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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

Backdoors and Breaches incident response card game makes tabletop exercises fun:

There's a new, fun way to run a realistic incident response tabletop exercise, and it's called Backdoors and Breaches. Inspired by Dungeons and Dragons (B&B instead of D&D), the game includes a pack of custom playing cards and a 20-sided die. Five to six people can play it in as little as 15 to 20 minutes.

The card deck comes from the folks at pentesting firm Black Hills, who sent us a review deck and walked us through how to play. It's a simple concept, easy to play, and looks like a fun way to run a tabletop exercise.

[...] Unlike some tabletop exercises that can take months to prepare and last for days, Backdoors and Breaches makes it simple to role-play thousands of possible security incidents, and to do so even as a weekly exercise. The game can be played just by blue teamers but could also involve a member of the legal team, management, or a member of the public relations team. The ideal game involves no more than six players to ensure that everyone is engaged and participating. "This game can be played every Thursday at lunch," Blanchard tells CSO.

If the upside of the B&B card deck is the ability to instantly create thousands of scenarios from generic attack methods, the downside is that it lacks cards for specific industries, or company-specific issues. Black Hills plans for expansion decks in 2020, including one for industrial control system (ICS) security and another for web application security.

[...] While obviously designed as a marketing tool for their pentesting business, the B&B deck will be useful to many enterprises, as well as schools and universities, who Blanchard says have shown great interest in the card deck.

If companies become more secure as a result of using their card deck? Blanchard says their pentesters would be happy with that. "We want to pentest companies that make us really have to work for it," he says.

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

Zaosong Zheng, a graduate student at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, was arrested December 10 as he was attempting to fly from Boston to Beijing with stolen biological specimens in his luggage. He planned to take the vials of cancer cells to Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in China, according to The New York Times.

Prosecutors stated in court documents that the incident seems to be part of a larger effort to steal material from the lab where Zheng worked and bring it to China, the Times reports. Zheng's roommate, also a researcher, told FBI agents that two labmates of Zheng had succeeded in getting specimens to China. "[I]t appears to have been a coordinated crime, with likely involvement by the Chinese government," the prosecutors allege in the court filings.

Source: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/grad-student-arrested-trying-to-smuggle-specimens-to-china-66889

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for chromas:

I spy, with my little satellite AI, something beginning with 'North American image-analysis code embargo':

The US government has placed software designed to train neural networks to analyse satellite images under new export controls in a bid to prevent foreign adversaries using said code.

The decision, made by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), is effective today. Vendors shipping software subject to the controls – in that the applications help machine learning systems annotate satellite images in a particular way – will have to apply for a license to sell their products to customers outside of the US and Canada.

"Items warrant control for export because the items may provide a significant military or intelligence advantage to the United States or because foreign policy reasons justify control," the BIS said.

Hah!

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Puerto Rican Natural Wonder, Punta Ventana, Collapses Amid 5.8 Magnitude Earthquake:

One of Puerto Rico's iconic natural wonders — a soaring stone arch along the southern coast known as Punta Ventana or Window Point — collapsed early Monday as a 5.8 magnitude earthquake rattled the island.

Denniza Colon, a 22-year-old resident of Guayanilla, said she went by the area Monday morning and was shocked to find the arch, a place that she visited frequently as a child, had simply vanished.

"This is really sad," she said in a telephone interview. "It was one of the biggest tourism draws of Guayanilla."

Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of 3.2 million, has been jolted by a series of earthquakes that began on Dec. 28 and have been concentrated along the southern part of the island.

[...] Monday's tremor was the largest yet, striking at 6:32 a.m. local time and knocking several homes off their foundations and causing rockslides along some roads. Puerto Rico's Energy Authority said two substations, in Guánica and Yauco, had been affected and power was out in some areas of the island. However, there were no immediate reports of injuries or casualties.

Also covered at The New York Times.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Jupiter is Flinging Comets Toward Earth:

Some astronomers believe that Jupiter, instead of protecting Earth from dangerous comets and asteroids, is actively flinging objects into the inner solar system. New research now demonstrates this complex process in action.

A popular theory suggests Jupiter, with its tremendous mass, acts like a gigantic shield in space, sucking in or deflecting dangerous debris left over from the formation of the solar system. That makes sense, but the Jupiter Shield theory, as it's known, has been falling out of favor over the past two decades.

A leading critic of this theory, Kevin Grazier, formerly of the West Point U.S. Military Academy and NASA, has sought to debunk this idea for years. He has published several studies on the subject, including a 2008 paper titled, "Jupiter as a Sniper Rather Than a Shield." Indeed, with each successive paper, Grazier has increasingly demonstrated the ways in which Jupiter, instead of being our protector, is actually—though indirectly—a pernicious threat.

Grazier's latest foray into the subject involves a pair of companion papers, one published in the Astronomical Journal in 2018 and the other in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Journal in 2019. The first paper takes a look at the complex ways in which objects in the outer solar system are affected by the Jovian planets, namely Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus, while the second paper looks at a specific family of icy bodies and how they're transformed by Jupiter into potentially deadly comets. Looking at the findings of the two papers, it seems the Jupiter Shield theory is in serious jeopardy.

"Actually, I wouldn't say that it's in jeopardy—I would say that it has been laid to rest." Grazier told Gizmodo in an email. "Our simulations show that Jupiter is just as likely to send comets at Earth as deflect them away, and we've seen that in the real solar system."

takyon writes:

AMD has announced its new Ryzen 4000-series mobile APUs for laptops, including 8-core parts for both 15W and 45W TDPs. The new chips all support up to 64 GB of LPDDR4X memory.

At the 15W TDP, Ryzen 7 4800U has 8 "7nm" Zen 2 cores (16 threads), and 8 "7nm" Vega graphics compute units (CUs) which perform better than the 11 Vega CUs from the previous generation, due in part to a much higher 1750 MHz clock speed. There is also an 8c/8t/7CU Ryzen 7 4700U, 6c/12t/6CU Ryzen 5 4600U, 6c/6t/6CU Ryzen 5 4500U, and 4c/4t/5CU Ryzen 3 4300U.

At the 45W TDP, Ryzen 7 4800H has 8c/16t at a 2.9 GHz base frequency (compared to 1.8 GHz for the 4800U), but only 7 graphics CUs. Ryzen 5 4600H has 6c/12t with 6 CUs, and the Ryzen 7 4800HS is identical to 4800H except for a lower TDP, and will be an ASUS exclusive chip for the first six months.

At the low end, there are two new Zen-based 15W laptop chips, a 2 core, 4 thread Athlon Gold 3150U, and a 2 core, 2 thread Athlon Silver 3050U.

AMD's 64-core Threadripper 3990X will be available on February 7th for $3,990, double the price of the 32-core TR 3970X. A 48-core version was not mentioned.

AMD has launched Radeon RX 5700M and RX 5600M discrete GPUs for laptops to complement the RX 5500M that was previously launched. A mid-range Radeon RX 5600 XT desktop GPU was also announced.

Also at cnet.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Wi-Fi Alliance Announces Wi-Fi 6E Moniker for 802.11ax in the 6 GHz Spectrum

The FCC has been considering the opening up of the 6 GHz band (essentially, the 1.2 GHz unlicensed spectrum span just above the currently used 5 GHz band) for unlicensed operation. Wideband unlicensed channels of 160 MHz and more may become essential to achieve expected performance from 802.11ax, 802.11be, 4G LTE, and 5G NR in unlicensed spectrum. Opening up a continuous 1200 MHz chunk will enable substantial amount of new bandwidth over multiple wide bandwidth channels.

Unfortunately, even though there are no currently unlicensed users of the 6 GHz band, certain fixed wireless point-to-point long-range deployments are licensed to utilize it. Wi-Fi platform vendors such as Qualcomm and Broadcom have been confident of working with those users to prevent any interference. Their key message to the licensed incumbents is that any Wi-Fi deployment in the 6 GHz band would use LPI (low-power indoor) operation and can also implement AFC (automated frequency coordination). LPI operation, for example, may impose restrictions on the total EIRP (effective isotropically radiated power) and PSD (power spectral density) for Wi-Fi devices. This will prevent interference due to low power levels and substantial building losses. In addition, most licensed users of the spectrum have their point-to-point endpoints well above the ground (mounted atop towers and buildings), and devices rated for LPI operation are not likely to affect them. AFC involves the maintenance of a database where licensed users are tracked based on their deployment location, and any unlicensed Wi-Fi usage in that spectrum capable of interfering with the licensed users could automatically shift to a different channel.

The Wi-Fi Alliance is introducing a new terminology to distinguish upcoming Wi-Fi 6 devices that are capable of 6 GHz operation - Wi-Fi 6E. This is essentially the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 / 802.11ax (higher performance in terms of faster data rates as well as lower latency) in the 6 GHz band. Wi-Fi 6E devices are expected to make it to the market relatively quickly after regulatory approval, as it only requires changing the antenna tuning / RF front end on existing devices.

802.11be is likely to become Wi-Fi 7 and also operate in the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands.

In retrospect, the new Wi-Fi naming scheme is not that bad. Or at least, it's not as bad as USB yet.

Previously: Wi-Fi Alliance Rebrands Wi-Fi Standards

Related: Netgear Introduces its First Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Routers
Intel Launches a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Wireless Network Adapter

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

A new method, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, could allow NASA's James Webb telescope to detect oxygen molecules in exoplanet atmospheres (a potential indicator of life).

As they [collide, oxygen molecules] block out a specific part of the infrared spectrum, and the new telescope will be able to see that and give scientists a clue to the distant worlds' atmosphere.

[...] "Before our work, oxygen at similar levels as on Earth was thought to be undetectable with Webb," Thomas Fauchez, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

"This oxygen signal is known since the early 1980s from Earth's atmospheric studies but has never been studied for exoplanet research."

On the Earth, oxygen is a byproduct of photosynthesis, a process whereby living organisms convert sunlight into chemical energy. For this reason, scientists believe its presence could be an indicator of life on exoplanets.

Spotting oxygen on a planet might not be a guarantee that something lives there. Scientists have proposed alternative explanations that could create oxygen on exoplanets, and so it might not be a definitive indication that the world is alive.​

Utilizing this collision induced absorption band at 6.4 μm, the scientists indicate that in some cases detection could occur within just a few transits.

Journal Reference: Sensitive probing of exoplanetary oxygen via mid-infrared collisional absorption^$, Nature Astronomy (DOI: doi:10.1038/s41550-019-0977-7)

Original Submission

Coward, Anonymous writes:

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs, pronounced vixels) are high-power workhorses with applications from laser printing to LIDAR sensing. But their geometry, which consists of large alternating layers, presents fabrication difficulties, limiting the devices' output colors.

In new research, scientists built An electrically pumped surface-emitting semiconductor green laser.

The realization of a low-threshold, high-efficiency, all-epitaxial surface-emitting green laser diode will enable many exciting applications including projection displays such as pico projectors, plastic optical fiber communication, wireless communication, optical storage, smart lighting, and biosensors.

Their configuration, dubbed nanocrystal surface-emitting laser (NCSEL), divides the surface area into small nanocrystals that allow more flexible choice of individual layers. Mismatch between physical properties of large layers can easily cause failure where smaller areas are immune. According to the authors:

This work demonstrates a viable approach to realizing high-performance surface-emitting laser diodes from the deep UV to the deep visible (~210 to 600 nm) that were previously difficult to achieve.

ODE TO THE LASER:

Beautiful beams of light
coherent in frequency and phase.
The public expected your biggest impact
to be Star Wars-like Death Rays.

Instead you're in our everyday lives
from bar codes to pointers to DVD drives
They say in Science is your biggest contribution
shining a light on stars and molecular distributions.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

A fast radio burst tracked down to a nearby galaxy:

In results published in the January 9 edition of Nature, the European VLBI Network (EVN) used eight telescopes spanning locations from the United Kingdom to China to simultaneously observe the repeating radio source known as FRB 180916.J0158+65. Using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), the researchers achieved a level of resolution high enough to localize the FRB to a region approximately seven light years across -- a feat comparable to an individual on Earth being able to distinguish a person on the Moon.

With that level of precision, the research team was able to train an optical telescope onto the location to learn more about the environment from which the burst emanated. What they found has added a new chapter to the mystery surrounding the origins of FRBs.

"We used the eight-metre Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to take sensitive images that showed the faint spiral arms of a Milky-Way-like galaxy and showed that the FRB source was in a star-forming region in one of those arms," said co-author Shriharsh Tendulkar, a former McGill University postdoctoral researcher who co-led the optical imaging and spectroscopic analyses of the FRB's location.

[...] "The FRB is among the closest yet seen and we even speculated that it could be a more conventional object in the outskirts of our own galaxy," said co-author Mohit Bhardwaj, a McGill University doctoral student and CHIME team member.

"However the EVN observation proved that it's in a relatively nearby galaxy, making it still a puzzling FRB, but close enough to now study using many other telescopes."

A repeating fast radio burst source localized to a nearby spiral galaxy^$, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1866-z)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Astronomers find wandering massive black holes in dwarf galaxies: In many cases, black hole is in galaxy's outskirts:

Astronomers seeking to learn about the mechanisms that formed massive black holes in the early history of the Universe have gained important new clues with the discovery of 13 such black holes in dwarf galaxies less than a billion light-years from Earth.

These dwarf galaxies, more than 100 times less massive than our own Milky Way, are among the smallest galaxies known to host massive black holes. The scientists expect that the black holes in these smaller galaxies average about 400,000 times the mass of our Sun.

[...] The scientists started by selecting a sample of galaxies from the NASA-Sloan Atlas, a catalog of galaxies made with visible-light telescopes. They chose galaxies with stars totalling less than 3 billion times the mass of the Sun, about equal to the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion of the Milky Way. From this sample, they picked candidates that also appeared in the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty centimeters (FIRST) survey, made between 1993 and 2011.

They then used the VLA[*] to make new and more sensitive, high-resolution images of 111 of the selected galaxies.

"The new VLA observations revealed that 13 of these galaxies have strong evidence for a massive black hole that is actively consuming surrounding material. We were very surprised to find that, in roughly half of those 13 galaxies, the black hole is not at the center of the galaxy, unlike the case in larger galaxies," Reines said

[*] VLA: Very Large Array.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There was a period in the very early universe—known as the "cosmic dark ages"—when elementary particles, formed in the Big Bang, had combined to form neutral hydrogen but no stars or galaxies existed yet to light up the universe. This period began less than half a million years after the Big Bang and ended with the formation of the first stars. While this stage in the evolution of our universe is indicated by computer simulations, direct evidence is sparse.

Now, astronomers using the infrared imager NEWFIRM on the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory of NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (OIR Lab), have reported imaging a group of galaxies, known as EGS77, that contains these first stars. EGS, or the Extended Groth Strip, is a region imaged by HST in 2005; it corresponds to a narrow strip of the sky about the width of a finger held at arms length. There are at least 50,000 galaxies known within the strip. Their results were announced at a press conference held today at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

[...] Once identified, the distances and hence the ages of these galaxies were confirmed with spectra taken with the MOSFIRE spectrograph at the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawai'i. All three galaxies show strong emission lines of hydrogen Lyman alpha at a redshift (z = 7.7), which means we are seeing them at about 680 million years after the Big Bang. The size of the ionized bubble around each was derived from computer modeling. These bubbles overlap spatially, but are large enough (about 2.2 million light-years) that Lyman alpha photons are redshifted before they reach the boundary of the bubble and can thus escape unscathed, allowing astronomers to detect them.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

It brings me great pleasure to announce that — thanks to a few last-day-of-the-year subscriptions — SoylentNews has successfully reached its fund-raising goal for the second half of 2019! (Note: these amounts are unaudited and are, therefore, approximate.)

During the period 2019-07-01 through 2019-12-31, we received a net total of $2036.33 (from gross receipts of $2121.64) on a goal of $2000.00! There were 71 paid subscriptions which ranged from $4.00 up to $200.00

Here's a great big thank you to all who have subscribed to SoylentNews... every contribution is important!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Bosch thinks its new lidar system is the breakthrough self-driving cars need:

Bosch, the German supplier that's responsible for building so many car-related components, won't be left out of the self-driving car discussion. Instead, it wants to help shape the conversation.

On Thursday, the company revealed the first information on its new lidar system. Lidar, a laser-based tool that gives autonomous cars "sight," so to speak, is by far the most popular tool for companies to use for self-driving cars. The one major exception remains Tesla, which believes an array of cameras, sensors and radar will be enough.

Bosch said its lidar system is advanced enough to work in both highway and city driving scenarios. Most importantly, it'll work in concert with cameras and radar as the German company wants to create the highest level of safety when it comes to self-driving cars. Lidar fills a "sensor gap," Bosch believes.

The company didn't provide too many details on the system ahead of more information at CES 2020, but promised the system can detect anything near or far away -- even a rock in the road. Giving the car enough to time to calculate what it needs to do, be it brake, steer or something else, is essential and power lidar gives it the opportunity.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

A malicious Chrome extension surreptitiously steals Ethereum keys and passwords:

A Google Chrome extension was caught injecting JavaScript code on web pages to steal passwords and private keys from cryptocurrency wallets and cryptocurrency portals.

The extension is named Shitcoin Wallet (Chrome extension ID: ckkgmccefffnbbalkmbbgebbojjogffn), and was launched last month, on December 9.

According to an introductory blog post, Shitcoin Wallet lets users manage Ether (ETH) coins, but also Ethereum ERC20-based tokens -- tokens usually issued for ICOs (initial coin offerings).

Users can install the Chrome extension and manage ETH coins and ERC20 tokens from within their browser, or they can install a Windows desktop app, if they want to manage their funds from outside a browser's riskier environment.

However, the wallet app wasn't what it promised to be.

Original Submission