate at a higher sensitivity.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190703121407.htm


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday July 12 2019, @12:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the Have-come-a-long-ways-from-the-4004 dept.

Intel will be using a few packaging technologies to connect CPU core "chiplets":

Intel revealed three new packaging technologies at SEMICON West: Co-EMIB, Omni-Directional Interconnect (ODI) and Multi-Die I/O (MDIO). These new technologies enable massive designs by stitching together multiple dies into one processor. Building upon Intel's 2.5D EMIB and 3D Foveros tech, the technologies aim to bring near-monolithic power and performance to heterogeneous packages. For the data-center, that could enable a platform scope that far exceeds the die-size limits of single dies.

[...] Compared to interposers, which can be reticle-sized (832mm2) or even larger, [EMIB (Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge)] is just a small (hence, cheap) piece of silicon. It provides the same bandwidth and energy-per-bit advantages of an interposer compared to standard package traces, which are traditionally used for multi-chip packages (MCPs), such as AMD's Infinity Fabric. (To some extent, because the PCH is a separate die, chiplets have actually been around for a very long time.)

[...] Intel showed off a concept product that contains four Foveros stacks, with each stack having eight small compute chiplets that are connected via TSVs to the base die. (So the role of Foveros there is to connect the chiplets as if it were a monolithic die.) Each Foveros stack is then interconnected via two (Co-)EMIB links with its two adjacent Foveros stacks. Co-EMIB is further used to connect the HBM and transceivers to the compute stacks.

Evidently, the cost of such a product would be enormous, as it essentially contains multiple traditional monolithic-class products in a single package. That's likely why Intel categorized it as a data-centric concept product, aimed mainly at the cloud players that are more than happy to absorb those costs in exchange for the extra performance.

[...] When they are ready, these technologies will provide Intel with powerful capabilities for the heterogeneous and data-centric era. On the client side, the benefits of advanced packaging include smaller package size and lower power consumption (for Lakefield, Intel claims a 10x SoC standby power improvement at 2.6mW). In the data center, advanced packaging will help to build very large and powerful platforms on a single package, with performance, latency, and power characteristics close to what a monolithic die would yield. The yield advantage of small chiplets and the establishment of chipset ecosystem are major drivers, too.

Also at The Register, VentureBeat, Guru3D, and PCWorld.

Related: Intel Core i7-8809G with Radeon Graphics and High Bandwidth Memory: Details Leaked
Intel Announces "Sunny Cove", Gen11 Graphics, Discrete Graphics Brand Name, 3D Packaging, and More
Intel Promises "10nm" Chips by the End of 2019, and More
Intel Details Lakefield CPU SoC With 3D Packaging and Big/Small Core Configuration
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan


Original Submission