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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Carny

Coronal Hole Activity on 31 July-1 Aug, 2019

Several coronal holes (CH) are currently spread across the visible solar disk. Analysis indicates that the isolated, negative polarity CH identified as CH45- will likely connect with Earth later on Wednesday, 31 July, 2019 and result in unsettled to active levels of geomagnetic response. The CH high speed stream (HSS) associated enhancements in the solar wind are expected to continue into Thursday, 1 August, 2019. Late in the week, connections with the positive polarity CH HSS (CH47+ and CH48+) are expected and some elevated levels of geomagnetic response are likely. Keep checking our SWPC web page for the latest information and forecasts regarding these features.

There is an elevated chance of power outages and electronics experiencing errors during these events. And lovely aurora too.

Original Submission

jas writes:

There is a relatively old—though still fundamentally true—adage about Windows: Microsoft's biggest competition is Microsoft, as a specific subset of users (and businesses) only upgrade to the latest version of Windows kicking and screaming. According to SpiceWorks' Future of Network and Endpoint Security report, published Tuesday, 32% of organizations still have at least one Windows XP device connected to their network, despite extended support for XP ending in 2014. (Notably, the last variant of XP, Windows POSReady 2009, reached end of life in April 2019.)

With the looming end of free support for Windows 7, this reticence of users and enterprises to upgrade to newer versions of Windows is likely to create significant security issues. Presently, 79% of organizations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network, according to SpiceWorks, which also found that two thirds of businesses plan to migrate all of their machines off Windows 7 prior to the end of support on January 14, 2020, while a quarter will only migrate after that deadline.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/its-2019-and-one-third-of-businesses-still-have-active-windows-xp-deployments/

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takyon writes:

Red Hydrogen Two confirmed despite first phone's failure

While Red's first foray into the smartphone market failed to live up to the digital cinematography company's stellar reputation, its founder Jim Jannard has today confirmed that a much-improved follow-up to the troubled Red Hydrogen One handset is in the works.

In a candid post on Red's own H4Vuser.net forums, Jannard placed most of the blame for the Hydrogen One's failings on an unnamed Chinese ODM (Original Design Manufacturer), saying, "Getting our ODM in China to finish the committed features and fix known issues on the HYDROGEN One has proven to be beyond challenging. Impossible actually."

However, it appears the phone's successor is on the right track, with Jannard explaining that "after months of vetting a new design to manufacture [in-]house, we have begun the work on the HYDROGEN Two, virtually from scratch, at a new ODM that is clearly more capable of building and supporting the product we (and our customers) demand."

Also at Ars Technica.

Previously: RED Pitches a $1,200 Holographic Android Smartphone
$1,300 RED Hydrogen One Smartphone Fails to Impress Reviewers

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view, then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralysed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars.

Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak exactly this widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. The researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cyber-security, which mainly focuses on hacks that could crash one car or run over one pedestrian, to include potential mass mayhem.

They warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defences, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.

Hackers could use connected cars to gridlock whole cities

[Source]: Georgia Tech

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Georgia police hit with ransomware infection

The Georgia Department of Public Safety was hit by a ransomware infection Friday that affected state patrol, capitol police and the Georgia Motor Carrier Compliance Division, which does safety inspections. Laptops installed in police cars lost connectivity and access to police information as a result, CNET sister site ZDNet reported Monday.

Ransomware attacks use malware to lock out users unless the hackers get paid. Cities and municipalities often get targeted because they can't afford to have services down.

The infection was contained by DPS shutting down its IT systems, including email servers, public website and backend servers. Police officers are instead using their work phones and car radios to request information, ZDNet said.

[...] In July, more than 225 US mayors signed a resolution not to pay ransoms to hackers. Twenty-two cyberattacks have shut down city, county and state government computer systems this year alone including the hacks against two Florida cities, Lake City and Rivera Beach, that saw a combined ransom of more than $1 million.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

US teenager wins $3m as Fortnite world champion

It is the largest prize pool in the history of e-sports, with $30m shared amongst the winners.

Kyle Giersdorf, 16, won the solo event of the competition in the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, which hosts the US Open tennis tournament.

Jaden Ashman - a 15-year-old from Hornchurch, London - won almost £1m for coming second in the duos event.

And another British teenager - 14-year-old Kyle "Mongraal" Jackson from Sidcup, Kent - also walked away with a major prize.

Also at:
https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/29/fortnite-world-cup-bugha-prize-money-esports/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/gaming/2019/07/29/kyle-bugha-giersdorf-16-year-old-fortnite-champ-three-million/1855093001/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/us/fortnite-world-cup-winner-bugha.html

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

College Financial-Aid Loophole: Wealthy Parents Transfer Guardianship of Their Teens to Get Aid

Amid an intense national furor over the fairness of college admissions, the Education Department is looking into a tactic that has been used in some suburbs here, in which wealthy parents transfer legal guardianship of their college-bound children to relatives or friends so the teens can claim financial aid, say people familiar with the matter.

The strategy caught the department's attention amid a spate of guardianship transfers here. It means that only the children's earnings were considered in their financial-aid applications, not the family income or savings. That has led to awards of scholarships and access to federal financial aid designed for the poor, these people said.

Several universities in Illinois say they are looking into the practice, which is legal. "Our financial-aid resources are limited and the practice of wealthy parents transferring the guardianship of their children to qualify for need-based financial aid—or so-called opportunity hoarding—takes away resources from middle- and low-income students," said Andrew Borst, director of undergraduate enrollment at the University of Illinois. "This is legal, but we question the ethics."

Also At:
https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-financial-aid-fafsa-parents-guardianship-children-students
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/7/29/20746376/u-of-i-parents-giving-up-custody-kids-get-need-based-college-financial-aid-university-illinois

Original Submission 

martyb writes:

Fastest Eclipsing Binary, a Valuable Target for Gravitational Wave Studies:

Each night, Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a survey that uses the 48-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, scans the sky for objects that move, blink, or otherwise vary in brightness. Promising candidates are followed up with a new instrument, the Kitt Peak 84-inch Electron Multiplying Demonstrator (KPED), at the Kitt Peak 2.1-meter telescope to identify short period eclipsing binaries. KPED is designed to measure with speed and sensitivity the changing brightness of celestial sources.

This approach has led to the discovery of ZTF J1539+5027 (or J1539 for short), a white dwarf eclipsing binary with the shortest period known to date, a mere 6.91 minutes. The stars orbit so close together that the entire system could fit within the diameter of the planet Saturn.

"As the dimmer star passes in front of the brighter one, it blocks most of the light, resulting in the seven-minute blinking pattern we see in the ZTF data," explains Caltech graduate student Kevin Burdge, lead author of the paper reporting the discovery, which appears in today's issue of the journal Nature.

[...] J1539 is a rare gem. It is one of only a few known sources of gravitational waves—ripples in space and time—that will be detected by the future European space mission LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), which is expected to launch in 2034. LISA, in which NASA plays a role, will be similar to the National Science Foundation's ground-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), which made history in 2015 by making the first direct detection of gravitational waves from a pair of colliding black holes. LISA will detect gravitational waves from space at lower frequencies. J1539 is well matched to LISA; the 4.8 mHz gravitational wave frequency of J1539 is close to the peak of LISA's sensitivity.

[...] As remarkable as it is, J1539 was discovered with only a small portion of the data expected from ZTF. It was found in the ZTF team's initial analysis of 10 million sources, whereas the project will eventually study more than a billion stars.

Very roughly speaking, imagine two geostationary satellites on opposite sides of the earth. Orbiting the Earth's center in under 7 minutes. And each satellite having a mass on the order of the mass of the Sun.

Correction: The article reports their orbit could fit within Saturn's diameter ~75,000 miles. Earth's equatorial radius is ~4,000 miles. Geostationary orbit is ~22,200 miles above the Earth's surface (or ~26,200 miles above Earth's center). That gives a distance between opposing geostationary satellites of ~52,400 miles. So, extend the location of each geostationary satellite another ~11,400 miles above the Earth (roughly 3 Earth radii). For another perspective, the radius of the Moon's orbit is ~230,000 miles which is approximately 3 times the distance between these two orbiting stars, each of which is about the size of the Earth.

Journal Reference:
Burdge et al. General relativistic orbital decay in a seven-minute-orbital-period eclipsing binary system. Nature, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1403-0

Here is a video animation of the eclipsing binaries on YouTube.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

The Moon is Older Than Previously Believed:

The Moon likely formed in the aftermath of a giant collision between a Mars-sized planetary body and the early Earth. Over time, the Moon accreted from the cloud of material blasted into Earth's orbit. The newborn Moon was covered in a magma ocean, which formed different types of rocks as it cooled.

[...] scientists used the relationship between the rare elements hafnium, uranium and tungsten as a probe to understand the amount of melting that occurred to generate the mare basalts, i.e., the black regions on the lunar surface. Owing to an unprecedented measurement precision, the study could identify distinct trends amongst the different suites of rocks, which now allows for a better understanding of the behaviour of these key rare elements.

Studying hafnium and tungsten on the Moon are particularly important because they constitute a natural radioactive clock of the isotope hafnium-182 decaying into tungsten-182. This radioactive decay only lasted for the first 70 million years of the solar system. By combining the hafnium and tungsten information measured in the Apollo samples with information from laboratory experiments, the study finds that the Moon already started solidifying as early as 50 million years after solar system formed. 'This age information means that any giant impact had to occur before that time, which answers a fiercely debated question amongst the scientific community regarding when the Moon formed,' adds Professor Dr Carsten Münker from the UoC's Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, senior author of the study.

Journal Reference:
Maxwell M. Thiemens, Peter Sprung, Raúl O. C. Fonseca, Felipe P. Leitzke, Carsten Münker. Early Moon formation inferred from hafnium–tungsten systematics. Nature Geoscience, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0398-3

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The British security enthusiast enjoyed instant fame after the U.K. media revealed he'd registered and sinkholed a domain name that researchers later understood served as a hidden "kill switch" inside WannaCry, a fast-spreading, highly destructive strain of ransomware which propagated through a Microsoft Windows exploit developed by and subsequently stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency.

In August 2017, FBI agents arrested then 23-year-old Hutchins on suspicion of authoring and spreading the "Kronos" banking trojan and a related malware tool called UPAS Kit. Hutchins was released shortly after his arrest, but ordered to remain in the United States pending trial.

Many in the security community leaped to his defense at the time, noting that the FBI's case appeared flimsy and that Hutchins had worked tirelessly through his blog to expose cybercriminals and their malicious tools. Hundreds of people donated to his legal defense fund.

In September 2017, KrebsOnSecurity published research which strongly suggested Hutchins' dozens of alter egos online had a fairly lengthy history of developing and selling various malware tools and services. In April 2019, Hutchins pleaded guilty to criminal charges of conspiracy and to making, selling or advertising illegal wiretapping devices.

At his sentencing hearing July 26, U.S. District Judge Joseph Peter Stadtmueller said Hutchins' action in halting the spread of WannaCry was far more consequential than the two malware strains he admitted authoring, and sentenced him to time served plus one year of supervised release.

"When it comes to matter of loss or gain," Wheeler wrote, quoting Judge Stadtmeuller. "the most striking is comparison between you passing Kronos and WannaCry, if one looks at loss & numbers of infections, over 8B throughout world w/WannaCry, and >120M in UK."

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

New protein found in strongest spider web material

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Slovenia has found a previously unknown protein in the strongest known spider web material. In their paper published in the journal Communications Biology, the group describes their study of Darwin's bark spider silk and the glands that produce it.

[...] Darwin's bark spiders are a type of orb spider, which means they make their spider webs in the shape of a spoked wheel. They make the largest known orb webs of any spider, which they spin above the surfaces of streams. Prior research has shown that the spider actually makes seven different kinds of silk for use in different parts of its web. One of those silk types, called dragline, is used to build the spokes that give the wheel its strength. Prior research has shown it to be the strongest spider silk in existence. In this new effort, the researchers took a closer look at the dragline silk and the gland that produces it.

The researchers found two familiar types of spindroins—types of repetitive proteins—called MaSp1 and MaSp2, which are found in many spider silks. But in the dragline from Darwin's bark spiders, they found another spindroin, which they named MaSp4a. Study of this protein revealed that contained high quanitities of an amino acid called proline, which prior research has shown is generally associated with elasticity. The protein also had less of some of the other components found in MaSp1 and MaSp2, which made it quite unique.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Dear hackers: If you try to pwn a website for phishing, make sure it's not the personal domain of a senior Akamai security researcher

Think you have bad luck? Imagine being the script kiddie who inadvertently tried and failed to pwn an Akamai security pro.

Larry Cashdollar, a senior security response engineer at the US-based global web giant, told us late last week he just recently noticed something peculiar in the logs on his personal website. Further investigation turned up signs of someone scanning for remote file inclusion (RFI) vulnerabilities.

[...] He told The Register his site's logs showed the would-be attacker probing for RFI holes that would allow them to trick web applications into fetching and running a remote malicious script. In this case, the scumbag was trying, unsuccessfully, to load a file via a custom tool Cashdollar had created for his site.

"Based on my log entries they appear to be parsing web sites looking for form variables and automatically testing if those variables allow remote file inclusion," Cashdollar told El Reg.

"It's a generic test against any website where they can parse out the form input variable and then supply a URL to that variable to see if the content is included and executed."

Unfortunately for the attacker, Cashdollar also used the logs to follow the GET requests to the payload the attacker was trying to load: a script that attempted to harvest information about his server. By dissecting that and other files the hacker had ready to execute commands and take over vulnerable websites, Cashdollar was also able to extract the criminal's email address and their preferred language – Portuguese.

[...] The Akamai security engineer told El Reg that, for admins, the big takeaway from his experience is the importance of watching logs, patching site management tools, and writing web code that cannot be exploited for RFI.

"Make sure their application patches are up to date," Cashdollar advised. "Keep track of any new vulnerabilities discovered in software they're using for content management and site delivery and patch when new vulnerabilities are disclosed by the vendor."

Original Submission

ikanreed writes:

According to a recent talk presented at the Ecological Society of America, solar panels and crops aren't always in competition.

In dry, hot areas, cooling by transpiration, not sunlight is the limiting factor of crop growth. Sometimes as much of 3/4 of sunlight is wasted in these places. An experiment by Greg Barron-Gafford hoped to take advantage of that.

"In an agrivoltaic system," Barron-Gafford says, "the environment under the panels is much cooler in the summer and stays warmer in the winters. This not only lessens rates of evaporation of irrigation waters in the summer, but it also means that plants don't get as stressed out." Crops that grow under lower drought stress require less water, and because they don't wilt as easily midday due to heat, they are able to photosynthesize longer and grow more efficiently.

Moreover, the passive cooling of the transpiration the plants are doing cools the solar cells and helps keep them closer to optimum operating temperatures.

The solar panels themselves also benefit from the co-location. In places where it is above 75 degrees Fahrenheit when sunny, solar panels begin under-performing because they become too hot. The evaporation of water from the crops creates localized cooling, which reduces heat stress on the panels overhead and boosts their performance. In short, it is a win-win-win at the food-water-energy nexus.

Saving water in drought-parched areas, producing renewable electricity without needing to develop new land, increasing crop yields, and better performing solar panels. What's not to like?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NVIDIA @ SIGGRAPH 2019: NV to Enable 30-bit OpenGL Support on GeForce/Titan Cards

Kicking off this week is SIGGRAPH, the annual North American professional graphics pow-wow that sees everyone from researchers to hardware vendors come together to show off new ideas and new products. Last year's show ended up being particularly important, as NVIDIA used the show as a backdrop for the announcement of their Turing graphics architecture. This year's NVIDIA presence is going to be far more low-key – NVIDIA doesn't have any new hardware this time – but the company is still at the show with some announcements.

Diving right into matters then, this year NVIDIA has an announcement that all professional and prosumer users will want to take note of. At long last, NVIDIA is dropping the requirement to use a Quadro card to get 30-bit (10bpc) color support on OpenGL applications; the company will finally be extending that feature to GeForce and Titan cards as well.

(Prediction) Ray Tracing GPUs Will Be Required For AAA Titles From 2023

Ray Tracing technology is starting to get more support from developers, and the first triple AAA titles that will require a GPU supporting the technology will be released in around four years, according to a recent statement from an NVIDIA employee.

According to NVIDIA's Morgan McGuire, the first AAA title that will require a GPU supporting the technology will be released in 2023. Additionally, all gaming platforms will offer accelerated ray tracing by that year, which is a very interesting comment, as it suggests gaming platforms other than the PS5 and the Xbox Scarlett, both of which are already confirmed to support the technology, will come with ray tracing support, like the next Nintendo console and smart devices.

SIGGRAPH 2019: Foveated AR With Prescriptions And A Physical Tail

Arque is eye-catching work from the Embodied Media Project at Keio University's Graduate School of Media Design in Japan which proposes "an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail to allow us to alter our body momentum for assistive, and haptic feedback applications." The tail's structure is "driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip" and, according to the abstract for the project submitted to SIGGRAPH's emerging technologies portion, it highlights what such a prosthetic tail could do "as an extension of human body to provide active momentum alteration in balancing situations, or as a device to alter body momentum for full-body haptic feedback scenarios."

SIGGRAPH 2019.

See also: Magic Leap Update Brings Hand Occlusion, Expanded Multiplayer Support & More
SIGGRAPH 2019: A CG Progress Report

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How and why resistance training is imperative for older adults

"When you poll people on if they want to live to 100 years old, few will respond with a 'yes'," says Maren Fragala, Ph.D., director of scientific affairs at Quest Diagnostics and lead author of the position statement.

"The reason mainly being that many people associate advanced age with physical and cognitive decline, loss of independence and poor quality of life," adds Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., FACSM, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Michigan Medicine and one of the senior authors of the statement.

The position statement, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, and supported by the National Strength and Conditioning Association, highlights the benefits of strength and resistance training in older adults for healthier aging.

Fragala explains that while aging does take a toll on the body, the statement provides evidence-based recommendations for successful resistance training, or exercise focused on building muscle endurance, programs for older adults.

"Aging, even in the absence of chronic disease, is associated with a variety of biological changes that can contribute to decreases in skeletal muscle mass, strength and function," Fragala says. "Such losses decrease physiologic resilience and increase vulnerability to catastrophic events."

She adds, "The exciting part about this position statement is that it provides evidence-based recommendations for resistance training in older adults to promote health and functional benefits, while preventing and minimizing fears."

Maren S. Fragala, Eduardo L. Cadore, Sandor Dorgo, Mikel Izquierdo, William J. Kraemer, Mark D. Peterson, Eric D. Ryan. Resistance Training for Older Adults. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2019; 33 (8): 2019 DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003230

Original Submission