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canopic jug writes:

Project Trident will be built on Void Linux starting January 2020 and leave its current base of TrueOS behind. This will immediately improve GPU driver support, sound card and streaming, wireless networking, and, for the first time, add Bluetooth capabilities as well as providing newer versions of user applications.

Currently, Project Trident is based on FreeBSD and uses the TrueOS build framework. Over the years, we have accumulated multiple long-standing issues with the underlying FreeBSD OS. Issues with hardware compatibility, communications standards, or package availability continue to limit Project Trident users. After many years of waiting for solutions, there don't appear to be any resolutions on the horizon. To continue to strive for the stated project goals, we have had to make the difficult decision to shift our focus and move to an operating system that better suits what Project Trident is trying to deliver to our users.

Earlier on SN:
TrueOS Doesn't Want to Be 'BSD for Desktop' Anymore (2018)

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Senators propose near-total ban on worker noncompete agreements

A bipartisan pair of senators has introduced legislation to drastically limit the use of noncompete agreements across the US economy.

"Noncompete agreements stifle wage growth, career advancement, innovation, and business creation," argued Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) in a Thursday press release. He said that the legislation, co-sponsored with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), would "empower our workers and entrepreneurs so they can freely apply their talents where their skills are in greatest demand."

Noncompete agreements ban workers from performing similar work at competing firms for a limited period—often one or two years. These agreements have become widely used in recent decades—and not just for employees with sensitive business intelligence or client relationships.

"We heard from people working at pizza parlors, yogurt shops, hairdressers, and people making sandwiches," Massachusetts state Rep. Lori Ehrlich told us in an interview last year.

Ehrlich was the author of 2018 Massachusetts legislation limiting the enforcement of noncompete agreements. Several other states—including Oregon, Illinois, and Maryland—have passed bills on the subject. These state reforms focused on reining in the worst abuses of noncompete agreements. Some prohibit the use of noncompete clauses with low-wage workers. Others require employers to give employees notice of the requirement at the time they make a job offer.

The Young and Murphy bill goes much further, completely banning noncompete agreements outside of a few narrow circumstances—like someone selling their own business.

[...]At least one leading presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), is interested in this issue. Last year, Warren co-sponsored a noncompete reform bill with Murphy and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). So expect this issue to get attention in the next few years if Warren captures the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for carny

Unpatched Linux bug may open devices to serious attacks over Wi-Fi

A potentially serious vulnerability in Linux may make it possible for nearby devices to use Wi-Fi signals to crash or fully compromise vulnerable machines, a security researcher said.

The flaw is located in the RTLWIFI driver, which is used to support Realtek Wi-Fi cards in Linux devices. The vulnerability triggers a buffer overflow in the Linux kernel when a machine with a Realtek Wi-Fi card is within radio range of a malicious device. At a minimum, exploits would allow denial-of-service attacks and possibly could allow a hacker to gain complete control of the computer. The flaw dates back to version 3.12 of the Linux kernel released in 2013.

"The bug is serious," Nico Waisman, who is a principal security engineer at Github, told Ars. "It's a vulnerability that triggers an overflow remotely through Wi-Fi on the Linux kernel, as long as you're using the Realtek (RTLWIFI) driver."

The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2019-17666. Linux developers proposed a fix on Wednesday that will likely be incorporated into the OS kernel in the coming days or weeks. Only after that will the fix make its way into various Linux distributions.

Waisman said he has not yet devised a proof-of-concept attack that exploits the vulnerability in a way that can execute malicious code on a vulnerable machine.

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Evidence of behavioral, biological similarities between compulsive overeating and addiction

According to Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) researchers the chronic cyclic pattern of overeating followed by undereating, reduces the brain's ability to feel reward and may drive compulsive eating. This finding suggests that future research into treatment of compulsive eating behavior should focus on rebalancing the mesolimbic dopamine system -- the part of the brain responsible for feeling reward or pleasure.

An estimated 15 million people compulsively eat in the U.S. It is a common feature of obesity and eating disorders, most notably, binge eating disorder. People often overeat because it is pleasurable in the short term, but then attempt to compensate by dieting, reducing calorie intake and limiting themselves to "safe," less palatable food. However, diets often fail, causing frequent "relapse" to overeating of foods high in fat and sugar (palatable foods).

"We are just now beginning to understand the addictive-like properties of food and how repeated overconsumption of high sugar -- similar to taking drugs -- may affect our brains and cause compulsive behaviors," said corresponding author Pietro Cottone, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology & experimental therapeutics at BUSM and co-director of the Laboratory of Addictive Disorders.

In order to better understand compulsive and uncontrollable eating, Cottone and his team performed a series of experiments on two experimental models: one group received a high sugar chocolate-flavored diet for two days each week and a standard control diet the remaining days of the week (cycled group), while the other group, received the control diet all of the time (control group). The group that cycled between the palatable food and the less palatable, spontaneously developed compulsive, binge eating on the sweet food and refused to eat regular food. Both groups were then injected with a psychostimulant amphetamine, a drug that releases dopamine and produces reward, and their behavior in a battery of behavioral tests was then observed.

[...]"We found that the cycled group display similar behavioral and neurobiological changes observed in drug addiction: specifically, a "crash" in the brain reward system," explained Cottone. "This study adds to our understanding of the neurobiology of compulsive eating behavior. Compulsive eating may derive from the reduced ability to feel reward. These findings also provide support to the theory that compulsive eating has similarities to drug addiction."

Journal Reference:
Catherine F. Moore, Michael Z. Leonard, Nicholas M. Micovic, Klaus A. Miczek, Valentina Sabino, Pietro Cottone. Reward sensitivity deficits in a rat model of compulsive eating behavior. Neuropsychopharmacology, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41386-019-0550-1

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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Under New Ownership, DigiCert Expands into Verified Mark Certificates

Three years after Thoma Bravo acquired a majority holding in DigiCert, the Utah-based digital certificate firm has announced its acquisition by Clearlake Capital Group and TA Associates. TA already had a minority holding in the firm and has been investing in DigiCert for seven years.

When the plan was first announced in July 2019, Thoma Bravo said, "As a part of the transaction, Clearlake and TA will become equal partners in DigiCert. The company will continue to be led by CEO John Merrill and the current management team, who are investing alongside Clearlake and TA in the transaction."

The financial terms of the deal have not been released, but Jason Werlin, a managing director at TA Associates, commented, "We look forward to continuing to work closely with the management team to invest in and support DigiCert's innovation and growth efforts," adding, ""DigiCert has a unique opportunity to capitalize on new growth initiatives that we believe will help them better serve their customers and their industry."

Two separate and current growth opportunities for DigiCert come with the burgeoning IoT market, and companies' increasing desire to prevent their brands being abused in email phishing scams. 

For IoT, DigiCert offers a PKI platform solution that verifies individual devices and encrypts their communication. "The company operates PKI for enterprise authentication and many IoT device industry consortia and manufacturers, and has issued billions of device certificates to-date," says the firm.

The email opportunity comes with the development of its own Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) for domains that send email at scale, and its upcoming pilots of the BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) standard that require validated logos. The purpose of BIMI is to allow sending companies to have their logo appear with messages in email inboxes, but without the danger of them being spoofed. The VMC is the certificate that verifies the authenticity of the logo. BIMI is intended to work alongside DMARC [(Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance)].

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-10-17/american-icons-rocky-horror-picture-show

When it was released in 1975, the movie did so poorly that the New York run was canceled before it began. And then someone noticed that "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" had all the ingredients of a midnight movie — it was risqué, raucous and a little bit trippy. The film was installed as the late show at the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village, and something unexpected happened: people started talking back to the movie, shooting water pistols and throwing toast, and even dressing up like the characters and shadowing their moves in front of the screen.

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canopic jug writes:

The theremin turned 100 years old sometime this year.

Russian inventor Léon Theremin, a cellist and physicist, was doing research for the Russian government on something called proximity sensors.

"He was just experimenting in his lab and somehow found out that you can create a sound by moving your hand in electromagnetic fields," Eyck said. "So, with the right hand, you can change the pitch the closer you get to an upright antenna, and with the left hand, you can change the volume the further away you go from a loop antenna."

That was in 1919. Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin reportedly "adored" the newfangled contraption. Léon Theremin brought his instrument to the New York Philharmonic, and his so-called "ether-wave" concerts were a hit all over Europe.

Even though the theremin isn't exactly mainstream today, it has had a big imprint in popular culture. For starters, the theremin's eerie, shaky sound figures prominently in the sci-fi classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

Also at The Radio Science Orchestra, The NY Theremin Society, and Theremin World.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google Ships Pixel 4 Without Daydream VR Support, Stops Selling Daydream Viewer

Google is effectively phasing out its Daydream virtual reality (VR) platform: The company's latest flagship Pixel 4 flagship phone, which Google unveiled at a press event in New York Tuesday, won't support Google's Daydream mobile VR platform anymore, a spokesperson confirmed to Variety.

[...] "We saw a lot of potential in smartphone VR—being able to use the smartphone you carry with you everywhere to power an immersive on-the-go experience," Google's spokesperson explained. "But over time we noticed some clear limitations constraining smartphone VR from being a viable long-term solution. Most notably, asking people to put their phone in a headset and lose access to the apps they use throughout the day causes immense friction."

Google launched Daydream in 2016 as the company's answer to Samsung's Gear VR headset. It allowed consumers to access VR simply by putting their phone into the cloth-covered Daydream viewer. However, support for Daydream had always been limited to just a few phones, including Google's own Pixel phones. Without support from key industry players, usage remained low.

Also at Wccftech.

Previously:
Google's Daydream VR Headset Reported to Cost $79
HTC Cancels U.S. Release of a Google Daydream VR Headset, Reveals Own Standalone Headset

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An unprecedented study mapping child deaths over almost two decades finds that nearly half of the 5.4 million under-5 deaths in 2017 can be attributed to differences in child death rates within and across countries.

The study is the first of its kind, mapping child deaths in 99 low- and middle-income countries at the level of individual districts. Published today in the journal Nature, the findings include precision maps illuminating health disparities within countries and regions often obscured by national-level analyses. An interactive visualization accompanying the research compares child death rates from year to year.

The research, conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine, looks at countries where more than 90% of child deaths occurred in 2017. Mortality rates varied as much as 10-fold between districts within a country. Across all countries studied, the likelihood of a child dying before age 5 varied more than 40-fold at the district level.

"It is as reprehensible as it is tragic that, on average, nearly 15,000 children under age 5 die every day," said Dr. Simon I. Hay, the senior author on the study and Director of the Local Burden of Disease (LBD) group at IHME. "Why are some areas doing so well, while others struggle? In order to make progress, we need to enable precise targeting of interventions, such as vaccines. Our findings provide a platform for nations' health ministers, clinicians, and others to make focused improvements in health systems."

upstart writes for Bytram:

Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups is shutting down after more than 18 years, and the Verizon-owned company is deleting all content from the site in mid-December.

"Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site," the company said in a notice to users. "Beginning October 28, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded."

The notice links to one Yahoo webpage that provides instructions for downloading photos and files from groups that you belong to before the cutoff date, but the process sounds laborious, as it requires clicking on each photo or file you want to download. The shutdown notice also links to a page that provides instructions for requesting a download of all your Yahoo data. This page notes that "It can take up to 30 days for the request to finish processing and the download to become available."

Although the Yahoo Groups site will continue to exist after December 14, "all public groups will be made private or restricted," Yahoo said. Users will continue to "be able to communicate with your groups via email and search for private groups on the site," and admins will retain "limited access to group settings and administration tools," but that's it.

[...] In 2010, Yahoo said there were 115 million Yahoo Groups users and 10 million groups, eWeek reported at the time. Yahoo also boasted then that it had contracts with about 100 carriers and handset makers around the world to preinstall Yahoo apps on mobile devices.

Original Submission

Chocolate wrote in with a story that became the inspiration for:

Every once in a while, a big business decides to pull in the belt another notch, gird the waist tighter, and cut some services. So it is with the Talking Clock that had been available to Australians for 66 years. The service was slated to end on September 30th as part of a Telstra "network technology upgrade" and as part of a desire by Telstra to "transform ourselves into a simpler business".

In the last two hours of the service, Melbourne musician Ryan Monro learned of the imminent shutdown. Keen to retain the nostalgia of the service, Monro repeatedly called and recorded the sound of 'George, the talking clock' as voiced by now-deceased Richard Peach. His calls were auto-terminated after 60 seconds. Things got a bit frantic as Monro kept getting busy signals near the end and still had failed to record "13" and "14".

Persistence paid off and in true post-millennium style, Monro created an online version of the Australian Talking Clock for those who miss the original and to preserve the service for future generations. The main difference is the site, now located at http://1194online.com/ only speaks the time according to the user's computer clock. This means that people who have rung the service for decades to check on time changeovers around daylight saving will be out of luck if their computer doesn't sync time properly.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for the speaking clock, as the "Talking Clock" is otherwise known.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Williamson and her colleagues, from CIRES, CU Boulder, NOAA and other institutions, including CIRES scientist Jose Jimenez, took global measurements of aerosol particles as part of the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission, or ATom. During ATom, a fully instrumented NASA DC-8 aircraft flew four pole-to-pole deployments -- each one consisting of many flights over a 26-day period -- over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in every season. The plane flew from near sea level to an altitude of about 12 km, continuously measuring greenhouse gases, other trace gases and aerosols.

"ATom is a flying chemistry lab," Williamson said. "Our instruments allowed us to characterize aerosol particles and their distribution in the atmosphere." The researchers found that gases transported to high altitudes by deep, convective clouds in the tropics formed large numbers of very small aerosol particles, a process called gas-to-particle conversion.

Outside the clouds, the air descended toward the surface and those particles grew as gases condensed onto some particles and others stuck together to form fewer, bigger particles. Eventually, some of the particles became large enough to influence cloud properties in the lower troposphere.

In their study, the researchers showed that these particles brightened clouds in the tropics. "That's important since brighter clouds reflect more energy from the sun back to space," Williamson said.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered a circuit in rats that links cigarette smoking and the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a study featured on the cover of the October 17 issue of Nature.

Diabetes is far more prevalent in smokers than non-smokers, but the reasons why have remained unknown until now. The researchers showed that consumption of nicotine is linked, through a brain circuit, to the activity of the pancreas. Nicotine use leads the pancreas to release less insulin, which raises the level of blood sugar; higher levels of blood sugar are associated with a higher risk of diabetes.

Specifically, the researchers found that a protein encoded by a diabetes-related gene called transcription factor 7 like 2 (Tcf7l2) mediates a signaling circuit that connects neurons in the brain activated by nicotine to blood-glucose regulation by the pancreas. The nicotine activates nicotine acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) proteins expressed on neurons in the medial habenula (a brain area that regulates aversive reactions to nicotine), leading to adverse responses to nicotine that limit both intake and the release of glucagon and insulin by the pancreas. This, in turn, raises the levels of blood sugar, and the raised levels of blood sugar create a feedback loop by inhibiting the nAChR-expressing neurons, blocking adverse responses to smoking and so helping to establish nicotine dependence. Tcf7l2 modulates the entire signaling circuit, thereby linking nicotine addiction with an increased risk of diabetes.

"Our findings are important because they describe a mechanism that controls the addictive properties of nicotine and, surprisingly, show that the same addiction-related brain circuits also contribute to smoking-related diseases previously thought to be related to the actions of tobacco outside the brain," says Paul J. Kenny, PhD, Ward-Coleman Professor and Chair of the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and senior author of the paper. "These unexpected findings suggest that at least some of the disease-causing actions of nicotine arise in the brain by the very same circuits that control the addictive properties of the drug. This means that the addictive and disease-causing actions of tobacco may, in some cases, share the very same underlying mechanisms."

Journal Reference:
Alexander Duncan, Mary P. Heyer, et al. Habenular TCF7L2 links nicotine addiction to diabetes. Nature, 2019; 574 (7778): 372 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1653-x

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I run FreeBSD on a Thinkpad X61.

I like the X61 because it has a physically small footprint. Also because I was able to pick up several of them at a good price, so that, with regular backups, my laptop, as well as the data upon it, are mirrored.

However, for several years I have noticed that the X61 overheats and shuts down when I push it too hard. Like, when I am building a new laptop, and running X, and multitasking, and compiling a kernel, and using the ports collection to build things from source, night and day, for three or four days. Somewhere in there it starts warming up and it just accumulates heat faster than it can get rid of the heat, until it shuts down.

I'm kind of disappointed. You would think they would anticipate that in the design.

FreeBSD has some registers in the kernel that can be monitored, much as Linux offers via /proc, to see what the actual temperature is on a per-core basis. I wrote a script and ported it from version to version of FreeBSD to monitor that. I began using powerd(8). That seemed to fix the problem; but at the cost of throttling the CPU to about 75% of its rated capacity.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An international research team led by scientists from McMaster University has unearthed new evidence in Greece proving that the island of Naxos was inhabited by Neanderthals and earlier humans at least 200,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than previously believed.

The findings, published today in the journal Science Advances, are based on years of excavations and challenge current thinking about human movement in the region -- long thought to have been inaccessible and uninhabitable to anyone but modern humans. The new evidence is leading researchers to reconsider the routes our early ancestors took as they moved out of Africa into Europe and demonstrates their ability to adapt to new environmental challenges.

[...] "Until recently, this part of the world was seen as irrelevant to early human studies but the results force us to completely rethink the history of the Mediterranean islands," says Tristan Carter, an associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University and lead author on the study. He conducted the work with Dimitris Athanasoulis, head of archaeology at the Cycladic Ephorate of Antiquities within the Greek Ministry of Culture.

While Stone Age hunters are known to have been living on mainland Europe for over 1 million years, the Mediterranean islands were previously believed to be settled only 9,000 years ago, by farmers, the idea being that only modern humans -- Homo sapiens -- were sophisticated enough to build seafaring vessels.

[...] The authors of this paper suggest that the Aegean basin was in fact accessible much earlier than believed. At certain times of the Ice Age the sea was much lower exposing a land route between the continents that would have allowed early prehistoric populations to walk to Stelida, and an alternative migration route connecting Europe and Africa. Researchers believe the area would have been attractive to early humans because of its abundance of raw materials ideal for toolmaking and for its fresh water.

Journal Reference:
Tristan Carter, Daniel A. Contreras, Justin Holcomb, Danica D. Mihailović, Panagiotis Karkanas, Guillaume Guérin, Ninon Taffin, Dimitris Athanasoulis, Christelle Lahaye. Earliest occupation of the Central Aegean (Naxos), Greece: Implications for hominin and Homo sapiens' behavior and dispersals. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (10): eaax0997 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax0997

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson on Wednesday introduced the custom suits that will be worn by the first private astronauts.

US sportswear designer Under Armour "worked day and night for about two years on this project" said Branson, who himself served as a model at the presentation at a skydiving simulator near New York.

The 69-year-old British billionaire donned the personalized royal blue suit that he plans to wear during his company's inaugural flight—sometime in 2020.

"Spacesuits are a part of the iconography of the first space age. Our visual impressions of human spaceflight and what astronauts wear are inextricably linked," Branson explained. "I love the way the spacewear looks and I love the way it feels."

"I also love the fact that the next time I put it on, I will be on my way to space."

[...] The material for the suits, undergarments and boots were chosen for their ability to aid in the body's temperature and moisture regulation.

A transparent interior pocket was added so space-exploring customers can keep pictures of their loved ones "literally... close to the heart," according to a statement from Virgin Galactic.

[...] Every space tourist will get their own custom suit that they can take home with them back on Earth, complete with a label of their name and their country's flag.

[...] Virgin Galactic, which was founded in 2004, has spent years developing its space program, and after a fatal accident in 2014, has twice crossed the barrier into the final frontier.

But the company has still not yet piloted a space flight with clients on board.

Previously:
NASA's New Artemis Spacesuits Make It Easier for Astronauts of All Sizes to Move on the Moon

Original Submission