SoylentNews

takyon writes:

Gate-All-Around Transistors, Quantum Refrigerators To Be Targeted By U.S. Export Rules

The trade war between the United States and China took a sharp turn for the tech world earlier this year when the United States' Bureau of Industrial Security added Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in its Entity List and required American companies to seek government approval before making sales to the company. This move followed concerns that sensitive technology that can be used against American national security interests will make its way into undesirable actors' hands, as per the current administration.

Now, after nearly a year of experience with the list, American authorities are well on their way to classify which exports can be harmful to the country, reports Reuters. The United States Department of Commerce is drafting up five new rules that will limit a specific set of technologies for export. These include Gate-All-Around Field Effect transistors jointly developed by Samsung and IBM, and quantum dilated refrigerators.

Gate-all-around field-effect transistors are expected to be used at the "3nm" node.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Europe's launch of space telescope called off at last minute

Europe's space agency was planning to send a new telescope to study far-off planets into space Tuesday but the launch was called off at the last minute.

A spokesperson for the European Space Agency (ESA) said the launch would not go ahead today because of a problem with the launch device.

Called CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), the telescope was due to be launched aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Europe's spaceport in Kourou in French Guiana early Tuesday. The launch had been due to be livestreamed on the ESA's website. During final countdown operations, the Soyuz launcher's automated sequence was interrupted at 1 hour 25 minutes before liftoff, Arianespace, the satellite company operating the launch, said in a statement. The new launch date will be announced as soon as possible, it added.

The telescope's mission is to observe individual stars already known to host exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system -- focusing on planets sized in the Earth to Neptune range. To date, 4,143 planets have been discovered around stars other than the sun, ESA said.

CHEOPS is a small space telescope with a cost cap of €50 million. It will measure the radii of previously discovered exoplanets, providing targets for future missions.

See also: Europe's Cheops telescope will profile distant planets

Related: PLATO Exoplanet Observatory Approved by ESA
ESA Selects ARIEL Exoplanet Survey as a Medium Class Mission

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/17/788775642/boeing-will-temporarily-stop-making-its-737-max-jetliners

Production will stop in January. The jets were grounded after two crashes that killed nearly 350 people. Despite being grounded, Boeing continued cranking the planes out at its factory near Seattle.

(The interview had more good information, but at time of submission, the transcript wasn't available. There may be better articles out there.)

There are. Here's one:

Boeing will suspend 737 Max production in January at CNBC:

Boeing is planning to suspend production of its beleaguered 737 Max planes next month, the company said Monday, a drastic step after the Federal Aviation Administration said its review of the planes would continue into next year, dashing the manufacturer's forecast.

Boeing's decision to temporarily shut down production, made after months of a cash-draining global grounding of its best-selling aircraft, worsens one of the most severe crises in the history of the century-old manufacturer. It is ramping up pressure on CEO Dennis Muilenburg, whom the board stripped of his chairmanship in October as the crisis wore on.

The measure is set to ripple through the aerospace giant's supply chain and broader economy. It also presents further problems for airlines, which have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and canceled thousands of flights without the fuel-efficient planes in their fleets.

Boeing said it does not plan to lay off or furlough workers at the Renton, Washington, factory where the 737 Max is produced during the production pause. Some of the 12,000 workers there will be temporarily reassigned.

Previously:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Boeing's 737 Max Troubles Deepen, Taking Airlines, Suppliers With It
Review of 737 Max Certification Finds Fault With Boeing and F.A.A.
American Airlines Says It Will Resume Flights With Boeing’s 737 Max Jets in January
AP Sources: Boeing Changing 737 Max Software to Use 2 Computers
Boeing Falsified Records for 787 Jet Sold to Air Canada
Boeing Pledges $100M to Families of 737 Max Crash Victims
Capt. 'Sully' Sullenberger and Boeing 737 Max News
Boeing’s Own Test Pilots Lacked Key Details Of 737 Max Flight-Control System
Boeing CEO Defends 737 Max Flight Control System
Analysis: Why FAA-Approved Emergency Procedures Failed to Save ET302
Initial Findings Put Boeing's Software at Center of Ethiopian 737 Crash
Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 Max Flight Makes Emergency Landing (While Carrying No Passengers)
Airline Cancels $4.9 Billion Boeing 737 MAX Order; Doomed Planes Lacked Optional Safety Features
Pilot Who Hitched a Ride Saved Lion Air 737 Day Before Deadly Crash
DoJ Issues Subpoenas in 737 Max Investigation
Boeing 737 Max Aircraft Grounded in the U.S. and Dozens of Other Countries
Second 737 MAX8 Airplane Crash Reinforces Speculation on Flying System Problems

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has published an electronic edition of his Essential Guide to Shenzhen. The PDF version is now available for download free of charge, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. His book is intended to help non-Mandarin speakers navigate the sprawling electronics markets, Hua Qiang Bei, in Shenzen. It specializes in finding components, setting quantities and packaging, agreeing on payments and deliveries, and remembering the vendor's location within the dense mazes.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to doing this, but here’s a link for a free-to-download copy of “The Essential Guide to Shenzhen”. The catalyst that prompted me to finally get around to this is the fact that Crowd Supply is now sold out (I think Adafruit is also sold out, too). Since the maps in the guide are now quite out of date, I figure it’s not worth re-printing the guide. Instead, it may be more useful to publish a link, so that others can swap out the map pages with something more up-to-date and have a swing at making their own derivative works.

Original Submission

"upstart" writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow4408.

Your workmates might still be reading that 'unshared' Slack document

Security researchers have uncovered a flaw in messaging app Slack that allows a file shared in a private channel to be viewed by anyone in that workspace – even guests.

Folk from Israeli cloud security outfit Polyrize uncovered the vuln, that they say exposes files shared through the IRC-for-millennials application, which boasts millions of users.

"If you share your file once, even if you later unshare it, that file can still be exposed to other people, without any indication to you," said Polyrize, adding that the vuln includes the viewing of files through API queries.

It works through Slack's implementation of file-sharing. Posts on a Slack workspace can be in a public channel, or conversation, where anyone with an account on that workspace can join and view messages and files, or a private conversation (invite-only). Files are shared with conversations which can have one or more participants; if you're in a conversation where a private file is shared, you can view it. Should you leave that private conversation, you can't view files from within it.

That's how it's meant to work, anyway. According to Polyrize, however, if someone in a private conversation shares a file from it to a different conversation, that bypasses the controls.

"Due to the fact that Slack users can only be aware of private conversations that they are members of, file owners have no way to tell that their files were shared in other private conversations," Polyrize told The Register.

There is an "Unshare" button, but once a file (a "Snippet" or "Post") has been shared with someone else, you have no ability to control copying of an already-shared file to different channel. Further, there is no way to track which files are being re-shared.

Original Submission

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

Mastercard tests new digital identity service - Help Net Security

Mastercard marked the first tests of a new digital service that has the potential to verify a person's identity immediately, safely and securely in both the digital and the physical world.

[...]The pilot program will test a new way for people to prove their identity without having to carry multiple documents. Instead, the model allows the data to sit with its rightful owner – the user.

It will activate a distributed model that blends information stored on an individual's mobile device and verified by additional reference points, such as an individual's bank or participating government agencies . It eliminates the need for a centralized identity database.

Mastercard's consumer-centric approach was outlined in a Principles of Digital Identity vision paper earlier this year and prioritizes privacy-by-design.

[...]Following these initial efforts, additional partnerships and pilots will be introduced across a number of markets throughout 2020.

Original Submission

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

How Facebook's Political Ad System Is Designed to Polarize

Amid the tense debate over online political advertising, it may seem strange to worry that Facebook gives campaigns too little control over whom their ads target. Yet that's the implication of a study released this week by a team of researchers at Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, and the progressive nonprofit Upturn. By moonlighting as political advertisers, they found that Facebook's algorithms make it harder and more expensive for a campaign to get its message in front of users who don't already agree with them—even if they're trying to.

[...] The paper, still in draft form, is a follow-up to research the group did earlier this year, which found that Facebook's algorithms can dramatically skew the delivery of ads along racial and gender lines even when the advertiser doesn't intend it. That's because while Facebook allows advertisers to design their audience—that's ad targeting—the platform's algorithms then influence who within the audience actually sees the ad, and at what price. That's ad delivery. Because Facebook wants users to see ads that are "relevant" to them, the algorithm essentially pushes a given ad toward users it thinks are most likely already interested in its message. This, the researchers found, can reinforce stereotypes. For example, of the users who saw ads for jobs in the lumber business, 90 percent were male, even though the intended audience was evenly split between men and women. (Facebook is also facing litigation for allegedly allowing advertisers to intentionally discriminate.)

For the new study, the team decided to explore whether the algorithm also skews political ad delivery along partisan lines. Because the company doesn't share that information, they had to run a number of experiments, essentially going undercover to figure out where targeting ends and Facebook's algorithms begin.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

In May this year, users of popular open source project FUSE for macOS noticed the source code for the latest update was missing. The project had become closed source and was no longer free for commercial use. But as The Reg discovered when we had a talk with its maintainer, there was a very good reason for that – and it's not a good look for the many companies that used it.

[...]FUSE for macOS 3.9 can still be freely bundled with commercial software. Then in July of 2019, I released FUSE for macOS 3.10 with support for macOS Catalina under the new, less permissive licence, that requires specific written permission to bundle FUSE with commercial software," he told The Reg.

MrPlow writes in with a submission, via IRC, for SoyCow4408.

Just in time for all those holiday packages stacking up at your door, former NASA engineer Mark Rober released on Sunday a video of his new and improved "Glitter Bomb Trap 2.0" that exacts stinky, sparkle-filled revenge on porch pirates. The new trap features design upgrades and even more fart spray. Macaulay Culkin, whose character in Home Alone inspired the original viral prank, makes an appearance in the new video.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/youtuber-debuts-glitter-bomb-2-0-to-get-back-at-package-thieves/

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

From the Guardian

A civil court in Rome has ruled that Facebook must immediately reactivate the account of the Italian neo-fascist party CasaPound and pay the group €800 (£675) for each day the account has been closed, according to local media.

Facebook shut the party's account, which had 240,000 followers, along with its Instagram page in early September. A Facebook spokesperson told the Ansa news agency at the time: "Persons or organisations that spread hatred or attack others on the basis of who they are will not have a place on Facebook and Instagram. The accounts we removed today violate this policy and will no longer be present on Facebook or Instagram."

According to an earlier article:

CasaPound was founded in the late 1990s as a pro-Mussolini drinking club. Named after the 20th-century American poet Ezra Pound, who was known for his fascist sympathies and antisemitism, it claims to support a democratic variant of fascism but it is accused of encouraging violence and racism.

In a 2011 interview with the Guardian, the party's secretary, Simone Di Stefano, described Mussolini's brand of fascism as "our point of reference, a vision of the state and the economy, and the concept of sacrifice". Di Stefano ran for prime minister in the last general election.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Three weeks after the Internet Society announced the controversial sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm, the organization that has to sign off on the deal has finally spoken publicly.

In a letter [PDF] titled “Transparency” from the general counsel of domain name system overseer ICANN to the CEOs of the Internet Society (ISOC) and .org registry operator PIR, the organization takes issue with how the proposed sale has been handled and notes that it is “uncomfortable” at the lack of transparency.

The letter, dated Monday and posted today with an accompanying blog post, notes that ICANN will be sending a “detailed request for additional information” and encourages the organizations “to answer these questions fully and as transparently as possible.”

As ICANN’s chairman previously told The Register, the organization received an official request to change ownership of PIR from ISOC to Ethos Capital in mid-November but denied ICANN’s request to make it public.

The letter presses ISOC/PIR to make that request public. “While PIR has previously declined our request to publish the Request, we urge you to reconsider,” the letter states. “We also think there would be great value for us to publish the questions that you are asked and your answers to those questions.”

Somewhat unusually it repeats the same point a second time: “In light of the level of interest in the recently announced acquisition of PIR, both within the ICANN community and more generally, we continue to believe that it is critical that your Request, and the questions and answers in follow up to the Request, and any other related materials, be made Public.”

And then, stressing the same point a third time, the letter notes that on a recent webinar about the sale organized by concerned non-profits that use .org domains, ISOC CEO Andrew Sullivan said he wasn’t happy about the level of secrecy surrounding the deal.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Sustainable sand pulls pollutants from stormwater

UC Berkeley engineers have developed a mineral-coated sand that can soak up toxic metals like lead and cadmium from water. Along with its ability to destroy organic pollutants like bisphenol A, this material could help cities tap into stormwater, an abundant but underused water source.

The team's findings were published recently in the journal Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology.

Researchers knew that the naturally occurring minerals they coated onto sand could react with organic contaminants like pesticides in stormwater. However, the ability of the coated sand to also remove harmful metals during filtration could unlock urban water supplies that had been written off. Cities with Mediterranean climates, like Los Angeles, could store stormwater underground during wet winters, where it could serve as an inexpensive, local supply during the dry season. But this resource has gone mostly untapped because stormwater picks up toxic chemicals as it runs through streets and gutters.

"The pollutants that hold back the potential of this water source rarely come one at a time," said study lead author Joe Charbonnet, who conducted this research as a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering. "It makes sense that we fight back with a treatment technology that has these impressive double abilities to take out both toxic metals and organics. We suspected that the mineral-coated sand was special, but the way it continues to impress us with multiple capabilities is rather extraordinary."

The use of manganese oxide-coated sand for the removal of trace metal ions from stormwater, Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology (DOI: 10.1039/C9EW00781D)

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Bows are more accurate, have greater range, and can fire more frequently than spears. They mostly replaced the spear. In many areas where thrown spears were used for a longer time, a lever known as an atlatl was use to add power to the throws. Some Canadian researchers reckon that if bow use, for example, was learned by children using child-sized bows and arrows, then spear use would be learned by children using child-sized spears and atlatls. Now they seem to have found archeological evidence of that in Par-Tee, Oregon, USA where they have uncovered small, child-sized whalebone atlatls.

The Par-Tee atlatls were made during what appear to have been the last few centuries of the widespread use of these weapons on the northern Oregon Coast; they were perhaps employed alongside the newly introduced bow and arrow. Their unusually high abundance at Par-Tee—they are more numerous here than at any other site on the west coast of North America—is difficult to explain. Most atlatls were probably made of wood, and therefore do not survive in most archaeological settings. Although the use of whalebone for atlatls at Par-Tee has facilitated their survival at this location, the reason for the repeated selection of bone for the crafting of these weapons is unknown. The choice to employ whalebone cannot be explained by differential access to this material alone, as bones from these animals could have been found whenever they washed ashore. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the use of whalebone improved the performance of atlatls compared to other types of locally available material. Perhaps this use of whalebone represents unique practices of marking status through the use of the body parts of truly powerful animals. Alternatively, this could have been a means of indicating close relations to, or high regard of, these animals among the inhabitants of Par-Tee, who appear to have sometimes hunted whales.

Source: Learning to use atlatls: equipment scaling and enskilment on the Oregon Coast.

Even just a few hundred years ago, archers had far more skill than the inept fumblings we are used to seeing. Archer Lars Andersen demonstrates archery on another level. (Direct link to Lars Anderson's YouTube page.) His major complaint is lack of strength, so the strength and skill training for that must have historically started in childhood. So why not similarly for spears?

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

Picked via Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram, the story of a massive electronic vote miscount, luckily paper ballots were available

Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate's zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.

The worse news:

The machines that broke in Northampton County are called the ExpressVoteXL and are made by Election Systems & Software, a major manufacturer of election machines used across the country. The ExpressVoteXL is among their newest and most high-end machines, a luxury "one-stop" voting system that combines a 32-inch touch screen and a paper ballot printer.

The good news was that the chairwoman of the county Republicans realized the numbers made no sense and promptly initiated an investigation. When officials counted the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines, they realized Kassis had narrowly won.

How many trees still need to die until humans learn how to do voting properly?

_{Note: the original story ran on nytimes, but I respect their choice to not let me read their stories with 'Do not track' activated}

Original Submission

"upstart" writes in with a submission, via IRC, for chromas.

Feds prescribe $9m cash injection to counter 5G phobias

The federal government has gone on the offensive against a growing anti-5G movement in some communities, freeing-up a cash splash of $9 million over four years to get back on the community relations front foot with “additional scientific research and further public education”.

The move, announced on Monday, comes amid broader government and industry concern that US-style conspiracy theories – which cover topics ranging from public health immunisation, water fluoridation and the electromagnetic radiation – are quickly taking root in some communities.

The proliferation of community based opposition to the rollout of 5G, which is just starting to occur across Australia, is potentially a major headache for the government and telecommunications industry because of its potential disrupt infrastructure renewal and substantially increase costs.

While most anti-5G groups initially muster and organise their actions online, the political trench warfare typically starts at the local government level in the form concerned resident opposition to the construction and placement of new infrastructure.