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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://globalnews.ca/news/5730770/tardigrades-on-moon/

A tiny species of nearly indestructible creatures may have just taken over the moon before humans — although we have no one but ourselves to blame.

Thousands of microscopic tardigrades likely survived a lunar lander crash into the moon last April, according to the founder of an Earth archive project.

The Israeli-run lunar lander, dubbed Beresheet, was supposed to be the first privately-funded spacecraft to touch down on the moon. Its payload included a DVD-sized library created by the Arch Mission Foundation, which contained vast troves of information and thousands of dehydrated tardigrades.

The spacecraft slammed into the lunar surface on April 11 after operators lost control of it during the final landing sequence.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Beijing Warns Hong Kong Protesters: Don't 'Play With Fire'

Amid weeks of mass anti-government demonstrations in Hong Kong that have frequently turned violent, Beijing on Tuesday issued a stark warning to protesters: "those who play with fire will perish by it."

The remarks, at a news conference in Beijing, were made by Yang Guang, a spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council. He said China has "tremendous power" to put down the protests and warned that anyone who engages in "violence and crimes ... will be held accountable."

Asked if he could rule out the use of military force in Hong Kong, Yang told journalists: "We will not let any acts attacking the principle of 'one country, two systems' go unpunished." "I warn all those criminals: Don't misjudge the situation or take restraint as a sign of weakness," he said.

Yang's comments came a day after Hong Kong's leader, Carrie Lam, vowed to restore order in the city after nine weeks of nearly uninterrupted demonstrations. Speaking on Monday, the embattled Lam said the Chinese territory was "on the verge of a very dangerous situation" — words repeated verbatim by Yang.

See also: Hong Kong Strike Sinks City Into Chaos, and Government Has Little Reply
Hong Kong's Stock Rout Enters 10th Day, Worst Streak Since 1984
Hong Kong Protests Broaden Despite Police Crackdown

Original Submission

jas writes:

For roughly two decades, Linux distributions have been the first choice for servers. Hardware support for Linux on the desktop has historically been an encumbrance to widespread adoption, though support for modern hardware on modern distributions has progressed such that most hardware is detected and configured correctly upon installation.

With these advances in hardware support, the last significant challenge users face when switching from Windows or Mac to a Linux distribution is app distribution and installation. While distribution-provided repositories are useful for most open source software, the release model of distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora lock in users to a major version for programs for the duration of a particular release.

[...] Because of differences in how they interact with the underlying system, certain configuration tasks are different between Snaps or Flatpaks than for directly-installed applications. Likewise, initial commits for the Snap and Flatpak formats were days apart—while the formats were developed essentially in parallel, the existence of two "universal" package formats has led to disagreement about competing standards.

TechRepublic's James Sanders interviewed Martin Wimpress, engineering manager for Snapcraft at Canonical, about Ubuntu's long term plans for Snaps, its adoption and support in other Linux distributions, Canonical's position as the operator of the Snap Store, and the benefits Snaps provide over Flatpak.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-canonical-views-the-snap-ecosystem-as-a-compelling-distribution-agnostic-solution/

Original Submission

"upstart" writes for SoyCow7671:

AT&T employees took bribes to plant malware on the company's network

AT&T employees took bribes to unlock millions of smartphones, and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on the company's network, the Department of Justice said yesterday.

These details come from a DOJ case opened against Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, and his co-conspirator, Ghulam Jiwani, believed to be deceased.

The DOJ charged the two with paying more than $1 million in bribes to several AT&T employees at the company's Mobility Customer Care call center in Bothell, Washington.

The bribery scheme lasted from at least April 2012 until September 2017. Initially, the two Pakistani men bribed AT&T employees to unlock expensive iPhones so they could be used outside AT&T's network.

[...] This initial stage of the scheme last for about a year, until April 2013, when several employees left or were fired by AT&T.

That's when Fahd changed tactics and bribed AT&T employees to install malware on AT&T's network at the Bothell call center. Between April and October 2013, this initial malware collected data on how AT&T infrastructure worked.

According to court documents unsealed yesterday, this malware appears to be a keylogger, having the ability "to gather confidential and proprietary information regarding the structure and functioning of AT&T's internal protected computers and applications.

The DOJ said Fahd and his co-conspirator then created a second malware strain that leveraged the information acquired through the first. This second malware used AT&T employee credentials to perform automated actions on AT&T's internal application to unlock phone's at Fahd's behest, without needing to interact with AT&T employees every time.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Toshiba Introduces New Tiny NVMe SSD Form Factor

Today at Flash Memory Summit, Toshiba is debuting a new form factor for NVMe SSDs that is small enough to be a removable alternative to soldered-down BGA SSDs. The new XFMEXPRESS form factor allows for two or four PCIe lanes while taking up much less space than even the smallest M.2 22x30mm card size. The XFMEXPRESS card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm. For comparison, the standard sizes for BGA SSDs are 11.5x13mm with a PCIe x2 interface or 16x20mm with a PCIe x4 interface.

XFMEXPRESS is intended to bring the benefits of replaceable storage to devices that would normally be stuck with soldered BGA SSDs or eMMC and UFS modules. For consumer devices this opens the way for aftermarket capacity upgrades, and for embedded devices that need to be serviceable this can permit smaller overall dimensions. Device manufacturers also get a bit of supply chain flexibility since storage capacity can be adjusted later in the assembly process. XFMEXPRESS is not intended to be used as an externally-accessible slot like SD cards; swapping out an XFMEXPRESS SSD will require opening up the case of the device it's installed in, though unlike M.2 SSDs the XFMEXPRESS socket and retention mechanism itself is tool-less.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

The US is at war. That's probably not exactly news, as the country has been engaged in one type of conflict or another for most of its history. The last time we officially declared war was after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Our biggest undeclared war today is not being fought by drones in the mountains of Afghanistan or even through the less-lethal barrage of threats over the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. In this particular war, it is the US that is under attack and on the defensive.

This is cyberwarfare.

Source: https://singularityhub.com/2019/08/01/undeclared-wars-in-cyberspace-are-becoming-more-aggressive-and-automated/

Original Submission

darkfeline writes:

Since we had an article espousing Vi(m)'s signature feature of operator composability, it seems only fair to talk about Emacs's signature feature, extensibility. This article does a good job, in my opinion, of describing the Emacs epiphany.

Within the constraints of the Emacs environment, there are no limits. Emacs is built upon this principle: [...] Make some small kernel of features. [...] Take care to make this substrate programmable, and then build the system upon it. Let users worry about future features. [...]

My road to Emacs love developed slowly. I first came to it due to Common Lisp. I knew enough Lisp to get by, copy-pasting example snippets, configuring just enough to edit my environment. [...]

Eventually I started patching some things here and there, writing my own hooks, little things like that. [...]

Finally, I wrote my first mode [...] It wasn't very good [...] But it gave me some key insights. This thing isn't just an editor, it's really an environment all the way down. I can configure everything about this mode. [...] It's all code.

After that, it was really a sky-rocket of productivity. Eventually I would write Elisp casually in between programming on work projects. I would notice that a way of working was repetitive, or that Emacs behaved in a way I just didn't quite like, or I simply thought of a nice thing that I could add. I'd happily spend anywhere from 30 seconds to half an hour writing some functionality to extend my editing facilities.

And it was extended for good. That amazed me, and still does. My problems are only problems for as long as I don't notice them. Once I do, I write some Elisp to solve it, and then it's never a problem again. In typical editors and IDEs, I simply wouldn't even think of fixing such things, never mind actually putting my work to one side for a minute, solving them, and then going back to work again. [...]

This really reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Igor clan. [...] Igors are a people inspired from the typical hunchbacked Igor archetype, but in Discworld, they are also self-modifiers. Their bodies consist of mixed and matched and patched and swapped body parts among other members of their clan, of scars and self-adjustements [sic]. They are infinitely self-improving, self-experimenting. They might end up with a botched job and have to hobble around for a few days, but in the end it's always fixable.

And they lisp.

If you're interested in a more technical treatment of Emacs, you can read the paper that Richard Stallman presented to the ACM Conference on Text Processing. One of the things that he covers is the need for separate editing and programming languages (*cough* Vim and VimScript).

Previous attempts at programmable editors have usually attempted to mix programming constructs and editing in one language. TECO is the primary example of this sort of design. It has the advantage that once the user knows how to edit with the system, he need only learn the programming constructs to begin programming as well.

However, there are considerable disadvantages, because what is good in an editor command language is ugly, hard to read, and grossly inefficient as a programming language. A good interactive editing language is composed primarily of single character commands, with a few commands that introduce longer names for less frequently used operations. As a programming language, it is unreadable if the editor is to be customizable, the user must be able to redefine each character. This in a programming language would be intolerable!

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

SpaceX expands rideshare missions on Falcon 9

Elon Musk's SpaceX is expanding its Falcon 9 rideshare missions to target small satellite operators, saying Monday it will have "regularly scheduled, dedicated" missions. The service will start at $2.25 million for 150kg (330 pounds) of payload mass, plus $15,000 for every kilogram above that.

The company pioneered the reusable rocket, lending it out for rideshare missions as a faster, less expensive way for companies to get their products into orbit.

[...] "With SpaceX as a launch partner, small satellites can fly on dedicated missions with the world's leading commercial launch provider at a fraction of traditional costs," the space company said.

The first mission will launch between November 2020 and March 2021, with the subsequent two SmallSat Rideshare Program missions scheduled for the first quarters of 2022 and 2023.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Google maps for tissues

Modern light microscopic techniques provide extremely detailed insights into organs, but the terabytes of data they produce are usually nearly impossible to process. New software, developed by a team led by MDC scientist Dr. Stephan Preibisch and now presented in Nature Methods, is helping researchers make sense of these reams of data.

It works almost like a magic wand. With the help of a few chemical tricks and ruses, scientists have for a few years now been able to render large structures like mouse brains and human organoids transparent. CLARITY is perhaps the most well-known of the many different sample clearing techniques, with which almost any object of study can be made nearly as transparent as water. This enables researchers to investigate cellular structures in ways they could previously only dream of.

And that's not all. In 2015 another conjuring trick -- called expansion microscopy -- was presented in the journal Science. A research team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge discovered that it was possible to expand ultrathin slices of mouse brains nearly five times their original volume, thereby allowing samples to be examined in even greater detail.

"With the aid of modern light-sheet microscopes, which are now found in many labs, large samples processed by these methods can be rapidly imaged," says Dr. Stephan Preibisch, head of the research group on Microscopy, Image Analysis & Modeling of Developing Organisms at MDC's Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB). "The problem, however, is that the procedure generates such large quantities of data -- several terabytes -- that researchers often struggle to sift through and organize the data."

To create order in the chaos, Preibisch and his team have now developed a software program that after complex reconstructing the data resembles somewhat Google Maps in 3D mode. "One can not only get an overview of the big picture, but can also zoom in to specifically examine individual structures at the desired resolution," explains Preibisch, who has christened the software "BigStitcher." Now, the computer program, which any interested scientist can use, has been presented in the scientific journal Nature Methods.

David Hoerl, Fabio Rojas Rusak et al. BigStitcher: Reconstructing high-resolution image datasets of cleared and expanded samples. Nature Methods, 2019 DOI: 10.1038/s41592-019-0501-0

Original Submission

DanRichNC writes:

Purism has finally released the specs of the up and coming Librem 5 smartphone!
Librem 5 Specs
What are your initial reactions?

Though I'm not a hardware expert by a long shot, I'm not incredibly impressed with the specs. I do feel that smartphone hardware has been "good enough" for most uses for a while now and I know they have to start somewhere. What has not been good enough is freedom, flexibility, and, you know, actual ownership of the device. Sure you could get some level of freedom by jumping through a bunch of hoops, but who has time for that? Also, in case you haven't been paying attention, most of the work-arounds are becoming more and more difficult, if not impossible to implement.

Like it or not, smartphones are the way most people interact with computers, and beyond the basics for survival, are probably among the most important of our possessions. I want devices that I control and I want my kids and grand-kids to live in a world where they don't have to be the "product". In the wake of so many failed open-smartphones, is there any way Purism has a shot?

Previously:
Lockdown Mode on the Librem 5: Beyond Hardware Kill Switches
Librem 5 Dev Kits Are Shipping
Progress Update From the Librem 5 Hardware Department

Original Submission

martyb writes:

According to the SpaceFlight Now Launch Schedule:

Falcon 9 • Amos 17
Launch window: 2253-0021 GMT on 6th/7th (6:53-8:21 p.m. EDT on 6th)
Launch site: SLC-40, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Amos 17 communications satellite. Built by Boeing and owned by Spacecom Ltd. of Israel, Amos 17 will provide high-throughput broadband connectivity and other communications services over Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Delayed from May 27, June, July 24, Aug. 3 and Aug. 5. [Aug. 5]

Previously: Spacex Falcon 9 Launch of Amos-17 Satellite Scheduled for Sat/Sun Aug 3/4 or Maybe Not? [UPDATED]

Original Submission

DeathMonkey writes:

Video games are partly to blame for mass shootings, Donald Trump has said.

Games that "celebrate violence" should be discouraged and made harder to buy, the president suggested.

"We must stop the glorification of violence in our society," he said during a speech in the wake of a spate of shootings. "This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.

"It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately."

[...] No connection has ever been meaningfully established between violent video games and violent behaviour, and the relationship between the two continues to be debated by academics and experts.

Trump to Launch Crackdown on Violent Videogames After Mass Shootings

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Is it Safe to use an Electric fan for Cooling?

Ignoring Betteridge's Law of Headlines, it appears that different guidelines have been promulgated regarding when it is, and is not, safe and effective to use a fan to cool off.

The safety and effectiveness of electric fans in heatwaves depend on the climate and basing public health advice on common weather metrics could be misleading, according to a new study from the University of Sydney.

[...] The results, published today in Annals of Internal Medicine, show that in a hot, humid condition with a heat index of 56 °C (133°F) fans lowered core temperature and cardiovascular strain, and improved thermal comfort.

However, fans were detrimental for all measures in very hot, dry conditions despite a lower heat index of 46 °C (115°F).

Heat index is a commonly used weather metric that expresses both air temperature and relative humidity. It was designed to help convey how hot weather conditions feel to the average person.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) states that fan use above a heat index of 37.2°C (99°F) "actually increases the heat stress the body must respond to."

[...] "Our results suggest that under environmental conditions that represent the vast majority of peak heatwaves in the United States and Europe fans should be recommended and the guidelines issued by most public health authorities are unnecessarily conservative," said Associate Professor Jay.

"It is only when the air temperature is very high and humidity is very low that fans are detrimental, which can be seen in arid conditions such as Phoenix or Las Vegas in the US, or Adelaide in South Australia."

Journal Reference:
Nathan B. Morris, Timothy English, Lily Hospers, Anthony Capon, Ollie Jay. The Effects of Electric Fan Use Under Differing Resting Heat Index Conditions: A Clinical Trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019; DOI: 10.7326/M19-0512

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Google Just Revealed a Brilliantly Simple Trick to Totally Destroy Telemarketers:

Google just announced it has come up with a new way to thwart telemarketers--heck, to completely destroy their business model. It's brilliantly simple, and it seems like it will actually work.

[...] Here's how Google's solution works--introduced at its hardware event in New York City on Tuesday. It's called simply "Call Screen," and it's built into Android on the Pixel 3.

• When you get a call from a number you don't recognize on an Android device, click "Call Screen" on your device.
• Google Assistant answers the call, with a greeting like, "Hi, the person you're calling is using a screening service from Google, and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name, and why you are calling."
• The caller will either hang up--in which case it's probably not important--or provide an answer, which will then be transcribed and displayed on your screen.
• Then it's up to you to decide whether to answer.

So if the message you receive reads something like, "Bill, this is your wife, I lost my phone, pick up," you'd answer (I hope). But if it's something like, "This is the IRS calling to say we will arrest you for not paying taxes," you can just ignore it, since it's absolutely a scam.

"Just tap the 'Call Screen' button and your phone will answer for you and ask who's calling and why," Google product manager Liza Ma said in announcing the new feature, followed by the eight most important words of her presentation: "You'll never have to talk to another telemarketer."

You can also mark spammy incoming calls as "Spam." That way, if you ever get a call from that number again, it will come with a big red interface reminding you that you've previously pegged the number as suspicious.

That's it. Call Screen won't remove your phone number from telemarketers' lists. But it could ultimately make the entire telemarketing industry unprofitable. If telemarketers can never reach anyone to pitch, they can never close a sale.

All the better to target advertising at you with.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Toshiba has provided more details about XL-FLASH, a high-performance version of 3D 1-bit-per-cell NAND memory:

Last year at Flash Memory Summit, Toshiba announced XL-FLASH, a specialized low-latency SLC[*] 3D NAND flash memory that is their answer to Samsung's Z-NAND (and to a lesser extent, Intel's 3D XPoint). Few details were provided at the time, but this year Toshiba is ready to give out more information, including a timeline for bringing it to market: sampling starts next month, and mass production begins next year.

The first XL-FLASH parts will use a 128Gb die, divided into 16 planes to support a much higher degree of parallelism than existing capacity-oriented 3D NAND parts. The page size will be 4kB, significantly smaller than what most 3D NAND uses, but that's not a surprise given that XL-FLASH is storing just one bit per cell rather than three or four. Toshiba's press release does not disclose the erase block size, but we expect it to be similarly smaller than what's used in high-capacity NAND designs. As for performance, Toshiba says read latency will be less than 5 microseconds, compared to about 50 µs for their 3D TLC.

Package size is 32 GB (2 dies), 64 GB (4 dies), or 128 GB (8 dies).

3D SLC NAND should continue to improve in the future as layer counts hit 176, 256, and beyond.

[*] SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC explainer.

Also at Guru3D.

See also: Memblaze's PBlaze5 X26: Toshiba's XL-Flash-Based Ultra-Low Latency SSD

Related: Western Digital and Samsung at the Flash Memory Summit
Samsung Shares Plans for 96-Layer TLC NAND, QLC NAND, and 2nd-Generation "Z-NAND"
Western Digital's Low Latency Flash: A Competitor to Intel's Optane (3D XPoint)?

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Over at Gizmodo, a report on a piece published by The New Yorks Times that fails on full disclosure.

The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google's largest competitors.

Thiel first blasted Google as "treasonous" last month, saying that the FBI and CIA should investigate the company for working with the Chinese government. The tech investor even asked if Google had been infiltrated by Chinese spies, a highly inflammatory charge that he didn't substantiate. Thiel has now followed up his anti-Google remarks in a new piece for the Times praising President Donald Trump and railing against "globalization."

(Disclosure: Thiel secretly bankrolled a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, which bankrupted Gizmodo's former parent company, Gawker Media.)

Thiel's central argument is that anyone helping China to develop artificial intelligence technologies is assisting China's military because, he says, all AI should be seen first and foremost as having military applications:

Could it have something to do with this? Or from earlier coverage by Gizmodo,

Theil has a decades-long list of headlines behind him. He was a PayPal co-founder, the first outside investor in Facebook, a rare San Francisco Bay Area cheerleader, tech adviser for Donald Trump and a man who is known to spend his multibillion-dollar fortune on ventures like immortality, the singularity, and getting kids to drop out of college, among other things. Palantir is a developer of increasingly common predictive policing technology that's used by law enforcement agencies around the United States. And based on Palantir's opaque contracts with Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, its tech is reportedly helping fuel the agency's accelerated deportations under President Trump.

Original Submission