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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/anatomy-of-a-dumb-spear-phish-hitting-librarians-up-for-zelle-cashapp-cash/

Here's a clue for would-be Internet financial scammers: do not target librarians. They will catch on fast, and you will have wasted your time.

Yesterday, the former outgoing chair of the Young Adult Library Services Association's [(YALSA)] Alex Awards Committee (and my wife) Paula Gallagher got a very odd email that purported to be from a colleague within her library system who is a member of YALSA's board. The email asked, "Are you available to complete an assignment on behalf of the Board, And get reimbursed? Kindly advise."

[...] She ignored the message until another member of the committee reached out to her after responding to an identical message. The "assignment" turned out to be a textbook payment scam, and it came from a new email address—"presidentnewboxmailme [at]gmail.com":

Would you help in paying a Merchant and get reimbursed by [name of the board's financial chair]? [He] not available today due to health reasons, But promised a swift reimbursement before Friday. It's imperative and it's $6,980. I was able to sent out $4000 from my daily savings limit. Get back to me if you can send the remaining $2,980 via Zelle & CashApp. It concerns our YALSA's 2020 Young Adult Services Symposium.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow2736:

Hackers can trick a Tesla into accelerating by 50 miles per hour:

This demonstration from the cybersecurity firm McAfee is the latest indication that adversarial machine learning can potentially wreck autonomous driving systems, presenting a security challenge to those hoping to commercialize the technology.

Mobileye EyeQ3 camera systems read speed limit signs and feed that information into autonomous driving features like Tesla's automatic cruise control, said Steve Povolny and Shivangee Trivedi from McAfee's Advanced Threat Research team.

The researchers stuck a tiny and nearly imperceptible sticker on a speed limit sign. The camera read the sign as 85 instead of 35, and in testing, both the 2016 Tesla Model X and that year's Model S sped up 50 miles per hour.

This is the latest in an increasing mountain of research showing how machine-learning systems can be attacked and fooled in life-threatening situations.

[...] Tesla has since moved to proprietary cameras on newer models, and Mobileye EyeQ3 has released several new versions of its cameras that in preliminary testing were not susceptible to this exact attack.

There are still a sizable number of Tesla cars operating with the vulnerable hardware, Povolny said. He pointed out that Teslas with the first version of hardware cannot be upgraded to newer hardware.

"What we're trying to do is we're really trying to raise awareness for both consumers and vendors of the types of flaws that are possible," Povolny said "We are not trying to spread fear and say that if you drive this car, it will accelerate into through a barrier, or to sensationalize it."

So, it seems this is not so much that a particular adversarial attack was successful (and fixed), but that it was but one instance of a potentially huge set. Obligatory xkcd.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Mission for Education and Multimedia Engagement Satellite (MEMESat-1) is planned to be the first meme broadcasting cube satellite ever created. MEMESAT-1 is being developed by letsgo2space.com, a non-profit trying to increase the exposure kids have to STEM topics.

At the moment, the team hopes to launch the satellite by late 2021, and no later than Spring 2022. The satellite will be a cubesat with flash memory containing thousands of meme images that will be broadcast to Earth via a transmitter operating in the UHF 70cm radio band. Enthusiasts on the ground will be able to receive the meme images with a Yagi antenna and we anticipate that RTL-SDRs will be a commonly used receiver. The satellite will also contain an FM UHF/VHF repeater operating in the amateur radio band for ham radio use.

Currently letsgo2space is fundraising and looking for $30,000 to fund the launch of MEMESAT-1. You can either donate any amount or submit a meme for their broadcast database for $1.69 via their website.

For non-radioheads, the 70cm band refers to the 433MHz frequency band normally used for industrial, scientific and medical devices. You should be able to pick up the signal with any UHF digital terrestrial television antenna and decode it with a Software Defined Radio receiver (Realtek RTL2832U clones being the most common due to its low cost) and gnuradio on a PC.

Original Source

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Blue Origin opens rocket engine factory

Blue Origin formally opened a factory Feb. 17 that the company plans to use to produce engines both for its vehicles and for United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony marked the completion of a 350,000-square-foot factory [in Huntsville, Alabama] that will produce BE-4 and BE-3U engines. The factory, built in a little more than a year, will host more than 300 employees and produce up to 42 engines a year.

[...] While the building is complete, Blue Origin is not yet ready to start producing engines there. Employees will start moving into the factory this week, company officials said, with tooling and other equipment to start arriving in the coming weeks. The factory should be ready to start building BE-4 engines this summer, starting with a "site certification" engine that will be fired at both at Blue Origin's West Texas test site and a test stand at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center that the company is refurbishing.

Blue Origin is currently building BE-4 engines at its headquarters in Kent, Washington. That work includes a series of engines used in testing and two "flight readiness" engines that Smith said in his remarks will be delivered to United Launch Alliance in May for integration on that company's Vulcan rocket for testing. The first engines intended for flight will also be produced there.

The company plans to transition production over a couple of years from Kent to Huntsville. Once the BE-4 production line is stabilized, Huntsville staff will be trained in Kent and then return to ramp up engine production in Huntsville. Ultimately the factory will be able to produce 42 engines a year, split roughly evenly between the BE-4 and the BE-3U engine that will power the upper stage of New Glenn. The company expects to take two to three years to reach that production rate.

SpaceX is planning to return to the Port of Los Angeles after previously abandoning plans for a Starship factory there.

Previously: Blue Origin Will Build its Rocket Engine in Alabama
Blue Origin Wins Contract to Supply United Launch Alliance With BE-4 Rocket Engines
Blue Origin Starts Construction of Rocket Engine Factory in Alabama

Original Submission

takyon writes:

96-Core Processor Made of Chiplets

For decades, the trend was for more and more of a computer's systems to be integrated onto a single chip. Today's system-on-chips, which power smartphones and servers alike, are the result. But complexity and cost are starting to erode the idea that everything should be on a single slice of silicon.

Already, some of the most of advanced processors, such as AMD's Zen 2 processor family, are actually a collection of chiplets bound together by high-bandwidth connections within a single package. This week at the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco, French research organization CEA-Leti showed how far this scheme can go, creating a 96-core processor out of six chiplets.

The CEA-Leti chip—for want of a better word—stacks six 16-core chiplets on top of a thin sliver of silicon, called an active interposer. The interposer contains both voltage regulation circuits and a network that links the various parts of the core's on-chip memories together. Active interposers are the best way forward for chiplet technology if it is ever to allow for disparate technologies and multiple chiplet vendors to be integrated into systems, according to Pascal Vivet, a scientific director at CEA-Leti.

"If you want to integrate chiplets from vendor A with chiplets from vendor B, and their interfaces are not compatible, you need a way to glue them together," he says. "And the only way to glue them together is with active circuits in the interposer."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Algorithms 'consistently' more accurate than people in predicting recidivism, study says:

In a study with potentially far-reaching implications for criminal justice in the United States, a team of California researchers has found that algorithms are significantly more accurate than humans in predicting which defendants will later be arrested for a new crime.

[...] "Risk assessment has long been a part of decision-making in the criminal justice system," said Jennifer Skeem, a psychologist who specializes in criminal justice at UC Berkeley. "Although recent debate has raised important questions about algorithm-based tools, our research shows that in contexts resembling real criminal justice settings, risk assessments are often more accurate than human judgment in predicting recidivism. That's consistent with a long line of research comparing humans to statistical tools."

"Validated risk-assessment instruments can help justice professionals make more informed decisions," said Sharad Goel, a computational social scientist at Stanford University. "For example, these tools can help judges identify and potentially release people who pose little risk to public safety. But, like any tools, risk assessment instruments must be coupled with sound policy and human oversight to support fair and effective criminal justice reform."

The paper—"The limits of human predictions of recidivism"—was slated for publication Feb. 14, 2020, in Science Advances. Skeem presented the research on Feb. 13 in a news briefing at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Wash. Joining her were two co-authors: Ph.D. graduate Jongbin Jung and Ph.D. candidate Zhiyuan "Jerry" Lin, who both studied computational social science at Stanford.

More information:
Z. Lin, et al. The limits of human predictions of recidivism [open], Science Advances (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz0652)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

SpaceX announces partnership to send four tourists into deep orbit:

SpaceX announced a new partnership Tuesday to send four tourists deeper into orbit than any private citizen before them, in a mission that could take place by 2022 and easily cost more than $100 million.

The company signed the deal with Space Adventures, which is based in Washington and served as an intermediary to send eight space tourists to the International Space Station (ISS) via Russian Soyuz rockets.

The first of these was Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million for an eight hour stay on the ISS back in 2001. The last to go was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, in 2009.

The new tourists would be carried on SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, which was developed to transport NASA astronauts and is due to make its first crewed flight in the coming months.

"Our goal is to try to get to about two to three times the height of the space station," Space Adventure's president Tom Shelley told AFP.

The ISS orbits at 400 kilometers (250 miles) above Earth's surface, but the exact altitude of the Space Adventures mission would be determined by SpaceX, added Shelley.

At its earliest, it could take place by late 2021, though "probably more likely is sometime in 2022," he said.

The capsule was designed to take astronauts from the surface to the ISS. Just nine square meters in volume[sic], there are no private areas to sleep wash or use the bathroom.

Mission duration will depend on what the customers want, said Shelley.

Space Adventures has posted its official announcement on its website.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Red Hat tips its Fedora at CoreOS Container Linux stans: Hop onto something else, folks, cos this one's on a boat to Valhalla:

Red Hat is set to fling a flaming arrow at Red Hat CoreOS Container Linux*, the software firm said as it laid out the details of the end of life timeline for the distro it acquired in January 2018.

[...] Users who want something similar outside the context of OpenShift are directed to Fedora CoreOS, the community version, which is "the official successor to CoreOS Container Linux," according to the end of life announcement. That said, Red Hat has admitted: "Fedora CoreOS cannot currently replace Container Linux for all use cases."

[...] The team said: "We've found that the incremental, exploratory, forward-looking development required for Fedora CoreOS — which is also a cornerstone of the Fedora Project as a whole — is difficult to reconcile with the iron-clad stability guarantee that ideally exists when automatically updating systems."

Red Hat noted there is a fork of CoreOS Container Linux called Flatcar Linux which may be more suitable for users who do not want to jump into OpenShift. Flatcar Linux is supported by a Berlin company called Kinvolk.

The end of life timeline for CoreOS Container Linux is aggressive, Red Hat said. May 26 is the last date for updates including security patches. From September 1st, "published resources related to CoreOS Container Linux will be deleted or made read-only. OS downloads will be removed, CoreUpdate servers will be shut down, and OS images will be removed from AWS, Azure, and Google Compute Engine. GitHub repositories, including the issue tracker, will become read-only." The reason for deleting OS images is to discourage continued use after end of support.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Using the Dutch-led Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, astronomers have discovered unusual radio waves coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. The radio waves bear the tell-tale signature of aurorae caused by an interaction between a star and its planet. The radio emission from a star-planet interaction has been predicted for over thirty-years but this is the first time astronomers have been able to discern its signature. This method, only possible with a sensitive radio telescope like LOFAR, opens the door to a new way of discovering exoplanets in the habitable zone and studying the environment they exist in.

[...] "The motion of the planet through a red dwarf's strong magnetic field acts like an electric engine much in the same way a bicycle dynamo works. This generates a huge current that powers aurorae and radio emission on the star." says Dr. Harish Vedantham, the lead author of the study and a Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) staff scientist.

[...] "We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star" said Dr. Joe Callingham, ASTRON postdoctoral fellow and co-author of the study. "A scaled up version of Jupiter-Io has long been predicted to exist in the form of a star-planet system, and the emission we observed fits the theory very well."

The group is now concentrating on finding similar emission from other stars. "We now know that nearly every red-dwarf hosts terrestrial planets, so there must be other stars showing similar emission. We want to know how this impacts our search for another Earth around another star" says Dr. Callingham.

Journal Reference: H. K. Vedantham et al. Coherent radio emission from a quiescent red dwarf indicative of star–planet interaction, Nature Astronomy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1011-9

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Correcting the jitters in quantum devices:

Labs around the world are racing to develop new computing and sensing devices that operate on the principles of quantum mechanics and could offer dramatic advantages over their classical counterparts. But these technologies still face several challenges, and one of the most significant is how to deal with "noise"—random fluctuations that can eradicate the data stored in such devices.

A new approach developed by researchers at MIT could provide a significant step forward in quantum error correction. The method involves fine-tuning the system to address the kinds of noise that are the most likely, rather than casting a broad net to try to catch all possible sources of disturbance.

The analysis is described in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper by MIT graduate student David Layden, postdoc Mo Chen, and professor of nuclear science and engineering Paola Cappellaro.

"The main issues we now face in developing quantum technologies are that current systems are small and noisy," says Layden. Noise, meaning unwanted disturbance of any kind, is especially vexing because many quantum systems are inherently highly sensitive, a feature underlying some of their potential applications.

[...] we just don't have the resources to do particularly useful quantum error correction in the usual way." So instead, the researchers found a way to target the error correction very narrowly at the specific kinds of noise that were most prevalent.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

New CRISPR-based tool can probe and control several genetic circuits at once:

Every cell in our body has a computer-like control system that sends biological signals through thousands of circuits to monitor the cell's needs and regulate its responses.

But when diseases such as cancer arise, these regulatory circuits often go awry, resulting in unnatural signals and responses. The ability to accurately detect these abnormal disease signals would be a potential avenue for more precise treatments.

Now, Stanford researchers have devised a biological tool that can not only detect such faulty genetic circuits but also "debug" them—like running a patch cord around a computer hardware glitch—to facilitate the elimination of cancer cells, for instance.

In an article in the journal Molecular Cell, Stanley Qi and his team describe how they built their sense-and-respond system by modifying the CRISPR-Cas gene-editing tool, which works like a molecular switch to repair faulty genes. Qi is an assistant professor of bioengineering and of chemical and systems biology.

Qi had previously developed Cas tools that could perform multiple tasks, such as switching desired genes on or off. In his latest work, with graduate student Hannah Kempton, he expanded on that concept to develop a CRISPR-Cas tool that performs these different tasks only in the presence of different combinations of biological signals.

Journal Reference:
Hannah R. Kempton et al, Multiple Input Sensing and Signal Integration Using a Split Cas12a System, Molecular Cell (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2020.01.016

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/isps-sue-maine-claim-web-privacy-law-violates-their-free-speech-rights/:

The broadband industry is suing Maine to stop a Web-browsing privacy law similar to the one killed by Congress and President Donald Trump in 2017. Industry groups claim the state law violates First Amendment protections on free speech and the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution.

[...] Customer data protected by this law includes Web-browsing history, application-usage history, precise geolocation data, the content of customers' communications, IP addresses, device identifiers, financial and health information, and personal details used for billing.

[...] The state law "imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs', and only ISPs', protected speech," while imposing no requirements on other companies that deliver services over the Internet, the groups wrote in their lawsuit. The plaintiffs are America's Communications Association, CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom.

[...] The lawsuit is part of a larger battle between ISPs and states that are trying to impose regulations stronger than those enforced by the federal government. One factor potentially working against the ISPs is that the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to preempt all current and future state net neutrality laws was blocked by a federal appeals court ruling in October 2019.

[...] But while the FCC was allowed to eliminate its own net neutrality rules, judges said the commission "lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 States' statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications."

Previous Story:

Maine Governor Signs Strictest Internet Protections in the U.S.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

First measurements by a Solar Orbiter science instrument reached the ground on Thursday 13 February providing a confirmation to the international science teams that the magnetometer on board is in good health following a successful deployment of the spacecraft's instrument boom.

Solar Orbiter, ESA's new sun-exploring spacecraft, launched on Monday 10 February. It carries ten scientific instruments, four of which measure properties of the environment around the spacecraft, especially electromagnetic characteristics of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun. Three of these 'in situ' instruments have sensors located on the 4.4 m-long boom.

"We measure magnetic fields thousands of times smaller than those we are familiar with on Earth," says Tim Horbury of Imperial College London, Principal Investigator for the Magnetometer instrument (MAG). "Even currents in electrical wires make magnetic fields far larger than what we need to measure. That's why our sensors are on a boom, to keep them away from all the electrical activity inside the spacecraft."

Ground controllers at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, switched on the magnetometer's two sensors (one near the end of the boom and the other close to the spacecraft) about 21 hours after liftoff. The instrument recorded data before, during and after the boom's deployment, allowing the scientists to understand the influence of the spacecraft on measurements in the space environment.

"The data we received shows how the magnetic field decreases from the vicinity of the spacecraft to where the instruments are actually deployed," adds Tim. "This is an independent confirmation that the boom actually deployed and that the instruments will, indeed, provide accurate scientific measurements in the future."

[Emphasis in original. -Ed.]

Previously:
Solar Orbiter Blasts Off to Capture First Look at Sun's Poles
Iran Satellite Launch Fails; ESA Solar Orbiter Launch Succeeds (So Far)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

ESA[*] is expanding its bedrest programme that allows researchers to study how human bodies react to living in space – without leaving their bed.

[...] Bedrest studies simulate aspects of spaceflight by placing volunteers in bed for long periods of time with their head 6° below horizontal. At all times one shoulder must touch the bed – meals, showers and toilet breaks included.

ESA has conducted many bedrest studies with Medes in Toulouse, France, and at the German aerospace centre DLR's ':envihab' facility in Cologne, Germany. The space agency is now welcoming the Jožef Stefan Institute based in Planica, Slovenia, to conduct a new round of 60-day studies: one in Toulouse and one in Planica.

The Planica site is a fitting addition, since it is located at high altitude and there is less atmospheric pressure – much like a in future lunar habitat, which adds to simulation. The centre allows researchers to tweak environmental conditions, such as oxygen levels in the room. Testing volunteers in low oxygen levels, or hypoxia, is relevant for future space missions where the confined environment of spacecraft and space habitats could contain less oxygen.

Each site in France, Germany and Slovenia has a centrifuge that can spin volunteers to recreate gravity pulling towards their feet while laying down. Artificial gravity could counteract some of the changes in the human body during space exploration.

"The goal is to definitively test measures that reduce the unwanted effects of living in weightlessness," explains ESA's science coordinator for human research Angelique Van Ombergen, "we have a long history at ESA of conducting bedrest studies and this round will put all our knowledge gained towards fine-tuning and working out the best techniques."

[...]Water bed for dry immersion

In a first for ESA, another type of terrestrial study with Medes will use dry-immersion baths. Similar to bath tubs, containers will hold a total of 20 female study participants in suspension for five days each.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/805291279/losing-sleep-over-the-quest-for-a-perfect-nights-rest

If you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame.

And there's a name for this new kind of insomnia of the digital age: orthosomnia.

It's "when you just really become fixated on having this perfect sleep via tracker," said Seema Khosla, medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep. "And then you start worrying about it, and you wind up giving yourself insomnia."

[...] But in an irony of our digital lifestyles, for some people, perfecting that sleep score becomes an end unto itself — so much so that they can lose sleep over it.

Original Submission