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martyb writes:

The "other" game of football has its championship today. On the docket are:

Athletics: Super Bowl LIV - Wikipedia:

Super Bowl LIV, the 54th Super Bowl and the 50th modern-era National Football League (NFL) championship game, will decide the champion for the NFL's 2019 and 100th season. The National Football Conference (NFC) champion San Francisco 49ers will play against the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Kansas City Chiefs. The game is scheduled to be played on February 2, 2020, at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. This will be the 11th Super Bowl hosted by the South Florida region and the sixth Super Bowl hosted in Miami Gardens, which hosted Super Bowl XLIV ten years earlier.

The game will be broadcast in the United States by Fox, and the halftime show will be co-headlined by Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.

According to NBC Sports:

Here's how to watch Super Bowl LIV between the 49ers and Chiefs, both online and on TV. 

When: Sunday, Feb. 2 at 3:30 p.m. PT [6:30 p.m. ET]
TV: FOX
Online: fuboTV -- Get a free trial

The Chiefs are favored to win by just one point, so it has all the hallmarks of a close game.

Advertisements: Over the years, it has grown to be a spectacle where the game play is occasionally overshadowed by the advertisements. An advertisement during this year's game sets a new record of "$5.6 Million for a 30-second spot. Some of the most memorable ads of all time premiered during the Super Bowl®. Who can forget the Apple Macintosh 1984 advertisement or Michael Jordan and Larry Bird's game of "horse" where "nothing but net" became a meme?

Chat: Like we tried last year, we have set up a chat channel on our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server. Also, as before, discussion about the game, teams, players and plays is invited. Also, of course, so is discussion about advertisements! Feel free to praise or pan them, in real time with your fellow Soylentils!

No catering is provided, so you'll have to BYOB (bring your own... bacon =).

Details: Use your favorite IRC client or use the convenient link copied here from the the left-hand slashbox titled "SoylentNews". If you are new to IRC, these commands may be helpful:

# Pick a name for use on IRC:
/NICK mynickname

# Join the channel (be careful with the spelling!)
/JOIN #Superbowl-LIV

Original Submission

upstart from IRC writes:

Video: How Myst's designers stuffed an entire universe onto a single CD-ROM:

Although the passage of time serves to make the past seem sweeter in recollection than it might have been in the moment, it's impossible to deny that there was something special about the gaming landscape of the 1990s. Every year in that decade brought a torrent of titles that were destined to become classics—including the often-imitated-but-ultimately-inimitible Myst.

Myst came to market in 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming—1993 also brought us X-Wing, Doom, Syndicate, and Day of the Tentacle, among others. It's fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too—both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors; Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest.

A few months back, Ars caught up with Myst developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. Myst's visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers' vision onto CD-ROM didn't happen without some challenges.

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upstart from IRC writes:

Grubhub is faking which restaurants it actually partners with:

Grubhub has a new "growth hacking" strategy that includes creating a restaurant listing on its platform for places it doesn't even partner with. According to a new report by the San Francisco Chronicle and tweets by restaurant owner Pim Techamuanvivit, Grubhub has been allowing customers to order food from its websites from restaurants that haven't technically signed up to be on Grubhub or its subsidiaries' platforms. (Disclosure: my parents own a restaurant that partners with Grubhub.)

Techamuanvivit explains in a Twitter thread that over the weekend, she received a call from a customer claiming their order hadn't been delivered. The only problem: Techamuanvivit's restaurant, Kin Khao, doesn't offer takeout or delivery.

I told him we've never been on it, not in our entirely lifetime as @kinkhao. He sounded really confused, so we said goodbye and I hung up the phone. Then I got a little curious, so I went into the office and googled "kin khao delivery", and guess what came up.. pic.twitter.com/cptMoYtoZu

— Pim Techamuanvivit (@chezpim) January 26, 2020

Previously:
Grubhub's New Strategy Is to Be an Even Worse Partner to Restaurants
Grubhub Says its Contract Allowed It to Create Fake Restaurant Websites
Grubhub Drivers Are Contractors—Not Employees—Judge Rules
Trial to Decide Whether Ex-Grubhub Driver Should be Classified as Employee

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RandomFactor writes:

After going into Fault Protection Mode on January 28th, Voyager 2 will soon return to normal operation.

On January 25th, Voyager 2 was instructed to perform a magnetometer calibration maneuver which would cause the spacecraft to rotate itself a full 360 degrees, however the maneuver was delayed causing two power hungry systems to be on simultaneously. The maneuver was not completed.

There's a tight power budget on Voyager 2, because its radioisotope thermoelectric generators are running down. To protect itself, the spacecraft went into its fault-protection mode. In that mode, it shut down scientific instruments to make up for the power deficit. By January 28th, engineers had successfully shut down one of the two high-power-drawing systems, and turned its science instruments back on.

The probe is currently approximately 18.5 billion kilometers from Earth, with a time lag of 34 hours for signals to make a round trip.

Voyager 2 is still running, but its power situation is precarious. Mission engineers are constantly evaluating the status of the power system, and they know that it's losing about 4% of its power each year. A lot of power is needed to keep systems on the spacecraft from freezing, including fuel lines. If those lines froze, and broke, then Voyager 2 would no longer be able to point its antenna towards Earth, and the mission would effectively be over.

NASA Tweeted the following regarding the issue

An update on our twin @NASAVoyager spacecraft, still operating in interstellar space. After software designed to automatically protect it was triggered, engineers successfully turned Voyager 2's science instruments back on. Normal operations resume soon: https://t.co/UEvQBfMHJt pic.twitter.com/GUCZamVZ0Q

        — NASA (@NASA) January 30, 2020

In the past NASA has indicated Voyager 2 will go dark in 'roughly 2020' so even though this isn't the end for the spacecraft, it is not far off.

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RandomFactor writes:

A concept paper published in ACS Photonics, describes a photovoltaic cell that works at night.

According Jeremy Munday, one of the paper's authors and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis

a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime

The described cell is thermoradiative and emits infrared radiation to space, which has a much lower than Earth temperature of 2.73 Kelvin.

"A regular solar cell generates power by absorbing sunlight, which causes a voltage to appear across the device and for current to flow. In these new devices, light is instead emitted and the current and voltage go in the opposite direction, but you still generate power," Munday said. "You have to use different materials, but the physics is the same."

The device would work during the day as well, if you took steps to either block direct sunlight or pointed it away from the sun. Because this new type of solar cell could potentially operate around the clock, it is an intriguing option to balance the power grid over the day-night cycle.

Journal Reference: [Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical Power Generation by Optically Coupling with Deep Space, ACS Photonics (DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b00679)

Original Submission

upstart from IRC writes:

DOD launches swarming drone in test of C-130 "drone mothership" concept:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been conducting research into a number of types of swarming drones that could be used on the battlefield. The latest of these is the "Gremlins" program—an effort to build relatively low-cost unmanned aircraft that can be launched from a "mothership" transport aircraft and then be recovered by the mothership after their mission is complete.

This past week, the Defense Department conducted the first airborne launch test for the Dynetics X-61A Gremlins Air Vehicle, a jet-powered drone that can be launched from the rotary weapons bays of the B-1 and B-52, from wing pylons, or from a C-130—and then recovered by a C-130 equipped with a docking cable and a crane-like recovery arm.

The first flight of the X-61A took place in November, but the test this week—at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah—was the first air launch of the drone. While the 101-minute flight was successful, the parachute system intended to allow for a soft ground landing failed, and the drone was destroyed in the unexpected hard landing that followed.

[...] The first recovery test will come sometime this spring. By the end of the year, the program aims to launch and recover four Gremlins within 30 minutes.

Also at MIT Technology Review

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takyon writes:

Next-Gen NVIDIA Teslas Due This Summer; To Be Used In Big Red 200 Supercomputer

Thanks to Indiana University and The Next Platform, we have a hint of what's to come with NVIDIA's future GPU plans, with strong signs that NVIDIA will have a new Tesla accelerator (and underlying GPU) ready for use by this summer.

In an article outlining the installation of Indiana University's Big Red 200 supercomputer – which also happens to be the first Cray Shasta supercomputer to be installed – The Next Platform reports that Indiana University has opted to split up the deployment of the supercomputer in to two phases. In particular, the supercomputer was meant to be delivered with Tesla V100s; however the university has instead opted to hold off on delivery of their accelerators so that they can instead have NVIDIA's next-generation accelerators, which would make them among the first institutions to get the new accelerators.

The revelation is notable as NVIDIA has yet to announce any new Tesla accelerators or matching GPUs. The company's current Tesla V100s, based on the GV100 GPU, were first announced back at GTC 2017, so NVIDIA's compute accelerators are due for a major refresh. However it's a bit surprising to see anyone other than NVIDIA reveal any details about the new parts, given how buttoned-down the company normally is about such details.

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legont writes:

A350 engine shutdown incidents linked to cockpit drink spills

Airbus and Rolls-Royce are investigating two incidents in which A350s experienced uncommanded in-flight engine shutdown after drinks were spilled on controls situated on the cockpit centre pedestal.

FlightGlobal understands that the airframer is to discuss the matter with operators on 30 January, and will issue a transmission on recommended practices for handling beverages on the flightdeck.

One of the incidents involved a Delta Air Lines A350-900 en route to Seoul on 21 January, which diverted to Fairbanks after its right-hand Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine shut down, while a similar event occurred to another carrier in November last year.

[...] The previous incident, on 9 November 2019, occurred about 1h after tea was spilled on the centre pedestal, FlightGlobal understands.

Apparently, waterproofing keys is against the spirit of Airbus engineering as membranes cost way too much.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

In the wake of the Coronavirus spreading across the world Australian airline Qantas has cancelled flights from China as the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced "new control measures" to prevent anyone traveling from China to Australia. The official advice is now that Australians "do not travel" to mainland China. This comes as the number of infected people rose to 12 on Saturday with three new cases across Victoria and South Australia.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced unprecedented new control measures that will see all non-Australians travelling from mainland China barred entry at the border in an attempt to stop the spread of coronavirus. The official advice is now that Australians "do not travel" to mainland China.

The tough new measures, announced on Saturday afternoon, come as the number of Australians confirmed to have contracted coronavirus rose to 12 on Saturday with three new cases across Victoria and South Australia.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk today called for all flights to be banned from China while Qantas said it would suspend services to mainland China.

At a press conference late this afternoon, Mr Morrison said all foreign travellers who had left or passed through mainland China 14 days before arriving in Australia will now be denied entry to the country.

In recent days British Airways, United Airlines, American Airlines, Air Asia, Cathay Pacific, Air India, IndiGo, Lufthansa and Finnair have announced plans to slash the number of flights they are operating to China or stop flying to the country entirely. Other airlines are offering customers refunds.

[UPDATE 020220-07:14UTC: First death from coronavirus reported outside China in the Philippines. For those wanting more complete reporting of coronavirus outbreak, CBS News has a live update web page with news as it is reported. --JR]

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

ScienceNews reports on a new study in the journal Science on using engineered gut bacteria to fight the Varroa Mite as well as deformed wing virus, two of the biggest threats to honeybees.

Rod-shaped Snodgrassella bacteria, common in bee guts, were engineered to release double-stranded RNA molecules that dial down gene activity in a mite or virus. The pest then sabotages itself by shutting down some of its own vital genes. This strategy highjacks a natural biological process called RNA interference, or RNAi. The gut bacteria churning out this targeted disinformation work "something like a living vaccine," says microbiologist Sean Leonard of the University of Texas at Austin.

The RNA's targeted approach intrigues scientists interested in fighting pests or other problems while minimizing the chances of hurting innocent bystanders.

Earlier work shows that directly dosing bees with the customized RNA also can work, Leonard says, but the stuff is expensive to make and degrades rapidly. A gut microbe, however, can keep making the RNA, replenishing the supply.

In mite testing, mites were 70% more likely to die within 10 days when feeding on bees with the engineered microbes.
in virus testing, 10 days survival rate of bees with the engineered gut microbes was 37% higher.

The testing is a proof of principle according to microbiologist Sean Leonard of the University of Texas at Austin.

This gut-microbe technique would need to work in the complexity of a full hive. And the protective bacteria would also need to work within a full bee gut microbiome, the collection of bacteria and other microbes found in the insects' innards.

According to Leonard, "actual use is a long way off."

Entomologist Jay Evans at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md notes that

whether the world is ready for bees with genetically engineered gut microbes is another thing. He doesn't expect these bees to be buzzing through almond groves or apple orchards anytime soon.

How close is your nearest honeybee hive?

Journal Reference:A microbiome silver bullet for honey bees [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6135 )

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The European Parliament (EP) just voted 582 to 40 to require one standard for chargers for all mobile phones. The EP cited the goals of reducing both frustration and electronic waste. The next step would be for the European Commission to draft a law and vote on it in July. Currently most of the industry uses micro-USB and is slowly adopting USB-C, however there are also phones using other connectors.

From the European Parliament resolution on a common charger for mobile radio equipment (2019/2983(RSP)):

1. Strongly stresses that there is an urgent need for EU regulatory action to reduce electronic waste, empower consumers to make sustainable choices, and allow them to fully participate in an efficient and well-functioning internal market;

2. Calls on the Commission to present and publish without further delay the results of the impact assessment on the introduction of a common charger for mobile telephones and other compatible devices with a view to proposing mandatory provisions;

3. Emphasises the need for a standard for a common charger for mobile radio equipment to be adopted as a matter of urgency in order to avoid further internal market fragmentation;

4. Calls, therefore, on the Commission to take action to introduce the common charger without any further delay by adopting the delegated act supplementing Directive 2014/53/EU on radio equipment defining a standard for a common charger for mobile phones and other small and medium-sized radio equipment by July 2020, or, if necessary, by adopting a legislative measure by July 2020 at the latest;

Earlier on SN:
The Dream Of A Common Charger Is Alive, Despite Apple's Complaining (2020)
European MEPs Back Single Charger Standard (2014)

Original Submission

upstart from IRC writes:

Microsoft will now pay up to $20k for Xbox Live security exploits – TechCrunch:

Think you’ve found a glaring security hole in Xbox Live? Microsoft is interested.

The company announced a new bug bounty program today, focused specifically on its Xbox Live network and services. Depending on how serious the exploit is and how complete your report is, they’re paying up to $20,000.

Like most bug bounty programs, Microsoft is looking for pretty specific/serious security flaws here. Found a way to execute unauthorized code on Microsoft’s servers? They’ll pay for that. Keep getting disconnected from Live when you play as a certain legend in Apex? Not quite the kind of bug they’re looking for.

Microsoft also specifically rules out a few types of vulnerabilities as out-of-scope, including DDoS attacks, anything that involves phishing Microsoft employees or Xbox customers, or getting servers to cough up basic info like server name or internal IP. You can find the full breakdown here.

Original Submission

upstart from IRC writes:

How a $300 projector can fool Tesla's Autopilot:

Six months ago, Ben Nassi, a PhD student at Ben-Gurion University advised by Professor Yuval Elovici, carried off a set of successful spoofing attacks against a Mobileye 630 Pro Driver Assist System using inexpensive drones and battery-powered projectors. Since then, he has expanded the technique to experiment—also successfully—with confusing a Tesla Model X and will be presenting his findings at the Cybertech Israel conference in Tel Aviv.

The spoofing attacks largely rely on the difference between human and AI image recognition. For the most part, the images Nassi and his team projected to troll the Tesla would not fool a typical human driver—in fact, some of the spoofing attacks were nearly steganographic, relying on the differences in perception not only to make spoofing attempts successful but also to hide them from human observers.

Nassi created a video outlining what he sees as the danger of these spoofing attacks, which he called "Phantom of the ADAS," and a small website offering the video, an abstract outlining his work, and the full reference paper itself. We don't necessarily agree with the spin Nassi puts on his work—for the most part, it looks to us like the Tesla responds pretty reasonably and well to these deliberate attempts to confuse its sensors. We do think this kind of work is important, however, as it demonstrates the need for defensive design of semi-autonomous driving systems.

Original Submission

Coward, Anonymous writes:

In a change that will cause mixed reactions, UK research funding proposals no longer need "impact" statements.

UK researchers will, however, benefit from no longer having to submit a "Pathways to Impact" plan or complete an "Impact Summary" when applying for cash from UKRI – the umbrella organization for the UK's seven research councils. The Pathways to Impact requirement, which had been in place for around a decade, was controversial. But for grant applications made from 1 March 2020, researchers will not have to submit. The UKRI currently invest a total of £7bn into British science each year

"The removal of 'Pathways to Impact' will be broadly welcomed by the many grant-writing physicists whose heart sank at the thought of churning out two pages of boilerplate on the ill-defined socioeconomic impact of their proposed research," says Physicist Philip Moriarty from the University of Nottingham. "Yet despite being a vocal opponent of it for many years, I feel it's important to recognise that it played a role in shifting attitudes regarding the broader implications of academic research. For one thing, the 'impact agenda' led to a greater – albeit, often rather opportunistic – interaction between science and the arts and humanities. Hopefully this interdisciplinary activity will continue in its absence".

The US National Science Foundation requires a "Broader Impacts" statement in its grant applications.

Grant proposals are generally a big time sink for scientists, and the "impact" statement seems like it needs the thickest helping of buzzwords, exaggerations, meaningless generalities, and unfounded optimism. But society legitimately wants to know what it's getting out of the research. Maybe cool results, publications, and productivity metrics are enough?

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

DMA attacks have never really gone out of fashion and, contrary to popular belief, do not necessarily require physical access. DMA is a misfeature designed provide peripherals with direct, unconstrained, high-speed read-write access to the whole of a system's RAM. Firewire (IEEE-1394) and Thunderbolt are two of the more infamous avenues for attacks, but network cards and other peripherals can also have this capability. One example of abuse would for the peripheral to read and exfiltrate private encryption keys as they rest in memory.

Eclypsium's latest research shows that enterprise laptops, servers, and cloud environments continue to be vulnerable to powerful Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks, even in the presence of protections such as UEFI Secure Boot, Intel Boot Guard, HP Sure Start, and Microsoft Virtualization-Based Security.

DMA attacks are a particularly powerful class of attacks for any adversary who has compromised firmware locally or remotely on peripheral hardware such as network cards, or who has physical access to a system. As the name suggests, DMA attacks enable a potential attacker to read and write memory off a victim system directly, bypassing the main CPU and OS. By overwriting memory, attackers can gain control over kernel execution to perform virtually any manner of malicious activity. We collectively refer to these as Memory Lane attacks.

Earlier on SN:
Thunderbolt Enables Severe Security Threats (2019)
$300 Device Can Steal Mac FileVault2 Passwords (2016)

Original Submission