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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A Viking Age mortuary house was discovered during the excavation of the burial ground of one of the Viking Age farms on Vinjeøra in Hemne in Trøndelag. The house measured five by three meters. It had corner posts, and the walls were made of standing planks, in a building style similar to that used in early stave churches. Archaeologists could see that the building was solidly constructed, even though the only thing that remains is a rectangular ditch with a slight impression from the house and some retaining stones where the walls once stood.

Even though the style of building is typical of the Viking Age, this house was far from ordinary. Archaeologists think it was most likely home to a Viking grave. Hundreds of years of farming in the area have plowed away the grave that was likely found inside the structure.

"We can see that the house once stood in the middle of a burial mound. That's how we know that there probably was a grave inside the house," said Sauvage, who is project manager for the dig.

The burial mound itself is also gone, but the ring ditch that once surrounded the mound has been filled in, rather than plowed away, and is therefore still visible.

"The ditch forms a circular depression that tells us where the burial mound was situated, which means that we also can see that the mortuary house was placed right in the middle of the mound," he said.

The mortuary house was found under an excavation of a Viking Age grave field on Vinjeøra in Hemne municipality in central Norway. The dig was undertaken in preparation for road construction associated with expansion of the E39 highway.

Viking Age mortuary houses are rare finds in Norway, with fewer than 15 found in the entire country. That means there's a lot we don't know about why these houses were built and what they were intended for.

"Early research has often interpreted these houses as purely functional. They've been seen as a morgue, where the Vikings stored corpses, such as when they were waiting for the ground to thaw in the spring," says Sauvage.

But this interpretation doesn't explain why the house on Vinjeøra was dug into the burial mound, and why graves have been found inside mortuary houses in other locations. Now, most researchers believe that these houses played more of a symbolic role than a practical one.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Wednesday, Intel announced it's joining Toshiba in the PLC (Penta-Level Cell, meaning 5 bits stored per individual NAND cell) club. Intel has not yet commercialized the technology, so you can't go and buy a PLC SSD yet—but we can expect the technology will lead eventually to higher-capacity and cheaper solid state drives.

Intel also differentiates itself from competitors by sticking with the floating-gate cell design used in early SLC devices, instead of the less expensive charge-trap design the rest of the industry has shifted to. It's unclear to casual researchers which technology is actually better from a technical perspective, but Intel argues that the floating gates can be manufactured at a higher density, meaning it can pack more cells into the same physical area.

Unfortunately, while PLC SSDs will likely be bigger and cheaper, they'll probably also be slower. Modern SSDs mostly use TLC storage with a small layer of SLC write cache. As long as you don't write too much data too fast, your SSD writes will seem as blazingly fast as your reads—for example, Samsung's consumer drives are rated for up to 520MB/sec. But that's only as long as you keep inside the relatively small SLC cache layer; once you've filled that and must write directly to the main media in real time, things slow down enormously.

[...] With sequential write speeds to QLC media already decreasing to or below that of conventional hard drives, PLC seems likely to be a niche player that will compete far more with NAS and datacenter drives than it does with laptop and desktop SSDs aimed at high performance. Sequential throughput isn't everything, of course—and PLC media should still offer much higher IOPS in challenging random-access workloads than conventional disks can. But it's probably not going to be a good solution in anything but truly massive-capacity drives, which can use higher parallelism (think "invisible RAID0") to offset the invididually-slow characteristics of PLC cells.

-- submitted from IRC

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Oculus is clearly bullish on its wireless VR system, the Oculus Quest, which means this week's Oculus Connect conference is chock full of the $400 headsets. The biggest queues at the show, unsurprisingly, have been dedicated to Quest—and to the headset's pair of surprise "coming soon" features announced on Tuesday morning.

So much Quest attention is due to promising sales figures: "over $20 million" of games and apps have been sold on Quest's digital marketplace since its May launch, Oculus announced on Tuesday, as opposed to "over $80 million" of Rift-specific software since that platform's March 2016 launch. Four months versus three-plus years? We don't need a graphing calculator to plot which platform is kicking more software-sales butt.

With that momentum in mind, I cut a few lines to see the two intriguing features slated for Quest's near-future: a wired PC-VR connection, launching this November, and a full hand-tracking API, launching in "early 2020."

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://tv-watches-you.princeton.edu/tv-tracking-acm-ccs19.pdf

Abstract:

The number of Internet-connected TV devices has grown significantly in recent years, especially Over-the-Top ("OTT") streaming devices, such as Roku TV and Amazon Fire TV. OTT devices offer an alternative to multi-channel television subscription services,and are often monetized through behavioral advertising. To shed light on the privacy practices of such platforms, we developed a system that can automatically download OTT apps (also known as channels), and interact with them while intercepting the network traffic and performing best-effort TLS interception. We used this smart crawler to visit more than 2,000 channels on two popular OTT platforms, namely Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Our results show that tracking is pervasive on both OTT platforms, with traffic to known trackers present on 69% of Roku channels and 89% of Amazon Fire TV channels. We also discover widespread practice of collecting and transmitting unique identifiers, such as device IDs,serial numbers, WiFi MAC addresses and SSIDs, at times over un-encrypted connections. Finally, we show that the countermeasures available on these devices, such as limiting ad tracking options and adblocking, are practically ineffective. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for researchers, regulators, policy makers,and platform/app developers.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In recent years, sex dolls have become increasing sophisticated and realistic in their resemblance to human beings, including mechanized components, and are thus now referred to as humanoid sex robots. Some media outlets have gone as far as to suggest that sex robots and other social robots will eventually become almost indistinguishable from humans.

This has sparked a number of interesting ethical and philosophical debates related to the significance of these robots and the possibility that future machines will replicate the physical intimacy between two people. In a recent study featured in Springer's International Journal of Social Robotics, two researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Bergamo in Italy have taken a closer look at some of the current arguments and predictions about sex robots, carrying out an ethics-based and critical discourse analysis.

"We started our joint research to debunk some myths and misunderstandings in the media regarding the future of artificial intelligence," Deborah Johnson and Mario Verdicchio, the two researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "We were struck by how fundamentally flawed some of the ideas were and especially the assumption that the computational version of some aspects of reality are the same as the real thing."

In their paper, Johnson and Verdicchio essentially challenge the perception of humanoid sex robots as robotic substitutes of lovers and companions. They argue that although humanoid robots may look and act more and more like human beings in the future, the claim that they will eventually replace humans is far-fetched and far from a certainty.

"Our research is aimed at showing that humanoid sex robots could come to be understood in ways that keep their status as machines, albeit technologically very sophisticated machines." Johnson and Verdicchio said.

Deborah G. Johnson et al. Constructing the Meaning of Humanoid Sex Robots, International Journal of Social Robotics (2019). DOI: 10.1007/s12369-019-00586-z

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Ariane 6, Europe's next-generation launch vehicle, has passed another key development milestone. Its Vulcain 2.1 liquid-fueled engine has now completed its qualification testing, which means combined tests can now begin.

The main stage Vulcain 2.1 engine will deliver 135 t of thrust to propel Ariane 6 in the first eight minutes of flight up to an altitude of 200 km.

A review last week marked the culmination of two Vulcain static firing test campaigns over 15 months on two demonstration models in test facilities at the DLR German Aerospace Center test facility in Lampoldshausen.

The final qualification static firing test of Vulcain 2.1 in July lasted almost 11 minutes (655 seconds). This completed a total of 13,798 seconds of operation, or nearly four hours with a controlled engine, using Ariane 6 flight actuators to gimbal the engine.

"These very positive results confirm the functional and mechanical behavior of Vulcain 2.1. The upcoming combined tests will qualify Ariane 6 subsystems at stage and launcher level," commented Guy Pilchen, ESA's Ariane 6 launcher project manager.

[...] The next step for large propulsion systems is the static firing in French Guiana of the final qualification model of Ariane 6's P120C solid fuel booster. This test will define the acceleration profile for the launcher and will consequently allow engineers to pursue the preparation of the upcoming flights.

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aristarchus writes:

Among other places, at Vice.

It's wild enough when two supermassive black holes collide, but scientists have now spotted an extremely rare triple hole smash-up.

The impending collision is occurring one billion light years away in a system called SDSS J0849+1114, which is a merger of three galaxies, according to NASA.

Scientists led by Ryan Pfeifle, an astrophysicist at George Mason University, identified the epic event while hunting for galaxy mergers, which occur when two galaxies collide and evolve into a unified system. Big galaxies host supermassive black holes in their centers, so a galactic merger may lead to a collision of gigantic black holes, as well.

Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole known to scientists, and can grow to be millions or even billions of times as massive as the Sun. When galaxies collide, their central black holes emit radiation as they consume stars, gas, and dust from the merger. (While light cannot escape a black hole once it has passed the event horizon, tidal forces at the outside edge of black holes heats up matter, making it visible to telescopes).

[...]Citizen scientists working on Galaxy Zoo, a project that allows users to help categorize galaxies in sky surveys, classified the system as a galactic merger using optical light images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope in New Mexico.

Other coverage:

• https://www.space.com/three-supermassive-black-holes-collision-discovery-photo-video.html
• https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/images/found-three-black-holes-on-collision-course.html
• https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1183036/Black-hole-collisions-three-supermassive-black-holes-crash-NASA-Chandra

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for FatPhil

It's a fact, scientists are the most trusted people in world

A new Ipsos poll reveals that scientists are considered the most trustworthy profession in the world, followed closely by doctors. Six in ten of the global public rate scientists as trustworthy and just one in ten consider them untrustworthy. The next most-trustworthy profession is doctors (56% trustworthy), followed by teachers(52%). Politicians are the least trusted group globally.

The survey, completed online by adults aged 16-64 in 22 countries, showed that while the most trustworthy profession varies across the countries covered, there is greater agreement on the professions considered to be untrustworthy. In all countries polled, politicians are seen as the most untrustworthy profession – globally, two thirds of the public consider politicians generally to be untrustworthy (67%) and almost six in ten say the same about Government Ministers (57%).

The index also shows that:

• Scientists are the most trustworthy profession in Argentina, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Sweden and Turkey
• Doctors are the most trustworthy for citizens of Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Great Britain, South Africa, Spain and Sweden (where they are tied with scientists)
• Teachers are the most trustworthy profession for Brazilians and Americans.
• Indians see armed forces members as the most trustworthy profession, while in China it is the police.
• Members of the armed forces are the fourth most trustworthy profession overall, seen as trustworthy by 43 per cent. Perceptions of the trustworthiness of servicemen and women are highest in China (72%), India (70%) and the US (60%), while they are particularly low in Germany (24%) and South Korea (18%).
• Trust in the police – overall the fifth-most trusted profession on 38 per cent – ranges widely from 80 per cent in China to 11 per cent in Mexico. In addition to China, a majority of the public consider the police to be trustworthy in Australia (56%), France (53%), Canada (52%) and Italy (50%).

[Source:] The Global Trustworthiness Index

Comparing net trust scores across nations shows which countries are marked by low trust in professions, and which show higher levels of trust.

[...]It has been said that we no longer trust experts.  This study shows that in fact, scientists are held in high esteem all over the world. Many professions have high levels of trust.

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JoeMerchant writes:

Extreme policies lead to extreme outcomes.

Income inequality reached its highest level in more than half a century last year, as a record-long economic expansion continued to disproportionately benefit some of the wealthiest Americans.

A key measure of wealth distribution jumped to 0.485 in 2018, the Census Bureau said Thursday, its highest reading since the so-called Gini index was started in 1967. The gauge, which uses a scale between 0 and 1, stood at 0.482 a year earlier.

Work alone won't solve poverty—unless wages and earnings pick up substantially. It still takes government aid for families with children and others who do not earn enough, despite working 40 plus hours a week.

The most troubling thing about the new report, says William M. Rodgers III, a professor of public policy and chief economist at the Heldrich Center at Rutgers University, is that it "clearly illustrates the inability of the current economic expansion, the longest on record, to lessen inequality."

According to some research, US income inequality might be higher than it was during the Roman Empire, and pre-tax income inequality is as high as it was in the Roaring Twenties.

What Is to Blame?

Income inequality is blamed on cheap labor in China, unfair exchange rates, and jobs outsourcing. Corporations are often blamed for putting profits ahead of workers. But they must to remain competitive. U.S. companies must compete with lower-priced Chinese and Indian companies who pay their workers much less. As a result, many companies have outsourced their high-tech and manufacturing jobs overseas. The United States has lost 20 percent of its factory jobs since 2000. These were traditionally higher-paying union jobs.

Service jobs have increased, but these are much lower paid.

If current policies touted as "decreasing globalism" in the US economy are trying to reduce income inequality, they're failing.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9427

Google has booted 46 apps made by a big Chinese developer from its app store with no explanation

The apps are from Chinese developer iHandy, and BuzzFeed reports that the 46 apps which were taken down collectively garnered tens of millions of downloads. The apps were varied, with a horoscope app, a security app, and a selfie camera filter among those removed.

The filter app — called Sweet Camera — was reportedly amongst the developer's most popular, with 50 million downloads.

Neither Google nor iHandy were immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider. A Google spokesperson refused to explain why the apps had been removed when asked by BuzzFeed, but confirmed Google has launched an investigation into them.

When BuzzFeed reported the story eight of iHandy's apps were left on the Play Store, but more seem to be disappearing — as of writing, only five remain.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

NASA Wants to Send Nuclear Rockets to the Moon and Mars

Just north of the Tennessee River near Huntsville, Alabama, there's a six-story rocket test stand in a small clearing of loblolly pines. It's here, in a secluded corner of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, that the US Army and NASA performed critical tests during the development of the Redstone rocket. In 1958, this rocket became the first to detonate a nuclear weapon; three years later, it carried the first American into space.

The tangled history of nukes and space is again resurfacing, just up the road from the Redstone test stand. This time NASA engineers want to create something deceptively simple: a rocket engine powered by nuclear fission.

A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today. But despite their conceptual simplicity, small-scale fission reactors are challenging to build and risky to operate because they produce toxic waste. Space travel is dangerous enough without having to worry about a nuclear meltdown. But for future human missions to the moon and Mars, NASA believes such risks may be necessary.

At the center of NASA's nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. "You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it's really hard," says Emrich. "Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion."

Emrich has been researching nuclear propulsion since the early '90s, but his work has taken on a sense of urgency as the Trump administration pushes NASA to put boots on the moon ASAP in preparation for a journey to Mars. Although you don't need a nuclear engine to get to the moon, it would be an invaluable testing ground for the technology, which will almost certainly be used on any crewed mission to Mars.

Let's get one thing clear: A nuclear engine won't hoist a rocket into orbit. That's too risky; if a rocket with a hot nuclear reactor blew up on the launch pad, you could end up with a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Instead, a regular chemically propelled rocket would hoist a nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit, which would only then fire up its nuclear reactor. The massive amount of energy produced by these reactors could be used to sustain human outposts on other worlds and cut the travel time to Mars in half.

"exec" has found the following story:

In total, Microsoft has now blocked 142 file extensions that it deems as at risk or that are typically sent as malicious attachments in emails.

Microsoft is banning almost 40 new types of file extensions on its Outlook email platform. The aim is to protect email users from what it deems "at-risk" file attachments, which are typically sent with malicious scripts or executables.

The move will prevent users from downloading email attachments with various file extensions, including ones associated with Python, PowerShell, digital certificates, Java and more. Overall, Microsoft had blocked 104 file extensions from Outlook (a full list of which can be found here), including .exe, .url, .lnk, and more. With these newest extensions, that number will now rise to 142.

"We're always evaluating ways to improve security for our customers, and so we took the time to audit the existing blocked file list and update it to better reflect the file types we see as risks today," said Microsoft in a post this week.

Microsoft said that many of these newly-blocked file types are rarely used, so most organizations will not be affected by the change: "However, if your users are sending and receiving affected attachments, they will report that they are no longer able to download them," it said.

[...] Newly blocked file extensions include:

• Python scripting language: “.py”, “.pyc”, “.pyo”, “.pyw”, “.pyz”, “.pyzw”
• PowerShell scripting language:”.ps1″, “.ps1xml”, “.ps2”, “.ps2xml”, “.psc1”, “.psc2”, “.psd1”, “.psdm1”, “.psd1”, “.psdm1”, “.cdxml”, “.pssc”
• Java programming language: “.jar”, “.jnlp”
• digital certificates: “.cer”, “.crt”, “.der”
• Windows ClickOnce (“.appref-ms”)
• Microsoft Data Access Components (“.udl”)
• Windows Sandbox (“.wsb”)

Microsoft will also block various extensions being used by vulnerable applications, which could be used to exploit security vulnerabilities in third-party software, including: ".appcontent-ms", ".settingcontent-ms", ".cnt", ".hpj", ".website", ".webpnp", ".mcf", ".printerexport", ".pl", ".theme", ".vbp", ".xbap", ".xll", ".xnk", ".msu", ".diagcab", ".grp"

For these extensions, 38 in all, "while the associated vulnerabilities have been patched (for years, in most cases), they are being blocked for the benefit of organizations that might still have older versions of the application software in use," Microsoft said.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Since Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2016, as of Oct. 31, 2018, more than 6,700 Canadians have chosen medications to end their life.

Canadians who meet eligibility requirements can opt to self-administer or have a clinician administer these medications; the vast majority of people choosing MAiD have had their medications delivered by physicians or nurse practitioners. Canada is the first country to permit nurse practitioners to assess for medically assisted dying eligibility and to provide it.

The precise meaning and implications of MAiD—in particular, who can request medical assistance in dying in Canada—is still evolving through court rulings. Québec's Supreme Court recently struck down the reasonably foreseeable death requirement under the Criminal Code and the end-of-life requirement under Québec's Act Respecting End-of-Life Care.

Without the requirement of a reasonably foreseeable death, it is likely that other legal challenges will occur to extend assisted dying to other groups such as those whose sole underlying condition is severe mental illness.

Our research has explored how the nursing profession is regulating the new area of responsibility towards medically assisted dying and how nursing ethics might guide policy and practical implications of nurses' experiences.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow9427

New "unpatchable" iPhone exploit could allow permanent jailbreaking on hundreds of millions of devices

All devices from the iPhone 4S to the iPhone X are impacted

A newly announced iOS exploit could lead to a permanent, unblockable jailbreak on hundreds of millions of iPhones, according to researcher axi0mX who discovered it. Dubbed "checkm8," the exploit is a bootrom vulnerability that could give hackers deep access to iOS devices on a level that Apple would be unable to block or patch out with a future software update. That would make it one of the biggest developments in the iPhone hacking community in years.

The exploit is specifically a bootrom exploit, meaning it's taking advantage of a security vulnerability in the initial code that iOS devices load when they boot up. And since it's ROM (read-only memory), it can't be overwritten or patched by Apple through a software update, so it's here to stay. It's the first bootrom-level exploit publicly released for an iOS device since the iPhone 4, which was released almost a decade ago.

In a follow-up tweet, axi0mX explained that they released the exploit to the public because a "bootrom exploit for older devices makes iOS better for everyone. Jailbreakers and tweak developers will be able to jailbreak their phones on latest version, and they will not need to stay on older iOS versions waiting for a jailbreak. They will be safer."

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Amazon unveils a couple new Ring cameras that cost less than $100

Alongside the deluge of Echo devices Amazon announced during its autumn hardware event on Wednesday, the company unveiled two new security cameras from its Ring subsidiary: the Ring Indoor Cam and a refreshed model of the Ring Stick Up Cam.

[...] On the software side of things, Ring's cameras and video door bells will soon support a new feature called "Home Mode" that Amazon says will prevent Ring products from recording audio and video while you're home. That will also arrive in November. The company also demoed a feature that will allow the Alexa voice assistant to answer visitors through a Ring doorbell in a "conversational" manner—it could ask a delivery person to leave a package, for instance. Amazon says this will come first to the Ring Video Doorbell Elite (which isn't battery-powered) next year.

[...] Finally, there's the Ring Fetch, which is a connected dog tag and tracker. This lets you geofence your yard and will ping you when your furry friend leaves a set perimeter. Again, Amazon didn't go too hard on the details here but says this will release next year.

Forget Ring Fetch, I'm waiting for the PeopleCam for each family member to wear.

Original Submission