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takyon writes:

Coronavirus declared global health emergency by WHO

The new coronavirus has been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization, as the outbreak continues to spread outside China.

"The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries," said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The concern is that it could spread to countries with weaker health systems.

1st Person-To-Person Spread Of Coronavirus Has Occurred In U.S., CDC Says

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Coronavirus: US reports first person-to-person transmission

Chicago health officials have reported the first US case of human-to-human transmission of the deadly coronavirus.

The new patient is the spouse of a Chicago woman who carried the infection back from Wuhan, China, the US Centers for Disease Control said on Thursday.

The discovery marks the second report of the virus in Illinois and the sixth confirmed case in the US.

Mojibake Tengu writes:

This paper provides early estimates of 2019-nCoV epidemiological parameters: Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV: early estimation of epidemiological parameters and epidemic predictions (open, DOI: 10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549) (DX)

Used model does not offer much grounds for optimism.

Previously:

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

China Reports 3rd Death, Nearly 140 New Cases of Coronavirus
China Confirms Human-To-Human Transmission of New Coronavirus; CDC Confirms First US Case
Coronavirus: Millions Quarantined in Wuhan City
China Battles Coronavirus Outbreak: All the Latest Updates
In The Pipeline: Coronavirus
Plague Inc. Maker: Don't use our Game for Coronavirus Modeling

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kreuzfeld writes:

Today marks the final mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Conceived of as an infrared-optimized "Great Observatory," Spitzer has spend the last 6002 days providing Earthlings with an unprecedented view into other galaxies, our own solar system, and (unexpected to its designers!) planets around other stars. But in its Earth-trailing solar orbit, Spitzer is now over 1.5 astronomical units from the Earth: radio transmissions are increasingly difficult, and (more importantly) Spitzer's operating costs were ultimately deemed to be too high relative to its science output.

Spitzer's infrared capabilities won't be replaced until 2021 (at the earliest) when NASA's James Webb Space Telescope -- an even larger successor to Spitzer and the Hubble -- is anticipated to launch. Bon voyage, Spitzer -- we'll see you again in about 30 years when our orbits meet up again.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Anonymous_Coward:

An Open Source eReader That's Free of Corporate Restrictions Is Exactly What I Want Right Now:

I get it. The Kindle and its ability to shop for and instantly buy books anywhere using wifi or Whispernet are incredibly convenient, and it’s what’s made Amazon’s hardware the obvious choice for consuming ebooks. But supporting awful companies like Amazon is getting harder and harder if you were born with a conscience, and right about now, an open source ebook reader, free of corporate restrictions, sounds like the perfect Kindle alternative.

A fully open-hardware eReader, it includes the following design specs: ARM Cortex M4 processor, 400x300 monochromatic resolution, microSD card reader, lithium-polymer rechargeable battery, audiobook-capable headphone jack, and audio-command-capable microphone.

The Open Book Project was born from a contest held by Hackaday and that encouraged hardware hackers to find innovative and practical uses for the Arduino-based Adafruit Feather development board ecosystem. The winner of that contest was the Open Book Project which has been designed and engineered from the ground up to be everything devices like the Amazon Kindle or Rakuten Kobo are not.

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takyon writes:

Atari has two Bay Area locations planned for its video game-themed hotels

The video game company recently announced plans to open up a series of eight hotels in cities across the country — including San Francisco and San Jose — to create a "unique lodging experience combining the iconic brand with a one-of-a-kind video game-themed destination."

Don't expect Atari-only tributes to the company's classic games, such as Pong or Centipede — while there is a retro element to the hotel, there will also be a number of more current upgrades to the entertainment offerings. Those staying in the hotel will be able to take part in "fully immersive experiences for every age and gaming ability" including virtual reality and augmented reality, the press release stated. A number of the hotels will also feature venues capable of hosting esports events.

Guest rooms will also be themed; some will sport a retro style of decor while others may be styled after "Ready Player One," CNN reported. They will also be "affordably priced."

[...] It's great timing for the hotel, as the New York Times pointed out. With an estimated 2.5 billion gamers and esports gaining in popularity — over 19,000 people went to the 2019 Fortnite World Cup that took place at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, the newspaper noted — it seems that a hotel venture with a planned space for esports competitions are likely to become popular destinations for gamers.

Also at the Chicago Tribune.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Apple and Broadcom have been told to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a beefy billion bucks for ripping off three of the US university's Wi-Fi patents. A federal jury in Cali decided on Wednesday that technology described in the data signal encoding patents owned by Caltech is used in millions of iPhones without wireless chip designer Broadcom nor phone slinger Apple paying the necessary licensing fees. Broadcom supplies radio communications components to Apple for various iThings.

The jury took just under five hours to decide its $1.1bn patent-infringement prize following a two-week trial, with Apple being forced to pick up the bulk of the damages, $837m, compared to Broadcom's $270m. The figures were what Caltech asked for.

[...] Despite the massive award, the news had no noticeable impact on Apple's share price coming a day after it announced better-than-expected results. Broadcom's slipped just a quarter of a per cent.

-- submitted from IRC

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upstart from IRC writes:

Facebook pays $550M to settle facial recognition privacy lawsuit:

Facebook will create a cash fund of $550 million for its Illinois users who filed a lawsuit over its privacy practices, law firm Edelson PC said on Wednesday. The settlement came after Facebook was sued for collecting facial recognition data to use in tagging photos, which allegedly violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Tagging someone in a photo on Facebook creates a link to his or her profile, with the feature finally made opt-in by Facebook last year. Facebook's photo tag suggestions come from collecting facial recognition data from other photos.

[...] The case has been ongoing since 2015, and the settlement has yet to be approved by the judge in the case. Illinois is the only state to have biometric privacy laws that allow people to sue for damages if their rights are violated.

Facebook settled because "it was in the best interest of our community and our shareholders to move past this matter," the company said in an emailed statement.

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canopic jug writes:

As a followup to an earlier blog post at Ubuntu's blog about why those on Windows 7 should upgrade to Ubuntu, the same blog has a post about how to actually do it.

A few days ago, Rhys Davies wrote a timely article, titled Why you should upgrade to Ubuntu. In it, he outlined a high-level overview of what the end of support of Windows 7 signifies for the typical user, the consideration – and advantages – of migrating to Ubuntu as an alternative, and the basic steps one should undertake to achieve this.

We'd like to expand on this idea. We will provide a series of detailed, step-by-step tutorials that should help less tech-savvy Windows 7 users migrate from their old operating system to Ubuntu. We will start with considerations for the move, with emphasis on applications and data backup. Then, we will follow up with the installation of the new operating system, and finally cover the Ubuntu desktop tour, post-install configuration and setup.

The upcoming Long Term Support (LTS) release will have not just the usual five years of regular support but an optional additional five years for those that decide to pay. That would be 10 years starting from April, 2020.

Previously:
Ditching Windows: 2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on a Dell XPS 13 (2018)
How to Create a Custom Ubuntu ISO with Cubic (2018)
Debian vs. Ubuntu: What's the Difference? (2017)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Climate change behind Africa's worst locust invasion in decades

Locusts by the millions are nibbling their way across a large part of Africa in the worst outbreak some places have seen in 70 years. Is this another effect of a changing climate? Yes, researchers say. An unprecedented food security crisis may be the result.

The locusts "reproduce rapidly and, if left unchecked, their current numbers could grow 500 times by June," the United Nations says.

[...] "A typical desert locust swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer," the East African regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, has said. "Swarms migrate with the wind and can cover 62 to 93 miles in a day. An average swarm can destroy as much food crops in a day as is sufficient to feed 2,500 people."

[...] Heavy rains in East Africa made 2019 one of the region's wettest years on record, said Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker. He blamed rapidly warming waters in the Indian Ocean off Africa's eastern coast, which also spawned an unusual number of strong tropical cyclones off Africa last year.

Heavy rainfall and warmer temperatures are favorable conditions for locust breeding and in this case the conditions have become "exceptional," he said.

Even now rainfall continues in some parts of the vast region. The greenery that springs up keeps the locusts fuelled.

So already in the 2020s we have a massive viral pandemic with millions of people facing quarantine, gravity waves hurtling towards earth from the black hole at the center of the galaxy, massive forest fires so large they start their own thunderstorms and thereby "self-reproduce", Betelgeuse about to go supernova, Sol going quieter than it has been in 200 years (which is a harbinger of a little ice age) and now giant locust plagues that threaten to consume all the crops on an entire continent!

Can't wait to see what the rest of this century has up its sleeve!

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JoeMerchant writes:

Scientists Create "Strange Metal" Packed With Entangled Electrons:

An international team of researchers has created what's called a strange metal — and they say it could help harness the potential of the quantum world in a practical way.

Specifically, the metal provides evidence for the quantum entanglement nature of quantum criticality.

[...] The researchers used the elements ytterbium, rhodium, and silicon to create a type of metal in which the electrons act as a unit rather than independently like they would in a regular metal, such as copper or gold.

When at the lowest temperature theoretically possible — absolute zero, or -273.15 degrees Celsius (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) — the team's strange metal undergoes a transition from a quantum phase, in which it forms a magnetic order, to another phase in which is doesn't.

While conducting experiments on ultrapure films made from the metal, the team noticed quantum entanglement among billions of billions of electrons in it.

But it's still no workaround for the light speed limit, not even if you use octinons.

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JoeMerchant writes:

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues that evolution has cloaked us in a perceptional virtual reality. For our own good.

The idea that we can't perceive objective reality in totality isn't new. We know everyone comes installed with cognitive biases and ego defense mechanisms. Our senses can be tricked by mirages and magicians. And for every person who sees a duck, another sees a rabbit.

But Hoffman's hypothesis, which he wrote about in a recent issue of New Scientist, takes it a step further. He argues our perceptions don't contain the slightest approximation of reality; rather, they evolved to feed us a collective delusion to improve our fitness.

Using evolutionary game theory, Hoffman and his collaborators created computer simulations to observe how "truth strategies" (which see objective reality as is) compared with "pay-off strategies" (which focus on survival value). The simulations put organisms in an environment with a resource necessary to survival but only in Goldilocks proportions.

Consider water. Too much water, the organism drowns. Too little, it dies of thirst. Between these extremes, the organism slakes its thirst and lives on to breed another day.

Truth-strategy organisms who see the water level on a color scale — from red for low to green for high — see the reality of the water level. However, they don't know whether the water level is high enough to kill them. Pay-off-strategy organisms, conversely, simply see red when water levels would kill them and green for levels that won't. They are better equipped to survive.

"Evolution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for pay-off strategies," writes Hoffman. "An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct."

Since humans aren't extinct, the simulation suggests we see an approximation of reality that shows us what we need to see, not how things really are.

Meanwhile, European researchers say Objective reality may not exist. At least, on the subatomic scale.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=406

The MOS 6502 CPU was introduced in September of 1975, and while the documentation described the three shift/rotate instructions ASL, LSR and ROL, the ROR instruction was missing – the documentation said that ROR would be available in chips starting in June 1976. In fact, the reason for this omission was that the instruction, while being present, didn't behave correctly. Only few 6502s with the defect are in existence, and nobody seemed to have checked what was actually going on in these chips.

Simon C got my KIM-1 working again, which has a 6502 from week 51 of 1975. There are 512 possible inputs to ROR (8 bit A plus 1 bit C; assuming it doesn't have dependencies on other registers), and roughly two bytes of output: the 8 bit result and the processor status (flags) register. We ran the following programs on the KIM-1 – note that we had to split the task into several programs, because the KIM-1 doesn't have enough RAM to hold all results.https://www.pagetable.com/?p=406

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.cpushack.com/2020/01/14/barn-find-mos-mcs6502-a-restoration/

In car collecting one of the 'holy grail' experiences is the 'Barn Find' finding and recovering a rare vehicle that has sat untouched, in some barn, or shed for some time. They are often in rough, but original condition and can evoke much excitement. As it turns out CPUs are not so different. I recently purchased a very rough and very old ATARI Arcade board.

The pictures clearly showed it in terrible condition, with lots of oxidation and 'stuff' on it. But it also had a white MOS 6502 processor. These are some of the very first CPUs made by MOS and are rather desirable, as in addition to their use by ATARI, they were used in the very first Apple computer, the Apple 1.

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takyon writes:

Upcycle Windows 7

On January 14th, Windows 7 reached its official "end-of-life," bringing an end to its updates as well as its ten years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security. The end of Windows 7's lifecycle gives Microsoft the perfect opportunity to undo past wrongs, and to upcycle it instead.

We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve. As there is already a precedent for releasing some core Windows utilities as free software, Microsoft has nothing to lose by liberating a version of their operating system that they themselves say has "reached its end."

Also at The Register and Wccftech.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Wave goodbye: DigitalOcean decimates workforce as co-founder reveals lack of profitability, leadership turmoil:

DigitalOcean last week axed an undisclosed number of employees.

In a statement to The Register, a spokesperson for the cloud-server-hosting biz addressed the job cuts using bland buzzwords that said very little about what's actually going on.

"DigitalOcean recently announced a restructuring to better align its teams to its go-forward growth strategy," the spinner spun.

"As part of this restructuring, some roles were, unfortunately, eliminated. DigitalOcean continues to be a high-growth business with $275m in ARR and more than 500,000 customers globally. Under this new organizational structure, we are positioned to accelerate profitable growth by continuing to serve developers and entrepreneurs around the world."

The New-York-based outfit did not say how many people it has let go, though reports suggest the number ranges from 35 to 50, or roughly 10 per cent of the 450-person company. Twitter has been abuzz with former DigitalOcean workers seeking new jobs.

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takyon writes:

New 'CacheOut' attack targets Intel processors, with a fix arriving soon

Researchers have discovered and published information on what they're calling CacheOut, a vulnerability in most Intel CPUs that allows an attacker to target more specific data, even stored within Intel's secured SGX enclave.

Intel assigned what's known as the CVE-2020-0549 vulnerability a threat level of "medium," acknowledging the danger of a targeted attack. The company noted that CacheOut has never been used outside of a laboratory environment.

Among the threats CacheOut poses is to cloud providers, and leaking data from hypervisors (virtual machine monitors) and the virtual machines running on them. Because the researchers disclosed the CacheOut vulnerability privately to Intel some time before making it public, those cloud providers have already deployed countermeasures against CacheOut.

Intel said that it plans to release mitigations to address the issue in the near future. These normally are sent to users in the form of BIOS or driver updates.

Virtually all Intel processors are potentially affected by CacheOut, save for processors released after the fourth quarter of 2019. AMD processors are not affected, according to details released on a dedicated CacheOut site. Processors made by IBM and ARM may be affected, but have not been confirmed. The paper, by lead author researcher Stephan van Schaik of the University of Michigan and colleagues, has also been made public.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Current model for storing nuclear waste is incomplete: Study finds the materials -- glass, ceramics and stainless steel -- interact to accelerate corrosion:

The materials the United States and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew because of the way those materials interact, new research shows.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature Materials, show that corrosion of nuclear waste storage materials accelerates because of changes in the chemistry of the nuclear waste solution, and because of the way the materials interact with one another.

“This indicates that the current models may not be sufficient to keep this waste safely stored,” said Xiaolei Guo, lead author of the study and deputy director of Ohio State’s Center for Performance and Design of Nuclear Waste Forms and Containers, part of the university’s College of Engineering. “And it shows that we need to develop a new model for storing nuclear waste.”

The team’s research focused on storage materials for high-level nuclear waste — primarily defense waste, the legacy of past nuclear arms production. The waste is highly radioactive. While some types of the waste have half-lives of about 30 years, others — for example, plutonium — have a half-life that can be tens of thousands of years. The half-life of a radioactive element is the time needed for half of the material to decay.

The United States currently has no disposal site for that waste; according to the U.S. General Accountability Office, it is typically stored near the plants where it is produced. A permanent site has been proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada, though plans have stalled. Countries around the world have debated the best way to deal with nuclear waste; only one, Finland, has started construction on a long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste.