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takyon writes:

Northrop Grumman makes history, Mission Extension Vehicle docks to target satellite

Four and a half months after its launch on a Proton-M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle[(MEV)] has made history, successfully docking with its target satellite above Geostationary Orbit to extend that satellite's lifetime well beyond the original plan.

The successful maneuver marked a groundbreaking change in how satellites are operated in orbit, with the Mission Extension Vehicle capable of not just extending a satellite's life but also moving defunct satellites to safer orbits.

[...] Two months after the MEV's launch, though, Intelsat began the process of decommissioning satellite Intelsat 901, formally removing it from service in December 2019 and transferring telecommunication customers to other satellites in its fleet. [...] After this decommissioning, Intelsat 901 was commanded to fire its thrusters to move itself into the GEO graveyard orbit. This satellite was chosen for the first MEV mission because it only had a "few months" of propellant life left according to Intelsat.

[...] The combined spacecraft stack will now perform on-orbit checkouts before MEV-1 begins relocating the combined vehicle to return Intelsat 901 into service in late-March/early-April.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD Launches Ultra-Low-Power Ryzen Embedded APUs: Starting at 6W

While it doesn't get the same attention as their high-profile mobile, desktop, or server CPU offerings, AMD's embedded division is an important fourth platform for the chipmaker. To that end, this week the company is revealing its lowest-power Ryzen processors ever, with a new series of embedded chips that are designed for use in ultra-compact commercial and industrial systems.

The chips in question are the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1102G and the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1305G SoCs. These parts feature a 6 W or a configurable 8 W - 10 W TDP, respectively. Both SoCs feature two Zen cores with or without simultaneous multithreading, AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphics, 1 MB L2 cache, 4 MB L3 cache, a single channel or a dual-channel memory controller, and two 10 GbE ports.

[...] Both ultra-low-power AMD Ryzen Embedded APUs will be available for the next 10 years, meaning availability will stretch all the way till 2030.

AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 Series

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Petnet's smart pet feeder system is back after a week-long outage, but customers are still waiting for answers:

Petnet, the smart pet feeder backed by investors including Petco, recently experienced a week-long system outage affecting its second-generation SmartFeeders. While the startup's customer service tweeted over the weekend that its SmartFeeders and app's functionality have been restored, Petnet's lack of responsiveness continues to leave many customers frustrated and confused.

Petnet first announced on Feb. 14 that it was investigating a system outage affecting its second-generation SmartFeeders that made the feeders appear to be offline. The company said in a tweet that the SmartFeeders were still able to dispense on schedule, but several customers replied that their devices had also stopped dispensing food or weren't dispensing it on schedule.

But all is not lost. A system update announcement reports:

System Update: SmartFeeders are returning online. There will be a system reset to help stabilize your SmartFeeder's app functionality. We will promptly update you once this has been completed. Scheduled automatic feeds should still dispense on time.

Those darn customers, so impatient, unwilling to wait for their next fix to download. Please check back in one quarter of a galactic rotation. Thank you.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/flaw-in-billions-of-wi-fi-devices-left-communications-open-to-eavesdroppng/

Billions of devices—many of them already patched—are affected by a Wi-Fi vulnerability that allows nearby attackers to decrypt sensitive data sent over the air, researchers said on Wednesday at the RSA security conference.

[...]Eset researchers wrote in a research paper published on Wednesday. "The attack surface is greatly increased, since an adversary can decrypt data that was transmitted by a vulnerable access point to a specific client (which may or may not be vulnerable itself)."

[...]Kr00k exploits a weakness that occurs when wireless devices disassociate from a wireless access point. If either the end-user device or the access point is vulnerable, it will put any unsent data frames into a transmit buffer and then send them over the air. Rather than encrypt this data with the session key negotiated earlier and used during the normal connection, vulnerable devices use a key consisting of all zeros, a move that makes decryption trivial.

[...]Eset researchers determined that a variety of devices are vulnerable, including:

• Amazon Echo 2nd gen
• Amazon Kindle 8th gen
• Apple iPad mini 2
• Apple iPhone 6, 6S, 8, XR
• Apple MacBook Air Retina 13-inch 2018
• Google Nexus 5
• Google Nexus 6
• Google Nexus 6S
• Raspberry Pi 3
• Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9505
• Samsung Galaxy S8
• Xiaomi Redmi 3S

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Listed on Forbes "30 under 30" for Science in 2017, Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new, extra-solar planets.

Astronomy student discovers 17 new planets, including Earth-sized world:

University of British Columbia astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new planets, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world, by combing through data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission.

Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the "Habitable Zones" of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet's surface.

The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 ½ times the size of Earth—small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System—and in the habitable zone of its star.

"This planet is about a thousand light years away, so we're not getting there anytime soon!" said Kunimoto, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of physics and astronomy. "But this is a really exciting find, since there have only been 15 small, confirmed planets in the Habitable Zone found in Kepler data so far."

The planet has a year that is 142 ½ days long, orbiting its star at 0.444 Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Earth and our Sun) - just bigger than Mercury's orbit in our Solar System, and gets about a third of the light Earth gets from the Sun.

Of the other 16 new planets discovered, the smallest is only two-thirds the size of Earth—one of the smallest planets to be found with Kepler so far. The rest range in size up to eight times the size of Earth.

More information: Michelle Kunimoto et al, Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. I. 17 New Planet Candidates Including One Habitable Zone World, The Astronomical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab6cf8

Original Submission

takyon writes:

UEFI Boot Support Published For RISC-V On Linux

Western Digital's Atish Patra sent out the patch series on Tuesday for adding UEFI support for the RISC-V architecture. This initial UEFI Linux bring-up is for supporting boot time services while the UEFI runtime service support is still being worked on. This RISC-V UEFI support can work in conjunction with the U-Boot bootloader and depends upon other recent Linux kernel work around RISC-V's Supervisor Binary Interface (SBI).

Building off the common (U)EFI code within the Linux kernel, the RISC-V bring-up so far is just over four hundred lines of code. Depending upon how quickly this code is reviewed, the initial UEFI RISC-V support could land for the Linux 5.7 cycle. So far this RISC-V UEFI boot support has been tested under QEMU.

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

See also: Linux EFI Going Through Spring Cleaning Before RISC-V Support Lands

Related:
Western Digital to Transition Consumption of Over One Billion Cores Per Year to RISC-V
Western Digital Publishes RISC-V "SweRV" Core Design Under Apache 2.0 License

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Clearview AI's Facial Recognition Tech Is Being Used By The Justice Department, ICE, And The FBI:

When BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month that Clearview AI had used marketing materials that suggested it was pursuing a "rapid international expansion," the company was dismissive, noting that it was focused on the US and Canada.

The company's client list suggests otherwise. It shows that Clearview AI has expanded to at least 26 countries outside the US, engaging national law enforcement agencies, government bodies, and police forces in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, India, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

The log also has an entry for Interpol, which ran more than 320 searches. Reached for comment, the worldwide policing agency confirmed that "a small number of officers" in its Crimes Against Children unit had used Clearview's facial recognition app with a 30-day free trial account. That trial has now ended and "there is no formal relationship between Interpol and Clearview," the Interpol General Secretariat said in a statement.

It's unclear how Clearview is vetting potential international clients, particularly in countries with records of human rights violations or authoritarian regimes. In an interview with PBS, Ton-That said Clearview would never sell to countries "adverse to the US," including China, Iran, and North Korea. Asked by PBS if he would sell to countries where being gay is a crime, he didn't answer, stating once again that the company's focus is on the US and Canada.

Clearview, however, has already provided its software to organizations in countries that have laws against LGBTQ individuals, according to its documents. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the documents indicate that Clearview gave access to the Thakaa Center, also known as the AI Center of Advanced Studies, a Riyadh-based research center whose clients include Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Investment. Thakaa, which did not respond to a request for comment, was given access to the software earlier this month, according to the documents.

Previously:
Clearview AI Reports Entire Client List Was Stolen
Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate "Creepy" Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI
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

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

More than a year after NASA's Mars InSight lander touched down in a pebble-filled crater on the Martian equator, the rusty red planet is now serving up its meteorological secrets: Gravity waves, surface swirling "dust devils," and the steady, low rumble of infrasound, Cornell and other researchers have found.

"This is entirely new territory we are exploring," said Don Banfield '87, principal research scientist and the science lead for the Auxiliary Payload Sensor Suite, or APSS, aboard InSight.

The Cornell-led research was published Feb. 24 in Nature Geoscience.

While other scientists studying the stationary Martian lander explore what lies beneath the planet's surface, the APSS team keeps track of the meteorology above.

[...]The craft features a seismometer for detecting Mars' quakes; sensors for gauging wind and air pressure; a magnetometer for measuring the planet's magnetic forces; and a probe designed to take the planet's temperature.

Banfield and the meteorology team were surprised that their sensors detected gravity waves[*], which are buoyancy oscillations of air parcels. Such waves on Earth can create linear rows of rolled "morning glory" clouds—white, puffy clouds that look like lofty jelly rolls. "We're still working to understand what these waves can teach us about Mars," Banfield said.

Banfield and his colleagues have noted "infrasound"—pressure oscillations below 10 Hertz, found by the lander's sensors. It is a low rumbling below what the human ear can detect.

"We expected infrasound would exist, but this is the first direct measurement," Banfield said. "It's still mysterious as to exactly what causes the signals we've heard, but we'll keep studying."

[*] Note: Gravity waves should not be confused with gravitational waves (combining of large stellar objects).

Journal Reference:
Don Banfield, et al. The atmosphere of Mars as observed by InSight, Nature Geoscience (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0534-0

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

A better way to detect underground water leaks:

You can delay irrigating the lawn or washing the car all you want, but to really make a big dent in water savings we need to stop water waste long before the precious resource ever reaches our taps.

An estimated 20 to 50 percent of water is lost to leaks in North America's supply system -- a major issue as utilities contend with how to sustain a growing population in an era of water scarcity.

"People talk about reducing the time you take showers, but if you think about 50 percent of water flowing through the system being lost, it's another magnitude," said study author Daniel Tartakovsky, a professor of energy resources engineering in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

In a move that could potentially save money and billions of gallons of water, Tartakovsky, along with Abdulrahman Alawadhi from the University of California, San Diego, have proposed a new way to swiftly and accurately interpret data from pressure sensors commonly used to detect leaks.

In addition to water utilities, Tartakovsky said the method could also be applied to other industries that use pressure sensors for leak detection, such as in oil and natural gas transmission networks that run under the sea and pose additional environmental hazards.

The research was published online Feb. 12 in the journal Water Resources Research.

Abdulrahman Alawadhi, Daniel M. Tartakovsky. Bayesian Update and Method of Distributions: Application to Leak Detection in Transmission Mains. Water Resources Research, 2020; DOI: 10.1029/2019WR025879

Original Submission

Booga1 writes:

Widely reported, "Konami Code" creator, Kazuhisa Hashimoto, has passed away.

From Rolling Stone's article:

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, the producer credited with creating the most famous and memorized cheat in video game history, has died at the age of 61.

Video game maker Konami confirmed the death of Hashimoto, who entered the "Konami Code" command – "Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start" – into both the video game and pop culture lexicon.

"We are saddened to hear about the passing of Kazuhisa Hashimoto, a deeply talented producer who first introduced the world to the 'Konami Code,'" Konami tweeted Wednesday. "Our thoughts are with Hashimoto-san's family and friends at this time. Rest In Peace."

Created by Hashimoto as a backdoor to assist testers on Konami's exceedingly difficult 1985 arcade game Gradius — "I hadn't played that much and obviously couldn't beat it myself, so I put in the Konami code," he said of Gradius in a 2003 interview, "because I was the one who was going to be using it, I made sure it was easy to remember" — "The Konami Code" became a secret staple of the company's output and an indispensable cheat code for an entire generation of gamers who grew up on titles like Contra, Castlevania and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In the case of Contra, the Konami Code would start the player with 30 lives instead of the usual three, making that side-scrolling shooting game somewhat beatable as opposed to impossible.

If you played multiplayer Contra, the final key presses are "Select, Start."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/02/flaw-in-billions-of-wi-fi-devices-left-communications-open-to-eavesdroppng/

Billions of devices—many of them already patched—are affected by a Wi-Fi vulnerability that allows nearby attackers to decrypt sensitive data sent over the air, researchers said on Wednesday at the RSA security conference.

[...]Eset researchers wrote in a research paper published on Wednesday. "The attack surface is greatly increased, since an adversary can decrypt data that was transmitted by a vulnerable access point to a specific client (which may or may not be vulnerable itself)."

[...]Kr00k exploits a weakness that occurs when wireless devices disassociate from a wireless access point. If either the end-user device or the access point is vulnerable, it will put any unsent data frames into a transmit buffer and then send them over the air. Rather than encrypt this data with the session key negotiated earlier and used during the normal connection, vulnerable devices use a key consisting of all zeros, a move that makes decryption trivial.

[...]Eset researchers determined that a variety of devices are vulnerable, including:

• Amazon Echo 2nd gen
• Amazon Kindle 8th gen
• Apple iPad mini 2
• Apple iPhone 6, 6S, 8, XR
• Apple MacBook Air Retina 13-inch 2018
• Google Nexus 5
• Google Nexus 6
• Google Nexus 6S
• Raspberry Pi 3
• Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9505
• Samsung Galaxy S8
• Xiaomi Redmi 3S

The researchers also found that the following wireless routers are vulnerable:

• Asus RT-N12
• Huawei B612S-25d
• Huawei EchoLife HG8245H
• Huawei E5577Cs-321

An Apple spokesman said the vulnerabilities were patched last October with details for macOS here and for iOS and iPadOS here.

[...]While the vulnerability is interesting and users should make sure their devices are patched quickly—if they aren't already—there are a few things that minimize the real-world threat posed.

[...]Despite the limited threat posed, readers should ensure their devices have received updates issued by the manufacturers. This advice is most important for users of vulnerable Wi-Fi routers, since routers are often hard to patch and because vulnerable routers leave communications open to interception even when client devices are unaffected or are already patched.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

How caloric restriction prevents negative effects of aging in cells:

"We already knew that calorie restriction increases life span, but now we've shown all the changes that occur at a single-cell level to cause that," says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a senior author of the new paper, professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory and holder of the Roger Guillemin Chair. "This gives us targets that we may eventually be able to act on with drugs to treat aging in humans."

Aging is the highest risk factor for many human diseases, including cancer, dementia, diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Caloric restriction has been shown in animal models to be one of the most effective interventions against these age-related diseases. And although researchers know that individual cells undergo many changes as an organism ages, they have not known how caloric restriction might influence these changes.

In the new paper, Belmonte and his collaborators -- including three alumni of his Salk lab who are now professors running their own research programs in China -- compared rats who ate 30 percent fewer calories with rats on normal diets. The animals' diets were controlled from age 18 months through 27 months. (In humans, this would be roughly equivalent to someone following a calorie-restricted diet from age 50 through 70.)

At both the start and the conclusion of the diet, Belmonte's team isolated and analyzed a total of 168,703 cells from 40 cell types in the 56 rats. The cells came from fat tissues, liver, kidney, aorta, skin, bone marrow, brain and muscle. In each isolated cell, the researchers used single-cell genetic-sequencing technology to measure the activity levels of genes. They also looked at the overall composition of cell types within any given tissue. Then, they compared old and young mice on each diet.

Many of the changes that occurred as rats on the normal diet grew older didn't occur in rats on a restricted diet; even in old age, many of the tissues and cells of animals on the diet closely resembled those of young rats. Overall, 57 percent of the age-related changes in cell composition seen in the tissues of rats on a normal diet were not present in the rats on the calorie restricted diet.

takyon writes:

GlobalFoundries' 22FDX with MRAM is Ready

GlobalFoundries on Thursday said that it had completed development of its 22FDX (22 nm FD-SOI) technology with embedded magnetoresistive non-volatile memory (eMRAM). The technology can be used for a variety of applications, including automotive, industrial-grade MCU, and Internet-of-Things (IOT). Several clients of GlobalFoundries are ready to tape out their first 22FDX chips with eMRAM this year.

eMRAM provides a number of advantages when compared to eFlash (which is widely used today) for chips that need relatively high-capacity onboard storage, including higher performance and endurance, but want it all in a single silicon die. MRAM does not involve electric charges or current flows, instead, it uses magnetic storage elements and relies on reading the magnetic anisotropy (orientation) of two ferromagnetic films separated by a thin barrier. The method does not require an erase cycle before writing data, which means additional performance. Furthermore, MRAM can be produced using modern process technologies and has a very high endurance. The technology has some downsides, which will be eventually addressed by fabrication processes that use ReRAM, but GlobalFoundries and Samsung Foundry see a huge potential in MRAM for the vast majority of applications.

Previously: Everspin Announces New MRAM Products
Samsung Announces Mass Production of Commercial Embedded Magnetic Random Access Memory (eMRAM)
GlobalFoundries Teams Up with Singapore University for ReRAM Project

Original Submission

takyon writes:

It took Google three years to add Firefox, Edge and Opera support to Google Earth

When Google unveiled the new Google Earth back in 2017, it switched Google Earth from being a desktop application to a web application. The company made Google Earth Chrome-exclusive at the time stating that the company's own Chrome browser was the only browser to support Native Client (NaCl) technology at the time and that the technology "was the only we [Google] could make sure that Earth would work well on the web".

The emergence of new web standards, WebAssembly in particular, allowed Google to switch to the standard supported by other browsers. The company launched a beta of Google Earth for browsers that support WebAssembly, Firefox, Edge and Opera are mentioned specifically six months ago.

Today, Google revealed that it has made Google Earth available officially for the web browsers Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), and Opera.

Google Earth.

Also at The Verge and Thurrott.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35

In two days' time, it will be our eighth birthday (or our second, depending on your point of view). Many of you set your alarms and got up early on the morning of 29 February 2012, to order your Raspberry Pi from our newly minted licensee partners, RS Components and Premier Farnell. In the years since, we've sold over 30 million Raspberry Pi computers; we've seen our products used in an incredible range of applications all over the world (and occasionally off it); and we've found our own place in a community of makers, hobbyists, engineers and educators who are changing the world, one project, or one student, at a time.

[...] Which brings us to today's announcement. The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35. Effective immediately, you will be able to buy a no-compromises desktop PC for the same price as Raspberry Pi 1 in 2012. [...] And of course, thanks to inflation, $35 in 2012 is equivalent to nearly $40 today. So effectively you're getting all these improvements, and a $5 price cut.

[...] In line with our commitment to long-term support, the 1GB product will remain available to industrial and commercial customers, at a list price of $35. As there is no price advantage over the 2GB product, we expect most users to opt for the larger-memory variant. [...] The 4GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 will remain on sale, priced at $55.

In addition to falling RAM prices (which will hopefully continue to fall in the future), there is likely an oversupply of the 2 GB model as the 4 GB model proved to be the most popular.

Also at TechCrunch, Tom's Hardware, PCWorld, and Hackaday.

The USB Type-C resistor issue has been fixed by the latest revision of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B hardware, which is confirmed to be out in the wild. The issue prevented some USB-C power supplies from working with Pi4B: