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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Facebook pulls Trump campaign ads for fake census claims:

Facebook infamously has a broadly laissez-faire policy for political candidates. If you're running for office, you can lie as much as you want in your paid and unpaid content—with one small catch. Anything that lies about voting or the census, such as sharing fake registration links or deliberately spreading incorrect polling dates, is prohibited. Even if it comes directly from the Trump campaign.

It just turns out that Facebook needs a lot of prodding—in the form of negative media attention—to follow through.

The site Popular Information first reported on the Trump campaign's ads early yesterday. The sponsored posts, which appeared on the accounts of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, were paid for by the Trump Make America Great Again committee, a joint fundraising effort by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

One ad Popular Information featured includes an image of a sheet of paper labeled "2020 census," next to a picture of Trump giving his characteristic thumbs up, and it exhorts readers, "President Trump needs you to take the Official 2020 Congressional District Census today." It continues, "The information we gather from this survey will help us craft our strategies for YOUR CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT."

Clicking through the ad directed readers to a website labeled as the "Certified Website of President Donald J. Trump," Popular Information reported, billing itself as the "Official 2020 Congressional District Census."

Popular Information pointed out to Facebook that the ads seem to violate the company's bright-line policy prohibiting "misleading information about when and how to participate in the census," but a spokesperson for the company at first disagreed. According to Facebook, since the campaign ads also referenced the campaign, it was clear they were not official Census advertising.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a world first, CRISPR, the powerful gene-editing tool that can cut and paste DNA, has been used inside the human body for the first time. Scientists at the Casey Eye Institute at Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, have administered a new CRISPR-based medicine to treat an inherited form of blindness, according to the two biotech companies which make the treatment.

"This dosing is a truly historic event -- for science, for medicine, and most importantly for people living with this eye disease," said Cynthia Collins, president and CEO of Editas Medicine, a gene-editing company headquartered in Massachusetts.

The first patient in the trial received a dose of the experimental drug, called AGN-151587, via an injection in the eye. The idea is that it delivers the gene-editing tool CRISPR directly to cells in the eye which are affected by the genetic disease. CRISPR is able to find its way into those cells and correct the gene -- a cut-and-paste scenario that sees a tiny DNA edit made to remove the mutation.

Importantly, the CRISPR edit is permanent, which means patients may only need a single dose and be set for life.

The trial is expected to enroll 18 patients in total and will look at different doses of the experimental drug, refining how much is necessary to achieve the goal of reversing blindness -- without any side effects. Information about the first patient is scant, with researchers staying silent on patient information and when the surgery officially occurred.

From the press release:

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.economist.com/prospero/2020/03/06/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-turns-42

EVERY YEAR the world celebrates the anniversaries of masterworks and maestros. In 2020 there will be a host of events and publications commemorating the lives of Ludwig van Beethoven, Raphael, Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë and William Wordsworth. Such milestones usually come in neat multiples of 50. The 42nd anniversary of anything is rarely observed.

Yet on March 8th fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ("HHGTTG") will pay tribute to the comedy science-fiction series, which had its radio premiere on that day in 1978 and was subsequently adapted into novels, TV series, video games and a film. To mark the occasion, Pan Macmillan has reprinted the scripts and novels in colourful new editions ("HHGTTG" was the first book published under their "Pan Original" imprint to sell more than 1m copies). The British Library will host a day of "celebrations, conversation and performance". BBC Radio 4 has aired the original episodes; Radio 4 Extra will put on a "five-hour Hitchhiker's spectacular" including archival material and specially commissioned programmes. Such is the enduring interest in Douglas Adams's story that it is due to be adapted into a new television series by Hulu, a streaming service.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275:

Ransomware Attackers Use Your Cloud Backups Against You:

Backups are one the most, if not the most, important defense against ransomware, but if not configured properly, attackers will use it against you.

Recently the DoppelPaymer Ransomware operators published on their leak site the Admin user name and password for a non-paying victim's Veeam backup software.

This was not meant to expose the information to others for further attacks but was used as a warning to the victim that the ransomware operators had full access to their network, including the backups.

After seeing this information, I reached out to the operators of the DoppelPaymer and Maze Ransomware families to learn how they target victim's backups and was surprised by what I learned.

It should be noted that in this article we will be focusing on the Veeam backup software. Not because it is less secure than other software, but simply because it is one of the most popular enterprise backup products and was mentioned by the ransomware operators.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

New sleep method strengthens brain's ability to retain memories: Process that uses smell can strengthen memories stored in one side of the brain:

A new joint study by Tel Aviv University (TAU) and Weizmann Institute of Science researchers has yielded an innovative method for bolstering memory processes in the brain during sleep.

The method relies on a memory-evoking scent administered to one nostril. It helps researchers understand how sleep aids memory, and in the future could possibly help to restore memory capabilities following brain injuries, or help treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for whom memory often serves as a trigger.

The new study was led by Ella Bar, a PhD student at TAU and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Other principal investigators include Prof. Yuval Nir of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience, as well as Profs. Yadin Dudai, Noam Sobel and Rony Paz, all of Weizmann's Department of Neurobiology. It was published in Current Biology on March 5.

"We know that a memory consolidation process takes place in the brain during sleep," Bar explains. "For long-term memory storage, information gradually transitions from the hippocampus -- a brain region that serves as a temporary buffer for new memories -- to the neocortex. But how this transition happens remains an unsolved mystery."

"By triggering consolidation processes in only one side of the brain during sleep, we were able to compare the activity between the hemispheres and isolate the specific activity that corresponds to memory reactivation," Prof. Nir adds.

Bar says, "Beyond promoting basic scientific understanding, we hope that in the future this method may also have clinical applications. For instance, post-traumatic patients show higher activity in the right hemisphere when recalling a trauma, possibly related to its emotional content.

"The technique we developed could potentially influence this aspect of the memory during sleep and decrease the emotional stress that accompanies recall of the traumatic memory. Additionally, this method could be further developed to assist in rehabilitation therapy after one-sided brain damage due to stroke."

Ella Bar, Amit Marmelshtein, Anat Arzi, Ofer Perl, Ethan Livne, Eyal Hizmi, Rony Paz, Noam Sobel, Yadin Dudai, Yuval Nir. Local Targeted Memory Reactivation in Human Sleep. Current Biology, 2020 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.091

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takyon writes:

New AMD Side Channel Attacks Discovered, Impacts Zen Architecture (archive)

A new paper released by the Graz University of Technology details two new "Take A Way" attacks, Collide+Probe and Load+Reload, that can leak secret data from AMD processors by manipulating the L1D cache predictor. The researchers claim that the vulnerability impacts all AMD processors from 2011 to 2019, meaning that the Zen microarchitecture is also impacted. (PDF)

The university says it disclosed the vulnerabilities to AMD on August 23, 2019, meaning it was disclosed in a responsible manner (unlike the CTS Labs debacle), but there isn't any word of a fix yet. We've pinged AMD for comment.

We've become accustomed to news of new Intel vulnerabilities being disclosed on a seemingly-weekly basis, but other processor architectures, like AMD and ARM, have also been impacted by some vulnerabilities, albeit to a lesser extent. It's hard to ascertain if these limited discoveries in AMD processors are triggered by a security-first approach to hardened processor design, or if researchers and attackers merely focus on Intel's processors due to their commanding market share: Attackers almost always focus on the broadest cross-section possible. We see a similar trend with malware being designed for Windows systems, by far the predominant desktop OS, much more frequently than MacOS, though that does appear to be changing.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Graveyards can be a reservoir for antibiotic resistant bacteria:

[...]generally, cemeteries are places where corpses can decompose without posing a danger to public health. But sometimes—especially when sanitation and waste management services are poor—they can become environmental reservoirs of pollutants arising from human activities.

Among these pollutants are bacterial pathogens. These bacteria can be transported into groundwater when people live near a graveyard. The same communities—and visitors to a graveyard—can then be exposed to the pathogens via groundwater or surface water.

Decomposing bodies can add bacteria to the soil, but most importantly, they provide nutrients to the bacteria already present in the environment.

Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a microorganism that is commonly used to indicate the level of pollution in an environment, especially aquatic ones. This organism can be found in many places, including soil, water, food, and the intestines of humans and animals.

The presence of E. coli in the environment in large numbers can indicate faecal pollution. Some strains of this organism can also cause diseases such as diarrhoea, urinary tract infections and meningitis in newborn babies. The bacterium can also cause infection in other animals such as birds. Some strains have also been linked to disease outbreaks in developed and developing countries.

Many E. coli strains are resistant to antibiotics used to treat human diseases.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Boeing hit with 61 safety fixes for astronaut capsule:

In releasing the outcome of a joint investigation, NASA said it still has not decided whether to require Boeing to launch the Starliner again without a crew, or go straight to putting astronauts on board.

Douglas Loverro, NASA's human exploration and operation chief, told reporters that Boeing must first present a plan and schedule for the 61 corrective actions. Boeing expects to have a plan in NASA's hands by the end of this month.

Loverro said the space agency wants to verify, among other things, that Boeing has retested all the necessary software for Starliner.

"At the end of the day, what we have got to decide is ... do we have enough confidence to say we are ready to fly with a crew or do we believe that we need another uncrewed testing," Loverro said.

Boeing's Jim Chilton, a senior vice president, said his company is ready to repeat a test flight without a crew, if NASA decides on one.

"'All of us want crew safety No. 1," Chilton said. "Whatever testing we've got to do to make that happen, we embrace it."

Loverro said he felt compelled to designate the test flight as a "high-visibility close call." He said that involves more scrutiny of Boeing and NASA to make sure mistakes like this don't happen again.

Software errors not only left the Starliner in the wrong orbit following liftoff and precluded a visit to the International Space Station but they could have caused a collision between the capsule and its separated service module toward the end of the two-day flight. That error was caught and corrected by ground controllers just hours before touchdown.

Citation: Boeing hit with 61 safety fixes for astronaut capsule (2020, March 6) retrieved 6 March 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-03-boeing-safety-astronaut-capsule.html

takyon writes:

AMD revealed a number of details about its upcoming CPUs and GPUs at its Financial Analyst Day 2020:

AMD Shipped 260 Million Zen Cores by 2020
AMD Discusses 'X3D' Die Stacking and Packaging for Future Products: Hybrid 2.5D and 3D
AMD Moves From Infinity Fabric to Infinity Architecture: Connecting Everything to Everything
AMD Unveils CDNA GPU Architecture: A Dedicated GPU Architecture for Data Centers
AMD's 2020-2022 Client GPU Roadmap: RDNA 3 & Navi 3X On the Horizon With More Perf & Efficiency
AMD's RDNA 2 Gets A Codename: "Navi 2X" Comes This Year With 50% Improved Perf-Per-Watt
Updated AMD Ryzen and EPYC CPU Roadmaps March 2020: Milan, Genoa, and Vermeer
AMD Clarifies Comments on 7nm / 7nm+ for Future Products: EUV Not Specified

[...] The big focus here (though far from sole) is on the data center market. Long the breadbasket of Intel and increasingly NVIDIA as well, it's a highly profitable market that continues to grow. And it's a market that slipped away from AMD, and which they're now clawing back on the strength of their EPYC processors. Over the next 5 years AMD wants to take a much bigger piece of the total data center pie, and in fact the company expects to cross 10% market share of data center CPUs this next quarter. Which, by our reckoning, would be the first time they've hit that kind of market share in a decade (if not more), showing just how much things have changed for AMD.

[...] Along with great GPU performance, the other big upgrade for the CDNA family is incorporating AMD's Infinity Architecture (née Infinity Fabric). Already extensively used in AMD's EYPC CPUs, the interconnect technology is coming to AMD's GPUs, where it will play a part both in AMD's multi-GPU efforts, as well as AMD's grander plans for heterogeneous computing. With the third generation of the technology scheduled to offer full CPU/GPU coherency, allowing for a single unified memory space, the Infinity Architecture will be how AMD leverages both their CPU and GPU architectures to secure even bigger wins by using them together.

[...] After playing second-fiddle to NVIDIA for the past few years in terms of the performance of their top GPUs, AMD is planning to offer video cards with top-tier performance, capable of delivering "uncompromising" 4K gaming. AMD's rivals won't be standing still, of course, but AMD believes they have the technology and the energy efficiency needed to deliver the extreme performance that enthusiasts are looking for.

AMD will use an improved TSMC "7nm" process node for Zen 3 CPUs, but is unlikely to use the "N7+" node which relies on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). Zen 4 CPUs will be made on a TSMC "5nm" process.

Upcoming RDNA 2 GPUs are confirmed to include features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading.

Related: U.S. Department of Energy's "El Capitan" Supercomputer Will Reach 2 Exaflops Using AMD CPUs and GPUs

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takyon writes:

Amazon is reportedly working to find a cure for the common cold

Amazon disrupted the books, grocery, and shipping business, and now it's set its sights on viral infections. The tech company has apparently tasked a team of employees to research and develop a cure for the common cold, a CNBC report indicates today. Under an effort called "Project Gesundheit," three people familiar with the effort tell CNBC that Amazon is specifically looking to develop a vaccine that would stave off cold infections. This small team exists under the broader Grand Challenge group within Amazon, CNBC says.

This is not a coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) story. Do not discuss the coronavirus.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

No joy for all you Rover McRoverface fans: NASA's next Mars bot is christened Perseverance:

NASA's latest Martian rover, due to launch in July and being assembled right now, finally has a name: Perseverance.

The moniker was chosen by Alexander Mather, a seventh-grade student – that's Year 8 in England and Wales, or 11 to 13 years old, depending on where you are – at Braddock Secondary School in Virginia. Mather, who won NASA's "Name the Rover" to well, name the rover, was visited on Thursday by Thomas Zurbuchen, a top brass at the US space agency.

[...] "Alex's entry captured the spirit of exploration," gushed Zurbuchen in announcing the Martian robot's name.

"Alex and his classmates are the Artemis Generation, and they're going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars. That inspiring work will always require perseverance. We can't wait to see that nameplate on Mars."

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Electric cars may not get cuter than the Microlino 2.0 - Roadshow:

The Iso Isetta is one of numerous cult classic cars the 20th century bestowed on us. Quickly, it earned the nickname "bubble car" due to, well, the fact it kind of looks like a bubble.

Now, it's poised for a return, thanks to Switzerland's Micro Mobility. The company previously revealed its intentions to create a new, electric version of the bubble car back in 2016, but on Wednesday, the Microlino 2.0 debuted.

[...] As the company continues to ready the electric bubble car for production, the price holds firm. Those who place a reservation will pay roughly $13,500 for the car when it's ready for delivery. Easily, I could see this challenging the Citroen Ami in Europe as long as Micro Mobility puts together a quality car. We should see the first cars ready for customers in 2021.

Wikipedia entry for the original Isetta "Bubble Car"

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Apple's new App Store policies fight spam and abuse but also allow ads in notifications:

Earlier this week, Apple notified app developers of a revised set of App Store review guidelines—the rules by which Apple curates its iOS/iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS App Stores.

Among many other things, the revised rules expand the definition of what constitutes a spam app, clarify that developers are able to use push notifications to serve ads to users (provided users explicitly opt in to them), and limit submissions of certain types apps to trusted organizations in regulated or sensitive industries.

The most controversial of these changes has been the clear statement that developers can serve ads to users via push notifications. At one point in the past, Apple's guidelines stated that push notifications "should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information." Now the guidelines state:

Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app's UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

Pixel Envy's Nick Heer noted that Apple was already failing to enforce the original language, so this seems like capitulation to what some developers have been doing for a while, perhaps in response to difficulty policing this consistently. Heer also points out that there is not currently a pre-baked way for developers to sort between types of notifications, so the "you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages" language may still curb some of this behavior.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Itokawa would normally be a fairly average near-Earth asteroid -- a rocky mass measuring only a few hundred metres in diameter, which orbits the sun amid countless other celestial bodies and repeatedly crosses the orbit of the Earth. But there is one fact that sets Itokawa apart: in 2005 it became[sic received?] a visit from Earth. The Japanese space agency JAXA sent the Hayabusa probe to Itokawa, which collected soil samples and brought them safely back to Earth -- for the first time in the history of space travel. This valuable cargo arrived in 2010 and since then, the samples have been the subject of intensive research.

A team from Japan and Jena has now succeeded in coaxing a previously undiscovered secret from some of these tiny sample particles: the surface of the dust grains is covered with tiny wafer-thin crystals of iron. This observation surprised Prof. Falko Langenhorst and Dr Dennis Harries of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. After all, over the last 10 years, research teams all over the world have exhaustively studied the structure and chemical composition of the dust particles from Itokawa, and no one had noticed the iron 'whiskers'. It was only when Japanese researcher Dr Toru Matsumoto, who is spending a year as a visiting scientist with the Analytical Mineralogy group at the Institute of Geosciences in Jena, examined the particles with a transmission electron microscope that he was able to locate the crystals using high-resolution images.

[...] This discovery is exciting not only because the tiny iron 'whiskers' -- which have since been shown on other particles from the asteroid as well -- had previously been missed. Of particular interest is how they were formed. "These structures are the consequence of cosmic influences on the surface of the asteroid," explains Falko Langenhorst. In addition to rocks, high-energy particles from the solar wind also strike the asteroid's surface, thus weathering it. An important constituent of the asteroid is the mineral troilite, in which iron and sulphur are bound. "As a result of space weathering, the iron is released from the troilite and deposited on the surface in the form of the needles that have now been discovered," says the mineralogist Langenhorst. The sulphur from the iron sulphide then evaporates into the surrounding vacuum in the form of gaseous sulphur compounds.

[Emphasis in original. --martyb]

Journal Reference:

Toru Matsumoto, Dennis Harries, Falko Langenhorst, Akira Miyake, Takaaki Noguchi. Iron whiskers on asteroid Itokawa indicate sulfide destruction by space weathering. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14758-3

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Paper that claimed the Sun caused global warming gets retracted:

A paper published last June was catnip for those who are desperate to explain climate change with anything but human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It was also apparently wrong enough to be retracted this week by the journal that published it, even though its authors objected.

The paper's headline conclusion was that it described a newly discovered cycle in the motion of the Sun, one that put us 300 years into what would be a thousand-year warming period for the Earth. Nevermind that we've been directly measuring the incoming radiation from the Sun and there has been no increase to explain the observed global warming—or that there is no evidence of a 2,000 year temperature cycle in the paleoclimate record.

Those obvious issues didn't stop some people from taking this study as proof that past warming was natural, and only mild and unavoidable warming lies in our future.

Original Submission