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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275:

An optimized structure of memristive device for neuromorphic computing systems:

Lobachevsky University scientists have implemented a new variant of the metal-oxide memristive device, which holds promise for use in RRAM (resistive random access memory) and novel computing systems, including neuromorphic ones.

Variability (lack of reproducibility) of resistive switching parameters is the key challenge on the way to new applications of memristive devices. This variability of parameters in 'metal-oxide-metal' device structures is determined by the stochastic nature of the migration process of the oxygen ion and/or oxygen vacancies responsible for oxidation and reduction of conductive channels (filaments) near the metal/oxide interface. It is also compounded by the degradation of device parameters in case of uncontrolled oxygen exchange.

Traditional approaches to controlling the memristive effect include the use of special electrical field concentrators and the engineering of materials/interfaces in the memristive device structure, which typically require a more complex technological process for fabricating memristive devices.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275:

Get ready for price hikes up to 10% annually after sale of .org registry:

The nonprofit Internet Society attracted widespread condemnation late last year after announcing it was going to sell off the Public Interest Registry, a subsidiary that administers the .org domain, to a private equity firm called Ethos Capital. People were particularly alarmed because the move came shortly after ICANN removed price caps on registration and renewal fees for .org domains. That opened the prospect of big price hikes in the coming years.

In a Friday press release, Ethos Capital announced it would voluntarily commit to limit price hikes for the next eight years. But under the new rules, Ethos Capital would still be able to raise prices by 10 percent a year—which would more than double prices over the next eight years. Ethos framed this as a concession to the public, and strictly speaking, a 10 percent price hike limit is better for customers than completely uncapped fees. But 10 percent annual increases are still massive—far more than inflation or plausible increases in the cost of running the infrastructure powering the .org registry.

For comparison, ICANN recently announced that Verisign, the company that administers the .com domain, will be allowed to raise prices by 7 percent per year over the next decade, except for a two-year "pause" after four years of hikes. Those changes, adding up to a 70-percent price hike over 10 years, was enough to trigger alarm among domain registrars who must pass these fees on to their customers.

Ethos Capital's proposed limits are also much more than historical increases in the .org fee. The maximum fee charged by the Public Interest Registry for a domain registration has risen from $6 at the end of 2006 to $9.93 today—an annual growth rate of less than 5 percent.

Previously: Now Internet Society Told to Halt Controversial .Org Sale... by its Own Advisory Council

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months:

Safari will, later this year, no longer accept new HTTPS certificates that expire more than 13 months from their creation date. That means websites using long-life SSL/TLS certs issued after the cut-off point will throw up privacy errors in Apple's browser.

The policy was unveiled by the iGiant at a Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser) meeting on Wednesday. Specifically, according to those present at the confab, from September 1, any new website cert valid for more than 398 days will not be trusted by the Safari browser and instead rejected. Older certs, issued prior to the deadline, are unaffected by this rule.

By implementing the policy in Safari, Apple will, by extension, enforce it on all iOS and macOS devices. This will put pressure on website admins and developers to make sure their certs meet Apple's requirements – or risk breaking pages on a billion-plus devices and computers.

[...] Shortening the lifespan of certificates does come with some drawbacks. It has been noted that by increasing the frequency of certificate replacements, Apple and others are also making life a little more complicated for site owners and businesses that have to manage the certificates and compliance.

"Companies need to look to automation to assist with certificate deployment, renewal, and lifecycle management to reduce human overhead and the risk of error as the frequency of certificate replacement increase," Callan told us.

We note Let's Encrypt issues free HTTPS certificates that expire after 90 days, and provides tools to automate renewals, so those will be just fine – and they are used all over the web now. El Reg's cert is a year-long affair so we'll be OK.

GitHub.com uses a two-year certificate, which would fall foul of Apple's rules though it was issued before the cut-off deadline. However, it is due to be renewed by June, so there's plenty of opportunity to sort that out. Apple's website has a year-long HTTPS cert that needs renewing in October.

Microsoft is an interesting one: its dot-com's cert is a two-year affair, which expires in October. If Redmond renews it for another two years, it'll trip up over Safari's policy.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:

Verizon is reportedly shelving further plans to sell Pixel phones:

Verizon has put an "indefinite hold" on plans to sell Google's Pixel phones, Android Police reported late Wednesday citing an unidentified source described as familiar with the company's plans. No specific reason was cited, but poor sales could have motivated the change.

Verizon on Thursday morning pushed back against the report, with a spokeswoman saying the mobile carrier will continue to work with Google and looks "forward to the new portfolio of devices." Android Police retracted its story hours later.

Since the original Pixel phone launched in 2016, Google and Verizon have been tied at the hip, with the nation's largest carrier serving as the exclusive partner for the phone franchise. That changed when Google unveiled the budget Pixel 3A in May, which was made available on multiple carriers for the first time.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time:

A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence. The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds.

Tests showed that the drug wiped out a range of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, including Acinetobacter baumannii and Enterobacteriaceae, two of the three high-priority pathogens that the World Health Organization ranks as “critical” for new antibiotics to target.

“In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first,” said Regina Barzilay, a senior researcher on the project and specialist in machine learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date,” added James Collins, a bioengineer on the team at MIT. “It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.”

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:

This app lets you see IoT devices around you and what data they're taking:

A new app launched this week will let you know what internet of things technologies are operating around you and what data they are collecting. The Internet of Things Assistant app and its infrastructure, created by Carnegie Mellon researchers, aims to give you more control over the devices tracking your activity and information.

With the app, you'll be able to see devices like public cameras with facial recognition technology, Bluetooth beacons tracking your location at the mall, and your neighbor's smart doorbell or smart speaker, according to a story published by Carnegie Mellon's Security and Privacy Institute. You can see what data these devices collect, and access privacy choices like opting in and out of data collection when available.

[...] If you own an IoT device that operates in a public space, you can use an online portal to publish where your IoT devices are and what data they collect, so they can be added to the app's database.

"We've done the work for you," Sadeh said in the story. "All you need to do is start adding your IoT resources so you can be in compliance with today's privacy laws."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:

SMS Attack Spreads Emotet, Steals Bank Credentials:

A new Emotet campaign is spread via SMS messages pretending to be from banks and may have ties to the TrickBot trojan.

Attackers are sending SMS messages purporting to be from victims' banks – but once they click on the links in the text messages, they are asked to hand over their banking credentials and download a file that infects their systems with the Emotet malware.

Emotet has continued to evolve since its return in September, including a new, dangerous Wi-Fi hack feature disclosed last week that can let the malware spread like a worm. Now, this most recent campaign delivers the malware via "smishing," a form of phishing that relies on text messages instead of email. While smishing is certainly nothing new, researchers say that the delivery tactic exemplifies Emotet's operators constantly swapping up their approaches to go beyond mere malspam emails – making it hard for defense teams to keep up.

[...] The SMS messages purport to be from local U.S. numbers and impersonate banks, warning users of locked bank accounts. The messages urge victims to click on a link, which redirects them to a domain that's known to distribute Emotet (shabon[.]co). Visually, when victims click on the link they see a customized phishing page that mimics the bank's mobile banking page.

Threatpost has reached out to X-Force researchers regarding how many victims have received the SMS messages, and which banks the messages purport to be associated with.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:

Mathematicians propose new way of using neural networks to work with noisy, high-dimensional data:

Mathematicians from RUDN University and the Free University of Berlin have proposed a new approach to studying the probability distributions of observed data using artificial neural networks. The new approach works better with so-called outliers, i.e., input data objects that deviate significantly from the overall sample. The article was published in the journal Artificial Intelligence.

The restoration of the probability distribution of observed data by artificial neural networks is the most important part of machine learning. The probability distribution not only allows us to predict the behaviour of the system under study, but also to quantify the uncertainty with which forecasts are made. The main difficulty is that, as a rule, only the data are observed, but their exact probability distributions are not available. To solve this problem, Bayesian and other similar approximate methods are used. But their use increases the complexity of a neural network and therefore makes its training more complicated.

RUDN University and the Free University of Berlin mathematicians used deterministic weights in neural networks, which would help overcome the limitations of Bayesian methods. They developed a formula that allows one to correctly estimate the variance of the distribution of observed data. The proposed model was tested on different data: synthetic and real; on data containing outliers and on data from which the outliers were removed. The new method allows restoration of probability distributions with accuracy previously unachievable.

Pavel Gurevich et al.Gradient conjugate priors and multi-layer neural networks, Artificial Intelligence (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2019.103184

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

Locust swarms arrive in South Sudan, threatening more misery:

Swarms of locusts which are wreaking havoc across East Africa have now arrived in South Sudan, the government said Tuesday, threatening more misery in one of the world's most vulnerable nations.

Billions of desert locusts, some in swarms the size of Moscow, have already chomped their way through Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan and Uganda.

Their breeding has been spurred by one of the wettest rainy seasons in the region in four decades.

Experts have warned the main March-to-May cropping season is at risk. Eggs laid along the locusts' path are due to hatch and create a second wave of the insects in key agricultural areas.

The arrival of the locusts could be catastrophic in South Sudan, where war followed by drought and floods has already left six million people—60 percent of the population—facing severe hunger.

Agriculture Minister Onyoti Adigo Nyikiwec said the locusts had crossed the eastern border with Uganda on Monday.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:

Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate Creepy Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI:

Canadian authorities are investigating shady face recognition company Clearview AI on the grounds that its scraping of billions of photos from the web might violate privacy laws, Reuters reported on Friday.

According to Reuters, privacy commissioners from the Canadian federal government and of the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Québec have all agreed to launch a joint investigation into the company's activities. In a statement, the commissioners wrote that Clearview's data scraping, along with admissions by Canadian law enforcement that they have used the service in police work, "raised questions and concerns about whether the company is collecting and using personal information without consent." Laws that they believe may have been violated include Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and regional laws concerning the use of user data in Quebec.

The privacy commissioners say they will also be looking into alleged use of Clearview's tools in the financial sector, though they did not release additional information about what practices they are investigating.

Previously:
Clearview AI Hit with Cease-And-Desist from Google, Facebook Over Facial Recognition Collection
Clearview App Lets Strangers Find Your Name, Info with Snap of a Photo, Report Says

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Multiple Soylentils have written in to let us know about the death of Mike Hughes:

"Mad" Mike Hughes Dies in Rocket Crash

RandomFactor writes:

Michael 'Mad Mike' Hughes, staunch flat Earth conspiracy theorist, launched himself into the skies above Barstow in San Bernardino county Saturday, February 22nd.

He was attempting to reach an altitude of ~5000 feet (1,500 meters). Unfortunately his parachute did not open during descent causing him to plummet to his death.

This wasn't Hughes' first rodeo, as the self-taught engineer had made two other attempts, the latest of which was supposed to launch in August 2019. That attempt was grounded by bad weather. Before that, the rocketeer had a successful (albeit bumpy) launch in March 2018, when his homemade rocket reached 1,875 feet (572 m) in altitude over Amboy, California. During that launch, Hughes had to deploy two parachutes to save himself from smashing into the desert. Even so he plummeted back to Earth at 350 mph (563 km/h). He got out of that one with just a sore back, he said at the time.

This launch was only a stepping stone to the eventual goal to proving the Earth was flat.

Would flat-Earth-believer Hughes have been able to see our planet's sphere at 5,000 feet (1,524 m)? Nope. And he knew that, saying he would need to soar past the so-called Kármán line — where the sky ends and space begins, or roughly 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — to see the curvature with his own eyes.

Two other amateur rocket teams are also attempting to reach the 100 KM point.

RandomFactor writes:

NASA engineers are preparing another tactic to get the troubled "mole" instrument on the Mars InSight lander burrowing into the regolith as intended.

Engineers plan to use the robotic arm on its InSight Mars lander to push a heat flow probe into the surface, acknowledging that they have "few alternatives" if that effort fails.

The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package instrument team has spent nearly a year trying to get the instrument's probe, or "mole," to burrow into the surface. The mole has an internal hammering mechanism that is designed to drive the probe as deep as five meters into the surface in order to measure the heat flow from the planet's interior.

The mole, though, stopped only about 30 centimeters below the surface. The mission has tried a number of ways to get the mole moving again, including removing the instrument housing on the surface to allow the lander's robotic arm to try and fill in the hole created by the mole, as well as pin the mole to one side of that hole, increasing the friction needed for the mole to work its way into the surface.

In October, that use of the arm to pin the mole worked briefly, allowing the mole to burrow into the surface, only for it to rebound partially out of the hole. A second attempt led to the mole again rebounding partially out of the hole in January.

The mole is a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) spike equipped with an internal hammering mechanism that relies on friction from the soil to help it dig down. The probe is designed to drag a ribbon-cable like tether behind it as it digs.

While pushing down on the top (back cap) of the probe seems an obvious approach, according to NASA "The team has avoided pushing on the back cap until now to avoid any potential damage to the tether."

Previous Coverage
More Mars Mole Mission Misfortune
Mars Mole Mission Rues Resistanceless Regolith
NASA to Jack up Insight Lander to Assess Non-Penetrating Probe
InSight Impinges Insufficiently in Site

Also at NASA-JPL

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takyon writes:

2007 OR₁₀ is now known as 225088 Gonggong, and its moon has been named Xiangliu:

Not far behind Pluto, the fifth-largest dwarf planet in the solar system hasn't had a name since it was discovered in 2007. It's just been hanging out beyond Neptune under the boring catalog designation 2007 OR10.

Well, that's officially changed as the previously largest unnamed body in the solar system is now officially Gonggong, named for a Chinese water god with the head of a human and the body of a snake.

And as a cool bonus, the tiny moon that orbits Gongong is named Xiangliu, after the minister that attended to the deity in Chinese folklore. The pair make up the first major solar system bodies to have Chinese names, according to astrophysicist Simon Porter.

Minor Planet Center.

See also: Seven Worlds in the Solar System That Could Be Just As Weird As Pluto

Standing on its surface, the icy ground would look dark and red, like Pluto. Indeed, 2007 OR10 is one of the reddest worlds astronomers know of. That reddish hue hints at the presence of complex organic compounds astronomers call tholins.

[...] Research published in 2011 [open, DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/738/2/L26] [DX] also showed that 2007 OR10 has a fresh surface covered in water ice. Astronomers think it's evidence of cryovolcanoes, where slushy ice erupts from below the surface like lava.

Previously: Large Moon Confirmed Around Slowly Rotating Dwarf Planet 2007 OR₁₀
Public Asked to Vote on a Name for Dwarf Planet 2007 OR10

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Elon Musk's Boring Company Finishes First Tunnel for 155mph Vegas Loop:

Last week, Musk's Boring Company finished excavating the first of two tunnels for a new transportation system that will run underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The second tunnel will run parallel to the first, creating a loop to carry people back and forth in modified Tesla Model 3 and Model X cars.

There will be one station at the convention center's south hall, another between the central and north halls, and a third at the west hall, which is currently under construction. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from one hall to another (more if there are super-cool things like Avatar concept cars to see along the way). According to Musk, the underground cars will move at speeds up to 155 miles per hour, taking people between stations in just one minute.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority awarded a $48.7 million contract to the Boring Company last year; it's the company's first commercial contract, and they're required to test the system for three months before opening it for public use. Their goal is to move a whopping 4,000 vehicles per hour.

It took three months to excavate the first tunnel, with work taking place 40 feet underground. Musk hopes to eventually expand the transit system to other parts of Las Vegas, including the Strip and the airport, and even to have a connecting tunnel running all the way to Los Angeles; LA residents may one day be able to hop over to Vegas for an afternoon (or Vegas residents go catch a glimpse of the ocean for a few hours).

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AnonTechie writes:

"We are sidestepping all of the scientific challenges that have held fusion energy back for more than half a century," says the director of an Australian company that claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected.

HB11 Energy is a spin-out company that originated at the University of New South Wales, and it announced today a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation.

Fusion, of course, is the long-awaited clean, safe theoretical solution to humanity's energy needs. It's how the Sun itself makes the vast amounts of energy that have powered life on our planet up until now. Where nuclear fission – the splitting of atoms to release energy – has proven incredibly powerful but insanely destructive when things go wrong, fusion promises reliable, safe, low cost, green energy generation with no chance of radioactive meltdown.

It's just always been 20 years away from being 20 years away. A number of multi-billion dollar projects are pushing slowly forward, from the Max Planck Institute's insanely complex Wendelstein 7-X stellerator to the 35-nation ITER Tokamak project, and most rely on a deuterium-tritium thermonuclear fusion approach that requires the creation of ludicrously hot temperatures, much hotter than the surface of the Sun, at up to 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit). This is where HB11's tech takes a sharp left turn.

[...] This is big-time stuff. Should cheap, clean, safe fusion energy really be achieved, it would be an extraordinary leap forward for humanity and a huge part of the answer for our future energy needs. And should it be achieved without insanely hot temperatures being involved, people would be even more comfortable having it close to their homes. We'll be keeping an eye on these guys.

Radical hydrogen-boron reactor

[Source]: Laser-boron fusion

Snake Oil or the Real Deal ? What do you think ?

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