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takyon writes:

Amazon Announces Graviton2 SoC Along With New AWS Instances: 64-Core Arm With Large Performance Uplifts

The new Graviton2 SoC is a custom design by Amazon's own in-house silicon design teams and is a successor to the first-generation Graviton chip. The new chip quadruples the core count from 16 cores to 64 cores and employs Arm's newest Neoverse N1 cores. Amazon is using the highest performance configuration available, with 1MB L2 caches per core, with all 64 cores connected by a mesh fabric supporting 2TB/s aggregate bandwidth as well as integrating 32MB of L3 cache.

Amazon claims the new Graviton2 chip is[sic] can deliver up to 7x higher performance than the first generation based A1 instances in total across all cores, up to 2x the performance per core, and delivers memory access speed of up to 5x compared to its predecessor. The chip comes in at a massive 30B transistors on a 7nm manufacturing node - if Amazon is using similar high density libraries to mobile chips (they have no reason to use HPC libraries), then I estimate the chip to fall around 300-350mm² if I was forced to put out a figure.

The memory subsystem of the new chip is supported by 8 DDR4-3200 channels with support for hardware AES256 memory encryption. Peripherals of the system are supported by 64 PCIe4 lanes.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow1337.

AWS launches Braket, its quantum computing service – TechCrunch

While Google, Microsoft, IBM and others have made a lot of noise around their quantum computing efforts in recent months, AWS remained quiet. The company, after all, never had its own quantum research division. Today, though, AWS announced the preview launch of Braket (named after the common notation for quantum states), its own quantum computing service. It’s not building its own quantum computer, though. Instead, it’s partnering with D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti and making their systems available through its cloud. In addition, it’s also launching the AWS Center for Quantum Computing and AWS Quantum Solutions Lab.

With Braket, developers can get started on building quantum algorithms and basic applications and then test them in simulations on AWS, as well as the quantum hardware from its partners. That’s a smart move on AWS’s part, as it’s hedging its bets without incurring the cost of trying to build a quantum computer itself. And for its partners, AWS provides them with the kind of reach that would be hard to achieve otherwise. Developers and researchers, on the other hand, get access to all of these tools through a single interface, making it easier for them to figure out what works best for them.

[...] Braket provides developers with a standard, fully managed Jupyter notebook environment for exploring their algorithms. The company says it will offer plenty of pre-installed developer tools, sample algorithms and tutorials to help new users get started with both hybrid and classical quantum algorithms.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Günter Born: Here's why the free upgrade from Win7 to Win10 still works

It's one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry: You can still upgrade from a licensed copy of Win7 to Win10 for free.

The how is easy: Almost everyone can upgrade using the Media Creation Tool. If you're asked for a product key, use the one that came with your copy of Win7 (or 8.1). There are detailed instructions on Microsoft's Answers Forum.

But the why remains a tantalizing unknown. Günter Born has found a possible answer, in a Reddit post from a self-proclaimed Microsoft employee. Short version: The cutoff date was a marketing ploy that was easily bypassed anyway.

Fascinating stuff.

Given that support for Windows 7 ends after January 14, 2020, who would not like to save some money and get a free upgrade?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Librem 5 backers have begun receiving their Linux phones

When Ars spoke to Purism founder and CEO Todd Weaver two weeks ago, the Librem 5 had been "shipping" for a month but not to backers—only to Purism employees and inside developers. Weaver talked a little about the unexpected hardware issues the company had been experiencing late in the game, including a batch of phone boards missing a 10kOhm resistor, and he gave us an updated schedule for when the phones would resume shipping. More importantly, Weaver said backers would begin receiving their phones by the first week of December.

Thankfully, the company met this latest deadline on time. On November 27, Ars reader Azdle posted a comment to the thread—"Just because I can, hello from my freshly-received Librem 5 phone! (And, no, I don't work for Purism, I'm just an early backer." Azdle was also kind enough to share some unboxing pictures and some commentary about what, exactly, a Librem 5 phone from the Birch shipment is—and what it's not.

First of all, it's not really a "phone" yet. There's no audio when attempting to place a phone call. The cameras also don't appear to work yet. Azdle reports "installing and opening up Cheese"—Cheese is a very basic Linux video application, installed by default in many distros—"I just get a message saying 'no device found.'" There's also effectively no power management yet, so the Librem doesn't last long on battery.

[...] This isn't supposed to be a finished, working, retail-ready phone—it's a (mostly) working prototype, made available in very small numbers to extremely early backers who knew what they were getting into.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Riot Games will pay $10 million in discrimination settlement

League of Legends publisher Riot Games will pay at least $10 million under a legal settlement with current and former female employees, following accusations of gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment at the company.

The Los Angeles Times writes that Riot will compensate around 1,000 women who worked there between November 2014 and the present, with the dollar amount varying based on their time at the company. Court documents note that the two class representatives, Jessica Negron and Gabriela Downie, will each receive $10,000. After attorney costs and other fees, around $6.2 million is expected to go toward payouts for the other employees — full employees will get a minimum of $2,500, and temporary contractors will get at least $500. The court filing says most class members should get at least $5,000.

Riot was sued in 2018 by multiple employees, following an investigation by Kotaku — which spoke to more than two dozen people about a "bro culture" where women were treated as outsiders and passed over for promotions based on their gender. Riot attempted to force two women into legal arbitration, a process that's often more favorable for employers. The move prompted a walkout at the company in spring of 2019.

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Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Internet Society says opportunity to sell .org to private equity biz for $1.14bn came out of the blue. Wow, really?

Analysis The price tag for one of the internet's largest and most important domain-name registries has finally been revealed: $1.135bn.

That is how much unknown private equity company Ethos Capital, funded by the investment vehicles of US billionaires, has offered the Internet Society (ISOC) to take over the .org registry; a move that has caused weeks of controversy that show no sign of slowing.

The figure was finally revealed by CEO of ISOC Andrew Sullivan at a webinar late last week. "I have only just now received permission to disclose a new piece of information, that we have not been able to disclose before," he told online attendees.

"And that is the amount of money that the Internet Society is receiving under this. I am sorry I wasn't able to send it around, but this is new information that we will post later today. The total purchase price in this case is $1.135bn."

The level of secrecy over the deal has been one of the most significant concerns over the proposed sale, which will shift more than 10 million .org domains to a for-profit company after having spent the past 16 years run by the non-profit organization Public Internet Registry (PIR), that was itself set up, and is wholly owned, by the non-profit Internet Society (ISOC). Specifically, the deal involves Ethos taking over PIR, thus taking over the top-level domain it oversees.

Previously: ICANN Eliminates .org Price Cap Despite Overwhelming Opposition
.ORG TLD Sold to Investment Firm Ethos Capital

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Homeland Security wants airport face scans for US citizens

Homeland Security is joining the ranks of government agencies pushing for wider use of facial recognition for US travelers. The department has proposed that US citizens, not just visa holders and visitors, should go through a mandatory facial recognition check when they enter or leave the country. This would ostensibly help officials catch terrorists using stolen travel documents to move about. The existing rules specifically exempt citizens and permanent residents from face scans.

It won't surprise you to hear that civil rights advocates object to the potential expansion. ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley said in a statement that the government was "reneging" on a longstanding promise to spare citizens from this "intrusive surveillance technology." He also contended that this was an unfair burden on people using their "constitutional right to travel," and pointed to abuses of power, data breaches and potential bias as strong reasons to avoid expanding use of the technology.

Via: TechCrunch

Original Submission

martyb writes:

SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch: How to Watch CRS-19 Mission to the Space Station

[...] A brand-new Falcon 9 booster is scheduled to launch a Dragon capsule, carrying scientific payloads and a handful of CubeSats for NASA, direct to the International Space Station, from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The mission, known as CRS-19, will be the 19th resupply voyage for SpaceX and the third time this particular Dragon capsule is headed to space.

The launch window opens no earlier than 12:51 p.m. ET (9:51 a.m. PT) on Dec. 4 and SpaceX usually broadcasts all of its launches live, with coverage to start about 15 minutes prior to lift-off. You can also keep your eyes glued to the SpaceX Twitter account for updates.

NASA TV launch coverage will begin at approximately 12:30 p.m. ET (9:30 a.m. PT) Dec. 4 and you can tune in below:[*]

The Falcon 9 booster will return to Earth to be reused in subsequent missions by SpaceX, while the Dragon capsule starts its journey to the ISS.

[*] On YouTube: NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

EFF warns of 'one-way mirror' of web surveillance by tech giants - led by Google

As the sacred shopping season gets underway, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a report detailing the privacy cost of surveillance-based commerce.

Issued on the Monday after the US observance of Thanksgiving, a day so known for online shopping that marketers branded the event with its own commerce-promoting moniker, "Behind the One-Way Mirror" explores the technology of corporate data gathering, specifically third-party tracking. That's when websites and applications include code that enables entities other than the website or app publisher to gather data about those interacting with the software.

"The purpose of this paper is to demystify tracking by focusing on the fundamentals of how and why it works and explain the scope of the problem," said Bennett Cyphers, EFF staff technologist and report author, in a statement.

"We hope the report will educate and mobilize journalists, policy makers, and concerned consumers to find ways to disrupt the status quo and better protect our privacy."

The problem, as the EFF sees it, is such data tends to be collected surreptitiously, without meaningful consent.

"Most third-party data collection in the US is unregulated," said Cyphers. "The first step in fixing the problem is to shine a light, as this report does, on the invasive third-party tracking that, online and offline, has lurked for too long in the shadows."

[...] Asked why the EFF is revisiting this topic now after years of minimal progress, Cyphers in an email said, "Never before has so much tracking power been concentrated in the hands of so few companies. GAFT [Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter] have more data from more places that they can tie to single identities."

Cyphers is hopeful that government officials around the world may be ready, finally, to support substantive privacy rules.

"There is real momentum behind privacy legislation, both in the US and abroad, and we want to make sure lawmakers know what and how to regulate," he said.

"The tracking industry is huge and convoluted, and you can easily make rules that don't reflect the way things really work, or that play right into the hands of the biggest actors. We're trying to say, 'This problem is big, and complicated, and subtle, but it's not intractable.' We really don't want to waste the opportunity to score meaningful wins for privacy."

Original Submission

martyb writes:

NASA (USA's National Aeronautics and Space Administration) reports that India's Vikram Lander has been Found:

The Chandrayaan 2 Vikram lander was targeted for a highland smooth plain about 600 kilometers from the south pole; unfortunately the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with their lander shortly before the scheduled touchdown (Sept. 7 in India, Sept. 6 in the United States).  Despite the loss, getting that close to the surface was an amazing achievement. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team released the first mosaic (acquired Sept. 17) of the site on Sept. 26 and many people have downloaded the mosaic to search for signs of Vikram. Shanmuga Subramanian contacted the LRO project with a positive identification of debris. After receiving this tip, the LROC team confirmed the identification by comparing before and after images. When the images for the first mosaic were acquired the impact point was poorly illuminated and thus not easily identifiable. Two subsequent image sequences were acquired on Oct. 14 and 15, and Nov. 11. The LROC team scoured the surrounding area in these new mosaics and found the impact site (70.8810°S,  22.7840°E, 834 m elevation) and associated debris field. The November mosaic had the best pixel scale (0.7 meter) and lighting conditions (72° incidence angle).

The debris first located by Shanmuga is about 750 meters northwest of the main crash site and was a single bright pixel identification in that first mosaic (1.3 meter pixels, 84° incidence angle). The November mosaic shows best the impact crater, ray and extensive debris field. The three largest pieces of debris are each about 2x2 pixels and cast a one pixel shadow.

See the NASA article for before/after pictures of the impact site.

Previously:
NASA Lunar Probe Will Help Search for India's Lost Moon Lander
Time is Running Out for India to Establish Contact With its Lunar Lander
India Locates Lander Lost on Final Approach to Moon
Chandrayaan-2: India's Vikram Lander Presumed to Have Crashed
Chandrayaan-2 Updates: Lunar Orbit Insertion and Lunar Orbit Maneuver
Chandrayaan-2 Launch: How to Watch First Mission to the Moon's South Pole Mon 20190722 @ 0913 UTC
Scrubbed Chandrayaan 2 Mission to Moon's South Pole to Launch on Mon July 22 0913 UTC
India's Lunar Spacecraft Launches Sunday on First-Ever Mission to Moon's South Pole
India to Launch Combined Orbiter/Lander/Rover Mission
India's Chandrayaan-2 Moon Mission Planned for 2018

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Judge says class action over Apple's MacBook butterfly keyboards can continue

A federal judge in California rejected Apple's request to dismiss a class action lawsuit from customers who said it failed to address issues with the "butterfly" keyboard on its MacBook laptops.

In a ruling Monday, US District Judge Edward Davila wrote that upset MacBook customers could continue their lawsuit in part because Apple's attempted fixes over the years and further repair programs for the keyboards were possible signs it didn't provide an "effective fix" for the devices.

The ongoing suit is the latest ding for Apple's new laptop keyboards. The butterfly keyboards, as they were called, were announced alongside Apple's newest laptops in 2015, promising a thinner, yet still effective design. They were named butterfly because of how they worked. (You can watch Apple's video about that here.)

[...] Apple attempted to have the suit dismissed, claiming in part that the customers (called "plaintiffs" in court-speak) hadn't participated in its repair programs and thus couldn't prove it didn't do enough to fix their laptops.

"Plaintiffs sufficiently allege they have suffered an injury-in-fact: Apple's alleged failure to repair the defective keyboards, including through the Program, has caused a concrete, particularized, and actual injury to each Plaintiff," Davila wrote in the opinion, earlier reported on by Reuters. "Plaintiffs sufficiently plead that the Program is ineffective in remedying the allegedly defective design of the butterfly keyboards."

The judge was careful to add, however, he wasn't issuing a ruling on the actual case Monday. He was just allowing it to move forward despite Apple's objections.

Benjamin Johns, a lawyer representing the customers, said in a statement that he was pleased the court allowed the suit to continue. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The gas turbines powering aircraft engines rely on ceramic coatings that ensure structural stability at high temperatures. But these coatings don't control heat radiation, limiting the performance of the engine.

Researchers at Purdue University have engineered ceramic "nanotubes" that behave as thermal antennas, offering control over the spectrum and direction of high-temperature heat radiation.

Researchers have engineered ceramic nanotubes, which act as antennas that use light-matter oscillations to control heat radiation. The design is a step toward a new class of ceramics that work more efficiently at high temperatures.

The work is published in Nano Letters, a journal by the American Chemical Society. An illustration of the ceramic nanotubes will be featured as the journal's supplementary cover in a forthcoming issue.

Original Submission

Seems that Leonardo designed a 280 meter single-span bridge in response to a sultan's request. The configuration is a very flat arch, with wide "feet" at each end to spread the loads. Nothing in antiquity was remotely close to this in a single span, at that time bridges were built with circular arches with columns at each end (many columns sitting in the riverbed). While the shape of this bridge has been approximated with modern materials, this time the researchers wanted to determine if it could have been built with what was on site -- big, cut stone. Story is here, http://news.mit.edu/2019/leonardo-da-vinci-bridge-test-1010

Spoiler alert: Leonardo knew what he was doing.
...
The bridge would have been about 280 meters long (though Leonardo himself was using a different measurement system, since the metric system was still a few centuries off), making it the longest span in the world at that time, had it been built. "It's incredibly ambitious," Bast says. "It was about 10 times longer than typical bridges of that time."

The design also featured an unusual way of stabilizing the span against lateral motions — something that has resulted in the collapse of many bridges over the centuries. To combat that, Leonardo proposed abutments that splayed outward on either side, like a standing subway rider widening her stance to balance in a swaying car.

In his notebooks and letter to the Sultan, Leonardo provided no details about the materials that would be used or the method of construction. Bast and the team analyzed the materials available at the time and concluded that the bridge could only have been made of stone, because wood or brick could not have carried the loads of such a long span. And they concluded that, as in classical masonry bridges such as those built by the Romans, the bridge would stand on its own under the force of gravity, without any fasteners or mortar to hold the stone together.

To prove that, they had to build a model and demonstrate its stability. That required figuring out how to slice up the complex shape into individual blocks that could be assembled into the final structure. While the full-scale bridge would have been made up of thousands of stone blocks, they decided on a design with 126 blocks for their model, which was built at a scale of 1 to 500 (making it about 32 inches long). Then the individual blocks were made on a 3D printer, taking about six hours per block to produce.

There is also a 2 minute video (but I'm sure no one here will bother to watch it!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHrUaifoMto

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Free of Earth generated interference and orbiting Starlink satellites, the far side of the moon now has a space based telescope in a halo orbit taking observations.

The instrument, called the Netherlands-China Low Frequency Explorer (NCLE), is located on Queqiao, a Chinese communications satellite that was launched in support of the Chang'e 4 mission, the first soft-landing and robotic mission to the lunar far side. NCLE was developed in the Netherlands by Radboud University, ASTRON, and ISISpace, along with support from Netherland's Space Office.

The satellite's orbit keeps it in the L2 Lagrange point (the L2 Lagrange point lies in a line through two masses, on the far side of the smaller of the two).

Until now, Queqiao provided telecommunications service for the Chang'e 4 mission, acting as a relay station between the Yutu 2 lander and China's project control center on Earth. The Dutch-Chinese telescope radio telescope has been dormant since it was launched in May 2018. The NCLE device was supposed to have been deployed a few months ago, but it was delayed owing to the tremendous success of the Chang'e 4 mission, which wasn't expected to last beyond March 2019.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has now decided to move on to the next stage of the mission and convert Queqiao into an observatory for radio astronomy, according to a Radboud University press release. Three antennas have now been partially unfurled, allowing for radio scans of space—without pesky interference from Earth's atmosphere.

NCLE is hoped to detect 'super-faint' radio signals in the 80kHz to 80MHz frequency range from the universe's 'Dark Age'- the period just after the Big Bang and before star formation began.

Additional Coverage

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC for Runaway1956.

Measles cases in Samoa more than double over past week as death toll rises - National

The number of suspected cases of measles on the Pacific island of Samoa has more than doubled over the past week to 3,530 and deaths related to the outbreak rose to 48 from 20 a week ago, the country’s Ministry of Health said on Sunday.

Samoa has become vulnerable to measles outbreaks as the number of people becoming immunized has declined with the World Health Organisation (WHO) saying vaccine coverage is just about 31 per cent.

[...] The government started a mandatory vaccination program on Nov. 20 after declaring a state of emergency due to the outbreak. The health ministry said in its statement that 57,132 people have since been vaccinated.

Schools and universities have been closed and most public gatherings banned on the island state of just 200,000, located south of the equator and half way between Hawaii and New Zealand.

Of the 48 deaths, 44 where among children under the age of four. Since Saturday, there have been 173 new cases of measles recorded and four people have died.

Neighboring New Zealand and a number of other countries and organizations, including the U.N. agency UNICEF, have delivered thousands of vaccines, medical supplies and have sent medical personnel to help with the outbreak.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with a submission, via IRC, for Runaway1956.

[Ed. note: For those who are unfamiliar with DuckDuckGo, it is a search engine that can be reached either via https://duckduckgo.com/html/ or via https://ddg.com/html/ --martyb.]

I ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here's why you should too

What was the last thing you searched for online? For me, it was '$120 in pounds'. Before that, I wanted to know the capital of Albania (Tirana), the Twitter handle of Liberal Democrat deputy leader Ed Davey (he's @EdwardJDavey) and dates of bank holidays in the UK for 2019 (it's a late Easter next year, folks). Thrilling, I'm sure you'll agree. But something makes these searches, in internet terms, a bit unusual. Shock, horror, I didn't use Google. I used DuckDuckGo. And, after two years in the wilderness, I'm pretty sure I'm sold on a post-Google future.

[...] DuckDuckGo works in broadly the same way as any other search engine, Google included. It combines data from hundreds of sources including Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia and Bing, with its own web crawler, to surface the most relevant results. Google does exactly the same, albeit on a somewhat larger scale. The key difference: DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information.

Billed as the search engine that doesn't track you, DuckDuckGo processes around 1.5 billion searches every month. Google, for contrast, processes around 3.5 billion searches per day. It's hardly a fair fight, but DuckDuckGo is growing. Back in 2012, it averaged just 45 million searches per month. While Google still operates in a different universe, the actual difference in the results you see when you search isn't so far apart. In fact, in many respects, DuckDuckGo is better. Its search results aren't littered with Google products and services – boxes and carousels to try and persuade people to spend more time in Google's family of apps.