SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

The postie who went off like a rocket

A British inventor has taken up the challenge to deliver a letter across open water through donning a jet engine-powered suit, 85 years after the idea of rocket post failed.

Richard Browning has followed in the footsteps of German entrepreneur Gerhard Zucker, who tried to send mail by rocket to the Isle of Wight, in 1934.

The distance from Hurst Castle in Lymington to Fort Albert in Freshwater is 1.3 km, and is the furthest Richard has ever flown.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When it comes to the vital statistics of a modern hypercar, surely none have as little relevance as its top speed. You can make use of a sub three-second 0-60mph time in most parts of the world without causing a ruckus—just find the nearest toll booth on a highway. Pin the throttle flat and for a brief moment, until respect for one's fellow humans or fear of the speeding ticket takes over, and it's possible to experience all of the torque and power. But reaching the Vmax for most of these hand-built exotics remains an abstract idea, even on Germany's derestricted Autobahns.

Fast forward another nine years and Bugatti replaced the Veyron with the Chiron, another scarab-like hypercar but this time with even more powerful 8L W16 engine, packing almost 1,500hp (1,103kW). But when the new car arrived, Bugatti revealed that its top speed was actually electronically limited to a maximum of 261mph (420km/h). It could theoretically go faster than that but its specially designed Michelin tires would fail under the extreme forces. [...]

Bugatti and Wallace spent four days at Ehra-Lessien, and eventually found enough confidence in the car to keep it flat over "the jump", a resurfaced section of track that would unsettle the Chiron as it crossed it at warp speed. "After it landed and had a bit of a weave about I thought it was the best it's been, the cross wind was a little bit less and I just kept it pinned," he told Autocar.

The result was a scarcely believable 304.773mph (490.484km/h), giving Bugatti hypercar bragging rights that will probably be difficult to beat. (Particularly since Bugatti, like Ehra-Lessien, is owned by Volkswagen.) At the same time, Bugatti is a European company, and therefore works in metric, as do most of its global customers. You have to wonder if discussions have already begun about trying to find an extra 10km/h so it can break the 500km/h barrier as well…

Original Submission

takyon writes:

"Legal Options Are a Better Way to Beat Piracy Than Enforcement"

A new article, published in the American University International Law Review, suggests that affordability and availability are the key drivers to decrease piracy. Focusing on the supply-side is more effective than enforcement options such as lawsuits, infringement notices, and website blocking, the researchers conclude.

[...] One recent article, published by University of Amsterdam researchers João Pedro Quintais and Joost Poort, suggests that affordability and availability are key drivers.

The researchers analyzed a wealth of data and conducted surveys among 35,000 respondents, in thirteen countries. What they found was that, between 2014 and 2017, self-reported piracy rates have dropped in all the European countries that were surveyed, except Germany.

In a 70-page paper, published in American University International Law Review, the researchers try to pinpoint the most likely explanation for this decline, starting with enforcement. [...] This article doesn't have space for a full review of all the literature, but the conclusion from the report's authors is clear. Enforcement is not the silver bullet that will stop piracy. [...] Instead, the researchers believe that other factors are likely responsible for the decline in piracy rates. Specifically, they point to affordability and availability of legal content.

The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets – Not Enforcement – Drive Down Copyright Infringement (open, no DOI)

Original Submission

martyb writes:

At the time of this writing, the National Weather Service's National Hurricane Center reports Eye of category 5 Dorian moving little while over Grand Bahama island. That page also contains several other views and forecasts of the storm.

Though it no longer looks like Florida will get a "direct hit", the storm's currently-predicted run up the US Atlantic coast promises storm surges, very heavy rain with potential flooding, and of course high winds.

For those who lie in the path of this beast, please accept my personal best wishes for you and your loved ones making it through safely.

What sites have you found to be the most informative, timely, and useful? Special credit for those which are minimally sensationalistic. Any webcams to recommend? How are things in your area? What preparations are you making?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

China's Chang'e-4 lunar rover has discovered an unusually colored, "gel-like" substance during its exploration activities on the far side of the moon.

The mission's rover, Yutu-2, stumbled on that surprise during lunar day 8. The discovery prompted scientists on the mission to postpone other driving plans for the rover, and instead focus its instruments on trying to figure out what the strange material is.

[...] So far, mission scientists haven't offered any indication as to the nature of the colored substance and have said only that it is "gel-like" and has an "unusual color." One possible explanation, outside researchers suggested, is that the substance is melt glass created from meteorites striking the surface of the moon.

Yutu-2's discovery isn't scientists' first lunar surprise, however. Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt discovered orange-colored soil near the mission's Taurus-Littrow landing site in 1972, prompting excitement from both Schmitt and his moonwalk colleague, Gene Cernan. Lunar geologists eventually concluded that the orange soil was created during an explosive volcanic eruption 3.64 billion years ago.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/china-s-lunar-rover-has-found-something-weird-moon-s-ncna1048416?cid=public-rss_20190831

Original Submission

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Michael Larabel over at Phoronix got his journalism on to produce this interesting story:

We were tipped off today that AMD's Head of Platform Firmware, Edward Benyukhis, publicly posted on LinkedIn that he is "looking to hire someone with solid Coreboot and UEFI background." If you have Coreboot experience or know someone who is, see LinkedIn for contacting Benyukhis.

Oh, and they're also one of the sponsors for the Open-Source Firmware Conference next week. Does this mean I may actually get to use a computer that isn't about to hit a decade old and without a functional hardware rootkit sometime soon?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

OpenBSD developer, Gilles Chehade, debunks multiple myths regarding deployment of e-mail services. While it is some work to deploy and operate a mail service, it is not as hard as the large corporations would like people to believe. Gilles derives his knowledge from having built and worked with both proprietary and free and open source mail systems. He covers why it is feasible to consider running one.

I work on an opensource SMTP server. I build both opensource and proprietary solutions related to mail. I will likely open a commercial mail service next year.

In this article, I will voluntarily use the term mail because it is vague enough to encompass protocols and software. This is not a very technical article and I don't want to dive into protocols, I want people who have never worked with mail to understand all of it.

I will also not explain how I achieve the tasks I describe as easy. I want this article to be about the "mail is hard" myth, disregarding what technical solution you use to implement it. I want people who read this to go read about Postfix, Notqmail, Exim and OpenSMTPD, and not go directly to OpenSMTPD because I provided examples.

I will write a follow-up article, this time focusing on how I do things with OpenSMTPD. If people write similar articles for other solutions, please forward them to me and I'll link some of them. it will be updated as time passes by to reflect changes in the ecosystem, come back and check again over time.

Finally, the name Big Mailer Corps represents the major e-mail providers. I'm not targeting a specific one, you can basically replace Big Mailer Corps anywhere in this text with the name of any provider that holds several hundred of millions of recipient addresses. Keep in mind that some Big Mailer Corps allow hosting under your own domain name, so when I mention the e-mail address space, if you own a domain but it is hosted by a Big Mailer Corp, your domain and all e-mail addresses below your domain are part of their address space.

Earlier on SN:
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)
Re-decentralizing the World-Wide Web (2019)
Usenet, Authentication, and Engineering - We Can Learn from the Past (2018)
A Decentralized Web Would Give Power Back to the People Online (2016)
Decentralized Sharing (2014)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A research team at The University of Tokyo has introduced a powerful method for actively breaking chemical bonds using excitations in tiny antennae created by infrared lasers. This process may have applications throughout chemistry as a way to direct chemical reactions in desired directions. In particular, the reactions used in the energy, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing sectors may become much more efficient by increasing yields while reducing waste.

[...] One way to control which bonds are broken during a chemical reaction is to get molecules vibrating by exciting them with infrared laser light. Since each type of chemical bond absorbs a particular wavelength of light, they can be activated individually. Unfortunately, it is difficult to deliver enough energy throughout the sample to generate the vibration intensity required. The team at The University of Tokyo was able to overcome this problem by fabricating tiny gold antennae, each just 300 nanometers wide, and by illuminating them with infrared lasers. When infrared light of the right frequency was present, the electrons in the antennae oscillated back and forth in resonance with the light waves, which created a very intense electric field. This phenomenon is called a "plasmonic resonance," and requires that the antennae be just the right shape and size. The plasmonic resonance focused the laser's energy on nearby molecules, which started vibrating. The vibration was further boosted by shaping the waveform of the infrared laser so that the frequency changed rapidly in time, reminiscent of the chirping of birds. "This successfully demonstrated that the combination of ultrafast optics and nano-plasmonics is useful for efficient, selective vibrational excitation," says senior author Satoshi Ashihara.

In the future, this technique may be applied to the production of cleaner fuels or cheaper pharmaceuticals as the chemical processes become optimized.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/london-gatwick-drug-bust-cake-scli-intl/index.html

Bags of white powder seized as part of a "huge drugs bust" at London's Gatwick Airport actually contained vegan cake ingredients, the British Transport Police said.

A member of staff at Purezza, a vegan restaurant with stores in London and Brighton, was transporting a suitcase filled with bags of cake mix when it was seized by police Wednesday afternoon.

Original Submission

upstart writes for Fnord666:

Coin-mining malware jumps from ARM IoT gear to Intel servers

Akamai senior security researcher Larry Cashdollar says one of his honeypot systems recently turned up what appears to be an IoT malware that targets Intel machines running Linux.

"I suspect it’s probably a derivate of other IoT crypto mining botnets," Cashdollar told The Register. "This one seems to target enterprise systems."

In addition to being fine-tuned for Intel x86 and 686 processors, the malware looks to establish an SSH Port 22 connection and deliver itself as a gzip archive. From there, the malware checks to see if the machine has already been infected (at which point the installation stops) or if an earlier version is running and needs to be terminated. From there, three different directories are created with different versions of the same files.

"Each directory contains a variation of the XMrig v2.14.1 cryptocurrency miner in either x86 32bit or 64bit format," the Akamai security ace explained. "Some of the binaries are named after common Unix utilities, like ps, in an attempt to blend into a normal process list."

Following that step, the malware looks to install the cryptocurrency mining tool itself and modify the host system's crontab file to make sure the malware runs even after a reboot. Additionally, the malware installs a shell script that allows it to communicate with the command and control server.

Original Submission

upstart writes for Fnord666:

Comcast, beware: New city-run broadband offers 1Gbps for $60 a month

A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city's voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it.

[...] Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There's a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on.

[...] "The initial number of homes we're targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume," Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion's fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city's homes and businesses, Shanley said the city's plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years.

"Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont," another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today.

[...] In November 2017, voters in Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build the broadband network.

The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), of which Comcast is a member, donated $815,000 toward a campaign against the ballot initiative. The Chamber of Commerce also opposed the plan. Comcast didn't participate in the campaign publicly, but the company would have been the main beneficiary of a vote against the municipal option.

In all, the industry-led opposition spent more than $900,000 fighting the ballot question, while the pro-broadband group led by residents spent about $15,000.

Before the election, a study by a pro-municipal broadband group estimated that "Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year."

Fort Collins Connexion promises to follow net neutrality principles, saying it will not "intentionally block, slow down, or charge money for specific websites and online content."

The municipal ISP's privacy pledge says that it does not "share, distribute, or sell a User's specific Internet usage history, call history, voicemail, or other electronic data generated from a User's Internet and phone Service to any external third party."

Original Submission

quietus writes:

In March 2007, the EU set itself some ambitious climate targets.

By 2020, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions should be 20 percent below 1990 levels, renewable energy should make up 20% of the energy mix, and the share of it in the transport sector should be up by 10 percent.

A briefing [PDF] to the EU Parliament now shows those targets are about to be beaten, by a margin.

GHG emissions, including those of air traffic, had already decreased 22 percent by 2017. The share of renewable energy sources had risen, by 2016, to 17%.

Interestingly, the drop in GHG emission intensity, the ratio of GHG emissions to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is even more pronounced. One euro in GDP, in 2017, compared to 315g carbon dioxide: half the level of 1990. Between 1990 and 2017, the combined GDP of the EU increased by 58% while total GHG emissions fell by 22%.

The figures mentioned do not include GHG emissions through land use. According to the briefing, the EU's land absorbs more carbon than it emits; member states are bound by regulation to at least preserve this situation. Of the 28 member states, 25 now have developed climate change adaptation plans, including measures like using less water, adapting building regulations, building flood defenses, developing crops that cope better in drought conditions etcetera.

For the period 2014-2020, the EU had vowed to spend at least 20% (€206 billion) of its budget to climate change measures. That target was already reached in 2017. For the 2021-2027 period, the European Commission proposed to increase that level to 25% of a €1134,6 billion overall budget.

Under current trends, the EU's GHG emission levels will have dropped by 30% by 2030. The new target set by the European Commission, though, is a drop of at least 40 percent, while the share of renewable energy should be 32%. Combined with a 32% increase in overall energy efficiency, this should result in a 45% drop in GHG emissions. Parliament itself proposes an even more ambitious target of 55 percent GHG emission reductions by 2030.

Under the 2011 Energy Roadmap, the 2050 target was a reduction of 80% in GHG emission levels compared to 1990. In November 2018, that target was changed to zero percent GHG emissions, through a socially fair transition in a cost-efficient manner.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Early hominin skull fills in "a major gap" in the fossil record

A 3.8 million-year-old fossil skull is giving anthropologists their first look at an early Australopithecine, the hominin genus that eventually led to modern humans. The skull belongs to a member of a species called Australopithecus anamensis, which many anthropologists have considered the ancestor of the fossil hominin Lucy and the rest of her species, Australopithecus afarensis. But the find suggests that, as with most of these things, the story may be more complicated.

A. anamensis lived in Eastern Africa between 3.8 million and 4.2 million years ago. Like Lucy, they would have walked upright, but with a gait that we would probably pick out as a little odd. They probably would have still had upper arms adapted to the physical strains of climbing, especially as young children. At the moment, however, those are just assumptions—albeit very likely ones—based on what we know about other Australopiths. That's because, until now, anthropologists knew A. anamensis only from its teeth and jaws. In fact, skulls are hard to find at all in the fossil record before 3.5 million years ago.

That doesn't sound like much to go on, but the sizes and shapes of teeth changed noticeably between hominin species, so they're very handy for identification. In fact, paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Salassie and his colleagues identified their newly found skull as A. anamensis based on the size and shape of its canines, which had certain anatomical features that stood out from A. afarensis and other close relatives.

But now anthropologists have a complete skull to work with. Formally known as MRD, it's mostly intact after 3.8 million years buried in sandstone, sandwiched between two layers of volcanic debris. The find, from the Waranjo-Mille site in the Afar region of Ethiopia, reveals what A. anamensis looked like, the kind of diet it was adapted to eat, and how its brain had grown compared to apes and to other hominins.

The lower half of the hominin's long face juts forward beneath its wide, heavy cheekbones, then narrows above them. Those broad cheeks and narrow upper face give A. anamensis a clear family resemblance to Lucy and other, later Australopiths. Overall, it's a strong, heavy-looking face, built on a frame of bones robust enough to support powerful muscles for chewing tough plant foods. In the dry shrubland around the shores of the ancient lake where MRD lived and died, nearly everything edible would also have been tough enough to make chewing serious work.

But if A. anamensis had the face of a later Australopith, its cranium looks more like those of apes and older hominin species. Its skull narrows just behind the eye sockets, like earlier hominins and apes, and its brain case, at 365cc to 370cc, is smaller than that of A. afarensis. Clearly, hominins hadn't yet started developing our infamous big brains in A. anamensis' day.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Google Play apps with 1.5 million downloads drained batteries and slowed devices

The apps—a notepad app called "Idea Note: OCR Text Scanner, GTD, Color Notes" and a fitness app with the title "Beauty Fitness: daily workout, best HIIT coach"—carried out the stealthy form of fraud for almost a year until it was discovered by researchers at security firm Symantec. Google removed them from Play after receiving a private report.

The newly discovered tactic positioned advertisements in places that weren't visible to end users—specifically in messages displayed in the nether regions of an infected phone's notification drawer. When a user clicked on the notification, Android's Toast class opened the ad—but in a way that wasn't visible to the user. The technique worked by opening a Canvas and using the translate() and dispatchDraw() methods to position the ads beyond the viewable screen area of the infected device. The result: the app could report a revenue-generating ad click even though users saw nothing.

Another way the apps concealed the ad-clicking was through the use of so-called packers. By changing the entire structure and flow of an APK, such packers can obfuscate the true behavior of an Android app. That makes it hard for Google scanners to detect malicious apps during any vetting processes.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

OpenAI has released the largest version yet of its fake-news-spewing AI

In February OpenAI catapulted itself into the public eye when it produced a language model so good at generating fake news that the organization decided not to release it. Some within the AI research community argued it was a smart precaution; others wrote it off as a publicity stunt. The lab itself, a small San Francisco-based for-profit that seeks to create artificial general intelligence, has firmly held that it is an important experiment in how to handle high-stakes research.

Now six months later, the policy team has published a paper examining the impact of the decision thus far. Alongside it, the lab has released a version of the model, known as GPT-2, that's half the size of the full one, which has still not been released.

In May, a few months after GPT-2's initial debut, OpenAI revised its stance on withholding the full code to what it calls a "staged release"—the staggered release of incrementally larger versions of the model in a ramp-up to the full one. In February, it published a version of the model that was merely 8% of the size of the full one. It published another roughly a quarter of the full version before the most recent release. During this process, it also partnered with selected research institutions to study the full model's implications.

[...] The authors concluded that after careful monitoring, OpenAI had not yet found any attempts of malicious use but had seen multiple beneficial applications, including in code autocompletion, grammar help, and developing question-answering systems for medical assistance. As a result, the lab felt that releasing the most recent code was ultimately more beneficial. Other researchers argue that several successful efforts to replicate GPT-2 have made OpenAI's withholding of the code moot anyway.

OpenAI Can No Longer Hide Its Alarmingly Good Robot 'Fake News' Writer

But it may not ultimately be up to OpenAI. This week, Wired magazine reported that two young computer scientists from Brown University—Aaron Gokaslan, 23, and Vanya Cohen, 24—had published what they called a recreation of OpenAI's (shelved) original GPT-2 software on the internet for anyone to download. The pair said their work was to prove that creating this kind of software doesn't require an expensive lab like OpenAI (backed by $2 billion in endowment and corporate dollars). They also don't believe such a software would cause imminent danger to society.

Also at BBC.

See also: Elon Musk: Computers will surpass us 'in every single way'

Previously: OpenAI Develops Text-Generating Algorithm, Considers It Too Dangerous to Release

Original Submission