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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/22/blast-from-the-past-vela-satellite-israel-nuclear-double-flash-1979-ptbt-south-atlantic-south-africa/ (may be paywalled; alternate link):

Shortly before sunrise on Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 recorded an unusual double flash as it orbited the earth above the South Atlantic. At Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where it was still nighttime on Sept. 21, the staff in charge of monitoring the satellite's transmissions saw the unmistakable pattern produced by a nuclear explosion—something U.S. satellites had detected on dozens of previous occasions in the wake of nuclear tests. The Air Force base issued an alert overnight, and President Jimmy Carter quickly called a meeting in the White House Situation Room the next day.

Nuclear proliferation was just one of the Carter administration's headaches in late 1979. The president was dealing with a slew of foreign-policy dilemmas, including the build-up to what would become the Iran hostage crisis. Carter was also preparing for a reelection campaign in which he had hoped to showcase his foreign-policy successes, from brokering Israeli-Egyptian peace to successful arms control talks with Moscow. The possibility that Israel or South Africa, which had deep clandestine defense ties at the time, had tested a nuclear weapon threatened to tarnish that legacy. And the fact that South Africa's own nuclear weapons program, which the Carter administration was seeking to stop, was not yet sufficiently advanced to test such a weapon left just one prime suspect: Israel. Leading figures within the administration were therefore keen to bury the story and put forward alternative explanations.

Those alternative explanations were widely dismissed by many members of the scientific and intelligence community at the time; four decades years later, they look even more questionable.

On the 40th anniversary of the Vela event, Foreign Policy has assembled a team of scientists, academics, former government officials, and nonproliferation experts to analyze the declassified documents and data in the public domain, explain the political and strategic objectives of the key players at the time, and argue why a mysterious flash 40 years ago still matters today.

[Ed. Note: Many here may not have experienced what it was like during the cold war with frequent nuclear weapons tests and the ever-present threat of thermonuclear war. Given the increasing rhetoric and sabre rattling going on around the world today, this seemed a good reminder of the past. Let's hope we do not try to repeat it.]

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14905/globalfoundries-unveils-12lp-technology-massive-performance-power-improvements

GlobalFoundries has introduced its 12LP+ fabrication process that relies on the groundwork set by its 14LPP and 12LP technologies and provides significant improvements when it comes to performance, power, and area (PPA) scaling. The specialty foundry positions the technology for developers of chips for cloud and edge AI applications.

GlobalFoundries' 12LP+ manufacturing technology builds upon the company's 12LP process yet enables a 20% increase in performance (at the same power and complexity) or a 40% reduction in power requirements (at the same clocks and complexity) as well as a 15% improvement in logic area scaling when compared to 12LP platform. Among other things, 12LP+ supports 0.5V SRAM bit cells (which probably use IP that the company designed for its 7 nm nodes). In addition, GF developed a new 2.5D interposer that enables 12LP+ SoCs to work with HBM memory.

So, "LP" is Low-Power, and "LPP" is Low-Power Plus", and "LP+" is Low-Power Plus", too?

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

As China's footprint grows, Taiwan wants to keep its few formal allies close while deepening informal links with world.

The first to go was the Solomon Islands, which broke with Taiwan on September 16 ending a 36-year diplomatic relationship.

Four days later, it was Kiribati. The Pacific island nation had established diplomatic relations with Taipei in 2003.

Both countries were wooed by China with offers of development aid and assistance.

"If we give up now, Taiwan's future generations will lose their sovereignty, their freedom, and their democracy; we will lose everything."

In all, seven countries have severed ties with Taiwan since Tsai, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), came to office three years ago. It now has formal diplomatic relations with just 15 nations, including the Vatican.

Some 70 years after China's nationalists fled the mainland to establish their capital in Taipei, the diplomatic tide has now almost completely turned in favour of the communist-led government in Beijing.

Shaohua Hu, professor in government and politics at New York's Wagner College and author of the 2017 book Foreign Policies towards Taiwan, noted that China's efforts to pick off Taiwan's political allies was a political strategy.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Abnormal gut bugs tied to worse cognitive performance in vets with PTSD and cirrhosis: Study involved more than 90 combat veterans

The study appeared Aug. 28, 2019, in the American Journal of Physiology.

Lead author Dr. Jasmohan Bajaj says the findings add to the substantial evidence linking gut health and brain function. He says they offer particular hope for people with PTSD and cirrhosis -- a common combination in the VA patient population.

"There is room for improvement in terms of the response to current therapies for PTSD," he says. "Targeting the gut microbiota might be an effective way to address the altered gut-brain axis in these patients and improve cognitive function, as well as other parameters of mental and physical health."

Bajaj is a physician-researcher with the McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver, is prevalent in veterans with PTSD. Common causes include alcohol use disorder, obesity, and hepatitis C. Some patients with cirrhosis develop a complication called hepatic encephalopathy, which affects brain function. They become mentally sluggish and confused, and in severe cases can even lose consciousness.

PTSD, for its part, can also impair cognition. This can occur whether or not patients are taking drugs, such as antidepressants or sedatives, that act on the brain.

The researchers wanted to tease out the impact of abnormal gut microbiota in these conditions, and see whether those with cirrhosis and PTSD had different gut profiles than those with cirrhosis but no PTSD.

Bajaj's team took stool samples from 93 male veterans with cirrhosis, about a third of whom had combat-related PTSD. The other men had been exposed to combat during their military service but had not developed PTSD.

All the veterans completed a battery of cognitive exams. The tests covered areas such as reaction time, spatial ability, memory, and problem-solving.

Compared with the non-PTSD group, the men with PTSD had poorer cognitive performance.

Those with PTSD had microbiota that were less diverse, meaning they had fewer types of bacteria overall. This was true even after the researchers controlled for severity of cirrhosis, prior episodes of hepatic encephalopathy, alcohol use, and psychotropic medication use.

Journal Reference:
Jasmohan Singh Bajaj, et. al.. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is Associated with Altered Gut Microbiota that Modulates Cognitive Performance in Veterans with Cirrhosis. American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, 2019; DOI: 10.1152/ajpgi.00194.2019

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Common Joe writes:

Clay vessels that have been found in Germany could have been used to supplement breast milk and wean children more than 5,000 years ago. They became more common across Bronze and Iron Age Europe and are thought to be some of the first-known baby bottles.

[...]Our results showed that the three vessels contained ruminant animal milk, either from cows, sheep or goat. Their presence in child graves suggests they were used to feed babies animal milk, as a supplementary food during weaning.

This is interesting because animal milk would only have become available as humans changed their lifestyles and settled in farming communities. It's at that time – the dawn of agriculture – that people first domesticated cows, sheep, goats and pigs. This ultimately led to the "Neolithic demographic transition", when the widespread use of animal milk to feed babies or as a supplementary weaning food in some parts of the world improved nutrition, contributing to an increased birth rate. The human population grew significantly as a result, and so did settlement sizes, which eventually became the towns and cities we know today. By holding these ancient baby bottles, we're connected to the first generations of children who grew up in the transition from hunter-gatherer groups to communities based around agriculture.

Apparently, they had been finding these animal-containers at dig sites, but couldn't pin down exactly how they were used. The ones they tested were found in a child grave site. They performed a lipid analysis to figure out the content had been milk.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Russian national has admitted to carrying out the largest-known computer hack on a US bank. His 2014 breach of JPMorgan Chase generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit revenue and stole the data of more than 80 million JPMorgan clients.

Andrei Tyurin, 35, whose last name is also spelled Tiurin, also pleaded guilty to hacks against other US financial institutions, brokerage firms, and other companies. In all, he pleaded guilty in federal court to computer intrusion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal online gambling as part of a securities-fraud scheme carried out by co-conspirators.

Prosecutors said that the from 2012 to mid-2015, Tyurin carried out a massive computer-hacking campaign that stole data belonging to more than 100 million customers of the targeted companies. The 2014 intrusion on JPMorgan alone resulted in the theft of more than 80 million customer records, making it the largest—or at least one of the largest—data hacks against a US financial institution.

Tyurin also carried out attacks on numerous US and foreign companies to further other criminal enterprises operated by Shalon and other co-conspirators. Those enterprises included unlawful Internet gambling businesses and international payment processors.

"Nearly all of these illegal businesses, like the securities-market manipulation schemes, exploited the fruits of Tyurin's computer-hacking campaigns," prosecutors said in Monday's release. "Through these various criminal schemes, Tyurin, Shalon, and their co-conspirators obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds."

[...] The sophistication and scale of the hacks led US investigators to initially suspect the campaign was sponsored by the Russian government or the government of another well-resourced country. Investigators eventually concluded the attacks were the work of a for-profit criminal enterprise.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a group of animals, who deals with new information coming from the environment? Researchers have discovered that the answer lies not in who, but in where: information can be processed, not only by individual animals, but also in the invisible connections between them. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists provides evidence of information processing occurring in the physical structure of animal groups. The study demonstrates that animals can encode information about their environment in the architecture of their groups and provides rare insight into how animal collectives are able to behaviourally adapt to a changing world.

For behaviour to be of any use, it needs to be modulated according to what's happening in the world around us. We see this in ourselves when we respond to a sudden noise: in a crowded street in broad daylight we might not notice the noise; but in an unfamiliar alley in darkness it might send our hearts racing. This context-dependent modification of behaviour -- known as behavioural plasticity -- has been very well studied in individual animals. What is much less known is how the process occurs in animal groups.

"When we start looking at how groups respond to their environment, it introduces a possibility that does not exist when you look at individual animals," says senior author Iain Couzin who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, one of the University of Konstanz' Clusters of Excellence, and the Department of Collective Behaviour at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz. "When you form groups, you suddenly have a network system where social interactions exist, and we wondered whether this invisible architecture was in fact contributing to how groups can respond to changes in the environment."

Matthew M.G. Sosna, Colin R. Twomey, Joseph Bak-Coleman, Winnie Poel, Bryan C. Daniels, Pawel Romanczuk and Iain D. Couzin. Individual and collective encoding of risk in animal groups. PNAS, 2019

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow2718

Security Warning For 23 Million YouTube Creators Following 'Massive' Hack Attack

High-profile YouTubers have been targeted by cybercriminals over the weekend in what appears to have been a highly coordinated and "massive" attack. The security warning was made by Catalin Cimpanu, a ZDNet reporter, who spoke to a member of an internet forum with a history of trading access to hacked accounts. Here's what we know so far and what you need to do to protect your own YouTube account.

According to the ZDNet investigation, many accounts belonging to well-known YouTubers within the car community appear to have been hijacked. However, it would also appear the attack itself has been directed mostly towards "influencers" across many YouTube channel genres. Amongst those taking to Twitter to complain about their YouTube accounts being hacked and access to their channels lost, were YouTubers covering technology, music, gaming and Disney. With more than 23 million YouTube channels, anyone who creates content should be heeding this warning though.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

FIDO2: The Dream Of Password-Free Authentication On The WWW

Of all the things which are annoying about the modern World Wide Web, the need to create and remember countless passwords is on the top of most people’s lists. From dozens of passwords for everything from social media sites to shopping, company, and productivity-related platforms like Github, a large part of our day is spent dealing with passwords.

While one can totally use a password manager to streamline the process, this does not absolve you from having to maintain this list and ensure you never lose access to it, while simultaneously making sure credentials for the password manager are never compromised. The promise of password-less methods of authentication is that of a world where one’s identity is proven without hassle, and cannot ever be stolen, because it relies on biometrics and hardware tokens instead of an easily copied password.

The FIDO2 project promises Web Authentication that means never entering a password into a website again. But like everything, it comes with some strings attached. In this article, we’ll take a look at how FIDO2 plans to work and how that contrasts with the state of security in general.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/our-new-interstellar-visitor-is-now-official-and-it-has-a-name

The verdict is in: after a thorough round of observations, the comet suspected of being an interstellar alien has been ratified. According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the comet is "unambiguously" interstellar in origin, and it has now been given a name: 2I/Borisov.

Previously, the comet had been going by the provisional name C/2019 Q4 (Borisov). C means it's a comet with a hyperbolic orbit, followed by the year it was discovered, an alphanumeric code for when in the year it was discovered, and the comet name in parentheses - that's Crimean amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who spotted the comet with telescope he made himself.

The new name has been simplified. In 2I, I stands for "interstellar", and 2 for being the second interstellar object ever discovered, after 'Oumuamua, which was detected in October 2017.

Previously: Possible Second Interstellar Object Discovered

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martyb writes:

Study: 60% of Major US Firms Have Been Hacked in Cloud

Hackers have penetrated cloud computing networks of some 60 percent of top US companies, with virtually all industry sectors hit, security researchers said Tuesday.

Researchers at the enterprise security firm Proofpoint said they detected over 15 million unauthorized login attempts to cloud computing networks of US Fortune 500 firms in the first six months of 2019, of which 400,000 were successful.

[...] In analyzing some 20 million user accounts in more than 1,000 cloud deployments, the study found 92 percent of the Fortune 500 companies surveyed were targeted by cyber attacks.

It found 60 percent of the companies had allowed attackers into their cloud networks and six percent had an unauthorized login to an executive account.

Log everything, identify aberrations, and act quickly.

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martyb writes:

Match.com? More like Match dot-con, claims watchdog: Cyber-lonely-hearts 'lured into forking out to view bot spam':

On Wednesday, the FTC alleged in a legal complaint that Match.com and other dating sites owned by Match group broke US law when they let accounts known to be fraudulent message netizens who had set up free profiles.

The problem, the regulator says in its Texas court paperwork (PDF), starts with the dotcom's business model of letting users join for free but charging them to view messages, or to see who is interested in them, and send replies.

In this case, the FTC says that the site allowed obvious scam accounts that had been banned from contacting paid customers to message people with free accounts. The free users were not told who was contacting them, nor see the content of the love note, nor that the sender had been flagged as a scammers.

Rather, the users were told they would need to upgrade to a paid account in order to see that sexy memo, and only then, after coughing up cash, were they notified that they were being courted by a bogus profile. In other words, the FTC says that not only did Match allow scammers to operate on its site, but it also used them to make money.

What's a lonely heart to do?

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Freeman writes:

At an event in Seattle today, Amazon announced a slew of new Echo devices that build on the company's existing smart speakers.

[...] Amazon closed the event by revealing two off-the-wall Alexa devices: eyeglass frames and a ring. The Echo Frames start at $179 and support regular or prescription lenses. Naturally, they support Alexa as well—while they don't have a display or a camera, they do have an Alexa-enabled speaker and microphone.

[...] The $129 Echo Loop is an oddly shaped ring that has a similar purpose as the Echo Frames, making it easier to access Alexa wherever you are. The titanium piece of jewelry's one button activates Alexa. The haptic engine in the ring vibrates to let you know you've actually pressed the button, and Alexa will deliver answers via the ring's tiny speaker.

Both the Echo Frames and the Echo Loop are currently available by invitation only. All of the rest of Amazon's newest devices will become available over the next few weeks and months, and all should be fully available for the holiday shopping season.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/09/amazon-announces-a-bevy-of-new-echo-devices-including-a-199-

I still don't like the whole always on, always listening thing, but at least those glasses aren't also video recording devices.

[This Ed. ponders how many Soylentils have one of these kinds of always-on snooping aides, and how many would buy another... -- FP]

Original Submission

Fnord666 persuaded upstart to forward us this tale of fail:

Million+ IoT Radios Open to Hijack via Telnet Backdoor:

Attackers can drop malware, add the device to a botnet or send their own audio streams to compromised devices.

Imperial Dabman IoT radios have a weak password vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to achieve root access to the gadgets’ embedded Linux BusyBox operating system, gaining control over the device. Adversaries can deliver malware, add a compromised radio to a botnet, send custom audio streams to the device, listen to all station messages as well as uncover the Wi-Fi password for any network the radio is connected to.

The issue (CVE-2019-13473) exists in an always-on, undocumented Telnet service (Telnetd) that connects to Port 23 of the radio. The Telnetd service uses weak passwords with hardcoded credentials, which can be cracked using simple brute-forcing tactics. From there, an attacker can gain unauthorized access to the radio and its OS.

In testing, researchers said that the password compromise took only about 10 minutes using an automated "ncrack" script – perhaps because the hardcoded password was simply, "password."[sic - I suspect the '.' wasn't part of it, -- Ed.]

After logging onto the device, researchers were able to access the "etc" path with root privileges to request various file contents, including the full system password shadow file, the group password shadow file, the USB password and the httpd service password containing the "wifi cfg" file with unencrypted information on the wireless LAN key.

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