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takyon writes:

This Brainless, Single-Celled Blob Can Make Complex 'Decisions'

Tiny, brainless blobs might be able to make decisions: A single-celled organism can "change its mind" to avoid going near an irritating substance, according to new findings.

Over a century ago, American zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings conducted an experiment on a relatively large, trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism called Stentor roeselii. When Jennings released an irritating carmine powder around the organisms, he observed that they responded in a predictable pattern, he wrote in his findings, which he published in a text called "Behavior of the Lower Organisms" in 1906.

[...] In the decades that followed, however, other experiments failed to replicate these findings, and so they were discredited. But recently, a group of researchers at Harvard University decided to re-create the old experiment as a side project. "It was a completely off-the-books, skunkworks project," senior author Jeremy Gunawardena, a systems biologist at Harvard, said in a statement. "It wasn't anyone's day job."

[...] "They do the simple things first, but if you keep stimulating, they 'decide' to try something else," Gunawardena said. "S. roeselii has no brain, but there seems to be some mechanism that, in effect, lets it 'change its mind' once it feels like the irritation has gone on too long."

A Complex Hierarchy of Avoidance Behaviors in a Single-Cell Eukaryote (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.10.059) (DX)

Original Submission

barbara hudson writes:

The Atlantic reports aging causes men to lose Y chromosomes.

Researchers have found men who are missing the Y chromosome in as many as 87 percent of cells in their blood.

The Y chromosome is the smallest one, and errors make it more likely that it will fail to replicate during cell division. When this happens, future generations of those cells also no longer have a Y chromosome.

The ongoing loss of Y chromosomes correlates with increases in cancer.

In [samples of] blood, loss of the Y chromosome in some cells is the most commonly observed mosaicism, but there are countless other examples. In women, some blood cells lose one X chromosome. Other subsets of blood cells might gain a mutation in just one gene, lose only a small bit of a chromosome, or even gain an entire chromosome. (Red blood cells don't carry DNA at all, so this applies only to white blood cells.)

Perry and his colleagues also wanted to understand why the Y chromosome disappears in some men but not others. They looked into whether certain genetic variants on other chromosomes predisposed men one way or another, and they ended up finding 156 variants linked to Y-chromosome loss. Many are also near cancer-susceptibility genes, and having these same variants was correlated with higher risk of prostate and testicular cancer in men—as well as glioma, kidney, and other cancers in both men and women.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Mozilla's revenue in 2018 fell by nearly 20% compared to the year prior, and for the first time expenses outweighed income, the organization said in its annual financial report.

The nonprofit behind Firefox implied that the apparent downturn was misleading because of the comparison to record revenue of the year before. "2017 was an outlier, due in part to changes in the search revenue deal that was negotiated that year," Mozilla said in the "State of Mozilla 2018" report published on its website.

Mozilla also asserted that the revenue decline would not affect its work. "Despite the year-over-year change, Mozilla remains in a strong financial position with cash reserves to support continued innovation, partnerships and diversification of the Firefox product lines," the organization wrote.

Most of the $451 million in revenue the Mozilla Foundation recognized in 2018 came from royalty payments, with the bulk of that produced by deals struck for Firefox's default search spot. Mozilla Foundation is the nonprofit that in turn runs Mozilla Corp., the commercial organization that actually develops and maintains Firefox.

According to Mozilla's 2018 financial statement_[0] released Nov. 21, the $451 million in overall revenue was $111 million less than in 2017, a plummet of 19.8%. The statement marked the first time Mozilla reported a year-over-year revenue decline in the 14 years that Computerworld has tracked the organization's financial health.

Of total revenue, $430 million, or about 95%, came from royalty payments. As always with Mozilla's revenue, the greatest portion of what the organization categorized as royalties came from search contracts. In 2018, those search deals accounted for 91% of all royalty revenue, Mozilla said, representing about $391 million. That was a whopping $110 million less than in 2017, a 22% decline. As with revenue, the search deal total was the first-ever search revenue slump in Mozilla's history.

Mozilla did not explain the massive decline in search revenue, other than the brief reference to 2017's number and how it was an "outlier."

⁰Bogus link. 2018 audited financial statement (pdf).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

KringleCon returns by popular demand, with last year’s inaugural conference viewed more than 87,000 times on YouTube. As such, it’s believed to be one of the largest virtual cybersecurity conferences to date, and SANS hope to welcome even more attendees in 2019. It also has an overarching storyline: last year, an evil hacker locked Santa’s castle, trapping conference attendees inside the building. This year, the hacker is trying to hack KringleCon to stop the event taking place entirely.

You can watch last year’s KringleCon and all previous Holiday Hack Challenges here.

With well over 20,000 people expected to participate worldwide this year, KringleCon and the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge are prime examples of how cybersecurity education can be made fun, and can engage a whole new generation of cyber-professionals as well as advance the skills of established pros. Allowing participants to learn from experts as well as other community members, the Holiday Hack challenges slowly ramp up in difficulty, with hints, talks, and blogs provided that share tactics that people can directly apply in their jobs.

This year’s Holiday Hack Challenge will also include offensive and defensive machine-learning challenges, and SANS has included more defensive training opportunities to engage a broader audience in the infosec community.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 865 is 25% faster, comes with mandatory 5G

Today, Qualcomm detailed its new flagship SoC for 2020: the Snapdragon 865. This is going to be the chip that ships in every single high-end Android phone that comes out in 2020, and there's a lot to go over.

Details include speed increases, improvements in camera performance, some android specific enhancements, and 5G related hardware.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

How neural networks work—and why they've become a big business

The last decade has seen remarkable improvements in the ability of computers to understand the world around them. Photo software automatically recognizes people's faces. Smartphones transcribe spoken words into text. Self-driving cars recognize objects on the road and avoid hitting them.

Underlying these breakthroughs is an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning. Deep learning is based on neural networks, a type of data structure loosely inspired by networks of biological neurons. Neural networks are organized in layers, with inputs from one layer connected to outputs from the next layer.

Computer scientists have been experimenting with neural networks since the 1950s. But two big breakthroughs—one in 1986, the other in 2012—laid the foundation for today's vast deep learning industry. The 2012 breakthrough—the deep learning revolution—was the discovery that we can get dramatically better performance out of neural networks with not just a few layers but with many. That discovery was made possible thanks to the growing amount of both data and computing power that had become available by 2012.

This feature offers a primer on neural networks. We'll explain what neural networks are, how they work, and where they came from. And we'll explore why—despite many decades of previous research—neural networks have only really come into their own since 2012.

Original Submission

upstart writes for SoyCow1337:

Quantum computing's also-rans and their fatal flaws

Last month, Google claimed to have achieved quantum supremacy—the overblown name given to the step of proving quantum computers can deliver something that a classical computer can't. That claim is still a bit controversial, so it may yet turn out that we need a better demonstration.

Independent of the claim, it's notable that both Google and its critics at IBM have chosen the same type of hardware as the basis of their quantum computing efforts. So has a smaller competitor called Rigetti. All of which indicates that the quantum-computing landscape has sort of stabilized over the last decade. We are now in the position where we can pick some likely winners and some definite losers.

But why did the winners win and the losers lose?

In the end, the story comes down to engineering. A practical quantum computer requires that we can create many quantum bits (qubits). Those qubits have to stay in a quantum state for multiple gate operations. Gate operations require that we are able to manipulate qubits on both an individual basis and in groups (or at least pairs). And, of course, you have to be able to read out the result of a computation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

US Customs and Border Protection said Thursday it will drop its plans to require that US citizens go through a biometric face scan when entering or exiting the country. Currently, citizens have the right to opt out of the scans, but a proposed rule indicated the agency was planning to make the program mandatory for all travelers.

The proposed rule was first published in spring 2018 in the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, a compendium the Executive Office of the President publishes every three months. A rule-making process that allows for public comment typically follows before a proposal can become a new regulation. The CBP's proposal was republished this fall, leading TechCrunch to ask the agency if it was still pursuing the rule.

"There are no current plans to require US citizens to provide photographs upon entry and exit from the United States," the agency said in a statement. "CBP intends to have the planned regulatory action regarding US citizens removed from the unified agenda next time it is published."

Related: Homeland Security Wants Airport Face Scans for US Citizens

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for carny

New Linux Vulnerability Lets Attackers Hijack VPN Connections

Security researchers found a new vulnerability allowing potential attackers to hijack VPN connections on affected *NIX devices and inject arbitrary data payloads into IPv4 and IPv6 TCP streams.

They disclosed the security flaw tracked as CVE-2019-14899 to distros and the Linux kernel security team, as well as to others impacted such as Systemd, Google, Apple, OpenVPN, and WireGuard.

The vulnerability is known to impact most Linux distributions and Unix-like operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, iOS, and Android.

[...] This security flaw "allows a network adjacent attacker to determine if another user is connected to a VPN, the virtual IP address they have been assigned by the VPN server, and whether or not there is an active connection to a given website," according to William J. Tolley, Beau Kujath, and Jedidiah R. Crandall, Breakpointing Bad researchers at University of New Mexico.

"Additionally, we are able to determine the exact seq and ack numbers by counting encrypted packets and/or examining their size. This allows us to inject data into the TCP stream and hijack connections," the researchers said.

Attacks exploiting CVE-2019-14899 work against OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2/IPSec, but the researchers are still testing their feasibility against Tor.

They also note that the VPN technology used does not seem to be of importance since the attacks worked during their tests even when the responses they got from targets were encrypted, given that the size of the packets and the number of packets sent was enough to find the type of data packets that were being delivered through the encrypted VPN tunnel.

[...] The full procedure to reproduce the vulnerability on Linux distros is explained in detail within the disclosure report publicly available here.

The research team is planning to publish a paper with an in-depth analysis of this vulnerability and its implications but only after finding an adequate workaround.

Also at The Register

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for soylent_fuschia

FCC tries to bury finding that Verizon and T-Mobile exaggerated 4G coverage

The FCC in 2017 required carriers to file maps and data indicating their 4G LTE coverage in order to help the commission determine which rural areas should get $4.5 billion in Mobility Fund money over 10 years. But small, rural carriers pointed out that big carriers exaggerated their coverage, potentially preventing those small carriers from getting funding to improve connectivity in areas that lack good service. The small carriers' complaints triggered an FCC investigation in December 2018.

The FCC's announcement of that investigation's findings today came in an odd manner that seemed designed to minimize the amount of attention it gets. A finding that some of the biggest wireless carriers in the US exaggerated mobile broadband coverage is certainly important enough to be mentioned in the headline of an FCC announcement.

Instead, Pai's office announced the issuance of the investigative report in the third paragraph of a press release titled, "Chairman Pai announces plan to launch $9 billion 5G fund for rural America." Pai's press release referred generally to carriers overstating coverage, but it did not name any of the specific carriers that did so.

Pai's office also held a press call with reporters in which FCC officials focused almost entirely on the new 5G fund rather than the carriers' inaccurate filings. As a result, early news coverage of the announcement focused more on the 5G fund than on the carriers' misdeeds.

The two announcements are related, as the FCC said it will try to improve the accuracy of data collection for the 5G fund, which will replace the old Mobility Fund plan. The 5G fund will supply $9 billion to carriers over 10 years, while the Mobility Fund would have distributed $4.5 billion over 10 years for 4G coverage. The money comes from the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for by Americans through fees on their phone bills.

FCC officials didn't voluntarily bring up the topic of whether Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular will be punished for exaggerating coverage. But FCC officials confirmed that Pai does not intend to take enforcement action in response to a question from a reporter during the press call and in response to a question from Ars via email.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Huawei Preps Desktop PC Motherboards Featuring Up To 8 Core Kunpeng 920 ARM v8 CPUs

Huawei is seemingly dipping its fingers into another market, this being the desktop PC market with the recent release of its first consumer PC motherboard. This motherboard houses the Kunpeng 920 ARM v8 Processor. This processor is usually being reserved for server boards but Huawei seems to think with the expandability that these processors offer, their Kunpeng lineup will be able to compete with Intel and AMD in the desktop PC segment.

The supported processors for this motherboard, the Kunpeng 920 ARM v8, offer different core counts, starting with 4 core and 8 core models for the desktop PC segment and scaling all the way up to 64 cores with server motherboards that are also expected to launch later on. The CPU itself is based on a 7nm process node and features support for PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 memory with speeds of up to 2400 MHz.

Related: ARM Aims to Match Intel 15-Watt Laptop CPU Performance
Windows on ARM Gains Native 64-Bit Application Support

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Rocket Lab tests key maneuver needed for reusability during 10th flight to space

Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab successfully flew its 10th mission this morning from New Zealand, sending seven small spacecraft into orbit above Earth. While the primary goal of the flight was a success, Rocket Lab also used the mission to test out a key maneuver with its rocket — one that could allow the company to reuse its vehicles in the future.

Rocket Lab's one and only rocket is the Electron, a 55-foot-tall vehicle designed to send relatively small payloads into space. [...] After deploying satellites into orbit, the rocket falls back to Earth and is basically out of commission. But in August, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck announced that the company was going to try things differently. The team is now working toward recovering part of the Electron after each flight in order to fly the vehicles back to space again. That way, the company can save itself from having to build an entirely new rocket for each mission, potentially making it cheaper for its customers to fly.

[...] Rocket Lab is still a long way off from catching the Electron with helicopters. But today, the company was able to test out one part of the recovery process: the guided reentry. It was a particularly difficult task since the rocket creates heated shockwaves when coming back to Earth, which risks tearing the vehicle apart. To combat these challenges, this particular Electron was outfitted with guidance and navigation systems that helped collect data during the rocket's fall. It also had a control system that helped to reorient the vehicle as it descended. Ultimately, it came back to Earth in one piece, which is what Rocket Lab was hoping for.

List of Electron rocket launches.

Also at CNBC and TechCrunch.

Previously: Rocket Lab Will Attempt to Recover First Stages Using a Helicopter

Original Submission

takyon writes:

In an interview with Tom's Hardware (adwalled), AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster has hinted that the 16 cores of the "mainstream" Ryzen 9 3950X CPU is not a stopping point for the company. Zen 3, Zen 4, or Zen 5 based Ryzen CPUs could feature up to 24 or 32 cores:

There are a lot of interesting details that Mark has mentioned in the interview in particular to the next-generation technologies that would be featured on their processor lineup ranging from Ryzen and EPYC CPUs. The most significant detail and the one I would start this article is with the fact that AMD isn't stopping at just 16 cores. According to AMD, there are now many applications that can scale across multiple cores and threads. The addition of cores is entirely relative to the number of applications that can take advantage of those cores so as long as this balance exists, there would not be a saturation point of cores on next-generation CPUs, whether these be mainstream or the HPC server parts.

[...] In the coming Zen iterations, Mark has stated that Infinity Fabric would continue to evolve to keep up with higher-bandwidth interfaces such as DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 (already confirmed for 2021) that would be featured on AMD's lineup around 2021-2022.

[...] AMD is also looking into integrating BFloat 16 on their next-gen EPYC lineup much like Intel's 14nm Cooper Lake CPUs which are expected to launch around mid of 2020. As for SMT4, it all boils down to whether there's enough demand or workloads that can take advantage of it.

SMT4 = simultaneous multithreading with 4 threads per core. The feature has been rumored to appear on Zen 3 or Zen 4 CPUs, although it may be included with Threadripper or Epyc instead of Ryzen CPUs.

A rumor based on a China Times report suggests that TSMC's "5nm" node is ahead of schedule and that AMD Zen 4 CPUs based on the process node could appear in "early 2021" instead of late 2021 or early 2022. The increased transistor density of the "5nm" node should allow for at least 50% higher core counts.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The US announced slightly stricter rules Thursday on the use of devices called "cyanide bombs," which are meant to protect livestock from wild predators, after the government reinstated their use in August.

The devices, known as M-44s, are implanted in the ground, resembling lawn sprinklers. They use a spring-loaded ejector to release sodium cyanide when an animal tugs on a baited capsule holder.

They are meant to target foxes, coyotes and feral dogs but can ensnare other animals too, such as raccoons and skunks.

The government halted the use of the devices last year after one of them was responsible for injuring a boy and killing his dog in Idaho.

[...]The new rules announced Thursday require a 600-foot (180-meter) buffer around residences where no M-44s can be placed, and call for the equipment to be installed at least 300 feet away from roads and paths—an increase from the previous 100-foot rule.

And each M-44 must now be accompanied by two signs within 25 feet, warning of their placement.

[...]"This appalling decision leaves cyanide traps lurking in the wild to threaten people, pets and imperiled animals," Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement in response to the EPA's decision.

According to government data, M-44s killed 6,579 animals in 2018—including more than 200 "nontarget" animals, such as opossums, raccoons, skunks and a bear.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At least 63 people, most of them children, have died since the outbreak began in mid-October and the country on Friday entered a second day of lockdown as it administers compulsory vaccinations in a desperate bid to stop the virus.

Al Jazeera's Jessica Washington, reporting from the Samoan capital, Apia, on Friday said that so far, an estimated 16,000 people have been vaccinated during the first day of the mass immunisation on Thursday.

[...]"The anti-vaxxers, unfortunately, have been slowing us down," he told TVNZ.

"We've had children who have passed away after coming to the hospital as a last resort, and then we find out the anti-vaccine message has got to their families and that's why they've kept these kids at home," he said.

He warned anti-vaxxers "don't get in the way, don't contribute to the deaths".

"We will advise police to act when we have no choice," Attorney General Lemalu Hermann Retzlaff added in a statement.

The government-backed its tough rhetoric by arresting vocal anti-vaccination campaigner Edwin Tamasese late on Thursday and charging him with incitement.

Officials said Tamasese had been warned about his activities previously but posted a message to social media regarding the immunisation drive saying: "I'll be here to mop up your mess. Enjoy your killing spree."

The government has additional powers after declaring a state of emergency to deal with the measles crisis and the Samoa Observer reported that Tamasese could face two years in jail.

It also said that US-based anti-vaxxers were swamping government websites with material that Tupai described as "nonsense".

He said the first day of the shutdown was a success, with more than 10,000 people, or five percent of the entire 200,000 population, receiving their jabs.

Previously:
Samoa Shuts Down in Unprecedented Battle Against Measles
Measles Cases in Samoa More Than Double Over Past Week as Death Toll Rises

Original Submission