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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The systemd-homed service, which enables portable home directories, has been merged into the code for systemd and will be included in the forthcoming 245 release.

Systemd releases are typically every three to four months, and version 244 was finalised at the end of November 2019. The new merge includes over 21,000 additions to systemd. Once 245 is out, it will be up to individual Linux distributions to decide when to update it. Use of the new home directories service is optional.

[...]Each directory it manages encapsulates both the data store and the user record of the user so that it comprehensively describes the user account, and is thus naturally portable between systems without any further, external metadata.

Home directories in the new system support several storage mechanisms and may be located on a removeable drive. The user record is cryptographically signed so the user cannot modify it themselves without invalidating it. There is an option for encryption with fscrypt (applies encryption at the directory level), or mounting from a CIFS network share, or in a partition encrypted with LUKS2 (Linux Unified Key Setup). This last is the most secure approach.

[...]One use case is where a user has a PC running Linux in both their home and office, and is able to carry their home directory with them on a portable storage device. The advent of cloud storage has made this less of a problem than would have been the case a few years back, and a common reaction to the new systemd approach is that the problems it fixes are not pressing and may be outweighed by potential incompatibilities. ®

See the file: https://github.com/poettering/systemd/blob/homed/docs/HOME_DIRECTORY.md for more information on what systemd-homed is intended to do, an how.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the better part of a year, SpaceX has gotten the lion's share of attention when it comes to mega-constellations and satellite Internet.

[...] But it was actually another company, OneWeb, that launched the first six satellites of its mega-constellation back in February, 2019. Initial tests of those satellites went well, the company said last summer. Now OneWeb is preparing for its second launch of 34 satellites on board a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The launch is scheduled for 4:42pm ET (21:42 UTC) on Thursday, February 6.

On the eve of Thursday's launch, Ars spoke with OneWeb Chief Executive Officer Adrián Steckel about the company's plans and how it will compete with half a dozen other firms looking at providing Internet from space.

[...] "Right now, we’re the largest buyer of launch in the world," Steckel said. "In the future, as we look to our next phase of deployment, we're willing to buy rocket launches from SpaceX, Blue Origin, or whoever."

OneWeb has taken a different approach than SpaceX in terms of how it plans to interact with customers on the ground. SpaceX has opted to offer direct-to-consumer services with the intention of selling user terminals to acquire satellite from space and essentially functioning as a new Internet provider. OneWeb plans to partner with existing telecommunications companies, Steckel said.

[...] It's a model the company believes makes sense because the right answer for getting regulatory approval and delivering service in the United States or the Philippines or Indonesia will vary, Steckel said. "We're going to be doing business with partners around the world," Steckel said. "Our style is not confrontational. We're using a different model. It's a big world."

OneWeb plans to offer its first customer demonstrations by the end of 2020 and provide full commercial global services in 2021.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/04/802502709/iowa-dem-party-says-delay-due-to-reporting-issue-county-chairs-blame-malfunction

The Iowa caucuses aren't over yet. A delay in the results meant the state Democratic Party did not call the race Monday night as expected, leaving the candidates and their supporters in limbo.

In a brief statement he read to reporters over the phone shortly after 2 a.m. ET, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price said, "At this point the [Iowa Democratic Party] is manually verifying all precinct results. We expect to have numbers to report later today."

[...] "The app that was intended to relay Caucus results to the Party failed; the Party's back-up telephonic reporting system likewise has failed. Now, we understand that Caucus Chairs are attempting to — and, in many cases, failing to — report results telephonically to the Party. These acute failures are occurring statewide," Remus said.

[...] Despite the denials from the [Iowa Democratic Party] that anything was wrong with the app, multiple county chairs on Monday night told NPR that there were, in fact, malfunctions that delayed reporting.

[...] "There has been a lot of concerns from the get-go about the security of the system. Why? Well, because we know that there are plenty of interests that would just as soon thwart the accurate reporting of results. So as a result, security has been a major issue," Meyer said. "And yet the security of the system becomes an issue in part because you have all these volunteers in 1,700 different precincts, a lot of the volunteers are not going to be technologically sophisticated."

(History: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/14/795906732/despite-election-security-fears-iowa-caucuses-will-use-new-smartphone-app )

Update: Nevada Democratic Party abandons problematic app used in Iowa caucuses

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Problems began at around 1pm, rapidly reaching a crescendo of wailing from users unable to while away their day on chat channels and forced instead to get on with some actual work.

Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on the matter, with the status mouthpiece for Microsoft 365 only admitting that there was a problem. And that was it.

We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to access Microsoft Teams. We're reviewing systems data to determine the cause of the issue. More information can be found in the Admin center under TM202916

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status)

As for the cause, an expired authentication certificate was apparently the root of today's woes. If true, then the postmortem will make for interesting reading indeed. [...]

We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to access Microsoft Teams. We will have further information soon. We appreciate your patience as we work to solve the problem.

— Microsoft Teams (@MicrosoftTeams)

The only deviation from the script was a brief message telling one worried user that there was no ETA for the resolution of the issue.

There is no workaround at present, and the issue is global. Affected users are unable to connect to the platform through the Windows desktop application, web or via smartphone app.

While the loss of messaging might do wonders for productivity, customers also use the platform to run meetings. Microsoft has been encouraging users in recent times to do this very thing as Skype for Business reaches the end of the road. Alas, when Teams disappears, so do those potentially important calls. Unless, of course, you have a backup.

Original Submission

Bytram from IRC writes:

As seen in movies, new meta-hologram can be used as a communication tool:

Hologram techniques are already used in our everyday life. A hologram sticker to prevent from counterfeiting money, Augmented Reality navigation projected in front mirror of a car to guide directions, and Virtual Reality game that allows a user to play in a virtual world with a feeling of live are just a few examples to mention. Recently, thinner and lighter meta-hologram operating in forward and backward directions has been developed.

As seen in the movie, Black Panther, people from Wakanda Kingdom communicate to each other through the hologram and, this specific movie scene seems to become reality soon that we can exchange different information with people from different locations.

Junsuk Rho, professor of POSTECH Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering Department with his student, Inki Kim developed a multifunctional meta-hologram from a monolayer meta-holographic optical device that can create different hologram images depending on a direction of light incident on the device. Their research accomplishment has been introduced as a cover story in the January 2020 issue of Nanoscale Horizons.

martyb writes:

First childhood flu helps explain why virus hits some people harder than others:

Why are some people better able to fight off the flu than others? Part of the answer, according to a new study, is related to the first flu strain we encounter in childhood.

Scientists from UCLA and the University of Arizona have found that people's ability to fight off the flu virus is determined not only by the subtypes of flu they have had throughout their lives, but also by the sequence in which they are been infected by the viruses. Their study is published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.

The research offers an explanation for why some people fare much worse than others when infected with the same strain of the flu virus, and the findings could help inform strategies for minimizing the effects of the seasonal flu.

[...] A team that included some of the same UCLA and Arizona scientists reported in 2016 that exposure to influenza viruses during childhood gives people partial protection for the rest of their lives against distantly related influenza viruses. Biologists call the idea that past exposure to the flu virus determines a person's future response to infections "immunological imprinting."

The 2016 research helped overturn a commonly held belief that previous exposure to a flu virus conferred little or no immunological protection against strains that can jump from animals into humans, such as those causing the strains known as swine flu or bird flu. Those strains, which have caused hundreds of spillover cases of severe illness and death in humans, are of global concern because they could gain mutations that allow them to readily jump not only from animal populations to humans, but also to spread rapidly from person to person.

In the new study, the researchers investigated whether immunological imprinting could explain people's response to flu strains already circulating in the human population and to what extent it could account for observed discrepancies in how severely the seasonal flu affects people in different age groups.

To track how different strains of the flu virus affect people at different ages, the team analyzed health records that the Arizona Department of Health Services obtains from hospitals and private physicians.

Two subtypes of influenza virus, H3N2 and H1N1, have been responsible for seasonal outbreaks of the flu over the past several decades. H3N2 causes the majority of severe cases in high-risk elderly people and the majority of deaths from the flu. H1N1 is more likely to affect young and middle-aged adults, and causes fewer deaths.

The health record data revealed a pattern: People first exposed to the less severe strain, H1N1, during childhood were less likely to end up hospitalized if they encountered H1N1 again later in life than people who were first exposed to H3N2. And people first exposed to H3N2 received extra protection against H3N2 later in life.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200128/10284943817/cbs-gets-angry-joes-youtube-review-picard-taken-down-using-26-seconds-shows-trailer.shtml

Joe Vargas, who makes the fantastic The Angry Joe Show on YouTube, isn't a complete stranger to Techdirt's pages. You may recall that this angry reviewer of all things pop culture swore off doing reviews of Nintendo products a while back after Nintendo prevented Vargas from monetizing a review of a a game. The whole episode highlighted just how out of touch companies like Nintendo can be with this sort of thing, given how many younger folks rely on reviews like Vargas' to determine where they spend their gaming dollars. Coupled with the argument that these commentary and review videos ought to constitute use of footage as fair use and it's hard to see why any of this was worth it to Nintendo.

Or CBS, apparently. CBS recently got Angry Joe's YouTube review of 'Picard' taken down, claiming copyright on the 2 thirteen-second videos of the show's publicly available trailer that Vargas used in the review.

Original Submission

Both c0lo and martyb write in with news of a new form of "traffic jam":

How to create a virtual traffic jam

c0lo writes:

Load 99 Androids in a cart and walk slowly

If you've ever used Google Maps in a remotely busy area, you've probably come across intersections where an accident or construction slowed down traffic a fair bit. When that happens, Maps changes the color of the affected roads from green to either orange or red to show how bad the traffic is and, if things get bad enough, it will even find another route for its users.

[...]Simon Weckert recently took advantage of that process with a "hack" – as he calls it – for Google Maps. To accomplish this, he loaded 99 smartphones into a wagon and turned them all onto Maps navigation. As he walks down a street, Google recognizes the high concentration of "users" and the slow-moving "traffic" and marks that street as having bad traffic.

Somewhat hilariously, this would actually cause other drivers in the area using Maps to be re-routed to avoid the "traffic" caused by this otherwise harmless prank. Weckert even took the collection of smartphones right outside of Google's Berlin offices to create the virtual traffic jam.

99 second-hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.

[...]Speaking with 9to5Google, a spokesperson from Google has responded to this situation to clarify a few things. In normal usage, Google does use a large number of devices running Maps in a single place as proof of a traffic jam, something this rare and very specific case took advantage of. In the statement below, though, the company does hint that it might use cases like this to further improve how Maps handles traffic data.

Whether via car or cart or camel, we love seeing creative uses of Google Maps as it helps us make maps work better over time.

martyb writes:

NASA reports that the Parker Solar Probe[*] Completes Fourth Closest Approach, Breaks New Speed and Distance Records:

At 4:37 a.m. EST on Jan. 29, 2020, NASA's Parker Solar Probe broke speed and distance records as it completed its fourth close approach of the Sun. The spacecraft traveled 11.6 million miles from the Sun's surface at perihelion, reaching a speed of 244,225 miles per hour. These achievements topple Parker Solar Probe's own previous records for closest spacecraft to the Sun — previously about 15 million miles from the Sun's surface — and fastest human-made object, before roughly 213,200 miles per hour.

[*] Wikipedia's entry for the Parker Solar Probe:

The Parker Solar Probe (previously Solar Probe; Solar Probe Plus or Solar Probe+, abbreviated PSP) is a NASA robotic spacecraft launched in 2018, with the mission of repeatedly probing and making observations of the outer corona of the Sun. It will approach to within 9.86 solar radii (6.9 million kilometers or 4.3 million miles) from the center of the Sun and by 2025 will travel, at closest approach, as fast as 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph), or 0.064% the speed of light.

In other words, at the so-far-fastest speed, one could travel from the Earth to the Moon in as little as 55 minutes when the Moon is at perigee. At its maximum expected speed, it could travel that distance in as little as 30 minutes!

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Ars Technica:

Music-industry lawyers plan to ask potential jurors in a piracy case whether they read Ars Technica.

"Have you ever read or visited Ars Technica or TorrentFreak?" is one of 40 voir dire questions that plaintiffs propose to ask prospective jurors in their case against Grande Communications, an Internet service provider accused of aiding its customers' piracy, according to a court filing on Friday.

[...] Record-label attorneys also want to ask potential jurors if they "know what a peer-to-peer network is," have "ever downloaded content from any BitTorrent website" such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, obtained music or video from "any stream-ripping service," been "accused of infringing a copyright," or "ever been a member, contributor or supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

The full list of questions by each party were made available by TorrentFreak as pdfs:

• Questions by the record labels.
• Questions by Grande Communications.

Have you now, or ever been, a member of the Pirate Party?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Ars Technica:

Archaeologists working decades ago at Olduvai noticed that those now-extinct hominins had preferred particular kinds of stone for particular types of tools. For example, quartzite was a favorite for making the small, sharp-edged cutting tools called flakes, while basalt and other lavas seem to turn up more often in the form of large cutting tools like hand-axes. To figure out why, University of Kent anthropologist Alastair Key and his colleagues put Pleistocene-style stone tools through a battery of tests usually used in modern engineering research.

Key and his colleagues wanted to know whether H. habilis and H. erectus knew how to choose the most practical materials for specific tools or jobs. To find out, the archaeologists compared the sharpness and durability of Olduvai basalt, chert, and quartzite: three of the most common materials for stone tools in and around the gorge. And that required letting a robot play with some replica stone tools.

An engineering testing machine lowered each sharp stone flake onto a 2mm-wide section of PVC pipe and recorded how much force had to apply to cut through the pipe, and how much the pipe’s surface gave way before splitting. To test durability, Key and his colleagues put the machine to work cutting through oak branches with the replica flakes, then measured how well each blade held its edge between uses.

Quartzite turned out to be the sharpest stone on the list, with chert coming in a close second. Basalt’s sharpness wasn’t terribly impressive; if you want to cut something with a basalt flake, it’s going to take about twice as much energy as using a chert or quartzite flake. So it makes sense that hominins at Olduvai Gorge would pick quartzite or chert for small flakes—quickly made cutting tools that would have been tossed aside after use (they're the plastic sporks of the Pleistocene).

A brand-new basalt biface is a bit duller than a biface made of chert or quartzite, but the basalt tool will hold its edge much better over time. And it seems that H. habilis tool-makers knew that 1.8 million years ago, because dull but sturdy basalt was a more common choice for heavier work or for larger cutting tools, which would be used over and over. Key and his colleagues suggest that’s not a coincidence.

Journal Reference:
Alastair Key, Tomos Proffitt, and Ignacio de la Torre. Raw material optimization and stone tool engineering in the Early Stone Age of Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania)^$, The Royal Society https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0377

It remains unconfirmed if the Olduvai engineers gamed the testing regimen...

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

Researchers have published an update to the "Heisenberg Limit."

One of the cornerstones of quantum theory is a fundamental limit to the precision with which we can know certain pairs of physical quantities, such as position and momentum. For quantum theoretical treatments, this uncertainty principle is couched in terms of the Heisenberg limit, which allows for physical quantities that do not have a corresponding observable in the formulation of quantum mechanics, such as time and energy, or the phase observed in interferometric measurements. It sets a fundamental limit on measurement accuracy in terms of the resources used. Now, a collaboration of researchers in Poland and Australia have proven that the Heisenberg limit as it is commonly stated is not operationally meaningful, and differs from the correct limit by a factor of π.

Wojciech Górecki, the lead author of the paper, explains:

The Heisenberg limit that has been used so far was based on a "frequentist" approach, whereby only repeatable random events are understood as having probabilities, a definition that excludes hypotheses and fixed but unknown values. As a result, when applying this approach to fixed but unknown physical quantities, the assumption was made that the measurement need only work properly on an infinitesimally small neighborhood of the exact value of the measured quantity. This assumption turned out to be insufficient

To redefine the limit, Górecki and his colleagues adopted a Bayesian approach, which accepts the notion of probabilities representing the uncertainty in any event or hypothesis and attributes a given probability distribution known as the prior, which describes the physical quantity in question.

The researchers were able to arrive at a final generally applicable result.

As well as having a 'fundamental impact in quantum theory' the research also has potential practical application in quantum error correction as well as more esoteric areas such as in "frequency estimation models for estimating atomic frequency transitions and in magnetometry of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond (among other studies)"

Journal Reference:
Wojciech Górecki et al. π-Corrected Heisenberg Limit^$, Physical Review Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.030501

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

Vast amounts of valuable energy, agricultural nutrients, and water could potentially be recovered from the world's fast-rising volume of municipal wastewater, according to a new study by UN University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).

[...]Today, the volume of wastewater roughly equals the annual discharge from the Ganges River in India. By the mid-2030s, it will roughly equal the annual volume flowing through the St. Lawrence River, which drains North America's five Great Lakes.

Among major nutrients, 16.6 million metric tonnes of nitrogen are embedded in wastewater produced worldwide annually, together with 3 million metric tonnes of phosphorus and 6.3 million metric tonnes of potassium. Theoretically, full recovery of these nutrients from wastewater could offset 13.4% of global agricultural demand for them.

Beyond the economic gains of recovering these nutrients are critical environmental benefits such as minimizing eutrophication—the phenomenon of excess nutrients in a body of water causing dense plant growth and aquatic animal deaths due to lack of oxygen.

The energy embedded in wastewater, meanwhile, could provide electricity to 158 million households—roughly the number of households in the USA and Mexico combined.

Journal Reference:
Manzoor Qadir et al. Global and regional potential of wastewater as a water, nutrient and energy source^$. 27 January 2020, Natural Resources Forum. DOI: 10.1111/1477-8947.12187

The aquatic plants that depend on the effluent could not be reached for comment.

Original Submission

upstart from IRC writes:

A deep dive into the Apollo Guidance Computer, and the hack that saved Apollo 14:

In the eight months since the harrowing flight of Apollo 13, engineers made several changes to the spacecraft to reduce the chance of another explosion happening. To help ensure that the crew could make it home if another emergency occurred, an additional oxygen tank and battery were added. The unplanned pause also allowed time for some software updates to be added to the lunar module computer; a particularly welcome addition was the ability of the computer to recognize changes in the height of the surface during the approach to the landing site. With this new capability, the computer would not be confused by the undulating terrain as the vehicle headed toward landing.

[...] A very serious problem cropped up almost immediately after TLI, as Kitty Hawk attempted to dock with the mission's lunar module, Antares. Fingernail-sized latches on the docking probe used to connect the command module to the lunar module failed to catch, and the two spacecraft were unable to dock. Only after repeated attempts was Kitty Hawk able to capture and securely attach Antares. Afterwards, the S-IVB was sent on its way to a lonely but spectacular death and the combined Apollo 14 spacecraft continued the voyage to Fra Mauro.

[...] However, less than four hours before the scheduled landing, controllers noticed that according to the indications on their consoles in Mission Control, the LM's Abort pushbutton appeared to have been pressed. When asked via radio, Shepard confirmed that no one on board Antares had pressed the Abort button—which meant there was a short-circuit or other electrical issue somewhere inside the LM's complicated guts.

This was potentially a mission-ending problem: if the button was pressed and the engine was firing, the LM would immediately begin its abort procedure as soon as the lunar descent started, making a landing impossible.

Under hard time pressure, the ground had to quickly figure out what was wrong and devise a workaround. What they came up with was the most brilliant computer hack of the entire Apollo program, and possibly in the entire history of electronic computing.

To explain exactly what the hack was, how it functioned, and the issues facing the developers during its creation, we need to dig deep into how the Apollo Guidance Computer worked. Hold onto your hats, Ars readers—we're going in.

Original Submission

upstart from IRC writes:

PETA wants to replace Punxsutawney Phil with an animatronic AI:

When we imagine the future of artificial intelligence, we tend to think of the technology making most human jobs obsolete. But if PETA has its way, an AI could also take over for the world's most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil. In a letter signed by PETA founder and president Ingrid Newkirk, the organization calls on the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, the group that takes care of the world-famous woodchuck, to allow the rodent to retire and let a robot like Sony's adorable Aibo dog take over the job of predicting the weather.

"Using technologically advanced electromechanical devices such as animatronics instead of live animals is more popular than ever," wrote Newkirk. "We even have the technology to create an animatronic groundhog with artificial intelligence (AI) that could actually predict [PETA's emphasis, not Engadget's] the weather."

The way the group sees it, not only would an AI be better at estimating when the winter will end, but it would also attract an entirely new generation of visitors to the western Pennsylvanian town. "Today's young people are born into a world of terabytes, and to them, watching a nocturnal rodent being pulled from a fake hole isn't even worthy of a text message," Newkirk said. "Ignoring the nation's fast-changing demographics might well prove the end of Groundhog Day."

Original Submission