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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Professor Peter Coveney, Director of the UCL Centre[*] for Computational Science and study co-author, said: "Our work shows that the behaviour of the chaotic dynamical systems is richer than any digital computer can capture. Chaos is more commonplace than many people may realise and even for very simple chaotic systems, numbers used by digital computers can lead to errors that are not obvious but can have a big impact. Ultimately, computers can't simulate everything."

The team investigated the impact of using floating-point arithmetic -- a method standardised by the IEEE and used since the 1950s to approximate real numbers on digital computers.

Digital computers use only rational numbers, ones that can be expressed as fractions. Moreover the denominator of these fractions must be a power of two, such as 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. There are infinitely more real numbers that cannot be expressed this way.

In the present work, the scientists used all four billion of these single-precision floating-point numbers that range from plus to minus infinity. The fact that the numbers are not distributed uniformly may also contribute to some of the inaccuracies.

First author, Professor Bruce Boghosian (Tufts University), said: "The four billion single-precision floating-point numbers that digital computers use are spread unevenly, so there are as many such numbers between 0.125 and 0.25, as there are between 0.25 and 0.5, as there are between 0.5 and 1.0. It is amazing that they are able to simulate real-world chaotic events as well as they do. But even so, we are now aware that this simplification does not accurately represent the complexity of chaotic dynamical systems, and this is a problem for such simulations on all current and future digital computers."

The study builds on the work of Edward Lorenz of MIT whose weather simulations using a simple computer model in the 1960s showed that tiny rounding errors in the numbers fed into his computer led to quite different forecasts, which is now known as the 'butterfly effect'.

[*] UCL: University College London

Journal Reference:
Bruce M. Boghosian, Peter V. Coveney, Hongyan Wang. A New Pathology in the Simulation of Chaotic Dynamical Systems on Digital Computers. Advanced Theory and Simulations, 2019; 1900125 DOI: 10.1002/adts.201900125

Original Submission

martyb writes:

JUUL Labs Names New Leadership, Outlines Changes to Policy and Marketing Efforts – JUUL Newsroom

JUUL Labs announced today that K.C. Crosthwaite will be joining the company as CEO effective immediately. The announcement from co-founders James Monsees, Adam Bowen and Kevin Burns follows Burns’ decision to step down.

[...]In his new role, Crosthwaite and the entire JUUL Labs leadership team will continue a broad review of the company’s practices and policies to ensure alignment with its aim of responsible leadership within the industry. Effective immediately, JUUL Labs announced the company is:

• Suspending all broadcast, print and digital product advertising in the U.S.
• Refraining from lobbying the Administration on its draft guidance and committing to fully support and comply with the final policy when effective

Commenting on the announcement, Crosthwaite said: “I have long believed in a future where adult smokers overwhelmingly choose alternative products like JUUL. That has been this company’s mission since it was founded, and it has taken great strides in that direction. Unfortunately, today that future is at risk due to unacceptable levels of youth usage and eroding public confidence in our industry. Against that backdrop, we must strive to work with regulators, policymakers and other stakeholders, and earn the trust of the societies in which we operate. That includes inviting an open dialogue, listening to others and being responsive to their concerns.”

Burns said: “Working at JUUL Labs has been an honor and I still believe the company’s mission of eliminating combustible cigarettes is vitally important. I am very proud of my team’s efforts to lead the industry toward much needed category-wide action to tackle underage usage of these products, which are intended for adult smokers only. Since joining JUUL Labs, I have worked non-stop, helping turn a small firm into a worldwide business, so a few weeks ago I decided that now was the right time for me to step down. I am grateful to be able to confidently hand the reins to someone with K.C.’s skill set, which is well-suited to the next phase of the company’s journey.”

Further, CNBC reports Philip Morris and Altria End Merger Talks:

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9427

Messaging app Kik shuts down as company focuses on Kin, its cryptocurrency – TechCrunch

Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston announced today that the company is shutting down Kik Messenger to focus on its cryptocurrency Kin, the target of a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company's team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect more than 100 employees, as it focuses on converting more Kin users into buyers.

"Instead of selling some of our Kin into the limited liquidity that exists today, we made the decision to focus our current resources on the few things that matter most," Livingston wrote in a blog post, adding that the changes will reduce the company's burn rate by 85%, enabling it to get through the SEC trial.

Kin launched two years ago, raising nearly $100 million in its ICO, one of the first held by a mainstream tech company.

But in June, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Kik Interactive, claiming the ICO was illegal, as part of the Commission's wider crackdown on companies it alleges are issuing securities illegally.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Dell Technologies on Tuesday is introducing new appliances under its PowerProtect DD brand, the next generation of its Data Domain protection storage appliances. In addition to the new hardware, Dell is adding new capabilities to its cyber recovery product, as well as to Dell EMC PowerProtect Software.

The updates are designed to meet the growing data protection needs of the enterprise. Earlier this year, the Dell EMC Global Data Protection Index found that organizations managed 9.7 petabytes of data in 2018. Compared to 2016, that's a 569 percent increase.

When it comes to protecting data, "the problem is getting bigger, it's not going away," Ruya Atac-Barrett, VP of Data Protection Marketing, said to ZDNet. In addition to the growth of data collected, she pointed out, organizations also have to deal with more applications and end points driving this growth.

"Customers are noticing the data is no longer sitting in four walls," she said. "It's much more distributed, whether it's at the edge, core or multi-cloud."

Dell EMC's goal, Atac-Barrett said, is to build a portfolio "to meet customer needs, whether that's in the terabyte range or in the multi-petabyte range with massively distributed IT environments."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Quieter, Faster, Stronger: The Next Jet Age Is Coming

Human flight is on the verge of a second renaissance, with new technology ushering in an age of faster and quieter passenger jets. Although the supersonic Concorde jet launched over 40 years ago, commercial flight speeds have stagnated (and even regressed) since then. But new breakthroughs from NASA and jet startups show that innovation is finally returning to air travel.

NASA is working on quiet supersonic tech that is able to muffle the inevitable sonic boom to a "soft thump." At the same time, they've found new technologies that can reduce noise from existing aircraft by over 70%, potentially improving the quality of life near airports and reducing noise complaints. Meanwhile, three US startups are working to revive commercial supersonic travel, with lighter and stronger materials, a quieter design, and cleaner and more efficient engines. They hope to deliver their first jets to the airlines by the mid-2020s.

In 1976, the Concorde premiered as the world's first supersonic commercial jet, and for the next 27 years, it limped along as a cautionary tale of innovation gone sideways. The plane was extremely loud at even normal speeds, especially during takeoff and landing, but its ear-splitting sonic booms were completely intolerable.

Public opposition to the noise led the FAA to preemptively ban supersonic flight over land, effectively imposing a speed limit of Mach 1 (or 767 mph) across the country.*

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9427

Google wins fight to restrict right-to-be-forgotten ruling to EU search engines

Google has won a long-standing battle with the European Union (EU), after the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled the company can limit the scope of the “right-to-be-forgotten” (RTBF) regulation to searches made within the EU.

Today’s announcement was largely expected, given that an adviser to the EU’s top court backed Google’s case in January. (ECJ judges typically follow the advice given by the advocate general.) But now it’s official, meaning Google and others will only have to delist search results from search engines inside the EU’s perimeters.

“The Court concludes that, currently, there is no obligation under EU law for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject, as the case may be, following an injunction from a supervisory or judicial authority of a Member State, to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine,” the ECJ said in a press release.

[...]Although today’s ruling is good news for Google and its ilk, it doesn’t necessary mean there won’t be similar cases in the future. The ECJ noted that although search engine operators are not required to carry out a de-referencing on all local versions of their search engine, they are not prohibited from doing so. Effectively, local jurisdictions within the EU are still free to weigh a person or company’s right to privacy against the right to freedom of information on a case-by-case basis.

“The authorities of the member states remain competent to weigh up, in the light of national standards of protection of fundamental rights, a data subject’s right to privacy and the protection of personal data concerning him or her, on the one hand, and the right to freedom of information, on the other. And after weighing those rights against each other, to order, where appropriate, the operator of that search engine to carry out a de-referencing concerning all versions of that search engine,” ECJ’s statement reads.

In other words, Google, Microsoft, and others could still find themselves having to fight global right-to-be-forgotten requests down the line. But today’s ruling does set a precedent, one that may discourage EU member states — or individuals — from pursuing such a course of action.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49810261

Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful, the Supreme Court has ruled.

Mr Johnson suspended - or prorogued - Parliament for five weeks earlier this month, but judges said it was wrong to stop MPs carrying out duties in the run-up to Brexit on 31 October.

Supreme Court president Lady Hale said "the effect on the fundamentals of democracy was extreme."

[...]Delivering its conclusions, the Supreme Court's president, Lady Hale, said: "The decision to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament was unlawful because it had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification."

Lady Hale said the unanimous decision of the 11 justices meant Parliament had effectively not been prorogued - the decision was null and of no effect.

She added that it was important to emphasise the case was "not about when and on what terms" the UK left the EU, but about the decision to suspend Parliament.

Speaker of the Commons John Bercow said MPs needed to return "in light of the explicit judgement", and he had "instructed the House of Commons authorities to prepare... for the resumption of business" from 11:30 BST on Wednesday.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

There's one crucial way tape still trounces SSDs and hard drives when it comes to storage...

Tapes will make sense to those born in the early 80s but magnetic ribbons have long been replaced by shiny disks, silicon chips and cloud-based storage for whoever wants to store data.

But don't discount them yet. Even if LTO-8 tapes are now in stock, you can buy cheap LTO-7, reformat them to M8 and get 9TB of native storage (22.5TB compressed). You can grab one (HPE LTO 7 Tape with Barium Ferrite (BaFe) C7977A) for just under $59.

With an uncompressed capacity of 9TB, it translates into a per TB cost of $6.55, about 12x less than the cheapest SSD on the market and 1/4 the price of the 12TB Seagate Exos X14, currently the most affordable hard disk drive on the market on a per TB basis.

In other words, if you want a LOT of capacity, then tape is the obvious answer (although truth be said, you also need to factor in the cost of the drive). 

But there's something else that tape offers that no other storage medium currently offers and that's on-the-fly, transparent compression which can go up to 2.5:1 and works best on text files (rather than multimedia which is already heavily compressed).

As for transfer speeds, they can reach 300MBps (that's 1.08TB per hour) which is plenty fast, just a tad slower than the just-reviewed PNY Pro Elite which tops 375MBps.

Tape that!

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Source: https://www.securityweek.com/flaw-gives-hackers-remote-access-files-stored-d-link-dns-320-devices

Researchers at Vietnam-based CyStack Security discovered the vulnerability and reported it to D-Link in mid-August. An advisory was released by the vendor roughly one month later, but it turned out that the security hole was actually fixed by mistake in April, when D-Link released version 2.06b01 of the firmware to address a weakness exploited by the Cr1ptT0r ransomware to infect D-Link NAS devices.

The flaw is tracked as CVE-2019-16057 and CyStack assigned it a CVSS score of 10. It affects D-Link DNS-320 devices with firmware version 2.05b10 and earlier.

CyStack's Nguyen Dang told SecurityWeek that the vulnerability can be exploited directly from the internet and he says there are currently at least 800 vulnerable devices that can be attacked from the web. Nguyen pointed out that all D-Link DNS-320 devices were vulnerable to attacks before the issue was patched in April.

The vulnerability has been described as a command injection issue present in the login module for the administration interface of the DNS-320.

CyStack Report: https://blog.cystack.net/d-link-dns-320-rce/

CyStack Security discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in the D-Link DNS-320 ShareCenter device which its version is lower or equal 2.05.B10 . By exploiting the vulnerability, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can access to all application commands with root permission. This device is a popular network storage device and interestingly, in the past, it was also reported that it contains a backdoor itself.

[...] D-Link team released a patch for this issue on 11/04/2019 [(April 11, 2019. --Ed.)]. According to their release notes, the patch is for login_mgr.cgi allows attackers pipe commands to the user.log. I don't know exactly what issue they found related to the flaw I'm addressing in this article, but the patch worked. They fixed it by type casting parameter port to Integer.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

How did MS-DOS decide that two seconds was the amount of time to keep the floppy disk cache valid?

MS-DOS 2.0 contained a disk read cache, but not a disk write cache. Disk read caches are important because they avoid having to re-read data from the disk. And you can invalidate the read cache when the volume is unmounted.

But wait, you don't unmount floppy drives. You just take them out.

IBM PC floppy disk drives of this era did not have lockable doors. You could open the drive door and yank the floppy disk at any time. The specification had provisions for reporting whether the floppy drive door was open, but IBM didn't implement that part of the specification because it saved them a NAND gate. Hardware vendors will do anything to save a penny.

[...] Mark Zbikowski led the MS-DOS 2.0 project, and he sat down with a stopwatch while Aaron Reynolds and Chris Peters tried to swap floppy disks on an IBM PC as fast as they could.

They couldn't do it under two seconds.

So the MS-DOS cache validity was set to two seconds. If two disk accesses occurred within two seconds of each other, the second one would assume that the cached values were still good.

I don't know if the modern two-second cache flush policy is a direct descendant of this original office competition, but I like to think there's some connection.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

What an elderly woman thought was a religious work of art hanging inside her kitchen, turned out to be a Renaissance masterpiece worth millions.

Art experts said on Monday that the [25cm (10-inch)] painting, which depicts a crowd mocking Christ and was found during a house clearance in June in the French town of Compiegne, was actually a piece called Christ Mocked, by the great 13th-century Florentine painter Cimabue. 

Tests using infrared light found that there was "no disputing that the painting was done by the same hand" as other works known to be by Cimabue, Eric Turquin was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

[...] Cimabue, known as Cenni di Penni, is widely regarded as one of the greatest Italian painters. 

[...] The painting found in the woman's house is thought to be part of a large diptych dating from 1230 when Cimabue painted eight scenes depicting Christ's passion and crucifixion.

Of the eight scenes, two others are known to the public. One of them, The Virgin and Child with Two Angels, currently hangs in the National Gallery in London while the other, The Flagellation of Christ, is in New York as part of the Frick Collection.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a story, submitted via IRC, for SoyCow9427 that was the inspiration for:

The BBC has posted a story, The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game, which describes the investigation by two Game Archaeologists into the Atari 2600 game "Entombed".

The article is a narration of the story outlined in the abstract: Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game (DOI: https://doi.org/10.22152/programming-journal.org/2019/3/4) and full article (pdf):

The Atari 2600 was an extremely limited device with 128 bytes of RAM, a scaled down version of the venerable 6502 processor called the 6507 which had only 13 address liness restricting it to 8 kB of addressable memory, no interrupt processing, and it had no frame buffer, so each line of pixels to be displayed had to be calculated in real time — racing the beam — so being limited to exactly 76 machine cycles per line. The paper succinctly puts it: "Given that 6507 instructions all take two or more cycles, there was no room for inefficiency."

As if that were not enough of a challenge, there were no libraries in ROM, all code had to be hand-crafted. No programmer documentation meant that to even get started programming, one had to reverse engineer how the 2600 even worked.

The word "uncrackable" in the title is not of the crypto flavor one would normally assume, but instead of the "How did they come up with that?" variety. Specifically: create a scrolling maze that had a path through it, all with the aforementioned hardware limitations.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Following a rigorous selection process, ESA has selected a new satellite mission to fill in a critical missing piece of the climate jigsaw. By measuring radiation emitted by Earth into space, FORUM will provide new insight into the planet's radiation budget and how it is controlled.

The Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission was one of two concepts competing to be ESA's ninth Earth Explorer mission.

Earth Explorers use innovative measurement techniques to yield new insight into different aspects of the Earth system and the interactions that bind the system as a whole. Fundamentally, they are designed and built to fill scientific community, so, importantly, the community retains a key role in the selection and development process.

After a two-year feasibility study phase, both FORUM and its competitor, the Sea-surface Kinematics Multiscale monitoring (SKIM) concept, were presented and discussed in detail with the scientific community at a User Consultation Meeting in Cambridge, UK, in July.

Wolfram Mauser, who chaired ESA's Advisory Committee for Earth Observation on behalf of Martin Visbeck, said, "Both mission concepts are outstanding in the value they would bring to science, and are technologically ready to be built, so it was difficult to recommend which one should be implemented.

"Nevertheless, FORUM promises to improve climate models and, therefore, climate prediction. So with the issue of climate change a major global concern, we finally decided to recommend this concept—and we are very happy that ESA has taken our recommendation."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Tmux is a very powerful terminal multiplexer which is extremely useful especially when you are using the remote server via SSH.

If we want to do multiple tasks simultaneously on the remote server, usually we have to two ways to do it. We could SSH into the remote server and run everything in the background with an ‘&’ at the end of each terminal command. This is problematic if you want to monitor the process of each task. We could also open multiple windows, SSH into the remote server for each window, and run one task for each window. This is good for monitoring all the tasks, but the shortcoming is that you would have to type your SSH login information for each of the windows you opened. Sometimes it is also hard to find which window is doing which task if there are too many windows opened.

Tmux allows the user to create multiple sessions and each session could have multiple terminals. The user would be able to control multiple tasks in multiple windows via Tmux. No more multiple SSH logins anymore. However, Tmux is not very friendly to beginners because you would have to memorize a series of commands required for controlling Tmux. Although Tmux is much useful than a terminal emulator such as Gnome Terminator, many users would just like to use Tmux as a multi-window terminal emulator. However, Tmux does not memorize user settings such as pane layouts, so every time after reboot or restart the Tmux server, all of the user settings will be gone.

In this short tutorial, I am going through some of the basic concepts and commands for Tmux, and how to use a Tmux plugin, which is called Tmux Resurrect, to restore Tmux environment after reboot or Tmux server restart.

Original Submission

rob_on_earth writes:

Surprising behaviours emerge when Open AI created a Hide and Seek game
https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/
(Lots of good GIF animations in the article)

AI bots were tasked with being the best "hider" or "seeker" in a 3D virtual environment.

But what resulted was cunning, brute force and downright cheating.

From blocking doors to stop seekers, to using ramps to get over walls. From stealing the ramps to stop the previous behaviour to "block surfing", not to mention accelerating objects into walls to exhibit glitches.

This is not the first time AI has done what is asked of it with a few unintended results.

https://hackaday.com/2012/07/09/on-not-designing-circuits-with-evolutionary-algorithms/
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/12/how-to-evolve-a-radio/
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/11/the-naughty-ais-that-gamed-the-system/

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

When hospitals are hacked, the public hears about the number of victims -- but not what information the cybercriminals stole. New research from Michigan State University and Johns Hopkins University is the first to uncover the specific data leaked through hospital breaches, sounding alarm bells for nearly 170 million people.

"The major story we heard from victims was how compromised, sensitive information caused financial or reputation loss," said John (Xuefeng) Jiang, lead author and MSU professor of accounting and information systems. "A criminal might file a fraudulent tax return or apply for a credit card using the social security number and birth dates leaked from a hospital data breach."

Until now, researchers have not been able to classify the kind or amount of public health information leaked through breaches; thus, never getting an accurate picture of breadth or consequences.

The findings, published in Annals of Internal Medicine, encompass 1,461 breaches that happened between Oct. 2009 and July 2019.

[...] With a newfound understanding of what explicit data was leaked -- and how many over the last decade were affected -- the researchers offer hospitals and health providers suggestions on how to better protect patients' sensitive information.

The researchers suggest that the Department of Health and other regulators formally collect the types of information compromised in a data breach to help the public assess the potential damages. Hospitals and other healthcare providers, Jiang said, could effectively reduce data breach risks by focusing on securing information if they have limited resources. For example, implementing separate systems to store and communicate sensitive demographic and financial information.

John (Xuefeng) Jiang, Ge Bai. Types of Information Compromised in Breaches of Protected Health Information. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019; DOI: 10.7326/M19-1759

Original Submission